eSharp

Michael Bates

'Cultural Exchange, Communal Destruction in W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo' Abstract

W. G. Sebald's travelogue Vertigo (2002) takes the reader through many countries, times and cultural landscapes, following Sebald's flâneur on a journey of self-discovery and exploration in contemporary Europe. By analysing just a handful of the images encountered alongside their associated cultural and psychological impact, one can reveal that, far from simply detailing an individual's journey, the narrator is discussing, revealing and experiencing the effects of European discourse.

From the effects of Christianity on Jewish children to the impact of the two World Wars and further into the past, to the Napoleonic campaigns of the early nineteenth century, the narrator reveals a means of understanding history and twentieth-century European culture that is both devastating and liberating in its implications. Every moment in history is shown to be equally important in the determination of Europe's future and its interplay with the past, as the paths of four historically and socially remote characters soon reveal through their repeated pilgrimages through continental Europe.

Europe, as a cultural body, affords the individual the opportunity for freedom, but when larger social and political bodies participate in these discourses the effects are shown to be much less beneficial. In Vertigo, Sebald reveals the opportunities for self-extrication from a mono-cultural identity as incontrovertibly linked to the destruction of other cultural traditions through the interference of larger political bodies.

Arve Hansen

'Integration and Late Industrialisation: The Effects of Neoliberal Economic Globalisation on Development and Late Industrialisation'

Globalisation leads to both challenges and possibilities for developing countries. This paper focuses on neoliberal economic globalisation, and the problems this causes for development in economically poor countries, mainly through shrinking developing countries' developmental policy space and thereby limiting the opportunities for late industrialisation. This is mainly taking place, it is argued here, through the rules and demands of the Bretton Woods institutions. The conditions attached to loans in the IMF and the World Bank, as well as the agreements and trade rules of the World Trade Organization, are all pushing developing countries to adopt liberal policies. The TRIPS, TRIMS and GATS agreements of the WTO are examples of this, and together shrink the policy space and power of developing countries considerably. The neoliberal globalist project largely ignores successful industrial policies used in the past, such as the use of different forms of protectionism that have been so central to basically all successful developers, including the Western European countries and the United States. This, it is argued, is due to the strong belief in the benefits of trade liberalisation within neoliberalism, something that this article questions, especially when taking place at an early stage of economic development. Taken together the findings suggest either a lack of understanding of the history of industrialisation, or a favouring of already industrialised countries, or possibly a combination of both, within the international development policy establishment, and call for special treatment of developing countries within the international trade regime.

Magdalen Lambkin

'Can Scriptures Unite? A theological exploration of the interreligious practice of Scriptural Reasoning'

This article examines a practice of interscriptural study developed by members of the Abrahamic faiths known as Scriptural Reasoning (SR). The practice is marked by a determination to articulate and preserve the distinct identities of each tradition coupled paradoxically with a tendency to recognise 'sacredness' and 'truth' in the others' scripture and tradition. It is suggested that the grounding of SR in postliberal theology, particularly in George Lindbeck's theory of religious traditions functioning as closed cultural-linguistic systems, places undue limits on the transformative impact of this practice. Problematic tendencies are examined in light of three features of the religious traditions concerned which are under-recognised by the practice and require deeper theoretical exploration if the benefits of SR are to be fully realised.

Richard Mallet

'Beyond Failed States and Ungoverned Spaces: Hybrid Political Orders in the Post-Conflict Landscape'

Hybrid political orders represent new ways of thinking about political community and institutional set-up in the aftermath of war. Mainstream perspectives on post-conflict governance and reconstruction are characterised by a tendency to view the state in unhelpfully narrow terms, not only uncritically assuming that peacebuilding is state-building, but also unwaveringly promoting rigid Weberian constructions of the liberal democratic state. It is argued that the concept of hybrid political orders, whilst not rejecting the important role of a central state in the post-conflict equation, enables analysts and policy-makers to recognise the existence of legitimate alternative governance mechanisms and sources of authority in many (if not all) post-conflict landscapes. Engaging positively with (ostensibly) 'non-state' or 'informal' actors necessitates a radical change in mainstream thinking and a departure from potent policy discourses of 'failed states' and, increasingly, 'ungoverned spaces'. Through a case study of Mozambique – the post-conflict 'poster child' of the 1990s – the concept of hybrid political orders is used to analyse the various ways in which 'actually existing' governance in post-conflict societies is made up of, and shaped by, a heterogeneous range of actors and institutions, from political parties and movements to 'traditional' chieftainship systems and external interventions. Moreover, a hybrid political order approach goes further than simply highlighting the existence of, and potential roles played by, these alternative mechanisms, suggesting that beneath the hard dichotomies of 'state/non-state' and 'traditional/modern' can be found a multiplicity of connections and associations, rendering political communities and institutional set-ups into truly hybridised structures.

Pamela McQueen

'Giving Voice to the Global Citizen: Characterization and Dialogue in David Greig's The Speculator.'

The aim of this article is to explore the dramaturgical practices employed by David Greig in his play The Speculator in his creation of characters struggling with the nascent realities of global citizenship. This play explores a moment of international, intercultural, economic turmoil in 1700s France, offering a rare dramatization of the global citizen in the figures of the Scotsmen, John Law and Lord Islay. The article uses Bakhtin's theorization of internally persuasive discourse and Falk's writings on global citizenship to explore the artistic representation of the actions and intentions of characters that exemplify the virtues and typify the failings of certain types of global citizenship. In a detailed examination of the actions and metaphors of Greig's playwriting, this article explores the dialogisation of Scottish national identity in a globalised world. This essay explores the characters of The Speculator in terms of international migration, and offers a reading of the play as a theatrical investigation of the cultural identification processes a global citizen needs to become a successful cosmopolitan when dominant cultural realities are in a state of flux due to economic instability.

Silke Reeploeg

'Intercultural Opportunities and Regional Identity: Nordic Voices in Scottish Literature'

This article will consider the important role intercultural dialogue plays in the construction of regional literary identity.  It will take advantage of the Nordic 'cultural space' as an example of the network of continuous interaction between cultures and societies, showing literary representations as embedded in both their regional and global economies, political structures and power relations.  The main focus will be on the links between the narrative voices of the Scottish Northern Isles of Shetland and Orkney, and connections between literary narratives and Nordic, Scottish and British nation-building projects during modernity and beyond – evaluating the opportunities for intercultural interpretation within the literature of Scotland's most northerly cultural region.

By showing the opportunities intercultural literary interpretation provides in enriching the investigation of cultural diversity, this paper will connect literary analysis to 'Nordic' and 'European' discourses and narratives, and interrogate the often protectionist and 'risk-based' global and national boundaries of the dominant discourses of Nordic and Scottish literary criticism.  The content of this article is based on research for a Masters thesis in Highlands and Islands Literature, entitled Intercultural Dialogue in Nordic Literatures, submitted in 2008, which included a critical approach to historiographies and change within modern and contemporary Scottish and Nordic cultural and literary communities.

Rahul Sambaraju and Steve Kirkwood

''We represent, here, the interests of the free world': Accountability in Israeli leaders' media talk on the Gaza Crisis (2008-2009)'

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict turned into an armed crisis from the 27th of December 2008 to 22nd of January 2009. Instances of such armed conflict make issues of accountability highly pertinent. In this paper we analyse media news interviews conducted with then Israeli political leadership after the start of the Gaza Crisis. From the analyses we show that: a) accountability is an interactional concern that interviewers and interviewees orient to within the interactional setting of a media news interview; b) Israeli politicians manage Israel's accountability for events in Gaza crisis via employing particular narratives and descriptions of both Israel and other parties; c) in managing their accountability they are seen to make avowals to peace and moderation which are then used for justifying extant military practices.