Seumas Bates
Beyond The Storm, Beyond The Spill: Moral Willing In Post-Katrina & Post-BP Oil Spill Plaquemines Parish As Narrative Re-Envisioning
This article seeks to explain the process by which residents of Plaquemines parish, Louisiana, deal with the emotional and economic hardship of experiencing crisis in terms of them re-orientating their sense of self in terms of both their personal and community narrative. Plaquemines parish was devastated by hurricane Katrina in 2005, a disaster in which most residents lost not only their homes and businesses, but also part of their community life. The British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in 2010 compounded this hardship and caused an as yet undetermined level of damage to the ecosystem of the surrounding wetlands. Using the ethnographic methods of participant observation and unstructured interviews, insight has been given to understand the lived experience of those people who chose to make their lives here. This ethnography has been considered alongside the theoretical work of Cheryl Mattingly who offers a theory of willing, based not around understanding direct action, but rather around understanding willing as a re-envisioning and re-orienting of a self and community narrative. The article shall use her four-point model as a foundation for analysis: refocusing of attention rather than discrete decision making; internal reorientation as crucial in the 'doing' of willing; a narrative rather than atomistic concept of action; and a notion of willing connected to one's sense of self at both a community and personal level.
Key Words: Hurricane Katrina - BP Oil Spill - Rebuilding - Reorientation - Anthropology
Gohar Karim Khan
The Treatment of '9/11' in Contemporary Anglophone Pakistani Literature: Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a Postcolonial Bildungsroman
This paper considers the treatment of violence and counter-violence after the crisis of '9/11' in Mohsin Hamid's second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It investigates the novel's depiction of the crisis, and the American-led 'war on terror', exploring its impact on a young, diasporic Pakistani-American named Changez; particularly his metamorphosis from a 'lover of America' to a 'reluctant fundamentalist'. Primarily, the paper explores how this particular act of terroristic violence, enacted on a massive scale against a superpower, becomes the catalyst for Changez's personal self-discovery. While the actual catastrophe of '9/11' remains indisputably horrific, the paper is interested in Hamid's exposition of the counter-terrorism that ensued in its wake. America's intrusion into the public and private spheres of countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are challenged on the grounds of hypocrisy - its motivations are doubted and its methods questioned. Specifically, this paper focuses on the chief problem in the representation of violence and terror in the contemporary world - its tendency to depict terror as a one-dimensional, current phenomenon associated mainly with Islam and the third world. Anglophone Pakistani fiction, represented by novels such as The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is increasingly determined to challenge this stereotype and expose the age-old existence of terrorism, from the time of colonization to the present day political schema of Anglo-American governments. Simultaneously however, the novel expresses distinct possibilities of transnational connectivity, leading this paper to argue that Changez's alienation from America does not amount to a rejection by highlighting the ways in which he remains connected to, and in awe of, America.
Key words: Pakistan - Islam - Terrorism - Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Seamus MacLeod
Death and Taxes: Why has the UK Securitised Fiscal Policy in the manner that it has and what does this imply regarding the Coalition Government's understanding of Economic Security?
The United Kingdom's coalition government has securitised fiscal policy – taxation and government spending – in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. The nature of this securitisation is the result of irreversible increases in interdependence and financial deregulation that characterised the end of the twentieth century. The UK's government no longer perceive economic security to be the conceptual handmaiden of more traditional militaristic notions of security. Geo-economic concerns are not visible in this securitisation and the primacy of the military on the security agenda appears to be, at least temporarily, in decline. The prioritisation of the protection of Britain's AAA credit rating over military, geo-economic, and welfare concerns suggests the an adoption of a financial realist perspective by the coalition government in which the state remains the referent object of security. As with any securitisation, the true motivation behind such a move is ambiguous, and whilst the rise of financial security has made economic security a more coherent field than it was under the reign of geo-economics, there remains the question of whether such a move is a positive one.
Keywords: Security studies - Securitisation - Financial Crisis - UK Coalition Government - Fiscal policy
Mattia Marino
The Mnemonics of Identity Crisis: Hybrid Gender and European Postmodern Memory in Literary and Audiovisual Cultures
In the early twenty-first century, the encounter between the west and the rest entails a tension between global and local practices where collective identity and memory are facing a crisis. It is possible to discuss part of this complex picture in a textual analysis which accounts for a wide variety of factors of global-local identities by shifting attention from hybrid ethnicity to hybrid gender as intersecting with differences of age, citizenship, sexuality, and class within postmodern western communities. Across the boundaries of European postmodern cultures and the divide between literary and audiovisual cultural artefacts playing a crucial part in early twenty-first century postmodern cultural memory, a suitable selection of texts consists of the novels Senza sangue by Alessandro Baricco (2002) and Corpus Delicti by Juli Zeh (2009), the film Antichrist by Lars von Trier (2009), and the music video for the pop-song The Fear by Lily Allen (2009). As these narrative representations combine gender identity with age, citizenship, sexuality, and class, their intertextual relationships offer a wide-ranging discussion about the changes taking place in global-local identities. This issue is best explored by taking into account the fact that the violence represented across these texts is connected with cultural memory, which defines identity in opposition to otherness. The definition of identity sanctions the violent exclusion of the Other in terms of gender, age, citizenship, sexuality, class, and related categories. In a global-local context, these texts converge in the exposure of identity as conformity to norms, which is then overcome with enthralling representations of hybridity.
Keywords: Identity - Memory - Otherness - Hybridity - Gender
Sam Wiseman
Identity, Ecology, Eschatology: The Country and the City in D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf
This article examines the ways in which Virginia Woolf challenges commonly-held associations with rural and urban life through her fiction. The dynamic, cosmopolitan character of modernity, it argues, instigates a crisis of English national identity which is linked to a simplistic opposition of rural and urban: the former representing a bucolic, unchanging Englishness, and the latter, the ephemeral artifice of 'high' culture. The paper examines representations of the city as an eschatological site in D.H. Lawrence's work, which are linked to a crude, 'deep ecological' critique of modernity. Woolf, it is argued, takes her cues from Lawrence in deploying the same kinds of imagery in her representations of the city; however, in her case, these are reappropriated towards ends which ultimately suggest new possibilities for the human relationship with the world. Rather than calling for a posthuman world, Woolf uses her deconstruction of the urban-rural binary to re-examine the ways in which the entanglement of human and nonhuman might be brought to light. The 1920s/1930s crisis of English identity that Woolf examines, therefore, is presented not as a threat, but as an opportunity; a chance to re-evaluate our understandings of how both urban and rural experience can reveal a deeper understanding of humanity's place in the world.
Keywords: Ecocriticism - Modernism - Identity - Virginia Woolf - D.H. Lawrence