There has been the recurrent suspicion that community, harmony, cohesion, and similar relational goods as understood in the African ethical tradition threaten to occlude difference. Often, it has been Western defenders of liberty who have raised the concern that these characteristically sub-Saharan values fail to account adequately for individuality, although some contemporary African thinkers have expressed the same concern. In this chapter, I provide a certain understanding of the sub-Saharan value of communal relationship and demonstrate that it entails a substantial (...) allowance for difference. I aim to show that African thinkers need not appeal to, say, characteristically Euro-American values of authenticity or autonomy to make sense of why individuals should not be pressured to conform to a group’s norms regarding sex and gender. A key illustration involves homosexuality. (shrink)

Pillow's aim is to demonstrate how representations of Sacajawea have shifted in writings about the Lewis and Clark expedition in ways that support manifest destiny and white colonial projects. This essay begins with a general account of Sacajawea. The next section uses two novels to make the case that shifts in the representation of this important historical figure serve similar purposes. There is some attention to white suffragist representations, but the central contrast is between manifest destiny and multiculturalism. The final (...) section addresses the important question of whether it is possible for feminists to theorize Sacajawea in ways that are not co-opted by colonial projects. (shrink)

Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests (...) that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution. (shrink)

Constructions of the animal and animality are often pivotal to religious discourses. Such constructions create the possibility of identifying and valuing what is "human" as opposed to the "animal" and also of distinguishing human beliefs and behaviors that can be characterized as being animal from those that are "truly human." Some discourses also employ the concept of savagery as a bridge between the human and the animal, where the form of humanity but not its ideal beliefs and practices can be (...) displayed. This paper explores the work of the influential scientist, philosopher, and theologian A. N. Whitehead in this context. His ideas of what constitutes "the animal," the "primitive" and the "civilized" are laid out explicitly in his now little-used history of religions text, Religion in the Making. This paper explores these ideas in this history and then considers how the same ideas permeate his currently more popular philosophical and theological writing Process and Reality. Drawing on some work in post-colonial theory, the paper offers a critique of this understanding of animality, savagery, and civilization and suggests that using Whitehead to underpin modern theological work requires considerable caution. (shrink)

This paper examines the political and ethical problems which arise in the course of undertaking participatory research in developing countries. It argues that, rather than supplanting relationships of power within the knowledge creating process, most participatory research actually strengthens them. Instead a more complete form of dialogic research is required, which will involve struggles within our academies as well as in those other organisations in which our research is situated.

This paper examines the political and ethical problems which arise in the course of undertaking participatory research in developing countries. It argues that, rather than supplanting relationships of power within the knowledge creating process, most participatory research actually strengthens them. Instead a more complete form of dialogic research is required, which will involve struggles within our academies as well as in those other organisations in which our research is situated.

This paper reconsiders the event in International Relations (IR) through the writings of Hannah Arendt. The event has for too long been neglected in IR; international events are overwhelmingly conceived as mere happenings that have meaning only within the process and temporal structure of the theory from which they are understood, and as holding no or only limited meaning in and of themselves. In her work on political theory and her reflections on totalitarianism, however, Arendt elaborates a rich view of (...) the event and its relationship to history, one that offers an alternative way of thinking about international relations. Arendt urges us to remain open to the possibility, however difficult, of conceiving of the event as meaningful outside of the processes within which our established mode of thoughts would have us subsume it. This requires on the part of the historian a commitment to judgement, to a recognition of the importance of imagination and impartiality that gives meaning to the event for others. In explicating Arendt's complex notion of the genuine political event, the paper aims not merely to demonstrate the intrinsic interest of this conception of the event to her thought, but to add to the small but growing number of works in IR that have found fruitful new avenues of thought in Arendt's various writings, and also to recent discussions on the proper relationship between history and IR theory. (shrink)

By considering a variety of readings of Renaissance Florence from Burckhardt to the present, this article discusses the nature of the interrelation between the archive and the historian, with a view to illustrating the partiality of both. The records contained within the archives are by nature fragmentary; vestiges of the past, they are also partial in the sense of being subjective, testimonies to past relationships either between individuals or between individuals and institutions - social or political. Likewise, the readings of (...) historians are partial both in the sense that the historian’s research is focused upon particular parts of the archive and in his or her subjectivity as an historian. Interestingly, in this context post-Burckhardtian Florentine historiography shares common ground, however unwittingly, with certain aspects of post-modern writing in decentring the subject, for observations concerning the partial subjectivity of Burckhardt’s Renaissance individual apply equally to observations concerning the partial subjectivity of historians as writers. The fiction of an objective historical method producing hard history becomes apparent once the static relation of historian as subject researching the archive as object is reconfigured as a dynamic and dialectical process. Through the acknowledging of the contingency of such archival readings it becomes apparent that the archive itself is a symbolic construct constituted through the process of writing. (shrink)

Homi Bhabha's attempts to recuperate Frantz Fanon's “black man” as a figure of resistance and subversion have relied on the simple fact of this figure's existence: because the black man's identity is irrevocably divided, Bhabha claims that its mere existence calls the unity of a normative identity into question. This essay broadly questions Bhabha's reading of Fanon by asking exactly how it is that the subject's potential for subversion can be realized in action, and suggests – drawing from Jacques Lacan's (...) work as well from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre – a new model for the figure of Fanon's black man which retains the possibility for a free subjectivity oriented toward resistance. The tacit belief that resistance must arise as a consciously developed response is belied by the suggestion that there are psychic tensions that might produce a subversive subjective orientation involuntarily, spontaneously. (shrink)

Cultural norms and values, as well as historical, social, and legal contexts shape the public uses and expressions of particular emotions, including anger. In the settler states of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, indigenous peoples and those who came later negotiate the unfinished business of empire. Their exchanges are framed in terms of ethnic identity and difference. It is argued here that anger plays a significant part in the legal and political processes of claim, denial, and response through which (...) these differences are articulated and transacted. This article examines situations where people whose very naming is a product of European thought engage in the struggles of decolonization. The very different occasions and forms of anger over justice claims described illustrate the extent to which meanings are not shared in these societies. (shrink)

This essay addresses Jacques Derrida’s theory of metaphor, as it has been handed to literary theory and continental philosophy. Our aim is to reassess the relationship between metaphor and metaphysics, using two distinct critical lenses. We will contrast Derrida’s influential position to an anachronistic author – Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). Vico initiated what is now (retrospectively) called the romantic theory of metaphor, but the details of his theory are missing from current discussions. For this reason, Vico’s view is given closer attention. (...) Two new concepts are introduced: mute metaphor and heroic metaphor. These terms help specify precisely how metaphor can be conceived as a process of consciousness rather than a grammatical rule or grammatical exception. Finally, it is suggested that Vico’s theory is preferable to Derrida’s. Vico’s vision of metaphorical language is more fruitful and less problematic than Derrida’s, both methodologically and terminologically. The romanticism espoused by Vico also suggests itself to new modes of contemporary research concerning the purpose and function of metaphor within language. (shrink)

This article engages with travel literature and is mostly concerned with the image of America in Abdellatif Akbib’s travel-inspired narrative, Tangier’s Eyes on America. It is devoted to examining a number of patterns of representation especially as they pertain to the notion of counter discourse and counter-hegemonic modalities of resistance and subversion. It also inspects the discursive mechanisms Akbib employs to represent America and highlights how Western cultural prejudices and stereotypes are destabilised, and how the discursively-inflected distortions of the Orientalist (...) mindset are disturbed in his work. The choice of this text is determined by a strong desire to discover how the Other of the Orientalist ideology examines and understands the Western Self and modernity and how he/she dismantles “the Centre/Margin binarism of imperial discourse.”. (shrink)

The paper is an interpretation of J.-J.Rousseau’s book on the government of Poland. The central part of the paper is devoted to complex relations between the notions of nature, nation, childhood, and civic education. Methodologically, the analysis involves interpretation of historical contexts and positions significant in the writing of the book, and deconstruction of its key categories. In the latter respect, the idea of “strangeness” of Poland is the point of departure, and the role it plays in the construction of (...) national and European identity is the aim of analysis. (shrink)