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shape, important shifts in racial and gender ideologies that accompanied the political and economic transformations of the imperial social formation in the late nineteenth century. The politics of colonial masculinity in the Ilbert Bill controversy not only reflected the intersection of racial and gender ideologies, but also enabled those hierarchies to be reconfigured in new ways. Contemporaries readily
5 Reconfiguring normative models of self Introduction Having considered the category of old age and ways it is made in the previous chapter, this chapter addresses the ways in which normative forms of selfhood and subjectivity can come under pressure and begin to shift in older age. In Chapter 1, I laid out a processual approach to the self that emphasises the salience of interaction and intersubjectivity in the creation of self. Within this framing, the self is negotiated through a variety of settings and situations, shifting at times to accommodate them. What
The human body is a crucial site for the inscription of cultural paradigms: how people are perceived controls the way they are treated. Postmodernist writers have shown sexual roles, racial inequalities and other forms of discrimination to be parts of a process of reductio ad absurdum, consisting of the identification of the individual‘s social functions with their anatomical features as well as with the habitual marking of their bodies. This article examines Angela Carter‘s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman where Carter‘s refusal of established body politics is most clearly dramatised. This novel exposes the dreary consequences of power/weakness relations, together with its contradictory exploitation of Gothic devices, making it an esssential testimony to Carter‘s postmodernist reconfiguration of worldviews and narrative modes.
The TRC’s reconfiguring of the past 1 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s reconfiguring of the past: remembering and forgetting We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past, to lay the ghosts of that past so that they will not return to haunt us. And [so] that we will thereby contribute to the healing of a traumatised and wounded people – for all of us in South Africa are wounded people – and in this manner to promote national unity and reconciliation. (Desmond Tutu)1 Because of this very fullness, the hypothetical fullness, of this archive
This chapter examines three key themes that are common to the work of these three women filmmakers (Ariadna Pujol, Chus Gutiérrez, and Icíar Bollaín) in their treatments of rural Spain and immigration: the geopolitics of power and disempowerment, the fracture of historical cohesion, and questions of alienation. It discusses three films of the filmmakers which showcase economic migrants from the developing world seeking empowerment in Spain, a developed nation. Their presence in rural areas underlines the uneven nature of development outside the 'First World'. Geographical mappings become complicated through such movements and unevenness, as human migration leads to an unsettlement of the singularity of place and any unbroken imagination of history. The chapter argues that what we see in the work of these three women filmmakers is the contingency of the rural and the many strategies that migrant subjects undertake for survival.
The most striking change in Empire aviation in the mid-1930s was not flagged by a more dense or extended route map or just by the imprimatur of flying the Royal Air Mail pennant on Imperial's aircraft. Thrust by engines that could propel aeroplanes toward a top speed of 200mph, the proposed new Empire flying schedule was two days to India, four to the Cape and to Singapore, and seven days to Australia. The intention was to operate four-a-week services to India, three to Singapore and East Africa, and two each to South Africa and Australia. In East Africa serious political challenges to the Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) arose over the proposed realignment of the Empire air trunk route away from the continental interior. South Africa's nationalistic air minister Oswald Pirow used the proposed flying boat service to express displeasure with Imperial generally.
Scholars of eighteenth-century literature have long seen the development of the Gothic as a break from neoclassical aesthetics, but this article posits a more complex engagement with classical imitation at the origins of the genre. In Horace Walpole’s formative Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, his Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother, and in the curiosities in his villa, classical elements are detached from their contexts and placed in startling and strange juxtapositions. His tendency towards the fragmentation of ancient culture, frequently expressed through the imagery of dismemberment, suggests an aesthetic not of imitation, but of collection. Moreover, rather than abandoning or ignoring the classical, Walpole reconfigures literary history to demonstrate elements of monstrosity and hybridity already present in Greek and Roman texts.
The aim of this article is to shed light on the conditions under which the funerary management of human remains was carried out by the French authorities during the early years of the First World War. It seeks to understand how the urgent need to clear the battlefield as quickly as possible came into conflict with the aspiration to give all deceased an individualised, or at the very least dignified, burial. Old military funerary practices were overturned and reconfigured to incorporate an ideal that sought the individual identification of citizen soldiers. The years 1914–15 were thus profoundly marked by a clash between the pragmatism of public health authorities obsessed with hygiene, the infancy of emerging forensic science, the aching desire of the nation to see its children buried individually and various political and military imperatives related to the conduct of the war.
This article will investigate the process of confronting death in cases of the disappeared of the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Based on the exhumation and identification of the body of a disappeared person, the article will reflect on how the persons social situation can be reconfigured, causing structural changes within the family and other groups. This will be followed by a discussion of the reflections generated by the anthropologist during his or her interview process, as well as an investigation into the authors own experiences in the field. This intimate relationship between the anthropologist and death, through the inevitable contact that takes place among the bodies, causes resonances in the context both of exhumations and of identifications in the anthropologists wider fieldwork.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about an unprecedented global crisis. To limit the spread of the virus and the associated excess mortality, states and governing bodies have produced a series of regulations and recommendations from a health perspective. The funerary aspects of these directives have reconfigured not only the ways in which the process of dying can be accompanied, but also the management of dead bodies, impacting on the dying, their relatives and professionals in the sector. Since March 2020, the entire process of separation and farewell has been affected, giving rise to public debates about funeral restrictions and the implications for mourning. We carried out a study in France and Switzerland to measure the effects of this crisis, and in particular to explore whether it has involved a shift from a funerary approach to a strictly mortuary one. Have the practices that would normally be observed in non-pandemic times been irrevocably altered? Does this extend to all deaths? Has there been a switch to an exclusively technical handling? Are burial practices still respected? The results of the present study pertain to the ‘first wave’ of spring 2020 and focus on the practices of professionals working in the funeral sector.