This article offers a conjunctural analysis of the financial and political crisis within which Brexit occurred with a specific attentiveness to race and racism. Brexit and its aftermath have been o...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544

Racism, Crisis, Brexit

In this paper, we analyse how news images of the 2015 Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ visualise refugees and how, in so doing, they mobilise various forms of moral responsibility in ‘our’ mediated public l...

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Rethinking media responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’: a visual typology of European news

Responsibility and Judgment

ion. For example, one of their categories is “Undesirable outcome” (1074), which seems to be at a level of abstraction above such categories as “Death of a loved one” and “Loss of a relationship” (1074; indeed, the second seems to be a case of the third which seems, in turn, to be a case of the first). But, insofar as they are concrete enough to count as prototypical, the categories they uncover are clearly in line with the preceding analysis. Thus, the eliciting conditions for sadness prominently include the two just mentioned, which are closely related to the prototype of happiness as romantic union. Other prototypes include “Discovering one is powerless” (1074), which is clearly related to the prototype of happiness as power. In relation to happiness itself, they isolate only three categories that are not overly abstract. These are “Receiving esteem, respect, praise,” “Being accepted, belonging,” and “Receiving love, liking, affection” (1075). The first is clearly connected with the prototype of happiness as power or authority. The third category is clearly related to the prototype of happiness as romantic union. The second category relates to both. Indeed, it relates to both in a way that bears on emplotment. Commonly, the conflicts that define the middle of a plot are resolved in such a way that the larger society comes together and there is an extension of acceptance and belonging in the end (e.g., through the reconciliation of parents and children in the romantic plot). In short, we seem to have some good prima facie evidence for positing two happiness prototypes. The point is not confined to modern America and Europe. Clearly, there were no broad scientific surveys or controlled experimental studies of emotion in premodern societies. However, there are highly regarded discussions and widely accepted ideas—such as the ancient Indic isolation of goals—that provide converging evidence. For example, Chikamatsu, widely thought of as one of the two greatest dramatists of Japan, wrote that, “The only happiness in this broad world” is “True love to true love” (234). The celebrated Malian Epic of Son-Jara states that “All people . . . seek to be men of power” (Sisòkò, I. 1277–78). Euripides’ Hecuba expresses both, lamenting the death of Astyanax: “if you had enjoyed youth and wedlock and the royal power that makes men gods, then you would have been happy” (200). These literary references lead to the second line of research. In order to consider cross-cultural prototypes in narrative, I set out to read a wide range of highly esteemed works of verbal art in unrelated literary traditions. I took up highly esteemed works as it seemed that they were most likely to express common narrative and emotional tendencies in a given culture or period. One crucial feature of a prototype-based account of

Theory and Interpretation of Narrative

Institutional ethnography is a sociological method of inquiry which problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience, while examining how series of texts coordinate actions, consciousness, and forms of organization in extra-local settings. This paper will demonstrate that institutional ethnography is a critically innovative way to study the socio-technical dynamics of camera surveillance. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance video should be conceptualized as a text which is active and activated, coordinating lived realities and facilitating organization at the institutional level within a specific ruling framework. Research was conducted with camera operators in a Suburban Mall CCTV control room located in Victoria, BC. The talk of CCTV operators in their work setting demonstrates how video is used to coordinate lived realities and facilitate extra-local organization. The findings of this study suggest the gravity of racialized profiling in everyday surveillance and complicate Foucault's Panopticon metaphor. Resume: L'ethnographie institutionnel est une methode d'enquete sociologique qui questionne des relations sociales a l'emplacement local d'une experience vecue, tout en examinant comment les series de textes coordonnent des actions, la conscience, et des formes d'organisation dans les arrangements supplementaires-locaux. Cet article demonstra que l'ethnographie institutionnel est une maniere innovatrice et critique d'etudier la dynamique socio-technique de la surveillance de camera. La video de surveillance de la television a circuit ferme (CCTV) devrait etre conceptualisee en tant qu'un texte qui est en activite et active, qui coordonnees les experience vecues et qui organize au niveau institutionnel dans un cadre regnant particulier. La recherche a ete conduite avec des operateurs de camera dans une salle de commande d'une CCTV suburbaine mail situee a Victoria,

How Closed-Circuit Television Surveillance Organizes the Social: An Institutional Ethnography

Examines the legacy of imperialism and decolonisation, globalisation and national identity Graham MacPhee explains how postwar writers blended the experimentalism of prewar modernism with other cultural traditions to represent both the pain and the pleasures of multiculturalism. He discusses a wide range of writers, from Auden, Orwell, T.S. Eliot and Larkin to Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tony Harrison, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. Key Features * Explores concepts and critical terms such as 'British national literature', 'new ethnicities', 'migrancy' and 'hybridity' * Case studies of postwar texts include: Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dread Beat an' Blood, Tony Harrison's V, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Leila Aboulela's Minaret and Ian McEwan's Saturday

Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Only in the frankly invented tale about events did man consent to assume responsibility for them, and to consider past events as his past. (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)At first sight there appear to be some striking homologies between Arendt's account of the poUtical role of meaning and the textual poUtics of contemporary cultural and Uterary theory, even if these similarities are valued differently in each case. Where the "linguistic turn" in literary and cultural studies has displaced "history" as the key social determinant and accorded discourse an extraordinarily expansive political agency through its role in constituting subjectivity, so George Kateb has identified what he sees as a similar animus in Arendt's conception of meaning in The Origins of Totalitarianism, although rather than being celebrated it is judged a source of weakness. On this reading, Arendt accords far too much weight to the determining power of ideology in the rise of totalitarian movements, overemphasizing the role of ideas and the search for meaning and ignoring more prosaic and wordly factors (Kateb 2002, 324-26). Equally, where contemporary literary theory has distanced itself from the referential capacity of language and has emphasized the free play and undecidability of textuality, Kateb complains that Arendt is similarly unconcerned with "truth," and "makfes] no attempt ... to distinguish between historical accounts and fictional accounts" (2002, 335; see Lyotard 1984, 73-79). And just as the contrast between the homogeneity of "grand narratives" and the inventiveness of "Uttle narratives" or "petit recit" has been offered as a means of political orientation in contemporary literary and cultural theory, so Kateb sees in Arendt a similar framework, which opposes the productivity and plurality of "storytelling" to the all-consuming narrative of "ideology" (Lyotard 1984, 60, 65; Kateb 2002, 331, 351-52).However, the occurrence of such an apparently close homology between Arendt's writing and contemporary concerns in literary and cultural studies should give pause for thought. That we find an image of present concerns in the past we interpret within the parameters of the present is, of course, not so surprising; and while not necessarily worthless, the immediacy of such apparent homologies risks erasing the nonidentity of the past and its potential for illuminating the present. Although enthusiasm for the textualism of postmodernism has waned in the Anglophone academy in recent years, the opposition of master and micro narratives has entered into the basic conceptual vocabulary of contemporary cultural and literary theory, becoming woven into the nexus of inteUectual assumptions which, in making contemporary critical discourse possible, tend to go unexamined. However, according to the editors of a recent coUection of theoretical essays on postcolonial studies, the automatic rejection of grand narratives and the assumption of the inherent political productivity of micro narratives may not be so straightforward. Indeed, they argue that in order to address the global inequalities of power and resources, we may "need to keep alive particular metanarratives" and the coUective subjectivities they sustain (Loomba et al. 2005, 34). It is therefore worth exploring the extent to which Arendt's conception of storyteUing may diverge from contemporary assumptions about the political character of narrative.This essay suggests that Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day provides a significant site for exploring the parameters of the identity and nonidentity between Arendt and contemporary critical assumptions. As Gillian Rose observes, the political questions raised by The Remains of the Day clearly connect with Arendt's concerns, perhaps most immediately with the figuring of subjectivity and retrospection in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1996, 5156). Yet at the same time, the novel has frequently been identified as a postmodernist text, an interpretation which would appear to be endorsed by Ishiguro's insistence that the fictional world it conjures needs to be read not in realist or representational terms but as "a pastiche" - one of the central terms in postmodern theories of fictionality (Ishiguro, Herzinger, and Vorda 1991, 138; Jameson 1991, 1-54). …

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Escape from Responsibility: Ideology and Storytelling in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture

In recent years there has been a sustained renewal of interest in British national identity at a popular, political and academic level, and a striking common feature in each case has been the concern to differentiate between "British" and "English" and to define a distinct sense of Englishness. The English flag (the cross of St. George as opposed to the flag of the United Kingdom, the Union Flag) has gained a currency inconceivable even ten years ago. Drawing together original research on imperial history and contemporary British culture, this volume reflects the interdisciplinary nature of this topic and clearly demonstrates that far from being idiosyncratic or self-involved, the question of Englishness and its relationship to British national identity offers an important avenue for thinking about the politics of national identity in our postcolonial and globalized world.

Empire and after : Englishness in postcolonial perspective

Introduction. / 1. Visions of Modernity. / 2. The Disappearance of the World. / 3. Technics of Vision. / 4. Urban Optics. / Afterword: Recognizing Modernity / Notes / Bibliography

Graham MacPhee

Papers

Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Escape from Responsibility: Ideology and Storytelling in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture

Empire and after : Englishness in postcolonial perspective

The architecture of the visible