Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Michel Foucault takes the reader on a serendipitous journey in tracing the history of madness from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Utilizing original documents, the author recreates the mood, the place, and the proper perspective in the history of madness. Madness or folly is viewed as part of the human condition and to be examined and illuminated through one of its many facets. At the end of the Middle Ages madness was seen either as a tragic or comic phenomenon. The Renaissance, with Erasmus' Praise of Folly , demonstrated how imagination and its derivatives were to thinkers of that day. The French Revolution introduced the so-called medical approach. Madness is a ubiquitous phenomenon that has common roots not only in medicine but in poetry and tragedy. Shakespeare brilliantly describes psychological phenomena with even greater clarity than Tuke or Wills. The author weaves a fascinating history showing the changing pattern of

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African culture and the world beyond

Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995

Berntsen examine the construction industry in three select CMEs (Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands) and contend that EU regionalization erodes national industrial relation systems through the promotion of ‘‘spaces of exception’’ via labor posting. Such spaces occur when firms in one EU country post contract laborers in other EU countries. The workers are then subject to the industrial relations systems in the home rather than the host country. This process creates competitive pressures in the EU, as domestic firms in the host country must now compete with firms utilizing (cheaper) posted labor. In turn, these competitive pressures undermine a key mechanism of institutional stability in CMEs—the support of capital for labor-friendly industrial-relations policy—because individual firms face a choice between using this form of ‘‘insourcing’’ to circumvent national labor policy or suffering a competitive disadvantage by choosing not to. So what can be learned from the dialogue between LPT and CPE as advanced in the chapters of this anthology? For one, varying explanandum will naturally produce varying explanans. For example, while it is true that comparative political economists (VoC scholars) have ‘‘failed to develop an understanding of capitalism as a system’’ and labor process theorists have failed to advance ‘‘a systematic understanding of how institutions structure and affect workplace dynamics and employment relations,’’ it is also true that American football players have failed to develop an appreciable skill for pitching and base running and baseball players have failed to master tackling and the forward pass (pp. 16, 18). But in articulating the LPT and CPE in this way, the authors have diagnosed a key problem in contemporary political economy: how can we explain significant political-economic changes happening in advanced capitalist countries vis-à-vis the immediate post-war period, where liberalization appears to advance everywhere with perhaps slightly different flavors? The clearest attempt to address this tension is the much less conciliatory solo chapter by Matt Vidal, who articulates a defiant (to VoC) Marxist institutionalist program for CPE that is rooted in regulation theory (the European sister to the American Social Structures of Accumulation school). Taking Wolfgang Streeck’s recent call for political economists to remember the commonalities of capitalism as a point of departure, Vidal reverses the causal salience of capitalism and institutions: ‘‘it is better to begin with [capitalism and] to understand how [it] is institutionalized in specific times and places’’ than to conceptualize the world as consisting of varying, institutionally determined capitalisms (p. 75). While this may at first seem like a distinction without a difference, it represents a significant theoretical departure from the simplifying assumptions of the VoC perspective. Economic change should not be analyzed as the product of distinct configurations of national institutions. Rather, countries experience common pressures emanating from the prevailing ‘‘generic accumulation regime’’ (Fordism, then post-Fordism), but economic dysfunctionalities (e.g., crises) will vary across countries because the particular institutional configuration in a given country makes some types of responses more likely than others for both political and economic reasons. For this reader, this would be a refreshing change of course indeed. Understanding the common pressures exerted by an idealtypical model of capitalism would allow us to understand why countries are changing in particular ways without the need for untheorized ‘‘exogenous shocks.’’ Attending to the particular constellation of national institutions at any point in time would allow us to predict how they are likely to change in the future without the need to presuppose that a particular constellation will reproduce itself over time.

Alien RuleAlien Rule, by HechterMichael. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. $29.99 paper. 201 pp. ISBN: 9781107617148.

A German, an Italian, and Van der Merwe were on death row. The warden gave them a choice of three ways to die: to be shot, to be hanged, or to be injected with the AIDS virus for a slow death. So the German said, "Shoot me right in the head" Boom, he was dead instantly. Then the Italian said, "Just hang me" Snap! He was dead. Then it was Van der Merwe's turn, and he said, "Give me some of that AIDS stuff" They gave him the shot, and Van der Merwe fell down laughing. The guards looked at each other and wondered what was wrong with this guy. Then Van der Merwe said, "Give me another one of those shots" so the guards did. Now he was laughing so hard, tears rolled from his eyes and he doubled over. Finally the warden said, "What's wrong with you?" Van der Merwe replied, "You guys are so stupid. I'm wearing a condom" Van der Merwe joke circulating on the internet EVERY SOUTH AFRICAN has a favourite Van der Merwe joke. Van der Merwe, the archetypal thickheaded Afrikaner, has been the beloved brunt of South African humour for decades. Alongside the adoption of apartheid as official government policy in 1948, Van der Merwe emerged as its foolish functionary, so it is no coincidence that the protagonist of Neill Blomkamp's film District 9 (2009) is the bumbling Wikus van de Merwe (played by Sharlto Copley), a walking Van der Merwe joke (for more on Van der Merwe, see articles by Sandra Swart and Deborah Posel). A petty bureaucrat (petty in every sense), he works in the Department of Alien Affairs at mnu, Multi-National United, the evil epitome of global corporate capital. But we like Wikus, despite his ineptitude, his nepotism, and his bigotry. So who is the joke on? In his director's commentary, Blomkamp repeatedly tells us that he finds certain moments in the film humorous, and they are often the most gruesome or graphic moments that push the characters and viewers into heightening horror. Opinion varies on whether District 9 is funny: in Safundis roundtable on the film, Stefan Helgesson finds it "genuinely funny--the alien infatuation with cat food being just one example of its absurd humor" (174), whereas in her article on masculinity in District 9, Claire Sisco King writes, "Absent comic relief, District 9 produces a decidedly different sensibility ... [T]he tone of District 9 remains intense and stressful, inviting not laughter but anxiety, terror, and even disgust.. This visceral experience invites viewers to suffer (rather than laugh) with onscreen characters" (83). Consciously or not, then, director Blomkamp is pointing out the fine, often vanishing, line that splits hysterics between what is hysterically funny and real hysteria. Not coincidentally, the title of a government parody playing the comedy circuit in South Africa these days, "Mass Hysteria, " also collapses the distinction. Featuring such faux leaders as the Minister Who Swears to Tell the Truth and the Minister of International Affairs and Pan-African Children, it is so titled because, says the co-producer, '"Mass Hysteria' is what South Africans are best at ... whether it's a penis or a march, we love a reason to scream and shout" (Gilbertson). Since apartheid ended, South Africa has experienced a wave of incidents of alleged mass hysteria, mostly among schoolchildren in underprivileged areas (see Kapstein). If, under apartheid, South Africa was in a state of panic, with professional agitators and members of the Third Force planted to spur on violent protests against the regime so as to be able to represent black South Africans as out of control and with whites worrying about a "total onslaught, " then postapartheid South Africa is a nation in hysterics. District 9 allows us to examine the distinctions between, and the overlaps among, the hysterically funny, hysterical anxiety, and mass hysteria not only as they pertain to a South African sensibility and setting but to an emerging, specifically South African, breed of science fiction. …

The Hysterics of District 9

When South Africa holds the FIFA World Cup in 2010, anywhere from three hundred thousand to three million tourists will pour into the country to watch. Already, three years before the big event, th...

A Culture of Tourism: Branding the Nation in a Global Market

Summary A decade ago, when South Africa was undergoing dramatic political, cultural, and social changes, newspapers began to print stories on a curious phenomenon ‐ the burning of so‐called witches in rural areas. Although this trend had probably been on the rise since the mid‐1980s, this particular moment was riddled with issues that found resonance in the witch‐burnings. Complex intersections of new politics, old customs, and extreme violence formed the basis for the press reports, which often attempted to draw clear lines between modern and traditional, legal and unauthorised, and secular and sacred, despite their overlaps. This paper seeks to investigate the phenomenon of witch‐burning and its representations. The very discourse of witchcraft, with its simultaneous resonances of atavistic witch doctors and historical witch trials, demands interrogation. Discussions of witch‐burning emphasise the historical moment of the early 1990s ‐ the last death throes of apartheid and the emotional transition into...

A town called nobody: Violence, nationalism, and witch‐burning

New Nigerian short stories, more easily available to readers than ever before, call into question the dominant discourse around oil production nationally and internationally as they depict the complex, lived reality of a resource-rich country riven by corruption, greed, and poverty The struggle over oil resources and rights regularly involves acts of sabotage and because of their content, their form, and their distribution, the stories themselves can be considered as small acts of sabotage The stories’ formal qualities - or lack thereof - reflect the circumstances of their production as a tertiary by-product of sabotage Like the material by-product, the crude oil to be distributed as part of an informal economy, these stories are unrefined This textual output, like that commodity form, is more quickly available, less constrained by production, less costly for being raw or unprocessed, and more willfully destructive of disciplinary institutions, corporate, national, and literary

https://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/download/2002/2193

Helen Kapstein

Papers

The Hysterics of District 9

A Culture of Tourism: Branding the Nation in a Global Market

A town called nobody: Violence, nationalism, and witch‐burning

Crude Fictions: How New Nigerian Short Stories Sabotage Big Oil’s Master Narrative

Coffins, Corpses and Wheelchairs: Mass Hysteria and Postcolonial Constitutions