Part I. The State and the Poor: 1. Seeing the state 2. Technologies of rule and the war on poverty Part II. The Everyday State and Society: 3. Meeting the state 4. Participation 5. Governance 6. Political society Part III. The Poor and the State: 7. Protesting the state 8. Postcolonialism, development studies and spaces of empowerment 9. Postscript: development ethics and the ethics of critique.

Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India

In general, rhetoric and myth play important roles in policymaking. Myths may inspire collective action but may also mystify and blur views on reality. In this article we identify, analyze, and reflect on the myths underlying the e-government programs of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and the Netherlands. We found that in all national policies myths of technological inevitability, a new and better government, rational information planning, and empowerment of the intelligent citizen can be discerned. Although the mobilizing powers of these myths are acknowledged, we conclude that existing empirical studies have generated little support for the inescapable telos of these myths, which makes canvas cleaning effects of e-government initiatives less likely.

The Myths of E-Government: Looking Beyond the Assumptions of a New and Better Government

Scholarly interest in ruins and derelict spaces has intensified over the last decade. We assess a broad selection of the resulting literature and identify several key themes. We focus on how ruins may be used to critically examine capitalist and state manifestations of power; we consider the way in which ruins may challenge dominant ways of relating to the past; and we look at how ruins may complicate strategies for practically and ontologically ordering space. We speculate about the motivations for this surge of current academic interest, draw out resonances with current trends in geographical thinking, and suggest directions for future research.

Reckoning with ruins

In this article, I respond to Vincent Crapanzano's recent call for attention to the category of hope as a term of social analysis by bringing it into view as a new terrain of commonality and difference across different forms of knowledge. I consider the efforts of participants active in the capitalist market to reorient their knowledge in response to neoliberal reforms side by side with the efforts of academic critics of capitalism to reorient their critique. These efforts to reorient knowledge as a shared method of hope bring to light contrasting views on where such a reorientation might lead.

Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques

The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. “Patchy Anthropocene” is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call “modular simplifi...

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/703391

Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West@@@Picasso: The Communist Years@@@French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art before, during and after Vichy@@@Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism

This article examines the claim by postwar French art historians that a little-known vanguard art movement in Paris during World War II, “la peinture bleu blanc rouge,” was a symbol of freedom during the Occupation years. On the contrary, it appears that the uncensored display of this art in Paris galleries acted as a veil simulating freedom and suggesting normalcy in the midst of the Holocaust. The idea that traditional modes of representation in painting are always “ciphers of regression” is also examined, revealing that in Resistance-inspired images of this period “the visual codes of recognizability” were frequently in use.

“Abstract” Art as a Veil: Tricolor Painting in Vichy France, 1940–44

This look at a previously unexamined exhibition of modern French art held in Berlin in 1937 contributes a new perspective on the Socialist government of Leon Blum and sheds new light on the Nazi reception of non-German modern art. It demonstrates that the exhibition, co-sponsored by the governments of France and Nazi Germany, corresponded to agendas of both. The French wanted it to serve as propaganda and advertisement, and they made sure it contained nothing offensive to their host. The Germans thought the art, through contrast, would highlight their idea of a national racial tradition.

Michele C. Cone

Papers

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West@@@Picasso: The Communist Years@@@French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art before, during and after Vichy@@@Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism

“Abstract” Art as a Veil: Tricolor Painting in Vichy France, 1940–44

French Art of the Present in Hitler's Berlin