Broken promises and transoceanic fragments: Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria, 1935–46

This article examines the personal experiences and memories of Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria in the years leading up to and immediately after the Second World War, revealing the tensions between migration and movement, on the one hand, and memory and loss, on the other. By engaging with the ideas surrounding tairiku (‘continents’) in early to mid-twentieth century Japan, this article moves away from triangulating the transoceanic movements of Japanese tango musicians and musical commodities across Japan, China and Latin America at this time. Instead, it considers such movements as the sonic manifestation of the island/continent dichotomy that framed Japanese maritime thinking in the first half of the twentieth century. Consequently, in offering a Japan-reflexive scholarship for the study and writing of global music histories, this article argues for the need to move beyond a geo-oceanic approach in examining transoceanic circulations

Consumer law in Ghana

This chapter examines the evolution of consumer law and policy in Ghana, focusing on reforms induced by crises over the last two decades. It considers whether such reforms converge with or diverge from, international, supranational, and sub-regional standards and initiatives in other jurisdictions. The discussion demonstrates that crises-oriented reforms over the last two decades are more slanted towards public regulatory governance in reaction to the emergence of crises. The analysis further reveals that the regulatory devices broadly converge with international, supranational, and sub-regional standards and initiatives of other jurisdictions, except in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, where some initiatives in Ghana and other jurisdictions manifest divergence in the policy responses. The chapter argues that convergence is predicated on instances where there exist well-thought-out international standards and protocols as guidelines; such standards were non-existent as regards the COVID-19 crisis. As such, each country was grappling to fashion-out measures to deal with the crisis head-on, bearing in mind the peculiar challenges experienced by consumers in the domestic setting, leading to a divergence of approaches. It is, therefore, submitted that while the existence of international standards or initiatives elsewhere is a bedrock for possible convergence of national legal systems in dealing with crises of identical character, the non-availability of such international standards provides space for the divergence of measures bearing in mind the peculiar national circumstances of various countries dealing with similar crises

Premodifiers and a scarcity-productivity hypothesis in Yorùbá: Does the scarcity of adjectives influence productivity of the premodification slot?

The notion that the Yorùbá language operates only a small, closed class of adjectives is well noted in the literature. However, this hypothesis of scarcity of adjectives in the Yorùbá language is yet to be examined in light of how such scarcity may influence the creativity of speakers in creating new functional adjectives, influence the placement of ‘created’ adjectives and the productivity of the premodification slot in the noun phrase structure. Combining theoretical concepts from construction grammar with corpus evidence drawn from a major source of contemporary Yorùbá, the article shows how speakers of Yorùbá negotiate between scarcity, creativity, placement and complexity in modifying their referents. The article identifies different forms of premodifiers, especially a sort of ‘creative premodifier’ with which a complex syntactic-semantic behaviour is built into the ensuing NP structure. It is argued that a scarcity of attributive adjectives in the language is a crucial variable with which relations between premodifiers and postmodifiers can be explored

South African Manufacturing: The challenge of growth with jobs

This paper evaluates South African manufacturing performance over 25 years. It reports the evolution of five basic variables: employment, mark-ups, exports, domestic sales, and investment, using an aggregated sample of firms from a reliable business database. The approach differs from other economic models by the complementary use of management perceptions in estimated equations.The results reinforce some previous findings; for example, wage pressure tends to constrain domestic sales while the relative wage incentivizes capital investment. The exchange rate matters for exports and investment is constrained by skill shortages. Other findings add evidence to contested issues such as the importance of the interest rate level for investment and exchange rate stability for export growth. Relationships between key variables can help to identify growth constraints and the potential for manufacturing jobs. In particular, the lack of transmission from exports to employment or to domestic sales and the response of the mark-up to investment suggest institutional failures in coordinating market activity

The social reproduction of (and through) food: Agrarian change in Uzbekistan

Food systems—and the interplay between food production, marketisation and access—are constituent elements of the social reproduction of life. Using a social reproduction framework, this paper problematises the ontological, epistemological and methodological premises of food system studies in agrarian change. Based on primary data collected during multiple rounds of fieldwork in rural Uzbekistan and adopting mixed methods, it offers a triple contribution. First, it assesses the inequalities of food security and dietary diversity among different classes of farmers and agrarian wage workers. Along these lines, it argues that individualised food security indicators do not unveil the systemic determinants that explain unequal patterns of social reproduction through nutrition during processes of agrarian marketisation. To move beyond individual-based theorisations, it extends the investigation to state policies, market drivers and gender norms in relation to food knowledge, provision, affordability and availability. In so doing, it unpacks the contradictions that explain the uneven conditions of social reproduction of (and through) food. Finally, by investigating the modalities of access and availability of ultra-processed food in rural areas, it reflects on the tensions between the capitalist global food system and its interaction with the logics of state-led development to maintain the social reproduction of rural life

What makes a spokesperson? Delegation and symbolic power in Crimea

This article argues that spokespersons who claim to speak on behalf of a social group cannot escape the structural problem of delegation whereby speaking in someone’s name entails speaking instead of someone. This form of delegated and authorised silencing through the promise of empowerment imposes symbolic violence on a group which recognises the spokesperson as a valid representative, without recognising its own potential disenfranchisement. I build on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological writings on language and symbolic power to theorise the trajectories of authorisation of spokespersons. In doing so, I critically engage with theories in International Relations which rely on a separation between speaker and audience to analyse the legitimation of political speech. Instead, I reformulate the speaker/audience relation through the concept of symbolic power and introduce the category of the spoken-for. When spokespersons struggle over symbolic power, they seek to impose social classificatory categories on social groups and spaces. I illustrate these dynamics in the context of human rights politics in Crimea, showing how various spokespersons are engaged in a symbolic struggle over ‘authenticity’ of their speech and the ‘universal’ of human rights. I conclude by suggesting new lines of inquiry to analyse creative strategies to mitigate the spokesperson problem