Foucault, dynastics and power relations

Michel Foucault’s historical approach is usually understood as moving from archaeology to genealogy, the former describing his work of the 1960s and the latter the 1970s. From the mid-1970s Foucault certainly describes his work as genealogy, and he explicitly relates this to Friedrich Nietzsche’s project, which he had critically explored in lectures and the famous “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” essay published in 1971. But in lectures and one interview from the early 1970s, Foucault uses another term to describe the complementary approach to archaeology, which is that of dynastics, a mode of analysis he relates to both power and knowledge. Tracing the usage of these terms over time, this article explores their relation. Foucault uses the term dynastics to describe his approach after his explicit engagement with Nietzsche, and before settling on genealogy as the appropriate term. Foucault’s use of dynastics is interesting for many reasons, including the way he glosses this as dunamis dunasteia. Foucault is here thinking about a range of senses, from dynamics or power to dynasties, heredities, and lineage. Even after he drops the term to describe his approach, Foucault is perhaps invoking the notion of dynastics every time he subsequently writes about power relations

Queen Charlotte and the Royal narratives of Boydell's Shakespeare Prints

This case study focuses on an atlas-sized folio of prints depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s plays published by John Boydell to reproduce paintings exhibited at his Shakespeare Gallery on Pall Mall (1789-1805). Boydell’s project brought together Britain’s leading painters and engravers, and secured subscriptions from George III, Queen Charlotte and the Prince of Wales. The two volumes of the print folio open with reproductions of full-length portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. Consequently, the folio shifted the public viewing experience for those who had already visited the Shakespeare Gallery into a more private and domestic mode, framing it through the presence of the monarch and his consort which structured the viewer’s encounters with the works, characters and narratives which follow. This essay explores the second volume of the folio, prefaced by Queen Charlotte’s portrait, in order to unpack the highly-gendered imagery of queens and royal children which dominates this volume

Developmental associations between motor and communication outcomes in Fragile X syndrome : variation in the context of co-occurring autism

Fragile X syndrome (FXS), the leading heritable cause of intellectual disability, has a co-occurrence rate of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) estimated at ~60%. The onset and rates of motor development in FXS are slower relative to neurotypical development, and even more so in the context of co-occurring FXS + ASD. Extant evidence suggests these differences are likely to affect communication, yet this developmental process or how it varies in the context of co-occurring ASD remains unknown in FXS. We aimed to delineate developmental associations between early motor abilities and their rate of development from 9 to 60 months of age on communication outcomes in 51 children with FXS, 28 of whom had co-occurring ASD. We also aimed to identify variation in these developmental associations in the context of co-occurring ASD. Results captured within-syndrome variability in these developmental associations as a function of co-occurring ASD. Fine motor proved to be a robust predictor of receptive communication regardless of co-occurring ASD, but we identified differences between FXS with and without ASD in the association between aspects of motor development and expressive outcomes. Findings provide evidence for differential developmental processes in the context of co-occurring ASD with implications for timely developmental intervention. Lay abstract Fragile X syndrome (FXS), the leading heritable cause of intellectual disability, has a co-occurrence rate of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) estimated at ~60%. Children with FXS experience delayed achievement and slower development of key motor abilities, which happens to an even greater extent for children with both FXS and ASD. A multitude of studies have demonstrated that motor abilities are foundational skills related to later communication outcomes in neurotypical development, as well as in the context of ASD. However, these associations remain unexamined in FXS, or FXS + ASD. In this study, we aimed to determine the associations between early motor skills and their rate of development on communication outcomes in FXS. Furthermore, we investigated whether these associations varied in the context of co-occurring FXS + ASD. Results revealed within-FXS variation in the context of co-occurring ASD between some aspects of motor development and communication outcomes, yet within-FXS consistency between others. Findings provide evidence for variability in developmental processes and outcomes in FXS in the context of co-occurring ASD and offer implications for intervention

Digging holes, excavating the present, mining the future : extractivism, time, and memory in Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s and Sammy Baloji’s works

This article explores the links between creative imagination and extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This question has an undeniable memorial dimension, for extraction, as a crucial point of entry into Congolese historical consciousness, allows for a multi-perspectivist examination of the way in which the memory of the past has been archived, experienced, and (mis)interpreted. As a key term to understand Congo’s geopolitical position since colonial times, extraction offers a rich array of tropes and ideas to assess culture from the DRC and the Congolese diaspora. First, I reflect on the notions of extraction and extractivism; secondly, I analyse how they form the basis of Sammy Baloji's multi-media work in Mémoire (2006) and Mémoire/Kolwezi (2014); then, I turn to La Danse du vilain (2020) and Tram 83 (2014) by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, first to assess how extraction is employed in these novels, then to conduct a reflection on ‘necropolitics’, and reveal little-known aspects of diamond digging during the Mobutu era. I will also show that Baloji’s and Mujila’s creative trajectories have been enriched by dialogues with Filip De Boeck, the Belgian social anthropologist and specialist of the DRC