A Politics of Peripheries: Deleuze and Guattari as Dependency Theorists

Given that Deleuze and Guattari came to prominence after May 1968, many readers attempt to determine the political significance of their work. The difficulty that some encounter finding its political implications contrasts with Deleuze and Guattari\u27s commitment to radical causes. In response, Patton and Thoburn elaborate on the Marxist elements in the pair\u27s oeuvre, a line of analysis I continue. Focusing on A Thousand Plateaus, I discuss their references to the theorisation of the ‘dependency theorists’, a group of Marxist-inspired scholars who became influential during the 1960s. Does their engagement with dependency theory provide the basis for a political project

Marxian Crisis, Maussian Gift: The mutual-help practices of Lisbon’s Cape Verdean labor immigrants in an age of austerity

The post-2008 economic crisis in Portugal has been particularly severe in the neighborhoods in which many of the country’s Cape Verdean labor immigrants live. In this article, I will attempt to examine how my informants have conceptualized the current downturn, as well as how they have used ‘gifts’ of mutual help (djuda) to cope with, or even overcome, the profound challenges of living on a Lisbon periphery in crisis. An additional factor I will explore is the perception among my informants that the giving of mutual-help gifts has lost importance. I will argue that there is a disconnect between Cape Verdeans perceiving that their mutual-help practices are in decline and simultaneously needing the material support that they provide.A crise económica que começou em Portugal a partir de 2008 tem sido particularmente grave nos bairros em que vivem a maior parte dos imigrantes cabo-verdianos do país. Neste artigo, tentarei analisar a maneira em que os meus informantes têm conceitualizado a actual crise, bem como a forma como têm usado “dádivas” de ajuda mútua (djuda) para aguentarem, ou mesmo ultrapassarem, os desafios de viver numa periferia de Lisboa em crise. Um outro fator que irei explorar é a percepção dos meus informantes de que a troca de dádivas de ajuda mútua tem perdido importância. Vou argumentar que há uma desconexão entre a percepção dos cabo-verdianos de que as suas práticas de ajuda mútua acontecem com cada vez menos frequência e, simultaneamente, a necessidade do apoio material que elas fornecem

From Canonical Law to Offshore Finance: Confessing to Priests and Bankers in Luxembourg

In this article, I address two recurring tendencies that I heard during a recent period of research on banking secrecy in Luxembourg. First, my banker interviewees frequently mentioned personal transgressions for why many of their clients hide assets “offshore.” The wrongdoings my interlocutors cited included not only clients’ tax evasion, bankruptcy, and avoidance of liability – but also divorce, adultery, and the existence of out-of-wedlock children. Second, with a similar frequency, my interviewees drew parallels between the secrecy laws covering bankers and those afforded to other professionals in the country. Article 458 of Luxembourg’s Penal Code, dating from the nineteenth century, forbids doctors, midwives, and healthcare workers from making public any information pertaining to their patients. While banking-secrecy laws (passed in the 1980s) were based on Article 458 – which does not mention priests, but rather “persons told secrets on account of their profession” – I argue that it was nonetheless Catholic canonical law applied to confession that provided the model for banking secrecy in Luxembourg. Making a conceptual linkage between Luxembourg’s Catholicism and its offshore financial activity is not as far-fetched as it might seem; both the country’s Catholic Archdiocese and its financial center count on vast state patronage, as 70% of Luxembourgers are Catholic and financial services make up 35% of GDP. In this context, Luxembourg’s priests and bankers learn about the more delicate aspects of someone’s life, yet are legally bound to keep this information secret. My closing argument asserts that the precedent of priestly confession gives the financial center the profound social, economic, and political significance it enjoys in contemporary Luxembourg

A Socio-Economy of Cape Verdeans’ Mutual-Help Circulation on the Lisbon Periphery

Amidst a backdrop of commodity exchange and economic inequality, Cape Verdean labor immigrants circulate “gifts” of mutual help in order to ensure their horizontal mobility on the Lisbon periphery. This mutual-help circulation tends to deal with “commodities” that would otherwise be inaccessible or unaffordable: “good” childcare, home-building assistance, interestfree credit, and job-market placement. Obligation to kin and friends can often camouflage the economic relations of these practices. Even though similar goods and services “appear” to be available for purchase on the Lisbon periphery, the giving and receiving of mutual help is thickly woven into relationships governed more by trust and proximity than by contracts or market relations. Thus, one cannot simply determine the value of mutual help, for it does not replace products existing in the market

Éric Allina. Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique

In the late-19th-century heyday of European imperialism in Southern Africa, the heavy and coercive hand of the colonial state was needed to procure for its enterprises the African labor that the market’s “invisible hand” could not supply. With this in mind, colonial administrators quickly realized that controlling land was of secondary importance to controlling a sizeable and inexpensive African work force. To this end, they sought to tax and restrict local land ownership in order to force Af..

Portugal in Ruins: From Europe to Crisis and Austerity

This article engages the analyses of Poulantzas, Anderson, and Ferreira do Aramal to outline the main politico-economic contours of post-Carnation Revolution Portugal. The account that follows examines the effects of accession to the European Economic Community (EEC), European Union (EU) structural funding and liberalization policies, and the euro currency. The article concludes by situating the troika’s 2011 “rescue” of the Portuguese state—and the accompanying austerity measures—within the post-1974 process of “Europeanization.

Patricia de Santana Pinho, Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia

In Mama Africa, Brazilian social scientist Patricia de Santana Pinho details the influence that “Africa” has on conceptions of blackness in Bahia, the northeastern ­Brazilian state with the country’s largest Afro-descendent population and a black culture known for its vibrancy. The receptiveness of Afro-Bahians to black cultural influences from abroad, coupled with the desire of outsiders to project African “tradition” and “purity” onto the state, has defined its place within the diasporic “b..

Characterisation of the roles of Stag paralogs in transitions of pluripotency

Specification of cell identity requires spatio-temporal gene expression changes, which are broadly controlled by epigenetic and post-transcriptional mechanisms. De-regulation of these processes leads to a plethora of loss of cell identity-associated phenotypes, including cancer and developmental disorders. Stag proteins are established regulators of the cohesin complex, which dynamically structures 3D genome topology during development to influence gene expression. Despite their homology, Stag1, Stag2 and Stag3 paralogs display non-redundancy in maintenance of cell identity through mechanisms that remain poorly understood. Here, I utilise an in vitro murine Embryonic Stem (ES) cell commitment model to characterise Stags roles in cell fate decisions during transitions of pluripotency. First, I find exit of naïve ES cell identity is concomitant with Stag1 down-regulation and Stag2 up-regulation. Stag1 protein variants containing different intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) were identified in ES cells and their selective knockdown resulted in heterogeneous cell fate decisions, indicating fine-tuning of genome topology. Through generation of a CRISPR/Cas9-tagged Stag1 ES cell line, I further uncover Stag1 co-localisation at heterochromatin domains. Degradation of Stag1 increases compaction of these condensates and disrupts nucleolar structure. Further, assessment of chromatin topology using SPRITE methodologies reveals Stag1 degradation promotes increased chromatin contacts at both Topologically Associated Domain (TAD) and compartment levels of genome organisation. In this project, I also identify expression of the germ cell-specific Stag3 paralog in pluripotent states. Stag3 knockdown decreased mRNA expression of the cell fate markers, including Dppa3, and resulted in a reduced commitment potential that was maintained through differentiation into Embryoid Bodies (EBs). Unexpectedly Stag3 knockdown also correlated with up-regulated Dppa3 protein levels. Contrasting to nuclear-localised Stag1 and Stag2, Stag3 exists as discrete cytoplasmic foci at established sites of post-transcriptional regulation, notably at the centrosome, around the nuclear envelope and along the cytoskeleton. Co-Immunofluorescence (co-IF) assays under Stag3 knockdown conditions suggests a role for Stag3 in structuring these sites. Thus, Stag3 is proposed to mediate ES cell fate decisions by post-transcriptional regulation of Dppa3. Overall, this project provides evidence for mechanisms in which Stags co-ordinate cell fate decisions and, for the first time, has reported on an extra-nuclear post-transcriptional function for Stag3