The Construction of Race and Space in Thomas Dooley’s Writings: “What kind of place was Laos?”

This article examines narratives on Laos published between the Geneva Agreements of 1954 and 1962 because this period saw the most aid workers, missionaries, diplomats, journalists, and educators in Laos, and provided Americans the most detailed knowledge of the country. Attentive to imperialist ideology and close readings of Thomas Dooley’s nonfiction account of his humanitarian journey in The Edge of Tomorrow and The Night They Burned the Mountain, I analyze the languages and tropes that enabled Dooley to conceive of Laos and Laotians as stagnant, backward and without progress, characteristics that allegedly would make them more susceptible to communism. In particular, I read Dooley’s nonfiction novels as an imperial discourse that racializes Laos’ landscape as “empty land,” which I suggest contributed to America’s eventual treatment of Laos as a military wasteland during the US air war from 1964 to 1973. Situating my work in transnational American studies, ethnic studies and cultural studies, I offer a critical analysis of Dooley’s construction of race and space in Laos, which I argue can reveal another form of America’s racial knowledge of Asia(ns) that reinforced US intervention in the region

Collective discussion: fracturing politics (or, how to avoid the tacit reproduction of modern/colonial ontologies in critical thought)

This article engages in an experiment that aims to push critical/post-structuralist thought beyond its comfort zone. Despite its commitment to critiquing modern, liberal ontologies, the article claims that these same ontologies are often tacitly reproduced, resulting in a failure to grasp contemporary structures and histories of violence and domination. The article brings into conversation five selected critical scholars from a range of theoretical approaches and disciplines who explore the potential of the notion of “fracture” for that purpose. The conversation revolves around political struggles at various sites—migrant struggles in Europe, decolonial struggles in Mexico, workers and peasant struggles in Colombia—in order to pinpoint how these struggles “fracture” or “crack” modern political frames in ways that neither reproduce them, nor lead to mere moments of disruption in otherwise smoothly functioning governmental regimes. Nor does such “fracturing” entail the constructing of a “complete” or “coherent” vision of a politics to come. Instead, we detail the incoherent, tentative, and multiple character of frames and practices of thought in struggle that nevertheless produce an (albeit open and contested) “whole.

Without Mandate for Conquest: A Transnational Comparison of Toni Morrison\u27s Song of Solomon and Isabel Allende\u27s Eva Luna

In our current age of globalization, multiculturalism is a key component of human relations. Place, when thought of as a geographic concept is more than just coordinates on a map, it is a concentration of a set of social relations. Geographers use this information to see how places are relational to other places. Morrison and Allende are relational because of their consciousness of place especially exhibited in Song of Solomon and Eva Luna. This project examines the disparate histories, politics, and landscapes that both authors emerged from, and argue the complexity of their work stems from thinking geographically, their conscious attempt to imagine their links with the wider world, rather than boxing themselves into genre, or taking a subservient position beside a great canonical “father”. A common pitfall for scholars of the United States is to assume categories of difference or categories of dominance are universal across borders. This is demonstrated in scholarship that aims to compare writers from the United States and writers from Latin America based on the notion that they are marginalized.Scholarship that assumes “marginalization” is the same in North and South America is aiding in another construction of the “other”, by universalizing what Mohanty calls, “the third world difference.” Thinking of the components of a text within a constellation encourages analysis of the relationship between categories of both individual and place identities in their discursive setting. In their imagination of the inter-subjectivity between categories, Allende and Morrison portray power and weakness from all angles. Looking at literature geographically forces us to remove hierarchies and instead draws our attention to the subject’s struggle against their material conditions

Animal Attractions: Cinema, Exoticism, and German Modernity

The paper analyzes the rich interconnections between the open zoos and early cinema. Between 1907 and 1913, these institutions engaged in a lively reciprocal exchange, supplying each other with attractions that mutually informed and expanded their different exhibition programs. At the same time, they commonly invoked cultural fantasies of exotic adventure, and transformed these fantasies into vicarious thrills. The entertainments of Carl Hagenbeck, Germany's most famous zookeeper, are a case in point. At his zoo in Hamburg, he 'modernized', popular exhibitions of the exotic and the primitive animals and foreign 'peoples', he also experimented with technological media (including cinema) and collaborated with early filmmakers.The paper analyzes the rich interconnections between the open zoos and early cinema. Between 1907 and 1913, these institutions engaged in a lively reciprocal exchange, supplying each other with attractions that mutually informed and expanded their different exhibition programs. At the same time, they commonly invoked cultural fantasies of exotic adventure, and transformed these fantasies into vicarious thrills. The entertainments of Carl Hagenbeck, Germany's most famous zookeeper, are a case in point. At his zoo in Hamburg, he 'modernized', popular exhibitions of the exotic and the primitive animals and foreign 'peoples', he also experimented with technological media (including cinema) and collaborated with early filmmakers

The use of the death trope in peer culture play: grounds for rethinking children and childhood?

Dying and death in children's imaginative play is often subjected to literal interpretation, seen as evidence of meaning-making about death or a form of catharsis. Viewed in this light, children's enactment of uncaused and reversible deaths in ludic activity is considered evidence of developmental ‘immaturity’. Such interpretations, however, fundamentally misplace the contestive and transformative aspects of play [Henricks, T. S. (2006). Play reconsidered: Sociological perspectives on human expression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press]. In contrast, this article argues for the importance of figurative interpretations of children's play. Drawing on data generated in an ethnographic study at an early years setting in West London, it will be suggested that the death trope served as a generative metaphor in the peer culture, its everyday world characteristics provoking relatively stable responses in the face of uncertainties and ambiguities encountered in ludic activity. The use of the death trope made intimate, caring touch between children permissible, rather than just a by-product of small play spaces filled with many bodies

The Democratization of Social Media A Critical Perspective in Technology

Social Media is part of contemporary technology that is the contentious subject matter within the society. It is paradoxical when social media should provide techniques and objects that serve human being in a positive way, but at the same time, it can dehumanize human being such as alienation. The main problem is because the lack of impact of public policy, which does not involve society in the democratic sphere. The article is about the possibility of democratization social media in the discourse of philosophy of technology. I refer to Andrew Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology (CTT) for opening discourse and criticizing social media. Social Media should be changed by the critical view to analyze the internal contradictions in technocracy, which view social media merely as an instrument and value-free. In the other hand, CTT will lead into the discourse of instrumentalization theory, technological rationality, technical code and democratization of social media. I conclude this article by applying CTT to delineate extant approach and consideration of democratization of social media in Indonesian through critical thinking participation and emotional education in the public sphere

Intimate Immensities

The works in the “Intimate Immensities” series of landscape paintings function as “aporia,” or irresolvable contradictions. Using two aspects of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic designations of the sign: the “icon” and “index,” these paintings function as both iconographic representations of mankind’s spiritual connection with nature and indexical relics of the creative process as ritual. The foundational view out of which the work emerges is grounded in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. This thesis correlates Vajrayana Buddhism, ritual and the creative process, by explaining the parallels between ritual and the cognition that occurs during the creative process. To do this, the discussion uses the three-stages of ritual as theorized by Arnold Van Gennep: “separation,” “margin” and “aggregation,” Victor Turner’s terms: “structure,” “anti-structure” and “liminal” and the research into the creative process by educator and Ph.D, Nicole M. Gnedza. By fluctuating between the two ontological states of index and icon, the work resists stasis, however by representing a spiritual theme via both these means the work forms a cohesive whole