Liberalism and Rationalism at the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1902–1903

This article reconstructs and analyzes a debate on “the crisis of liberalism” that took place in a prominent philosophy journal, the Revue de me´taphysique et de morale, in 1902–3. The debate was actuated by combiste anticlerical measures and the apparently liberal demand made by Catholics for freedom of instruction. Participants—all hostile to the church—sought to articulate a principled, rationalist liberalism that could respond to the needs of the republic in the post-Dreyfus era. Participants—including Célestin Bouglé, Dominique Parodi, Gustave Lanson, Elie Halévy, and Paul Lapie—balanced each in their own way the demands of rationalism, democracy, and modernity. The debate opens a window onto the transition between the Second Empire’s dissident, neo-Kantian, liberal republicanism and the antitotalitarian liberalism that Hale´vy and his student Raymond Aron would articulate in the interwar years

'I Have Every Reason to Love England': Black (neo)Victorianism and Transatlantic Fluidity in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Within neo-Victorianism, or contemporary fiction which rewrites the Victorian age, Marie-Lousie Kohlhe has pointed out a critical “reluctance to engage head-on in cross-cultural comparisons, which seem essential in order to get fully to grips with exactly how cultural memory of the nineteenth century is mediated and shaped by a genre that is hardly exclusively ‘British’ in any self-contained sense” (Kohlke 2009, 255). Setting off from that premise, I tackle the neo-Victorian genre in its global dimension by focusing on the transoceanic links between Antebellum America and Victorian Britain as it is exhibited in two postcolonial neo-Victorian novels, namely Belinda Starling's The Journal of Dora Damage (2007) and Nora Hague's Letters from an Age of Reason (2001), both of them dealing with African Americans crossing the Atlantic ocean towards Victorian Britain. These texts provide a remediation on significant loopholes in Victorian literature, namely the absence of race as an explicit subject in general and the under-representation of interracial love affairs in particular. Similarly, these neo-Victorian texts provide imaginative acts of fictional recovery coalescing with historical reconstructions on the growing presence of African Americans in Victorian Britain which, according to Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, feature as a gap in the historiography of Black British history (Holbrook Gerzina 2003, 5). The transatlantic interplay between African Americans and nineteenth-century Britain, or “Black America’s romance with Victorian Britain” (Dickerson 2008, 4) was not free from contradictions, though, given that African Americans were then appealing to a country which at the time was setting the foundations for late-Victorian scientific racism, a project which secured the British Empire’s subjugation of non-white races and provided the basis for modern-day racism (Brantlinger 2011, 6-7). The transatlantic fluidity between Black America and Victorian Britain reveals a double drive, a conduit for mutual influence which finds resonance in the recovery of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy’s term for the hybrid, fractal and transcultural circulation of subjects and ideas across the Atlantic ocean as a result of the slave trade which unearths black subjects as historical agents with an intellectual history (Gilroy 1993, 4-6). In the novels under analysis, the Atlantic ocean comes to stand for a liquid conduit facilitating both the reconstruction of broken transatlantic family ties and the appropriation of European radical discourses in order to support African-American abolitionism. Ultimately, I contend that for the African-American characters in the texts under scrutiny, Victorianism represents a model of respectability, democracy and modernity, the very values of citizenship that black slaves were denied by the American slave system. The inherent contradictions of associating the Victorian age, the epitome of imperialism and colonial domination, with the liberation of African-American slaves only reveals the complexities of the term ‘Victorianism’ and what it has meant to past and present generations.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Collective learning experiences in planning: the potential of experimental living labs

‘Living labs’ originate from an R&D environment, and intend to innovate commodities by experience-based knowledge, with a direct involvement of users. Meanwhile, the living labs approach has been shifting into a wider range of applications, and has also ended up in the toolbox of actor- and action-oriented planners. The approach is (implicitly) promoted as a new and better way of combining capacities of different stakeholders by exploring and experimenting in realworld situations. In this paper, we attempt to critically discuss the use of the living lab approach. The first section explores the potential thereof for planning issues: How univocal is the concept of Living Labs? How much do different interpretations and practices of Living Labs resemble in terms of actors involved, actions stimulated, processes promoted and criteria for good practices accepted? The exploration is based on the experience of two experimental living labs, which are compared with a range of international examples. The second section turns to a series of alternative approaches in spatial planning in Flanders: How do the aims and means of these collaborative learning experiences differ? What is the role of users and how important is experimentation? What is the innovative contribution to planning (if any)? How do the practices deal with path dependencies and uncertainties in complex multi-actor settings? We will answer these questions based on research seminars on ‘collective learning’, which are organized for the Policy Research Center Spatial Planning in Flanders, as a part of a work-package which focusses on methodologies for future explorations

Struggles to remain in Kigali’s “unplanned” settlements: the case of Bannyahe

Examining the precarious status of informal settlements in Kigali at a time of large-scale planning-induced expropriation, this article considers urban contestation in the context of the city’s changing spatial-legal regime. We analyse the case of one informal settlement’s expropriation and relocation – the settlement of Bannyahe – and the contestation that has ensued as resident property owners take the District of Gasabo to court. Through interviews with settlement residents, we follow the fates of these displaced urban citizens and consider their struggles to remain in their homes. Finally, we suggest that such contestation over legal procedural regularity and negotiation over property valuation at the neighbourhood level forms the limit of overt opposition to the city’s masterplan. Terming these limits to contestation “silent boundaries” that circumscribe contestation for property owners in the Bannyahe settlement, we offer perspectives on contestation and compromise amidst urban socio-spatial reordering in the “new Kigali”

Social Discipline, Democracy, and Modernity: Are They All Uniquely ‘European’?

Historically, narratives about the grandiosity of absolute monarchy and social discipline dominated the research agenda on European absolutism, as in the case of the renowned works of Norbert Elias. Yet, less emphasis was made about the various levels of powers existing outside the central monarchy and the importance of other institutions in laying the foundations of European modernity. It is in this spirit that it is worth examining the work of the German social historian Gerhard Oestreich and his historically rich notion of ‘social discipline’, as he gave light to the various differentiated levels of authority that demystified the powers of the absolutist state. As Oestreich argues that the establishment of social discipline was one of the most notable achievements of the absolutist state in as much as it is crucial in establishing a vibrant democracy, the paper examines the conceptual- and praxis-oriented links between and amongst the notions of social discipline, modernity, and democracy. Particularly, I locate this notion of ‘social discipline’ within the grand (meta)-narratives of Euro-centric modernity and how such dominating discourse has to be re-thought and re-drawn amidst emerging disquisitions about the various ‘stories’ of modernity (ies) in the non-Western world in which (Euro) Western-centric scholarship endeavors have dismally and unfortunately ignored. Furthermore, discussions of ‘modernity’, ‘democracy’ and ‘development’ have to be discursively situated within the broader realm of delicate cultural, social, historical and political nuances and subtleties of the context-in-question (e.g. state, nation or a political community) as opposed to totalizing and universalizing tendencies that European scholarship has been consistently characteristic of such.History and International Relation

Right to the City, Right to Rights, and Insurgent Urban Citizenship

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.James Holston is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focuses on cities and citizenship; political theory, democracy, and law; planning and architecture; urban ethnography; Brazil, and the Americas. Holston is the author of Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil, (Princeton University Press, 2008), The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (University of Chicago Press, 1989), and editor of Cities and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1999). His current research examines the worldwide insurgence of democratic urban citizenships, their entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and their contradiction in violence and misrule of law under political democracy. He is also studying the new institutions and practices of participatory urban planning in Brazil and preparing a book that documents, through photographs and interviews, the autoconstruction of houses and neighborhoods in the urban peripheries of São Paulo.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photos, working pape

The Land Question in Amazonia: Cadastral Knowledge and Ignorance in Brazil’s Tenure Regularization Program

In the Brazilian Amazon, a quest˜ao fundi´aria (the land question) has been asked and answered in a variety of ways since the region was opened up tolarge-scale migration and development projects in the 1960s. The question of who is entitled to land and under what conditions is at the heart ofmost debates concerning the region’s future, but recent attempts to reform and simplify rural land tenure in Amazonia confront a history of contradictory land-use policies and a legacy of impunity. In response to economic and demographic pressures, the Brazilian state aims to combat the illicit occupation, sale, and transformation of lands. This article presents an ethnographic approach to the land question in Amazonia by studying the knowledgemaking practices associated with the Programa Terra Legal (Legal Land Program), Brazil’s effort to create a cadastral registry for rural holdings in the region. It argues that tenure regularization dedicated to securing smallholders’ rights and to instituting environmental regulations is being used by rural elites as a mechanism to accumulate land and power. By showing how a reform program gets remade in the thrall of local interests and vernacular dispositions of property, this article reveals how knowledge both illuminates and obscures subjects of governance

The Aesthetic Politics of Unfinished Media: New Media Activism in Brazil

This article analyzes the role of key visual technologies in contemporary media activism in Brazil. Drawing on a range of media formats and sources, it examines how the aesthetic politics of activists in protests that took place in 2013 opened the way for wider sociopolitical change. The forms and practices of the media activists, it is argued, aimed explicitly at producing transformative politics. New media technologies were remediated as a kind of equipment that could generate new relationships and subjectivities, and thereby access to intentionally undetermined futures