Participation as Post-Fordist Politics: Demos, New Labour, and Science Policy

In recent years, British science policy has seen a significant shift ‘from deficit to dialogue’ in conceptualizing the relationship between science and the public. Academics in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have been influential as advocates of the new public engagement agenda. However, this participatory agenda has deeper roots in the political ideology of the Third Way. A framing of participation as a politics suited to post-Fordist conditions was put forward in the magazine Marxism Today in the late 1980s, developed in the Demos thinktank in the 1990s, and influenced policy of the New Labour government. The encouragement of public participation and deliberation in relation to science and technology has been part of a broader implementation of participatory mechanisms under New Labour. This participatory program has been explicitly oriented toward producing forms of social consciousness and activity seen as essential to a viable knowledge economy and consumer society. STS arguments for public engagement in science have gained influence insofar as they have intersected with the Third Way politics of post-Fordism

Reificação, representação e instanciação: Georg Lukács contra seus intérpretes

Resumo: De acordo com História e Consciência de Classe de Georg Lukács, o pensamento e a existência são “aspectos reais de um mesmo processo histórico e dialético”. A simultaneidade do pensamento e da existência é obscurecido pela reificação, entendida por Lukács como a lógica das relações capitalistas. Meu argumento é que as implicações de sua grande inovação conceitual para se compreender as relações entre o capitalismo e a representação têm sido eclipsados por comentários recentes sobre o conceito de reificação. Ao me aproximar criticamente dos comentários recentes ( por Axel Honneth e Kevin Floyd), os quais tendem a ver a reificação enquanto um modo de representação e não uma lógica, argumento por um retorno e clarificação do conceito de reificação de Lukács como melhor meio de se orientar na lógica contemporânea da racionalidade capitalista.Palavras-chave: Georg Lukács; Axel Honneth; Kevin Floyd; Reificação;Representação; Instanciação

The Event of Postcolonial Shame

Includes bibliographical references and index

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Confronting the obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, it entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention. The essays included in it tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, they consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame\u2019s destructive potential. Cogently (see the Introduction, in particular), the question of how the relation of postcolonial literature to shame is to be qualified with respect to all other literature is given due emphasis. Chapters contributed (in their order) by David Attwell, Susanna Zinato, Rita Barnard, Sue Kossew, Annalisa Pes, Dolores Herrero, David Callahan, Angelo Righetti, Vincent Van Bever Donker. Afterword by Timothy Bewes

‘I don’t belong nowhere really’: the figure of the London migrant in Dan Jacobson’s ‘A Long Way from London’ and Jean Rhys’s ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’

Publisher versionIn this article we compare and contrast the figure of the migrant, central to Dan Jacobson’s short story ‘A Long Way from London’ ([1953] 1958. A Long Way from London and other stories. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson), and to Jean Rhys’s short story ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ ([1962] 1987. The Collected Stories. New York: Norton), both of which are set in London in the early to mid-twentieth century. The main argument is that these figures, as migrants in London from South Africa and the Caribbean respectively, similarly occupy a liminal space despite stark differences in class, race and gender. In both stories this liminal space is described through evocations of London as a hostile diasporic space, lacking in hospitality, and experienced by the migrant figure as a place of confinement and incarceration. Also, both stories utilize the technique of silence or lacunae when it comes to issues of specific discrimination and abuse, such as racism or sexual exploitation. For the purposes of comparison, the character Manwera from ‘A Long Way from London’ and, Selina, the protagonist of ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, are selected for analysis. Particularly, their respective responses (Manwera’s pride and dignity, and Selina’s recovery after a breakdown, and her musical talent) to the exigencies of migration are suggestive of ‘adaptive strength’ (Steve Vertovec and Robin Cohen [1999] 2001. Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Elgar Reference Collection, xviii), a common feature in transnational literature which attempts to celebrate liminality and multiplicity as key characteristics of a transnational subjectivity. In addition, the protagonist of ‘A Long Way from London’, Arthur, offers a contrast to Manwera and Selina, not only because of race and class, but because he is depicted as having adapted to and assimilated into British culture, while being strangely detached from and ambivalent about both homeland and diasporic home. Varying forms of adaptive strength are portrayed in both stories, but they close with intimations of bleak futures for the migrant figures. The essay thus concludes with the observation that in these two stories, the figure of the London migrant is rendered as facing further grave challenges, and that all three figures ‘belong nowhere’ (Rhys [1962] 1987 Rhys, Jean. [1962] 1987. The Collected Stories. New York: Norton. [Google Scholar] , 175)