Speaking in Other Voices: An Ethnography of Walloon Puppet Theaters (Book Review)

Theatre Journal, 2006

In the Belgian political debate, regional and national identities are often presented as opposites, particularly by sub-state nationalist actors. Especially Flemish nationalists consider the Belgian state as artificial and obsolete and clearly support Flemish nation-building as a project directed against a Belgian federalist project. Walloon or francophone nationalism has not been very strong in recent years, but in the past Walloon regionalism has also directed itself against the Belgian state, amongst other things accused of aggravating Walloon economic decline. Despite this deep-seated antagonism between Belgian and Flemish/Walloon nation-building projects its roots are much shorter than most observers believe. Belgium’s artificial character – the grand narrative and underpinning legitimation of both substate nationalisms - has been vehemently contested in the past, not only by the French-speaking elites but especially by the Flemish movement in the period that it started up the construction of its national identity. Basing ourselves methodologically on the assumption that the construction of collective and national identities is as much a result of positive self-representation (identification) as of negative other-representation (alterification), moreover two ideas that are conceptually indissolubly related, we compare in this interdisciplinary contribution the mutual other representations of the Flemish and Walloon movements in mid-nineteenth century Belgium, when the Flemish-Walloon antagonism appeared on the surface. By launching in 1840 a petition demanding the use of Flemish language – Vlaemsch or Nederduitsch - in matters of local governance in what then was called the Flemish provinces, a budding Flemish movement set its first steps on the political scene. As a political Walloon movement only came into existence as a reaction around the 1890’s, we will analyze other representation by francophone elites and the first Walloon philologists. The sources for our discussion of othering strategies in this early period of Belgian history are public sources such as cultural magazines and brochures, through which national movements intended to gain legitimacy. The analysis shows that on both sides, actors not only situated themselves eagerly inside the Belgian framework; they represented themselves as indispensable for the legitimation of a Belgian identity and represented the other as a threat for the completion of this undertaking. The francophones considered a general frenchification as key for the anchoring of a Belgian identity, as this would unify the country and be a vehicle for high cultural education and emancipating values, necessary to stand up to the menace of the ‘negative external other’ personified by the Dutch kingdom of William I. In contrast to this, Flemish elites aimed to root this Belgian identity by stressing the Flemish character, history and language as distinctive features necessary to stand up to the annexionist menace of the ‘negative external other’ France. In their respective discourses both camps accentuated their Belgian patriotism, accusing the national ‘internal other’ of jeopardising the fragile unity of the young country by benefitting the menacing ‘external other’. Flemish and francophone elites represented themselves as being the best, the most original and the most efficient Belgians… not least by unmasking the fake ones.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2009

How do the senses shape human experience, and how does history shape sensorial experience? According to Smith, historians, anthropologists, art historians, and sociologists have answered this question principally by studying vision: Ever since Marshall McLuhan's "great divide" theory, which linked the modem era with the visual era, and posited a lost aural/oral moment that faded with the invention of the printing press, the visual has taken a central role in sensory history. Scholars have written volumes on how and what people see, the power of sight and the ability to control it, and the ubiquity of surveillance. But others have begun to challenge this periodization of the "rise" of the visual. Noting that the visual cannot be understood in isolation from the audible, the tactile, the olfactory, and the gustatory, they have worked to integrate these senses into explorations of the experiential past. The point is that "premodern" societies depended on the visual and that "modern" societies felt, heard, tasted, and smelled the world as much as they saw it. As Smith puts it in this masterly extended reºection on these matters, the key to more nuance is "a habit of thinking about the past, an engrained way of exploring not just the role of sight but the other senses too" (4). This book is a survey of the ªeld of sensory history. Smith draws from a growing and unruly collection of work that includes histories of medicine and of music, anthropologies of commodities and of religion, and sociologies of smell and of taste. The volume emphasizes work that diminishes the centrality of visual culture by taking an intersensorial approach. Although his intention is never to dismiss the importance of vision altogether, Smith successfully demonstrates the limitations of a purely visual approach with compelling examples. A sensory history of the supermarket, for example, suggests that although changes in lighting and presentation altered the visual experience of shopping, equally transformative diminutions of sound and invitations to touch and smell produce accompanied them. Disturbing but telling studies situated in the American South have demonstrated the prevalence of theories of "racial smells" in racist ideologies. In another example, the act of touching assumes a historical dimension with shifts in theories of child rearing-from warnings during the 1890s against too much touching to the later re-evaluation of parental caresses as essential to a child's wellbeing. To his credit, Smith points out some shortcomings of the ªeld, which are necessarily replicated in the book. The heavy emphasis on North America and Europe, for instance, is a call to scholars of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean to contribute. But this supposed lack of studies in languages other than English may be overdrawn; Spanish-language scholarship on sound, listening and technology, for instance, is burgeoning. Nonetheless, many of the paradigms drawn from Reviews Europe or North America continue to dominate the study of the senses. The hope is that books like this one will spur work that not only contributes to the geographical scope of the ªeld but also tackles the tough epistemological and methodological issues. This book is important for scholars interested in sensory history and anyone interested in acquiring the habit of sensing the past.

Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 2007

International Review of Social History, 2001

Anke Niehof. The Domestic Domain. Chances, choices and strategies of family households. Ashgate, Aldershot [etc.] 1999. xii, 241 pp. £37.50. Social historians have been systematically examining family households in the past for some four decades now: a long enough period of time for this kind of research to have developed a history of its own. In its ®rst phase, there was a plenitude of comparative investigations of households according to structural type, as far back as sources would permit. In the second, researchers worried that the household was being studied far too much in isolation from other social con®gurations and too frequently as a static, timeless, entity. The third phase (the present) ®nds the historical study of family households paying proper attention to their embeddedness in larger social contexts and in the¯ow of time, but also somewhat frustrated at the inability of historical sources to provide an unambiguous picture of what went on``inside'' these microentities. With respect to inner workings, research on the historical household is still mostly an exercise in inference and educated guesswork. Given the nature of most historical sources, the internal history of the family household is likely to remain mostly hidden, especially for the distant past. The serious exploitation of various kinds of written personal testimonies makes the recent past somewhat more transparent, however. This fact renders The Domestic Domain a very useful work, because the authors focus precisely on ways of explicating``what goes on inside the`black box' of households'' (p. 1). Though the book was not written for historians, (the authors are members of the Department of Economics and Management at Wageningen Agricultural University), it neatly summarizes the theoretical approaches to the family household in various contemporary family sciences, and effectively discusses the multiplicity of approaches useful for understanding what transpires (and, perhaps, transpired in the past) inside``the black box''. The work is thus a useful addition to the social science literature that has been part of historical family-household studies from the beginning. (It should be remembered that the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structures envisaged and portrayed its early investigations as an exercise in``historical sociology'', and that the anthropologist Jack Goody, from whose writings the title of the present work ±``domestic domain'' ± was drawn, authored a valuable chapter in the landmark publication, Family and Household in Past Time.) 1 Pennartz and Niehof have organized their book rather schematically. An introductory chapter lays out the theoretical justi®cation for considering the family household as aǹ`a ctive agent'' (p. 5), rather than as only as an epiphenomenal battleground for larger social forces. The next seven chapters review the``approaches'' with the help of which an understanding of the inner dynamics of the family household have been sought. The family household can be envisaged as a locus of rational choice (ch. 2), of reasoned action and planned behavior. It can also be looked at as a site in which household strategies of various kinds (ch. 3) are formulated and coordinated. In allocating resources, the household reveals 1. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (eds), Family and Household in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972). for a new start. The Great Alliance between the Americans, Russians, and British could be depended on to guarantee peace, cooperation and development, and the United Nations would be instrumental in achieving this. The world of labour was closely involved, and felt the heartbeat of history. The leading elite in the three superpowers included senior ®gures from the labour movement. The cooperation between them would re¯ect the collaboration at the international level, while the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which they planned to establish, would become the voice of labour, both at the negotiating table and within the corporative model of cooperation and consultation. The aim was a sustained increase in the welfare and rights of the working population in a world of peace. It was a dream that inspired many, even those who, in the past, had had bitter experiences with communists in their own country and on the international scene. However, things turned out differently. The pluriform model of cooperation became a confrontational model between two antagonists. The WFTU did indeed come to mirror relations between countries. Before too long, the Cold War destroyed the structure and, immediately, the prominent role of labour within the international community. The cynics were proved right, and many, including those who had passionately believed in the dream and had even proclaimed it, joined them in concluding that the experiment was doomed to fail right from the start. In this fascinating and engagingly written book, Victor Silverman attempts to reconstruct that pivotal period from the point of view of the``believers'', those who had faith in the possibility of a new and harmonious world order in which labour would play a prominent role. There were many such believers within the labour movement, particularly among the rank-and-®le. The switch to the Cold-War ideology that took place so quickly in political and government circles occurred much more slowly within the labour movement, where memories of the great dream continued to linger for a long time. Silverman takes the labour movements in the two``Western'' powers ± Great Britain and the United States ± as the starting point for his study. These also serve as useful comparisons. Following the failure in the mid-1920s of attempts to collaborate with the labour movement in the Soviet Union, the leaders of the British labour movement were among the most prominent and powerful opponents of the policy of unity. But among the rank-and-®le this opposition was less one-sided. Without necessarily being communists, many British workers admired and respected the``workers' state'' in Russia, though there was much scepticism about Russia's military potential. Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 relieved German pressure on Britain, and, in the words of the TUC's General Secretary, Sir Walter Citrine, led British public opinion to demonstrate an``almost unreasoning admiration'' for the Red Army. Throughout Britain there were spontaneous initiatives designed to show support for and cooperation with the Soviets, in some cases at the instigation of the British government. The TUC also came under pressure to demonstrate its backing for Soviet Russia, and resorted to founding an Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee, which led to the ®rst structural collaboration between the trade-union leaderships of the two countries for ®fteen years. So it was external factors that pushed the``right-wing'' leadership of the TUC towards cooperation with the Soviets. In domestic terms, such cooperation was also convenient since it allowed the TUC to bene®t from the goodwill evoked by association with the Soviet Union at that time; otherwise, the communists might have pro®ted. At the international level, however, it precipitated a chain reaction over which the TUC leadership lost control. Against its

Monatshefte, 2017

Modern Language Quarterly, 1999

University Press, 1997. vi + 413 pp. $55.00. "The question of how one begzns to write," Jacques Lezra observes well into Unspeakable Subjects, is "generously" posed throughout Don Quixote (157). The same question arises for any reviewer of Lezra's intricate and brilliant study of "eventiality" and "unspeakable subjects." At the heart of this bookto bend its own use of body parts to our purposes-are two of the most rigorously theoretical chapters on Cervantes in print. At the heart of the heart of this book is a hand, specifically, Cervantes' hand. The reader ponders that "truncated hand" after a salubrious run through Freud, Descartes, and virtually all the major critical discourses of European modernity and postmodernity. Cervantes' maimed hand gives way to Don Quixote's eroticized hand and, at the book's end, to the severed head of a pirate in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, a "grammatical event" in a play shown "to abound grotesquely with parts of bodies" (289-90). The history of Ragozine's disembodied head "tells allegorically" the story of the passage from tropological systems to the political and institutional events-for example, &ng James's six proclamations against piracy-for which they seem to substitute

Ibadan Journal of English Studies , 2013

A number of studies in national theatrical discourse have focused on the elements and forms of theatre and its performance as well as comparative discussion of differences in similar and dissimilar theatrical traditions across cultures and nations. Several of these investigations centre on other national and theatrical concerns without addressing the roles these forms play in reinforcing national identity and without necessarily focussing on the substantial potentials inherent in the forms in identifying a people's identity and promoting and preserving the same.

Communication Theory, 2014

ABSTRACT Although Bakhtin's ideas have been mainly explored in the realm of literature and linguistics, his ideas of ventriloquation and polyphony could be mobilized to study the communicative constitution of reality, more generally. Using an excerpt taken from a conversation between two administrators, we show how various forms of ventriloquism actualize themselves in what they say and the way they say it. This kind of analysis amounts to questioning our traditional way of conceiving of discourse and interaction in general, especially in terms of their roles in the constitution of our world. The world we live in is a speaking and personified world; a world that comes to speak through us because people make it speak in a specific way.

Current studies of the period of early modernity turn about a compelling methodological fantasy. in the period of early modernity, we believe, cultural works broadly understood are folded into the baggy purse of tradable, transportable, and translatable products and objects we now call commodities; from that purse emerge what Chandra Mukerji called "new and elaborate systems of thought," of imagination, and of perception. 1 here is Mukerji, writing in 1983 about "the economic life of early modern europe":