Journal articles on the topic 'Metaphysics of race'

Abstract The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017).

AbstractThis article redresses the interpretative lacunae of historians’ conceptions of Nazi racism by overcoming their attempts to comprehend it from either a secular/scientific or a religious/theological perspective. Drawing on a variety of anthropological, philosophical, and political-theoretical works, the article illustrates how Nazi racial ideas were formulated not only in accordance with the latest discoveries in the field of human heredity, but also in correspondence to contemporary debates over secularization, value-free science, and biological determinism. It argues that the Nazi conception of race constituted a new form of religiosity, which did not draw on supernatural beliefs or theological narratives, but rather on vitalist-oriented metaphysics, shifting the object of faith from the transcendent realm of God to the immanent sphere of racial inwardness. Redefining faith in vitalist-existentialist terms corresponded with the Nazi aspiration to overcome the fragmentation of modernity, overturn the nihilistic threat posed by materialist society, and carry out a spiritual renaissance built upon immanent-biological foundations.

Abstract Heidegger’s geophilosophyIn Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’, his geophilosophy, the fact that he attributes a crucial importance to different places, becomes more evident than in his other works. The effect of this geophilosophy is that ontological difference ‐ the key point of Heidegger’s thinking ‐ is mixed up with, or replaced by, ontic differences. If in Being and Time Dasein’s ‘ground’ is an openness to Being, later this word often refers to Germany as a specific country. In 1939, just before the start of World War II, Hölderlin’s view of the relationship between ‘the own’ and ‘the foreign’ inspires Heidegger to see the possibility of a complementary relationship between the German and the Russian people. During and after World War II, Heidegger’s criticism of ‘Western’ metaphysics is strongly colored by his hostility to England, France and the U.S.A. In response to metaphysical universalism he relates different types of it to specific regions on earth. Remarkably, his criticism of metaphysics brings him to both support and criticize the notion of race.

This paper examines the links between Western music, Western metaphysics, and Western imperialism. Taking Derrida's reading of "White Mythology" and "Violence and Metaphysics" as its point of departure, the paper explores the relationship between the theories and practices of musical composition formalized in Europe in the eighteenth and finalized in the nineteenth century, and the theories and practices of race, racial differentiation, and empire that coincide(d) with it.

The modern worldview inherent in postmodern culture consists in the negation of metaphysics. Metaphysics is a teaching that has its subject universal, considered in the forms or absolute basis, or the ultimate cause of the universe, the universe itself as an ordered whole (cosmos), as well as the soul as a principle of unity. In the modern era, the absolute beginning (the absolute can be described as complete infinity) moves from the transcendent to nature and to the human race. This naturally led to the «loss» of metaphysics in the culture of postmodernism. The logical development of the opposing theories of empiricism and rationalism ultimately led to one result – the absurdity of the world and the «disappearance» of man. Metaphysics is inextricably linked with the concept of «sacred», which characterizes the absolute beginning, the highest and perfect value of something for a person. Therefore, it is not by chance that in post-metaphysical time there is a process of desacralization of the world and man, and all ties that root man in the unchanging and eternal are broken. The essential characteristic of man is consciousness. The component structure of consciousness includes will, knowledge, emotions and self-consciousness. If metaphysics as a doctrine is correlated with the rational aspect of the mastering of the world, the sacred is correlated with the strong-willed and emotional. The widest range of feelings is connected with the sacred: faith, love, worship, awe, etc. The sacred is what causes these feelings. Hostile attitude to integrity, as the implementation of violence, affects and distorts all components of consciousness: rational, strong-willed, sensual and emotional. The true sacred sphere complements metaphysics as the highest level of the value component of consciousness. The «deformation» of metaphysics and the sphere of the sacred has led to two consequences in modern culture: mass man (in the presence of affects) and man-made man (in the absence of affects).Efforts to «restore the integrity of man» are opposed by the logic of the development of modern society, carried out by methods of specialization and «prosthetics». If the logic of development is higher than the sense of self-preservation of man, then he can expect an anthropological catastrophe.

In Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, contemporary feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger claims that the reality of race and gender (both social constructs) is built on unjust social structures and must be resisted. Meanwhile, contemporary social theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak extends the term ‘subaltern’ to Third World Asian women who were rendered inarticulate by centuries of oppressive masculinist, imperialist, and colonial rule. This article examines how a metaphysics of resistance, culled from philosophy and postcolonial studies, can contribute to expanding postcolonial feminist theologizing.

This article examines how choreographer Zab Maboungou uses philosophical themes about the “self” positioned in time and space to reappropriate subjecthood through a contemporary African dance vocabulary. I suggest that in deploying such methods—which I describe as an “embodied Africanist metaphysics”— Maboungou challenges the rhetoric of the European Enlightenment that continues to influence constructions of race today. Maboungou's choreography and pedagogy effectively undermine implicit assumptions that align whiteness and European aesthetics with universal subject-hood and creates a productive space for the presentation and development of contemporary African dance in Montreal (and North America more generally).

Abstract Richard Wagner's Siegfried constitutes something of an anomaly within the Ring cycle: the epic narrative of the Nibelungs and Valsungs grinds to a virtual halt, while two characters, Mime and Siegfried, reenact the fairy tale of the ““youth who went forth to learn what fear is.”” The fairy tale's mythic framework nevertheless reasserts itself within the fairytale enclosure in the guise of sexuality, in particular sexual difference: As Siegfried begins asking troubling questions about his paternity, Mime is thrust into the role of unitary origin, culminating in his desperate claim that he is Siegfried's ““father and mother.”” This article explores how exactly Wagner stages the tug of war between Siegfried and Mime over sexual difference, in particular in act I of Siegfried, allying different ways of conceiving descent, knowledge, and love with either the epic or the anti-epic (which Wagner associates with the fairy tale). This turns the generic struggle at the heart of Siegfried into a struggle between two kinds of families laying claim to Siegfried's paternity: the Gods of Valhalla who reproduce sexually, and the Nibelungs who are capable only of asexual reproduction of the self-same. This article argues that Wagner draws on his own speculations on sexuality, race, and history, in particular his idiosyncratic reading of Schopenhauer, to overlay this opposition not only with moral significations, but racial ones as well.

Abstract This interview with the digital media theorist Luciana Parisi opens with the hypothesis that cybernetics is not merely the name for that postwar metascience of command and control. For Parisi, cybernetics names a “historical reconfiguration of metaphysics on behalf of technics.” This interview asks about the meaning and consequences of this hypothesis but steers away from the all-too-easy poiesis-as-panacea solution to the computational quagmire. Instead, this interview descends into the computational medium, into the specificity of its logic, asking what it might mean not merely to live in a cyberneticized world but to actively participate and believe in such a world. Parisi’s response puts to philosophy an important task: not to seek the accommodations of an expanding concept of the human within a machinic world but to think with the logic of the ascendant cybernetic metaphysics. For Parisi, a necessary move herein is to negotiate the reality of the algorithm’s syntactic operations, their performativity, a move that for her implies a certain form of belief. In tracking this form of belief across disciplines, this interview broaches questions of scalability, race and colonialism, the nonneutrality of technoscience, and the potential of computational aesthetics. Finally, the interview gestures toward Parisi’s future work, because, as she reminds us, we cannot go back; there are questions emerging from within machines that are eager to emerge and are waiting for us to think them.

The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze the thoughts of Islamic multicultural education proposed by KH Imam Zarkasyi in or- der to find the rationale and the construction of thoughts as well as the contribution to Islamic civilization in Indonesia through historical-philo- sophical approach. The results of the study showed that the rationale of Islamic multicultural education proposed by KH. Imam Zarkasyi referred to the principle of the unity of man or unity of creation and the unity of knowledge, as a reflection of the nature of one God conception. The in- terpretation of the concept created internalization approach regarding the spiritual reason in which every human work stepped on the objective value and implications on the orientation of God as the minimum ratio- nality to release the negative spirit, dichotomy, liberalization of science, socio-cultural, fanatics of tribes/nation/race/ethnic group/culture, or the overall types of the local/national/international students’ souls through the integration of the value in terms of diverse knowledge and socio- cultural values based on Islamic teaching values, cultural philosophy of Indonesian identities, socio-cultural diversity of local/national/interna- tional students and the integration of Education Center in terms of social structure equal to the form of communal religious, had formed a balance of value function and changes of attitudes, intellects and the strength of local/national/international Moslems as the power of socio-religious Mos- lems in Indonesia in order to foster peace throughout the world. The above findings showed the integrated points of view on religion, metaphysics and reason that determined the consciousness of human morality, not as the guidance of thoughts and ratio.

The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze the thoughts of Islamic multicultural education proposed by KH Imam Zarkasyi in or- der to find the rationale and the construction of thoughts as well as the contribution to Islamic civilization in Indonesia through historical-philo- sophical approach. The results of the study showed that the rationale of Islamic multicultural education proposed by KH. Imam Zarkasyi referred to the principle of the unity of man or unity of creation and the unity of knowledge, as a reflection of the nature of one God conception. The in- terpretation of the concept created internalization approach regarding the spiritual reason in which every human work stepped on the objective value and implications on the orientation of God as the minimum ratio- nality to release the negative spirit, dichotomy, liberalization of science, socio-cultural, fanatics of tribes/nation/race/ethnic group/culture, or the overall types of the local/national/international students’ souls through the integration of the value in terms of diverse knowledge and socio- cultural values based on Islamic teaching values, cultural philosophy of Indonesian identities, socio-cultural diversity of local/national/interna- tional students and the integration of Education Center in terms of social structure equal to the form of communal religious, had formed a balance of value function and changes of attitudes, intellects and the strength of local/national/international Moslems as the power of socio-religious Mos- lems in Indonesia in order to foster peace throughout the world. The above findings showed the integrated points of view on religion, metaphysics and reason that determined the consciousness of human morality, not as the guidance of thoughts and ratio.

Just as the differentiation of human beings from other species has traditionally been thought to be based on some common essence or nature, so has the division of humankind into certain groups, in particular, men and women and races, been thought to be based on their distinct natures. There are many similarities between the concepts of human nature, ‘women’s nature’ (what we now call gender) and race, and how these concepts have functioned ideologically: For all three, the traditional idea was that there were fixed, natural essences determining the cognitive, moral, and emotional traits and abilities of the group in question. Some, e.g., Plato, and Herrnstein in recent years, have applied the idea to different social classes as well. I will call this view essentialism, and note that it is compatible with various metaphysical analyses. One could be opposed to metaphysical essentialism, but accept essences in this sense, as, for example, Hume did.

This essay begins by asking whether the new materialism, as currently constituted, can say anything useful about race, given that the most widely read texts recognized as belonging to this emerging field pointedly do not. Put another way, this essay examines possibilities for the reading of the raced enfleshed human subject in and beyond the parameters of the new materialism. The essay’s first section locates the raced enfleshed subject as latent (if not actively suppressed) entity in existing new materialist work. The latter half turns to questions of possibility, especially the question of whether a much older, precluded, or occluded voice is already “speaking through” the so-called materialist turn, challenging it as a way of contesting its own (attempted, failed) erasure from the metaphysical founding scene of the liberal humanist subject that informs the material turn.

Abstract In response to commentaries by Esa Díaz León, Jennifer Saul, and Ra- chel Sterken, I develop more fully my views on the role of structure in social and metaphysical explanation. Although I believe that social agency, quite generally, occurs within practices and structures, the relevance of structure depends on the sort of questions we are asking and what interventions we are considering. The emphasis on questions is also relevant in considering metaphysical and meta-metaphysical is- sues about realism with respect to gender and race. I aim to demon- strate that tools we develop in the context of critical social theory can change the questions we ask, what forms of explanation are called for, and how we do philosophy.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that genes determine not just human physical, but human behavioral tendencies to a much greater degree than many people want to believe. In particular, they argue that certain behavioral tendencies distinguishing men from women are reflective of different male and female reproductive strategies which evolved during the early history of the human race. In this article, evolutionary psychology's claims to be a rigorous science are questioned, with particular reference to its conclusions about gender relations. In addition, evolutionary psychology as a metaphysical world view is contrasted with the biblical creation account, which calls for gender co-operation, not competition, and which does not see pair-bonding as a reductionistic strategy for getting individuals' genes copied in the next generation.

There are certain remarks in Culture and Value in which Wittgenstein writes about Jews and about what he describes as their ‘Jewish mind’. In these remarks he appears to be trying to make a distinction between two different spiritual forces which operate in Western culture and which give rise to two different types of artists and works of art. On one side of the divide are Jews and works of art imbued with Jewish spirit. On the other side are men of culture and works of art which exhibit a non-Jewish spirit. Among the various remarks made in this context, he offers the following thoughts about the spiritual nature of Jews, their mentality, character and artistic achievements:‘You get tragedy when a tree, instead of bending, breaks. Tragedy is something un-Jewish’ (1). Following Renan he writes: ‘The Semitic races have an unpoetic mentality, which heads straight for what is concrete’ (6). This, he explains, is because Jews are attracted by ‘pure intellectualism’. ‘I think it would be possible now to have a form of theatre played in masks. The characters would simply be stylized human types.’ (In his opinion this suits Karl Kraus's plays and their abstract nature.) ‘Masked theatre is anyway the expression of an intellectualistic character. And for the same reason perhaps it is a theatrical form that will attract only Jews’ (12). ‘The Jew is a desert region, but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit and intellect’ (13). ‘It is typical for a Jewish mind to understand somebody else's work better than that person understands it himself.’ But intellect, it seems, is not a mental attribute providing for genius and true creative powers. ‘Amongst Jews “genius” is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) … It might be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass; its way is rather to make a drawing of the flower or blade of grass which has grown in the soil of another's mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture. We aren't pointing to a fault when we say this and everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. It is only when the nature of a Jewish work is confused with that of a non-Jewish work that there is any danger, especially when the author of the Jewish work falls into the confusion himself, as he so easily may. (Doesn't he look as proud as though he had produced the milk himself?)’ (18–19).

This paper discusses the emergence of Negritude and its contribution to the early development of African theology. The Negritude movement of the 1930s and 40s understands itself as a literary and philosophical movement that responds to colonial domination. It awakened a cultural voice African priests used to become legible in the discipline of Christian theology. Negritude was a contested category. For some, it was nothing more than a nativist philosophy that promoted a metaphysic of race; for others, Negritude was an initiative to recover African cultural values. This paper traces the Senghorian tradition of Negritude that began as a philosophy of black identity but evolved into a mode of thought that inspired blacks to reimagine African alternatives to the colonial state. Senghor's proposal of African socialism was a component of the broader struggle that influenced the development of a theology of liberation in Africa.

The article aims to present Herder’s early philosophy of language against the background of the question regarding the human or divine origin of language, which influenced mainly the German discussion in the 1760s. It focuses on the interpretation of two writings in which Herder answers the question of the origin of speech in a seemingly different way: A Treatise on the Origin of Language and The Oldest Document of the Human Race. While in the Treatise Herder insists on the human origin of language, in The Oldest Document he admits the need for “God’s teaching” for its origin. The question therefore arises as to whether Herder has revised his original position. However, we demonstrate that The Oldest Document is not a revision, but a supplement to the theses contained in the Treatise by metaphysical assumptions, which form an indispensable framework for Herder’s philosophy of language.

Leucine-rich repeat kinase-1 (Lrrk1) consists of ankyrin repeats (ANK), leucine-rich repeats (LRR), a GTPase-like domain of Roc (ROC), a COR domain, a serine/threonine kinase domain (KD), and WD40 repeats (WD40). Previous studies have revealed that knockout (KO) of Lrrk1 in mice causes severe osteopetrosis, and a human mutation of Lrrk1 leads to osteosclerotic metaphysial dysplasia. The molecular mechanism by which Lrrk1 regulates osteoclast function is unknown. In this study, we generated a series of Lrrk1 mutants and evaluated their ability to rescue defective bone resorption in Lrrk1-deficient osteoclasts by use of pit formation assays. Overexpression of Lrrk1 or LRR-truncated Lrrk1, but not ANK-truncated Lrrk1, WD40-truncated Lrrk1, Lrrk1-KD, or K651A mutant Lrrk1, rescued bone resorption function of Lrrk1 KO osteoclasts. We next examined whether RAC1/Cdc42 small GTPases are direct substrates of Lrrk1 in osteoclasts. Western blot and pull-down assays revealed that Lrrk1 deficiency in osteoclasts resulted in reduced phosphorylation and activation of RAC1/Cdc42. In vitro kinase assays confirmed that recombinant Lrrk1 phosphorylated RAC1-GST protein, and immunoprecipitation showed that the interaction of Lrrk1 with RAC1 occurred within 10 min after RANKL treatment. Overexpression of constitutively active Q61L RAC1 partially rescued the resorptive function of Lrrk1-deficient osteoclasts. Furthermore, lack of Lrrk1 in osteoclasts led to reduced autophosphorylation of p21 protein-activated kinase-1 at Ser144, catalyzed by RAC1/Cdc42 binding and activation. Our data indicate that Lrrk1 regulates osteoclast function by directly modulating phosphorylation and activation of small GTPase RAC1/Cdc42 and that its function depends on ANK, ROC, WD40, and kinase domains.

This essay is an analysis of three literary works by black women writers from the U.S.: Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sherley Ann Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In my analysis, I use Shange’s trope of the “methaphysical dilemma” to consider the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in these writers’ textual representations of black women’s bodies. Writing against a historical legacy of colonialism and domination that defined black bodies as “primitive” or “unbridled” (bell hooks 1991), I argue that these works illustrate some of the artistic/literary strategies contemporary black women writers use to re-claim the power of voice/voicing as they depict black women’s subjectivities as unfinished, complex, but self-fashioned creations.

ABSTRACT Background Stress fracture risk is elevated during initial military training (IMT), particularly in lower-extremity bones such as the tibia. Although the etiology of stress fractures is multifactorial, lower bone strength increases risk. Objective The objective of this study was to assess, through the use of peripheral quantitative computed tomography, whether adherence to a dietary pattern rich in calcium, potassium, and protein before IMT is positively associated with bone indexes in young adults entering IMT. Design A cross-sectional analysis was performed with the use of baseline data from 3 randomized controlled trials in Army, Air Force, and Marine recruits (n = 401; 179 men, 222 women). Dietary intake was estimated from a food-frequency questionnaire. A dietary pattern characterized by calcium, potassium, and protein was derived via reduced rank regression and a pattern z score was computed for each volunteer, where higher scores indicated greater adherence to the pattern. At the 4% (metaphysis) and 14% (diaphysis) sites of the tibia, bone mineral content (BMC), volumetric bone mineral density, robustness, and strength indexes were evaluated. Associations between dietary pattern z score as the predictor variable and bone indexes as the response variables were evaluated by multiple linear regression. Results Pattern z score was positively associated with BMC (P = 0.004) and strength (P = 0.01) at the metaphysis and with BMC (P = 0.0002), strength (P = 0.0006), and robustness (P = 0.02) at the diaphysis when controlling for age, sex, race, energy, smoking, education, and exercise. Further adjustment for BMI attenuated the associations, except with diaphyseal BMC (P = 0.005) and strength (P = 0.01). When height and weight were used in place of body mass index, the association with BMC remained (P = 0.046). Conclusions A dietary pattern rich in calcium, potassium, and protein is positively associated with measures of tibia BMC and strength in recruits entering IMT. Whether adherence to this dietary pattern before IMT affects injury susceptibility during training remains to be determined. These trials were registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01617109 and NCT02636348.

In this article we aim to show the potential of cross‐continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyĕrónké Oyĕwùmí. Oyĕwùmí's work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oyĕwùmí's claims. We then draw Irigaray and Oyĕwùmí into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oyĕwùmí's critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray's philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray's critique of Western culture's forgetting of sexual difference to Oyĕwùmí's critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray's philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of.

AbstractIn spite (or because) of the infinity of (the) voice, of the boundless mystery it carries and exhales, of its disembodied traversing and joining, sayings follow barely traced courses. They travel along fragile lines of memory, often discontinuous bridges, transpositions into notational forms. They travel alone, exposed to corruption, consuming friction, repetition - their beginning and final destination often lost to those who listen to them and send them past. In spite of the power of memory and its arts, there are sayings and stories handed down to us in fragments, like decapitated Níke and disfigured Diónysos. There are poems reaching us, race of diggers and preservers, through somebody else's reminiscence, recovery, or loving quotation. In turn, our receiving and sending (stretching) forth, our being thus traversed, shares something with the destiny of these sayings and sculpted deities - being sent, crossing and (un)covering distances, in the fragmented continuity of dialogues, or what remains of them. The present essay is devoted to a meditation on the question of temporality and history in its epistemologico-metaphysical implications. It is developed mainly by reference to Aristotle, after Heidegger.

This article discusses queer bioethics, a critical stance for dismantling cis- and heteronormativity in bioethics, together with intersectionality, the investigation of and potential for social justice-oriented change. I discuss the difficulties of navigating plurality with solidarity and ethical sobriety that I call the problems of identity, essentialism and relativism in intersectionality theory. I then proceed to ponder how queer bioethics relates to intersectionality, and close by offering some remarks for further research. Certain intersectional approaches share key queer bioethical imperatives in exposing how seemingly neutral antidiscrimination discourses rely on bias and privilege. Both powerfully demonstrate how ostensibly objective methodologies are often inadequate for addressing socially sanctioned bias or for unpacking oppressive habits of the mind. Intersectionality interrupts narrative norms and disrupts easy binaries, such as male/female or homo/hetero. Because it is practice-oriented and has a social justice mission, intersectionality approaches analysis and advocacy as necessarily linked, which corresponds to queer bioethics arising from LGBTQI activism. However, establishing intersectional queer bioethics requires further investigation into cases of race, sexual and gender diversity with queer bioethics as the background moral theory, formulation of which I suggest should be inspired by feminist metaphysical advances.

With the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become impossible to avoid Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. There has been the expected controversy with Heideggerians on the defensive and the philosopher’s detractors condemning his work outright. But there has been little serious exploration of the matter aside from several recent works. This article builds on this literature on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and concludes that an anti-Semitic narrative lies at the heart of Heidegger’s history of the oblivion of Being as nihilism. Moreover, Heidegger adopts the narrative framework set up by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality. In the end, we assert that Heidegger advocates a kind of war against Judaism that seeks to eradicate the Jewish influence in the western tradition. Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical’ anti-Semitism aims to overcome the nihilism of the ‘Jewish Christian’ revenge [ Rache] against death, a nihilism that has evolved into the technological effort to make everything secure.

Oswald Spengler belongs to the trend in the so-called “conservative revolution” which was entitled “young conservatism” (Jungkonservative) in times of Weimar Republic and was close to the political position of German business and military elites. The projects of those elites before and during the First World War and their development up to the seizer of power by the Nazis and the Second World War apply to the geopolitics, and Spengler was one of the most talented representatives and creators of those plans in world politics. His views on the world politics are determined by the Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) described in the fragments of his main “metaphysical” work Urfragen and his philosophy of history stated in the book “Decline of Europe”. Particular attention in the article is paid to his views on Russia, both in the second volume of “Decline of Europe” and in his last work “The Years of Decision”. The transition from culture to civilization that started in the 19th century, lead to the epoch of world wars and revolutions in the 20th century. According to Spengler, two types of revolution threatened the West, - the “white revolution” in western countries themselves, that Spengler termed “Bolshevism”, and the “colour revolution’ in the colonies. The military power of new Caesars would put the end to those revolutions, as well as liberalism and parliamentarism. According to Spengler, Germany was the only land, that preserved the main features of the “Nordic race”; and that’s why could unite Western countries in the struggle for self-preservation. Spengler’s heroic pessimism affirmed the readiness to resist the history course: the time of the “Faust” culture was nearly over, but for two more centuries it would be necessary to fight hard from the losing positions.

Background; Blount’s disease is a rare developmental disorder of children which causes progressive bowing of lower limbs. The term “Blount” was named after American orthopedic surgeon “Walter Putnam Blount” who first described this condition. The etiology of Blount’s disease is unknown but believed to be multifactorial. Various predisposing factors have been attributed including obesity, early walking, race, pre-existing varus, increased pressure on growth plate and nutrition. Blount’s disease has been suggested to be more frequent in African, Afro-american populations. Blount’s disease has to be differentiated from physiological bowing (physiologic genu varum) and rickets. Early diagnosis and treatment of Blount’s disease is essential as the disease process is reversible in early stage. Case; A three years old female child was brought by her mother with complaint of progressive bowing of both lower limbs for last one year. She achieved her milestones at appropriate age and started walking at 11 months of age without support. On examination, her height was 90 cms (at 10th centile) and weight was 17 kgs (at 90th centile). BMI (body mass index) was 20.9 (obese). There were no clinical signs or symptoms of rickets i.e frontal bossing, wide wrist, rachitic rosary, carpopedal spasm, fits or muscle weakness etc. Roentgenogram showed tibia in varus with a peculiar beak at metaphysic and raised metaphyseal-diaphyseal angle (>16 degrees). Serum calcium and serum vitamin D (25-hydroxy vitamin D) were normal. Serum alkaline phosphatase level was raised. Keeping in view typical history, examination findings and radiological epiphyseal beaking along with raised metaphyseal-diaphyseal angle, diagnosis of Infantile Blount’s disease was made. Conclusion; The clinicians should have a high suspicion of infantile blount’s disease when a child, more than 3 year’s age presents with severe varus deformity at proximal tibia with typical radiological findings. Characteristic radiologic findings along with history and examination help to distinguish it from physiologic bowing (physiologic genu varum) and rickets. Keywords; Blount’s disease, Physiologic genu varum, Rickets, Tibia vara, Osteochondrosis deformans tibiae

I. IntroductionA. The Science of AnthropologyThis study is speculative and concerns a difficult and complex subject.Its task is made more difficult as it defends a metaphysical position, advancesan ideological argument, and serves a moral cause. It will therefore remainan incomplete part of an on-going process in the debate on key issues in contemporaryMuslim society.The major task of anthropology' -the study of man-is to enable us tounderstand ourselves through understanding other cultures. Anthropologymakes us aware of the essential oneness of man and therefore allows us toappreciate each other. It is only quite recently in history that it has come tobe widely accepted that human beings are fundamentally alike; that they sharebasic interests, and so have certain common obligations to one another. Thisbelief is either explicit or implicit in most of the great world religions, butit is by no means acceptable today to many people even in "advanced" societies,and it would make no sense at all in many of the less-developed cultures.Among some of the indigenous tribes of Australia, a stranger who cannotprove that he is a kinsman, far from being welcomed hospitably, is regardedas a dangerous outsider and may be speared without compunction. Membersof the Lugbara tribe of northwestern Uganda used to think that all foreignerswere witches, dangerous, and scarcely human creatures who walked aboutupside-down and killed people by magic. The ancient Greeks believed thatall non-Hellenic peoples were barbarians and uncivilized savages whom itwould be quite inappropriate to treat as real people. Many citizens of modemstates today think of people of other races, nations, or cultures in ways notvery different from these, especially if their skin is differently colored or if ...

The author of the article carries out an analysis of texts by two writers who present the Shoah from different perspectives. At the onset he points out two layers of looking at theHolocaust in fantasy writing. The first one results from the said theme filtering through into the genre directly, the second is an intermediary one, namely, through the popular after the Second World War post-apocalyptic narratives where the Shoah is thematised as, for instance, the annihilation of the human race resulting from nuclear conflict or the spread of a deadly virus. The article analyses both mentioned layers using particular examples. Polaroidy z Zagłady [The Shoah/Annihilation Polaroids] by Paweł Paliński is a tale of an individual Shoah. What constitutes the analytical framework here are the titular pictures, which translate into a genre, nowadays rarely practised, called the literary picture. In the course of reading one recognises the triangle of attitudes: victim – witness – torturer. Even if the said triangle has been criticized by historians, it nonetheless decisively appears in the text owing to its layout. Requiem dla lalek [Requiem for Dolls] and Holocaust F written by Cezary Zbierzchowski are, respectively, a short-story collection and a novel, set in the fictitious world of Ramm. It is known from the very beginning that the world is doomed to be annihilated, the harbinger of which is God’s departure. In the short stories other signs of extinction are, among other things, euthanasia, the problem of immigration etc. The plains of annihilation recognized in the course of interpretation: metaphysical, social, and personal, compose a part of philosophical reflection on consequences of catastrophes being one of the spheres of the analysis undertaken. What also arrests our attention, and thereby is reflected upon, is the highly intertextual background of Zbierzchowski’s oeuvre. A prominent place is given to the analysis of the novel’s final chapter entitled Heart of Darkness, both referring to the famous novella written by Joseph Conrad and more than sufficiently justified by the text composition itself. The article’s conclusions both position the texts in relation to other works of Polish fantasy genre and indicate their role as examples of various absorption by popular culture (here fantasy) of the Shoah-related issues.

AbstractTheodore Adorno entitled the final section of his book Negative Dialektic “After Auschwitz”. For Adorno, this horror rendered metaphysical speculation incapable of speaking in universal terms. Paul Tillich’s early correlative method led him to speak against the Nazi regime and its persecution of the Jewish race. The practice of this correlative method brought Tillich to critique both the political and the social structure. His method of correlation stands above “metaphysics in its downfall” as he was aware of the negative results long before Auschwitz. This essay contends that Tillich’s methodology called for a new praxis of emancipation.

AbstractIn Heidegger’s Black Notebooks some ideas about political embodiment can be found, which have come under suspicion to justify the Third Reich’s race law. In the following article, the analysis and discussion of Heidegger’s political embodiment will firstly be traced back to the traditional understanding of the human as a “rational animal”, and will then look at how the “racial being” is subsequently developed and eventually transformed into political absolute subjectivism. Moreover, Heidegger’s in-depth explanation and critique on Nietzsche’s metaphysics, which he views as having transformed human experiences to a metaphysical representation and thus misunderstanding human nature, will also be clarified. Through Heidegger’s critic on biologism, a profound disclosure which potentially imply an attack of the racism at his time (Nazism) can be shown. Furthermore, Heidegger’s thinking of Being as a kind of emancipation of European political embodiment will also be analyzed. Lastly, although Heidegger and Confucianism have different ideas of lived-body, both schools basically show the same fundamental understanding of human nature. In regard to this, their understanding of political embodiment, their similarities and divergences, will be elucidated.

AbstractThe project of Categories We Live By is to offer a metaphysics of social categories. The strategy is to give a theory of social properties of individuals. The main components of the theory are a conferralist framework for properties; an account of social meaning; and an account of social construction; accompanying is also an account of social identity. This theory can be applies to offer concrete conferralist proposals of categories such as sex, gender, race, disability, religion, and LGBTQ categories. This précis describes the main components (conferralist framework, social meaning, social construction, social identity) briefly, but leaves discussions of applications for another time.

AbstractIt is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the debate away from metaphysics and epistemology towards ethics and moral psychology. Despite the important progress they make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian paradigm is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism makes it incapable of accounting for the irreducibly social dimension of the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy. In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’s

Racism and Its Presuppositions: Towards a Pragmatic Ethics of Social ChangeRacism has been described as a litmus test or a barium meal which reveals other disorders and injustices within the body politic. It presupposes the legitimacy of racial classifications and the metaphysical reality of races and therefore provides a vital area of scrutiny for philosophical traditions. This paper examines racism and its anti-social effects both on the individual and the society at large. It argues that racism is generally driven by fear and hatred hence all forms of racism are dangerous, socially harmful and morally wrong in practice. The paper recommends ways of overcoming the evil of racism by emphasizing social intelligence and self-realization as moral ideals drawing on John Dewey's pragmatism in ethics. It concludes by stressing Dewey's moral pragmatism as a potent instrument of social change.

Representation of Aboriginality in National Geographic In trafficking images of cultural difference, National Geographic has an unrivalled worldwide reach to over 37 million people per issue. Over the past 25 years, 48 photographs of Aboriginal Australians have appeared in 11 articles in the magazine. This article first examines how the magazine has exoticised, naturalised and sexualised Aboriginal Australians. By deploying the standard evolutionary model, National Geographic typically represents Aboriginal Australians as Black savages relegated to the Stone Age. In the remote outback "Arnhem Land Aboriginals Cling to the Dreamtime" (Scollay & Tweedie 645). In "Journey into Dreamtime" (Arden & Abell 8) an Aboriginal man is "triumphant with his kill of a wild turkey [and] leads a small group of Aborigines who have returned to some of the old ways of their nomadic ancestors in the Great Sandy Desert". The article concludes that the Stone Age encounter with modernity depicted in the magazine became a journey through time from location past to location present. Exoticisation The world of the Aboriginal Australians is male through the eyes of National Geographic. This stems from the Western cultural pattern that assigns things masculine to the cultural and things feminine to the natural realm (Ortner). The male Aboriginal performer of an initiation ritual in "Leapingin tribute" (Scollay & Tweedie 656-7) is represented as rooted in tradition and living in a sacred yet superstitious world. Portraits abound of men with painted faces, as in "Surging energy" (Scollay & Tweedie 648). Male finery and self-display become salient markers, Aboriginal "Boys summon courage" in male initiation focussing on bloodletting (Scollay & Tweedie 656). Such images convey the impression that the region is one of nature, taboo, danger and adventure and that it is a land out of time. The enchantment with ritual stems from it being a key to the past and indicative of photographer and writer having travelled through space to travel through time, similar to the connection made by Victorian evolutionary anthropologists last century (see Fabian). Naturalisation The naturalised Aboriginal Australians appearing in National Geographic are characterised by having timeless societies and personalities, what Wolf identifies as people without history. Routine location narratives naturalise Aboriginal Australians through their remote landscapes and seascapes ("blazing bushfire", Scollay & Tweedie 652-3; "conjuring an image as old as his ancestors", "scorched in one season, sodden in the next" Newman & Abell 3-9). In the West the cultural appropriation of nature is the object of labour, whereas for Aboriginal Australians it is the subject of labour. Aboriginal men are hunters ("triumphant with his kill", Arden & Abell 9; "the earth and sea of their own accord furnish them with all the things necessary for life", Newman & Abell 14-5). Thus, in National Geographic the productive world of work further naturalises the Aboriginal 'Other'. Sexualisation Naked Black women provide the hallmark National Geographic imagery of the sexualized 'Other'. By purveying the nude Aboriginal female, the magazine develops Western ideas about race, gender and sexuality, subcategorised in each case as black, female and unrepressed (Lutz & Collins 115). Women are white, men are Black and Black women are invisible in popular visual representations of motherhood in Western culture. In trafficking in photographs of Black women for an overwhelmingly white readership, National Geographic is clearly linking narrative threads of gender and race (Lutz & Collins166). As the readers' gaze focusses on the Aboriginal child they become the site for dealing with racial anxieties through creating the Black love object ("an appetite for learning", Scollay & Tweedie 654; "mud mates", Ellis & Austen 8-9). National Geographic's nickname for mother-child photos is 'tits and tots' (Meltzer) and they are a romantic staple in the magazine. Aboriginal mothering in "marriages of diplomacy" is idealised as the foundation of human social life (Scollay & Tweedie 650-1). However, with "seven of Johnny Bungawuy's 11 wives and a handful of his 52 children" this marriage is exotic enough to make cultural difference an issue because it depicts the unusually large number of plural marriage partners available to Aboriginal men in their practice of polygyny. The attribution of erotic qualities and sexual license to Aboriginal women is a result of displaying their bodies for close examination. The naked Aboriginal women in "marriages of diplomacy" represent the nude stylised as ethnographic fact (Scollay & Tweedie 650-1). The addition of a woman in the "marriages of diplomacy" photograph commoditises the practice of polygyny and illustrates that women have traditionally been seen as objects to be possessed, owned and adornments to the lives of men (Pollack). Location Past to Location Present Idealisation of the Aboriginal 'Other' allows for detemporalisation to be played out in alluring images of a simpler, natural Aboriginal world only now tentatively facing the throes of modernisation. Social Darwinism counterpoises superstition/ritual with science/technology and darker skin/exotic clothes with lighter skin/Western clothes. The Aboriginal guide bearing a "striking resemblance to his counterpart on the Burke-Wills journey" facilitates a form of ancestor worship that relates to what Rosaldo calls imperialist nostalgia for the passing of what we ourselves have destroyed (Judge & Scherschel 165). Photographs of the Aboriginal Australians are organised into a story about cultural evolution couched in normative discourse of modernisation and development as progress. In photographs contrasting the premodern with the modern the commodity stands for the future: "soda, soap, and spears in the arms of an [Aboriginal] father and daughter demonstrate their coexistence with white society" (Scollay & Tweedie 662). While for the Aboriginal father in "keeping faith with past and future" his "son enters an era that will inevitably propel his people into modern society" (MacLeish & Nebbia 171). Commodities in these contrasting representations are to be seen simply as a stage on the way to Westernisation. Dynamism, change and agency are apportioned to the Western centre, while Aboriginal Australians are just responding to the onslaught of modernisation on the periphery. Aboriginal masculinisation of modernity is situated in a series of photographs depicting the expansive frontier outback where Aboriginal stockmen are content to muster the cattle of white station owners. In "boiling the red dust" the Aboriginal stockman strums his guitar but sometimes "lapses into tradition and roams on walkabout" (Walker & Scherschel 457). Another Aboriginal stockman, in "saga of beef or bust", "uses his tracking ability to run down strays and cleanskins -- unbranded beasts" (MacLeish & Nebbia 161). "Other than his boots and a jug of water all he owns is rolled into the swag", the Aboriginal stockman must compete with the modern helicopter ("pesky as a giant fly", MacLeish & Stanfield 165); alternatively, "with a wager on the line, an Aboriginal stockman whoops it up at the annual Bedourie Race Meeting" (Ellis & Austen 3). The idealised image is one of the rugged yet happy lives of the Aboriginal stockman in transition to modernity. Social evolutionary theory "saw women in non-Western societies as oppressed and servile creatures, beasts of burden, chattels who could be bought and sold, eventually to be liberated by 'civilisation' or 'progress', thus attaining the enviable position of women in Western society" (Etienne & Leacock 1). Aboriginal feminisation of modernity is told through stories about the premodern helpmate to husband work of Aboriginal women. "Sharing a 'cuppa' at the start of their day" is gendered with vulnerability, primitivity, superstition and the constraints of tradition (Newman & Abell 24-5). The ambivalent message represented in "sharing a 'cuppa' at the start of their day" is complicated by the Aboriginal woman's stockman partner being white. Western ideological understanding of women's work has changed since WWII from helpmate to husband to self-realisation and independence (Chafe). However, images of Aboriginal women in modern work are conspicuously absent. Dispossessed Aboriginal prospectors earn money by 'yandying' ("Paddy Blair's no Irishman", MacLeish & Stanfield 166) -- "winnowing by tossing handfuls of ore into the wind to separate dirt from tin or gold" and 'noodling' -- "poking through rubble" ("selling water and renting bulldozers", Moore & Tweedie 569). Abject "down-and-outs addicted to cheap, poisonous wood alcohol" end up as dispossessed fringe-dwelling 'goomies' in Redfern ("matron saint", Starbird & Madden 224-5). Resistance through situationally motivated undertaking by Indigenous people against expropriation of land and resources is rarely represented in the media (see Drinnon), and National Geographic first attempts such a representation in the 1980s with "heads of several clans" (Scollay & Tweedie 653). Aboriginal men attempt to block a government mining survey crew. But the six Aboriginal men gaze off in different directions and only one is clearly focussed on something in the frame, thus the assembled men assume a disconnected, uncoordinated look. In the 1990s National Geographic story "The Uneasy Magic of Australia's Cape York Peninsula", Aboriginality is equated with caring for the land (Newman & Abell). Aboriginal peoples of Cape York Peninsula are portrayed as conservators valuable for their preservation of biocultural diversity ("the richlytextured landscape", Newman & Abell 17). Aboriginal "white sand people" of Cape York Peninsula are "on a sacred mission" when they "return an ancestor's skull to their homeland at Shelbourne Bay (Newman & Abell 32-3). After years of frustrated efforts to win back their lost domain, the peninsula's native people are at last gaining ground". Aboriginal Australian uses of land and resources are idealised as non-destructive and caring in contrast to rapacious postcolonial development aggression. National Geographic images of Aboriginal Australians have moved from the exoticised, naturalised and sexualised location past. Images in the location present of Cape York mirror the postcolonial transition from Aboriginal dispossession informed by terra nullius to their contemporary empowerment informed by native title. References Arden, H., and S. Abell. "Journey into Dreamtime: The Land of Northwest Australia." National Geographic 179 (Jan. 1991): 8-42. Chafe, W. "Social Change and the American Woman, 1940-70". A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar America. Eds. W. Chafe and H. Sitkoff. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. 157-65. Drinnon, R. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980. Ellis, W., and D. Austen. "Queensland: Broad Shoulder of Australia." National Geographic 169 (Jan. 1986): 2-39. Etienne, M. and E. Leacock, eds. Women and Colonisation: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Praeger, 1980. Fabian, J. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Judge, J., and J. Scherschel. "The Journey of Burke and Wills: First across Australia." National Geographic Feb. (1979): 52-91. Lutz, C., and J. Collins. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. MacLeish, K., and T. Nebbia. "The Top End Down Under." National Geographic Feb. (1993): 143-73. MacLeish, K. and J. Stanfield. "Western Australia: The Big Country." National Geographic Feb. (1975): 147-87. Meltzer, M. Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life. NewYork: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978. Moore, K., and P. Tweedie. "Coober Pedy: Opal Capital of Australia's Outback." National Geographic Oct. (1976): 560-71. Newman, C., and S. Abell. "The Uneasy Magic of Australia's Cape York Peninsula." National Geographic June (1996 ): 2-33. Ortner, S. "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" Woman, Culture, and Society. Eds. M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974. 67-88. Pollack, G. "What's Wrong with Images of Women?" Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and the Media. Ed. R. Betterton. London: Pandora, 1987. 40-8. Rosaldo, R. Culture and Truth. Boston: Beacon P, 1989. Scollay, C., and P. Tweedie. "Arnhem Land Aboriginals Cling to the Dreamtime." National Geographic Nov. (1980): 645-61. Starbird, E., and R. Madden. "Sydney: Big, Breezy, and a Bloomin' Good Show." National Geographic Feb. (1979): 211-36. Walker, H., and J. Scherschel. "South Australia, Gateway to the Great Outback." National Geographic April (1970): 441-81. Wolf, E. Europe and the People without History.Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Citation reference for this article MLA style: David Hyndman. "Postcolonial Representation of Aboriginal Australian Culture: Location Past to Location Present in National Geographic." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/geo.php>. Chicago style: David Hyndman, "Postcolonial Representation of Aboriginal Australian Culture: Location Past to Location Present in National Geographic," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/geo.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: David Hyndman. (2000) Postcolonial representation of Aboriginal Australian culture: location past to location present in National Geographic. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/geo.php> ([your date of access]).

Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. — Anne Anlin Cheng, OrnamentalismIn this (apparently) very versatile piece of clothing, she [Michelle Zauner] smokes, sings karaoke, rides motorcycles, plays a killer guitar solo … and much more. Is there anything you can’t do in a hanbok?— Li-Wei Chu, commentary, From the Intercom IntroductionAnne Anlin Cheng describes the anomaly of being “the yellow woman”, women of Asian descent in Western contexts, by underlining the haunting effects of this artificial identity on multiple politically valent forms, especially through Asian women’s conceived ambivalent relations to subject- and object-hood. Due to the entangled constructiveness conjoining Asiatic identities with objects, things, and ornaments, Cheng calls for new ways to “accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life” (14). Following this call, this essay articulates a creative combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Avery Gordon’s haunting theory to account for some hauntingly disidentificatory ways that the performance of diaspora sensibilities reimagines Asian American life and femininity.This essay considers “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016) (EWLY), the music video of Michelle Zauner’s solo musical project Japanese Breakfast, as a ghostly performance, which features a celebration of the Korean culture and identity of Zauner (Song). I analyse it as a site for identifying the confrontational moments and haunting effects of the diaspora sensibilities performed by Zauner who is in fact Jewish-Korean-American. Directed by Zauner and Adam Kolodny, the music video of EWLY features the persona that I call the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, singing in a restroom cubicle, eating a Dunkin Donuts sandwich, shotgunning a beer, shredding a Fender electric guitar on the hood of a truck, riding a motorcycle with her queer lover, and partying with a crowd all in the traditional Korean attire hanbok that used to belong to her late mother. The story ends with Zauner waking up on a bench with a hangover and fleeing from the scene, conjuring up a journey of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-liberation through multiple sites and scenes of everyday life.What I call a ghostly performance is concerned with Avery Gordon’s creative intervention of haunting as a method of social analysis to study the intricate lingering impact of ghostly matters from the past on the present. Jacques Derrida develops hauntology to describe how Marxism continues to haunt Western societies even after its so-called failure. It refers to a status that something is neither present nor absent. Gordon develops haunting as a way of knowing and a method of knowledge production, “forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past” (xvii). A ghostly performance is thus where ghostly matters are mobilised in “confrontational moments”:when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (xvi)The interstitiality that transgresses and reconfigures the geographical and temporal borders of nation, culture, and Eurocentric discourses of progression is important for understanding the diverse experiences of diaspora sensibilities as critical double consciousness (Dayal 48, 53). As Gordon suggests, confrontational moments force us to confront and expose the interstitial state of objects, subjects, feelings, and conditions. Hence, to understand this study identifies the confrontational moments in Zauner’s performance as a method to identify and deconstruct the triggering moments of diaspora sensibilities.While deconstructing the ghostly performances of diaspora sensibilities, the essay also adopts an object-oriented approach to serve as a focused entry point. Not only does this approach designate a more focused scope with regard to applying Gordon’s hauntology and Muñoz’s disidentification theory, it also taps into a less attended territory of object theories such as Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology due to the overlooking of the relationship between objects and racialisation that is much explored in Asian American and critical race and ethnic studies (Shomura). Moreover, while diaspora as, or not as, an object of study has been a contested topic (e.g., Axel; Cho), the objects of diaspora have been less studied.This essay elaborates on two ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails. It uncovers two haunting effects throughout the analysis: the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America. By defying the objectification of Asian bodies with objects of diaspora and refusing to assimilate into the American nightlife, Zauner’s Korean woman persona haunts a multiculturalist post-racial America that fails to recognise the specificities and historicity of Korean America and performs an alternative reality. Disidentificatory ghostly performance therefore, I suggest, thrives on confrontations between the past and the present while gesturing toward the futurities of alternative Americas. Mobilising the critical lenses of disidentification and ghostly performance, finally, I aver that disidentificatory ghostly performances have great potential for envisioning a better politics of performing and representing Asian bodies through the ghostly play of haunting objects/ghostly matters.The Embodied (Objects) and the Disembodied (Ghosts) of DisidentificationThe sonic-visual lifeworld constructed in the music video of EWLY is, first of all, a cultural public sphere, through which social norms are contested, reimagined, and reconfigured. A cultural public sphere reveals the imbricated relations between the political, the public, and the personal as contested through affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications (McGuigan 15). Considering the sonic-visual landscape as a cultural public sphere foregrounds two dimensions of Gordon’s hauntology theory: the psychological and the sociopolitical states. The emphasis on its affective communicative capacities enables the psychological reach of a cultural production. Meanwhile, the multilayered articulation of the political, the public, and the personal shows the inner-network of acts of haunting even when they happen chiefly on the sociopolitical level. What is crucial about cultural public spheres for minoritarian subjects is the creative space offered for negotiating one’s position in capacious and flexible ways that non-cultural publics may not allow. One of the ways is through imagination and disputation (McGuigan 16). The idea that imagination and disputation may cause a temporal and spatial disjunction with the present is important for Muñoz’s theorisation of disidentification. With such disjunction, Muñoz believes, queer of colour performances create future-oriented visions and coterminous temporality of the present and the future. These future-oriented visions and the coterminous temporality can be thought through disidentifications, which Muñoz identifies asa performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. (97)Disidentification offers a method to identify specific moments of imagination and disputation and moments of temporal and spatial disjunction. The most distinct example of the co-nature of imagination and disputation residing in the EWLY lifeworld is the persona of the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, as she intrudes into the everyday field of American life in a hanbok, such as a bar, a basketball court, and a convenience store. Gordon would call these moments “confrontational moments” (xvi). When performers don’t perform in ways they are supposed to perform, when they don’t operate objects in ways they are supposed to operate, when they don’t mobilise feelings in ways they are supposed to feel, they resist and disidentify with “the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz 97).In addition to Muñoz’s disidentification and Gordon’s confrontational moments, I adopt an object-oriented approach to guide my analysis of disidentificatory ghostly performances. Object theory departs from objects and matters to rediscover identity and experience. My object-oriented approach follows new materialism more closely than object-oriented ontology because it is less about debating the ontology of Asian American experiences through the lens of objects. Instead, it is more about how re-orienting our attention towards the formation and operation of objecthood reveals and reconfigures the vexed articulation between Asian American experiences and racialised objectification. To this end, my oriented-object approach aligns particularly well with politically engaged frameworks such as Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Eunjung Kim’s ethics of objects.Taking an object-oriented approach in inquiring Asian American identities could be paradoxically intervening because “Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects” (Shomura). Furthermore, this objectification is doubly performed onto the bodies of Asian American women due to the Orientalist conflations of Asia as feminine (Huang 187). Therefore, applying object theory in the case of EWLY requires special attention to the interplay between subject- and object-hood and the line between objecthood and objectification. To avoid the risk of objectification when exploring the objecthood of ghostly matters, I caution against an objects-define-subjects chain of signification and instead suggest a subjects-operate-objects route of inquiry by attending to both the haunting effects of objects and how subjects mobilise such haunting effects in their performance. From a new materialist perspective, it is also important to disassociate problems of objectification from exploration of objecthood (Kim) while excavating the world-making abilities of objects (Bennett). For diasporic peoples, it means to see objects as affective and nostalgic vessels, such as toys, food, family photos, attire, and personal items (e.g., Oum), where traumas of displacement can be stored and rehearsed (Turan 54).What is revealing from a racialised subject-object relationship is what Christopher Bush calls “the ethnicity of things”: things can have ethnicity, an identification that hinges on the articulation that “thingliness can be constituted in ways analogous and related to structures of racialization” (85). This object-oriented approach to inquiry can expose the artificial nature of the affinity between Asian bodies and certain objects, behind which is a confession of naturalised racial order of signification. One way to disrupt this chain of signification is to excavate the haunting objects that disidentify with the norms of the present, that conjure up what the present wants to be done. This “something-to-be-done” characteristic is critical to acts of haunting (Gordon xvii). Such disruptive performances are what I term as “disidentificatory ghostly performances”, connecting the embodied objects with Gordon’s disembodied ghosts through the lens of Muñoz’s disidentificatory reading with a two-fold impact: first exposing such artificial affinity and then suggesting alternative ways of knowing.In what follows, I expand upon two haunting objects/ghostly matters: the manicured nails and the hanbok. I contend that Zauner operates these haunting objects to embody the “something-to-be-done” characteristic by curating uncomfortable, confrontational moments, where the constituted affinity between Koreanness/Asianness and anomaly is instantiated and unsettled in multiple snippets of the mundane post-racial, post-globalisation world.What Can the Korean Woman (Not) Do with Those Nails and in That Hanbok?The hanbok that Zauner wears throughout the music video might be the single most powerful haunting object in the story. This authentic hanbok belonged to Zauner’s late mother who wore it to her wedding. Dressing in the hanbok while navigating the nightlife, it becomes a mediated, trans-temporal experience for both Zauner and her mother. A ghostly journey, you could call it. The hanbok then becomes a ghostly matter that haunts both the Orientalist gaze and the grieving Zauner. This journey could be seen as a process of dealing with personal loss, a process of “reckoning with ghosts” (Gordon 190). The division between the personal and the public, the historical and the present cease to exist as linear and clear-cut forces. The important role of ghosts in the performance are the efforts of historicising and specifying the persona of the Korean woman, which is a strategy for minoritarian performers to resist “the pull of reductive multicultural pluralism” (Muñoz 147). These ghostly matters haunt a pluralist multiculturalist post-racial America that refuses to see minor specificities and historicity.The Korean woman in an authentic hanbok, coupled with other objects of Korean roots, such as a traditional hairdo and seemingly exotic makeup, may invite the Orientalist gaze or the assumption that Zauner is self-commodifying and self-fetishising Korean culture, risking what Cheng calls “Oriental female objectification” operating through “the lenses of commodity and sexual fetishism” (14). However, she “fails” to do any of these. The ways Zauner acts in the hanbok manifests a self-negotiation with her Korean identity through disidentificatory sensibilities with racial fetishism. For example, in various scenes, the Korean woman appears to be drunk in a bar, gorging a sandwich, shotgunning a beer, smoking in a restroom cubicle, messing with strangers in a basketball court, rocking on a truck, and falling asleep on a bench. Some may describe what she does as abnormal, discomforting, and even disgusting in a traditional Korean garment which is usually worn on formal occasions. The Korean woman not only subverts her traditional Koreanness but also disidentifies with what the Asian fetish requires of Asian bodies: obedient, well-behaved model minority or the hypersexualised dragon lady (e.g., Hsu; Shimizu). Zauner’s performance foregrounds the sentimental, the messy, the frenetic, the aggressive, and the carnivalesque as essential qualities and sensibilities of the Korean woman. These rarely visible figurations of Asian femininities speak to the normalised public disappearance of “unwanted” sides of Asian bodies.Wavering public disappearance is a crucial haunting effect. The public disappearance is an “organized system of repression” (Gordon 72) and a “state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). While the journey of EWLY evolves through ups and downs, the Korean woman does not maintain the ephemeral joy and takes offence at the people and surroundings now and then, such as at an arcade in the bar, at some basketball players, or at the audience or the camera operator. The performed disaffection and the conflicts substantiate a theory of “positive perversity” through which Asian American women claim the representation of their sexuality and desires (Shimizu), engendering a strong and visible presence of the ghostly matters operated by the Korean woman. This noticeable arrival of bodies disorients how things are arranged (Ahmed 163), revealing and disrupting whiteness, which functions as a habit and a background to actions (149). The confrontational performances of the encounters between Zauner and others cast a critique of the racial politics of disappearing by reifying disappearing into confrontational moments in the everyday post-racial world.What is also integral to Zauner’s antagonistic performance of wavering public disappearing and failure of “Oriental female objectification” is a punk strategy of negativity through an aesthetic of nihilism and a mediation of performing objects. For example, in addition to the traditional hairdo that goes with her makeup, Zauner also wears a nose ring; in addition to partying with a crowd, she adopts a moshing style of dancing, being carried over people’s heads in the hanbok. All these, in addition to her disaffectionate, aggressive, and impolite body language, express a negative punk aesthetics. Muñoz describes such a negative punk aesthetics as an energy that can be described “as chaotic, as creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-destructive” (97). What lies at the heart of this punk dystopia is the desire for “something else”, something “not the present time or place” (Muñoz). Through this desire for impossible time and place, utopian is reimagined, a race riot, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s term.On the other hand, the manicured fingernails are also a major operating force, reminiscent of Korean American immigrant history along with the racialised labor relations that have marked Korean bodies as an alien anomaly (Liu). With “Japanese Breakfast” being written on the screen in neon pink with some dazzling effect, the music video begins in a warm tone. The story begins with Zauner selecting EWLY with her finger on a karaoke operation screen, the first of many shots on her carefully manicured nails, decorated with transparent nail extensions, sparkly ornaments, and hanging fine chains. These nails conjure up the nail salon business in the US that heavily depended on immigrant labor and Korean women immigrants have made significant economic contributions through the manicure business. In particular, differently from Los Angeles where nail salons have been predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese owned, Korean women immigrants in the 1980s were the first ones to open nail salons in New York City and led to the rapid growth of the business (Kang 51). The manicured nails first of all conjure up these recent histories associated with the nail salon business.Moreover, these fingernails haunt post-racial and post-globalisation America by revealing and subverting the invisible, normalised racial and ethnic nature of the labor and objects associated with fingernails cosmetic treatment. Ghostly matters inform “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives” (Gordon xvii). They function as a reminder of the damage that seems forgotten or normalised in modern societies and as an alternative embodiment of what modern societies could have become. In the universe of EWLY, the fingernails become a forceful ghostly matter by reminding us of the damage done onto Korean bodies by fixing them as service performers instead customers. The nail salon business as performed by immigrant labor has been a business of “buying and selling of deference and attentiveness”, where white customers come to exercise their privilege while not wanting anything associated with Koreaness or Otherness (Kang 134). However, as a haunting force, the fingernails subvert such labor relations by acting as a versatile agent operating varied objects, such as a karaoke machine, cigarettes, a sandwich, a Fender guitar, and a can of beer. Through such operating, an alternative labor relation is formed. This alternative is not entirely without roots. As promoted in Japanese Breakfast’s Instagram (@jbrekkie), Zauner’s look was styled by a nail artist who appears to be a white female, Celeste Marie Welch from the DnA Salon based in Philadelphia. This is a snippet of a field that is now a glocalised industry, where the racial and gender makeup is more diverse. It is increasingly easier to see non-Asian and non-female nail salon workers, among whom white nail salon workers outnumbered any other non-Asian racial/ethnic groups (Preeti et al. 23). EWLY’s alternative worldmaking is not only a mere reflection of the changing makeup of an industry but also calling out the societal tendency of forgetting histories. To be haunted, as Gordon explains, is to be “tied to historical and social effects” (190). The ghostly matters of the manicure industry haunt its workers, artists, consumers, and businesspeople of a past that prescribes racialised labor divisions, consumption relations, and the historical and social effects inflicted on the Othered bodies. Performing with the manicured nails, Zauner challenges now supposedly multicultural manicure culture by fusing oppositional, trans-temporal identities into the persona of the Korean woman. Not only does she conjure up the racialised labor relations as the child of a Korean mother, she also disidentifies with the worker identity of early Korean women immigrants as a consumer who receives service from an artist who would otherwise never perform such labor in the past.Conclusion: Toward a Disidentificatory Ghostly PerformanceThis essay suggests seeing the disidentificatory ghostly performance of the Korean woman as an artistic incarnation of her lived Othering experience, which Zauner may or may not navigate on an everyday basis. As Zauner lives through what looks like a typical Friday night in an American town, the journey represents an interrogation of the present and the past. When the ghostly matters move through public spaces – when she drinks in a bar, walks down the street, and parties with a crowd – the Korean woman neither conforms to what she is expected to do in a hanbok nor does she get fully assimilated into this American nightlife.Derrida avers that haunting, repression, and hegemony are structurally interlocked and that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because “hegemony still organizes the repression” (46). This is why the creative capacity of disidentificatory performances is crucial for acts of haunting and for historically repressed groups of people. Conjoining the future-oriented performative mode of disidentification and the forking of the past and the present by ghostly performances, disidentificatory ghostly performances enable not only people of colour but also particularly diasporic populations of colour to challenge racial chains of signification and orchestrate future-oriented visions, where time is of the most compassion, at its utmost capacity.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–168.Axel, Brian Keith. “Time and Threat: Questioning the Production of the Diaspora as an Object of Study.” History and Anthropology 9.4 (1996): 415–443.Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Bush, Christopher. “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age.” Representations 99.1 (2007): 74–98. Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. New York: Oxford UP, 2019.Cho, Lily. “The Turn to Diaspora.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (2007): 11–30.Chu, Li-Wei. “MV Throwback: Japanese Breakfast – ‘Everybody Wants to Love You’.” From the Intercom, 23 Aug. 2018. <https://fromtheintercom.com/mv-throwback-japanese-breakfast-everybody-wants-to-love-you/>.Dayal, Samir. “Diaspora and Double Consciousness.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 29.1 (1996): 46–62. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge, 1994.Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Harman, Graham. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press, 2009.Hsu, Madeline Yuan-yin. The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2015.Huang, Vivian L. “Inscrutably, Actually: Hospitality, Parasitism, and the Silent Work of Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28.3 (2018): 187–203.Japanese Breakfast. “Japanese Breakfast – Everybody Wants to Love You (Official Video).” YouTube, 20 Sep. 2016. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNT7wuqaykc>.Kang, Miliann. The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work. Berkeley: U of California P, 2010.Kim, E. “Unbecoming Human: An Ethics of Objects.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21.2–3 (2015): 295–320.Liu, Runchao. “Retro Objects, Alien Objects.” In Media Res. 12 Dec. 2018. <http://mediacommons.org/imr/content/retro-objects-alien-objects>.McGuigan, Jim. Cultural Analysis. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2010.Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.———. “‘Gimme Gimme This ... Gimme Gimme That’: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons.” Social Text 31.3 (2013): 95–110.Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22.2–3 (2012): 173–196. Oum, Young Rae. “Authenticity and Representation: Cuisines and Identities in Korean-American Diaspora.” Postcolonial Studies 8.1 (2005): 109–125.Sharma, Preeti, et al. “Nail File: A Study of Nail Salon Workers and Industry in the United States.” UCLA Labor Center and California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, 2018.Shimizu, Celine Parrenas. The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.Shomura, Chad. “Object Theory and Asian American Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2020.Song, Sandra. “Japanese Breakfast Is the Korean-American Songwriter Empowering Everyone to Overcome.” Teen Vogue. 14 July 2017. <http://www.teenvogue.com/story/japanese-breakfast-songwriter-empowering-everyone-overcome>.Turan, Zeynep. “Material Objects as Facilitating Environments: The Palestinian Diaspora.” Home Cultures 7.1 (2010): 43–56.

Anomaly: something different, abnormal, peculiar, not easily classified or classifiable; a deviation; a detour. Something out of time and out of place. No longer can we read the anomaly without considering the larger global crisis of COVID-19. Where were we if not out of time during the temporal disjunction – time out of joint, after Shakespeare – of worldwide lockdowns, which coincided with the time of proposal and submission, the time of reading and editing this issue? Where were we, as scholars in North America, if not out of place when we set out to curate a collection of essays in a journal which “originated” down under? A related question: what happens when the anomaly becomes standardised as the norm?Daniel Fineman’s “The Anomaly of Anomaly of Anomaly” inverts the paradigm of scientific expression, opening the “philosophically unassailable” to “metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge” to make a claim about the anomaly as a reflection of global misrepresentation and the prevailing powers of governance. To accomplish this, Fineman returns to the metrics system, the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments, and the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”.What happens, moreover, when anomaly falls back onto social practices, and informs the way academia perceives social formations? Christopher Little raises this issue when reviewing the literature produced on “Chav” subculture, and how the anomalous Chav intersects with race, class, ethnicity, and consumer culture.The ways in which social practices inform and intersect with national patterns of belonging and exclusion have never been more apparent than during the current pandemic. In Michelle Aung Thin’s contribution, the smartphone is read as an anomalous, hybrid, and foreign object with connotations of fluidity and connection, all dangerous qualities in Myanmar, a conservative, former pariah state. Within the framework of recent scholarship on mixed race identification and affect theory, Aung Thin addresses deeply held fears around ethnic belonging, cultural adeptness, and hybridity, tracing these anxieties to the original scene of colonisation. The smartphone, in her essay, acts as a conduit – between pre-colonial Mandalay and contemporary Yangon – and a reminder of historical trauma.In an essay that unpacks the complexity of a music video by Japanese Breakfast, the solo musical project of Michelle Zauner, Runchao Liu posits identificatory ghostly performances as a locus of confrontation between past and present. In her analysis of what she defines as “ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails”, Liu locates both “the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America”, where the connections between ethnic concerns and anomaly are both discomposed and concretised. Starting from the theoretical premises laid out by Gilles Deleuze, who maintained that computational processes were incompatible with anomaly, Emma Stamm sets out to prove the contrary, grounding her analysis on the work of M. Beatrice Fazi, while applying it to the specific field of live-coded music. Through a close treatment of the improvisational techniques involved in the processes of writing audio computer functions for the production of “sound in real time”, Stamm herself produces a characterisation of the aesthetic dimensions of live coding that problematises the divisions between discrete and continuous media.The anomalous body of the freak, from its early manifestation to its contemporary manufactured exaggeration of contemporary beauty standards, is the subject of Siobhan Lyons’s investigation of the freak as biological anomaly. Drawing on the parallel ascent of “Catwoman” and real-life “Barbie”, the author connects earlier manifestations of the biological freak to the mediatic resonance given to what she defines as “the twenty-first century surgical freak”.Jasmine Chen’s exploration of Pili puppetry, a popular TV series depicting martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences, reveals how this “anomalous media form ... proliferates anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn”. Her attention to the culture of fandom and cosplay attends to a broader structural shift: the “reversible dialectic between fan-star and flesh-object”.Shifting this volume’s inquiry from popular culture to architecture, we turn to Patrick Leslie West and Cher Coad, and their close reading of the CCTV Headquarters as “an anomaly within an anomaly in contemporary Beijing’s urban landscape”, due to the collision of classical China and the “predominantly capitalist and neo-liberalist ‘social relationship’ of China and the Western world”. Recalling Roberto Schwarz’s argument, that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53), the authors conclude that the real “site of this unsettlement” is data. We end where we begin, with our featured article by Bronwyn Fredericks, who includes architecture among the practices that have evidenced the fraught relationship between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people, using the University of Queensland and its Great Court as a landscape and a case study. Dismantling the perception of Indigeneity as anomalous, Fredericks articulates the visibility of Indigenous voices and sovereignty, ultimately establishing their presence and power through mixed-media events and collaborative writing productions.Ultimately, our aim for this issue, and the response of its contributions, revolve on this question of power relations, and, indeed, on the politics of presence: to make anomaly visible, not as outlier or aberration, but as meta-textual shift, a symptom of and a reaction to larger conditions encompassing and obscured by the technical processes of logistics and the neoliberal governance that organise our everyday life. We hope that closer consideration to such a performative shift, explored here in its multiple and various facets, might also constitute a critical response.ReferencesSchwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. New York: Verso, 1992.

Introduction Ngarrindjeri futures depend on the survival of the land, waters, and other interconnected living things. The Murray-Darling Basin is recognised nationally and internationally as a system under stress. Ngarrindjeri have long understood the profound and intricate connection of land, water, humans, and non-humans (Trevorrow and Hemming). In an effort to secure environmental sustainability the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA) have engaged in political negotiations with the State, primarily with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), to transform natural resource management arrangements that engage with an ethics of justice, redistribution, and recognition (Hattam, Rigney and Hemming). In 1987, prior to the formation of the NRA, Camp Coorong: Race Relations and Cultural Education Centre was established by the Ngarrindjeri Lands and Progress Association in partnership with the South Australian Museum and the South Australian Education Department (Hemming) as a place for all citizens to engage with the values of a land ethic of care. The complex includes a cultural museum, accommodation, conference facilities, and workshop facilities for primary, secondary, and tertiary education students; it also serves as a base for research and course development on Indigenous and Ngarrindjeri culture and history (Hattam, Rigney and Hemming). Camp Coorong seeks to share Ngarrindjeri cultural values, knowledges, and histories with students and visitors in order to “improve relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people with a broader strategy aimed at securing a future for themselves in their own ‘Country’” (Hemming 37). The Centre is adjacent to the Coorong National Park and 200 km South-East of Adelaide. The establishment of Camp Coorong on Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar (land/body/spirit) occurred when Ngarrindjeri Elders negotiated with the Department of Education and Children’s Services (DECS) to establish the race relations and cultural education centre. This negotiation was the beginning of many subsequent negotiations between Ngarrindjeri, local, State, and Federal governments about reclaiming ownership, management, and control of Ngarrindjeri lands, waters, and knowledge systems for a healthy Country and by implication healthy people (Hemming, Trevorrow and Rigney). As Elder Tom Trevorrow states: The waters and the seas, the waters of the Kurangh (Coorong), the waters of the rivers and lakes are all spiritual waters…The land and waters is a living body…We the Ngarrindjeri people are a part of its existence…The land and waters must be healthy for the Ngarrindjeri people to be healthy…We say that if Yarluwar-Ruwe dies, the water dies, our Ngartjis die, the Ngarrindjeri will surely die (Ngarrindjeri Nation Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan 13). Ruwe/Ruwar is an important aspect of the public pedagogy practiced at Camp Coorong and by the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA). The NRA’s nation building activities arise from negotiated contractual agreements called KNYs: Kungan Ngarrindjeri Yunnan (Listen to Ngarrindjeri people talking). KNYs establish a vital aspect of the NRA’s strategic platform for political negotiations. However, the focus of this paper is concerned with local Indigenous experience of teaching and experience with the education system rather than the broader Ngarrindjeri educational objectives in the area. The specific concerns of this paper are the performance of storytelling and the dialectic relationship between the listener/learner (Tur and Tur). The pedagogy and place of Camp Coorong seeks to engage non-Indigenous people with Indigenous epistemologies through storytelling as a pedagogy of experience and a “pedagogy of discomfort” (Boler and Zembylas). Before detailing the relationship of these with one another, it is necessary to grasp the importance of the interconnectedness of Ruwe/Ruwar articulated in the opening statement of Ngarrindjeri Nations Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan: Caring for Ngarrindjeri Sea, Country and Culture: Our Lands, Our Waters, Our People, All Living Things are connected. We implore people to respect our Ruwe (Country) as it was created in the Kaldowinyeri (the Creation). We long for sparkling, clean waters, healthy land and people and all living things. We long for the Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country) of our ancestors. Our vision is all people Caring, Sharing, Knowing and Respecting the lands, the waters, and all living things. Caring for Country The Lakes and the Coorong are dying as irrigation, over grazing, and pollution have left their toll on the Murray-Darling Basin. Camp Coorong delivers a key message (Hemming, 38) concerning the on-going obligation of Ngarrindjeri’s Ruwe/Ruwar to heal damaged sites both emotionally and environmentally. Couched as a civic responsibility, caring for County augments environmental action. However, there are epistemological distinctions between Natural Resources Management and Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar. Ngarrindjeri conceive of the River Murray as one system that cannot be demarcated along state lines. Ngarrrindjeri Elder Uncle Matt Rigney, who recently passed away, argued that the River Murray and the Darling is embodied and that when the river is sick it impacts directly on Ngarrindjeri personhood and wellbeing (Hemming, Trevorrow and Rigney). Therefore, Ngarrindjeri have a responsibility to care for Ngarrindjeri Country and Ngarrindjeri governance systems are informed by cultural and ethical obligations to Ruwe/Ruwar of the lower Murray River, Lakes and Coorong. Transmitting knowledge of Country is imperative as Aunty Ellen Trevorrow states: We have to keep our culture alive. We want access to our special places, our lands and our waters. We need to be able to protect our places, our ngatji [totems], our Old People and restore damaged sites. We want respect for our land and our water and we want to pass down knowledge (cited in Bell, Women and Indigenous Religions 3). Ruwe/Ruwar is an ethic of care where men and women hold distinctive cultural and environmental knowledge and are responsible for passing knowledge to future generations. Knowledge is not codified into a “canon” but is “living knowledge” connected to how to live and how to understand the connection between material, spiritual, human, and non-human realms. Elders at Camp Coorong facilitate understandings of this ontology by sharing stories that evoke questions in children and adults alike. For settler Australians, the first phase of this understanding begins with an engagement with the discomfort of the colonial history of Indigenous dispossession. It also requires learning new modes of “re/inhabition” through a pedagogy informed by “place-consciousness” that centralises Indigenous connection to Country (Gruenewald Both Worlds). Many settler communities embody a dualist western epistemology that is necessarily disrupted when there is acknowledgment from whence one came (Carter 2009). The activities and stories at Camp Coorong provide a positive transformative pedagogy that transforms a possessive white logic (Moreton-Robinson) to one of shared cultural heritage. Ngarrindjeri epistemologies of connection to Country are expressed through a pedagogy of storytelling at Camp Coorong. This often occurs during weaving, making feather flowers, or walking on Ngarrindjeri Country with visitors and students. Enactments such as weaving are not simply occupational or functional. Weaving has deep cultural and metaphorical significance as Aunty Ellen Trevorrow states: There is a whole ritual in weaving. From where we actually start, the centre part of a piece, you’re creating loops to weave into, then you move into the circle. You keep going round and round creating the loops and once the children do those stages they’re talking, actually having a conversation, just like our Old People. It’s sharing time. And that’s where our stories were told (cited in Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin 44). At Camp Coorong learning involves listening to stories while engaging with activities such as weaving or walking on Country. The ecological changes and the history of dispossession are woven into narrative on Country and students see the impact of the desecration of the Coorong, Lower Murray and Lakes and lands. In this way the relatively recent history of colonial race relations and contemporary struggles with government bureaucracies and legislation also comprise the warp and weave of Ngarrindjeri knowledge and connection to Country. Pedagogy of Experience A pedagogy of experience involves telling the story of Indigenous peoples’ sense of “placelessness” within the nation (Watson) as a story of survival and resistance. It is through such pedagogies that Ngarrindjeri Elders at Camp Coorong reconstruct their lives and create agency in the face of settler colonialism. The experiences of growing up in Australia during the assimilation era, fighting against the State on policies that endorsed child theft, being forced to live at fringe camps, experiencing violent racisms, and, for some, living as part of a diaspora in one’s own Country is embedded in the stories of survival, resilience and agency. “Camp Coorong began as an experiment in alternative teaching methods developed largely by George Trevorrow, a local Ngarrindjeri man” (Hemming 38). Classroom malaise was experienced by Ngarrindjeri Elders from Camp Coorong, such as Uncle Tom and Aunty Ellen Trevorrow and the late Uncle George Trevorrow, Aunty Alice Abdulla, and others when interacting or employed in schools as Aboriginal Education Workers (AEWs). It was the invisibility of these Elders’ knowledges inside schools that generated the impetus to establish Camp Coorong as a counter-institution. The spatial dimension of situationality, and its attention to social transformation, connects critical pedagogy to a pedagogy of place at Camp Coorong. Both discourses are concerned with the contextual, geographical conditions that shape people, and the actions people take to shape these conditions (Gruenewald, Both Worlds). Place-based education at Camp Coorong advocates a new localism in order to stimulate community revitalisation and resistance to globalisation and commodity capitalism. It provides the space and opportunity to develop the capacity for inventiveness and adaptation to changing environments and resistance to ecological destruction. Of concern to the growing field of place-based education are how to promote care for people and places (Gruenewald and Smith, xix). For Gruenewald and Smith this requires decolonisation and developing sensitivity to forms of thought that injure and exploit people and places, and re/inhabitation by identifying, conserving, and creating knowledge that nurtures and protects people and places. Engaging in a land ethic of care on Country informs the educational paradigm at Camp Coorong that does not begin in front of bulldozers or under police batons at anti-globalisation rallies, but in the contact zones (Somerville 342) where “a material and metaphysical in-between space for the intersection of multiple and contested stories” (Somerville 342) emerge. Ngarrindjeri knowledge, environmental knowledge, scientific knowledge, colonial histories, and media representations all circulate in the contact zone and are held in productive tension (Carter). Decolonising Pedagogy and Pedagogies of Discomfort The critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller. Reciprocity is based on the principles of interconnectedness, balance, and the idea that actions create corresponding action through the gift of story (Stewart-Harawira). Camp Coorong is a place for inter-cultural dialogue through storytelling. Being located on Ngarrindjeri Country the non-Indigenous listener is more able to “hear” and at the same time move along a continuum of a) disbelief and anger about the dispossession of Indigenous peoples; b) emotional confusion about their own sense of belonging in Australia; c) shock at the ways in which liberal western society’s structural privilege is built on Indigenous inequality on the grounds of race and habitus (Bordieu and Passeron); then, d) towards empathy that is framed as race cognisance (Aveling). Stories are not represented through a sanguine vision of the past, but are told of colonisation, dispossession, as well as of hope for the healing of Ngarrinjderi Country. The listener is gifted with stories at Camp Coorong. However, there is an ethical obligation to the gifting that learners may not understand until later and which concern the rights and obligations fundamental to notions of deep connection to Country. It is often in the recount of one’s experience at Camp Coorong, such as in reflective journals or in conversation, that recognition of the importance of history, social justice, and sovereignty are brought to light. In the first phase of learning, non-Indigenous students and teachers may move from uncomfortable silence, to a space where they can hear the stories and thereby become engaged listeners. They may go through a process of grappling with a range of issues and emotions. There is frustration, anger, and blame that knowledge has been omitted from their education, and they routinely ask: “How did we not know this history?” In the second stage learners tend to remain outside of the story until they are hooked by an aspect that draws them into it. They have the choice of engagement and this requires empathy. At this stage learners are grappling with the antithetical feelings of guilt and innocence; these feelings emerge when those advantaged and challenged by their complicity with settler colonialism, racism, and the structural privilege of whiteness start to understand the benefits they gain from Indigenous dispossession and ask “was it my fault?” Thirdly, learners enter a space which may disavow and dismiss the newly encountered knowledge and move back into resistance, silence, and reluctance to hear. However, it is at this point that a choice emerges. The choice to engage in the emotional labour required to acknowledge the gift of the story and thereby unsettle white Australian identity (Bignall; Boler and Zembylas). In this process “inscribed habits of attention,” as described by Boler and Zembylas (127), are challenged. These habits have been enabled by the emotional binaries of “us” and “them”. The colonial legacy of Indigenous dispossession is an emotive subject that disrupts national pride that is built on this binary. At Camp Coorong, discomfort is created during the reiteration of stories and engagement in various activities. Uncertainty and discomfort are necessary parts of restructuring the emotional habitus and reconstructing identity. The primary ethical aim of a pedagogy of discomfort is the creation of contestability. The learner comes to understand the rights and obligations of caring for Country and has to decide how to carry the story. Ngarrindjeri ethics of care inspire the learner to undertake the emotional labour necessary to relocate their understanding of identity. As a zone of cultural contestation, Camp Coorong also enables pedagogies that allow for critical reflection on common educational practices undertaken by educators and students. Conclusion The aim of the camp was to overturn racism and provide employment for Ngarrindjeri on Country (Hemming, 38). Students and teachers from around the state come to Camp Coorong and learn to weave, make feather flowers, and listen to stories about Ngarrindjeri Country whilst walking on Country (Hemming 38). Camp Coorong fosters understanding of Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar and at the same time overturns essentialist notions developed by deficit theories that routinely remain embedded in the school curriculum. Camp Coorong’s anti-racist epistemology mobilises an Indigenous pedagogy of storytelling and experience as a decolonising methodology. Learning Ngarrindjeri history, cultural heritage, and land ethic of care deepens students’ understanding of connecting to Country through reflection on situations, histories, and shared spaces of human and non-human actors. Pedagogies of discomfort also inform practice at Camp Coorong and the intersections of theory and practice in this context disrupts identity formations that have been grounded in a white colonial construction of nationhood. Education is a means of social and cultural reproduction, as well as a key site of resistance and vehicle for social change. Although the analysis of domination is a feature of critical pedagogy, what is urgently required is a language of hope and transformation understood from a Ngarrindjeri standpoint; something that is achieved at Camp Coorong. Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the process of collaboration that occurred at Camp Coorong with Aunty Ellen Trevorrow, Aunty Alice Abdulla, and Deborah Rankine. The key ideas were established in conversation and the article was revised on subsequent occasions whilst at Camp Coorong with the aforementioned authors. This paper was produced as part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, ‘Negotiating a Space in the Nation: The Case of Ngarrindjeri’ (DP1094869). 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