scholarly journals No Wild Iris

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-53
Author(s):  
Christian Jil Benitez

The Philippines, as a tropical archipelago, is “concurrently a country of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies[:] our rural areas, small communities, and villages, while we may sweepingly characterize them as premodern, possses at the same time some of the trappings of postmodern cities like Manila, Los Angeles, or Paris” (Cruz-Lucero, 2007, p. 7). And yet, as a nation, this concurrence of temporalities is ultimately flattened, so as to turn it into “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time” (Anderson, 2006, p. 26). What emerges, therefore, is a Philippine time that is also a disjuncture: multiplicities that insist on a singularity, or a singularity that insists on being multiple. Keeping time with this contradiction between the diverse temporalities in the archipelagic tropics (see Carter, 2013) and the adamant dream toward a nation-state, this poem meditates on the concurrence of various events that happen in the archipelago nation during the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. Taking cues from the 1992 poem “The Wild Iris” penned by the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient Louise Glück, “No Wild Iris” attempts to interrogate the experience of homogenous and empty time in the longest lockdown in world history. By interweaving the personal, the political, and the ecological, it harnesses the lyrical while also disclosing its limits, if not outrightly refusing the tendency to sentimentality and universality as a poem.

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Rex

The theory of ethnic relations has developed ad hoc on an interdisciplinary basis. It has dealt with ethnicity in small communities, larger ethnic groups or “ethnies”, ethnic nations, modernising nation states, subordinate nationalisms, the establishment of empires, post- imperial situations, transnational migrant communities and the political problems facing modernising nation states in dealing both with subordinate nationalisms and with migrant ethnic minorities. This paper seeks to deal with these various elements in an interconnected and systematic way setting out the nature of communities, small-scale self contained communities, the enlargement of these communities to form ethnic nations and the relationship between these and the institutions of the modernising nation state. It also seeks however to deal with what I call “The second project of ethnicity” which is migration and finally goes on to look at the complex problems of multi-nationality and multiculturalism in modern nation states


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.


2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amal Jamal

This essay analyzes the political motivations behind the Jewish Nation-State Bill introduced in the Knesset in November 2014, shedding light on the ascendancy of the Israeli political establishment's radical right wing. It argues that there were both internal and external factors at work and that it is only by examining these thoroughly that the magnitude of the racist agenda currently being promoted can be grasped. The essay also discusses the proposed legislation's long history and the implications of this effort to constitutionalize what amounts to majoritarian despotism in present-day Israel.


Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay

In examining the efforts of European socialists to forge a common position towards the issue of post-war empires, this chapter highlights some of the political stakes involved in decolonization. As debates between European and Asian socialists suggest, the process of decolonization witnessed a struggle between competing rights: national rights, minority rights, and human (individual) rights. Each set of rights possessed far-reaching political implications, none more so than minority rights, as they were often associated with limits on national sovereignty. These limits could be internal, such as constitutional restraints on the working of majority rule; but they could also take the form of external constraints on sovereignty, including alternatives to the nation state itself. The victory of the nation state, in other words, was inextricably tied to the defeat of minority rights as well as the growing predominance of human rights.


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