‘Hard-Boiled’ Detectives in Spain and Mexico: The Ethical Reorientation of a Genre

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-170
Author(s):  
Deborah Cafiero

Hard-boiled’ fiction arose in the early decades of the twentieth century, uncovering connections among crime, wealth and power, and exposing moral fissures within U.S. capitalism. After French publisher Gallimard marketed translations of American crime fiction as noir, international writers started adjusting the ethical framework of the original authors as part of their ‘glocal’ adaptation of a global genre to local circumstances. The present article pushes past ‘glocal’ analysis of noir to propose a ‘transnational’ relationship, adapting Paul Giles’ definition of ‘transnational’ practice in which international authors reflect the genre back upon its American roots in order to illuminate the ‘silences, absences and blindspots’ in the original ethical stance. The ‘misreading’ of noir also permits a ‘misrecognition’ of local circumstances, exposing moral fissures throughout different societies. This article shows how series by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Paco Ignacio Taibo II reveal ethical blindspots in American models by situating the detective within an emotional history of place (Barcelona for Vázquez Montalbán, Mexico City for Taibo II). Although these detectives ultimately cannot determine or perform the role of ethical citizen, their emotional-geographical bonds open up a critique of American ideals and pave the way for a reimagining of the ethical in the twenty-first century.

Author(s):  
Genevieve Liveley

This book explores the extraordinary contribution that classical poetics has made to twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of narrative. Its aim is not to argue that modern narratologies simply present ‘old wine in new wineskins’, but to identify the diachronic affinities shared between ancient and modern stories about storytelling, recognizing that modern narratologists bring particular expertise to bear upon ancient literary theory and offer valuable insights into the interpretation of some notoriously difficult texts. By interrogating ancient and modern narratologies through the mutually imbricating dynamics of their reception it aims to arrive at a better understanding of both. Each chapter selects a key moment in the history of narratology on which to focus, zooming in from an overview of significant phases to look at core theories and texts—from the Russian formalists, Chicago school neo-Aristotelians, through the prestructuralists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, to the latest unnatural and antimimetic narratologists. The reception history that thus unfolds offers some remarkable plot twists. It unmasks Plato as an unreliable narrator and theorist, and offers a rare glimpse of Aristotle putting narrative theory into practice in the role of storyteller in his work On Poets. In Horace’s Ars Poetica and in the works of ancient scholia critics and commentators it locates a rhetorically conceived poetics and a sophisticated reader-response-based narratology evincing a keen interest in audience affect and cognition—and anticipating the cognitive turn in narratology’s mot recent postclassical phase.


2018 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 2-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Wiese

Place-based activism has played a critical role in the history of urban and environmental politics in California. This article explores the continuing significance of environmental place making to grassroots politics through a case study of Friends of Rose Canyon, an environmental group in San Diego. Based in the fast-growing University City neighborhood, Friends of Rose Canyon waged a long, successful campaign between 2002 and 2018 to prevent construction of a bridge in the Rose Canyon Open Space Park in their community. Using historical and participant observer methodologies, this study reveals how twenty-first-century California urbanites claimed and created meaningful local places and mobilized effective politics around them. It illuminates the critical role of individual activists; suggests practical, replicable strategies for community mobilization; and demonstrates the significant impact of local activism at the urban and metropolitan scales.


2018 ◽  
Vol 04 (03) ◽  
pp. 1850013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard O. Barraqué ◽  
Patrick Laigneau ◽  
Rosa Maria Formiga-Johnsson

The Agences de l’eau (Water Agencies) are well known abroad as the French attempt to develop integrated water management at river basin scale through the implementation of the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP). Yet, after 30 years of existence, environmental economists became aware that they were not implementing the PPP, and therefore were not aiming at reducing pollution through economic efficiency. Behind the purported success story, which still attracts visitors from abroad, a crisis has been recently growing. Initially based on the model of the German (rather than Dutch) waterboards, the French system always remained fragile and quasi-unconstitutional. It failed to choose between two legal, economic and institutional conceptions of river basin management. These principles differ on the definition of the PPP, and on the role of levies paid by water users. After presenting these two contrasting visions, the paper revisits the history of the French Agences, to show that, unwilling to modify the Constitution to make room for specific institutions to manage common pool resources, Parliament and administrative elites brought the system to levels of complexity and incoherence which might doom the experiment.


Author(s):  
Alfred L. Brophy

This chapter discusses the role of historical analysis in property law. The history of property has been used to offer support for property rights. Their long history makes the distribution of property look normal, indeed natural and something that cannot or should not be challenged. However, historically in the U.S there have been competing visions of property. From the Progressive era onward especially, the history of property has been used to show the unequal distribution of property and to offer an alternative vision that expands the rights of non-owners of property. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the history of opposition to feudalism and protection of the rights of non-owners was used to protect the rights of non-owners. Thus, the history of property has been a tool of judges and legislators to support property rights and it has also been, less frequently, a tool of critique.


Author(s):  
Ana Cabana ◽  
Colin R. Johnson ◽  
Henry French ◽  
Leen Van Molle

The aim of this debate article is to promote a discussion of a historiographical nature (not ideological, not political) about the meaning, place and role of gender in both the rural past and the rural historiography. The discussion revolves around a variety of questions, ranging from the relevance, the opportunity and the very history of the use of gender category in rural history, to the analysis of gender (im)balances in the community of historians working in this broadly defined field of studies, not to mention the very definition of what is meant by gender. These and other related topics, for which there are no single or definitive answers, are debated here in a roundtable format.


1978 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
J. Manuel Espinosa

The centuries-old Spanish folk heritage of our Southwest, and its many faceted and enduring influence on the cultural life of the region, has been written about from various rims of observation. This article describes the pioneer studies of Aurelio M. Espinosa on Spanish folklore in the Southwest, with special emphasis on northern New Mexico. Although he made important contributions to the study of Spanish folklore of southern Colorado, Arizona, and California, and to that of Spain, Mexico, and other parts of Spanish America as well, he devoted most of his research and field work to the upper half of New Mexico which is the richest field of Spanish folklore in the Southwest.In viewing the cultural history of New Mexico, Espinosa reminded his readers that its first century as a Spanish colony, the 17th, was the second great century of Spain's Golden Age of arts and letters. With the vigor of Spain's sense of mission in those centuries, her Golden Age radiated to all parts of Spanish America via Mexico City, Lima, and the other principal colonial capitals. At the same time, from the bookshelf and the store of knowledge of the humble missionary, and the folklore of the Spanish settlers, passed down from generation to generation, the spirit of the Golden Age was reflected on the most remote settled frontiers.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anupamaa Seshadri ◽  
Ali Salim

The concept of “brain death” is one that has been controversial over time, requiring the development of clear guidelines to diagnose and give prognoses for patients after devastating neurologic injury. This review discusses the history of the definition of brain death, as well as the most recent guidelines and practice parameters on the determination of brain death in both the adult and pediatric populations. We provide specific and detailed instructions on the various clinical tests required, including the brain death neurologic examination and the apnea test, and discuss pitfalls in the diagnosis of brain death. This review also considers the most recent literature and guidelines as to the role of confirmatory tests making this diagnosis.  Key Words: apnea test, brain death, brainstem reflex, death examination


This chapter extends the book’s insights about nature, technology, and nation to the larger history of the modern period. While the modern nation loses its grip as a locus of identity and analysis, attempts to understand the operation, disruption, and collapse of continental and global infrastructures continue to mix the natural and the machinic in ways that define them both. Those vulnerabilities emphasize large-scale catastrophe; historiographically, they mask the crucial role of small-scale failures in the experience and culture of late modernity, including its definition of nature. Historical actors turned the uneven geographical distribution of small-scale failures into a marker of distinctive local natures and an element of regional and national identity. Attending to those failures helps not only situate cold-war technologies in the larger modern history of natural and machinic orders; it helps provincialize the superpowers by casting problematic “other” natures as central and primary.


2018 ◽  
pp. 126-150
Author(s):  
Sarah Wood

This chapter locates the figure of Félix Éboué in the cultural politics of commemoration in Guyane. It offers a cultural history of the production of memorials to Éboué in Guyane (his birthplace) and beyond, assessing the role of these markers of national power in the local landscape. The chapter focuses first on the monument located in central Cayenne, produced at the instigation of a local committee and inaugurated in 1957, towards the end of the Fourth Republic. It then addresses the revival of 'memory' of Éboué and the renewal of his presence in Guyane which occurred during the 2000s. Instigated in part by Christiane Taubira, this culminated in the renaming of the only international airport in the Département — the key point of arrival and departure between Paris and Cayenne. The chapter concludes by asking how the vision of Guyane asserted in the act of ‘remembering’ Éboué has changed or been adapted in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Matthew Guah

By examining the history of what was earlier considered project management, this chapter not only points out lessons from past practices but also justifies the selected definition of VLITP. It also explains the role of project management in a fast business environment. The author has demonstrated such importance by representing VLITP in the form of a major initiative that contains a series of relevant processes in the host organization.


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