scholarly journals Offshore Mysteries, Narrative Infrastructure: Oil, Noir, and the World-Ocean

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Harry Pitt Scott

Situated within debates of world literature, petrocultures, and the blue humanities, this article provides a methodological approach to interpreting genre, energy forms, and world-literature. This relies on Dominic Boyer’s concept of ‘energopolitics’ (adapted from Foucault’s biopolitics), which considers the codependence of political power, electricity, fuel and energy infrastructure. Echoing Fredric Jameson (1981) and Patricia Yaeger (2011), the article argues that looking for a text’s ‘energopolitical unconscious’ is a means of discerning the way energopolitics and energy are encoded in world-literary plot, form, and genre. Then, it turns to a comparative reading of two novels, Carlos Fuentes’s The Hydra Head (1978) and Ian Rankin’s Black & Blue (1997), to argue that such novels provide an understanding of relationships between world-literary genre, forms of energy, and the world-oceanic regime of the offshore. The offshore is a juridical-spatial regime that circumvents nation-state regulation through extraterritorial ownership practices. It is a political and infrastructural power over the oceanic flows of capital and energy, to produce a spatial environment that exceeds the juridical boundaries of nation-states. Thus, if the world-ocean is the space upon which fossil capital depends for its realisation, the offshore is the legal form of fossil capital in the world-ocean. Finally, the article argues that noir mysteries are the genre of the offshore, as it is a genre particularly capable of indexing its social tensions. Noir’s settings and atmospheres are intimately connected with petromodernity’s infrastructure: hotels, highways, flickering streetlights and eerie hinterlands, ports and warehouses; the mystery is an excellent formal device, providing both narratorial motivation and a code for traversing imagined territories and detecting their secrets. At the same time, noir’s generic investment in investigations of legality and power—its ‘legal grammar’—makes it a useful stage through which to pursue questions of sovereignty, ocean-space, territory, and juridical forms.

2006 ◽  
pp. 133-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Arystanbekov

Kazakhstan’s economic policy results in 1995-2005 are considered in the article. In particular, the analysis of the relationship between economic growth and some indicators of nation states - population, territory, direct access to the World Ocean, and extraction of crude petroleum - is presented. Basic problems in the sphere of economic policy in Kazakhstan are formulated.


2021 ◽  
pp. 966-981
Author(s):  
Sergey Gennadyevich Kapkanshchikov

The article uses the methodology of systemic global analysis and the theory of systemic cycles of capital accumulation to argue that we are now at a turning point of the modern era in connection with the unfolding change in the dominant world economic order. Based on the methodological approach, within the framework of which there is a hegemonic country and the rest of the world, the forecast regarding the forthcoming multipolarity of the world economy is rejected. Various stages of capital and financial expansion with their inherent, respectively, dirigistic and liberal models of state regulation of the economy are compared to each other. A chronological overview of the Spanish-Genoese, Dutch, British, American and Asian accumulation cycles is presented. The patterns of their change in the course of the formation of new technological structures are revealed. The place of Russia in the process of natural evolution of world economic structures is also identified. The objective and subjective reasons for the longterm hegemony of the United States, as well as factors of the upcoming completion of the American cycle of capital accumulation in the foreseeable future, are revealed. The author outlines the tactics employed by the American authorities to counteract the objective hegemonic cycles. The reasons for the movement of the center of the world economy to the East Asian region are revealed, with the justification of the need for a natural inclusion of Russia in the functioning of the Asian world economic order.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Lesjak

Published in tandem in 2013, Franco Moretti’s two most recent books continue his on-going project to develop radical new methods of literary history and to propose new formulations and frameworks for understanding the relationship between form and history and form and ideology. Bringing together the series of essays through which he developed his concept of distant reading, his collection of the same name argues for a ‘falsifiable criticism’ grounded in the data now available through digital technologies and for the concept of a ‘world literature’ that it is the task of comparatists to theorise. His book on the bourgeois – characterised by Moretti as a project of an entirely different nature – finds in the minutiae of language the construction of a bourgeois culture in which the figure of the bourgeois himself ultimately disappears. Contra Moretti, the review contends that these books are deeply interrelated and that the limits of Moretti’s method are to be found specifically in the issues of scale raised by reading these two works in dialectical relationship to each other. In particular, while Moretti importantly forces us to confront in world literature what Fredric Jameson refers to as the ‘scandal of multiplicity’, his method is unable, in the end, to account for a reading of the world in literature in which both the empirical fact of a dead history and the allegorical possibility of another history already in the making can be found.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1372-1385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harsha Ram

One of the Principal Challenges Facing the Study of Global Modernisms, as of Any Transnational Cultural Phenomenon, is the question of scale. In declaring the contemporary world to be “one, and unequal,” several recent theorizations of world literature rest on the foundational assumption of a unified—albeit uneven—planetary scale (Moretti, “Conjectures” 56; see also Casanova 62-74; WREC 6-12). As such they model the dynamic of literary circulation across world regions according to the geographic distances, as well as the disproportionate access to socioeconomic and cultural resources, that separate and distinguish the world's centers from their peripheries. These distances, and the inequalities they generate, are perceived as the necessary by-products of two spatial logics, that of the expanding world market and that of the modern Westphalian system of sovereign and competing nation-states. To posit the modern world as a singular system has the undoubted merit of acknowledging the structural connectedness of its operative inequalities, arising from the territorial partition of the globe by the imperial powers during the final decades of the nineteenth century and from its simultaneous unification in the wake of accelerating trade and new infrastructures of transport and communication. Nevertheless, the premise of a singular modernity (Jameson 142) has been repeatedly challenged (Chakrabarty 6-16; Mitchell; Scott 113-15; Orsini). It has been faulted for its developmentalist logic, involving an implied or explicit adherence to the related assumptions of linear or stadial historicism and spatial diffusionism, which together reduce the negotiated impact of modernity on the world's far-flung regions to a process of top-down modernization originating in and imposed by the West. The force of this critique is blunted once the world system (Wallerstein; Hopkins et al.) is grasped as a profoundly uneven totality, allowing us to view the multiply differentiated space-times that coexist in the global present as produced by the imbalances constituting the world system as such (in literary scholarship, see Anderson, “Modernity”; Moretti, Modern Epic 50-52; Wollaeger 13-14; Lazarus 232-41, WREC 1-95; for corresponding debates in historiography and the social sciences, see Harootunian 62-63; Cooper 113-49; Chibber).


Author(s):  
Vidhu Verma

In this introduction, the volume’s regional focus is embedded in the wider context of changing debates on secularism. While a new appreciation of the works on secularism in the world order in a post–Cold War era has played a part in overcoming some of the assumptions in the Western public domain, others have cautioned against an essentialist understanding of culture and religion. The chapter traces the contemporary challenges and responses to the decline of the old pattern of state regulation of religion found in Europe. It argues that there existed a greater variety and heterogeneity of religious practices and beliefs than was presumed in the homogenizing models of the nation states of Southeast Asia. The chapter argues for a complex interaction between politics, religion, and state policies to better understand the select countries of this region.


TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dina Amelia

There are two most inevitable issues on national literature, in this case Indonesian literature. First is the translation and the second is the standard of world literature. Can one speak for the other as a representative? Why is this representation matter? Does translation embody the voice of the represented? Without translation Indonesian literature cannot gain its recognition in world literature, yet, translation conveys the voice of other. In the case of production, publication, or distribution of Indonesian Literature to the world, translation works can be very beneficial. The position of Indonesian literature is as a part of world literature. The concept that the Western world should be the one who represent the subaltern can be overcome as long as the subaltern performs as the active speaker. If the subaltern remains silent then it means it allows the “representation” by the Western.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Glenn Odom

With the rise of the American world literature movement, questions surrounding the politics of comparative practice have become an object of critical attention. Taking China, Japan and the West as examples, the substantially different ideas of what comparison ought to do – as exhibited in comparative literary and cultural studies in each location – point to three distinct notions of the possible interactions between a given nation and the rest of the world. These contrasting ideas can be used to reread political debates over concrete juridical matters, thereby highlighting possible resolutions. This work follows the calls of Ming Xie and David Damrosch for a contextualization of different comparative practices around the globe.


CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.


Author(s):  
Stefania Mosiuk ◽  
Igor Mosiuk ◽  
Vladimir Mosiuk

The purpose of the article is to analyze and substantiate the development of tourism business in Ukraine as a priority component of the national economy. The methodology of this study is to use analytical, spatial, geographical, cultural and other methods. This methodological approach provided an opportunity to carry out a complete analysis of the state of the tourism industry of the state and to draw some conclusions.The scientific novelty lies in the coverage of the real and potential resource potential for the development of the recreational and tourism sphere in Ukraine, detailing the measures for the country ‘s entry into the world tourist market. Conclusions. Analyzing the state and prospects of tourism business development in Ukraine, it should be noted that this industry is one of the priority areas for improving the economy of the country. Historical, cultural – ethnographic, gastronomic, sanatorium and resort potentials of the country will lead the country into world leaders of the tourism industry when creating favorable conditions for investment and proper marketing.


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