Stargate SG-1

Author(s):  
Shawn Malley

This chapter develops the central thesis of Chapter 1, namely that paramilitary archaeology is a means of invoking then containing dangerous pasts as an imaginative extension of U.S. foreign policy. Aired in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Stargate (1994) translates the colonial milieu of 1930s Egyptology to the science fictional terrain of Abydos and the battle against Ra. But the shift to the small screen's televisual identity is symptomatic of the deepening complexities of representing geopolitical activity in the region. Just as archaeology passes from a source of wonder into a vehicle for military adventure, the show's ideological commitments to global (read intra-galactic) security become increasingly destabilized, particularly in the Mesopotamian-themed episodes aired after 9/11. The mercurial figure of Babylon offers a counterpoint to the film's overlay of archaeology and militarism, and indeed to the rhetoric of military stewardship at the heart of the "military-archaeology complex." The shifting representation of Mesopotamian antiquity in SG-1's ten-year run (1997-2007) offers powerful cultural criticism of the show's own premise.

2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
Martin Karcher

Abstract The New Cybernetic Order. Thoughts on the Cybernetic Governing of Education After an attempt to determine key features of cybernetics (Chapter 1) and the consideration of the conditions of the cybernetization of the present (Chapter 2) the article takes a closer look at three fields (Chapter 3): empirical educational research, governance and finally the cybernetic self. The three areas coincide in the critical question of the controllability of pedagogical processes and mutually condition and legitimise each other. The central thesis is that these fields are closely connected and that cybernetization of education entails a depoliticization (Chapter 4).


Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil

Chapter 1 defines the volume’s key terms: domestic colonization as the process of segregating idle, irrational, and/or custom-bound groups of citizens by states and civil society organizations into strictly bounded parcels of ‘empty’ rural land within their own nation state in order to engage them in agrarian labour and ‘improve’ both the land and themselves and domestic colonialism as the ideology that justifies this process, based on its economic (offsets costs) and ethical (improves people) benefits. The author examines and differentiates her own research from previous literatures on ‘internal colonialism’ and argues that her analysis challenges postcolonial scholarship in four important ways: colonization needs to be understood as a domestic as well as foreign policy; people were colonized based on class, disability, and religious belief as well as race; domestic colonialism was defended by socialists and anarchists as well as liberal thinkers; and colonialism and imperialism were quite distinct ideologies historically even if they are often difficult to distinguish in contemporary postcolonial scholarship—put simply—the former was rooted in agrarian labour and the latter in domination. This chapter concludes with a summary of the remaining chapters.


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