An Impossible Task? Reconciling Europeanism and National Popular Culture in Caliban (1947–51)

A kind of hybrid between high-profile political and literary periodicals and successful popular book digests targeted at a mass audience, the French magazine Caliban (1947–51) both tried to adjust to a fast-changing global marketplace and to defend a form of cultural legitimacy based on national claims against globalist domination. This article traces the evolution of the magazine’s editorial venture in relation to questions connected to the issues of modernity and mobility. In particular, it aims at examining Caliban’s implacable ‘anti-digest’ stance.

Post-Pandemic Futures and the Affective Appeal of Immunity

The COVID-19 pandemic has opened up futures for debate in an unprecedented manner and on an unforeseen scale. This article explores how ideas of immunity structured debates about pandemic management strategies as a means of securing a post-pandemic future during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. Building on queer theorization of temporality, the article asks how ideas of COVID-19 immunity derive their affective appeal and cultural legitimacy, and what is at stake in the imagined futures that unfold from such visions of post-pandemic immunity. The analysis focuses on two affective figures that circulated widely in public discourse in March–May 2020: the figure of the soon-immune nation and the figure of the immune individual. I unsettle these figures by contextual- izing them through the histories of immunity politics around race, gender and sexuality. The analysis shows that the two figures have long affective histories entangled with nationalism, racism and discrimination. The article argues that these histories shape and curtail the kinds of post-pandemic futures that may be enacted and imagined through popular ideas of immunity.

“Feudal Barons Extracting Tribute”: Narratives of Market Power in the Australian Retail Property Sector during the 1980s

This article analyzes the ways that shopping center tenants deployed narratives to encourage government intervention in the Australian retail property sector during the 1980s. Tenants claimed that landlords were abusing their market power through a range of egregious and exploitative practices. Landlords responded with stories of their own, claiming that amateurish retailers were using isolated cases to make broad generalizations about the industry as a whole. Politicians retold retailers’ stories in Parliament, championed small business enterprise as a driver of economic growth, and produced retail leasing legislation aimed at protecting shopping center tenants. In the process, established conceptions of shopping centers were inverted. In the 1960s and 1970s they were seen as bastions of capitalist enterprise constructed by nation-building visionaries. Through stories, retailers captured the cultural legitimacy of entrepreneurship from their landlords, who were characterized as feudal barons blocking the free operation of markets they controlled. Exploring these developments offers new insights into the relational dynamics of preplanned retail environments, expands our understanding of postwar Australian retail history, and contributes to a growing historiography on the role of narrative in business history.

Two Sports, Two Systems, One Goal: A Comparative Study of Concussion Policies and Practices of the Australian Football League and Hockey Canada

Concussion in sport is today regarded as both a public health issue and high profile injury concern in many contact and collision sports. This paper undertakes a comparative review of the current policies and practices of two high profile national sporting organisations of such sports—the Australian Football League (AFL) and Hockey Canada (HC)—in governing the issue as a regulatory concern. By examining the policies and practices of the AFL and HC, this study aims to identify common themes, divergent practices, and nuanced sport-specific approaches to develop understandings on the regulation and governance of this high profile sports injury. The paper aims to contribute to understanding concussion as a regulatory concern, while at the same time recognising the heterogeneity of sport and reinforcing nuanced understandings that align to specific social and cultural settings. We make recommendations based on regulatory and cultural legitimacy. The paper concludes that these NSOs are institutional actors with historical and cultural roots who assert regulatory legitimacy by steering and influencing behaviour and directing the regulatory agenda to manage and mitigate the harm associated with concussion.

A Dove Grey Renaissance

Launched in 1999, at a time of radical change for the publishing industry, Persephone Books has become a successful independent publisher of neglected female authors mainly from the 20th-century inter-war period. Publishing being an industry primarily shaped by the differential distribution of symbolic and economic capital (Bourdieu, ‘The Market for Symbolic Goods’, in The Rules of Art, Polity Press, 1996, p. 9), competing principles of cultural legitimacy within an increasingly commercial climate clarify the position of modern publishing at the intersection of culture and commerce (Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 27). This article explores how Persephone Books’ understated assertion of publishing’s ‘middle ground’ and commitment to the historically reviled ‘middlebrow’ genre have reconciled the perennial tension between culture and commerce to create a thriving yet unintentional publishing brand.

Social Control of Women’s Body as Cultural-Political Legitimation in “Putri Cina” Novel

This research aimed to describe the depiction of the female body’s domination as a form of political-cultural legitimacy raised in Sindhunata’s work entitled Putri Cina. Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse was applied as the approach to reveal how sexuality was closely related to power practices. The discourse presented in the novel was dissected by qualitative methods, descriptive qualitative, and interpretative data analysis techniques. The results show that the two main characters of this novel are Chinese women who experienced oppression in Java. The existence of a cultural identity crisis, abjection, passivity, and not subversion represents the figure of alienated women. This perspective is intertwined with how indigenous men perceive Chinese women figures. Sindhunata describes the unequal construction of sexuality between men and women and the discrimination of the Chinese race as repeated during the kingdom era, pre-independence, to the New Order era.

Family Background

This chapter examines the classification of Yiddish as a member of two different families of languages: Germanic languages and Jewish languages. Each of these language families is founded on a different conceptualization of how languages are related to one another: genetic or cultural, respectively. These two distinct classifications of Yiddish can be integrated by considering it a fusion language, which situates the perceived hybrid nature of Yiddish as its defining essence. Discussions of the family background of Yiddish also reveal extralinguistic concerns reflecting ideologically shaped notions of about cultural legitimacy, demographic integrity, social and political status, and the construction of a Jewish authenticity.