Decolonial thinking: A critical perspective on positionality and representations in island studies

Scholars conducting research on and about islands face the challenge of countering the epistemic and methodological dominance of external perspectives on islands with an insular internal view, while also avoiding essentializing the island or reproducing Western perspectives. Islands have always been—and in some cases still are—confronted with a colonial gaze. Thus, to avoid producing hegemonic epistemology, we call for critical reflection on how islands are represented in our research, which theoretical concepts are referred to, and what knowledge is produced by applying them. Furthermore, we appeal for a reconsideration of the researcher’s positionality within the field and their role in knowledge production. This special section is a contribution to the decolonial project within island studies.

The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), founded after the Iranian revolution in 1979, is one of the most powerful and prominent but least understood organizations in Iran. In this book, Annie Tracy Samuel presents an innovative and compelling history of this organization and, by using the Iran-Iraq War as a focal point, analyzes the links between war and revolution. Tracy Samuel provides an internal view of the IRGC by examining how the Revolutionary Guards have recorded and assessed the history of the war in the massive volume of Persian language publications produced by the organization's top members and units. This not only enhances our comprehension of the IRGC's roles and power in contemporary Iran, but also demonstrates how the history of the Iran-Iraq War has immense bearing on the Islamic Republic's present and future. In doing so, the book reveals how analyzing Iran's history provides the critical tools for understanding its actions today.

Islamic Law from the Internal Point of View

Haider Hamoudi notes the different perspectives lawyers and historians employ in making sense of the law. Invoking H.L.A. Hart’s famous distinction between “internal” and “external” points of view with respect to law and legal rules, Hamoudi describes lawyers as primarily adopting the former, and historians, the latter point of view. This is not to suggest that lawyers do not take history into consideration, but rather to mean that when they do, their focus is results oriented in that they use history to understand the ultimate endpoint, the contemporaneous meaning of a legal rule or institution. Hamoudi observes two consequences emanating from lawyers’ adoption of the internal view that puts lawyers somewhat at odds with the demands of historical method and meaning. While deliberately omitting discussion on the normative desirability of either method, Hamoudi concludes by observing value in merely pointing out the differences between the internal and external viewpoints of law and history, respectively, to help expose “our own biases and assumptions.”

The reputation of horticulture – an internal view of the industry

The reputation of an industry represents an important strategic resource and this has already been highlighted in the past for the horticulture sector. However, the heterogeneity of horticulture makes it difficult for the industry to be perceived by society. An online survey was conducted to identify the most important characteristics of horticulture and to identify the reasons for its good or bad reputation. For this purpose, 102 experts – consultants from the horticultural industry – were asked to describe horticulture and the reputation of the industry. An evaluation of the survey, based on a qualitative content analysis using inductive category formation, indicated that horticulture is primarily associated with its diverse activities and various product groups. In terms of the product groups, the focus is on food products. The reputation of the industry is rated as ‘slightly positive’ on a 7-point Likert scale, with an average of 4.4.

Pluralism, Confucianism, and Democracy

This paper aims to connect the issues of pluralism, Confucianism, and democracy in East Asia. Through engaging with empirical evidence, I will argue that although Confucianism still has a strong yet shallow moral and cultural hold on East Asian societies, it no longer has dominance over how citizens in East Asian societies envision their political future. Then, I will examine the idea of pluralism and argue that neither the Confucian classicists nor the liberal-minded Confucian political theorists take pluralism truly seriously, because both sides ultimately adopt the same internal view of pluralism that contains and addresses pluralism from within Confucianism. In contrast, an external view of pluralism is needed to treat Confucianism as one of many comprehensive doctrines coexisting with one another in East Asia. Finally, I will conclude by proposing a two-track strategy that takes advantage of two distinct approaches toward a better understanding of pluralism, Confucianism, and democracy.

Enargeia and Bodily Mimesis

This chapter analyses the ancient rhetorical concept of enargeia (‘visual vividness’) against the background of recent cognitively inflected research into embodied aspects of reading. While enargeia has usually been interpreted as involving the transference of mental images from author to reader by means of elaborate verbal descriptions (ekphrasis), this chapter shows that this approach leaves many aspects of enargeia unaccounted for—not least a notable focus on narrative descriptions of bodily movements in ancient sources that discuss the concept. The chapter argues that an enactivist account of vision and imagination and embodied theories of language comprehension help us better to understand what ancient critics mean by enargeia. In particular, they give cognitive substance to the claim made by various ancient critics that readers’ quasi-visual responses to texts entailed taking an internal view of represented scenes and could even prompt readers to imaginatively ‘project’ themselves into the bodies of described characters. Imagining bodily actions always to some extent cuts through an inner–outer dichotomy, as it achieves its power and vividness through the reader’s awareness of motor processes, both in others’ bodies and in one’s own. The chapter shows that ancient critics were drawn especially to narrative renditions of goal-directed, transitive movements of the kind which, on an enactivist account, are formative of our experience of agency, and to representations of not necessarily voluntary movements of ‘swaying’ bodies.

Representation and the Internal View of the Instruments of Scenic Creation

The actor, through his/her memories, images and own representations, will confer the perfect resonance to his/her gestures and scenic actions. Linked to the performance, the representation, the mental images and the internal view give life, uniqueness, beauty and truthfulness to the part, construct the scenic imagery in an expressive and original manner. The actor, in his/her creation, uses on one hand his/her memory (sensorial, visual, auditive, gustatory, olfactive, kinesthetic, imagistic, voluntarily cognitive, involuntary and affective) and his/her past experiences and, on the other hand, sensations, perceptions, representations and reproductive imagination. Memory and imagination, the representations and mental images, thus become primordial tools in scenic creation, having the extraordinary power of updating on an intuitive level, relevant and significative, the actor’s experiences. If through memory the actor has the possibility of reproducing, evoking and experiencing sound, image, situations, spaces, circumstances and relations from his/her prior experience, through representations, images and his/her reproductive memory, he/she detaches him/herself from this concrete reality and is able to create a new world, imaginary and fantastic. The actor has to be aware of the tools he/she works with, has to develop his/her flexibility and the mobility of his/her imagination through the reconstruction and recombination of certain representations, by elaborating images: evoking an image, studying it in detail, completing, developing and direct influence of the image through subtle intervention, suggestion and collaboration, as to incorporate it in his/her scenic performance.

Why judges need jurisprudence in cyberspace

Judges are increasingly asked to decide whether a rule of national law is applicable to a cyberspace actor who is not present in their jurisdiction, or whose activities do not clearly fall within the established understanding of the rule. They do this through interpreting the applicability and meaning of the law.Every attempt to enforce a national law makes a claim that the law has authority over the cyberspace actor. By accepting that claim, the judge asserts that the law's claim is legitimate. This is a Hartian exercise, adopting the internal view of the national legal system as the test for legitimacy.But in cyberspace the legitimacy of a national law claim is determined not by the internal perspective of the legal system but by the external perspective of cyberspace actors. A law will only have authority in cyberspace if it can convince cyberspace actors that its claim is legitimate. And a legal system which repeatedly makes illegitimate claims thereby weakens its status as a system which adheres to the rule of law.Judges can help solve this problem by interpreting laws and applying public and private international law so as to reject applicability claims which are illegitimate. To do this successfully, they need to understand the jurisprudential foundations of any law's authority in cyberspace.