The Paradox of Automation: QWERTY and the Neuter Keyboard

With the neutering of the QWERTY keyboard in the early 1980s following largely successful clerical worker organizing, male workers in offices began taking on clerical work that, until recently, they would have considered beneath both their job descriptions and their manhood. Paradoxically, the men who now began typing, filing, and performing data entry for themselves did not generally consider the imposition of these new tasks an increase in work. Rather, they called it “automation.” Employers’ and computer manufacturers’ regendering of the QWERTY keyboard from feminine to neuter in the last quarter of the twentieth century was an example of the uses and power of the automation discourse, an ideological commitment that obscured the intensification of human labor behind utopian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm. Employers regendered the keyboard to get more work out of their employees, and as they did so, they claimed that no one did the work at all. Obscuring human labor behind technological marvels, the claims that the work was done by “automation” proved persuasive, even as human labor was sped up and intensified.

The marvellous life of a Haitian refugee: James Noël’s Belle merveille

This article examines the marvellous realism of two Haitian writers, past and present. Building on earlier schools of literary and socio-ethnographic thought, including Haitian indigenism, French surrealism and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s ‘marvellous real’, Jacques Stephen Alexis theorized marvellous realism at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956. Some 60 years later, James Noël published Belle merveille, a novel that depicts a refugee who survives the earthquake of 2010 and embarks on a journey to understand his place among international aid groups that proliferate in the aftermath. The article suggests that Noël’s novel is both a tribute to and a creative rethinking of Alexis’s ideological commitment to the intersection of literary and social realism. It argues that by filtering events through the imaginary of the refugee, Noël interrogates the very categories of the marvellous and the real undergirding Alexis’s aesthetic and political project. After providing theoretical and historical context for Noël’s work, the article carries out close readings of Belle merveille to illuminate the ways in which its redeployment of marvellous realism delivers a critique of humanitarian aid.

Home Truths: Property TV, Financialization, and the Housing Crisis in Contemporary Ireland

This article examines how a specific form of lifestyle programming indexes both national concerns and transnational financial trends as well as diffuse social fissures in Irish life. Emerging in the late 1990s amid a construction boom, Irish property television adapted and thrived through the subsequent post-2008 crash, the concomitant implementation of austerity policies and an ensuing housing crisis. This boom-to-bust cycle was precipitated by the financialization of property within Ireland, a process whereby housing and commercial property became embedded in transnational financial market cycles. Through an analysis of three key examples of the genre, this article argues that for the most part, Irish property television seeks to hold at bay anxieties generated by a growing wealth and income disparity in the state. While this programming displays an ideological commitment to the “investor subjects” of home-ownership, increasingly the concerns of those excluded from this version of the good life are evident.

Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siécle

Oscar Wilde’s political identity informed his literary writings, which were motivated by his revolutionary outlook as much as they were driven by his Paterian “passion for sensations”. Addressing his radical engagements with anarchism, socialism and anticolonial thought, this monograph provides a new interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism and of his major works by emphasising the importance of progressive politics to his positioning and self-identification within late Victorian literary culture. Consisting of previously unpublished material, it provides a politicised and historicised account of Wilde’s key works by situating them within the framework of his very pronounced – but to date critically under-recognised and as yet untheorised - ideological commitment to these radical political causes. This book interprets Wilde’s better-known works against the important political contexts addressed in his correspondence, reviews, lectures and journalism, and through his personal relationships with contemporary radicals.

An Overview of Zimbabwe–China Relations

This chapter surveys Zimbabwe’s relations with China in two main ways. It first examines the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) liberation movement’s relations with China during Zimbabwe’s independence struggle, followed by the ZANU-PF controlled independent Zimbabwean state’s links with China. The chapter shows the fundamentally realist character of ZANU-PF’s relationship with China from the 1970s to the present. It maintains that although ideological commitment and rhetoric has been an observable dynamic buttressing these relations, the links have mainly been steered by practical factors such as the supply of weaponry in Zimbabwe’s independence war and, latterly, reciprocally advantageous foreign policies. Crucially, the chapter argues, in the 1980s China played a role in directing the ZANU-PF government towards a capitalist economy, thereby avoiding the socialist ideological adherences with which China was historically associated. However, many of the capitalist deals and diplomatic links between China and Zimbabwe have, in the Zimbabwean domestic context, primarily advanced the interests of ZANU-PF elites and solidified their control of the state. Colonial legacies and the not always constructive interventions of former colonial powers in Africa, have partly contributed to political and developmental problems in many African states. China presents itself as the antithesis of the behaviours of ex-colonial powers but the case of Zimbabwe casts some doubt on this contention.

Ideological Commitment in Modern African Poetry: Redefining Cultural Aesthetics in Selected Poems of Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth and Village Voice

<p>In this study, ideological commitment to cultural norms is a standpoint that has led to the development of modern African poetry. The Modern African poet is seen as an advocate for cultural prowess and transformation and as such naturally adopts this African traditional antecedent in his poems. Several critical studies on the two collections have focused on the stylistic and literary values of Osundare’s craft without appropriate reviews on the poet's use of cultural forms to reflect his ideological stance on pertinent issues affecting the society. The descriptive qualitative content analysis method was used to show how the selected poems reflect Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of hybridity as expressed through the shifting of cultural margins in the society, thus, illustrating the use of cultural art forms as a means of appreciating nature and exploring issues of exploitation and marginalization. The study also examines the influence of the traditional Yoruba African culture on the poet with an adequate focus on the content and devices of orature, proverbs, riddles, parables, humor, satire, and traditional forms of language. The study submits that the poet adequately incorporated the ideals of culture and its elements in his enduring craft showing his allegiance to his folk cultural patterns.</p>

“The Finest Men We Have Ever Seen”: Jefferson, the Osages, and the Mirror of Nativism

Noting the entwined histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, Robert Warrior investigates the place of Native Americans in colonial hierarchies manifest across US history, from an 1804 encounter in Washington, DC, between the Osage people and Thomas Jefferson—in which Jefferson claims that the Osage were among “the finest men we have ever seen”—to the January 2019 media event surrounding Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann on the National Mall. Drawing from the work of Arica Coleman, he notes that Jefferson’s seeming high regard for the Osage people masks his ideological commitment to racial purity, and he casts these reflections alongside movements such as Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter.

The Limits of the Commune: A Review of The Mystery of the Kibbutz

Ran Abramitzky's book, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World, tries to answer the questions of why the communal kibbutz worked so well in Israel's formative years and what limits its current success in modern Israel. Initial ideological commitment and the special circumstances of Israel's founding led to unusual success when combined with well-thought-out rules on behavior and entry. Over time, the commitment to socialistic income sharing has not worked so well, given modern technology and global commerce. The author links up these ideas to the broader issue of organizational structure but misses out on some opportunities to test the ideas further. (JEL D31, D63, D82, J24, P13, Q13)

Reserve Military Service: A Social Constructionist Perspective

This study examines reserve military service from a perspective of social construction—the ways in which the reservist’s conscious experiences are constructed to give meaning to military service. Content descriptions of conscious experiences of reserve military service are identified in past studies. Constructions fell into four broad categories: (1) complementary to life—reserve military service providing wanted satisfaction not otherwise achieved, material gain, or ideological commitment; (2) equitable arrangement—understood compensation for self-sacrifice; (3) discordant identity—requirements of military life blatantly or surreptitiously conflicting with established identity and civilian life; and (4) self-definition—reserve military service understood as an aspect of self-identity. Directions for integrating these constructions as a basis for future research are identified and discussed.