‘She Was Such an Exotic Creature’: Feeding the Orientalist Machine in Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia

The Orientalist scenario that Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia displays is an incontestable representation of the ‘Orient’ as an exoticised ‘Other’ that menaces Western civilization with its inherent tendency towards depravation and savagery. In Christie’s novel, the archaeological site configures a terrain wherein civilisation is safeguarded because controlled by Westerners and yet, civilisation is disrupted the moment a murder is committed and everything indicates that the murderer is ‘one of us’, not the oriental ‘Other’. However, the stranger that endangers the civilising integrity of an otherwise unpolluted, commendable Orientalist enterprise by murdering ‘one of us’ is none other than the victim, Mrs Leidner, who goes through an orientalising process that premeditatedly transforms her into the essential Oriental female, the Belle Dame sans Merci. This article aims at unmasking how the Orientalist plot of Murder in Mesopotamia is strategically used to condemn the woman, the victim, and exonerate the murderer, the husband. Hence, the ‘Oriental’ female that lurks behind Mrs Leidner’s ‘blonde, Scandinavian fairness’ ( Mesopotamia 28) is exposed whereas Dr Leidner’s past as a German spy is conspicuously undermined. What this Orientalist plot ultimately unveils is the prescience of ‘whiteness’ as a discursively constructed category just as elusive as gender.

Investigando a Experiência de Usuários em um Centro de Convivência: Estudo Fenomenológico

This paper presents the results of a qualitative research of phenomenological nature that aimed to understand the experience of people who attend a Coexistence Community Center (CECO). Individual dialogical encounters were held with seven adult users of both sexes. After each meeting, the researcher wrote a Comprehensive Narrative, based on his own impressions, about the participant's experience. A Narrative Synthesis was then constructed containing the significant elements of the experience of all participants in relation to the experiences in the CECO. The phenomenologically revealed elements, that constituted the results of the research, can be expressed as follows: (1) interpersonal relations, mediated by professionals in the context of the CECO, are guided by respect, understanding and mutual interest; (2) from the daily coexistence with other people and from participation in collective activities, users can creatively develop their skills and interests; and (3) when they feel welcomed and respected as people, users also develop a positive affective relationship with the service. In conclusion, CECO is a space conducive to the development of individual and collective potentialities and to the valorization of constructive social relations that facilitate and preserve the inherent tendency of people for growth, autonomy and psychological maturation. Palavras-chave : Coexistence Community Center; Phenomenological Psychology; Narratives; Psychological Attention in Institutions; Public Health.

Bipolar Abstract Argumentation with Dual Attacks and Supports

Bipolar abstract argumentation frameworks allow modeling decision problems by defining pro and contra arguments and their relationships. In some popular bipolar frameworks, there is an inherent tendency to favor either attack or support relationships. However, for some applications, it seems sensible to treat attack and support equally. Roughly speaking, turning an attack edge into a support edge, should just invert its meaning. We look at a recently introduced bipolar argumentation semantics and two novel alternatives and discuss their semantical and computational properties. Interestingly, the two novel semantics correspond to stable semantics if no support relations are present and maintain the computational complexity of stable semantics in general bipolar frameworks.

“Out, and under, and out, and out.” Self-(Dis-)Organisation and the Stories of Libertatia

Recent socio-political developments in the experimental performing arts scenes from Europe have seen a strong commitment to the practices of self-organisation and their liberating impetus. Responding to the experimental nature of many such activities with a likewise experimental theoretical enquiry, this paper invests in an interpretation of self-organising principles from anarchism, cybernetics, and vitalist materialism through the fictional narrative of the pirate utopia Libertatia. The argument thus developed is that the liberating potentials of self-organisation can be located precisely in its inherent tendency toward self-dis-organisation.

Unhistorical Fictions: Sedgwick and Neal

Chapter 2 attends two early works that, I argue, resist rather than participate in the formation of the historical romance tradition in antebellum U.S. literature and, in doing so, offer an implied critique of historicist assumptions and procedures. John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) each experiments with writing (and experiencing) history through the present tense. Deploying anachronism as both narrative method and trope, Hope Leslie’s narrative of colonial New England disrupts the unidirectional course of time, challenging fundamental conceptions of the form and shape of history that are as prevalent today as in Sedgwick’s time. In Seventy-Six, Neal strives to render an account of history that neither refers nor means, but that simply is. Impossibly, Neal seeks to evacuate the narrative of temporality, to circumvent the inherent tendency of narrative to shape and bestow coherence upon experience—a coherence that inevitably distorts the particular tang of now.

Central banks: Hesitant guardians of equilibrium

In our paper we focus on situations when central banks have to conduct monetary policy in a world in which they cannot rely fully on what is regarded the best practice and they have to cope with financial system inherent tendency to be unstable. Both phenomena are rooted in János Kornai’s intellectual heritage highlighting that economy tends to divert from equilibrium and that soft budget constraint erodes economic actors’ behavior.

The Question of Representation

Chapter 4 reconsiders the question of primitivist representation in light of the theoretical and historical arguments presented in Chapters 1 through 3. Discussing works by Emil Nolde, D. H. Lawrence, Langston Hughes, and Jacques Roumain, it argues that primitivism has an inherent tendency to transcend any fixed notion or representation of the primitive, and that it is the work itself that must produce the sought-for primitive experience. Thus we find a vacillation between concrete representations of “primitive” remnants and an abstracted, nonspecific ideal of the primitive to come.

Christianity without Onto-Theology

Dreyfus develops Kierkegaard’s critique of nihilism in terms of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the nature of selfhood. On Kierkegaard’s account, the essential nature of the self involves an inherent tendency toward contradiction that leads us to despair—a despair we can only escape through an absolute commitment to something outside of ourselves. This chapter explains that aesthetic, ethical, and many forms of religious existence will inevitably break down because they can’t resolve this contradiction. In our current age, we are left with a choice between meaningless distractions to disguise our fundamental despair, or a decision that involves an unconditional commitment that can be manifest in our everyday existence.

Thomas Piketty's Capital and the Developing World

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a tour de force—a compelling and accessible read that presents an eloquent and convincing warning about the future of capitalism. Capitalism, Piketty argues, suffers from an inherent tendency to generate an explosive spiral of increasing inequality of wealth and income. This inegalitarian dynamic of capitalism is not due to textbook failures of capitalist markets (for example, natural monopolies) or failures of economic institutions (such as the failure to regulate these monopolies), but to the way capitalism fundamentally works. Unless the spiral is controlled by far more progressive taxation than is now the norm, the political fallout could undermine the viability of the successful “social state” (p. 471) in the advanced economies, putting the democratic state itself at risk.