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PEO HANSEN AND STEFAN JONSSON |
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At the EU Africa Summit in Lisbon on December 8–9, 2007, the European
Union and 53 African states adopted the Lisbon Declaration. The two parties
called for more EU-Africa cooperation and joint action. "On a global
scale," the Declaration stated, "we have today an increased understanding
of our vital interdependence and are determined to work together in
the global arena on the key political challenges of our time, such as energy
and climate change, migration or gender issues." Most importantly for our
purposes here, the Lisbon Declaration also alluded to the prehistory of the
EU-Africa partnership. Starting out on a conciliatory note, acknowledging
that "we have come together in awareness of the lessons and experiences
of the past," the text of the Declaration further hailed the Lisbon Summit as
offering "a unique opportunity jointly to address the common contemporary
challenges for our continents, in the year that we celebrate the 50th anniversary
of the European integration and the 50th anniversary of the beginning
of the independence of Africa." This, of course, was a direct reference to
the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC; today's EU) in
the Rome Treaties signed on March 25, 1957, and to Ghana's independence
from British rule just weeks earlier on March 6, 1957.
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DILIP M. MENON |
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We have a tendency to make contemporaries of thinkers with whom we feel
an affinity. Gandhi is one of those figures whose thought has been mined
for aphorisms on issues ranging from the environment and alternative economics
to an ethical politics and the placebos of peaceful coexistence. While
his epigrammatic statements—what we need is less civilization rather than
more, or, the solutions we offer are indeed sometimes the problem, to state
just a few—are bracing, it is the genealogy of Gandhi's arguments that is
considered as crucial in this paper. Gandhi's words may have a resonance
today, but we must pay special attention to the historical context and its influence
on his arguments, or indeed, the diverse and now-forgotten fields of
discourse within which his positions were located. This is not merely about
conducting a historicist or contextualist exercise that imprisons thought in a
temporal moment. We have to deal creatively with notions of anticipation,
prescience, and prolepsis.
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HELGE JORDHEIM |
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It is a familiar sight: in most cities in the world there will be dark brown vans
navigating the crowded streets, while they proudly announce their purpose,
in yellow letters on both sides: "Synchronizing the world of commerce." The
owner of the vans is UPS, United Parcel Service, which is one of the world’s
largest logistics companies, transporting all kinds of goods and materials to
every corner of the globe. To promote its services, UPS has chosen a slogan,
which instead of bringing to mind the vast distances its employees cover
every day, points to something else: what they do with time.
The verb "synchronize" is composed of the Greek prefix syn, "together," and
the word chronos, "time." In its transitive form, to synchronize refers to actions
or activities that cause something to happen together, coincide, to occur or
unfold at the same time, to be in sync. Literally, what UPS offers its customers
is the opportunity to complete the commercial activities they are involved
in—selling and buying goods—while ignoring any temporal differences caused
by geographical distance or changing time zones. In other words, with its slogan,
which has been a mainstay in the urban topography of major cities for
many years, UPS flaunts a commercialized version of what the geographer and
Marxist critic David Harvey called in his influential 1990 book, The Condition of
Postmodernity, "the time-space compression." Due to innovations in the transportation
and communication sector, to which UPS obviously belongs, space
is "annihilated" by time, in Harvey's words. Put slightly less dramatically, to
"synchronize the world of commerce" means that UPS grants its customers
the freedom to act as if communication, and more precisely, the distribution
of different kinds of goods across short or long distances, were instantaneous.
This can never completely succeed, of course; there will always be a time gap
between when a parcel is sent and when it is received at the other end, at least
as long as we are talking about actual physical parcels, traveling actual physical
distances, and not digital ones.
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DANA SIMMONS |
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How much life is in the living wage? In recent months, a number of major
American cities have enacted minimum wage ordinances, offering urban
working families a promise of better living conditions. Yet just as minimum
wage laws attempt to ameliorate the conditions of low-wage workers, working
communities appear under threat by temporary work, automation, task
labor, mass incarceration, deportation, and a host of other social pressures.
Shifts in capital and labor seem to have swept away any guarantees of secure,
steady, and sufficient working-class employment in the global North. A
decent life continues to escape even those within the reach of recent minimum
wage victories. The MIT Living Wage Calculator reckons that a $15/
hour minimum wage would not suffice in a city like Los Angeles to cover
a family's basic expenses. When one considers all the forms of life and all
the living people excluded from wage work—by choice, by necessity, or by
force—very little potential life appears left in the wage. The era of the wage,
some two hundred years old, seems likely to fade sooner or later.
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GARY WILDER |
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This article is an expanded version of an informal talk given in March 2015 as part of
the History of a Book lecture series hosted by the Princeton University English Department.
The talks are meant partly for authors to share writing experiences with junior
scholars who are thinking about how to transform their work into book form. The title
of the talk was "Unsolicited Advice Based on Idiosyncratic Experience." It has been
revised for this Intervention.
This book snuck up on me. After publishing The French Imperial Nation-State:
Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars in 2005, I sketched
out a new research project on the relationship between the French imperial
wars of colonial liberation during decolonization in the 1950s, the
emergence of "romantic" mercenaries during the postcolonial period
in relation to French neocolonialism [la françafrique], and the spread of
private military corporations in the neoliberal post-Cold War present. It
was to be an inquiry into the afterlives of empire that traced a genealogy
of post-democratic state forms in relation to international law and new
imperial practices. To prepare for this research, I was awarded a Mellon
New Directions fellowship to spend a year studying international law
(which I did in 2007–2008). I had no plans to write a second book about
the Negritude project.
However, as all writers probably do, I felt that there was a great deal
of unfinished business related to my first book. So when I was invited to
participate in a conference at the New School for Social Research on "Ruins,
Ruination, and Imperial Debris" I decided to write a piece about Aimé
Césaire's understanding of decolonization, which unfolded after the time
period covered in The French Imperial Nation-State. One essay. And maybe
I'd have a chance to write something about Senghor and decolonization.
Two max; then I would move on. I wanted only to indicate how my study of
colonial administration, the imperial nation-state, and the emergence of
the Negritude project in the 1930s provided a useful foundation for thinking differently about the French Fourth Republic, West African decolonization,
and Césaire's and Senghor's postwar texts and acts.
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