NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

PUBLIC CULTURE - a journal of the Division of the Humanities, University of Chicago - is a very serious academic publication. Opens with photographs of a bather by Tabata Hideomi scholarly appraised by various authors, footnotes sometimes taking up half a page. (That's the kind of book it is — thin paper, 350 perfect bound pages of the larger US version of A5. Grant-funded obviously; and I'm tempted, as a struggling grantless editor, to sneer at the sheer indulgence of giving over so many pages to varying interpretations. I would rather, though, given the wealth of insights offered here, that we had such generous patronage of the arts in the UK. Hereafter I will confine myself to comment solely on PUBLIC CULTURE's contents.)

Regards THE BATHER

...it isn't the object of public bathing to neutralize the potential erotics of the naked body or to cause regret over its absence. Most of the time, the fact of nakedness dissolves into the sociability of relaxation... In presenting himself in the bath, Tabata chose the activity in which he would be least distinguishable from the able-bodied...

Concepts considered here, the language used, one knows will be robbed rotten by journalists looking for easy copy, the photos taken over and misused by the clever-clever advertising industry; and all here will be commonplace in the broadsheets within a year. When it will have become media shallow, simple surface imagery. Here serious art is being seriously discussed in depth. And, as such, it would be so easy to lampoon; lampooner, though, would be the loser.

Bruce Caron places THE BATHER in a cultural (Japanese) context, James I Porter discusses attitudes to disablement; and so on and so forth. So, what begins with some rather obvious photographs of a man in an ordinary looking hip bath, opens out into sociological and historical studies.

The same flowering takes place with other subjects covered - an analysis of the rape, torture and murder of the women of Ciudad Juarez. This opens out into a study of the worth of women in that society, which is reflected back, of course, into each our own societies and their ractions to this type of story.

Followed by an excellent essay, GOD'S PHALLUS, by Achille Mbembe on monotheism, tracing it from Akhenaton to present day Christianity and demonstrating its effect upon our language and our cognitive processes, on even those of us who refute all religions.

Celia Lury's analysis of the Nike brand opens out into aspects/iconography of capitalist/consumer culture/economics.

In RACE, NATIONALITY, MOBILITY... Radhika Viyas Mongia relates the significance of the passport in the creation of the twentieth century nation state, and within each its intrinsic racism.

Roxanne Varzi's IRAN GARDI looks at contemporary Iranian art and what it signifies — principally a shift from Islamic to secular aesthetics. [Incidentally Iran Gardi is exactly what the term suggests — a search for Iran, in Iran. Which reminded me of the Simon & Garfunkel number, NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE — ...all come to look for America...]

This issue of PUBLIC CULTURE is rounded off with updates on several international current art projects.

I have seen nothing similar to this in Britain, not in its enthusiasm for its subject material. (Too often in Britain along with such highminded art projects goes an off-putting Oxbridge establishment snobbery. None of that is present here.) PUBLIC CULTURE is a mind-opening publication. If your local library isn't already a subscriber, get them to order it.

This issue concerns itself with globalization, and comprises a series of papers and studies from experts in the field from all over the world.

Although the high level of scholarship and enquiry means that PUBLIC CULTURE mainly recommends itself to other committed professionals working on related projects, the papers presented are by no means dry or academic and the issues engaged with are of such far-reaching application that most people who are concerned with the future welfare of the planet will find at least some of the articles absolutely fascinating.

All of the contributors are writing from the position of intense commitment to their chosen issues, and with a passion and intellectual rigour, which is also, in nearly every case, engaging to read and with the minimum of statistics or technicalities. Whether the individual writers are scholars, legislators, social theorists or political activists, they all have the skill of reaching out, through the written word, to engage specialists or laymen alike. Many of the contributors are among the most far-sighted and intellectually courageous of the world's population. Indeed, one scholar, Neelan Tiruchelvam, who is honoured in the publication, was recently murdered in Sri Lanka whilst helping to produce new, non-violent constitutional solutions to some of Sri Lanka worst ethnic conflicts.

Even within the general theme of "globalization" the range of articles is very wide and far reaching. One that especially excited me was TOWARD AN ETHICS OF THE FUTURE by Jerome Binde.

Suffice it to say that PUBLIC CULTURE is a beautifully produced and important series of books (each issue almost 300 pages thick) dealing with current social, cultural and political issues. Whilst never dumbing down it should not fly over anybody's head and, indeed, goes far enough down the popularisation road to sell its own T-shirts. It is the sort of publication by which generations to come will seek to know those minds among us who are trying to take on responsibility for our collective future.

Although PUBLIC CULTURE appears three times in each calendar year, this is volume 3 of a Millennial Quartet, a PUBLIC CULTURE mini-series. The title for this volume is "MILLENNIAL CAPITALISM AND THE CULTURE OF NEOLIBERALISM", and it comprises nine academic articles, written in accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style. And if that's not indication enough, scanning of the copious footnotes and lists of references will reveal names like Jacques Derrida, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, there are some regular PUBLIC CULTURE features like "MISCELLANY" and "FROM THE FIELD" that incorporate photography, including a few full colour plates. These are spread out along the way like the welcome rest stops on the Trans-Canada Highway.

Given the title of this volume, one might have expected to read political scientists, economists, or even sociologists, but instead almost all the contributors (the editors included) are anthropologists. Thus there are many new twists and points of view to arguments you might have heard or read before. The editors write:

The global triumph of capitalism at the millennium, its Second Coming, raises a number of conundrums for our understanding of history at the end of the century.

While the critique of Eurocentrism has sought to provincialize Europe and to question its professed universality, the critique of globalcentrism should seek to differentiate the globe and show its highly uneven distribution of power and immense cultural complexity. A critique that demystifies globalization's universalistic claims but recognizes its liberatory potential may make less tolerable capitalism's destruction of nature and degradation of human lives and, in the same breath, expand the spaces where alternative visions of humanity are imagined, whether in 'pockets of resistance' to capital, in places still free from its hegemony, or within its own contradictory locations.

Cosmopolitanism is back. For some that is the good news. Shaking off the negative connotations of its past (when Jews, communists, and cosmopolitans were so frequently cast as traitors to national solidarities), it is now portrayed by many as a unifying vision for democracy and governance in a world so dominated by a globalizing capitalism that it seems there is no viable political-economic alternative for the next millennium. The bad news is that cosmopolitanism has acquired so many nuances and meanings as to negate its putative role as a unifying ethic around which to build the requisite international regulatory institutions that would ensure global economic, ecological, and political security in the face of an out-of-control free-market liberalism.

PUBLIC CULTURE is an important academic journal dealing with issues of globalisation and transnational culture. The issue under review carries a series of articles concerned with "cosmopolitanism", a term the editors admit to be problematic but which contributor Walter D. Mignolo rather endearingly defines as "a set of projects toward planetary conviviuality".

In other words we are looking at how we can love our neighbours in a world where the old barriers between nations are collapsing and power is shifting from local governments to transnational corporations. It is hard to conceive of a more important area of enquiry. Some of these articles attempt a broad overview. Mignolo's article, for instance, looks at earlier periods in Western European history when the horizon of the known world expanded and compares their thinking with our own. Sheldon Pollock also looks for lessons from history in an excellent article which compares the fortunes of two once cosmopolitan languages— Latin in the Roman Empire and Sanskrit in South-East Asia— and documents how both were supplanted, around the beginning of the second millennium, by a multiplicity of local vernacular tongues.

Other articles have a narrower focus. Arun Appadurai contributes a telling piece on the housing shortage in present-day Mumbai(or Bombay) while T.K. Biaya writes about eroticism in Senegal.

PUBLIC CULTURE is aimed at an academic readership and, while most of the authors write clearly and even wittily, there were times when I found myself struggling under avalanches of many-syllabled abstract nouns ending in "ity" and "ism". I don't suppose there's much point in complaining about this, though it strikes me as faintly ironic that articles which aim to further transcultural understanding should be couched in language impenetrable to all but a tiny elite.

This is a great magazine that does great work. The awareness of global interconnectedness that it fosters is our hope for the future. W.H. Auden once wrote that

we must love one another or die.

Sponsored by the University of Chicago and the Society for International Cultural Studies and published three times a year, Public Culture has, as one would expect from this source, an academic and scholarly bias. The contents of this particular 440-page issue comprise essays on subjects such as violence in society, culture and communication. Essays include one by John Borneman entitled RECONCILIATION AFTER ETHNIC CLEANSING — a recurring problem of the 20th and present centuries. Strategies discussed include those of Listening, Retribution and Affiliation, with particular reference to the act of witnessing practised in South Africa and in Latin America. Compulsive procreation as an attempt at recuperation following ethnic cleansing is also discussed.

Li Zhange has an essay on "SPATIALITY AND URBAN CITIZENSHIP IN LATE SOCIALIST CHINA", where recent economic reforms and the opening up of Chinese society have led to increased social displacement and unemployment. As a consequence many workers, now in their late 40s and early 50s, share nostalgia for a socialist past and look back to a "golden age" which overlooks the other many problems of this period.

Other essays in this book include one entitled "AM I THE ONLY SURVIVOR" by Pun Ngai, which also discusses social trauma in China. Joseph Massad's "RE-ORIENTING DESIRE" discusses The Gay International and its relationship with the Arab World, while "MONUMENTAL HISTORIES" by Sheila Miyoshi Jager, subtitled Manliness, the Military, and the War Memorial centres on the Korean conflict, in which the participants have yet to sign a peace treaty.

Brian Keith Axel contributes "THE DIASPORIC IMAGERY" dealing with problems associated with the Sikh Diaspora and the violence emerging from the conflicts between India and Sikh aspirations to create a homeland — Khalistan (Land of the Pure).

Public Culture also contains shorter photo essays; including one by Kathleen Stewart — "SCENES OF LIFE/KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS and "41 SHOTS" by Sherry Milner and Ernest Larsen.