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Territories : A Trans-Cultural Journal of Regional Studies
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This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 2640-9607
Published by eScholarship

[73 journals]

Note from the Editor
- Authors: Arranz; Iker
  Abstract: Editor's note
  PubDate: Fri, 22 May 2020 00:00:00 +000
Censorship and Self-Translation in the Era of the Latin American Boom
- Authors: Levine; Suzanne Jill
  Abstract: This piece focuses on an analysis of Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers and the role that the author's condition of exile played in its publication history: first, the impact of Franco and censorship on the book's final published version and secondly the impact of the writer's changing political perspectives, along with the process of translation as a literary reflection of the political situation.
  PubDate: Wed, 13 May 2020 00:00:00 +000
Kundera and Ionesco on the Unmistakable Awareness of Being Minor
- Authors: Lupas; Maria
  Abstract: Deleuze and Guattari’s 1975 text, Kafka, pour une littérature mineure, posited a theory concerning some groups of literary texts including those of Franz Kafka. Their theory was nevertheless highly connected to their own historical and geographical context in France, and much less so with that of Kafka who had himself previously attempted to theorize small literatures. By looking at the context of Kafka and of two other writers who might be considered as belonging to minor literary contexts, I argue that theorists of minor literature tend to view minor literature in a positive way when their own cultural context is further from nation-state building. On the other hand, those writers who are writing from inside nation-building contexts tend to emphasize minor literature’s limits on literary production. Interestingly, Milan Kundera and Eugene Ionesco who had first-hand experience of nation-building contexts, but then moved to France and wrote in French, take more nuanced...
  PubDate: Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000
(Ultra)Minor Comics' Opening Up the History of (Post-)Yugoslav and
Bulgarian Comics to Outsiders
- Authors: De Dobbeleer; Michel
  Abstract: The last decade saw the publication of more and more monographs (partially) devoted to the history of comics (and/or graphic novels) in smaller or larger geographical/cultural areas around our globe. In this article I first focus on what – if anything – (the relevant chapters in) several of these books tell their readers about the history of comics in the former Republic of Yugoslavia and its successor states, and in Bulgaria, the other Slavic country on the Balkan Peninsula. In doing so, I discuss a (‘Cold War’) misperception about East European comics. In the second part, I probe the usefulness of extending the application range of the terms ‘minor [literatures]’ and ‘ultraminor [literatures]’ to the field of comics, whereupon I put forward some suggestions on how future contributions – scholarly and other – to the cultural transmission or opening up of the history of (post-)Yugoslav and Bulgarian comics, as well as those of countries/nations/language areas with comparable traditions,...
  PubDate: Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Levinas’ notion of neighbor as an approach to understand Pío Baroja,
otherness and modern Spain.
- Authors: Arranz; Iker
  Abstract: The Cold War era touched Spain only subtly. Because of the geopolitical situation of Europe during the second half of the 20th century, Spain remained almost isolated from macro politics, attempting impossible alliances with Italian and German fascism. For instance, whilst the rest of the world witnesses the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 and the Space Race, Spain’s history is marked by the death of a “matador”, Manuel Laureano Rodriguez “Manolete”, who copes the newspapers’ front pages for days and is followed by popular grief and controversy. Four decades before, Miguel de Unamuno already coins this ancestral voice of the Spaniard consciousness as “casticismo” and “intrahistoria”. However, in literary terms, Iberian literature showed clear signs of modernity, and sometimes, even of hybridity. The Iron Curtain did not cover the shame of a dictatorship regime in Spain, and yet, authors like Baroja describe that atmosphere at a great extent, even, as this paper...
  PubDate: Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Transatlantic Literary Networks during the Cold War: Emir Rodríguez
Monegal, Reader for Gallimard
- Authors: Gras; Dunia
  Abstract: In this paper, I propose to address the issue of transatlantic networks and the circulation of literary paradigms between Latin America and Europe. I will focus on a relevant actor from the time of the well-known and still controversial “boom” of Latin American narrative, within the context of the Cold War (Franco 2002, Sorensen 2007, Alburquerque 2010). This was a key moment in the internationalization of Latin American writers, as José Donoso underlined in Historia personal del ‘boom’ (1972, 1983). Donoso highlighted some names that served as nodes, such as Carlos Fuentes, who played an important role, thanks to his extraordinary and natural handling of informal networks (Gras 2015). Among these names that had a specific weight in the process of international recognition of the “boom”, Donoso also highlights the figure of the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal (1921–1985), to whom I will devote these pages. I will present a very specific—and even...
  PubDate: Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Rethinking Minor Literature and Small Literature as Secondary Zone
Literature
- Authors: HE; Yanli
  Abstract: The aim of this article is to argue that both “minor literature” and “small literature” should be readdressed as Michel Ragon’s “secondary zone literature” from three perspectives. Firstly, it will be argued that “minor and small literature” began to lose its theoretical capacity with the advent of globalization after the new millennium. Secondly, the problems of “minor literature” and “small literature” will be updated. “Minor literature” mainly has two problems: 1) The first feature of “minor literature” runs the risk of not only dismissing all literature written by minorities in “minor languages”, but also diminishing the possible meanings of the term, “minority”; and 2) The second and third characteristics of “minor literature” are unable to explain why only non-European arts are perceived to be political and collective. “Small literature” also has two problems: a) it fails to explain why countries that hardly qualify as ‘small’, face problems similar to those of “small...
  PubDate: Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Small and Large Cultures: Individuality, the Collective, Conformity and
the Period of the Cold War
- Authors: Hart; Jonathan Locke
  Abstract: The Cold War is something I analyze in two parts. First, I examine its politics, including political literatures and cultures large and small that concentrate on central concerns of the Cold War. Second, I discuss small and minor literatures in the period of the Cold War in theory and practice, including examples from the Netherlands and Canada that are in the period of the Cold War but do not focus on it as its primary concern or theme. In these sections, I argue for the centrality of the tension between tyranny and liberty, individual and the group, conformity and nonconformity and related matters. The article ranges in the politics of the Cold War from the background of Marx and Mill though Churchill, Stalin, Truman, McCarthy to Russell, Grant and Ignatieff. In literature, that is the Cold War in ink, the essay analyzes Orwell’s essay on the nuclear bomb and his novels, Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm as well as Miller’s play, The Crucible...
  PubDate: Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Re-membering Armenian Literature in the Soviet Borderlands
- Authors: Movsesian; Arpi
  Abstract: This article focuses on Armenian literature during the Soviet period and engages with the varied responses of Armenian writers to the Soviet imperialism from its periphery, with a particular eye to poets like Hovhannes Shiraz and Eghishé Charents, who, despite the censor’s unrelenting efforts to silence national discourse and remembrance of the Armenian Genocide, sought to rekindle the Armenian sense of self. This article also attempts to highlight the poetic sensitivity and daringness of those Armenian literati, such as Derenik Demirchian, Gurgen Mahari, and Kostan Zarian, who believed it was their duty to faithfully depict the current historical moment, even in the face of its inhumanity, as under Stalin, in order to preserve and re-member their nation’s past. Although a nation with millennia of literary history, Armenian literature remains virtually unknown outside the small group of Armenian speakers within the country and in its diaspora. This article hopes to shed some...
  PubDate: Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000
From the Poetry of Late Socialism to the Dogmatism of Democracy: The
Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc before and after the Collapse of
Communism
- Authors: Tion; Lucian
  Abstract: Using the examples of two films from the late socialist era, Roman Balayan’s Flights in Dream and Reality (1982) and Mircea Daneliuc’s Glissando (1982) and following Alexei Yurchak’s description of vnye as “deterritorialized milieus,” I plan to show how the entirety of the cultural space of late socialism amounted to what Foucault would term a heterotopic place featuring both simultaneity and juxtaposition. Finally, by further comparing this space to that created in the nonlinear postmodern era by Sergey Loznitsa in his documentary film Donbass, I will attempt to show that this cultural space, and by extension, the affective space of socialism right down to the everyday lives of the “masses,” unlike the totalitarian universe it is nowadays made out to appear, presented the early features of the very intermediality, non-linearity, and non-topicality we are celebrating in post-meta-narrative art cinema of the early 2000s. A home-bred...
  PubDate: Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Book Review Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory
- Abstract: At the close of his Living in the End Times, Žižek returns to a concern that theology has become (again) a touchstone of radical political activity. Indeed, the work of socialism has always—rightly or wrongly, positively and negatively—maintained a strongly messianic-apocalyptic character in the hands of its most ardent supporters. Žižek’s correct analysis in End Times is to remind his reader that such energies ought to be handled with care, because the desire (under the insistently traumatic terms of contemporary life) is that we simply reassert the moral, agential supremacy of the “big Other” who will validate and assure socialism’s success. Such a condition leads us then to something that radical activists on the street—as an entity separate from those theorizing capitalism’s demise—might do well to call simply class consciousness. Ever the goal of organizational energies, the best version of class consciousness (à la Žižek) exists between the self...
  PubDate: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000
Algorithmic Nations: Towards the Techno-Political (Basque) City-Region
- Abstract: Despite the need to better understand the changing dynamics between the ongoing political regionalization processes and the re-scaling of nation-states, at least in Europe, updated and timely research that responds to these challenges fueled by data-driven societies and the algorithmic revolution invigorated by an uneven establishment of borders remains scant and ambiguous. Nations, regardless of the spatial boundary by which we define them, matter as much as political borders and account for algorithmic disruption. Hence, this paper explores these new cartographies from the regional studies perspective by presenting the city-region as a pivotal term amidst a wide range of challenges for cities, regions, and nation-states. The Basque Country, as a small, stateless, city-regionalized European nation, is presented as a case study, focusing on its transitional techno-political and city-regional metaphor called ‘Euskal Hiria’ (Basque City). The paper examines five standpoints in the...
  PubDate: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000
EU spatiality under question - Territorial cohesion in danger
- Abstract: Spatial transformations constitute an important attempt to perpetuate a setting that becomes a stabilizing factor of human consciousness in the course of time. The understanding of spatial transformations becomes directly dependent on the prevailing balance between the unity and the multiplicity of the concepts of space, place, and territory. The paper highlights the importance of spatial transformations with respect to the EU integration undertaking and the fact that the insufficient knowledge of the inherent characteristics of territory poses a threat to the achievement of the territorial cohesion objective. This is so given that both the EU official documents and the EU adopted practices are far from the real meaning – and the achievement – of territorial cohesion. In fact, the conflict of interests and goals, through the demands of hard and soft planning, has an adverse impact on the strength of EU territory. The change of perception and the view of territory through the lens...
  PubDate: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000
Toward an Expanded Cubanidad: Foucault’s Aesthetics of the Self and the
Embodiment of Revolutionary Subjectivities
- Abstract: Drawing from interviews with Cuban nationals during and shortly after the 50th anniversary of the Castro-led revolution, this essay explores Cubanidad or the dynamic and constantly evolving conception that Cubans have of themselves as revolutionary subjects. It does so by first outlining a Foucauldian framework that highlights the embodied, rather than ideological, constitution of subjectivity and offering a generative method for discourse analysis that moves against the dominant currents of binary containment. Second, it tracks the production of that embodied subjectivity backward through the revolutionary rhetoric of such foundational figures as José Martí and Ernesto (Che) Guevara as well as forward into divergent self-conceptions among contemporary Cubans. The essay ends by reflecting on the possibilities and limitations that this identity poses for the normalization of Cuba within the global political and economic community.
  PubDate: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000
Note from Editor-in-Chief
- Abstract: The journal Territories: A Trans-Cultural Journal of Regional Studies officially takes off with this first issue. Created in and around the idea of post-national realities that emerge around the globe, it navigates in the idea of post-foundational geographies that do not respond to ancestral and/or causal nominations, but are based in new imaginaries that reach out cultural intersections. The diverse editorial board is formed of internationally based scholars and students, with a clear interdisciplinary aim, who strive to provide with an open-access, peer-reviewed forum of discussion, with special focus on minor/small cultures that form the in-process and continuously changing new regionalities
  PubDate: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000
Book Review Resilience, Crisis and Innovation Dynamics. New Horizons in
Regional Science series
- Abstract: Stemming from ecology studies, the interdisciplinary concept of resilience has been gaining significance and notoriety towards the understanding of socioeconomic systems, reverberating the prevailing feelings of uncertainty and insecurity. Emanated from the extent, the depth and the duration of the recent (i.e. erupted in years 2007-8) world-wide financial and economic crisis, the prevalence of such feelings – and thus, the emergence of the concept of resilience – is no surprise. Indeed, the crisis has exposed the highly engaged with globally footloose activities, socioeconomic systems to exogenous disturbances (shocks) and resilience is, precisely, interwoven with the capacity of socioeconomic systems to move through multiple equilibria. Particularly, under such an evolutionary perspective, resilience may point to the capacity of socioeconomic systems, not only to respond successfully to short-term disturbances, but also to sustain long-term development.
  PubDate: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000
The weak fronts of political pluralism. National and cultural minorities
in Europe
- Abstract: This article deals with the political challenges that European liberal democracies confront in relation to their internal national pluralism. After analysing two analytical distortions of Western political thought –the fallacy of abstraction and the usual shortcomings of this tradition in relation to pluralism- the article presents twelve elements for a political and moral refinement of plurinational liberal democracies. These elements are linked with an analytical and normative collective dimension usually marginalized and which cannot be reduced to the individualist, universalist and stateist approach of traditional democratic liberalism and constitutionalism. Finally, the article deals with the practical solutions offered by comparative politics to try to accommodate nationally pluralist societies according to reviewed liberal-democratic patterns.
  PubDate: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000