In 1815, two benevolent organizations commenced operation in Antigua, the Female Refuge Society based in English Harbour and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society based in St John's. The driving force behind the establishment of the Female Refuge Society, on which the Distressed Females’ Friend Society was modelled, was Anne Hart Gilbert (1768–1834), the earliest known published African-Caribbean woman writer, the agent of the Female Refuge Society. The organizations were run on principle by women and the executive committees were multi-racial. They (...) accepted female subscribers only, but donations from women and men. For Gilbert, an affective poetics of life story and writing is crucial to the formation of an ethical community that she situates as an emerging and modernizing counter-culture to plantation slavery. Her civic ethic of caring centres on development and engagement of the ‘finer sensibilities’ in creating ‘bands of amity and love that are the ornament and glory of our nature’ (Female Refuge Society, 1822: 12). The annual reports of the Female Refuge Society had a profound impact on the direction of female anti-slavery activism in Britain. In this essay, I analyse the inscription of affect in extant letters, annual reports and published material about the work of the Female Refuge Society and Distressed Females’ Friend Society. I am interested in how the women in the Creole organizations and their male supporters represent their affective relations to the objects of their benevolence and appeals for funding, and how these relations are racialized, gendered and classed in the grounding of activism. I draw out the local and British affective reception of these relations. In the field of affect studies, the essay might be compared with projects that address ‘the cultural and historical contingency of emotions, and … emotions and emotion cultures as contingent technologies of subjects’ (Koivunen, 2010: 19). (shrink)

In this essay I examine Hélène Cixous's readings and figurings of women in colonial and decolonizing cultural spaces and slippages between universalized Western metaphors and metonyms and their colonial and orientalist significance. These readings, figurings, and slippages provide a supplementary framing of Cixous's utopian model of intersubjective exchange, her representation of the relation between materiality and textuality, and her universalization of the singular transcendental subject.

In this essay I examine Hélène Cixous's readings and figurings of women in colonial and decolonizing cultural spaces and slippages between universalized Western metaphors and metonyms and their colonial and orientalist significance. These readings, figurings, and slippages provide a supplementary framing of Cixous's utopian model of intersubjective exchange, her representation of the relation between materiality and textuality, and her universalization of the singular transcendental subject.

This paper outlines a case for the reconfiguration of the public sphere as discursive space, arguing that such a reconfiguration better enables investigations into public debates on education. The paper focuses on one such investigation, which studied one newspaper's reporting of a review of the school curriculum in Queensland, Australia. It employs Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the interrelationships between policy discourses and the discourses about the review that were constructed in the print media. The paper shows how the dynamic (...) structure of the public sphere enabled discursive connections to be made across sites in order to privilege a shared public discourse on education policy, schools and teachers. In so doing, it demonstrates the capacity of the public sphere to define educational issues and identities in particular ways. (shrink)