[REVIEW] Vilhelm Moberg, History of the Swedish People, Volume II

pompe's birthday gift of Swedish novelist Vilhelm Moberg's A History of the Swedish People, Volume II - From Renaissance to Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005; trans. Paul Britten Austin) is much appreciated as this history, covering most of the 15th and 16th centuries, is a fine read, a text written by a man with a keen intelligence and a decided amount of concern for the little people--villages, ordinary soldiers, leaders of peasant revolts--who once were neglected by historians. This reads as a very Swedish text, somehow.

[BRIEF NOTE] CFTAG After-Report

It went quickly enough, with me and schizmatic and larkvi in attendance, talking mainly about current-day Canadian and American politics, the Olympics, and other topics.

In separate news, there's a movement afoot to shift the location from the Yonge/Wellesley Starbucks to another location, preferably an independent coffee house that also serves food. Do Torontonians have any suggestions on this front?

[BRIEF NOTE] Akira

As part of his ongoing effort to familiarize me with anime and manga and after showing me the film version of Akira, finfin is lending me the six volumes of the manga Akira. I'm on volume 3 right now, and finding myself having mixed emotions. On the one hand, it is interesting to see some of the underdeveloped themes of Otomo's film version unpacked, like Lady Miyako and the origins of the political maneuvering in post-apocalyptic Japan. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that shouldn't have been unpacked because of their superfluity.

One thing that strikes me as interesting about Akira--both versions--is that I don't see the future here. If anything, without the information revolution--personal computers, the Internet, text messaging, the works--Akira's future feels decidedly retro, like the Japan of the 1980s. Whether or not Otomo intended this effect, I leave to people better versed in his works.

[BRIEF NOTE] A Paraguayan Irony

The idea that Paraguay is--or given mortality trends in the 80+ cohort, was--a haven for Nazis is common knowledge (1, 2, 3), even seeping into popular culture. How ironic is it, then, that the population of Paraguay is largely mestizo, product of one of the most thorough intermixings of indigenous and immigrant populations in the whole of the Western Hemisphere, and united in the use of the Guaraní language as the national language? Compare, if you would, the despair of Bormann in São Paulo when he realized that he lived in a global metropolis where "race mixing" was ubiquitous?

[BRIEF NOTE] Allcock on Post-Yugoslav Ethnicity and Democracy

Persuant to a discussion over at nhw's LJ, John B. Allcock's Explaining Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), chapter 14, "Quo Vadis, Jugoslavijo?".

In setting out my own agenda for the analysis of "post-Communist" and "post-Yugoslav" developments in the region, I draw attention to six important problems which will remain generic to the former Yugoslav states for the foreseeable future. Predictions about the future of individual states would be foolhardy in view of the complexity of the processes of change in which the entire Balkan Peninsula is involved. For this reason, I concentrate upon the way in which these issues will continue to figure as problems, rather than upon any anticipated solution to them.

These are: (1) the impact of demographic factors; (2) the continuing importance of the paternalist state; (3) the rootedness of populist democracy in a fundamentally collectivist political culture; (4) the long-term significance of patterns of ethnic diversity; (5) the uneasy balance between tradition and modernity; and (6) the tension between the local and the global (431)

( From pages 434 through 438. )

In the original discussion, for whatever it's worth, I think that I may have overstated Allcock's emphasis on ethnic homogeneity and a relative freedom from ethnic tensions as an enabling factor for representative, non-majoritarian democracy.

[BRIEF NOTE] The good Canadian

The acute mhw considers this question "Just because you're Canadian doesn't mean we hate you", on the defensiveness of Canadians about their nation's apparent reputation as a warm and friendly nation (is this right). A fun exchange in the comments:

rfmcdpei: "Usually when the "good Canadian" is brought up the "ugly American" is lurking somewhere. Or not lurking, as the case may be."

mhw: "Which always amuses me while making me despair at the same time, because in the novel the Ugly American was actually the good and helpful guy."

[BRIEF NOTE] Life's categories

The Wikipedia category Gay icons is informative. I'm out of touch, I think.

[LINK] "A Place of Danger: Alone and Adrift in Toronto over Christmas Break"

Via multiple people on my friends list, Jenny Trait and Stephen Elliott's "A Place of Danger: Alone and Adrift in Toronto over Christmas Break".

Most of what I knew about Canada I'd read in the news. I read it was unsafe and getting worse. I read that the American occupation was a disaster and that we were turning our neighbors to the north into a breeding ground for anti-American sentiment. I read about insurgents roaming the streets and reporters unable or unwilling to leave the safety of their hotels in the heavily secured area of downtown Toronto. And the truth is that I wanted to see for myself how bad the situation was.

Because I believe there are two sides to the story. While perhaps we originally invaded Canada looking for illegal weapons that we never found, that doesn't mean there is something wrong with spreading democracy. That doesn't mean that, deep down, Americans and Canadians don't want the same thing. My parents grew up in Canada and remembered it fondly as a country of honest folk and simple pleasures. They spoke warmly of Kraft Dinner and Mr. Big bars.

Classic.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Upcoming Brazilian Wave

Joel Millman's recent Wall Street Journal article "Immigrant group puts new spin on cleaning niche" is provides an overview of a specific case of chain migration, of Brazilians moving to the greater Boston area in order to take up careers as house cleaners. Emigration, it seems, is a popular strategy for the Brazilian middle classes in the face of severe social blockages at home.

Brazilians enjoy advantages over some other groups. About 90 percent of Brazilian immigrants finished high school, and nearly 40 percent have some college training, estimates sociologist Franklin Goza of Ohio's Bowling Green State University. By contrast, a majority of Mexican and Central Americans lack high-school diplomas.

"When Brazilians talk about social mobility and new opportunities, emigration to the U.S. is high on the menu," says Eduardo Siqueira, a Brazilian professor on the Public Health faculty at the University of Massachusetts' Lowell campus.

The cost and complexity of emigrating from Brazil -- often involving a flight to Mexico for a chance to sneak into the U.S. -- means that only the relatively prosperous can afford such a journey. That helps to explain why former dentists, school teachers and journalists are among those coming here to pursue better, albeit sometimes humbling, income opportunities.

I asked elsewhere why there were so many Mexican emigrants and so few Brazilian emigrants. Distance and cost, it seemed, were the main limiting factors. Now in our globalized 21st century world, they're not.

What's particularly interesting in Millman's article is his suggestion that the Brazilian influx to the United States is building upon the social networks built up by previous Portuguese immigrants. The Portuguese and Brazilians naturally share many connections, thanks to Brazil's origins in Portuguese colonization and the multiple waves of Portuguese immigrants settling in Brazil. Are Brazilians starting to emigrate in large numbers to First World countries where large numbers of Portuguese are already established? Looking at the statistics, after the United States France is home to the second-largest Portuguese immigrant community in the world, almost a million people of Portuguese background, and Canada falling half that number. I wonder: What will census reports on national origin in these three countries look like in a generation's time?

And who after the Brazilians? Angola, perhaps. This increasingly Lusophone country, impoverished and generally playing Ireland to Portugal's Britain with its long dysfunctional settlement colonialism, is being increasingly drawn into the circuits of the wider Lusophone world by out of control urbanization and the spread of Lusophone popular culture. It can't be that long before Angolans will start to follow in the path of other Lusophone migrants.

I've already seen some Angolan flags waving from restaurants and social clubs on Dundas Street.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Clashes of Civilizations

Last week imomus wrote that the controversy over the Danish cartoons made him believe that Samuel Huntington was right about the impending clashes of civilizations. Who am I to disagree? All that I can say is that there are plenty of situations in which metrics apart from his primordial religious definitions define allegiances--Romanians' affinity for the Latin world, say, or Argentines' origins in western and southern Europe, or the strength of Ukrainian nationalism outside Catholic circles, or the interest of Francophone Maghrebins in la francophonie--and say that these differences only matter when people want them to matter in certain specific ways and in certain circumstances. Otherwise, they need not matter at all.