Recent readings XI

黃毓棟：〈統而不正－－對魏禧〈正統論〉的一種新詮釋〉，《漢學研究》，第27卷第1期（2009年3月），頁235-261。

劉緯道：〈《婦女雜誌》中的戀愛觀〉，《中國歷史學會史學集刊》，第41期（2009年10月），頁201-242。

陳金城：〈史臣與兒臣角色的擺盪－－論蕭子顯《南齊書》的修撰立場〉，《中國歷史學會史學集刊》，第41期（2009年10月），頁365-404。

史曜菖：〈操作反清：以《民報》中「呂留良案」論述為例〉，《中國歷史學會史學集刊》，第41期（2009年10月），頁243-280。

Michèle Martin and Christopher Bodnar, "The Illustrated Press under Siege: Technological Imagination in the Paris Siege, 1870-1871," Urban History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2009), pp. 67-85.

"An analysis of the content of four illustrated periodicals - The Illustrated London NewsandThe Graphic in London and L'Illustration and Le Monde Illustré in Paris" (p. 67, abstract)

A colleague of mine is sitting in a postgraduate course on Cultural Studies and it reminded me of a similar course back in England a few years ago. Just yesterday, I was browsing my Manchester's MA supervisor Patrick Joyce's blog and his article in the journal Cultural Studies and other latest papers. Heather Brook's "Choosing Using: Drug Policy, Consumer Culture and 'Junkie Manquées" (Cultural Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, July 2009, . 95-109) is relevant to HK's recent drug policy and debate. Drug-using is a matter of choice and consumption. Choice is pivotal in consumer capitalism where, paradoxically, not-choosing is not an option. Drug policy manifests the governmentality of consumption which demands drug-users to proper and normal consumption in a way that "drug wars police and produce docile consumers." (p. 99, original emphasis)

Brook quotes Desmond Manderson's work ("Possessed: Drug Policy, Witchcraft and Belief,"Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2005, pp. 36-63), who identifies parallels between witch-hunting and drug policy, contending that "the former seeking to preserve some sense of supernatural agency or will in a world becoming gradually disenchanted by the force of human rationality, the latter seeking to preserve some sense of human agency or will in a world becoming gradually disenchanted with the force of human rationality. (p. 50, original emphasis)

In policy level, drug-users have been represented as "habit-bound, impoverished and unable to choose" and been rejected as smart consumers choosing a meaningful rationale. Brook's title answers this myth, choosing using. "The anxiety mobilizing contemporary drug panics is," Brook argues, "perhaps, connected to capitalist fears that the proliferation of product differentiation will not remain meaningful."