University of Warwick Press: Journals
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Does Taxing Mobile Money Harm the Poor: Evidence From the 10 Per Cent Excise Fee Introduction in Kenya
No full textMobile money has been a key innovation in Africa that has increased the financial resilience of vulnerable households by providing an easy way to send and receive remittances. While recent literature has focused on the link between mobile money and its function as a social protection mechanism for the vulnerable population, less is known about the extent to which the costs of using the service affect the transaction behaviour of these people. By exploiting anatural experiment in the form of an excise fee that was imposed on mobile-money transactions in Kenya, this paper estimates the differential effect of a price hike in mobile-money transaction fees on transaction behaviour of households with a daily income below 1.25 USD and households above this threshold. The study finds that households with an income below 1.25 USD reduced their monthly mobile-money transactions volume by 25 per cent compared to households above this threshold. Additionally, the paper finds suggestive evidence that the tax also led to a relative reduction in mobile-money remittances received by households below an income of 1.25 USD. The loss in received remittances was not substituted by an increase in remittances sent by cash or in-kind
The Once and Future Story: Arthurian Mythology as an Emblem for Western Ideals
No full textThis article analyses three key texts in Arthurian literature to illustrate the changes the myth has undergone from its popularisation in the twelfth century to its rediscovery in the nineteenth century. It compares Geoffrey of Monmouth’s unfounded insistence on historical accuracy with Chrétien de Troyes’ focus on interiority and male–female dynamics before making a leap in time to explore Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and its anxieties concerning gendered power dynamics and material culture. The paper draws on these comparisons to demonstrate the malleable nature of the Arthurian myth, as well as its status as both a reflection of Western values and a focus point for the authors’ priorities within their own environments and cultures. This is achieved through a focus on social commentary and the creation of a plethora of characters and symbols that will become rooted in the European psyche
From Baroque Spain to 1600s Amsterdam: Emergent Judaism in the Literary Works of Ex-New Christian Miguel de Barrios
No full textWriting from the Hispano-Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam, Miguel de Barrios (1635–1701) used literary forms of Catholic Spain to resist the erasure of Jewish identity in Iberian lands by Inquisition tribunals that prosecuted non-Catholic practices as heretical. Our analysis of sonnets and allegorical plays by Barrios shows how, through them, this converso, or New Christian, of Jewish lineage openly exalts Judaism as a divinely chosen faith. We also argue that, by writing diasporic texts firmly adherent to Baroque Spanish literary trends, Barrios broadens the reach of this literature to include the hybrid identity of former conversos living as Jews. We demonstrate how the poet expresses this identity by examining elements that influenced its expression, including his biography and the importance of Amsterdam as a centre of Sephardic, or Iberian Jewish, settlement, and how he reworks canonical genres of Spanish literature to privilege Judaism and Hispano-Portuguese conversos returned to Judaism
Eve and Other Poems
No full textTo further explore the patriarchal adaptations made to female biblical characters, I have experimented in creating poetry from the female perspective of Eve in the creation story (Genesis). Like Mary Magdalene, Eve has been aligned with original sin and it is this story that was frequently used to justify the treatment of women by the church. Instead of focusing specifically on sin, I wanted to create a poem that explored what it may have been like to exist before the concept of ‘the past’ and ‘time’, as well as suggest what it may have been like for Eve to experience the world after she had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. If our understanding of good and bad is a result of their contrast, then surely, without ever having experienced evil before she bit the apple, how could Eve (and Adam) ever have truly appreciated or understood ‘paradise’ or the parameters of the Garden of Eden? There are more interesting philosophical discussions to be had about the creation story aside from simply that women are the cause of original sin. ‘Mother Nature’ encompasses both the labours of women and the present-day ecological issues that connect with the original creation story. Likewise, on the theme of feminist mythological retellings, the tale Pygmalion inspired the poem ‘not my bed’, which is a modern-day take on the blurred lines of consent, focusing solely on the female experience, in the wake of the #MeToo Movement and the Warwick Rape Chat Scandal
A Picture of Health: Art, Medicine & the Body – Needs More Room to Breathe
No full textReview of A Picture of Health: Art, Medicine & the Body at the Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa, England
Isabel Wilkerson (2020), Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
No full textBook review of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (2020).
 
«Sola nel letto di me stessa»: Osservazioni sulla poetica di Biancamaria Frabotta ne "La materia prima"
No full textL\u27articolo è approfondisce la poetica di Biancamaria Frabotta nella sua penultima raccolta poetica, La materia prima. Sebbene il panorama degli studi abbia prodotto più di un approfondimento sull’opera della poetessa, nessuno è stato ad oggi dedicato alla raccolta. Con lo scopo di produrre uno studio inedito sul lavoro poetico di Frabotta, lo scopo dell’articolo sarà operare un’analisi del corpus testuale con una metodologia critico-filosofica. Tale analisi sarà segmentata in tre paragrafi e approfondirà le questioni sollevate dalla centralità ontologica ed estetica della figura dell’animale, dalla concezione metafisica della poetessa e dalla componente teoretica compositiva. Il risultato dello studio fornirà una nuova lettura epistemologica della raccolta, utile per una più profonda comprensione, in senso lato, del lavoro di Frabotta. La letteratura critica sull’autrice sarà così arricchita da un contributo nuovo, sia nel senso della metodologia che del focus di ricerca.
English title: «Alone in the bed with myself». Observation of the last poetic conception of Biancamaria Frabotta
This essay focuses on the poetic conception of Biancamaria Frabotta in the collection La materia prima. The literature dedicated to Frabotta’s poetry is to date very wide. However, no studies on the collection have been produced to date. In order to offer an unprecedented insight into Frabotta’s poetic work, the purpose of this study is to perform a study of the textual corpus, approached through a philosophical critical methodology of analysis. Such analysis will be divided into three paragraphs and will focus on the issues raised by the ontological and aesthetical centrality of the figure of the animal, the metaphysical conception of the poet and the theoretical compositional component. The study will provide a new epistemological reading of the second-last poetry collection of Frabotta, which will also allow for a deeper understanding of her work. A new contribution will thus enrich the critical literature on the author both in the sense of the methodology and of the research focus
Textile Poetics of Entanglements: The Works of Antonella Anedda and Maria Lai
No full textBy looking at the works of the poet Antonella Anedda (b. Rome, 1955) and the artist Maria Lai (Ulassi, 1919–Cardedu, 2013), this study investigates the relationship between poetic texts and textiles, contending that the ‘intra-action’ – to use the feminist physicist Karen Barad’s term – between the language of poetry and that of textile can be understood through a paradigm of entanglements that expands the semantic capacity of both words and textiles. One main objective of this study is to re-think the genre of lyric poetry and some of its core generic markers, in particular apostrophe, rhythm, and repetition, in light of a focus on materiality and tactility; this shall problematise ideas of linearity and completeness in favour of notions of movement, instability, and tactility. This will enable us to propose new parameters that allow for conceptualisation of textile poems and the textile poetics of entanglement that they articulate
The ayllu and territoriality in the Andes
No full textThe ayllu is a political, geographical and ethnic unit that encompasses indigenous communities occupying different ecological levels (Condarco Morales, 1970; Murra, 1975). It was the most basic indigenous territorial organization before the spread of haciendas in the Andean region and it is practiced today in zones historically unaffected by haciendas, or by communities that seek to rebuild their indigenous socio-political organization. The text below focuses on how the Aymara concept of suma qamaña, normally translated as “living well” or vivir bien in Spanish, relates to a native perspective of development stemming from the ayllu organization itself. The book was published in 2001, during a time when “communitarian lands of origin” (TCOs, in their Spanish acronym) were starting to be recognized and institutionalized, a process that began in the mid-1990s. Yampara’s discussion of suma qamaña was highly influential amongst academics and helped to shape the policies adopted by the current administration under Evo Morales. Despite the important influence of this book in particular, and Yampara’s work in general, in Bolivian national politics, his work has remained largely absent in English-speaking academia. We are very happy to share this first translation with you and we welcome comments and inquiries
Seed Sovereignty Struggles in an Emberá-Chamí Community in Colombia
Get PDFLaura Gutierrez’ article takes us to Riosucio, in the North West of Colombia, where the Embera-Chami indigenous people of the region have organised to promote and protect their agricultural sovereignty. Laura examines the intricacies of the seed conflicts that take place in this country, where the government and industrial agriculture associations have promoted the use of certified seeds, while Embera-Chami communities have challenged this system through the development of their own networks of seed saving, multiplication, and reproduction. These conflicts constitute struggles over seed sovereignty, that is, over the way seeds are produced, owned, circulated, saved, and endowed with meanings and spirituality. However, these struggles reveal a larger battle over autonomy and place-based ways of inhabiting and sustaining territory. These conflicts are the manifestation of the coloniality of power that continues to promote Euro-American models and knowledges as superior, and Latin American agricultural and botanical knowledges as inferior. The seed, as a living organism that interacts with humans, and as a recipient of cultural, symbolic, and economic values, is at the core of the struggle between colonialism and local resistance, and thus serves as a lens through which these conflicts can be analysed