Liberation

France in The London Review ofBooks come at this issue in wonderful ways, catching the (for me) near impossibility of finding an adequate theoretical basis for my belief, for example, that it is perfectly all right, indeed neces­ sary in the interests of inclusiveness, oftoleration (there is condescension in that word, but I still take comfort in E.M. Forster’ s observation that while it may not be much, it may keep a splintered world functioning) to allow the headscarf (kirpan, yarmulka, cross, turban; choose your own religious object) in the secular space of the state educational institution. Where/who is the individual in this conflict? In the young girl who by wearing the scarfis indivisible from her religious group but divided from the secular institution? Anderson doesn’t write specifically of this conflict, rather of the delusion in attempting the sophistical enterprise of constructing an elegiac national narrative “in which the divisions and discords of French society would melt away in the fond rituals of postmodern remembrance’’ (10). But they won’t melt away; “If singular agents will not associate freely to shape or alter their condition, what is the pneuma that can unexpectedly transform them, from one day to the next, into a collective force capable of shaking society to its roots?” (15). “Individuals are, essentiallypowerless,”Hal Niedziecki asserts in the recent HelloI’ m Special: HowIndividualityBecame theNew Conformity. “Only com­ munities can truly effect change in society.” But that begs the question that Anderson asks. Of course, one can take some comfort from the man who changed his name to They, reminding us that “the sum of all of us is greater than the individual.”Yet in a world where non-conformity is a mass marketed commodity, where everyone wearing the same Gap Jeans is expressing her individuality, the word may have returned ironically to its point of origin as undifferentiated and indivisible. One can only hope not. Or then again ... Judith Scherer Herz Concordia University Liberation It would be difficult to think of a more “key” word in late twentieth-cen­ tury culture than Liberation. In a discussion of any group’ s freedom to do something the “L” word was usually lurking behind. Yet when Keywords was published in 1976, the word was not there. It is difficult to see what other entry in Williams might have served its purpose but the possibilities seem to be Imperialism or Revolution. The former is a brief look at English Retro Keywords | 37 Terry Goldie is author of Fear and Temptation: the Image ofthe Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (McGillQueen ’s, 1989) and Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction (Broadview 2003). He is editor of In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context (Arsenal Pulp 2001) and co-editor, with Daniel David Moses, ofAw Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford 2005) At present he is writing a book tentatively titled Lifewright: A Lheoretical Sexual Autobiography. colonialism. In contrast, Revolution is four and a half closely argued pages, from the fourteenth century to the present. Williams first demonstrates the circular meaning of early uses of revolution and thus how the political use is based on Fortune’s wheel. While Imperialism suggests the hegemonic process that necessitates liberation, Revolution conceptualizes how it might be brought about. In the 1983 edition, liberation is first specifically English, linked to church disestablishment, but by the bottom of the page Williams men­ tions its use by “the women’ s movement” in the 1960s “by association with the political movements from 1940” (182). Williams’ s attention to history is of particular interest here: The common earlier word had been emancipation, in English from C17, at first following the sense from emancipo, L, which in Roman law meant to release (usually a child but sometimes a wife) from the patria potestas, the legal powers of the pater familias; the person thus emancipated could act sui juris—in his/her own right. (182) Williams suggests liberation became the choice because of assumptions of “self-determination.” In other words, it was no longer a release from a natural law that normally should be obeyed but rather an opportunity to be...