Search

The introduction traces the long history of fashion's movement across cultural, national, and political borders. After brief case studies of early twentieth-century French and Spanish styles imagining fashion as an engine of transnational amity, the introduction highlights how fashion navigates some of the most troubled borders of recent years, including the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and racial violence. Fashion forces viewers and consumers to choose sides, whether through national identification or through recognition of the long history of black and brown bodies producing fashionable objects. To advance the global history of fashion, the introduction briefly discusses the work of designers Rawan Maki (Bahrain), Laurence Leenaert (Belgium), and Kim Jones (Great Britain), examining how each upends gender, race, class, or fashion binaries, and analyzes how LVMH and Uniqlo, brands at opposite ends of the contemporary style spectrum, underline the very different ways in which fashion traverses the globe in the twenty-first century. The introduction concludes with the hope that this issue will raise questions about fashion's articulation of the relation among the local, the national, and the global, as well as about the human experience of interacting with the fashion industry in one national context while living in a globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses the need to promote French and Francophone studies, particularly the academe, research and teaching programs to better help students. Also cited are the key contributions of the late Hayden White in said studies including his focus in teaching his students on the relationship between literary discourse, memory, and history.

In the article, the author discusses the importance of French studies in modern society and why stakeholders should reinvest in shared inheritance of global French. Other topics include canonicity as a medievalist working in Old French and Old Occitan, the mediality of medieval studies, and her experiences in learning ancient and European languages like French, German, and Latin.

This intervention takes up the recent controversy over "presentism" in the historical discipline. It argues that the focus on "presentism" conceals and thus ignores a larger problem. The discipline of history has become misaligned with the task of historical representation in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages the dismissal of presentism and identity politics by the former president of the American Historical Association. In doing so, the essay argues that his essay shares a rhetorical style with other intellectuals and politicians that can aptly be called the spectacle of transgression. The essay argues that this spectacle works to obscure the material conditions of higher education in general and of history in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fourteenth-century contemplative manual The Cloud of Unknowing and the shorter texts attributed to its author explore an extreme form of apophatic spiritual encounter. In order to guide his disciples in this kind of practice, the anonymous Cloud-author adopts a classical theory for pedagogy and adapts it to suit his specifically contemplative ends. He transforms the traditional rhetorical schoolroom triad of natura, doctrina, and usus into a new Middle English version, tailored for teaching contemplation: "disposicoun, techying, and profe." This article examines the technical, theoretical, and theological implications of the three terms in the Cloud-author's reconceptualized triad. It argues that the nuances and subtleties of each term reveal the author to be a self-conscious and self-theorizing pedagogue who uses the triad to offer new descriptions of the contemplative's pursuit of the divine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the nature and significance of geographical diagrams in medieval commentaries on classical Roman poems. It situates these diagrams within larger conversations about cartographic traditions and the pedagogical contexts for which these diagrams were originally designed. Modern scholars have only begun to address these geographical diagrams in histories of cartography, but not in textual studies. In surveying a range of ninth- to fifteenth-century manuscripts especially of Lucan's poetry, the article uncovers the sources of geographical diagrams that recur in cartography, encyclopedias, and other pedagogical tools, illustrating how medieval academics developed paratexts to shape an extensive program of geographical explication. Geographical diagrams and other textual annotations accompanying classical poems established a distinct pedagogical strand of cartography that served medieval students' training in Latin composition and understanding of the ancient world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to speculate on the reception of de Anton de Kom's Wij slaven van Suriname (1934) within a very different context of political debates on race; decolonization; the politics of solidarity; and internationalist and anticapitalist struggles—all themes that De Kom's narrative tackles in unique ways—and on the question of time. The author attempts to displace De Kom's book away from its entanglement of political and intellectual connections and toward the diverse temporalities of Suriname's decolonial struggles, seeking to explore what could be called the "collateral effects" produced by the 1934 publication of Wij slaven by a Caribbean publisher and institution. The author then compares the 1981 Spanish translation of De Kom's work, Nosotros, esclavos de Surinam, with a different set of debates and texts addressed to diverse audiences and subjects entangled in distinct networks of political engagements and projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Fellowships, Awards, and Prizes Sponsored by the Society for French Historical Studies in 2022. Topics discussed include Society for French Historical Studies awards the David H. Pinkney Prize for the most distinguished book in French history; Gilbert Chinard Book Prize is awarded by the Society for French Historical Studies and Marjorie M. and Lancelot L. Farrar Memorial Awards dissertation projects on any period of French history.

The article discusses the history of political aspects of Sufism in relation to the poet Jalal al-din Rumi. Topics include the notion of spiritual authority held by Sufi mystics, the notion of sincerity in relation to the study of Sufi mysticism, and the importance of sociopolitical context in the historiography of Sufi mysticism.

The article discusses political aspects of Muslim mysticism in the early modern period Ottoman Empire. Topics include the significance of Sufi dream interpretation, the interventions of Sufi shaykhs in Ottoman dynasty politics, and the role of Muslim reform movements in limiting Sufi political involvement.

The article discusses Jewish mysticism in relation to politics, focusing on the history of Kabbalah mysticism. Topics include the relation of Kabbalah to Christian polemical arguments, reactions of Jewish mysticism to the development of the state of Israel, and the role of knowledge and power in the Kabbalah tradition.

This essay brings a fresh approach to the early kabbalistic work, the Sefer Bahir (the Book of Clarity, tenth to twelfth century, Hebrew). It does a close reading of its imagery, focusing on water, to illuminate its contested provenance and to challenge prevailing conceptions of its function. Most scholars agree that the work was composed in two layers (tenth and twelfth centuries), which together articulate the sefirotic cosmos at the heart of kabbalah. Close study reveals significant differences in the two layers, as the first is set in a dry and rocky landscape with water supplied by springs and cisterns, and the second in a lush and stormy place with a sophisticated plumbing system. Composed in different milieus, they articulate different cosmologies to cultivate different experiences: the first confounds taxonomic categories to cultivate an affect of mystical unity, while the second creates categories for an orderly cosmological system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses intellectual mysticism in the works of religious leader Yça Gedelli and an anonymous author of a Spanish language Hebrew aljamiado poem about the biblical Akedah (sacrifice of Isaac). Topics include the relation of Yça to theologian Juan de Segovia, Yça's role in a translation of the Qur'an, and the notion of hidden knowledge in relation to mysticism.

It has long been known that Muslim scholars used rabbinic literature in what is called Isra'iliyyat in the Islamic tradition. They used these sources as legitimate details of the Qur'anic stories. Less well known is how later Islamic scholars incorporated these sources into their own retellings of the stories that all three texts--the Qur'an, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament--share. This article examines the hagiography by Abdülvasi Çelebi (d. 1415), Halilname, which tells the story of Abraham and draws on rabbinic literature. Several factors led to the use of Jewish sources in Halilname. First, the Ottoman state did not have a canonized orthodox Islamic system until Süleyman I (r. 1520-66), and this lack of canonization gave Islamic mystics greater liberty to say what they wanted. Second, a zeitgeist of religious syncretism drew inspiration from the mysticism that dominated Anatolia. Finally, the most important patriarch for Jews, Christians, and Muslims--Abraham--proved the ideal subject in an empire that included members of all three monotheistic religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Zohar, the most important work of the classical Kabbalah, in prayer the soul of the mystic ascends through seven celestial halls or palaces as part of its quest to unify the male and female aspects of divinity, and thereby stimulates Ein Sof, the infinite aspect of divinity to pour down its bounty. As the soul ascends through the halls--diverse qualities of being, imagined, and experienced as an array of lights--it travels higher and deeper, finally arriving at the imageless seventh hall, Shekhinah, now primed to receive the flow of higher realms. This article argues that the ascent is accomplished through pressing on the eyeball to generate phosphenes and associated entoptic phenomena. The stimulation of the eye's inner light has been associated with shamanic practices and mystical experience as well as commented on by such thinkers as Plotinus, Albert the Great, and Isaac Newton. This study thus contributes to the growing appreciation of "ecstatic" states in the theosophical Kabbalah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thinking with the Christian mystery of kenosis (the self-emptying of God) in relation to divine motions of charity and love, this article sets out to recover a kenoticmystical element in Greco-Judeo-Islamic Neoplatonisms. After rehearsing the postmetaphysical parameters of the term mystical (and ultimately of the term kenotic-mystical), and after identifying a "deep kenosis" (or "kenosis without kenosis") in the postmetaphysical kenotics of Vattimo andMarion, the article identifies a ground of "kenosis-charity-love" in the Greco-Islamic Theology of Aristotle, a text whose unique lineage gives insights into Islamic, Greek, and Jewish Neoplatonic encounters with an irruptive and charitable Goodnesswithout-Being in the shadow of whose outpouring Being pales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines select teachings from Kedumah, a contemporary mystical path in the lineage of the Primordial Torah. Kedumah, a Hebrew word that means "ancient" or "primordial," points to the nonconceptual ground that eternally abides at the heart of all our experiences, prior to all the labeling and processing of our conceptual mind. The contemporary mystical path of Kedumah is interested in accessing and including this primordial nature as an integral part of our everyday experience. Kedumah thus calls for a more integrative appreciation of all reality--including the ordinary and mundane as equally sacred expressions of the whole. In this sense, Kedumah posits a mysticism that entails the normalization of the spiritual and the equalization of the sacred and profane. In this essay ancient Kabbalistic principles and biblical texts are examined to demonstrate this radical vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the complicated relationship between mysticism, repetition, and critique, saying and unsaying. It counters the figuration of mysticism as critical insofar as it is understood to solely consist in negation of the forms, language, and structures of religious practice and community. Such a view, it argues, hierarchizes the apophatic (negation) and cataphatic (affirmation), sequestering them from each other, rendering the "mystical" disembodied and ahistorical, unbound by negation from the theological and ritual traditions from which it arises. In the late ancient and medieval periods, it shows, those seeking God undertake ritualized repetition of prayers, reading, and bodily mortification. In texts teaching apophasis, students learn within the context of a personal relationship to the teacher, as students seek to repeat the practices, stances, aspirations, and techniques of the teacher who is exemplar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the early telecommuting discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, understanding it as a pedagogical context for white plasticity, an ecological project in which racial privilege is protected through the transformation of homes and inhabitants. Rationalized initially as a crisis of adjustment, pedagogies of telecommuting were disseminated largely to upper-middle-class white professionals to build a "telecommuting personality," a subjectivity that was also meant to buffer them from the growing precarious nature of jobs. Not content to focus simply on work, however, telecommuting gurus took occasion to urge the enhancement of relationships between partners, families, and communities. The home office was core to this imaginary. Convertible, modular, ergonomic home offices that can be changed to suit the needs of the home's many inhabitants were said to yield more integrated and rounded personalities that would radiate outward, creating emotionally mature children and stronger community bonds. Emerging at a moment when "telecommuting" condensed the political stakes of digital labor, this strand of discourse reveals how working from home was appropriated to ensure the protection of white plasticity—the racialized capability of adaptation that was to be passed as inheritance from parents to progeny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the revolution of ideas surrounding the body in 1950s Japan from the perspective of two women dancers, Noh dancer Tsumura Kimiko (1902–74) and butoh dancer Motofuji Akiko (1928–2003). By contrasting one mid-twentieth-century view—that the postwar era offered a chance to "liberate" individual bodies—with the backdrop of continued control over bodies exercised by large institutions, I first show that this perceived rupture was not as stark as it initially appears. Moreover, I show how Tsumura and Motofuji rejected popular ideas about the body's purpose to forge their own. This allowed them to critique and confront the issues that popular views presented, particularly for disabled or gendered bodies. These issues involved increasing urbanization and the treatment of bodies based upon their desirability. This article argues that Tsumura's and Motofuji's conceptions of "body" challenged gender norms and presented new ideas about how to live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Kimmage reviews a textbook recently published by Anthony Grafton and David Bell, The West: A New History, identifying this book as a splendidly researched and written contribution both to the history of Europe and to ongoing debates about the scope, meaning, and historiographical salience of the West. This review isolates seven features of Western history from The West's narrative and analysis: a style of learning pioneered in ancient Greece; the importance of cities; an alternating series of political forms, including monarchy, democracy, republic, and empire; a tendency toward violence; an emphasis on constitutions; an attraction to trade, commerce, and technological innovation; and a long attachment to the institution of slavery. This review concludes by exploring the relationship between the "core" and the "periphery" of the West, which is to say the place of Turkey, Russia, and the United States, within the narrative that Grafton and Bell so skillfully develop in The West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kamau Brathwaite left us just before COVID-19 changed our world. This memoriam essay explores the questions his work poses in his role as mentor/teacher/Griot to other writers, toward whom he was always very generous and encouraging. He asks us to embrace uncertainty, making it an aesthetic value from which transformative understanding may come. We learn to deeply explore the relation of languages of the voice, the musical instrument, and visual image; to be eclectic with regard to influences; to have the courage to face loss and trauma; and to be honest about history. Kamau made revision into an art form, from which we can learn about ways to embrace change, not only in creative work but in social and political thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the impact of the 1964 earthquake and tsunami on the Alutiiq Eskimos of Kodiak, Alaska. He mentions the two crises that faced the Alutiiq, the flood and tsunami and the Russian massacre of native people in 1784, the government assistance provided after the 1964 disaster, and the impact this assistance had on the culture of the Alutiiq.

The article examines medieval charters and looks at how such documents conveyed meaning through their physical features such as marks of human contact, display, and rituals. It discusses how deed' individual characteristics made the objects of desire for collectors and archivists. Examples from the collection of the Historical and Special Collections of the Harvard Law School Library are cited.

An essay is presented which examines the crown of light from the nave in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Bayeux, Normandy to discuss the relationship among poetics, writing, and materiality in medieval epigraphy. It looks at the inscription on the object, discussing the religious and symbolic aspects.

The article discusses economic aspects of the history of ascetic mysticism in the Mediterranean religion. Topics include economic aspects of Franciscan mysticism, the economic views of the mystical order Shadhiliyya Order, and the relation of interfaith relations among Christians, Muslims, and Jews to Mediterranean trade relations.

The article discusses the notions of Mediterranean religion and Abrahamic traditions in relation to each other. Topics include the historical periodization of Mediterranean religion in relation to the history of Islam, the inclusive anthropological and sociological perspective involved in the notion of Mediterranean religion, and the importance of lived experience in the study of religion.

It is difficult to expound in any pithy fashion on the imprint that James C. Scott's work has had on writing history in the orbit of Asia. Where to start? From The Moral Economy of the Peasant all the way to Against the Grain, Scott's work has found receptive and fertile ground among his peers in Asian studies, who have often proudly pointed out to their non-Asianist colleagues that Scott is "one of their own." This has certainly been true "internally" as well, in the ways that Southeast Asianists have spoken to their fellow professionals in the larger, allied subdisciplines of South and East Asian studies. It does not matter that Scott's books have touched on a wide variety of subjects: the central concerns with power, agency, space, and the essence of a shared humanity have all resonated with his professional interlocutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Archive Angst" is a meditation on one historian's attempt to create her own archive and the questions and challenges it poses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's research on writer Claude McKay, which he published in the book "Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance". Particular focus is given to McKay's homosexuality and his political radicalism. Topics include McKay's book "Romance in Marseille," Black internationalism, and the author's encounters with scholars performing similar research.

This paper examines the temporal politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that despite the emphasis on digital real-time coverage and epidemiological forecasting, the pandemic has been understood as a historical event, even as it has been unfolding. The paper considers the implications of this ambiguous temporality, suggesting that COVID-19 has made visible a new heterotemporality, wherein real time, history, and the future intermesh. The paper concludes by focusing on Hong Kong, a former British colony and Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China since 1997, showing how the pandemic has become an uncanny rendering of the city's uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As anyone who has written a book can tell you, when you finally finish wrestling with it and it is confined between covers, or tucked away in e-book form, it goes on to have an afterlife, sometimes quite a complicated one, which the author may glimpse only in intermittent and fragmentary form. An original and provocative book such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble will travel to places its author never anticipated and become embroiled in conversations the author may not overhear. A book's influence on another field far from its point of origin is not best assessed by a citation index—though Gender Trouble's numbers are massive. To take the measure of the work that Gender Trouble has done for scholars working in Asian studies (itself a constructed and constantly morphing category, like gender), we should ask how the book traveled. Which pieces were taken up by scholars of Asia, and what conversations and challenges did the book enable, not as a blueprint but as an incubator of locally grounded thinking? How has it been adapted, pruned down to one or two insights, or expanded into new domains? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines that the fantasy of the End also appears outside, and prior to capitalist world order, but it could be instructive to look at the way it is structured in this world order, as well as to look at the shifts that occurred in structuring. Topics include reports that the impossibility to end capitalism, or the impossibility for capitalism come to an end and if capitalist democracy, constitutes the end of History, this end can last forever.

The author expresses his opinion on the quality of twenty first century literary criticism. Topics include updated schools of critical thought, which includes new formalism, surface reading, and object-oriented ontologies (OOOs), the institutional and interpersonal values of Theory, and the relationship between history and criticism.

Through a close reading of Freud's last major work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), this article considers the socio-political and literary stakes of a central element of Freud's oeuvre, which reaches its fullest elaboration in the Moses text: belatedness. Belatedness, or deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), which structures the movement of repression and return in the individual psychology of Freud's earlier work, is aggravated and intensified in this late modernist text. Now, it is an entire people (the Jews) and (Judeo-Christian) civilization founded upon the temporal predicament of trauma, latency, and the return of the repressed. What is most innovative about Moses--its fragmentary style, its rewriting of biblical origins, its daring conjectures and methods of recording history--gestures back, after all, to the singular problem that both Freudian psychoanalysis and modernism are destined to repeat: the constitutive belatedness of all experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has produced two different narratives in India. One, here described as "historical," looks back to the pandemics of the colonial past—bubonic plague from 1896, influenza in 1918–19—as a source of comparisons, lessons, and dire warnings for the present. This narrative envisages the reenactment of past scenes, including flight from the cities, victimization of the poor, and the questioning of state authority. The other narrative, here called "insurgent," questions the value of historical analogies, doubts that history ever substantially repeats itself, and stresses the specificity of postcolonial Indian politics and health. While recognizing the validity of both narratives, the author urges caution in employing colonial history to critique contemporary events and, while recognizing the 1890s plague as a watershed moment, questions whether even the most devastating pandemics (such as 1918's influenza) necessarily result in profound social, political, and health care changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the fate of people who had escaped slavery in colonial Cartagena de Indias as well as that of their descendants. In the 1690s, colonial military troops captured many individuals of African descent who had long lived as free in the hinterlands and forcibly transported them to Cartagena city. In the aftermath of these military campaigns, some putative owners filed lawsuits claiming that their ancestors had never relinquished ownership claims to the ancestors of freeborn residents of the forests. Since many of the captives had lived in the hinterlands all their lives, strategies such as performing acts of possession over people of African descent were not available to the claimants. This essay shows how some claimants were nonetheless able to obtain rulings that granted them rights of ownership over free Afro-descended people who had been seized and exiled from their home communities in Cartagena province’s hinterlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the French antiracist movement and its main organizations dealt with Zionism and the Middle East conflict from the liberation of France until the early 1970s. Their generally positive view of Israel and their concern for Arab interests at the end of the 1940s demonstrate these republican organizations' desire to recognize ethnic identities. During the 1950s an ideological split between left-wing antiracism and Zionism began to develop, and by the end of the 1960s a number of new antiracist associations questioned the very foundation of the Jewish state. Overall, the study argues that antiracist organizations' stances on and statements about Zionism and the Middle East conflict influenced Jewish-Arab relations during the postwar period and played an important role for both Jews and Arabs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on conversation on the Occasion of the Publication of Revolution Today. Topics include examines that Jonathan Flatley admire the clarity and brevity with which pose the problems of the current moment and present an emergent "common sense" about where the left project is now; and reports that certain scenario of history-as-progress brought about by means of modernization through industrialization no longer appears possible.

The author discusses the passage "The Ancient Monk" from the history book "Past and Present" by 19th century philosopher Thomas Carlyle, focusing on the utopian aspects of the work in which he chronicles the history of St. Edmundsbury Monastery in England in the 12th century. Carlyle's source material from Jocelin of Brakelond's "Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds," his criticism of the abbey, and the leadership of Abbot Samson in the work are also discussed.

An essay is presented on civil rights photography in the U.S., covering issues such as the subliminal psychological effects of photography, scholar Eve Sedgwick's theories of photographic aesthetics, and faces in photography. Documentary photographs of protests, racial aspects of art, and the gaze theories of philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty are discussed, as well as psychoanalytic philosophy, identity in photography, and gender roles in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

An essay is presented of photographs commissioned by African American activist Booker T. Washington for his book "Working With the Hands" by photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston, and the documentary photographs by A. P. Bedou of Washington's 1915 speaking tour. Washington's advocacy for industrial education, his school the Tuskegee Institute, and Johnston's photography of African American students are discussed, as well as portrait photography and realism in photography.

A literary criticism is presented which discusses the 1935 book "The Life of Jesus" by the Chinese author and religious scholar Zhao Zichen. Particular focus is given to the book's application of Chinese philosophy and literary traditions to the story of Jesus' life and the political significance of the work for mid-century China.

The article focuses on power struggle between political view of philosopher Gramsci. Topics include Gramsci's analysis of the war of position is based, he asserts, on his reading in early nineteenth-century European politics and its historiography; his opinion on the war of position; and impasse is associated especially with difficulties within parliamentary politics. It also mentions that subjective conditions can never be missing when the objective conditions exist.

The article discuses about interpretation of dream in eighteenth-century and work of poet Mary Robinson. Topics include consuming eighty drops of laudanum to create a poem, constructing poem through regularly modified by the regular irregularity and facilitates such uncertainty patterning through poetic indirection, after the very moment when she makes the most direct appeal of the poem at the midpoint of the poem. It also mentions historical way in which poems were written during war.

This article explores a recent stage of the national project in Taiwan as reflected in comic books. It compares historical comics and graphic memoirs as lieux de mémoire (according to Pierre Nora) and as stories that define Taiwan, situated between the historical apparatus and cultural memory (in Marita Sturken's terms). It argues that the memoirs' higher potential appeal is based on their relevance to contemporary concerns, on building links between the wu nianji 五年級 (fifth-grader) generation and present-day youth, and on depicting history as recoverable through elements of everyday life. The article also highlights borrowings from existing discourses of national history in the analyzed memoirs and their new contributions thereto: a focus on the postwar period; a strong generational consciousness; an idea of historical continuity as embodied in present everyday life; a nonantagonistic approach to national history that transcends ethnic and political divides and positions Taiwan in the midst of global flows; and a nonelite view of Taiwan's most recent history grounded in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]