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The ʾAgur—a relatively obscure and occasionally derided Jewish legal compendium of the late fifteenth century—represents the first halakhic work truly of the printed age, in that it was not simply a printed manuscript, a book that utilized the production value of the printing press without changes to its substance or presentation, but rather an original text, written by its author during his lifetime, to be precisely suited for the opportunities presented by print. Jacob Landau, the author, was wholly aware of the cultural ramifications of print and adapted his work to these new circumstances and possibilities. He created a text that could be used by both scholars and nonscholars and would appeal to a variety of geographically specific traditions. It was also the first Hebrew book to contain haskamot, which later were commonly used and even required in some Jewish communities. As the first halakhic book printed during its author's lifetime, justification was necessary for its very existence.

This article examines various attempts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that sought to repackage and reorganize kabbalistic knowledge through the compilation of lexicons to one of the most sacred texts in the Jewish mystical canon, the Zohar. By considering the Zoharic lexicon ʾImrei binah, written by Yissakhar Baer ben Petaḥyah Moshe, printed in Prague in 1610, in diachronic and synchronic contexts, the article exposes competing strategies adopted by Jewish mystics to transmit the linguistic and theosophical layers of the Zohar. I will place and discuss lexicons to the Zohar within broader questions of cultural transmission and textuality, revealing the modalities through which these works generated meaning for Jewish and non-Jewish readers. As Kabbalah came to occupy an important role in the intellectual exchange between Jews and Christians in this period, Zoharic lexicons and other study guides played a major role as cultural mediators.

The article establishes so far neglected links between the German anti-English pamphlets during WWI, on the one hand, and right-wing antidemocratic theory after the war, on the other, by engaging with their central argumentative forms. Particularly the metaphors of the English as “merchants” or “peddlers” as well as England as a mechanical civilization in contradistinction to German organic culture facilitated the transfer of arguments between the discourses on war and democracy, respectively. The metaphors were old, but they were intensified by the concrete enmity – and further intensified the domestic constitutional arguments by underscoring the fundamental unsuitability of democracy for Germany.

International audience

Hunting scenes are common in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and are understood as allegories of the Jew, usually represented as a hare or a deer, being persecuted by the Christian, shown as a hunter and his dogs. This article will discuss a hunt scene from theWorms Maḥzor, an Ashkenazic illuminated prayer book produced in 1272, probably in Würzburg. At the top of folio 130r, an illumination of the piyyut (liturgical poem) “ʾAyelet ʾahavim” (the loving hind, or doe) for Shavuot displays a deer being hunted by a devilish hunter and his dogs. Examining the illustration in the context of contemporary textual evidence, I shall demonstrate that the deer in theWorms Maḥzorportrays the Torah itself being persecuted by the hunter, who can be understood not only as a Christian or Esau, but also as Jesus.

This article revisits rabbinic laws of menstrual impurity by comparing them to the parallel laws of male impurity. The prevailing scholarly paradigm has examined menstrual purity laws through the lens of cultural criticism and gender analysis, demonstrating that the sages molded the legal discourse of this field to construct their own authority vis-à-vis the women they describe. By contrast, this article argues that a comparison of menstrual impurity laws with the laws of male impurities discloses substantial parallels that have not been sufficiently explored. This comparison demonstrates that the rabbis developed similar legal categories for both men and women, revealing more about their systematic legal thinking than about their gender economy. Tracing the development of both male and female impurities through rabbinic sources thus has the potential to uncover not only the gendered constructions engaged by the rabbis, but also fundamental rabbinic ideas about the body, legal knowledge, and rabbinic expertise.

In its first season, Israeli television thrillerFaudaproclaimed an utter symmetry between Israel “proper” and its Occupied Territories, by humanizing Hamas militants and treating them as equals to the Israeli characters. Throughout the story the Jewish warrior's body becomes a site for the detonation of explosives and a potential vehicle for suicide bombings, in a false but intriguing reenactment of the trauma of the second intifada, which has been repressed in Israeli consciousness. In this unwitting manifestation of Jewish martyrdom, the façade of the rule of law in the State of Israel is dismantled in what seems like a religious battle between clans. The discourse of pain in the series suggests a stream of constant retribution in a vicious circle that can never historicize the allegedly eternal conflict and work through its traumatic residues. Nonetheless, this dynamic of retribution and martyrdom also informs a multilayered structure whereby the secular, modern Jew returns to his roots by engaging with Arabness in the theatre ofmistaʿaravim: in becoming Arab he also becomes, finally, a Jew.

The sanctification of Yiddish in hasidic society occurred primarily in the first half of the twentieth century and intensified in the wake of the Holocaust. The roots of this phenomenon, however, lie in the beginnings of Hasidism in the eighteenth century. The veneration of Yiddish is linked to the hasidic attitude towards vernacular language and the status of the ẓaddik “speaking Torah.” Hasidism represented—and represents—an oral culture in which the verbal transfer of its sacred content sanctifies the language spoken by its adherents, in this case, Yiddish. This article presents a theological and sociological examination of the various stages of the sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim from the movement's early stages to the late twentieth century.

The article traces the development of narrative complexity in the book and television versions of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. The series has been criticized for its repetitive structure; however, drawing on seriality theory by Umberto Eco, Jason Mittell and Frank Kelleter, I demonstrate how it does move beyond repetition and towards a more complex narrative structure. I point out how the recent Netflix adaptation, rather than merely repeating the books, adds to this development of serial complexity. Thus, by comparing the book series and the adaptation, I demonstrate a tendency towards developing transmedial complexity in serial narratives.

The lack of any explicit engagement with art and aesthetics, coupled with his strong rationalism and naturalism, has led to the claim that Spinoza held a philosophy actively "hostile" to art. My essay, contrary to this claim, brings together certain key principles of Spinozism and a poem by futurist poet Mina Loy. I argue that when viewed under Spinoza's ontology of power and through his relational theory of the individual, works of art and literature emerge as particularly active sites of relation that are both constitutive of, and constituted by, the wider affective field within which they find themselves.

What does it mean to “exist and not to belong”? This article analyses the themes of exile and alienation in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach in relation to current discourses of global migration and state surveillance. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the refugee as “pure man,” I argue that the novel calls into question the degree to which the discourse of the human (and human rights) can exist beyond state apparatuses of citizenship and belonging, and the ways in which refugees, migrants, and sans papiers are excluded from the “realm of common humanity” via state apparatuses of security and surveillance. Examining the novel as a revenge narrative, I focus on how Cockroach’s unnamed protagonist – an impoverished, Arab migrant living in Montreal – shifts between human and insect form to indicate the ways in which the discourse of the human fails to create the political and socio-economic conditions necessary for his survival.

Hongshan is the name of a material culture straddling Inner Mongolia and the Liaoning provinces―the Liaoxi region―China, dating ca. 4500-3000 BCE. Known for enigmatically carved jades, Hongshan rose to popular prominence in the 1980s following the discovery of two significant ritual sites. Since then, some Chinese archaeologists have proposed Liaoxi as a source of either regional or greater Central Plain civilization. Heralding public knowledge in South Korea, meanwhile, Korean scholars active on the “inner fringe” of professional scholarship sought to contest Hongshan’s “Chinese” identification, instead asserting it to be the origin of a civilization directly ancestral to the early polities of Korean history. Leading the popular discourse, they incorporated Hongshan into preexisting paradigms asserting continental origins of the Korean people and connected to aggrandizing schemes of Old Choso˘n (trad. 2333- 108 BCE). From the latter half of the 2000s and against the context of national-level history disputes with China, a second generation of inner-fringe and unequivocal pseudohistorians has promoted Hongshan, establishing it as a seemingly core topic of “Korean” prehistory. Their emergence signals the “Hongshan turn” in Korean pseudohistory, a turn that has been further bolstered through Hongshan’s incorporation into South Korean new religions. This article narrates the recent trajectory of the Hongshan discourse, critically analyzing its functions and framing.

This article explores the entangled histories of dengue and yellow fever. It traces how historical conflations of these diseases deepened at the start of the twentieth century in the context of rising fears that yellow fever might spread to Asia. Advances in biomedicine, I suggest, reinforced notions of their kinship and generated competing theories that dengue either foreshadowed yellow fever in Asia or inoculated the region against it. This history in which the language and science of dengue and yellow fever shadowed one another offers a nonlinear narrative of scientific progress. Furthermore, as the so-called neglected tropical diseases resurge in the present, it elucidates how disease threats are read against one another. Thus, the article offers a historical context to ongoing discussions on disease emergence and pandemic preparedness.

The world’s languages exhibit striking diversity. At the same time, recurring linguistic patterns suggest the possibility that this diversity is shaped by features of human cognition.One well-studied example is word order in complex noun phrases (like these two red vases).While many orders of these elements are possible, a subset appear to be preferred. It has been argued that this order reflects a single underlying representation of noun phrases tructure, from which preferred orders are straightforwardly derived (e.g. Cinque 2005).Building on previous experimental evidence using artificial language learning by Culbertson& Adger (2014), we show that these preferred orders arise not only in existing languages,but also in improvised sequences of gestures produced by English speakers. We then use corpus data from a wide range of languages to argue that the hypothesized underlying structure of the noun phrase might be learnable from statistical features relating objects and their properties conceptually. Using an information-theoretic measure of strength of association, we find that adjectival properties (e.g. red) are on average more closely related to the objects they modify (e.g. wine), than numerosities (e.g. two), which are in turn more closely related to the objects they modify than demonstratives (e.g. this). It is exactly those orders which transparently reflect this—by placing adjectives closest to the noun, and demonstratives farthest away—which are more common across languages, and preferred in our silent gesture experiments. These results suggest that our experience with objects in the world, combined with a preference for transparent mappings from conceptual structure to linear order, can explain constraints on noun phrase order.

Prei Khmeng, a village 13 km northwest of Siem Reap, Cambodia, is noted for the presence of one of the region's earliest monuments, Prasat Prei Khmeng. Aside from its ruined temple, Prei Khmeng is an important prehistoric occupation site that immediately pre-dates the foundation of the temple. First excavated by a Franco-Cambodian team in the early 2000s, the site was revisited in 2014 by an Australian-Cambodian research team. Recent research revealed Iron Age domestic occupation as well as inhumation burials. The burial assemblage provides evidence of regional trade and exchange and mortuary wealth differentiation. Bioarchaeological examination of the individuals interred at the site reveals intentional dental modification and perimortem blunt and sharp force skeletal trauma. This research sheds light on this important epoch in prehistory, a juncture between the prehistoric and protohistoric period in Cambodia, which was a time of substantial socio-political transformation.

This article explores the humanitarian work of the Australian Communist Esme Odgers during the Spanish Civil War. Odgers's story highlights the child sponsorship program as a humanitarian technique, which has yet to be fully discussed within the history of Spanish humanitarian aid. Odgers's detailed letters written during the war offer unique insights into the material, social, and psychological conditions under which humanitarian workers labored, suggesting that such an activity was a multifaceted and unpredictable experience. An examination of this dimension allows for an exploration of emotions that are expected to be repressed by humanitarian workers, where the expression of individual emotions in the context of life and death is perceived as an indulgence. Further, a study of Odgers's humanitarian efforts during the civil war sheds light on the impact of these endeavors beyond Europe, extending our understanding of the global impact of the Spanish Civil War.

This article focuses on Edward Said’s still undigested influence on world literary studies by using Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) as a test case of what Said’s thinking, beginning with Orientalism (1978), allows in terms of reading quintessential works of world literature. The article links Said’s elaboration of “contrapuntal reading” in Culture and Imperialism (1993) with his claim in the “Imaginative Geography and its Representations” chapter of Orientalism that the confrontation with Islam, dating as far back as the eighth and ninth centuries, constituted a “lasting trauma” for Europe and the West (59). With Said’s remarkable diagnosis of what Islam represented—and perhaps continues to represent—for the West’s Eurocentric, orientalist imaginary firmly in mind, this article provides an opportunity for scholars and students of world literature alike to move forward in the debate over how world literature is to be read, translated, and disseminated across historically uneven networks of violent, traumatic cultural encounters.

In this paper, I analyze the phenomenon of child cultural body modification (CCBM). I describe the practice, discuss philosophical, sociological, and anthropological arguments about the parental motivations, and evaluate an influential justification based on the children's putative cultural benefit of undergoing CCBM. I propose an alternative view of bodily integrity based on the value of body agency, the ability of individuals to generate meaning in their world through conscious, voluntary, and purpose-driven usage of their own bodies.

In this article I consider Donald Trump as an “antisemantic” president, and link antisemanticism to broader forms of populism. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism, I explore the politi...

This article theorizes a new temporal category, the mesochronous (or “middle time”), via analyzing The House of Hunger (1979), the debut novella by Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera. Marechera's vulgar, irreverent aesthetic has expanded the definition of postcolonial African writing while at times prompting his categorization as a cosmopolitan or global modernist author. Within postcolonial literary studies, questions of political commitment or individual identity often accompany aesthetic categorization: for instance, to what extent does an author's stylistic choices reflect an individual or collective narrative of national struggle? Marechera’s fictional and essayistic writings disallow easy assignation as local or universal, African or Western. Rather than considering his work as reflective of a hybrid identity, I argue that it proposes a mesochronous, coeval relation between Western and African aesthetic and material worlds in the post-War era. Marechera enacts this historico-aesthetic relation through representing 1970-80s Zimbabwe with violence and vulgarity—which, in turn, confronts and subverts the dialectical fashioning of Africa as outside history, modernity, and the universal. I read The House of Hunger (1979) as a theorization of this mesochronous relation between Africa and its others, rather than merely a realist depiction of a violent postcolony.

Is there a particular experience-type associated with the exercise of agency? This question was subject to lively philosophical debate in nineteenth-century France. William James paid close attention to these debates, and for most of his academic life argued that the answer was "no." However, in this article, I show that a few years before the end of his life, under the influence of the French spiritualist tradition, he changed his mind. I argue that this change led to a global shift in his philosophical thinking. One major consequence of this is that he modified his philosophy so that it allowed a greater role for "objective" reality, and was consequently at less risk of the charge of "solipsism" directed at him by his critics. After this shift, James's philosophy could stand on much firmer ground.

Like a number of contemporary progressive thinkers, William Clarke (1852-1901) was a socialist with liberal leanings. Believing in the benefits of collective ownership and democratic reform, he joined the Fabian Society in 1886 before resigning from it in 1897. This article seeks to account for Clarke's intellectual development from socialism to liberalism by focusing on the implications of his political writings. It argues that this estrangement partly resulted from the incompatibility between the principle of historic necessity underlying his critique of private ownership and his ongoing commitment to democracy and pragmatic reform.

International audience

While discriminant function analysis is an inherently Bayesian method, researchers attempting to estimate ancestry in human skeletal samples often follow discriminant function analysis with the calculation of frequentist-based typicalities for assigning group membership. Such an approach is problematic because it fails to account for admixture and for variation in why individuals may be classified as outliers or nonmembers of particular groups. This article presents an argument and methodology for employing a fully Bayesian approach in discriminant function analysis applied to cases of ancestry estimation. The approach requires adding the calculation, or estimation, of predictive distributions as the final step in ancestry-focused discriminant analyses. The methods for a fully Bayesian multivariate discriminant analysis are illustrated using craniometrics from identified population samples within the Howells published data. The article also presents ways to visualize predictive distributions calculated in more than three dimensions, explains the limitations of typicality measures, and suggests an analytical route for future studies of ancestry and admixture based in discriminant function analysis.

In recent years, social media have become increasingly important means through which orangutan conservation organizations engage with the wider public. But more than publicizing orangutan-related issues, the social media-scape of orangutan conservation serves as a powerful space of interaction and moral intervention through which Internet users can participate in a particular project of “saving the orangutan.” Drawing on earlier anthropological analyses of rights-related media activism, this article examines how orangutan causes are crafted, circulated, and given affective and political “charge” online, thereby producing their beholders as “witnessing publics.” At the same time, it pushes beyond the extant literature’s focus on circulation and dissemination by tracing how ideas about orangutans are apprehended, appropriated, embellished, and personalized on social media—sometimes in ways that exceed their original frameworks. Focusing on how social media supporters negotiate the enduring tension between interspecies attachment and species difference, the article aims, first, to highlight the multiplicities and fluctuations that can characterize seemingly straightforward “Western naturalist” conceptions of human-animal relations, and second, to illuminate the complexities of “participation” inherent in that digital gray area between everyday social networking and full-blown political activism on social media.

Jerusalem in the late Second Temple period (second century BCE–70 CE) was transformed into the largest pilgrimage city of the Hellenized East and the sole locus of sacrificial worship of the Jewish God in greater Judea. As argued in this paper, it also became a place for sightseeing and spectacle. By the early Roman era, movement to the city for pilgrimage was a significant component of Mediterranean and Near Eastern travel. The Jewish festival experience may have evolved to cater to the tastes of foreigners now regularly visiting the city from the Jewish Diaspora. The architecture of Herod's Temple complex and the distinctive religious customs practiced within its walls intrigued visitors, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. For those unable to witness the Temple or participate in one of its festivals firsthand, a virtual visit through a “walking-tour” description would have to suffice. Such descriptions, which are attested from the earliest days of the Second Temple, can charter in imaginative invention in order to foster a sense of awe and wonder for the audience.

This article examines a narrative about a seven-headed demon in Bavli Kiddushin 29b as an entry point into a much broader conversation about the Talmud's demonology. I first lay out the interpretive challenges of the story, then argue that B. Kiddushin's demonic discourse has more in common with ancient Near Eastern demonologies that it does with contemporaneous Zoroastrian materials. Two particular aspects of the rabbinic depiction of the demon in B. Kiddushin align with Mesopotamian characterizations of demons: (1) the physical description of the demon as a seven-headed serpent, and (2) his demonic nature. At the same time, the way that the rabbis describe the mode of the demon's defeat strongly parallels contemporaneous Syriac Christian modes of exorcism. This article demonstrates that the talmudic story exists at the intersection of more ancient and contemporary concerns and typifies rabbinic selectivity in adopting and adapting available discourses about demons. To conclude, I discuss some of the broader implications of this observation for our study of the Babylonian Talmud in its Sasanian cultural context.

One of the important means of promoting connectivity and cooperation between China and Cambodia is Chinese enterprises’ investment in Cambodian infrastructure construction. The Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China brings both opportunities and challenges for Cambodia’s economic development. Through an analysis of detailed case studies, in this article we review the background on Chinese infrastructure investment in Cambodia and identify factors in the approach to investment by Chinese enterprises in the Cambodian context that appear to underlie these challenges and suggest opportunities for improvements.

The centrality in Timorese life of the presence of ancestors and deceased relatives has long been noted in the ethnographic literature. In monographs based on fieldwork carried out in the 1960s and early 1970s, David Hicks and Elizabeth Traube argued that mortuary ceremonies occupy a central role in the life of both Tetum- and Mambaispeaking people.Shepard Forman, who spent long periods in the 1970s among the Makassae, starts his article on the “Spirits of the Makassae” testifying that, when he began his fieldwork, he obsessively collected genealogies of living people, “yet the dead were all around us, buried in prominent gravesites at the ancestral hearths and invoked as the spirit causes of most contretemps.” Forman also underlines that his field assistant often teased him “with allusions to the link between spirits and his living kinsmen.”

Collective action is a much-discussed topic today, but not in the historiography of philosophy. Therefore, I would like to contribute a little bit to our understanding of the history of this concept by exploring the political philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. A compelling interpretation of his treatise On Kingship emerges when we read it not, as is often the case, in terms of his moral perfectionism, but as expressing the idea that the political community is an artificial and distinct subject of agency. Thus, the political philosophy of On Kingship turns out to be congenial to contemporary approaches to collective action.

In my essay I argue Kyle Baker’s 2008 graphic novelNat Turnerdelivers a complex reimaging of history, which positions readers to confront an Antebellum past that produced few undamaged heroes. Recent criticism surrounding Baker’s work has split on how to understand Turner’s actions, but I argue Baker neither wholly celebrates nor condemns the rebellion. Instead, he focuses on the overwhelming violence that characterized Turner’s nineteenth century environment. The insurrection then becomes a natural part of a devastating cycle of violence caused by enslavement, and Turner himself is cast as a man who is simply acting rationally within a deeply troubled reality. Therefore, while Baker’s characterization of Turner and his rebellion does not leave readers with clear answers or heroes, it does offer a deeper understanding of slavery’s all-consuming violence and continuing impact on the nation.&nbsp

Author(s): Lamoreaux, Janelle | Abstract: This article analyzes media responses to a 2010 Greenpeace China report titled Swimming in Poison. Among other alarming data, the report states that fish from collection points along the Yangtze River showed elevated levels of harmful “environmental hormones” (huanjing jisu), also referred to as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Scholars have critiqued EDC science and activism for its heteronormative pathologizing of intersexuality, nonreproductive sexual activity, and impaired fertility, drawing attention to the “sex panic” at work in EDC discourse. This article shows that such sex panic is neither necessary nor universal in anxieties surrounding EDCs. Unlike media responses to EDC events in Europe and North America, Chinese news articles that followed the report did not focus on anxieties surrounding sexual transgression. Instead, media reactions focused on food safety, industrial capitalism, and the ecological scope of pollution. Based on this analysis, the author argues that the disruptive quality and analytic potential of China’s environmental hormones has less to do with a defense of sexual purity or bodily integrity, and more to do with acknowledging the depths to which human and nonhuman bodies in today’s China are suffused with the sometimes toxic social, economic, political, and chemical environments in which people eat, grow, and live. Keywords: China, toxicity, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, pollution, Yangtze River, Greenpeace, milk powder, environmental activism, hormones

This article explores the Franciscans' attempt to translate their local conception of poverty into a world order between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Studies of Franciscan poverty have generally been confined to Europe and to the Middle Ages, yet the pursuit of poverty also shaped the Franciscans' global interactions across the medieval and early modern periods. This focus provides an alternative perspective not only on the history of the Franciscan Order but also on global history, which has often been conceptualised as the European expansion of commodities, money and markets. Economic expansion was in dialogue with an overlooked story of resistance to, and questioning of, the phenomena of money and markets, and the attempt to realise a vision of the world based upon a unifying, yet unequal, notion of poverty.

In A Very Easy Death Simone de Beauvoir documents the illness, hospitalization, and death of her mother Françoise. Critics in the fields of bioethics and the medical humanities have concentrated on the text's paternalistic doctor-patient encounter, which culminates in the withholding of the cancer diagnosis from Beauvoir's mother and entails an unnecessary medical intervention to which the patient never consents. Reviewing the text's reception, this article argues that a focus on the ways in which it depicts breaches of several tenets of medical ethics have decontextualized A Very Easy Death and occluded the key role Beauvoir plays in the doctor-patient relationship. By situating the text within Beauvoir's œuvre and debates in French philosophy of medicine at the time of publication, this article proposes that Beauvoir's part in the withholding of the cancer diagnosis emerges less as a submission to medical paternalism than as a form of maternal caregiving.

Jon Stewart has recently argued that Hegel's defense of Friedrich Creuzer's controversial Symbolik should give us pause to reconsider the widely held view of Hegel's philosophy as racist and Eurocentric. More attention needs to be paid, however, to the strategy that Hegel employs in this defense. This article argues for the influence of Aristotle's theory of epigenesis on Hegel's philosophy of nature as well as his understanding of the stages of world-historical development. This Aristotelian understanding privileges the masculine West in relation to the feminine East that provides the material but not the vital efficient cause that animates Greek culture.

Author(s): Son, Hijoo | Abstract: This article examines diaspora in the context of intimacy in order to focus on individual conditions of art-making, taking into account global conceptions of diaspora that have appealed to celebratory, emancipatory, pessimistic, or desirous formulations about diaspora and art. Through a discussion of paintings by Himan Sŏk, a Chinese Korean (Chosŏnjok), and Jun Ch’ae, a Japanese Korean (Zainichi), the author proposes that diasporic art can be analyzed in terms of the transpersonal relations that surround the intimate vicinity of the artwork in three ways. First, these works of art are neither structured from above nor resistant from below. Second, they express an idea of doubleness bound at once to a larger organizing collective and to the individual experience. These artists imbue their paintings with ethnos and nation and the personal and intimate, and a comparison of their works reveals social relations that form around the objects and evolve as art is produced, exhibited, written about, and discussed. Third, transpersonal relations surrounding the artists and artwork underscore a two-tiered idea of who transindividuals are to others and to themselves, a concept of identity that is especially pertinent to diasporic artists who are postcolonial subjects, as it allows for differing “selves” according to context-specific settings. The transindividual is, thus, shown to be a critical concept of integration in understanding identity. Keywords: Chosŏnjok, Zainichi, diaspora, art, intimacy, transindividuality

The phenomenon of medical overtesting in general, and specifically in the emergency room, is well known and regarded as harmful to both the patient and the healthcare system. Although the implications of this problem raise myriad ethical concerns, this paper explores the extent to which overtesting might mitigate race-based health inequalities. Given that medical malpractice and error greatly increase when the patients belong to a racial minority, it is no surprise that the mortality rate similarly increases in proportion to white patients. For these populations, an environment that emphasizes medical overtesting may well be the desirable medical environment until care evens out among races and ethnicities; additionally, efforts to lower overtesting in conjunction with a high rate of racist medical mythology may cause harm by lowering testing when it is actually warranted. Furthermore, medical overtesting may help to assuage racial distrust. This paper ultimately concludes that an environment of medical overtesting may be less pernicious than the alternative.

This article expands the scope of Margaret Atwood’s engagement with posthumanism and apocalyptic narrative beyond her recent speculative fictions by revisiting one of her first texts, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970). Atwood’s work is situated within contemporary debates surrounding the Anthropocene to emphasize how her ecocritical stance is aligned with feminist new materialist critiques of imperialist viewpoints that have determined white settler relations with the environment, indigenous peoples, and nonhuman others. Reading The Journals of Susanna Moodie within this critical framework deepens understanding of Atwood’s ongoing commitment to decolonizing settler perspectives. Focused primarily on Susanna’s ruptured sense of identity in her encounters with the “wilderness,” this paper argues that Atwood’s text engages the politics of seeing and subjectivity to expose not only how settler perspectives and practices have led to ecological devastation but also how the settlement of wilderness spaces often unsettles white settler bodies and identities. By contesting human exceptionalism and asserting the complex, material, and intersubjective relations between humans, nonhumans, and their shared environments, Atwood’s earlier writing is an exemplary precursor to and illustration of the current turn in feminist philosophies toward posthuman ontologies and new materialisms.

Form and content are inseparable. Story depends on technique, de? pends, Henry James claimed, on "every word and every punctuation point."1 Although Thomas Hardy could be expected to resist his contem? porary's strict attention to minutiae, James's broad point about the in? terdependence of idea and form nonetheless helps explain problems in Hardy's Jude the Obscure and particularly in that elusive character, Sue Bridehead, who is a touchstone for many of the difficulties posed by Hardy's final novel. Critics have called this character childish, selfish, sadistic, masochistic, narcissistic, and frigid, all in explanation of what has been defined as her dominant trait: inconsistency.2 But these conclu? sions have not satisfied even their authors, among whom Irving Howe is representative in cautioning: "Yet one thing, surely the most important, must be said about Sue Bridehead. As she appears in the novel itself, rather than in the grinder of analysis, she is an utterly charming and vibrant creature."3 Perhaps a character can be so fluid and complex that she eludes the combined critical efforts to capture her. But, before despairing of analysis altogether, we should consider Sue's inconsistency and elusiveness in light of formal difficulties in Hardy's last novel. That Sue Bridehead has resisted satisfactory analysis points both to problems in the formal conception o? Jude and to the inadequacies of its point of view in conveying a growing sensitivity to other versions ofthe novel's central experiences. An omniscient narrator, such as Hardy offers in Jude, should be a guarantee of reliability, but Hardy's final narrator eludes and evades. And, for the first time, Hardy lets the perspective of a single character, Jude Fawley, dominate the story. To complicate matters further, it is not clear to what extent Jude's perspective is judged by the narrator, or even, as criticism has made clear, to what extent Hardy

This article studies the relationship between media experiments and embodied politics in the work of the Venezuelan pedagogue and savant Simon Rodriguez, a key figure in the transition from late colonial times to the early republican experience in Spanish America. The essay connects Rodriguez’s corporeal take on typographic innovations (which he termed “the art of painting words”) with his postcolonial rendition of Western republicanism (which he called the “the art of painting republics”). It argues that Rodriguez’s use of the term “gesture” served to create an experimental and performatic space for printing innovations and republican reforms, so as to imagine the post-Independence period as a new political beginning for Spanish American societies. The article reads Rodriguez’s texts and a rich collection of 19th-century pieces about writing reforms, typographic aesthetics, and republicanism through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the “gesture” as an open-ended mediality. “Gesture,” as conceptualized by Rodriguez and elucidated by Agamben, functions as a critical tool for proposing new connections between typography, education, and politics, and for highlighting the embodied dimension of Rodriguez’s work.

I argue that insofar as Kant describes faith as a free-choice, he is aligned with the medieval tradition, and with his own sources that mediate this heritage (in particular, Leibniz and Locke). The medieval tradition consistently, affirmatively, and systematically invokes freedom and the will, with reference to belief in God, without such a dimension of choice implying any deflation in the degree of commitment to this belief. However, in clarifying that the movement of the will involves “human freedom” alone, without divine action, Kant departs from this tradition. Such divine action, Kant is convinced, would destroy genuine human freedom. This conviction is the source of Kant’s repeated insistence that grace follows rather than precedes moral conversion. It is on this point concerning human freedom and grace that Kant departs from the medieval tradition, rather than with his claim that we choose to believe in God.

Alcohol was recently banned in West Papua in the name of saving Indigenous Papuans from extinction. In this article, I draw on fieldwork and discussions with Dani men and women in the highlands town of Wamena, where home brew is proliferating, to reveal that alcohol facilitates representational, gendered, racialized, and embodied violence. Participants drew attention to the "refined" ways that Indonesia has taken over their territory by introducing alcohol (and other goods and people), which then negatively affect their ability to live. Dani under-standings of their cultural and ethno-racial constitution challenge the racialization of Papuan men as violent and drunken and argue for reestablishing control over Papuan bodies and territories. The proliferation of alcohol constrains masculine possibilities rather than opening up new avenues for expression and is thus linked to a reconfiguration of Indigenous masculinities under Indonesian rule. For Papuans, alcohol symbolizes a broader struggle over Indigenous bodies, including what goes into them and how they are constituted, represented, and treated. Looking at alcohol in terms of racialization-assumptions about what biology or culture determines-can give us a better understanding of how Pacific masculinitics are being configured by and around the problem of alcohol consumption.

In this article I study the competing US and Chinese narratives about the South China Sea. Arguing that the practice of calculating power shifts in terms of the changing distribution of material capabilities is inadequate, I complement existing literature by taking ideational and normative dimensions of power into account. I ask what the alternative Chinese narrative of power and leadership in the South China Sea looks like and how it is perceived by others in comparison with the dominant US narrative. While a "hard" power transition is ongoing, China's preferred narrative has yet to become widely accepted and the US narrative will remain dominant for now. Nevertheless, China has been making progress in shifting the narrative of what the future could look like with China's vision for a post-US regional and global order now seen as a possible alternative.

One way to read an eighteenth-century review journal would be for the critical judgments that it contains. This essay argues, instead, that it should be read as allegory. The essay focuses on the Critical Review, established by Tobias Smollett in 1756, with the (impossible) aim to review everything, and explores how it appears both as what it is and in what it is not. Placed alongside Smollett’s other works of instalment and translation, what is disclosed by the Critical Review is a new work: the work of criticism itself.

The Testimony of Truth (NHC IX,3) presents a relatively unique portrait of Christ, with little attention to his teachings or death; rather, the author emphasizes the Son of Man's arrival, both via a descent upon the Jordan River and through Mary, the virgin. This article argues that the pairing of these seemingly disparate traditions emphasizes key interests: the rejection of water baptism and sexual desire. A comparison with the Paraphrase of Shem (NHC VII,1), particularly its reference to John the Baptist and its cosmology, further illuminates both texts; in addition to questioning modes of baptism, shared interest in bearing proper witness suggests common engagement in early Christian debates regarding martyrdom.