Search

This paper reviews the book Challenging Traditional Classroom Spaces with YA Literature: Students in Community as Course Co‐Designers by Ricki Ginsberg (2022). Published amid increasingly contentious censoring of teachers' autonomy and students' rights to read in many districts across the United States, this book is a timely call for educators to rethink traditional curriculum choices and pedagogical approaches in the secondary literature classroom. Ginsberg makes a strong case for privileging engaging and relevant texts utilizing YA literature and centering students and their voices in communities of practice in the classroom. She offers a wide range of approaches to make this book relevant for teachers across the spectrum of autonomy, including impactful additions to existing curriculum for those in more constrained environments and a blueprint for a stand‐alone YA literature course for those with more flexibility. Geared toward an audience of secondary literature teachers with many practical pedagogical considerations and suggestions, the solid theoretical base makes this book a useful read for literacy researchers and administrators interested in promoting student‐centered pedagogical methods, leveraging meaningful communities of practice in classroom settings, and reaping the benefits of YA literature with secondary students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians' power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Being able to narrate was itself a manifestation of power. It was only after the Second World War that history renounced its pact with power and a reimagination of the historical idiom emerged. Various shades of South Asian and Caribbean anti‐colonial leaders and postcolonial writers began to think beyond the historicist category of the empire. These efforts to dismantle the empire's historical narratives were paralleled by the writings of British historian E. P. Thompson, although he remained tied to the idea of history as progress. The moral question, however, remains unsettled. It endures for present‐day historians because the teleserials, nostalgic period dramas, and "great men" histories continue to hold sway over the public mind, generate debates about the "benefits" of the empire, and feed Britain's anti‐immigrant sentiments. Satia's book lies at the intersection of three sets of historiographies—histories of British political thought, postcolonial writings that highlight alternate conceptions of the past and the significance of orality, memory, and community history, and, lastly, histories of violence—all of which engage the moral question in some form or another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This mostly admiring review article focuses on Martin Jay's 2020 essay collection entitled Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations. Though it highlights details and insights from nearly every essay in the collection, the review devotes significant attention to chapter 4, which focuses on the relationship of the Frankfurt School's first‐generation scholars with Sigmund Freud. The departure point for my engagement with Jay's fourth chapter is the translation of the German word Trieb (drive) as "instinct" throughout The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Although Jay's treatment of Max Horkheimer's, Theodor W. Adorno's, and Herbert Marcuse's recourses to Freudian psychoanalysis emphasizes their abiding commitment to Freud's theory of instinctual forces (over and against objections to his biologism), the question of whether a drive differs from an instinct does not arise. This question therefore offers an occasion to speculate on how distinguishing more firmly between instinct and drive might matter for the Frankfurt School's opposition between first and second nature. Though I praise Jay's decision to include a chapter on Miriam Hansen's Benjaminian revision of the public sphere, I also criticize his practice, in this volume at least, of consigning most scholarship authored by women to the endnotes rather than engaging with it in the main text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we adequately capture multivocal history? What are good ways to represent multiple narratives and arguments in an open‐ended fashion? The online publication Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep‐Mapping Modern East Asian History, edited by David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald, addresses these questions for modern East Asian spatial history. Mainly a tool for teaching and research, the website works by interlinking historiographical information and primary sources. Complementarily, Bodies and Structures 2.0 displays all its contents via a set of visualizations. In this review essay, I argue that this multimodal format is innovative on two ends. First, the site convincingly implements what earlier research on hypertext and visualization has long sought—namely, to exceed traditional text and its limitations to represent intricate matters neatly. This is because of these media formats' semiotic efficiency in analytically representing complex wholes and their parts. Second, Bodies and Structures 2.0 successfully translates its multivocal concept of spatial history into an interactive multimodal user experience. All in all, it demonstrates that representing concepts is not just about the applied language of narrative and argumentation; it is also about the publication's form. Bodies and Structures 2.0, therefore, is an exciting work from the perspective of theory of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]