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This research examines the introduction and development of ballroom dancing in Modern China, focusing on the cultural clashes, professional evolution, and survival strategies of pioneers like instructors and "Taxi-dance Girls." It shows ballroom dancing epitomized tensions between Chinese traditions and Western modernity. The transformations of dancing and its pioneers provided insights into China's socioeconomic transition, urbanization, and modernization. The shift from foreign to Chinese instructors reflected tensions between westernization and localization, as well as China's cultural awakening. Case studies on instructors enabled nuanced analysis. As commodified entertainers, "Taxi-dance Girls" gained economic sustainability and social mobility through talents and gender charm, though their glamorized images provoked debates on gender relations. By exploring multifaceted roles and experiences of pioneers, this research enriches understanding of entertainment consumption, urban middle-class lifestyles, and Eastern-Western cultural integration in Modern China. It provides new historical materials and perspectives, unveiling complex interplay between cultural globalization and localization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparative analysis between Roberto Arlt's novel "El amor brujo" and Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Notes From Underground." It analyzes the depiction of nihilism and social romanticism in "Notes From Underground" and the representation of modernity in "El amor brujo," differences in the degrees of anguish in "Notes From Underground" and "El amor brujo," love as a chronicle of humiliation and tyranny in both novels, and rejection of determinism as precondition for morality.

In the late nineteenth century, Ottoman culture witnessed a concerted effort to develop a national literature on par with modern European literature and culture. This was also the time when Ottoman intellectuals began to develop a systematic approach to literary analysis. Debates on the imitation, translation, and adaptation of Western forms were central to this period. This article examines the evolution of the concept and practice of imitation as part of these debates. This detailed analysis of the theoretical discourse surrounding the concepts of imitation and authenticity contributes to the broader field of literary theory and comparative literature. By introducing the theoretical rigor inherent in Ottoman-Turkish intellectual practice and highlighting its specific conceptual tradition, the article not only bridges the gap of non-Western critical thought in contemporary literary history, but also offers a fresh perspective on the much-debated East–West paradigms and cross-cultural approaches in literary studies and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates late twentieth‐century Corsican nationalism through the lens of gender, drawing attention to how women have sought to play an active and creative role in the movement. Through a series of interviews with female nationalist militants, this article will focus on what belonging to the nationalist movement meant to Corsican women. Gender relations within the nationalist movement reflected the changes taking place in a society fluctuating between tradition and modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intersection of gender roles, traditional Shona culture, and colonial legacies in Stephen Chifunyise’s play Oh My Grandfather (2018). Set in post-colonial Zimbabwe, the play highlights generational conflicts within the Matanga family, reflecting broader societal struggles. It explores how patriarchal Shona traditions continue to dictate gender dynamics, which are largely oppressive toward women. The article focuses on the roles of Morgan and Dorcas, who navigate between these traditional expectations and modern, Western values, creating what Homi K. Bhabha terms a ‘Third Space’ of cultural hybridity. The article discusses how Chifunyise critiques rigid gender norms while advocating for a balance between preserving cultural heritage and embracing modern ideals, such as gender equality. By highlighting characters like Dorcas and Tandi, who resist oppressive traditions, the play suggests that cultural practices can evolve without perpetuating injustice. Ultimately, Oh My Grandfather provides a nuanced exploration of the complexities of cultural identity in contemporary Zimbabwe, advocating for an integration of tradition and modernity that promotes a more equitable society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his later work, such as "The Question Concerning Technology", Martin Heidegger puts forward a critique of modern technology. Alongside this critique, Heidegger presents a kind of positive alternative through his discussion of "dwelling". I put forward a reading of Heidegger's critique of modern technology and his embrace of "dwelling". On my reading, Heidegger's thinking centers on the idea that modern technology's form of "world-disclosure" prevents human beings from encountering (and then living in light of) our own essence. In contrast, he takes "dwelling" to allow us to do that. When humans dwell, they also live in such a way as to (purportedly) allow other things (e.g. rivers) to exist in accordance with their own essence. I argue that, for Heidegger, the (purported) truth that humans should live in accord with our own essence is explanatorily prior to the (purported) truth that humans should let other things exist in accordance with their own essence. Following this interpretative argument, I reflect on some of the promises of this position that I attribute to Heidegger, along with some of the most pressing challenges facing those who might want to further develop it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corley and Lenehan con a gold coin off a servant girl in James Joyce's "Two Gallants" – but how they do so is left unclear. Lenehan's consumption of a plate of peas midway through the story meanwhile appears relatively unmysterious. This article argues however that Lenehan's peas are a key narrative motif: firstly, crystallising the antagonisms that consciously underlie Joyce's emergent modernist style, but also (by way of the evolving connotation of peas through Irish history) actively historicising the social conditions that underlie this aesthetic. Ultimately, it is via the peas' relationship with near-absent figure of the "slavey" herself that we see how Joyce's dialectical aesthetic serves to interrogate the socio-historical position of Corley and Lenehan's Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two different ways of naming and narrating historical periods, including the present time, involve using the terms 'capitalism' and 'modernity'. Each terminological set opens certain intellectual vistas, while foreclosing others. This article argues that while 'late capitalism' is, despite its many problems, a meaningful concept to use today, 'late modernity' is not. Offering a genealogy of each term, the article considers how ascriptions of lateness to modernity result in some absurdity, while ascribing lateness to capitalism does not involve such marked risks. Nonetheless, more comprehensive and all-encompassing definitions of capitalism may be incompatible with ascriptions of lateness to capitalism. These various issues are considered in light of the need to name the current world-condition in a period of accelerating environmental crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Set against the backdrop of the 1857 uprising against British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent, the article examines the impact of this tumultuous event on the Mughal era Bagh (garden). The uprising, while causing a sudden and unprecedented rupture in the subcontinent's political, cultural and urban landscape, also led to a form of disruptive innovation that displaced the well-established Bagh, a private space for leisure or veneration of the deceased, by a novel garden type, an English-style public park. More often than not, this new garden type emerged from remodelling the Bagh, to result in a Bagh-turned-Public Park. This innovative venture not only physically replaced the original Bagh but also changed the notion of leisure from the Mughal-to-the-metropole-inspired variant. Concurrently, this landscape endeavour served the agenda of empire to stamp British authority. To make its case, the city of Delhi, whose large corpus of Mughal- era Baghs underwent remodelling, is selected. As the epicentre of the uprising, Delhi was the recipient of the colonial regime's spatially tumultuous military and civic interventions to turn it into a tamed modern city, among whose new spatial icons was the English-style public park. Two gardens are examined to demonstrate the rupture and disruptive innovation, as colonial civic actors overlaid an English-style landscape on the Bagh. This seemingly innocuous landscape intervention was as disruptive and efficacious as its spatially violent military counterpart in transforming Delhi into a colonial modern city. The article concludes by taking stock of the Bagh-turned-Public Park in the present as a colonial legacy that continues to be an integral part of the leisure landscape of Indian cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws attention to the reproduction of logistical power in what is identified as the eroticism of logistics. Eroticism here describes the way that transmission is understood as a seamless conveyance of goods or an intimate communication across a surface. It is first argued that this eroticism is found in attempts to define modernity as logistical that ought to be rejected in favor of a more grounded account of rerouting. It is then demonstrated that this latter account best accommodates the findings of critical logistics studies, where logistical spaces are shown to be fractious and the movement of goods far from smooth. It is finally argued that while an erotic principle of transmission lends itself to a reductive account of logistics that sustains its violence, a postal account of transmission better captures the experience of getting the goods while situating logistics within a critical space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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AbstractAt the heart of Peter Abrahams’s 1946 novel Mine Boy is Xuma. He travels from the north (as we are often reminded) to Johannesburg in search of work after his farm has become infertile. It is an anxious transition for Xuma, who is quick to recognise the meaninglessness of his labour, and must adjust to a loud and alienating city. This article concerns the gendering of Xuma’s attitudes to both his work and his new surroundings. The women Xuma meets in Johannesburg (Leah, Eliza, Maisy), women he comes to rely on, are in some instances seen as instantiations of their place, where Xuma often reads their femininity into the places they inhabit. Abrahams, through Xuma, offers a portrayal of the city that is limited in its framing, and, as such, limited in how Johannesburg may be narrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Death in Western modernity is predominantly experienced as challenging and destabilising, bringing uncertainty, loss, and pain. However, from some contemporary spiritual perspectives, death represents not just an ending, but also facilitates new ways of experiencing our embodied being. Based on participatory fieldwork in the UK, this paper explores constructions and encounters with death through the formal religious lens of Spiritualism and the more informal and personalised practices of tarot. Reflecting practitioners’ belief in the agency of spirit in earthly lived experience I resist simple dichotomies of life and death by taking seriously a place for spirit. Using three empirical examples I explore how such a lens allows alternative geographies and therapeutic relationships to emerge, framing experiences of death as both endings and new beginnings, opening up new possibilities in the space left behind. Drawing on this potential, the paper encourages creative exploration of alternative narratives around death, spirit, and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People on the radical right are often considered to be climate deniers. Today, however, the new right in France has embraced a radical, ecological agenda and set out to experiment with traditional, agrarian ways of life. This paper asks how the new right currently revives a far-right tradition of ecological thought and how they practice this ecological vision. To move forward with their ethno-ecological utopia and salvage European civilization, they turn away from national politics and create local communities or ‘identitarian sanctuaries’. This article explores the new right’s practiced eco-utopias from three different angles. First, it shows how the ‘native soil’ and notions of ‘rootedness’ are pivotal for their understanding of identity. Second, it examines how the new right reframes ‘biodiversity’ as a plurality of European cultures, currently threatened by global capitalism and unchecked immigration. Finally, the article argues that the new right’s critique of modernity is not only political but also epistemic. To break free from modern scientific worldviews and enable a re-enchantment of nature, they turn to fantasy literature as well as Romantic and neo-pagan spiritualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Mapping the colonial modernity of preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE)" published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs explores the colonial roots and modern subjectivities in P/CVE policies. It delves into the historical and spatial trajectories of local practices in Tunisia, the exclusion of African women in Kenya, and the neocolonial influence on Kosovo's security policy. The authors critically analyze how P/CVE policies reproduce colonial hierarchies and power structures, emphasizing the intersectionality of gender, race, and class in Western articulations of security and threats. The article aims to contribute to ongoing debates on colonial security practices and encourages further reflection and resistance to these practices. [Extracted from the article]

This study deals with the history of teacher training system in modern Turkey starting from mid-19th century to present times. The goal of this study is to describe the historico-discursive formation of the system. I used an analysis of institutional, rhetorical and programme contexts to determine and define discursive phases. The results indicated that teacher training system in Turkey has three overarching discursive phases and three corresponding teacher types; enlightenment-secularization era, the roll-back and conservatism era, and neoliberalization era, corresponding to missionary-teacher, expert-teacher and dysfunctional technician-teacher types, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses pedagogical aspects of training in modern times. The school is a social institution that aims to promote changes and transformations in society through educational processes. The teaching profession is an educational practice that consists of the intervention of social reality through education. When it comes to school education, it is the teachers who provide this intermediation. Therefore, the training of those who will be trained becomes central in formal educational processes, towards the preservation of a civilization that contains better possibilities for life and co-participation for all. Therefore, understanding and discussing the training, working conditions and careers of teachers, and, as a result, their professional identity configuration, becomes important for understanding and discussing the educational quality of a country or a region. It was therefore concluded that the school still demands public policies that recognize the importance of solid and continuous teacher training, in order to obtain a better quality in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the secession of formerly colonized countries from large imperial units is a story of political hope, the central actors in Quinn Slobodian's story perceive the opportunities provided by the proliferation of new jurisdictions following decolonization very differently. According to the "market radicals" of the late 20th and 21st centuries, the break-up of empire is not a story of the potential for the democratization of politics and history-writing. Their ideas do however offer critiques of modernity. In this commentary, I convene critics of modernity – anticolonial leaders, historians of decolonization and the aftermath of empire, Indigenous and tribal peoples and their historians, and decolonial thinkers – in conversation with the capitalist adventurers of Slobodian's tale, via an exploration of the limits and possibilities of history-writing and the politics of historicist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qur'an translation was an important element of the daʿwa activities of reformist Muslims in West Java at the beginning of the twentieth century, as is reflected in the publication of the Sundanese translation of Ahmad Hassan's Tafsir Al-Foerqan, as well as other Qur'an translations penned by his friends and associates. These Sundanese translations not only promote a reformist ideology, but also demonstrate a shift in the formation of translation and literary culture in West Java: from interlinear word-for-word to verse-for-verse translation; from handwriting to printed books; and from Arabic (jawi and pegon) script to Roman script. This article explores this new tradition of Qur'an translations. Written for the modern era, they differed from the interpretive translations taught in the traditional Javanese Islamic schools (pesantren) and were influenced by a wave of reformist ideas originating from the Middle East during the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the novelistic production of Yucatec Maya writer Marisol Ceh Moo and her process of authorial construction as a decolonizing Indigenous cultural intervention. By analyzing the content and impact of her novel X-Teya, u puksi'ik'al ko'olel/Teya, un corazón de mujer (Teya, a Woman's Heart, 2009), this article elucidates how the adoption of a modern literary genre such as the novel and Indigenous authorial formation create a specific locus of enunciation that aligns with the resistance to cultural coloniality embedded in the heterogeneous Abiayala movement. Moreover, this research reveals the need to rethink the analytical categories that are part of the author theory when it comes to the study of contemporary Indigenous literatures in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the fluid nature of literature as exemplified both semantically and conceptually in the English-language studies of Chinese literature conducted by Western Sinologists in the nineteenth century. If Chinese literary modernization of the early twentieth century is seen as shaped by the contact with foreign literary theories, Sinologists in the nineteenth century had already engaged actively with English literary concepts to reconfigure Chinese literature in their English-language writings. This article contends that, regardless of their impact on Chinese literary modernity, the Sinologists' conceptions underlined the aesthetic and generic concerns that are fundamental to the modern understanding of literature and thereby fostered a renewed imagination of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world. Examining a wide range of primary materials, including dictionaries and Sinological writings, this article aims to unfold their transcultural naming and legitimizing process that gave rise to the knowledge category of Chinese literature through contingent English and Chinese literary terminology, narrative frameworks, and categorization schemes. This article traces the unnoticed history in comparative literary history to offer a genealogical understanding of the Western conception of Chinese literature. It also provides a new dimension for reviewing and analyzing the dialogue and interplay between Western and Chinese literary ideas within the Sinologists' writings prior to the overwhelming influence of Western literary ideas during the period of Chinese literary modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short reflection on the responses to The Making of Persianate Modernity, the author offers thoughts on the methodology of literary history, on the relationship between history and literature, and on the politics of historical research in general and Persianate studies in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article fleshes out two future directions for Middle Eastern studies as it puts the recent scholarship in Ottoman studies in dialogue with Alexander Jabbari's The Making of Persianate Modernity. First, like Jabbari, who interpreted the sexual puritanism in modern Persian literary histories as a convention of Persianate modernity, the author notes that critics can analyze key claims in texts of Arabic and Turkish modernity as generic conventions rather than as facts that capture sociopolitical transformations of modernity. Second, the author argues that The Making of Persianate Modernity, which examines the "form that the Persianate takes" in modern Iran and South Asia, can serve as a point of departure for studying the diverse forms that the Persianate takes in other Middle Eastern contexts, which do not have to be subsumed to a single Persianate world. While the term "Persianate world" has served as a useful heuristic concept, critics can shift their focus to "the multiple worlds that the Persianate has taken" as they analyze communities, such as the Ottoman literati, who do not self-identify as members of a cosmopolitan Persianate community. The Persian textual heritage can cultivate multiple worlds that uphold different, and even contradictory, political ideals and aesthetic norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the advantages of taking a triangulated approach to colonial and postcolonial literary history as modeled by Alexander Jabbari's The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India. Jabbari's reconsideration of literary modernity through the synchronous and multilingual exchange between Persian, Urdu, and English letters softens some of the assumed hierarchies that dominate Persianate and Anglophone studies, particularly. It furthermore underscores the unique perspective that Urdu writing on literary modernity offers scholars of world literature in light of the former's associations with Persian in an intellectual climate that chiefly valued indigenized historiographies of linguistic origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses sexuality as a crucial component of Persianate modernity in Alexander Jabbari's The Making of Persianate Modernity. Drawing on the work of Joseph Massad, Afsaneh Najmabadi, and Michel Foucault, Jabbari argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary historians erased premodern Persianate homoerotic desire to craft a "productive" vision of modernity. This erasure participated in a larger epistemic shift that located heteronormative coupling as useful for emerging nation-states. Alongside this erasure, the author points to other ruptures related to sexuality in Persianate modernity, such as the surfacing of a distinctly feminine voice that speaks of desire, the post-1980s adoption of LGBTQ+ identities by many in the modern Persianate world, and the loss of a premodern Islamic approach to romantic love understood as a disease within humoral medicine. Drawing from her own work, Kanner-Botan indicates how continuities in premodern Islamic approaches to love may serve as an additional counterpoint to the epistemic rupture caused by modern approaches to sexuality. Though the ruptures caused by modern approaches to sexuality in the Persianate world merit further research, Jabbari's engagement with rupture counters the book's overall focus on continuity by foregrounding the risks of nostalgia latent within the category of the Persianate itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts Alexander Jabbari's The Making of Persianate Modernity in conversation with Levi Thompson's Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry to explore the relationship between literary modernism and literary modernity in non-Western literary contexts. It highlights the authors' parallel theoretical engagements of Michel Foucault's "attitude of modernity" and modernists' and modernizers' reworkings of literary heritage through the sublation of premodern literary content and form into modern conceptions of literary history. Drawing on these parallels, the article reviews several points of convergence in contemporary Arabic literary historical analysis that limn Jabbari's approach to the Persianate world, which crosses between Persian and Urdu, the naskh and nastaʿlīq scripts, and Iran and India. It seeks out connections in the work and thought of Jabbari's interlocutors, such as Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār and N. M. Rashed; Iranian modernist poets Nīmā Yūshīj, Aḥmad Shāmlū, and Furūgh Farrukhzād; and the Arab "free verse" (shiʿr ḥurr) poets such as ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb. The article highlights how Jabbari's book proves that literary historians in the Persianate world were subject to modernization discourse in making themselves modern and therefore covered up aspects of their premodern heritage that did not fit their modernizing projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction to this forum on Alexander Jabbari's monograph The Making of Persianate Modernity (2023) introduces the scholarly conversation about Persianate literary modernity that has recently developed, and clarifies Jabbari's role in drawing these conversations together into a coherent subfield. The article situates this book in the historiography of the Persianate as a conceptual category and an object of critique, with particular attention to its extension into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the politics of Persianate modernity as a category for post-Cold War scholarship in the West and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a given Fact that The conditions of contemporary life are in a continuous process of change, and so are the conditions of individuses Lives. This fact Puts responsibility on Islam Scholars to connect these new conditions with their origines, and this is what is expressed in the context of this research by "modernization": its main function here is manifested in intervening through the mechanism of ijtihad in the aim to run out to the aspects of new emerging issues For the purpose of approaching it within the framework of Sharia and its legislative guidelines, in a precise form that to leads to assign the appropriate jurisprudential rulings to those new situations, without being a victim to extremism nor to negligence. The choice of making this subject came in this context as a research contribution to advance the explanatory function of the sciences of Islamic law on the one hand, and to discuss suspicions and limit their possible repercussions on the nation on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asian cities share a contested late colonial history. Calcutta (Kolkata) occupies a distinctive place in their emergence as modernising urban centres. Instead of viewing changes in Calcutta's markets merely as the products of colonial and racial hierarchies—or as the product of modernisation—mental maps of people moving through these spaces inform a deeper understanding. Attempts by the Calcutta municipality to 'modernise' markets using European assumptions about how urban markets work, failed to recognise the autonomous nature of indigenous 'mental maps'. The paper analyses these tensions through a street-level observational typology. An experiential legibility of urban spaces thus exposes an otherwise obscured haptic and psychological tension, as cities modernised, between a Westernised urban sensibility and an expanding autonomous space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In examining the religious implications of printing, there is a scholarly consensus that Protestant Christianity, rather than Catholicism, played a central role in popularising print technology by disseminating religious materials in vernacular languages. This article builds upon this widely accepted hypothesis and seeks to explore the religious aspects of print modernity in Kerala, a southern state in India. The focus of this study is on the Catholic Church's engagement with printing and the development of Catholic print capitalism in Kerala, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth century until the 1870s. This paper investigates how the Catholic Church interacted with and mediated with the printing press as an agent of modernity, particularly in response to the flourishing Protestant missionary engagements in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the first translations of Byron's 'The Isles of Greece' by Liang Qichao, Ma Junwu, Huang Kan and Hu Shi to highlight an essential facet of Chinese literary modernity – namely, the recourse to traditional poetic language and forms, which, though often dismissed as outdated and incapable of representing modern reality in the dominant narratives of Chinese literary history, nonetheless reflects a growing sense of urgency to find a new voice during the late Qing and early Republican periods. With considerable emphasis placed on the poetic form and narrative mode of both the original and its translations, this study facilitates a productive textual investigation into the temporal–spatial paradigm of progression and evolution of early modern Chinese poetry as well as modern Chinese literature from a historical perspective. The findings suggest that the poetic manipulations by the respective translators were in line with the nationalist discourse of the day and that their act of rewriting poetic tradition to integrate the legacy of the past into a new vision of the present established a far-reaching basis for the construction of Chinese literary modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the exploration of modernity and the conflicted selves in Abdolreza Kahani's film 'By No Reason', particularly examining how traditional and modern values create internal tensions in Iranian society. Topics include Kahani's use of absurdism to highlight societal contradictions, the conflict between modernity and tradition as a source of character struggle, and the impact of censorship on Kahani's career and cinematic style.

This study, based on the argument that the literary-aesthetic field is deeply intertwined with social, cultural, and political spheres, examines the societal, cultural, and economic transformations brought about by modernity, alongside the paradoxes these changes create, through a sociological and literary approaches. The rise of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism profoundly impacted not only production processes but also the social roles and identity perceptions of individuals. Drawing on the analyses of Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber, this study investigates how capitalism reduces individuals to functional entities, alienates them, desensitizes them, and weakens social bonds, rendering them anonymous. The article further explores how the promise of freedom offered by capitalist modernity paradoxically transforms into structures that limit individual autonomy. The paradoxical effects of modern capitalism on both individuals and society are also widely reflected in literary works. Nineteenth and twentieth-century literature extensively addresses the themes of loneliness, alienation, and identity crises brought about by capitalist modernity. In this context, the study explores how authors such as Dickens, Flaubert, Kafka, Camus, Orwell, and Beckett engage with the paradoxes of capitalist modernity in their works. By integrating social, economic, cultural, political, and literary analyses, this article offers a comprehensive perspective on the effects of modern capitalism on human beings, their imagination, and society as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom situates the historical origins of social movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by attributing their emergence to the rise of democracy, capitalism, and the nation-state. In this article, I challenge this scholarly orthodoxy by presenting primary sources and historical scholarship that demonstrate how the German Peasants' Revolt of 1524 and 1525 meets Charles Tilly's criteria for a modern social movement. By challenging the standard narrative of social movements as a product of modernity, this article breaks with the dichotomy between modern and premodern social movements and encourages us to rethink the concept of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores Machiavelli's perspective on the interplay between religion and political rule. Rather than being an enemy of religion itself, we argue that the Florentine thinker was critical of its particular interpretations and applications. Specifically, Machiavelli highlights the detrimental effects of certain religions and denominations (particularly Catholic Christianity) on virtue and political engagement, which (in his perspective) foster passivity and fatalism. On the other hand, Machiavelli sees religion as a tool for rulers to serve and defend their power. By dissecting Machiavelli's views, we unveil his nuanced approach to the political value of religion. In short, we will argue that Machiavelli diverged from classical Greek and Roman philosophical systems; his view of Christianity as a tool for civil obedience marks an important shift towards modern political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an alternative reading of the intellectual as a phenomenon that emerged in the context of fascination with colonial achievements, alongside a tendency to catch up with and be independent from it, all while being accompanied by a phenomenon based on the “worship of modernity,” which not only failed to critique it but also considered everything local as inherently backward. Since the intellectual regards their society as regressive and unworthy of being relied upon as a lever for advancement, but rather as the subject of change, they have no choice but to turn to power to present their modernist vision, ultimately becoming a part of the tools for its perpetuation and the reproduction of its domination and functionality. Based on the philosophy of “activation” and the attachment of theory to practice, this paper seeks to establish a conceptual framework for the “ practicing thinker, ” who is engaged with their community in producing change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study examines the approach taken by Muhammad Shahrour in his division of the Quran, aiming to reveal the methodological and scientific errors he made, as well as his explicit contravening of linguistic rules and the principles of faith and religion. This is explored through his applied study on the meanings of the terms (ballagh and ablagh) and (nazzal and anzal). Methodology: The researcher employed the inductive, analytical, and critical methods in this analysis. Results: One of the findings reached is that Shahrour's method of dividing the Quran into miraculous and non-miraculous is an innovative approach that distorts the facts. He reverses the roles of clear and ambiguous verses, making the clear ones ambiguous and the ambiguous ones clear, contrary to the explanations established by scholars of Quranic interpretation regarding the meanings of the Quranic texts. Recommendations: The study recommended further critique of Shahrour's intellectual legacy by presenting his views, discussing them, and responding to them in a systematic and scholarly manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the predominant forms of Buddhism in Southeast Asia are enchanted, some novel interpretations of Buddhism are disenchanted rejecting anything supernatural and metaphysical. One such case is the teaching of the controversial, blue-robed monk Ashin Nyāna in Burma/Myanmar. The aim of this article is, first, to examine Ashin Nyāna's own objectives of his doctrinal and moral reform of Buddhism, and how his followers make sense of his teaching. Second, it argues that Ashin Nyāna's reformist Buddhism, which is characterized by a this-worldly orientation and an absence of supernatural, metaphysical, and transcendent dimensions, can be understood as disenchantment in the Weberian sense and referred to as disenchanted Buddhism or a disenchanted Buddhist discourse that has emerged through a critique of enchanted forms of Buddhism, and in interplay with modern urban life. Third, the article suggests that the concept of a disenchanted Buddhist discourse might have some advantages as a comparative concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maritime museums occupy a challenging position when it comes to confronting environmental and social justice issues linked to colonial modernity, understood as five hundred years marked by European colonial expansion and exploitation. As institutions that emerged to celebrate national maritime exploits and dominion over the seas, they embody many of the features of colonial modernity itself. In light of the climate emergency, this article examines two recently opened or renovated French maritime museums to analyse the extent to which they are reorienting their focus and embracing more critical, oceanic ways of thinking about human relationships with the sea. An oceanic perspective recognises the fluid, interconnected nature of the oceans and the need for more holistic approaches to environmental sustainability and climate justice. The analysis reveals tensions between nationalist perspectives and emerging efforts to tell more environmentally attuned stories. Significant scope remains for maritime museums to shift their interpretive frameworks towards the seas as entities worthy of preservation in their own right, rather than as resources to be managed for human use and profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern and material development in the name of progress has always hindered and displaced a few specific communities like tribal, Adivasis, or indigenous people in India. In a developing country like India, most modern projects are implemented following the Nehruvian model of development, often criticised as 'flawed.' Once constructed, while much fuss and hype are made about such 'Modern' projects, the sufferings and plight of the surrounding local communities are often neglected, and their voice remains unheard. Analysing Orijit Sen's graphic narrative River of Stories (1994, 2022), this article focuses on the 'visuality of inauspicious' in the form of constructing the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the country. The Dam displaced several Adivasis, and their society also 'dislodged from its ideal state' (Sen 2018, 110) and caused environmental degradation in the surrounding areas. This article underscores how the usurping of the villager's land in the name of modernity, development, and national progress evokes the process of colonisation and its associated violence. The article also explores the environmental movement in the form of 'Environmentalism of the Poor' that rose against this project, and while analysing the movement, I discuss in detail how the villagers adopted an eco-conscious and Gandhian non-violent approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notions of strength and weakness of will appear at central junctures in Nietzsche's philosophy, figuring, for example, into his critique of modernity (BGE 212) and his engagement with the free will debate (BGE 21). Despite the centrality of these notions for Nietzsche's philosophical project, little scholarly attention has been devoted to examining how Nietzsche actually conceives of strength and weakness of will. Instead, it is commonly assumed that Nietzsche simply follows his philosophical predecessors in identifying weakness with akrasia. In this paper, I challenge this reading, arguing that the primary kind of agential failure that Nietzsche associates with weakness is irresoluteness , understood as the failure to persist in one's intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Swiss Alps have been a tourist destination for the past two centuries, promising guests extraordinary holiday experiences and providing local populations with a means of subsistence. Based on field research in a Swiss German-speaking touristic village, this article discusses the mundane experiences of capitalist time in a wealthy yet uncertain context. By analyzing the temporal debates permeating the valley, I argue that modern, capitalist time has a slippery or disorientating quality for those who experience it, especially in Alpine regions, which are either dominated by tourism or prone to outmigration. In a second turn, I bring the question of inequality back into the temporal equation of capitalist time by dwelling on the experience of migrant hospitality workers who are made 'temporal others'. I conclude on the unevenly distributed capacity to temporally reason between insiders and outsiders as well as the unequally disorientating quality of life under capitalist globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides an analysis of texts and images (memes) that have been widely distributed and discussed within the contemporary fascist/national socialist spectrum, and that articulate a pointed antagonism toward modernity. The meaning of the term 'modernity' is seldom clearly defined, but it can be generally understood, in this context, as referring to liberal or progressive stances on current hot-button topics concerning race, gender or sexuality as well as broader post-Enlightenment conceptions of democracy, equality or human rights. It is often contrasted with a mythologized past and an idealized future. Fascists thus style themselves as an elite-yet-beleaguered minority with the courage to contradict modern consensus values, despite all social or material costs. In particular, this essay takes a closer look at the online genre known as 'fashwave'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a pervasive term in Pier Paolo Pasolini's work, 'nostalgia' remains theoretically enigmatic and often politically contradictory. This article argues for the critical potential of nostalgia in Pasolini's political aesthetics through a seemingly unlikely subject: his 1968 film and novel Teorema (Theorem). Set in post-war Milan, Theorem depicts the transformative encounter between a godlike visitor and five archetypes of the bourgeois household. After he leaves, they must reckon with his departure. I suggest that Pasolini's formal and theoretical interest in nostalgia is crucial to understanding Theorem's aesthetic invocation of the sacred, which the film stages through an interplay of presence and absence in bodies, spaces and temporalities. Unpacking the etymological roots algos ('pain') and nostos ('return'), my reading forges intertextual connections within Pasolini's oeuvre while also suggesting that Pasolini's oblique, materially rooted nostalgia encourages a re-evaluation of the critical productivity of this term more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Fitzpatrick's life and work encourages reflection on the enduring myth of the father, including as it appears in contemporary debates about the place of canonical figures on university syllabi. I suggest that a simple call for the destruction of father figures misses one of the key insights offered by Fitzpatrick: the story of the father is the ur-myth of modernity. As we criticise the legacies of fathers, whether in the canon or otherwise, we miss this revelation and, inadvertently re-circulate monumental stories of patriarchal and colonial origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic study seeks to position Turkish women within the lucrative global bridal industry, which is today heavily influenced by the style, aesthetics and consumer values of the American wedding. It will add to the existing literature by examining Turkish brides' participation in transnational networks that promote the commodification of weddings in Turkey – a country where, for many, weddings were until quite recently low-budget affairs designed to maximize newlywed profits. We will explore how such networks establish and reinforce bridal rules and codes through wedding props such as gowns, cakes, jewellery, flatware, china and honeymoons. By unpacking the complexities, symbolism and meaning of the contemporary Turkish bride, we will move beyond simple binaries to examine how tradition and modernity overlap and intersect and how modernity is an intrinsic part of the evolution of traditional Turkish wedding practices. This study will also critique processes of (American) cultural assimilation and reveal how Turkish brides are negotiating western trends, influences and the 'wedding-industrial complex'. Through lifestyle marketing and other industry practices, these networks are prescribing how Turkish women – regardless of their socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, educational and class status and cultural and religious beliefs – should perform the bridal role. Moreover, because of its ties to aesthetics, style and fashion, the lavish American-style wedding has also become the ultimate platform for the display of purchasing power in Turkey – a way to replicate the conspicuous consumption of the wealthier, leisured classes that, for many Turks, has become synonymous with modernity and elevated social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A close reading of literary representations of Johannesburg's public transport in the early decades of the 20th century gives insight into the intricate way in which freedom, mobility, and narratives of progressive modernity interlink with urban mobility regimes of public transportation. The literary representations mark public transport simultaneously as progressive and oppressive, depending on access. Where access is denied, public vehicles become part of an oppressive racist mobility regime and exclude individuals from formative experiences of collective belonging. The present analysis engages with selected concepts from the field of mobility studies, namely Cresswell's thoughts on the relationship of mobility and modern citizenship, Bissell's observations regarding 'mobile collectives', and the idea of 'throwntogetherness' by the social geographer Massey. These will be used to analyze the gatekeeping function of public transport in representations of early Johannesburg, where black, male, urban subjecthood is negotiated against white urban modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The main aim of this article is to broaden the notion of strategic intent in public relations. It also develops an understanding of the social value of what can be defined as the first modern health communication campaign in Europe based on strategic intents and the development of modernity. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on both historical research and empirical material from the Norwegian tuberculosis campaign from 1889 up to 1913, when Norwegian women achieved suffrage. The campaign is analysed in the framework of modernity and social theory. The literature on lobbying and social movements is also used to develop a theoretical framework for the notion of strategic intent. Findings: The study shows that strategic intent can be divided into two layers: (1) the implicit strategic intent is the real purpose behind the communication efforts, whereas (2) the explicit intent is found directly in the communication efforts. The explicit intent may be presented as a solution for the good of society at the right political moment, giving an organisation the possibility to mobilise for long-term social changes, in which could be the implicit intent. Originality/value: The distinction between explicit and implicit strategic intent broadens our understanding on how to make long-term social changes as well as how social and political changes occur in modern societies. The article also gives a historical account of what is here defined as the first modern health communication campaign in Europe and its social value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]