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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 this paper, I examine some ways in which Indian artists explore tradition and modernity by fusing devotional music and spiritual themes with popular music. This is illustrated through examples such as ‘Krishna’ (1996) by the indipop group, Colonial Cousins, as well as works such as ‘Aathma Raama’ (2012), ‘Vaishnava Jana To’ (2019), and ‘All Divine’ (2022) by hip-hop artist Brodha V. My analysis draws upon established theoretical frameworks including cultural hybridity, globalisation theory, transculturation, and modernity. While spiritual motifs appear to be inextricably linked with traditional Indian musics, this is rarely viewed through the lens of modernity. Through a series of case studies, I explore key instances indicative of sonic conversations negotiating the global and local, emphasising the role of language and global cultural flow in facilitating both resistance and transculturation. Beyond uncovering contemporary engagements with spirituality, case studies reveal how Indian modernity is increasingly characterised by a manner of hybridity. Ultimately, the analysis contributes to our understanding of hybrid modernities and postcolonial identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that, in Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Boris Max's pronouncement to his client, "This thing's bigger than you," indicates not only the aporetic status of Black being—and ultimately, all singularities—in modernity but also the process through which this hard knot can begin to be unraveled. The communist lawyer at once identifies his client with Mary Dalton's murder and its aftermath ("This thing's Bigger") and, through the identification, seems to miss the singularity of his being ("bigger than you"). The double gesture repeats Karl Marx's identification of the proletariat as the particularity that encompasses the "concrete universal." Condensed in Max's speech act, Wright's argument turns Marx's characterization of capitalist modernity into one of diasporic modernity. In several of his texts, Wright indicates that, while the modern era promised the emergence of this self-determining, rational being, the birth was aborted by the "tragic error" of the African slave trade and the consequent forms of bad faith that are characteristic of modern racial identities. This history of bad faith has prevented the actualization of modernity's promise; with Boris Max's formula for Bigger's aporetic being, Wright seeks to precipitate modernity's second coming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The author reflects on her experience of co-editing a special issue of the "Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies" with Luisa Elena Delgado and Oscar Vázquez, which focused on modernity in Spain, 20 years after its publication. She describes how working with Delgado influenced their thinking about Spain and placed their work in art history in direct dialogue with a new generation of Peninsular studies scholars. She explains why they described modernity in Spain as recalcitrant.

I will in this article use Fircks as a point of departure for trying to understand the complexities involved in the use of the concept of mindfulness. As will be seen, mindfulness can be traced to a decoupling from a religious background and subsequent appropriation within several Western contexts. This will then be used for a discussion of how to deal with the historicity of the phenomena studied within cultural psychology. Here two reminders will be suggested, namely understanding phenomena through a context-sensibility and at the same time being aware of any disciplinary parochialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethno-nationalist historiography in South Asia primarily emerged as the postcolonial critique of British colonialism. Alternatively, the anti-caste historiographers have criticized the postcolonial historiography for reflecting the similar hegemonic bias towards the possible pre-or-post colonial histories of the internally colonized classes and castes. In this article, while appreciating with epistemic humility the equally legitimate position of Michel Boivin, I interrogate the concept of the 'declassed' caste groups as it tends to relativize the erasure of caste, the structural aspect that is peripheral to Boivin's avowed goal of capturing diversity instead of difference, but central to the contemporary critical anti-caste scholarship that I rely on as an alternative framework of reference. Contending his selective epistemic prioritizing of the privileged Amil, Khoja, Mirza castes, I argue that Boivin's archival ethnography has not effectively attended to the embedded caste-based political orders. He has failed to adequately address the possible erasure of caste, thereby adding to the ahistorical portrayal of the underprivileged castes such as Kolhi, Bheel, Meghwar, and Jogi. Boivin's rendering of the 'Sufi Paradigm', therefore, is in continuation with the scholarship on Sindh that undermines hierarchical differences based on caste discrimination, and facilitates Sindhi progressive intelligentsia to historicize the privileged caste myth of caste-neutral Sufi Sindh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging with Amitav Ghosh's recent essays that link imperial modernity's mechanistic view of the world to the novel's failure to imagine climate change, this article examines how Ghosh's fiction attempts to dislocate narratives of modernity to reveal a world constructed by capital and naturalized through reason. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists on the introduction of Western science to India, this article returns to Ghosh's first novel, The Circle of Reason , to focus on the intimate scale of the transformations that imperial modernity enacted on the human body and psyche. Though underrepresented in scholarship on Ghosh, this novel is a critical site for understanding Ghosh's view of how the ideology of modernity gets entrenched as scientific reason, reshaping humankind's relationship with the human body and the surrounding world. The novel's representation of the body, moreover, proposes an intimate and uncanny space that discloses alternative ways of imagining the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the complexities of how refugees and asylum seekers navigate various temporal regimes imposed by asylum and reception policies. Topics include the power dynamics involved in the synchronization and fragmentation of time, the role of temporal representations and maps in coping mechanisms, and the broader implications of these temporalities in shaping modernity and the construction of Otherness.

Bruno Latour's concept of translation provides ways to both extend the 'material turn' in translation studies and conceptualise translation as process. This concept cannot be understood apart from Latour's critique of Modern epistemology which requires an alternative conception of temporality and, in the context of the Anthropocene, provides a means to imagine futures and pasts beyond the tropes of growth vs contraction or progress vs regression. In this article, Latour's concept of translation is read through Anna Tsing's anthropological account of the matsutake mushroom trade, engaging this thick descriptive case-study to further develop translation as times of indeterminate encounters. This approach provides a means to conceptualise translation in terms of material agency, from which notions of translation-as-meaning, and linguistic translation can be more credibly theorised, contributing both within and beyond translation studies to discussions on new materialist philosophy and its implications, arguing for the importance of translational thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing attention to storification of assessments (i.e., embedding a storyline into a non‐storified assessment) in research and practice and to gamified and game‐based assessment in general. However, there is a surprising lack of agreement and of recommendations regarding what level of fantasy of the storyline one should choose for the storification from the perspective of applicant reactions. A distinction is typically made between fantasy (e.g., fighting aliens) and realistic (e.g., workday simulations) storylines, with both choices having their advantages and disadvantages. In this study, a sample of 195 participants was shown either a storified realistic test, a storified fantasy test, or a non‐storified test. Afterwards, they rated various applicant reaction measures. Both storified assessments were rated equally positively on perceived modernity of the organization and enjoyment but the storified realistic test was superior to the storified fantasy test in terms of perceived job‐relatedness, procedural fairness, organizational attractiveness, and clarity of work activity. Thus, the level of fantasy of a storyline in a storified assessment plays an important role for applicant reaction variables, whereby the overall pattern of results showed that the storified realistic test was rated most favorably, followed by the non‐storified test, and the storified fantasy assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Martin Luther's pietas and Zhu Xi's Cheng‐Jing are not purely empirical emotional categories, but transcendent emotional categories of faith. By comparing Luther's pietas and Zhu Xi's Cheng‐Jing, this article reveals how Christianity and Confucianism constructed individual emotional and spiritual transcendence in early modernity. By doing so, it highlights both similarities and fundamental differences between Neo‐Confucianism and Protestantism in matters of faith, thus revealing their significance for modern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the planning history of the first major housing projects built in Soviet Leningrad: the Traktornaya Ulitsa and Serafimov site housing estates. Initiated by municipal authorities in 1924, they were built according to the designs of its own Design Buro and the architects Aleksandr Nikolsky, Aleksandr Gegello, and Grigorii Simonov in 1925–1926. Spearheading the reconstruction of a large industrial suburb, these projects offer an original example of the role of housing in urban development in the Soviet Union and in one of Europe’s largest cities. The planning history of the projects illuminates the way urban development unfolded in the early Soviet context: through practice and negotiation with multiple contexts, both the historic, imperial city and the revolution. The article shows the exemplary quality of these projects and their power and means to reinvent the historic forms and meanings of the city, and reconfigure its spatial hierarchies. It analyses the sources and means at play from revolutionary ideals and avant-garde ideas on form to western models of housing, the surrounding classical city and Byzantine and Russian vernacular architecture. It thus delineates the means through which architecture acts as an instrument of social and cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his poetry and fiction, Alai creates a historiography of Eastern Tibet replete with the grandeur and magnificence of the past occasionally interposed with some oppressive cultural practices. It is a historiography motivated and energized by nostalgic lyricism, which helps locate and construct a symbolic Tibetan ethnicity. This article proposes that Alai's nostalgic lyricism critically reflects on the inversion of loss and the compensation of lack, thus articulating alternatives against the discontent of the present. In so doing, Alai formulates a minority position against the forces of deterministic historicism and discourse of linear modernity that have constantly placed the minority subject in modern China under threat of erasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its great popularity in both the scientific and non-scientific fields, Max Weber's concept of "disenchantment" remains mostly obscure and in recent years it has become the center of an interdisciplinary debate on modernity involving both Weberian specialists and non-specialists. The aim of the article is to return to Weber's text and analyze Weber's use of the term and the meaning of what he calls the "disenchantment of the world." To do so I follow Taylor's and Schluchter's insight and investigate how Weber would picture an initial condition of enchantment. However, while these interpreters did not explore the Weberian perspective on magic, I instead show that not only Weber had a precise and original conception of magic as the primitive attitude toward the world, but also that this conception may clarify the meaning and dynamics of the process of disenchantment in both the spheres of religion and of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from J. Fabian’s critique of anthropology and its study of the ‘primitive’ Other, Fernando Esposito discusses R. Koselleck’s work as a critique of historical practice, not least the practice of periodization. While often understood as ‘merely’ a contribution to the question of temporalities, Koselleck actually aimed to develop a new way of writing and understanding history. Seen in this light, his work on historical time is really about a fundamental theoretical reorientation of the discipline. This fundamental reinvention of history was the central problem Koselleck wrestled with. Based on his personal experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War, he came to the conviction that history had no meaning and no goal, and therefore undertook a historicization of historicism, i.e. a re-evaluation of the way history had been written up to his own times. Koselleck’s historicization of historicism was a decisive chronopolitical act. It was catalyzed by his intention to debunk an unhistorical understanding of history and to replace it with a self-reflective, truly historicist historicism, a metahistory reflecting upon the ‘conditions of possible histories’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses relationships between racism and antisemitism. It focuses on three major contestations that have taken place during the post-Second World War era(s) regarding the ways racism, antisemitism and the relationships between them should be analysed. The first examines the different academic disciplinary approaches from which racism and antisemitism need to be studied. The second concerns the relationship between antisemitism, racism and modernity, introducing the notion of 'new antisemitism', which has become entangled in this contestation. The third examines how understanding racism and antisemitism relates to the theory and politics of intersectionality. The article argues against exclusionary constructions of racism resulting from different forms of identity politics. It calls for an inclusive definition of racism in which vernacular and specific forms of racism can be contextualised and analysed within an encompassing de-centred non-Eurocentric definition of racism. Within such an analytical framework, antisemitism should be seen as a form of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Viennese waltz was the first vernacular, modern dance. Modern, here, Carrie’s the meaning of modernity. Such dances have an expressive relationship with the body and this requires a specific discursive understanding of what a body is and how it can be experienced. That is, modern, vernacular dancing is a function of the modern body. The modern body evolved as part of the social transformation of society from a feudal order to one founded on capitalism and industrialisation. The modern body is understood, and experienced, as limited by the body’s physical form, distinct from its environment. The body is the site of the individual, and, at the same time, it is the expressive site of mental stimulation. Notoriously, René Descartes theorised this construction in terms of a distinction between the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’ in Meditationes de Prima Philosophia published in 1641. A problem for modern, bourgeois society then became, how to control the expressiveness of the body in dance. This problem of management pervades modernity and is central to this article. The Viennese Waltz was the first modern dance, the first manifestation of dance as individual expression and, consequently, the first time the problem of how to control expression presented itself, and what the consequences might be if the dancing body was not controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on assemblage theory to propose a new theoretical understanding of modernity. While the conceptual framing is meant for modernity at large, this paper locates its conceptual discussion in the context of tourism in Macao and illustrates how plasmatic thinking, the new conceptual framework proposed, advances analysis of aspiration, exploitation and freedom of its tour guides. Plasmatic thinking helps examinations of tourism labour to engage with the fragile and fluid nature of the sociomaterial environments. Instead of structures, networks or fluidities, plasmatic thinking sees the world as composed of 'plasmas' – 'charged' sociomaterial clustering of objects, humans and the processes between them. Plasmas are a form of charged matter falling outside solid, liquid and gaseous states and metaphorises the fragility and impermanence of sociomaterial situations for plasmas disintegrates when discharged. The attention to charges and fragility of plasmas helps describes both pandemic levels shocks and everyday disruptions. Through a plasmatic analysis of the falling apart and coming together of such plasmas and how they bring about significant consequences to Macao's tourism, I showcase plasmatic thinking as a theoretical approach which vividly uncovers the fragility and fluidity of modernity and the workings of power in our sociomaterial worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While not primarily a social theorist in the classical sense, E. F. Schumacher's interdisciplinary thought helped galvanise ecological social theory and the ecological movement more broadly. In this article, we introduce a special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory dedicated to engaging with E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful on its 50th anniversary. We provide both an overview of his life and work before locating Small is Beautiful within both its contemporary context and within today's social theoretical literature. As we show, Schumacher was a fierce critic of capitalist modernity and its 'gigantist' tendencies. As we discuss below, he advocated a metaphysical turn in economics, the implementation of intermediate technology and a reorientation of social practices in line with a more ecologically attuned political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are numerous conceptions of violence today, such as physical, psychological, emotional, structural, and epistemic. The question of which social phenomena are to be described as violence is itself a matter of furious dispute. In social theory, there is a widespread tendency to distinguish between 'modern' and 'postmodern' conceptions of violence. In this scheme, modern violence is primarily physical, while postmodern violence takes places across a broad spectrum of forms. The paper questions this binary. The co-occurrence and conflict between these forms of violence leads to a third form, which I call refigured violence. The refiguration of violence can be observed in three developments, which are mediatisation, polycontexturalisation, and translocalisation. I provide one illustration of these considerations with the example of so-called shock sites on the internet. In so doing, I emphasise that the sociology of knowledge can provide a valuable perspective for making sense of contemporary discourses about violence in all their complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I introduce the concept of “transcosmogenerationality” to emphasize the sustained and dynamic significance of Ancestral relationalities to particular Indigenous modernities. I draw on the case of certain Akha communities in Southeast Asia and southwest China who are channeling wealth from booms in cash crops, such as coffee, rubber, and tea, into the “ritual economy” bridging the parallel and mutually dependent worlds of Ancestors and descendants. These communities are further channeling their wealth into local and transregional efforts to sustain and vitalize their Ancestral Ways and cultivate a pan‐Akha identitarian movement. Their motivations are to ensure their Ancestors remain always living and thus close to and of moral significance for the living living, sustain their and their descendants' receipt of Ancestral geeqlanq or vital life‐giving energy, redistribute wealth, and promote the status of their families and clans. I emphasize that growing wealth and access to consumer goods among Akha has led not to the decline, but rather, an intensification of Ancestral relationalities, which they view as the very source of this wealth. I further argue that Akha rites of transcosmogenerational commensality are especially concrete and revealing of the co‐presence and conviviality between and among Ancestors, Elders, and descendants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we dwell tenderly in the ruins of the modern university? This paper engages a hopeful, collaborative, and sensory methodology to imagine possibilities for research and researcher. As academic women navigating the decay of the neoliberal university amid the shadowy spectre of the 'ideal' academic, we explore our lived experiences, identities, and questions. For us, managing modernity's disorientation and dislocation means showing up differently, with new tools, new theoretical frames, and new ways of relating. From our experiential and aesthetic inquiry, tendrils of possibility for what research does, has been, is, and could be, are emerging. Our dwelling together (co-sensing in radical tenderness) helps us see beyond the thicket of institutional requirements towards a more hopeful and collective existence – for if the sense of separation instilled by modernity is a social disease, healing must be a communal endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Serres's natural contract is not merely a proposal for an alternative legal or political paradigm. It offers something deeper: a new imaginary to unsettle and confront the deep assumptions of classical social contract theories and their retrojected justification: the state of nature. The argument of this article is that Serres systematically unpicks the conditions of possibility of the contractual paradigm in the modern social imaginary, replacing them with an original noise, a primacy of parasitic relationships and a telos of symbiosis. This reframes the natural contract as the visible profile of a comprehensive social and natural imaginary that radically refigures society and ecology otherwise than on the basis of primacy of reciprocal exchange relationships between self-sufficient individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calvino's apology of multiplicity starts with the exposure, revealed by his take on typically modern novels, of some fundamental contradictions underlaying the modern quest for knowledge, which are definitely not alien to our day education. Then, when Calvino goes on to explore how twentieth century literature transcended those difficulties, he provides us with a valuable inspiration for how education could cope with its ambiguous relation to knowledge, still deeply rooted in the modern approach. Guided by Calvino's readings, we are shown that literature can succeed in its epistemological (r)evolution. Meanwhile, education, as it seems, is still struggling to overcome its entanglement with the unreachable goal of teaching everything about everything, to cope with the infinity and complexity of that everything, making reflecting upon education's epistemological stance in the twenty-first century very much a necessity, one that I will try to pursue in the following pages After a methodological introduction, the paper starts by placing Calvino's examination of beautiful, yet unsuccessful literary attempts at an exhaustive account of the world in the context of education, to show how their unattainable ambitions are mirrored in pedagogical practice, pointing out to the "modern spirit" underlying both the aforementioned novels' and contemporary education's relation to knowledge. Then, with the help of J. Rancière's take on education, I will try and make educational sense of Calvino's account of Bouvard and Pécuchet failed quest to know everything there is to be known, and relate it to the particular model of knowledge at work in education, one that needs to be questioned. Finally, I will draw on Calvino's praise of "the contemporary novel as (...) a method of knowledge" (SM, p. 105), and particularly on his analysis of Perec's masterpiece La Vie mode d'emploi, and his rehabilitation of the idea of arbitrariness, to outline some reflections about how an educational multiplicity, where "everything is in everything" could come to life (Rancière, 1991, p. 26). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Zeitschrift für Psychodrama und Soziometrie is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the contemporary world, women have been considered in a variety of ways, including as a subject for the propagation of modernism, religious traditionalism, and as a criterion for the development of citizenship rights. In the doctrine of the National Socialist Party of Germany, women were regarded as a means to augment the country’s political-military influence and increase its population. Simultaneously, certain journals, including “Nameh Iran Bastan,” observed the treatment of women as a means of modernity and a factor in the expansion of the population and the establishment of a robust central government in Iran. This research seeks to determine the position of women in this journal and the extent to which the views and policies of Nazi Germany were reflected in it. This research was carried out in a descriptive-analytical manner and based on the content analysis of the pro German weekly periodical “Nameh Iran Bastan” over the course of four years. The results of research shows that according to the defence of this weekly newspaper to fascism and a modern understanding of women in society, they are referred to as an effective tool for childbearing, thereby enhancing the military power of the country. Contrary to the conventional perspective, which prohibits women from participating in sports and political-social activities, this contemporary perspective posits that women are semi-divine beings who are responsible for the formation of the nation. They are expected to fulfil their most significant responsibilities, which include childbearing and raising children, when they engage in social activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of foreign literature in China is closely related to the country's modernization process and the rise of modern academic thought. The translation, research, and teaching of foreign languages and literatures are also linked to the rise and development of Chinese higher education in the modern time. This paper examines the historical progression of English and American Literary Studies in China from the perspective of these two correlations while discussing the resulting intellectual and cultural impact and consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent scholarship on the novel and Middle Eastern modernities, this article examines how Ottoman intellectuals theorized the novel as a realist genre in the nineteenth century as a way of including Ottoman literary knowledge within global novel theories. In the late Ottoman context, the novel was articulated in terms of conceptual separations (primarily as truth/imitation–fiction/creation, which then develops into nature-beauty and romance-realism binaries). Such conceptual divides inform both the history and the theory of the novel by Ottoman intellectuals. Revisiting the problem of realism in light of the dialectics that these divides built up, this article argues that they dialogically establish realism as a symbiotic regime of representation that merges mimeticism and transcendentalism, which had aesthetic as well as political implications. More importantly, negotiating the tension between imitation and creation through Ottoman-Islamicate terms, Ottoman realism complicates the relation between literature and secularization as it speaks to the institutionalization of modern literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can one write the modern legal history of the Gulf states without projecting onto the past the contemporary hegemony of the modern nation-state? What narratives other than secularization stories might be told? And what archives are available to us to facilitate such an endeavor? This paper addresses these questions with reference to Qatar, where a powerful sharia judiciary developed under the British Protectorate maintained its autonomy until the 1990s. The publications of the Presidency of Sharia Courts (est. 1958) and the work of its long-time president, Shaykh ʿAbdallāh b. Zayd Āl Maḥmūd (1911–97), suggest that oil wealth, modern state bureaucracy, and the British legal order expanded – rather than curtailed – the scope of sharia law in Qatar in the course of the twentieth century. Sharia scholars and institutions reinforced the rule of law, contributed to minimizing the role of customary norms in society, replaced commercial courts and alternative modes of dispute resolution, and helped establish an autonomous legal sphere separate from political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributors to Mere Light ask how ‘light’ falls in and through the non-visual medium of the literary text, illuminating that medium’s potential to initiate an experience of immediacy. While we might look to the luminous inscriptions of medieval mystics for its template, a fascinating post-Enlightenment exemplar of this paradox is the literary ‘self-recording’ of the deafblind modern ‘miracle’ Helen Keller. ‘Illustrated’ with often surreal photographs that both marked their modernity and complemented their thematic preoccupation with the dynamics of light, Keller’s nine autobiographies strove to replicate her primarily ‘tactual’ sense experience in graphic language while tendering apparently eyewitness images of light. Where these literary dissimulations bring the body of Keller’s disabled I into view, they develop a complex ‘sense of light’ as vibrant, self-actualising literary metaphor, capable of moving between sight and touch, and thus beyond the limits of both. Projecting its speaking I as light’s writing alongside illustrative photographs that projected that I as light-written, Keller’s life-writing synthesises sight and touch. Epitomised in her experimental The World I Live In (1908), this was to ‘photo’ synthesise the mimetic pretenses of post-Enlightenment visualising technologies with a transhistorical disability aesthetics oriented around peripheral – hence invisible – embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have begun the work of untangling the deep yet occulted functioning of fossil fuels in our symbolic cultures. This essay contributes to growing understanding of how narrative forms interact with hydrocarbons by reading Dymphna Cusack’s engagement with coal in her 1953 novel Southern Steel through her use of melodrama. Set in the Australian coalopolis turned steel city of Newcastle, Southern Steel contrasts the lives of those who benefit from the city’s coal-fired industries with the struggles of those who are victimised by them. In this way Cusack dramatises the primal ethical conflict of fossil fuel modernity, between the forces of carbon capitalism and what Bob Johnson calls the ‘fossil unconscious’: our repressed knowledge of hydrocarbons’ earthly origins, elemental power and outsized harms. Drawing on Peter Brooks’ influential reading of melodrama as a ‘piercing of repression’, I argue that in Southern Steel, Cusack harnesses the melodramatic mode to bring the fossil unconscious to the surface of her realism, forcing recognition of carbon capitalism’s multifaceted harms and ethical failings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ‘construction manual’ tries to deal with the paradoxes inherent in so many attempts to define modernity: the try to construct themselves a foundation as a starting point of their own development, just to identify this base as void in retrospect. The solution to this paradox suggested here, however, does not call for the abandonment of modernity as a term or concept altogether, but for a revised conception of modernity: an understanding that does not define modernity as a starting or end point of development, but (only) as the respective present. In other words: we need a new form of history. The alternative advocated here is to understand historical time as a network of ‘chronoferences’, i.e. a history that is not about chronologically consistent development, but about temporal relations between present and absent times that are kept present by actors and practices. This could constitute a non-chronocentric form of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her historicisation of the concept of the ‘Sattelzeit,’ Julia Angster argues that the term does not represent a meaningful definition of a specific historical epoch. Instead, it serves as source material for analysing the notions of West German historians during the 1970s. Although their conception of the ‘Sattelzeit’ built on the work of R. Koselleck, it simplifies his concept by transforming an analytical tool of conceptual history into a starting point for social history. It enabled the conception of the Western world, understood as the epitome of ‘modernity’, as a counterpart to a non-modern other. This, in turn, was influenced by modernisation theories developed by US sociology in the 1950s, ultimately aimed at guiding US policies in the ‘development’ of the ‘Third World’. Modernity thus became a political goal and a result of economic development, to be perceived in the European past as well as in the present of the ‘developing world’. In the 1970s, this understanding of ‘modernity’ was crucial for West German historiography and politics, both trying to inscribe themselves into the modern world of the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This medievalist perspective reflects on the paradoxical relationship between Modernity and the Middle Ages, based on the author’s research into temporalities in the central Middle Ages. When dealing with modernity, she argues, medievalists encounter an ‘already here’-feeling on two instances: the medieval roots of everything modern, and the dynamics of historical development, typically attributed to modernity. This particularly concerns dealings with the future: While the idea of an open, malleable future may in fact be the characteristic feature of modernity, both ‘temporal consciousness’ and the shaping of the future are also characteristics of medieval temporalities. More precisely, different concepts of time can be distinguished among different social groups and spaces. Although they all ultimately operated within the framework of providential history, the future was conceived in very different ways and as something that could be planned. Medieval temporalities provide examples of alternative, non-linear concepts of time. However, we can only recognise and utilise the alterity of such concepts if we retain the concept of ‘modernity’, against which we can delineate the differences. Therefore, ‘the modern’ and ‘the medieval’ can only be thought of reciprocally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a focus on a contemporary corpus of twenty-first-century Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek fiction that questions the peripheralization of these countries in European discourse, this essay aims to discuss Southern Europe as a literary space. Published around the 2008 financial crisis, these novels capture how the crisis’s onset precipitated the demise of a set of cultural, political, and institutional values previously taken for granted. Despite their national and local specificities, novels such as O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas (2002) by Lídia Jorge, Crematorio (2007) by Rafael Chirbes, Psomi, paideia, eleftheria (2012) by Petros Markaris, and I Chironi trilogy by Marcello Fois, critically reflect upon the long-standing realities of unequal development, historical hierarchies, and ambiguous positions within Europe, as well as upon deep-rooted orientalist perceptions of Europe’s South. A major trope cross-cuts these four novels: the so-called “economic miracles” of the second half of the twentieth century and their economic, political, cultural and environmental destructive drift as a major consequence of the accelerated modernization of late capitalism. Through our case studies, we develop our formal argument by exploring a crucial shared plot trigger: the death of a character as a metaphor for the ruins of a fading or collapsed modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the 19th century, anthropology rode the coat-tails of modernity, adopting new printing technologies, following new travel networks, and gaining increasing access to Indigenous people as colonialism spread and new policies were developed to contain and control people in settler-colonial states. The early innovator in kinship studies Lewis Henry Morgan and his two greatest proteges, Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt, working respectively in the United States, Fiji, and Australia, epitomised this conflation of governance, technologies of representation, and anthropology. They corresponded on the alterity of kinship systems across increasingly regularised postal routes, and developed new forms of collecting and new diagrammatic representations of kinship using developments at the press. Nineteenth-century kinship studies were focused exclusively on relationships formed through biology and descent, and there was little recognition of kinship making beyond these forms. This was especially significant for Howitt, whose closest Aboriginal interlocutor, Tulaba, claimed him as a brogan (brother), according to Gunaikurnai kinship paradigms. This article tracks the links between the collection and publication of kinship material in the questionnaires and the books of the latter part of the 19th century across the English-speaking world and the outcomes for Indigenous peoples, as arguments for distinctive kinship systems helped define their 'primitiveness' and dismissed Aboriginal attempts to forge kinship links across the settler/Indigenous divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, art history has repeatedly renewed interest in a number of the most important artists of various periods, especially Rembrandt. Research, both on his art and on the large legacy of knowledge and documentation concerning his working processes, should add to his influence on certain of his followers and among Bulgarian artists. Rembrandt's plastic and professional approach is expectedly and unexpectedly found in dialogue with a number of our artists, such as Karl Yordanov, Acad. Iliya Petrov, Kiril Gyulemetov, Prof. Petar Chuklev, Yavora Petrova, and others. On the other hand, it is the innovativeness of the Dutch master that adds certainty to the paths to modernity, which is highlighted in a number of notes, diaries, and interviews of our artists, including those of Prof. . Lyubomir Dalchev, Boris Angelushev, and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a review of the book "Birth of Modernity and the Governmentalization of the State: (Geo)political History of the Arts of Governing in Michel Foucault" written by Luis Félix Blengino. The author analyzes the relationship between government and war, as well as the influence of Europe on the rest of the world and the economic expansion through war in the emergence and development of liberalism. The book also examines the shifts in Foucault's thinking about modernity and governmentality, and how power transforms into biopower. The author structures the book into four chapters that address different aspects of political theory and are aimed at university students and academics in the field. [Extracted from the article]

The purpose of this article is to support the idea that art is an exploration of conflicts. To achieve this goal, at first it is necessary to understand that a key to interpretation is to assume that conflicts are constitutive of every social bond, and that a harmonious society is a contradiction in terms. In a second moment, we will understand that the conflict will be located in the novel as the fundamental setting where modernity occurs. In a third moment, the questioning of the crisis will take us to the psychoanalytic assumptions to understand the relationship between conflict, modernity and identity based on the concepts of sublimation, oblivion and mourning. Finally, we will try to determine how the three previous moments are synthesized in anthropological vulnerability as a point of contact in the relationship between literature and philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex semantic aspects of "Transmodernity" by Enrique Dussel and "New Cultural Mixing" by Juan Carlos Scannone within the context of how Christianity's liberating philosophical framework contributes to the idea of "universality". This reconstruction delineates a analysis of the reconfiguration offered by these two authors concerning notion of "universality", on the basis of the relationship between European Modernity and Euro-North American Postmodernity, the differentiated processes of Latin American modernization and Nuestroamerican tradition's plurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we will analyze the historical conditions of the processes of subjectivity in Neiva during its foundation in the seventeenth century based on colonial discourses in whose games of truth they were constituted. The objective is to examine how these games of truth were shaped through which the subjects related to knowledge, what rules controlled this game and how they functioned in it. This implies that understanding modernity traversed by coloniality requires a critical analysis of the different regimes that have historically operated within it. That is to say, to think of a set of norms or rules that, imbricated with discourses and practices of subjectivation, have functioned in history in different ways in an attempt to unify the differences of the subjects under the same paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century is witness to a revival of interest in the bildungsroman as writers, especially from postcolonies in the Global South, turn to it to reflect on concerns of history, culture, and social life in a postcolonial setting. Scholars, however, disagree regarding the nature of these reworkings. Some see them as a continuation of the original European models established by Goethe, Dickens, and other European writers. Others find such associations Eurocentric and call for more local standards of evaluation. This article examines this debate by looking closely at a version of the postcolonial bildungsroman proposed by the Kannada writer U. R. Ananthamurthy in his 1965 novel Samskara. The novel follows an orthodox Brahmin priest from Karnataka who, disillusioned by the corruption and moral decay in his community, embarks on a pilgrimage to rediscover his identity in the rapidly modernizing world of twentieth‐century India. Ananthamurthy's bildungsroman, while retaining some structural similarities, departs from European models in fundamental ways. The motif of the hero's journey, for instance, is flipped. The novel tracks the hero's growing discontentment with his community leading to a sense of communal alienation, thus inverting the European journey‐trajectory that typically follows the hero's movement toward social integration. It also deviates from the generic Western rags‐to‐riches storyline that complements that hero's road to social integration. Instead, it adopts the narrative structure of the Niti‐shastra, a set of precolonial Hindu texts that teach about the wise conduct of life. Such readings not only facilitate fresh ways of understanding the relationship between the Western and the postcolonial models, but they also allow new insights into understanding how South Asian authors utilize the bildungsroman to rediscover precolonial and classical works through modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to demonstrate how the artworks in the exhibition "Madres plantas y mujeres luchadoras. Visiones desde Cantagallo", created by the Shipibo artists of the Non Shinanbo collective, constitute a testimonial record that evidences the strategies that emerged within Cantagallo, an urban indigenous community, in the context of the measures taken by the Peruvian State during the first stage of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through the "reading" and analysis of a selection of artworks and based on interviews with the artists, it will be illustrated how their work creates an effective testimony that emphasizes the empowerment of the women in the community, the significance of the bonds of solidarity within the community and the relevance of Shipibo traditional knowledge, which is open to heterogeneous elements, thus evidencing its modernity and complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) outbreak inflicted vulnerability on individuals and societies on a completely different scale than we have seen previously. The pandemic developed rapidly from 1 day to the next, and both society and individuals were put to the test. Older people's experiences of the early outbreak were no exception. Using an abductive analytical approach, the study explores the individual experiences of vulnerability as described by older people hospitalised with COVID–19 in the early outbreak. In these older people, we found that the societal context and the individual experiences of vulnerability were inextricable linked. The study demonstrates that despite significant individual stress, informants displayed an interesting ability to also view their situation to reorient their perspective. The experience of vulnerability is both conditional and individual, which imposes a degree of unpredictability that neither they nor others were able to negotiate. The article discusses the phenomenon of unpredictability in light of a modern society with regard to how individuals and society may encounter unexpected events in the future where the potential to reorient will be vital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a first analysis of representation in the African press of the fast-emerging amalgamation of online financial services popularized under the label 'Fintech'. Authors conducted content analysis of selected African newspapers, deploying the concept of framing to examine how the Fintech story is communicated to news readers in Africa. Authors identified nine frequently apparent tropes in a sample of Fintech news and used these tropes to reveal dominant themes in news coverage. The sample of 386 pieces was drawn from multiple African news sources published between 2016 and 2021, a period characterized by rapid uptake of Fintech across the continent and by a global pandemic. Findings suggests that the Fintech story in African newspapers is a predominantly positive, celebratory, and enabling narrative offering little critical reporting. News media examined demonstrate collaboration with the local/transnational finance sector to present a vision of progressive modernity and to reinforce afro-optimism and a techno-utopian discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the writings of a prominent Canadian nineteenth-century land surveyor and scientist to show the continuity of settler colonial narratives from his time until ours. As a Dominion Lands Surveyor, Otto Julius Klotz (1851–1923) was part of the vanguard of his white-supremacist, expansionistic, industrializing society; a group of front-line invaders who facilitated the taking of land from Indigenous people and nations, and transferred it to mostly white men. Employing a biographical microhistorical approach to settler colonialism, this research examines Klotz's personal diary and the events contained in it. Klotz was able to live the ideals of heteropatriarchal white masculinity and middle-class respectability, and his voluminous, life-long diary demonstrates the ways in which his privilege was actively advanced by dehumanizing others. I show the ways this land surveyor mourned the world he was destroying at the same time as he celebrated the world he was bringing into being, and how this apparent contradiction is central to settler colonialism and anti-Indigenous racism, and is still with us today. I argue that understanding the continuity of settler colonial narratives can help us to better understand our world while we strive to construct decolonial narratives and find ways to reconnect to one another and the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]