‘Think of All the Differences!’: Mixed Marriages in Transcultural Adaptations of Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan O’Connell
Keyword(s):  
Racial Inequality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Mixed Marriages ◽  
Religious Intolerance ◽  
Abstract Principle ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
To Come ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Relationship Of

Abstract At a historical moment in which we attempt to come to grips with the legacy of racial inequality, this essay considers two twenty-first-century adaptations of Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’, which respond to the xenophobic and imperialist ideology of the original by representing its noble white heroine as a black asylum seeker, and replacing the dynastic genealogy of Chaucer’s tale with a celebration of an inter-racial marriage that defies cultural norms. Chaucer’s text might not seem promising for modern adaptation: its passive heroine embodies the abstract principle of constancy, and the action of the tale serves an ideological purpose that seems, to modern eyes, to be profoundly and unpleasantly imperialist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic. And yet, the 2003 BBC adaptation made the work remarkably legible for a twenty-first-century audience, by highlighting, rather than suppressing, the tale’s concerns with issues of family, race, and religion, and by imagining its central heroine as a Nigerian Christian, fleeing religious persecution. These concerns with migration and racial and religious intolerance are developed brilliantly in Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, a poetic revision of Chaucer’s work as filtered through the lens of the television adaptation. In these texts, mixed marriages become a powerful tool with which to challenge the racist legacy of the past and to interrogate the relationship of the adaptation to its canonical forebears.

Hydrocarbons and the Illusion of Sustainability

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent A. Klitgaard
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Labor Process ◽  
Marxian Theory ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Rapid Accumulation ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
To Come ◽  
American Society ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Institutional Order

After fifty years, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's Monopoly Capital has stood the test of time. Not only did it provide a lucid description of midcentury American society, but Monopoly Capital established a framework for analyzing events to come.… By bringing Marxian theory into their historical moment, they fomented many debates and encouraged the development of various perspectives, a legacy that has expanded to include analyses of the labor process, imperialism, finance, globalization, and the environment.… They elucidated a fundamental contradiction of the time. Capitalism is a system of self-expanding value that must continually accumulate, yet is confined by a social and institutional order that precludes rapid accumulation. This framework is especially useful for analyzing the fundamental problems of the twenty-first century. Among those crucial problems is the demise of the hydrocarbon economy.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

scholarly journals Heterotopian Disorientation: Intersectionality in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth

Humanities ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Marlena Tronicke
Keyword(s):  
White Privilege ◽  
First Century ◽  
Country House ◽  
Spatial Disorientation ◽  
Lady Macbeth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The One ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
White Hegemony ◽  
Blind Spots

This article reads William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to explore the film’s ambivalent gender and racial politics. The country house that Katherine Lester is locked away in forms a quasi-heterotopia, mediated through a disorienting cinematography of incarceration. Although she manages to transgress the ideological boundaries surrounding her, she simultaneously contributes to the oppression of her Black housemaid, Anna. On the one hand, the film suggests that the coercive space of the colony—another Foucauldian heterotopia—may threaten white hegemony: While Mr Lester’s Black, illegitimate son Teddy almost manages to claim his inheritance and, hence, contest the racialised master/servant relationship of the country house, Anna’s voice threatens to cause Katherine’s downfall. On the other hand, through eventually denying Anna’s and Teddy’s agency, Lady Macbeth exposes the pervasiveness of intersectional forms of oppression that are at play in both Victorian and twenty-first-century Britain. The constant spatial disorientation that the film produces, this article suggests, not only identifies blind spots in Foucault’s writings on heterotopian space as far as intersectionality is concerned, but also speaks to white privilege as a vital concern of both twenty-first-century feminism and neo-Victorian criticism.

Barbarism or Socialism: 1917–2017–2050 (?)

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minqi Li
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Era ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
To Come

Two decades after the end of the Soviet Union, the global capitalist economy narrowly escaped total collapse in the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008–2009. The world in the twenty-first century has entered into a new era of crisis, which is economic, political and environmental. What will happen between now and the mid-twenty-first century that may shape and largely determine the future of humanity for centuries to come. On the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the October Revolution, this article re-evaluates the trajectory of the twentieth century socialism and identifies its legacies. It also considers the unique character of contemporary contradictions and argues that the formation of new industrial working classes may fatally undermine the system’s political legitimacy and raise again the ‘spectre of communism’ that Marx and Engels predicted, this time not only in Europe but also in the entire globe.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Oluf Emerson ◽  
Kevin T. Smiley
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
To Come

The book’s claim is that cities in the twenty-first century are diverging in their fundamental priorities in one of two directions: toward markets or toward people. In introducing the concepts of Market Cities and People Cities, we make our primary argument that cities are not the homogeneous lot that many urban scholars might lead us to believe. Rather, our investigation of Copenhagen and Houston supplies the evidence that there are wide and important differences across cities. In this chapter, we state this argument, address a few critical questions, illustrate the concepts using a journey through our two cities, and preview the chapters to come.

Afghanistan Enters the Twenty-first Century

Afghanistan ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Barfield
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Community ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
National Government ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks at the first decade of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan. As the twentieth century ended, ever-larger numbers of Afghans had become caught up in political and military struggles from which they had been previously isolated. Whether as fighters, refugees, or just victims of war and disorder, few escaped the turmoil that roiled the country. Ethnic and regional groups in Afghanistan had become politically and militarily empowered, reversing the process of centralization that had been imposed by Amir Abdur Rahman. Yet when the international community set about creating the new Afghan constitution, it did not start afresh but attempted to restore the institutions of old. This brought to the surface long-simmering disputes about the relationship of the national government to local communities, the legitimacy of governments and rulers, and the relationship that Afghanistan should have with the outside world.

The New Territory

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
First Century ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Interpretive Study ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Historical Moment

The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century offers fifteen original essays that seek to examine and re-examine Ellison’s life and work in the context of their meanings for our own age, the early 21st century, the age of Obama and of a nation that is simultaneously post-racial and all-too-racial. Following a careful introduction that situates Ellison’s writings in the context of new approaches and abiding interest in his work, while also exploring the affinity between Ralph Ellison’s fiction and commentary and Barack Obama’s political and literary sensibilities, the book offers four new essays examining Ellison’s 1952 masterpiece, Invisible Man. It then turns to his unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting . . . , with five detailed chapters exploring that powerful and elusive narrative—the first sustained, book-length treatment of that multi-faceted work (the source of the shorter, edited novel Juneteenth). The New Territory concludes with five chapters that discuss Ellison’s political, cultural, and historical significance, asking how Ellison speaks to the America of 2016 and beyond. In The New Territory, we see how clearly Ellison foresaw and articulated both the challenges and the possibilities of America in the 21st century. Together, these chapters offer a thorough and penetrating assessment of Ellison at this crucial historical moment and the most comprehensive interpretive study of the writer best suited to act as the cultural prophet of 21st-century America.

Overflow

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Bernes
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Theoretical Investigation ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Structural Transformations ◽  
First Century ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Epilogue considers the possible fate of the artistic critique of labor in the decades to come. As demand for labor weakens because of ongoing structural transformations, the link between art and labor will likewise weaken, Bernes argues. Thus, artists would do well to revive older traditions linking the poet to wagelessness. The Epilogue examines these traditions, beginning with the Renaissance ballad and continuing through the Romantic poetry of vagrancy and the African American fugitive lyric, linking this poetic history to a theoretical investigation of what Karl Marx calls “surplus populations.” The long history of the poetics of wagelessness gives some indication of the aesthetic outlines of the coming era. In closing, Bernes looks at two contemporary poets, Fred Moten and Wendy Trevino, who engage this long tradition and mobilize it to meet the specific conditions of twenty-first-century capitalism.

“More Cowbell”

Latin Jazz ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 141-174
Author(s):  
Christopher Washburne
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
Latin Jazz ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
To Come ◽  
Made In

This chapter is an ethnographic study of New York–based Latin jazz in the twenty-first century. It uses five prominent bandleaders actively shaping the future of Latin jazz as case studies—Eddie Palmieri, Michele Rosewoman, Carlos Henríquez, Miguel Zenón, and Bobby Sanabria—demonstrating how the historical specificities and developments discussed in the preceding chapters continue to reverberate and inform the music made in the present. Their voices and perspectives demonstrate how each of these musicians adopts unique strategies to navigate the terrain of inequity and adversity. They represent significant trends that will assert much influence on generations of musicians to come. Their combined perspectives suggest that Latin jazz is not, nor ever should it have been, an “other jazz.” Its presence can no longer be silenced or erased. All of the music and musicians associated with jazz deserve to be fully embraced and recognized.

scholarly journals MAKUNAIMA, O MEU AVÔ EM MIM!

ILUMINURAS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (46) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaider Esbell
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Cognitive Effects ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Grand Design ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
Indian Art

ResumoEu aconteço, artisticamente falando, acredito, dentro de um processo que nos convida a pensar criticamente a decolonização, a apropriação cultural, o cristianismo, o monoteísmo, a monocultura e todos os dilemas do existir globalizado. Ou não? O meu surgimento vem junto com a expectativa que se cria em volta de outro termo, no Brasil ao menos, a arte indígena contemporânea. Não a moderna, a passada e extinta, nem a por vir, mas a deste início do século XXI. Ensaio escrever para socializar um pouco o socializável da minha relação com meu avô, esse que não é gente exatamente para não sê-lo. Portanto Makunaima é meu avô e o gênero, a forma e o conteúdo têm seus lugares de ação como vamos citar sempre, pois são fundamentais, mas é preciso ir além. Makunaima está além e prova isso ao transformar-se continuamente. Não, ele não é transformista. Vamos dissociar aos poucos o existir-atuação de Makunaima dos efeitos cognitivos do gênero em nossas mentes. Sim, nas mentes. Aos leitores é requerido um vácuo total interior, um nudar-se por dentro para ter espaço. Em uma grande concepção, é requerido um esvaziamento total de um ser para outro ser caber.Palavras-chave: Makunaima; Arte Indígena Contemporânea; Gênero; Literatura AbstractI happen, artistically speaking, I believe, in a process that invites us to think critically about decolonization, cultural appropriation, Christianity, monotheism, monoculture and all the dilemmas of globalized existence. Or not? My emergence comes along with the expectation that is created around another term, in Brazil at least, contemporary Indian art. Not the modern, the past and extinct, not yet to come, but the beginning of the twenty-first century. Essay writing to socialize a little the socializable of my relationship with my grandfather, the one who is not exactly people to not be. So Makunaima is my grandfather and the genre, form and content have their places of action as we will always quote, because they are fundamental, but we must go further. Makunaima is beyond and proves this by continually transforming himself. No, he is not a convert. We will gradually dissociate Makunaima's existing-action from the cognitive effects of gender in our minds. Yes, in the minds. Readers are required to have a total interior vacuum, a nudge inside to have room. In a grand design, a total emptying of one being is required for another to be fit.Key words: Makunaima; Contemporary Indian Art; Genre; Literature

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