Of nomadology: A requiem for India(n-ness)1

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-292
Author(s):  
Avishek Ray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
Political Partisanship ◽  
Beat Movement

Despite the statist imagination of the ‘nomad’ pitted against an overtly instrumental understanding of space, ‘modern’ techniques of statist demographic control, and increasing surveillance on mobility, the trope of nomadology in the context of India often characterizes ‘the return of the repressed’. The Buddhists in the Ancient, the Bhakti‐Sufi practitioners in the Medieval, and certain anti-imperialist ideologues in the Modern have perpetually latched on to the trope to articulate political dissidence. Thinking in these terms, the invocation of nomadology in Critical Theory ‐ by Deleuze and Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, Michel de Certeau and Edward Said, among others ‐ alluding to non-conformity, non-linearity and political subversion, has an intellectual history that is often purportedly grounded onto ‘India’. My article will explore how the dichotomy between the ‘good’ wanderer and the ‘bad’ wanderer in the ‘Indian tradition’ was premised upon a highly contingent process of religio-political partisanship and struggles over territorialization. Using the nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse on the Romani community and the Beats’ obsession with ‘India’ (cf. the Beat Movement) as case studies, this article, from the postcolonial vantage point, demonstrates how the impulse to assume nomadology as characteristic of ‘India(n-ness)’ ‐ to have perpetually existed in the ‘Indian’ cultural repertoire ‐ is symbolic of an ahistorical and essentialist notion of ‘India’.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Selection Of

This book examines the ways in which the biblical book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It zeroes-in on a selection of case studies, covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur’an, premodern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian dictionary, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. The book argues that Muslim sources preserve important, pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman’s epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, and the literary context of the “plot of the eunuchs” to kill the Persian king. Furthermore, throughout the book we will see how each author’s cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story: In particular, it will be shown that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.

Critical International Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Civil Government

Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory’s prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory’s reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.

Posthumanism

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-218
Author(s):  
Denise Kimber Buell
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
Early Christian Studies

For New Testament and early Christian studies, posthumanism provides a vantage point for contemporary readers to appreciate just how fully contingent ancient texts perceive “the human” to be. This chapter opens by linking the study of gender and sexuality with posthumanism. Situating posthumanism especially in relation to intersectional feminisms, this chapter explores ways that New Testament and early Christian scholarship has engaged posthumanism and might further contribute to this field. Juxtaposing New Testament and non-canonical writings with contemporary critical theory that may be associated with posthumanism, this essay offers new possibilities for reading ancient narratives of human origins such as Genesis 1-3 and its retellings, for identifying non-reproductive kin-making and multispecies mutualisms through rhetoric and ritual, and for reconsidering temporality. A brief case study of Ephesians also shows how biblical interpretation offers a caution to those who view posthumanism’s potential as primarily liberatory.

Bandstands and Modernity: Constructing Spanish Cities Musically

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422097612
Author(s):  
Gloria Araceli Rodriguez-Lorenzo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Sonic Environment

This article analyses the interplay between sound and urban spaces in Spain, from the end of nineteenth century until 1936. Free outdoor concerts performed by bands in public urban spaces offered a new aural experience audience from across an increasing range of very diverse social groups, almost ritualizing both the practice of listening to music and the spaces in which that music was heard—all at a time when those very spaces were changing, in a way which mirrored the wider reconfiguration and modernization of Spanish cities. Case studies focusing on political, social, and cultural changes in urban spaces are analyzed, in order to understand how cities developed new spaces for social interaction, the modern sonic environment, and the ways in which those cities have appropriated culture for their citizens, as a symbol of urban modernity.

Households and ‘hidden’ kin in early-nineteenth-century England: four case studies in suburban Exeter, 1821–1861

1995 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Di Cooper ◽  
Moira Donald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Xixe Siecle ◽  
Xixe Siècle

Cet article étudie la parenté entre les chefs de ménage et leurs serviteurs domestiques, dans la banlieue d'Exeter. On se concentre particulièrement sur les cas où le recensement ancien n'enregistre pas de lien familial et où le nom de famille du chef de menage est different de celui de son employé, homme ou femme. On a cependant réussi à prouver une parenté de sang entre maître et domestique. La méthode adoptée pour ce travail est inhabituelle, d'autant plus qu'on a tracé aussi bien les lignées féminines que masculines, ce qui a mené à des conclusions intéressantes et nouvelles en ce qui concerne d'une part les proportions de membres de la famille qui résident dans les ménages au début du XIXe siècle et d'autre part la nature du service domestique durant cette période.

Augustine and the Humanists. Reading the City of God from Petrarch to Poliziano

10.54179/2102 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Della Schiava
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Western World ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The City

Augustine and the Humanists fills a persistent lacuna by investigating the reception of Augustine’s oeuvre in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In response to the call for a more extensive and detailed investigation of the reception of Augustine’s works and thought in the Western world, numerous scholars have addressed the topic over the last decades. However, one of Augustine’s major works, De civitate Dei, has received remarkably little attention. In a series of case studies by renowned specialists of Italian humanism, this volume now analyzes the various strategies that were employed in reading and interpreting the City of God at the dawn of the modern age. Augustine and the Humanists focuses on the reception of the text in the work of sixteen early modern writers and thinkers who played a crucial role in the era between Petrarch and Poliziano. The present volume thus makes a significant and innovative contribution both to Augustinian studies and to our knowledge of early modern intellectual history.

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