Anglophone Academy Research Articles

Introduction: Poetics from the Global South

Postcolonial literary studies has focused on narrative prose. We argue that the field would benefit from expanding this focus to poetics from the Global South. By utilizing the rubric of the Global South, we include decolonial thought from hispanophone and lusophone domains alongside postcolonial thought, often identified with the anglophone academy. Our approach to poetics foregrounds poetry as a literary form pertinent to the project of theorizing global cultural form more broadly. Without proposing a Manichean poetics that would sever the Global South from the Global North, we take a geographically situated approach to poetics, examining how attention to poetry from the Global South might produce knowledge relevant to decolonial and postcolonial critique. Here, we define this special issue’s key terms and scope, provide an overview of current scholarship within postcolonial poetry studies, and offer a brief analysis of M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language” in light of our proposed framework of poetics from the Global South.

The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova

Reviewed by: The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova Annmaria Shimabuku (bio) The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought. By Dennitza Gabrakova. Brill, 2018. 210 pages. €88.00, cloth; €88.00, E-book. The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova is a unique delight. It is a study of Japanese literature published in English that bears the fruit of graduate study at the University of Tokyo rather than a program in the Anglophone academy. In a study on the "postcolonial," the reader is given the expected references to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, [End Page 418] but yet is struck more profoundly by a sustained engagement with Japanese-language theorists such as Ukai Satoshi, Komori Yōichi, and Takahashi Tetsuya. In a study of the "postcolonial" in "postwar Japanese literature," one might assume a focus on texts emanating from the legacy of Japanese colonialism in Hokkaido, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, and beyond. But this is not the case here. The texts are—I daresay—ineluctably Japanese, albeit in a radically different manner. They are "Japanese" in a way that the author might argue is "unnamable." In all of these ways, this work displaces the centrality of Anglophone scholarship with archipelagic thought infused into postwar literature in Japan. Archipelagic thought has been explored through the work of the writer Shimao Toshio who conceptualized Yaponeshia, or the merging of the words for "Japan" and "islands" (p. 157). Shimao was largely concerned with displacing the centrality of a purportedly homogenous Japan by engaging with the peripheral islands of Okinawa. Gabrakova, however, is more informed by the cultural anthropologist Imafuku Ryūta's world theory of the archipelago which she reads in a deconstructive vein. In her approach, engagement with islands does not reaffirm the continental stability of the writer but, rather, provides a reflection on the fragmentation and multiplicity that was always already there, within "Japan." The first two chapters provide a theoretical foundation for the middle three chapters, which examine literary texts. Chapter 1, "Archipelagic Thought and Theory's Gift," engages with Imafuku's theory of the world through the guntō or archipelago and the art critic Taki Kōji's notion of the same. Taki follows Kant's division of "the transcendental subject into several faculties representing islands" and examines the "movement between them" that he calls the "archipelago" (p. 20). Whereas the transcendental subject synthesizes these faculties in an act of self-determination, Gabrakova, via this constellation of theorists, is more interested in the generative power of the individual faculties, or islands themselves, and their intercourse. She is critical of iterations of Japan in which its archipelagic diversity is eliminated by synthesizing itself internally in the name of sovereignty that gives protection but also asks for conformity in return. Archipelagic thought, following Gabrakova's reading of Trinh T. Minh Ha, "give[s] without obligation or debt involved and, without expecting any form of return" (p. 14). This is the "un-give in giving" (p. 14) and points to "Japan strictly enforcing Article 9" as a "gift of a higher degree that cannot involve reciprocation but rather anticipates a dissolution of sovereignty" (p. 28). Chapter 2, "Translating Shame and the Wound of Ethnicity," operates as a "supplement to Imafuku's 'archipelago'" (p. 61). If the disjointed motion of the archipelago is the euphoric moment of the "un-give in giving," then this chapter examines the painful moment of shame when confronting the gendered and ethnic implications of the failure to erect a sovereign [End Page 419] national polity. Through a Ukai Satoshi–inspired reading of Ruth Benedict, Gabrakova argues that whereas guilt is rooted in abstractions of the moral, shame is located in bodies marked by ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The "wound" or gaishō is literally an "external wound" (p. 47), or that passage where one is both wounded by the outside while also opened up to it. Quoting Ukai, she prioritizes the "poetics of translation" (p. 53) in thinking about ways to negotiate this wound. She invokes Ukai's question: "How could one...

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Amplifying the Archive: Methodological Plurality and Geographies of the Black Atlantic

AbstractFirst published in 2001, Judith Carney’s Black Rice drew on a complex methodology to argue that enslaved Africans, despite the brutal oppression of bondage, made fundamental intellectual and cultural contributions to agricultural landscapes and economies in the Americas. This thesis sparked a spirited debate in the Anglophone academy, especially among historians, some of whom took issue with the book’s inclusive geographical methodology. That discussion provides a point of departure to show how plural geographical methods work to amplify the archive, historical and otherwise, and enhance our knowledge with more complex and inclusive narratives. After summarising the debate touched off by Black Rice, we update its thesis with inter‐ and multi‐disciplinary research findings over the past two decades. We then survey theoretical and methodological developments in subsequent geographies of the Black Atlantic, before exploring new pathways and connections made possible when we amplify the archive beyond colonial and other written texts.

Estrada, Jorge. Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil: A Relentless Character Construction.

Estrada, Jorge. <i>Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil: A Relentless Character Construction</i>.

The Limits of National Film Histories and the Logic of Expansion

The Limits of National Film Histories and the Logic of Expansion Thomas Matusiak KEYWORDS National Cinema, Transnationalism, Film History, Film Theory, Modernity, Underdevelopment, Affect, Brazil, Argentina MAITE CONDE. Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil. U of California P, 2018, 310 pp. MATT LOSADA. The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins. SUNY P, 2018, 220 pp. CYNTHIA MARGARITA TOMPKINS. Affectual Erasure: Representations of Indigenous Peoples in Argentine Cinema. SUNY P, 2018, 398 pp. Tracing the Historical Turn In recent years, Latin American film studies in the United States has seen a steady output of monographs on national cinematic traditions that is due, in large part, to the genealogy of this young field and its relation to the broader discipline of film studies. Despite the region's long cinematic history, it was first introduced to the Anglophone academy in the 1970s through the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC).1 Latin American film studies began to congeal around two crucial assumptions that were characteristic of this movement: its object of study was, on the one hand, explicitly political—having its origins in Third Cinema and global projects of decolonization—and, on the other, regional. Robert Stam, Julianne Burton-Carvajal, Michael Chanan, and Ana M. López, among others, put Latin American cinema on the academic map in the United States through their work on the NLAC.2 Nevertheless, scholars soon began to question the limitations of this approach. Summarizing a decade of scholarship from the 1980s, López argued that early work on Latin American film confined itself to the contemporary politics of the [End Page 227] Third World and was thus ahistorical ("Setting up the Stage" 256). While this research demonstrated the growing interest in Latin America in film departments, scholars would need to historicize their object of study to justify the consolidation of Latin American film studies as an independent field. An initial emphasis on the radical critique of the Hollywood model by filmmakers such as Julio García Espinosa, Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Fernando Birri, Jorge Sanjinés, and Glauber Rocha—to name only some of the most widely studied filmmakers of the NLAC—ignored decades of Latin American film history, especially its early cinema and commercial productions. The early critical construction of Latin American cinema as a regional and contemporary project was not entirely in step with the discipline of film studies. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie note that as film studies began to institutionalize in the 1960s, nascent departments oriented themselves around national cinemas, taking as a model influential histories such as Siegfried Kracauer's account of German cinema in From Caligari to Hitler (2).3 Once Latin American film studies gained sufficient momentum to receive disciplinary recognition in the US academy—with the establishment of the Latino/a Caucus within the Society for Cinema Studies (today the Society for Cinema and Media Studies) in 1990 and the Film Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association in 2002—a research agenda aligned with the need for retroactive historical scholarship along predominantly national lines had taken hold (D'Lugo et al. 2).4 This did not preclude resistance to a national framework within the field, especially as a result of rampant globalization in the 1990s and subsequent debates surrounding the crisis of the nation (Stock). Despite such objections, the field insisted on the relevance of this model.5 Furthermore, by López's own estimation, this decade saw the field turn to historicization following pressure from the wider discipline of film studies, which had begun to experience a historical turn ("The State of Things" 198). National film histories offered the clearest path forward. Of course, researchers in Latin America had extensively documented the cinematic traditions of their respective countries for decades. Nevertheless, this scholarship remained untranslated and largely ignored in the United States.6 As the [End Page 228] field took its first steps, a noticeable rift emerged in which US-based scholars—grounded in film studies departments that, in turn, typically derived from literary studies—limited themselves to textual questions of politics and form, while scholars in Latin America concentrated on film history (López, "The State of Things" 199). This echoed the...

Premodern European Capitalism, Christianity, and Florence

The essay examines the role of Christianity in premodern European capitalism, with regard to the city of Florence. It traces the formation of the historical construct and the influence of Werner Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus, a work much neglected nowadays in the Anglophone academy. The article seeks to historicize and contextualize faith and economy, to stress their fundamentally intertwined nature and more specifically how notions of “negotiation” and diriturra (moral Christian rectitude) connect the seemingly antagonistic sides, and connect also Florentine finance and business history, which are too often studied independently. It argues that Christian rectitude and service to the church (a noncynical quid pro quo) were conjoined with a calculated, reasoned profit motive--evident especially among papal bankers, a key sector of the Florentine economy.

Decolonising Language: Towards a New Feminist Politics of Translation in the Work of Arab Women Writers, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Nawal al Sadawim, and Assia Djebar

This paper argues that the Anglophone academy’s relative lack of appraisal of Ahlam Mosteghanemi as an Arab woman writer is not incidental. I assert that, for many Arab women writers, authorship is strategic engagement; in other words, they develop strategies that bring together formal experimentation with the social effectivity of authorship. In an attempt to present fully the aforementioned complexities at hand, this paper compares Mosteghanemi’s work with that of two other eminent women writers from the Arab world: Egyptian women’s rights activist and novelist, Nawal al Sadawi, and Algerian writer and historian, Assia Djebar. This comparative analysis is structured into three sections that take up the questions of the politics of literary form, language and decolonisation, and finally, translation. In the critical reception of their work outside their region, Arab women writers all too frequently find themselves caught up in the dynamics of a hegemonic Eurocentric feminism that already constructs them as new representatives of an Orient, one that further stubbornly refuses to dissolve under the action of rigorous critique. I argue that the underwhelming international reception to Mosteghanemi’s writing serves as a reminder that colonialism remains real, even in a world of independent nations, while decolonisation remains on the theoretical horizon in the postcolonial world. It is these two interrelated points that map the wide field of effectivity that is brought into play in the reception of Mosteghanemi as a writer.

The organic metaphor in twentieth-century Lusophone urban geography: cities and their history in the work of Aroldo de Azevedo and Orlando Ribeiro

This article investigates the use of organic metaphors in Lusophone urban geography of the Vidalian paradigm. There is presently a growing body of literature on the use of metaphors in urban studies in the Anglophone academy, yet the use of metaphors in urban studies in other languages seems to be an unexplored matter. To tackle this issue, we examine the work of Aroldo de Azevedo (1910–1974), a Brazilian geographer at the University of São Paulo, and Orlando Ribeiro (1911–1997), a Portuguese geographer at the University of Lisbon. The choice of these authors is based on the high visibility of their work in both Brazilian and Portuguese geography and urban studies, as well as the long-standing dialogue between them. We will show that Aroldo de Azevedo and Orlando Ribeiro mobilised organic metaphors to explain the history and form of the cities founded by the Portuguese, establishing a common language for the Lusophone geography community. We will also discuss how they used organic metaphors to criticise the logics of large scale urban planning, and, more importantly, the perspectives and techniques of spatial science. In a broader sense, this study also shows that considering the use of metaphors provides a novel way of examining scientific controversies beyond ideas of the succession of paradigms.

Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace

Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace

Créolisation, Creolization, and Créolité

Conceived as a contribution to a 2014 symposium reconsidering Éloge de la créolité—written by three Martiniquan intellectuals—twenty-five years after its publication, this essay draws a distinction between the French use of créolisation as a mainly philosophical and poetic concept and the more historically grounded use of creolization in the anglophone world. After outlining the various criticisms of the Éloge expressed in the author's 1995 essay “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove” (coauthored by Sally Price), it sketches in a history of the use of the creolization metaphor in the anglophone academy, drawing examples mainly from historical and anthropological work on Afro-America. It ends by considering the limitations of the perspectives put forth in the Éloge and the potential usefulness of the creolization concept for the future.

What is Italian Cinema?

The success of films like the Oscar-winning La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino), the family-friendly comedy Sole a catinelle (Buckets of Sunshine, Gennaro Nunziante) and the poetic documentary Sacro GRA (Sacred GRA, Gianfranco Rosi), all released in 2013, confirms the continued and perhaps surprising vitality and variety of Italian cinema. This variety tended to be ignored in what might be called the Standard Model of Italian cinema history, which emphasized the realist and auteurist traditions in Italian cinema. In this article I range across contemporary, classic and lesser-known Italian cinema by analyzing the means and priorities that have been employed when studying it in the Anglophone academy. My title, “What is Italian cinema?,” intentionally recalls Bazin (and I refer also to Deleuze and “world cinephilia”), but an additional clause might read, “and how do we think we know?”. The second half of the article considers the contents of three edited companions to Italian cinema (one recently published and two forthcoming) in order to grasp the current concerns of Italian cinema studies and so to signpost the state of knowledge about Italian cinema, at least as it exists in English. I suggest throughout some methods and approaches for better grasping the variety of Italian cinema over its history, but I finish by noting that the Pantheon of World Cinema has also distilled Italian cinema to neorealism and the “golden age” auteurs and so has obscured both the range and the particularity of Italian cinema.

Borderland historiography in Pakistan

ABSTRACTIn this article, I survey historical writing related to the twentieth-century Afghan–Pakistan frontier, particularly Pashtun-majority locations in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa: the former Northwest Frontier Province. I focus on works that help conceptualize history beyond issues of political economy. Some locate themselves solely in the Anglophone academy, but this is not intended as a complete survey of their field. Rather, I place those works in dialogue with, and prioritize, eclectic histories that are both ‘about’ and ‘of’ the borderland; and I discuss this combined field with reference to other scholarly work on ‘thinking from borders’ in both the political–economic and intellectual–cultural senses. My goal is to intervene in the second set of borders, to disrupt boundaries between global academic culture and ‘other’ intellectual milieus. Taking tazkiras and autobiographies as examples, I argue that genres of writing from regions heavily fragmented by imperial bordering, among other factors, are social theory in action, not just representation for historians to appropriate. Engaging border history genres and taking seriously the insight they offer requires a willingness to engage the webs of social commitments that produced these works: to work in contribution to their milieus rather than merely writing about them.

(RE)WRITING EMPIRE? THE RECEPTION OF POST-COLONIAL STUDIES IN FRANCE

ABSTRACTThis article explores the fierce resistance and controversy that have marked the reception of post-colonial studies in France. In contrast to the anglophone academy, where post-colonialism emerged and was gradually institutionalized throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in France these approaches did not make a mark until much later. The context of social and political crisis over France's post-colonial populations, in which the debate surrounding post-colonial studies emerged, is fundamental to understanding the high stakes and thus the vehemence and polemical nature of their reception. Institutional factors and the particularities of the French intellectual climate, France's strong Republican ideology, and its problematic relationship with its own colonial history, are all explored as reasons for this troubled relationship. The anglocentrism of post-colonial studies is also considered, as are the mutually beneficial outcomes of a dialogue between post-colonial studies and the French debates and context. I outline a specifically ‘French’ post-colonialism that has emerged from these debates, and suggest that whilst positive moves have been made towards a truly inclusive post-colonial studies that would take account of numerous languages, former empires, and former colonies, there remains work to be done in this direction.

Community in ‘Global’ Academies: The Critical Positioning of ‘Meta-Francophone’ Caribbeanists

Caribbeanists working on the Francophone Caribbean within the Anglophone academy are perhaps particularly well placed to bring into focus the linguistic and cultural losses of the dislocations and relocations of High Capitalism. Although our object of study should facilitate critical insights into the fundamental linguistic and cultural indifference and irresponsibility of capitalist extraction models and into what is at stake politically and ethically in contemporary versions of those profiteering models, the commercialist reductionism currently (re-)formatting not just our own pulverized academic universe, but the entire globe over which it has by now comprehensively spread, surely works against any such truly critical positioning.

TOWARDS A TRANSNATIONAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN FILM

The topic of this roundtable prompts me to reflect with some optimism on the contrast between the uncertain status of Italian film studies when I began teaching and researching in the field over twenty years ago, and the flourishing profile it enjoys today as a sub-discipline of Italian studies in the Anglophone academy. It also obliges me to acknowledge that the institutional inclusion of Italian screen studies (ISS; now encompassing both film and television) within italianistica has meant that it exists in relative isolation from some of the theoretical discourses and methodological trends developing in the broader field of film and media studies, more specifically transnational film criticism. My own introduction to the study of cinema occurred in the context of a film studies department in the 1980s, at a time when the discipline was marked by the conjunction of semiotics, psychoanalytic film theory, and feminism. This theoretical background did not necessarily provide the most compelling preparation for a teaching career in a department of Modern Languages and Literatures, where the focus of my research was expected to match the field in which I was hired to teach, that is, Italian studies — then, as now, dominated by literary history and analysis. Nonetheless, it enabled me to bring theoretical discourse to bear on my investigation of Italian cinema and Italian cultural production more generally. It also trained me to approach all films as texts that offer rich potential for deconstructive inquiry, rather than as aesthetic objects to be cherished or cast aside according to predetermined hierarchies of value. My decision to focus my research on contemporary Italian cinema met with some incomprehension at the outset, particularly among italianisti. This resistance has not yet entirely disappeared. ‘Ma il cinema italiano non esiste piu’ is the dismissive comment I still hear, more often in Italy than elsewhere, from a number of colleagues who assert that the films produced in Italy over the past twenty or thirty years are rarely worth viewing, much less worth studying. Rather than reflecting a reasoned assessment of Italian cinema at present, such claims are symptomatic of a refusal to move beyond out-dated evaluative criteria and canonical hierarchies, such as the embalmment of neorealism as the gold standard of Italian filmmaking, the privileging of a discourse of autori, and so on — taken-for-granted values that were astutely challenged in a landmark article by Catherine O’Rawe about five years ago, and further elaborated in a more recent study by Alan O’Leary in collaboration with O’Rawe. The Italianist, 34. 2, 268–271, June 2014

Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies. Between the Local and the Global ed. by Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga Moruxa (review)

Reviewed by: Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies. Between the Local and the Global ed. by Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga Moruxa David Miranda-Barreiro Hooper, Kirsty, and Manuel Puga Moruxa, eds. Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies. Between the Local and the Global. New York: The Modern National Association of America, 2011. 344 pp. Galician Studies have become increasingly relevant in the Anglophone academy since prominent scholars John Rutherford (founder of the first Centre for Galician Studies in the UK at the Queen’s College, Oxford in 1991) and Xoán González-Millán (pioneer in the introduction of Galician Studies in the United States, who passed away prematurely in 2002) established the foundations for the internationalization of the discipline. Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies. Between the Local and the Global is dedicated to these two key figures of Galician Studies, and shows the success of their initiative. The volume connects the work of Anglophone researchers (Kirsty Hooper, Jane Beswick, Eugenia R. Romero, John Patrick Thomson, Timothy McGovern) with that of Galician/Spanish academics settled outside their country (José Colmeiro, Silvia Bermúdez, Joseba Gabilondo, Laura López Fernández), Anglophone lecturers living in Galicia (Burghard Baltrush), and consolidated scholars of the Galician academy (María Reimóndez, Marta Pérez Pereiro, Lourenzo Fernández Prieto, María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, Antón Figueroa). This constellation of experts in Galician culture working both within and outside Galicia reflects the spirit of the volume, which aims at highlighting the dynamism of and hence the possibilities for Galician culture in the era of globalization. The book is structured in three parts, “Histories,” “Identities” and “Cultural Practices.” As the title announces, the contributions are characterized by their interdisciplinarity and therefore cover a number of areas ranging from literary theory to linguistics, cinema and television, through the prism of the tensions generated by the transition of Galicianness from a local to a global identity. The first section includes Figueroas’s well-known application of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “field” to the study of Galician literature, together with a new reading of Rosalía de Castro’s often neglected narrative in Spanish by Joseba Gabilondo. In tune with his previous work on postnationalism (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Special Issue: Critical Approaches to the Nation in Galician Studies, 2009), Gabilondo proposes “a feminist, postnationalist alternative” to “the limitations of a [End Page 234] national understanding of Galician literature” (79), and touches on the often conflicting parameters provided by the so-called “criterio filolóxico” which limits Galician literature solely to texts written in Galician. The conflictive nature of Galician culture is also exposed by Rábade Villar, who examines the wounds created by the peripheral position of Galician language and literature within the Spanish state, and the tensions provoked by the relationship between culture and power. For his part, Fernández Prieto challenges some deeply rooted stereotypes that have characterized Galicia as an economically and industrially backward region crippled by mass emigration since the nineteenth century, and brings a new approach in which “the story of Galician emigration … in fact demonstrates Galicia’s integration into modernity” (34). Emigration is also the focus of Eugenia R. Romero’s contribution, which opens the second section of the volume about “Identity.” As she has developed extensively in her monograph, Contemporary Galician Culture in a Global Context: Movable Identities (Lexington Books, 2011), Romero argues that Galician identity is a concept “in constant tension and movement” due to the home/away dichotomy caused by the essential role of the diaspora in Galician history (105), and explores literary representations of a globalized concept of Galicianness in the narrative of key writers Antón Risco and Manuel Rivas. Indeed, emigration to South America and Europe has opened the possibility of new ways of understanding Galicianness that often combine Galician and Spanish identity with that of the host country. In her essay, Jane Bestwick explores the possibility of a Galician-Spanish-British identity by examining the life of Galicians living in Guildford (Surrey). Far from showing an idealized view of the benefits of hybridity and globalization, Bestwick’s study illustrates the complexities involved in the negotiation of multiple identities, especially in the case of...

Book review: The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production, by Stephen P. Dunn

The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Routledge: London, 2012; 154 pp: 9780415618625, 28 [pounds sterling] (pbk); 9780415616218 (hbk) 70 [pounds sterling] Originally published in 1982, The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production, by the late anthropologist Stephen P. Dunn (1928-1999), has received a reprint as part of the Routledge Revival series. Since its initial publication, the book has held a unique location in Anglophone academy, since it catalogues the Soviet debate on Marxist theory of history in relation to the Asiatic mode of production (AMP) from 1929 to 1975. Predominantly based on primary sources in Russian, Dunn's book painstakingly charts the isochronal resurgence of the debate over half a century, and astutely reveals the vicissitudes of theoretical, historical and occasionally political positions taken by its participants. As the author makes clear in the preface, the book deals exclusively with the literature written by Soviet authors on the topic. In lieu of treating the study of this body of work merely within the confines of intellectual history, Dunn locates them within a broader framework dealing with the fundamental questions concerning Marxist theory of history. The main theoretical preoccupation, in the author's own words, is 'whether the historical process is to be regarded as single or double or multiple, as determined by one force, or by two related forces, or by a congeries of unspecifiable factors' (p. xii). The starting point of Dunn's chronicle is the transactions of a meeting held in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) by the Association of Marxist Orientalists at the Enukidze Oriental Institute in 1931. Published as 'Diskussia ob Aziatskom sposobe proizvodstva po dokladu M. Godesa' (A Discussion on the Asiatic Mode of Production According to the Report of M. Godes), the proceedings reveal the extent to which contemporary Soviet scholars were divided on both the theoretical position of the AMP in Marxism and its empirical credibility. In this first section, Dunn retraces the original transactions in Russian and offers a verbatim summary of the various positions taken by the 'Aziatchiki' and 'anti-Aziatchiki'. (1) The line of contention is the categorisation of 'ancient societies', which the Aziatchiki camp classifies as the historical site of the manifestation of the AMP. The opposing anti-Aziatchiki perspective leans towards a heuristic rejection of Marx's use of the term (but not an outright rejection of the outline Marx provided in the 'Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy', which includes the AMP [Marx 1987 [1859]: 263]) and attempts to relocate ancient societies as social formations operating on variants of feudalism. Illustrative of the pro-Aziatchiki position, Dunn quotes extensively from S. I. Kovalev, who effectively argued that the patterns of landownership in 'India, ancient China, and the states of the ancient Near East' were different from Marx's description of feudalism as a mode of production comprising 'dispersed' or 'noncollective' landownership (p. 19), hence these societies cannot be understood as 'feudal' in the sense that Marx used the term. For Kovalev, the AMP not only corresponds to historical evidence, but it also prevents the degradation of Marxist theory of history into 'a circular conception of the historical process' (p. 23). The discussion proceeds with an overview of the anti-Aziatchiki line defended by inter alia Mikhail Godes, S. M. Dubrovskii and Evgenii S. Iolk. Dunn evades linear interpretations of the anti-Aziatchiki arguments as exclusively political and vindictive reprisals and balances their presentation with rich but equally controversial theoretical and historical opposing claims. Political innuendos and factional invectives crop up frequently, but the provided account suggests that the anti-Aziatchiki position was marred by analytical deficits as much as it was limited by political parochialism. …

Raffaele Pettazzoni from the Perspective of the Anglophone Academy

AbstractThere should be no need to emphasize the significance of Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883–1959) to historians of religions. However, there are only two books by Pettazzoni available in the English language: the monographThe All-knowing God(1956; original:L’onniscienza di Dio, 1955) and an anthology ofEssays on the History of Religions(1954), which is “a collection of sundry writings on various subjects connected with the History of Religions, which have been already published on different occasions in Italian and foreign periodicals” (Pettazzoni 1954).2 Added to this is a tiny collection of articles in English (in fact, the American Theological Libraries Association database references only three). This seems to constitute a serious neglect of such a productive scholar, who has been called an “exemplary historian of religions.” This paper will attempt to assess the reception of the work of Raffaele Pettazzoni in the Anglophone Academy, to question the adequacy and accuracy of that reception, and to indicate what might be learned from it.

Magic in the Ancient Greek World

Magic in the Ancient Greek World