Citational Practices Research Articles

Genre and “Genring” in Music Education

In this article, I explore the theoretical and analytical potential of the concept of genring, which here refers to productive acts of temporary interpretation and signification, wherein existing classification systems and genre categories in the social are operationalized and (re)negotiated. Foucault and Butler’s theories of discursive subjection serve as a theoretical framework to consider how genring works as a performative mode of action: a discursive, reiterative, and citational practice that establishes ontological effects of truth, reality, and naturalness. This performative mode of action is not a “discursive practice” in itself; rather, it might be understood as one of the ways discourse practices itself. To probe the analytical value of the concept genring, I take as my case the field of music education, where genring seems to be a common strategy for associating music with music, music with people, and people with people for educational purposes.

Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith's Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity

Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith's Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity

The Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century

The Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century

Kleist in Italy: An Icon of Gendered Conflicts

Abstract: In this essay I analyze citational practices around Heinrich von Kleist in Italian postmodern theater and Italian feminist biopolitics. In this realm, the reference to Kleist performs a gesture of interruption of traditional eroticism (Catholic, modern, based on women’s sexual slavery), in particular, by using and rewriting Kleist’s narrative of the Amazons, the legendary tribe of women who would cut their breast to embrace the art of war. Postmodern citations of Kleist introduce a new language around sexuality instead of reenacting the ferocious narrative embedded in the ancient icon. The essay conducts a contrastive reading of two postmodern versions of the Kleistian Amazon in Italy: the first version is Lina Mangiacapre’s and Angela Putino’s philosophical conversation in “Androgina/Amazzone” as well as in Mangiacapre’s stage plays; the second version is Carmelo Bene’s cycle of performances on Achilles’s “necrophilia.” While intellectuals like Laura Mulvey in the UK and Gilles Deleuze in France tend to condemn Kleist for his necrophiliac account of romantic love, in Italy Kleist’s pessimistic image of romantic relationships offers a queer standpoint to develop a sustained critique of violent forms of desire.

The citational practice of social science research articles: An analysis by part-genres

Citational practice has been an important feature of academic writing. This study analyzed the in-text citations of 30 social science research articles (RAs) by part-genres. The citations identified in their rhetorical contexts were analyzed for densities, surface forms, roles of cited authors, reporting verbs (RVs), and functions. This multi-perspective analysis shows substantial differences of citation patterns across the Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion (IMRD) part-genres, which illustrates how forms and functions of citations are connected to various rhetorical purposes of RA part-genres. Findings contribute to a better understanding of the citational practice in social science RAs and provide useful implications for research writing pedagogy.

Shadow Conversations and the Citational Practices of a Journal

Drawing on the resonances between Judith T. Irvine’s (1996) writings about “shadow conversations” and the broader linguistic anthropological literature on citational practices (Goodman et al. 2014; Nakassis 2013; Rhodes 2020), I explore how the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology has sought to and continues to engage with the politics of inclusion and diversity in the construction of disciplinary knowledge, focusing in particular on publishing in academic journals. Following an earlier attempt to include an inclusion criterion on the journal’s Scholar One review portal, I now instead endorse the views of my colleagues to adopt a variety of strategies to showcase the work of underrepresented yet critical voices in the discipline. I conclude by highlighting the influential role that linguistic anthropologists play in promoting dialogue about the interdiscursive dimensions of knowledge production in the academy.

A Critique of the ‘Author Function’ Concept in Art History

Since the 1970s, the incorporation of European critical theory into the academic discipline of art history within the Anglophone context has become an established scholarly convention. This article aims to attend to one example of this institutionalised referencing practice: Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘author function’ as explicated in the famous essay, ‘What is an Author?’ From Craig Owen’s attempt to develop a ‘materialist cultural practice’ to Caroline Jones’s recent exploration of the ‘artist-function’ in the reception of Robert Smithson’s work, Foucault’s concept has proved to be a rich source for art historians. That being said, the deployment of ‘author function’ has, as I will show, come at the price of a more careful examination of Foucault’s essay – one that does not permit the seamless reproduction, via a citational practice, of a concept from one study to the next.

What Is a Theorem (in Practice)? The Role of Metamathematics in the Making of Mathematics

This article advocates the benefits of a sociological perspective for the philosophy of mathematical practice. Drawing from the literature of the sociology of sciences, it defends a community-centered approach of the study of mathematical practice and assesses the role of the notion of metamathematics in mathematical change and in stabilized mathematical practices. It relies on the case study of the emergence of geometric control theory at the beginning of the 1970s and of the citational practices associated to the community of control theory since the mid-1990s. The case study shows that the introduction of geometric tools in control theory at the end of the 1960s induced a change in the metamathematical views that control theorists had on their objects. It is then demonstrated how membership to the community of control theory shapes the production and the reception of the theorems of Stefan, Sussmann and Nagano. Interpreting the historical development and citational practices of this community through the perspective of metamathematics, this paper concludes by discussing the role of the orbit theorem in control theory, both as a cognitive label and as a social marker of membership to this community.

Calling forth our pasts, citing our futures: an envisioning of a Kaupapa Māori citational practice

Calling forth our pasts, citing our futures: an envisioning of a Kaupapa Māori citational practice

Introduction

Introduction

Embracing Amateurs: Four Practices to Subvert Academic Gatekeeping

ABSTRACT Citational practices function as a form of academic gatekeeping. To create a more inclusive scholarship, authors must consciously commit to embracing the contributions of all researchers, including amateurs. I base my case on Mildred Crowl Martin's biography of Donaldina Cameron, a New Zealand-born moral reformer in San Francisco's Chinatown. Martin undertook extensive original research during the late 1960s, and materials she compiled form the basis for an archival collection at Stanford University that researchers still consult today. However, Martin also admitted to incorporating a ‘few fictionalized scenes’ into her biography, and because she wrote for a popular audience, Martin omitted references in her texts. These two decisions left her vulnerable to charges of amateurism. Nonetheless, more than fifty monographs, book chapters, and journal articles from the 1980s to the present cited her biography. This success makes a fascinating case study for deriving research practices that fulfil our intellectual debts to all predecessors.

The Use/Less Citations in Feminist Research

ABSTRACT This article points to the paradox in feminist citation practices. It provides a brief overview of the key issues at stake in feminist citational practices. By highlighting the ways in which the logic of territoriality, authority and property continues to inform the mood and mode of moralistic repair, it cautions again the reification of certain racialised and gendered bodies as the remedy, ground and supplement for feminist research ethics. Thinking through the figure of the (bio)degradable, this article asks whether it is possible to consider feminist citation as use/less.

In Search of Pure Sound: Sanqu Songs, Genre Aesthetics, and Translation Tactics

Abstract This article consists of an introduction by Patricia Sieber and six short essays on translation approaches together with actual translations of sanqu songs by Mario De Grandis, Ke Wang, Hui Yao, Jingying Gao and Ian McNally, Xu Yichun, and Jenn Marie Nunes. The introduction provides a short history of the translation of sanqu songs into English, followed by a reflection on which distinctive features of the genre beg for attention in the translation process. In particular, it argues that the different sonic features of sanqu merit close consideration, the loss of the notational contours of the original tunes notwithstanding. Rather than bemoaning the absence of the underlying music, it suggests that, in keeping with Walter Benjamin's vision of the “task of the translator,” translation into another language can be an opportunity to reinvent that musicality in different ways. The six short essays that follow consider sanqu songs from the corpus of diasporic writers from the Yuan dynasty, with a view toward enriching the repertoire of translation strategies for sanqu in terms of musicality and other salient features of the genre. The six essays discuss, respectively, pronouns, rhyme, punctuation, language registers, allusion, and citational practice. In contextualizing such strategies theoretically and illustrating them with examples, the short essays seek to contribute more broadly to the theory and practice of the literary translation of Chinese poetic forms.

Black Girl Abroad: An Autoethnography of Travel and The Need to Cite Black Women in Anthropology

AbstractThis article explores the feminist potential and possibilities of Black women's travel writing. The author reflects on her travel stories, in dialogue with other Black women's travel memoirs, to make two arguments: (1) we must expand and deepen our citational practices in anthropology to critically engage more seriously with Black women's work, especially those who have been marginalized or excluded from the “canon”; (2) international travel is crucial to forming the connections and networks necessary to be able to cite Black women's work transnationally.

Vocal Colour in Blue

This essay invokes a line of historical singing lessons that locate blues singers Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters in the lineage of Broadway belters. Contesting the idea that black women who sang the blues and performed on the musical stage in the early twentieth century possessed “untrained” voices—a pervasive narrative that retains currency in present-day voice pedagogy literature—I argue that singing is a sonic citational practice. In the act of producing vocal sound, one implicitly cites the vocal acts of the teacher from whom one has learned the song. And, I suggest, if performance is always “twice-behaved,” then the particular modes of doubleness present in voice point up this citationality, a condition of vocal sound that I name the “twice-heard.” In considering how vocal performances replicate and transmit knowledge, the “voice lesson” serves as a key site for analysis. My experiences as a voice coach and composer in New York City over two decades ground my approach of listening for the body in vocal sound. Foregrounding the perspective and embodied experience of voice practitioners of colour, I critique the myth of the “natural belter” that obscures the lessons Broadway performers have drawn from the blueswomen’s sound.

Encrypted Citations: The Bondwoman’s Narrative and the Case of Jane Johnson

Abstract I read Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002) and its legal historical intertexts in order to nuance “fiction” as a literary category of antebellum African American writing. Specifically, I develop connections between The Bondwoman’s Narrative and US laws of slavery by thinking about the novel’s form in relation to legal citational practices. I argue that the novel encrypts and encodes legal narratives within its fictionalized accounts of verifiable “historical” events. By close reading Crafts’s alterations of such events, I compare her use of encryption to the citational practices inherent in legal precedent. This comparison yields a stronger understanding of antebellum African American authorial practices as deploying legal rhetorical strategies that resisted dominant legal narratives and generated new literary forms. I problematize the tendency to redeem law as a possible or ideal site of black belonging and to underscore the ways that authors such as Crafts encrypted their writing with rejections of law and the nation-state. Her work does so even as it rehearses a facility and engagement with legal culture that might suggest an effort to inscribe African Americans into legal frameworks and the ongoing nineteenth-century project of US nation-building. Instead of reading this complex engagement with US law as evincing an attachment to it, I argue for reading it as the rejection and radical reimagining of existing logics of authority and community.

‘This spasm upon canvas’: George Eliot, Gustave Courbet and Realist Aesthetics

Abstract This article offers sustained consideration for the first time of George Eliot’s entanglement with mid-nineteenth-century French art. Taking realism’s transnational nature as its point of origin, this essay probes Eliot’s claim in Adam Bede (1859) for seventeenth-century genre painting as the most conspicuous visual precedent to define, embody and vindicate her aesthetic choices – at just the moment when Gustave Courbet makes realism scandalous in the Salons of the Second Empire. Questioning Eliot’s deliberate disavowal of influence, I trace the modes of transmission through which Courbet’s art was exported to and circulated within Britain during the 1850s; while London’s official art world was unreceptive to French art in the nineteenth century, a different picture emerges if we consider the visibility afforded by independent galleries and the periodical press, and if we take account of these diverse reading, viewing and citational practices. I then offer close readings of works by Eliot and Courbet to suggest that both evidence a discomfort with representation as the primary methodology of realism, and consider the consequences for the ideological, epistemological and affective energies of realist aesthetics. Reading Eliot alongside Courbet reveals her radicalism, but this only becomes clear when we place her realism within the orbit of a broader European tradition and understand her aesthetics as a form of praxis.

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

Elitism in mathematics and inequality

The Fields Medal, often referred as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, is awarded to no more than four mathematicians under the age of 40, every 4 years. In recent years, its conferral has come under scrutiny of math historians, for rewarding the existing elite rather than its original goal of elevating under-represented mathematicians. Prior studies of elitism focus on citational practices while a characterization of the structural forces that prevent access remain unclear. Here we show the flow of elite mathematicians between countries and lingo-ethnic identity, using network analysis and natural language processing on 240,000 mathematicians and their advisor–advisee relationships. We present quantitative evidence of how the Fields Medal helped integrate Japan after WWII, through analysis of the elite circle formed around Fields Medalists. We show increases in pluralism among major countries, though Arabic, African, and East Asian identities remain under-represented at the elite level. Our results demonstrate concerted efforts by academic committees, such as prize giving, can either reinforce the existing elite or reshape its definition. We anticipate our methodology of academic genealogical analysis can serve as a useful diagnostic for equity and systemic bias within academic fields.

Bodily Citationality and Hermeneutical Sex: Text, Image, and Ritual as Tools for Queer Intimacies

Bodily Citationality and Hermeneutical Sex: Text, Image, and Ritual as Tools for Queer Intimacies1 Shlomo Gleibman This article discusses queer images of traditional Jewish clothes and objects-the prayer shawl, the ritual undergarment, and the phylacteries-in contemporary photography and novels, in relation to the biblical and rabbinic texts (the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, and Midrash). The selected cultural productions of the turn of the millennium that represent the intersections of Judaism and male-male desire include works of fiction and visual art from Canada, the United States, Israel, and Germany. Michael Lowenthal’s The Same Embrace (1998), set in the early 1990s, follows Jacob, a secular and openly gay Jewish man, who, while visiting his religious twin brother Jonathan, becomes infatuated with Ari, an Orthodox yeshiva student who is his brother’s study partner. Evan Fallenberg’s novel Light Fell (2008) depicts a passionate romance between two Jewish male scholars in the 1970s: Yoel Rosenzweig, an Orthodox rabbi, and Joseph Licht, a university professor. André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name (2007) delineates a love relationship between two Jewish men in the 1980s: Elio, a professor’s son, and Oliver, a doctoral student and Elio’s father’s research assistant.2 In all of these works, Jewish religious references serve to establish the immediacy and totality of the intimate connection between male lovers. The photography of Benyamin Reich, produced between 2005 and 2020, and of Oscar Wolfman, produced in 2010–11, employs biblical and rabbinic tropes to represent contemporary Jewish queer experience. Sarah Rosen’s and Tom Stokes’s blog Porn4Jews3 and Duncan Pflaster’s Naughty Jewish Boys Calendar (2015) introduce eroticized Jewish religious references and ritual objects into the contemporary popular culture.4 Drawing upon the works of queer theorists such as Judith Butler and José Esteban Muñoz, I propose to look at these literary and artistic productions as examples of subversive citationality and (dis)identification that construct queer subjectivity by rethinking traditional religious images and cultural practices across texts and [End Page 41] genres, through particular modes of intertextuality and cultural translation. Like a number of works in Jewish critical scholarship (see e.g. Lefkovitz; Pellegrini), I approach Jewish identity, along with gender and sexual identities, as a performative category enacted in cultural productions through interpretation and reworkings of earlier texts. Judith Butler’s description of identity as performative ritual includes the notion of bodily inscriptions, which, through compulsory citationality, establish textual authority as a form of conventionality and normativity. In Bodies that Matter, Butler defines sex as “citational practice” (71–72). She understands citation as a way of accumulating “the force of authority” through “a prior, authoritative set of practices” (171–72) in which the law is produced through citation (xxiii). Citation produces the norm (xxii), yet it also produces “a viable subject” (177). Butler makes a distinction between “forced citations” and “subversive citations” (232). The very mechanism of sex being “produced as reiteration of hegemonic norms” (70) allows a possibility of “a form of cultural iterability or rearticulation, a practice of resignification” (70). Citation can invite reappropriation and recontextualization (169). The texts and works of art that cite the tradition differently could be seen as examples of such subversive citations, as instances of bodily citationality through queering biblical and rabbinic texts and religious rituals associated with these texts. The classical religious texts are cited in liturgy, performed in ritual, and enacted by, with, and upon the queer male bodies through subversive erotic performance. When discussing his art, Benyamin Reich draws a parallel between religious ritual objects and sexual fetishes: “Fetish […] is connected to holiness. In religion, fetish is when a person makes kiddush, if he puts tefillin […]. You take an object, and you make of this object much more than what it is. This is the whole idea of art” (Schmoozing 3:54–4:24). The similar roles of imagination in erotic fantasies and in religious concepts bring together sexual practices and religious rituals. This strategy of queer reclamation of traditional images could be understood in light of José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentifications. In his discussion of the relation of queers of colour to their mainstream, traditional cultures, Mu...