Modern Discourse Research Articles

Can Ambivalent Heritage Embody a Nation? The Meaning‐Making of Japanese Colonial Legacies in Contemporary Taiwan

ABSTRACTThis study explores how state and nonstate actors endorsed and utilised heritage from the Japanese colonial era to redevelop the cultural discourse supporting Taiwanese nationalism. Grounded in the methodological approach to social constructionism, this study examines how these actors created and recreated the meanings of ‘ambivalent’ heritage places to embody Taiwan as one ‘imagined community’. The results suggest that the state invented and reinvented the meaning of colonial‐era heritage to be associated with the political discourse of multiculturalism, social evolution and political modernisation, reinforcing its legitimacy. Following and even transcending the official narrative, nonstate actors elicited a meaning of the colonial‐era heritage as intertextually associated with rituals, happy memories, everyday environment and individual experiences, revealing who served as the nationalists reconstructing the ‘national’ culture in a social context.

Malayāḷa Islam and Modernity: Being ‘Muslim’ and Being ‘Modern’ in Colonial Kerala

Abstract This paper analyses the contours of the vision of Islamic modernity in Kerala as articulated in the work of Sayyid Sanaullah Makti Taṅṅaḷ, a reformer, thinker, writer, polemist, printer, and publisher of the nineteenth century. He was regarded as the first Muslim reformer to make an influential presence in the modern Malayalam sphere. Hence, the study would offer an assessment of Makti’s reformist initiatives and writings in Malayalam between the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Locating him as a central figure in the new public arena, this study seeks to analyze his multi-faceted efforts to the emergence of a Mappila/Muslim modernist discourse along with the realms of religion, language and education.

Transformasi Islamic Worldview dalam Pemikiran Islam di Dunia Barat

The transformation of the Islamic worldview in Islamic thought in the Western world reflects the dynamic interaction between Islamic traditions and the context of modernity and secularization. This study aims to analyze how the Islamic worldview undergoes transformation within the thoughts of Muslim intellectuals in the Western world. Using a qualitative approach based on literature review, this research identifies a paradigm shift from traditional understanding toward the integration of Islamic values into modern discourse. The findings reveal that this transformation involves not only value adaptation but also the recontextualization of Islamic principles to address philosophical, social, and epistemological challenges in the Western world. This transformation opens opportunities for a more harmonious synthesis between Islamic values and the Western context without losing its identity.

Fifty Years of Early Medieval History

Abstract This article reflects on the phrase ‘early medieval’ as applied to European history between the end of Roman political rule in the West and some indeterminate point in the tenth or eleventh centuries. It is framed with reference to Michael Wallace-Hadrill’s 1974 lecture entitled ‘Early Medieval History’, which serves as a foil for a discussion of the evolving historiographical landscape from 1974 to 2024. The origins and the chronology of the term’s adoption into English usage are reviewed and, with an eye to discourses of modernity, the elements of middle-ness and early-ness are dissected. Points of comparison and contrast with the notion of ‘early modernity’ are noted, while an emphasis on the entanglement of middle-ness with European-ness leads into a discussion of whether the term has any applicability to extra-European history. The article concludes by highlighting the value of the weak relationship of ‘early medieval’ to modernity.

The Critical Engagement with Modern Knowledge in the Writings of Malek Bennabi

This paper explores the intellectual contributions of Malek Bennabi, focusing on his engagement with modern knowledge, and its implications for addressing the challenges faced by Muslim civilization. It examines Bennabi’s critical perspective on the interpretations of history, the social sciences, Western Centrism, and the modernity discourse, and how his approach reflects both a creative openness to diverse fields of knowledge and a critical stans to their worldviews, concepts methodologies, and end products. The paper finds that by integrating modern knowledge advancements while maintaining a critique of their underlying assumptions, Bennabi aimed to lay the groundwork for social and civilizational renewal within the Muslim Ummah. His work advocates for a balanced approach, combining critical dialogue between modern Western knowledge and Islamic worldview, heritage, and teachings, to overcome stagnation and activate the civilizational potential of Muslim societies in the modern era.

REFORMA DO ENSINO MÉDIO DE 2017: AS CONTRADIÇÕES DO DISCURSO DE MODERNIDADE E SEUS IMPACTOS

The present work aims to unveil what is behind the discourse of modernity propagated with the new reform of High School, through law No. 13.415 of February 16, 2017, which modified the Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education of 1996 and, consequently, the school curriculum. In view of this, in order to understand the dangers brought by the new law to the schooling of high school students, we resorted to the analysis of the French discourse, affiliated with Michel Pêcheux, in which it is possible to consider discourse as human praxis, as it is constituted in historical and social relations, materializing in language. Therefore, in order to understand its meanings, it is necessary to have a process of analysis that considers the relations between language, history and ideology. To achieve this intent, the conditions of discourse production that enabled the constitution of this discourse will be investigated, here the constitution of neoliberalism is considered as an important factor to understand this process. For analysis, the research corpus was constituted from a discursive sequence of the text of the law that discusses the contents, methodologies and forms of evaluation of High School so that at the end of this stage the students begin to demonstrate mastery of the technological and scientific precepts that guide modern production. From this analysis it was possible to understand that other reforms of High School have already been carried out, in similar contexts, and it is interesting to note that there is a return to other discourses. However, we now see a deeper, neo-fascist and authoritarian neoliberalism, which uses the term "modernity" to succumb more and more to the right to life of the working class. For this reason, students in the last stage of basic education are directed to a superficial education that has as its "focus" a false scientific and technological training based on modernity, to disqualify future workers and consolidate the ideology of non-employment.

The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema: Recontextualizing Campy Fantasies of Gender, Sex, and Ethnicity in Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and Ernst Lubitsch's Sumurun (1920)

Gueneli examines the adaptation of the Arabian Nights into filmic narratives in the Weimar Republic by asking how these films participated in and shaped modern discourses on gender, sex, and ethnicity. What fantasies, anxieties, and dreams did these Arab, “exotic” tales fulfill for audiences in Weimar Germany, where debates about colonial dreams and the simultaneous loss of colonies, as much as about women’s liberation and the LGBTQ+ population’s voicing of social, political, and sexual interests saturated the public sphere? Gueneli analyzes Lotte Reiniger’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun (1920). She argues that the films’ deliberations on these questions provide reactions to modern Germany’s changing socio-cultural and -political fabric. Gueneli discusses these films from the perspective of gender and sexuality and pays particular attention to the interplay between ethnicity and the cinematic use of campy/drag performances. Looking closely at the use of costume (fashion, props, jewelry) and the staging of desire (mise-enscène, casting, performance), Gueneli claims that through the occasional use of a campy mode/campy drag performance the films include more nuances in their depictions of gender, yet, at the same time, create a ranking among the implied ethnicities.

Liberating Enslaved Humanity

This article presents an analysis of the life and work of Abul Hashim (1905–1974), an important but somewhat forgotten political leader and scholar from Bengal, as an example of decolonial political thought. Like that of many other decolonial thinkers, Hashim's political thought contains profound and powerful critiques of modern political ideas and institutions, including nationalism. Writing in the context of the emergence of the new state of Pakistan and the onset of the cold war, Hashim's comparative approach presented Islamic political philosophy as a better alternative than both liberal capitalism and socialism, not only for Pakistan but also as a universal ideology. Building on the discourses of Islamic modernism dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, Hashim produced a particular reading of Islam as the pastoral political philosophy of “Rubbaniyat” that was egalitarian, tolerant, and progressive, while being critical of both traditional views of the ulema and of the Muslim nationalism of the modern opportunist politicians. Hashim's political thought, this article argues, helps us better appreciate diversities within Islamism, recover its critical edge rooted in the decolonial project, and challenges the contradiction between Islam and progress supposed in much of both Bangladeshi and global contemporary political discourses.

Moving around the Synagogue: Responses to COVID Restrictions on Movement for Ritual Purposes in a Liberal Jewish Community

Taking the experiences of families in a Liberal Jewish congregational school under COVID travel restrictions as a case study, this article highlights the ways in which the religious and the secular as categories, ways of being, and experiences are articulated through and as specific mobilities. It pushes back against the assumption that ‘everyday’ travels are primarily the time-spaces of secular modernity and questions the extent to which ideas about existential mobility tend to be framed by discourses of secular modernity. Examining disruptions to mobilities that entailed the redefinition of old movements as newly secular or religious, the article ethnographically demonstrates that religious and secular mobility regimes frequently overlap, coexist, and co-define each other, even within single events. Ultimately, it calls for greater attention to movement itself in the study of religious lives, rather than taking movement as the backdrop against or through which another set of actions or identities occur.

Dignity lives on: a comprehensive review and critical reflections on its relevance and enduring impact in modern discourse

Dignity lives on: a comprehensive review and critical reflections on its relevance and enduring impact in modern discourse

Символизмът в творчеството на Александър Мутафов (1879–1957).

Alexander Mutafov is one of the most recognizable names in Bulgarian fine art. He began his creative career as a painting student at the Royal Academy of Art in Turin. After completing his education in Italy, he went to specialize in painting in Munich. In Turin and in the Bavarian capital, Mutafov became part of the contemporary artistic pursuits of the era. It is inspired by the modern discourse of symbolic poetics. In the solitude of individualism and in decadent culture, he discovers that personal and intimate path to selfexpression, to the materialization of his inner world and the depths of his creative emotionality. The symbolistic searches in his work can be divided mainly into two directions: on the one hand, there are those in which we find the clear parameters of individualism (lonely human figures by the sandy shore, violinists overhanging the sea abyss, portraits of his relatives presented in the characteristic symbolism external forms mourning lonely grave women), on the other hand are those in which the author looks into the mythological image and the supernatural world (demons, mythical deities, sea sirens, the image of death, personifications of heavenly bodies and natural objects). As one of the significant representatives of marinism in Bulgarian art, Mutafov’s symbolic works unfold in front of the sea or in its depths. Forever inspired by the beauty of the Bulgarian Black Sea, the artist looks into the mytho-poetic topos associated with it. The vastness of the sea itself will take the form of a symbol, be sometimes alluring, sometimes sinister, and often beguiling to doom, or compassionate and kind, like a close friend. The sea often comes alive, through its turbulent and dark waters or through the calm reflections in the frozen water, in an experienced and deeply felt work.

Relaciones de la pedagógica y la pedagogía de la liberación latinoamericana. Estudio epistemológico basado en Dussel y Freire

In the last decades, new epistemological discussions have been developed to support Latin American pedagogies that distance themselves from the hegemonic discourses of modernity and their colonial accent. In this context, this essay aims to contribute to the understanding of some of the relationships between Enrique Dussel’s pedagogy and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of liberation. In the first section that contributes to this objective, the three chapters of Dussel’s book La pedagógica latinoamericana and the first two chapters of Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Opressed are presented. From Dussel’s book, the concepts father-State, mother-popular culture, and son-child-people are highlighted as symbols that explain the cultural relations of domination. From Freire’s book, the concepts of oppressors, oppressed, banking education, and liberating education are highlighted. In the second section of the development, a distinction is made on the levels of analysis of each philosopher and some coincidences on the banking dimension, totality, exteriority, otherness, and the hope of a liberated world. To conclude the paper, it is considered that there is a correlation between both philosophers that favor the dialectic of the collective human and the cultural human in Latin American pedagogies.

Literary Modernism and Literary Modernity in the Middle East

ABSTRACT This article puts Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity in conversation with Levi Thompson’s Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry to explore the relationship between literary modernism and literary modernity in non-Western literary contexts. It highlights the authors’ parallel theoretical engagements of Michel Foucault’s “attitude of modernity” and modernists’ and modernizers’ reworkings of literary heritage through the sublation of premodern literary content and form into modern conceptions of literary history. Drawing on these parallels, the article reviews several points of convergence in contemporary Arabic literary historical analysis that limn Jabbari’s approach to the Persianate world, which crosses between Persian and Urdu, the naskh and nastaʿlīq scripts, and Iran and India. It seeks out connections in the work and thought of Jabbari’s interlocutors, such as Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār and N. M. Rashed; Iranian modernist poets Nīmā Yūshīj, Aḥmad Shāmlū, and Furūgh Farrukhzād; and the Arab “free verse” (shiʿr ḥurr) poets such as ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb. The article highlights how Jabbari’s book proves that literary historians in the Persianate world were subject to modernization discourse in making themselves modern and therefore covered up aspects of their premodern heritage that did not fit their modernizing projects.

Political Imaginaries in the Climate Movement: Youth-Led Groups Constructing Plural Views of the Future

Since 2018, there has been a notable increase in recognition of the global youth climate movement. Young activists have come into the spotlight through extensive street demonstrations, school occupations, and engagement in other collective actions with the purpose of promoting alternative visions of the future. Multiple scholars have delved into activists’ profiles, their media representations, and other topics. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of research exploring their political imaginaries. This article aims to contribute to understanding how young activists in Portugal assess the current social and political landscape and construct visions of political futures. After analyzing online texts from four climate groups, we identified four themes that offer insights into the political imaginaries of these groups. The four groups discursively negotiate political imaginaries that correspond to a wide spectrum of perspectives, ranging from collective resistance against the neoliberal capitalist system and proposals of decentralized democracy to strategies based on individual ethics and the prevalent discourses of sustainable development and ecological modernization. The plurality of political imaginaries reflects the diversity of sociopolitical stances within youth-led climate movements in Portugal and their commitment to exploring alternative ways of governing climate change.

Matters of the Mind: A Look Into the Life of Sigmund Freud.

This biography of Sigmund Freud examines the life and contributions of the individual recognized as the progenitor of psychoanalysis, analyzing his significant influence on the fields of psychology, culture, and the comprehension of the human psyche. Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Freiburg, Moravia. His early education and burgeoning interest in the field of medicine established a critical foundation for the development of his innovative theories. Following his academic pursuits with distinguished individuals such as Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, Freud formulated his theories regarding the unconscious mind, mechanisms of repression, and the importance of dreams. Freud's theoretical framework presented constructs such as the id, ego, and superego, fundamentally transforming our understanding of human behavior and motivation. The implementation of innovative methodologies, including free association and transference, has significantly contributed to the evolution of contemporary psychotherapy, facilitating the exploration of inner conflicts and unconscious desires among individuals. In the face of criticism and controversy, Freud's theories exerted a significant influence on psychology, as well as on art, literature, and popular culture, thereby shaping the intellectual landscape of the 20th century. The article further investigates Freud's personal life, encompassing his familial relationships. This also elucidates the diverse benchmarks of human psychiatry that were established during the era of Sigmund Freud. This review characterizes Freud as a multifaceted individual, a trailblazer whose contributions to the understanding of the human psyche persist in relevance, inciting discussions and encouraging further investigation across diverse disciplines. The narrative provides a comprehensive examination of Freud's life, contributions, and lasting impact, emphasizing his significance as a pivotal intellectual whose ideas continue to shape modern discourse surrounding identity, sexuality, and mental health.

Reclaiming Desire and Defying Conventions: An Analysis of Female Sexuality in Mrs Dalloway and the God of Small Things

The paper offers a detailed analysis of the complexities of female sexuality in Mrs Dalloway and The God of Small Things from a feminist perspective. It investigates how female protagonists overcome and defy societal norms and expectations concerning their sexual desires. The obstacles of conventional sexual norms align with the ‘repressive hypothesis’, coined by Michele Foucault in The History of Sexuality which posits that the modern discourse on sexuality is characterized by repression. This theory is used to depict how societal repression shapes and is shaped by the narratives of Clarissa and Ammu. The paper is qualitative and uses close textual analysis as an analytical tool. For the study, primary data were collected from textbooks, and secondary sources including various books, websites, articles, and journals were used to gather secondary data. The clear finding is that Clarissa has a sexual desire for Sally which is not accepted by post world war British society and Ammu, being a divorcee and upper-class woman, reclaims her sexual agency and attempts to fulfill her sexual desire by making a romantic relationship with Velutha which is prohibited in the post-colonial Indian society. Through the blending of sexual desires with more general societal issues like race, class, and cultural identities, both novels deconstructed conventional depictions of female sexuality. Thus, the study contributes to the ongoing conversation on the role of women’s sexual desires and their place in a postmodern world where autonomy, self-expression, and the deconstruction of conventional norms are of paramount importance.

Research on the Application of Information Visualization Design Based on the Three-level Theory of Emotions

As society progresses, environmental challenges have emerged as a central concern in modern discourse. The degradation of ecosystems has led to the endangerment and extinction of numerous plant species. Moreover, the overwhelming influx of information available to individuals often hampers their understanding of the significance of these endangered species. Conventional written narratives are frequently inadequate in fulfilling the audience’s informational needs. As a nascent medium for scientific communication, information visualization presents an innovative and effective approach for individuals to swiftly acquire and interpret data. This paper concentrates on the endangered aquatic flora within the South China Botanical Garden, grounded in a three-tiered emotional theory framework. Strategies are developed across instinctual, behavioral, and reflective dimensions. The outlined strategic goals aim to elevate design aesthetic literacy, broaden cognitive processing capability, and enhance the efficiency of information dissemination. By employing endangered aquatic plants as a focal point for design initiatives in the South China Botanical Garden and integrating it with the theoretical framework, the objective is to present information regarding these vulnerable species in a more direct, inventive, and concise manner. This methodology aspires to raise public awareness surrounding the conservation of endangered plant life.

The politics of the anti-politics machine of agricultural commercialization: Uganda and Tanzania in the Longue Durée

ABSTRACT Powered by global financial institutions, philanthrocapitalists and development agencies, agricultural commercialization is once again at the forefront of development discourse and policies, especially since the late 2000s. The cornerstone of this development approach is that by investing in raising agricultural productivity, supporting infrastructure, and introducing climate-smart agricultural systems, with private sector investments all along the food value chain, Africa will transform into a breadbasket for the world. In the last decade, Uganda and Tanzania have enthusiastically embraced agricultural modernization discourses, becoming test beds of new ‘frontier’ blueprints: ‘responsible’ agricultural commercialization projects, ‘inclusive’ business models and ‘sustainable’ contract farming schemes. This paper takes issue with the de-politicizing discourse of the value chain paradigm by exploring diachronically the genealogies of agricultural commercialization in Uganda and Tanzania from colonial times, across post-independence state-led modernizations, to the present neoliberal reforms. It argues that mainstream development narratives tagged to commercialization projects have worked as an ‘anti-politics machine’ making invisible to the public eye the widespread land dispossession, rural pauperization and social conflicts it entails.

Thinking with the Girls with Burning Hinder Parts: Process, Revision, and Uncertainty in Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack

Abstract: Whereas Djuna Barnes's use of early modern discourses in Ladies Almanack has generally been read as a critique of sexology and psychoanalysis, I argue that her use of this cross-temporal knowledge is a part of a cacophonous, contradictory, plastic, and process-oriented understanding of embodied gender, reproduction, and queer desire. She "thinks out loud" about how women can have sex in the wake of centuries of (male) authors trying to make sense of women's sexual desires. In so doing, Barnes defies twentieth-century assumptions of how knowledge happens and what knowledge should do, and instead privileges thinking over knowing.

THE CONCEPT OF “THE POLITICAL”: CONTENT, SCOPE, FUNCTIONS

Politics, state, government, bureaucracy, law, etc. as institutions, war, revolution, elections, lawmaking, etc. as processes, sociological polling, collection, storage, presentation and dissemination of information, digitalization, lobbying, corruption, etc. as technologies are hyponyms, that is, concepts expressing a private essence in relation to another, more general concept - hyperonym. Such a common concept for them is political. And a deep understanding of its meaning and content is the initial condition for their scientific research. Today, society has not developed a socially significant and generally accepted understanding of the political. In modern discourse, it has a fairly broad interpretation, characterized by multivariance and ambiguity. At the same time, its meaning and content are often deliberately and purposefully distorted and distorted. On this basis, they sometimes talk about politics as an extremely contradictory concept. The article presents an experience of operationalization of the concept of “political”. It offers the author’s definition of the political, reveals its originality, its relationship with politics and its role in understanding and describing the sphere of politics. An attempt is made to identify criteria of politicality, to reveal the content, scope and functions of the title concept.