Discursive History Research Articles

Religion after Critique

Abstract In the last few decades, religion and its terms have shown to be implicated in projects of colonial modernity. While this critique of religion is now generally accepted, the term continues to be used in the field with little regard to its history and its colonial construction. This essay aims to bring greater attention to the continuing relevance of religion in contemporary society as articulated in postcolonial scholarship. It proposes closer attention to the critique of religion in the work of David Chidester, Talal Asad and Charles Long. Two distinct dimensions of religion are identified in their work. The first is a construction of religion in colonial modernity, while the second suggests ways of studying religions in light of this construction. I show in this essay that their work points to multiple complementary ways of studying religions in the contemporary. Their work suggests that the field of religious studies cannot ignore its discursive history and construction.

Discursive History of Screening Criteria for Blood Donation Affecting Gay, Bi, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men in Canada: 1983–2013

Background: In September 2022, Canadian Blood Services (CBS) implemented a sexual behaviour–based screening (SBBS) approach for all donors, putting an end to Canada’s “gay blood ban.” Analysis: To better understand the discursive history leading up to this change, this article analyzes articles in major newspapers and 2SLGBTQIA+ periodicals in Canada from 1983 to 2013 related to the ban. Conclusions and implications: The move to SBBS came about due not only to advancements in epidemiological knowledge and testing technologies, but also to significant shifts in how the issues were framed in public discourse.

Civil Rights and Prophetic Indictment: A Discursive History of Jesuit Superior General Pedro Arrupe’s On the Interracial Apostolate

In 1967, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Pedro Arrupe, sent a memorandum on the American “racial crisis” to the Jesuit priests, brothers, and social institutions of the United States. Through appeals to the American legal and Catholic moral traditions, On the Interracial Apostolate articulated why Jesuits should strive to achieve racial equality, initiating a historic period of expansion in Jesuit civil rights programs. Given scholars’ limited engagement with On the Interracial Apostolate’s distinctive rhetorical features, this article explains why the document was framed within the discursive framework of prophetic indictment by uncovering the influence of William J. Kenealy, a Jesuit legal scholar, on the document’s drafting. In light of this drafting history, this article concludes by suggesting that the emergence of twentieth-century “Jesuit anti-racism” can, in part, be explained by how questions about racial equality came to be understood as discrete expressions of broader debates about the American legal tradition’s moral foundations.

Epitaphs to Empire: On Abe Kōbō and the (Un)Making of the Repatriation Narrative

This article considers some of the dynamics of movement and non-movement in the context of East Asia through an examination of the repatriation narrative. By “repatriation narrative,” I refer to a postwar Japanese form of testimonial interlocution which features a first-person returnee narrator/author who explicitly or implicitly addresses a national audience that does not share the experience of repatriation; and which temporalizes repatriation as a memory reconstructed in the present, marked on one end by the end of the war and on the other by the returnee’s “homecoming” to Japan. This article considers the discursive limits of the repatriation narrative by reading Abe Kōbō’s 1948 debut work Owarishi michi no shirube ni (The Signpost at the End of the Road) and 1957 novella Kemonotachi wa kokyō o mezasu (The Beasts Head for Home) in relation to Fujiwara Tei’s 1949 paradigmatic repatriation narrative Nagareru hoshi wa nagarete iru (The Shooting Stars are Alive), focusing in particular on the various literary and geopolitical displacements in all three texts. In reading Abe's works against the larger discursive history of the repatriation narrative, I aim to show how both texts evince a preoccupation with narrative form that is itself a critique.

Let’s Talk about Gender

Abstract Within Europe, gender and Islam have a complex and often polarised discursive history. Whilst some find only repression of women in patriarchal and religious structures, others hail Islam as the birthplace of emancipation. This article explores the experiences of women who have moved out of Islam in both the Netherlands and the UK and finds that many navigate in between these narratives of suppression and liberation. The aim of this article is twofold: based on 22 life-history interviews, it firstly explores gendered experiences whilst growing up (from personal experienced inequality to observing theological or legislative problems), which may have led to various degrees of doubt or distress. It further unpacks gendered embodied experiences, such as veiling, modesty or mosque attendance as having relative importance when moving out of Islam. Secondly, this article elaborates on how these women position themselves, within religious and secular expectations of what it means to be a former Muslim woman. It explores their positionality in a polarised debate: how did they relate to the discourses of suppression and liberation, from either secular(ised) or religious environs?

VIETNAM WAR: REDRAWING OF LOADS THROUGH THE WORKS OF TIM O’ BRIEN’S THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

War and memory are interrelated and it represents a verisimilitude approach through the presentation of distinction among legitimate history, intellectual history and the military histories of the war (written history of armed forces, journalist). In the history of War, there are natural tendencies of legitimate historians to hide the discursive history of war (from ground zero) from the ordinary people. Most of time, the physical and psychological pain of battalions during the war , their agony, trauma and frustrations are not penned down and people of the nations(defeated and triumph nations) are unaware of the true history of ground zero. In this paper, I would like to analysis American War on Vietnam through the work of Tim O’Brien. Vietnam War is also known as “War against the Americans to save the Nation” or “American War in Vietnam”. Tim O’Brien is an American novelist and he contributes in the war. He has ranked as a sergeant in military. His semi-autobiographical novel, Things They Carried points out his experiences in the Vietnam War. It is an empathetic, as well as, fictional account of nonfictional story of American soldiers through the jungles of Vietnam. It is a story of loss and love, guilt and fear. In War, soldiers carry their necessary things (physical objects) like matches, Morphine, M-16 Rifles and Candy. After the War, they bring grief, terror, guilt, confusion and the brutality of War as a return gift. After life of War, each soldiers’ physical loss underscores under emotional loss. In this memoir, Tim O’Brien delineates how soldiers carry heavy physical and psychological loads in the War.

"Lesbian with the attributes of a man: Is a trans history of male masochism possible?

This article is an attempt at presenting a case for thinking about male masochism—from its conceptual inception in late 19th century sexology, to its contemporary framing as a sexual practice falling under the umbrella of BDSM—as having close historical connections with the history of transness, and trans femininity in particular. In order to do so, I provide an overview of the way that the idea of male masochism as femininely gendered has been variously posited, contested, and disavowed across 130 years of masochism’s discursive history. Finally, I argue for the necessity of histories of trans femininity to accept speculative approaches as a valid way of thinking about the possibilities of trans history, and ask what political ends have been served by the “cisisfication” of masochism and practices of sexual submissiveness, which is rendering them culturally legible as having nothing to do with their practitioners’ gender.

Opposing Innovations: Race and Reform in the West Philadelphia Community Free School, 1969–1978

AbstractThis article uses oral history, archival material, and published primary sources to examine the competing conceptions of “innovation” at work in the creation and operation of the West Philadelphia Community Free School (WPCFS) from 1969 to 1978. One of the longest-running initiatives in the School District of Philadelphia's experimental Office of Innovative Programs, the WPCFS stood at the crossroads of conflicting imperatives for “innovation.” These included: (1) institutional interests in advancing “humanizing” pedagogy; (2) Black activists’ interests in operating a community-controlled school for students of color in West Philadelphia; and (3) teachers’ interests in balancing their commitments to “humanizing” instruction and a surrounding community with different educational priorities. We highlight two instances where the frictions between these uses of “innovation” became pronounced in the WPCFS—debates over “free time” and the 1973 teachers’ strike. These incidents clarify how the burden of reconciling opposing innovations fell unevenly on the teachers and community members—often in ways that pitted the groups against one another—and exacerbated raced and classed inequalities in the school and district. While the account focuses on the 1960–1970s, we suggest that the WPCFS is relevant for us today, offering insights for the present into the longer discursive history of “innovation” as a lever for school reform, and into its impacts on educational equity.

Are You My Progeny?: Academic Labor as Reproduction

Abstract: There is a long discursive history that addresses academic labor within a metaphorical framework of reproductive labor. This trend has seen a viral rebirth on social media platforms as countless posts have extended this connection, fleshing out the ways in which these forms of labor might equate to or inform one another. Looking to a series of recent online posts, this brief essay examines what results from the continuation of this metaphorical framing.

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Two Responsibilities to Protect

The purpose of this paper is to re-theorize the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in the UN through to 2011, the apogee of liberal interventionism in the post-Cold War period. Contrary to a common argument in existing literature, and notwithstanding the adoption of the concept as an annual agenda item of the General Assembly, international contestation is not about implementation as neatly separated from meaning, but rather definition or interpretation. To better understand the boundaries of intergovernmental understanding, we need to interrogate the language or terms of the debate, particularly the ways in which those terms have been practiced. There have been two Responsibilities to Protect in international society. A discursive practice called Southern RtoP, traced through UN-based political dialogue, contests a meaning that has been prevalent for 20 years at least: that of Northern RtoP. This article shows evaluative nuance and data from the perspective of the Global South and provides a discursive history of an ongoing non-aligned protest against a NATO-associated theory of defeasible sovereignty. Deux responsabilités de protéger

The Creolizing Turn and Its Archipelagic Directions

AbstractRecent years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest across disciplines around the concept “creolization” even as there has been some pushback against this development in other academic quarters. This article contextualizes this state of art around “creolization” and presents an analytical overview of the term’s discursive history. First, I discuss the appearance of the termcreolein several areas of the world as an epiphenomenon of the first wave of European expansionism from the fifteenty century onward. Second, I track the emergence of “Creole” as an analytical category within nineteenth-century philology and its further development within linguistics. Third, I focus on milestones in the move of “creole” to “creolization” as a category for theorists of culture. Finally, I discuss recuperations of creolization as a theoretical model, including my own work that articulates it together with theoretical approaches to archipelagos.

Mediating and Representing the Slum: An Introduction

As a lexical concept, slum has been widely criticized by twenty-first-century researchers, but the formulation and spread of the concept have profoundly altered actual cities in many parts of the world since the early twentieth century. Examining the discursive history of the slum concept demonstrates the contribution literary studies focused on the city can make to urban history. Urban historians concerned with areas labeled as slums would benefit from problematizing the concept of slum as well as from establishing comparative histories of stigmatized urban zones in a planetary context. Such work leads to a definitional challenge in which undesirable conditions do need labeling in some way, but the challenges and materialities of different cities on different continents are also all unique and potentially damaged by the application of an overarching tag such as slum. In various ways, the contributions to this special feature all address the foregoing issues.

John Yang & the island as boundary object: photography, marine light & spectralities of national feeling on Ile de Sein

This paper explores a series of photographs taken on the Ile de Sein, a 1 km long island off the French Atlantic coast, by architect-photographer John Yang in 1960. Today, these photographs have developed a powerfully auratic life of their own, shaping affective understandings of the island through the multiple spectralities they awaken, thickened by the image’s (and place’s) continued existence in time. This photo-spectrality is underscored by the tendency for islands to serve either as places of loss and nostalgia (for instance, through cultural anxieties about postwar reconstruction and decolonization) or of dystopian visions (through fears about the Ile de Sein’s possible disappearance due to sea-level rise). A more-than-representational analysis suggests that Yang’s photographs’ contemporary affects can only be understood through an expanded concept of place in which material-environmental interactions infiltrate politics, society, and culture. The interplay between figural and metonymical presences in them simultaneously mediates a lifeworld of ‘islandness’ and broader instrumental and discursive histories through which the Finistere littoral has shaped the geographical narration of the French nation. The key to these non-terrecentric empathetic affects is constantly-shifting marine light, at once extra-discursive and atmospheric, and best captured by monochrome photography.

Label Noir's Heimat, bittersüße Heimat : A Transgressive and Transformative Text

Label Noir's <i>Heimat, bittersüße Heimat</i> : A Transgressive and Transformative Text

Controllers and the Magic Kingdom

Who controls the Kingdom Hearts franchise? This article examines this question using a mixed industrial and promotional approach to seek moments of revelation about the creation and status of the Kingdom Hearts franchise for both of its conglomerate co-creators, Disney and Square Enix. Disney’s conglomerated industrial practice has long been assessed for adherence to the concept of synergy. By examining where and how synergy was adopted as an industrial logic within the creation of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, and Kingdom Hearts III in particular, I argue that it is in moments of tension, that we can find the most instructive evidence for who controls the games we play. Following work by Janet Wasko (2001) and Barbara Klinger (1999) in particular, I first look across the shared discursive history of the franchise and then at the promotion of Kingdom Hearts III for instances where synergy breaks down or becomes contested. These, I contend, demonstrate the limits of the logical of synergy in cross-cultural, transindustrial production cultures.

Introduction

Introduction

The Lexicographical Lesbian: Remaking the Body in Anne Lister’s Erotic Glossary

Abstract In recent years, literary criticism has witnessed a flourishing of what Paula Blank presciently called ‘etymological moments’: playful tracings of the roots of words that unearth unexpected links between the past and the present, and in so doing unsettle our certainties about both. Many of these moments have occurred under the rubric of queer philology, which has particularly called into question scholarly assumptions about the historical transmission of discourses on gender, sexuality, and embodiment. However, this impulse to reclaim the discursive history of the sexed and sexual body is not new. Between 1814 and 1820, the Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister—now famous for her diary’s candid accounts of her love affairs with women—pored through English, Latin, and Greek dictionaries, looking up terms for sexual acts and anatomies and collating what she found into a personal glossary. Lister’s citing and rewriting of these definitions illuminate the protean forms that a dictionary can take for its writers and users: a source of knowledge, a moral guide, and even an erotic aid. Through lexicography, Lister found new ways of reading the body and reimagining its borders, the better to fit the contours of her own desires.

"Less Abortion, More Adoption": A Brief Discursive History of Adoption as Solution

"Less Abortion, More Adoption": A Brief Discursive History of Adoption as Solution

“Less Abortion, More Adoption”: A Brief Discursive History of Adoption as Solution

“Less Abortion, More Adoption”: A Brief Discursive History of Adoption as Solution