Enlightenment Narrative Research Articles

The Antinomy of the Anthropocene: The Narrative of Enlightenment in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Ecological Theory

This article examines Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ecological theory to explore inherent tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions concerning human agency in Anthropocene discourse. Contra most commentators, I argue that Chakrabarty’s account of the Anthropocene remains neither modernistic nor posthumanistic per se because his view of the human turns out to be consistently inconsistent. Chakrabarty apparently advances an anti-anthropocentric and posthumanist explanation of the climate crisis by shifting his focus from the ‘species’ to the ‘planet’. However, his account of the planet remains within the modernistic paradigm that privileges progress, rationality, and human agency because he tacitly embraces the narrative of enlightenment, or transition from ignorance to knowledge, when describing a passage from the global to the planetary. Chakrabarty’s narrative of enlightenment thus epitomizes the remains of anthropocentrism in Anthropocene discourse, registering the extent to which it retains beliefs in human agency, rationality, and singularity.

Apologists for Spanish intolerance and the dawn of the “black Legend”, 1556–1665

ABSTRACT The image of Spain as the epitome of religious intolerance is believed to have been constructed by Spain’s enemies during the reign of Philip II, and later disseminated by Enlightenment and liberal writers. This common belief conceals vast evidence that early modern apologists of Spain insistently claimed that the kings, inquisitors, and people of Spain exceeded any others in religious intolerance. By revealing the similarities between Habsburg Spain propaganda and the Enlightenment narrative, this article suggests that ideas evolve through history in less linear and obvious paths that is often assumed, and that the same tropes can serve both to exalt and vilify the same collective identity.

Windows on the Womb and Guiding Trains of Light: Figuring the Real in Plate XXVI of William Hunter's Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus

AbstractEschewing the symbolic in favour of commitment to the unmediated replication of exactly that which is actually observed, Hunter's attitude to the images in his Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus embraces a juridical ideal of scientific representation: images should tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Contemporary scholars have questioned this appeal to objectivity, maintaining representation always exists inside culture and arguing gender frequently inflects purportedly neutral scientific vision. I extend that debate via a reading of Plate XXVI, which is frequently misunderstood as representing something completely different to what it actually depicts. Its sequence of images, I argue, chart a narrative of enlightenment wherein folk mythologies of the uterus are subdued by the controlling scientific gaze. I also suggest a previously unrecognised correspondence between Plate XXVI and one of the plaster casts of the dissected bodies preserved in the University of Glasgow's Anatomy Museum.

From Night to Light: Harmony as Allegory in Die Zauberflöte

Abstract: Mozart's final opera, Die Zauberflöte , wields visual and musical metaphor to deliver possibly the most effective allegory of Enlightenment themes ever achieved in Austrian art. Supported by a systematic tonal analysis, this article reviews, integrates and expands upon decades of scholarly research on this opera, with a strict focus on the thematic symbolism of its harmonic elements. By unifying disparate sources and providing an independent overview of tonality throughout the two acts of Die Zauberflöte , this study aims to foment subtler appreciation of Mozart's application of harmonic contrasts. Special attention is devoted to the manner in which the symbolic meaning of such contrasts evolves together with the opera's dominant themes, to build a formidable musico-dramatic metaphor of a fundamental narrative of European Enlightenment—the philosophical struggle of reason against ignorance.

Saying the right thing, doing the white thing: Perpetuating the enlightenment narrative in White undergraduate student leaders

This phenomenological qualitative study explored the ways undergraduate student leaders engaged in the enlightenment narrative. Eighteen White student leaders from seven higher education institutions were interviewed. Participants engaged in frontstage performances of inclusion by “saying the right thing” to maintain ownership of their leadership positions and differentiate themselves from white peers through a white savior complex. When asked to clarify, they revealed private sentiments of dispossession and fear that some campus equity efforts threatened their leadership positions. This revealed ways in which participants undermined their initial rhetoric of inclusion through “doing the white thing.” Implications using Adaptive Leadership theory are provided to suggest how student involvement professionals can challenge White student leaders to confront their own Whiteness and counter forms of white supremacy.

Cossacks, Empire, and the Enlightenment: From Orientalization to Republican Reappropriation

This article seeks to explore how Enlightenment narratives and categories framed the perception and image of the Zaporozhian Cossacks both in the imperial center and in the south-western periphery of the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century. It demonstrates that Catherine II deployed the discourse of civilizational mission to justify the disbandment of the Zaporozhian Cossack Host and the liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich. The historical works of Voltaire became an important source of inspiration for Catherine's orientalist image of the Ukrainian Cossacks, which gained wide currency in the Russian Empire and was accepted by some representatives of the Ukrainian Cossack elite. On the other hand, the Enlightenment allowed some Ukrainians to challenge imperial hegemony by going beyond traditional estate and regional particularism and by rethinking the Cossack tradition as a democratic republican one and setting it against the supposed despotism of Imperial Russia.

Culture Wars in Gothic Mode: The Example of HBO’s Miniseries Sharp Objects

Cultural and political polarization in The United States has been a prominent topic both in social sciences and the media since the beginning of the 1990s. Whether the polarization is understood as a deep moral divide among Americans, i.e., as the culture war between liberals and conservatives, or as a superficially maintained political hostility, i.e., as party sorting between Democrats and Republicans, most scholars agree that the media sphere is deeply polarized, especially since 2016 when Donald Trump emerged as a political figure and then the U.S. president. HBO, known for its progressive cultural capital and liberal ethos, distinguishes itself in the daring narrative productions which often tackle polarizing themes of race, gender, sexuality, etc. Gothic mode or genre is among the often-employed narrative styles of its productions. American gothic, also the subject of increasing academic interest in recent decades, has been largely considered within its cultural and historical context and interpreted as a site where the nation’s historical benighted ghosts disrupt and challenge official enlightened national narratives. As HBO’s original production told in a gothic mode, Sharp Objects (2018) will be contextualized within the U.S. culture wars and analyzed as a Southern Gothic tale told from the liberal progressive perspective. The show’s narrative will be seen as a gothic journey deep into the South by a liberal heroine haunted by her conservative ghosts, who attempts to face and settle them. The paper explores the thesis that the gothic disruptive potential is of a conditional and limited impact on liberal America’s Enlightenment narrative.

The Rise of Victorian Caricature, by Ian Haywood

Reviewed by: The Rise of Victorian Caricature by Ian Haywood Dominic Janes (bio) The Rise of Victorian Caricature, by Ian Haywood; pp. vii + 296. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $79.99 ebook. Ian Haywood's The Rise of Victorian Caricature is a book that takes caricature seriously as having played a variety of important cultural and political roles in the 1830s. Historians have paid considerable attention to the lively parodic visual culture of the Georgian period but have tended to neglect what came after. In books such as Vic Gattrell's City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (2006), we learned that the personal was also political and that laughter was a way of critiquing power, not just a way of relaxing from the tensions of the day. The comparative insignificance of Victorian cartoons is that they, supposedly, were buried in more-or-less worthy periodicals such as Punch (1841–2002) and were designed to politely amuse the sedate reader. Whether that is an accurate assessment of the later Victorian period, however, is a question that this book does not address. What it does achieve is to highlight a wide range of little-read periodicals and sources for political radicalism in the aftermath of the Reform Act of 1832. These contained a huge number of images—the author estimates around 2,000—in publications which, in some cases, reached a substantial public. Figaro in London (1831–38), notably, reached an estimated circulation of around 70,000, thus outstripping other publications in the later 1830s. The book is, in effect, a follow-up to Haywood's Romanticism and Caricature (2013), which focused on close readings of a small number of images produced mainly by well-known artists such as James Gillray and George Cruikshank during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The figures who loom large in this new study, such as Charles Jameson Grant, are not just little known but often unknowable, since the facts of their lives have not been preserved. This is, however, a common problem for those who research the work of minor artists. The book works effectively within these evidential limitations as a useful compliment to Brian Maidment's works, such as Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 (2013). That book did important work in drawing attention to the cultural and social worlds of visual satire during this period but notably, and perhaps regrettably, excluded the political realm. It is easy to see why art historians have paid little attention to the material explored in Haywood's volume since most of it is derivative and was often poorly executed, although he makes the point that the crudeness of the images was sometimes deliberate. In, for instance, The Two Mothers (1842), difference in execution was used to differentiate the worlds of the privileged from their social inferiors. Haywood's main concerns are not, however, art historical, since he views caricature primarily as source material for the [End Page 131] understanding of the history of radicalism. He persuasively argues for the importance of the periodicals of the late 1830s and early 1840s, asserting that the fact that they "have been all but erased from cultural memory is testimony to the success of Victorian newspaper historians who played down the importance and achievements of the radical-satirical press in their 'respectable' and gradualist narrative of cultural progress and enlightenment" (3). In his quest to correct this narrative, Haywood in turn effectively ignores Punch, which initially displayed some radical qualities that it was, admittedly quite swiftly, to lose. The result is that this book is not so much a full account of the rise of Victorian caricature as a discussion of its preconditions. Nonetheless, Victorianists will undoubtedly benefit from reading his account of the visual culture of Chartism. Haywood highlights the intriguing fact that what he terms the mainstream Chartist media was dominated by reliance on the use of text and apparent disdain for caricatures. The history of cartoons in periodicals was shaped by disdain coming from both sides of the political spectrum for the Bahktinian carnivalesque that caricature, unless constrained by conventions of politeness, threatened to evoke. The world that Haywood brings to...

Sovereign dealings with blasphemy: the prosecution of written pacts with the Devil within the absolute monarchy of Denmark-Norway

ABSTRACT This article discusses how to perceive developments in the prosecution of written pacts with the Devil in Denmark-Norway between 1634 and 1754. While existing scholarship interprets the prosecution within the framework of an Enlightenment narrative by presenting the cases as evidence of an incomplete rejection of magical beliefs, such as the possibility of making a pact with the Devil, this article investigates the cases with regard to the early absolutist sovereigns’ endeavours to deal with blasphemy offences. The medley of punishments imposed in the cases – including public confession, executions, and imprisonment with hard labour – calls for a more complex evaluation of both ruptures and continuity in the prosecution of this type of crime during the period. Through selected cases representing varying approaches of the respective sovereigns, this article analyses how the understanding and administration of the offence developed in the legal practice of the emerging absolutist state.

Glitter, Shine, Glow

Abstract This article explores the ways in which patina is deployed in gendered celebrity culture, specifically through forms of visual communication in relation to luxury. The article is framed by literature on race and gender from apartheid to postapartheid, and texture in visual communication in relation to luxury in Africa. The author uses three magazine covers featuring beloved Black South African women celebrities to illustrate three aesthetics of Black feminine success: glitter, shine, and glow. Visually, the three patinas are linked and on the surface might seem indistinguishable, but a difference in positioning and ethic comes through in the discourse animated by each. Glitter is linked to the classic narratives of sexy fame, in which the woman featured is portrayed as the heteronormatively desirable archetype of fun and glamour. Shine is linked to a politicized ethic of visibility, the work of spotlighting presence, legitimacy, and excellence as a role model for a broader feminine community. Glow is linked to a narrative of feminine enlightenment and inner peace, in which beauty comes from within and radiates outward from the skin, and feminine aesthetic labor is harnessed to the project of transcending gross materialism while simultaneously using material cues to communicate that joyful transcendence.

Haʻu ka Waha i ka Nahele: Dissonance and Song in Kanaka Sites of Counter-Memory

Waikīkī and Maunakea are two sites of global interest and prominence, occupying a certain space in the collective consciousness of Hawaiʻi. They are not, however, often considered as sites of conscience, even though they are the sources of Kanaka counter-memory that stand in opposition to the memories codified by the settler state into narratives of Kanaka dispossession and Americanization. This article interrogates this condition of illegibility, and the role of mele, hula, and a moment of dissonance in revealing the sites and stories often overwritten by dominant, quasi-colonial narratives of tourism, capitalism, Western enlightenment, and progress. I also argue that our true sites of conscience are those that invite a change of consciousness on the part of the onlooker/participant, laying the foundation for collaborative envisioning of pono futures for Hawaiʻi, in the context of aloha ʻāina.

Smash the Thing: William Kentridge, Classical Antiquity, and hisRefusal of TimeinO Sentimental Machine

AbstractThis article examines a 2018 exhibition of William Kentridge’s work, entitled O Sentimental Machine, at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt. This exhibition placed the South African artist’s work in confrontation with the museum’s collections, which offer an overview of sculpture from antiquity to early modernity. The exhibition draws together themes explored in Kentridge’s sustained engagement with Greek and Roman antiquity: critiques of triumphant narratives of history; questions of memorialization and ruination; and the probing of narratives of enlightenment, which begin with Plato’s allegory of the cave (Rep. 514a–521b). The first half of the article considers Kentridge’s dialogues with Greek and Roman antiquity in his wider works before turning to his Triumphs and Laments (2016), a series of images telling the story of Rome, imprinted on the embankment walls of the Tiber. The second half focuses on O Sentimental Machine, paying particular attention to The Refusal of Time, a piece presented at the exhibition. The article argues that this piece offers a compelling challenge to narratives of ‘civilisation’, at the centre of which lie hegemonic notions of time, underpinned by constructions of the classical tradition. Kentridge thus offers a vision for emancipatory engagements with Greek and Roman antiquity.

Narratives of Media Education of Modern Liberal Information Culture

The scientific understanding of the narratives of media enlightenment of the modern theory of liberal culture and the factor of functioning of its carriers in the conditions of historical and contemporary aspects of the communication transformation of society is a relevant and undeniable fact of the modern science of social communications. The description of the theory of liberal information culture from the point of view of typology and the principles of identifying the primary and fundamental nature of the fact and the possibility of its free interpretation in the realization of the interpretive resources of the carriers of information culture, which forms a specific feature of liberalism in their totality — free personal social evaluation. Despite several centuries of actual spread within the global information environment, liberalism (both as a philosophical trend, theoretical current, and informational practice) stands in a certain way aside from serious research in social communications. Modern mass communication, increasingly clearly and unequivocally drawing the border between the demonstration characteristics of a communication product based on the principle of online or offline, leaves both severe topics and problems, as well as the seriousness of approaches to their coverage, out of the context of the audience’s attention. The study aims to reveal the key factors of the modern and historical aspects of the carriers of Ukrainian liberal information culture. Following the purpose of the research, we defined the following tasks: to find out the content and audience characteristics of social communications as the basic concepts of the functioning of liberal information culture. The methodological basis of the research is a combination of general scientific methods and particular methods and approaches to the study of regularities and features of information processes and phenomena. As for the comprehensive system of scientists in the theoretical component of the research on Ukrainian information culture of the second half of the 19th — beginning of the 20th century, this approach leaves out of the research field two popular opposite paradigms of information culture: the so-called Modern project and the Postmodern project. Accordingly, the research results are specific general ontological grounds for the universal unity of things, people, events, and reports about them, hence — universal criteria for evaluation and interpretation of everything. In this understanding, the informational and cultural world is a universe of all possible meanings, contents, and guidelines of human existence, transmitted to a person at any time and space.

The enlightenment narrative: White student leaders’ preoccupation with racial innocence.

The enlightenment narrative: White student leaders’ preoccupation with racial innocence.

Anthropocene and Empire: Discourse Networks of the Human Record

Scientists have recently proposed 1610 as a candidate for the first year of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. They pinpoint the rise of European colonialism and the global movement of life among ecosystems it precipitated as the triggers for measurable changes in the earth system. We used digital humanities methods to mine historical archives to evaluate the relations among colonialism, early modern globalism, and the origins of the Anthropocene. We suggest that the Anthropocene was initiated by a premodern earth system that defined life across the globe in spatial terms, furthering the goals of empire—a regime of biopower that has not been adequately acknowledged in debates on the Anthropocene. We propose that the idea of empire, rather than Enlightenment narratives of progress and scientific modernity, must be considered in our definition of the Anthropocene. (JJL and JB)

Tasks of Philosophy in the Present Age

This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s recently discovered 1952 Berlin speech. The speech includes several themes that reappear in Truth and Method, as well as in Gadamer’s later writings such as Reason in the Age of Science. For example, Gadamer criticizes positivism, modern philosophy’s orientation toward positivism, and Enlightenment narratives of progress, while presenting his view of philosophy’s tasks in an age of crisis. In addition, he discusses structural power, instrumental reason, the objectification of nature and human beings, the reduction of both to mere means, and the colonization of scientific-technological ways of knowing and being—all of which continue to impact our social and political lives together and threaten the very existence of every living being. This speech is essential reading for Gadamer scholars interested in the social, political, and ethical dimensions of his thought and for those interested in bringing Gadamer into conversation with critical theory.

Этнокультурные сообщества в архивном кино: «За Полярным кругом» Владимира Ерофеева

At the turn of the 1930s, the Soviet film industry produced for the wide screen many educational films about the life of remote regions of the country, allowing the audience to make a virtual journey through the multi-structured multinational Union of the SSR. The article is to introduce Vladimir Erofeev’s archival ethnographic film “Beyond the Arctic Circle” (1927), an assembled film about the “exotic” frontier region of the Far North. The socio-political and cultural-ideological context of the film creation is being analyzed. The author concludes that Vladimir Erofeev’s concept of documental film was radically different from that of Dziga Vertov (poetical Constructionism) or of Mikhail Kalatozov (revolutionary romanticism) or of Nikolai Lebedev (ideology journalism). The method consistently used by Vladimir Erofeev when creating his documentary films involved systematic study of source material and its retranslation in cinema; it thus may be called “anthropological newsreel.” Due to the specifics of silent cinema, the film “Beyond the Arctic Circle” is a kind of visual text consisting of approximately the same number of film images and captions alternating in a narration. The film is built as a sequence of episodes describing the geography and ethnography of distinctive North-Eastern outskirts of the country. In the course of the study it becomes obvious that this film is to the utmost a documental film / chronicle, which distinguishes it from many propaganda films of the Soviet period. The source base of the research is little-known archival film and photo sources, as well as data from the Soviet periodicals and excerpts from the theoretical heritage of the film director Vladimir Erofeev. The method discovered by Vladimir Erofeev, while working on the “Beyond the Arctic Circle” film, amount to combining research and creative approach, and thus his film conveys not just information about the events, but also provides their visual and emotional context, the vital “feeling” of the North. This is a case-study providing historical and anthropological analysis of the Far North image in the Soviet documentary. No wonder that the film “Beyond the Arctic Circle” has broken the framework of purely enlightening narrative and become an outstanding phenomenon in the cinema art and a significant experience of visual anthropology in the Soviet period, as well as a multi-layered historical source that has not lost its relevance for contemporary scientific research.

Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural WorldsCredulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism

Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural WorldsCredulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism

Assumptions on Gender Equality in the Narrative of Secularism

Secularism, which is central to the Enlightenment narrative, promises liberation, freedom, emancipation, and progress to humanity. At the same time, the narrative of secularism poses religion as its antithesis, which brings dogmatism, fundamentalism, and violence. In this project, I read secularism closely in various contexts from a gender and sexuality perspective and question the assumption that secularism always provides a progress for gender equality, whereas religion always produces inequality and oppression. To open up new ways of understanding secularism and gender, I firstly question the so-called universality of secularism by addressing the European origin of secularism and the concept of religion. Then, I address the diversity of secular and religious experiences which reconstruct each other in various contexts. Finally, I argue that the embodiment of secular or religious in terms of gender, sexuality and family is an important matter for the understanding of the division between religious and secular.

Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self by Mark Byers

Reviewed by: Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self by Mark Byers Steven Shoemaker Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self. Mark Byers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 224. $80.00 (cloth); $76.00 (eBook). This carefully researched, insightful, and provocative study of Charles Olson's development as an American modernist of the period following the Second World War seeks to place Olson in a new context and thereby grant us a fresh understanding of his work. Rather than concentrating his attention primarily on immediate poetic precursors (and still-living contemporaries) like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Mark Byers focuses on the New York scene that gave birth both to abstract expressionism and to radical experiments in new music. Further, Byers considers these aesthetic developments in relation to the postwar, and post-Marxist, soul-searching of thinkers on the Left who sought a way forward after the political and social upheavals wrought by worldwide conflict. Byers's innovative approach is to place Olson's work alongside the work of painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb, as well as composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman. At the same time, he attends to the critics and thinkers who were both critiquing the current state of art and culture and helping to imagine new artistic and [End Page 440] social possibilities, including Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald, and Sidney Hook, as well as Frankfurt School émigrés like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. To this already full roster he adds twentieth-century scientists Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Erwin Schrödinger—shapers of the "new physics" who shook the epistemological certitudes that had underpinned both scientific inquiry and the Marxist historical imagination. In Byers's reading, a widespread sense of skepticism and radical questioning ran through every aspect of postwar culture and led to a search for new forms of political agency, and, indeed, for a new "practice of the self" suitable to the times. During the war, Olson had worked for first the Office of War Information and then the Democratic National Committee, but by 1945 had begun to withdraw from political life (9). One of Byers's central areas of concern is the question of what political agency might look like after such a turn, or even "retreat," into private life. The question sparked intense debate not just for Olson, but for many artists and thinkers of the period. The technological rationality of Germany's National Socialism had come to seem like a perverse fulfillment of the dream of Enlightenment "reason" and "progress," thus calling into question the whole Enlightenment narrative that had been so central to the development of European culture. At the same time, the Marxist faith in the historical inevitability of socialist revolution seemed no less wrongheaded and useless in the face of the actual events of recent world history. Amid this loss of faith in the ideals of "civilization" and in grand narratives more generally came an upsurge of interest in the individual rather than the class or the tribe. Writers and artists turned away from the dream of collective political action, as well as from the sorts of aesthetic commitments with which that dream was associated. Subsequent critiques of abstract expressionism as "the official style of postwar American capitalism" have questioned the triumphalism, imperialism, and devotion to self-interest of this political, cultural, and artistic moment, but Byers wants to provide a corrective to such critiques, to show that they have often "drastically simplified the fate of 'I' in the United States in the years immediately following the Second World War" (11). Byers argues that beginning around 1945 "the first person subject was increasingly regarded as the site of radical political agency by the new independent left; a transitional formation cutting its ties with orthodox Marxism and the ambitions of the New Deal state" (11). In this reading, the Maximus of Olson's The Maximus Poems embodies a "radical 'practice of the self'" that "charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the immediate postwar period" (19). Further, Olson's construction of such a figure positions him...