Essay Claims Research Articles

Female Tract Distributorsand Their Door-to-Door Rhetorical Education

In the nineteenth century, religious tract distribution was a popular form of evangelism. Drawing on evidence from the American Tract Society’s periodical, American Tract Magazine, and tract society reports, this essay claims tract distribution as an early site for women’s rhetorical education. While distributing tracts, women received a door-to-door rhetorical education where they acquired and honed skills including canvassing, establishing ethos, and adapting appeals and evidence to different audiences and rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this essay contributes to a broader understanding of what counts as rhetorical education and how and where that education takes place.

'The Socialist Environment Should Be Beautiful': Nature and Heimat in the German Democratic Republic

Heimat – home, birthplace or motherland – is an important factor of German identity. Because it evokes feelings of belonging to a community as well as to a particular location, nature and landscape are major aspects of the Heimat concept. Throughout history, Heimat has served various nationalist, national-socialist, environmental and escapist agendas and ideologies. As Jan Palmowski has argued, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) developed its own tradition regarding a socialist Heimat. Palmowski, however, did not adequately address the role of nature itself in the East German conceptualization of Heimat. Nature is important to take into account, especially because the GDR was infamous for its problematic environmental conditions. In order to understand the idea of nature in the East German Heimat discourse and how it contrasted with actual environmental circumstances, this essay draws upon a variety of sources such as educational materials and printed media, most of which were made under government control. This essay claims that the nature-based notion of Heimat played a significant role in East German ideology, identity and everyday life. Nature created a feeling of belonging, even though this idea of nature contrasted sharply with the actual reality in the GDR. In the realm of ideology, a socialist idea of nature was combined with heavy industry in contrast to the bourgeois-romantic notion of unspoiled nature. In the course of the 1970s, after Erich Honecker gained power and in the face of more environmental pollution, the bourgeois notion of nature became more popular.

The Indian left and the Indian National Congress Party: what is to be done?

With the routing of both the Left and the Congress in election after election, there are murmurs that there is pressure for the two to unite to take on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in the 2014 National Elections. These views echo the line of the General Secretary Sitaram Yechury of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), a view that seems to echo the old revisionist S.A. Dange line of the former united Communist Party of India, which talked of a collaboration with the Indian National Congress and total abandonment of the idea of the Indian Revolution. This essay claims that the Left needs to go back to its philosophical roots and rediscover themselves rather than getting involved in the tactical maneuvers of parliamentary politics, tactics that are increasing becoming devoid of ethics. It also claims that the Left in this philosophic discovery totally transcends Stalinism of all sorts, which is stated not merely as a deviation or an accident, but a counterrevolution against the Bolshevik Revolution specifically and Marxism in general. In this philosophical rediscovery, the essay also asserts that liberalism and Gandhism are alien trends to Marxism and cannot be considered otherwise. Instead, one needs to go to Jyotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar for a radical critique of the Indian rightwing project.

Why has sustainability advanced in management schools? A sociological explanation

Abstract This theoretical essay aims to provide a sociological explanation for the increasing importance of sustainability principles and practices in Management Schools. It does so by approximating two theoretical perspectives. First, from a macrosociological standpoint, it employs some of Pierre Bourdieu’s core concepts and his theory of the State to interpret how sustainability-related principles and practices have advanced in Management Schools, theorizing about the context of developed countries. Second, it changes the focus onto a microsociological perspective to analyze how these advances have been taking place in Brazil. In order to do so, it utilizes Bernard Lahire’s conceptual apparatus and his sociology at an individual scale. Therefore, this essay supports a double-folded argument. On the one hand, it claims that in developed countries the State has been the protagonist for the advancement of sustainability in Management Schools, since the State has the power over monopolies that are fundamental to engender social changes at national level. On the other hand, when its focus is shifted onto Brazilian reality, it argues that the State has a smaller participation regarding the advancements of sustainability-related practices and principles in Management Schools. Thus, the essay claims it is necessary to change the focus to the importance of key individuals, who have been essential for such advances.

Contours of Asian American political theory: introductions and polemics

ABSTRACTThis essay claims that Asian American political theory (AAPT) exists but needs to be more explicitly articulated. I contour AAPT as the practice and tradition of critical theoretical reflection upon Asian American politics. I then situate Claire Kim’s Dangerous Crossings (2015) and Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) within this contour. I read Claire Kim’s approach to localized Asian American conflicts as a case of ethically and nationally inflected AAPT, while I read Lisa Lowe’s approach to global Asian/Asian American figures as a case of historically and transnationally inflected AAPT. These examples show that AAPT fits within some parameters of political theory and political science, but also anticipates a wider reconfiguration of basic concepts such as Asian American politics. My proposal is that AAPT be conceived and developed as a disciplinary and transdisciplinary project.

South Africa as postcolonial heterotopia: The racialized experience of place and space

This essay claims that heterotopia is characteristic of post-Apartheid South Africa, i.e. where heterotopia is usually the exception in society, it is the norm in South Africa. This claim reinterprets and expands Foucault’s concept: heterotopia here refers to the racialization of place and space, and hence to otherness and difference as primary. The ubiquity of heterotopia post-Apartheid is evident in the life-worlds of white suburbia and the black township. A case study is undertaken of white suburbia through a series of phenomenological descriptions of contemporary South Africa using heterotopia as a heuristic tool. This study demonstrates how Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is relevant but also too narrow when related to the postcolonial context. An expanded notion of the term as denoting a racialized experience of space and place is necessary for the purposes of coming to terms with the strangeness of post-Apartheid South Africa, where contradiction and otherness are the norm rather than the exception.

Is It a Man's World? Reconceptualizing the Right to Be Heard in the Aftermath of the Charlottesville Tragedy

This forthcoming Essay draws upon the racial conflict spurred by the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to explore the unspoken relationship between gender, protest, and violence in contemporary American society. It posits that the anemic response from the ACLU and government to the threat posed by the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville stems from various gendered limitations in traditional First Amendment analysis. Armed with insights from masculinity studies, feminist legal theory, and Critical Race Theory, the Essay highlights some of these limitations. It aims to prompt more searching inquiry into the ways gender constructs inform seemingly gender-neutral areas of First Amendment law. The Essay identifies two problems revealed by the responses to the Charlottesville events. First, it posits that our free speech jurisprudence was, as a matter of history, created in a “man’s world” with limited female participation. As a consequence, First Amendment doctrine encodes certain gendered cultural assumptions that assume a close relationship between passionate political protest and violence. This standard appeared to have required Charlottesville officials to protect protestors’ speech up to and until it constituted a call for immediate violence, or amounted to a concrete threat of tangible harm. This approach, in effect, subsidizes the interests of a specific identity construct called “protest masculinity,” which sociologists have recognized as a threat to minority communities and society more generally. The Essay argues that free speech doctrine focused on incitement and “true threats” of violence as the primary threats to democracy fails to adequately credit the harms inflicted by other forms of political intimidation. Second, the essay shows that our traditional doctrinal focus on individual rights—rather than community concerns—is masculine-gendered, and has tangible consequences for the quality of American political debate. It argues that First Amendment law needs more nuanced constructs that can accommodate the various fiduciary duties government officials have to local residents, stemming from captive audience considerations, including being used as props, foils, or forced witnesses to intentionally demeaning and traumatizing public speech. It emphasizes the need for a doctrine that permits a historically contextualized inquiry into targeted attempts at intimidation, as this approach would far better subsidize the expression of free speech interests that are valuable to democracy. The Essay concludes by examining areas of First Amendment doctrine that could be reimagined with more sensitivity to the risks posed by hidden masculinity norms. It shows that existing underdetermined and underdeveloped First Amendment doctrinal concepts can be interpreted to address fiduciary and communitarian interests. More broadly, the Essay claims that the time has come for First Amendment scholars to face the hidden gender norms in our doctrine, and to raise questions about how these standards compromise political debate. Once these norms are revealed, scholars can have far richer conversations about how First Amendment doctrine can be improved to ensure full participation by a broader range of speakers. https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Rich-05.28.18.pdf

Cognition and emotions in Japanese humanoid robotics

ABSTRACTFrom the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese roboticists have observed specific features in the physical designs of humanoid robots that cause users to react with either fear or affection. Analyzing the sources of these reactions, robotics egineers eliminated from robots those features that might trigger negative associations, and instead embedded their designs with cues to norms, theories, and cultural references valued by their society. By analyzing Nishimura Makoto’s building of an affable artificial human named Gakutensoku, Mori Masahiro’s discovery of the phenomenon of the ‘uncanny valley’, and Ishiguro Hiroshi’s current employment of cognitive, social, and psychological sciences to overcome the ‘uncanny’ impression of his robots, this essay claims that the development of the field of humanoid robotics in Japan was driven by concern with human emotion and cognition, and shaped by Japanese roboticists’ own associations with the social and intellectual environments of their time.

Astonishing Byblows: Rurality, Snopesism, and Populist Modernization in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend

David Evans summarizes a common critical response to Faulkner's The Hamlet, describing the novel as "an allegory of modernization and its social and cultural consequences." This essay claims that Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend fictions—The Hamlet, Father Abraham, and "Barn Burning"—assert a largely unremarked source for modernization: the rural countryside. By tracing the modernizing energies of turn-of-the-century rural populism and its politics of rage, as well as the economic and cultural abstractions of rural capital, on display in these texts, this essay argues that they reverse a familiar trajectory in which modernity fans outland from distinctly urban environs.

The Politics of Old Age in Shakespeare's King Lear

The notion of an archetypal struggle between "the young" and "the old" has dominated the critical discussion of Lear's age in Shakespeare's tragedy. This essay argues instead that such trans-historical binary constructions have obscured how King Lear presents Lear's age as a contested space subject to specific, conflicting cultural definitions. Disparate representations of the life cycle, evident in early modern taxonomies of age, give Goneril and Regan the tools to recast Lear as a man in his second childhood or dotage, and thus to deny him the still powerful role he seeks to adopt as a figure in his "green old age." This framing of Lear and other older men in the play shows how an old man's physical decay might become a political fact before it was a biological one. The essay claims that King Lear—along with a handful of other plays by Shakespeare from the late 1590s to the early 1600s—reveals how vulnerable patriarchal authority could be in early modern England when older men were defined and classified in ways that disempowered them.

A lâmina que opera: um estudo sobre João Cabral e Marianne Moore

Pode-se afirmar que um dos pontos mais característicos da poética de João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999) é a metalinguagem, e uma metalinguagem não raro associada também a um juízo estético sobre outros escritores e artistas. Um bom exemplo dessa poesia “crítica” cabralina são seus textos sobre a poeta norte-americana Marianne Moore (1887- 1972). No total, são cinco os textos em que Moore e/ou sua obra aparecem como assunto de poesia. Sabendo também que, em João Cabral, esse juízo crítico sobre outros muitas vezes reflete uma visão crítica sobre seu próprio trabalho artístico, este estudo objetiva averiguar certas implicações estéticas estabelecidas nesses poemas de Cabral sobre Marianne Moore.

Face to Face: facial close-ups and joint attention in Science and the Visual Arts

This essay examines the contrasting visions of the expressive powers of the human face—both from neuroscientific approaches rooted in Darwin which argue for a codified system of six basic emotions universally recognized (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise) and from the visual arts of cinema, television and portraiture painting that rely on facial close-ups to represent an emotional fluidity that is always subjective. As a means of reconciling the two approaches, it turns to the current study of infants by developmental psychologists (like Peter Mundy and Daniel Stern) who stress the importance of an infant’s ability to read the mother’s face, which facilitates joint attention, the acquisition of verbal language and social interactions with the world. Although Stern’s imaginative dialogues sound literary and subjective, his description of the infant’s encounter with the mother’s face is actually consistent with the explanation by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1999) of how consciousness is first launched in the “core self.” By treating the mother’s face as the crucial object in the infant’s early development and by perceiving this encounter awash in reflective feelings (which Damasio distinguishes from basic emotions shared with other species), he helps explain the dichotomy between the two systems of emotive facial expressions: reading the specific codified emotions (in humans and other species) versus experiencing the flow of (what Damasio calls) “background feelings” that continuously play across the human face. By emphasizing the theories of Béla Balázs and films of Ingmar Bergman and Chick Strand, which literally teach us how to read these background feelings moving across the human face, this essay claims facial close-ups do not distract us from our social circumstances or political action as Walter Benjamin argued. Instead they can have an ideological edge in a wide range of genres as they enable us to see this emotional engagement in joint attention both as a form of interpellation and as a means of survival—not only for infants but for all those engaged with the visual narrative arts.

Mastering the Mysteries of Diplomacy: Karl Marx as International Theorist

The field of international relations is one of few corners of the social sciences in which it has been relatively easy to avoid an encounter with Karl Marx and Marxist thought. Arguably, the reverse has also been true. Whatever the reasons for that mutual ambivalence, this essay claims Marx as a serious theorist of the international, not just a pamphleteer or tactician. It does so primarily by rereading his response to the suppression of the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France. Marx’s essay, lively and provocative, challenges the distinction between ‘domestic politics’ and ‘international relations,’ and suggests that the ontological building blocks of international theory – the state and war – are revealed as historically unstable by ‘the most tremendous war of modern times.’ While Marx later reconsidered some of his analysis, The Civil War in France retains its interrogatory power especially in relation to contemporary instances of international political violence.

The special goods of childhood: lessons from social constructionism

To what extent does the common claim that childhood is ‘socially constructed’ affect the ethical debate on the ‘intrinsic’ and ‘special’ goods of childhood? Philosophers have referred to this kind of goods in their critique of overly adult-centred and future-oriented conceptions of childhood. The view that some goods are child-specific, in the sense that they are only good for children, not for adults, seems to presuppose an understanding of what children ‘are’, and how they differ from adults. However, if the social-constructionist view is accepted, it cannot be assumed that childhood is a given. This essay claims that the social-constructionist understanding of childhood does not undermine the debate on the moral status and the goods of childhood, but that nevertheless important lessons can be drawn from the insight that childhood, as we know it, is not a natural and universal phenomenon.

The discovery of surplus value: Karl Marx and Senior’s ‘last hour’

This essay claims to discover the point at which Marx worked out his theory of surplus value sometime during the 10-year period between 1857 and the publication of Capital Vol. I in 1867. This, it is claimed, was due to his reading of a well-known pamphlet by an English Oxford University professor of political economy, Nassau W. Senior. Senior had claimed that capitalist manufacturers made all of their profit during the last hour of the then normal 12-hour working day. Marx knew that this was incorrect since, if Senior was right, the capitalists might just as well employ their workers for this 1 hour alone and not bother with the other 11 hours of the working day. The workers must then have been doing something else which was of value to the capitalists over and above merely producing their profit. This something else Marx realised was nothing less than the renewal of the worn out fabric of the capitalist enterprise and hence, along with this, the recreation year after year of the capitalists claims to be the legitimate owners of the enterprise. This essay then also claims to have identified two letters by Marx written just 11 months apart which might help to further date the discovery of surplus value, in the first of which, written in 1862, Marx gives Senior’s incorrect view of surplus value as profit and in the second of which, written in 1863, he gives his mature view of surplus value as profit plus the recreation of the capitalist mode of production itself. Having made this theoretical breakthrough by 1863, Marx finally stopped making notebooks and threw himself into the writing of Capital Vol. I in 1864, the year in which by chance Nassau Senior died.

Élie Halévy and French socialist liberalism

ABSTRACTÉlie Halévy (1870–1937) is best known in the Anglo-American world for his volumes on British Utilitarianism and his multi-volume history of England during the nineteenth century. His reputation in his native France, however, is associated with his directing role of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale and for his lectures on the history of European socialism, given every other year at the École libre des sciences politiques between 1902 and 1937. This essay analyses the relationship of Halévy’s scholarship on socialism with his self-proclaimed liberalism. Contrary to much of the literature about Halévy, and at odds with the ideological thrust of the posthumously published version of his lectures on the history of European socialism, this essay claims that Halévy was a socialist liberal before the First World War. It makes this case by providing a careful reading of Halévy’s correspondence and of the manuscript versions of these lectures (held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris), and by placing these in the wider historical context. It argues that Halévy developed a sophisticated comparative analysis of European socialism, and that he was sympathetic to many of its dimensions.

“Furnace-smoke ... wrapt him round”: Industrial Hinduism and Global Empire in The Curse of Kehama and Sir Thomas More

My essay claims that Robert Southey uses Hinduism to fashion a poetics of Romantic-era technology inThe Curse of Kehama(1810). In his neglectedSir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society(1829), Southey compares the manufacturing system to Indian theology and ritual, a metaphor that relativizes religion and technology while implying that the Industrial Revolution amounts to a new breed of religious network. Southey next likens the emergent world order made possible by such technologies to the cosmic ambitions of Kehama, his own Indian tyrant-cum-demigod. TheColloquiesthus suggests an allegorical reading ofThe Curse of Kehama, whereby this tale of a king bent on cosmic rule simultaneously explores how technological and imperial networks intertwine. Accordingly, I draw from metaphor theory to read the earlierKehamaas a repository of veiled comparisons and displacements through which Southey glimpses the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution. Just as Indian wealth propels the techno-imperial enterprise described in theColloquies,Kehama’s paganism supplies the raw discursive material through which Southey fashions a poetics of manufacturing. Read alongside theColloquies,Kehamaaestheticizes the connection between imperial and technological systems, expresses the imaginative significance of twinned manufacturing novelties—the steam engine and coke smelting—and concretizes the opaque moral and poetic properties attaching to industrial power by depicting it in reference to the minutiae of Hindu religion so far as Southey understood it.

The Dao that Cannot Be Named

This essay claims that the first stanza of the Dao-de Jing (DDJ) attempts to formulate the sense of paradox—and loss—in the transition from pre-linguistic humanity to the first linguistically self-aware Chinese generation. Hegel’s account of the silence of the Sphinx is employed to lay the ground for a Kantian conjectural account of this paradoxical transition. Nagel’s question “What is it like to be a bat?” is employed as a model for the “Kantian” conjectural question posed in the first stanza of the DDJ: “What is it like to be a member of this primordial linguistically self-aware generation?” Also discussed here is the question whether there is a Kantian metaphysical dimension to the DDJ. Finally, an explanation is offered as to why understanding such primordial texts is both so difficult and so important for modern thinkers.

Breaking the “Mould” of The Ambassadors

This essay claims that the friction between sexual identity and desire in The Ambassadors is given shape by an evangelical language of election and abjection. My interpretation centers on Lambert Strether’s metaphor of the tin mold, an embodiment of a fatalistic sensibility that admits no surprises. This image responds to the ideological fallout from the Oscar Wilde trials, which popularized notions of fixed sexual identity in a way that also reconstituted queerness as merely a type. I argue that Strether’s experience, written into the temporal disjunctures of the late Jamesian sentence, orients his sexuality around a Calvinistic fulfilment of fate.

A Cinema of Refusal

Marva Nabili's The Sealed Soil (1977) is one of the few feature films made by a woman in Iran prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This article argues that the film inaugurated the “distanced look” that most scholars attribute to Iranian art cinema made after 1979. Through a reading of the film's thematic and formal articulations of refusal, the essay claims that this work can open new readings of the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Iranian cinema.