Critical Genealogy Research Articles

A son of Souffles ? Abdellah Taïa and the poetics of illiteracy in Vivre à ta lumière

In 1966, ten years after Morocco gained independence from French colonial rule, a group of decolonial writers founded the journal Souffles (1966–1972). Its mission was to deconstruct the suffocating binaries, concepts, and essentialisms that trapped Morocco in an enduring French cultural imperialism or hermetic cultural atavism. In this article, I draw a critical genealogy between leading Moroccan anti-imperial thinkers including Abdellatif Laâbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and Abdellah Taïa’s latest novel Vivre à ta lumière (2022). Just as the Souffles generation exposed the politics of illiteracy that had cemented the conditions of oppression during the Protectorate and its violent aftermath under the reign of Hassan II, so I argue that Taïa inhabits his mother’s illiterate tongue in the novel as a decolonial language that refuses to make itself legible to monologic forms of European, or Moroccan neocolonial, intellectualism. Attentive to the metatextual tropes of language, words, letters, scripts, and even envelopes as spaces in which Taïa reworks hegemonic colonial and absolutist narratives, I explore the poetic potential of illiteracy not as a cultural lack, relegated to silence in Morocco’s post-independence struggle for national sovereignty, but as a potent instrument of postcolonial literary critique.

Popular Culture

Abstract Scholarship on the creation and circulation of forms of popular culture has always been concerned with questions of audiences and reception. Initial theorizations of audiences as overly credulous, easily swayed masses have long been significantly complicated to account for more active participation. One of the key drivers of this move of framing audiences from passive to active has been the emergence of the discipline of fandom studies. Today, the field is truly multidisciplinary, encompassing popular culture and media studies, literary studies, communication studies and psychology, marketing and tourism studies, amongst others. Additionally, while fan communities have always been transnational and transcultural, the explosion of cross-cultural phenomena like the Korean Hallyu Wave (the worldwide popularity of Korean media texts and celebrities) has brought renewed attention to the interconnected nature of the contemporary global mediascape. Even as it has expanded, one of the main challenges to the discipline has been criticism that it has overemphasized aspects of fan identity, such as gender identity and sexual orientation, while neglecting the role of race. This critique challenges the structure of the field, whereby certain critical genealogies, methodologies, and even fandoms themselves, are granted a canonical and universal status while others are seen as tertiary. This review of published works in popular culture studies focuses on studies of fandom that aim to break these silos, selecting three publications that address different aspects of today’s globalized fandom mediascape to underline the necessity for fandom scholars to expand their understanding of how these spaces are interconnected. Thematically, the review considers how these publications address and extend three core interests of fandom studies: 1. Digital Platforms and Politics; 2. Identity and Community; and 3. Transcultural Flows.

The Cultural Life of Democracy: Notes on Popular Sovereignty, Culture and Arts in Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya

This paper explores the emergence of a demotic style of politics alongside demotic forms of cultural and esthetic expression during Sri Lanka’s 2022 political struggle dubbed the aragalaya (struggle). It argues that the aragalaya opened up a discursive space to reimagine democratic politics in Sri Lanka and the role of aesthetics and culture in such popular-democratic political mobilization. However, the paper also argues that such popular political mobilization and its attendant cultural expression needs to be considered cautiously because its potential is politically and culturally ambiguous. By tracing a critical genealogy of the notion of the “people” in Sri Lankan political history and extending this genealogy to how the “people” was reimagined as an agential collective during the aragalaya and by looking at aesthetic and cultural practices that were foregrounded during the aragalaya—particularly the music of Ajith Kumarasiri—the paper argues that the demotic understanding of the people and the demotic cultural forms that gained prominence within the aragalaya offer a counterpoint to the deeply corrupt and exclusionary mainstream political culture of the country. A central concept used to frame this argument is the analytical and methodological heuristic of the “cultural life of democracy.”

Gods, Absolute, Non-theistic Divinity, and Monotheism in Indian Philosophy of Religion: A Genealogical Critique of Evolutionary Theogony

There are various permutations of theism: henotheism, pantheism, panentheism, a/theism, and nontheistic divinity. There is debate whether the idea of OmniGod was ever achieved in India. R. C. Zaehner argued that an evolutionary transition from pratenaturalism of the Vedas to Upaniṣad’s monism, culminated in monotheism with Purāṇas and the Bhagavad Gītā. I argue differently, beginning with ancient ritualistic polytheism, followed by unifying One Brahman, toward monistic panentheism and later non-dualism of advaita Vedānta. Under the influence of Asaṅga, Buddhism elevated the Buddha as the Great Divine Replacement. As a response or reaction, Brāhmaṇism forged Īśvara as God with the World as his Body. By 13th century, theistic dualism separated Īśvara from his creatio. Even Nyāya rational philosophy was persuaded by monotheism as demonstrated in their teleo-cosmological argument for the existence of Īśvara. I attribute all this to sectarian and doctrinal shifts rather than to any evolutionary teleology and/or predestined historicist movement.

Nietzsche and the Significance of Genealogy

Nietzsche and the Significance of Genealogy

Curators of Global Buddhism: A Critical Genealogy and Decolonial Reading of Contemporary Curatorial Practices in Buddhist Studies

Abstract This article offers the first critical genealogy of scholarship on the category of “global Buddhism” and its related literature. The category was first theorized around the turn of the millennium and has since been used in multiple publications, yet in all this scholarship, there is no clear definition, classification, or critical evaluation of the term. This article, therefore, details the different histories, taxonomies, and examples associated with global Buddhism, the relationship between power and knowledge in such representations, and clarifies what, if anything, any of this has to do with the category of “religion,” a question whose critical dimensions have been ignored by scholars on the topic thus far. Since the category rose to prominence alongside a series of others like “Buddhist Modernism,” “postmodern Buddhism,” and “global religion,” the article also draws attention to the curatorial practices that inform the academic study of Buddhism and religion and critiques the remnants of colonialism, orientalism, and universalism still operative in late capitalist scholarship. Theoretically, the article is informed by critical theory from the study of religion and Decolonial thought. Overall, it suggests deep ties between global Buddhism and what Anibal Quijano calls the coloniality of power but also suggests critical ways to employ the category going forward.

Creativity — Narrativity — Fictionality: A Critical Genealogy

Abstract: The term “narrative” has become ubiquitous in public discourse, but to date little work has been done to explore how vitally it is related both historically and theoretically to another contemporary buzzword: creativity. By addressing this lacuna this essay seeks not only to illuminate the popularity of narrative as a mode of knowledge, but to shed new light on its relationship to another core concept in the field: fictionality. The essay argues that the narrative turn and the contemporary boom in instrumental storytelling have been facilitated by a lexical and semantic shift from narrative as artifact to narrative as process, and that this shift is the result of ongoing historical intersections with new secularized and democratized theories of creativity as a human faculty. By tracing this shift we can better understand the contested history of fictionality, particularly in relation to debates about the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, and bring a new approach to the epistemological underpinings of the narrative turn in the academy and the subsequent popular appeal to personal storytelling in the networked public sphere.

Decolonizing a museum: Exhibiting Mexican American mythologies of place in Los Angeles’s historic Plaza District

This article examines how the disciplinary technologies of land use, zoning laws, immigration policy and urban renewal were utilized in the creation of LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes (LAPCA), Los Angeles’s first museum dedicated to Mexican American arts. I analyse the methods used by LAPCA’s founders, curators and city planners who have deployed the museum’s location adjoining the city’s historic Plaza to situate this institution within the symbolic and spatial jurisdiction of a historic place. In this case study, I begin with an exploration of the earliest foundations of ethnic tourism in Los Angeles’s historic Plaza district to situate LAPCA within a long history of governmental interventions used to create and reframe Los Angeles’s ethnic cultural spaces. I draw upon two theoretical strands – Foucauldian governmentality and Henri Lefebvre’s dialectic of urban implosion/explosion – as my primary tools of genealogical critique. In this article I provide new practical applications for using governmentality as a lens through which we can examine how the ensemble of administrative techniques and procedures used in the governance of populations shape the spaces they inhabit.

A case for popular geoeconomics: Angelina Jolie, China, and the semiotic limits of the archive

AbstractPicking up where Mallin and Sidaway (2023) left off, this commentary makes a case for popular geoeconomics—as well as geoeconomics beyond the Beltway. We address the dialectical tension between geoeconomics and geopolitics as it is demonstrated through popular and geo‐dispersed renderings of the concept. Geoeconomic visionaries drive geopolitical relations not only by revaluing land, labour and resources across space but through their everyday enactments and popular expressions. We comment on how geoeconomics is enrolled into popular culture and plays out through the Hollywood icon Angelina Jolie, as well as its articulation beyond the Anglosphere in Mandarin language scholarship. The geoeconomics debate in Mandarin, as well as its mediation by celebrities, formidably contribute to the refashioning of the global geoeconomic landscape. In doing so, we expand the critical genealogy of geoeconomics as a concept, field of inquiry and everyday experience, and account for the semiotic limits of the archive.

Cultural Governance and New Forms of Governmentality Focus on the South Korean Case

The paper discusses the reasons behind the dominance of governance in contemporary societies. The techniques of government cannot be understood apart from a critical genealogy of governmentality. This article references Michel Foucault’s analysis of governmentality to analyze the role of governance in arts and cultural management. It argues that, following the governmental state described by Foucault, the contemporary governance state is defined by a new spectacle governmentality. The globalized context of this governmentality produces a simulacrum of governance that tends to substitute for actual outcomes. The South Korean case is used to illustrate this new form of ubiquitous cultural governance.

Positions, positionality, and relationality in educational research

In this paper, we provide a critical genealogy of position statements and take up the questions of why positionality and position statements have become a presence in the field of qualitative education research, what these statements do and don’t do, and how relationality may serve purposes of mutuality that reach beyond an individual’s social locations. Using content analysis of fifty position statements found in high-impact educational research journals, we theorize and trace how positionality statements have become a genre, with concerns about power and representation from the field of anthropology and in educational research. We also include a conversational interlude as praxis to lift up our own experiences with positionality statements and our interpretations. We provide provocations about positionality statements and what they operationalize in knowledge making projects.

Counter-Archive as Methodology

<p>Remembering Refuge: Between Sanctuary and Solidarity is a counter-archive based on oral history interviews with people who crossed the Canada-US border to seek refuge and advocacy groups working at this border in two moments of crisis: the 1980s Central American crisis and the 2017-19 crisis at Roxham Road. This paper foregrounds counter-archiving as a methodology, building from the oral histories to illustrate how borders and bordering practices are navigated and contested and how these lived experiences push back at state-directed logics and narratives of migration. By drawing connections across past and present struggles over mobilities and borders, we offer a critical genealogy of refuge around the Canada-US border. The oral histories collectively and individually contest state-led narratives of migration as a ‘crisis,’ the need for borders to be further securitized, and specifically of the Canadian state’s generous humanitarianism towards a select few. We introduce the methodological choices, contexts, and limitations of the project’s research design, and present two themes that emerged from the oral histories: the contested element of ‘choice’ in migration movements and the important roles played by resistance and refusal in the working out of borders. Finally, we emphasize that relationships between borders are crucial to understanding the histories of asylum around this border, and the political shift activated by the counter-archive of centering borders as lived, experienced, contested or refused.</p>

What Transnational Feminism Has Not Disrupted Yet

Abstract Examining the critical genealogy of transnational feminism, this essay proposes a feminist theoretical model called quilted epistemology derived from the Black feminist art of quilting. Aiming to strengthen transnational feminism, quilted epistemology intends to resolve some of the existing limitations of transnational feminism and embrace multiple and incompatible feminist knowledge positions from the Global South to the Global North.

ReOrienting Religion?

This study presents a case of East–West entanglement not confined to dynamics internal to the Western trajectory of production and critique of Eurocentric notions of religion. It explores how the critical opening initiated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in 1962 against reifying “religion” cannot be treated exclusively as an antecedent to the critical genealogy of religion performed by Talal Asad. We suggest that it needs to be read in the context of Smith’s collaboration with Toshihiko Izutsu, whose approach possessed a stronger counterhegemonic potential than the genealogists’ interventions in the critique of religion, which are still inscribed within a Western conceptual compass. We argue that thanks to his original skills as a philosopher of language, Izutsu put to better fruition Smith’s embryonic approach to the power-fraught character of language and discourse by studying Islamic traditions semantically, discursively, and contextually.

The World Turned Outside In: Settler Colonial Studies and Political Economy

Abstract This article criticises the political-economic analysis of settler colonial studies, which it draws out through an immanent critique of its most famous practitioners. It then offers a critical genealogy of the wider theoretical trend that secures it: the post-Cold War vogue of asserting the ever-increasing centrality of primitive accumulation in global capitalism – what we might term a mode of predation. Finally, it teases out the tensions and confusions in the reliance of settler colonial studies upon Marx’s concept of surplus populations, as well as problems abounding in Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’. Overall, it argues that the frequent claim that we inhabit a global settler modernity cannot be sustained through these notions, and that this claim is profoundly moral and academic, lacking political and analytical value. The insistence on the durability of settler colonialism amounts, in this literature, to a claim on behalf of settler colonial studies itself.

The architectonic of Foucault's critique

AbstractThis paper presents a new interpretation of Michel Foucault's critical project. It is well known that Foucault's genealogical critique does not focus on issues of justification, but instead tackles “aspectival captivity,” that is, apparently inevitable limits of thought that constrain the subject's freedom but that, in fact, can be transformed. However, it has not been recognized that, according to Foucault, critique can proceed along two distinct paths. In a key passage of “What Is Critique?,” Foucault states that critique is tasked with questioning truth about its effects of power and with questioning power about its discourses of truth. We show that this “double movement” organizes Foucault's critical project as a whole, giving it a significantly wider scope and a more complex structure than has been previously acknowledged. At the heart of the above‐mentioned bifurcation lies an apparent tension between two contrastive roles Foucault assigns to truth‐telling in the context of critique: on the one hand, truth‐telling (as avowal) is a target of critique; on the other, truth‐telling (as parrhesia) is one of critique's methods. We argue that combining these two dimensions in a unified account is crucial for understanding and re‐evaluating Foucault's critical project as a whole. By showing that truth‐telling remains an essential element of Foucauldian critique, this paper also rectifies some influential misinterpretations according to which Foucault's critical project seeks to eliminate truth from the picture.

The Devil Is in the Cellar: The Genealogy of an American Thanksgiving Narrative

This essay investigates the historical adaptation of a narrative whose primary image is an animal mistaken for the devil. This critical genealogy charts the narrative’s development from a 1648 pamphlet in England to an 1824 newspaper in Salem, Massachusetts, where it transformed into a tale concerning the New England Thanksgiving tradition. It then considers subsequent permutations and variants of that tale as they relate to the rise of a national holiday, only to be supplanted by narratives concerningthe Pilgrims in the late 1800s. It further demonstrates the utility of increasingly accessible newspaper archives for historical research into folk narratives.

Programming Plasticity as Embodied in Childhood: A Critical Genealogy of The Biology of Adversity and Resilience

The Biology of Adversity and Resilience coheres around the claim that early childhood experiences of stress and adversity get ‘under the skin’ and become ‘biologically embedded’, increasing the risk of negative health and behavioural outcomes later in life. Taking a genealogical approach to biosocial plasticity, this article situates The Biology of Adversity and Resilience within the arc of an apparatus of power/knowledge that emerged in tandem with liberal governmentality and which assumes childhood as a means of programming the future. The argument is that The Biology of Adversity and Resilience is a normative fiction: a socially scripted story that figures the ‘resilient’ child in a way that potentially sustains extant inequalities by prefiguring a future that is in step with the neoliberal present.

Critical geoeconomics: A genealogy of writing politics, economy and space

AbstractTowards the end of the Cold War, the vocabulary of global power, space and economy received a qualitative update. Amongst the terms rapidly gaining prominence since the early 1990s has been the notion of geoeconomics, the coining of which has frequently been attributed to the strategist Edward N. Luttwak. In his interpretation, it signified a transition away from Cold War ideological and military geopolitical competition towards commerce and market‐based geo‐power. Over the past three decades, a ‘geoeconomics boom’ set in, characterised by think tanks and a varied body of politico‐economic literature making extensive use of the term. Conventionally treated as a neologism, the provenance and earlier iterations of geoeconomics, some dating back more than a century, have been largely ignored by both celebratory and critical accounts. In this paper, we trace and contextualise these earlier instances, leading us to the Geopolitik era in Germany and references to geoeconomics in the United States in the decades after WWII. We thereby offer a critical genealogy of geoeconomics, conceptualised as an object of definitional struggle. Proponents of the term sought to position it variously as a tool of national economic cohesion and competition or as a way of understanding and harnessing shifting global power relations, whilst others sought to subsume geoeconomics to geopolitics. These past struggles track forward into ongoing dialectical tensions between geoeconomics and geopolitics as competing but related geostrategic visions.

Montage Diversity

Montage diversity divides even as it unites the people it represents, making it a telling register of possibilities for social inclusion in American visual culture. Montage effects in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Pepsi-Cola’s 1969 campaign “You’ve Got a Lot to Live” demonstrate the problems that arise in the combination of social diversity and filmic montage, and, because one was the work of avant-garde film artist Slavko Vorkapich and the other of his son Ed Vorkapich, compose a critical genealogy of montage diversity and its implications for social inclusion.