Grand Narrative Research Articles

Henry Breault: Construction of a naval hero

United States Navy sailors are excellent subjects for personal microhistories due to the volume of surviving official documentation in the form of their Official Military Personnel Files. This article deconstructs a grand narrative surrounding Henry Breault, the only enlisted sailor to receive his Medal of Honor while serving aboard a submarine. Breault experienced contemporary enshrinement, a long period of sporadic interest, and a later iconographic construction into a submarine folk hero in the present day. Breault has come to represent unnamed submariners, who are expected to perform in the same fashion with no expectation of similar commendation. It is found that Breault is still representative of sailors, but as an ordinary man who acted in an extraordinary manner when circumstance required. The methodology provides insight into Breault's relationship and connection to greater society as a submariner and as a highly decorated sailor in the interwar period.

STORIES FROM THE INSIDE OF DEMENTIA: CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES AND RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH THE DISCOURSE OF EXPERIENCE

Abstract Dementia is often characterized as a time of decline and loss. The grand narrative (i.e., the biomedical narrative) of dementia describes it as a time of meaninglessness given the inevitable loss of memory and language, fraught with difficulties recognizing familiar faces, recalling autobiographical events, and orienting to time and place. This unfortunate depiction negatively positions people living with dementia as living a ‘social death’ and overlooks the potential of forming meaningful relationships and experiencing a sense of community. Elements often overlooked can be found in the careful reading and analysis of individual interactions that make up constructions of identity, relationships, and community. In this symposium, we draw data from the “Friendship Study,” a 6-month ethnographic study on the social environments of people living with dementia in long-term care to consider meaning-making in dementia through three perspectives: phenomenological, gerontological, and discursive. The first paper considers the phenomenology of friendship, moving away from linear narratives to look at micro-constructions of identity. The second considers the co-construction of friendship through discursive elements found in conversational interactions. The third challenges staff’s construction of residents, highlighting how negative assumptions about resident capabilities can affect personal relationships and the social environment.

The Culture Industry and Loss of Individuality in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

When Theodore W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two of the most prominent figures of Frankfurt School, published their work Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947, the Second World War had shaken the world and almost all hopes for humanity’s salvation were lost. The grand narratives such as Marxism, which had previously announced the coming of a fair and just revolution for the oppressed, and Humanism, which pointed the way to a harmonious existence of all humans, were all abandoned because the wars had shattered humanity’s hope in its own capabilities to achieve these ideals. Adorno and Horkheimer feared the dangers totalitarian and capitalist societies imposed on their citizens. Their assertion that late capitalism created a ‘culture industry’ which is used for the stupefaction and subjugation of people by turning them into uncritical masses is exemplified in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World. Huxley illustrates some of the key points that critical theory scholars make, such as commodification of culture, and alienation and reification of the individual. It is the aim of this research to analyse Brave New World in terms of Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of ‘culture industry’, as specified in Dialectic of Enlightenment and the aforementioned key concepts of critical theory.

Invention or Inversion? Revisiting the Question of Caste Tradition

The main theme of this paper is to revisit the question of caste and the politics of/on traditions. We have explored the questions of mythology; how ‘we’, the lower caste people associate and (re)interpret the mythical characters as a process of social upward mobility. So, is it the invention of tradition or is it the inversion of tradition or both? Interestingly, we could be able to locate a distinct regional pattern in this case. Thus, we argue that in the Northern part of India, specifically in Uttar Pradesh, though it is the process called the invention of tradition, it can be framed as a little tradition under the grand Hindu tradition. On the other hand, in the Southern part of the country specifically in Tamil Nadu, it is rather the process called the inversion of tradition which is much more radically grounded in sub-national ethos. Based on these premises, this article further argues that Uttar Pradesh’s caste politics is based on the invention of a tradition model which can incorporate the lower castes’ little traditions within the larger ambit of the Hindu grand narratives. Thus, new Hindutva politics has easily appropriated them within their polemic. On the contrary, in the South, due to the inversion of the tradition model embedded in a pre-existing political tradition and sub-national ethos, Hindutva failed to get a proper hold in recent times.

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-century America

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-century America

A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond

Reviewed by: A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond Van Gosse (bio) Keywords Missour Crisis, Slavery, Antislavery, Sectionalism A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200: Western Slavery, National Impasse. Edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. 426. Cloth, $45.00.) This volume is that rare thing: an edited collection in which the whole is considerably greater than the sum of the parts. Pasley, Hammond, and their authors offer a profound reconsideration of the early republic, challenging the edifice built by historians like Gordon Wood, in which race and slavery register as distractions from the main thrust of post-Revolutionary consolidation. The editors' Introduction proposes revisions on multiple fronts, since "the first two decades of the nineteenth century remain one of the least studied and most poorly understood periods in American history" (11). This gap reflects the periodization of the First Republic (1790–1860) as a series of discrete chunks (the Era of Federalism, the Age of Jackson, and so on), avoiding the larger continuity of sectional contestation over the problem of slavery. Positing the struggle in 1819–1821 as a fulcrum in this [End Page 642] larger dynamic indicts the blinkered historiography of the early republic, which has never "dealt easily or accurately with anything connected to the Missouri Crisis: slavery, the trans-Appalachian West, or even the nineteenth century" (11). This volume not only challenges scholarship that elides the centrality of slavery; it also poses a powerful corrective to historians of race and slavery who elide formal politics. In the editors' sum-up, "By the 1990s, historians working on the social and cultural history of race and slavery often felt free to eschew political events altogether" (15). That silence made it easier for political historians to pose grand narratives skating over the "peculiar institution." With great brio, this volume rides into the terrain left open by these mutually reinforcing exclusions. Putting the Missouri Crisis at the center of post-Revolutionary history, its authors explore both the "crisis" itself and what it represents, the long struggle over the explosion of racial capitalism inside a putatively republican order. What was hidden is revealed; the partisan fissuring of the Era of Good Feelings is no longer a meaningless churn; Jackson's southwestern wars no longer predestined "expansions"; James Tallmadge's amendment to bar slavery from Missouri not premature sectionalism but the eruption of rising antislavery outrage. The biggest shift proposed here is not temporal but spatial. In decisive ways, its authors turn the focus back to the West and away from Congress. Most previous studies (Glover Moore's pro-southern The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821 in 1953; Sean Wilentz's influential 2004 article in the Journal of the Historical Society; Robert Pierce Forbes's groundbreaking The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath in 2007) focused on maneuvers in and around Washington.1 Missouri and the frontier into which it fit scarcely figured, a testament to enduring regional prejudices. No longer! Collectively, these essays clarify that the extraordinary influx of slaveholders into Missouri after 1810, and the possibility that such men would control the entire frontier, was the issue—not sectional power plays. Obviously, the latter precipitated the crisis: Tallmadge represented a strongly [End Page 643] antislavery constituency, as Sarah Gronningsater explicates with great subtlety, and, as John Van Atta outlines, the South felt threatened by "an aggression not just on slavery and slave-state sovereignty but also on them personally and their cultural identity … a comprehensive northern attack on the entire structure of their society, on their concept of manhood and the roots of their self-respect" (189). A re-centering on the trans-Mississippi West linked to both the juridically slaveless Northwest Territory and the new Cotton Kingdom is explored in three key articles (John Craig Hammond, "The Centrality of Slavery: Enslavement and Settler Sovereignty in Missouri, 1770–1820"; Robert Lee, "The Boon's Lick Land Rush and the Coming of the Missouri Crisis"; Christa Dierksheide, "Border Control: Slavery, Diffusion, and State Formation in the Era of the Missouri Crisis"). Dierksheide, in...

The Formation and Denouement of “Perso-Islamic” in Oriental History and the Case of Seljuk Art and Architectural History

This paper questions the validity of the term “Perso-Islamic,” a label invented in scholarship on the history of the Middle East to coin the presumed cultural union between former ancient Persia and later Islamic culture. From the nineteenth century on, particularly the European historians with Indo-European philological background introduced an idiosyncratic discourse to studies on Islamic civilization. The phrase Perso-Islamic has been almost extemporaneously employed by them in places where institutions, culture and etiquette in central Islamic lands hint at elements of preIslamic kingship. As a result, the elements of culture in Central Asia, Iran and Anatolia that are considered as “civilized” are habitually linked to ancient Persia, and non-Iranian elements are marginalized under that holistic term, Perso-Islamic. As a chief expression of a long fostered orientalist paradigm, “Perso-Islamic” then became one of the key concepts of the grand narrative on Islamic art and architecture. The objective of this paper is first to reveal what “Perso-Islamic” refers to in historical studies, then to illustrate virtually impetuous use of the term in recent scholarship on Seljuk art and architecture.

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries, by Anna Maria Busse Berger

<i>The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries</i>, by Anna Maria Busse Berger

Of ‘Master’ and ‘Grand Narratives’ and Their Discontents: Early Modern European Military History

This article offers a short, critical survey of the 'grand' or 'master' narratives produced since the 1950s by those discussing the history of war in early modern Europe. It examines in turn the War and Society approach, the concept of a Military Revolution, narratives linking political and social impacts, the more recent models of Fiscal Military and Contractor States, and the debates around the nature of military change. It concludes that grand narratives are always flawed, but we need them to relate or compare what would otherwise be a bewildering array of disconnected stories.

Grand Narratives: Decolonisation and Its Wars

As political scientist Tarak Barkawi has argued, studying wars of decolonization demands a readiness to decolonize previously Eurocentric approaches to war. To do that, we need first to think about how the study of violent decolonization has evolved over the past generation or so. This brief essay offers a few answers. It focuses on three issues: the recognition of decolonization’s wars, the place of unarmed civilians in such conflicts, and the inter-connection between violent decolonization and civil war.

Evolving Grand Narratives: A Forty-Year Perspective

Eminent historians reflect on the creation, evolution, and in some cases the destruction of the field of military history’s ‘grand narratives,’ ‘master narratives’, or ‘metanarratives’ over the past forty years in the following areas: race and the history of the modern US military; Asian military history; US military history; African military history: Europe 1789 to 1900; European history since 1914; wars of decolonisation; explanations of Confederate defeat; gender and war; and early modern European warfare.

Grand Narratives and Gendered Wars and Societies

Grand Narratives and Gendered Wars and Societies

RETRACTED - Agents of Change? Families, Welfare and Democracy in Mid-to-Late Twentieth Century Europe

This special issue argues that historical work must take ‘the family’ seriously as an active participant in shaping historical change. The issue offers seven case studies from across the North to South and East to West of Europe, ranging from the 1940s until the present, and looking across authoritarian, liberal democratic, communist and fascistic systems. In all case studies, authors look ‘from below’ to show how individuals thought of themselves, in messy and complex ways, as living within ‘families’. This powerful yet shifting idea shaped people's social lives, political choices and activism. This introduction explores grand narratives of welfare and democracy in the twentieth century; offers a new working approach to analysis of family ‘agency’; and then summarises the collection's main findings around chronologies and geographies of change.

Reconstructing the Grand Narrative: The Pure Land of &lt;em&gt;Madoka Magica&lt;/em&gt;

Since its premiere, the 2011 anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica has been widely regarded by both critics and consumers as a groundbreaking work. While contemporary otaku culture typically eschews the notion of a grand narrative, this does not mean that otaku lack a longing for the transcendent, which is often projected onto a young girl whose limitless potential triggers an intense reaction with otaku who have an affinity for the fictional over the mundane. However, Madoka Magica harkens back to an even older model of the transcendent. Within the series, through powers gained from multiple, self-sacrificial incarnations, the lead character Madoka is able to break free from her reality and into a paradise in which her fellow magical girls can attain absolute peace. This article explores the ways in which the discourse of Pure Land Buddhism have been integrated into Madoka Magica and, thereby, offers otaku a postmodern Pure Land.

„SHUMEN TEXT“ IN BULGARIAN LITERATURE/ CULTURE (AN ATTEMPT AT RECONSTRUCTION)

The text reconstructs "Shumen text" in Bulgarian literature / culture, based on texts of different genres (historic, memoir, literary), considering the problem of provincialism and the correlation between "grand narrative" and “everyday narrative”. Among memoir texts stand out the memories of Shumen university, featuring a combination of mythologising discourse and self-irony; an awareness of provincialism and a problematisation of this category.

Kropsmodernismen genbesøgt

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Danish literary histories often depict the 80ies as a period in which questions of corporeality moved to the foreground of the poetics of its poets. Dubbing this move »corporeal modernism« (»kropsmodernisme«), scholars have explained this new agenda as an attempt to reclaim stability in late modernity, an era in which all grand narratives have allegedly collapsed, and the world of new media increasingly fragments perceptions of reality. This article argues that such explanations fail to recognize that a significant amount of poetry from the 80ies does not view the body as the subject’s existential and ontological foundation, but perceives it, rather, as a fluctuating materiality that merges the human with a more-than-human world. The article takes Pia Tafdrup’s Intetfang (1982) and Henrik S. Holck’s Vi må være som alt (1978) as symptomatic examples of this trend and characterizes their more-than-human bodies as watery flesh and cosmological skin respectively. Ultimately, the aim of the article is to problematize established constructions of »corporeal modernism« and stake out some of the ways in which the literary history of Danish poetry in the 80ies could be re-written.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Unequal Citizenship and Ethnic Boundaries in the Migration Experience of Polish Roma

AbstractSince the early 1990s, large numbers of Polish Roma have emigrated, mainly to Germany and Great Britain. Unlike the migration of Polish (non-Roma) citizens there was an intriguing silence regarding the migration of this ethnic group. The absence of Roma in the grand narrative of migrations from Poland, as we argue, suggests that the notion of belonging and citizenship were unequally distributed among Poland’s population. Based on our ongoing ethnographic research among Polish Roma migrants, complemented by an analysis of relevant documents, we argue that these inequalities and hierarchies are deeply rooted and there is an interesting continuity in how they were produced and reproduced prior to and after the 1989 regime change. We argue that one of the key factors in these movements, the collectiveness of the migration project – i.e. migrating as an extended family group as a component of the moral economy of Roma mobility – is mutually produced by unequal citizenship, mobility regimes and strong moral obligations stemming from kinship ties.

Historicizing Hindutva Ideology

Historicizing Hindutva Ideology

6 Crete: Early Iron Age to Classical

This review covers recent archaeological work on Early Iron Age to Classical Crete, focusing on research conducted and published in the 2010s. Proceeding from the west to the east part of the island, and encompassing material ranging from the 12th to the mid-fourth century BC, this study finds that, overall, the field is flourishing, despite the challenges created by the international financial crisis and the constraints posed by the global pandemic. In the last decade, the major archaeological projects which focus on Crete for the period under examination continued with their fieldwork and finds research, while new projects were also established. Additionally, as many as eight archaeological museums were opened, reopened, or are about to open. Nevertheless, final publication of large bodies of Cretan material from the period in question remain scarce, a condition which is more severe on the western half of the island. Notwithstanding its floruit, research on Early Iron Age to Classical Crete is often treated as relatively marginal, and – arguably – rather inconsequential to the grand narratives of Greek history, and art and archaeology. This paper traces the roots of this problem and shows that current work on the archaeology of Early Iron Age to Classical Crete has full potential for revolutionizing the largely Athenocentric paradigm which still pervades the study of ancient Greece.

The old, the new, or the old made new? Everyday counter-narratives of the so-called fourth agricultural revolution

Prevalent narratives of agricultural innovation predict that we are once again on the cusp of a global agricultural revolution. According to these narratives, this so-called fourth agricultural revolution, or agriculture 4.0, is set to transform current agricultural practices around the world at a quick pace, making use of new sophisticated precision technologies. Often used as a rhetorical device, this narrative has a material effect on the trajectories of an inherently political and normative agricultural transition; with funding, other policy instruments, and research attention focusing on the design and development of new precision technologies. A growing critical social science literature interrogates the promises of revolution. Engagement with new technology is likely to be uneven, with benefits potentially favouring the already powerful and the costs falling hardest on the least powerful. If grand narratives of change remain unchallenged, we risk pursuing innovation trajectories that are exclusionary, failing to achieve responsible innovation. This study utilises a range of methodologies to explore everyday encounters between farmers and technology, with the aim of inspiring further work to compile the microhistories that can help to challenge robust grand narratives of change. We explore how farmers are engaging with technology in practice and show how these interactions problematise a simple, linear notion of innovation adoption and use. In doing so, we reflect upon the contribution that the study of everyday encounters can make in setting more inclusionary, responsible pathways towards sustainable agriculture.