Heroic Individuals Research Articles

Reflections on the State of Eastern European Jewish Studies: Editor’s Introduction

Reflections on the State of Eastern European Jewish Studies: Editor’s Introduction David N. Myers One of the distinctive features of the Jewish Quarterly Review over the past seventeen years—from the time that the brilliant and dearly departed Elliott Horowitz and I became coeditors—has been our reliance on the mode of the forum to debate, revisit, and probe. Our first forum in volume 94 in 2004 brought together a diverse trio of scholars, Robert Bonfil, Gavriel Rosenfeld, and Sister Carol Rittner, to analyze Daniel Gold-hagen’s book A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. Their critical and often sharp reflections inaugurated a new tradition and created a place of honor for the forum in JQR. Since that time, we have taken up many trends, themes, books, and scholars in our fora; they allow for more supple and compact engagement with scholarship in the field of Jewish studies than our formidable articles. In the last few issues, we have begun to utilize the forum as a means of exploring the wide world of Jewish studies scholarship in different geo-cultural settings. There is a certain ambiguity in our formulation that, in all honesty, we were not fully mindful of initially. That is, we did not clarify whether we meant scholarship produced in or about those distinct geo-cultural settings. The fact is that we mean both. We are interested in how a particular space within the wider field of Jewish history has been represented in scholarship. And we are interested, as Marcin Wodziński exemplifies in his bibliometric essay on Eastern European Jewish scholarship in this issue, where and by whom research in a given area is produced. This kind of exercise, we hope, can shed light both on the subjects and on the objects of research in the field of Jewish studies. The kinds of reflections we invite vary in scope and disposition, ranging from the “micro” to the “macro” and even on to the “meta.” Our first such forum in JQR 111.1 (Fall 2021) explored Jewish studies and cultural production in [End Page 215] Latin America by asking seven scholars to choose a character from the past who illuminated their own research paths. The present forum pivots to Eastern Europe, home to what was the world’s largest population of Jews until the Holocaust. As such, Eastern Europe was the site of extraordinary scholarly and cultural creativity in a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish languages. Among the devastating losses of the Nazi genocidal assault was the eradication of this remarkable space of multilingual creativity. Recent decades have seen two important developments that animate the authors in this forum: the reemergence of Jewish studies scholarship in Russia and Poland—stimulated by often heroic individuals who emerged from the shadows of Communism—and growing post-Communist contestation and dispute over the sites of memory on which Jews lived and created. The call to forum contributors asked them to address in concise fashion an important moment, piece of scholarship, or personality that has been important to this field of research. The first group of essays takes up a diverse group of key Eastern European personalities covering over a century. Israel Bartal reaches back to a foundational figure of the early twentieth-century, Simon Dubnov, and examines the surprising reception and afterlife of the historian and Autonomist in the Zionist worlds of Mandate Palestine and the State of Israel. Ellie Schainker excavates the fascinating story of master archivist Benyamin Lukin, who played a central role in unearthing critical sources related to Russian Jewish history already in pre-1989 Leningrad, later in post-Soviet St. Petersburg, and finally in Jerusalem as head of the Eastern European section of the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People. Benjamin Nathans offers a touching tribute to a dear Russian friend and mentor, Viktor Yefimovich Kelner, who, after 1989, abandoned the study of British labor history to devote himself to building up an archive of Russian Jewish history, which he himself began to study and master; Kelner’s biography of Dubnov remains one of the best studies ever written...

Общность и её пластические воплощения

How does the practice of contemporary art make us rethink the principles of classical aesthetics? This question is examined through a specific case study, namely, the sculptures of Vadim Sidur, an original Soviet artist. The paper formulates the concept of hieroglyphic sign that originates in the artistic practices themselves, indicating ways in which the contemporary theory of art might be further developed. Sidur’s sculptures are juxtaposed with G. E. Lessing’s Laocoon that interprets classical sculpture as striving for eternity, i.e., as subject to idealization and subordinated to the principle of beauty. What Sidur’s sculptures express, however, is not individual heroism, where pain is overcome for the sake of harmony, but collective pain and suffering that cannot be sublated –– harmonized –– in a work of art. In order to better understand Sidur’s sculptures, it is useful to turn to S. M. Eisenstein’s remarks. For Eisenstein, the hieroglyph is not only a combination of picture and concept, but also a “conflict” of the two, which is how he understands cinematic montage. The hieroglyph expresses something meaningful and universal by means of pictorial units. Elaborating this idea, one might suggest that symbolic mediation is discarded and that sculpture becomes a social sign of pain. Inseparable from the dynamic of social matter, such signs participate in it directly. Thus they challenge the linguistic model and reveal an irreducible community, in Sidur’s case –– a non-heroic community of those who share the experience of 20th century mass suffering. Hieroglyphic signs contradict autonomy and individuality typical of the classical philosophies of art.

Columbus Falls: Recovering Indigenous Presence in the Public Sphere

ABSTRACT For decades scholars and educators have marshalled archival evidence of Columbus’s voyages in an effort to present a more accurate history of their brutality. Despite these efforts, dominant cultural narratives of Columbus residing in monuments, children’s books, television commercials, and other markers of valorization continue to cast a long shadow over the Indigenous lives and cultures that withstood Columbus’s “new world” excursion. Too often these peoples are represented as empty ciphers of primitivism, their entities readily absorbed and subsumed by the sometimes valorous, sometimes tragic story of western progress. This article calls for the use of Indigenous methodologies to disrupt the cultural ambivalence by which Columbus continues to be perceived as both hero and villain. A greater understanding and appreciation of Indigenous cultures is required in order to forge what Anishinaabe historian Jean O’Brien refers to as a “replacement narrative,” shifting the focus away from Columbus, as either flawed or heroic individual, and placing it on the more complex dynamics of settler colonialism itself. This shift can only occur, however, when we reposition ourselves, as scholars and educators, to read against the grain of the dominant archive, gathering to ourselves the intellectual tools to imagine Indigenous lives and cultures as fully human.

Introduction—Stories of the old world: The Narrative Policy Framework in the European context

Introduction—Stories of the old world: The Narrative Policy Framework in the European context

Epic narratives of the Green Revolution in Brazil, China, and India

The Green Revolution is often seen as epitomising the dawn of scientific and technological advancement and modernity in the agricultural sector across developing countries, a process that unfolded from the 1940s through to the 1980s. Despite the time that has elapsed, this episode of the past continues to resonate today, and still shapes the institutions and practices of agricultural science and technology. In Brazil, China, and India, narratives of science-led agricultural transformations portray that period in glorifying terms—entailing pressing national imperatives, unprecedented achievements, and heroic individuals or organizations. These “epic narratives” draw on the past to produce meaning and empower the actors that deploy them. Epic narratives are reproduced over time and perpetuate a conviction about the heroic power of science and technology in agricultural development. By crafting history and cultivating a sense of scientific nationalism, exceptionalism, and heritage, these epic narratives sustain power-knowledge relations in agricultural science and technology, which are underpinned by a hegemonic modernization paradigm. Unravelling the processes of assemblage and reproduction of epic narratives helps us make sense of how science and technology actors draw on their subjective representations of the past to assert their position in the field at present. This includes making claims about their credentials to envision and deliver sustainable solutions for agriculture into the future.

Varia: The Enduring Power of the Classical World View

For the poet, prophet, and politician, as for the lover, the king, and the anthropologist, the human is the measure of all things. Philosophers and psychologists define us as a perceiving consciousness, an object determined by the environment, a subject not only capable of heroic individualism but also of esoteric understanding. For some, our measure is beyond things and our true worth lies not only in the here and now but rather in our freedom to transcend the bounds of self and prevail beyond the limits of temporality. For the artist, whose creative consciousness aims to redeem the human image from the constraints of brute anonymity, the questions about our status must be asked if not finally answered. The article considers the role that the classical world view plays in the process of artistic redemption. It looks at the Judeo-Christian and Classical legacies and their interpretations. Nineteenth-century Russian literature and religious philosophy are then analysed. The article winds up with a reading of select poems by Osip Mandelstam as special attention is paid to the ethical stance of the poet when confronted with the dictates of totalitarian power.

'Remember Aesi':

In this article I draw upon a definition of ‘dialogical memorial’ offered by Brad West to offer an experimental artist's brief that outlines the various ways that a contemporary monument to the colonial artist, Adelaide Eliza Scott Ironside (1831-1867), could ‘talk back’ to the nineteenth-century statues of her contemporaries, and ‘converse’ with more recent acts of history making. In contrast to the familiar figure of the individual hero, which we associate with the statuary of her age, I suggest a group monument that acknowledges the intimate intergenerational female network which shaped Aesi's life and also ‘re-presents’ – a term coined by the historian Greg Dening – several native born and convict women from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras who influenced her life. Instead of elevating Aesi upon a plinth, I recommend grounding this group monument on Gadigal country and planting around it many of the Australian Wildflowers she painted in ways that draw attention to the millennia-old Indigenous uses of the same plants. And finally, by situating Aesi’s monument in the Outer Domain (behind the New South Wales Art Gallery in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens and to the east of the Yurong Pennisula, near Woolloomooloo Bay), in an area where she once boldly assumed centre stage before a large male audience in a flamboyant moment of her own theatrical history-making, I argue that this memorial will have the capcity to speak for itself in ways that challenge the underepresentation of colonial women in Sydney's statuary, abd, as West suggests, do much to ‘alter the stage on which Sydney's colonial history 'is narrated and performed’.
 
 [i] Greg Dening, Performances, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p37.

Luther's Treatise on Christian Freedom and Its Legacy by Robert Kolb

Reviewed by: Luther's Treatise on Christian Freedom and Its Legacy by Robert Kolb Mark D. Tranvik Luther's Treatise on Christian Freedom and Its Legacy. By Robert Kolb. Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020. 161 pp. As readers of this journal know, in the world of Luther scholarship we are celebrating a series of 500th anniversaries. The Ninety-five Theses made a big splash in 2017. In 2020 several significant Luther texts were highlighted. None is more important than On Christian Freedom (1520) where Luther laid out for common people an elegant outline of his theology. We are indebted to the prolific Robert Kolb for a book that does an admirable job of placing this key work in context, summarizing its contents, and tracing its influence in the past five centuries. The book is divided into three separate sections. In the first part Kolb provides a nuanced and balanced summary of Luther's life. He is careful to describe the theological and political context and stresses the importance of the community surrounding Luther, thus avoiding the temptation of treating him simply as a heroic individual. The second section is the heart of the book and consists of a careful commentary on the texts (both Latin and German) of On Christian Freedom. Kolb carefully explores the thesis that frames the argument of the treatise—a Christian is at the same time free in faith and bound in love to the neighbor. Particularly helpful is Kolb's insistence that Luther's understanding of freedom still connects with people today and is not merely an artifact of the Reformation (36–38). Preachers and teachers will want to pay special attention to the way "the great exchange" between Christ and the sinner is unpacked. Luther's use of striking images and language to convey the depth of God's love for the unlovable can stimulate the [End Page 242] imaginations of those charged with proclaiming the gospel today (52–54). Finally, Kolb makes clear that Luther's understanding of freedom is anything but "empty" or merely something that resides within the believer. Christian liberty is for the sake of the neighbor. And the word "neighbor" is not some sort of abstraction for Luther. God's Word resonates in our daily lives through our vocations. We are always in some sort of earthly relationship. The good news is actually incarnated in our lives as family members, citizens, workers, and church members (74–79). The last section considers the impact of Luther's writing. Kolb notes that the reception of the treatise has varied. Some have seen it as a dangerous step toward antinomianism. Perhaps most surprising is the way the text has been noted but mostly ignored, particularly from the immediate post-Reformation era until the time of the modern Luther renaissance, when it has received much more attention. It might be noted that Kolb did miss the extensive comments on Christian freedom in John Calvin's Institutes. More attention to the Reformed perspective and its concern for discipline might have added a helpful dimension. Overall, this book is vintage Robert Kolb. It contains careful historical scholarship combined with a pastoral desire to make the insights of On Christian Freedom relevant to the lives of Christians today. We can be thankful that he continues to inform the faith with grace and erudition. Mark D. Tranvik Luther Seminary Saint Paul, Minnesota Copyright © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Traumatic Communities and the Problem of the Past in the Utopian Narratives of Pauline Hopkins and Sutton E. Griggs

Traumatic Communities and the Problem of the Past in the Utopian Narratives of Pauline Hopkins and Sutton E. Griggs Daniel Fladager (bio) In its first edition published in May 1900, The Colored American Magazine announced two goals: to advance a forum in which African American scholarly and academic institutions could develop their ideas, and to deepen a general understanding of African American history through the continued progress of this community of Black scholars. As Pauline Hopkins and the editors of the magazine saw it, the teaching and theories of African American leaders had "grown dormant," and their magazine could help focus these conversations while providing a forum for discussion and the development of a historical racial consciousness ("Announcement"). The project often centered around rehabilitating or publicizing the wartime contributions of African Americans in the US military. Indeed, one of the first pieces that this magazine published was a brief history of Company L, "the only colored company in the Massachusetts militia" during the Spanish-American War (Braxton 19). The history presented a group of gallant men who were disciplined, brave, and honored for their service. The next issue carried another such article, but this time with a more explicit reference to the political project of such editorial work. It advanced the same idea of the martial exploits of African and African American soldiers in the past, citing "the courage, endurance, and fiery valor of the black and tawny warriors of Egypt, Ethiopia, Numidia, and Carthage," but also lamented how African American participation in the Spanish-American War was downplayed or erased, reminding its readers that "there has never been a war of consequence in which Old Glory has been waved over massed battalions or reeling war-decks, in which the Afro-American has not proved himself a brave man" (Hall 94). As David Kramer has demonstrated, many in the African American community hoped that participation in the war would win them greater status within the [End Page 250] US, proving their racial equality through martial participation. As soon as the war was over, however, returning Black soldiers were often treated brutally or liable to attack from whites, despite being treated as war- and folk-heroes by their African American counterparts, thwarting Black attempts toward progress. This unacknowledged participation in the Spanish-American War can be a telling introduction to themes that surface in African American utopian fiction written at the beginning of the twentieth century, where this historical wound is repeated in the novels of Pauline Hopkins and Sutton E. Griggs, both authors who were heavily involved in the racial uplift projects of the end of the nineteenth century and two of the first practitioners of the utopian genre among African American novelists. Pauline Hopkins rose to literary fame as editor and regular contributor to the Colored American Magazine (CAM), in part because of her biographies of prominent historical Black figures, including collective units of African American companies during the Spanish-American War. Biographies of collective companies strategically counteracted the brutal treatment of returning Black soldiers. Indeed, biography became part of a strategy of racial uplift in CAM. In Pauline Hopkins's short biography of the leader of the Haitian Revolution, "Toussaint L'Overture," she makes it clear that these biographies are meant to draw a relationship between the individual hero and the collective group to which they belong: "races should be judged by the great men they produce, and by the average value of the masses" (11). According to C. K. Doreski, CAM's biographies emphasized not just the "great deeds" of individuals, but also "the potential of a larger collective force, the 'citizen' always moving toward that constituent whole of 'citizenry'" (79). This citizenry becomes an important focus not just for racial uplift activism at the turn of the century, but also in reframing the focus of the utopian novel to accommodate African American concerns at the same time.1 Sutton E. Griggs shares with Pauline Hopkins an interest in uplift through publication and in the preservation of collective identity beside individual greatness. He was editor of the Virginia Baptist from 1894–98, started his own publishing house, Orion, to market his novels directly to the African American...

Cli-Fi Georgic and Grassroots Mutual Aid in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Cli-Fi Georgic and Grassroots Mutual Aid in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower Daniel D. Clausen (bio) Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. —Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (1902) Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality. —Malcom X, “Message to the Grassroots” (1963) Octavia E. Butler’s beloved novel Parable of the Sower (1993) is regularly cited as one of the earliest examples of climate fiction (cli-fi). Stephanie LeMenager even suggests that “cli-fi begins . . . in the Parable novels of Octavia Butler” (223). And, while the novel and its sequel Parable of the Talents have enjoyed consistent reading and critical attention since publication, now in the 2020s (the period in which they are set) the Parable novels are reaching a broader audience than ever before, even finally landing on bestseller lists (Cox). Readers can enjoy a podcast devoted to chapter-by-chapter reflections on the novels (Reagon and brown). In March of 2020 Butler was the subject of an hour-long NPR special (Arablouei and Abdelfatah). NASA even named its most recent Mars lander site in her honor (Greicius). In our own field of western studies, she enjoys rising prominence and seems to be taught and cited ever more frequently. With the Parable novels’ seemingly clairvoyant thematic confluence of racial justice, climate crisis, and progressive politics it is easy to see why Butler is having a moment. Much of the critical conversation around Butler’s cli-fi builds on a well-established premise of speculative fiction criticism, a premise at the heart of ecocriticism’s attraction to the genre. The idea [End Page 269] is that speculative fiction offers readers something new: an imagined world that, without the narrative exploration at hand, would remain unthinkable. This interpretive model is generally traced to Darko Suvin’s concept of “cognitive estrangement” via what he termed the “novum” of “an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (qtd. in Moylan, “Look” 52). Moylan and others credit Suvin’s intervention as enabling critics to recognize speculative fiction as a “didactic literary form with its own history” (53). That framework, applied to Butler’s Parable novels, has produced a rich body of criticism that celebrates the narrative as a “critical dystopia” representing interracial community, depicting empowered Black motherhood and disability, and even proposing an alternative “solarpunk” religious ideology.1 Generating novelty is certainly an important role for literature—fiction can and does imagine a future than can then be realized (e.g., the widely circulated story of Star Trek communicators inspiring the inventor of the cell phone).2 Speculative fiction can estrange the “empirical environment” of the reader and thus help us see the world anew. But I worry there can also be a flattening tendency to such criticism, as utopian readings easily drift into a potentially naïve position that seems to imagine that plotting a story with good outcomes is sufficient. We should be cautious of slipping into the idea that all we as scholars (or even the general population) need to be doing is merely finding and reading “the right” stories—a climate canon, or a left orthodoxy. There are still, of course, more or less useful ways to read these stories. On the other hand, to imagine a better future is a prerequisite for advancing toward it. But readings that hinge too fully on novelty and plot seem destined to paradoxically reinforce the idea that readers don’t already have cultural tools for adapting to climate change. I am arguing here in support of attending to the way stories can pass on existing knowledge. Teaching Butler’s Sower in 2020, the tension between “the right story” and the way we read stories came home to me. In teaching this novel to early undergraduates during the pandemic, I encountered a spectrum of student responses. These ranged from the complacent view that Butler obviously got the 2020s all wrong (clearly things aren’t that bad, my students would argue to my [End Page 270] surprise) to reading the narrative as an uncomplicated gunslinger Western complete with a rugged individual hero...

Embracing the collective through medical education.

The journal Advances in Health Sciences Education: Theory and Practice has, under Geoff Norman’s leadership, promoted a collaborative approach to investigating educationally-savvy and innovative health care practices, where academic medical educators can work closely with healthcare practitioners to improve patient care and safety. But in medical practice in particular this networked approach is often compromised by a lingering, historically conditioned pattern of heroic individualism (under the banner ‘self help’). In an era promising patient-centredness and inter-professional practices, we must ask: ‘when will medicine, and its informing agent medical education, embrace democratic habits and collectivism?’ The symptom of lingering heroic individualism is particularly prominent in North American medical education. This is echoed in widespread resistance to a government-controlled public health, where the USA remains the only advanced economy that fails to provide universal health care. I track a resistance to collectivist medical-educational reform historically from a mid-nineteenth century nexus of influential thinkers who came, some unwittingly, to shape North American medical education within a Protestant-Capitalist individualist tradition. This tradition still lingers, where some doctors recall a fictional ‘golden age’ of medical practice and education, actually long since eclipsed by fluid inter-professional health care team practices. I cast this tension between conservative traditions of individualism and progressive collectivism as a political issue.

Advancement of Social Justice, Development and National Security through Drama in Ola Rotimi's If…a Tragedy of the Ruled

This paper examines how social justice, development, and national security could be advanced through drama from the perspective of Ola Rotimi's IF...a Tragedy of the Ruled. The paper adopts qualitative analysis as a methodology in determining the suitability of drama in the actualization our country's objectives in relation to development and national security. Drama is employed as an instrument of consciousness to the people and makes them aware of their responsibilities to the nation to ensure the sustenance of their communal survival. It is observed that the entire community is encouraged to work together in solidarity to achieve progress and self- reliance to free themselves from their oppressors. Within the drama, it is revealed that individual heroism is discouraged as being incapable of solving Nigeria’s problems and so the communal heroism is the desirable as it ensures development and guarantees collective security. The paper makes advocacy for a reduction in poverty which is crippling the lives of the people by the government to alleviate the hardship that is being experienced by the masses. Again, it is necessary that basic amenities such as food, water, shelter, education, health services, road and power should be made available to the people as a means of consolidating social security in the country. The point from this drama is that social justice, development and national security will advance if the majority of the citizenry are provided with basic necessities to sustain their lives.

How Can We Move Beyond Education?

How Can We Move Beyond Education? Kathy E. Ferguson (bio) Eli Meyerhoff. Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 272 pp. $24.95 (pb). ISBN: 9781517902032 This book invites readers to imagine and create kinds of studying that are not anchored in the conventional academic world of universities but are instead created out of and for "alternative modes of study and worldmaking" (200). Following Harney and Moten's powerful portrait of thinking together in the undercommons,1 Eli Meyerhoff defines study as "an activity in which people devote attention to the world" (13). The modes of attention that recruit us, or at least permit us to enter their domain, can change us: as Meyerhoff comments, "sustained attention modifies [our] capacities and dispositions for understanding the world" (13). He rightly points out that critics of higher education tend to confine their analyses to identifying problems or crises within the university, to be addressed by the prevailing tools universities have at their disposal, including academic freedom, tenure, assessment, planning, recruitment, and so forth. But these tools perpetuate the very hierarchies and dispossessions that Meyerhoff contests, so he calls instead for an "abolition university" that develops practices of studying "within, against, and beyond the university as we know it" (204). The strength of this book is its critical tracing of the histories and the political consequences of various academic practices and institutions. Chapter one explores the framing of the language of "crisis" in higher education, finding three recurrent narrative strategies at work: a romantic story of heroic individuals overcoming obstacles to move up the educational ladder; a nostalgic story lamenting the erosion of past virtues; and a consumer guide coaching the hapless student in becoming a self-maximizing entrepreneur in the educational market place. Each of these stories manifests what Meyerhoff calls "educated ignorance," a state of structured non-understanding similar to Josiah Royce's useful concept of "viciously acquired naiveté." Educated ignorance obscures the institutionalized effects of racism, capitalism, and colonialism while diverting attention away from robust alternative perspectives and practices. Chapter two takes apart the dominant narrative of the school "dropout problem," [End Page 1133] showing how the usual account makes the kids who don't finish high school to be the problem, not the schools themselves or the entire system that produces schools. This chapter showcases Meyerhoff's skills of narrative analysis to good effect, revealing the educational establishment's campaign to create the ominous figure of the dropout as "a crisis management tool for liberal-capitalist modernity" (89). Chapter three builds on Sylvia Federicci's analysis of gendered primitive accumulation of capital and Glen Coulthard's account of colonial dispossession by bringing in Meyerhoff's own analysis of education's vertical imaginary. This imaginary is anchored in an idealized individual pursuing "spiritual assent up levels of schools" (109), and an accompanying assault on competing worlds, such as the fascinating Beguinages, communities of women in thirteenth—sixteenth-century Lower Germany, whose mode of life created and was created by a mode of study not confined by ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Chapter four investigates the emergence of the term "education" in England in the 1530s, showing the resonance of "bad education" with idleness, femininity, and darkness, and "good education" with hard work, masculinity, and light. Meyerhoff charts the production of tools of accounting—earning "credit," moving "up," or being held "back"—that concretize a vertical imaginary of progress and loss. He always circles back around to his main argument, which is the various ways in which dominant frames of understanding education divert attention from, and thus perpetuate ignorance about, both the structural constraints of those frames and the alternatives to them. The major weakness of this book, as I see it, is that the radical worlds that could and at times have given rise to the kind of studying he seeks are largely missing. Meyerhoff promises to "engage with the hidden histories of alternative modes of study" (6), and he accomplishes this goal with his explorations of the Beguinages, but otherwise he spends most of his time explaining how the educational system that dominates US society has become so flawed. This is important ground but it is...

Memory: Churchill and the US lures of the quagmire

‘Churchill’ has been used as a powerful lure in US collective memory on questions of military intervention and defiance. While the history of Winston Churchill is extensive and complicated the image of him in US collective memory has been reduced to a narrower image and understanding of him set around resolution, defiance, individual heroism as an antidote to the discourses and memories of appeasement. US presidents have a proclivity to reach for a memorable phrase or quotation from Churchill when considering questions of defiance and intervention. While the common aphorism suggests that lessons from the past that are unlearned will be repeated, it does not engage the issue of memory. Collective memory, as opposed to history, provides a consciousness that can be used by speechwriters and presidents to galvanise, define and motivate public opinion under particular circumstances.

The making of John Tyndall's Darwinian Revolution

ABSTRACT One of the most influential imagined histories of science of the nineteenth century was John Tyndall's Belfast Address of 1874. In that address, Tyndall presented a sweeping history of science that focused on the attempt to understand the material nature of life. While the address has garnered attention for its discussion of the conflict at the centre of this history, namely between science and theology, less has been said about how Tyndall's history culminated with a discussion of the evolutionary researches of Charles Darwin. Tyndall presented Darwin as a revolutionary scientific practitioner, whose virtues of patience, self-denial, and observation led him to his epochal theory of evolution and thus justified the extension of science into realms previously under the purview of theology. Tyndall was criticized at the time for his ‘vulgar admiration’ of a man of science who was still very much alive, and who could not possibly live up to such ‘fulsome adulation’. What such critics failed to realize, however, is that Tyndall had historicized the living Darwin within the context of his own philosophy of history that he cultivated years before, a philosophy that integrated the moral lives of heroic individuals within a progressive history of science itself.

“Accessories included”: Armed Christians and the mythos of heroic violence

The myth of the “good guy with a gun” is a seductive one for Americans, who cite self-defense as the foremost reason for gun ownership, and Pew data show that white, self-identified evangelicals are more likely than members of other faith groups or the average citizen to own and carry a gun. This fantasy of the individual hero’s efficacy is enticing but, I argue, incoherent. Through comparison of past and present Southern Baptist Convention resolutions on gun violence and a close reading of gun rights advocacy rhetoric, I show how biblical language and heroic biblical exemplars are exploited to fuse fantasies of highly individualistic, personal power with a glorification of national power. The iconography of gun manufacturer merchandise perpetrates a misreading of history and Scripture, and, at least implicitly, of medieval romantic texts, as well. Careful attention to gun manufacturer advertising iconography, and to the medieval textual tradition that it appropriates, reveals a warning that the self-authorized hero, lethally “accessorized,” is as likely to threaten the safety of the community he serves as to guard it.

Searching for the HERO in Youth: Does Psychological Capital (PsyCap) Predict Mental Health Symptoms and Subjective Wellbeing in Australian School-Aged Children and Adolescents?

Psychological capital (PsyCap) comprising the positive psychological resources of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism (HERO) has strong empirical associations with increased wellbeing and reduced mental health symptoms in adult samples. Emerging studies of PsyCap among school-age students have also shown preliminary, positive associations between PsyCap and student wellbeing. The present study is the first to examine PsyCap-HERO constructs and associations with both mental health symptoms and subjective wellbeing in school-aged children and adolescents (aged 9–14 years). A convenience sample of Australian school students (N = 456, Mage = 11.54, SD = 1.20, 47% female) completed an online survey during class time. Measures of hope, efficacy, resilience, optimism, flourishing, anxiety, and depression previously well-validated in school samples were used. Significant associations between each HERO construct and flourishing, anxiety and depression symptoms in the expected direction were found, and importantly, the combination of HERO constructs was shown to be a stronger predictor of increased levels of student flourishing, and decreased levels of anxiety and depression symptoms, than individual HERO constructs. Findings indicate that student PsyCap may be a promising area of further investigation for schools, policymakers, clinicians and researchers looking to identify positive psychological resources in youth that may buffer poor mental health and promote wellbeing.

정의와 사랑에 대한 단상

V for Vendetta (VfV, 1988) is a graphic novel that portrays the anarchist protagonist V s resistance against a fascist regime and the political awakening and existential transformation of his female successor, Evey. Its creators, Alan Moore and David Lloyd, represent an anarchist s politics for justice and love through V while encouraging their system-abiding readers to have a critical consciousness. In fact, V is more than an individual hero as he is a symbolic and historic subject of a resistance, and thus an identity that is ever available for appropriation. V and Evey s relationship is characterized by inter-subjectivity and a dialectic of destruction and creation. VfV utilizes this to offer a reinterpretation of justice and violence, and to bring about a possible inter-generational solidarity. The overarching significance of VfV lies in its emphasis on universal love and love for humanity as the hope for a social change, because it is love that allows the two characters to succeed the historic resistance. Here, Valerie is introduced as a figure who reminds V and Evey that the respect and faith in humanity and the foundation of social justice constitute universal love for others. Moore and Lloyd highlight Adam Susan s incapacity for mutual love to indicate the necessity of love, which nourishes mutual empathy and compassion required to establish a free and democratic community.

The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot

Reviewed by: The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot Robert Hawkins (bio) The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture grégory pierrot University of Georgia Press, 2019 264 pp. HBO's 2019 series Watchmen deservedly garnered attention for its treatment of the history of racial violence in the United States. Opening with gripping scenes of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, Watchmen explored intergenerational trauma, grappled with the raced and gendered nature of superhero stories, and, via the character of black vigilante Hooded Justice, encouraged viewers to empathize with black rage. Yet, for a narrative rooted in collective loss, a story that introduced the topic of reparations against a backdrop of lingering racial conflict, the political agendas of Tulsa's broader black community were virtually indiscernible. With The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture, Grégory Pierrot offers an explanation for this absence: figures similar to Hooded Justice, he contends, have long served to dismiss black collective agency. Pierrot's study is a sweeping exploration of textual incarnations of black avengers, fictionalized figures whom generations of writers have imagined rising from the masses to deliver retributive violence on the heads of their [End Page 877] oppressors. Though scholars have studied these characters before, largely within the bounds of national literatures, The Black Avenger builds on previous work to tell what the author describes as the "history of an essential trope of Atlantic modernity" (9). His aim is to reveal the persistent political purposes of black avenger narratives; despite the frequent association of black avengers with resistance to white supremacy—the book explicitly invokes responses in this vein to the film Django Unchained (2012)—Pierrot contends that the trope has served a very different agenda (7–9). Rather than a challenge to systemic black subjugation, he argues that the figure "always simultaneously contributed to maintain this system by promoting extraordinary, individual black heroism to the detriment of collective agency" (10). The legend of the exceptional black avenger, revised and adapted over centuries to suit changing national and racial contexts, functioned to narratively corral and exterminate any vision of a viable, autonomous black polity. The scope of The Black Avenger is expansive, encompassing the late seventeenth through early twentieth centuries and spanning the Atlantic to draw together literary, historical, and diplomatic writings from Great Britain, France, the United States, and Haiti. Beginning with Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1688), Pierrot dissects the anatomy of this vengeful black messiah: he is of royal or aristocratic lineage, is enslaved through trickery, is schooled in European culture, and exacts revenge primarily in response to personal rather than collective injuries—often in the form of the rape or abduction of his spouse. But above all, his insurrection invariably fails because he is the exception to the ostensible rule of black inferiority and incapacity for mass politics. Though molded to specific circumstances, the general composition of avenger narratives remained, in Pierrot's view, remarkably consistent through iterations in eighteenth-century England and France, the Haitian Revolution, and the United States of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In all of these adaptations Pierrot interprets the black avenger as a trope that writers deployed to delineate boundaries of national belonging. In the hands of British, French, Haitian, and US American authors, the figure became "either a model or a foil to design national visions and project them into the world," usually erasing the politics of the black masses in the process (14). To elucidate the role of avenger narratives in demarcating various bodies politic, Pierrot enlists Benedict Anderson's conception of the nation as an [End Page 878] "imagined political community" predicated on the limitation of membership and the cultivation of a sense of commonality among members that transcends even profound differences of station (Anderson, Imagined Communities [1983; 2nd ed., Verso, 1991], 6–7). In Pierrot's analysis, black avengers emerged as crucial components for such imagining as European nations increasingly defined themselves in racial terms. Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and its various adaptations, for example, drew together aspects of earlier black stage characters to create a protagonist uniquely suited to binding Englishness to whiteness. The novella's ostensibly sympathetic portrayal offered English readers at the time of the...

Contradictions concerning care: Female surgeons' accounts of the repression and resurfacing of care in their profession

Surgery is a high‐status, distinctly embodied, profession, dominated by men and saturated with masculine ideals of individual heroism, manual skill and detachment. In this study, we focus on exploring how surgery both represses, but also requires, caring work, creating gendered contradictions for the women that enter its ranks. Based on interviews with eighteen female surgeons from Australia and New Zealand, we apply a ‘rationality of caring work’ lens to explore how they experienced these contradictions through training, socialization and in everyday interactions. Our findings show inter‐related mechanisms whereby female surgeons are required to become more independent and self‐reliant than comparable men, but also make up for the systemic lack of care shown to junior staff and students. In particular, their pregnancy and motherhood challenge the ideal of the detached, independent, heroic agent. We conclude by discussing how a ‘rationality of caring’ lens could help unpack the gendered contradictions women experience in other elite professions.