Canonical History Research Articles

CHALLENGING TERMS: Contemporary Art and the Disciplining of Novelty in the UAE

AbstractCurators and gallerists are constantly in search of exciting, new contemporary art from around the globe. Yet in order for “emerging” art markets to become visible to the contemporary art elite, they must adopt infrastructures and criteria from that world. In so doing, they often standardize and lose the very novelty for which they are sought. These infrastructures, such as biennials and commercial art fairs, determine how artworks are exhibited and which artists are successful, and they codify art historical narratives which complement, rather than challenge, the dominant Euro‐American art historical canon. This phenomenon is particularly visible in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where infrastructural and market changes have transpired swiftly across the art scene in the past decade, resulting in the frequent sidelining of Arabic‐speaking artists and those who work in more traditional media. [contemporary art, United Arab Emirates (UAE), canon, aesthetics, novelty]

Florence Treadwell Boynton in Progressive Era Berkeley: Early Modern Dance and California’s Political Unconscious

Florence Treadwell Boynton was a dancer, teacher, and bohemian health enthusiast who spent most of her life in Berkeley, California. A childhood friend and contemporary of Isadora Duncan, Boynton espoused a similar movement aesthetic. Yet, in spite of her lively contributions to the cultural life of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has remained largely a footnote in the extensive literature on Duncan. Revisionist histories often draw out the importance of figures omitted from the dance historical canon. This article goes beyond mere inclusion and rectification of the historical record to reframe both Duncan and Boynton as symbols of the political economic tensions specific to their Californian context in the early twentieth century.

Beauty is in the eye of the follower: Facial aesthetics in the age of social media.

The advent of social media has influenced the relationship between aesthetic surgeons and their patients, as well as the motivations of such patients to seek cosmetic surgery. To determine how the cephalometric proportions of modern social media models fit with historical canons of beauty. Frontal and lateral photographs of 20 high-influence female Instagram models were obtained and evaluated for cephalometric measures. The means of these measures were compared with previous reports in the literature. Cephalometric measurements of social media models were in agreement with historical ideals of beauty for Nostril axis (120.7°), Goode's ratio (0.6), Nasofacial angle (35.7°), Nasofrontal angle (130.9°), and the horizontal thirds. Results were discrepant from historical ideals for the Nasolabial angle (82.6°) and the vertical facial fifths. Cephalometric measurements of social media models in the digital age closely resemble the ideal values proposed by previous authors. Due to a preference for larger or altered lip profiles, nostril axis is a more reliable measure of nasal tip rotation than nasolabial angle.

Serfdom as entanglement: narratives of a social phenomenon in Baltic history writing

ABSTRACT Serfdom narratives belong to the most prominent, emotionalized, and politicized elements of Baltic history writing. We are claiming in this article that serfdom narratives, although used mainly in national narratives, are regionally and globally entangled topics shared not only by historians from very different contexts but also created outside the historical canon in fiction and the arts. To analyze Baltic history writing as a form of entangled literature we are comparing serfdom narratives in Estonian and Baltic German history writing throughout the long nineteenth century.

De-Centering Rome

Teaching the history of architecture from a global perspective remains controversial. First, there is no consensus on what global history is or should be. Second, global history warrants a fundamental transformation of the disciplinary tactics of knowledge production and new models of grounded research in cross-border phenomena. Third, historians often feel intellectually and morally challenged as to how to tackle the epistemic framing of the Other through the institutional mandate of inclusivity. In this essay, I examine how architectural history textbooks typically frame the Roman Empire as part of the Greco-Roman foundation of “Western civilization.” I then highlight how Rome’s long-distance trade relationships, strategic alliances, taxation policies, and frontier activities render untenable the historical canon’s essentialization of the Roman Empire as a cohesive Mediterranean unit propelled by its internal dynamics. Analyzing the works of Greek historian Strabo, Greco-Roman geographer Isidore, and the anonymous author of the Periplus of the Eurythraean Sea, I demonstrate how the Roman emperor Augustus’s seizure of Egypt after the Battle of Actium in 30 BCE transformed Rome’s economic and imperial aspirations. I argue that just because we can now use recent research to highlight Rome’s “trans-civilizational encounters” with Afro-Eurasian regions does not mean that it is easy to de-center an entrenched academic tradition. But global histories can provide architecture students with new insights into the challenges of articulating history as a narrative of entangled human experiences.

Modern movements: women’s contributions to the success of Rudolf Laban’s ideas and practice in England 1930–1941

This article reconsiders the significant contributions made by women who worked in England during the 1930s and developed modern dance and movement as performers and teachers. Laban’s arrival in 1938 built on a series of ideas, practices, events, and relationships that were to have far reaching consequences and which left a legacy where it is Laban’s name that is canonical. These dancers and teachers included Anny Boalth, Leslie Burrowes, Anny Fligg, Joan Goodrich, Diana Jordan, Lisa Ullmann, Louise Soelberg and others. It gives an overview of the ways in which these women interacted with Laban and his ideas and how they variously developed networks that enabled Laban’s practices to flourish. The histories of these women working in Britain during the 1930s are uncovered. As a genealogy, this chapter is a re-appropriation of those archival and published records out of which the canonical history of dance and theatre performances have been created in order to find something altogether different. Previously unpublished interviews and archival documents are drawn on to help uncover the hidden histories of the contributions that these women made to the field of theatre, dance, performance and movement training, bringing their pedagogy out of the shadows.

THE ANNIVERSARY POLITICS OF 17 JUNE 1953 SINCE 1990

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the politics of anniversaries through examination of the role that the anniversary of the East German uprising of 17 June 1953 has played in German politics since 1990. Prior to reunification, West Germany commemorated the date as the ‘Tag der deutschen Einheit’. This annual public holiday was a chance for politicians to express their views on the possibility of German unification and to lambast the East German regime. After 3 October became the ‘Tag der Deutschen Einheit’ in 1990, German politicians all but ignored the anniversary of 17 June until political commemoration of the date enjoyed a revival in 2003. The article argues for a development of Jeffrey K. Olick's framework of ‘genre memory’ regarding the drivers of political mnemonic activity. It shows that, alongside social and political contexts, the contemporary ‘media context’ and its ability to inspire politicians to commemorate a historical anniversary must also be considered. The technology‐led ubiquity of the media in the twenty‐first century enables them to impact the political‐historical agenda as never before. Moreover, the analysis here reveals that the ‘anniversary context’ of a date must also be taken into account. Political actors can be motivated to commemorate a historical anniversary by its perceived links with other significant dates in the same historical canon.

Uses of the archive in exhibition practices of contemporary art institutions

ABSTRACT One area of increasing interest in contemporary art is the reconsideration and reinterpretation of archives to convey historical knowledge based on memory through exhibitions, organized by institutions. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of how and why contemporary art institutions use archives in their exhibition practices. Six art institutions, which are members of L’Internationale, were sampled. Data from research demonstrated that contemporary art institutions organize archive-based art exhibitions to reinterpret the widely-known history; to reveal the lesser-known history; to fill in the gaps between artist, artwork, and institution; as a result of artists` archives and archive-based artworks and as an output of their research function. The paper argues that archive-based exhibitions provide a foundation for the new institutional activities and alternative interpretations out of the canonical history of art.

Imperial Saint. Toward a History of the Canonization of St. Metrophanes of Voronezh in 1832

Imperial Saint. Toward a History of the Canonization of St. Metrophanes of Voronezh in 1832

From Margin to Mainstream: Retranslation of Early Chinese History

This paper sets out to examine the diachronic movement of the three English versions of Zuozhuan 左傳 (Commentary of Zuo) by James Legge ([1872] 1991), Burton Watson (1989), and Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg (2016) with the time span of nearly one century and a half based on paratextual analysis. Zuozhuan , listed as one of the thirteen ‘Chinese canons,’ is the core Confucian narrative history recording the turbulent period in the pre-Qin dynasty between 722–468 BCE. The current literature often involves the examination of its narrative, key words interpretation, and comparative study with other historiographies; however, there has been little discussion about the English translations of the historical texts. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti’s retranslation theory, the present study explores the retranslation of Zuozhuan in terms of the translators’ agency, the intertextual relationship with the other historiographies, and the role of history. Our results indicate that Legge explores the comparative and the scholarly value from the Victorian moral standard and Protestant ideology. Watson, by contrast, places priority on its narrative feature in the late twentieth century. Durrant et al. highlight literariness and the scholarly and the pragmatic value at the start of the new millennium. The research reveals the translators’ endeavor to change the status of early Chinese history from periphery to centrality through literary features and easier accessibility while preserving the academic value. This research not only sheds new light on the cause and value of the retranslations but also investigates the application of the retranslation hypothesis on the newly-targeted data of the historical canon.

A Critical Examination of Disability and Agency through Art

Throughout history and the historical canons of western art, disability and the afflicted human form have often been marginalized and used as manifestations of iniquity, social malfeasance and mental degradation. It is not until the 20th and 21st centuries that changing social attitudes, as well as rapidly transforming scientific and medical advancements have reshaped how disability is framed, shown and discussed. In this article the author delves into the artistic, medical, scientific, and social complexities surrounding this topic to shed light on its multipart, shifting narratives.

Metanarrative Tensions

521 BOOKS IN REVIEW in this volume—thirteen of sixteen—originally appeared in this journal. You cannot spell science fiction studies without Science Fiction Studies. We must address the elephant in the room—the exorbitant price of the volume under consideration. By my calculations, if it were possible to buy Volume III separately, at a total of $1100 for the full series that is still $250, far too much for this associate professor’s book budget. The publisher sells other books for reasonable prices, and it would seem that being destined for the reference section in a university library is what explains the price tag. I have accosted every colleague I could, and the best any of us could come up with for this pricing policy is something or other about university research libraries being willing to pay that much for reference works and presses being willing to charge. If a book is really important to me, it goes on the shelf in my office, where it is read and re-read, marked up and dog-eared. The fore-edges get smudged with dirt, and the spine begins to crumble. By the time that has happened, I have a decent grasp of what it is about. What is the fate of a book destined for the reference section, and who is its audience? —Nathaniel Isaacson, North Carolina State University Metanarrative Tensions. Gary Westfahl. The Rise and Fall of American Science Fiction, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019. x+301 pp. $45 pbk. From Hugo Gernsback to Joseph W. Campbell, from the Golden Age to the rise of paperbacks, the New Wave, cyberpunk, and the dominance of film and TV, the established history of American sf has been told and retold several times now. This is how histories and canons are cemented: by the sustained repetition of a narrative that takes on—slowly, eventually, inexorably—the appearance of objectivity. A cynical approach to reading Gary Westfahl’s new book, a collection of eight previously published chapters, now updated, and six newly written chapters designed to create a “mosaic of my general argument about the genre’s development” (4), would be to summarize it as yet another retelling of the entrenched history of the genre in America, with all of the usual figures and texts that, while crucial to sf’s development, are now so well-known among critics and scholars as to be hardly worth dragging into the spotlight. It would be easy to conclude, rather dismissively, that this history has become a kind of metanarrative, to borrow Lyotard’s term, and that its recapitulation lacks critical and scholarly value. A more generous or level-headed approach is to recognize that Westfahl, who has been a critic, teacher, and historian of sf since the 1990s, was a recipient of the Pilgrim Award in 2003, and played a key role in coordinating the Eaton conferences at the University of Riverside, California, as well as publishing volumes of their noteworthy presentations, has done more than enough here and in past work to justify returning to the canonical history of American sf. Westfahl certainly focuses on well-trodden territory in his mosaic: for instance, on my count discussions of Gernsback, his fiction, and his 522 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) magazines occur on over ninety pages of the collection. But at the same time, the book displays a strong commitment to reading and exploring those aspects of American sf and its history that are too-often sidelined or ignored within critical circles. Several examples stood out in my reading. In a chapter on sf art, updated from a piece published in 2002, Westfahl notes the existence of many books on the subject, but laments that none attempt a critical taxonomy of its forms—“Surely, one might argue, we need a more systematic framework for such discussions” (39), he insists, and then goes on to develop one. In a newly developed section dealing with early sf anthologies, he notes that sf historians recognize the importance of anthologies, citing works such as Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions collections (1967, 1972), but that the vast majority of anthologies, especially from the 1940s...

Metanarrative Tensions

521 BOOKS IN REVIEW in this volume—thirteen of sixteen—originally appeared in this journal. You cannot spell science fiction studies without Science Fiction Studies. We must address the elephant in the room—the exorbitant price of the volume under consideration. By my calculations, if it were possible to buy Volume III separately, at a total of $1100 for the full series that is still $250, far too much for this associate professor’s book budget. The publisher sells other books for reasonable prices, and it would seem that being destined for the reference section in a university library is what explains the price tag. I have accosted every colleague I could, and the best any of us could come up with for this pricing policy is something or other about university research libraries being willing to pay that much for reference works and presses being willing to charge. If a book is really important to me, it goes on the shelf in my office, where it is read and re-read, marked up and dog-eared. The fore-edges get smudged with dirt, and the spine begins to crumble. By the time that has happened, I have a decent grasp of what it is about. What is the fate of a book destined for the reference section, and who is its audience? —Nathaniel Isaacson, North Carolina State University Metanarrative Tensions. Gary Westfahl. The Rise and Fall of American Science Fiction, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019. x+301 pp. $45 pbk. From Hugo Gernsback to Joseph W. Campbell, from the Golden Age to the rise of paperbacks, the New Wave, cyberpunk, and the dominance of film and TV, the established history of American sf has been told and retold several times now. This is how histories and canons are cemented: by the sustained repetition of a narrative that takes on—slowly, eventually, inexorably—the appearance of objectivity. A cynical approach to reading Gary Westfahl’s new book, a collection of eight previously published chapters, now updated, and six newly written chapters designed to create a “mosaic of my general argument about the genre’s development” (4), would be to summarize it as yet another retelling of the entrenched history of the genre in America, with all of the usual figures and texts that, while crucial to sf’s development, are now so well-known among critics and scholars as to be hardly worth dragging into the spotlight. It would be easy to conclude, rather dismissively, that this history has become a kind of metanarrative, to borrow Lyotard’s term, and that its recapitulation lacks critical and scholarly value. A more generous or level-headed approach is to recognize that Westfahl, who has been a critic, teacher, and historian of sf since the 1990s, was a recipient of the Pilgrim Award in 2003, and played a key role in coordinating the Eaton conferences at the University of Riverside, California, as well as publishing volumes of their noteworthy presentations, has done more than enough here and in past work to justify returning to the canonical history of American sf. Westfahl certainly focuses on well-trodden territory in his mosaic: for instance, on my count discussions of Gernsback, his fiction, and his 522 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) magazines occur on over ninety pages of the collection. But at the same time, the book displays a strong commitment to reading and exploring those aspects of American sf and its history that are too-often sidelined or ignored within critical circles. Several examples stood out in my reading. In a chapter on sf art, updated from a piece published in 2002, Westfahl notes the existence of many books on the subject, but laments that none attempt a critical taxonomy of its forms—“Surely, one might argue, we need a more systematic framework for such discussions” (39), he insists, and then goes on to develop one. In a newly developed section dealing with early sf anthologies, he notes that sf historians recognize the importance of anthologies, citing works such as Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions collections (1967, 1972), but that the vast majority of anthologies, especially from the 1940s...

The Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran and the Concept of a Library

Editors Sidnie White Crawford and Cecilia Wassen have assembled an excellent collection of studies that address an important topic. In their introduction (pp. 1–3), the editors note that since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls many scholars have spoken of “library,” while others are not so sure, speaking instead of “collection” or simply “scrolls.” How this question is answered will have implications for how the Scrolls are interpreted and perhaps also for the question of canon.The book under review is divided into five parts. In part 1, “General Studies,” we have Devorah Dimant, “The Library of Qumran in Recent Scholarship” (pp. 7–14), and Årstein Justnes, “On Being a ‘Librarian’: Labels, Categories, and Classifications” (pp. 15–29). In part 2, “The Greco-Roman Context,” are essays by Monica Berti, “Greek and Roman Libraries in the Hellenistic Age” (pp. 33–54), Corrado Martone, “The Qumran ‘Library’ and Other Ancient Libraries: Elements for a Comparison” (pp. 55–77), and Ian Werrett, “Is Qumran a Library?” (pp. 78 –105).In part 3, “The Collection as a Whole and the Question of a Library,” we have Sidnie White Crawford, “The Qumran Collection as a Scribal Library” (pp. 109–31), Stephen Reed, “The Linguistic Diversity of the Texts Found at Qumran” (pp. 132–54), Mladen Popovic, “The Ancient ‘Library’ of Qumran between Urban and Rural Culture” (pp. 155–67), and Stephen Pfann, “The Ancient ‘Library’ or ‘Libraries’ of Qumran: The Specter of Cave 1Q” (pp. 168–213). In part 4, “Collections within the Collection: Specific Evidence for a Library?” we have Helen R. Jacobus, “Calendars in the Qumran Collection” (pp. 217–43), and Daniel A. Machiela, “The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls: Coherence and Context in the Library at Qumran” (pp. 244–58). Finally, in part 5 “Implications for the Identification of the Qumran Collection as a Library,” we have an essay by Armin Lange, “The Qumran Library in Context: The Canonical History and Textual Standardization of the Hebrew Bible in Light of the Qumran Library” (pp. 261–79).All of the studies make useful contributions. Dimant argues that even the so-called sectarian writings at Qumran should no longer be viewed as reflecting a narrow group. Justnes cautions against importing our modern categories when we label and catalog the texts of Qumran. I found the essays by Berti, Martone, and Werrett especially interesting. They compare the Qumran library to the libraries of the Greco-Roman world (and Martone even reaches back to the ancient Near East). Berti discusses the political motives behind the development of royal libraries at major centers such as Alexandria and Antioch on the Orontes. Werrett concludes that Qumran fulfills most of the criteria that have been developed for identifying a library. Accordingly, he finds that it is “both historically and grammatically appropriate to describe the scrolls from Qumran as the remains of a Jewish library” (p. 105). In an especially insightful essay, Crawford suggests that the library of Qumran reflects the interests of an elite group of scribes and may have served as an archive, that is, a repository of records. She concludes that it is best to use the label “library with archive” in describing the Qumran Scrolls (p. 131).Reed ponders the possible implications of the multilingual character of Qumran’s library, which has texts written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. We should not assume that everyone at Qumran could read all three languages. Popovic suspects the Qumran library probably originated in 100–50 BC and, if so, would have reflected Hellenistic patterns, not Roman or Herodian patterns, of book collection. In a lengthy and learned study, Pfann inquires into the mere chance that Cave 1 was the first cave to be discovered. What if other caves had been found first? How might we today look at the entire collection? Jacobus throws the discussion of Qumran calendrical texts into a new light when she raises interesting hermeneutical questions about how some of the calendars would have been interpreted by the residents. Machiela supports the view that the Aramaic texts should be interpreted as a “distinctive subgroup.” Lange agrees that the scrolls constitute a library, but he finds that “neither the canon of the Hebrew Bible nor its proto-Masoretic standard text developed as a consequence of the Hellenistic religious reform and the Maccabean wars” (p. 279).The Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran concludes with a lengthy bibliography and several indexes. This outstanding collection of studies will serve well both biblical scholars and classicists who are interested in book culture in late antiquity.

Utilizing circles of attention in musical theatre acting: a personal perspective

ABSTRACTPedagogy and methodology for acting curriculum is consistent among universities in the United States. Students are introduced to acting principles formulated by Konstantin Stanislavski, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, Robert Cohen, Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Benedetti, Lee Strasberg, and other experts in the field. This is not always the case for musical theatre acting courses offered by these same institutions. Musical theatre “acting” courses usually just expose students to a broad range of songs within the historical canon of musical theatre repertoire. Primary focus tends to be on the singing technique and vocal interpretation of the song. Musical theatre students in the academic setting must understand that acting technique represents the intellectual life of a character. The musical structure employs the emotional colour to the given circumstances of the character’s reason for singing the song. As a practitioner and educator of musical theatre pedagogy and methodology, I have experienced great success by utilizing Stanislavski’s “circles of attention” when coaching students through musical theatre song performance. The technique provides a clearer path of analysis for song text, activates given circumstances more clearly, clarifies moment-to-moment work, and links musical notation to language in order to achieve a more meaningful performance experience. It has become the most effective teaching tool in my musical theatre courses.

Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone

Reviewed by: Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone Aaron Bachhofer Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene. By Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone. Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 212. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-6291-1.) Current approaches to studying the history of jazz in the United States often focus on the stylistic and compositional nature of the music itself. The physical backdrop and spaces in which the musical scene developed and evolved are frequently subsumed in the story of “great men” who “did jazz”—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, for instance. Worse yet, the historical canon reimagines and sanitizes the jazz scene for a variety of motives that speak [End Page 948] to the preconceived expectations of scholars and their need to characterize scenes, such as those found in Kansas City, as wide-open and licentious. Such myopic practices ignore significant intersections of race, gender, class, non-normative sexuality, and spatial elements in the development of jazz scenes. These are precisely the subjects unpacked by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone’s Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene. Clifford-Napoleone relies on a penetrative theoretical foundation, which includes works by Michel Foucault and José Esteban Muñoz, to resurrect Kansas City jazz scenes from the limited and misleading concentration on giant personalities from the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to her efforts, readers visualize the convoluted nature of early-twentieth-century Kansas City politics, in which the Thomas J. Pendergast machine clashed with moral reformers who hoped to spatially compartmentalize vice. Rather than being just a place where the so-called Kansas City sound developed, the early-twentieth-century “Pendergast world” is exposed as one that also included prostitution, gender nonconformity, racial mixing, and displays of non-normative sexuality (p. 22). Scholars have ignored or downplayed them all, though this underworld shaped jazz in Kansas City. With her approach, lesser-known cabarets, clubs, and personalities fall into clearer focus. Institutions like Dante’s Inferno and the Spinning Wheel emerge as sites of gender nonconformity on the part of patrons and entertainers alike, and these venues’ significance rivaled that of canonical institutions like the Chesterfield Club, the Cherry Blossom, and the Subway Club. Clifford-Napoleone also highlights women in this creative maelstrom, not only as performers who enjoyed long but somewhat obscure careers, such as Edna Mae Jacobs, but also as conduits for female agency and resilience, such as madam Annie Chambers. The refusal of canonical literature to see Chambers’s efforts to protect prostitutes and working-class women from the corrective morality of middle-class reformers constitutes what Clifford-Napoleone terms the “deterritorialization and reterritorialization of space,” a process that ultimately distorted the creative structures of scene-making into discussions of the roles that “great men” played in the development of jazz in Kansas City (p. 15). Clifford-Napoleone reframes the Kansas City jazz scene as one shaped by otherness, and she focuses on the nonmusical foundations of jazz. While that is one obvious strength of this slender volume, its greatest contribution entails the resurrection of the marginalized cultural pioneers of scene-making—the gender and sexual nonconformists, the working-class Kansas Citians, women, and the plethora of journeyman entertainers, all of whom nourished this scene. In that regard, Queering Kansas City Jazz is an example of the opportunities that intersectionality provides for the reimagination of cultural phenomena. Aaron Bachhofer Rose State College Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Canon and Archive: Yahwism in Elephantine and Āl-Yāḫūdu as a Challenge to the Canonical History of Judean Religion in the Persian Period

Canon and Archive: Yahwism in Elephantine and Āl-Yāḫūdu as a Challenge to the Canonical History of Judean Religion in the Persian Period

Canon and Archive: Yahwism in Elephantine and Āl-Yāḫūdu as a Challenge to the Canonical History of Judean Religion in the Persian Period

Canon and Archive: Yahwism in Elephantine and Āl-Yāḫūdu as a Challenge to the Canonical History of Judean Religion in the Persian Period

Logical Horses: Or Several Historical, Aesthetic, Allegorical, and Mythical Vignettes

Author(s): Czacki, Catherine Erica | Abstract: Logical Horses: Or Several Historical, Aesthetic, Allegorical, and Mythical Vignettes is a multi-tiered essay that weaves historical accounts in relation to storytelling, science fiction, and visual culture. The various methodologies detail instances of categorization within aesthetic discourse while also narrating absence––how exclusion/inclusion as polarities create conflicting histories. The essay jumps historical time periods––a problem I attempt to navigate by focusing on particular instances and cases that relate together the cacophony of history, time and aesthetics (using the concept of cacophony in line with Jodi Byrd’s argumentation in The Transit of Empire). The essay was edited by 6 participants and colleagues, in order to treat their art, writing and work as integral to the narratives established for the service of my writing. The essay begins with a vignette on the Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, establishing a thread regarding cultural and social othering as a broader social issue, continued later in the essay specific to artistic aesthetics. Other vignettes detail structures, such as Marxist thought, the history of Western ideas like the Great Chain of Being and institutions such as the College Art Association––analyzed as participants that promote certain artists over others as hierarchicalized authentic producers of art and culture, alternately falling into dangerous territories of exotification when including subjectivities previously excluded from the canon. Systems of connoisseurship and validation (Sally Price), deference and preference within how language is a tool for doing it right or wrong (Joanna Russ), and Liquid Blackness (a research collective and a term used by Black Studies scholars), are themes throughout the essay that address particular artists within and aside from the canon. Additionally interspersed throughout the essay is a speculative science fiction narrative, a story that unfolds under an alternative planetary setting, where resistances to dominant cultural paradigms are taking place. The aim of this essay is to, following Byrd’s idea of cacophony, place instances next to each other so that the tensions of the narratives might trouble the stability of monolithic canonical histories, and seek hybridity as a methodology (though admittedly troubled as well)––what Byrd describes as opening doors, on the complex issues relevant to how colonialism, cultural othering and aesthetics are interwoven.

Alternative Beginnings

In this paper, we discuss three alternative approaches to the dominant histories of techniques of illusion and interaction that emerged in the context of the panel “Alternative Beginnings: Towards an-Other history of immersive arts and technologies” sponsored by the New Media Caucus presented at the 2018 College Art Association Conference. Bringing together recent insights by media archaeologists (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011, Parikka 2012), decolonial thinkers (Mignolo 2011a, b), feminist and indigenous media scholars (Zylinska 2014, Todd 1996, Todd 2015) we invited papers that gave visibility to diverse genealogies of immersion, outside the dominant western art historical canon, to contextualize our current interest for embodied and multi-sensorial experiences. Focusing on the Latin American context – both geographically and epistemologically— the three critical approaches proposed include a discussion on the decolonizing potential of immersion as it moves away from a purely ocular regime towards an embodied one, an exploration of strategies that delink the development of immersive technologies from the military and for-profit game industry, and an emphasis on how localized sites can highlight the decolonizing potential of the local/global relationship in our possible rethinking of immersive technologies.