Historical Chapters Research Articles

Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency by Rachel Conrad

Reviewed by: Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency by Rachel Conrad Amy Fish (bio) Rachel Conrad. Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2020. Time for Childhoods insists on the value of poetry authored by children for its own sake, in its own time. Merging literary criticism with social science, Rachel Conrad works to dispel common biases against young people's writing and shape an interpretive approach to the genre. She urges a "shif[t] from thinking of children as potential artists training for a future in which they can express themselves and contribute to cultural life … [to] acknowledging that young people can be artists or poets in the present, now, while they are young" (xii). The resulting study not only makes "time for childhoods" but also clears space for future research and teaching on child-authored literature. As she advocates for young people's verse, Conrad champions interdisciplinary childhood studies. Perspectives from psychology, sociology, and education studies enable Conrad to conceptualize young people's agency and to critique teleologies of development that evaluate young people solely in the terms of their potential as future adults. These social science elements frame literary close readings of youth-authored verse, which build on lyric poetry criticism, as well as recent work on child authorship by such scholars as Victoria Ford Smith, Laurie Langbauer, and Katharine Capshaw. Whereas these three critics represent the strength of the field in historical cases of children's writing, Conrad devotes half her book to young writers of the twenty-first century. This contemporary emphasis may inspire us to attend to present-day children's ways with words as seriously as we monitor the ongoing production of adult-authored children's literature. In a fresh contribution to conversations on young people's literary agency, Conrad focuses on child poets' exercise of "temporal agency" (1). "Rather than taking time as an unproblematic given or fixed timeline," she argues, young people use their verse to "work with time as a pliable medium that they can shape and reshape" (40). Conrad grounds this idea in children's everyday experiences and actions, as illustrated in an anecdote of her young child Sammy's use of "slow-motion leave-takings" (13). By taking as much time as possible over such preparatory acts as the donning of socks and shoes, despite parental preferences otherwise, Sammy found a way to manage transitions in activity and setting. The concept of temporal agency proves equally relevant to young people's negotiations of intersectional structures of power, as in Aurelia Davidson's [End Page 208] "Trapped," a 1980 winner of a prize for youth-authored verse created by then-Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks. Conrad tracks the timecentered moves by which Davidson's speaker escapes her constrained state as "'a little Black girl TRAPPED'" by "'the white man.'" As repetitive lines communicating futility and frustration give way to a fast-paced array of assertive actions—"'I look, / I learn / And I sing, / And I dance'"—the speaker shakes free of the set terms of oppression: "'And OUT I COME—/from the past'" (51). Davidson thus consigns to history what Conrad aptly terms the "drawn-out present" while laying claim to an agential future (53). Drawing on Michelle M. Wright's work on the epistemology of blackness, Conrad suggests that only by disrupting linear time, a poetic practice that Conrad terms "dynamic temporality," can Davidson liberate her identity as "a little Black girl." This specificity regarding young poets' confrontations with racism and patriarchy attests to the value of Conrad's temporal lens and constitutes a strength of Time for Childhoods as a whole. An introductory chapter unfolds the role of time in children's work, setting the stage for four case studies surfacing temporal agency in young people's verse. Archival research drives two historical chapters, each focused on a black woman poet's work with primarily young writers of color. Chapter 2 highlights Brooks's cultivation of child poets in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 5 examines The Voice of the Children, a Brooklyn-based youth writing collective directed by poet June Jordan and teacher Terri Bush in...

The Arc of the Covenant: Jewish Educational Success on the Upper Mississippi by Earl Schwartz

Reviewed by: The Arc of the Covenant: Jewish Educational Success on the Upper Mississippi by Earl Schwartz Laura Yares (bio) The Arc of the Covenant: Jewish Educational Success on the Upper Mississippi. By Earl Schwartz. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. x + 152 pp. "To a disinterested observer," wrote Isaac Leeser in the January 1844 edition of the Occident and American Jewish Advocate, "the state of the American Israelites must present itself as anomalous in the highest degree. There are congregations scattered over an immense surface of country, from the snows of Canada to the tropical heats of Guiana [sic], and one community knows absolutely nothing of the state and the wants of the other." While some "congregations" are today relatively familiar, having been featured extensively within American Jewish historiography as well as in American popular culture more broadly, in the case of others Leeser's description remains, perhaps, still apt. Earl Schwartz's The Arc of the Covenant offers a valuable account of one of these lesser chronicled communities, that of St. Paul, Minnesota, through a study of its Jewish educational institutions. To investigate the contours of regional Jewish experiences, particularly outside major metropolitan centers, the history of Jewish education offers the opportunity to examine how national paradigms have met local realities. The Arc of the Covenant offers an institutional study examining the surprising successes and the challenges of community-sponsored Jewish learning in the upper Mississippi during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Written in part as a historical chronicle in its own right and in part to inform strategic planning for the future of Jewish education in St. Paul, The Arc of the Covenant straddles the domains of local history and communal policy making. The historical chapters in Part I narrate the surprising successes of St. Paul's communal education initiatives, an account that focuses on fruitful efforts to build and maintain a community sponsored Talmud Torah in the twentieth century. Schwartz's narrative is most compelling when he highlights the local story of St. Paul against national patterns in American Jewish education, reflecting, for example, on how the initiatives of Samson Benderly, conceived in New York City, flourished in this quite different locale. The midsize, midwestern setting, Schwartz surmises, made uniquely possible a regional educational collaboration that brought together "school, shul and community" (31). Chapter two, focusing on the last quarter of the twentieth century, offers an analysis of the dynamics that Schwartz sees as contributing to this successful collaborative effort, inclusive of factors specific to the regional demographics of St. Paul as well as national ideological trends such as increased attentiveness to Israel and Israel education in the aftermath of the Six Day War. The third chapter offers a historical overview of [End Page 474] institutional change during the first decades of the twenty-first century, a less than sanguine tale of decreasing Jewish population in St. Paul combined with a rising average population age, leading to a decline in Jewish enrollment in the community-sponsored Talmud Torah. At the end of his historical account, Schwartz is thus forced to conclude that despite the twentieth-century successes it enjoyed, "a communal school cannot produce a multigenerational, Jewishly knowledgeable and concerned community out of whole cloth" (113). In its place, congregational education, as well as the Jewish day schools planted in Minneapolis in the latter decades of the twentieth century, have taken up the Jewish educational baton. Chapters four through seven, focusing on the current strategic planning progress for St. Paul's communal Jewish educational institutions in the light of this historical narrative, will principally be of interest to scholars invested in the contemporary Jewish educational landscape, as well as to educational practitioners and policy makers. The chief limitation of this study for students and teachers of the American Jewish historical experience lies in its top-down approach to Jewish educational history. This is overwhelmingly an institutional study, and its chief protagonists are the administrators, policy makers and benefactors of the educational institutions it surveys. Absent from the book are, arguably, its primary subjects: the students, parents, and classroom teachers who animated the enterprise. Schwartz offers little insight into the ways that the titular "covenant" was made...

СОЦІОІСТОРИЧНА ПРОБЛЕМАТИКА В РАДЯНСЬКІЙ АРХЕОЛОГІЇ 1940–1960-х РОКІВ: ВІД ЦІЛЬОВИХ ЗАВДАНЬ ДО ПРАКТИЧНОЇ РЕАЛІЗАЦІЇ

The article is dedicated to the main aim of the Soviet archaeology, which was also its feature – to study social development of ancient societies basing on archaeological sources. It was stated at the beginning of 1930s and after the WW2 a list of actual tasks was specified. In the late 1940’s – the early 1970’s they included studying of regularities and features of ancient (from primitive to feudal) societies development, reconstruction of concrete history of folks from the USSR territory, which had no written language, researches on handicrafts, swap and trade, studies of the mediaeval village history, examination of primitive society ideology, improvement of the typological method and archaeological theory, preparation of fundamental publications. All these tasks were practically realized in work of archaeological research institutions during above mentioned period, in particular, research fellows of central and republican archaeological research establishments worked on topics related to study of social and historical problems of ancient societies basing on archaeological data. As well these problems were discussed at methodological workshops of the Institute of archaeology AS USSR and its Leningrad branch, at All-Union meetings and conferences. Soviet archaeologists completed resumptive archaeological publications with historical conclusions and chapters or even separate volumes of fundamental books dedicated to history of particular folks, regions or periods in the 1950’s – the early 1970’s. This work on social and historical problematique determined Soviet archaeologists’ requirement for methodology development which was a cause of appearance of a new subdiscipline. The Soviet theoretical archaeology institutionalized in the early 1970s.

McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana ed. by Brescia, Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada

Reviewed by: McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana ed. by Brescia, Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada Ryan Long Brescia, Pablo, y Oswaldo Estrada, editores. McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana. Albatros Ediciones, 2018. 270 pp. Pablo Brescia and Oswaldo Estrada’s anthology opens and closes with the contributions of Pedro Ángel Palou, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Naief Yehya. Its final section is a group interview that took place just after ¿Nuestra América? Pasado y futuro de la nueva narrativa latinoamericana, the 2016 conference whose presentations became the starting point for the anthology. In the interview, Palou recalls that, during two public presentations of the Crack, including the initial reading of its manifesto in 1996, Ignacio Padilla was absent and that his brother stood in for him, apparently unannounced and in an effort to convince audiences that he was, in fact, the Padilla they came to see. Attention to historical details and the effects of mistaken identities are useful starting points for evaluating the anthology’s important contribution to recent and contemporary Latin American literary history and criticism. The book’s first section consists of four chapters written, respectively, by Paz Soldán, Palou, Yehya, and Rivera Garza. The chapters that make up the remaining three sections are written by students, professors, and other scholars from Europe and the Americas. Framing the anthology with texts and interview statements by writers foregrounds one of the book’s central contributions, its detailed history of the ways in which several forces overlap in the formation of literary fields. These include primarily academia, publishing houses, cultural journalism, original language and translation markets, and the two group efforts identified in the anthology’s title, the Crack and McOndo. Brescia’s chapter emphasizes how much Latin American literature has been defined as a field from within the United States. Brescia’s emphasis thus complements Rivera Garza’s observations in her chapter about how important it is to recognize that many contemporary writers are also academics in the US, including Palou, Paz Soldán, and herself. The institutional boundary crossings germane to this fact are similar to the other complexities related to defining Latin American literature in the present, which several chapters address. The importance of the Spanish publishing industry and US academia call into question, for example, the coherency of traditional geographically bound ways of conceiving Latin America as an organizing principle for literary history. The cosmopolitanism and attention to Latin Americans living in the US that helped define the Crack and McOndo from the beginning are thus prescient. On the other hand, chapters by Rita De Maeseneer and Catalina Quesada-Gómez, about the Caribbean and Colombia, respectively, demonstrate the need for considerations of local and regional contexts, whose specificities might otherwise be blurred by discussions of hemispheric and global trends, be they aesthetic or, as is more often the case, economic. The historical details elucidated and questioned by the writers who contribute to the anthology—from Yehya’s critique of the so-called culture of excellence that began to permeate the UNAM in the 1980s to Rivera Garza’s description of [End Page 859] the Crack and McOndo anthologies as “hechas por hombres para ser consumidas por hombres” (259)—put the eponymous movements in their places more than most of the literary historical chapters do. For example, De Maeseneer argues convincingly that the movements’ relevance is at least as much a product of critics and historians as it is of the texts their authors have written, including founding anthologies and manifestos. Here is where the question of mistaken identity arises. Are the Crack and McOndo strong enough phenomena, as foundational moments, to sustain a literary history organized around them? Or, with all due respect to Bob Dylan, are some critics seeing them less for what they are then what they’re not? Tomás Regalado López’s history of the Crack proves that it deserves the attention he gives it, for the writers who comprise it and for, again, that observation that, in part, guides the whole anthology, “la función de la crítica como instancia mediadora clave” (87...

From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England by Arlene Young

Reviewed by: From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England by Arlene Young Helen McKenzie (bio) Arlene Young, From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019), pp. xii + 220, $29.95 paperback, $110.00 cloth. From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England opens with talk of revolution. Rather than the industrial revolution, Arlene Young charts a transformation for young women, one which slowly granted them a doorway into the professional world. Young [End Page 167] argues that the need for employment and reconceptualisations of professionalism, the middle-class woman, and femininity worked in dialogue through the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on nurses and typewriters, the book demonstrates how demographic determinates, social constructions, and literary representations influenced Victorian middle-class women who worked. Young sheds light on how the rise of the professional nurse and typewriter coincided with and manipulated Victorian "fixations" such as "the Woman Question, the Strong-Minded Woman, the Glorified Spinster, and the New Woman" (13). Young challenges scholarship by Christopher Keep and Katherine Mullin that predominantly focuses on the historical context and wider conceptions of work in the nineteenth century. Instead, she offers a fresh perspective by bringing literary representations into conversation with social and historical material. She warns that imposing modern views hampers understanding of the radical nature of nursing and typewriting in Victorian England. Moreover, Young argues that the demographic imbalance—the higher proportion of women to men through the nineteenth century—is essential to understanding social debates about women striving to work, challenging critics such as Ellen Jordan who downplay its role. Through her analysis of cultural and literary history, Young convincingly demonstrates how this imbalance shaped Victorian society. Young quotes from an 1892 issue of the Woman's Herald to establish the methodology integral to the book: "Ideals of womanhood are largely originated by heroines in real life, and by heroines in fiction, as well as by the unconscious but powerful interaction of these two factors" (4). Real and fictional heroines embody Young's premise that the periodical press and fiction contributed to social change and that the powerful interaction between cultural and literary constructions is integral to book history research. The texts under discussion include prose and fiction by well-known midcentury authors and prominent New Woman writers, as well as vignettes from the Idler, but the study also encompasses writers and periodicals on which there is little scholarship, offering a welcome addition to Victorian literary and social history. The book is effectively structured by pairing historical chapters on the rise of each profession with chapters analysing fiction. Each chapter (re)traces the developments of the nineteenth century, allowing Young to add new dimensions to the revolution rather than simply moving sequentially through the time period. However, as the profession of typewriting did not emerge until much later in the century, there is a slight imbalance of focus between nursing and typewriting, particularly in the number of fictional typewriters. The trope of marriage pervades the book, facilitating effective discussion of the incompatible Victorian constructions of femininity [End Page 168] and professionalism that meet in the figure of the middle-class working woman. In the first chapter, Young scrutinises shifting conceptions of employment, professionalism, and femininity in the context of the Woman Question. Focusing on the midcentury, she argues for the impact of the demographic gender imbalance and explores the burgeoning opportunities for middle-class women's remunerated employment. Further, Young contends that support or criticism for women's employment in the periodical press was not dictated by simple divisions between genres, readerships, and popularity, highlighting the plethora of voices in these debates. The second and third chapters offer valuable insights into middle-class women's path to professional nursing. As Young states, "The transition of the lady nurse from selfless volunteer to trained and efficient professional was anything but smooth" (39). Chapter two charts the historical events and debates integral to the professionalisation of nursing, including the Crimean War and the Guy's Hospital crisis in 1880. The Crimean War was influential in cementing associations...

Blinkered Learning, Blinkered Theory: How Histories in Textbooks Parochialize IR

AbstractCalls for a more “global” international relations (IR) based on theories grounded in world rather than Western histories have highlighted the Eurocentrism of history within the discipline. Global IR literature, however, neglects the role of tempocentrism in fostering that Eurocentrism. Tempocentric IR portrays the past as an extrapolation of the (Eurocentric) present, suggesting an inevitability and normality to Western dominance of international relations and obscuring non-Western significance. It also deprives IR theory-building of a broader pool of examples to inform existing theories. This article locates those centrisms in the textbooks of the discipline, while drawing on interdisciplinary research to reveal the disproportionate influence of the first years of higher education on students’ future worldviews. It is here that students are exposed to a historical grand narrative that establishes the boundaries of their inquiries and outlines what is, and what is not, significant. For a more “global” IR, therefore, it is suggested that textbook historical narratives require reconstructing in two ways. First, textbook history should be presented through connections and relations rather than substances. Second, historical chapters should reveal the multiple layers of time, including the deeper past, that have been instrumental in constituting the international relations of today.

The Joy of Noh: Embodied Learning and Discipline in Urban Japan by Katrina L. Moore

Reviewed by: The Joy of Noh: Embodied Learning and Discipline in Urban Japan by Katrina L. Moore Christopher T. Nelson (bio) The Joy of Noh: Embodied Learning and Discipline in Urban Japan. By Katrina L. Moore. SUNY Press, Albany, 2014. xvi, 124 pages. $70.00, cloth; $23.95, paper. In recent years, significant popular attention has been focused on the crisis of aging in Japan. As the overall Japanese population declines, the proportion of the elderly continues to grow. Media representations depict the failure of families and community institutions to come to grips with the problem and a neoliberal ruling regime unwilling or unable to manage the crisis. Japanese scholars have been attentive to these issues, as have growing numbers of academics writing in English: Anne Allison, Jason Danely, and Jieung Kim have all published compelling interventions, complex and nuanced ethnographies that belie the language of catastrophe that colors popular discourse. As Anne Allison recently wrote of the response of the elderly and the dying, taken in the face of this crisis: "This sociality to come is already [End Page 480] emergent today and can be seen in innovations given to dealing with—and learning from—the dead."1 Katrina L. Moore's The Joy of Noh: Embodied Learning and Discipline in Urban Japan explores similar terrain. As the author writes in her introduction, her focus is "women's cultivation of self in later life within communities of learning in urban Japan" (p. 2). However, her book is less an intervention in this particular crisis than a text grounded in a long tradition of Japanese ethnographies that explore the ways Japanese men and women construct meaningful lives. In that sense, it has more in common with the work of John Traphagan, Gordon Matthews, and David Plath. This is not to say that the text is inattentive to crisis: it is simply that the ethnographies in this tradition have long been attentive to the problem of self-fashioning in the face of pressures to the contrary. In her introduction, Moore outlines this problem in very personal terms. When describing her interest in studying nō herself as part of a project to understand the lives of women who practice it, her grandmother—a cultured and accomplished woman—offers a discouraging reply. "How can you understand nō when even a Japanese person cannot?" However, her grandmother follows up this dispiriting assessment by sending the author a shoulder drum that she herself had used as a student in the 1920s, encouraging her to be patient and commit herself to three years of study. Despite the personal and particular nature of the exchange between Moore and her grandmother, the tone is set for a broader ethnographic project. To learn a traditional performing art is demanding. It requires a commitment of time, effort, capital, and self-discipline that will push the aspiring student to her limits. Perhaps it will be impossible. Still, for those who persevere, the self that emerges in practice and in performance might make all of these sacrifices worthwhile. The introduction also lays out the theoretical stakes of Moore's project. The author briefly reviews other ethnographies that consider ways in which the category of leisure affords subjects an opportunity to transform themselves through keiko—the demanding, structured tutelage that characterizes much of traditional Japanese art—in ways that might otherwise be unavailable to them in their daily lives. A short historical chapter follows, tracing the changing relationship between professional and amateur performers, and exploring the place of women in both. However, all of this serves to prepare the reader for the second chapter, the intellectual and affective heart of Moore's project. In "The Biography of a Noh Teacher," Moore collaborates in the narration of the life story of Tsurumi Reiko, founder and primary teacher of the Sumire Kai nō group. Tsurumi first appears in a dramatic encounter [End Page 481] with the author, transforming a performance at a birthday party into an impromptu lesson in nō chanting and commanding her audience to become her students. It is a memorable introduction to the figure who will animate the rest of the ethnography. Speaking of the work of the film essayist Chris Marker...

Engaging Japanese Philosophy: A Short History by Thomas P. Kasulis

Reviewed by: Engaging Japanese Philosophy: A Short History by Thomas P. Kasulis Leah Kalmanson (bio) Engaging Japanese Philosophy: A Short History. By Thomas P. Kasulis. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2018. Pp. i + 773. Hardcover $72. ISBN 978-0-8248-6979-3. When I first opened my copy of Thomas Kasulis's Engaging Japanese Philosophy: A Short History, I had planned to skip around, as one might do when reading an edited volume. Initially, I was most interested in how I might excerpt various chapters for classroom use. And I have indeed come away with many ideas for reading this book with students (a point that I will return to in the end). But, after making it through just the first few pages of Kasulis's highly informative and entertaining history of Japanese philosophy, I found that the book demands to be read in the order in which it was written. In addition to his role as philosopher and historian, in this book Kasulis is a storyteller. And so, as when enjoying a story, I read the book from cover to cover. The book is organized into four sections—ancient, medieval, Edo, and modern—each containing two chapters on an individual philosopher and a third chapter on general historical context, not always in that order. The philosophers included are Prince Shōtoku, Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, Nishida Kitarō, and Watsuji Tetsurō. The historical chapters focus on the Heian and Kamakura periods, Muromachi and Warring Domains, Edo, and the modern period, respectively. Throughout the text, Kasulis's narrative is synced to the 2011 collection Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook1 via marginal page citations, so that readers can cross-reference all texts and thinkers that he mentions with the primary source material available in the Sourcebook, making the two books together an impressively comprehensive course in Japanese philosophers, from famous to infamous to obscure. In his Preface, Kasulis explains why his project is not an intellectual history or a history of ideas but rather a history of philosophy, and that, as such, he writes with a philosopher's methodologies. Though the book is far-reaching in both breadth and depth, the thread that ties the content together is Kasulis's engagement with methods of philosophical argumentation and analysis that developed in Japan as a result of scholarly interactions within and across the major intellectual lineages comprising Confucianism, Buddhism, and nativist studies. More than an intellectual history of such developments, Kasulis's text also serves as an [End Page 1] introduction to these methodologies and an invitation to use them as tools for philosophical scholarship today. In particular, he identifies four key strategies for philosophical engagement relevant to his project: refutation, allocation, hybridization, and relegation (pp. 35–39). Refutation is the methodology most familiar in the Western context, resting on the basic logic of contradiction: if a given proposition is refuted as false, then the negation of that proposition is affirmed as true. As Kasulis points out, this method is not only seen as characteristic of Western philosophy but often as essential to doing any philosophy at all. Nonetheless, he claims, it is not the dominant mode of philosophical argumentation in Japan, where intellectual discourses often looked to achieve various modes of co-existence, compromise, and, at times, synergy. Argument by allocation, for example, looks to restrict competing claims within separate areas of discourse, to reveal that the competition is only apparent and that all claims carry weight in the contexts in which they are applicable. Relegation achieves a similar end but ranks various areas of discourse hierarchically, showing that some are more limited in scope than others, thereby upholding the supremacy of claims that are seen to be applicable in the most all-encompassing sense. In turn, hybridization does not restrict claims to separate areas of discourse but rather aims for a fusion that, at times, results in a third position altogether. All four strategies can be seen across both Western and Japanese traditions, Kasulis says, but the latter three strategies are particularly important for understanding philosophy in Japan. The chapters on the eight philosophers featured in the book alternate between Kasulis's engagement with the...

Education through Quranic stories

This paper "education through the Qur'anic stories" consists of five chapters. Chapter one include the importance of the paper, the aim of the paper, the boundaries of the paper, the methodology of the paper, the definitions of terms. Chapter two contains the general properties of the Qur'anic stories, represented as the educational properties of the Qur'anic stories, the types of the Qur'anic stories in terms of derivation, the types of the Qur'anic stories in the technical terms (historical, realistic, representative, symbolic), the elements of the Qur'anic stories, and also the educational importance of the Qur'anic stories. Chapter three take the Religious, cognitive, educational, and historical goals Chapter four contains the method of viewing the Qur'anic stories, and educational applications of the Qur'anic stories. Chapter five include the results , and the suggestions.

Macroprudential Risk Management Problems in Brexit

Brexit is not only a historical chapter of the British — EU relationship, but it also carries immense challenges for fi nancial market stability in the short and medium run for the 28 member states of the European Union. The scale of these challenges depends heavily on the outcome of EU-UK negotiations. The European Systemic Risk Board plays a critical role in macroprudential supervision, a crucial policy challenge for the EU. However, there are doubts as to whether it will fulfill its mandate. The EU27 faces major problems in terms of prudential supervision after Brexit since a very large part of their wholesale banking markets are in the UK and thus will not be regulated by the EU after 29 March 2019. Indications point to a considerable risk of a new transatlantic banking crisis in the future.

Hungarians in Kyiv. Leading figures of history of Hungarian-Ukrainian relations from 9th century to present day

In this review, the author sheds light on the content and concept of the publication entitled Hungarians in Kyiv. Historical Chapters of Hungarian-Ukrainian Relations from the 9th Century to the Present by Stefan-Arpad Madiar. In 2005, in the course of an international scientific conference ‘Ukraine-Hungary: Common Past and Present’ at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the NAS of Ukraine, the main issues and challenges of the history of relations between Ukraine and Hungary were discussed. The participants of the conference concluded an agreement on the establishment of the commission of historians to strengthen scientific cooperation. The review notes that Ukrainian and Hungarian historians should carry on a permanent dialogue on disputable matters related to the historical past of the two nations for obtaining objective knowledge about the relations between Hungary and Ukraine at different historical junctures. The book Hungarians in Kyiv. Historical Chapters of Hungarian-Ukrainian Relations from the 9th Century to the Present is considered as a joint artistic achievement of cooperation among Ukrainian and Hungarian historians. The review also mentions certain aspects of the past relations between Ukraine and Hungary, and the life of Stefan-Arpad Madiar, the main initiator, author, and layout director of the publication. The author stresses that it was Stefan-Arpad Madiar who managed to work on the book structure, select original illustrations, exclusive documentary materials, engage famous scholars and historians to the creation of the book, etc. The book consists of 23 problematically and chronologically arranged chapters and offers a glimpse of unique periods in the history of relations between Ukraine and Hungary, activities of Hungarian diplomatic missions in Kyiv and Ukrainian missions in Budapest, and contains information about Hungarian prisoners of war in post-war Kyiv based on memoirs and archival documents. The author is fully confident that this book will give its readers new knowledge about the history of relations between Ukraine and Hungary, thus facilitating the sense of a more profound understanding between the two nations. Key words: relations between Ukraine and Hungary, scientific conference, publication Hungarians in Kyiv. Historical Chapters of Hungarian-Ukrainian Relations from the 9th Century to the Present, Embassy of Hungary in Ukraine, cooperation between Ukraine and Hungary.

Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge by Therese Scarpelli Cory

Reviewed by: Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge by Therese Scarpelli Cory Christopher A. Decaen Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. By Therese Scarpelli Cory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 241. $103.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1-107-04292-6. “Know thyself.” This inscription on the Temple of Apollo helped inspire the birth of philosophy in Greece. And yet it is no small irony that Loxias’s command was issued at the notoriously ambiguous Delphic oracle, for self-knowledge is both easy and difficult, ready at hand and obscure. In a relatively short but remarkably dense book, Therese Cory has given us a meticulous examination of how St. Thomas Aquinas handles the paradox of self-knowledge. This thorough collection and study of the manifold contexts in which St. Thomas treats the matter—and of contemporary scholarship on the same—deepens our understanding of the subtlety of his teaching. Indeed, contrary to modern mythology, in which “premodern thinkers are supposed to have nothing interesting to say about human subjectivity” (215), Cory argues that St. Thomas’s approach is “sophisticated and compelling” (7) and “could be fruitfully placed into dialogue with contemporary inquiry” (220). In addition, Cory admirably bucks the trend of “methodological segregation” (8), wherein the history of ideas and real philosophizing do not belong in a single volume, as the book is divided into two parts: a historical study of the background, context, and development of St. Thomas’s understanding of self-knowledge (encompassing the first two chapters), and then an engagement with the particular problems surrounding self-knowledge, aided by St. Thomas’s approach (in the remaining six chapters). The historical chapters begin with the obvious sources of the medieval debates about self-knowledge—St. Augustine and Aristotle—but then delves into St. Thomas’s contemporaries, including not only Sts. Albert and Bonaventure but also William of Auvergne and Jean de la Rochelle. The medieval debate was shaped by the Augustinian notion that self-knowledge is natural and by the Aristotelian notion that self-knowledge is dependent on knowledge of the world outside the self, a pair of notions that, though “not necessarily in competition” (18), often were treated as such. Augustine himself [End Page 651] proposed two ways in which the mind naturally knows itself, which Cory calls, respectively, “permanent dispositional or habitual” (“weak”) and “peripheral, pre-conscious” (“strong”) self-knowledge (21–22). The latter (which Cory strangely describes as “supraconscious” [26]) was endorsed by most medievals, even the youthful St. Thomas, though he quickly became critical of it. Aristotle’s influence exerted itself most in understanding how active or explicit self-knowledge occurs, with his claim that “the intellect is intelligible like other intelligibles,” that is, through a species (27). In the second chapter, summarizing St. Thomas’s account of self-knowledge, Cory argues that St. Thomas reformed the medieval debate so as to focus on what things the soul knows about itself, and how the soul’s being the form of a certain kind of body determines its mode of self-knowledge. Studying the former allows St. Thomas to balance one’s certainty of immediate and privileged self-access against one’s experience of a large dose of self-opacity. While distinguishing three phases in the maturation of his insights about self-knowledge, Cory shows the importance of the distinction between the ordinary man’s prephilosophic knowledge of the reality of the self/soul and the philosopher’s deeper knowledge of exactly what the human soul is, as expressed in its definition. Saint Thomas agrees with his contemporaries that the former kind of knowledge of the self as an existing fact occurs either habitually (through the “soul’s essential self-presence” [63]), or actually (through attending to one’s activities, from sensing to understanding to willing). In addition, however, St. Thomas makes the “radical claim at the time” that all kinds of self-knowledge presuppose knowing extramental objects, so self-knowledge cannot be “natural” in the sense of innate (ibid.). Because of the human intellect’s natural state as pure potency relative to the knowable, even the prephilosophic knowledge of the self requires that the intellect learn about the external world in order...

Future Options of the Kurds. Part II: Historical Background

The following second part of our analysis provides historical background information in order to better understand future options of the Kurds. We explain here in some detail why so far in contemporary history, virtually all efforts failed to achieve legitimate national rights for the Kurds and why they could and should not be repeated in the future. We basically show in sketched small historical chapters that Kurds to date could only win limited national rights, like some forms of autonomous regional self-rule. The reasons for that are in many aspects. Firstly, because they were used over centuries both by dominant central as well as foreign powers as proxies for their interests and also cooperated with them for own split aims. Second, because Kurds are chronically divided, constantly at loggerheads, disunited (Sheikhmous, 1992 & 2013: “united in disunity”) and fragmented. Thirdly, although they remain a considerable force of stability in Eurasia and the Middle East and are indeed underway to democracy they are still unable to come true majority rule of Western democracies. And last but not least, because they lack experience governing themselves and diplomacy to secure their own national rights with one strong united voice.

Brazil’s movement of the landless at the cutting edge of conflicted modernity

Brazil’s Movement of the Landless (MST) emerges from this collection as one of the great social movements of modernity. In historical chapters we see its evolution from confrontations with landowners and police in land invasions in the South of Brazil in the 1970s to become a multi-faceted movement with a presence throughout Brazil. More than a pressure group for Land Reform, it turned to mount a comprehensive challenge, on linked legal, cultural, political and economic fronts to Brazil’s dominant model of development. Its ‘social movement approach’, conjoining challenge to Brazil’s massive inequalities with the formation of active citizens among the marginalised rural poor, has become a model for movements in the urban scene. We see this not just through the rich descriptive accounts of MST actions, but because the contributing editor, Miguel Carter, has pointed the action portraits with theoretical acumen, and, with other contributors, placed them in historical context.

The Blue and the Green: A Cultural Ecological History of an Arizona Ranching Community

Works in the history of western American ranching traditionally fall into two categories: those that explore federal land policies that evolved into the conflicted politics of public grazing management we have known for nearly a hundred years; and those that examine the history of a specific locale. In recent decades notable works of the latter type, particularly by environmental writers and historians, have immersed readers in the social and ecological worlds of western ranch families who both maintain strong attachment to place and struggle with scarce water, changing federal land policies, and unpredictable markets. Jack Stauder's book is kin to these works. It aims to open a window on the “cultural ecological history” of one place in the West—the Blue River watershed of eastern Arizona—but historians will note the very different approaches Stauder, a cultural anthropologist, takes to his material. Stauder introduces readers to the geographic area and to his subjects through a series of short historical chapters that swiftly traverse across the time of the “frontier,” when white American settlers first came into “the Blue,” to the fully established presence of the U.S. Forest Service in grazing regulations in the mid-twentieth century. While these chapters can be faulted for glossing over many important historical details and concepts, Stauder seeks to move beyond these stock chronological markers, which western historians will be familiar with, and arrive at the meat of his discussion: the “wilderness” ideas that Aldo Leopold and other conservationists at the time brought to the region, analyzing the origins and flaws in some of that thinking. He also pauses to discuss the many social changes that residents along the Blue experienced, particularly as they became increasingly able to break out of their geographic isolation through improvements in communications and transportation. He then moves to the latter half of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first, slowing the pace of his narrative as he looks at the effect of, and ranchers' reactions to, changing Forest Service grazing regulations in the postwar period, environmental values, and wildlife issues, to name some of the most pressing topics he examines. He spotlights in particular the painfully difficult periods for ranchers that ensued from livestock reductions on their grazing allotments.

Kvetching and Shpritzing: Jewish Humor in American Popular Culture

Kvetching and Shpritzing: Jewish Humor in American Popular Culture

Jonathan D. Oldfield; Denis J. B. Shaw. The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment. xi + 196 pp., illus., maps, tables, bibl., index. London/New York: Routledge, 2016. £95 (cloth).

Jonathan D. Oldfield; Denis J. B. Shaw. <i>The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment</i>. xi + 196 pp., illus., maps, tables, bibl., index. London/New York: Routledge, 2016. £95 (cloth).

At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland by Sarah Cole

Reviewed by: At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland by Sarah Cole Krista Kauffmann Sarah Cole. At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. xiv + 377 pp. Sarah Cole’s fascinating new study At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland takes its title from The Waste Land. Optically and aurally close to “violent” yet also denoting spring flowers and the color purple, the word “violet,” Cole argues, “herald[s]” violence in Eliot’s iconic poem (74) while simultaneously “transform[ing]” and “beautify[ing]” it (75). Thus, “violetness” becomes an apt figure for what she names the “enchantment” of violence (75). However, because the words are so similar, the “violet hour” is always at risk of shading back into the “violent hour,” and thus violetness also serves as an evocative figure for the complex interplay explored throughout the book between enchantment and its opposite mode for imagining violence, disenchantment. Enchantment, as Cole has it, is the process through which violence comes to be sacralized and viewed as productive. Disenchantment, by contrast, treats violence as “unredeemable” (36). Lest we are tempted to substitute aestheticization for enchantment, Cole emphasizes that both modes are, in fact, aesthetic. Her masterful readings of a wide range of texts acknowledge the generative function of violence for modernist literary production as well as the excessive quality to it that often “haunt[s],” “stain[s]” and “deface[s]” even those texts that enchant it (19). At the Violet Hour chiefly sets out to reconsider the centrality of violence to modernist form, and Cole argues powerfully that in [End Page 178] “seek[ing] to understand literary violence, we will find ourselves looking at literature’s very nerve center, the place where its most proud accomplishments and greatest limitations are engendered and defined” (7). The book provides fresh looks at key modernist authors Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf, while carefully situating their work in relation to other authors and modes of textual and visual production that similarly grapple with the violence of the modernist moment. Cole reaffirms the pivotal role of World War I in the development of modernism but cautions that not all modernist texts readily fit into the narrative of the war as the driving force behind experiments with form. Thus, she directs our attention as well to European anarchist violence—or, in her rather more colorful parlance, “dynamite violence”—and to the specific, historical convulsions of violence that rocked early twentieth-century Ireland (36). The book is comprised of an introduction, four substantial chapters, and a brief coda. Throughout, Cole combines original close readings of canonical texts with a cultural studies approach that sheds light on their broader cultural and historical milieus. The introduction opens by noting the extent to which the story of literature has always been enmeshed with the story of violence, from the writing of the Homeric epics to the present. Yet, she notes, the modernists were singularly situated to explore questions of the representation of violence, not only because of the cataclysmic violence of their era but also because of their well-known interests in “deconstructing great cultural institutions that are fundamentally sustained by violence” and “exploring the human psyche” (4). Chapter 1 continues the introduction’s work of setting up the argumentative framework, beginning with an elaboration of the theoretical model of enchantment and disenchantment. This chapter represents the book’s primary engagement with World War I’s impact on literature, and it ends with an incisive reading of the interweaving of the enchanted and disenchanted modes in The Waste Land. The next three chapters are designated “historical chapters” (35). Chapter 2 explores the representation of dynamite violence and the closely associated figure of the anarchist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in popular novels, drama, sensationalist journalism, and Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It also considers the transmutation of the historically specific late-Victorian anarchist into the “transhistorical figure of the terrorist” (36). Chapter 3 turns to early twentieth-century Ireland, offering four new paradigms for understanding literary violence in that context. This time, the privileged terms are “keening,” “generative violence,” “reprisal violence,” and “architectural...

The Exhibition at the Hvězda Summer Palace About Emigration From Post-Revolutionary Russia and its Possible Overlapping

The first plan of the presentation within an extremely challenging seminar entitled “Museums and their international audiences” organised by the National Museum was a short presentation of the exhibition of the Museum of Czech Literature that has been dedicated to interwar emigration from the area of the former Czarist Russia to Czechoslovakia, a major exhibition organised this year in the premises of the Hvězda Summer Palace. The purpose of the paper was not only to contribute to the promotion of the exhibition, nor would that be a sufficiently good reason for the exhibition that was trilingual and therefore completely open to both the English and the Russian-speaking visitors. The presentation was supposed to feature the other goals of the exhibition, which aimed further than simply presenting a closed historical chapter.

The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia by Rachel Mairs

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 407 The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia. By Rachel Mairs. Oakland: University of California Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 234. Classicists often label Bactria and northwestern India as the “Greek Far East.” In this thought-provoking book, Mairs proposes the more appropriate “Hellenistic Far East,” challenging the traditional perspectives expressed in the very titles of the two main works referencing the question: William Woodthorpe Tarn’s The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938), and Awadh Kishore Narain’s The Indo-Greeks (Oxford 1957). The former considered these regions as the outpost of Hellenism, while the latter claimed them as parts of Indian history. Arguing that “this material is exotic in a double sense” (3), Mairs proposes a more complex approach, focusing on the interaction between the Greeks and their neighbors after Alexander. In her criticisms she mostly takes aim at the traditional attitude of classicists. However, some late twentieth-century approaches, espousing acculturation, also need revision. Mairs’s methodological observations give a welcome complement to the more traditional, comprehensive monograph by Omar Coloru, Da Alessandro a Menandro: Il regno greco di Battriana (Pisa and Rome 2009). The book is structured as a sort of matryoshka doll. After a methodological “Introduction ” (1–26), two historical chapters provide the opening and the closing (Chapter One, “Administering Bactria: From Achaemenid Satrapy to Graeco-Bactrian State,” 27–56; Chapter Four, “Waiting for the Barbarians: The Fall of Greek Bactria,” 146–176), whereas the central chapters focus on two expanded case studies (Chapter Two, “Ai Khanoum,” 57–101; Chapter Three, “Self-Representation in the Inscriptions of Sōphytos [Arachosia] and Hēliodōros [India],” 102–145). A brief “Conclusion” (177–188) sums up the methodological achievements of the book, followed by an “Appendix” (189–193) with the texts of three inscriptions discussed in Chapters Two and Three, a sizeable “Bibliography” (195-225), and a general “Index” (227–231). There is no source index . Chapter One considers the continuity of Achaemenid institutions in Bactria, an aspect less developed by Coloru, who starts with the actual beginnings of the kingdom. Mairs draws on the archaeological and the epigraphic evidence, extracting “a few themes or pieces of pertinent information” (32). Some preserved administrative documents, still written in Aramaic, seem to show that Alexander’s conquest did not apparently produce an outright break, but no written evidence was found until the third century. The Seleucids may well have retrieved Achaemenid administrative know-how, but is it enough to label the Seleucid satrapy as a period of lengthy transition from the Iranian to the Hellenistic phase? Chapter Two deals with the center of Āy Ka ̄nom (usually known with the spelling Ai Khanoum) in Arachosia, present-day Afghanistan.1 Mairs criticizes an early article of the late Paul Bernard giving emphasis to the “Greekness” of the city, “whose colonists strove to maintain the integrity of the civilization they had brought with them” (91).2 1 Laurianne Sève-Martinez (in her review of the book in TopoiOrOcc 20 [2015] 579–588) suggests that this discussion ignores several relevant archaeological publications. 2 P. Barnard, “Ai Khanoum on the Oxus: A Hellenistic City in Central Asia,” PBA 53 (1967) 71–95; cf. G. Traina, “Notes on Hellenism in the Iranian East (Classico-Oriental Notes, 6-8),” Iran & the Caucasus 9 (2005) 1–14. 408 PHOENIX To support her argument, Mairs proposes a new interpretation of the inscription of Klearchos with the sayings of the wise men from Delphi from the pronaos of the heroon of Kineas.3 Following Narain against Louis Robert, she dismisses the latter’s identification of Klearchos with the philosopher Klearchos of Soloi, a pupil of Aristotle,4 and considers him a local citizen from the Bactrian-born generation. Refined texts such as Klearchos’ inscriptions were meant to enforce Ai Khanoum’s Greek identity in a sort of invention of tradition. Chapter Three compares two apparently opposite cases, dating from the same chronological context (second century b.c.e.): Sōphytos, a poet of Arachosia bearing a local name, who composed an extremely refined Greek acrostic funerary epigram found in Qandaha ̄r (SEG 54: 1568; Rougemont, no. 84), and...