Historical Impulse Research Articles

Death and immortality in "Dracula's Diary": readings through "Corpus Hermeticum"

The knowledge existent at present, which generates the need for a new approach to the myth of Dracula, refers to an almost unanimous reception based on the novel published in 1897 by Bram Stoker and on the tens of the subsequent portrayals which have induced a social and cultural paradigm standardized as commercial kitsch. Within this fictitious construct Dracula has been expounded in manifold keys. However, to ordinary perception, his figure is reduced to the semi-caricatural vampire character, the living-dead craving for blood. This article aims to answer a series of questions about the representations of Dracula and their relevance to the fields of cultural and literary studies: Which is the “real” Dracula? Which are the psychological, cultural, social and historical impulses determining the actions of the character and the established myth? To what extent the deeds of the personage can be accounted for through the instrumentality of psychological impetus and by the agency of cultural, philosophical, esoteric, and occult principles? Thus can the “real” Dracula be integrated into an ampler context of culture and civilization, where his alienation and his monstrosity belong less to the paradigm of “the other”, of “the stranger” and refer more to the revealing of some of “our” intimately repressed human features? The article proposes a critical examination and reinterpretation of Dracula’s image, starting from the novel Jurnalul lui Dracula (Dracula’s Diary) (1992) by the Romanian writer and academic Marin Mincu. Original responses are being suggested to the questions defined previously – through several writing and literary theory techniques, including references to Corpus Hermeticum. By comparing and contrasting the hermetic philosophical text and the Romanian novel, the essay aims at finding out whether the entire construct of the myth of Dracula can be explained through two cultural and philosophical aspects, namely death and immortality. It also offers a new reading, another conceptualization of a familiar but debatable subject, which reinterprets and even rejects the mainstream view. The work by the extremely well-informed Romanian academic, which was first published in Italy, has nothing in common with Bram Stoker’s (“vampiric falsification”, asserts the author in the preface…), but vividly portrays the “real” Dracula, the Prince Vlad the Impaler, imprisoned in the underground cave of a castle under the Budapest Danube, writing a journal between February, 2nd, 1463 and August, 28th, 1464. In his diary the character recalls his historical fate and legendary destiny through references to aspects of Romanian culture and civilization considered in a European context. For instance, the study approaches topics such as: the religion of Zalmoxis as the philosophical and existential foundation of the Romanians; Dacians’ attitude towards death, as described by Herodotus, which might have influenced Pythagoras, Socrates, the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries; the boycott of history by the Romanian people (an echo from philosopher Lucian Blaga’s writings); the orality of the Romanian culture (as opposed to the written culture of the western Europe); the oral folkloric creations, the ballad Miorița (The Little Ewe) and the fairy-tale Tinerețe fără bătrânețe și viață fără de moarte (Youth without old age and life without death), etc. All of these are put forward within the humanistic, Renaissance context of the epoch, given that Dracula was a friend of Marsilio Ficino, Nicolaus Cusanus, Pope Pius II, Cosimo de’ Medici, etc. Researchers will discover new speculative themes and directions with regard to the seemingly exhausted myth of Dracula.

Fugitive Archives: Translation, Sea, and History in Indian Ocean Fiction

Abstract This article explores the representation of multilingual Indian Ocean pasts in novels by Amitav Ghosh and Abdulrazak Gurnah, two key contemporary postcolonial writers from the opposite shores of the ocean. It theorizes the historical impulse in the novels as anarchival drift, which refers to the self-conscious mode of rewriting the past that subjects the archive to the instability and fluidity of the sea. Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2006) and Gurnah’s Paradise (1994) both tell stories of forced displacements in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean; both rewrite colonial archives in order to depict cross-cultural interactions, employing various self-reflexive textual strategies that draw attention to the linguistic and archival mediations operating in those encounters. This article examines these textual moments alongside the novels’ archival sources—specifically, nineteenth-century colonial dictionaries and Swahili travelogues—to argue that the self-reflexivity results from the multiplicity of linguistic registers on which these texts operate, making visible the translative processes imbricated in transoceanic historical forces. While both novels appeal to the linguistic aspects of cross-cultural interactions, the article traces the divergent ways in which the semantic drift among languages stage the materiality and historicity of trans-oceanic encounters.

Cultural Reproduction in the Socio-political Context of Bone District, South Sulawesi, Indonesia

This study aims to reveal the phenomenon of cultural reproduction in local politics in Bone Regency. Cultural reproduction in question is the maintenance of traditional cultural patterns carried out by the aristocrats amid the current socio-political changes that occur. This research is descriptive using qualitative research methodology. Data collection techniques were carried out through observation, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and literature reviews. The data analysis technique was carried out through the stages of data reduction, data presentation and conclusion drawing. The results showed that cultural reproduction in local politics was constructed from two aspects, namely: (1) the existence of a transition in the local government system, and (2) the failure of local political parties in political regeneration. Through these two social processes, cultural reproduction occurs where cultural elites (aristocrats) always exist on the stage of local power. This study concludes that cultural reproduction in the realm of local politics occurs due to historical impulses in the transition of the government system and the failure of political parties to build public awareness of the principles of open democracy.

Interpreting the Other: Intellectual History and Cultural Difference

This paper argues that higher education in India, especially in the field of humanities and area studies, continues to be a Euro-American inheritance. Even when area studies attempt to offer a critique of the post-Enlightenment construction of universal human nature by locating the human in diverse cultural specificities, the discipline is still unable to configure the ‘context’ outside conceptual boundaries of the West. For instance, studies of culture seem to take historical narrativity as a cultural universal. That is to say, even when cultures do not privilege clear-cut notions of history or philosophy, the assumption is that it should be possible to unravel the historical or philosophical impulses of these cultures by studying the kind of narratives that the cultures have produced. The primacy of the narrative as the life-giving and meaning-making source in an essentially chaotic world is grounded, it seems to me, in Western onto-theology. This narrative model is incapable of studying mnemocultures (cultures of memory) like India (and Asia), for even when the culture produces diverse and heterogenous narrative weaves like itihasa, purana and kavya, the narrative does not enjoy a privileged status in these cultural forms. These compositions have a performative significance whose meaning is not found or guided by presence of the narrative or its potential for truth and identity. This paper will show that positivist historiographic assumptions regarding cultural forms in the non-West, especially in the Indian context, are ill-equipped to engage with traditions that lie outside the heritage of the West. Such attempts to situate an ancient past as embodied in cultural forms extraneous to the Western metaphysic are really accounts of self-understanding of the latter. The receptions of Keralamahatmyam purana in modern intellectual discourses set against the existence of the purana in living traditions of performance outside the confines of the university will be used as a case in point to elucidate the incapability of existing conceptual categories in the humanities discourse to configure cultural difference.

Relinquishing, Forgetting, and Renouncing: Comments on and around Batuwangala Rahula’s Rankaraňḍ uva and Gum

ABSTRACT This paper discusses and historicizes two Sinhala novels by the Sri Lankan writer, Ven. Batuwangala Rahula: Rankaraňḍuva and Gum.. As works influenced by both global literary genres (for example, magic realism) and more specific aesthetic traditions (such as Buddhist aesthetics), the novels can be read as local and contingent expressions of a more general historical impulse – one of relinquishing, actively forgetting and moving forward in domains such as literature, criticism, and political imagination, resisting the end of history declared by late capitalism. I claim that the novels – especially Rankaraňḍuva – play on the possibility of being “neither realism nor not-realism,” an aesthetic form derived from a Buddhistic double-negative logic in order to un-inherit magic realism; that is, to move “beyond” the genre and interrogate its limits, while retaining traces of it. I offer a speculative reading of the novels, synthesizing content, form and aesthetic, offering a historical interpretation that reads the renouncing of genre in tandem with two theoretical and philosophical moves present within the contemporary critical landscape: Ananda Abeysekara’s un-inheriting, modeled on Nietzsche’s concept of active forgetting, and Meillassoux’s post-critical calls to relinquish the transcendental.

On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big MagazinesPoetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print

On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big MagazinesPoetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print

T.C. Cannon’s Guitar

How might we understand the art—and perhaps something of the life—of Kiowa/Caddo artist T.C. Cannon by centering his engagement with music and in particular with a meditation on Cannon’s 000-18 Martin guitar, which greeted visitors to the landmark exhibition, T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America? In the form of a personal reflective essay, T.C. Cannon’s Guitar contemplates my own history with similar guitars, songs from the folk-songwriter tradition, and questions of multi-media crossings—art, music, text, object—that demonstrate revealing stylistic affinities. The essay explores intergenerational relations between myself, Cannon, and my father Vine Deloria, Jr., the three of us evenly spaced over the course of the late twentieth century, and it does so in an effort to understand something about the historical impulses of the period between 1965 and 1978. In that moment—accessible to me through memories of affects more than memories of actions—Native politics and art were both figuring out ways to honor the past while making it new, creating distinctive forms that we can recognize around concepts such as survivance, sovereignty, and indigenous modernism.

Theater arts, global education, and policy; or, what Chance the Rapper taught us about arts education

In theater arts education and arts education more broadly, scholars and policy makers now navigate forces associated with the well-documented neoliberal turn shaping discussions of competition, performance, privatization, and austerity. Thus, in response to the special issue’s call, this article directs attention to the ways in which historical understandings of class, combined with contemporary economic discourses of neoliberalism, exert profound influence on arts learning policy and shape the ways in which pedagogy, research, and resources circulate as societies move into an increasingly global context. Specifically, this article focuses attention on theater arts education, a relatively young academic discipline that has matured in the last 50 years and, through deliberate and tireless efforts, cultivated an increasingly international scholarly community. This global growth in artistic, pedagogical, and scholarly interconnectedness begs for ongoing critical reflection in order to shape the field in support of sustainable, inclusive, and ethical systems and institutions for theater arts education as it further develops and diversifies in the 21st century. I situate my discussion of theater arts in global education within the histories and theories shaping culture in the 21st century, from Lyft-sponsored viral videos starring hip hop performers like Chance the Rapper to the Progressive-era historical impulses for theater arts learning, in order to contextualize the landscape in which theater arts educators, scholars, artists, and policy makers might move forward together into the 21st-century global context.

Histories of Futures Past: Dystopian Fiction and the Historical Impulse

AbstractThis article traces the historical impulse in two intertextually connected dystopian texts – George Orwell’s1984(1949) and Margaret Atwood’sThe Handmaid’s Tale(1985) – by reading the two novels in the context of the construction of historical narrative after the proclaimed ‘end of history’ in the twentieth century. It considers their representation of history within the framework of literary criticism of the historical novel (György Lukács), critical dystopias (Tom Moylan), and memory as an active, mediated engagement with the past (Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney). It looks, more specifically, at how the texts contrast personal experience and the meta-narrative contemplation of memory with institutionalized versions of history on different diegetic levels by juxtaposing the narrators’/focalizers’ view of history with that presented in the framework of pseudo-historical appendices that accompany and significantly modify the interpretations of both narratives.

What drives innovation? Evidence from economic history

An unresolved issue in innovation studies is to what extent and how innovation is affected by changes in the economic environment of firms. This study elaborates on a theoretical framework that unites theories of innovation as creative response and the economics of complexity. In the empirical section, results from a new micro-based database on Swedish product innovations, 1970–2007, are introduced. Applying the theoretical framework, both quantitative evidence and collected innovation biographies inform of the historical impulses that have shaped innovation activity in the Swedish economy in two broad surges during the 1970s and 1990s. The study shows that, rather than being the result of continuous efforts, most innovations were developed as a response to discrete events, history-specific problems and new technological opportunities. It is also suggested that patterns of creative response are industry-specific and associated with the radicalness and complexity of innovation processes.

The Routledge Companion to Strabo by Daniela Dueck

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 411 Sesostris, do not become gods because they do not meet Diodorus’ high standards for deifying a ruler, which were inspired by late Hellenistic kings such as Ptolemy xii of Egypt, under whom the Hellenistic ruler cult “had veered increasingly into caricature” (165). However, not all Muntz’s arguments are convincing. To begin with, he underestimates Alexander the Great’s impact on Diodorus and overlooks Diodorus’ high regard for his fellow countrymen (such as Gelon). Furthermore, how does Muntz’s theory fit with Diodorus’ description of Sesostris as a sovereign who expanded his realm, brought peace to his subjects, and let them enjoy it, which is similar to Virgil’s depiction of Augustus? The final section of this chapter engages with Diodorus’ contribution to the debate over ruler cult in Rome and his justification for Caesar’s deification. In Chapter Six, Muntz analyzes Diodorus’ perception of the ideal sovereign. Like several contemporary authors, Diodorus maintains that the Roman republic declined due primarily to the corruption of its leaders, who pursued luxury and wealth. Muntz argues that Diodorus may have indirectly commented on the Roman republic via his account of Assyria, which decayed owing to its depraved rulers, while promoting his preferred form of government—monarchy at its best—via his account of Egypt, which enjoyed prosperity and longevity under its good kings. The final chapter explores how the Roman civil wars affected the composition of the Bibliotheke. Believing that Diodorus completed Books 1–3 between 46 and 42 b.c.e., and accepting the traditional date of 30 b.c.e. for the completion of the entire work, Muntz argues that since Diodorus elaborated on Dionysus and Egypt in his opening books and since his accounts of them contained controversial issues of the late republican period, he thought it dangerous to publish these books in the political climate of the 30s b.c.e. Diodorus’ attempts to adjust his work to rapidly changing political circumstances could well explain the inconsistencies pervading its first pentad. However intriguing, some of Muntz’s conjectures are too speculative. Undeniably, scholars are allowed a certain number of “well-supported speculations” in order to initiate significant readings of the past,5 yet statements such as “perhaps Diodorus did see himself as a supporter of Antony” (244) are not well supported; no notion would be, founded on so many sentences starting with “perhaps.” These reservations aside, Muntz presents a worthy study, one that does justice to an author unjustly depreciated. His appropriately key themes—Diodorus’ originality, his kinship with the intellectual world of Rome, and his use of accounts of barbarians to discuss contemporary issues—are voiced throughout the book, serving as the thread that connects all its chapters. The Open University of Israel Iris Sulimani The Routledge Companion to Strabo. Dirigé par Daniela Dueck. London, New York : Routledge. 2017. Pp. xiv, 407. L'ouvrage dirig e par Daniela Dueck réunit un ensemble d’articles dont l’objectif est de donner une image globale et actualisée de Strabon et de son œuvre, tant pour le grand 5 To use the words of P. E. Bolin, “Imagination and Speculation as Historical Impulse: Engaging Uncertainties within Art Education History and Historiography,” Studies in Art Education 50 (2009) 110–123. 412 PHOENIX public — un public averti et déjà bien versé dans les études classiques tant les articles supposent une bonne connaissance préalable de l’œuvre — que pour le public spécialisé du monde universitaire : faire le point sur certains thèmes privilégiés et offrir quelques nouvelles pistes d’études, sans prétendre à une exhaustivité que le lecteur ne trouvera pas et pour laquelle il ne pourra se passer de lire les introductions et commentaires des éditions et traductions de référence. Les chapitres sont regroupés en quatre parties thématiques : le point de vue de Strabon (partie I, trois chapitres), la Géographie (partie II, subdivisée en six sections et vingt-deux chapitres), l’œuvre historiographique (partie III, un chapitre) et la réception, dans l’Antiquité et à la Renaissance (partie IV, deux chapitres). Suivent des index : les références a...

Internationalising Constitutional Law: An Inward-Looking Outlook

This article considers how certain domestic policies with respect to immigration have impacted on Australia's diplomatic engagement in the negotiation of international and human rights standards. It considers selected historical examples that illustrate Australia's impulse to internationalise the plenary power of exclusion embodied in ss 51(xix) and (xxvii) of the Constitution. It suggests that this historical impulse has an enduring relevance and is echoed in contemporary attempts to legitimise and normalise controversial aspects of Australia's asylum policy. In this connection, it considers the example of extraterritorial detention and processing of asylum seekers, in particular the issue of resettlement.

The Unaccounted inTessandTrishna

New Historicism and cultural studies have worked to reclaim the people, events, and narratives consigned to the trash heap of history, suggesting that what has been deemed unsuitable to a capitalist narrative of progress nevertheless has value and should be accounted for. Although the ethical intent behind such reclamation efforts is commendable, these efforts enact their own version of a capitalist improvement ideology—the imperative to turn all things, even “waste,” to profit or good account. This essay explores the tension between the desire to account for experiences that fall outside improvement's profitizing calculus and the choice to allow such experiences to remain unheard and erode away undetected. This tension informs Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Michael Winterbottom's Trishna (2011), a recent film adaptation of the novel set in twenty-first-century India. The author reads the male protagonists in the novel and the film and the film's implied viewers as improving subjects—characters and spectators that marry a capitalist's desire to turn waste to profit and a New Historical impulse to uncover hidden narratives and make them count. She argues, however, that both texts ultimately resist such capitalist improvement energies by using the female protagonists and minor characters to foreground moments of withholding, silence, and nonnarrativity that refuse to be incorporated into a profitable project of articulation. The essay aims to demonstrate that twenty-first-century film adaptations of nineteenth-century British novels can make newly visible latent critiques of improvement discourse in the source novels while at the same time deploying these critiques against new objects of analysis.

Scratching at the Surface: Understanding History through Style in James’s Italy

Drawing attention to the immediate beauty of language and the distracting superficiality of ornate expression, James offers style as a means for representing and contemplating Italy. This essay argues that an emphasis on stylistic surface illustrates how contemplations of Italy dramatized a distinct struggle of James’s writing career: how to balance the perceived necessity of plot, read as an historical impulse, with the rich surface of style, understood as an embrace of extra-temporal spectacle.

Human rights for some: Universal human rights, sexual minorities, and the exclusionary impulse

This article explores historical and present-day exclusionary impulses within the human rights movement. It juxtaposes the widely celebrated expansion of universal human rights in the second half of the twentieth century with ideological and institutional counter-movements that have sought to restrict the scope of human rights. Using the exclusionary experience suffered by LGBT people as sexual minorities, the paper argues that we must pay attention to the exclusionary impulses that continually threaten to undermine the full realization of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ vision of human rights protection for all, and not just for some.

What School Culture Teaches Us about Queer Theory

George looks at Wally Bryant with a deep shining look that says, I am with you, little minority-sister. My forthcoming book, “Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar Culture” (2013), evolved out of two impulses, one methodological and one historical. The methodological impulse was to produce a criticism that looked to be unavailable within queer theory when I began the project. The historical impulse was to visit upon the 1950s and 1960s a perspective that highlights dimensions of postwar culture equally unavailable within the standard accounts of the period. I'll elaborate briefly on the methodological concern before turning to the historical intervention “Camp Sites” makes. It cannot escape our notice that much of what gets published under the banner of queer theory in literary studies is scholarship on the recovery model. However sophisticated, queer-identified critics by and large engage in rereading, revamping, or otherwise revisiting figures in the literary tradition whose work either overtly or obliquely, readily or with difficulty, yields to a reading practice in which the following assumptions are in force: such figures were erotically nonconformist; their nonconformity was subject to punitive social pressures; their creative output reveals an illuminating cultural strategy for coping with such pressures, including the denial, the dissemblance, or the defiant embrace of their erotic difference. To observe this repertoire of assumptions is not to deny the value of queer criticism, nor to deny that much of it is as sophisticated as it professes to be. It is only to point out that these governing assumptions are so fully in accord with the mainstream of literary criticism, which for decades has treated authors as opponents or proponents of broader cultural values, that the question must arise: what warrants the assertion of numerous queer theorists that their work is radical or new?

Recipes as Memory Work: Slave Food

Contemporary African American and Afro-Caribbean cookbook authors and food memoirists seek to make the past of slavery seem more relevant and meaningful to twenty-first century readers by invoking the idea of ‘slave food’ as some common ground between themselves as eating subjects and the countless bondspeople who struggled to ensure their loved ones had enough nourishment to face the arduous tasks that lay before them every grinding day during the time of slavery. This essay turns to Marianne Hirsch's concept of ‘postmemory’ to elucidate the historical impulse to cook and eat the past as a way of understanding what it took to survive the trauma of chattel slavery practiced in the American South and throughout the Caribbean, by reading the individual recipes for slave food as textual snapshots that lend an aura of historical authenticity to each writer's representation of a communal legacy indelibly marked by the trauma of transatlantic slavery. Following Grant Farred's and Paul Gilroy's lead, I argue that the cookbook authors emerge as ‘grounded vernacular intellectuals’, whose professional knowledge of food preparation and the culinary arts give them the authority to discuss the cultural implications of cooking and eating traditional foodways, whereas the memoirists emerge as ‘conventionally trained intellectuals’ because of their formal education and institutional ties to the academy, as manifested in the pages of their books. Both sets of writers perform the memory work of honoring their unnamed slave ancestors through the publication of their food writing. Through the expository prose of the recipes, these texts invite the reader to join in the process of theorising the past of slavery by simulation (eating like slaves) and incorporation (eating like slaves). The goals of the type of memory work performed by these texts are to educate as well as feed its readers.

Russian Autocracy Redux: Path Dependency and the Late Modern State

Path dependency emerged as a theoretical approach in the social sciences (specifically economics) in the 1980s, and has gradually been applied with greater frequency in political science. As a form of historical institutionalism, it shows promise of casting significant light on processes of political stability and change. The present study examines several large-scale defining traits of Russian politics and governance from the perspective of historical path dependence: to date, most applications of path-dependency theory to Russian studies have focused more on economics than politics and governance per se. This essay applies core ideas in path dependency theory to the case of Russia in the early twenty-first century, focusing on significant political traits that emerged during the Putin and Medvedev presidencies. This study proceeds from the view that politics revolves fundamentally around three core axes: identity, interests, and institutions; every aspect of political life, arguably, falls under one or more of these dimensions and all show path-dependent tendencies. The traits of Russian governance that show evidence of path-dependent self-replication include: (1) tendencies toward monocratic manifestations of political power; (2) political authority being conceived and exercised in neo-autocratic modes that deliberately control, marginalize, or patently exclude broad and efficacious participatory democracy; (3) an apparently instinctive trend toward political centralization; and (4) a tendency to vacillate historically between a weak and strong state, with powerful historical impulses toward the latter. By applying core ideas in path-dependency theory to the case of Russian politics in the early twenty-first century, our understanding is deepened.

Secrets of Moltmann’s Tacit Tradition: Via Covenant Theology to Promise Theology

AbstractThis article takes a genetic approach examining Moltmann’s early post-Reformation studies in Moyse Amyraut, Petrus Ramus, Jacob Brocard and Johann Coccejus as the secrets to the tacit tradition of his theology of hope. I contend that the gold he struck in these studies is a historical impulse and legitimization of his own turn to the horizon of the empirical and the historical. However, with respect to the dross, Moltmann critically notes that with the post-Reformation covenant theologians the word of God got entangled in a ‘system’ of hope because of their symbolic-prophetic approach to Scripture. In place of their symbolic-prophetic exegesis he substitutes a promise-exegesis as a way of pointing to God’s relationship to this world and to the human beings in it. He thus replaces the theme of a restless history, and a restless soul, with the restless promise of which God is the author, the originator and the fulfiller. In this way Moltmann found a way beyond post-reformation covenant theology and Barth’s dialectical theology, culminating in his Theology of Hope.

Imagination and Speculation as Historical Impulse: Engaging Uncertainties within Art Education History and Historiography

Through the presentation of three historical accounts, this article explores the roles imagination and speculation may play within the writing and study of history. By looking at these three incidents, each drawn from the history and historiography of art education over the past 150 years, through a perspective that embraces the value of utilizing imagination and grounded speculation, it is believed that a reasoned and supported case is made for each of the three historical interpretations put forth. It is intended that by engaging in this process of historical speculation, others in art education will be enkindled to explore the past and read about the history of this field in new and adventuresome ways, thus demonstrating the beneficial roles imagination and grounded speculation may play in generating much needed historical inquiry and discussion in art education.