Modern Articulation Research Articles

Decolonizing Travel(ing Theory): Vernacular Travels in (Post)Colonial India

Abstract: Postcolonial scholars, in general, institute a clear distinction between the "pre-modern-religious" and the "modern-secular" practices of travel. The problem is not so much with using this framework as with the pervasive tendency to unreflectively project it onto certain alternative travel performances that do not fit into the taxonomy. In this essay, I argue that this framework is inadequate in making sense of the alternative imaginaries and conditions that rendered possible the emergence of a new decolonial episteme of traveling in the Indian context that occasioned the articulation of vernacular modernity. Here, I insist that, within the remit of postcolonial scholarship, vernacular travel cults, when approached from a longue durée perspective, become subservient to the telos of postcoloniality. Conversely, I situate the decolonial travel(er)s beyond the prevailing postcolonialist regime. I also furnish a preliminary but provocative framework for decolonial thinking as a gesture toward alternative imageries of vernacular travel.

LEGAL CHANGE AND THE ROLE OF THE SCHOLAR: SCRATCHING BENEATH THE SURFACE OF COMPARATIVE TAXONOMIES

Both the classical theory of legal families and its more modern articulations place East European jurisdictions in the same box because they give precedence to their common socialist experience. Not only do they serve as distorting mirrors propelling stereotypes, but also they close off promising avenues of comparative research because of the politically tainted pre-understanding(s) of legal systems which they impose. This article argues that legal change is frequently facilitated by small groups of individuals who are often scholars. By paying closer attention to their role and incentives as well as the networks to which they belonged, we may see traditional categories realign and gain a more in-depth understanding of the patterns of legal change – namely, the intricate ways in which law evolves – and uncover little-known but important relationships between legal systems which comparative taxonomies either ignore or fail to explain. The article illustrates its argument by zooming in on the role of three scholars – Lyuben Dikov, Filippo Vassalli, and Karl Llewellyn – who may hold the key to explaining interesting, but unexpected similarities between Bulgarian, Italian, and US law.

A true crime story: The role of space, time, and identity in narrating criminal authority

Abstract This article presents a theoretical and methodological argument for employing a narrative-based approach to explore criminal organisations’ (COs) claims to political authority, accompanied by an empirical example. International Relations scholarship is increasingly interested in the role narratives play in political meaning-making processes, with violent non-state actors (VNSAs) beginning to occupy a central space in such investigations. This work has contributed important insights into how VNSAs, such as terrorists and insurgents, mobilise narratives to challenge state authority. However, this literature still needs to take stock of groups that do not directly challenge the state but rather live within it. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and using the Sicilian Mafia as a case study, I show that COs exercise and construct their narratives of political authority by reappropriating the state’s key constitutive narratives of space, time, and identity. By reflecting the same form of (statist) political imagination via alternative spatial, temporal, and identity configurations, these groups simultaneously reject and reproduce modern articulations of political authority in their spatio-temporal and identity dimensions.

Networks of Power in the Nineteenth Century: The Sampradaya, Princely States and Company Rule

Abstract This article reconsiders a religious institution in India during the early colonial era as a manifestation of regional influence, or a non-statist public force. Founded by Sahajanand Swami, the Hindu devotional (bhakti) community known as the Swaminarayan Sampradaya expanded in the area that is today Gujarat in western India. The community arose as a source of popular influence in a region that lacked a dominant state at this time. Its creation was forged in relation to local struggles for power and resources, involving princely states, Maratha and East India Company powers, Kathi chieftains, and broader social and cultural changes in the nineteenth century. Historically examining the process of community expansion in the region through aspects like patronage and cultural production, I argue that the sampradaya’s articulation of devotion internalized political acumen to navigate material realities successfully. Effectively, the modern articulation enabled adherents to broker power from diverse networks and strengthen the community’s complex, multifaceted authority in Gujarat.

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Introduction: political subjectivity in times of crisis

ABSTRACT Modernity is often understood as a time of crisis. Health, humanitarian, economic, and environmental crises are just some crises characterizing the present. This special issue investigates these interwoven crises by investigating the subject in crisis, as making sense of how our worlds are changing requires interrogating how we ourselves are changing. How can we apprehend the subject and forms of subjectivities implied when evoking specific crises responses? In this introduction, we suggest reading current crises as expressions, effects, and accelerations of a longstanding epistemological crisis sustaining the modern articulation of subjectivity. To trace the subjectivity/crisis link we mobilize Derrida's notion of aporia, which exposes the unresolvable tension(s) at the foundation of concepts, to survey how subjectivity has been examined in political theory and international relations (IR) and to posit the continued necessity of immanent critiques of modern subjectivity. We conclude by setting out the individual contributions to this special issue.

Introduction to special issue: The critical theory of society

The state of theorizing bearing on an explicit, contemporary, critical theory of society is first of all outlined. While contemporary conditions of scholarship are not promising in this respect, the potential of a distinctive critical theory of society nonetheless remains tantalizing. The mostly agreed, even if mostly only implicitly, core architectonic of critical theory is outlined as a foundation, though disagreements persist over the significance of the linguistic turn and context-transcendent versus context-immanent modes of theorizing. On the basis of the outline of the general architectonic, suggestions are made, pointing forward to the articles in the special issue, as to how the contemporary democratic focus of the theory offers inspiration for a more explicit, modern articulation. Such a theory would follow the lead of the first generation, but it would additionally take on board the multiple theoretical as well as social changes that have since occurred.

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Locating Ḥākimiyya in Global History: The Concept of Sovereignty in Premodern Islam and Its Reception after Mawdūdī and Quṭb

AbstractThe concept of ḥākimiyya (sovereignty), as understood by its leading proponents, refers to the notion that it is God, rather than humans, Who possesses the prerogative to make laws. A concomitant of this is that Muslims with political power and authority must recognise the supremacy of Islamic law. This notion, perhaps most notably articulated in modern times by Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī, may be viewed as the rearticulation of ideas latent in the premodern Islamic juristic tradition, but whose modern incarnation as ḥākimiyya emerged in response to the legislative norms of the liberal colonial state. Despite its modern articulation, and against the views of several scholars, I argue that ḥākimiyya qua sovereignty finds its antecedents quite clearly in the Islamic scholarly tradition. Such an understanding leads into a discussion of how Islamic conceptions of sovereignty can help us reassess influential Western articulations of the concept. I also show that Mawdūdī's influential younger contemporary, the Islamist alim Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī, upholds ḥākimiyya despite his critique of Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb's conceptions of it. I conclude with a brief reflection on how our understanding of ḥākimiyya as sovereignty can help us provincialise Europe in global historical studies.

Baroque Modernity in Latin America: Situating Indigeneity, Urban Indigeneity and the Popular Economy

This article uses the Bolivian city of El Alto as a lens through which to evaluate the place of urban indigeneity and the popular economy within Latin American modernity. Whilst some express worries over the erosion of indigenous ways of life and others see urban indigenous practices as defying capitalist modernity, I argue that these emergent forms of indigeneity need to be understood as part of the complex, particular historical articulation of modernity in Latin America. Here, colonialism and uneven capitalist development have imbued modernity with a baroque character, containing multiple temporalities and contradictory societal forms, including that of urban indigeneity.

Novobaroko a česká sochařská generace devadesátých let 19. století

Second half of the 19th century saw a number of national attempts to revise the Baroque values. Czech Neo-Baroque sculpture represents a style-expressive tendency, which reflected this nationally motivated interest and at the same time became a response to the change of esthetic taste of the end of the century. The goal of this article is to introduce the generation of sculptures of 1890s who built on the works of Josef Václav Myslbek, František Bílek and Bohuslav Schnich and presented their Neo-Baroque pieces for public monument tenders or at Art Union exhibitions. Variable and unexplored Neo-Baroque, which can be found in pieces by many authors (Vilím Amort, Quido Kocián, Josef Strachovský, Stanislav Sucharda, Gustav Zoula etc.) helps to find the missing idealistic and stylistic links between key Czech sculptores whose work made way towards modern articulation of matter in the beginning of the 20th century.

Operatic Encounters in a Time of War

Absolute war, total war, world revolution: the nature and scale of the global conflicts that took place around 1800 have been explored (and contested) both at the time and ever since, and recent scholarship has begun to resituate the literary, visual, and theatrical art of the period within this landscape of perpetual conflict. Opera historians, though, have until recently largely steered clear of the operatic mediation of war beyond its most local manifestations. My article returns to the subject of opera and war, to reflect on how an expanded understanding of wartime, in reaching beyond the actual war event (Favret, 2010. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: Princeton University Press), can provide new insights into the recent scholarly work on opera’s transnational mobility (and malleability), its articulation of modernity and its framing of cross-cultural encounters.

Alfred Gysi (1865-1957) - More than a Pioneer of Dental Prosthetics and Articulation.

Alfred Gysi was one of the most influential dental scientists of the last century. He is primarily considered a pioneer of modern articulation and occlusion theory, and several of his technical developments still bear his name. But what milieu did this dentist come from, what characterized his academic career and what research contributions did he make beyond the theory of articulation? How was he perceived by contemporary experts – as a researcher and as a colleague – and how can his scientific contributions be classified from today's perspective? These are precisely the questions that this article examines. The study is based on contemporary primary sources and on Gysi's own publications. In addition, a systematic re-analysis of the available secondary literature on the life and work of Alfred Gysi and on the history of the Zurich Dental Institute was carried out. The analysis shows that Gysi had a strong influence on contemporary dental prosthodontics and contributed considerably to its scientific character, especially due to the development of articulators and face bows, which received worldwide attention. But Gysi's scientific influence was by no means limited to prosthetics. Rather, he also provided important studies on caries and the dental pulp. Moreover, he published fundamental work on dental histopathology and microphotography. The current image of Gysi therefore needs to be revised. In view of the thematic breadth of his scientific contributions, Gysi is not only the most important prosthodontist of his time, but also one of the most versatile and innovative representatives in the history of Swiss dentistry.

ЗНАЧЕНИЕ ДРУГОГО В КОНТЕКСТЕ ФИЛОСОФСКО- АНТРОПОЛОГИЧЕСКИХ ОСНОВАНИЙ ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ

The study focuses on the phenomenon of alterity found in experience, in general, as the «other» or Others (other subjects as such). The research is based on phenomenological and dialectical approaches and orientation on the problem field of philosophy of education proceeding from an anthropological perspective. The article outlines the context of the problem of the other in philosophy and social sciences, based on which there was set an objective of developing an understanding of the meaning of the other, especially in relation to education. In considering the experience of «being a human» as the foundation of education, there are identified ‘layers’, starting with the ‘simplest’ — the level of «order», at which «self» and the «other» are revealed. This is a perspective determined by self-identity, which explains such areas of education as «embedding», training in relations with different environments; «systems thinking»; «learning» to «cope». A special relationship between «self» and the «other» is revealed in the layer of the experience of the «living». This layer is found to be nonstatic and should be designated as the phenomenon of «agency». The dialectics of the relations between the self and the «other» within this layer also explains the processes of «reflection» inherent in living things and accompanying human experience in its development at all further levels. The paper conceptualizes the significance of the «other» in the experience of this level for the modern articulation of the principles of education and for the interpretation of «human education». In the layers of experience of a «living being» and a «person-in-particular», the article reveals the significance of the «other» and Others for the gradual development of the properties and characteristic phenomena of agency according to the levels of experience in the course of a lifetime up to «maturity». These properties and phenomena include «open agency»; «subjective experience»; «light of consciousness»; «understanding»; interactions and «relationships» with the Others; «discernment»; «thing»; «sign». The paper provides conclusions regarding the significance of the «other» and Others for human experience, in general, and for the essential characteristics of individual agency («self-expression»; «self-overcoming»; «inclusive nature» of agency), as well as for understanding the education required in the modern world.

Narrative Ethics, Media and the Morality of the Ecological Modern: The Case of Sweden

The Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his groundbreaking analysis of contemporary ethics, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory, asserted that modernity was devoid of a unified moral system. This observation has been noted by, among others, the ecophilosopher Arran Gare as a means of dealing with approaches to contemporary crisis. By characterizing debates about the future as reflexively constructed articulations of modernity, this paper briefly considers how such a perspective is useful when attempting to communicate questions of development under contemporary conditions. Using qualitative examples from modern Sweden taken from a larger corpus of research to speculate on the potential for normative conceptual change, it uses the self-styled enlightened polity as a case study to discuss how environmental knowledge is instrumentalized in self-consciously modern contexts. MacIntyre’s insight thus provides a view into the relationship between discourse and practice which recognizes the situated nature of environmental argumentation over uniform green epistemologies.

Sangha as art public? Questions on Buddhist monks engaging with art in Theravada Southeast Asia

This essay explores whether Theravada Buddhist monks – collectively called the sangha – might constitute an ‘art public’ in Southeast Asia. Publics for art have been under-studied in this region, and rarely discussed in more nuanced terms than as being a ‘general public’ or ‘ordinary people.’ The essay argues for the need for an alternate vocabulary and terms of reference for thinking and speaking about the reception of art: one that is theoretically informed by and engaged with the multiplicity of discourses and publics in this part of the world. The essay provides a brief survey of the sangha's role in the development of modern art in Southeast Asia, as a constitutive agent in the articulation of modernity since the mid-nineteenth century, and then concentrates on the engagement of monks with contemporary art, since the 1990s. Key examples discussed include activities organised by Sa Sa Art Projects in Phnom Penh since 2010; the collection and programming of the Buddhist Archive of Photography in Luang Prabang; the practice of artist Orawan Arunrak since 2015; and the historiography of the Chiang Mai Social Installation and related festivals held during the 1990s.

The Age of Attraction: Age, Gender and the History of Modern Male Homosexuality.

In 1902, founder of the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, Magnus Hirschfeld, developed a ‘psychobiological questionnaire’ to investigate human sexuality.1 The section labelled ‘sexual instinct’ [Geschlechtstrieb] asked: ‘What approximately are the highest and lowest limits in age of the people to whom you feel drawn, or is age of no importance to you?’2 Hirschfeld's interest in age as a driver of sexual attraction reflects broader sexual scientific attempts to map an erotics of age.3 This article explores how and why the relative age of sexual subjects was theorised by British and German sexual scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It demonstrates that questions around age preoccupied sexual science and argues, more specifically, that constructions of male homosexuality were driven by anxieties about interactions between children or adolescents and older men.4 In so doing, the article reveals the interrelationship between sexological debates about homosexuality and scientific explorations of childhood sexuality and adolescent development. It shows that age needs to be acknowledged as a crucial category shaping sexual scientific debate and structuring understandings of modern homosexuality.5 As is well known, the erotic charge provided by age difference was central to many culturally prominent eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century understandings of same‐sex desire.6 European and American elites interpreted classical (predominately Ancient Greek) cultures as providing affirmative models of youthful male beauty and intimate attachment between older and younger men or boys.7 While precise differences in age were rarely specified, partners were separated on the basis of maturity into active (the erastes) and passive roles (the eromenos). Moreover, attraction to younger same‐sex partners was not seen to exclude opposite‐sex relationships: men who desired male youths could also be married to women. The influence of this material on individual identities can be found, for example, in sexological case studies or letters received by prominent Hellenic writers.8 At the same time, this idealisation of age‐differentiated erotics reinforced existing associations between same‐sex activity and the sexual misuse of younger people by older men.9 In response, some sexual scientists sought to tease apart age‐structured and same‐sex relationships. These authors defined the male homosexual through his exclusive inborn attraction to other consenting adults. This article shows that this influential construction of the modern homosexual as a discrete congenital type emerged in direct response to considerations around age.10 It also demonstrates that, notwithstanding the emergence of this model, questions about the impact of sexual encounters with older men on a younger person's sexual development continued to be debated within sexual science, creating dialogue between theorisations of homosexuality and concurrent studies of childhood sexuality.11 As such, investigations of male homosexuality continued to revolve around urgent questions about how and when same‐sex desire emerged and what impact sexual experiences in youth had on later desires. These debates remained at the centre of early twentieth‐century sexual science in Britain and Germany, complicating the inborn model and securing the centrality of age as a key category in modern articulations of sexuality.

The Forgotten First Iteration of the ‘Chinese Space Threat’ to US National Security

Existing analyses of US-China relations in matters of space policy have overwhelmingly focused on the contemporary relationship, with a tendency to represent the interaction between the 2 states as primarily competitive for its entire existence. By making use of American archival materials, this article argues that these characterisations are misleading. Instead, the historical evidence shows that an iteration of a ‘Chinese space threat’ predates contemporary threat perceptions by almost 5 decades. Crucially, however, this first iteration of a ‘Chinese space threat’ was side-lined to such an extent in the 1970s that cooperation in space policy became possible, leading to some significant technology transfer. This cooperation lasted until the modern articulation of a ‘Chinese space threat’ began to make such exchanges controversial once again. Analysis of these archival materials, therefore, shows that, while contemporary tensions between the United States and China in outer space are not new, they are also not the norm.

Freedom, Compulsion, and ‘Esoteric Religion’: Mullā Ṣadrā’s exegesis on the phrase lā ikrāha fī al-dīn

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 43, 2, 2018 © The Maghreb Review 2018 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources FREEDOM, COMPULSION, AND ‘ESOTERIC RELIGION’: MULLĀ ṢADRĀ’S EXEGESIS ON THE PHRASE LĀ IKRĀHA FĪ AL-DĪN SAJJAD RIZVI* One of the mainstays of modernist Muslim discourse is the accommodation of a broadly liberal notion of religious freedom, the freedom to choose one’s religion and to leave one’s religion if necessary, including, of course, Islam.1 The universal declaration of human rights and various other liberal modern documents of a rights-based approach to ethics have bundled together a number of liberties as essential social goods to which the modernist Muslim intellectual has acquiesced, sometimes understanding and engaging in the debates and embracing the notions enthusiastically, and at other times seemingly oblivious to the contexts and quasi-religious concerns that arise out of the history of Christendom and the desire to defang religious violence and prejudice inherited since the early modern period.2 The twin incoherences of liberalism pose problems for such reconciliations of the Muslim with modernity and liberalism. First, the dissonance between the metaphysics and hermeneutics of liberalism that seeks to universalize their own principles and hence leave no space for dissent and its alternative reading that proposes modus vivendi that allow pluralistic conceptions of reality and the good to flourish makes it difficult to embrace liberalism unequivocally.3 Second, liberalism may be a force for the good in which violence is overcome and dethroned for peace, but it is often equally a colonial (and neo-colonial) * University of Exeter This paper was originally presented as a lecture at the Pontifical Institute for the Study of Arabic and Islam in Rome on 25 February 2016. I am grateful to Fathers Valentino Cottini and Christopher Clohessy for their generous hospitality and invitation, and to the participants for their incisive and useful contributions. 1 Although it is worth pointing out that the question of apostasy is more complicated than that despite some moratoria or casuistic thinking on this associated with intellectuals affiliated or loosely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood such as Tariq Ramadan – see http://religionresearch.org/closer/2005/03/31/tariq-ramadan-an-international-call-formoratorium -on-corporal-punishment-stoning-and-the-death-penalty-in-the-islamic-world/ accessed 23 October 2017. Ramadan specifically dealt with apostasy in his interview with Der Speigel in 2005 given here http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-withtariq -ramadan-they-live-in-a-bleak-devastated-universe-a-384900-2.html accessed 23 October 2017. The approach posited here juxtaposes the letter against the ‘spirit’ of the law and is an example of the purposive nature of the law (maqāṣid al-sharīʿa) approach that Ramadan and others propose for the modern articulation of ethics in Islam – see Tariq Ramadan, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 2 For two important intellectual histories of human rights, one focused on the Christian roots, and the other on the Enlightenment legacies, see Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, and idem, The Last Utopia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, and Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008. 3 John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. FREEDOM, COMPULSION, AND ‘ESOTERIC RELIGION’ 155 enterprise that privileges a certain praxis of power and violence over others in hegemonic relationships.4 One need not be a Foucauldian or understand the cultural critique of Gramsci to see these tensions, incommensurabilities that seem to have passed the modernist’s attention. The aim of this paper is to set aside liberal and modernist discourses in favour of esotericism as method drawing upon the Safavid thinker Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1045/1636). But let us take first the critique of the former two approaches to hermeneutics. Three further problems plague our encounter with the liberal. The language of violence, religion and politics in our contemporary world is located within the bracketed set of three critical (and inter-connected) questions that affect and interrogate us. First, in our secular public spaces (leaving aside the niceties of...

The Rubber Waistband and the Resistor: Solidarity Radio and Media Fantasies of Emancipation under Late Socialism in Poland

The article presents the story of the underground Solidarity radio, a less known chapter of dissident media activism, whose emblematic form was the “extra Gutenberg” phenomenon of underground print culture, or samizdat. It proposes an approach, influenced by media archeology, in which both can be studied as part and parcel of the same communication environment in order to better understand the particular articulation of dissent, media and modernity which both represented. It proposes that in addition to being a certain media form, samizdat was a “social media fantasy” – a shared cultural matrix which embodied political expectations and passions about liberating effects on horizontal communication, attainable here and now through means at disposal of an average person. Underground broadcasting developed in the shadow of the samizdat materialization of this emancipatory media fantasy, despite the fact that radio activists mastered a unique craft of intrusion into the public airwaves, which gave broadcasting an aura of spectacularity that underground publishing had lost as it expanded.