Narrative Of Progress Research Articles

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Fugitive Abstraction

In this paper, I analyse Gordon Bennett’s Stripe series of abstract paintings, examining in particular their connection to the work of Frank Stella and the aesthetic modernism of Michael Fried and Theodor Adorno. Focusing in part on Number Nine (2008) from the Stripe series, I develop the notion of ‘fugitive abstraction’ to describe the achievement of Bennett in the abstracts as both exposing and averting the racialised gaze that constrained the reception of his work. Rather than read the paintings as positing an identity, I explore how Bennett sought to escape from such a framework. I argue that the abstracts offer a compelling, aesthetically rich experience whose demand emerges from the formal attributes of the paintings. This contrasts with the dominant critical reception of Bennett, as well as more recent scholarship that incorporates the abstracts into a developing, progressive narrative of his practice. I suggest that, in attempting to avert this dilemma, Bennett sought to expose the limitations of his critical reception, and exceed them by painterly accomplishment. By locating Bennett more firmly in the modernist tradition, I propose that we can more deeply engage with the Stripe series, as well as better understand Bennett’s wider project.

Feminists Reading of Foucault's Theory of Sexuality and Power

Sexuality is a normal and healthy part of human lives, normally and naturally, human is a sexual being and sexuality is viewed as a person's capacity for sexual interests and feelings. Similarly, sexuality is shaped and regulated by various determining factors such as social, political, cultural, legal, biological, psychological, spiritual, historical and so on which varies across societies and cultures. Sexuality is a broader idea which has various theoretical explanations and unbending social arrangements and comprises much more than sexual intercourse. On top of it, there is no single narrative which is globally accepted, various debates and discourses are more vigorous in the context of power, sexuality and feminism. Many theoreticians, researchers and practitioners have looked upon instances of homosexual, intersexual or non-hetero births as problems for the binary model that they have identified of power and sexuality. We consider power and sexuality to be distinct hitherto closely attached categories and yet it is a dynamics of power and mechanism of social control. Foucault has emphasized the role of discourses of ideas in constructing and regulating human sexuality and prevailing patriarchal order. Basically, this paper explores some conceptual and theoretical dialogues concerning sexuality, power and feminist narrative. In this context, the aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between feminist standpoints of gender and sexuality and Foucault's ideas of sexuality and power.

Violence, History and Silence in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

This article analyzes Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines to examine a narrative gap at its heart that conceals the central fact of the death of Tridib, arguably the most important character in the text. The novel concentrates on the Partition of Bengal and its impact on people from different countries and nationalities in Asia and Europe. Accommodating the story of three generations of people in three cities--Dhaka, Calcutta, and London--The Shadow Lines shows the interaction of characters belonging to Hindu, Muslim, and Christian faith. Important events in the text revolve around the family of Mayadebi, her sister Tha’mma and the Prices, their English friends. The narrative begins in 1939 and ends in 1964, connecting the Second World War, the Partition in 1947, and the riots of 1964 in Calcutta and Dhaka. Using Tha’mma, the grandmother of the unnamed narrator, as the connecting link between their pre-modern life before Partition in Dhaka and diasporic life in post-Partition Calcutta, The Shadow Lines depicts the traumatic suffering of characters from different nationalities but mainly from India and Bangladesh. The paper argues that the silence and secrecy maintained by Tha’mma and others about Tridib’s death mirrors the silence of official history concerning violence in their narrative of civilization, freedom, and progress which Ghosh unravels to produce a novelistic revisionist history that not only challenges the mainstream history but also fills the gaps it leaves.

Who Comes after the Anthropocene?

I remember my immediate fascination with an edited collection, now twenty years old, Who Comes After the Subject? The title seemed to entirely displace the identity of the subject, the “of-courseness” of its uniquely human definition. Indeed, its provocation did more than destabilise the what and where of the subject, as if we might extend this complexity, albeit in attenuated form, to non-human entities. The more radical implication was a destabilisation of human identity itself—its circumscribed location—together with the progress narrative that made the arrival of language, technology and agential smarts synonymous with human achievement. As contemporary concern about planetary health is galvanized around the unique power of human agency to either ruin or redeem an impassive and defenceless Nature, a “before” that lacks what being a subject affords, this article will linger over the logic that continues to sustain this story. By reworking Derrida’s “originary writing” as “originary humanicity,” a different sense of ecological involvement might be possible.

Who Comes after the Anthropocene?

I remember my immediate fascination with an edited collection, now twenty years old, Who Comes After the Subject? The title seemed to entirely displace the identity of the subject, the “of-courseness” of its uniquely human definition. Indeed, its provocation did more than destabilise the what and where of the subject, as if we might extend this complexity, albeit in attenuated form, to non-human entities. The more radical implication was a destabilisation of human identity itself—its circumscribed location—together with the progress narrative that made the arrival of language, technology and agential smarts synonymous with human achievement. As contemporary concern about planetary health is galvanized around the unique power of human agency to either ruin or redeem an impassive and defenceless Nature, a “before” that lacks what being a subject affords, this article will linger over the logic that continues to sustain this story. By reworking Derrida’s “originary writing” as “originary humanicity,” a different sense of ecological involvement might be possible.

‘Rainbow is not the new black’: #FeesMustFall and the demythication of South Africa’s liberation narrative

ABSTRACT In the 1990s, South Africa transitioned from apartheid to liberal democracy. Heroes, place names, holidays and symbols were revisited and replaced to reflect a ‘new’ nation and delineate a clear break from the ‘bad old days’. Central to this nation-building narrative is the figure of Nelson Mandela as a unifying hero exemplifying the ideals of this new nation. South Africa is now experiencing another transition. The so-called ‘born free’ generation mobilised for the first time on a mass scale in the 2015–2016 #FeesMustFall (#FMF) student protests at universities nationwide. Initially focussed on financial accessibility of higher education, these massive protests also questioned the rhetoric, narrative and heroes of the ‘new’ nation, reprising counter-hegemonic and hidden scripts to deconstruct the post-1994 hegemonic discourse and expose enduring inequality. Centring our analysis on interviews with Pretoria-based protesters, we position the students as experts on themselves distilling theoretical insights that emerge from their articulated experiences. We show that students engaged in a powerful project of dismantling a national narrative, questioning Nelson Mandela as ‘father’ of the nation, rejecting the unifying and temporal terminology that rhetorically placed apartheid’s inequalities in the past, and calling for the deconstituting of South Africa, the settler-created polity.

Ìwà l’ẹwà: Towards a Yorùbá Feminist Ethics

This paper explores a narrative path towards foregrounding what it calls a gender-relative morality as a core dimension of female subordination. It takes a feminist approach to ethics, which stresses specifically the political enterprise of eradicating systems and structures of male domination and female subordination in both the public and the private domains. The theoretical implications of Feminist narrative ethics is then applied to the philosophical imports of Yorùbá proverbs about women as a way to tease out how female subordination is grounded in Yorùbá ontology and ethics. Spe[1]cifically, the essay interrogates the ethical and aesthetical trajectory that leads from ìwà l’ẹwà (character is beauty), a Yoruba moral dictum, to ìwà l’ẹwà obìnrin ([good moral] character is a woman’s beauty). Within this transition, there is the possibility that the woman is excluded from the category of those properly referred to as ọmọlúwàbí.

Periodontal Disease: The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown.

Periodontal disease is classically characterized by progressive destruction of the soft and hard tissues of the periodontal complex, mediated by an interplay between dysbiotic microbial communities and aberrant immune responses within gingival and periodontal tissues. Putative periodontal pathogens are enriched as the resident oral microbiota becomes dysbiotic and inflammatory responses evoke tissue destruction, thus inducing an unremitting positive feedback loop of proteolysis, inflammation, and enrichment for periodontal pathogens. Keystone microbial pathogens and sustained gingival inflammation are critical to periodontal disease progression. However, recent studies have revealed the importance of previously unidentified microbes involved in disease progression, including various viruses, phages and bacterial species. Moreover, newly identified immunological and genetic mechanisms, as well as environmental host factors, including diet and lifestyle, have been discerned in recent years as further contributory factors in periodontitis. These factors have collectively expanded the established narrative of periodontal disease progression. In line with this, new ideologies related to maintaining periodontal health and treating existing disease have been explored, such as the application of oral probiotics, to limit and attenuate disease progression. The role of systemic host pathologies, such as autoimmune disorders and diabetes, in periodontal disease pathogenesis has been well noted. Recent studies have additionally identified the reciprocated importance of periodontal disease in potentiating systemic disease states at distal sites, such as in Alzheimer’s disease, inflammatory bowel diseases, and oral cancer, further highlighting the importance of the oral cavity in systemic health. Here we review long-standing knowledge of periodontal disease progression while integrating novel research concepts that have broadened our understanding of periodontal health and disease. Further, we delve into innovative hypotheses that may evolve to address significant gaps in the foundational knowledge of periodontal disease.

Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart

Reviewed by: Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture ed. by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart Elizabeth Chang (bio) Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart; pp. xvii + 265. New York: Routledge, 2019, $160.00, $44.05 ebook, £120.00, £33.29 ebook. For humanities scholars, the Anthropocene periodizes a history of imperiled and imperiling human existence that demands interdisciplinary explanation. The scope and scale of the explanation required has compelled a widening of focus for entire subfields now charged with addressing long-unnoticed particulars of ecological crisis in the intersections of multiple fields of study. In nineteenth-century visual studies, this has meant an expansion from art historical considerations of the pastoral toward study of a far wider range of human objects and interventions. The sheer complexity of the nineteenth-century material environment is satisfyingly addressed by Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart and illustrated extensively with both black-and-white figures and color plates. The eighteen short essays included within the collection are divided into five sections interleaved with a series of contextual introductions, each emphasizing, following Karl Kusserow, that "ecocriticism is not merely a method but a habit of mind" (2). [End Page 598] These sections of the collection—political and material ecologies, natural resource management, agricultural husbandry, and animal histories—follow an ecocritical logic; art historians and other visual studies scholars will likely, as the editors note, find multiple other ways to group the approaches. Some essays resituate familiar famous works in new contexts, such as Joan Greer's linkage of Vincent van Gogh's painting Giant Peacock Moth (1889) not with French Post-Impressionism, but rather with Willem Roselof's earlier Hague School landscape In the Floodplains of the River Ijssel (1870–97) in order to describe a new art-historical category of nineteenth-century "ecological envisioning" (208). Other essays elevate lesser-known decorative objects for closer scrutiny, like Naomi Slipp's study of the plant and animal life highlighted on Rutherford B. Hayes's presidential dining service. And still others use fine and decorative arts as a stepping-off point for discussion of a broader environmental concern, as in Laura Turner Igoe's use of Randolph Rogers's sculpture Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii (1861) to anchor an investigation of the practices of mining Carrara marble in the nineteenth century. As these brief summaries make clear, the diversity of the collection's essays makes its contribution especially valuable for readers interested in quickly surveying a variety of methodologies and subject matters appropriate to this growing field. Coughlin and Gephart's introductory materials help situate the interventions of the individual essays while also laying out the key theoretical underpinnings of the collection, which draws from nineteenth-century and contemporary studies as well as academic and curatorial models in an attempt to resituate traditional art historical frameworks of biography and provenance. The essays in the collection cluster around the visual culture of the nineteenth-century Americas, including George Philip LeBourdais on George Henry Durrie's "cryoscapes" of snowy New England scenes that freeze their mid-century bucolic homesteads against narrative progress, Caroline L. Gillaspie's evocation of the global commodity trade in a study of Francis Guy's Tontine Coffee House, N.Y.C. (c. 1797), and Shana Klein's survey of Cincinnati horticulturalists' engagement with the African-American artist Robert Duncanson's still-life paintings of fruit (93). Going a bit further afield, Annie Ronan follows the loving destruction of Albert Laessle's goat sculpture Billy (1914) within Rittenhouse Square Park in Philadelphia, Jessica Landau theorizes the self-defeatingly anti-conservationist effects of trap camera photography by George Shiras, and Emily Gephart and Michael Rossi show the complex ecocritical conversation spurred in American periodicals by condemnations of the fashion for ladies' millinery decorated with bird plumage—the accompanying Punch cartoons of these rapacious hat-wearers make particularly striking illustration here. British and European fine art, though not the main focus of the collection, offers a good opportunity for authors to continue existing art historical scholarship in...

Stevens, Ralph. Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720.

Stevens, Ralph. <i>Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720</i>.

Memory politics in the future tense: Exceptionalism, race, and insurrection in America

The grounding myth of American collective memory is built on the idea of America as a promise, what it shall be. Crises place futures in doubt. Against these two considerations, this article examines how the future can be used to shape the past. In the American context, the future as a general promise is invoked in times of crisis to reassure a nation by way of laundering difficult pasts so as to fit a narrative of progress in spite of the continued presence and recursive nature of these pasts. In the immediate wake of the 2021 Capitol Insurrection, another crisis (itself a harbinger of crises to come), the 2000 Bush v Gore decision, was rewritten as an exemplar of American exceptionalism rather than a stain on it. Beyond displaying the intricate relationship between future and past in collective memory, the case highlights how this operation only works to further neglect the racism and unresolved pasts entrenched in the myth of exceptionalism that motivated the Capitol Riot.

The Poetics and Politics of Custom: Law, Literature, and Time

The Poetics and Politics of Custom: Law, Literature, and Time

A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood

A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction Carmen Kynard and Bryan J. McCann In her first non-fiction collection, Michelle Cliff set out to (re)write the history of British colonialism, slavocracy, U.S. white settler colonization, and racial capitalism from her own body’s memories and experiences. She names perhaps one of her most unrelenting and memoir-inspired chapters in this collection: “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire” (which is also the namesake of the book, If I Could Write This in Fire).1 In this chapter, Cliff’s prosaic style and rhetorical force works deliberately in homage to Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo and her 1977 tome, Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint.2 Setting Aidoo as both Black Diasporic sister and mentor, Cliff reaches into the everydayness of the racial violence of colonial schooling that sorts, punishes, ranks, and reproduces global hierarchies via: colorism, disability, class status, anti-Blackness, homophobia, misogynoir, and mimicry of British etiquette; memorization of white canons of European nation and femininity from the singing of required morning hymns; the coronation mugs on parlor tables; to the exaltation of Jane Austen. Working to seam it all together, Cliff writes: “I think about how I need to say all this . . . it is up to me to sort out these connections—to employ anger and take the consequences . . . To make it impossible for them to think me harmless.”3 In this second issue of our still very first volume of RPC, we look to Cliff’s notion of “writing in fire” to situate the work that this issue’s authors are doing and the work we do as rhetoric scholars. In this second issue, we are also (re)writing the body politic of our nation-states from our experiences in the way that Cliff demands. We are buttressed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; a white supremacist mass murder of Black patrons in Buffalo, NY; more gun violence against Latinx children in Uvalde, TX and parade attendees in Highland Park, IL; the overturning of Roe V. Wade; and a rollback on voting rights acts and other litigation in relation to equality of opportunity. Schooling maintains its colonial legacy, this time with a renewed public [End Page v] attack on anything deemed a racial justice education and/or an embrace of queer, trans, and nonbinary youth. As Carter G. Woodson argued almost a century ago, schooling’s function is to reproduce the logic of oppression and social violence, and it continues to do that well today.4 We hesitate to suggest that things have gotten worse because that would only serve to validate the false claim of a linear progress narrative or—worse yet—a kind of plantation nostalgia. Instead, the structure has remained the same with merely a varied set of daily expressions. As editors, we also eschew the kind of white liberalist mantra that says rhetoric scholars must respond to the moment in which they live as if that alone coincides with re-imagining that moment. Instead, as editors, we seek to chronicle the long lineage of those of us in rhetoric who know we are writing in fire like the authors and texts this issue collects. In “Decolonizing the Ideas and Ends of Church(-)Settlers,” Romeo Garcia helps us to “produce decolonized archives” since settler words and ideas shape how knowledge is archived towards ongoing colonial goals. Garcia examines the settler ideas of Texas and Utah as a “LatinAmericanist project of modernity/(de) coloniality” that upends our usual obsessions in the Enlightenment enterprise of the 18th century; instead, he historicizes our rhetorical origins in modernity with the Americas of the 15th and 16th centuries. Thus, the linking of Americanity and coloniality unfolds a logic of domination underlying how we study language, rhetoric, and literacy. Americanity acts rhetorically within the projects of both colonialism and coloniality where specific settler locales like Utah and Texas are a profound articulation. Christa J. Olson further challenges us to do the work of “unsettling ‘our’ rhetorical ancestors.” In “‘Nuestras Reliquías Históricas’ and the Rhetorical Work of Objects at Machu Picchu,” she closely follows Machu Picchu ruins in Peru that were “uncovered...

Why Medieval Allegory?

Why Medieval Allegory?

Denial of coevalness: charges of dogmatism in the nineteenth-century humanities

ABSTRACT Since the seventeenth century, scholars have been accusing each other of ‘dogmatism’. But what exactly did this mean? In exploring this question, this article focuses on philosophy and Biblical scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany. Scholars in both of these fields habitually contrasted Dogmatismus with Kritik, to the point of emplotting the history of their field as a gradual triumph of critical thinking over dogmatic belief. The article shows that charges of dogmatism derived much of their rhetorical force from such progressive narratives. Especially neo-Kantian philosophers and Biblical scholars of liberal Protestant persuasion liked to depict their opponents as clinging to long-superseded modes of thought, thereby implying that these colleagues harked back to a past from which modern Wissenschaft had emancipated itself. This ‘denial of coevalness’, as Johannes Fabian calls it, demonstrates to what extent the vice of dogmatism was imbued with normative visions of how the field or, more broadly, German intellectual life should develop.

Application of Postcolonial Feminist Theory, Chicana Feminist Thought, and Black Feminist Thought in Analyzing the Mental Health Needs of Latina Migrant Farmworkers: A Shared Legacy.

The purpose of this theoretical article is to analyze the utility of postcolonial, Black, and Chicana feminist frameworks to inform nursing research and practice specific to mental health needs of Latina women migrant farmworkers. Twentieth-century Western feminist narratives overlooked the intersecting systems of oppression experienced by women of color, including Latina women. Feminist epistemologies are useful in understanding the complex sociopolitical contexts that have impacted women's health outcomes and well-being. This analysis is critical to shaping nursing care that meets the unique health needs of migrant farmworker women while considering their sociopolitical realities.

Reality Bites

Reality Bites

Pen Pals

Pen Pals