Turn In Scholarship Research Articles

Engendering carcerality: An introduction

AbstractReflecting the carceral turn in scholarship, this introduction to a special issue on engendering carcerality explores the difference that gender makes in the history of the carceral in its various forms over time and space. It considers the multiple meanings and spaces of imprisonment, surveillance, and confinement; incarceration of mothers; confinement of sex workers; imprisoning of political prisoners, and reforming of youths, taking account of intersectional identities, sexuality and resistance. It looks forward by looking back, engaging in a dialogue with abolitionist movements and current global struggles to encourage critical gendered histories of incarceration and resistance.

Sociocultural aspects of the medicalisation of infertility: a comparative reading of two illness narratives

This paper is a comparative reading of variations in the medicalisation of infertility caused by sociocultural aspects, in two illness narratives by patients: Elizabeth Katkin’s Conceivability (2018), a story of...

Metaphysical Horror in Samuel Beckett

Efforts to unravel the strands of philosophy and literature in Samuel Beckett’s work have marked each phase of its critical reception. While the archival turn in scholarship has shed valuable light on Beckett’s debts to philosophy, it has also exposed the rift between the epistemological assumptions of scholars and Beckett’s philosophy of ignorance. I argue that Beckett’s tragic view of philosophy took literary shape as a species of metaphysical horror, Leszek Kolakowski’s term for the failed quest for the absolute in Western thought. Beckett’s legacy is then viewed in a postsecular context as negative theodicy, the struggle to come to grips with the ethical and anthropological consequences of metaphysical horror.

“What does it mean to make a picture of the now?”

“What does it mean to make a picture of the now?”

Chevaux, paysans et artisans: Le travail attelé entre Meuse et Loire (XIIe-XVIe siècle) [Horses, peasants and craftsmen: Harnessed work horses between Meuse and Loire (12-16th centuries)] by Floriana Bardoneschi (review).

Reviewed by: Chevaux, paysans et artisans: Le travail attelé entre Meuse et Loire (XIIe–XVIe siècle) [Horses, peasants and craftsmen: Harnessed work horses between Meuse and Loire (12–16th centuries)] by Floriana Bardoneschi Fabrice Guizard (bio) Chevaux, paysans et artisans: Le travail attelé entre Meuse et Loire (XIIe–XVIe siècle) [Horses, peasants and craftsmen: Harnessed work horses between Meuse and Loire (12–16th centuries)] By Floriana Bardoneschi. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021. Pp. 549. Floriana Bardoneschi's book title sums up very well the aim of her thesis, which will certainly become a reference work for specialists in the history of agricultural techniques. The book is based on a wealth of sources drawn from the French National Archives and Côte d'Or Departmental Archives. Textual analysis is combined with critical analysis of images produced in the late Middle Ages and experimental archaeology. Bardoneschi adds her own experience of horse riding and driving. Thus, her book offers a technical, economic, and social triple approach. Published in the prestigious History of Techniques collection of Classiques Garnier, the book corrects many established ideas about the use of the draft horse in the medieval rural economy. Readers may however be disappointed with the mediocre quality of the black-and-white pictures. As a subsistence economy is largely dependent on animal traction, the tools used to turn animal power into motive power are key elements explaining agricultural growth. This book explores the evolution of techniques in the area between Meuse and Loire from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, when horse traction became more frequently used and transformed the rural world. Owning a horse was also a sign of social ascent for a peasant elite aspiring to chivalry and the nobility. Bardoneschi notes, however, that it is not possible to completely visualize this hierarchical organization of farmers based on possessing land and horses. Some sources documenting daily life contain traces of this hierarchy between Meuse and Loire that is, unsurprisingly, inside the royal domain and its area of influence. The first part of the book focuses on the zootechnical aspects of using a horse: selecting, training, and looking after the animal, almost at the individual level, an approach introduced in the animal turn in scholarship. The second part is strictly technical. Bardoneschi excels in reviewing harnessing methods and their effectiveness. This fits perfectly in the experimental archeology exploring traction techniques during antiquity carried out by G. Raepsaet (Attelages et techniques de transport dans le monde gréco-romain, 2002). Approaching horses as agricultural auxiliaries is enriched with drawings demonstrating practical knowledge and the author's personal experimentation with hitching a horse. Bardoneschi explains that the technical refinement of the harness reached a form in medieval times that hardly changed afterward. Farmers favor low-line traction to achieve the highest degree of adaptation to the morphology of [End Page 871] the animal. The integration of braking possibilities completes this progress in using horses on uneven terrain. The other parameters are the quality of the vehicles and the towed instruments, as well as the power of the animals harnessed to them. Technically speaking, horses are not necessary for work on the land. Oxen are the most economical and most powerful champions of agricultural traction. The peasants' interest in horses was social and cultural rather than pragmatic. The final part of the book reveals the legacy of G. Comet (Le paysan et son outil, 1992) and details the different uses of horses on farms. Working with horses eventually became more profitable, thanks to the high quality of craftsmanship developed around the harness and towed agricultural equipment. Productivity increased accordingly, enabling reinvestment in the latest equipment and new horses. As these animals saved valuable time in all sorts of agricultural activities as carriers of goods and people, the introduction of horses contributed to the rise of capitalism. Fabrice Guizard Fabrice Guizard is assistant professor in medieval history at University of Valenciennes. He is coeditor with C. Beck of Animal source d'énergie: Enquêtes dans l'Europe d'avant la révolution industrielle (Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2018). Citation: Guizard, Fabrice. "Review of Chevaux, paysans et artisans: Le travail attelé entre Meuse et...

Review: Balkrishna Doshi: Writings on Architecture and Identity and One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash

Review: <i>Balkrishna Doshi: Writings on Architecture and Identity</i> and <i>One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash</i>

Reading the Affects in the Colonial Americas: The Exteriority of Feeling in Cabeza de Vaca’sNaufragios

This article proposes an affective turn in scholarship on colonial Latin American literature, focusing on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’sNaufragiosas a case study. Through an engagement with embodied, intersubjective, and circulatory affects in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, it sketches out a critical framework that investigates what I call the exteriority of feeling in the colonial Americas. My reading focuses on three main areas: the theory of the humoral body as the cultural referent that shapes the externalization of embodied affect in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, the description of forms of affective transmission precariously established between European and indigenous communities, and the emergence of affective minefields and emotional untranslatables in colonial contexts. In this way, this article works toward a broad investigation of the meanings, functions, and circulation of affect and emotion in the colonial Americas.

Representation and its limits: 2020 protests against curfew

The paper deals with the ways in which representatives (both Serbian government officials and opposition politicians) described the protest against the curfew in 2020 and its participants. From the perspective of the ?constructivist? turn in scholarship on representation, the paper branches into two main lines of enquiry: 1) what did the representatives say about the protests and the protesters; 2) how did they (re)define the represented and their relationship towards them. The representatives recontextualise the protests: translate the incidents and the lack of well-articulated demands into a narrative about violent demonstrations and unrepresentable protesters. Consequently, they ignore and delegitimise possible systemic reasons for discontent, desubjectivise a significant number of protesters and, in turn, exclude them from the process of representation.

Decolonising Religious Studies in South Africa: Reflections on the field 26 years after democracy

AbstractIn light of the decolonial turn in scholarship, this essay maps the state of the field for Religious Studies in South Africa, 26 years after the first democratic elections. It suggests that between the genealogical critique of the discipline and the mapping of decoloniality in research and teaching, a description and assessment of the institutional presence and politics of Religious Studies and theology is necessary. This conceptual pause allows us to chart the practical possibilities and limitations for the discipline's future. By highlighting the contested Christonormativity that characterises contemporary South African public culture and illustrating the overrepresentation of theology in higher education, I argue that the flourishing of Christian privilege in higher education should be more critically considered within the decolonial project.

On the Full- and Half-Sheet Inserts of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543 and 1555)

On the Full- and Half-Sheet Inserts of Andreas Vesalius’s <i>De humani corporis fabrica</i> (1543 and 1555)

“It Took Us a Long Time to Go Here”: Creating Space for Young Children’s Transnationalism in an Early Writers’ Workshop

ABSTRACTAlthough growing numbers of children engage in transnational literacy practices in their homes and communities, these practices are rarely invited into the early literacy classroom, where teachers face increasing pressure to standardize instruction. In this qualitative, participatory case study, we examined how one early literacy teacher created space for young children to explore transnationalism within his primary‐level writers’ workshop. Drawing on theories associated with the trans‐ turn in scholarship and using portraiture in analysis, we document how this teacher modified his published literacy curriculum to center students’ translingual and transnational literacy practices. We also describe how three young children took up invitations to compose poetry that explored their transnational identities and experiences, highlighting how explorations of transnationalism enriched their writing. Ultimately, we suggest that early literacy teachers, including those working within the confines of increasingly standardized curricula, can create spaces for children to explore and express the fullness of their lives, including their transnationalism. We conclude with implications of this work for teaching and future research.

Clio’s Non-education History Journal’s (NEHJ): Broadening Journal Publishing for History of Higher Education

Historians of higher education need to consider publishing in non-education history journals [NEHJ’s] to place scholarship, especially for visibility for their research, or remain an isolated research specialization. This examination focuses on the landscape of history journals that publish history of education topics, specifically [NEHJ’s], on an international basis. A case study approach yielded data and, discussion revolves on history of higher education publication uses in four representative case studies: colleges and universities, professors, science, and medicine, to illustrate NEHJ’s and their contribution to history of higher education. Publishing considerations of this scholarly landscape, based on data gathered from various databases will provide the baseline for exploratory discussion of disciplinary cultures as they inform or deform history of higher education published within NEHJ literature. Animated by historiographic, subject, and methodological concerns, this discussion meshes histories of higher education vis-a-vis globalization within the publishing landscape and the transnational turn in scholarship. Journals, geographical and linguistic dispersion, articles and book reviews, are examined, revealing a larger publishing topography for NEHJ journals.

Desiring the Beautiful: The Erotic‐Aesthetic Dimension of Deification in Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, FilipIvanovic, The Catholic University of America Press, 2019 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐3189‐1), xiv + 250 pp., hb $75

Desiring the Beautiful: The Erotic‐Aesthetic Dimension of Deification in Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, FilipIvanovic, The Catholic University of America Press, 2019 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐3189‐1), xiv + 250 pp., hb $75

Three Rival Versions of Theological Genealogy: Catholicism, Left Hegelianism and Post-Secularism

In this paper I would like to discuss three rival versions of theological genealogy that are popular today. In doing so I seek to offer a few examples of how the most recent scholarly turn to theology is ultimately being driven by disparate political ideologies. The first one I describe as new Catholic modernity critiques, which often emphasize the breakdown of moral consensus brought on by Protestantism, theological nominalism, etc. The second are proponents of what I describe as a Left Hegelian project of detheologization—scholars on the political Left who in recognizing the theological origins of modernity seek to overcome theology in order to advance a progress project (Roberto Unger and Samuel Moyn). Finally, I will discuss the so-called post-secularists (Jürgen Habermas, Hans Joas, Charles Taylor) who see modernity neither as morally incoherent, nor theology as a bad thing; rather, these scholars argue that secularism and “the Judeo-Christian tradition” developed together and therefore can mutually enrich each other.

Digital Humanities and the Discontents of Meaning

The digital humanities offer more than just a set of tools. The application of software to assist in the analysis of large collections of data does not just expand the volume of material we can incorporate in our work, it also expands how we in the humanities understand the nature of meaning. The recent scholarly turn to the expanded modes of analysis made possible by DH is not just the “latest new thing” but gives the scholarly community a way to articulate and respond to long-standing doubts about the epistemological grounding in the practice of the humanities. Even more importantly, I believe that this broadening of inquiry afforded by DH is intrinsic to the humanistic project itself. In this essay, I seek in particular to connect the implicit conceptual substructure behind the architectural logic of the digital humanities to key strains of hermeneutic thought that have established a basis for exploring the question of how we are to understand the vast, variegated world of historical human experience that is the object of our humanistic inquiries across disciplines.

All the Muslims Fit to Print: Racial Frames as Mechanisms of Muslim Ethnoracial Formation in the New York Times from 1992 to 2010

A generative turn in scholarship examines the institutional and political dimensions of Islamophobia, conceptualizing Muslim representations as a mechanism of ethnoracial formation in which the media is one such site of racialization. Moments of great political and cultural transformation can motivate and activate these racial projects, generating racialized representations that attach racial meaning to bodies. Much of the research on Muslim representations in news media centers on this very question: did the attacks of 9/11 usher in a new racial project? Previous studies offer competing hypotheses. Bridging social movement and communication theories with a theory of ethnoracial formation, the author develops an approach for evaluating racial framing processes through a comparison of diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames. The author applies this approach using computational text analysis techniques to examine latent shifts in the racial framing of Muslims in the New York Times in the decade before and after 9/11. The author finds evidence of increasingly racialized, but more complex, representations of Muslims in the decade after 9/11 in which diagnostic frames evolve from locating social problems in states and institutions to locating social problems in Muslim bodies. Prognostic frames shift from institutional reforms to those targeting group pathology. The author argues that excavating the latent mechanisms of racial projects helps us better understand the dynamic and ongoing processes of ethnoracial formation.

Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene

Abstract Recently, scholars have called for a “critical ocean studies” for the twenty-first century and have fathomed the oceanic depths in relationship to submarine immersions, multispecies others, feminist and Indigenous epistemologies, wet ontologies, and the acidification of an Anthropocene ocean. In this scholarly turn to the ocean, the concepts of fluidity, flow, routes, and mobility have been emphasized over other, less poetic terms such as blue water navies, mobile offshore bases, high-seas exclusion zones, sea lanes of communication (SLOCs), and maritime “choke points.” Yet this strategic military grammar is equally vital for a twenty-first-century critical ocean studies for the Anthropocene. Perhaps because it does not lend itself to an easy poetics, the militarization of the seas is overlooked and underrepresented in both scholarship and literature emerging from what is increasingly called the blue or oceanic humanities. This essay turns to the relationship between global climate change and the US military, particularly the Navy, and examines Indigenous challenges to the militarism of the Pacific in the poetry of Craig Santos Perez.

Special Issue: Dance in musical theatre

This special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre examines the role of dance in musical theatre from a variety of perspectives. Given the scholarly turn from textual analysis to performance analysis, even studying musicals without extensive dance per se can benefit from understanding how movement shapes meaning. The introduction below explains some key themes that have emerged in the six articles that follow. One is the question of genre: what exactly is musical theatre dance? Another is auteurship: what is the role of the choreographer in shaping musicals? A third is technology, which reminds readers that choreography extends beyond human bodies. Finally, the articles all consider questions of methodology and history – how do we best study musical theatre? While there are several other areas of potential inquiry not covered in these six articles, this special issue, the first in the field to focus on dance in musical theatre, aims to help define and cohere an important subfield.

Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen

Reviewed by: Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen Holly Yanacek Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism. By Kata Gellen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 250. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810138933. With Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism, Kata Gellen makes an important contribution to modernist scholarship and the interdisciplinary field of sound studies through her analysis of noise in Kafka's oeuvre. The book participates in the recent turn in scholarship to define "modernist epistemologies"—that is, to examine "the ways in which modernist art and literature produce new modes of perception and knowledge" (199). Gellen aims to show how Kafka responds to two central crises of modernism—the crisis of narration and the crisis of knowledge—through the treatment of noise in his collected stories, notebooks, and letters. A central premise of this book is that noise is a "productive obstacle" in modernist literary narration in general and in Kafka's works in particular (3). Gellen's interpretations reveal that Kafka never settled on a single, unified approach to sound. Instead, she emphasizes that each one of Kafka's texts that deals with sound presents a different attempt to explore the productive tension between noise and writing (33). Noise puts a strain on many of the characters in Kafka's stories, and Gellen's book examines the literary significance of these disruptive, persistent, and enigmatic noises. Kafka and Noise is noteworthy as the first sustained English-language study of sound in Kafka's collected works. Jürgen Daiber's Kafka und der Lärm: Klanglandschaften der frühen Moderne (2015) demonstrates a similar interest in sound in Kafka's writings; however, the book primarily focuses on Kafka's own frustrations with noise that disrupted his writing. Gellen adds to the scholarship on Kafka and sound through her innovative application of film theory and her focus not on Kafka's biographical writings, but on the literary significance of noise in his narration. Her approach yields fresh interpretations of Kafka's stories, including "Großer Lärm" (1912), "Die Verwandlung" (1915), "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" (1917), "Forschungen eines Hundes" (1922), "Der Bau" (1923), and "Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse" (1924). Although the use of film theory to analyze sound in Kafka's works is new, the study of the connection between Kafka and cinema has a long history, which Gellen traces back to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's debates about gesture in Kafka's writing in the 1930s. Inspired also by Gilles Deleuze and [End Page 613] Félix Guattari's interpretation of noise in Kafka in their theory of a minor literature, Gellen picks up where these critics left off and offers sustained close readings of the problem of sound in Kafka's works. Gellen's justification for her approach to analyze Kafka's literary works and silent film together in Kafka and Noise is persuasive. Concepts from film theory, such as acoustic close-up and acousmatic sound, provide the language necessary to analyze noise in literature, a silent medium. Gellen's application of these concepts offers new insights into Kafka's works that would not be possible with literary concepts and narrative theory alone. In addition, the interpretation of literary sound with film terminology illuminates what literature (and cinema) can do and what it cannot do, and thus this book makes a significant contribution to genre studies. There is another reason why concepts from film theory, rather than concepts in the field of sound studies, form the methodological underpinning of Kafka and Noise. According to Gellen, sound studies has "has, to a large extent, ignored literary sound" because literature is a medium that does not directly produce actual sounds (203). However, she argues that sound studies would have much to gain by focusing on literary sound as an object of analysis, and her book makes a strong case for that assertion. In each of the book's four chapters, Gellen introduces concepts from film theory and applies them in her close readings of Kafka's letters and stories, which she interprets...

INTRODUCTION

Against the background of the decolonial turn in scholarship, we reflect on the implications of the exclusion of Africa and Africans from the epistemo-logical labour involved in the development of the field of religion and media. In reviewing recent developments in the field of religion and media studies in Africa, we reveal the research dearth produced by the scarcity of studies in religion and media in Africa, which focuses on the interplays and overlaps between religion, media, and gender. This introduction illustrates the possibility that gender perspectives, approaches, and theorising might contribute to the advancement of the field of religion and media in Africa and examines the possibilities that are generated by the seven contribu-tions featured in this volume. In recognising the discursive, material, and contextual nature of knowledge production, we understand how, through explorations in the religion-media marketplace, the limitations of traditional notions of the field and the archive are challenged.