Turn In Scholarship Research Articles

The “Turn” Turn

In this special issue, we focus on academic equivalents of the Wuhan lockdown and the George Floyd protests. That is to say, we examine moments when multiple intersecting factors have generated a crucial inflection point within scholarly discourse, resulting in a series of methodological and conceptual shifts capable of impacting work across a variety of different disciplines. These sorts of shifts are often referred to as “turns,” with the word turn being a trope (which, of course, literally means “turn”) that carries two sets of mutually opposed connotations—suggesting both a discrete shift within an existing trajectory as well as a fundamental redirection, such as a U-turn. In fact, both sets of connotations apply to the phenomenon of the scholarly turn. Just as the Wuhan lockdown and the George Floyd protests were each the result of a gradual accumulation of earlier developments that eventually came to pose a more fundamental challenge to the existing status quo, scholarly turns are similarly the product of a long series of incremental intellectual and sociocultural developments but ultimately come to be regarded as fundamental paradigm shifts and methodological realignments.

The Stubborn Mythology of Andrew Jackson

The Stubborn Mythology of Andrew Jackson Mark R. Cheathem (bio) John M. Belohlavek. Andrew Jackson: Principle and Prejudice. New York: Routledge, 2016. xi + 151 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $43.95. Bradley J. Birzer. In Defense of Andrew Jackson. Washington, D.C.: Regnery History, 2018. xiv + 209 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $29.99. Alfred A. Cave. Sharp Knife: Andrew Jackson and the American Indians. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2017. xviii + 241 pp. Notes and index. $58.00. David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics. New York: Basic Books, 2018. ix + 433 pp. Notes and index. $32.00. Many people say that Donald Trump has reinvigorated interest in Andrew Jackson, but the scholarly turn toward Old Hickory began earlier this century. Biographies by Hendrik Booraem, Andrew Burstein, and Jon Meacham and Jacksonian-era studies by Daniel Walker Howe and Sean Wilentz marked the beginning of this revival.1 More recently, works by Sean Patrick Adams, Mark Cheathem, Steve Inskeep, and Jason Opal have continued the trend of reexamining Jackson.2 This new scholarship represents a more critical take on the seventh president, one that considers more fully the ways in which Jackson failed to live up to the democratic promise associated with his politics. Since 2016, four new studies of Jackson have appeared. Three of them reflect this trend of critical interpretation, while one trafficks in hagiography. In Defense of Andrew Jackson provides Bradley Birzer's interpretation of Andrew Jackson in light of the criticism levied against Old Hickory by "New Left historians of the 1960s through today" (pp. xiii, 43). Defending Jackson is a difficult task today, but it is made more challenging when an author flouts accepted professional standards of evidence, interpretation, and accuracy, as is the case here. In terms of evidence, Birzer misrepresents or distorts parts of Jackson's life. Examples of this deficiency are several. Presenting Jackson as "utterly alone" and without family at the age of fourteen fails to recognize that he had [End Page 342] extended family in South Carolina who had cared for him, his mother, and his two brothers since Jackson's birth and who continued to look out for him until he permanently left the Waxhaws region of his childhood (p. 24). Birzer also relies uncritically on hearsay evidence contained in a nineteenth-century Jackson biography to contend that Andrew and Rachel Jackson were married by a Roman Catholic priest who also annulled Rachel's first marriage (p. 28).3 Birzer goes on to argue that "every time Jackson stood for election, the press debated" the Jackson marriage and that Rachel had a heart attack as a result of learning about the media smears against her in the 1828 campaign (pp. 28, 29, 101). Neither of these claims is substantiated by contemporary evidence.4 Birzer also exaggerates Jackson's dueling, claiming that "no one knows exactly how many Jackson fought, but they were frequent" (p. 34). In fact, the historical evidence reveals that he fought three duels—against Waightstill Avery, Charles Dickinson, and John Sevier, although one could argue that the latter altercation never fully developed into an actual duel. None of these duels was the 1813 brawl with the Benton brothers, as Birzer claims (p. 35). Birzer's interpretation of Jackson's life is also flawed. He insists that Jackson was "self-reliant" and "self-made," which ignores the assistance that his various kinship networks provided him throughout his life (pp. 8, 18).5 Birzer also argues that "most students of history tend to think of Jackson as a southerner" (p. 41). That will surprise those acquainted with Jacksonian historiography, since most biographies and studies of his era call him, as Birzer does, a westerner and a frontiersman.6 Birzer tells readers that neither Jackson nor his eventual wife Rachel knew that she had not been granted a divorce from her first husband when she and Jackson began a relationship; scholarly consensus today is that they knew exactly what they were doing.7 The rich historiography of Early Republic politics is also noticeably absent from his description of the era's political party development.8 In...

Introduction

Introduction Candace Barrington and Louise D'Arcens The global Middle Ages and global medievalism: ask anyone about these two terms (anyone, that is, who cares deeply about the Middle Ages and medievalism) and until a decade ago you'd have heard a resounding "Pshaw!" Both were just more exasperating examples of well-meaning academics' attempts to embrace diversity while remaining unable to see beyond their European blinders. Middle Ages and medieval are terms that can only describe local European phenomena; in the words of Robert I. Moore, "the double discontinuity that defines [a middle age, circa 500–1500 ce] is quintessentially, irredeemably European" (80–92). Simply adding the spatial modifier "global' does not free the two terms from a very unglobal Eurocentrism. Notwithstanding reservations around nomenclature (for instance, as preferred terms Moore offers Age of Global Intensification and Geraldine Heng offers early globalities; elsewhere, she and Lynne Ramey remind us that the "troublesome" term "the Middle Ages . . . can 'only be embraced under erasure' when applied beyond Europe" [Heng 234; Ramey and Heng 391]), objections to the concept of the global Middle Ages has become less sustainable as medieval Europe's apparent spatial limits have been shown to be more porous and its engagement with peoples and cultures beyond its borders to be more consistent. These insights were stimulated by new conversations that demonstrated what medieval studies could learn from Janet Abu-Lughod's groundbreaking economic study, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350, which challenged the unexamined assumption that world systems could only pertain to the transatlantic age and beyond. Especially important to these conversations have been the Global Middle Ages Project—and a special issue of Literature Compass focusing on the global Middle Ages (co-edited by Heng and Ramey in 2014). By turning to texts such as The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio's [End Page 1] Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, Marco Polo's Travels, Ibn Battuta's Rihla, Ibn Fadlan's Risala, Rabban Sauma's Journeys, Vinland Sagas, and The Letter of Prester John—and by bringing together experts from the humanities, social sciences, computer technology, musicology, archeology, and design—the Global Middle Ages Project helps us to visualize Asia, Africa, and Europe as connected by "networks of communication and mobility . . . emplaced through trade, war, pilgrimage, missionary activity, [and] diplomacy" (Heng 244). As a result, we can intuit that medieval texts with global themes are not fanciful aberrations but evidence for cultural exchanges we had allowed ourselves to ignore (Ramey and Heng). The Global Middle Ages Project has prompted us to conceive of a global Middle Ages and to recognize the essential interdisciplinary nature of the work before us. This same impetus has led to other exciting developments in the field: the inaugural issue of the journal the Medieval Globe declares its dedication to the interdisciplinary examination of "varieties of connectivity, communication, and exchange" across the millennium leading up to 1500 (Symes 2), a commitment that is echoed in the PMLA issue Reframing Postcolonial and Global Studies in the Longer Durée (edited by Sahar Amer and Laura Doyle in 2015). A magisterial recent contribution is Geraldine Heng's much-anticipated book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, which is a culmination of years of investigation into European racial thinking and its emergence out of encounters with non-European peoples in the Middle Ages (Heng 2018). Other recent additions to this accelerating scholarly turn have appeared on scholarly websites examining practices within medieval studies, as well as on public-facing sites. These include important provocations on the pages In The Middle and Medievalists of Color about developing anti-racist frameworks to challenge ingrained racial imaginaries about the medieval past, (see, for instance, Lomuto 2019), and a series on the Public Medievalist website: "Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages" (Sturtevant 2017). Aimed explicitly at countering fantasies of a racially pure (read white) medieval Europe that have not just underpinned prejudice, racialized violence, hate crimes, but also permitted institutionalized whiteness within medieval studies as a discipline, these sites feature posts highlighting the cultural and racial diversity of a range of medieval societies. All of these global approaches to the Middle Ages correspond with...

Rethinking publics in Africa in a digital age

ABSTRACTThe digital transformations taking place across the African continent present an urgent need for fresh thinking in the study of publics. This introduction lays out the impetus and contribution of this Special Issue to such a rethinking of the study of publics in Africa. Following in the footsteps of a wider body of scholarship, we draw on Africa’s pasts and present in order to move beyond the limiting assumptions, histories and languages that are embedded within Western scholarship on publics. We make the case that both de-Westernising and capturing publics in a digital age in Africa require openness to a diversity of disciplines, approaches and questions. In addition, we explain how, collectively and individually, the articles in this Special Issue contribute to taking up this task. Taken together, the articles are an eye-opening collection on the unfolding practices of citizens convening and participating in discussions using both newer and older media and communication platforms across Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. Contributions cover diverse disciplinary perspectives and empirical cases that investigate publics convening around digital platforms from WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook to weblogs and dating apps on mobile phones. We see this endeavour of examining the complex and dynamic digital transformations across Eastern Africa as part of a crucial scholarly turn in which the study of African society and politics helps us to rethink ideas and concepts that have heritages elsewhere, and to understand them in a new light.

Survival angst: Reading Hothead Paisan in the Trump era

ABSTRACTThis essay considers Diane DiMassa's 1990s comic book series Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist alongside the recent rise and visibility of White supremacist movements following the 2016 United States election. While Hothead's acts of queer revenge primarily target White heterosexual cismen, several issues feature Hothead taking aim at neo-Nazis and the KKK. Exploring the way in which Hothead's relationship to debility and capacity is mediated by her gender, sexuality, and race, the essay argues that a biopolitical approach, including the recent scholarly turn to the non-human, can provide a useful framework for approaching interlocking systems of violence and oppression that go beyond traditional intersectional models of resistance.

Composing Connections between Continents: Tracing the History of Australia’s Engagement with Antarctica through Music

This article explores the history of Australia’s engagement with Antarctica through music, from the earliest songs and an opera created by the first Australian explorers to Antarctica, to the popular Antarctic-related classical music of Australian composer Nigel Westlake and the soundscape-based compositions of Australia-based sound artists Philip Samartzis and Lawrence English. Drawing on the field of musicology, but also the scholarly turn to the senses as part of the broadening reach of cultural history, the article argues that Australia’s musical engagement with Antarctica constitutes a significant, though understudied, aspect of our aural heritage. Further, deeper and critical appreciation of this music as cultural and aural heritage enhances our ability to reflect on the full extent of Australia’s relationship with, and contribution to knowledge about, its ‘Great Frozen Neighbour’ and its identity as a ‘gateway’ to the Antarctic region.

Remains of the Future: Rethinking the Space and Time of Ruination through the Volta Resettlement Project, Ghana

Focusing on a planned scheme of resettlement undertaken in Ghana in the wake of independence in 1957, this essay explores how midcentury plans for modernization exist in disjunctive relation to unrealized material infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in resettlement townships, the account describes the contemporary afterlives of the plan, tracing how its promised futures shadow present understandings of contemporary and future life. The essay examines the distinctive form that ruination takes not as once-functional, now-decaying infrastructure, but as the ongoing effects of an unrealized plan. Here, experiences of ruination are associated with a set of spatial and temporal dynamics that emerge as the felt negation of linear time and Cartesian space. Insofar as the recent scholarly turn to ruins assumes the existence of modernization, it in fact eclipses what is conceptually at stake in situations where modernization exists only as a promise.

Learning that Reflects the Living: Aligning Anticipation and Edusemiotics

Joining educational philosophy with theoretical biology has come to form an important part of the growing edusemiotic movement. Edusemiotics has followed the example of biosemiotics (the understanding that the emergence of life is coextensive with the emergence of semiosis) to describe the process of learning itself as being coextensive with semiosis (or, sign-action). Following this recent turn in scholarship this paper argues for a perspective of learning rooted in the dynamics of the living. By ‘living’, I am referring to the integrated dynamics of reaction and anticipation that is definitional of living organisms, as distinguished from (non-living) inanimate matter. This calls for a theoretical perspective that transcends the realist/idealist divides often inherent in educational theory; offering a possible middle way between the constructivist emphasis on mind dependent reality, and the positivist emphasis on mind independent reality. Such a theoretical approach must be able to account for interactions in states of becoming, and thus calls for a broader causality than reductionist methods or computationalist accounts allow. To approach this re-conceptualization, I attempt to explore the combined relevance of two theoretical perspectives --- anticipatory biology, and the edusemiotic understanding of learning-as-semiosis. To address how anticipatory systems research from biology can be applied to learning theory, I first explore Nadin and Rosen’s notion of (Gödelian) G-complexity, and how this contributes to an understanding of the living as complex. Secondly, I address Peirce's notion of semiosis as it is embedded in his categorical system and overarching cosmology. In conclusion, I consider the confluences and differences between the concept of semiosis and the triadic relations that Peirce saw as fundamental to the origins of life, and the anticipatory processes that these theoretical biologists use to define living organisms, and examine how and if these two conceptions (taken in union) can potentially enrich theoretical accounts of learning. In this final analysis, the combined relevance of these two perspectives is applied to understanding the process of improvisation as an anticipatory/semiotic dynamic, to demonstrate the possible pedagogical relevance of this theoretical alignment

A Space for Place in Business Communication Research

Many corporate leaders believe that the physical environment of the workplace can play a major role in fostering the interdisciplinary collaboration they link to organizational innovation and in creating a brand that attracts and keeps highly talented employees. Their belief aligns with a recent materialist turn in scholarship that addresses the mutual creation of objects and subjects. Taking advantage of ubiquitous communications technology, the open plan design of these new workplaces offers a variety of settings, created more through furnishings than architecture, to support the four modes of 21st-century work: collaborate, socialize, learn, and focus. In this flexible, “mobile” workplace, people and things mutually reconfigure themselves as projects and preferences change. A tension exists, however, between group-oriented communication conducted face-to-face and private, individual thinking. Exploring the fit between the rhetoric of what space can do, especially enhancing collaboration and achieving innovation, and results on the ground, is an inviting, largely untapped, area for business communication research.

Review Essay: Where Is “Dark Public History”? A Scholarly Turn to the Dark Side, and What It Means for Public Historians

Book Review| August 01 2016 Review Essay: Where Is “Dark Public History”? A Scholarly Turn to the Dark Side, and What It Means for Public Historians Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. v + 308 pp.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $42.50.Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xi + 154 pp.; illustrations, notes, index; clothbound, $24.95; eBook, $13.99.Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places edited by Leanne White and Elspeth Frew. London: Routledge, 2013. ix + 296 pp.; figures, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $145.00; paperback, $52.00. Jessica Moody Jessica Moody Jessica Moody is a lecturer in modern history and heritage at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She has research interests in the memory of transatlantic slavery and the public representation of difficult histories. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2016) 38 (3): 109–114. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2016.38.3.109 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jessica Moody; Review Essay: Where Is “Dark Public History”? A Scholarly Turn to the Dark Side, and What It Means for Public Historians. The Public Historian 1 August 2016; 38 (3): 109–114. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2016.38.3.109 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Introduction

Introduction

What is the issue? The transformative capacity of documents

Paperwork does not simply describe an external reality ‘out there’: Documents also take part in working upon, modifying, and transforming that reality. That is the overriding argument of this paper, which uses a practice-oriented approach to demonstrate how this is being done. The paper pursues the argument by analyzing what the author suggests we call ‘modifying work’. Very concretely, the paper demonstrates how a bureaucratic document, as the result of a series of modification work, may come to transform an issue radically. The paper is written, in part, as a contribution to the discussion related to what is often called the scholarly turn to ‘materiality’ or the ‘materialities of objects’, a turn that is often considered as a way of taking seriously the materiality of nature objects and pressing questions relating to how scholars within the social sciences and humanities may take ‘the environment’ into account in our studies. The argument of this paper is that if we are to analyze and take nature objects into account, a thorough attention to ‘materiality’ or ‘materialities’ is not sufficient. Rather than suggesting that there might be a conflict or an opposition between a turn to words and a turn to objects or materialities, it suggests that we think about this differently: Words and materialities, the material and the semiotic, must be handled together.

A “Network of Hopes”: The Romance of Gambling in Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean

If we had knowledge of absolute certainty could be no such thing as romance for us. If science held absolute sway, if we were not forever skirting the perilous edge of the unknown, we should never be disappointed and we should never hope ... Magnificent uncertainty is essential to the romantic atmosphere; the intellect must leave things undefined in order that imagination may define them, that the consciousness which lurks behind consciousness may hint at the wonders behind the known. (Scott-James 9) In Modernism and Romance (1908), literary critic R. A. Scott-James registers the angst of many of his literary contemporaries about the cultural forces undermining the romance novel. He recognizes the romance novel's affinity with indeterminacy, and identifies scientific rationalization as detrimental to the possibilities of the form. In discerning the threat that scientific certainty poses to hope and wonder he anticipates Max Weber's account of disenchantment in society and culture more broadly in the 1918 lecture that claimed there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play ... one can, in principle, master all things by calculation (Science as a Vocation). A pervasive concern with modern romance and disenchantment underlies the fiction of many turn-of-the-century novelists about whom Scott-James was writing, but the specific link between romance, chance and rationalization is explored consciously in Thomas Hardy's novel A Laodicean. Though Hardy had shifted all his energies to poetry by the time Scott-James was writing, Modernism and Romance contains a whole chapter on Hardy as a modernist, but it neglects any mention of A Laodicean. The omission of this minor novel is unsurprising but regrettable, since, amongst other themes, it consciously juxtaposes realism and modern romance to tease out the cultural and literary trends with which Scott-James engages. The pairing of romance and chance reveals Hardy's sensitivity to some of the major artistic, scientific, and ideological issues of his time, and suggests a project of re-enchantment for both chance and romance in the novel. The disenchantment of the modern has been a favoured historical narrative of scholars and cultural critics since its articulation by Weber. In essence, this narrative posits disillusionment as an effect of advances in science and technology that eliminate the magic of the unknown. Yet a more recent scholarly turn attempts to alter this script by looking to instances of enchantment and re-enchantment that challenge the dominant story of modern rationalization and the loss of wonder and magic. (1) In her 2001 book The Enchantment of Modern Life, political theorist Jane Bennett articulates a project for re-enchantment today with which Hardy was already involved at the end of the nineteenth century. For Bennett, fostering enchantment is both an ethical imperative, and a sort of coping mechanism that helps one respond to the challenges of a turbulent and (160). Many of Hardy's novels nakedly present such a turbulent and unjust world with little space for meaningful participation, but in A Laodicean Hardy is occupied with something akin to Bennett's re-enchantment project: Hardy's sensitivity to his own changing time is notably less morbid in this novel than in many of his others, and even hopeful as he strategically romanticizes and depicts the wonder of chance in a manner unconventional for the Victorian novel. In the twenty-first century, Bennett claims this enchantment and sense of wonder can actually be cultivated and practiced intentionally through deliberate strategies, three of which she describes as giving greater expression to the sense of play, hon[ing] sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things, and resist[ing] the story of the disenchantment of modernity (4). According to her, such practices open up possibilities, and provoke new ideas and connections (6). …

The Historical Presidency: The Development of Unilateral Power and the Problem of the Power to Warn:Washington throughMcKinley

The scholarly turn to the unilateral presidency has expanded our understanding of the presidency and executive power, but, to date, this body of work has focused on presidents since theNewDeal. This is somewhat surprising, given that many of the most well‐known unilateral orders were issued before 1900. Rather than being isolated events, they are part of a longer list of unilateral presidential orders among early presidents that, as a group, have received little scholarly attention. This article seeks, first, to introduce “settle down” proclamations (which are issued as warnings to the public) issued by presidents before Theodore Roosevelt as a way to further understand the development of executive power in the early presidency. Second, it uses these proclamations to test whether the findings of the unilateral presidency scholarship hold with respect to unilateral power before the twentieth century. The article concludes by comparing unilateral power to prerogative power and proposing a path for future research.

Textual Subjects in Motion: Letters, Literature and Print Medium in an Indian-South African Exchange (1928-1946)

This article traces an epistolary exchange between South Africa and India that was animated by the circulation of print media and literary texts. The exchange – between the South African archivist, poet and social historian MK Jeffreys and the Indian statesmen and scholars VS Srinivasa Sastri and P Kodanda Rao – is read as forming part of a larger web of personal and political relations and textual traffic that contributed to the production of Indian Ocean public spheres. Through engagement with this particular case study, the article seeks to contribute to the scholarly turn from explorations of relations between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ or along a North-South axis toward elaborating those engaging South-South connections within the Indian Ocean arena.

Migration and Labor in the Americas: Praxis, Knowledge, and Nations

Abstract This article examines the conceptualization, development, and implementation of two related courses on the lives and labors of migrants in the United States. Both courses focus on the histories and hemispheric experiences of migrant workers, within and between the United States, Latin America, and the Spanish Caribbean. The courses are used as a means to think more broadly about what it means to teach courses on Latin America in the twenty-first-century context of the transnational turn in scholarship, the debates over immigration and its reform, concerns over the future of labor organizing, and efforts to seek social justice. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, students in the seminars engage in praxis and work to deconstruct four interrelated and seemingly fixed binaries: structure and agency, theory and practice, classroom and outside world, and teacher and student.

Disorienting Captivity: A Response to Gordon Sayre

There are several provocative assertions in Gordon Sayre's essay “Renegades in Barbary” that together make a compelling case for rethinking the ways in which we consider captivity narratives in light of the recent scholarly turn toward the Mediterranean and “the Muslim world.” As Sayre rightly notes, this turn, spurred by the geopolitics of the past decade, which has made US political incursions in the Middle East and captivity of both Americans abroad and transnational Muslims at Guantanamo Bay subjects of popular fascination and political crisis, may be seen both in studies of the early American republic and in Americanist work treating subsequent periods. Too often, it would appear, scholars working outside the period have caricatured narratives of American captivity in Muslim hands during the early republic, forgoing a richer understanding of the literary and political engagement with North Africa in the late eighteenth century. That this is done in terms that feed into and are made comprehensible by present concerns is troubling and demands corrective measures.

Seeing “That of God” in Texts: Christian Practices for Training in Perception

The diversity of submissions for the seminar on the turn to religion in studies makes clear that there are in fact many contemporary turns to religion. My article is concerned with the study of religious practice as part of that turn, concern shared by the essays of Liam Corley and Karen Dieleman, which follow this one. Where their essays are chiefly concerned with the values of particular practices--devotional reading and liturgy, respectively--mine focuses more on the general value for Christian scholars of conscious reflection on the role of religious practice in their exercise of literary, professional interpretation and judgment, though I will turn to practices for cultivating sensibility--training one's faculties of perception to be more or less responsive to certain feelings or kinds of details--for examples to illustrate some of my general claims. That the study of religious practice has been major element of the religious turn, especially as starting point for secular scholarship on religion I take to be an obvious point. If, as Karen Dieleman points out, religion has re-entered the discourse of largely through recognition of its status as a component of individual and social formations (this issue, 278), then practice will be the element of religion that this discourse will first explore. (1) It is perhaps not obvious that religious practice can also, therefore, be valuable starting point for religious scholarship on literature. Our seminar's discussions have raised reasonable hopes that, given the religious turn in scholarship, Christian scholars might be able to enrich that turn by providing explications of faith and theology not accessible to secular scholars who lack intimate experience of the former or intimate knowledge of the latter. As Caleb Spencer put it, can be argued that literary texts, like other art forms and texts, can be revelatory and that the role of the Christian scholar is to mediate that revelation to those who don't have the eyes to see it (this issue, 278). If the Christian scholar is to seek after truly revelatory insight into texts, then attention to ordinary religious practice might be too limited scope. (2) Our discussions have also raised doubts, however, about the capacity of Christian to make revelation available to readers who are not prepared to see for themselves. Vincent Buckley, for instance, doubts that even if a specifically Christian criticism is possible, will likely seem to the non-believer to be a kind of aesthetic dogmatism making for its own powers of interpretation claims which derive from, and represent, the claims of Christianity itself, in other words, a particularly demanding and even aggressive ideology thrusting out from the ruck of contemporary loyalties (215-16). (3) If the revelatory insights of Christian critics run the risk of being dismissed as aesthetic dogmatism, then examination of religious practice might provide way for the religious scholar to explain to secular scholars something of how religious scholars see, rather than more directly telling them what they cannot see but ought to. (4) Literary scholarship on religious practice might then prepare the way for scholarship that more directly addresses the foundations of religious meaning in experiences of faith and communion with the divine, as well as the systematic application of this experience to an understanding of God and creation in theology. This view of practice as the point of departure for growth in faith and knowledge is consistent with much recent work in Christian theological ethics. Stanley Hauerwas, for example, claims: We do not become free by conforming our actions to the categorical imperative but by being accepted as disciples and thus learning to imitate master. Such discipleship can only appear heteronomous from the moral point of view, since the paradigm cannot be reduced to, or determined by, principles known prior to imitation. …

Thinking Multisensory Culture

The scholarly turn toward visual culture has left in place the sensory hierarchy that subtends Western philosophy. Yet given the commodification of sense experience, an inversion of the sensory hierarchy with the proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell at the top is not necessarily any more conducive to knowledge or justice. I argue that proximal sense experience may be a vehicle of knowledge, beauty and even ethics. Operating at a membrane between the sensible and the thinkable, the proximal senses have an affective dimension that permits an immanent epistemology. My examples and olfactory ‘illustrations’ emphasize the sense of smell, which, I posit, given its intimacy with emotion and memory, gives rise to an ‘olfactory unconscious’.

Exploring Identity in Latin American History

The historiography of Latin America, which for decades centered on the twin cold-war concerns of revolution (and the repression thereof) and economic development, has within the past few years begun to explore questions of identity-the ways in which the ideologies and subjectivities of ordinary people have intersected with material conditions. In the Latin American context, analysis of social identities has centered primarily on class, ethnicity, gender, race, and nationality, considering ways in which elite and nonelite actors have tried to fashion the meanings of labels such as woman, Maya, or peasant. Other categories, such as sexual, generational, and regional identities, have begun to attract some scholarly attention but thus far have taken a back seat to categories more conventionally associated with Latin American studies. This scholarly turn is hardly divorced from interest in revolutionary movements, however. Examining levels of repression and exploitation in the region, many historians of Latin America have speculated on why no larger and more successful resistance movements have blossomed. Exploring identity as an analytical category uncovers the fissures that often gaped under pressure from repressive military forces, foreign intervention, and elite domination. Alternatively, these studies also reveal the important ways in which social identities provided the cultural glue that bolstered solidarity under these same pressures. The success of these recent explorations of Latin American identities thus hinges upon the examination of social markers as historically specific rather than essential and inherent. The four books under review here form part of a larger body of literature that has fundamentally shifted the terrain in Latin American studies. Edited collections such