Universalist Ideals Research Articles

Hurston’s Art of Controversy in Dust Tracks on a Road

Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, has generated controversy since its publication in 1942. Critics either dismiss the work for its alleged celebration of liberal individualism and its denial of race consciousness, or else they argue that the book deconstructs its apparent meanings or is essentially ironic in tone. Countering such polarized reactions, this essay takes seriously Dust Tracks’ overt sentiments by placing them in the context of the abstract humanism that developed at midcentury to understand the particular forms of Hurston’s transracial universalism, based on patterns of likeness and relationality. Moreover, by appreciating the ways this discourse fails—as evidenced in the many textual contradictions and inconsistencies of Dust Tracks—we gain a fuller sense of a process in which universalist ideals bear the marks of Hurston’s personal and historical position as a Black woman in a racist society.

To Have and to Hold

Heritage politics in Turkey came under global scrutiny in July 2020 following the conversion of the Hagia Sophia Museum in Istanbul back into a mosque, and then again in October 2020 after the confiscation of ancient and modern seed collections residing at the British Institute in Ankara. In the accounts of several Turkish and international critics, these two events were presented as kindred, reactionary maneuvers aimed at galvanizing nationalist fervor, and Turkish claims on biological and cultural property were pitted against universalist ideals of conservation. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and archival research on the Turkish conservation bureaucracy, this article analyzes the role of plants and antiquities in Turkish metanarratives of loss, sovereignty, and modernization, and it offers an anthropological account of everyday conservation work in Turkey that challenges the purported divide between universalist science and nationalist politics that very much mimics the contours of a civilizational split.

Beyond the Veil

This article critically analyzes the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI) and its relationship with the widely recognized Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which guarantees and protects human rights for all regardless of gender, social and economic situations. Adopted by 45 Islamic states in 1990, the CDHRI is often portrayed as complementing the UDHR but is rooted in Sharia Law, leading to tensions between universal and cultural relativist perspectives on human rights. By using Saudi Arabia and Indonesia as case studies to illustrate the various manners the Sharia Law is implemented, this paper illustrates how the law in these countries amplifies social, physical, and structural violence specifically against gender and religious minorities, namely Shia. This highlights the immense disparities between international human rights norms and state-centric patriarchal norms. Additionally, by analyzing the legal frameworks of these states, specifically the Aceh region in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia as a whole, this article emphasizes the complex interplay between universalistic ideals and cultural relativism, emphasizing the need for a nuanced understanding of human rights in diverse cultural contexts.

Seeking an intersectional “convergence des luttes” in the occupied theaters of Marseille

In recent culture wars in France, critics claim that intersectionality “fractures everything” (Emmanuel Macron, Le Point). Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel argue that “identitarian” discourses—and an emphasis on race in particular—have contributed to divisions in popular classes and divided progressive activists (Le Monde Diplomatique). At issue in these debates is whether explicit references to modes of gendered and racialized oppression will be recognized as legitimately universalist in accordance with the French republican tradition, a question explicitly addressed by recent scholarship proposing a rethinking of universalism—more “concrete” for Lépinard and Mazouz (2021) and more “inclusive” for Hourya Bentouhami (2020). This article examines the occupation of two theaters in Marseille as a setting where universalist ideals about citizenship were expressed and put into practice. In March 2021, more than 100 theaters were occupied across France, some by the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) union, and some by theater students. Whereas unions prioritized economic issues in the arts sector, students framed the occupations as a broader struggle against racism, sexism, police violence, and environmental degradation, arguing that these must be considered together. Drawing on interviews and occupation documents, this article examines the differences and points of alignment between students and unions. This analysis highlights points of collaboration and exchange, and also shows how the intersectional priorities of students extended the scope of the occupations to include other marginalized populations. Here, an intersectional approach fostered collaboration not only across two currents of social justice activism, but also with other partners across the urban territory of Marseille, thereby showing intersectionality’s value and compatibility within contemporary French social justice activism.

Tech-based Prototypes in Climate Governance: On Scalability, Replicability, and Representation

‘[T]he “mainstream” of global governance has changed course’ and in so doing, might well have ‘outrun the standard tools of critical, progressive, and reform-minded international lawyers’, Fleur Johns wrote in 2019. It is especially the critical tools of ‘appeals to history, context, language [and] the grassroots’ in response to universalist planning that Johns sees absorbed in the turn to prototyping as a new ‘style’ of governance. In this article, we take on this observation and explore how the ‘lean start-up mentality’ that Johns described has taken hold of tech-based climate governance. We base our reflections on the ‘Tech for Our Planet’ challenge that took place over 2021 and was showcased at the UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow. While a turn ‘from planning to prototypes’ is observable, we question how exactly this ‘change of course’ affects the high modernist style of global governance and its critique by international lawyers. The ‘digital solutions for climate challenges’ that were showcased in Glasgow are indeed based on localized experiments with data science, thereby seemingly overcoming high modernist impulses towards universalist ideals. Yet, these experimental prototypes are developed with the ambition of being replicable and scaled up, to become a stack of tools deployable in any given scenario. This form of scaling up neither breaks with modernist aspirations based on technologically-mediated replicability—of moving the same logic inscribed in code to different sites and contexts—nor with a modernist understanding of knowledge as universal in its application. In our analysis, the determining feature is then not so much a matter of planning or prototyping in ideal type forms, but of replicability of knowledge production and scalability of technological know-how that underpin both planning and prototyping. Prototyping in the start-up space does not depart from, but rather reinscribes, a modernist representation of the human subject that forces its epistemological lens onto a world of nonhuman objects amenable to governance. Critical international lawyers’ toolkits must therefore be reconfigured with a focus on a governance style of disembodied knowledge production that runs through both planning and prototyping.

Sex, Profit, and Political Power: California and Its Influence on Paris’s Queer Business, Press and Politics in the Late 1970s and 80s

ABSTRACT In late 1970s Paris, San Francisco Nights and Far West, popular institutions in the city’s new queer nightlife, helped fashion new sexual norms. They were part of a constellation of California-inspired places that stimulated new imaginings of how queerness could be expressed and embodied. Indeed, large Californian cities, San Francisco in particular, provided a profit model based on queer consumption that participated in the creation of a new queer Paris. As the decade came to an end, the mobilisation of a gay vote in California also fed Parisian activists with the inspiration to organise a queer voting bloc in Paris to influence national elections and lobby for an end to discriminatory, anti-gay sections of the penal code. These re-imaginings of politics and urban economy challenged cherished French universalist ideals. As such, opposition accompanied the embrace of California-inspired visions of queer life. Both support and resistance attested to the growing global power of California, and of the United States. Drawing upon archival research, this paper explores California as a cultural reference, commercial brand, and political aspiration in the construction of a new queer Paris at the end of the 1970s and the dawn of the 1980s.

The poetics of secular cosmopolitanism: Anouar Majid’s critical views of Islam and America

ABSTRACT Anouar Majid, a Moroccan diasporic writer in the US, is the author of one novel and five critically acclaimed books on Islam and the West. His latest unfavourable polemics against Islam as well as his seeming detour from the pursuits for diverse stronger religions and cultures to the Universalist ideals of the Founding Fathers are likely to provoke controversies. However, this paper argues that the diasporic ethos of openness and dialogism in his novel Si Yussef continues to prevail in his polemical scholarship of Islam and America. Majid’s succinct call for espousing the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers emanates from the latter’s incarnation of the imaginary of tout-monde (‘unity-diversity’), as theorised by Edouard Glissant’s poetics of Relation. In their acceptance of all sorts of differences and denunciation of dialectical philosophies in the context of universal humanity, the Founding Fathers and their ghost scholars envisage secular cosmopolitanism as a panacea to the troubled relationship between Islam and America.

Next year, if grain is dear, I shall be a Sayyid: Sayyid Ahmad Khan, colonial constructions, and Muslim self-definitions

AbstractBritish social surveys and census statistics defined ‘Sayyid’ as a caste identity, while often casting a sceptical eye on the authenticity of genealogical claims associated with the concept. The article examines how Muslims, especially Sayyid Ahmad Khan, participated in the formulation of the concept of Sayyid identity and status. Islamic ideology and practice have long wrestled with conflicting claims of religious equality and hierarchical status, often based on concepts of sacred lineage. From his earliest writings Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) emphasised his descent from the Prophet Muhammad on his father's side alongside his somewhat less exalted relationship with his Kashmiri grandfather. In later years he tried to balance universalistic ideals with claims to status based on supposedly ‘foreign’ ancestry, which he cited as parallel to the supposed Aryan ancestry of high-status Hindus. His British allies used his Sayyid ancestry as reinforcement of his leadership of an India-wide Muslim ‘community’ and evidence that India was not prepared to develop into a national polity based on representative government. But the Aligarh movement's claim to represent the wider Muslim population and in particular its educational project at Aligarh struggled with a more egalitarian ethos, defining students and the members of voluntary associations as ‘brothers’, and quite prepared to cross ascriptive boundaries both in public life and personal relationships.

Cultural policies mixing commonality and difference? The case of public libraries in French cities

ABSTRACT Libraries are a core element of local cultural policies. In a country historically marked by national integration policies aiming at cultural homogeneity, what is the relationship of local public libraries to the socio-cultural diversity of populations? The results of qualitative studies conducted in three major cities (Bordeaux, Rennes and Nantes) display a growing awareness of more diverse users and adaptations to their demands. Librarians, at the same time, do not give up the universalist ideals central to the history of their institutions and their current activities. Despite differences between cities, the case of public libraries illustrates the possibility to combine universalism and diversity in the policies implemented in France, here in the cultural field. My study demonstrates how local institutions can use their room for manoevre and combine elements of the republican ideal and adjustments to a diverse social reality.

Global Citizenship Education, Global Educational Injustice and the Postcolonial Critique

This contribution develops a defence of a universalist conception of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) against three prominent critiques, which are, among others, put forward by postcolonial scholars. The first critique argues that GCE is essentially a project of globally minded elites and therefore expressive both of global educational injustices and of the values and lifestyles of a particular class or milieu. The second critique assumes that GCE is based on genuinely ‘Western values’ (e.g., in the form of a conception of human rights or conceptions of rationality or the self), which are neither universally accepted nor universally valid and therefore unjustly forced on members of non-Western cultures and societies. GCE, according to this critique, is assumed to be another version of the educational justification of a hegemonic and unjust global Western regime. The third critique focuses on the epistemological preconditions of GCE. It assumes that GCE relies on a particular, culturally embedded ‘Western epistemology,’ which perpetuates historically grown global educational and epistemic injustices by dominating and subjugating alternative epistemological approaches. With respect to the first critique I argue that it is to a certain extent sociologically plausible, but wrong when it is applied to the educational and political legitimacy of GCE. The second critique overestimates the consensus within the ‘Western tradition’ and underestimates the transnational dissemination of universalist ideals and values as well as its own reliance on universalist validity claims. I argue that in order to provide a plausible criticism of historically grown global educational and political injustices, it is imperative for GCE to integrate central insights provided by the postcolonial critique, without giving up on universalist ideals and values. The third critique is, according to my argumentation, based on flawed epistemological assumptions, which do not withstand critical scrutiny. Instead of identifying epistemic and scientific claims as the expressions of a particular ‘culture’ or geographical location (the ‘West’), I defend the position that philosophical and scientific research should ideally be conceived as a democratic and universalist project, whose emancipatory potential can only be realized on the basis of a universalist epistemology.

Search and Destroy

This article is an analysis of artist-activist Nancy Spero’s War Series paintings, 1966–70. The author analyzes her paintings from this crucial time period within the context of significant historical events that impacted her artistic development of themes, formal devices, and radical breaks from numerous canonical art tenets. Within the emergence of the American political and artistic Left, Spero’s political radicalism became the foundation of her artistic content and studio practice. From this foundation, as an early feminist artist, Spero produced a wide-ranging figurative oeuvre that pioneered a new lexicon of image/text and figure/ground conjunctions, overturning the prescriptive universalist ideals of modern art.

Universal Human Rights ‘Versus’ Cultural Relativism: the Mediating Role of Constitutional Rights

Abstract The claim that human rights are rights that all humans hold everywhere and at all times embodies the concept of universalism. There are however some that do not believe that human rights are universally held. Those who hold such views are widely described as cultural relativists. A rich body of literature exists with a particular focus on the divergence that exists between universalism and cultural relativism. We posit that these areas of antagonism might be overstated. In the light of this, this work investigates the mediating role that constitutional rights may play between these two seemingly opposing schools of thought. Ultimately this paper avers that the constitutional making process that international human rights principles go through in order to emerge as constitutional rights allows for constitutional rights to simultaneously lay claim to both universalist and relativist ideals. Thus, allowing constitutional rights to represent a grossly overlooked middle ground.

Humor and the Law of Rights: Voltaire’s Cosmopolitan Optimism and Emile Habiby’s Dissensual Pessoptimism

Abstract This article explores the operation of humor in Palestinian author Emile Habiby’s novel The Pessoptimist (1974) and compares it to Voltaire’s humor in Candide, which it explicitly cites. The differences between the two authors’ modes of humor are read as an index of their different relations to the law, and specifically, to international law as the guarantor of human rights. Voltaire’s humorous critique is limited to the current content of the law, reflecting his confidence in universalist ideals and rights attainable by legal reform. Habiby’s humor, however, protests the law as such, exposing universalist ideals as not merely unhelpful for the Palestinians’ struggle but also as complicit in the oppression and fragmentation of Palestinian society. Habiby therefore redirects the emphasis toward interpersonal manners and intimacies that are external to the realm of the law yet underwrite it. Against Voltaire’s cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment-era ideals, Habiby’s humor thus offers a differential and conflictual community that prioritizes a practice of decolonization over ideal solutions and their dichotomous logic.

Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England. Katherine Eggert. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. xi+351.

<i>Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England</i>. Katherine Eggert. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. xi+351.

Identity Politics Is Not Enough: Why the Left Needs Universalism to Survive

Identity Politics Is Not Enough: Why the Left Needs Universalism to Survive

New Age, New Media: Kabbalah on the Web

This essay explores the resituation of medieval and early modern kabbalistic diagrams in a New Age, new media context. Because they are taken out of their previous discursive context, there are real differences in their meaning and in their ritual enaction. Thus, the contemporary use of medieval sources is a medievalism dependent on new media. Contemporary scholars often define New Age religion according to its construction and application of syncretistic discourse without concern for historical continuity, and they link this to universalistic ideals and a monistic theology. Thus, syncretism and anachronism have ideological and theological significance. By examining the use of these diagrams, we can better understand how New Age, new media religions create, interpret, and enact sacred discourse.

Sexual Protection, Citizenship and Nationhood: Prostituted Women and Migrant Wives in South Korea

This article examines the making of two distinct groups of women—‘prostituted women’ and migrant wives—into citizen-subjects in South Korea at the turn of the twenty-first century. Though the lives of these women barely intersect, they become visible in the public sphere as victims of sexual violence and therefore in urgent need of state protection. Defined as such, prostitutes and migrant wives come under the gaze of the state and civil society through anti-prostitution policy and multiculturalism policy respectively. I suggest that, through the language of protection, the South Korean state and civil society seek to redefine moral order and national borders through the regulation of a woman's body and sexuality. For prostituted women, leaving prostitution restores them to the embrace of the nation as good Korean daughters. For immigrant wives, reproduction is their gendered path to citizenship as good Korean mothers. Through an analysis of the gender ideals reproduced in these policies, and their repercussions on the lives of women, I tease out the gendering of citizenship and nationhood and its tensions with the universalist ideals of gender equality and human rights in the modernising project in South Korea.

Cultivating Inner and Outer Plantations: Property, Industry, and Slavery in Early Quaker Migration to the New World

For American Quakers during the seventeenth century, a careful moral calculus permeated the Society's negotiations between their twin goals of spiritual reflection and economic sustenance—balancing one's metaphorical plantations, both "inner" and "outer." In Barbados, where the Society of Friends had attracted a large following by the 1660s, slaveholding and plantation culture were facts of life that dominated efforts to implement universalist ideals without threatening social control. Many leading West Indian Quakers embraced a paternalistic evangelization campaign to the enslaved in an effort to ease the consciences of individual masters, to create a consensus among the Society's members, and to help Friends in the colonies build up a stock of "moral capital" to be used against their non-Quaker peers. Although some Friends experimented with the idea that particular enslaved individuals could redeem themselves through "moral" behavior or industriousness, the process of legal racialization virtually negated the concept of free will, the heart of non-Calvinist Protestant conversion. In following the migratory patterns of wealthy Barbadian Friends to the North American Middle Colonies, this article demonstrates the depth of their influence in promoting African slavery and quelling critiques of the institution.

Them Who Kill the Body: Christian Ideals and Political Realities in the Interior of Southern Africa during the 1850s

This article considers the changing political significance of Christianity in the interior of southern Africa during the 1850s, focusing primarily on the views of Tswana rulers, converts and others within their communities, and secondarily on attempts by European missionaries to reconcile their service both to African communities and to European expansion, which compelled them to articulate a rationale for their civilising mission. The article historicises the process whereby Christianity lost its initial universalistic ideals and became politicised by African-European competition, with divine sanction being claimed by one side or another. That process was accompanied by considerable debate and doubt: the separation of believers from unbelievers, faith from works and souls from bodies was far from clear or certain. Although African converts would ultimately continue to pursue the promise of equality offered by Christian teachings, they would do so more as individuals than as intact African communities, surrendering their bodies to European rule while entrusting their souls to the care of God.

Appropriating Borges: The Weary Man, Utopia, and Globalism

In the story A Weary Man's Utopia by Jorge Luis Borges, a traveler finds himself in an unrecognizable world. He enters the home of a man clothed in gray who has no name. The man lives in a time of shared global achieve ments: poverty, wealth and illness have been eradicated; also gone is the di versity of particular peoples, languages, places, cultures, and governments. With particular differences and attachments no longer standing in the way, the people of the future are able to realize universal human goals. This article appropriates images from Borges's story to explore assumed tensions between particularism and universalism. We grapple with the question of how, in an age of fundamentalisms, particularism can be understood to be justifiable in universalist terms (Nussbaum, Can Patriotism Be Compassionate? 13). This question has been addressed in the political-science literature in the con text of conversations regarding patriotism and cosmopolitanism: the former being assumed to correspond to particularist attachments, and the latter to universalist ideals. Efforts to promote localism or globalism are understood as loosely representing popular outgrowths of particularism and universal ism, respectively. We begin with a brief overview of that academic conversa tion and then move on to a discussion of how Borges's fictional images lend themselves to a more nuanced understanding of the issues underlying that academic conversation. In particular, we argue that Borges's tale makes vivid the ramifications of emphasizing the universal to the exclusion of the particu lar, and thereby we expose the significant problems such an approach must confront.