Wave Of Scholarship Research Articles

Catholic Theological Association 2008 Conference Papers: Vatican II and the Church to Come

Catholic Theological Association 2008 Conference Papers: Vatican II and the Church to Come

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SPANISH ATLANTIC MONARCHY

ABSTRACTThe Spanish empire's vertiginous collapse in the first decades of the nineteenth century has long been a source of historiographical disputes. Historians seeking to explain the demise of Spain's dominion in the Americas and the emergence of independent nation-states have identified certain factors as decisive. Among these are: the coalescence of an anti-colonial, national consciousness among creoles; peninsular misrule and economic mismanagement; and the seismic effects of geopolitical upheaval, particularly the Napoleonic occupation of Spain. This historiographical review recapitulates established explanations, introduces a new wave of scholarship on the subject, and identifies topics that may be crucial for future research.

Found and Lost: The Politics of Modernist Recovery

Found and Lost:The Politics of Modernist Recovery Jane Garrity Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections Scott Bonnie Kime , ed. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. xviii + 872. $95.00 (cloth); $40.00 (paper). When Bonnie Kime Scott's ground-breaking anthology, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, was first published in 1990, I was a graduate student at Berkeley writing a dissertation on primarily noncanonical British women modernists. At the time, those of us who were working in Anglo-American modernist and feminist studies were delighted to encounter this wide-ranging anthology, which sought to illustrate not only how modernism was unconsciously gendered masculine, but how previously marginalized and neglected women writers were actually central proponents and practitioners of modernism. None of my seminars in graduate school exposed me to writers such as Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, or Katherine Mansfield, but Scott's anthology legitimized my interest in noncanonical writing and invited me to pursue the kind of recovery work that had been spearheaded by critics such as Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own, 1977), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979), and Shari Benstock (Women of the Left Bank, 1986). Today, the project of recovering lost women writers is no longer in vogue as it once was, but Scott's new anthology sees itself as part of this earlier tradition at the same time as it seeks to break new ground by highlighting its engagement with recent concerns in modernist studies: transnationalist feminism, global travel, emigration, queer theory, scientific discourse, technology, visual and material culture. While the impact of The Gender of Modernism is incontestable, the conceptual limits of that collection—privileging gender at the expense of other categories of identity, such as race, ethnicity, class, nation, and sexuality; focusing primarily on white women and exclusively on white men—are directly addressed by Scott in her ambitious and well presented introduction to Gender in Modernism, which is conceived as both a sequel and a corrective to the first now-classic [End Page 803] volume. The trade-off between the laudable conceptual re-evaluations of the new anthology and the first book is the loss of a focus on recovery work, a phenomenon that Gender in Modernism makes tacit gestures toward but ultimately moves beyond. One result of this shift in emphasis is a more muted and neutralized understanding of the first anthology's feminist argument that the "politics and aesthetics of gender may lie at the heart of a comprehensive understanding of early twentieth-century literature."1 The significance of the tiny pronoun difference in each volume's title—Gender of Modernism, versus GenderinModernism—cannot be overstated; in the first anthology, a now dated "gendered reading of modernism" was privileged, whereas in the new anthology references to gender are couched within a larger, interdisciplinary conversation about selfhood that is inseparable from the "complex intersections" signaled by the new collection's subtitle.2 The first book incorporated five primary male writers; the new anthology has nearly thirty, many working cooperatively with women. Just as gender is no longer isolated from other constituents of identity, both the categories of nationality and periodization are expanded in Gender in Modernism. Where the first volume limited itself to British and American texts published roughly between 1910 and 1940, the second anthology incorporates work from India, Africa, and Ireland, in an attempt to give voice to the "missing era," 1880–1910, when women were entering the public sphere as suffragists and socialists. The volume's commitment to "new geographies," interdisciplinarity, and its incorporation of cutting-edge theoretical work on the overlooked transnational and racial dimensions of modernist texts situates the book at the forefront of a new wave of scholarship in modernist studies that seeks to show how the study of modernity—defined at one point as the examination of "patterns of material consumption, technological inventions, and medical interventions" (13)—can do more for the re-evaluation of literature than the traditional focus on periodization and stylistic designation. Gender in Modernism places greater emphasis on the cultural and historical underpinnings of literature and rigorously seeks to displace Eurocentric notions of what modernism...

Where We’re Headed: A New Wave of Scholarship on Educating Medical Professionalism

Ah yes, another editorial on professionalism. This topic has certainly been one of accelerating interest. For example, a PubMed search on the title word “professionalism” finds 1331 articles as outlined in Table 1; approximately 100 articles per year have appeared since the 2002 publication of the physician charter.1 While much of the past literature has focused on the definition of professionalism, increasingly, the field is moving in the needed direction of discovering and building processes that foster professional attitudes and behaviors among physicians and physicians in training. In this education issue of The Journal of General Internal Medicine, at least six articles focus on the subject.2–7 While all six add to the literature in their own right, taken collectively, they contain several powerful messages that provide a beacon for future work in this field: Table 1 English Language Articles Published With the Word ‘Professionalism’ in the Title*

Imperial Entanglements : Two New Histories of Russia's Western and Southern Borderlands

Imperial Entanglements: Two New Histories of Russia's Western and Southern Borderlands G. M. Hamburg (bio) Robert D. Crews , For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. viii + 463 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN 0674021649. $29.95. Mikhail Dmitrievich Dolbilov and Aleksei Il´ich Miller, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii [The Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire]. 608 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006. ISBN 586793425X. These days, one of the most active research fields in modern Russian history is borderlands history: that is, the history of non-Russian peoples living on the empire's peripheries, understood either in isolation from the Great Russian heartland or in dynamic relationship to it.1 Because this subject encompasses a central dimension of Eurasian history—Russia's status as a multinational, multi-confessional polity—the intellectual attractiveness of studying it is self-evident. Since as little as 20 years ago one could not confidently have predicted that scholarship would move so vigorously in this direction, we should ask why so many scholars both in post-Soviet Russia and the West have now opted to write on the borderlands. In the Soviet Union, of course, writing the history of non-Russian peoples was a serious enterprise from the very beginning of Soviet power, but much of the scholarship that appeared in the early Soviet period was attuned to party doctrine and thus not inclined to investigate important questions such [End Page 407] as the place of religious affiliation in nationality politics.2 Moreover, certain issues like Russian–Jewish relations were so sensitive that, at times, they were virtually off-limits to scholars.3 In addition, borderlands scholarship occasionally became the virtual preserve of academics who either belonged to one of the non-Russian nationalities or lived in one of the non-Russian republics; meanwhile, the "commanding heights" of the historical profession were occupied by historians who wrote the history of the heartland.4 This professional constellation began to disintegrate in the Gorbachev and post-Soviet periods, but its breakdown did not immediately lead to a concentration on borderlands history. Indeed, if we imagine scholarship proceeding in waves, the [End Page 408] first wave, lasting from the late 1980s through the early 1990s, issued from a fascination with liberalism and reform in imperial Russia; the second wave, beginning in the early 1990s and still continuing at present, arose from a revival in Russian conservatism and a concomitant interest in the relative durability of the Russian empire compared with the Soviet Union. Borderlands history is the third wave of scholarship since the late 1980s. Its numerous sources include: the shattering of old taboos that hindered research on the subject; the realization that the Russian empire managed its national minorities for 300 years without experiencing the kind of "meltdown" that occurred in the last years of Soviet power; the knowledge that post-Soviet Russia, being a "post-imperial empire," must also attend to nationality problems of various kinds, many of them inherited from the Soviet system or from the Russian empire; the opening of archives in former borderlands regions that were once difficult to access, even for Russians; Western scholarly research in borderlands history that reinforces Russian interest in the subject; and the revival of certain classical problems in international relations—namely, tensions between Poland and Russia over the Western border zone, and tensions between Russia and Islamic states over the Caucasus and Central Asia. Western scholarly interest in the imperial borderlands developed in a slightly different fashion. In Britain, for example, historians have long paid attention to the non-Russians along the southern rim of the Russian empire, probably because these peoples have been near neighbors of Britain's own empire.5 Moreover, the desire to compare the operation of competing empires has animated many British scholars, from imperial taxonomists like Arnold Toynbee and Niall Ferguson to Russian specialists like Dominic Lieven.6 In France, which has had its own empire located partly in Muslim societies, there has been a long-standing fascination with Russia's Islamic subjects in the Caucasus, in Tatar regions, and in Central Asia.7 Moreover, French [End Page 409] scholarship on the multinational composition of...

<span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism</span> (review)

Reviewed by: Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism Suzanne Del Gizzo Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. By Richard Fantina. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 224. $69.95 (cloth). Masculinity has arguably always been the central feature of scholarship on Ernest Hemingway; one need only think of the masculine qualities credited to that earliest and most enduring of critical responses to Hemingway's work: the isolated, stoic, brave Hemingway "code hero," who must perform gracefully under pressure. Since the 1990s, with the publication of studies like Mark Spilka's Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny, critical discussions of Hemingway's masculinity have become increasingly complex and often contradictory, in part because they are now almost invariably linked to the issue of his sexuality. Galvanized by an ever-expanding arsenal of gender theories and the brilliant work on masculinity by scholars like Anthony Rotundo and Michael Kimmel, this new wave of scholarship has been largely characterized by an understanding of Hemingway's masculinity as "in crisis." Along the way Hemingway has been the subject of much speculation as scholars have mined the details of his childhood, his relationships, and even his sexual habits and proclivities. In recent years he has been considered (or reconsidered) in light of issues such as latent (or not-so-latent) homosexuality, transvestitism, and sexual role reversal. Although the deeply personal and invasive nature of such work is enough to give even the most stout-hearted critic pause, this scholarship has undoubtedly illuminated enigmatic aspects of Hemingway's life and work that were glossed over by earlier critics. Still, these well-researched, carefully considered theories about Hemingway's motivations for constructing his hypermasculine public image all eventually run aground of the irrefutable realities of that image itself. As a result, we are left with either incommensurable versions of Hemingway's masculinity or an all-too-neat understanding of his public displays of masculinity as a cover for an unconventional private life. It is onto this busy critical field that Richard Fantina steps with his book Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. At first glance the book [End Page 290] appears to be another attempt to "charge" Hemingway with yet another form of "unconventional" sexual behavior, but, upon closer inspection, it is in fact a rich, multilayered, and provocative contribution to a difficult discussion, one that, refreshingly, questions some of the most basic assumptions of that discussion to date. In particular, Fantina challenges the idea that Hemingway's masculinity is a cover designed to compensate for transgressive desires in his private life. Rather, Fantina argues that Hemingway valued traditional masculinity; he notes: "I do not try to make the case that Hemingway did not sincerely share those virtues, but simply that he shared others as well" (8). From this starting point Fantina attempts to account for what he calls Hemingway's "dual masculinity," by which he means Hemingway's ability to explore vulnerability and empathy in his work and life while also "preserving and reinforcing traditionally stoic masculine values" (9). He identifies evidence of this "dual masculinity" in a variety of inconsistencies that have notoriously irked Hemingway scholars, most notably, Hemingway's awe and respect for women, which coexists with his misogyny, and his fascination with sodomy, which coexists with his homophobia. Throughout the book Fantina rejects the "either/or" premise that underlies most discussion of Hemingway's masculinity in favor of a "both/and" model that is compelling and satisfying. Rather than seeing the contradictions in Hemingway's masculinity as a problem (a stance suggested by the language of the "symptom" inherent in psychoanalytical approaches), Fantina argues that "Hemingway's embodiment of diverse models of masculinity may be his greatest legacy" (3). As a scholar addressing all aspects of Hemingway's masculinity, Fantina (as have many critics before him) must make some difficult methodological decisions. In particular, he understands that his combination of textual and biographical analysis will trouble some readers (especially those who believe "the author" to be long dead). But as any Hemingway scholar can tell you, some authors are easier to keep dead than others. Hemingway is a particularly persistent presence, so much so that Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes theorized the existence of what they termed...

A Forgotten Case of “Scientific Excellence on the Periphery”: The Nationalist Cocaine Science of Alfredo Bignon, 1884–1887

In recent years, Latin American history has been awash in an exciting wave of scholarship on the history of science and medicine. Historians are exploring Latin American reactions to foreign medical, sanitary and scientific missions; the creation of national research institutions; the impact of epidemics on conceptions of urban space, politics and social control; the role of indigenous and folk cures in modern public health campaigns; and the relation of transnational eugenics movements to national anxieties about race, among other fertile topics. Pioneering medical historian Marcos Cueto dubs this focus “scientific excellence on the periphery”—the idea that surprising avenues of research and innovation occurred in societies generally deemed “underdeveloped,” especially in modern scientific activities and outlooks.

Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953 (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953 James Smethurst Stacy I. Morgan . Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004. x + 356 pp. Stacy Morgan's Rethinking Social Realism is an ambitious and important study of left-wing African American expressive culture from the beginning of the Great Depression to the depths of the McCarthy Era. Its largely successful efforts to think across boundaries of genre, medium, and intellectual discipline make it among the most impressive studies of African American art and the Communist Left to date. Like Michael Denning's The Cultural Front and Bill Mullen's Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46, Morgan's study reads across boundaries of genre and media, placing African American art within the institutional and ideological context that produced it. However, Rethinking Social Realism is more narrowly concerned with what some scholars of the Left have called the "Black Cultural Front" than is Denning's book and more broadly focused in terms of chronology and geography than Mullen's Popular Fronts. Among its many virtues is the way in which Rethinking Social Realism shows the cross-pollination between artists working in different media. For example, Morgan convincingly demonstrates the formal and thematic impact that Richard Wright's Native Son had on the graphic art of John Wilson. After an introductory chapter examining the institutional and ideological matrices out of which African American social realist art of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s emerged, Morgan treats four categories of black social realism (murals, graphic art, poetry, and novels) in separate chapters that, again, attempt to bring these art forms in dialogue with each other even as he does close readings of visual and verbal texts. The individual chapters are further subdivided into a couple of sections that take up more general concerns along with a sort of case study of an important, but critically under-considered artist: Charles White, John Wilson, Frank Marshall Davis, and Willard Motley. Of course, with a comparatively recent surge of interest in the Left and African American culture, all of these artists have attained a higher profile in academia over the last ten years. Still, Morgan's close examination of particular works by those artists, particularly the visual artists, while linking those works to the larger institutional, ideological, and aesthetic framework of the Left, is a valuable addition to this new wave of scholarship. Morgan's chapters on African American muralists and graphic artists are especially groundbreaking. In general, the study of visual art and the Left in the United States has lagged behind the examination of literature and the Left, Andrew Hemingway's wonderful Artists [End Page 725] on the Left notwithstanding. Scholarship on black visual artists and the Left has been even more scant though the influence of the Communist Left on those artists was no less than it was on African American writers. Morgan contextualizes the work of relatively well-known figures, such as Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, John Biggers, and Hale Woodruff; less famous, but generally well-regarded artists, such as Hughie Lee-Smith, Charles Alston, and John Wilson; and far less considered painters and printmakers, such as James Lesesne Wells and Raymond Steth, within their longstanding (and in some cases life-long) engagement with the ideology, aesthetics, and institutions of the Communist Left, both domestically and internationally. Other critics have made the connection between African American artists, especially the black muralists of the 1930s and 1940s, and the Mexican mural movement, most famously represented by the work of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. However, Morgan lays out how Left Mexican artists and cultural institutions, such as the Taller de Gráfica Popular, provided inspiration, training, and refuge from Cold War political persecution to muralists and graphic artists in an unusually clear and detailed manner. Morgan also details the role that historically black colleges and universities, such as Talladega College, Atlanta University (and the other black schools of Atlanta's University Center), Dillard University, and the Hampton Institute, played in support of black social realist art in the South, significantly expanding our notion of...

EU compliance: Still a ‘black hole’?

This paper assesses whether EU compliance is still a ‘black hole’, reviewing two decades of research on this topic. It is argued that the first wave of scholarship was rather eclectic in nature, suggesting numerous legal and politico-administrative explanations. The second wave focused on the goodness of fit hypothesis. As the empirical support for this hypothesis has been rather disappointing, the consensus now seems to be that domestic politics needs to enter the equation in a more explicit fashion. The current challenge is to theorize and research the exact role and effects of domestic politics on processes of compliance. In doing so, scholars are advised to pay more attention to methodological issues, such as case selection. Finally, scholarship on compliance should shed more light on the actual size of the implementation deficit, especially when it comes to application and enforcement.

Amalgamating the Social in the French Revolution

The French Revolution has long depended on social factors to explain its causes, course, and consequences. In particular, Marxist explanations held sway throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. In the last twenty years or so, linguistically driven works pushed the social aside and became the leading viewpoint. However, a current wave of scholarship suggests a differing approach in which the social returns but significantly altered. First, it arrives linked to cultural or ideational factors. Second, bourgeois class consciousness emerges from commercial links, not from the precise social position of individual entrepreneurs.

Still Fighting: The Nicaraguan Women's Movement, 1977-2000

The story of the women's movement in Nicaragua is a fascinating tale of resistance, strategy, and faith. From its birth in 1977 under the Somoza dictatorship through the Sandinista revolution to the fall of the Chamorro government, the Nicaraguan women's movement has navigated revolutionary upheaval, profound changes in government, and rapidly shifting definitions of women's roles in society. Through it all, the movement has surged, regressed, and persevered, entering the twenty-first century a powerful and influential force, stretching from the grassroots to the national level. How did women in an economically underdeveloped Central American country, with little history of organizing, feminism, or democracy, succeed in creating networks, organizations, and campaigns that carved out a gender identity and challenged dominant ideologies (both revolutionary and conservative)? In Still Fighting Katherine Isbester seeks to understand. She analyzes the complex and rich case of Nicaragua in order to learn more about the dynamics of social movements in general and women's organizing in particular. Social movement theory offers Isbester an analytic tool to explain the extraordinary evolution of the Nicaraguan movement. She theorizes that a sustainable movement is composed of three elements: a focused goal, a mobilization of resources, and an identity. The lack of any one of these weakens a social movement. Isbester shows how this theory is borne out by the experience of the Nicaraguan women's movement over the past thirty years. She demonstrates, for example, how the revolutionary government of the 1980s co-opted the women's movement, crippling its ability to create an autonomous identity, choose it own goals, and mobilize resources independent of the state. Hence, it lost legitimacy, membership, and influence. She traces the movement's resurgence in the 1990s, the result of his redifinition as an autonomous movement organized around an identity of care. Still Fighting combines social theory with field research, leading a new wave of scholarship on women in Latin America. Isbester interviewed more than a hundred key participants in the women's movement, in addition to members of the National Assembly, male leaders of other social movements, and women outside the movement. In Nicaragua, she was witness to much political organizing, enabling her to reveal the organic intricacy, as well as the historical path, of a social movement. Still Fighting will be an important book for a broad range of students and professionals in the areas of social movements, social change, gender, politics, and Latin America.