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The African Choreographer’s Envisioning

Naomi Gedo Johnson Diouf

in Hot Feet and Social Change: African Dance and Diaspora Communities

In Kariamu Welsh’s essay, “The ‘Gospel’ of Memory; Memory as ‘Trace’,” the foundational understandings of African dance in the U.S. are dissected and analyzed. Welsh’s emphasis straddles two ... More

In Kariamu Welsh’s essay, “The ‘Gospel’ of Memory; Memory as ‘Trace’,” the foundational understandings of African dance in the U.S. are dissected and analyzed. Welsh’s emphasis straddles two objectives, one historical and one theoretical. She unpacks terminology for African dance from her long-term, dual perspective of both researcher and performer; she names and records the African dance/music masters who have contributed to the implantation and dispersal of African dance and gives her explanations regarding notions of Africa and the African Diaspora. Then, she proceeds philosophically to offer a “Gospel of African dance,” that is, fluid and malleable interactions of memory and ‘trace’ in their crucial positions, which affects the collective energy of Africa, both past and future.Less

“Peasants” Against Industrialization: Images of the Peasantry and Urban Activists’ Representations of the Rural

Sarasij Majumder

in People's Car: Industrial India and the Riddles of Populism

This chapter shows how urban activists seek to construct an authentic peasant voice in order to make connections with a transnational civil society, which has its own agendas, views, and implicit or ... More

This chapter shows how urban activists seek to construct an authentic peasant voice in order to make connections with a transnational civil society, which has its own agendas, views, and implicit or explicit interests. The construction of an “authentic voice” requires erasing differences within villages in the name of social justice. The strategies employed to do so lead to the silencing and exclusion of many poor and non-poor villagers, and even the protesters themselves, who stand to gain in various ways from the building of the factory.Less

The Function of the Distorted Angle in the Destructive Intention

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

in Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

This chapter explores the dialogue between Gertrud Koch and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about Theodor W. Adorno's and Walter Benjamin's influence on Kluge's work. What really attracts Kluge ... More

This chapter explores the dialogue between Gertrud Koch and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about Theodor W. Adorno's and Walter Benjamin's influence on Kluge's work. What really attracts Kluge to Benjamin is that he possesses several personalities of thought and several forms of production all at once. Meanwhile, Adorno is immune to the idea that people actually possess linguistic mastery. Adorno relied heavily on Romanticization with respect to his dreams, but rejected Romanticization out of principle just as he did the tyranny of melody in music. What Kluge finds wonderful about Adorno is how he is able to disregard the fact that he thinks in the first-person singular. Kluge then describes how he met Adorno at the inaugural lecture by Prof. Dr. Harald Patzer.Less

An Exotic City: A Relational Theory of Gender as Social Site

Chih-yu Shih

in Eros of International Relations: Self-Feminizing and the Claiming of Postcolonial Chineseness

IR theories have not fully considered gender as a national role, a post-Western site, or a relational strategy. This chapter considers these dimensions. Specifically, it explores how the city of ... More

IR theories have not fully considered gender as a national role, a post-Western site, or a relational strategy. This chapter considers these dimensions. Specifically, it explores how the city of Shanghai attempted to enhance its attraction by promoting the image of Shanghai women in cheongsam. In practice, cheongsam is a metaphoric identity for a postcolonial population to encounter and assimilate arriving cultures. The cheongsam wearer can fulfil the respective desires of all incoming forces through Shanghai’s own self-romanticizing exoticness. The metaphor of cheongsam reflects the strategy of Shanghai, not to claim any substantive difference in its identity but, rather, to recombine cultural varieties and entertain its citizens as well as international visitors.Less

Deromanticizing democracy

Katherine Fierlbeck

in Globalizing Democracy: Power, Legitimacy and the Interpretation of Democratic Ideas

This chapter describes the romanticization of democracy. As democracy has become more prevalent and more successful, it is seen as superficial and unsatisfying. The current romanticization of ... More

This chapter describes the romanticization of democracy. As democracy has become more prevalent and more successful, it is seen as superficial and unsatisfying. The current romanticization of democracy is closely tied to the development of the concept of autonomy. The German Romantics discussed autonomy and individual liberty without reference to democracy, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau discussed autonomy with reference to democracy, but at the expense of individual liberties. The best form of democracy for a globalized world is one in which clear and impartial institutions permit individuals enough room to sort out subjective issues like ‘meaningfulness’ in their own way. The cultural rights are necessary to address power imbalances. ‘Democracy’ must ensure a clear measure of the diffusion of power within states; but recognition of ‘state sovereignty’ does not require that states be seen as democratic.Less

Creativity versus Containment: The Aesthetic Defence

Seán Burke

in The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in Plato and Nietzsche

This chapter addresses the fictional or poetic frame as an essential aesthetic defence against the dangerous discourses which, beginning with the very Republic of Plato, flourished in the ‘open sea’ ... More

This chapter addresses the fictional or poetic frame as an essential aesthetic defence against the dangerous discourses which, beginning with the very Republic of Plato, flourished in the ‘open sea’ of loss and liberation that is now named as modernity, then again as the romanticisation of philosophy. The work of the Republic falls under the censure of so many of the discursive judgements that were entirely original and new with his writing and the teaching of his master. The responsibilities of the writer extend beyond the writing of ethical works to an ethics of writing in general. If the tentative suggestions made here and in the succeeding volume towards an authorial ethics of writing make only the slightest contribution to the rethinking of the question, ‘What is the Good?’, from within what is but a minor area of literary theory, this project will have achieved its highest aspiration.Less

“Breeding a race apart from nature”: Ruralists and Conservationists

in Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain

This chapter explains why those who claimed that the coming of mass society entailed ecological disaster could not avoid linking up sexual, eugenic, and conservationist concerns. Stanley L. Baker's ... More

This chapter explains why those who claimed that the coming of mass society entailed ecological disaster could not avoid linking up sexual, eugenic, and conservationist concerns. Stanley L. Baker's romanticization was most clearly manifested in his anthropomorphic portrayals of the tree which he called man's best friend and God's noblest creation. Baker presented himself in his writings as yet another great white chief protecting the natives. He maintained his working premise that the city was bad and the countryside good. Eugenicists frequently complained that elected politicians were afraid to make tough decisions to protect and improve the population. The national park, the reserve, and the concept of the wilderness were all products of modernity requiring the intervention and supervision of trained experts like the forester.Less

Demography on the Nomadic Periphery

Suzanne E. Joseph

in Fertile Bonds: Bedouin Class, Kinship, and Gender in the Bekaa Valley

The question taken up in this chapter is whether similar forms of class-like differentiation shape the transitional experiences of less stratified peoples peripheral to state control, particularly ... More

The question taken up in this chapter is whether similar forms of class-like differentiation shape the transitional experiences of less stratified peoples peripheral to state control, particularly nomadic groups. Upon reviewing local empirical studies of women's fertility and health in tribal pastoral and hunting-gathering economies, the chapter affirms the presence of sociodemographic equality in multiple contexts.Less

Romanticizations, or Cauda Pavonis

Theodore Ziolkowski

in The Alchemist in Literature: From Dante to the Present

This chapter begins with examples of alchemical imagery in the poetry of Milton and John Donne as well as religious poets in England, Germany, and the American colonies that provided a transition ... More

This chapter begins with examples of alchemical imagery in the poetry of Milton and John Donne as well as religious poets in England, Germany, and the American colonies that provided a transition from the earlier satirizations of the alchemist to the new romanticizations of the figure. Several English works take the figure of the alchemist to provide moralizing examples for the dire social consequences stemming from the pursuit of gold. As a youth Goethe actually practiced alchemy in its medical form of iatrochemy; but by the time he wrote his Faust he had become disenchanted with the Art, presenting it as a corrupting force. His younger contemporary E. T. A. Hoffmann, while similarly criticizing the alchemist for his presumption in tampering with human life in his story “The Sandman,” presented alchemy in “The Golden Pot” as a metaphor for the higher poetic reality toward which his protagonist Anselmus aspires.Less

Jena Romanticism and the Philosophical Significance of Irony

Fred Rush

in Irony and Idealism: Rereading Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard

Chapter one begins by setting out the general post-Kantian and post-Jacobian philosophical landscape against which the Jena romanticism of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel develops. Both Novalis’ and ... More

Chapter one begins by setting out the general post-Kantian and post-Jacobian philosophical landscape against which the Jena romanticism of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel develops. Both Novalis’ and Schlegel’s positions are carefully reconstructed along several dimensions important to the overall project of the book: their conceptions of ‘the absolute’, their epistemology, their philosophy of art, social philosophy, their idiosyncratic notions of philosophical systematicity, and their views on the necessity of developing indirect forms of agency such as, but not limited to, irony. The claim is made and defended that it is Schlegel who has the most radically non-Idealist, and therefore most philosophically interesting, position among the romantics. A large part of this superiority has to do with rotating the idea of the absolute decisively away from transcendent metaphysics towards social ontology.Less