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Foreword
George Greenia
The Spanish Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage rooted in the Medieval period and increasingly active today, has attracted a growing amount of both scholarly and popular attention. With its multiple points of departure in Spain and other European countries, its simultaneously secular and religious nature, and its international and transhistorical population of pilgrims, this particular pilgrimage naturally invites a wide range of intellectual inquiry and scholarly perspectives. This volume fills a gap in current pilgrimage studies, focusing on contemporary representations of the Camino de Santiago. Complementing existing studies of the Camino’s medieval origins, it situates the Camino as a modern experience and engages interdisciplinary perspectives to present a theoretical framework for exploring the most central issues that concern scholars of pilgrimage studies today.
Contributors explore the contemporary meaning of the Camino through an interdisciplinary lens that reflects the increasing permeability between academic disciplines and fields, bringing together a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives (cultural studies, literary studies, globalization studies, memory studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, cultural geographies, photography, and material culture). Chapters touch on a variety of genres (blogs, film, graphic novels, historical novels, objects, and travel guides), and transnational perspectives (Australia, the Arab world, England, Spain, and the United States).
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"'Dying to live': remembering and forgetting May Sinclair”
Suzanne Raitt
For Sinclair, the past was a wound. She feared being unable to escape it, and she feared in turn her own persistence in a form that she could not control. Mystic ecstasy – what she called the “new mysticism” – was a way of entering a timeless realm in which there was no longer any past to damage her. But she was also fascinated by what could never be left behind – hence her interest in heredity, the unconscious, and the supernatural. However, the immanence of the future can also emancipate us from the past, in Sinclair’s view, and this is the key to why mystical experience was so immensely appealing to her. Mystical experience could take the self out of the body and thus out of past traumas and into the future. False dying – like that which creates ghosts – traps the psyche in its own pain and forces it to re-experience the suffering of its life; real dying – mystical dying – involves forgetting the self and the world.
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Immoral science in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Suzanne Raitt
Near the beginning of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the painter Basil Hallward explains to Lord Henry Wotton exactly what it is about Dorian Gray that inspired him to paint such an exquisitely beautiful portrait. Basil explains, “[Dorian] defines for me the lines of a fresh school” of art, and his “personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before.”1 In the course of the narrative, Hallward’s phrase “recreate life” turns out not to be simply a metaphor. After Dorian’s wish that the picture might “grow old” while he himself remains “always young” (25), the picture literally “recreates” life, renewing Dorian’s fading body and absorbing into itself the processes of biological and moral decay that would otherwise engulf the living man. The picture substitutes for Dorian’s mortal body so that the biology of aging is expressed not in the man but in the image. The immortality of art—its arrest of time and change—is transferred to the flesh that in normal circumstances would droop and wither as the body made its inexorable way toward death.
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Women out Loud: Hearing Knowledge and the Creation of Soundscape in Islamic Indonesia
Anne K. Rasmussen
The study of listening—aurality—and its relation to writing is the subject of this eclectic edited volume. Theorizing Sound Writing explores the relationship between sound, theory, language, and inscription. This volume contains an impressive lineup of scholars from anthropology, ethnomusicology, musicology, performance, and sound studies. The contributors write about sound in their ongoing work, while also making an intervention into the ethics of academic knowledge, one in which listening is the first step not only in translating sound into words but also in compassionate scholarship.
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Fragmentos culturales e identidades recicladas
Regina A. Root
La moda siempre ha sido parte de la historia argentina pero, como afirma el presente volumen, también ha tenido sus propias historias para contar. Tiene un pasado de moda, revelado continuamente en los procesos culturales y en las nuevas filosofías que afirman una diversidad de estilos y tendencias.
Con un enfoque detenido en los momentos clave que definen la moda desde el siglo XVIII hasta nuestros días, los ensayos de este libro dan cuenta de las múltiples relaciones entre la moda y la identidad nacional hasta llegar a la complejidad de nuestra época posmoderna, global, rápida y sumamente mediatizada, heterogénea y lúdica a la vez. Por medio de una perspectiva interdisciplinaria y de un paciente trabajo de archivo, esta obra colectiva aborda el problema de la traducción cultural y la necesaria lectura de la cultura material como base de la historia, y ofrece en su conjunto un riguroso acercamiento a la moda y su lugar en los debates sobre política, cuerpo y nación.
Si bien el título Pasado de moda podría sugerir un estudio netamente histórico de los pasados de la moda en la Argentina –y de los relatos que los hicieron posibles–, es importante señalar que los trabajos aquí reunidos tratan también de abrir propuestas hacia el futuro. Como siempre que se trate de moda, ese futuro será equívoco, transgresivo e inesperado. -
In the Moment of Violence: Writing the History of Postemancipation Terror
Hannah Rosen
This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postemancipation life as a new form of freedom, these essays develop the work of scholars who are looking at how belonging to an empowered government or community defines the outcome of emancipation.
Some essays in this collection disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation. Others offer trenchant renderings of emancipation, with new interpretations of the language and politics of democracy. Still others sidestep academic conventions to speak personally about the politics of emancipation historiography, reconsidering how historians have used source material for understanding subjects such as violence and the suffering of refugee women and children. Together the essays show that the question of freedom―its contested meanings, its social relations, and its beneficiaries―remains central to understanding the complex historical process known as emancipation.
Contributors: Justin Behrend, Gregory P. Downs, Jim Downs, Carole Emberton, Eric Foner, Thavolia Glymph, Chandra Manning, Kate Masur, Richard Newman, James Oakes, Susan O’Donovan, Hannah Rosen, Brenda E. Stevenson.
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Corporate Capitalism and Racial (In)Justice: Teaching The Colonel’s Dream
Francesca Sawaya
Growing up in Cleveland after the Civil War and during the brutal rollback of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Charles W. Chesnutt could have passed as white but chose to identify himself as black. An intellectual and activist involved with the NAACP who engaged in debate with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he wrote fiction and essays that addressed issues as various as segregation, class among both blacks and whites, Southern nostalgia, and the Wilmington coup d’état of 1898. The portrayals of race, racial violence, and stereotyping in Chesnutt’s works challenge teachers and students to contend with literature as both a social and an ethical practice.
In part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” the editors survey the critical reception of Chesnutt’s works in his lifetime and after, along with the biographical, critical, and archival texts available to teachers and students. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” address such topics in teaching Chesnutt as his use of dialect, the role of intertextuality and genre in his writing, irony, and his treatment of race, economics, and social justice.
Winner of the Sylvia Lyons Render Award from the Charles W. Chesnutt Association
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The New Woman Narrating the Histor(ies) of the Feminist Movement
Francesca Sawaya
To dip into the scholarship about the New Woman is to be puzzled by the extensive focus on and the strong disagreement about chronology. Why do some scholars offer such a wide range of years for the New Woman, and others such a narrow range? And why do the dates - whatever they may be - diverge so widely? What becomes clear is that date matter not because the New Woman can be easily periodized - after all, there are no legislative or political milestones that mark her entrance or exit from the public stage - but because she herself invoked, and thus still provokes, a polemic about temporality. Indeed, temporality defines the New Woman.
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Fighting to Belong: Asian American Military Service and American Citizenship
Deenesh Sohoni
The military has been recognized as one of the most crucial institutions in setting the parameters of national citizenship, and in helping facilitate the expansion of these boundaries to include racial minorities. Historically, it is during periods of war and strong external threat that notions of shared American identity become most salient. It is also during these periods that racial minorities can demonstrate their patriotism through military service, and thus make a claim for the full benefits of social membership.
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Introduction to "Citizens of Memory: Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina"
Silvia Tandeciarz
Citizens of Memory explores efforts at recollection in post-dictatorship Argentina and the hoped-for futures they set in motion. The material, visual, narrative, and pedagogical interventions it analyzes address the dark years of state repression (1976-1983) while engaging ongoing debates about how this traumatic past should be transmitted to future generations. Two theoretical principles structure the book’s approach to cultural recall: the first follows from an understanding of memory as a social construct that is always as much about the past as it is of the present; the second from the observation that what distinguishes memory from history is affect. These principles guide the study of iconic sites of memory in the city of Buenos Aires; photographic essays about the missing and the dictatorship’s legacies of violence; documentary films by children of the disappeared that challenge hegemonic representations of seventies’ militancy; a novel of exile that moves recollection across national boundaries; and a human rights education program focused on memory. Understanding recollection as a practice that lends coherence to disparate forces, energies, and affects, the book approaches these spatial, visual, and scripted registers as impassioned narratives that catalyze a new attentiveness within those they hail. It suggests, moreover, that by inciting deep reflection and an active engagement with the legacies of state violence, interventions like these can help advance the cause of transitional justice and contribute to the development of new political subjectivities invested in the construction of less violent futures.
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Women Dancing Otherwise: The Queer Feminism of Gu Jiani’s Right & Left
Emily E. Wilcox
In twenty-first-century urban Chinese contemporary dance, gender and female sexuality are often constructed in ways that reinforce patriarchal and heterosexual social norms. Although “queer dance” as a named category does not exist in China, it is possible to identify queer feminist perspectives in recent dance works. This essay offers a reading of representations of gender and female sexuality in two works of contemporary dance by Beijing-based female Chinese choreographers: Wang Mei’s 2002 Thunder and Rain and Gu Jiani’s 2014 Right & Left. Through choreographic analysis informed by ethnographic research in Beijing’s contemporary dance world, this essay argues that Thunder and Rain reinforces patriarchal and heterosexual social norms common in Chinese contemporary dance, while Right & Left disrupts such norms. Through its staging of unconventional female-female duets and its queering of nationally marked movement forms, Right & Left offers a queer feminist approach to the presentation of women on the Chinese stage.
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Photographic Automatism: Surrealism and Feminist (Post?) Modernism in Susan Hiller's Sisters of Menon
Katharine Conley
Excerpt from book chapter: "Susan Hiller stated in a 2005 interview that what drew her ‘to look again at surrealism’ and ‘the repressed history of automatism within modernism’ was the experience she had drawing Sisters of Menon (1972) as part of a group project she initiated involving automatic practice. One reason for this reconsideration must surely have been the surrealists’ engagement in the countercultural ideals of her own generation as evidenced by their commitment to the May 1968 student protests in Paris..."
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The Surrealist Collection: Ghosts in the Laboratory
Katharine Conley
Excerpt from book chapter: "Surrealism was forged by poets and artists who intentionally surrounded themselves with objects of philosophical significance to them, objects whose arrangement refracted back to them elements of their own beliefs. André Breton, author of the manifestoes of Surrealism, was the movement’s exemplary collector and his practice of collection yielded the movement’s mystery‐laden backdrop to the development of the principles of Surrealism just as his apartment on the rue Fontaine in Paris provided the setting for gatherings of the group’s meetings..."
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Santiago de Compostela
George Greenia
This collaborative literary history of Europe, the first yet attempted, unfolds through ten sequences of places linked by trade, travel, topography, language, pilgrimage, alliance, disease, and artistic exchange. The period covered, 1348-1418, provides deep context for understanding current developments in Europe, particularly as initiated by the destruction and disasters of World War II. We begin with the greatest of all European catastrophes: the 1348 bubonic plague, which killed one person in three. Literary cultures helped speed recovery from this unprecedented "ground zero" experience, providing solace, distraction, and new ideals to live by. Questions of where Europe begins and ends, then as now, and disputes over whom truly "belongs" on European soil are explored, if not solved, through writing.
A war that would last for a century convulsed much of western Europe. Divisions between Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianities endured, and in 1378 the West divided again between popes of Avignon and Rome. Arabic literary cultures linked Fes and Granada to Jerusalem and Damascus; Persian and Turkish writings began to flourish south and west of Constantinople; Jewish intellectuals treasured Arabic texts as well as Hebrew writings; Armenian colophons proved unique. From 1414-18 western nations gathered to heal their papal schism while also exchanging literary, humanist, and musical ideas; visitors from the East hoped for commitment to wider European peace. Freed from nation state historiography, as bequeathed by the nineteenth century, these 82 chapters freshly assess the free movement of European literature in all its variety, local peculiarity, and regenerative power. -
Aguafuertes de la moda contemporánea argentina
Laura Novik and Regina A. Root
La moda siempre ha sido parte de la historia argentina pero, como afirma el presente volumen, también ha tenido sus propias historias para contar. Tiene un pasado de moda, revelado continuamente en los procesos culturales y en las nuevas filosofías que afirman una diversidad de estilos y tendencias.
Con un enfoque detenido en los momentos clave que definen la moda desde el siglo XVIII hasta nuestros días, los ensayos de este libro dan cuenta de las múltiples relaciones entre la moda y la identidad nacional hasta llegar a la complejidad de nuestra época posmoderna, global, rápida y sumamente mediatizada, heterogénea y lúdica a la vez. Por medio de una perspectiva interdisciplinaria y de un paciente trabajo de archivo, esta obra colectiva aborda el problema de la traducción cultural y la necesaria lectura de la cultura material como base de la historia, y ofrece en su conjunto un riguroso acercamiento a la moda y su lugar en los debates sobre política, cuerpo y nación.
Si bien el título Pasado de moda podría sugerir un estudio netamente histórico de los pasados de la moda en la Argentina –y de los relatos que los hicieron posibles–, es importante señalar que los trabajos aquí reunidos tratan también de abrir propuestas hacia el futuro. Como siempre que se trate de moda, ese futuro será equívoco, transgresivo e inesperado. -
Marital law in He Knew He Was Right
Suzanne Raitt
Bringing together leading and newly emerging scholars, The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope offers a comprehensive overview of Trollope scholarship and suggests new directions in Trollope studies. The first volume designed especially for advanced graduate students and scholars, the collection features essays on virtually every topic relevant to Trollope research, including the law, gender, politics, evolution, race, anti-Semitism, biography, philosophy, illustration, aging, sport, emigration, and the global and regional worlds.
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Teaching Passing as a Lesbian Text
Suzanne Raitt
At the end of a semester teaching an upper-level course called Lesbian Literatures, I always ask students to talk about which texts they recommend keeping the next time I teach the course. They mostly love Virginia Woolf's Orlando; they usually dislike Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, but they see why it should be in the course; and, almost to a person, they tell me I should drop Passing. It's not about lesbians, they complain; the lesbian interpretations we developed were far-fetched; the novel deals with racial passing, and not with passing as a heterosexual. In this essay, I explore several ways of teaching Passing in a course on lesbian literature and suggest some reasons for student dissatisfaction with it in such a context. Much of their resistance, I believe, grows out of their inexperience with and potential reluctance to accept the socially and culturally constructed nature of racial and sexual identities, or the ways in which such identities are mutually constitutive-what Kimberle Crenshaw has called "intersectionality: In my Lesbian Literatures classroom, I encourage students to reflect on the historical and cultural contingency of identity categories and on the multivalence of literary writing. The ambiguous nature of much of the language of Passing encourages students to think about how their assumptions about the social and cultural configuration of race, sexuality, and gender shape not only the ways they read written and visual texts but also their own identities and their experience of the world around them. Perhaps it should go without saying that their resistance to reading Passing as a lesbian text has not deterred me from including it in the course. Rather, knowing how intensely students deny the novel's engagement with lesbian erotic experience has allowed me to experiment with different ways of using the book to help them question their habits of reading and of analysis.
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Food
Brad Weiss
The study of food is at once a classic theme in anthropological theorizing, as well as a burgeoning field in contemporary ethnography. Some of the earliest attempts to characterize culture, or identify the minimal, “elementary” features of social life, drew inspiration from a consideration of food prohibitions. In the 19th century, and again in the middle of the 20th century, the text of Leviticus provided fodder for a host of theories—historical, symbolic, and materialist—that attempted to account for the kosher food laws this text details. The study of these same prohibitions laid the foundation for a comparative anthropology to develop arguments about totemism and taboo, each expressions of human restrictions on the category of “the edible” that are seen as foundational features of social and cultural activity. While these largely (though by no means exclusively) symbolic concerns have dominated much of the anthropology of food, ethnographers and others have also explored a host of very different concerns in the last few generations (though many of these projects also have much-earlier antecedents). The sociological capacity of food as a substance with manifold material dimensions (i.e., it must be cultivated, harvested, distributed, processed, cooked (or not), served, and consumed along with—or rigorously separated from—other foods, to cite only a few of these material considerations) allows its production and consumption to characterize, represent, and shape the relationships by means of which it is eaten. The study of feasting, food exchange, and food offerings makes powerful connections between the symbolic and social potential of food as a sociocultural form. This same potential for revealing complex interconnections has been critical to political-economic analyses of food and food systems. Whether examining the flows of labor necessary to produce global commodities; the impact of the same commodities on diet, nutrition, and the structure of meals; the shifting gendered character of the time needed for food production, and of certain foods that are meant for various persons in the household; or the changing character of class tastes, aesthetics, and wider patterns of consumption, food has proved to be a highly valuable resource—at once a lens and a touchstone—through which to trace the unfolding of capitalism’s diverse histories. In the early 21st century, scholars have returned again to the rich symbolic and material potential of food to think about an ontology of food: the kinds of “naturecultural” worlds, and the encounter between different worlds (e.g., human and other animal forms) that food reveals and embodies.
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Fraternities and Sororities: Developing a Compelling Case for Relevance in Higher Education
James P. Barber
With over 60 collective years of serving the fraternal movement as fraternity/sorority members, chapter advisors, fraternity/sorority life advisors, and (inter)national fraternal leaders, we approached writing about the experiences of college students who participate in fraternities and sororities from an affirming and positive perspective. We believe these distinctive and intergenerational organizations can provide a forum for college students to create meaningful, well-rounded, and learning-oriented experiences. Deep and long-standing challenges continue to exist, but the juxtaposition of the best and worst actions of today's college students make fraternities and sororities among the most complex organizations on college campuses. In addition, there is a high level of interaction between and among students, the campus community, administrators, faculty, alumni, and external stakeholders such as parents and (inter)national fraternity/sorority headquarters. Such dynamic experiences can create shared and distinctive realities for students that are integral to student development. This chapter provides insight into the historical and modern-day complexities that affect students' experiences in fraternities and sororities and offers a framework for working with this population across contexts.
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The Ontogeny of Taste Perception and Preference Throughout Childhood
Catherine A. Forestell and Julie A. Mennella
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"Introduction" & "Modernisms and Authority"
Charles J. Palermo
Modernism and Authority presents a provocative new take on the early paintings of Pablo Picasso and the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. Charles Palermo argues that references to theology and traditional Christian iconography in the works of Picasso and Apollinaire are not mere symbolic gestures; rather, they are complex responses to the symbolist art and poetry of figures important to them, including Paul Gauguin, Charles Morice, and Santiago Rusiñol. The young Picasso and his contemporaries experienced the challenges of modernity as an attempt to reflect on the lost relation to authority. For the symbolists, art held authority by revealing something compelling—something to which audiences must respond lest they lose claim to their own moral authority. Instead of the total transformation of the reader or viewer that symbolist creators envision, Picasso and Apollinaire imagine a divided self, responding only partially or ambivalently to the work of art’s call. Navigating these problems of symbolist art and poetry entails considering the nature of the work of art and of one’s response to it, the modern subject’s place in history, and the relevance of historical truth to our methodological choices in the present.
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Pilgrimage and the American Myth
George Greenia
Exploring what does and what does not constitute pilgrimage, Redefining Pilgrimage draws together a wide variety of disciplines including politics, anthropology, history, religion and sociology. Leading contributors offer a broad range of case studies from a wide geographical area, exploring new ways of approaching pilgrimage beyond the classical religious model. Re-thinking the global phenomenon of pilgrimages in the 21st century, this book offers new perspectives to redefine pilgrimage.
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