bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
El niño de la calle y la ciudad fragmentada en la película Buenos Aires viceversa, de Alejandro Agresti
Authors: Dufays Sophie
Published: February 2012

The story of the homeless little orphan Bocha, which is integrated into the fragmented plot of the Argentinian film Buenos Aires viceversa (Alejandro Agresti 1996), emphasizes and reflects a vision that is peculiar to the media-drenched city, to modern cinematography, and to the street child’s character. This article proposes an analysis of the film focusing on the relationship between the different modalities of that vision and the social and aesthetic effects of urban fragmentation. In this way it examines to what extent the modern city can be seen as a “non-place” whose physical organization impacts on the narration, the editing, the plastic conception of the different shots, and the sound processing in the film. The article then focuses on the aesthetic tension that is revealed through the mise-en-scène of the child, and more particularly of his death: this last sequence makes the film a paradoxical “fragmented melodrama.”
Adolfo Suárez y Felipe y Letizia : ficción televisiva y memorias inmediatas sobre la monarquía española
Authors: Laffond José Carlos Rueda
Published: February 2012

This paper analyzes two television miniseries centered on the representation of recent Spanish history: Adolfo Suárez , el presidente and Felipe y Letizia , deber y querer . Both were aired in 2010. The study outlines their general content, and interrogates other products dedicated to information and historical evocation. My analysis highlights various strategies of memory undertaken in both productions. These strategies were based on the use of a differential selection of historical periods and dramatic patterns. While Adolfo Suárez emphasized the providential meaning of democratic transition and its historic leadership, Felipe y Letizia evoked much more mundane or even parodic aspects. This contrast permits the examination of the uses to which contemporary Spanish fiction puts different significations regarding the monarchy.
Splitting the Difference: Aesthetic Relations in Henry James and Leo Bersani
Authors: Jöttkandt Sigi
Published: February 2012

As an alternative to psychoanalysis’s aggressive subject/object relation, Leo Bersani proposes a more modulated, aesthetic subjectivity. This essay explores Bersani’s concept of aesthetic relations through impressionism’s and realism’s competing demands on the artistic object in Henry James’s “Flickerbridge.” I suggest this 1902 short story can be productively read as a theory of the perspectival shift James was exploring in his experiments with literary impressionism in that period.
Casse toi! —or, The Calling of Leo Bersani
Authors: Savoy Eric
Published: February 2012

This article provids a context for the appraisal of Leo Bersani’s interventions in the queer-theoretical project, the roots of that intervention in his literary criticism, and his status not merely as a public intellectual in America but also as a Francophile. Queer theorists in the United States have tended to be indifferent to the fact that, until recently, Bersani was the Class of 1950 Professor of French at Berkeley. This essay contends that the dailiness of his engagement with specific kinds of French complexity--linguistic to be sure but, more consequentially, literary and theoretical--has been instrumental in the formation of his critical and political positions.
Non-Readings and Misreadings of “The Jamesian Lie”
Authors: Buelens Gert
Published: February 2012

Leo Bersani’s “The Jamesian Lie” has had less of an impact than it deserves. It has often been ignored or misread. For Sharon Cameron, Bersani critiques how consciousness “betrays the social order” in James; in fact, Bersani shows how betrayal is the index of a notion of truth against which his work does battle. In “The Beast in the Closet” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pulls away from a surface-level secret (“the secret of having a secret”) to the depth of underlying causes (“the closet of imagining a homosexual secret”). “Truth” here denies the reality of the lie that only Bersani has recognized as a productive rather than privative force in James.
Jamesian Sociability
Authors: Jafri Maha
Published: February 2012

Building on Leo Bersani’s work on literature, sociability, and psychoanalysis, this article argues that The Sacred Fount highlights the limitations and the potential of Henry James’s compositional consciousness in fiction at the time. It asks why the narrator insists on reinscribing a depth model of knowledge and psychology onto a social world that ostensibly has rejected that model. It also argues that the novel’s interest in depth and surfaces prepares the way for an impersonal intimacy that de-emphasizes egoistic relations to others.
Jamesian Lying/Jamesian Intimacies
Authors: Winnett Susan
Published: February 2012

Leo Bersani’s readings of The Golden Bowl in “The Jamesian Lie” and The Freudian Body suggest that Jamesian sociability represents an obstacle to Bersani's attempt to recuperate an admittedly oxymoronic “metaphysical sociability” for a new “ethics” of “connectedness.” James is resigned to the surface / depth schema that Bersani's utopian enterprise wants to think beyond. Because the Jamesian text's “superficiality” does not extend to the scheme of human psychology that is represented as motivating the characters' actions, The Golden Bowl insists on the continued presence of a self determined through intersubjectivity within the utopian space of sociability and cruising.
Answering Aenesidemus: Schulze's Attack on Reinholdian Representationalism and Its Importance for Fichte
Authors: Messina James
Published: February 2012

According to a standard story about the genesis of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre , the early Fichte was largely sympathetic to Gottlob Ernst Schulze's attack on the validity of Reinhold's principle of consciousness and the definition of representation that he derives from it. I argue that the standard story is unacceptable, insofar as it distorts Schulze's true objections to Reinholdian Representationalism and the real nature of their influence on the early Fichte. I offer a new account of the nature of Schulze's critique of Reinholdian Representationalism and its role in the genesis of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre .
Malebranche on Sensory Cognition and "Seeing As"
Authors: Nolan Lawrence
Published: February 2012

Nicolas Malebranche famously holds that we see all things in the physical world by means of ideas in God. In some writings he seems to posit ideas of particular bodies in God, but when pressed by critics he insists that there is only one general idea of extension, which he calls "intelligible extension." But how can this general and "pure" idea represent particular sensible objects? I develop systematic solutions to this and two other putative difficulties with Malebranche's theory of sensory cognition by appealing to the notion of "seeing as" and to his doctrine that ideas in God have causal powers to affect the mind.
Indigenous Community Justice in the Bolivian Constitution of 2009
Authors: Hammond John L.
Published: February 2012

The Bolivian constitution, debated in a Constituent Assembly in 2006 and 2007 called by the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, was adopted in a referendum in 2009. Among many other important provisions recognizing the country's majority indigenous population, it legitimizes the practice of indigenous community justice. Indigenous justice differs in important ways from the national justice system and from the international human rights regime but it expresses a legitimate assertion by the country's indigenous peoples of their cultural integrity.
Invoking International Human Rights Law in a "Rights-Free Zone": Indigenous Justice Campaigns in Australia
Authors: Arzey Sylvia , McNamara Luke
Published: February 2012

Some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals, organizations, and communities in Australia have embraced international human rights norms in their efforts to obtain redress for historical grievances and influence government policy and legal reform on contemporary social justice issues. This is unsurprising given the absence of formal national infrastructure for human rights recognition in Australia. While the use of international law and frameworks has brought notable gains, there have also been significant limitations on the relevance of international human rights law to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. These limitations are both a result of the local legal conditions in Australia as well as the form and nature of international law generally. A case study of the attempts during the 1990s and 2000s to apply the label of genocide to past government policies of removing and separating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities illustrates that there are considerable challenges and risks associated with campaign strategies based on the local mobilization of international human rights law.
Drug Control, Human Rights, and the Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health: A Reply to Saul Takahashi
Authors: Flacks Simon
Published: February 2012

A recent article in this journal challenged claims that a human rights framework should be applied to drug control. This article questions the author's assertions and reframes them in the context of socio-legal drug scholarship, aiming to build on the discourse concerning human rights and drug use. It is submitted that a rights-based approach is a necessary, indeed obligatory, ethical and legal framework through which to address drug use and that international human rights law provides the proper scope for determining where interferences with individual human rights might be justified on certain, limited grounds.
Redressing the Balance: How Human Rights Defenders Can Use Victim Narratives to Confront the Violence of Armed Groups
Authors: Parker Tom
Published: February 2012

Armed groups have distinct personalities as organizations and in an age of “franchise terrorism” where the “brand” associated with a given terrorist group can inspire copycat violence, human rights defenders must engage narratives as well as actions if they wish to remain relevant. A precedent exists in attempts over the past decade to hold transnational corporations to human rights standards. Compelling social science theory and qualitative evidence suggests that by challenging armed group narratives of legitimacy and promise, human rights defenders can effectively erode complicit support for terrorist violence.
Rights of Ethnic Minorities in Liberal Democracies: Has France Gone Too Far in Banning Muslim Women from Wearing the Burka?
Authors: Leane Geoffrey W.G.
Published: February 2012

After a controversial ban on Islamic headscarves in schools in 2004, the French government now goes further in banning the wearing of the full-body burka by adult women in public spaces generally. The ban raises important questions regarding constitutional politics, liberal political theory, identity formation and the legitimate social expectations of majority cultures. Seemingly clear answers in multicultural liberalism are complicated by the informing French principle of laïcité, through which the French state seeks to legitimize what would otherwise appear to serious, even incomprehensible, breaches of minority religious and cultural freedoms. However, nuanced theoretical arguments are overwhelmed by the trivial nature of the threat to French legal, political, and civic culture. One argument is that social opprobrium ought to be left to respond to an issue which must ultimately be characterized as de minimis . Should that not happen then the burka ban, together with the earlier headscarf ban, will likely come to be seen in retrospect as incremental steps in a progression of repressive policies. In all likelihood these policies will end badly, not only for Muslim minorities in Europe, but for the legitimacy and integrity of modern European liberal values as well.
Educating Muslim American Youth in a Post-9/11 Era: A Critical Review of Policy and Practice
Authors: Bonet Sally Wesley
Published: February 2012

Through a review of educational research literature this piece explores how federal politics and policies have trickled down into secondary schools, and what the effects of these policies have been on secondary schools, paying particular attention to the effects on Muslim American youth. The main research questions are: What federal and state policies, specifically those constructed as measures of ensuring national security, have affected secondary schools? What are the effects of this policy on Muslim American youth? What pedagogical practices can be changed to engage these youth in active citizenship-in a post 9/11 context- for meaningful inclusion and participation in their societies? This review will critically examine the USA PATRIOT Act, a federal law designed and implemented after the terrorist attacked of 9/11, with the aim of understanding how the law has contributed to the growing national anti-Muslim sentiment. Findings suggest that this law has contributed to the over-targeting of Arabs and Arab-American families and students, and has had damaging effects on their educational outcomes, psychosocial well-being and sense of nation and belonging. Additionally, findings suggest that laws framed around securitization are constructed around problematic ideologies that lie beneath dominant and main-stream discourses around Islam.
Healing, Rebellion, and the Law: Ethnologies of Medicine in Colonial Burma, 1928-1932
Authors: Aung-Thwin Maitrii
Published: February 2012

Asia’s encounter with Western medicine and the emergence of public health regimes might be regarded as one chapter within the larger framework of colonialism and its discursive practices. Medicine contributed to the ordering of colonized Asia by providing particular vocabularies and frameworks through which cultures and communities could be identified, categorized, and transformed into accessible knowledge. Notions of the body, race, cleanliness, sickness, “the patient” and healing were continuously shaped and negotiated within the context of this encounter, involving sites of healing, communities, and a wide range of socio-political contexts. This study considers the way in which “indigenous medicine” was delineated by two instruments of the colonial administration in British Burma: a committee appointed to integrate the study of local practices into the educational system and a special tribunal, which was formed to process detainees in the wake of one of the largest rebellions in colonial Burma’s history. It suggests that the shadow of Burma’s administrative connection to India might have corresponded to the manner in which healing culture was conceptualized. Due to changing political circumstances surrounding the question of Burma’s separation from India, the image of traditional medicine shifted to represent a distinct form of Burmese criminality and resistance.
Death and Disease in the Prisons of Colonial Burma
Authors: Brown Ian
Published: February 2012

Over the half-century from 1890 to 1940, the death rate in Burma’s prisons was cut by more than half. This article first seeks to explain that reduction by examining the shifting incidence of the main diseases found in the province’s jails in this period―dysentery and diarrhea, smallpox, cholera, plague, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis―and the measures taken by the prison administration to contain them. It then critically examines the argument advanced in the 1920s, for example, that a prolonged term in a Burmese prison was likely to improve the inmate’s physical condition―that he would generally leave prison fitter, heavier and in better health. Finally, the article seeks to explain why the incidence of disease and the rate of mortality among the inmate population were apparently of such concern to the prison administration of colonial Burma.
The Scientific and Hygienic Housewife-and-Mother: Education, Consumption and the Discourse of Domesticity
Authors: Ikeya Chie
Published: February 2012

This article examines the development of a discourse on modern domesticity in colonial Burma that not only emphasized the role of a woman in safeguarding the health and welfare of her family and nation, but also associated housewifery and motherhood with “domestic science,” medicine, and hygienic behavior. The article shows that two cultural and didactic institutions, one formal and the other informal, served to disseminate this discourse on modern domesticity: “secular” government-funded co-educational schools and the popular press. It reveals that the emergence of the ideal of the scientific and hygienic housewife-and-mother was not simply an effect of a unilateral and hegemonic process of imperialism. Rather, it is best understood as a phenomenon informed simultaneously and conjointly by “Western” and cosmopolitan notions of scientific progress, bodily discipline and hygiene, bourgeois femininity, and health technologies, and the rise of consumer culture, aided by the spread of illustrated printed material, especially advertisements.
Inoculators, the Indigenous Obstacle to Vaccination in Colonial Burma
Authors: Naono Atsuko
Published: February 2012

Colonial records on smallpox vaccination point to inoculations and inoculators as among the most serious obstacles to the progress of vaccination. However, despite their apparent importance, those identified as inoculators by the colonial medical officers remained an unclear, evasive and almost phantom-like group. This article examines how British colonial medical men wrote about a group who probably never existed in Burma outside of the colonial imagination. By locating the vaccinator’s enemy in a social practice and not in a particular group of practitioners, I seek to uncover the secret of inoculation’s resilience in the face of decades of aggressive vaccination campaigns. The inoculator was the bogeyman of colonial vaccination reports, requiring the historian to ask a different set of questions about indigenous resistance to colonial medicine and to look at the colonial records in a different way.
Conjuncture and Reform in the Late Konbaung Period: How Prophecies, Omens and Rumors Motivated Political Action from 1866 to 1869
Authors: Candier Aurore
Published: February 2012

Contrary to the modern Western concept of reform, the precolonial Burmese concept of pyu pyin was not linked to the notion of progress, but to the notion of “regeneration.” These reforms, called here “cyclical reforms,” were meant to restore a pristine and ideal order. Their implementation was strongly connected to the “prophetic reading” of a time. Following Buddhist cosmology, wordly affairs reflect cosmic order, so that prophecies, omens, rumors and other extraordinary signs were immediatly reported to the king and interpreted by his experts in wordly matter knowledge (lawki piñña). When these “prophetic readings” were inauspicious, “cyclical reforms” were carried out to restore the socio-cosmic order. But there were also reforms, here called “conjunctural reforms,” which were a more specific response to a changing context. Within this frame work, it is productive to bring the conception and practice of reform during the middle and late Konbaung period (1820s-1880s) under scrutiny. At that time, the Burmese government had to adjust to the coming of a new colonial order. The reign of king Mindon (1853-1878) was particularly rich in major sociopolitical changes and implementation of reforms, which were drafted as a response to the new “conjuncture.”
The years 1866-1869 are particularly formative for two reasons. First, the year 1866 is the major political turn of king Mindon's reign. The heir-apparent, the Kanaung prince, leader of the “conjunctural reform” program after his brother Mindon took power, was murdered during a coup d’etat in August. Thereafter, king Mindon led both “cyclical” and “conjunctural” reforms until changes in the international context of Burma in the 1870s put an end to his attempts. Second, these years are particularly well-documented, both in vernacular and western primary sources. Only a careful and close examination of both types of sources will allow us to analyze how “prophetic” information was interpreted and understood at the Burmese court and allow us to see how this understanding influenced decision-making and choices of the appropriate type of reform, whether “cyclical”—a reversion to normative or ideal conditions—or “conjunctural”—a creation of a new precedent.
Narratives of Nation, Questions of Community: Examining Burmese Sources without the Lens of Nation
Authors: Turner Alicia
Published: February 2012

As much as scholars know that Burmese identity was never singular or completely unified, we still
allow the mirage of a singular nation to quietly seep into the assumptions that frame our research. As Prasenjit Duara has argued, the nation has become the subject of history. It shapes our disciplines and our orientations, as we write for and about Burma studies. A focused look at one moment in Burmese history, one document and even one person, however, reveals that even when efforts to produce a feeling of unity was at its peak, Burmese sense of themselves and their worldviews were inherently multiple. Diverse and hybrid modes of Burmese identity thrived even in the heart of the anti-colonial nationalist movement, and it was this multiplicity that made the response to colonialism possible. This article offers micro history of a single moment in the rise of the anti-colonial nationalist movement, looking at the meeting minutes of the Ninth All-Burma Conference of Burmese Associations and the biography of U Kyaw Yan a key figure of the period. Focusing in this way exposes the inherent multiplicity of Burmese worldview and
identity at the micro level and help to make us, as scholars, more attuned to its impact in Burmese history in broader terms. In this, I offer a simple and perhaps obvious point: that when we return to the primary sources we find that history and the lives, motivations, and interactions of those we study are never as simple as the stories we tell about them.
Archibald Alexander and the Use of Books: Theological Education and Print Culture in the Early Republic
Authors: Paulus Michael J.
Published: February 2012

In the early nineteenth century, as part of a movement to Christianize the early American republic through education and persuasion, evangelical Christians developed a new type of theological school and an extensive theological print culture. The post-baccalaureate schools they established, usually called theological seminaries, were designed to be situated at the top of the educational system and to relate the Bible to all other fields of inquiry. The faculties, graduates, and publications of these schools influenced the content and formation of an allied Bibliocentric print culture. This paper highlights formative connections between theological education and print culture in the early republic by focusing on the life and literary work of Archibald Alexander (1772-1851), the founding professor of Princeton Theological Seminary and a prolific and prominent theological author during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Identity and Diversity in the History of Ideas: A Reply to Brian Tierney
Authors: Seagrave S. Adam
Published: February 2012

In the April 2011 issue (volume 72, number 2) of the Journal of the History of Ideas, S. Adam Seagrave published an article entitled "How Old Are Modern Rights? On the Lockean Roots of Contemporary Human Rights Discourse," which included a detailed discussion of several publications written by Brian Tierney. In the July 2011 issue (volume 72, number 3), Brian Tierney published a brief essay, "Response to S. Adam Seagrave's 'How Old Are Modern Rights? On the Lockean Roots of Contemporary Human Rights Discourse,'" addressing some of the points that Seagrave had made in his article. In "Identity and Diversity in the History of Ideas" Seagrave replies to Tierney.
China and East Asian Democracy: The Coming Wave
Authors: Diamond Larry
Published: February 2012

Abstract:
With the eruption of mass movements for democratic change throughout the Arab world in 2011, hopeful analysts of global democratic prospects have focused attention on the Middle East. But if a new regional wave of transitions to democracy unfolds in the next five to ten years, it is more likely to come from East Asia: Thailand is progressing back toward democracy; Malaysia and Singapore show signs of entering a period of democratic transition; Burma, to the surprise of many, is liberalizing politically for the first time in twenty years; and China faces a looming crisis of authoritarianism that will generate a new opportunity for democratic transition in the next two decades and possibly much sooner.
Indonesia: The Benefits of Civic Engagement
Authors: Lussier Danielle N. , Fish M. Steven
Published: February 2012

Indonesia’s successful democratization poses a puzzle. As a vast, lower-middle income country with scant tradition of open politics, Indonesia did not seem to be a good bet for robust democracy. But Indonesia enjoys an advantage: extraordinary levels of civic engagement. Indonesians participate in organizations at unusually high rates and display an exceptional level of interpersonal sociability. Spirited associational life has enabled Indonesians to constrain elites and sustain self-government by cultivating a sense of efficacy, fostering the cultivation and transfer of civic skills, and creating opportunities for individuals to be recruited into politics. Indonesia demonstrates how civic engagement can abet democratization.
Salesclerks, Sexual Danger, and National Identity in Egypt, 1920s-1950s
Authors: Reynolds Nancy Y.
Published: February 2012

This article investigates change and continuity in anxieties about shopping during the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt to argue that department stores and their salesclerks became critical sites for enacting and challenging new notions of sexuality and citizenship. Retail innovations, such as commission pay, display, free entry, and large commercial staffs, became understood as sexual and moral problems because department stores blurred the boundaries between classes and were public spaces where unrelated men and women could mix. These concerns about sexuality in the 1920s were recycled and amplified in the late 1940s and early 1950s when salesclerks again came under scrutiny during debates over citizenship and ethnicity. I argue that the particular way this latter debate was barnacled by the concerns of the 1920s helped to delineate the broader society's reaction to the challenges of defining Egyptian nationality.
Traveling with Faith: The Creation of Women's Immigrant Aid Associations in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century France
Authors: Machen Emily
Published: February 2012

This article explores the efforts of French Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women to morally, spiritually, and physically protect immigrant and migrant women and girls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women of faith worried about the dangers posed by the white slave trade, and they feared the loss of spiritual consciousness among women living far from their families and their places of worship. In response to these concerns, they developed numerous faith-based international organizations aimed at protecting vulnerable working-class immigrants. Upper-class women's work in immigrant aid societies allowed them to take on much greater social and religious leadership roles than they had in the past. Likewise, the intricate, international networks that these women developed contributed to the building of international cooperation throughout Europe.
Empowerment and Submission: The Political Culture of Catholic Women's Religious Communities in Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Adelman Sarah Mulhall
Published: February 2012

At a time when women in the United States were excluded from participation in the civic electoral system, nineteenth-century Catholic sisters voted in elections, held offices, and enacted a complex political culture. In both governmental structure and internal social interaction, these communities of women constructed a system that simultaneously mandated deference, participation, hierarchy, and equality, balancing these elements despite tensions and apparent contradictions. The tensions surrounding the two-tier system that assigned lay sisters an inferior status boiled over in the climate of late-nineteenth-century America and, in response to lay sisters' protests, communities modified their rules, creating a new equilibrium. The dynamic systems of self-governance created by women religious exemplify the potential for empowerment, authority, and social mobility offered to nineteenth-century women by religious life, as well as the ways these possibilities and their potentially radical societal implications were constrained by a language and culture that mandated submission and obedience.
The Survey Project: Researching Women’s Everyday Experience and Envisioning Modernity in Rural Bohemia at the End of the Second World War
Authors: Feinberg Melissa
Published: February 2012

This article examines a survey of rural Czech women conducted in 1944–1945. It argues that the survey tells two very different stories. First, the survey provides an unvarnished look into the everyday material circumstances of a few rural Czech women. But for all they tell us about the material conditions of these rural women’s lives, the surveys tell us very little about their ideals, hopes, and dreams. The surveys do, however, reveal quite a bit about the inner motivations of the very different group of women who commissioned this research, a group known as the Women’s Center. Reading in between the lines of these texts shows how the activists of the Women’s Center imagined modernity in the countryside. Theirs was a vision of rational households, technological advances, and good taste, even in rural villages.
‘Til Death Parts Us: Women’s Domestic Partnerships in Eighteenth-Century Brittany
Authors: Locklin Nancy
Published: February 2012

This article investigates the legal provision for two adult, unmarried women to create a “perpetual society” with one another found in the customary code of 1725 for the French province of Brittany. This arrangement allowed women who shared a household to designate one another as primary heir and to protect their community property from the claims of others. Evidence of this arrangement demonstrates that single women in some places had options outside of marriage and the convent. The contracts filed by the women also reveal the extent to which this arrangement went beyond considerations of property to express both affection and loyalty. Available to siblings as well as to pairs of unrelated women, this union is likely not the equivalent of same-sex marriage. It does however broaden our knowledge of the meaning of marriage, partnership, and kin in early modern Europe.
The Dedication of Polycharmos from Stobi: Problems of Dating and Interpretation
Authors: Habas (Rubin) Ephrat
Published: February 2012

The inscription commemorating a donation by Polycharmos of Stobi has been known for seventy years. In spite of its palaeographic characteristics, which strongly suggest a 2nd-century CE dating, it is commonly dated to 279/280 CE , following M. Hengel's influential 1966 analysis. Hengel admitted that the inscription displayed some early characteristics but nevertheless argued for this late date on historical grounds. Historical context left no room, in Hengel's opinion, for a dating earlier than the late 3rd-century CE . I suggest that a different interpretation of the issues addressed by Hengel is possible. Moreover, extensive excavations in Stobi (including the site of the Polycharmos inscription) in the 1970s and early 1980s, and archaeological and epigraphical work in Roman Macedonia in general, have brought to light substantial evidence which points to a 2nd-century dating for the Polycharmos inscription. In this reconsideration of the inscription's date, I survey the main palaeographic and archaeological data and argue for the dating originally supported by the first publisher, 163/4 CE . Some aspects of the form and content of the inscription are then discussed, and it is argued that they do not necessarily imply a late 3rd-century dating.
Missionary Protestants as Defenders and Detractors of Judaism: Franz Delitzsch and Hermann Strack
Authors: Levenson Alan
Published: February 2012

Franz Delitzsch (1812-1890) and Hermann Strack (1848-1922) were two missionary Protestants who were also leaders in the fight against antisemitism. Well-known figures in their own day, Strack and Delitzsch have been marginalized in studies of Protestant missionary efforts to convert Jews and also in the histories of anti-antisemitism in Imperial Germany. This essay argues that Jews and Judaism presented a difficult crux for both men, who were deeply involved in the world of Wissenschaft des Judenthums , personally and professionally. On the one hand, missionary Protestants upheld the physical and spiritual descent of Jesus from Judaism, rejected the antisemitic caricatures of Judaism found in both propagandists and scholarly literature of the period and evinced a genuine affection for rabbinic literature. Strack, in particular, played a unique role as someone who defended Judaism not from the secular Enlightenment perspective of universal tolerance, but from the perspective of a committed Christian who was also an expert on Jews and Judaism. On the other hand, Delitzsch and Strack held very conservative views regarding a wide range of Christian dogmas. They regarded Jewish (and Christian) scholarly speculation about the comparative truth-claims of Judaism and Christianity as offensive and were profoundly supersessionist in orientation. Strack's Einleitung in den Talmud offered an accurate and sympathetic characterization of rabbinic literature; his Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch offered a massive "demonstration" of the superiority of the New Testament material to the same. Both works became standards. Delitzsch and Strack represent a case study in ideational compartmentalization and constitute a parade example of what the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann has termed allosemitism.
The Dependence of Rabbi David Kimhi (Radak) on Rashi in His Quotation of Midrashic Traditions
Authors: Grunhaus Naomi
Published: February 2012

This article demonstrates that the 13th-century exegete Rabbi David Kimhi (Radak) relied on Rashi as a source for midrashic traditions, in addition to his known use of Rashi as a resource for exegetical interpretations. This reliance shows that Radak viewed Rashi as an authoritative source for midrashic material and formulations. Furthermore, Radak's use of Rashi as a source reveals Rashi's influence on Radak's thought. It suggests that Radak learned the exegetical and pedagogical value of the quotation of rabbinic material from Rashi. Radak's dependence on Rashi can in turn be applied broadly to suggest that Radak did not check all original sources, but rather relied at times on his own memory in conjunction with Rashi's record of certain aggadic interpretations. Radak's quotation of midrashic material from Rashi demonstrates the extent of the availability of Rashi's commentaries on the Prophets and Hagiographa in Radak's environment. While Rashi's commentary on the Pentateuch was widely known, the commentaries on other biblical books were less popular. Specific instances of Radak's use of Rashi as a source for midrashic traditions are investigated and offered as evidence of heavier use by Radak of Rashi's commentaries than has previously been documented.
Fientivity, Transitivity, and Stem Vowel Variation in Byzantine Piyyuṭ
Authors: Rand Michael
Published: February 2012

In the following article, an attempt is made to trace the expansion of the fientive ablaut class a ~ o throughout the history of the Hebrew language, beginning with Biblical Hebrew, through Qumran Hebrew, into Mishnaic Hebrew, and finally into the language of Byzantine piyyuṭ . Once it has been established that in piyyuṭ , this ablaut class is expanding at the expense of its competitors (e.g., the Stative class e ~ a ), I make the claim that due to this spread, as well as the pressures of rhyme and a rigid view of the relationship between the qal stem and the causative hifʿil on the part of the liturgical poets, piyyuṭ shows a number of completely unprecedented, transitive/causative uses of qal verbs which are otherwise stative in the Hebrew language—e.g., [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="01i" /] 'he will cause to approach'. Finally, a publication of two Qillirian shivʿatot is appended at the end of the article, together with commentary.
The Politics of Secrets: Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah in Context
Authors: Lachter Hartley
Published: February 2012

Mystical texts, like all texts, are informed by the context in which they are written and read. The proliferation of Kabbalah in late 13th century Castile is an instructive example of how the construction of Jewish esotericism is shaped by the intellectual and cultural environment. Kabbalists during this period were able to compose a large number of texts which succeeded in acquiring legitimacy in at least some Jewish circles, due in no small part to the increased interest in esoteric knowledge in the broader cultural context. Moreover, by advancing a uniquely Jewish claim to ancient, revealed esoteric truth, kabbalists sought to counter Christian anti-Jewish claims, and present an alternative to rationalist interpretations of Jewish scripture and religious praxis. By considering the historical context in which kabbalistic texts take shape, we can better appreciate the way that kabbalistic texts advance a worldview and conception of Jewish identity that addresses the perceived needs of Jews in particular intellectual and political environments.
Modernizing Moroccan Jews: The AIU Alumni Association in Tangier, 1893-1913
Authors: Marglin Jessica
Published: February 2012

This article examines the Alumni Association of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Tangier through the organization's bulletins, published between 1893 and 1913. The Alumni Association was a group of self-consciously modernizing Jews who, as graduates of the Alliance school, wanted to help spread European culture and values they had imbibed as students to other Jews in Tangier and beyond. Through their annual bulletins, the Alumni Association members created their own version of modernity, one inspired by yet distinct from that of the Alliance itself. The organization encouraged Jews to emulate Europe, yet it also promoted a feeling of belonging to a Moroccan Jewish community—a group with which few Jews affiliated before the colonial period. Using the Alumni Association as a lens, this article looks at the impact of the Alliance and its schooling on Jews in Morocco, and at how these Jews embraced the project of modernity in their own unique way.
Malice in Wonderland: Dreams of the Orient and the Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China
Authors: Ringmar Erik
Published: February 2012

This article explains the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan, the imperial palace compound located northwest of Beijing, by an Anglo-French army in 1860. Bracketing the political and military context, it looks at the ways the emperor’s palace has been interpreted in European cultural history and the ways it was understood by the people responsible for its destruction. To Europeans, the Yuanmingyuan was a place of wonder, and it was more than anything the transformation of the language of wonder that made the palace vulnerable to European aggression. Intercultural aesthetic judgments, the article concludes, always have political implications.
Gu Hongming as a Cultural Amphibian: A Confucian Universalist Critique of Modern Western Civilization
Authors: Du Chunmei
Published: February 2012

Intellectuals around the world debated the meaning of civilization during the World War I era. This article reexamines the life and ideas of the so-called Chinese sage Gu Hongming. Born and raised in British Malaya, Gu grew up as an English-educated Romanticist, but he ended as a staunch monarchist and eminent Confucian propagandist to the early twentieth-century Western world. In contrast to the traditional label of "cultural conservative," I propose the new concept of "cultural amphibians" to characterize Gu and his contemporary "spokesmen of the East." Because of their social "hybrid vigor" and transcultural competence at a time of rapid global transformations, these men were able to forge "authentic" identities across national, ideological, and cultural boundaries. Seemingly rooted in a cultural and ideological confrontation between the West and the non-West, their discourses on "Eastern-Western civilizations" are in fact better seen as marked by a global intellectual syncretism.
Tibetan Buddhism in Don DeLillo's Novels: The Street, The Word and The Soul
Authors: Kohn Robert E.
Published: February 2012

Joseph Dewey divides Don DeLillo's novels into three chronological stages: the first, in which he embraced the street; the second, in which he tested his own deep fascination with the word; and the third, in which he turned to the implications of the soul. Dewey's three stages have a parallel in the Tibetan Buddhist Tri-Kaya , with the street corresponding to the Priesthood ( Sangha ), the word to the Scriptures ( Dharma ), and the soul to the Buddha . This essay traces the remarkable development of DeLillo's spirituality through the three stages of his writing. In contrast to Dewey's view that DeLillo channeled his Catholicism into his evident fascination with the vision and metaphors of Eastern traditions, the present essay argues that DeLillo developed his sense of spirituality primarily from Tibetan Buddhism, and then channeled that spirituality back into Catholicism.
El espectáculo revolucionario: El teatro cubano de la década de los sesenta
Authors: Ford Katherine
Published: February 2012

This essay examines how three plays written in Cuba during the sixties question the official Revolutionary discourse. By representing the instability and violence that emerge from this imposition, they reveal the repetition that underlies the revolutionary moment. José Triana's La noche de los asesinos , Virgilio Piñera's Una caja de zapatos vacía and Antón Arrufat's Los siete contra Tebas approach the idea of violence and repetition through the motif of revolution as both a violent break with the past and, ironically, a return to this very past through an inability to break free from the circularity of history.
Bridging the Gaps in Cultural Memory: Carlos Gorostiza's El puente , and Gabriel Peveroni's Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El puente)
Authors: Misemer Sarah M.
Published: February 2012

Though more than 50 years separate Carlos Gorostiza's and Gabriel Pevoroni's most well-known plays, El puente, and Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El puente) , they share many of the same preoccupations with the politics of performance, most specifically the focus on social life and human behavior as embodied actions. Because the bridges are never seen in either of the plays, the absent but present quality of these markers also reminds the actors and public alike of the metatheatrical and performative nature of history and behavior within the sphere of cultural memory. Political reforms enacted in real life in Argentina will be examined as repeated behaviors, situations, and linguistic performances within Gorostiza's play. In contrast, in Peveroni's play one observes how and why collective memory is transmitted through ephemeral, embodied practices.
Globalizing Allegory: Augusto Boal's A Lua Pequena e a Caminhada Perigosa in Brazil and Cape Verde
Authors: McMahon Christina S.
Published: February 2012

This article suggests that Augusto Boal's play, A Lua Pequena e a Caminhada Perigosa , a documentary drama about Che Guevara's execution in Bolivia, is an example of "global allegory," differing from Fredric Jameson's notion of "national allegory" because it addresses specific political situations in multiple countries simultaneously. Local stage productions, however, transform global allegories into national allegories, since performances respond to varying political climates. Thus, the same allegory that condemned the Brazilian dictatorship of Humberto de Alencar Castello Branco when staged as part of the São Paulo Feira de Opinião in 1968 served to celebrate the PAIGC party's recent victory over Portuguese colonialism, as well as its installment as government in a one-party state, when performed as part of Cape Verde's Independence Day celebrations in 1977.
Plínio Marcos y Juan Radrigán: Íconos del teatro de resistencia
Authors: Alexandre Marcos António , Rojo Sara
Published: February 2012

This article shows how, in the darkest period of Latin America (the period of military dictatorships), there was an increased focus on activity critical of the system. It is within that framework of resistance and rupture that the works of Brazilian Plínio Marcos (1936-1999) and the Chilean Juan Radrigán (1937), which we are calling hyperrealist, were born. Through their actions, the characters within the dramatic worlds of Radrigán and Plínio Marcos show us, by analogy, not their personal histories, but rather the history of their people in a particular context, specifically a sector of their societies that generally is not valued by those who uphold power or even by those who are successfully located inside the system.
José Rivera, Neoliberalism, and the Outside of Politics
Authors: Rossini Jon D.
Published: February 2012

José Rivera's play School of the Americas , which recounts the last days of Che Guevara's life in a Bolivian schoolhouse, presents a self-conscious example of the problem of political thinking in the contemporary period of US neoliberalism. The limits of political thinking are shaped by a focus on character and rhetorical persuasion, which forecloses the possibility of systemic or structural thinking, a concern the Guevara character voices within the play. Engaging negative production reviews, the author argues that problems may emerge because Rivera is foregrounding the difficulty of thinking differently about politics. The essay concludes with the ambivalent legacy of Che's Bolivian mission suggested by both the play and a contemporary neoliberal development project in Bolivia: La Ruta del Che.
Regreso del pasado: Madame Lynch y el imaginario paraguayo
Authors: Ramis A. Gabriela
Published: February 2012

In the context of historical revisionism that characterized Latin American theater in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Milton Schinca wrote Madame Lynch (1989). This essay looks at two political readings of Lynch's marginality in Paraguayan society, and of her relationship to power as a way of highlighting social constructs. It does so by analyzing the deliberate emphasis of the material conditions of Elisa Lynch, the function of her body, her use of visual and linguistic signs, the tension between power and marginality, and how monologues work as an attempt to deconstruct the patriarchal view of Madame Paraguay. This leads to a reading of the playtext as an attempt to reconsider Uruguay's responsibility in the War of Paraguay (1865-1870).