bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Building the First Persian Empire
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the construction of the Achaemenid empire and its royal residence cities including Persepolis, Susa, Ecbatana and Babylon. It also explores the role of rock art and ritual in shaping Persian topographies of power.
The Destruction of Achaemenid Persia and the Creation of Seleucid Iran
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 3 offer a new approach to the evidence that takes into account not just continuities with Persian practice, but also the Seleucid Empire’s breaks with Achaemenid traditions. I argue that the Seleucid Empire strategically introduced stark and deliberately instituted changes in the Iranian world’s topography of power, architecture and religious traditions to create a new vision of Iranian, though not necessarily Persian, kingship. The Seleucids’ new topography of power and visual and ritual expressions of Irano-Macedonian charismatic kingship subsumed and transcended the traditions of Persia and Babylon alike. Ultimately, they laid the groundwork for new Iranian kingship.
The Rise of the Arsacids and a New Iranian Topography of Power
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 4 argues that the Arsacids, through their tenure as the Iranian world’s longest-lived dynasty, created foundational architectural and cultural forms that shaped Iranian kingship through the early modern period. While they portrayed themselves in their coins in Persian satrapal costume, the early Arsacids were equally driven to engage and reinvent the traditions of Seleucid kingship. After initially taking over the topography that the Seleucids had established, the Arsacids began to claim Western Asia landscapes, rebuilding and reinvigorating ruined urban and sacred centers, such as Assur and Nippur and establishing new cities and parallel foundations, like Ctesiphon and Vologasias. With Nippur’s ziggurat standing as an important case study, the Parthians neither obliterated nor faithfully restored these ancient cityscapes, but harnessed and strategically reshaped them to serve their new imperial vision.
Sasanian Rupture and Renovation
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 6 explores the development Sasanian urbanism and the dynasty’s approach to the landscape. It argues that the Sasanians quickly and dramatically reshaped Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau to bring it into accord with their new imperial vision, establishing new regional settlements that controlled their surrounding agricultural hinterlands militarily and economically while expanding and restructuring the imperial cities of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. Their new cities brought new areas into prominence and rendered others cities and ceremonial centers obsolete, as well as trade networks that had depended on them. Cities played an integral role in building the Empire of the Iranians not only materially but conceptually.
The Seleucid Transformation of Iranian Sacred Spaces
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 8 argues that temple building played a key role in the Seleucids’ ambitious and successful program of claiming and reshaping the Achaemenid Empire’s political landscape. The dynasty systematically appropriated ancient cultic traditions by constructing new Seleucid temples for the cult even as they constructed innovative temples in their newly founded settlements It argues that in provinces without a deeply embedded tradition of temple architecture, or in their newly founded cities, the Seleucids introduced a new repertoire of temple architecture that deliberately blurred the lines between Greco-Macedonian and Western Asian traditions.
Ancient Sacred Landscapes and Memories of Persian Religion in Anatolia and the Caucasus
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 9 explores the impact of Persian religion on Anatolia and the Caucasus and the means by which the Orontids, Artaxiads, Pharnabazids, Mithradatids and Ariarathids engaged ancient Persian royal traditions while cultivating pre-Persian cults.
Iranian Funerary Landscapes
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

The chapters in this section explore the intersection between political temporalities and the natural and built environments of Iranian kingship. They consider the formation, change and influence of Iranian traditions and institutions, like tombs and dynastic cults, but also the role that those institutions played in shaping Iranian memory.
Sasanian Memory and the Persian Monumental and Ritual Legacy
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 12 explores the techniques by which the early Sasanian dynasty shaped Pars’ patrimony of glorious Achaemenid ruins and foregrounded its ancient artistic heritage and traditions of ritual. The built and natural environment of Pars, including Achaemenid ruins and new sites, created a vital experience of the Sasanians’ new vision of the past and their place in it.
Reshaping Iran’s Past and Building Its Future
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 13 agues that the Sasanians created a new vision of the Iranian past and their central role in it by building a new sacred topography. It argues that Avestan sites of memory emerged at locales with no previous Achaemenid monumental activity but which benefited from beautiful and dramatic natural features.
Persian Palatial Cosmologies
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 14 explores the development and significance of the Achamenid palatial tradition. It offers a critical approach to the palatial vocabulary.
Earthly Paradises
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 17 investigates the development of the Iranian institutions of estates and gardens. It examines the continuities and changes in the development of the paradise as well its ideological role from the Achaemenid to the Sasanian period.
Epilogue
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: January 2019

The Iranian Expanse has presented a new approach to understanding Iranian kingship, cosmology, and identity. Its chapters have explored the role of highly significant spaces and places in constructing, maintaining, and transforming the identity of their patrons and viewers. In the course of doing so this book has investigated the development of landscapes of power and memory, cities, sanctuaries, palaces, and paradise estates in Persia and across the wider ancient Iranian world. At these sites imperially and religiously formulated cosmologies promoted by royal elites were most explicitly and tangibly experienced. Putting ancient Iranian theories of mind and matter into dialogue with contemporary theoretical debates, I have argued that Iranian sovereigns sought to reshape the “conceptual” (Av. ...
Dialectic and the Training of the Mind
Authors: Satran David
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores the initial phase of the author’s tutelage in Caesarea, one well known from the traditional Greco-Roman curriculum of encyclical studies (enkyklios paideia): dialectic, the training in the logical and precise analysis of articulation, and argumentation. This is described both as an investigation of the natural abilities of the student and a thoroughgoing process of breaking down acquired habits of thought and speech. These are examined in light of Origen’s own views as expressed throughout his works, as well as in the writings of earlier exponents of the Alexandrian theological tradition (Philo, Clement) and within contemporary philosophical, especially Platonic, traditions (Alcinous). This emphasis on dialectical training as a corrective to enclosed or habitual attitudes is coordinated with Origen’s striking understanding of a heresy as primarily a dogmatic or exclusivist system of thought and belief. His opposition to this sort of blind allegiance finds a number of interesting parallels, particularly in the writings of Galen of Pergamum.
Paradise and the Cave
Authors: Satran David
Published: January 2019

This chapter analyzes the final section of the Thanksgiving Address, an elaborate assembly of scriptural examples—the expulsion of Adam from Eden, Abraham’s departure from his homeland, the parable of the prodigal son, the Babylonian captivity of the Jews—which the author marshals in order to lament his own departure from his studies with Origen. The passage is not easily coordinated with the classical rhetoric of leave-taking—as described by Menander of Laodicaea and exemplified in an oration by the fourth-century bishop Gregory of Nazianzen—but may be closer to a form of rabbinic homiletics. Especially pronounced is the reversal of both classical and scriptural structures and the lack of clarity surrounding the necessity of departure. It is suggested that the Plato’s Republic and the necessity of the guardians to return to the cave, thus retracing their philosophical ascent, might have provided the effective model. Origen’s own writings are examined in order to bolster the hypothesis.
Paideia, Loss, and Prospect
Authors: Satran David
Published: January 2019

The final chapter reprises the major arguments of this study and attempts to point forward to the subsequent trajectories of some of the central themes of the Thanksgiving Address discussed above. Opening with a brief comparison of the role played by the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka in the life of Vaclav Havel—playwright, dissident, and president—the chapter reviews the extraordinary stature and significance accorded Origen by the author of the address. A series of themes then are surveyed in order to assess their salience in looking ahead to the development of Christianity during the succeeding centuries: the relative weight of ecclesiastic versus academic authority; the rise of Christian asceticism and the position of the holy man; and patterns of advanced education. Finally, there is a discussion of the possible relevance of modern pedagogical models and a return to the underlying question of the relationship between freedom and constraint in the formation of the individual.
Introduction
Authors: Gálvez Alyshia
Published: January 2019

In this chapter, the main arguments of the book are outlined, including a rationale for a focus on diet-related illness and obesity as pernicious consequences of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a discussion of methods, and an outline of the text. The book is framed, as an analysis of the paradoxical rise in global popularity of Mexican food at the same time that ancestral milpa-based cuisine has fallen further from the reach of the average Mexican citizen. The rise in obesity and noncommunicable diseases as a consequence of Mexico’s reorientation of its economy away from small-scale agriculture and toward a food security model based on foreign direct investment is outlined.
People of the Corn
Authors: Gálvez Alyshia
Published: January 2019

Chapter 2 explores Mexico’s ancestral cuisine and the ways that it has come to enjoy a moment of high prestige and appreciation in the global food marketplace in the last few years. The chapter discusses the question of ownership over the food traditions of Mexico and the ways that Mexican food has come to occupy a prominent place in elite, global food circles.
NAFTA
Authors: Gálvez Alyshia
Published: January 2019

The fourth chapter, “NAFTA: Free Trade in the Body,” describes the magnitude and characteristics of Mexico’s so-called obesity and diabetes epidemic and the current hypotheses for the causes and treatment of obesity for individuals and at the population level. The chapter points out some of the lesser known hypotheses for the abrupt rise in obesity and diet-related chronic diseases in the last few decades. Far from linking the rise of obesity to increased appetites for snacks and sodas, some of these hypotheses focus on ways that the production and consumption of processed foods and beverages have increased people’s exposure to chemicals with metabolic and endocrinological properties that produce weight gain and alter organ function. The methodological and empirical challenges of understanding the effects of economic policy, like free trade agreements, on the body are explored.
Deflecting the Blame
Authors: Gálvez Alyshia
Published: January 2019

This chapter critiques some of the assumptions about the causes and solutions for obesity using anthropological and historical understandings of class and ethnic differences in Mexico. It unpacks Mexico’s policy response to obesity and diabetes, including its much lauded soda tax and poverty reduction policies, and demonstrates how a progressive and aggressive policy response has been stunted in ways that favor transnational food corporations, while deflecting the blame for diet-related illness onto individuals, especially women, and historically marginalized poor and indigenous populations. The chapter addresses the idea that better health and wellness can be achieved for the Mexican population through greater education and socialization into healthful ingredients and cooking styles, narrowly defined.
Diabetes
Authors: Gálvez Alyshia
Published: January 2019

The chapter “Diabetes: The Disease of the Migrant?” examines alternative etiologies for diabetes, including the syndemic connection drawn by some researchers between diabetes and emotional trauma. The chapter explores how this theory is supported by many of the vernacular etiologies of diabetes in Mexican communities. In this chapter, the possibility is raised that a “slow death” from diet-related illness has sinister ramifications in defusing and postponing calls for more just economic, trade, and migration policies.
Nostalgia, Prestige, and a Party Every Day
Authors: Gálvez Alyshia
Published: January 2019

“Nostalgia, prestige and a party every day,” examines how food marketers and producers have manipulated cultural associations between food, status, identity and ideas about the past to boost market reach. Processed food alternately imitates and provides a counterpoint to ideas about “traditional” foods. At the same time, many people make efforts to retain habits and knowledge associated with milpa-based cuisine. The chapter acknowledges the inherent destructiveness of nostalgia in the variety that anthropologist Renato Rosaldo called “imperialist nostalgia,” mourning that which one has destroyed, in ways that further displace and destabilize historically dominant ways of preparing food.
Black Market Capital
Authors: Konove Andrew
Published: January 2019

For more than three hundred years, Mexico City’s Baratillo marketplace was synonymous with crime, vice, and the most disreputable elements of urban society. Despite countless attempts to disband it, the Baratillo persevered, outlasting Spanish colonial rule and dozens of republican governments. In the twentieth century, transformed the neighborhood of Tepito it into a global hub of black-market commerce. Black Market Capital argues that the Baratillo and the broader shadow economy—which combined illicit, informal, and second-hand exchanges—have been central to the economy and the politics of Mexico City since the seventeenth century. The Baratillo benefited a wide swath of urban society, fostering unlikely alliances between elite merchants, government officials, newspaper editors, and street vendors. Vendors in the Baratillo turned their market’s economic appeal into political clout, petitioning colonial and national-era officials and engaging in the capital’s public sphere to defend their livelihoods. Using records from municipal and national archives in Mexico City, newspapers, travelers’ accounts, and novels, Black Market Capital reconstructs the history of one of Mexico City’s most enduring yet least understood institutions. It provides a new perspective on the relationship between urban politics, the informal economy, and public space in Mexico City between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries.
A Pernicious Commerce
Authors: Konove Andrew
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the efforts of New Spain’s last Habsburg viceroys to eliminate the Baratillo in the late 1680s and 1690s, focusing on the 1692 riot that ravaged the Plaza Mayor. Following the riot, Spanish authorities sought to re-engineer the Plaza Mayor, forcing the Baratillo out and replacing it with a masonry alcaicería—later known as the Parían—a structure designed for the capital’s elite import merchants. The chapter explores why colonial authorities found the Baratillo so troubling, how they sought to eliminate it, and why that effort ultimately failed.
The Dictator, the Ayuntamiento, and the Baratillo
Authors: Konove Andrew
Published: January 2019

This chapter takes readers into the national period with a focus on a largely-forgotten urban renewal campaign that the nineteenth-century strongman Antonio López de Santa Anna and the Mexico City Ayuntamiento undertook in the early 1840s. Removing the Baratillo was central to Santa Anna’s ambitious, if short-lived, reform agenda. But he encountered resistance from baratilleros who pushed back by writing petitions and airing their grievances in the Mexico City press—decades before historians have found popular actors engaging in Mexico’s public sphere. The episode shows how the laws and the rhetoric of republicanism gave vendors new tools to defend their businesses against government policies that threatened them.
Order, Progress, and the Black Market
Authors: Konove Andrew
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the Baratillo’s relationship with Porfirian Mexico City, when the country’s autocratic president Porfirio Díaz sought to modernize the nation and its capital city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the events that led to the Baratillo’s relocation to the neighborhood of Tepito, in 1902. Facing the threat of the market’s closure, baratilleros bargained with the municipal government, reaching a compromise to move to Tepito—a location the vendors proposed themselves. The chapter contributes to recent scholarship that revises earlier depictions of the Porfiriato as a monolithic dictatorship, emphasizing instead the multiple ways that Mexico’s government and citizens maintained a tense and unequal peace for more than thirty years.
Epilogue
Authors: Konove Andrew
Published: January 2019

The epilogue briefly traces the intertwined histories of the Baratillo and the neighborhood of Tepito in the twentieth century. Like many other decisions regarding the Baratillo, its move to Tepito was supposed to be temporary. Yet the market remained, and over the decades it grew into a sprawling marketplace for second hand, stolen, contraband, and pirated goods that consumed the neighborhood. By the middle of the century, Mexico City newspapers rarely referred to the Baratillo by name; instead, they used the same disparaging language that observers had traditionally employed to describe the Baratillo for the neighborhood itself. Today, Tepito is the most famous barrio in Mexico, with a distinctive oppositional identity that is inextricably tied to its role as the epicenter of Mexico City’s black market.
Belatedness
Authors: Ferme Mariane C.
Published: January 2019

This chapter offers an example of violent and sensory transmissions—and belated encounters with trauma—in the context of masked political and ritual performances by a male secret society. Latency is the temporality of traumatic memories and their erasures. This chapter offers an analysis of the ways in which the violence of an event is fully experienced only in the aftermath of its performance, informing the gap between images and textuality. It weaves material from the photographic and textual archive of T. J. Alldridge and the anthropologist’s experience of a related event a century later to elaborate how the trace of the Real emerges from past erasures.
Chronotope 1
Authors: Ferme Mariane C.
Published: January 2019

Borrowing an expression from Bakhtin about the crystallization of space-time in language, this reflection focuses on the anticipatory and revelatory quality of collective anxieties about the present, which are frozen in rumors (for instance, about suspected collusions between soldiers and rebels) and become fully realized as actual alliances at a later time. The chapter traces the emergence and eclipse of rumors at specific historical moments in war.
Wartime Rumors
Authors: Ferme Mariane C.
Published: January 2019

The circulation of wartime rumors frames the history and experiences of particular conflicts, as well as widely shared popular anxieties that mark turning points and critical events—transitions that define clear “befores” and “afters” in the memories of those who lived through the civil war. Rumors of collusions between humanitarian agencies and the RUF rebels—particularly the multiple “Red Crosses” with their secretive and sometimes conflicting agendas—informed collective imaginaries during the conflict. The chapter also examines historical instances of suspicions surrounding the secretive diplomatic activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross in other wars and the organization’s practices of neutrality and secrecy that fail to quash those suspicions.
Chronotope 2
Authors: Ferme Mariane C.
Published: January 2019

Numbers aggregated in the form of estimates of casualties or to convey the scale of a catastrophic event are the companion aspect of exemplary cases. Numericality increasingly informs evidence-based governance, humanitarian, and human rights discourse, advancing claims to objectivity and transparency through aggregations, averages, and statistical samples. This chronotope examines in particular the amputee as the figure of exemplary victimhood of this civil war in mediatic efforts to mobilize an international response, and it argues that taken in the broader context of the war, other causes of fatalities outnumbered this one.
Hunters, Warriors, and Their Technologies
Authors: Ferme Mariane C.
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores the transmogrification of historical figures of hunters and their epistemologies of forest and landscape into novel forms of militias trained for guerrilla warfare. Hunter militias organized at a national scale as paramilitary forces emerged halfway through the civil war in alliance with the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), which took power in the 1996 elections. They blended modern techniques of warfare with supernatural protections. These militias initially provided protection and accountability to civilian populations—particularly in rural areas—at a time when political institutions failed to do so. The reconfiguration of hunters as militias enabled the possibility of new forms of community as creative experiments at a time of transition and crisis.
Refugees and Diasporic Publics
Authors: Ferme Mariane C.
Published: January 2019

The civil war saw a dramatic increase in emigration from Sierra Leone, and the country’s diasporic population has increasingly contributed to the ways in which Sierra Leone reterritorializes itself beyond its boundaries through the practices of this population. The chapter also examines the emergence of transnational public spheres through cyber-publics and other revolutions in the means and media of communication in the formation of national and subnational communities of belonging beyond Sierra Leone.
Child Soldiers and the Contested Imaginary of Community after War
Authors: Ferme Mariane C.
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the emergence of the figure of the child soldier in African conflicts and of the criminalization of forced conscription of children in combat in international war crimes jurisprudence, particularly at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL)—one of the first war crimes tribunals to secure convictions on this count. The chapter examines the context of a civil war that often split small-scale communities and of a society that offers individuals multiple communities of belonging, thus complicating choices about the reintegration of demobilized, war-affected youth. Through two cases of war-affected youth, the chapter questions the humanitarian application of “normative post-traumatic” practices of psychological narrativization of trauma, leading to ambiguous and ambivalent returns in communities of origin, where forms of collective forgetting were preferred as strategies for addressing harms and war reparations.
Introduction
Authors: Hölscher Tonio
Published: January 2019

The societies of ancient Greek city-states can be defined as communities of “immediate acting” in which all social interaction is brought about in the presence of its members. In this context, seeing and being seen becomes a primary condition of social and political life. The basic thesis of the book is that the world human beings live in, the “Lebenswelt,” is characterized by its visuality, like images, and that the visual world, together with images, constitute the “conceptual reality” the Greeks and Romans lived in.
Time, Memory, and Images
Authors: Hölscher Tonio
Published: January 2019

Greek and Roman societies were strongly rooted in and intentionally based on their authoritative pasts, made visible in monuments and “lieux de mémoire.” For a precise understanding of these phenomena, a theoretical distinction is introduced between the knowledge of tradition and the memory of a paradigmatic past, exemplifying both categories by testimonies of the age of Augustus. Specific commemorative capacities are explored, on the one hand, in places of mythical and historical memory in Athens and Rome and, on the other hand, in political monuments from classical and Hellenistic Greece to republican Rome and the Roman Empire. The distinction serves to underline the potentially aggressive character of collective identity based on public memory.
Person, Identity, and Images
Authors: Hölscher Tonio
Published: January 2019

Within the ancient culture of “immediate acting” the visual appearance and behavior of individual persons was of paramount importance. The result was a particularly strong interrelation between persons and images: Greek politicians, Hellenistic kings, and Roman generals and emperors styled themselves into “living images,” whereas portrait statues made these persons corporally “present” in public spaces and served as models of public behavior. Yet, while recent scholarship has underlined the ideal features in Greek and Roman portraiture, exemplifying normative virtues, the aim in this chapter is to reestablish individual features as a basic phenomenon in Greek and Roman art practice.
The Dignity of Reality
Authors: Hölscher Tonio
Published: January 2019

Greek art is traditionally considered the birthplace and highpoint of artistic idealism; the same judgment is applied, with the exception of portraits and historical reliefs, to Roman art. In addition, recent art theory strongly emphasizes the fundamentally constructing character of the visual arts. Yet the Greeks and Romans themselves considered their art as basically mimetic. In order to overcome this contradiction, the notions of conceptual realism and conceptual reality are introduced. The real world, as it is formed and perceived by human beings, is conceptually constructed; figurative art is a translation from the medium of conceptual reality into the medium of images.
“All the World Was America”
Authors: Jelly-Schapiro Eli
Published: January 2019

Though ubiquitous in contemporary political discourse, the trope of “security” is under-historicized. Countering ahistorical accounts of “post-9/11” political-economic order, this chapter situates the contemporary manifestation and twentieth-century evolution of security rhetoric and practice within the long history of colonial modernity at large. It proceeds through an examination of three elemental relations: security and property, security and race, and security and emergency. The security state emerges to guarantee the process and outcome of capitalist accumulation, in the colony as in the metropole. The securing of private property is enabled by and in turn reinforces race thinking and practice. And the enactment of emergency or exception legitimates the preemptive and punitive violence of the security state.
“Choc en Retour”
Authors: Jelly-Schapiro Eli
Published: January 2019

The contemporary theorization of security and terror, this chapter demonstrates, is less a direct and autonomous critical project than a synthesis of three categories of critique: the critique of spectacle; the critique of the politics of exception; and the critique of global capital qua empire. Each of these categories of critique is conditioned by but unevenly revelatory of the “choc en retour” of colonial rationality to the metropole—the boomerang return, to the postcolonial North, of imperial forms of governance and accumulation. This unevenness, this chapter argues, is an effect of, and reveals, theory’s symptomatic nature—the ways in which theory often echoes the form of its critical object.
“Vanishing Points”
Authors: Jelly-Schapiro Eli
Published: January 2019

This chapter engages works of fiction that counter both the ahistorical affirmation and ahistorical critique of U.S. Empire with historicist renderings of the current conjuncture. In particular, this chapter is guided by a discussion of three postcolonial novels—three works that locate the present within the long history of colonial modernity: Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Resisting the exceptionalism of the “post-9/11” frame, these novels reveal the colonial histories that haunt the present. But they also self-reflexively betray, in their form as well as their content, the persistent and pervasive force of the trope of rupture and related modes of erasure.
Rupture and Colonial Modernity
Authors: Jelly-Schapiro Eli
Published: January 2019

This Epilogue begins by highlighting the narratives and processes of historical distortion that imagine the War on Terror as a past-tense event and absolve the War on Terror of its manifestly imperial substance. It then turns to a consideration of cultural texts that counter the cycle of historical erasure and imperial reproduction—in particular a growing body of War on Terror veterans’ narratives that illuminate the lingering effects of war’s traumas. In brief dialogue with two novels in particular—Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life—this Epilogue offers a summary reflection on the false beginning and false endings of the War on Terror.
History, Narrative, and the War on Terror
Authors: Jelly-Schapiro Eli
Published: January 2019

The assumption that September 11, 2001 constituted a historical rupture enabled the advent of the War on Terror and disabled its critical apprehension. Beginning to counter the trope of rupture, this Introduction locates the paradigms of security and terror—the core conceptual tropes of contemporary and American and global culture—within the long history of a specifically colonial modernity. After outlining this history—its rationalities of accumulation and governance—this Introduction poses the problem of representation, the question of how the colonial present is historicized and theorized in works of contemporary fiction and theory.
Letters, Diaries, etc. (1930–1948)
Authors: Daub Adrian
Published: January 2019

This section presents the letters, excerpts from diaries, and other materials exchanged and/or written before Thomas Mann's delivery of a copy of Doctor Faustus to Arnold Schoenberg in January of 1948.
Additional Reading
Authors: Hoffmann Richard
Published: January 2019

This chapter presents a firsthand account by Arnold Schoenberg's assistant Richard Hoffmann and an analytical essay by Bernhold Schmid. Among the anecdotes that Hoffmann shares is how he was requested to record those sections of Doctor Faustus which dealt, in some way, with music, and how Schoenberg would smile in appreciation as he played and replayed these excerpts at his leisure. Schmid's essay deals with the long and bitter dispute between Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. The dispute is structured into two phases: one concerns the private sphere, which ended with a postscript added to Doctor Faustus by Mann, and Schoenberg's letter of thanks; and the other the public sphere, initiated by Schoenberg with a letter to the Saturday Review of Literature, which resulted in the press engaging in the dispute.
Appendices
Authors: Daub Adrian
Published: January 2019

This section presents an appendix of original essays and writings by Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Theodor Adorno that are referenced in the letters and diaries.
Introduction
Authors: Portes Alejandro , Armony Ariel C.
Published: January 2019

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's focus, namely the changes in Miami during the last quarter of a century—a period that led to the present social, economic, and political character of the city. The confluence of diverse populations in this single geographic spot continues to produce change without a blueprint, leading to surprising outcomes. Tracing them is the object of the investigation in this volume. The remainder of the chapter outlines a set of conceptual guidelines framing the analysis. Topics covered include cities as the center of the evolution of humankind; the transformation of Miami that began in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992; the absence of a consolidated power structure and the still-evolving character of local culture; and the key roles of Miami with respect to Latin America.
Between Transience and Attachment
Authors: Portes Alejandro , Armony Ariel C.
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores people's attachment to Miami in order to understand the character of urban life. Attachment to a place has a concrete psychological impact on individuals. It makes them feel comfortable, gives them a sense of security, and facilitates their involvement with the community. How we feel about the place where we live is a fundamental component of our lives. Conversely, how people experience attachment to a place is a fundamental component of the life of the city. In the case of Miami, understanding community attachment requires an examination of the various ways in which people feel that they belong against the backdrop of transience. A city like Miami with such a degree of heterogeneity, constant migrant flows, and fragmentation faces a major challenge: How can it have meaningful community life?
The Economic Surge
Authors: Portes Alejandro , Armony Ariel C. , Portes Alejandro , Armony Ariel C.
Published: January 2019

This chapter traces Miami's economic development. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Miami-Dade County gross regional product in 2012 was $124 billion, having increased from $40.4 billion in 1982 and $50.9 billion in 1992. The motors of the regional economy are wholesale trade, transportation, real estate, finance and insurance, and health care. Together, these sectors accounted for almost half (48.3 percent) of the regional economy by the second decade of this century. By contrast, the accommodation and food services industry, traditionally associated with tourism, represented just 6 percent of the metropolitan economy. An emerging high-tech sector offers promise of transforming the city into a center of technological innovation.
Miami through Latin American Eyes
Authors: Portes Alejandro , Armony Ariel C.
Published: January 2019

This chapter considers Latin American beliefs and attitudes toward the United States. These beliefs and attitudes are multidimensional. They express tensions, paradoxes, and often ambivalence. Studies have indicated that access to information and personal contact with the United States are vital in shaping people's dispositions because these concrete interactions have a direct impact on individuals' conceptions about the United States. Research has also demonstrated that anti-Americanism in Latin America is shaped by ideology and national context. Miami has become an extension of Latin America and the Caribbean, where the culture is as influenced by Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, and other Latin groups as it is by the sophistication and allure of New York City and Hollywood.
The Qianlong Emperor
Authors: Kutcher Norman A.
Published: January 2019

When the Qianlong emperor came to the throne, he abrogated his father’s compassionate and rational system for eunuch management. Qianlong saw his father’s innovations as a dangerous departure from the gold standard of eunuch management. Qianlong would lower eunuchs’ status, cut their salaries, eviscerate their system of ranks, and reduce their education levels. In so doing, he came to perpetuate a series of myths about his eunuchs meant to perpetuate the notion that he was strict on them. He asserted that they only performed menial tasks, never left the palace, had no wives or children, were few in number in his palaces, and were carefully watched over by him personally. In truth, he was quietly allowing them new opportunities to come and go as they pleased, and to develop business interests on the outside. He did this because he faced a growing shortage of eunuchs to staff his ever-burgeoning number of palaces, including Yuanming Yuan.
Conclusion
Authors: Kutcher Norman A.
Published: January 2019

Besides reviewing the chapter themes, the Conclusion reflects on the power dynamic between emperor and eunuch. Emperors were the most powerful men in their world, and they occasionally exercised total power over their eunuchs, but in general imperial power over eunuchs was tempered by factors such as palace opinion, and the responsibilities imposed by the gold standard described in Chapter 1. The Conclusion also points to the consequences of Qianlong’s management style late in his reign, and in subsequent Qing reigns (such as that of the Daoguang emperor), when eunuchs grew in arrogance, sense of entitlement, and independence. They also developed rich lives outside the palace, buying homes, living on their own, and pursuing romantic connections with those on the outside. They never achieved the political power of Ming eunuchs, but they became wealthy and powerful in Beijing and beyond.
Culture
Authors: Chidester David
Published: January 2019

This chapter engages material culture in the study of religion. Referring to bodies, objects, and places, material culture in religion is the sacred vitality of things. Rejecting the division between spirit and matter, soul and body, recent research on religion and material culture has attended to the senses, embodied practices, meaningful objects, built environments, and the material possibilities and constraints of technology, with special attention to the communication technology of media. As an entry into the study of religion and material culture, this chapter focuses on the relic and the icon as material objects in religious practice; the fetish in the Atlantic world and the cargo in the Pacific world as focal points for conflicts over about the meaning, power, and value of objects; and the material conditions of religious media, from the senses to audiovisual media, which in their materiality create different capacities and constraints for religion.
Colonialism
Authors: Chidester David
Published: January 2019

This chapter situates religious formations in the contact zones and power relations of colonial situations. Referring to the settlement of a distant territory by foreigners, colonialism entails the use of military force and political power to create and maintain a situation in which colonizers gain economic benefits by exploiting trade, raw materials, and the labor of indigenous people. For the study of religion, colonialism calls attention to the role of religion in intercultural contact; the force of religion in the conquest and control of indigenous populations; and the changing character of religious subjectivity and agency, especially in relation to the inherent violence of colonialism. These issues are examined by referring to the analysis of anticolonial theorists, such as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Frantz Fanon, and Eduardo Mondlane. While colonialism has played an important role in the history of religions, it has also shaped the modern categories of religion and religions.
Imperialism
Authors: Chidester David
Published: January 2019

This chapter extends the analysis of religious formations in colonial situations by focusing on imperialism. As critical research on religion, the study of imperialism and religion directs attention to religious creativity within the asymmetrical power relations of contact zones, intercultural relations, and diasporic circulations. Starting with the imperial ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, which featured a pageant of the imperial myth of progress from savagery to civilization, this chapter recalls how the Shakespearean drama of the imperial Prospero and the colonized Caliban has been a template for analyzing religion under colonial conditions. Like Shakespeare’s enchanted isle, colonizing and colonized religion have been shaped by oceans, with the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds emerging as crucial units of analysis. By attending to imperial and colonial formations, this chapter indicates some of the important landmarks, sea changes, and possibilities in the study of imperialism and religion.
Conclusion
Authors: Chidester David
Published: January 2019

In this book we have moved through religious materiality, exploring striking and illuminating cases, guided by attention to material categories, formations, and circulations. We have considered different meanings of materiality. People engage objects; objects engage people; and both people and objects are interwoven in material conditions and consequences that can rise to the level of materiality. Following the usage of the term in the practices of law and accounting, materiality is less a question of metaphysics than a matter of political economy. In this respect, materiality is a matter of force and effect, a configuration of discourse and power that makes a difference in the world. As a result, our exploration of the material dynamics of religion has been as much about dynamics—power, energy, force, and motion—as it has been about material objects....
Diva Seductions
Authors: Miller Laura , Copeland Rebecca
Published: January 2019

The introduction describes how we define and think about the diva in this volume. We discuss the way divas systematically draw our attention to the performative nature of identity, to gender, and to battles over control of female bodies and female sexuality. We want our case studies to move beyond archival portraits to consider historically and culturally informed diva imagery and diva lore. From ancient goddesses and queens to modern singers and writers, we note that each chapter critically reconsiders the female icon, tracing how she has been offered up for emulation, debate, or censure. We ask how the diva disrupts or bolsters ideas about nationhood, morality, and aesthetics. She is ripe for expansion, fantasy, eroticization, and playful reinvention, yet her unavoidability also makes her a special problem for patriarchal culture.
Kirino Natsuo Meets Izanami
Authors: Copeland Rebecca
Published: January 2019

Kirino Natsuo picks up where the Kojiki leaves off in Joshinki (The Goddess Chronicle), her creative retelling of the Izanami-Izanagi myth sequence. She invents an afterlife for the goddess Izanami. In so doing, Kirino defies earlier gendered stereotypes by reconstituting Izanami with a diva-esque interiority. Izanami is furious that she has been locked in the underworld while her male partner roams the world freely. Her anger spills over into the imaginary human world Kirino designs, and it disrupts the myths that have been invented to keep female desire in check. Using Lauren Berlant’s notion of the “diva citizen,” this chapter finds in the angry voices of both Izanami and her author, Kirino, a creative force meant to challenge and change social and institutional practices of gender discrimination.
Ame no Uzume Crosses Boundaries
Authors: Aoyama Tomoko
Published: January 2019

Ame no Uzume no Mikoto is widely regarded as Japan’s first comic-erotic diva. She is a shamanistic trickster goddess who appears in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Uzume uses her body and performance effectively to establish communication and overcome actual and potential crises. In one of the most celebrated episodes of the mythology, Uzume’s comic-erotic dance successfully invites the sun goddess Amaterasu out of the Heavenly Cave. This chapter first outlines the portrayal of this goddess in the classical texts. Then, using Tsurumi Shunsuke’s theory, the discussion focuses on Uzume’s ability to cross various boundaries and find ways to communicate even in the most dangerous and challenging situations and with potential opponents. Applying the theory to the contemporary “vagina artist” Rokudenashiko, the final section of the chapter demonstrates the significance and validity of the Uzume model of comic subversion and revitalization in our misogynistic society.
Searching for Charisma Queen Himiko
Authors: Miller Laura
Published: January 2019

Himiko was a third-century ruler described only briefly by Chinese historians. In contemporary culture, she is cast as an elderly priestess, an adorable shrine attendant, or a vain sorceress. She morphs from ancient shaman in manga to ditzy gal in video games and anime. She is commodified and objectified in communities as a touchstone for local commerce and community character. Himiko is a rich resource for regional groups in need of a city mascot, beauty-contest theme, or touristic motif. She also appears in divination products and advertising to denote female power and ethnic spirituality. Himiko replaces the high priestess in tarot cards and is channeled by divination providers. This chapter explores these many reinventions of Himiko in order to track how her varied iconography encodes assumptions about gender and power.
Izumo no Okuni Queers the Stage
Authors: Hartley Barbara
Published: January 2019

This chapter introduces the dazzling brilliance of Izumo no Okuni, the woman credited with founding kabuki. Given the scant historical record regarding the real Okuni, the chapter draws extensively on the 1969 novel by the post-war literary diva Ariyoshi Sawako. In Ariyoshi’s telling, Okuni rises from a provincial shrine dancer to become a willful diva, enthralling sophisticated Kyoto audiences. Refusing to allow either her sexual identity or performance style to be constrained by societal norms, she championed theatrical innovation to achieve wild success. Since a feature of Okuni’s performance was to cross-dress and dance as a man, the chapter interprets Okuni’s performance art through the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz.
Transbeauty IKKO
Authors: Bardsley Jan
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores how Ikko, transgender celebrity make-up artist and lifestyle-guide author, uses her personal story and beauty expertise to encourage all women to find self-confidence. The chapter analyzes Ikko's performances in diverse venues: music videos; high school visits; the promotion of beauty tourism to Korea; cameo film appearances; lifestyle guides; and television appearances. It is shown that in all venues, Ikko openly discusses her own history of overcoming personal adversity, offering her life as what Eva Illouz has termed a therapeutic biography and employing a language of recovery to inspire others. It is argued that this call to a personal aesthetics of virtue, beauty, and self-cultivation can lead to social change, even when the diva does not seek political action.