bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Adaptation and Assimilation of Buddhism in China as reflected in Monastic Architecture
Authors: Zhou Yin
Published: June 2017

This chapter takes Buddhist architecture as an example of the dynamic interchange between East and West and the compromise between the original Indian style and native Chinese architecture so as to help demonstrate the transformation process of Buddhism in China during the first through sixth centuries CE. This chapter tries to point out that early medieval Buddhist monasteries, particularly the official ones, were constructed following Indian and Central Asian designs. These foreign types of monasteries brought in a new kind of religious architecture to China, which was later fused into the preexisting architectural culture and evolved into the distinct layout of Buddhist temple adopting the traditional Chinese residential design. This is a concrete and material way to contribute to the understanding of the interaction between a new faith and an old society.
The Dominant Culture View and the Women of the Wall
Authors: Jobani Yuval , Perez Nahshon
Published: June 2017

This chapter analyses the dominant culture view (DCV), which argues that, in any given country, majorities can legitimately advance their religious traditions and shared cultural understandings through the acts of the government, so long as such shared understandings and traditions are effectively demonstrated and present, and their advancement by the state does not violate the rights of minority groups. The dominant culture view thus identifies the state with one denomination. The chapter critically considers the DCV approach as a whole and its applicability to thick sites in general and to the Women of the Wall case in particular. The examination focuses on three assumptions of the dominant culture view approach: the existence of shared understandings, a robust tradition rooted in the past, and respect for democratic standards.
Evenhandedness, Thick Sites, and the Women of the Wall
Authors: Jobani Yuval , Perez Nahshon
Published: June 2017

This chapter analyzes the evenhandedness model, according to which the state remains unaffiliated with any given denomination. While the state does adopt a hands-on approach in which governmental resources are allocated to different religious denominations and groups, the allocation of resources is impartial. The chapter examines the evenhanded approach in general, and its applicability to thick sites and the Western Wall in particular. Critically, it focuses on two principled drawbacks of the evenhanded approach: first, an evenhanded approach to religious claims tends to lead to the adoption of end-result solutions that potentially violate religious freedoms, and second, the burden that this approach places on the government—to continually assess and respond to the demands of different groups—requires unjustifiable optimism with regard to the abilities of any governmental apparatus.
Privatization, Thick Sites, and the Women of the Wall
Authors: Jobani Yuval , Perez Nahshon
Published: June 2017

This chapter analyzes the model of privatization, which keeps the state unaffiliated with any given denomination via a strict “hands off” approach toward religions. It attempts to reduce governmental entanglement with religion both by strictly limiting the role religion can play in political institutions and by respecting the autonomy of religions. It examines the applicability of privatization to thick sites in general and the Western Wall in particular. The main argument is that the most adequate governmental response for the Women of the Wall case, as well as for similar religious conflicts, is context-sensitive privatization. This approach is a promising framework for managing struggles over thick sites, because among other considerations, it is egalitarian, protects religious believers from the state, and unburdens the government from an entanglement with diverse religious beliefs.
Modern Marriage and Emerging Adulthood in the United States
Authors: Willoughby Brian J. , James Spencer L.
Published: June 2017

This chapter explores the broader developmental and cultural contexts of emerging adulthood, explaining how the third decade of life in the twenty-first century is drastically different from that experienced by previous generations. National data are presented that outline trends in education and employment to illustrate these shifts. The authors argue that the increased variation in how emerging adults experience their 20s is perhaps the most important factor in the shifting marriage and family formation trends currently seen among emerging adults. Changes in cultural values such as individualism and moral relativism are also discussed. The authors contend that uncertainty in emerging adulthood has also created conflict, anxiety, and ultimately paradoxes around marriage and family formation that are vexing many modern emerging adults.
I Want to Get Married … Just not Right Now
Authors: Willoughby Brian J. , James Spencer L.
Published: June 2017

This chapter explores emerging adults’ beliefs about the timing of marriage. Variations between the expected and ideal age at marriage are discussed. Emerging adults’ belief that one can marry too early or too late is also discussed as a specific marital paradox. The concept of maturity is discussed in that many emerging adults see maturity as a requirement for adulthood generally and for marriage specifically. The timing of marriage in relation to education and career is also explored. Although career establishment may come before marriage in emerging adults’ minds, the instability of employment and career trajectories in the modern era was an important wrinkle in the best-laid plans of many emerging adults. The authors suggest categorizing emerging adults, based on this set of complex marital timing beliefs, into three common categories: marriage delayers, marriage hesitants, and marriage enthusiasts.
The Influence of Parents and Families
Authors: Willoughby Brian J. , James Spencer L.
Published: June 2017

This chapter begins to explore how parents and families influence emerging adults’ beliefs about marriage. Parents are the primary focus. Two key roles parents play in their children’s lives in terms of future behavior and current orientations are socialization and the intergenerational transmission of values. For emerging adults with happily married parents, many of the marital paradoxes appeared to vanish. The authors discuss how having never-married or divorced parents affects marital beliefs. Observing conflict generally appears to diminish many emerging adults’ view of marriage regardless of the current marital status of their parents. The influence of siblings is also explored. Parents and other family influences appear to be one of the key foundations on which emerging adults have built their internal conceptualization of modern marriage.
The Counterculture of Married Emerging Adults
Authors: Willoughby Brian J. , James Spencer L.
Published: June 2017

This chapter explores the stories of five emerging adults who married in their early 20s, a time when most emerging adults believe it is too early to marry. The authors explore the journeys of each of these five early-married emerging adults, noting, where applicable, how they are forging a unique path compared with many of the themes mentioned earlier in this book. The chapter concludes with an overview of the common patterns across the stories, which include religiosity, a transformational power of marriage, and a strong collectivist mentality. The authors note that these examples illustrate a unique way of approaching marriage that includes believing that marriage is a transformative union that changes people for the better.
Introduction
Authors: Callicott J. Baird , McRae James
Published: June 2017

The dedication of this collection of papers on Japanese environmental philosophy to YAMAUCHI Tomosaburo is intended both to honor a dedicated senior Japanese philosopher and to acknowledge that creating a volume devoted to Japanese environmental philosophy was his idea.

Professor Yamauchi believes that the traditional Japanese sociopolitical order embedded in a distinctly Japanese worldview had once, not so long ago, preserved “the integrity, stability, and beauty” (in Aldo Leopold’s oft-quoted words) of the Japanese islands. ...
Kūkai and Dōgen as Exemplars of Ecological Engagement
Authors: Parkes Graham
Published: June 2017

The current environmental crisis is largely due to a particular conception of the human relationship to nature. Common in anthropocentric traditions of Western thought, this view depicts human beings as separate from, and superior to, all other beings in the natural world. Traditional East Asian understandings of this relationship are quite different and remarkably unanthropocentric, especially as exemplified in the ideas of Chinese Daoism and Japanese Buddhism. The human-nature relationship in the philosophies of Kūkai (aka Kōbō Daishi, 774–835) and Dōgen (1200–1253) offers a notion of somatic practice designed to bring about a transformation of experience. Both thinkers advocate philosophy as a way of life that can help us to engage the world in an ecologically responsible manner.
Recollecting Local Narratives on the Land Ethic
Authors: Mitsuyo Toyoda
Published: June 2017

Indigenous Japanese narratives about the land and its relation with human societies have been handed down from generation to generation as guides to appropriate human conduct. Though Japan has a rich heritage of such narratives about nature, their value has not been properly appreciated because of the adoption of a modern epistemology, which is primarily based on scientific reasoning. Japanese mythological accounts of the world provide a treasure trove of ideas for constructing a land ethic rooted in local traditions. Aldo Leopold’s land ethic offers the notion of biotic community based on his actual observation of nature from an ecological perspective, treating humans as plain members and citizens of the biotic community. Japanese nature narratives provide guidance for living safely and sustainably in harmony with the natural world. The collection of these narratives, therefore, is an important source for a Japanese land ethic built upon the unique cultural heritage of Japan.
Who Wouldn’t Want to Be a Person?
Authors: Smith Caleb
Published: June 2017

In an influential 2005 article, Julie Stone Peters analyzed the state of law and literature scholarship and offered her prognosis for the future of an “interdisciplinary illusion.” This chapter reviews trends in law and literature scholarship of the decade that followed. It observes the prominence of historical approaches that treat law and literature not as universals but as contingent fields and institutions whose relations change over time. It goes on to show how historicism has re-evaluated the key concept of personhood, seeking forms of agency and belonging that do not conform to liberal ideals of individual autonomy or contractual consent. A “postcritical” turn in interpretive scholarship and a rising interest in mixed, compromised forms of selfhood are considered in relation to the precarious conditions of legal and literary studies within the contemporary university.
From Charisma to Routinization and Beyond
Authors: Sarat Austin
Published: June 2017

This chapter argues that the charismatic period of law and literature scholarship and the days when some turned to literature as a template for legal thinking are long gone. It identifies three possible futures for law and literature. One would see the field emphasizing its distinctiveness and resisting incorporation into broader interdisciplinary explorations of law. The second would see the field embedded in broader analysis of the relationship of law and cultural production. The third involves pushing the boundaries of law and literary study beyond the humanities and culture. This law as performance perspective brings literary and cultural analysis together with social studies of the way law performs in a variety of domains. The chapter concludes that the brightest future for the field is one in which the distinctiveness of law and literature scholarship fades so that its contribution to broader understandings of law can be enhanced.
Paranoia, Feminism, Law
Authors: Halley Janet
Published: June 2017

In this chapter, Halley reflects on her friendship with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, focusing on the ways in which it provided a conduit between queer theory in the humanities and legal studies. She compares the roles of paranoia, feminism, and law in Sedgwick’s work and her own, particularly as her friendship with Sedgwick turned on cohering and conflicting emotional and political orientations to these key elements of their shared conversation. Because Sedgwick profoundly altered the conditions of possibility in the humanities, while Halley moved into legal studies, this remembrance is also a reflection on the possibilities for interdisciplinary love and longing.
Pictures as Precedents
Authors: Goodrich Peter
Published: June 2017

Contemporary expansion of the use of images, photographs, film, animation and other visual media in legal argument has given rise to a practice and subdiscipline of visual advocacy. Less studied and commented on, this scopic dimension to legal practice has also resulted in an increasing use of images in judicial decisions. Recent case law provides examples of an image of an ostrich with its head buried purportedly remonstrating against failure to cite binding precedent, a smiling emoji in a decision relating to child custody, numerous splash pages and online order icons in cases relating to consumer purchases over the net, and many further instances of pictures coming to play the law. This chapter directly addresses the role of the eye and the impact of the visual upon the reasoning of judgments, as also on the status and import of precedents that include pictures.
Ornament and Law
Authors: Cheng Anne Anlin
Published: June 2017

Who constitute “natural persons”? How do we move from a biological person to a legal standing? And what does a superficial, minor, and feminized category like the ornament have to do with these large questions? This chapter introduces a case that is little known but arguably one of the most significant habeas corpus cases in the nineteenth century in order to track the surprisingly critical role that racialized and feminized objects played in forming juridical ideas of natural and unnatural persons, legal and illegal subjects, citizenship and criminality. What this case reveals about how a body comes to be legally discernible holds profound implications and challenges for how we conceptualize citizenship and civil rights today.
The Flowers Are Vexed
Authors: Perry Imani
Published: June 2017

This work, at the intersection of feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, and African American literary studies, challenges the concept of the reasonable man which informs Anglo-American jurisprudence. The argument revolves around a politics of relation that challenges the hierarchies of membership that are an integral part to the development of the American legal order. The chapter draws on Hortense Spillers’s germinal concept of vestibularity (standing at the threshold) as well as Stanley Cavell’s concept of the “passionate utterance” to furnish alternatives to the reasonable man. It concludes with readings of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.
Genocide by Other Means
Authors: Cheyfitz Eric , Huhndorf Shari M.
Published: June 2017

Louise Erdrich’s prize-winning novel The Round House tells a story about rape on the reservation that reflects on alarmingly high rates of sexual violence against Native women and the roots of this violence in federal Indian law. This chapter takes the novel as a starting point for analyzing contrasts between indigenous and European conceptions of law, including the relationship between law and literature, and the ways that federal Indian law has historically served as an instrument of genocide and colonial expansion. Erdrich’s novel, the chapter argues, draws out the material consequences of the legal and political disempowerment of tribes and the imposition of federal legal authority, and it upholds tribal law as providing the sole path to justice in colonial contexts.
Copyright and Intellectual Property
Authors: Saint-Amour Paul K.
Published: June 2017

After offering a brief overview of interdisciplinary scholarship on literature and intellectual property law, this chapter argues that future research in the field should focus less on the figure of the individual author and more on how copyright regulates populations. This would be to put down Michel Foucault’s classic essay “What Is an Author?” and pick up some of his later work, in particular his writings on biopolitics. Taking this new direction, we could begin to uncover the demographic logic that has attended copyright since its origins. We could trace how cultural works mediate copyright’s grounding in biology and power. And in quantitative methods we might find powerful tools for both measuring and curbing the extent to which intellectual property laws set the parameters of life.
Drug Regulation and the Inductive Risk Calculus
Authors: Stegenga Jacob
Published: June 2017

The drug approval process is fraught with inductive risk. Regulators must make a prediction about whether or not an experimental drug will be effective and safe. Such inductive risk has important practical consequences, and so non-epistemic values about the importance of these consequences impact the regulatory decisions. To balance the demands of the non-epistemic values, regulators must perform an “inductive risk calculus.” In the American context, this inductive risk calculus is not well-managed. For a variety of fine-grained methodological reasons, the epistemic standard with which the FDA assesses experimental pharmaceuticals is low. This chapter discusses these problems and argues that the inductive risk calculus for pharmaceutical regulation should be retuned in a variety of ways.
Safe or Sorry? Cancer Screening and Inductive Risk
Authors: Plutynski Anya
Published: June 2017

The general assumption behind cancer screening has been that early diagnosis and treatment is effective at reducing cancer-related mortality; this is broadly speaking true, for some cancer screening efforts, in some age groups. However, screening may in some cases do more harm than good. One source of harm is overdiagnosis and overtreatment, the diagnosis and treatment of indolent or slow-growing disease that may never lead to morbidity or mortality in the lifetime of the patient. Precaution in cancer screening is thus a double-edged sword: early diagnosis and treatment has clear benefits; but it is also true that some percentage of patients is unnecessarily treated. This chapter will examine how inductive risk and values come into play in debates about mammography screening.
The Geography of Epistemic Risk
Authors: Biddle Justin B. , Kukla Rebecca
Published: June 2017

At each stage of inquiry, actions, choices, and judgments carry with them a chance that they will lead to mistakes and false conclusions. One of the most vigorously discussed kinds of epistemic risk is inductive risk—that is, the risk of inferring a false positive or a false negative from statistical evidence. This chapter develops a more fine-grained typology of epistemic risks and argues that many of the epistemic risks that have been classified as inductive risks are actually better seen as examples of a more expansive category, which this paper dubs “phronetic risk.” This more fine-grained typology helps to show that values in science often operate not exclusively at the level of individual psychologies but also at the level of knowledge-generating social institutions.
The Inductive Risk of “Demasculinization”
Authors: Powers Jack
Published: June 2017

That scientists should countenance non-epistemic values in their scientific practices has become widely accepted, in part on the basis of arguments from inductive risk. But traditional arguments from inductive risk have focused narrowly on the risk of making mistakes about the truth of hypotheses. This chapter argues that there are inductive risks associated with characterizational choices in science even when there are no mistakes about the truth of hypotheses. Using research into the endocrine-disrupting properties of the herbicide, atrazine, as a case study, this chapter shows how choosing to characterize the effects of atrazine using gendered language poses the risk of reinforcing problematic societal gender norms, while choosing to eschew the use of that gendered language poses risks with respect to environmental protection. The argument that such risks are inductive risks is supported by an analysis of the concept of induction found in traditional arguments from inductive risk.
Augustinian Puzzles about Body, Soul, Flesh, and Death
Authors: Byers Sarah Catherine
Published: June 2017

Augustine’s employment of some (ultimately) Aristotelian concepts and distinctions, such as from the work On the Soul, helped him to develop his own account of the human being as a single-substance body-soul compound, and a correlative theory of death. The recovery of his view involves some work, because he does not always explain how he thinks the core theses to which he is committed play out in detail. Nevertheless it is possible when we use his Literal Meaning of Genesis to illuminate the City of God, Book 13. The former text contains the most extended presentation of Augustine’s natural philosophy. It employs concepts from classical metaphysics—such as matter, body, form, and potentiality—which, along with some of the Aristotelian categories, are recognizable again in the City of God, a work that he commenced as he was completing the Genesis commentary.
Leibniz’s View of Living Beings
Authors: Nachtomy Ohad
Published: June 2017

Leibniz’s theory of organic emboîtement is well known, but seldom analyzed in detail. The model of embodiment Leibniz deploys is not a material one, not the kind of physical emboîtement that we find exemplified in Russian dolls, which are physically encapsulated one within the other, or the view of living things as subtle machines advanced by Descartes. This paper will examine several models of embodiment: physical, logical, expressive/representative, as well as a model of functional organization. I will conclude that the latter captures most adequately the Leibnizian view of a living being as a nested individual and the kind of embodiment it involves. What makes all these nested individuals components of a single individual is that they all follow one dominant program of action which may be seen as composed of many subprograms. But they all serve a single end (telos) that informs the developmental program of an individual.
Phantom Limbs
Authors: Gaukroger Stephen
Published: June 2017

Phantom limbs pose a philosophical problem about the location of pains. The work of Descartes first used them to make a philosophical point about the brain in relation to the body. They have traditionally been thought of as being due to nerve endings on the pathway to the original limb being activated. However, it was subsequently discovered that the phenomenon occurs even when the spinal chord is severed, suggesting that it is rather a question of brain activity, part of a neurosignature through which the brain indicates the body is one’s own. More recent resarch suggests involvement not only of the sensory systems but also the parietal cortex and the limbic system, which is concerned with emotion and motivation.
Ghosts in the Celestial Machine
Authors: Regier Jonathan
Published: June 2017

The brief reflection that follows is a discussion of how and why celestial bodies were seen as alive in the celestial physics of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. From Aristotle to the angelology of the Scholastics and through to the new astronomy of Johannes Kepler, vitalism of some kind played a part in the study of celestial bodies. Celestial vitalism probably reached its height in the late Renaissance, when it was strongly informed by medical ideas. Those living skies seemed to embody animal souls and their forces. William Gilbert, a doctor, described the rotation of the earth as a matter of health. Notably, the freedom attributed to the body’s interal circulations was passed on to celestial spaces. A universe open to the circulation of a generative pneuma, spiritus, or light, anticipated the uniform space of classical physics. The question of celestial embodiment during the Renaissance is thus essential to the wider history of physics and cosmology.
The American Lecture Hall and an Anglo-American Commons
Authors: Wright Tom F.
Published: June 2017

This chapter introduces the themes of the book through a survey of lecture culture during the 1830s–1860s. It draws upon a wide archive of articles, editorials, letters, journal entries, public commentaries, and reminiscences to nuance the claims of multiple generations of historians and critics. The discussion first surveys the transition of “lyceum” into “lecture culture” and the shifting values involved. It explores the role of ideas of civic speech, and the influence of the experiments of Scottish educationalists on what many participants in the lyceum saw as its laudable values of liberal neutrality, independence, and civic duty. The second part argues that we can read the American lecture circuit’s obsession with a transatlantic imaginary as a complex, and problematic, means of securing this neutrality. This category of performances embraced key lectures by group—whose rhetoric challenged the meanings of the Anglo-American commons.
Britain and Wartime Unity
Authors: Wright Tom F.
Published: June 2017

The final chapter turns to the Irish “spider dancer” Lola Montez and the British-American temperance reformer John B. Gough. At precisely the same time they found themselves reimagined as popular lecturers, and speaking to audiences about Anglo-American unity. Their arrival on the lecture circuit highlights the profound changes at the lyceum in the years before the Civil War. This chapter reveals how these two performers used the authority of their hyphenated identities to pose as cultural mediators, reassuring audiences of the strength of Anglo-American unity. Rather than embodying a medium in decline, increasingly theatricalized events became part of the enlarged civic mission of lecture culture. Montez and Gough were focal points of tremendous cultural energy within a moment of national crisis in which popular cultural forms such as the lecture were conscripted into the broader debates around the meanings of loyalty, disunion, and national identity.
The Geopolitics of Total War
Authors: Weinreb Alice
Published: June 2017

This chapter looks at the ways in which food was crucial to the waging of the First World War, exploring the links between military and agricultural technologies, the invention of nitrogen fixing by German chemist Fritz Haber, and the British use of the Hunger Blockade to defeat Germany. These developments meant that the war left a lasting legacy on the world’s food economy. The chapter argues that the current system of international food aid, developed by Herbert Hoover to feed first Belgium and then Germany during the conflict, is one of the most important legacies of the First World War. It also argues that Germany’s experiences of hunger during the war shaped the charged political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, pushing the population toward extremism and ultimately paving the way for the rise of Hitler.
Kitchen Debates
Authors: Weinreb Alice
Published: June 2017

This chapter compares East German and West German attitudes toward women working outside of the home during the 1960s and 1970s. The two German states had radically different attitudes toward female employment. West Germany discouraged it, believing that women should remain out of the workforce to care for their families, especially their children. East Germany encouraged female labor as essential for meeting the country’s economic needs; women’s employment was seen as necessary for their self-fulfillment and as having a positive impact on their children’s health. Despite these differences, both countries perceived home cooking as women’s sole responsibility, as well as a vital necessity. This belief, among other things, determined the countries’ quite different school lunch policies. Ultimately, the normalization of home cooking and a “family meal” shaped women’s relationship to wage labor by demanding that their time and energy be dedicated to daily food work.
Invention
Authors: Vivian Bradford
Published: June 2017

Chapter 1 uses a historical, and notably unconventional, example of witnessing to demonstrate how bearing witness involves sometimes radical and purposeful rhetorical invention (or reinvention) of historical fact. In his Cotton States Exposition Address (1895), Booker T. Washington, a former slave, romanticized the pre–Civil War South with curious irony. This counterintuitive example indicates that witnesses bear witness in public only if social, political, or moral authorities permit their testimonies. In Washington’s case, the authorities in question presided over the economic and political institutions of the post-Reconstruction South. Witnesses are either broadly empowered or narrowly constrained in their ability to invent a version of the past that presiding officials and the public at large may welcome, according to existing standards of decorum or conventions of praise and blame. Witnessing, this chapter argues, is rhetorically inventive insofar as witnesses testify by appearing to present unmediated recollections of the past; yet such apparently unmediated accounts are effects of rhetorical invention constrained by the dictates of immediate sociopolitical hierarchies.
Authenticity
Authors: Vivian Bradford
Published: June 2017

Chapter 2 investigates a case in which large segments of the public praised a deeply suspect act of witnessing without critical scrutiny. Questions of historical authenticity (as well as authorship and authority) attend the rhetorically inventive nature of witnessing in Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fraudulent Holocaust memoir, titled Fragments. The author’s alleged childhood memories during his fictional imprisonment at Auschwitz were hailed as an instant classic in the genre for its apparent historical authenticity, and subsequently lauded with international literary awards, but historians and journalists who eventually questioned its historical accuracy proved, in the end, that the book was fake. The chapter examines why even actual Holocaust survivors celebrated Fragments as an authentic work of testimony insofar as Wilkomirski borrowed and recycled numerous tropes and images characteristic of postwar survivor memoirs, including the ethos of the survivor, fragmented memories, and recollections focused on trauma. Wilkomirski’s book illustrates potential dangers that attend the extensive public receptiveness for commonplace, and oftentimes unquestioned, tropes of authenticity in witnessing.
Habituation
Authors: Vivian Bradford
Published: June 2017

Chapter 4 demonstrates the commonplace nature of witnessing in the symbolic language and embodied habitudes of witnessing at contemporary memorials. The premise that liberal-democratic citizens should bear witness to national crimes and traumas by visiting celebrated memorials has become a commonplace form of civic obligation. The chapter examines the specific forms of witnessing that the National September 11 Memorial encourages visitors to enact. Prolonged and contentious controversies over its design—in effect, its symbolic rhetoric—provide insight into normative assumptions about how such a memorial should best memorialize collective tragedy based on past memorial precedents. The chapter argues that the memorial facilitates habitual forms of witnessing, which involve discursive practices of public remembrance that invoke familiar experiences of physical space, spatial aesthetics, and virtual reality. The National September 11 Memorial thus accommodates popular and immanently personalized habitudes of remembrance that typify late modern public culture.
Impossibility
Authors: Vivian Bradford
Published: June 2017

This chapter argues that the very prospect of witnessing in late modern public culture is defined by countervailing imperatives: the publicly lauded ideal that bearing witness to the past allows forgiveness, as compared to philosophical, theological, or literary arguments that it is impossible to effectively bear witness to atrocious violence or indescribable tragedy. The combined wisdom of frequently invoked postwar commonplaces holds that witnessing is, in a rhetorical sense, both imperative and impossible. This aporia warrants deeper consideration of the rhetorical, as well as political and moral, goods of witnessing. Chapter 5 identifies the widely promoted ideal of forgiveness in late modernity as a timely test case with which to consider the worldly rhetorical effects that witnessing may be said to produce. Examining popular as well as institutional relationships between witnessing and forgiveness suggests crucial insights regarding the rhetorical efficacy of witnessing as a now-commonplace idiom in Western public culture.
Conclusion
Authors: Vivian Bradford
Published: June 2017

The Conclusion reiterates the main conceit of the book: that witnessing is rhetorically commonplace in modern public culture in a twofold sense—culturally commonplace and rhetorically commonplace. It also defends the basic methodology and key concepts deployed throughout the analysis, including the emphasis on principles of rhetorical invention, salient dimensions of modern and late modern public culture, and a capacious understanding of witnessing maintained in each chapter. In doing so, the Conclusion reviews the fundamental thematic connections among all the chapters. It closes by considering the degree to which commonplace witnessing helps to facilitate an emergent form of social, political, or moral community.
Curated Storytelling
Authors: Fernandes Sujatha
Published: June 2017

This introductory chapter presents the main questions and arguments of the book. What is behind the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling? Under what conditions do stories reproduce dominant relations of power, and when can they be subversive? The chapter looks at how storytelling has been treated within scholarly and popular works as a predetermined, universal category, and it posits an alternative approach toward studying stories based in the political economy of storytelling. It addresses the theoretical literature on narrative, class formation, neoliberalism, and subjectivity that will inform the book. The chapter gives an overview of the book, defines the key terms, and discusses the methodologies and research strategies employed.
Charting the Storytelling Turn
Authors: Fernandes Sujatha
Published: June 2017

This chapter aims to give an overview of how the storytelling turn occurred in recent decades. It is a chronicle of the broad shifts that led from the more deeply oppositional storytelling tactics of the 1960s and 1970s social movements to the transactional, therapeutic, and then market-based model of storytelling that currently predominates. During the 1980s and 1990s, social movement storytelling was repurposed by states, international agencies, and the culture industries. In truth commissions, courtrooms, and talk shows, stories were abstracted from the goals of building mass movements that confronted power, and they were reoriented toward transaction and negotiation. In the new millennium, with broader shifts from productive capital to finance capital and the intensification of market values in guiding vast spheres of personhood and practices, storytelling has come to be configured more closely on the model of the market. Nonprofit storytelling and advocacy storytelling are increasingly defined by a business model that emphasizes stories as an investment that can increase competition positioning, help to build the organization’s portfolio, and activate target audiences.
Stories and Statecraft
Authors: Fernandes Sujatha
Published: June 2017

This chapter is focused on the uses of curated stories in cultural diplomacy as a soft power strategy to absorb and defuse antiwar sentiment among women in Afghanistan and the Western women who read and engage with their stories. It looks at the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP), a series of online creative writing workshops conducted by US-based mentors with Afghan women in English. The mentors are genuinely motivated by a desire to share the stories of Afghan women widely and to make visible the abuses they suffer, but their framing of the project encourages responses and outcomes that often reproduce the structural conditions of subjection rather than challenging them. This chapter explores how stories can be drawn into strategies of imperial statecraft, can help to construct modes of Western liberal subjectivity, and, conversely, may contain strategically placed critiques of imperialist projects.
Out of the Home, into the House
Authors: Fernandes Sujatha
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines how curated storytelling in legislative advocacy campaigns redirected migrant domestic workers away from oppositional strategies. During the campaign for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State, storytelling at the legislature and in the media helped to draw mainstream attention to the plight of domestic workers but also truncated larger political possibilities. Domestic worker stories were publicly disseminated through limiting media tropes, they were reframed using hegemonic myths in legislative debates, and they were couched in the language of Hollywood narratives. These stories were severed from the root causes of injustice and from strategies to address these causes. Over the course of the Bill of Rights campaign, the heavy involvement of advocacy networks and foundations in shaping the strategies and narratives employed by the groups ultimately narrowed the goals of the movement and resulted in limited changes for migrant domestic workers.
Sticking to the Script
Authors: Fernandes Sujatha
Published: June 2017

This chapter looks at how storytelling was used by mainstream immigrant rights groups to produce an aspiring class of upwardly mobile and self-reliant undocumented youth while defusing broader migrant rights activism. In the campaign for legalization through a DREAM Act, the undocumented students known as Dreamers told their stories to the legislature and the media. The students were given scripts to follow that emphasized their achievements, assimilation into American society, and rejection of their home countries. In the lead-up to the 2008 national election and the subsequent push for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR), groups of young people were mobilized in mass storytelling trainings across the country to support the electoral and legislative agenda of mainstream organizations. Eventually, many young people rebelled against this orchestration and sought to take control over their own representations. Some even began to move away from storytelling as a mode of political engagement altogether.
Epilogue
Authors: Fernandes Sujatha
Published: June 2017

The Epilogue reprises the major arguments of the book and elaborates on the theoretical observations. Grappling with and analyzing the empirical details of each case in the book requires suturing a Foucaultian account of neoliberal governmentality with Marxian and Gramscian accounts of class formation, agency, and contradiction. This chapter also reflects on one of the key concerns raised in the book: can we find a way beyond curated storytelling? It is only with a resurgence of interlocking movements in a range of areas that we can move from curated stories to mobilizing stories that deepen the work of social justice organizing.
Local Hostilities and International Diplomacy
Authors: Orkaby Asher
Published: June 2017

During the early months of the civil war, Yemen’s mountainous terrain was a particular challenge for the Egyptian army, which was equipped for desert warfare. By the beginning of 1963, Nasser had begun to employ a counterinsurgency strategy against royalist tribal armies that relied on Egypt’s overwhelming advantage in artillery and air power. Between 1963 and 1964, Egypt launched the Ramadan and Haradh offensives in an attempt to conquer northern territories, cut off royalist supply lines from Saudi Arabia, and create a buffer zone protecting the republic’s “strategic triangle” of Sana’a, Ta’iz and Hodeidah, Yemen’s three largest cities. Each Egyptian offensive was followed by internationally orchestrated diplomatic overtures that collectively failed as a consequence of royalist counterattacks that reversed Egyptian territorial successes and placed constraints on Nasser’s bargaining power in Yemen.
Nasser’s Cage
Authors: Orkaby Asher
Published: June 2017

The 1964 Arab Summit and subsequent Egyptian-Saudi agreements appeared to mark the end of Egypt’s military adventure in Yemen. In 1965, however, Nasser reneged on his commitment to withdraw, declaring instead his “long-breath strategy” to remain in Yemen indefinitely. Nasser’s decision to stay in Yemen was encouraged by financial incentives from US President Johnson and Soviet Chairman Brezhnev, who preferred to keep Nasser’s aggressive foreign policy contained in Yemen. While supporting Egypt’s continued presence in Yemen, the United States, with a large USAID presence, and the USSR, with a group of pro-Soviet Yemeni leaders, were competing for the “hearts and minds” of Yemenis in an effort to secure an independent position in South Arabia.
The Anglo-Egyptian Rivalry in Yemen
Authors: Orkaby Asher
Published: June 2017

The Yemen Civil War brought about the end of the British Empire and represented the final stage of an Anglo-Egyptian rivalry that had begun with Lord Palmerston’s 1839 conquest of Aden and the struggle against Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian army. Post-WWII British foreign policy had, until the end of the 1960s, been strongly influenced by the Conservative Suez Group, later renamed the Aden Group, which wasvehemently anti-Nasser. Members of the Aden Group established a mercenary organization to aid the royalist guerrilla war against Egypt, while Nasser supported anti-British nationalist groups in South Yemen during the 1960s. This clandestine war helped bring about the mutual defeat and withdrawal of British and Egyptian imperial designs in Yemen.
The Impact of Individuals
Authors: Orkaby Asher
Published: June 2017

No single foreign or domestic power was able to exercise control over events in Yemen, which created an opportunity for many to have a lasting presence in South Arabia. Three individuals, in particular, made inroads in Yemen that impacted the course of the civil war and the future of the country: Bruce Condé, an eclectic American philatelist, became postmaster general of Imam al-Badr’s tribal areas and singlehandedly brought tribal nonstate actors a level of international legitimacy. André Rochat brought the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Yemen for the first time and played an important role in royalist healthcare and the adoption of Geneva Conventions in Yemen. Dr. James Young led a group of Southern Baptist missionaries in founding a modern Western hospital in the rural village of Jibla, amidst one of the most religiously conservative societies in the world.
The Siege of Sana’a and the End of the Yemen Civil War
Authors: Orkaby Asher
Published: June 2017

As Egyptian troops withdrew from Yemen in November 1967, Imam al-Badr’s royalist armies descended upon Sana’a to overthrow the republic. The subsequent seventy-day siege served as a defining moment for Yemen. The heroic efforts of Hassan al-‘Amri and timely Soviet airlifts helped defend the capital city and create the revolutionary ethos that defined the Yemeni republic for the next six decades. The lifting of the siege in February 1968 was the first step toward a gradual Yemeni-led cessation of hostilities. In the aftermath of the siege, international attention dissipated as quickly as it had arrived six years earlier, having transformed Yemen from an isolated imamate into a modern nation-state.
The Map of the Body
Authors: James Elaine T.
Published: June 2017

The descriptive poems of the Song (sometimes called waṣfs) are three long texts that punctuate and lend a sense of overall structure to the Song. In these poems, the lover’s body is described as a landscape. This chapter offers a reading of these three texts together as a conceit of process. It argues that the landscape concept relies on an intuition of perspective—of viewing—that orders the audience’s response to the poem’s subject. The descriptive poems build a progressively more developed vision of the lover’s body as a map. As they do so, they model a way of seeing—a lover’s vision—that sees with increasing complexity over time.
A Definition, a Typology, and a Theoretical Model of Host-State Use of Diasporas
Authors: Marinova Nadejda K
Published: June 2017

This chapter defines how “diaspora” is interpreted throughout the book and for multiple generations belonging to a diaspora, as well as what “utilization of diaspora” means. A contribution in the chapter is the theorizing about the plethora of ways in which host states utilize diasporas (i.e., creation of the organization, funding, granting of a platform, etc.). The chapter proceeds to propose a typology of how host states utilize diasporas to advance foreign policy agendas, with examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. The central contribution of the book, presented in the chapter, is the four-factor theoretical model for the circumstances under which host governments utilize diasporas. The model explains the dynamics of this previously systematically unexamined phenomenon, and it draws on insights from political science and sociology, including the literatures on diaspora, ethnic lobbies, and transnationalism. The chapter elaborates on the model and on its qualitative measurements.
Lebanese-American Allies of the Bush Administration
Authors: Marinova Nadejda K
Published: June 2017

Utilizing firsthand interviews with activists and Lebanese diaspora leaders, the chapter centers on the active role of a coalition of Lebanese-American organizations who advanced their positions and those of the Bush administration in promoting, before UN diplomats, members of Congress, the public, and the media, the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1559 (2004). UNSCR 1559 mandated Syrian withdrawal from Lebanese territory and militia disarmament. The chapter also analyzes the involvement of Lebanese-American organizations in lobbying for the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (2003). The novel relationship between US policymakers and their junior Lebanese-American allies was in contrast to the 1990s, when Washington was interested in preserving the status quo with Syria and doors had been closed for the Lebanese diaspora activists. The relationship upholds the theoretical model central to this work, and it traces the interaction between the Bush administration and Lebanese-American organizations from 2001 until 2005, when Syria withdrew its troops from Lebanon.
Syro-Lebanese Diaspora Entrepreneurs in Brazil
Authors: Marinova Nadejda K
Published: June 2017

The Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, or Camara de Comercio Arabe Brasiliera (CCAB), an organization of Syro-Lebanese entrepreneurs, is the official intermediary of the Brazilian government in export relations and a variety of business functions related to conducting business with the Arab League states. The chapter illustrates how host-state utilization of diasporas takes place both in military regimes and in democracies, tracing Brazil’s engagement with the Chamber in mutually beneficial commercial endeavors since the 1970s. The chapter also delves into and illustrates how this utilization of diasporas, in this instance of the Brazilian government and Syro-Lebanese entrepreneurs, can also occur in matters of not only politics and security, but also commerce.