bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Scandal of Starvation in Niger, 1931
Authors: Slobodkin Yan
Published: May 2024

This chapter covers the scandal of starvation in Niger in 1931. The 1931 Niger famine marked the first time that the French Empire explicitly took responsibility for the subsistence of its subjects. However, the French admitted the inadequacy of aid during and after the famine. Essentially, famine prevention was acknowledged as a raison d'être of the colonial state. The chapter then mentions the impact of race, environment, and gender in the progress concerning the freedom of commerce as the answer to famine. It elaborates on the differences and similarities of the Sahelian famines of 1913 and 1931 that eventually presents a narrative of stasis.
Taking Responsibility in the French Empire, 1931–1939
Authors: Slobodkin Yan
Published: May 2024

This chapter explains how the French Empire took responsibility for famine. The 1931 famine in Indochina and Niger forced administrators to articulate the relationship between famine and the colonial state after new discourses emerged regarding norms for prevention and relief. The ethical dimensions of hunger were inseparable from questions of social order. The chapter provides an overview of the association of food, security, and sovereignty to the Nghe Tinh movement, which was one of the first times activists explicitly framed nationalism as a contest over social justice and well-being. Additionally, the famines of 1931 in Niger and Indochina forced a rethinking of subsistence in the French Empire.
Introduction
Authors: Powers David S. , Tagliacozzo Eric
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter explores the culture and way of life of Muslim people across the world. It looks into the processes of negotiation that determine what it means for a particular society to be Islamic, which are simultaneously dynamic and continually renegotiated by the members of any religion. Almost all Muslims adhere to key doctrines, such as the oneness of God and the finality of Muhammad's prophecy. The chapter explains how differences between different Muslim societies develop slowly over time, which argues that societies manifest bonds of similarity that cross cultural boundaries. It cites that the key features of the Muslim ecumene revolve around a broad sense of community, adherence to the five pillars of Islam, and a set of often shared beliefs.
Educating Muslim Intellectuals
Authors: Pickett James
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks into the notion of a Persianate madrasa in Central Asia in the nineteenth century. It cites that nineteenth-century central Asia was a bastion of both Islamic learning and Persianate high culture. Although there were discrepancies between broadly overlapping curriculum lists, the disparities were not a product of institutional differences between madrasas, which are also known as Islamic colleges. The madrasa was the foundation of a broader educational environment within which the ulama cultivated Persianate forms of knowledge. The chapter explains that the Bukharan madrasa was characterized as “Persianate,” which references that Arabic was the bedrock of the knowledge system and that Persian disciplines shared space with emergent Turkic vernacular forms by the nineteenth century.
Sovereignty, Slavery, and Diplomacy in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Sulu
Authors: Thomas Megan C.
Published: May 2024

This chapter overviews the notion of sovereignty, slavery, and diplomacy in mid-eighteenth-century Sulu. Forms and practices of sovereign authority were on full display in the 1700s in a series of diplomatic negotiations and treaties between the sultanate of Sulu and Spain or the British East India Company. In the Sulu sultanate, sovereignty was understood and practiced in terms of people and relationships. The chapter mentions that the sultanate's plurality was directly related to the slave trade. It elaborates on the Spanish strategy to contain Sulu slave trading in line with their claims to sovereignty of the islands before considering the British East India Company's objective to initiate a trade relationship.
The French Revolution Comes to the Indian Ocean
Authors: Coller Ian
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses deportation, slavery, and empire in Anjouan. It highlights that slavery and its abolition were more central to the revolutionary age, and their respective implications concerned all categories of people instead of just the enslaved people. The French Revolution was a conflict with global stakes that enmeshed far greater parts of the world than just Europe and the Atlantic. The bodies of French revolutionaries buried on the island of Anjouan speak to the centrality of enslavement and abolition as a dynamic of the revolutionary age in the Indian Ocean. The chapter tackles Anjouan's willingness to become the prison and the graveyard for deportees.
The Lhasa Uprisings of 1959 and 2008
Authors: Atwill David G.
Published: May 2024

This chapter elaborates on the Lhasa uprising of 1959 and 2008. It looks into the repeated erasure of Muslims from the uprising as the result of politicization of the Tibet issue. The subtle airbrushing of Muslims out of Tibet's past and present is part of a centuries-old tradition, which is a tendency by outsiders to regard Tibet as an idealized Buddhist land untouched by external influences. The chapter cites that the Tibetans attack on Lhasa's Grand Mosque in the 1959 and 2008 uprisings raised the suggestion that political alignments were more relevant than religious beliefs. It explains that violence was less a result of underlying ethnic or religious antagonisms than a defense of Tibet's culture and way of life.
Walls, Wonder, and the Edges of the Muslim World
Authors: Zadeh Travis
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the notion of walls as a spatial metaphor for wonder, entertainment, and territory. The wall metaphor is an ideological tool used to identify groups and to keep them separate from one another while simultaneously lining the imagination as an ideological basis for fathoming human history. The dilemma posed by spatial binaries is amplified by the dialectic quality of language and the numerous forms of deixis that structure collective thought and action. The chapter cites how often Western powers emerged as hegemons of the world in political, economic, and technological terms. It explains that the Western triumphalist postures of exceptionalism are mixed with thin stories of Oriental decline, stagnation, and superstition.
Media Coverage of Islam in Contemporary Germany and the United States
Authors: Hinze Annika Marlen
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents an analysis of the media coverage of Islam in contemporary Germany and the United States. It primarily revolves around the two newspapers with the highest circulation in each country: the New York Times (NYT) in the United States and the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) in Germany. The media play a special role in shaping public opinion and the policy discourse about Islam in Germany and the United States. Despite the influence of right-wing populism inside the US government and in the German parliamentary opposition, both countries are deeply divided on Islam. The chapter cites how Islam remains a contentious topic in two of the world's most powerful Western democracies.
Reading Cultural Translation in Two “New Arrival” Arab American Novels
Authors: Youssef Mary
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights how Arab American writers have long been telling stories about immigration, displacement, belonging, and community formation. The chapter primarily focuses on Laila Lalami's work The Moor's Account (2014) and Rabih Alameddine's The Angel of History (2016) as examples of cultural translation and border crossing within literature. The shifts in the assessment and appreciation of Arab and Arab American literature and its translational relationship have occurred at a moment of power imbalance between Arab countries and the United States. The chapter argues that Arab cultural translation efforts are decentered, multivalent, and heteroglossic sites of resistance. It explains how the premigration and postmigration stories remind readers that the metropolitan site has been suffering from postcolonial melancholia owing to its loss of what it is supposed to be, a glorious empire.
The Tomb of Al-Shadhili in Mocha, Yemen
Authors: Um Nancy
Published: May 2024

This chapter covers the construction, reconstruction, and destruction of the tomb of al-Shadhili in Mocha, Yemen. It notes al-Shadhili's burial site as a contested location, situated at the intersection of widespread coffee legends and competing visions of Islam. Al-Shadhili's status as the patron saint of Mocha increased after his death, so his embellished biography served as the site for the conflation of a multiplicity of legacies. The connection between al-Shadhili and coffee also appeared in Yemeni literary sources but with different themes. The chapter explains that the pretense of war and its ensuing chaos have provided certain groups with the opportunity to engage in violent acts against religious practices that they deem objectionable.
Writing Time
Authors: Franzel Sean
Published: May 2024

This book shows how serial literature based in journals and anthologies shaped the awareness of time at a transformative moment in the European literary and political landscapes. The book explores how German-speaking authors and editors “write time” both by writing about time and by mapping time itself through specific literary formats. Through case studies of such writers as F. J. Bertuch, K. A. Böttinger, J. W. Goethe, Ludwig Börne, and Heinrich Heine, the book analyzes how serial writing predicated on open-ended continuation becomes a privileged mode of social commentary and literary entertainment and provides readers with an ongoing “history” of the present, or Zeitgeschichte. Drawing from media theory and periodical studies as well as from Reinhart Koselleck's work on processes of temporalization and “untimely” models of historical time, the book presents “smaller” literary forms—the urban tableau, cultural reportage, and caricature—as new ways of imagining temporal unfolding, recentering periodicals and other serial forms at the heart of nineteenth-century print culture.
Bertuch’s Modejournal
Authors: Franzel Sean
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the organizing conceptual and format conditions of Friedrich Justin Bertuch's Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786–1827) and his response to the “new time” of the French Revolution. The Journal des Luxus und der Moden was Bertuch's flagship publication for many years and played a central role in promoting the visual encounter with various kinds of products and art objects. The chapter explores how Bertuch, his coeditors, and their correspondents attempted to chronicle the present and identify patterns of historical duration at work. It also studies the journal's prominent use of fashion plates as part of its broader engagement with the genre conventions of the tableau. Fashion imagery played a central role in the journal's representation of luxury, but it was also an important part of the journal's aspiration to be itself a form of print luxury.
Goethe’s The Roman Carnival and Its Afterlives
Authors: Franzel Sean
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines J. W. von Goethe's representation of the Roman carnival, which was published in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden and accompanied by a series of images that strongly recalled the journal's fashion plates. The chapter reads Goethe's piece against the backdrop of reporting on features of postrevolutionary popular life characteristic of Friedrich Justin Bertuch's and his coeditors' cultural journalism. The multiple versions of Goethe's piece in luxury book, journal, and works editions represented a compelling case of how different print formats shape the awareness of time. Goethe's text is also a telling example of how contemporaries engage with the cultural politics of the revolution through the logics of visual spectatorship. Ultimately, different horizons open up if one views Goethe's text as a stand-alone work, as one in a series of articles about Rome and antiquity in Modejournal, as part of a broader journalistic and historiographical fascination with Rome vis-à-vis contemporary France, or as one of many single-author writings later incorporated into collected works editions.
Jean Paul’s Incomplete Works
Authors: Franzel Sean
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by describing two episodes where Jean Paul writes the end of his life and works in tandem with serial print formats. In the first, he explores the productive tension between the book fair as medial dispositive and single-author literary production, while in the second, he envisions the conjunction of his life and works with the beginning and end of the Morgenblatt. These episodes encourage one to consider how his visions of future writing and reception trouble a notion of canonical authorial personas. The chapter then examines Jean Paul's works edition, which he planned up to the point of his death, comparing his ideas for collecting the entirety of his writings with J. W. von Goethe's Ausgabe letzter Hand. It also discusses Jean Paul's announcement of his “last work” titled the Papierdrache, or paper kite or dragon, and to the ways in which this late piece reflects on the past and future of a miscellaneous oeuvre. Across these various projects, Jean Paul sets into motion the unruly coexistence of multiple miscellaneous literary work, or Werkchen, enabling multiple possible futures of ever more miscellaneous reading rather than the consolidation of a stable and unchanging body of work.
Waiting for the Revolution (Ludwig Börne)
Authors: Franzel Sean
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by addressing Ludwig Börne's reflections on several different writing and editing projects he is involved in, including his journals and his collected works edition. In both cases, he programmatically suggests that the ephemerality of the periodical tells us something essential about the times. Even while embracing the periodical format, he does not rely on notions of regular periodicity, choosing instead to publish in irregular installments, or zwanglose Hefte. This extends to his volumes of Gesammelte Schriften (Collected writings) (1829–1837), which started coming out in 1829 and to which he added newly generated material over the course of the 1830s. Börne positioned his collected works edition in proximity or analogy to periodical publication, thereby engaging with the potential of republication to reactualize works from the past. The chapter then considers Börne's 1832 to 1834 Briefe aus Paris, which appeared in six volumes as part of his Gesammelte Schriften. Here Börne tried his hand at the conventions of the letter format, long a popular mode of open-ended journalistic and literary correspondence. In his Briefe aus Paris volumes, Börne foregrounds themes of delay and waiting.
Heine’s Serial Histories of the Revolution
Authors: Franzel Sean
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by exploring Heinrich Heine's more general approach to history and his dual critique of academic historians and of the philosophy of history before turning to several specific episodes in his contemporary historical writings. The first deals with his juxtaposition of significantly different modes of journalism and history writing and his placement of these modes into varying relations of before and after. Heine's critical take on historical portraiture was a second side to his engagement with serial forms. The chapter then looks at Heine's serial history writing in Französische Zustände (Conditions in France) (1833) and Lutezia (1854). He set apart his own historical character description from other modes of history writing through ironic mirroring and mimicry, a kind of anti-portraiture. The chapter also considers the French and German prefaces to the book publication of Lutezia, examining how these retrospective texts address the question of literary afterlives.
Afterword
Authors: Franzel Sean
Published: May 2024

This afterword begins by highlighting the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, who, in reworking and expanding the size and scope of his writings, increasingly aspired to a Goethean notion of the completed work. The chapter then returns to questions of the historiographical stakes of foregrounding serial literature, considering the timely as well as untimely afterlives of serial forms. Foregrounding periodical culture and serialization brings into view key, often underthematized features of nineteenth-century media ecologies. Another way to pose the question of literary-historical relevance is to ask how the study of the serial print of past centuries might shed light on the temporal awareness of the digital age. Digitization makes print timely again, one might argue, for it allows one to access the central place of it in the lives of nineteenth-century readers.
Strangers in the Family
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This book provides a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). At the heart of this story lies the creolization of patrilineal Confucian marital and familial norms to the colonial legal, moral, and sexual conditions of urban Java. Departing from male-centered narratives of overseas Chinese communities, the book tells the history of community formation from the perspective of women who were subordinate to, and alienated from, full Chinese selfhood. From native concubines and mothers, creole Chinese daughters, and wives and matriarchs, to the first generation of colonial-educated feminists, the book showcases women's moral agency as they negotiated, manipulated, and debated men in positions of authority over their rights in marriage formation and dissolution. In dialogue with critical studies of colonial Eurasian intimacies, the book explores Asian-centered, inter-ethnic patterns of intimate encounters. It shows how contestations over women's place in marriage and in society were formative of a Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.
Bourgeois Manhood and Racial Boundaries
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by examining how basic Confucian and Chinese literacy was expected of boys and young men of middle- and upper-class family backgrounds. There is no intrinsic theological connection, however, between book-based Confucian learning and the moral norms that shaped gender and sexuality expectations. Creolized Confucian masculine and sexual norms were morally determined in three mutually constitutive ways around the institution of marriage. First, it was through success in business that wealthy men and their cult of virility, as embodied in the polygynous ways of the male Kapitan elite, came to represent the peak of Chinese manhood. Second, the bride-price put Confucian marriage and a Chinese bride beyond the reach of the urban working class. Middle-class men came to value this marital premium through their sense of entitlement to a virgin bride. The chapter then demonstrates how middle-class Chinese men could often only keep their “Chinese” brides from running away—and crossing ethnic boundaries—by enlisting the moral policing aid of their Kapitan leaders.
Divorce and Women’s Agency
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This chapter evaluates how creole Chinese wives radically reconstructed the Confucian notion of womanhood by seizing on divorce—a customary institution widely recognized and practiced by Southeast Asian women and men—to admonish their husbands, reassert their status, and break free from oppressive marriages if need be. Minutes from divorce trials at the Chinese Council of Batavia show that the overwhelming majority of petitioners were women. The five most commonly asserted complaints, by order of frequency, were desertion, abuse, jealousy, eviction, and tensions with in-laws (predominantly mothers-in-law). Based on all 738 divorce trials from the 1830s to the 1890s, the chapter demonstrates that creole Chinese customary divorce procedures were largely improvised from local Muslim legal practices. The chapter then analyzes two particular types of pleas: desertion and jealousy (against another woman). In both, women were able to discursively bargain for their personal autonomy by staging claims about their husband's moral duty as breadwinner and emotional obligation as exclusive lover.
The Civilizing Gift of Monogamy
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes how the Dutch and the Chinese of Java negotiated the gender aspects of the civilizing discourse of Europeanized family law between the 1890s and the 1920s. Liberal colonial jurists like Pieter H. Fromberg presented gender equality in general, or monogamous marriage in particular, as a gift of civilization. Yet outside of a small sliver of metropole-educated young Indies Chinese, the concept of family law reform as a civilizing project was received with moral ambivalence by the leading voices of the creole Chinese community in Java. After a brief and heated debate with a young Indies Chinese feminist, the patriarchal reformist leaders proceeded to redefine Chineseness in the realm of customary rites in a bid to counter the civilizational claims of the colonial state. Enforced with little consultation in 1919, the concept of civil law marriage remained peripheral to the cultural lives of the creole Chinese of Java.
Conclusion
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This concluding chapter compares the gendered history of the Chinese in colonial Indonesia with other ethnic Chinese communities in the British colonial Straits Settlements, semicolonial Thailand, and the American colonial Philippines. In the Straits Settlements, there was neither a Kapitan to manage marriage registries nor a racially segregating approach to law. Still, Confucian ritual marriage prevailed among the wealthier Chinese even without the legal bureaucratization of Kapitan-managed Confucian rites marriage and divorce. In the Philippines, the Spanish policy of converting all its subjects to Catholicism appears at first glance to have removed the fundamental cause of marital inequality within and across ethnic lines. Yet the overwhelming majority of interethnic relationships between migrant Chinese men and local women went unregistered and were in effect not unlike the interethnic concubinage relations found in the Dutch Indies. The chapter then reflects on the immediate and longer-term effects of colonial-era race and gender policies on Chinese identity in postcolonial Indonesia.
The Uncreation of the Human
Authors: Brown Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines Alexander Pope's The Dunciad (1728, 1743), which is among literary history's sustained and direct imaginative engagements with human creativity. It takes up the “force inertly strong” that flows through The Dunciad's extended scenario of other-than-human realms and that carries along and across those realms the whole human population of London authors and booksellers, all made into matter. A close reading of The Dunciad from the perspective of gravity provides a methodology for an analysis of the force of the counterhuman imaginary, exercised despite and against the human. The chapter begins with an analysis of the poem's ongoing materialization of human being before describing the processes by which all of those material objects are gathered, assembled, and entangled in a turbulent state of chaos beyond human convention or law. It then accounts for the poem's ultimate, impossible achievement of “a new world to Nature's laws unknown.”
The Military
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the powers that the military holds vis-à-vis the president. As a self-perceived guardian of independence and territorial integrity, as well as a key component of the authoritarian regimes between 1959 and 1998, the military is—for many Indonesians—inseparably linked to the concept of authority. Thus, the military's leverage is significant. Nevertheless, Indonesian presidents have considerable authority, which they can use to counterbalance the military's weight. The constitution positions the president as supreme commander of the armed forces who nominates the military chief and appoints the service chiefs. These appointment powers allow presidents to fill the ranks of the military with personal loyalists, giving them an effective control mechanism against potential insubordination. The chapter demonstrates how Indonesian presidents and the military have used their powers to extract concessions from each other within the framework of coalitional presidentialism. This system has stabilized Indonesian democracy as far as the absence of coups is concerned but also explains some of the setbacks of Indonesian democracy from the 2010s on. The chapter offers an illustrative case study, outlining how the military forced President Widodo in 2016 to abort an attempt to publicly discuss the anti-communist massacres of 1965.
Introduction
Authors: McGillen Michael
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the complex fabric of time and history. Over the past few decades, critics have pointed to a range of factors that contributed to new perspectives on time and space around 1900. The chapter explains that the imagination of eschatology as the temporal end of history was supplanted by spatial representations of the relationship between time and eternity. Meanwhile, alternative models of historiography utilize key modernist aesthetic strategies to reimagine the contours of history. The chapter explains the formulation of new shapes of time in correlation with religious thought and renewed interest in eschatology.
Temporal Exterritoriality
Authors: McGillen Michael
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on Siegfried Kracauer's critique of the historicist paradigm of time. The paradigm serves as a homogenous medium that serves as a vehicle for the chronological flow of events. For Kracauer, history is a collection of diverse “shapes of time” whose spatial and morphological characteristics take priority over their temporal indexes. Kracauer's theory of shaped times is defined by a dialectic of form and formlessness, of the configuration of shapes and their disintegration. According to Kraceaur, history defines its own intrinsic forms of space in a kaleidoscope of changing modal relations, so the ends of history are nonvisualization because they are multidimensional.
Epilogue
Authors: McGillen Michael
Published: May 2024

This chapter covers how the imagination of time unveiled a multiplicity of shapes of time. It explains that history can be illuminated in multiple aspects and that chronological time exists side by side with shaped times. Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musil provided a range of new images of time that expanded and complicated the repertoire of concepts of history handed down by historicism. The chapter looks into Hans Blumenberg's work addressing Franz Kafka's Prometheus marked by the mute persistence of the non-historical substrate of existence. It explains that the end of history gives way to an endlessness of reflection following the modernist imagination of history and eschatology.
Letter One
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents the letter of Plato to Dionysus the Younger. It discusses how Plato felt wronged by the slander and being sent away while Dionysus conducted himself as a tyrant ruling over the city. Plato wrote about how the gold Dionysus gave him was not even enough as a travel allowance nor even as a means of livelihood. Thus, Plato returns the gold since his absence from Dionysus the Younger meant less than any other comrade who had been with him. The chapter highlights how Plato hoped that Dionysis would be strong but recognized how he wronged people so that he could improve himself.
Letter Seven
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter acknowledges Plato's letter addressed to Dion's intimates and comrades. It details how Plato reminisced about his journey with Dion, who was young and learned to cherish virtue more than pleasure and the rest of luxury, and lived his life so until the death of Dionysus. Plato also narrates how he found Dionysus's slander and accusations about Dion in relation to tyranny. Then, Plato offers advice on how to counsel a sick man adhering to a regimen that is depraved with respect to health. The chapter then provides an overview revolving around the counseling Dion and Plato provided for Dionysus.
Eros Tyrannos
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I.
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by discussing Greek culture, the nature of sexuality, and the figures of Eros and Aphrodite. It looks at two examples from the archaic age in epic (Iliad 14) and cultic hymn (the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite). Both involve the actions of Aphrodite in the divine milieu and set important paradigms about the psychology and enactment of sexual desire. The chapter then turns to two influential genres of the classical period in Athens: tragedy (Euripides' Hippolytus) and philosophy (Plato's Symposium). Both texts exemplify the effects of eros in the human world, albeit with vastly different outcomes. Finally, the chapter considers a scene from one of the prose romances (Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe) to take the measure of the drastic changes regarding Eros and his overpowering influence in the expanded world of later antiquity under the Roman Empire.
Cultic Models of the Female
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I.
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes two rituals which fall into the domains of Dionysus and of Demeter, respectively that of the Bacchic rites and that of the Thesmophoria. Both rituals were confined mainly or only to women. In the case of the Bacchants, there is a male leader, but Dionysus is sometimes a child and they his nurses, and sometimes he himself is an androgynous figure who crosses the strict dividing line between the sexes and encourages women to do the same. More significant is the fact that these two rituals function as ideological opposites. For while both share a common agrarian context (grain, wine), the relation between Demeter and Dionysus is one of “correlation through opposition,” each exhibiting “different functional contacts with the feminine world and with the organizing structure of the polis.” The Bacchic rites claim their efficacy through their being perceived as “countercultural” events; the Thesmophoria is directly connected with the overt aims and goals of the city-state.
Aristophanes
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I.
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews Aristophanes' Ecclesiazousae, which showcases performance at different levels: the performance of gender, the performance of politics, and the performance of utopian schemes. It displays and plays with Athenian role-modeling with immense comic verve. It makes a joke of civic (and sexual) performance. However, the chapter also emphasizes the teleological and normative aspects of a mythic scenario, seen also in the cultural productions of tragedy and iconography, which endeavors to create and sustain the solid ideological basis of Athenian masculinity. This scenario allows women to take charge in response to (or rebellion against) transgressions of the social order, which in the first instance are always initiated by men, but then stages a sequence of events that suggest the cure may be worse than the ailment. Ultimately, this scenario of the so-called myth of matriarchy remains in force at the play's comic conclusion, but in its outline, it bears a striking resemblance to Aeschylus' Eumenides, where, by the machinations of Athena, the myth is overcome in favor of masculine rule.
The Future Is Feminist
Authors: Rahnama Sara
Published: May 2024

This book offers a closer look at a pivotal moment in Algerian history when Algerians looked to feminism as a path out of the stifling realities of French colonial rule. Algerian people focused outward to developments in the Middle East, looking critically at their own society and with new eyes to Islamic tradition. In doing so, they reordered the world on their own terms—pushing back against French colonial claims about Islam’s inherent misogyny. The book describes how Algerians took inspiration from Middle Eastern developments in women’s rights. Empowered by the Muslim reform movement sweeping the region, they read Islamic knowledge with new eyes, even calling Muhammad “the first Arab feminist.” They compared the blossoming women’s rights movements across the Middle East and this history of Islam’s feminist potential to the stifled position of Algerian women, who suffered from limited access to education and respectable work. Local dynamics also shaped these discussions, including the recent entry of thousands of Algerian women into the workforce as domestic workers in European settler homes. While Algerian people disagreed about whether Algeria’s future should be colonial or independent, they agreed that women’s advancement would offer a path forward for Muslim society toward a more prosperous future. Through its use of Arabic-language sources alongside French ones, the book moves beyond Algeria’s colonial relationship with France to illuminate its relationship with the Middle East.
Muslim Women Address the Nation
Authors: Rahnama Sara
Published: May 2024

This chapter covers the woman question in postwar Algeria primarily through the women’s page of as-Salam. It explains that the reformist movement had become decidedly more nationalist, but the failure of projects like Blum-Violette left many disillusioned that such reform was possible. Moreover, as-Salam offers access to a broad range of voices highlighting how nationalism’s possibilities for women were contested and renegotiated from below. While nationalism produced new regimes of respectability to which women needed to adhere, it also produced a language that women could marshal to challenge colonialism and Muslim men. The chapter also considers how the nationalist movement minimized women’s concerns despite benefiting from women’s participation.
Machiavelli on War
Authors: Lynch Christopher
Published: May 2024

This book offers a comprehensive interpretation of the philosopher–historian's treatment of war throughout his writings, from poems and memoranda drafted while he was Florence's top official for military matters to his posthumous works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. The book argues that the issue of war permeates the form and content of each of Niccolò Machiavelli's works, the substance of his thoughts, and his own activity as a writer, concluding that he was the first great modern philosopher because he was the first modern philosopher of war. The book details Machiavelli's understanding of warfare in terms of both actual armed conflict and at the intellectual level of thinkers competing on the field of knowledge and belief. Throughout Machiavelli's works, the book focuses on how military commanders' knowledge of human necessities, beginning with their own, enables and requires them to mold soldiers, organizationally and politically, to best deploy them in operations attuned to political context and changing circumstances. Intellectually, leaders must shape minds, their own and others', to reject beliefs that would weaken their purpose; for Machiavelli, this meant overcoming the classical and Christian traditions in favor of a new teaching of human freedom and excellence. As the book makes clear, prevailing both on the battlefield and in the war of ideas demands a single-minded engagement in “reasoning about everything,” beginning with oneself. For Machiavelli, the book shows, the successful military commander is not just an excellent leader but also an excellent human being in constant pursuit of the truth about themselves and the world.
Machiavelli in Command
Authors: Lynch Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines Niccolò Machiavelli's missions during his tenure in office. Machiavelli's government activity can be divided with respect to the two most important military-political events of his career: the creation of Florence's militia toward the middle of his service and the reconquest of Pisa toward the end. Pisa's reconquest is perhaps the event most celebrated by Florentines during the time of the republic in which Machiavelli served, and the militia was instrumental to the success of that enterprise. One can therefore divide his career into the part leading up to his work to create the militia (1498–1504), the part devoted to its creation (1504–6), and then, once the militia existed, the phases before (1507–9), during (February–June 1509), and after the reconquest of Pisa (1509–12). The last of these phases concludes with the other most important military-political event of Machiavelli's career: the disastrous defeat of his militia at Prato in 1512, leading to the end of the republic and return of the Medici, the ouster of Machiavelli's boss, Piero Soderini, and his own dismissal, torture, and political exile.
War Fighting
Authors: Lynch Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter details Niccolò Machiavelli's extensive guidance on how best to operate at various levels of conflict. Some of this guidance comes in the form of general rules, as when he exhorts princes never to remain neutral if their neighbors are at war, or when he insists that one must always assume that any apparent error committed by an enemy is in fact a trap. However, his most essential purpose is not to give rules that relieve one from the labor of thinking through particular situations, but instead to cultivate a certain type of thoughtfulness about particular situations—an especially intense and far-reaching version of situation awareness and situational understanding. His efforts to cultivate this type of thoughtfulness can be considered by analyzing his treatment of specific military commanders or “captains.” The chapter then explores Rome's implementation of its grand strategy of military expansionism, the captain's strategic function, the choice of specific military strategies, and the character and consequences of different styles or modes of command.
Imperial Republic?
Authors: Lynch Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter addresses Niccolò Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, in which he depicts an expansionist Roman republic as being more worthy of imitation than any other republic. To make his case and fill out his depiction, Machiavelli, particularly in the prominent opening chapters of the Discourses' first and second books, puts forth a version of republican Rome as dedicated to military expansionism. This imperial aspect of the Discourses on Livy is so prominent that today Machiavelli is generally regarded as having wholeheartedly advocated republican imperial expansionism grounded in a “fundamentalist” understanding of human nature as essentially and fixedly rapacious, suspicious, and ambitious. The chapter argues that Machiavelli's Discourses promotes Rome, to be sure, but also that it is at least as concerned with the problems of republican empire as with its promotion. For even as he celebrates Rome's ability to manage the passions and opinions of people, friends and enemies, Machiavelli is deeply critical of Rome's republican empire.
Neither “Mad Dogs” nor “Reluctant Dragons”
Authors: Griffith Luke
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the informal summit in Guadeloupe attended by President Jimmy Carter, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, James Callaghan, and French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. The Carter administration walked a fine line during transatlantic consultations about theater nuclear issues, but it did recognize the antinuclear climate in Europe. Domestic politics and antinuclear movements influenced American and allied thinking about theater nuclear issues. The chapter cites that the Carter administration and its NATO allies took significant steps toward the dual-track decision in 1978. It then elaborates on how the Carter administration was an effective manager of NATO on theater nuclear issues by the fall of 1978.
Carter in Command
Authors: Griffith Luke
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the notion of dual-track decision. The dual-track decision allowed the Reagan administration to approach the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations from a stronger position. Moreover, the dual-track decision advanced Carter's arms control agenda. The chapter cites that the Carter administration dominated “the decision-making phase” of the dual-track decision in the Special Group on Arms Control and Related Matters and High Level Group in 1979. Moreover, the Carter administration remained in command of the modernization and arms control tracks. The chapter explains how the dual-track decision reflected America's strategy to constrain Soviet theater nuclear forces.
Infrastructures of Impunity
Authors: Drexler Elizabeth F.
Published: May 2024

This book argues that the creation and persistence of impunity for the perpetrators of the Cold War Indonesian genocide (1965–66) is not only a legal status but also a cultural and social process. Impunity for the initial killings and for subsequent acts of political violence has many elements: bureaucratic, military, legal, political, educational, and affective. Although these elements do not always work at once—at times some are dormant while others are ascendant—together they can be described as a unified entity, a dynamic infrastructure, whose existence explains the persistence of impunity. For instance, truth telling, a first step in many responses to state violence, did not undermine the infrastructure but instead bent to it. Creative and artistic responses to revelations about the past, however, have begun to undermine the infrastructure by countering its temporality, affect, and social stigmatization and demonstrating its contingency and specific actions, policies, and processes that would begin to dismantle it. The book contends that an infrastructure of impunity could take hold in an established democracy.
Building the Foundation for Impunity
Authors: Drexler Elizabeth F.
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the origins and the persistence of affectively powerful histories of the genocide in Indonesia and considers how they were made emotionally and viscerally compelling. It considers the bureaucratic and legal elements that enforced the truth of the state's narrative. It also describes several elements of the infrastructure of impunity, such as the bureaucracy in the form of identity cards and practices of social stigmatization and the territorial command and its direct, indirect, and potential violence or intimidation. The chapter considers the undiscussed role of economic beneficiaries from the 1965 killings. It talks about how policies and stigmatization over generations have transformed civil and political rights violations into structural violence and economic disparity.
Conclusion
Authors: Drexler Elizabeth F.
Published: May 2024

This chapter reflects how insights from Indonesia might apply to other cases of transitional justice and how an infrastructure of impunity might gradually take hold in established democracies. It addresses the question of why truth telling and the revelation of historical facts fail to produce justice and accountability by describing an infrastructure of impunity in Indonesia. The infrastructure of impunity relies on the creation of policies and laws on paper and on their interpretation and implementation in practice by decentralized elements of the state. The chapter highlights the creation of an infrastructure of impunity to shield perpetrators of a relatively undiscussed genocide, which may seem to be a problem of the Third World. It looks at Indonesia in the context of global discourses and practices of transitional justice, demonstrating that legal trials and tribunals alone cannot eradicate a system of impunity lodged in affectively powerful narratives and dispersed social practice.
Trading Violence
Authors: Tiribás Victor
Published: May 2024

This chapter pushes back against the notion that religious identity was the product of pragmatic considerations. It scrutinizes the vicissitudes of four Jews who served as soldiers in the ranks of the Dutch West India Company's army in the Americas. It also describes their deep sense of revenge against the tyranny of Catholics embodied in the Inquisition, their messianic expectations about the dispersion of the Jews across the globe, and the possibility of gaining prestige within the Jewish community. Whatever the four Jews' motives were, they connected their fate to the Dutch, who had their own, partly religious, reasons to fight their Spanish hereditary enemies. The case study in this chapter is an important example of the ongoing relevance of microhistory to the emerging field of Atlantic Jewish history.
Toward Non-consumption
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

The chapter looks into efforts of non-consumption of tea. The campaign against tea proceeded in different colonies at different times, eventually, the Continental Association imposed uniformity on the diversity. The chapter explains how the ban on tea took nearly a year, reflecting the difficulty in convincing Massachutsettsans to see tea as a political product instead of a consumer product. It mentions how tea parties were sometimes just propaganda even if Patriots wrote how they were signs of widespread, uniform, and already-accomplished tea resistance. Meanwhile, Loyalists' fears became half-true since non-consumption was eventually enforced, the ban on tea was implemented, and the Association became a tool for finding colonists disaffected from the Patriot cause.
Truth in Advertising
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the truth in advertising that unveiled when and where the boycott became effective. It primarily focuses on the significance of tea advertising which testified to the consumer culture of late-colonial life and the difficulty of a ban. The press was part of the collision between merchants and politics since, while newspapers could be reliable sources of information, they could also serve the political agendas of editors, contributors, and committees. Newspapers printed parallel political and commercial discourses because newspapers had political and commercial appeal. The chapter provides an overview of the types of tea ads and advertisers before considering how Patriots gamed the news to support their cause.
Tea Drinkers
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines tea consumption beyond the reach of Patriot control. Loyalists tried to organize against the Continental Association, but the main thrust of tea consumption was not political but rather from colonists operating as consumers and merchants. The chapter notes how merchants recorded tea sales in merchant ledges, citing that recordkeeping allowed merchants of any size to track stock and balance books. Most surviving merchant records do not show tea sales during the ban. The chapter then explains how tea failed as a Loyalist symbol and faintly symbolized Tory resistance. It also explains how war replaced the boycott as a practical and symbolic way to resist Britain, making the consumption of banned goods easier.
Life at War
Authors: Moran Ryan
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks at the relationship between Japan's life insurance industry and wartime expansion. Starting as early as 1931, reformers advocated for nationalizing the industry to fund imperial expansion. Although full-scale nationalization of the Life Insurance Association never occurred, direction from above increased as the war dragged on and as life insurance became incorporated into the control economy. The chapter discusses ideologues that hoped to use life insurance to help maintain popular support for the war by managing the fears of the populace and compensating the families of the dead. The very legitimate fear of death that most people might have experienced was channeled back into support for the very same war effort that threatened their livelihoods.