bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Illuminating Consciousness
Authors: Blasing Molly Thomasy
Published: January 2022

This chapter uncovers the way that links between photography and creativity are established, developed, and sustained in Boris Pasternak's poetry and other writings over several decades of his writerly life. It assesses the claim that Pasternak's “Singular Days” is a poem that could not have been written before the advent of photography. By exploring Pasternak's use of the lexicon and metaphor of photography in his poetry and prose, the chapter elucidates the way that the depiction of time in “Singular Days” is consistent with the writer's broader conception of the problem of time as it relates to the photographic. Ultimately, the chapter traces the development of Pasternak's interest in photography and the way photographic motifs in his poetry allow him to develop means of depicting divergent philosophical conceptions of time, the power of light as a creative force, and the exquisite potential for poetry to capture and preserve ephemeral moments of lived experience. It then concludes by emphasizing the power and terror of documentary cinema.
Through the Lens of Loss
Authors: Blasing Molly Thomasy
Published: January 2022

This chapter turns to the creative world of Marina Tsvetaeva, a poet whose early life has much in common with Boris Pasternak's. It links Tsvetaeva's interest in photography to her poetic practice by analyzing a series of photographs she took in 1934, following the death of her friend, the aspiring poet Nikolai Gronskii. The intersection of photography and poetry for Tsvetaeva consistently occurs at the crossroads of life and death. The chapter looks at how Tsvetaeva employs language, poetry, and the space of a photograph to bridge the divide between herself and the people and places she cannot access in the physical world. Ultimately, the chapter connects the images to Tsvetaeva's poetic elegy to Gronskii and contextualizes them within her other biographical and artistic encounters with photography, revealing that for Tsvetaeva the photograph operates — like dream motifs, tombstone imagery, and the poetic word itself — as a “third space” in which souls can commune across physical and metaphysical boundaries.
Darkroom of Dreams
Authors: Blasing Molly Thomasy
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores how other late and post-Soviet poets use photographic motifs to access the inner workings of the mind and the dream-like space of the unconscious in their experimental poetry. It considers two such poets — Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Andrei Sen-Sen'kov — and their use of photographic practices and aesthetics to expand poetry's potential. The chapter examines the connection between photographic processes and Walter Benjamin's notion of the “optical unconscious” in poems by Dragomoshchenko and Sen-Sen'kov, each of whom uses photography as a means of accessing elements of human experience that are hidden from the conscious mind. It argues that contemporary poets' interest in photography's links to the subconscious arises from modernist and late-modernist photo-poetics and continues the pattern of a complex relationship of attraction and resistance between the lyric and the snapshot. Situating Dragomoshchenko and Sen-Sen'kov both in the contexts of contemporary Russian photo-poetic writing and within the theoretical framework of the optical unconscious, the chapter demonstrates the enduring relevance of photography for poetic writing in Russian and lays the groundwork for new scholarly approaches to photo-poetic encounters in contemporary Russian poetry.
Intimate Networks
Authors: Park Seo Young
Published: January 2022

This chapter shows how working people build relationships with their spouses, children, siblings, and friends within and alongside their labor, interweaving these intimate relationships with Dongdaemun market's manufacturing, wholesaling, and retailing networks. The chapter argues that women workers manage their multiple roles in reproducing the family and monetary value at the same time, rendering the intimacy as integral in the smooth and sped-up cycle of commodity production circulation. It highlights the subtle dynamics and tensions between what is intimate and what is economic and challenges the perceived division between notions of care and impersonal economic rationalities, without erasing or reconciling the differences between them. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates how people's practices in the market are acts of caring, reproduce and disturb gender relations, and provide avenues to tactically fulfil or avoid family duties. It then argues that intimacy and the market are coproduced and mobilize one another and that this process makes the fast pace and viability of Dongdaemun market possible.
Redirecting the Future
Authors: Park Seo Young
Published: January 2022

This chapter considers how MANI, a civil organization, takes part in the legacy of labor activism of Dongdaemun but also encapsulates the new market logic of a social enterprise. It displays the practices of various actors who participated in MANI's experiment to “slow down” the sped-up production and consumption as a way of political and moral critiques of what they see as problems in Dongdaemun and the garment industry. However, the project shows that the social enterprise that attempts to counteract the market's speed shares a similar capitalist logic about speed (assuming that a singular speed is a vehicle for surplus value) and developmental temporality (believing that by controlling speed we can improve the future). The chapter then argues that the engineering of a “slow” pace faces its own complexities, due to incongruent logics, attachments, and investments by different actors, which has ultimately fostered and halted this new market project. It reveals that the organization was not external to the market but connected these existing actors who were actively involved in the market in a different network of slow and humane labor practice.
Preface to the Lives of the Eight Dog Warriors
Authors: Bakin Kyokutei
Published: January 2022

When the Satomi clan first came to prominence in Awa, they led the multitude with rightminded virtue; they put down the recalcitrant with ingenious strategy. They took over both provinces of Fusa1 and passed them down through ten generations; they held dominion over eight lands, and thus became crowned above a hundred generals. At this time they had eight courageous retainers, each of whose surname included the character for “dog.” Therefore they were called the Eight Dog Warriors. Even if their cleverness was not as that of Yu Shun’s Eight Virtuous Ones,...
A gallant looses an arrow and kills a white horse; A craven usurps two districts and approaches the scarlet gate
Authors: Bakin Kyokutei
Published: January 2022

This chapter begins by examining Awa, which was originally the southern extremity of the province of Fusa. Awa comprised a mere four districts, called Heguri, Nagasa, Awa, and Asahina. Long ago, in the Nin'an and Jishō eras, during the ascendency of the house of Taira, there were three warriors there, whose names are Maro Gorō Nobutoshi of Mikuriya, Anzai Saburō Kagemori, and Tōjō Shichirō Akinori. In the eighth month of the third year of Jishō, the Noble Lord Yoritomo of the Minamoto was defeated in battle at Mount Ishibashi and made his way to Awa, and at this time the aforementioned warriors were the first to join his following. Once the Minamoto clan had consolidated their rule, those men were given the four districts of Awa to share among themselves. Their descendants for ten or more generations inherited them, not losing their home territories even as the realm passed into the hands of the Hōjō, and then began the time of the Ashikaga house. The chapter then considers the deeds of Yamashita Sakuzaemon Sadakane.
Serving women hurry their conveyance across the ravine; Chudai jingles his staff in search of the prayer beads
Authors: Bakin Kyokutei
Published: January 2022

This chapter describes how Yoshizane pardoned Kanamari Daisuke Takanori and ordered him to be a great and learned monk. Takanori, the initiate, then took possession of a coffin and placed within it Princess Fuse's body. He enlarged the grotto that it might serve as her tomb: but there was no stone on which to carve an epitaph, only the pines and oaks, standing side by side as natural markers of her grave. The tale of this was told, until the place came to be known as the Grave of the Valiant Virgin. He buried Yatsufusa, too; he did not use a coffin, but simply placed the dog in a hole. People came to call this the Dog Barrow. Takanori, now transformed into a bald-pated, black-robed bonze whose name in the Law was Chudai, alone remained a while on the mountain, where day and night without surcease he read aloud from the Lotus Sutra that Princess Fuse had left behind, until some forty days had passed. Meanwhile, Lady Isarago's funeral was held at Takita.
Crafting the Salvific Asclepius
Authors: Greenwood David Neal
Published: January 2022

This chapter describes Julian's pattern of responding to the challenge Christianity presented by using his knowledge to foster division and appropriate its theology. It recounts how he utilized this same deliberate pattern in Antioch, exploiting the theological and political divide between the Nicene and non-Nicene factions. The chapter also explicates the controversy surrounding non-Nicene bishop Aetius and a subtle theological attack against Christianity, recrafting Heracles into a water-walking son of Zeus and the virgin goddess Athena, begotten by Zeus to be the savior of the world. The chapter examines the public relations crisis in Antioch that escalated rapidly. Attempting to bring events back under control, the chapter tracks how Julian wrote a letter attacking a Nicene bishop, invited the cooperation of a bishop universally agreed upon as heterodox, and then followed up with theological recraftings of Asclepius into the preexistent son of Helios who took on a body to become the savior from sin.
Creating a Robust Religious Structure
Authors: Greenwood David Neal
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses Julian's statement of “religious toleration,” remitting the exile imposed by Constantius II due to “the madness of the Galilaeans.” It reviews how Julian's view of Christianity is deflated by his generally supportive contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus. Julian had begun his march to Constantinople with promises of religious tolerance, which Ammianus attributed to a cynical effort to foment dissent among rival Christian groups. The chapter also looks at how Julian came to power — desiring to be seen as the restorer of the empire, both its cities and its religion. Ultimately, the chapter investigates a new phase in the emperor's relations with the Christian church. It then recounts how Julian began applying pressure on Christians in education posts on the grounds that they displayed a lack of character in teaching set texts like Homer while rejecting their worldview.
Image Producers
Authors: Oh Youjeong
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores how the very functionality of social media sites — the graphic-oriented nature, virality, and spreadability — interplays with the visually focused operation of K-pop. It investigates how K-pop idols are produced, consumed, and utilized in profit generation. All three sections are constructed on the same plan: K-pop idols appeal to consumers by developing desirable images and building intimacy. The chapter delves into the means by which K-pop idols' seductive power to engage the affective commitment of their fans is constructed. It argues that the idols' alluring aura emanates primarily from their visual quality; that, in the end, is what draws fans into affective consumption of idol-associated products and places. In discussing this kind of visually oriented production and consumption, the chapter looks at a variety of topics: the cultivation of K-pop idols, the deliberate development of idol concepts, fans' voluntary and affective reproduction of idol images, and the profit-generation schemes that capitalize on these images.
Limitations of Police Reforms
Authors: Scoggins Suzanne E.
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides an overview of the reform issues that police officers themselves talk about most often and that matter most for police response on the ground. It elaborates on Chinese police officers' resistance to reform and tells us about the relationship frontline police have with supervising authorities and the specific ways in which even well-intentioned reforms can undermine the ability of officers to perform their jobs, especially since the same is not true for reforms related to stability maintenance. The chapter also analyses the risks police officers face under the firearm restriction and reveals the human effects of police reform on the officers serving the state. But of course, not all reforms are received negatively by people on the front lines. By talking to street-level police about these issues, the chapter uncovers more about how police reform in China actually works and how various policies affect day-to-day operations. To fully assess police reform in China and understand why the ministry might enact policies that impose challenges for ground-level response, the chapter recalls the rationale behind the Public Security Bureau's reform agenda.
Introduction
Authors: Barnhart Michael A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter hopes to serve as a guide for using simulations successfully in teaching. It explores how to find a simulation (or several) that fits a classes' needs — not just by providing a list of websites or resources where the reader can find hundreds of possible simulations already designed and packaged for classroom use. The chapter seeks to help the reader be able to consider which of those simulations might be a good fit for them and their students — things to think about when evaluating possible simulations, ways to kick the tires. Focusing on the three examples from the Reacting to the Past project, the chapter illustrates some important points: simulations are not the same as war games, simulations can and do span centuries, and simulations can be very brief, requiring just a few class sessions, or be very long, spanning an entire semester.
Sediment
Authors: Erley Mieka
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses sediment as the symbol of an Asiatic past in the Bolshevik cultural imaginary. It focuses on the joint cultural and geopoetic projects the Soviets undertook in the 1920s and 1930s to de-sedimentize the archaic cultural stratum that configures the surface of socialist modernity. Soil symbolized the primitive ground under modern Soviet culture, but it was also the very material substance of the agrarian economy and peasant life. The chapter considers how the Soviet construction site becomes the ground for the violent assault on historical sediment — material, political, and psychic. It highlights the two novels that reflect on sedimentation and excavation as processual metaphors for the transformation of nature (through Soviet construction) and the reform of human nature (through perekovka, or political and psychological reform): Boris Pilniak's The Volga Falls to the Caspian (Volga vpadaet v kaspiiskoe more, 1930), and Bruno Jasienski's Man Changes His Skin (Chelovek meniaet kozhu, 1932–1933). The juxtaposition of these two spaces is central to the author's analysis because despite the expected differences, the authors of these works associate the past and its sediments with Asian belated development.
“Because I Have a Hookup”
Authors: Hromadžić Azra
Published: January 2022

This chapter evaluates complex and seemingly contradictory cheating discourses and practices as a lens through which to approach youth's enactments and performances of sovereign agency and (anti-)citizenship in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Cheating practices and discourses should be interpreted as twofold. They constitute a powerful critique of and distancing from the Bosnian “democratic predicament,” a democracy gone wrong. At the same time, they are a historically and socially situated desire for incorporation into the corrupt state. Bosnian student cheaters often described their cheating savvy, purchasing of exams, and use of veze (connections) as a way to be “sovereign.” This is a context saturated with disillusionment, mistrust, corruption, and discontent. As a result, the focus on cheating as sovereign agency shows how the state, however “empty,” becomes operative in part through the affective registers of students' duplicitousness.
Everyday Sovereignty in Exile
Authors: Wilson Alice
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines sovereignty as a set of social relations explored through the case of the Sahrawi refugee camps. Full territorial sovereignty as desired by the refugees is absent in this setting; nevertheless, the various governance activities suggest that the social relations of sovereignty are very much present in the Sahrawi refugee camps. The chapter then addresses what kinds of ethnographic forms these social relations of sovereignty take in exile. The claimed territory of Western Sahara is an essential feature of Sahrawis' aspirations for full sovereignty in the future; the Polisario Front currently controls part of this claimed territory. In the context of Sahrawis' exile, the claimed territory either is not readily accessible for refugees on a daily basis due to distance, or is under Moroccan annexation. As a result, the chapter explores how, in exile, the social relations of sovereignty take the form of relations between people — governing authorities and governed constituencies — with these relations playing out with regard to resources that, due to displacement, take nonterritorial, mobile forms such as rations and refugees' labor.
Existential Sovereignty
Authors: Dzenovska Dace
Published: January 2022

This chapter addresses the phenomenon of existential sovereignty on the basis of analysis of how government and nongovernment actors handle the problem that post-Soviet freedom of movement introduces for the embattled Latvian nation and the state. In particular, it focuses on the Latvian state's diaspora politics, as well as two political events. These include a referendum on whether to make the Russian language the second state language that took place in 2012 and the 2014 constitutional reform that reaffirmed the national nature of the Latvian state. On the basis of this analysis, the chapter argues that existential sovereignty is not a state of being, but a claim to the coherence and continuity of a collective self, pursued with the tools of statecraft. It is not primarily a matter of control over territory, but rather of the existence of self in space and time.
Signs of Sovereignty
Authors: Reeves Madeleine
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on sovereignty as it appears and disappears from view in everyday life in sites where that stretch and reach is contested or problematic. Drawing on several periods of fieldwork over the course of a decade (2004–2014) in Central Asia's Ferghana Valley, and focusing on fieldwork around two geographical exclaves, Sokh (Uzbekistan) and Vorukh (Tajikistan), it explores how sovereignty might appear differently if we track its movement through claims, names, and objects as they circulate and reverberate in the region of a historically contentious and still, in parts, officially “unwritten” (neopisany) and internationally disputed border. In a situation of contested histories, the challenge for local residents was often not so much that of “obeying the law” as knowing “whose rules rule” in any given encounter. The chapter then looks at maps, and stories of past mappings and countermappings, as a vehicle for exploring these local signs of sovereignty and their (non-)recognition in everyday life. Indeed, maps have a particularly critical role to play in producing an affect of sovereignty at the juncture between people and territory.
Legitimacy, Consent, and the Mobilization of the British and Commonwealth Armies during the Second World War
Authors: Fennell Jonathan
Published: January 2022

This chapter looks at the manpower problems that became so prevalent from 1942 onward due to the question of consent. It elaborates how the conflict on consent cast doubt on the supposed moral unity of the polity by resuscitating sectional divisions. It refers to tensions that strained the legitimacy of the state and nation and intensified the pressure on governments and military commands to arbitrate between different perceptions of what was right or wrong in the context of total war. The chapter explores manpower mobilization challenges that Britain and the Commonwealth faced, such as convincing their complex mix of citizens that the war was necessary and that it was being fought in a fair and procedurally just manner. It discusses the struggle of the British Empire to mobilize its people for war, which had profound implications for the performance of the British and Commonwealth Armies on the battlefield.
“Enemy Aliens” and the Formation of Australia’s 8th Employment Company
Authors: Bartrop Paul R.
Published: January 2022

This chapter talks about “enemy alien” internees that arrived in Australia in 1940, who would be enlisted as soldiers in an Australian Army labor corps and work as noncombatants to do their part in the war against the Axis powers. It considers the story of the enemy aliens from Germany and Austria as one of the most remarkable episodes in the immigration history of twentieth-century Australia. It also highlights the account of the enemy aliens in relation to the manpower management in a country that was manpower poor. The chapter recounts the so-called Phoney War that ended on 10 May with the German invasion of the Low Countries and France, while Britain stood alone awaiting a German invasion. It refers to Sir John Anderson, who declared that the British government would draw a clear distinction between enemy aliens and refugees from Germany and Austria.
South African Manpower and the Second World War
Authors: Waag Ian van der
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses how the Union Defence Force (UDF) in South Africa was considered small, ill-prepared, and in a dismal state due to years of peacetime neglect. It cites the defense policy of the interwar Union governments that had been based on fighting an African opponent or defending against a Japanese attack, but not combatting the Germans or the Italians. It also recounts the mobilization plans for the UDF that required thousands of trained men for the Mobile Field Force, but the Defence Act limited the service of the Active Citizen Forces (ACF) to southern Africa. The chapter mentions that the Smuts government decided that expeditionary forces must come from an army of volunteers who would be South African in spirit, outlook, leadership, and tactics. It shows the increase in the strength of the ACF infantry regiments in 1939.
Conclusion
Authors: Delaney Douglas E. , Brown Andrew L.
Published: January 2022

This chapter reviews how defeating twentieth-century challengers to the British Empire and Commonwealth demanded careful management of military manpower. It considers building armies to meet enemies as an exceptionally complex business for the British Empire and Commonwealth as none of their national armies had sufficient forces-in-being in August 1914 and September 1939. It also reviews a wide range of army manpower issues, such as putting enough citizens into uniform, training them and balancing army requirements against those of the other services, industry, and agriculture. The chapter outlines observations on the themes of recruitment and conscription, training and the soldier's experience, and demobilization and postwar care. It highlights what the manpower-scrounging measures implied about societal pecking orders.
Moral Injury
Authors: Pederson Joshua
Published: January 2022

This chapter creates a sketch of the ways moral injury appears in the world. It reviews contemporary research on moral injury, outlines working definitions of the term, identifies common symptoms, and explains current possibilities for treatment. Here, the concept of moral injury is discussed in tandem with the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of veterans are plagued by mental illnesses, and there are no good strategies to help them heal. This is the promise of the moral injury concept. The chapter surmises that the reason why so many veterans continue to suffer is because the source of their pain has not been correctly identified, and perhaps moral injury is a significant contributing factor to it. Accordingly, researchers in the field believe that moral injury might be key to helping address a mental health crisis that continues to metastasize.
“My Sin Is Ever before Me”
Authors: Pederson Joshua
Published: January 2022

This chapter takes a look at literary depictions of moral injury and its historical antecedents. It advances a few theses regarding the ways in which moral injury sometimes inflects literary style. Indeed, moral injury shapes both individuals' conduct and their worldview — their works and their words. Thus, the central claim here is that literature engaging moral injury themes is often formally distinctive. The chapter contends that in the ways they respond to evil, the characters discussed in the following chapters have family similarities to the veterans discussed in the previous chapter. It argues that they respond to wrongdoing in ways that are both recognizable and predictable when viewed through the lens of moral injury. the chapter also argues that we can see such responses in both contemporary and classic works.
Introduction
Authors: Carso Kerry Dean
Published: January 2022

This introductory chapter discusses the architecture known as “follies” and their playful, whimsical presence in the United States as garden structures. In addition to these, many American buildings are follies outside of gardens but can trace their origins to the garden folly. Despite popular denigration of follies, the chapter argues that architectural historians need to take a more serious look at these buildings. There is a need to look beyond the lightheartedness of follies and determine their social and cultural context. The approach here is interdisciplinary, focusing in particular on the literary context and/or storytelling possibilities of these buildings. Furthermore, these buildings often contribute to a narrative either unto themselves or in relation to the garden as a whole.
Ruins
Authors: Carso Kerry Dean
Published: January 2022

This chapter takes a look at how ruins aged the American landscape, thereby conferring a cultural status equivalent to Europe's architectural heritage. Purpose-built ruins in the nineteenth-century United States were rare, but they did exist. Gardeners and architects indulged this desire for age by building such structures in America. Ruins fulfilled a need for a physical heritage beyond pure nature. When Americans built ruins, oftentimes their pragmatism ironically led them to rebuild the ruins as permanent structures. Beyond ruin follies, though, existed a larger culture of ruins among writers and tourists who sought out actual ruins from America's past to visit and to ponder. And in the visual culture of the nineteenth century, Americans projected their desire for ruins onto natural scenery as well, creating ruins in the landscape.
Introduction
Authors: Rignall Karen E.
Published: January 2022

This chapter opens with a recounting of how small farmers and other residents in Morocco's southeastern oases actively engaged with broader economic and political processes to invest new resources and meaning in their rural roots. It investigates how these investments defied the pessimism about the viability of rural life that had marked dominant narratives and government policy since the French colonial period. Through an ethnography of land, labor, and community, the chapter also looks at how small farmers and other residents crafted a new rurality by reshaping the institutions that govern collective life. This politics of the commons drew on a tradition of legal and political pluralism in the Mgoun Valley, offering new visions for communal governance while also producing contestations over belonging, political representation, and subsistence rights. In arguing for an agrarian rurality constituted through rather than cordoned off from global engagements, the chapter ultimately questions the assumptions about the kinds of politics that can promote land and food sovereignty.
Political Pluralism, Local Politics, and the State
Authors: Rignall Karen E.
Published: January 2022

This chapter expands the account of rural political life to detail how state involvement in the valley sustained political pluralism as a central feature of local politics and social mobilizations. The chapter tracks how the colonial history of indirect rule shaped contemporary state strategies for asserting authority in marginalized rural zones. These strategies buttressed land and communal identity as the basis for rural governance and collective action. Although implanting a territorializing modern state in Morocco certainly involved dismantling many aspects of communal governance, the chapter then argues that state actors often seemed as invested as many nonstate actors in preserving the political pluralism of the rural southeast, including nonstate forms of communal authority. Ultimately, the chapter details how after independence in 1956, the practice of cultivating heterogeneity continued to inform state strategies for control and shaped the quotidian political life.
Transforming Xiamen
Authors: Ong Soon Keong
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores how returned overseas Chinese investors used their money, knowledge, and vision to influence the urban reconstruction and cityscape of Xiamen in the early twentieth century. The chapter then proceeds to describe the transformation and modernization of the city brought about by the returned Chinese emigrants. Overseas financiers worked in tandem with city administrators to champion developmental projects, and they also speculated in real estate for personal profits, pushing land prices up three to four times. The chapter also reveals how the infusion of money from abroad allowed Xiamen's municipal government to push forth the construction of new roads and the reclamation of marshlands, ponds, and even graveyards. The chapter highlights the public utility companies set up by the overseas Chinese investors and the introduction of modern life, including telephone, electricity, and running water.
Monotowns and Russia’s Post-Soviet Urban Geography
Authors: Crowley Stephen
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on the unique economic and industrial geography that Russia inherited from the Soviet past. This includes the large number of Russian monotowns, which have become flash points for real and anticipated labor protest, and has led to elaborate government programs to prevent that unrest. Indeed, Russian authorities have demonstrated a palpable fear of social unrest stemming from these particularly vulnerable cities and towns. Such fear places a sizable barrier in front of any attempt to increase economic growth by shifting capital and state resources from declining regions to more dynamic urban centers. Yet government plans, announced in 2019, to shift investment toward a handful of major metropolitan centers could place Russia's monotowns in untenable conditions, with potentially dire consequences.
Labor Protest in Russia’s Hybrid Regime
Authors: Crowley Stephen
Published: January 2022

This chapter assesses Russia's labor relations and labor protest. The avenues for resolving labor disputes have become so restricted under Vladimir Putin that often the only recourse is spontaneous action taken out of desperation, resulting in a paradox of overcontrol. Despite considerable research over the years, some key questions about Russian workers remain unanswered: To what extent have Russian industrial relations been transformed over the last two to three decades, and how much do workers and workplaces remain weighed down by the Soviet legacy? The chapter then looks at some formative episodes in Russian labor relations, such as the strike wave of the late 1990s and the adoption of the new Labor Code shortly after Putin came to power. It also considers the choice workers make between pursuing individual strategies — whether redress through the courts or exit to the informal economy — or acting collectively to address their grievances. Finally, the chapter explores the types of conflicts that generate overt protest, how the authorities tend to respond, and the struggle of workers and others to make sure their demands are heard.
Philosophy and the Muses
Authors: Verene Donald Phillip
Published: January 2022

This chapter establishes the connection of philosophy and poetry. It argues that poetry and rhetoric are intertwined as components required for the presentation of philosophical ideas. It also introduces the Muses — the Greek deities of poetry, literature, music, and dance. Later on, the Muses became associated with astronomy, philosophy, and all intellectual pursuits. The chapter thus considers who the Muses are and what connection they have to philosophy and to philosophizing. Here, the philosopher seeks the knowledge of the Muses — of what was, is, and is to come — but the philosopher, unlike the poet, seeks this order not simply as a temporal “before and after” but as the Daughters of Necessity would have it, as an unvarying or necessary sequence whereby the whole of things is determined and the causes of all are known.
Philosophy and Eloquence
Authors: Verene Donald Phillip
Published: January 2022

This chapter demonstrates the sense in which the rejection of rhetoric by the founders of modern philosophy is untenable. Looking to the present, one faces the phenomenon of “critical thinking,” the new and ever-widening thesis of educational theory, namely, that the general purpose of university instruction is to teach how to think critically. The chapter thus considers if there is a way out of this neo-Kantian world that would reduce the love of wisdom to the problem of knowledge. Whenever philosophy, in its history, reaches an impasse, it is because it has forgotten part of itself. It has attempted to reduce the pursuit of wisdom to the attainment of some form of knowledge that holds all that lies outside it to be error, and once declared as error, this outside is forgotten. If one is to recover from the dominance of critique one must bring back to life what has been left behind. Philosophy advances by the power of memory, not by going forward toward novelty.
The Lack of Low-Income Housing
Authors: Weikart Lynne A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter details how Mayor Michael Bloomberg celebrated successes and suffered defeats when it came to low-income housing. It mentions 165,000 units of affordable housing that Bloomberg built or renovated during his three terms, a record surpassed only by mayors Fiorello La Guardia and Ed Koch. It also reviews the highly sophisticated system of financing that Bloomberg created to accomplish his feat on housing, which included funding the New York City Housing Trust Fund. The chapter recounts the establishment of the New York City Acquisition Fund that built affordable though not necessarily low-income housing, providing developers financial incentives through various federal and state programs. It highlights the housing policy in which Bloomberg suffered his greatest defeat as he lost more low-income housing than he built.
Defining the Necrocitizenry
Authors: Vu Linh D.
Published: January 2022

This chapter outlines Wang Shijie's strongly worded memorandum — his opposition to the order from the national government to create a new system of commending and compensating citizens on the grounds that such a system would be incompatible with modern republicanism. Wang Shijie was the head of the Bureau of Legal Affairs (Fazhi ju) and one of the most prominent legal specialists in Republican China. The chapter demonstrates Wang's interest in and knowledge of Western laws and his vision in China as an egalitarian republic. It also sheds light on the institutionalization of martyrdom during the Nanjing decade. The chapter then shifts to illustrate the new state that took shape in the early 1930s — the success of the Northern Expedition and the Nanjing government's vision of disciplinary and martial loyalty to the state. It examines how the looming threat of the Japanese encroachment in northern China added to the urgent need to adopt new criteria of martyrdom — creating a more inclusive necrocitizenship. Ultimately, the chapter explores the significance of shrines in spreading the nationalist religiosity — the beliefs and rituals for the national dead promoted by the nation-state.
Gendering the Republic
Authors: Vu Linh D.
Published: January 2022

This chapter considers how the republic was gendered in the sense that it differentiated its male and female population. It argues that men were subjected to Confucianized Republican citizenship, while women were subjected to traditional female chastity, now infused with nationalism. The chapter utilizes a number of petitions from female relatives of revolutionaries who died during various early twentieth-century Republican uprisings, anti–Yuan Shikai movements, the Northern Expedition, and the war against the Communists to demonstrate the relationship between the family and the state as reflected in the Nationalist commendation policy. These petitions, submitted to the Nanjing government, place the dead in a web of familial relationships. The chapter also addresses the changes brought on by the War of Resistance. From the late 1920s to the late 1930s, widows of revolutionaries who had died in anti-imperial uprisings gained autonomy as petitioners and beneficiaries of death stipends. Ultimately, the chapter sheds new light on the gender dynamics of modern Chinese society. It looks at the growing group of feminist men and women who linked women's liberation to the wealth and power of the nation.
Epilogue
Authors: Vu Linh D.
Published: January 2022

This chapter unfolds how the war-dead have shaped modern China. It examines how the Chinese Republic, plagued by war for most of its existence, dealt with deaths in the tens of millions. The fall of the imperial state and subsequent wars did not destroy but strengthened the idea of the Chinese nation and the structure of the Chinese state. The multitude of the war-dead — immobile and silent, but potent and efficacious — empowered both the imagination of the nation and the institutionalization of the state. The chapter also seeks to understand the significance of institutional capacity to manage the dead — to narrativize and memorialize unprecedented mass destruction and to promise relief for the grieving living — to the formation of the modern nation-state in China. Ultimately, it looks at how commemoration turned death into an inalienable part of the making of the modern Chinese nation-state. It further reviews China's commendation and compensation laws in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Connected Language Histories
Authors: Hoogervorst Tom G.
Published: January 2022

This chapter reconstructs the plurilingual landscape of the Indies Chinese, along with its tensions and loyalty conflicts. It focuses on the multiple linguistic competencies of Indonesia's Chinese communities. The chapter first traces episodes of language contact preceding the late colonial situation. It follows words to designate, respectively, the different communities, languages, and language politics informing Chinese-Indonesian linguistic experiences and cultural productions. It then investigates what terms were available to designate local-born Chinese, people born in China, and indigenous Southeast Asians, and where did they originate from. By addressing such queries, the chapter unveils a complex hierarchy in which linguistic proficiency intersected with social mobility. From the early twentieth century, this plurilingual landscape was further complicated by the sudden entry of Mandarin as the proud vehicle of pan-Chinese chauvinism. Ultimately, the chapter looks at how Chinese children could theoretically receive education in Dutch, Malay, Mandarin, or the provincial Sinitic variety of their ancestors. It then assesses how such language choices shaped political allegiances and cultural identities.
Competing Expressions of Modernity
Authors: Hoogervorst Tom G.
Published: January 2022

This chapter looks at how city dwellers embrace the technological, educational, and employment opportunities afforded by colonial modernity. It highlights how language, again, offers a window into these everyday-life contestations. Indonesia's last decades of colonial rule coincided with the global rise of capitalism and visual mass culture. At the same time, they spearheaded a fiery antidiscourse, openly doubting the benefits of modernity under the conditions of colonialism. The chapter then examines the role of the press in this ideological clash, with vernacular Malay once again arising as the language to articulate society's shifting values. It presents the linguistic underpinnings of colonial modernity, and explicates it in three specific arenas: attire, medicine, and cuisine. Ultimately, the chapter investigates how the cultural loyalties began to intersect with consumption patterns, with “pro-Chinese” commodities competing against European ones in the realms of dress, medicinal knowledge, and food.
Epilogue
Authors: Hoogervorst Tom G.
Published: January 2022

This chapter argues that vernacular Malay was crucial for Indonesia's public sphere to develop and for its middle classes to catch the pace of modernity. The chapter suggests that vernacular language is fundamental to understand the counterpull people faced — and continue to face — between modernity and tradition, progressivism and conservatism, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, Asia and the West. It propels the interplay of pushing and pulling, accepting and rejecting, ridiculing and fetishizing. By studying the vernacular words, meanings, and messages, the chapter offers glimpses into the knowledge produced and acquired by the so-called common people, in all their heterogeneity, who are by no means as commonly understood as the term would suggest. Ultimately, it concludes with two sets of reflections: first on postcolonial attitudes towards Sino-Malay print culture and then on directions for further research. Amidst the kaleidoscope of Asian studies and institutionalized knowledge production, SinoMalay books and periodicals occupy a nebulous position.
Introduction
Authors: Quinlan Sean M.
Published: January 2022

This chapter contributes to a growing literature on the cultural uses of science and medicine in the modern period. It clarifies that the term cultural uses distinguishes the approach from the established “social uses of science” historiography that Steven Shapin and like-minded historians pioneered in the 1970s, and which has studied science and society from Foucauldian or neo-Marxist perspectives. The chapter treats science as an ideological or hegemonic system that seeks to control individuals or entire groups of people. The chapter also introduces the elite doctors of the Paris medical establishment. It studies the relation between medicine and culture in post-revolutionary France and how medical subcultures permeated the broader intellectual world of the time. The chapter defines, if in schematic terms, what is meant by the words culture and subculture so as to clarify critical elements of the analysis and establish the contours of this cultural exchange. It highlights the continuities and connections between individuals and ideas in the flow of the medical undercurrents.
Introduction
Authors: Idema Wilt L.
Published: January 2022

This chapter talks about piety in women, which is a virtue that may easily lead to tensions between children and parents, and between husbands and wives when taken to extremes. It explains that when piety attracts the attention of the gods, the immediate result may be negative rather than positive for the families concerned. It also provides a background on the translations of two rare narrative precious scrolls of the Ming dynasty: the Precious Scroll of the Red Gauze and the Precious Scroll of the Handkerchief. The chapter reveals that the two scrolls portray how a wife and mother's piety results in the disruption of her family and terrible misery for her children and her husband. It highlights how the precious scrolls draw on a wide variety of popular motifs regarding their coincidences, miracles, and divine interventions in daily life, which at times read like gruesome fairy tales.
Widows and the Romance of Grief
Authors: Moore Megan
Published: January 2022

This chapter investigates how emotional and gender practices entwine to articulate the contours of the story of noble privilege. It looks closely at Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide and his Yvain to explore the relation between grief, gender, and narration in romance. While the chapter reveals much about how gender operates and what it does, it argues that is not simply about aligning grief and suffering with the feminine. Often read as objects of men's desire, widows like Enide are also desirable because women's mourning entails narrative. The chapter discusses grief as a kind of storytelling, one eroticized as it narrates power for the powerful. It seeks to answer the questions such as, whose feelings may be expressed, whose feelings matter? Who can practice desire beyond the bounds of the law?
Toward a Mediterranean Erotics of Grief
Authors: Moore Megan
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines what the author characterizes as a kind of Mediterranean elite-affective diaspora, in which emotional exceptionalism goes hand in hand with the construction of elite communities, privileging elite status over geo-cultural specificity. It focuses not only on ancient Mediterranean texts, but also on contemporaneous romances written in Medieval Greek, Middle English, and Old French. The chapter highlights one of the best known and most widely reproduced travel narratives — John of Mandeville's Travels, a fictionalized and highly popular early-fourteenth-century account of an Englishman's travels during the Crusades, transmitted in several versions and languages in over seventy-five manuscripts. The chapter reviews Mandeville's judgments of foreign practices — and specifically of interest to us, the emotions these practices produce — as delineating the contours of the privileged self. The chapter proposes that medieval narratives of encounter deploy an erotics of grief that rely on an emotional intertextuality with an elite, Mediterranean past in order to figure elite practices of power in an interwoven, Mediterranean present. It argues that the erotics of grief that course throughout medieval literature are a deeply Mediterranean, intertextual, and intercultural negotiation of status and community through emotion.
Commandments
Authors: Morrison James Ashley
Published: January 2022

This chapter assesses how the conventional view emphasizes the consensus among the Bank of England's governors and between the Bank and the Cunliffe Committee. Of course, there was zealous agreement about the objective and its priority. But there was endemic conflict between these authorities over the translation of faith into practice, of ideals into institutions, of the word into the law. Thus, the commandments that defined the UK's return to gold were hammered out in the arguments within and between the Cunliffe Committee and the Bank of England. The doctrine that emerged was riddled with contradictory assumptions, logical missteps, and underspecified prescriptions. Despite this — perhaps because of this — the Cunliffe Committee's landmark first report garnered support from every corner. The chapter then documents the reception of the Cunliffe Committee's recommendations among policymakers, the broader public, and, crucially, the UK's labor unions.