bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Mundane
Authors: Ahmad Irfan
Published: May 2018

This chapter shows critique among non-intellectuals, as practised in an outstanding peace movement in history—the ḳhudāī ḳhidmatgār (servants of God), led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. It discusses the role of mosques, reference to the Qurʾān, and employment of ṣabr (perseverance) in the pursuit of nonviolent struggle against the British colonialism. The Pathans in the northwestern part of contemporary Pakistan, where ḳhudāī ḳhidmatgār was based, have been depicted as anything but intellectual and critical. The chapter concludes with everyday critique by delineating three proverbs. While the first two proverbs ridicule molvī and mullā— “theologians”—the third one introduces a “shifter” proverb to show how the subalternated view the rich. The alternative portrait it presents is of a hawker as critic. The chapter gainfully utilizes Didier Fassin’s differentiation between reality and truth as productive and tension-ridden at the same time.
Virtus in Velleius
Authors: Balmaceda Catalina
Published: May 2018

Chapter 4 shows how through his Historiae, Velleius sought to highlight the fact that the principate had come not just to re-establish peace and order, but to restore something very important to the Romans: virtus. The examination of men of virtus during the republic was used by the author both to emphasise his standpoint of continuity and to prepare the reader for his distinctive interpretation of Roman history. The analysis of the emperor Tiberius in Velleius’ work serves as a case study to illustrate his positive interpretation of virtus in which political ideology and Velleius’ own version of historical reality blend together.
Virtus in Tacitus
Authors: Balmaceda Catalina
Published: May 2018

In chapter 5 Tacitus’ historical writings are divided into three units: 1) the Agricola and the Germania, 2) the Histories, and 3) the Annals, not to refer to successive stages in the evolution of his understanding of virtus, but to stress the repeated insistence by which he delineates the expressions of virtus in three diferent periods of Roman history. By identifying what was essential to Roman virtus and what was superfluous and susceptible to change, Tacitus illustrates how, even though a certain degree of political freedom was lost, there were some Romans who could exercise a more ‘personal’ freedom which led to new manifestations of virtus. Tacitus’ perception of the nature of political change is one of the main themes used throughout the chapter to plot the barriers that virtus had to overcome in the new world of the principate.
Epilogue
Authors: Capó Julio
Published: May 2018

The epilogue introduces some of the major changes that came about after World War II and their effects on Miami’s queer individuals and communities. Miami’s liberal policy remained in place—albeit with some post-tourist-season or arbitrary crackdowns and raids—until the late 1940s. The early Cold War era, however, brought about massive changes that radically altered the lives and experiences of the city’s gender and sexual renegades. This included an effort to diversify Miami’s economy and reduce dependency on tourism, a local and national “lavender scare,” the national crackdown on gangsterism, corruption, and graft, changing zoning laws and municipal incorporation policies, urban renewal programs that decimated and displaced black communities and cultures, and the advent of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The epilogue also introduces some of the limitations of homophile organizing in Miami and the U.S. South more generally, while emphasizing other modes of resistance that took place outside of traditional political organizing and those guided by an emerging sexual identity politics.
Different SNFs, Different Miffs
Authors: Gillick Muriel R.
Published: May 2018

Skilled nursing facilities vary in quality, with for-profit facilities offering, on average, poorer care. Not-for-profit facilities are at the forefront of the culture change movement that promotes patient-centered care. However, substandard care is common in both types of facility, with a recent Office of Inspector General report finding high rates of adverse events, many of them dangerous.
Movers and Shapers
Authors: Gillick Muriel R.
Published: May 2018

Nursing home administrators, physicians, hospitals, drug companies, and Medicare are among the major influences on the patient’s experience of skilled nursing facility (SNF) care. Administrators are concerned with selecting patients with high levels of Medicare reimbursement; physicians tend to regard SNF care as low status and unrewarding; hospitals use the SNF as a safety valve allowing for early discharge; drug companies work with regional medical distributors to influence physician prescribing; and Medicare tries to promote quality by using an elaborate system of quality indicators, mandating state inspections or surveys, and reimbursing care so as to encourage maximal use of physical therapy.
Crossing the Black Atlantic
Authors: Grant Nicholas
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores how trans-Atlantic travel provided an important avenue through which black activists related to one another’s struggles. It also demonstrates how the U.S. and South African governments worked to regulate and restrict transnational black travel during the early Cold War. Focusing in on the lesser-known transatlantic journeys of Canada Lee, Sidney Poitier, and Z. K. and Frieda Matthews, the chapter argues that these individuals acted as important cultural translators that physically connected the struggle against racism in both countries. Finally, by tracing the international opposition to the removal of Paul Robeson’s passport, the chapter shows how experiences of state repression could be negotiated in ways that further strengthened bonds of solidarity between African Americans and black South Africans.
Political Prisoners
Authors: Grant Nicholas
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the gendered language political prisoners used to frame their experiences and the moral legitimacy of their struggles. In South Africa, prison was where this heroic vision of black masculinity could be forged. Black political prisoners used their carceral experiences to construct specific gender identities that affirmed their status as political leaders in the public sphere. In this configuration, the prison experiences of African women were often neglected. This led to black women often being cast as vulnerable figures in need of protection and denied their agency as political actors. Finally, the chapter traces how groups such as the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) and the ANC Women’s League engaged with and challenged this masculinist vison of black protest.
Hadassah Makes You Important
Authors: Kranson Rachel
Published: May 2018

During the postwar years, American Jewish women received contradictory advice over how they ought to conduct their lives as they entered the middle-class. As Jewish men felt pressure to become breadwinners, the mores of the middle-class stipulated that married women limit their interests to the needs of home and family. Some Jewish leaders supported these middle-class gender ideologies and warned Jewish women against spending too much time away from domestic responsibilities; others encouraged Jewish women to defy postwar gender norms and engage fully and deeply in the public sphere. Significantly, both those leaders who believed that Jewish women needed to contributed to the world outside their homes and those who feared that they were spending too much time away from their families all tended to agree that the rising affluence of American Jews posed a threat to Jewish women and the Jewish families they were supposed to be raising.
From Generation to Generation
Authors: Kranson Rachel
Published: May 2018

Beginning in the late 1960s, young Jewish radicals rejected the middle-class culture in which they had been raised, and attempted to reinvent American Jewish life in the spirit of the era’s global youth revolt. This Jewish counterculture organized multiple religious and political collectives and advanced a variety of causes, some of which overlapped and some of which actually contradicted with one another. The common denominator linking together all of these disparate undertakings, however, was a pointed critique of the middle-class Jewish culture that had been forged by the older generation of American Jews. Indeed, when members of the Jewish counterculture created narratives to justify their investments in such issues as the plight of Soviet Jewry; the inclusion of women, gays and lesbians in American Jewish life; Zionism; or the restructuring of American Judaism – none of which pertained directly to the class position of American Jews-- they often cited American Jewish affluence as not only relevant but fundamental to the problems they were trying to solve.
Conclusion
Authors: Kranson Rachel
Published: May 2018

By and large, during the postwar years, Jewish resistance to middle-class norms took the form of verbal and written warnings that did not translate to concrete change. The gap between the widespread denigration of middle-class Jewish life and the minimal attempts to create alternatives to it represents more than just a quirk of postwar American Jewish history. Instead, these critiques of Jewish upward mobility comprised, in and of themselves, a crucial means by which American Jews adapted to prosperity and social acceptance, and an important means by which Jews, and especially their leaders, articulated their difference from other middle-class Americans. Significantly, this manner of asserting their Jewishness did not jeopardize the social and economic security that this new status afforded them. Even so, this continued tendency among middle-class American Jews to identify with histories of poverty and marginalization has continued to influence Jewish political investments and ideologies well into the contemporary moment.
Introduction
Authors: Lim Julian
Published: May 2018

In 1883, the San Antonio Daily Express published a series of letters written by special correspondent Hans Mickle. The reporter was exploring parts of the new transcontinental railway that ran across the American Southwest, connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles to New Orleans. As he followed the route that raced westward across Texas from San Antonio, he entertained his readers with descriptions of the foreign landscape and the assorted passengers that caught his attention, including the “Chinamen” who filled the cars on their way back west, he presumed, to San Francisco and China. Mostly, however, Mickle wrote about El Paso, which according to his report was “the most western point in Texas, and is Texan only in name, as, in almost everything else, it has few Texan characteristics.” If not characteristically Texan, though, El Paso came to represent something even grander for Mickle, for at the “extreme head of an extensive valley,” in a pass flanked by high and rugged mountains, he found himself standing in what he called the “Future Immense.”...
“Razas no gratas” and the Color Bar at the Border
Authors: Lim Julian
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the hardening of the border during the 1920s and 1930s, and the more expansive racially restrictive immigration regimes that developed from both sides of the border. As the United States shifted its focus from excluding Chinese immigrants to targeting Mexicans, Mexico enacted its own set of immigration policies to marginalize and bar Chinese and African-American movement to Mexico. Using NAACP papers, government correspondence, and immigration records from both U.S. and Mexican archives, this chapter provides a fresh perspective on the experiences of African Americans in Texas who felt the double blow of exclusion at the U.S.-Mexico border: the exclusions of Jim Crow and Mexico’s indigenismo. Providing a more integrated understanding of Chinese, black, and Mexican experiences at the border, the chapter ultimately emphasizes the shared venture between the Mexican and U.S. nation-states in controlling race, immigration, and the nation during the first half of the twentieth century. As racial ideologies and immigration policies migrated across national boundaries, it became more difficult for racialized bodies to do the same. And not only was their multiracial presence physically marginalized within the landscape of the borderlands, they were removed altogether from the nation’s identity and history.
Conspiracy
Authors: Malavasic Alice Elizabeth
Published: May 2018

The chapter begins with a discussion of the arrest of Robert M.T. Hunter and other key members of the Confederacy in conjunction with the investigation into Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The chapter also discusses Lincoln and the Republican Party’s rhetorical use of the slave power conspiracy thesis. It concludes with a historiographical overview of the thesis and the role played by the F Street Mess in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Senatorial Junta
Authors: Malavasic Alice Elizabeth
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the institutional power of the F Street Mess during the 33rd Congress including their influence over President Franklin Pierce and Stephen Douglas, the author of the proposed Kansas-Nebraska bill. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the F Street Mess forced a rewrite of the bill’s language which repealed the original 1820 restriction against slavery above the 36 30 and replaced it with the principle of congressional non-intervention, better known as popular sovereignty.
Historical Rights in the Territory
Authors: Patiño Jimmy
Published: May 2018

Chapter 1 reveals the history of Mexican-American immigrant rights organizing in San Diego and larger Southern California at the intersection of ethnic and labor politics from 1924 to 1968. This chapter reveals that Chicano Movement struggles against the deportation regime are part of a longer duree of Mexican-American social movements across generational divides. The chapter begins by exploring the enactment of the Border Patrol and the invention of the “illegal alien” category in 1924 to detail how it came to primarily target the ethnic Mexican population. The chapter then follows the immigrant rights activism of ethnic-based labor movement organizations, primarily the Congress of Spanish-Speaking People, an encounter that convened antiracist labor activists, many members of the Communist Party, and trade unionists from affiliates of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and 40s.
For Those Families Who Are Deported and Have No Place to Land
Authors: Patiño Jimmy
Published: May 2018

Chapter 3 intervenes in the larger scholarship on CASA (The Center for Autonomous Social Action), a national Chicano Movement organization based in Los Angeles, by being the first analysis of its San Diego chapter called CASA Justicia. It reveals CASA Justicia as a significant political space that introduced younger Chicano Movement activists to elder organizers who had struggled against the deportation regime in earlier decades. CASA’s offering of legal and social services to immigrants suffering the perils of undocumented legal status unleashed a wave of migrant agency – that infused Chicano Movement ideological narratives with – and influenced the mostly Mexican-American administrators of CASA to a point where their own identities shifted. Migrants infused their narratives about the way border enforcement policies were an intensely repressive presence in their day-to-day lives determining their ability to be present in their familial relationships, to provide sustenance and economic well-being, and to freely move about.
The Question of Diversity
Authors: Raby Megan
Published: May 2018

Tracing the fieldwork and ideas of Robert H. MacArthur, Howard T. Odum, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, chapter 4 examines the post­World War II rise of efforts to capture the complexity of tropical nature using a simplified quantitative measure: species diversity. The new approaches were abstract but were shaped by U.S. biologists’ experiences in an increasingly wide array of sites within and beyond the circum­Caribbean—facilitated by the U.S. government’s interest in tropical warfare, demand for tropical products, and the growth in air travel. The rise of mathematical and systems approaches in ecology, along with the population perspective of the modern evolutionary synthesis, recast the old question of the biological difference of the tropics. The need for tropical data to solve biology’s core theoretical problems was now unquestionable.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Stephanie J.
Published: May 2018

The introduction lays the foundation for the book. First, the introduction examines culture as a revolutionary weapon, including a comparison of socialist realism in the Soviet Union and social realism Mexico. Second, the chapter considers the relationship between culture and the construction of a Mexican postrevolutionary identity. And lastly, the introduction analyzes the making of the cultural revolution in Mexico, including a consideration of women’s roles, and Mexico City as the destination for radical transnational artists.
Art and the Creation of Mexico’s Communist Party, 1919–1930
Authors: Smith Stephanie J.
Published: May 2018

Chapter 1 focuses on the founding of Mexico’s Communist Party in 1919, and the Party’s links to the influential national and international artistic movement active in Mexico throughout the 1920s. Although during these early years the Party’s official membership numbers remained relatively insignificant, this chapter argues that the extraordinary influence of these creative participants, both female and male, on the politics of the period was far from trivial. Art and politics intertwined as artists played major roles in political affairs, and government officials appropriated the arts to transmit the “official” national history.
Trotsky in Mexico
Authors: Smith Stephanie J.
Published: May 2018

Chapter Three focuses on the ongoing debates between Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, including their central disagreements over Leon Trotsky and his significance to global revolution, to analyze the multiple roles of culture within Mexican society and the profound connections between art and politics during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This chapter examines the importance of art and artists in Mexico’s post-revolutionary state formation to argue that the radical artists and government officials utilized art and culture as a medium to negotiate larger issues whose general relevance fell well beyond art’s more traditional influence. Chapter 3 also utilizes the arrival of Trotsky to Mexico in January 1937 to highlight a crucial time in Mexico’s history when the artists influenced Mexico’s politics in profound and lasting ways.
National Show Town
Authors: Asch Chris Myers , Musgrove George Derek
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the massive demographic and spatial changes that reordered Washington’s racial geography in the decades between disfranchisement in 1878 and the election of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in 1912. As the federal government expanded and real estate boomed, the city burst its bounds and extended far beyond the central core. Driven by real estate developers, urban planners, and congressional leaders who could act without local democratic accountability, the city became a “national show town” featuring a monumental core of federal buildings and monuments. Its residents spread out into surrounding neighborhoods that were increasingly segregated by race and class, as exclusive suburban enclaves put physical and psychological distance between wealthy white Washingtonians and the masses of poor residents, black and white. Without the pull of integrated politics to promote interracial interaction, life in Washington became more segregated than ever before.
How Long? How Long?
Authors: Asch Chris Myers , Musgrove George Derek
Published: May 2018

This chapter begins with urban renewal, which destroyed the entire quadrant of Southwest Washington in the late 1950s. The catastrophic impact of urban renewal helped catalyze an era of grassroots citizen activism throughout Washington in the decade after the legal barriers to racial segregation had tumbled. From the late 1950s to the late 1960s, black and white activists fought back against the business interests and unelected officials who ran Washington, challenging embedded economic inequalities in the black-majority city. Mobilizing citizen power, they struggled to stem white flight, open economic opportunities, build affordable housing, end police brutality, and win home rule. It was a time of extraordinary social ferment, escalating tensions, and explosive confrontation as Washingtonians questioned the basic relationship between the city and the nation. Progress, however, did not keep up with expectations. Despite years of protests, negotiations, hearings, and reports about racial inequality, Washington remained separate and unequal, the divide between black and white only seemed to grow wider, and frustration within the low-income black community intensified.
Go Home Rich White People
Authors: Asch Chris Myers , Musgrove George Derek
Published: May 2018

This chapter analyzes the dramatic economic and demographic transformations that D.C. experienced in the early twenty-first century. Driven by a nationwide housing boom and post-September 11 government expansion, new development injected millions of dollars of capital into neighborhoods that had not seen significant investment since the 1950s. Young, affluent residents swarmed back into Washington, reversing the city’s five-decade population slide, replenishing its tax base, and reshaping the landscape and the culture. But as the city became younger, wealthier, and whiter, many established residents, particularly black Washingtonians, felt alienated from their new neighbors and unwelcome in their own city. Unable to afford homes as D.C. real estate prices skyrocketed, many lower-income residents sought affordable housing in the suburbs. Those who stayed used their dwindling political strength to fight back against displacement and the policymakers who supported unbridled development. On the verge of financial collapse in the mid-1990s, by 2010 the nation’s capital was thriving economically but remained sharply divided along racial lines.
A Strange Time to Seek a Residence in Washington
Authors: Ziparo Jessica
Published: May 2018

Chapter 4 describes the challenges and opportunities of life for women in the nation’s capital during the 1860s. During the Civil War, Washington, D.C., was on the front lines of the conflict. After the war, annual reports of the Board of Metropolitan Police to Congress make clear that Washingtonians continued to endure overcrowding, housing shortages, crime, and disease. Women not only survived in this chaotic context; many—including Patent Office clerk Julia Wilbur, whose diary offers an intriguing window into the everyday life of a female federal employee—thrived in this tough city, enjoying independence, filling their leisure time, and changing the demographics of Washington. For those who chose to do so, female federal employees’ salaries, newly acquired political knowledge, and personal associations provided them with the financial and practical wherewithal to participate in philanthropy and political movements, including the suffrage movement. Female federal employees were visible all over the city, helping to normalize the presence of middle-class women in the streets of Washington. In forming this new, conspicuous community of independent women in full view of the nation’s politicians, female federal employees became a part of the struggle for women’s rights, whether they intended to or not.
I Am Now Exerting All My Thinking Powers
Authors: Ziparo Jessica
Published: May 2018

Chapter 6 addresses female employees’ struggles to keep their positions with the federal government. The number and percentage of women in the federal labor force grew fairly steadily throughout the 1860s, but insecurity and volatility characterized the federal civil service. During the Civil War and immediate postwar period, departments coped with unpredictable workloads through unsystematic, non-uniform, rapid expansions and contractions of their workforces resulting in short employment periods. At the same time, the press of new applicants was unrelenting. Because much of the basic work women did could be adequately done with relatively little training, some supervisors saw female employees as interchangeable. This atmosphere of uncertainty discouraged collective action and forced female federal employees to utilize aggressive strategies to retain and regain the positions they had become reliant upon. In their attempts to remain employed, women demonstrated strength and self-confidence that seemed to have been gained through their federal employment.
Hybrid adaptive control for variable-speed variable-pitch wind
energy systems using general regression neural network
Authors: Yin Xiuxing
Published: May 2018

Abstract. This paper presents a novel hybrid adaptive control approach for the VS-VP half-direct driven WECS by combining pitch control with variable generator torque regulation in different operating regions. A general regression neural network (GRNN) is employed to derive the reference commands of generator torque and pitch angle from the real-time signals of generator power and speed. Furthermore, a fast and effective nonlinear PID pitch controller is presented to track the reference command of pitch angle in the full load region. The proposed GRNN based hybrid adaptive control strategies have been developed and validated using simulations. This study shows that the proposed method is much faster, more accurate and effective than conventional linear control approach.
Public Sector Provision of Free Agricultural Inputs in Uganda: The Rationale and Challenges of Operation Wealth Creation Programme
Authors: Robert Tabaro , Mesharch Katusiimeh
Published: May 2018

The paper analyses the rationale and challenges of public sector provision of free agricultural inputs in Uganda focusing on Operation Wealth Creation (OWC) programme. The programme officially started in 2014 and targets subsistence farmers in the country. OWC aims at commercialization of agriculture thus creating wealth and reducing poverty. It uses the military (Uganda Peoples Defence forces) to distribute and supervise delivery of inputs on the assumption that the army is efficient, organized and disciplined. The study was conducted in the new district of Sheema using purely a qualitative approach. We interviewed farmers, local leaders, opinion leaders and central government officials (key stakeholders) and conducted two Focus Group Discussions. Observation was also used to see how input distribution was being done. Our findings revealed that although OWC is well intended (creation of wealth and reduction of poverty at household level), it faces numerous challenges that hamper smooth implementation. The most common identified challenges were: small quantities of inputs supplied due to limited budget, poor quality inputs, elite capture and stringent entry requirements. Others are fear of the military by farmers, late deliveries of inputs and poor information flow between suppliers, district leadership and farmers. We recommend that government should increase agriculture sector budget, improve on quality of inputs and information flow between suppliers, district leaders and farmers but also fully involve the district leadership in programme implementation.
Italian Lizards and Literary Politics II
Authors: Geller Jay
Published: May 2018

This chapter turns to Heine’s Baths of Lucca, the prequel to City of Lucca, and follows Heine’s proleptic encounter on an Italian mountain road with a different sort of animal, a Hirsch or stag, in the form of the Jewish lottery dealer and chiropodist Hirsch-Hyacinth. One cervine encounter leads to another as the chapter takes a side trip into the woods when it inquires of the Austrian-Jewish author and Zionist Felix Salten’s 1922/23 novel Bambi and its 1940 sequel Bambi’s Children as to whether a doe is just a female deer. Close readings of both belie current attempts to read Salten’s novels as Zionist allegories of the dangers of European Jewish life and argue instead that they open up the relationship between human/animal difference and the designation of the outlaw that becomes an interpretive key for the Jew-as-Animal in chapter eight. Returning to Hirsch-Hyacinth, this chapter concludes by triangulating Heine’s character with the Luccan lizards and Kraus’s “Heine and the Consequences” discussed in chapter five in order to suggest that the distance between Heine’s and Kafka’s writings is less than conventionally assumed.
Colony
Authors: Stoler Ann Laura
Published: May 2018

This chapter analyzes concept of colony, which inhabits an ambiguous sort of space in its oscillation between the still neutrality of a common noun and a political concept in waiting, poised to discharge its potentiality. The conceptual work marshaled to maintain the colony as a political principle is protean, transitory, and contingent in its inception and instantiations. As a political entity, a colony stands apart and is part of something else. Ontologically, it exists in virtue of its dependent status as a subset of another commanding polity. Those who inhabit a colony stand in a skewed relationship to a broader biopolitical and legal norm. Conceptually, the colony is a tenuous, illegitimate, provisional political formation that can only sustain itself by turning people into other social kinds and its political subordination into something else.
Sovereign violence is always justified violence
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2018

Starting from the principle supported by Hegel and others that all violence is link to forms of justification, this thesis explores the way in which instrumental rationality operates in the political sphere.
Judgment is constitutive of democracy
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2018

If the justification of violence is the main characteristic of sovereignty, then how can sovereignty be analyzed? I argue that judgments about the justification of violence are characteristic of democratic practice.
Judgment establishes the agonistic relation between democracy and sovereignty by dejustifying violence
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2018

Thesis 5 shows that the judgment characteristic of democracy consists in exposing the justification of violence characteristic of sovereignty as inadequate.
Stasis, or agonistic monism, names the forms of the relation between democracy and sovereignty
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2018

As soon as justification—and hence judgment and dejustification—are seen as more primary than legitimacy, we can argue that agonistic democracy is the form that precedes any particular formation of political regimes. I call this political insight agonistic monism.
The Visible and the Legible
Authors: Judovitz Dalia
Published: May 2018

This chapter is focused on recurrent representations of books and acts of reading as pictorial subject matter in La Tour’s works. Several scenes of reading are examined starting with St. Jerome reading a letter, the Virgin Mary learning how to read, St. Joseph’s falling asleep while reading, and St. Alexis identified after his death on basis of a letter he holds in his hands. It presents an analysis of the ways words determine how we see and the role of reading as a figure for spiritual illumination understood as a way of seeing that challenges the realm of painterly expression. La Tour’s appeal to the word and the legible casts doubt on knowledge attained through vision in its reliance on visual signs. Indeed, reading as a figure for spiritual illumination challenges and opens up a conceptual redefinition of the visual realm of painterly expression.
Flea Catching and the Vanity of Painting
Authors: Judovitz Dalia
Published: May 2018

This chapter is devoted to an exploration of the role of painting as an instrument of intercession for attaining spiritual insight. Is the supposed “flea” catcher really holding a flea or a rosary bead in her enclosed hands? No one can really tell. But her ordinary appearance, engaged in the trivial even abject task of catching fleas, takes on spiritual connotations when considered in light of the possibility of her holding a rosary. Her familiar appearance acts as a visual gateway that opens onto the spiritual and the sacred. La Tour’s depictions of “blowers of light” help illuminate how painting may ignite and sustain spiritual passions. Imbued with light and the heat of color, the flea catcher’s humble representation is interpreted as a pivotal turning point that alternatively figures both painting’s material limitations and its spiritual aspirations.
Painting as Portal: “Birth” and “Death” of the Sacred Image
Authors: Judovitz Dalia
Published: May 2018

Images of birth, death, and mourning are considered in terms of their theological and pictorial implications. Naturalistic depictions of birth and infancy lend themselves to a theological meditation on the Incarnation, as well as reflections on painting as a medium of incarnation. Taking into account the destruction of sacred images in the wake of Post-Reformation iconoclasm, the second part focuses on paintings of St. Sebastian depicting his supposed “death,” mourning, and miraculous recovery. It shows how the martyrdom of painting, figured through the lens of St. Sebastian’s “death,” and the Catholic Reform’s subsequent response in attempting to redefine the sacred image, lead to a new understanding of painting. La Tour’s works address this seminal problem, by
showing how painting may redeem its spiritual authority by sacrificing its visual manifestations as an image when redefined as a portal to the sacred.
Epilogue
Authors: Judovitz Dalia
Published: May 2018

The epilogue presents a reassessment of La Tour’s reception and pictorial impact in light of his unique and inexplicable disappearance from the annals of art history. His pictorial legacies to both the seventeenth century and to the twenty-first century are considered insofar as they provide a platform for engaging in broader reflections on the nature of vision, the visible, and viewer response. The importance and endurance of La Tour’s artistic legacy is summed up in terms of his conceptual approach which calls the very nature of painting into question.
Out of the Groove
Authors: Bachner Andrea
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores different links between sound and writing, from Rilke’s and Adorno’s reflections on phonographic grooves as a type of proto-writing in the early decades of the twentieth century to contemporary media theories that invest sound with the powers of immediacy, immersion, and corporeal resonance on the one hand and to poststructuralist fantasies of sound as an embodiment of écriture on the other. Sound theorists invest sound with contradictory desires: as a counter to phonocentric phantasms of presence as well as an alternative, resonant way of thinking, as that which is most mediated as well as a figure of non-mediation. And figures of inscription—as overt or disavowed imaginary, as well as negative foil—frequently represent and mediate between these differing theoretical approaches to sound. The genealogy of intextuated sound that this chapter narrates throws light on the strategic deployment of media in theory, for which sound (and its conceptual imaginaries) becomes a hallmark of reconceptualizing corporeality and materiality as well as a way of negotiating between mediation and the unmediated.
Who Weeps for the Sodomite?
Authors: Brintnall Kent L.
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines pro-LGBT readings of the Sodom and Gomorrah story (Genesis 19) in light of Lee Edelman’s argument from No Future concerning the constitutive antagonism that founds and funds the social. The chapter shows how such readings replicate the dynamic of exclusionary othering that can be found in both the story and in anti-LGBT readings of the story. As an alternative to such readings, the chapter proposes an embrace of the catastrophic negativity at the heart of the story, and its representations, figured in Lot’s wife’s act of witnessing.
The Madness of Holy Saturday: Bipolar Temporality and the Queerdom of Heaven on Earth
Authors: Bray Karen
Published: May 2018

This chapter makes queer and feminist interventions in contemporary political theology. It uncovers the temporalities and affects nurtured by the eschatological and counter-eschatological orientations within radical orthodox and radical democratic theologies. It then places such orientations into dialogue with: Shelly Rambo’s Holy Saturday theology; the queer temporalities of Lee Edelman, Heather Love, José Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman; Ann Cvetkovich’s work on depression; and Robert McRuer’s critical disability theory. From this dialogue the concept of “bipolar time”—a Holy Saturday temporality and a mode of affect-laden resistance to profitable time—is constructed. Bipolar time is birthed from the interpenetrating feelings of depression occasioned by the neoliberal present and those of manic hope for alternative futures. Bipolar time does not seek a final end to its penetrative flows of despair and desire or to become efficiently and sufficiently ordered; instead it seeks out the insights on offer by disorder. It is a dream of a temporally reordered world—a Queerdom of Heaven on Earth—where worth is divorced from work, and purpose is divorced from profitability.
Remember—When?
Authors: Mackendrick Karmen
Published: May 2018

In the Confessions, Augustine argues that God is found in memory. One indication of this is that we all desire true happiness, even though we certainly have not found it in our lifetimes; this indicates that we must remember it from somewhere or somewhen. This chapter asks what it means to find a God only in memory and what kind of memory that could be. After reviewing the mnemonic options of forgetting, mourning, and melancholy, it turns to the possibility of haunting. In conjunction with Judith Butler’s theory of a forbidden melancholic queer identification, it asks about a haunting by God and, then, how such a God is to be conceived. The result ties an immemorial past to a future of possibility and a mutual entanglement of hope with loss
Coda
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2018

Philosophy, literature: expectation.

Expectations by one of the other: desire, expectation, solicitation, appeal, desperate insistence.

Each expects the truth. Each also expects the truth of the other, in two ways: each of them interrogates the other about its truth, each holds the truth of the other. They reciprocally expect that truth as a service, as an aid, an example, an illustration or explanation, a revelation. Each one knows that it can expect nothing of the other but nonetheless persists in its expectation, for each also knows that its truth is outside itself....
Reasons to Write
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2018

In a certain manner—very certain, in fact—it is pretty much impossible today to write anything/nothing about the book. This particularity of the French language with respect to the word nothing [rien] forces us to simultaneously understand it as: it is no longer possible to write anything at all concerning the book, and it is no longer possible to dispense with writing about the book....
… would have to be a novel …
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2018

Literature is not part of written language: that is, at least, if writing is not the simple graphic record of speech.

Writing is prior to speech and perhaps even to language. For a language is possible only through implicit but constitutive reference to the impossibility of going beyond itself to establish itself in another language that would provide it with meaning. A language can only be established in itself, in the circular return to its own code. This law of language can be expressed by the formula: no metalanguage....
On the Work and Works
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2018

Seen from a no-doubt-questionable vantage point, but one we must occupy for the time being, we can say that the idea of the “work” annoys, irritates, and excites the entire history of our culture. It assumes pride of place in an uneasy way of thinking about reality, that is, a mode of thinking in which the real is no longer guaranteed, neither by its perceptible certainty nor by its drive toward an intellect that would, when all is said and done, be no more than that certainty itself. On the contrary, it is through the disjunction between perceptible presence and a breath held behind it that we are more or less forced to represent the constituent movement of our tradition....
To Open the Book
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2018

When the book is closed, there are three possibilities.

The first consists of not opening the book, literally or, at least, in the sense that opening and reading it involve repeating the text we already know, which we have learned and possessed since childhood, by heart, as they say, that is, with an intimacy that preserves it intact in its recitation. In that intimacy, we can say that the book remains open indefinitely, but contained in its dispersion....
Noli me frangere
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2018

Of the fragment, little should be written. It is not an object or a genre, it does not form a work. (Friedrich Schlegel’s fragmentary will is the very will to the Work, and enough has been said about that. But what Blanchot calls the fragmentary ...
“Within my breast, alas, two souls …”
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2018

To accompany L’Isola del silenzio

by Claudio Parmiggiani

Labor lost, philosophy,

jurisprudence, and medicine,

other labor lost, theology, physiology, and you,

learned disciplines of every kind,

all your efforts lost, as well as mine.1

Take care, for in a short while nothing of you shall remain, knowledge, wisdom, venerable deposits of nights of study and lives of contemplation. Nothing will remain but my closed fist on your torn pages, which I will toss into the fire....
City Moments
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2018

a cobblestone street

among the asphalt pavements

the fawn colored stones gleaming

on the back of the great lizard

a hint of grass between the scales

worksite ditch barrier

crane shovel pothole

jackhammer compressor

protective grating

on all those hoses

electric gas hydraulic digital

entrails cables conduits...
Derrida, Agamben, Wynter
Authors: Lloyd Vincent W.
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the way race and religion are articulated together in the work of leading critical theorists Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. It probes how these theorists stand on the border between philosophy of religion and theology, and it argues that it is only because of secularist assumptions that this divide between outsider’s philosophy of religion and insider’s theology can be maintained. For Derrida, both religion and race function as loose threads that can be pulled in order to unravel a system of thought. For Agamben, the protagonist of modernity, homo sacer, is both racialized and sanctified. Yet Derrida and Agamben’s accounts are skewed by a Eurocentrism and a failure to take religious ideas sufficiently seriously. The black feminist Sylvia Wynter offers an antidote, similarly linking race and religion but doing so in a way that attends to how racialization is produced theologically and goes hand in hand with patriarchy. Wynter’s work implies that philosophy of religion that refuses secularism is always black theology and that black theology must engage seriously with questions in philosophy of religion.
For What Are Whites to Hope?
Authors: Lloyd Vincent W.
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines how secularist conceptions of hope lead us astray. In analytic philosophy, hope is often understood as a desire that is not entirely justified with reasons. In cultural studies, hope has recently been looked upon suspiciously, as an affect the circulation of which is intensified by neoliberal economics. In mid-twentieth-century German political theology and theory, hope is viewed as entirely other-worldly. In liberation theology, the object of hope is identification with the poor. This chapter argues that each of these views grows out of concealed secularist premises, and each of these views ends up perpetuating the status quo: white supremacy. After exploring the antinomies of hope, the chapter urges that whites are to embrace these antinomies. They are to hope for despair.
Coda: The Birth of the Black Church
Authors: Lloyd Vincent W.
Published: May 2018

This essay reflects on the meaning of black religious community in light of the critique of black secularism performed. When paradox and tradition, sainthood and messianism, hope and love, and most of all blackness and theology are purged of the distortions wrought by secularism, what does that mean for black religious life? How can black theology be renewed in the wake of the critique of secularism? Challenging Eddie Glaude’s contention that the black church is dead, this essay shows that black religious thinkers have long understood the black church theologically. Doing shows how the black church is constantly being reborn.
Cervantes on “Derrida”: Hispanism in the Open
Authors: Lezra Jacques
Published: May 2018

This essay describes and addresses the difficulty that Hispanism has in imagining its foundations and origination. It reads Cervantes’s novela ejemplar “El licenciado Vidriera” as an allegory of disciplinarity and disciplinarization, which the novela treats as a matter inextricable from the sense of touch. This Cervantic, early-modern account of the primal relation between discipline and touch, the essay suggests, anticipates and allows us to see unexpected consequences to Derrida’s quite radical approach to disciplinarity.
Spectral Comparisons: Cortázar and Derrida
Authors: Kelman David
Published: May 2018

How can a certain monolingualism help theorize comparative literature? What does Hispanism have to say about comparison? By comparing texts by Julio Cortázar (on the cuento or short story) and Jacques Derrida (on the limit), Kelman suggests that the mode of communication called “Hispanism” is structured like a cuento: every focus on a delimited text in Spanish would also present another text that never fully appears. Cortázar especially invites us to think about a ghostly “comparative literature” at the heart of Hispanism. This spectral comparison—or a comparative literature in secret—would then touch the sovereignty of the Hispanist, even and especially when the emphasis remains limited to the monolingual.
On Mondialatinization, or Saving the Name of the Latin
Authors: Hanneken Jaime
Published: May 2018

The last century of Latin Americanist Hispanism could be characterized as a mondialatinisation through which ethno-religious Latin origins and experience are elevated to an ontotheological register of expectation. Given Derrida’s own insistence on the specifically Latin extraction of globalizing power structures, deconstruction may help us grasp more concretely how the specific or the identitarian figures in the singularity of the messianic as horizon of change. In other words, does the specific have a role in deconstruction other than being deconstructed? To address such questions, this essay undertakes a reading of Faith and Knowledge focused on mondialatinisation by way of related issues of the event, time, and experience.