bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Surplus Feelings: Neoliberal Noir and the Affective Economy of Debt
Authors: Dunst Alexander
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the dramatization of debt in two contemporary noir films by Danish-American director Winding Refn. A financialized obligation, debt is ceaselessly bought, sold, and securitized. At the same time, debt creates and sustains a social economy of affect that moves within and between people as it crisscrosses our planet. Drive and Only God Forgives tell stories about working-class families, drifters, and small-time crooks to explore the guilt, distrust, and despondency set in motion by a present that remains forever in debt to the past and cannot discern a future. Incapable of repaying what he owes, Drive’s nameless protagonist finds that debt breeds ever more debt. This constant increase, or excess, situates Refn’s characters as biopolitical relays for the monetized consumption and free production of sexuality and violence, and thus the surplus jouissance on which both capital and cinema feed. Set in Los Angeles and Bangkok at the intersection of migratory and financial flows, Refn imagines a global shadow economy of money laundering and drugs. Yet Refn's meditation on the relationship between debt and violence also ponders the possibility of forgiveness within a system determined to uphold financial measurements of social interaction.
Capitalism as Affective Atmosphere: The Noir Worlds of Massimo Carlotto
Authors: Pepper Andrew
Published: January 2021

This chapter interrogates the relationship between the novels of the Italian crime writer Massimo Carlotto and the ills of capitalism in its neoliberal phase. But crucially it is not an ideological critique where character and action can be fully explained according to the logic of capitalism as a social and economic system. Rather, Carlotto's noir universe is chaotic and unpredictable, and his characters do not understand themselves or their actions beyond a basic inclination toward financial gain and self-interest. As such, I argue that affect understood as an autonomic or bodily response to one's environment better explains Carlotto's noir world; and that 'noir affect'—which takes and inverts the positive potential of affect identified by Massumi and others—acts on populations to negatively imbricate or subsume action and character in the unruly violence of the 'free' market.
Epilogue: The Cosmopolitics of Literature
Authors: Cherbuliez Juliette
Published: January 2021

The Epilogue offers an application of the Medean principle of violence beyond the premodern, first through a reading of cosmopolitanism as a state of epistemological outsiderness: that which can neither be assimilated nor expiated. It turns to Leïla Slimani’s 2016 Chanson douce as a critical examination of contemporary Medean violence
Don’t Ask the French
Authors: Garnier Philippe
Published: January 2021

This is a personal account by someone who witnessed firsthand, and himself had a hand in, John Fante's extraordinary popularity in France in the late 1980s. Before being rediscovered by Charles Bukowski and Black Sparrow Press, Fante’s neglect in his own country for over forty years had a lot to do with French enthusiasm for his work. Identification with Fante's alter ego Bandini was instrumental as well, but a rather similar character (a struggling and starving young artist) in another, earlier, novel which had an undeniable influence on Ask the Dust—Knut Hamsun's Hunger—never stirred as big an emotional response with the French, possibly because Hamsun was extremely well-known not only in his own country but also everywhere else in Europe. The French never like success, but instead love to embrace artists they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as maudits—doomed to oblivion at home.
Photography and the Image of the City
Authors: Faflik David
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the visual form of urban photography during the technology’s foundational stages of the mid-nineteenth century. Of special interest in this chapter is the photographic form of the daguerreotype. Because of its technical limitations and cumbersome requirements for prolonged exposure, the daguerreotype was never a literal window onto the city. The photographic process itself posed the practical and philosophical paradox of whether a city that could not and would not stand still might be interpreted by a mode of representation that required its objects of observation to be stationary. This new technology could offer up images of exquisite detail. It could also produce (unlike the alternative later technology of the stereoscope) pictures in which the pulsating life of the metropolis was more or less absent. Chapter 4 addresses this representational paradox, while presenting a selective visual survey of some of the early city views from New York and Paris that photography afforded the nineteenth-century reader.
Peculiar Attunements
Authors: Grant Roger Mathew
Published: January 2021

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music. These theorists postulated that it was music’s physical materiality as sound that vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it argues for renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.
Comic Opera: Mimesis Exploded
Authors: Grant Roger Mathew
Published: January 2021

This chapter concerns eighteenth-century comic opera, which emerged as a metatheatrical commentary on the conventions of aristocratic, serious opera. In its mockery of neo-classical mimesis, comic opera forced critics to articulate what was new about its musical style. It therefore precipitated a huge pamphlet debate known as the querelle des bouffons, in which certain theorists began to understand music’s aesthetic appeal differently. These thinkers cleaved music’s affective power away from the operation of mimesis, offering instead a materialist account of vibrational attunement predicated on sympathetic resonance. The chapter concludes with a reading of Diderot’s contribution to the debate in his celebratedtext Rameau’s Nephew.
Goethe’s Erratics
Authors: Groves Jason
Published: January 2021

The second chapter explores a geological imaginary in the Age of Goethe that takes shape around the errant mobility of granite within a climatologically volatile planet rather than the vertical cliffs, stationary mountains, and imperturbable landforms that have traditionally occupied ecocritical attention. In carefully attending to Goethe’s longstanding engagement with the aesthetic and geological problem of so-called erratic blocks, this chapter recontextualizes the scenes and figures of mobility in his 1829 novel Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering within the errancy of the more-than-human world. The itinerant protagonists in this novel are geomorphic figures whose genealogy includes the granite erratics, and the novel’s environmental imagination is one oriented less toward fixed stratifications and more toward the plotting of an erratic mobility.
The Shock of the Earth
Authors: Groves Jason
Published: January 2021

This chapter unearths Walter Benjamin’s dispersed remarks on a figure of shock, the Erschütterung, in order to mark a shift from theorizing sudden disturbances toward registering a deeper time of collapse. The resonant asphalt of Berlin’s Tiergarten, the porous rock of Naples, the uneven paving stones of Paris, the unregulated ground of Marseilles’s public squares, and the rocky paths of Ibiza’s hills become the locus of a shocking experience whose theorization offers an aesthetics of and for the mineral imaginary. Benjamin’s critical and literary elaborations of this form of shock, which evinces an astonishing sensitivity both to the unsettled earth underfoot and planetary irregularities, offer a way to figure the sense of disorientation shared by Tieck, Goethe, and Stifter as well as that of a contemporary epoch facing a breakdown of the Earth system.
Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World
Authors: Johnson Galen A. , Carbone Mauro , Saint Aubert Emmanuel de
Published: January 2021

Merleau-Ponty’s Poetics of the World offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Thus also arise the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. This poetics is worked out across each co-author’s chapters in dialogue with Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, and Sartre. A new optic proposes the conception of literature as a visual “apparatus” in relation to cinema and screens. Recent transcriptions of Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France The Sensible World and the World of Expression and Research on the Literary Usage of Language, as well as the course of 1953–54, The Problem of Speech, lend timeliness, urgency and energy to this project. Our goal is to specify more precisely the delicate nature and properly philosophical function of literary works in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the literary writer becomes a partner of the phenomenologist. Ultimately, theoretical figures that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.
“The Proustian Corporeity” and “The True Hawthorns”
Authors: Carbone Mauro
Published: January 2021

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty famously wrote: “No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible.” To gain a fresh and original access to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Proust, this chapter places his views alongside those of another of Proust’s great interpreters, Walter Benjamin. In spite of the absence of explicit references to Benjamin in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, certain intersections are clear. For one thing, we find the originating importance of Husserl for Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin. Though they make reference to very distant periods of Husserlian thought, they share at least a distrust with regard to experience understood as Erlebnis. Second, they each give attention to the theme of essence and ideas, which, concerning artistic and literary works, are considered by the two thinkers as immanent within the works themselves. This suggests one of the most important contributions of Proust to Merleau-Ponty’s thought, the concept of “sensible ideas.” Third, both Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin demonstrate their common interest in perception and memory, sometimes focusing on the very same pages of Recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] to deepen, through the character of Marcel, the concept of “involuntary memory.”
The Clouded Surface
Authors: Carbone Mauro
Published: January 2021

The whole path of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is crossed—sometimes more evidently than others—by what I propose to qualify as the idea of literature and philosophy as visual apparatuses, to use an expression that was born—and not by chance—in the Film Studies domain. More precisely, I aim at asserting that Merleau-Ponty sees literature and philosophy working in his epoch as convergent apparatuses (dispositifs) of vision, in turn understood as a bodily and not merely ocular practice. Immediately after that, I should specify that such convergent visual apparatuses peculiarly function by words, and that Merleau-Ponty stresses their different efficiency in expressing his epoch. Moreover, I think that the implicit idea of philosophy as a visual apparatus working by words “like all literature” has a particularly relevant but so far not consequently developed place in in the last period of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Also, I would like to stress that such a perspective is crucial in our own time too, even though I consider it to be different from Merleau-Ponty’s. Indeed, I think that both our time and Merleau-Ponty’s are characterized by a tension between the increasing importance of images and the traditional centrality of the concept in our culture.
Metaphoricity
Authors: Aubert Emmanuel de Saint
Published: January 2021

Whoever has an inclination toward the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty can sense manifest and multiple ties with the question of metaphor. The study of these linkages invites an examination of the philosopher’s original manner or style of writing, especially in the late texts; it also leads to a reading of what Merleau-Ponty says explicitly about metaphor. Finally, and especially, it promises an evaluation of what his philosophy brings to us for a renewed understanding of metaphoricity. Particularly, we need to understand its natural inscription and its expressive power, its anthropological foundations and its ontological horizons: why metaphor is typical of our carnal being-in-the-world, as well as what it says to us about being human, about the world, and even about Being. These complementary approaches require bringing together the most advanced dimensions of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty.
The Fact of Resonance
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: January 2021

The Fact of Resonance returns to the imperial and colonial contexts in which Anglophone and francophone narrative theory developed, seeking an alternative sonic premise for theorizing narrative form. The exclusion of postcolonial sound and acoustics is foundational not only to modernist studies, but to narrative theory, novel theory, and the strains of film theory they orient. The study is primarily focused on Joseph Conrad and concerns the bearing of his multilingual formation and attunement to the gender and race of sound in colonial encounter. To return to Conrad is to return to the repressed of colonial sound. Bringing new methodologies of sound studies and postcolonial studies to bear upon older models of narrative and close reading, the book argues the novel to be a sound technology. This technology captures not “facts,” but a fact of resonance, which is both a physical sound and a strategy of relation across difference. The book develops a methodology of reading for resonance, while also developing a vocabulary for the acoustic unconscious of texts. These readings focus on the way that imaginary sound and voice circulate within and between texts, from page to psyche, from colonial site to metropole, and across race and gender. The book follows the resonances between Conrad and a series of writers and artists, including Chantal Akerman, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the transatlantic and transpacific are resonance, less a place than an event.
Coda: Chantal Akerman and Lip Sync as Postcolonial Strategy
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: January 2021

… and with the very first word uttered Marlow’s body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past.

Joseph Conrad, ...
The Echo of the Object: On the Pain of Self-Hearing in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and “The Fact of Blackness”
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: January 2021

Chapter Two searches for a mode of reading that might repair the sonorous after-life, or echoes, of racism in narrative and text. Echo is defined by slap-back, or a doubling. This doubling locates, as a counterpart to the Freudian subject (the ego ideal), a “voice ideal.” It is defined by the melancholy of race in relation to foreign traces, colonial accent, and slurs. The instantiating case of the study is Conrad’s third novel, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, but as a counterpart to psychoanalysis in Sigmund Freud’s “On Narcissism” and Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness.” The chapter concludes with William Faulkner’s intensive engagement with Conrad in The Sound and the Fury, as it amounts to Faulkner finding his “voice” as a writer of the American South through the echo of Conrad’s racial melancholy.
Reprise: Reverberation, Circumambience, and Form-Seeking Sound (Absalom, Absalom!)
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: January 2021

The Reprise takes up among his most sensitive readers, Faulkner and his Absalom, Absalom!. Through Conrad, Faulkner was seeking a literary racial form for the historical present of a segregated and unreconstructed South: “reverberation.” Bringing sound studies to bear upon narratology, the Reprise argues that Faulkner’s difference from Conrad lies in the place of history: as action at a distance, reverberation in narrative involves one actor completing in the present what another could not in the past. The Reprise brings the traces of Polish in Conrad’s grammar to bear upon Faulkner’s continuation of Conrad’s project of listening, a project that also complements Du Bois. Ultimately, the novel becomes in Faulkner’s hands a technology for recording history and its negativity.
Against Sustainability
Authors: Neely Michelle
Published: January 2021

Against Sustainability responds to twenty-first-century environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. In readings that juxtapose antebellum and contemporary writers such as Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book reconnects sustainability, recycling, and preservation with nineteenth-century U.S. contexts such as industrial farming, consumerism, slavery, and settler colonial expansion. These readings demonstrate that the paradigms explored are compromised in their attempts to redress environmental degradation because they simultaneously perpetuate the very systems that generate the degradation to begin with. Alongside the chapters that focus on defamiliarization and critique are chapters that reveal that the nineteenth century also gave rise to more unusual and provisional environmentalisms. These chapters offer alternatives to the failed paradigms of recycling and preservation, exploring Henry David Thoreau’s and Emily Dickinson’s joyful, anti-consumerist frugality and Hannah Crafts’s and Harriet Wilson’s radical pet keeping model of living with others. The coda considers zero waste and then contrasts sustainability with functional utopianism, an alternative orienting paradigm that might more reliably guide mainstream U.S. environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Ultimately, Against Sustainability offers novel readings of familiar literary works that demonstrate how U.S. nineteenth-century literature compels us to rethink our understandings of the past in order to imagine other, more just and environmentally-sound futures.
Joyful Frugality: Thoreau, Dickinson, and the Pleasures of Not Consuming
Authors: Neely Michelle C.
Published: January 2021

Chapter two counters the ethic of recycling with an anti-consumerist, joyful frugality theorized in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. It begins by evoking Lydia Maria Child, Sylvester Graham, and a popular culture of antebellum frugality advice literature, demonstrating that such advice literature linked refusing to consume with personal happiness and vibrant democratic citizenship. In this nineteenth-century context, Thoreau’s experiments in frugal living at Walden Pond emerge as central to the book’s political and artistic projects. Thoreau’s radical minimalism in Walden is designed to promote both individual happiness and collective social justice as it challenges the consumerist status quo. The last part of the chapter explores Emily Dickinson’s 1860s and 1870s poetry of desire, possession, and consumption. Against readings that have consistently pathologized Dickinson’s approach to these topics, chapter two suggests that Dickinson is a complex theorist of consumer desire whose emphasis on the pleasures of anticipation and the disappointments of consumption have much to teach us in the Capitalocene. This chapter ultimately suggests that Thoreau and Dickinson together theorize a joyful frugality that shifts the site of pleasure away from consumption, making anti-consumerist lifeways seem not only possible, but—more importantly—richly appealing.
Introduction: Two Minds
Authors: O'Donnell Angela Alaimo
Published: January 2021

Presents a general overview of the book’s argument concerning O’Connor’s relationship to race and surveys the current state of scholarship. Highlights the role that the unpublished letters have for the present study.
“Whiteness Visible”: Critical Whiteness Studies and O’Connor’s Fiction
Authors: O'Donnell Angela Alaimo
Published: January 2021

Chapter 1, “‘Whiteness Visible’: Critical Whiteness Studies and O’Connor’s Fiction,” summarizes the treatment of race in O’Connor criticism from the 1970s to the present, outlines some key concepts of racial formation theory and whiteness studies, and considers their potential relevance and application to O’Connor’s work. The chapter includes a brief history of the idea of race, an examination of the so-called “color line” and the racial code observed by whites and blacks in the South, and an exploration of O’Connor’s attitudes toward that code as evident in some of her letters and in her representations of black characters in her stories. The chapter includes analysis of her first and last stories, “The Geranium” and “Judgement Day.”
Race, Politics, and the Double Mind: Flannery’s Correspondence versus O’Connor’s Fiction
Authors: O'Donnell Angela Alaimo
Published: January 2021

Chapter, 2, “Race, Politics, and the Double Mind: Flannery’s Correspondence versus O’Connor’s Fiction,” provides necessary background for the origins of O’Connor’s ideas about race. It focuses on concepts of race O’Connor inherited, challenges to those ideas she may have encountered going to graduate school in Iowa and living in New York, and O’Connor’s response to the events of the Civil Rights movement. This chapter includes discussion of O’Connor’s correspondence, especially the letters exchanged between O’Connor and Maryat Lee and between O’Connor and Elizabeth Hester (both published and unpublished) and considers the light they shed on O’Connor’s attitudes. In assessing the inconsistency evident in O’Connor’s discussion of race in the letters and in the stories, the chapter includes discussion of speech act theory, particularly Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s differentiation between “natural” and “fictive” discourse. These considerations serve as foundation for an analysis of O’Connor’s treatment of race in some of her early stories, including “The Geranium” (reprise), “The Barber,” “Wildcat,” and “The Coat.”
Living with Tiny Aliens
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

Astrobiology forces us to realize how deeply tethered we are to this pale blue dot in the universe while also opening us to the exciting possibilities of existing in a fecund cosmos. Addressing both of these issues, this work offers a model for doing public theology attuned to astrobioloical humanities. It taps into theology’s capacity to develop societal goods by interpreting religious symbols as expressions of ultimacy that foster powerful moods for meaningfully ordering our ways of being-in and belonging-to the cosmos. Providing a series of specific examples drawn from astrobiology, doctrinal reflection on the imago Dei, and reflections on the Anthropocene, this book claims the Earth is not only a living planet but an artful one. Consequently, it suggests that the imago Dei be reframed in terms of planetarity: to be the imago Dei is to be a planetary system that opens up new possibilities for the flourishing of all creation by fostering technobiogeochemical cycles not subject to runaway, positive feedback. The imago Dei, then, is not something any one of us possesses; it is a symbol for what we live-into together as a species in intra-action with the wider habitable environment. Attentive to how this outlook can be fostered, the conclusion advocates for the development of presence, wonder, and play in the lives of individuals who seek to live as part of an artful planet.
Being a Living-System
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

If astrobiology provides a credible way of thinking about what it means to ‘live’ on and with the wider habitats of any cosmic body, then existing sets of symbols must be reinterpreted in order to develop a meaningful way of being-in-the-world and belonging-together-with-the-world in light of the astrobiological concern for intra-action that counters tendencies to human exceptionalism. This chapter makes overlapping arguments that deal with the nature of such symbols. It first examines the relationship between Christian doctrine and symbols to make a case for why doctrines might be reclaimed as symbols in constructive theological reflection if they are not used primarily for apologetic purposes but to facilitate the meaningful re-orientation of our existence in the world. It then considers the Imago Dei as such a doctrinal symbol. Resisting the tendency to turn the doctrine into a freestanding account of biblical anthropology, the chapter draws out resonances between astrobiology’s account of intra-action and the harmonious ordering of creation in cosmogonies that can ground subsequent interpretation of the symbol.
An Artful Planet
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

This chapter offers a constructive account of interpreting the Anthropocene and the imago Dei as corroborative symbols interpreted in an astrobiological context of engagement by weaving the crucial themes of intra-action, refraction, planetarity, and deep time together. It proposes that to be the imago Dei is not a property of individuals or even a species but describes a categorical shift in planetary flows of energy and matter. This is a shift from biogeochemical cycles to technobiogeochemical cycles. If human beings live into our shared responsibility for being the imago Dei, then the Earth should be understood as not only a living planet, but an artful one.
The Homemaker as Worker
Authors: Swinth Kirsten
Published: January 2021

Swinth’s essay explores 1970s American feminists’ efforts to revalue household labor as work with economic and social value. It begins by tracing domestic workers’ campaign to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act and secure a minimum wage for household employees. The chapter then turns to liberal and radical feminists’ struggles to recognize housework as labor worthy of wages and fringe-benefits, including most importantly, social security. By altering the valuation of household labor and making social reproduction visible as work, feminists of the era drew on a gender justice framework to put forward successful working alternatives to conventional economics. Swinth bolsters contemporary campaigns to value women’s emotional labor and caregiving by connecting them to the vision pioneered by second wave feminists more than fifty years ago.
Working Alternatives
Authors: Pirson Michael
Published: January 2021

A clear definition of capitalism should be a building block for any conversation about working alternatives. In this chapter I am exploring the different definitions of capitalism that have been forwarded and highlight the difficulty in establishing such clarity. I then propose understanding capitalism as a metaphor and highlight the contentious dimensions that have provoked the search for working alternatives: the protection of dignity or intrinsic value as well as the promotion of the well-being or the common good. I then suggest that the way we organize on individual, group, organizational, and societal level can protect intrinsic value and promote the common good, a concept I label humanistic management.
Meaningful Work in a Time of Crisis
Authors: Stanley Vincent
Published: January 2021

The co-author of The Responsible Company: Patagonia’s First 40 years describes how work at the clothing company he helped start became increasingly meaningful and satisfying over the decades as, beginning with a switch from conventional to organic cotton, Patagonia tackled increasingly difficult social and environmental problems in its operation and supply chain. Stanley draws on two papal encyclicals, Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum(1891) and Francis’s Laudato Si (2015), and Catholic social justice principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, to illustrate the need and the possibility, in a time of social and environmental crisis, for business to mobilize its productive capacity to help regenerate human communities and the natural world; this would be meaningful work of the highest order.
Identifying the Enemy
Authors: Short Courtney A.
Published: January 2021

Analyzing the complicated relationship between Okinawa and Japan, U.S. Army planners recognized that they had to gauge the reaction of the Okinawan population to a foreign force invading their land. Assessing the civilian temperament correlated directly to the practical military planning considerations of provisions and security, yet also required the planners to interpret the level of allegiance that the Okinawans felt toward Japan. The Americans, therefore, made determinations about the Okinawans’ identity that influenced the construction of military government policy. The U.S. Army planners who devised military government policy and the commanders and soldiers who executed that policy thus carefully considered practical military matters in their decision-making; however, contemplation of the complex ethnic and political situation in Okinawa as a prefecture of Japan stood as a paramount element of policy construction. The U.S. Army concluded that the actions of the Okinawans could not be accurately predicted. The U.S. Army’s consideration of race and ethnicity produced logically reasoned policies instituted to ensure the success of the combat mission.
The US Fights Overseas
Authors: Short Courtney A.
Published: January 2021

U.S. military forces spread across the globe in various states of preparation. While some military government personnel attended Civil Affairs training schools, many only received training onboard the transport ships heading across the Pacific. Soldiers received training that instructed them to approach the Okinawans with caution and to view them as potential enemies, yet they also were granted the authority to assess their own interactions with the civilians on their own merits. Marines training finalized Okinawan identity and left no room for debate or reconsideration.
Benevolent Captors?
Authors: Short Courtney A.
Published: January 2021

Confrontation with the Americans both frightened and confused the Okinawans. Believing in the horrific Japanese propaganda that described the Americans as demonic, sadistic monsters, the civilians attempted to avoid capture. Failing at evasion, the Okinawans discovered to their surprise that the military government camps offered relative safety and access to medical care, fresh clothes, and food. American military government camps and the behavior of U.S. troops offered an opportunity for the Okinawans to redefine their identity in order to capitalize on the favorable conditions. By deliberately aligning their identity either more closely with the Americans or more strictly as Okinawans, and fracturing their association with the Japanese, the civilians found they could also dispel American fears and confusion as well.
Middling Romanticism
Authors: Sng Zachary
Published: January 2021

The book examines the “middling” work performed by writers of the Romantic period such as Lessing, Kleist, P. B. Shelley, and Hölderlin. It traces their attempts to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle, which begin with dislodging terms such as medium, moderation, and mediation from their conventional roles as self-evident, self-effacing tools that conduct from one pole to another or provide a compromise between two extremes. What they offer instead is a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that recognize their centrality to the concept of relation. This produces a profound medial ambivalence that underpins romanticism’s re-writing of conceptual pairs such as origin and destination, speaker and addressee, deficit and surplus, self and other. In this light, we might also ask what it means for us to recognize our mediated relationship to romanticism. To address this question, the readings consider romantic writing in the context of a double juxtaposition: alongside the legacy of romantic middling in the twentieth century but the classical sources about the middle that romanticism draw on. The challenge is to see romanticism as neither ancient nor modern, but as the historical hinge upon which such distinctions turn, the mirror in which our own image is mediated and cast back to us.
Introduction
Authors: Sng Zachary
Published: January 2021

Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that make these terms central to modern understandings of relation.
Confederation as a Hemispheric Anomaly
Authors: Smith Andrew
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on the decision of several of Britain’s North American colonies to develop a political confederation for domestic self-governance in the 1860s while eschewing external sovereignty. Bringing insights from U.S. historiography to bear on recent studies of British identity, Smith finds an additional motive for Confederation not often addressed: defending Britishness against “an ethnic-nationalist definition of U.S. citizenship.” The use of British “as both an ethnic label and a more inclusive legal concept that corresponded to the category of British nationality” gave important protections to nonwhite and non-Protestant Canadians that they worried might be lost after annexation to the bellicose United States, which had shown its hand in anti-Catholic attitudes in its conquest of Mexico.
Civil War and Nation Building in North America, 1848–1867
Authors: González Pablo Mijangos y
Published: January 2021

In this essay, the author “outlines a regional and comparative history of the emergence of North American nation-states during the mid-nineteenth century, attempting to highlight common challenges and solutions—and reciprocal influences—between the region’s distinct countries.” It analyzes the “successive ‘constitutional pacts’ that governed the difficult adaptation of the North American peoples to the demands of liberal capitalism and representative government.” Mijangos observes that the US and Mexico experienced “constitutional revolution,” while Canadians, who experienced neither civil war nor a revolution of independence, arrived at a similar place in the 1860s by a distinctive, more gradual process.
1860s Capitalscapes, Governing Interiors, and the Illustration of North American Sovereignty
Authors: Bonner Robert
Published: January 2021

The author identifies democratic nationalism as a common theme of state making in Canada, Mexico, and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The essay focuses on public architecture and commemoration in the capital cities of Ottawa, Washington, DC, and Mexico City, largely as conveyed in illustrated news. Midcentury illustrations of “Leviathan 2.0” repeatedly assert that power was wielded on behalf of the people. Bonner argues further that illustrated print journalism’s focus on “parliamentary procedure, staged as a matter of federative give-and-take,” balanced and distracted from “the physical force on which the ‘self-rule’ of territorial nation-states depended.”
Reconstructing North America
Authors: Johnson Benjamin H.
Published: January 2021

This essay compares the failed secessionist movements of Juan Cortina in south Texas and Louis Riel in Manitoba. Johnson explains that Canada, the U.S., and Mexico “were intent on extinguishing competing sovereignties in the territory that they claimed as their own.” In the borderlands, followers of Cortina and Riel resisted incorporation into national communities in hopes of maintaining autonomy and self-governance, using some of the same liberal capitalist arguments as their oppressors. With the “imposition of Canadian and U.S. sovereignty in Cortina and Riel’s homelands,” “property regimes and legal systems further marginalize[d] ethnic Mexicans and Métis in both economic and political terms.” In both places resistance was ultimately overwhelmed, but “the tragedy lay not only in what befell these communities in a material sense, but also in the foreclosure of the possibility of equitable belonging that had once beckoned Juan Cortina, Louis Riel, and their countless followers.”
Border-Concept (Of the Political)
Authors: Gourgouris Stathis
Published: January 2021

Examines the concept “border” bearing in mind Etienne Balibar’s extensive work on the matter of geopolitical borders, animated by analysis of the problem of “Europe” which ranges from a historical demand to account for the trajectory of European thought and its political implications to a philosophical demand to account for the present as it unfolds, often unpredictably, in real time of thinking and acting. To the first belongs a huge corpus addressing almost the entirety of modern European thought, from Balibar’s early work on Marx and Spinoza onward, and to the latter the work that encounters key landmarks of European reality (from those texts on capital, class, nation, and race to their eventual implication with questions of universality, secularity, citizenship, anthropology, and subjectivity). In a more pointed sense, this meditation on the concept of border in this European trajectory spans the range from the early analysis of the “interior frontier” in Fichte to multiple interventions regarding the institutional project of the European Union in its various manifestations in the last 35 years.
Cosmopolitics
Authors: Apter Emily
Published: January 2021

Revives, with Balibar, cosmopolitics as a term accountable to the fallout of economized existence and to the necessity for a language of rights to have rights capable of doubling down on the politics of the global south within Europe.
Relation
Authors: Lezra Jacques
Published: January 2021

Identifies and explores the concept of relation in Balibar’s work and offers a genealogical account of the “ontology of relation.”
Religious Difference and Christian Theology
Authors: Thatamanil John J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter introduces and frames the argument for the entire book: Christian theology must understand religious diversity as promise rather than as problem. The chapter then proceeds to lay out conceptually what was articulated allegorically in the introduction, namely that theology of religious diversity, comparative theology, and constructive theology must be integrated. The chapter defines the scope and tasks of each of these three subfields within theology and puts them into conversation. The chapter argues that it is not enough to merely think about others; we must instead think with religious others and think through what is so learned. In sum, we ought not give an account of the other without being transformed by the other through interreligious learning.
The Hospitality of Receiving
Authors: Thatamanil John J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter demonstrates that interreligious learning is not just a desirable project to be pursued by academics alone. Interreligious learning has taken place prominently in public life and with world transforming significance. The circuit of learning between M. K. Gandhi, his teachers, and other black leaders of the American Civil Rights movement is an exemplary instance of interreligious learning and the virtue of interreligious receptivity. By taking a brief look at this momentous engagement across religious traditions and the profound transformations generated by this auspicious instance of interreligious learning, this chapter shows that constructive theology through interreligious learning has already transpired to great public good.
Racism, Sexism, Universalism
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses a hypothesis advanced several years ago by the author and that seems particularly imperiled by the interpretive ambiguities surrounding the idea of universality. This hypothesis concerned the paradoxical relationship between racism and universalism in the modern era. The chapter explains why one should assign central importance to the institution when examining the paradoxical relationship between racist or sexist discrimination and universalist discourse. It then posits a concept of “anthropological difference” that should help to distinguish between several uses of the—inextricably metaphysical and political—notions of identity, human essence or nature, norms, and normativity. Finally, the chapter considers what constitutes the apparently ineluctable paradox underlying the relationship between the politics of emancipation and the political community.
Constructions and Deconstructions of the Universal
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: January 2021

This chapter studies the lectures which the author gave in the United States in 2005. It develops, guided mainly by Hegel and his legacy, the notion of conflictual universality, moving from enunciation to domination and from the latter to the subjectivation of the bearers of the universal, who measure the existing community against the ideal of universality. The chapter considers two types of approaches favored by philosophers who share the belief that the universal is decidedly not a given, but rather a process. A process, furthermore, in which the “opposites” of the universal are continuously affecting or contesting the universal in return. For certain philosophers, the process at issue is a progressive construction of the universal that proceeds by the internalization of its opposites within the concept itself, opposites that are thereby transformed into mediations of its own development until, from the dialectic, a concrete figure of the universal emerges. For other philosophers, however, the process is doomed to lose control of its own idea or question in a dissemination without end. Whether or not Derrida invented the term deconstruction, he remains the key reference here, because he subjected to critical interpretation all the antitheses of the universal.
Ultrasound shear-wave elasticity and magnetic resonance diffusion coefficient show strong inverse correlation in small fibroadenomas
Authors: ANDAC BALTACIOGLU Nurten , TURELI Derya
Published: January 2021

Objective: Stiffness of breast lesions helps distinguish malignant from benign solid masses. Stiffness can be quantitatively measured
by magnetic resonance and ultrasound imaging using apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) and shear-wave elastography (SWE)
techniques, respectively. This study aims to analyze correlations between SWE and ADC in biopsy-proven small fibroadenomas.
Patients and Methods: Shear-wave elastography and ADC measurements of 50 fibroadenomas were evaluated retrospectively. Mean
patient age was 41±13 years (range 27-63). All lesions had maximum diameters of ≤20 millimeters. Correlations between intralesional
ADC, lesion-parenchyma ADC ratio, intralesional SWE, SWE heterogeneity index and lesion volume were analyzed.
Results: Mean values of lesions were as follows: ADC=1.71±0.22 x10-3mm2/s, ADC ratio=1.04±0.09, maximum SWE=73.4±28.8
kPa, minimum SWE=43.9±21.8 kPa and SWE heterogeneity index =29.4±12.7 kPa. There was a strong inverse correlation between
fibroadenoma ADC and SWE values (rho = – 0.746, p <0.01). Significant correlations were also found between fibroadenoma volume
and ADC (rho = – 0.525, p <0.05) and SWE (rho = 0.840, p <0.01).
Conclusion: Apparent diffusion coefficient and SWE values show strong inverse correlation in small fibroadenomas. If proven
threshold values for lesion characterization are revealed, ultrasonographic SWE and diffusion-weighted MRI have potential to be
used interchangeably.
A rare cause of respiratory distress in a newborn: Pneumomediastinum
Authors: KERSIN Sinem Gulcan , OZDEMIR Hulya , BILGEN Hulya Selva , MEMISOGLU Asli , OZEK Eren
Published: January 2021

Pneumomediastinum is an uncommon cause of neonatal respiratory distress and occurs in approximately 2.5 per 1000 live births.
Although, the most common cause of pneumomediastinum is an underlying lung disease, it can be seen in newborns who undergo
resuscitation during delivery without a predisposing factor. Initial diagnosis by chest X-ray can be difficult in some cases. The
“spinnaker-sail sign” is an uncommon radiological appearance of pneumomediastinum. Careful conservative management can result
with spontaneous resolution without long-term sequelae. In this case report, we present a neonate who developed pneumomediastinum.
Correlation of PAPP-A values with maternal characteristics, biochemical and ultrasonographic markers of pregrancy
Authors: KAYMAKCALAN Hande , UZUT Ommu Gulsum , HARKONEN Juho , BAKIR GUNGOR Burcu
Published: January 2021

Objective: Our aim is to investigate whether there is a correlation of pregnancy-associated plasma protein A (PAPP-A) values with
other variables in pregnancy and maternal characteristics.
Materials and Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the relation between the pregnancy-associated plasma protein A levels,
demographics, biochemical and ultrasonographic markers of the first trimester screening of 11,842 pregnant women seen at a tertiary
hospital between November 2002 and November 2008.
Results: A significant difference between PAPP-A values of the diabetic and non-diabetic pregnant women were observed (p=0.0005,
Mann-Whitney U test). In terms of weight, crown-rump length, BetahCG values, significant differences were observed between
low and medium level PAPP-A subgroups and between low and high level PAPP-A subgroups. PAPP-A levels were found to differ
significantly between the pregnant women of Caucasian origin and other racial origins.
Conclusions: Pregnant women with different ethnic and medical backgrounds have different PAPP-A values and other markers of
the aneupleudity screening. To make patient specific risk predictions, understanding these interactions and differences is important.
Future studies are needed to understand the pathopyhsiology behind these differences.