bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Logic of the “As If” and the (Non)existence of God
Authors: Dickinson Colby
Published: May 2017

The first chapter explores Jacques Derrida’s rich reworking of the Kantian regulative principle of the as if in order to point toward certain potential movements of the as such in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, and Paul Celan, as well as the various mystical traditions which Derrida himself took up on occasion. By taking this precise path and yet staying open to Derrida’s critique of any possible presentation as such beyond the as if, this chapter shows how Derrida’s work ultimately also points toward an encounter with the O/other as such, beyond the as if, though within language, very much within its failures—which is, in the end, the only real way to fully respect the encounter at all. In such fashion, an ethical imperative appears within the event of encounter, one that does not seek to reduce the singularity of the O/other’s presence before us to a regulative ideal as if to go beyond what has been (re)presented to us, but rather that which embraces what cannot be represented, bringing philosophy, politics, and religion to the threshold of a mystical-ethical imperative that we must take very seriously.
On Language and Its Profanation
Authors: Dickinson Colby
Published: May 2017

The third chapter, in many ways, extends this trajectory of thought into a dialogue with the work of the Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben. Beginning with his characterization of a “scission” within language that posits philosophy as that which can know its object without possessing it and poetry as that which can possess it without knowing it, this chapter demonstrates how his earlier work on poetry maintains a necessary correlation with his later philosophical and theo-political writings. In this context, I explore his development of a poetic “atheology” that is a sort of materialist metaphysics, the potential last refuge of meaning in an otherwise nihilistic world—one that contains dire implications for the fields of poetry, philosophy, and theology. The establishment of poetry as a last refuge of meaning over and against the “destruction of experience” in the modern era is a bold claim to be sure, expressing Agamben’s attempt to reformulate the possibility for meaning to emerge beyond its inscription in language, as well as the conditions under which theology could be understood as a profane endeavor that tries to speak to this situation of human existence.
Introduction: Representational Static
Authors: Neary Janet
Published: May 2017

Using contemporary artwork as a lens onto the textual visuality of 19th-century slave narratives, this introduction to Fugitive Testimony works backwards historically to excavate ex-slave narrators’ challenge to authenticating conventions, and therefore their challenge to the assumptions motivating racial classification itself. The introduction argues that the book’s unique focus on the recursive nature of the slave narrative form unifies what have been three distinct phases of the genre’s criticism within the academy—historical, literary, and cultural studies approaches—and contributes to the historiographical contours of Atlantic studies. Drawing on literary analysis, art history, and visual and performance theory, the book connects vital early literary critical accounts of the slave narrative that examine the genre’s conventions of authentication and issues of literacy with later cultural studies approaches, including those advanced by Lindon Barrett, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, and Michael Chaney.
Sight Unseen: Contemporary Visual Slave Narratives
Authors: Neary Janet
Published: May 2017

Establishing and examining an archive of contemporary visual slave narratives—including Glenn Ligon’s Narratives and Runaways series (1993), Kara Walker’s Slavery! Slavery! (1997) and Narratives of a Negress (2003), and Ellen Driscoll’s The
Loophole of Retreat (1991)—this chapter reframes critical debates on the slave narrative around the visual stakes of the form and advances a new model of reading the slave narrative founded on attention to the historical and aesthetic dislocations and disjunctions accentuated in contemporary visual slave narratives. Concluding with an analysis of Frederick Douglass’s visual intervention in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, specifically, his metaphorical assertion, “You have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave was made a man,” the chapter argues that both contemporary artists and 19th-century ex-slave narrators produce representational static to evade the racial constraints on their artistic production.
Optical Allusions: Textual Visuality in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
Authors: Neary Janet
Published: May 2017

This chapter reads William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) as an emblematic text that depends upon a series of complex interactions between the Crafts’ cultivation of their image and their use of dialogue and narration in different contexts. Examining how the visual image Ellen cultivates is juxtaposed with the couple’s use of double entendre, the chapter argues that William Craft places the ambivalence of language and the ambivalent language of skin color side by side to unsettle popular notions of racial identity and identification. The narrative illustrates that phenotypical characteristics such as complexion are not facts with fixed meanings, but, rather, are discursively defined social symbols that can be manipulated to various ends. I argue that Craft turns this revelation back on the authenticating requirements of the slave narrative, offering interpersonal recognition as a mode of visuality which counters the objectifying gaze of slavery.
Racial Violence, Racial Capitalism, and Reading Revolution: Harriet Jacobs, John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker
Authors: Neary Janet
Published: May 2017

Meditating on the continued racial speculation on black bodies in our contemporary moment, the epilogue brings the link between racial violence, capitalism, and evidentiary epistemology into sharper focus. Drawing on Harriet Jacobs’s insights into the role racial violence-as-spectacle plays in the construction of wealth, the epilogue considers what ex-slave narrators bring to contemporary debates around racial violence, such as the debate over whether or not police body cameras will resolve or lessen unremitting episodes of police brutality on people of color. While the book opens with an analysis of contemporary visual slave narratives at the end of the 20th century, the epilogue ends with a consideration of the slave narrative form in the 21st century, considering works that contribute to contemporary figurations of slavery but are not all strictly within the slave narrative tradition I have defined, including John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker.
Preface to Toward the Concrete
Authors: Wahl Jean
Published: May 2017

First published in 1932, Vers le concret(“Toward the Concrete”) served as something of a manifesto for a new approach to philosophy in France, one that turned away from idealism and toward the questions that would engage phenomenology and existentialism. The Preface draws out the themes that Wahl sees uniting the three figures discussed in the book’s three chapters: William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gabriel Marcel, all the while showing the proximity of these three thinkers to the work of Heidegger. About this work, Jean-Paul Sartre would later write: “What interested us, however, was real men with their labors and their troubles. We cried out for a philosophy which would account for everything, and we did not perceive that it existed already and that it was precisely this philosophy which provoked in us this demand. At that time one book enjoyed a great success among us—Jean Wahl’s Toward the Concrete. … the work pleased us, for it embarrassed idealism by discovering in the universe paradoxes, ambiguities, conflicts, still unresolved.”
Heidegger and Kierkegaard
Authors: Wahl Jean
Published: May 2017

First published in 1932/1933, Wahl’s article laid the groundwork for the anthropological, humanist reading of Heidegger by showing how Heidegger’s philosophy must be seen as an attempt to ontologize and secularize Kierkegaard’s more religiously-tinged thought. At the same time, and thanks precisely to Heidegger’s philosophy, it revealed that Kierkegaard was a serious philosophical thinker in his own right. Wahl’s essay also stands out for being at once a succinct, admirable overview of Heidegger’s early philosophy and a penetrating critique of issues still debated by Heidegger scholars today. Finally, in characteristic style, we see Wahl bringing thinkers into dialogue over the most fundamental issues. In this essay alone, there are more than just passing remarks on Nietzsche, Jaspers, Bergson, and Hegel.
The Problem of Choice
Authors: Wahl Jean
Published: May 2017

First published in 1934 in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale and later republished with minor revisions in Études kierkegaardiennes, this extended discussion of Karl Jaspers’s three-volume Philosophie (1932) was among the first to address Jaspers’s work in France. While ranging widely over Jaspers’s three volumes, this essay is also strangely personal, addressing those topics in Jaspers’s work that most matter to Wahl: the question of choice, being in a situation, the limited, fragmented, and tragic character of existence. Wahl makes a point of drawing a distinction, one not always recognized, between philosophers of existence like Jaspers and Heidegger and existential philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. While not always agreeing with Jaspers, Wahl nevertheless recognizes that Jaspers’s thought is “situated in a place where some of the most eternal and most real philosophical problems are located.”
Subjectivity and Transcendence
Authors: Wahl Jean
Published: May 2017

Featuring replies and letters by Raymond Aron, Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, and many others, Wahl’s 1937 “Subjectivity and Transcendence” should be included among the most important debates in twentieth-century European philosophy. It is essential for understanding the secularization of Kierkegaard, and it provided a crucial forum in which to discuss and shape the future of existentialism. While revealing Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s debt to Kierkegaard, Wahl at the same time worries that any attempt to provide a philosophy of the insights that stem from Kierkegaard’s life would threaten either to fall into abstraction or to harbor implicit theological presuppositions. He also sets the stage for dialogue about the nature of transcendence by developing the concepts of “transascendence” and “transdescendence.” This chapter concludes with a previously unpublished letter Wahl wrote to Heidegger in which he provides a more detailed response to Heidegger’s contribution to the debate than the one given in “Subjectivity and Transcendence.”
Order and Disorder in Nietzsche’s Thought
Authors: Wahl Jean
Published: May 2017

In July 1964, a major five-day conference on Friedrich Nietzsche took place at the Royaumont Abbey just north of Paris. Organized by Gilles Deleuze, with input from Jean Wahl, Deleuze invited presentations from both younger philosophers like Michel Foucault and Gianni Vattimo, as well as from distinguished senior philosophers, including Jean Wahl, Jean Beaufret, Karl Löwith, and Gabriel Marcel. Wahl’s presentation characteristically focused on Nietzsche as an irreducibly contradictory thinker in whom conflicting states coexist in a tension without resolution, in which order is imposed even as chaos is affirmed. In his talk and in the discussion which follows, one gets a good sense of how Wahl approached Nietzsche’s thought and how Nietzsche’s thought was a fundamental resource for Wahl throughout his career.
Introduction
Authors: Yountae An
Published: May 2017

Afuera hay sol.No es más que un solpero los hombres lo mirany después cantan.Yo no sé del solYo sé de la melodía del ángely el sermón calientedel último viento.Sé gritar hasta el albacuando la muerte se posa desnuda en mi sombra....
The Colonial Abyss
Authors: Yountae An
Published: May 2017

This chapter extends the meaning of the abyss by giving it a concrete and contextualized shape. The chapter probes complex crossings that take place at the intersection of the mystical and the political by investigating the colonial impasse from which the Afro-Caribbean decolonial imagination of the (post)negritude movement emerges. In the writings of the Caribbean thinkers one witnesses an extended notion of identity based on relational ontology; the story of the shattered other shapes the very contours of the collective history from which the traumatized self emerges. It is, then, in this very middle, the groundless site lying between the traumatizing past and the dumbfounded present, between fragmentation and reconstruction, and between suffering and redemption, where one begins to reflect upon the possibility of passage, of beginning after trauma. The possibility of the reconstruction of the traumatized self is reconsidered in the extended notion of identity based on relational ontology found in the writings of the Afro-Caribbean thinkers. A comparative reading of Glissant and contemporary continental philosophers (Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Rosi Braidotti) molds the contour of colonial difference emerging in Glissant’s decolonial vision.
Conclusion
Authors: Yountae An
Published: May 2017

In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “When you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.”1 The journey that I have taken in this book can be read, perhaps, as an act of staring into the abyss. Perhaps, to be more accurate, the path that my inquiry has taken through the chapters of this book might be better described as “plunging into” the abyss rather than just gazing on it. As I have been consistently arguing, the abyss, after all, cannot be restricted to matters of epistemology. Rather, it signals an ontological question. What, then, does the abyss that stares back at us look like? What happens to us as we gaze upon the abyss and as it gazes back upon us?...
To Receive the Idea of the Infinite
Authors: Moati Raoul , Wyche Daniel
Published: May 2017

This chapter explicates the notion of separation as constitutive of the deployment of the Idea of the Infinite and the way in which relation to the Face of the Other concretizes the formal Ideal of Infinite.
The Utopia of the Dwelling
Authors: Moati Raoul , Wyche Daniel
Published: May 2017

This chapter is devoted to the paradoxical situation of the home in Levinas’s view—as both utopian and as a way to lift the burden of the threat of the anonymous element from the ego.
Being toward Infinity
Authors: Moati Raoul , Wyche Daniel
Published: May 2017

This chapter is devoted to the question of the Infinite with regard to fecundity and generation.
Intentionality and Metaphysics
Authors: Moati Raoul , Wyche Daniel
Published: May 2017

The book concludes with a Levinasian critique of Derrida’s understanding of the conflict between Husserl and Levinas regarding intentionality.
Citizen Subject: Response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Question “Who Comes After the Subject?”
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: May 2017

Both following Hegel and opposed to him, Heidegger proposes Descartes as the moment when the “sovereignty of the subject” is established (in philosophy), inaugurating the discourse of modernity. This supposes that man, or rather the ego, is determined and conceived of as subject (subjectum...
Annex: Subjectus/Subjectum
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: May 2017

At the heart of the problems that are now raised by the use of the “subject” category—which has never been more central to philosophy, even though the twentieth century gave it a completely new orientation—there is a pun (intentional or other wise) on two Latin etymologies: that of the neuter ...
“My Self,” “My Own”: Variations on Locke
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: May 2017

This chapter explains the relationship between the Lockean self and own in clarifying a previous error which had been made as the basis for a theory of personal identity. It seeks to understand Locke's near obsessional insistence upon these two little words and their recurrent pairing in his argumentation in order to perceive how, in and through the idiom of his writing itself, he produces an unprecedented signification and seeks to open a place for it within the field of philosophical discourse. In so doing, this chapter also shows that Locke's English cannot be understood without referring to certain neighboring languages—in particular, the French of Descartes and Malebranche, who are his interlocutors, if not his adversaries.
Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist: Spirit’s Dictum
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that while the category of “modernity” is differential, it is so in several senses that intersect and vie with one another. It introduces certain theses on modernity which aim to “deconstruct” the institutions, presuppositions, and discourses of modernity, arguing that they are always present at the heart of the philosophical expressions of modernity. The chapter discusses these concepts with respect to a problem of reading and interpreting a particular Hegelian utterance: “Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist” (hereafter, “IWWI”), taken from Chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In doing so the chapter also takes into account two models for Hegel's utterance: the theophanic utterances from the Gospel of John, and Rousseau's Social Contract.
The Invention of the Superego: Freud and Kelsen, 1922
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: May 2017

This chapter synthesizes a number of hypotheses centered around the invention of the superego (Über-Ich) and simultaneously upon the relation between psychoanalytic discourse and the problem of the political: not as a relation of application, a philosophical analogy, or simply of their mutual dependence on a common anthropology or theory of “culture,” but rather as a veritable reciprocity of perspectives, manifest in a recurring question that both fields recognize as their own. This reciprocity, the chapter argues, is manifestly evidenced in Freud's very introduction of the concept of the “superego,” which thus becomes the representative of the political at the heart of the theory of the unconscious just as it is or could be the representative of the unconscious psyche at the heart of political theory.
Bourgeois Universality and Anthropological Differences
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: May 2017

This chapter articulates the relationship between the political categories of modernity and the question to which its metaphysics always returns: that of subjectivity, endowed with consciousness—perhaps affected with unconsciousness—and with rights, duties, or individual and collective missions. It examines this relationship on the level of the history of ideas, morals, and social relations, and also articulates it as a conceptual unity that helps to clarify certain existential and institutional problems. In so doing, this chapter asks whether they are still our problems (and why) or whether they are already on the wane (and how). This discussion is thus schematic, incomplete, and preliminary, not only in its “conclusions” but also in its formulations.
Incarnation as Instruction
Authors: Jordan Mark D.
Published: May 2017

For Thomas Aquinas, God’s choice to take flesh in an incarnation was a pedagogical response to human sin. So Thomas’s questions on the incarnation in Part 3 of the Summa are principally concerned to show its appropriateness or convenientia. He does draw other lessons from divine incarnation—say, about the metaphysics of individual being. But his main emphasis is on moral teaching and moral learning.
Stages on Law’s Way
Authors: Jordan Mark D.
Published: May 2017

The famous questions on natural and human law in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae are only the beginning of a sequence that culminates in the proclamation of the Gospel of grace. The sequence of laws is an important part of God’s moral teaching. Just as with the incarnation, this teaching is adjusted to the condition of embodied minds that have forgotten what they once knew about the way back to God. The character of the teaching is clearly seen in Thomas’s detailed exposition of the ceremonial law that God gave to ancient Israel.
The Gifts of the Spirit
Authors: Jordan Mark D.
Published: May 2017

At various points in Summa theologiae 2-2, Thomas Aquinas treats the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. They are an important part of his plan. Three of the gifts take the place of the intellectual virtues in the Aristotelian scheme. Describing these intellectual gifts, Thomas shows important features of the kind of knowledge he is providing in the Summa. All of the gifts together show the limits of the virtues as moving principles of human action.
Vocations and Viae
Authors: Jordan Mark D.
Published: May 2017

The last section of the moral part of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae concerns special graces and states of life. It might seem a supplement or appendix to the main treatment of virtues. In fact, it is the culminating exhortation of the moral part and a bookend to the exhortation that begins Summa 2-1. The treatment of prophecy as one of the special gifts contrasts its transitory quality with sustainable moral formation. Thomas’s vindication of communal life under vows is meant to show the surest way (via) to cultivate the moral re-formation that leads to human happiness with God. His defense of the contemplative life that also expresses itself in teaching is not a self-interest plea for the mendicant orders. It is the persuasive proposal of a pedagogy.
The Heart or the Law
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2017

In the third chapter, Nancy extends his critical exchange with Blanchot by discussing questions of exposure and abandonment in rethinking an “inoperative” community. The reference to abandonment is also situated in relation to writing, communication, or “the transmission of the untransmissable.” Nancy stresses that the “heart” or the “law” of community is the negativity of an abandonment or its “empty intimacy.”
The Consumed Community
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2017

In the fourth chapter, Nancy extends the exchange with Blanchot with references to literature, in this case to Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death, a text that Blanchot reads in light of Emmanuel Levinas and the question of an ethical relation. He refers to the events of May ’68 in terms of rethinking questions of community and the relation of such a community to other political forms. Nancy discusses Blanchot’s proposal for an “unsociable sociality” or “anti-social society,” which Nancy relates to the concept of the people, who at once dissolves and reinvents the bond of the law and of the relation. The argument also opens toward the religious references in Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community (including the Eucharist): the proposal to think “a community of lovers,” and to the various female figures that emerge in Blanchot’s text
“Essentially That Which Escapes”
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2017

In the last chapter, Nancy measures the implication of the Christian references in Blanchot’s text while seeking to understand what constitutes the “unavowable” in Blanchot’s unavowable community. The question of the unavowable is related to different ways of conceiving of community in Blanchot’s text, which suggests that it is neither the realization of its essence nor its “dissolution.” The argument also opens to questions of myth, as well as the relation between work and unworking in the thought of community, the very terms that initiated Blanchot’s exchange with Nancy in the first place
Discipline and Listen
Authors: Szendy Peter
Published: May 2017

An archaeology of “overhearing”: starting with an etymological investigation of the French word “ecoute,” the chapter explores different historical (Jeremy Bentham’s “panacousticon”), philosophical (Nietzsche, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze), musical (Mozart, Furtwangler), cinematic (Coppola), and literary (Shakespeare, Joyce) figures for overhearing. It defines “overhearing” as a form of reduplication and splitting up of listening (diaphonia).
In the Footsteps of Orpheus
Authors: Szendy Peter
Published: May 2017

The chapter follows different cultural manifestations of the Orpheus myth (Sophocles, Marcel Duchamp, Hitchcock, Monteverdi, Mozart, Fritz Lang, Gaston Leroux, Brian De Palma, Alban Berg) in order to trace the theory of listening that it carries within itself. The chapter ends with a deconstructive rereading of Adorno’s theory of “structural listening.”
Sovereignties, Poetic and Otherwise
Authors: Rodríguez Matos Jaime
Published: May 2017

Chapter two traces the link between the Guerrilla or Foco in the early stages of the Cuban Revolution and the role of the dictation of the Muses in Romantic poetry. The chapter shows to what extent what is at issue is not simply a literary or aesthetic question, but the difficulty of confronting the void at the center of any politics. This void is not something that is offered as a motif by the arts, but the central evidence made available by the political upheavals in the Age of Revolution. Nevertheless, much of the intellectual, political, and artistic work that confronts that foundational abyss has no other aim than to cover it up. Thus, the central aim of the chapter is to bring into sharper focus the implications of a thought that is central to the history of modern aesthetics and politics, but which remains fundamentally occluded by that same archive.
Shouting
Authors: Crawley Ashon T.
Published: May 2017

This chapter is about the resistance to becoming an object for theological-philosophical reflection. Attention is given to the ways choreography and sonicity work together, how there is a choreosonic ethical demand that is germane to Blackpentecostal performance. This word, choreosonic, indexes the ways vibration is foundational to both sound and dance, how each is about vibration in and against worlds. The chapter elaborates indeterminacy at the heart of Blackpentecostal performance and celebrates such indeterminacy.
Comparative Theology and the Postmodern God of “Perhaps”
Authors: Kiblinger Kristin Beise
Published: May 2017

Kristin Beise Kiblinger responds to Elaine Padilla and Jon Paul Sydnor in conversation with the view of God developed by John D. Caputo. She observes points of agreement between Caputo and both comparative theologians with their common emphases on immanence (Padilla) and relationality (Sydnor), but argues that Caputo’s thought also challenges them both in significant ways. For Caputo, we inevitably condition what we know and thus God as the unconditioned cannot be known or present but remains “to come.” Caputo uses Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction as a hermeneutic principle that exposes conditionedness and thus keeps our theology humble and open. Kiblinger suggests that Sydnor and Padilla could benefit from following Caputo in his theology because Caputo’s work 1) helps respond to problems that have plagued past theology, 2) illuminates issues involving immanence and relationality, and 3) helps to justify (and lay the necessary theoretical groundwork for) comparative theology.
Longing and Letting Go
Authors: Hillgardner Holly
Published: May 2017

Holly Hillgardner develops a relational notion of the desiring self by reading the thirteenth-century Christian beguine Hadewijch in light of the sixteenth-century Vaisnava poet-saint Mirabai. Christian mysticism has often been read as moments of blissful union interspersed with long periods of painful absence, with union celebrated as the goal of the spiritual life. Mirabai, however, interprets this mystical ebb and flow through the category of viraha
bhakti, defined as a bodily, all-pervading “love-longing.” Read in light of Mirabai’s viraha bhakti, Hadewijch’s descriptions of separation and union can be seen as integrated by the concept of love-longing. Viraha bhakti thus provides a schema to celebrate and cultivate such longing, not as a means to an end, but as an end itself. A conscious and sustained lingering in the middle spaces of longing opens Mirabai and Hadewijch to possibilities for mutual, non-possessive relationships with the other, divine and otherwise—a passionate non-attachment.
Longing and Gender
Authors: Hussain Amir
Published: May 2017

This chapter is a response by Muslim theologia, Amir Hussain to the work of Holly Hillgardner and Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier. It takes the connections between the Christian and Indic traditions discussed in their chapters and connects them to Islamic concepts, particularly Muslim understandings of Mary, the mother of Jesus. There is also a discussion of Sufism, the mystical tradition in Islam. The work of scholars Wilfred Cantwell Smith and María Rosa Menocal is introduced as a way of talking about the lived experience of religion. There is also a discussion of music that connects across various religious traditions.
What Child Is This?
Authors: Bidlack Bede Benjamin
Published: May 2017

Similarity across religious boundaries attracts many comparative theologians to the effort of their work. But what happens if the similarity is so striking that a doctrinal turf war erupts? Engaging the Chinese Taoist tradition, Bede Bidlack looks to the similar beginnings of two stories to ask, “What Child is This?” His chapter examines the birth narratives of Jesus Christ and Lord Lao, the sixth-century BCE author of the Daode jing, for clues to their roles as “saviors.” Instead of letting the comparison dissolve into a quarrel over competing truth claims––who is the real savior?–– the chapter allows the similarities to propel closer examination of what the texts claim about these divine children and the function of those claims within their original contexts. The result is a Christology that holds Jesus’ cosmic function in tension with his call for the temporal realm.
Who Is the Suffering Servant?
Authors: Moyaert Marianne
Published: May 2017

Marianne Moyaert analyzes how interreligious exchange on the Suffering Servant in the First Testament (Isa. 52:13–53:12) has challenged and transformed Christological reflection. Taking into account contemporary Jewish criticisms of Christian theology, she critiques the Christian hermeneutics of Jürgen Moltmann in a post-holocaust setting. Levinas’s ethical treatment of the suffering servant provides a helpful alternative interpretation. Against the anti-Jewish attitudes in much of Christian theology, Moyaert’s reading of these figures rejects Christian triumphalism and a reappropriates a kenotic Christology.
Introduction
Authors: Williamson Terrion L.
Published: May 2017

The introduction makes the case for black feminist practice as a study of black sociality by way of a personal narrative that explores the terrain of meaning between thought and practice, feminism and feminist practice, and social life and social death. It consequently outlines the parameters of the book’s primary argument that the logics of representation, which are typically coded by terms such as value, visibility, citizenship, diversity, respectability and responsibility, largely fails to account for the reality of lived black experience. As such, there is a need to consider black social life from the perspective of those who are most closely attuned to and identified with the indicia of blackness.
Biomass conversion and expansion factors in Douglas-fir stands of different planting density: variation according to individual growth and prediction equations
Authors: Marziliano Pasquale A. , Menguzzato Giuliano , Scuderi Angelo , Scalise Clemente , Coletta Vittoria
Published: May 2017

Aim of study: We built biomass expansion factors (BCEFs) from Douglas-fir felled trees planted with different planting densities to evaluate the differences according tree size and planting density.Area of study: The Douglas-fir plantation under study is located on the northern coastal chain of Calabria (Tyrrhenian side) south Italy.Materials and methods: We derived tree level BCEFs, relative to crown (BCEFc), to stem (BCEFst = basic density, BD) and total above-ground (BCEFt) from destructive measurements carried out in a Douglas-fir plantation where four study plots were selected according to different planting densities (from 833 to 2500 trees per hectare). The measured BCEFs were regressed against diameter at breast height and total height, planting density, site productivity (SP) and their interactions to test the variation of BCEFs. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the post hoc Tukey comparison test were used to test differences in BCEFt, BCEFc and in BD between plots with different planting density.Main results: BCEFs decreased with increasing total height and DBH, but large dispersion measures were obtained for any of the compartments in the analysis. An increasing trend with planting density was found for all the analyzed BCEFs, but together with planting density, BCEFs also resulted dependent upon site productivity. BCEFt average values ranged between 1.40 Mg m-3 in planting density with 833 trees/ha (PD833) to 2.09 Mg m-3 in planting density with 2500 trees/ha (PD2500), which are in the range of IPCC prescribed values for Douglas-fir trees.Research highlights: Our results showed that the application of BCEF to estimate forest biomass in stands with different planting densities should explicitly account for the effect of planting density and site productivity.
CliPick – Climate change web picker. A tool bridging daily climate needs in process based modelling in forestry and agriculture
Authors: Palma Joao H. N.
Published: May 2017

Aim of study: Climate data is a need for different types of modeling assessments, especially those involving process based modeling focusing on climate change impacts. However, there is a scarcity of tools delivering easy access to climate datasets to use in biological related modeling. This study aimed at the development of a tool that could provide an user-friendly interface to facilitate access to climate datasets, that are used to supply climate scenarios for the International Panel on Climate Change.Area of study: The tool provides daily datasets across Europe, and also parts of northern AfricaMaterial and Methods: The tool uses climatic datasets generated from third party sources (IPCC related) while a web based interface was developed in JavaScript to ease the access to the datasetsMain Results: The interface delivers daily (or monthly) climate data from a user-defined location in Europe for 7 climate variables: minimum and maximum temperature, precipitation, radiation, minimum and maximum relative humidity and wind speed). The time frame ranges from 1951 to 2100, providing the basis to use the data for climate change impact assessments. The tool is free and publicly available at http://www.isa.ulisboa.pt/proj/clipick/.Research Highlights: A new and easy-to-use tool is suggested that will promote the use of climate change scenarios across Europe, especially when daily time steps are needed. CliPick eases the communication between climatic and modelling communities such as agriculture and forestry.
Wild mushrooms in Ethiopia: A review and synthesis for future perspective
Authors: Dejene Tatek , Oria-de-Rueda Juan Andrés , Martín-Pinto Pablo
Published: May 2017

Aim of study: To review and provide all-purpose information about wild mushrooms in Ethiopia and to create awareness for conservation and use of mycological resources.Area of study: We focused mainly on Ethiopia, where information about wild mushrooms is scanty and their status is unknown under the rampant degradation of the habitats.Main results: We reviewed all relevant references related to wild mushrooms and their ecological niches, cultural practices and species used for cultivation as well as the anthropogenic factors affecting the conservation of fungal diversity.Research highlights: This review summarizes issues related to the diversity of wild mushrooms, the main ecological niches and their associated fungal species, and mushroom cultivation practices in Ethiopia. Moreover, threats and the need for future conservation of wild mushrooms in the country are also reported. This review paper can serve as base line information and indicator for further mycological studies in Ethiopia as well as in other developing countries with similar scenarios.
Ancient Maya Life on the Fringes of Chetumal Bay
Authors: Walker Debra S.
Published: May 2017

Chapter 1 introduces the volume. It describes the geography of Chetumal Bay and its settlement history as well as problems in the archaeological chronology and the history of archaeological research in the region. It outlines relevant colonial and native documents (Chilam Balam) that inform us about the region prior to and at European contact. The origins of the terms Chetumal and Dzuluinicob are also considered, as are the migrations from Petén at the end of the Classic era, particularly the place called Siyan Kaan Bak’halal. After a review of various authors’ contributions, it outlines theoretical perspectives that track through the volume, focusing on settled landscapes, multiethnic communities, and trade.
The First Settlers on Chetumal Bay
Authors: Reese-Taylor Kathryn
Published: May 2017

Chapter 2 reviews recent data on the original settlement of the Chetumal Bay region. There is evidence for habitation in northern Belize during the Archaic and Preceramic periods on Progresso Lagoon and other parts of the interior, but the first evidence for settled life on the bay itself stems from the early Middle Preclassic period, specifically around Santa Rita Corozal in Belize and Oxtankah in Mexico. By the late Middle Preclassic a trading port was established on Tamalcab Island, indicative of organized community interaction and trade in highland imports such as jade and obsidian, probably exchanged for salt and other marine products. By the end of the Late Preclassic, the bay area population had increased dramatically, and both ports and inland centers exhibited monumental architecture.
Noh Kah
Authors: Camacho Javier López , Villegas Araceli Vázquez , Díaz Luis A. Torres
Published: May 2017

This chapter, “Noh Kah: An Archaeological Site in Extreme Southeastern Quintana Roo,” describes the newly surveyed site Noh Cah as an example of the clustered dispersed settlement pattern known from throughout southeastern Quintana Roo. These mostly Early Classic sites do not have a single monumental core as is common in Petén. Rather they have multiple monumental cores arranged in clusters across a more dispersed landscape, possibly an advantageous arrangement for large scale cacao production. They are linked by line-of-site from pyramidal summits oriented on a predominately east–west axis that does not deviate beyond the angle of the summer and winter solstices. Epigraphic evidence from several of these sites links them to Early Classic Dzibanché and the powerful Kaanal dynasty that was located there.
Postclassic Tool Production at Santa Rita Corozal
Authors: Marino Marc D. , Johnson Lucas R. Martindale , Meissner Nathan J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a case study of a previously excavated lithic sample from Santa Rita Corozal, considering stone tool production at two structures, 216 and 218. Both exhibit a higher number of Postclassic chert and chalcedony lithic artifacts than other contemporary structures excavated at the site. The authors use debitage analysis to reveal how two households crafted formal tools locally and visual sourcing analysis to better understand how these tools articulated with broader traditions of lithic craft production in a regional exchange network. In contrast to the commercial level of production exhibited at Colha, Belize, these households used a variety of source materials and produced a less standardized tool kit on a much smaller scale.
Maya at the Edge of the World
Authors: Freidel David A.
Published: May 2017

This summary chapter weaves together the themes presented by various authors into a broader view of greater Mayab. The author draws on his wide experience excavating on Cozumel Island and in Yucatan, Belize, and Guatemala to link Chetumal Bay, situated on the eastern edge of the region, to more distant Maya polities across time and space. He follows the themes of waterborne travel, noted in new discoveries at El Achiotal, the precocious early development of a long distance exchange network at Yaxuna and elsewhere, the rise of the El Mirador polity in the Late Preclassic, and the fortunes of the Classic era Kaanal kingdom to link individual site histories to broader historical trends.
“The Very Beginning of Things”
Authors: Blazek William
Published: May 2017

Edith Wharton benefited in her early career from the intellectual cosmopolitanism and encouraging support of the Harvard art professor Charles Eliot Norton. His emphasis on the imagination as a powerful force for social change drew from his close association with the aesthetic principles of John Ruskin and the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, and it found expression in a key art-historical publication, Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages. The moral and spiritual concepts underpinning this text, along with Norton’s writings about Italy, including Notes of Study and Travel in Italy, and his life itself, are read in this chapter alongside Wharton’s short stories and her first novel, set in late-eighteenth-century Italy, The Valley of Decision. Wharton’s fiction owes much in its focus on the artistic imagination, moral choices, and community transformation to Norton’s lessons in virtuous service, sympathy, and aesthetic sensibility.
The Cosmopolitan at War
Authors: Carney Mary
Published: May 2017

Edith Wharton’s war literature reflects her attentiveness to the material culture of France and its powerful embodiment of intercultural exchange across centuries and cultures. In Wharton’s two major World War I texts, her earliest essays in Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (1915) and her final war novel, A Son at the Front (1923), material phenomena push the narrative toward a more nuanced view of warfare, one in which violence happens against a backdrop of transcultural objects created by “imagined communities” reaching back centuries. As an example of women’s warw literature, Wharton’s work illuminates the tragic consequences of mechanized violence of international warfare while also providing a heightened expression of the interrelatedness of cultures.
Orientalism, Modernism, and Gender in Edith Wharton’s Late Novels
Authors: Toth Margaret A.
Published: May 2017

Given the excellent scholarship on Edith Wharton and race appearing in the last two decades, surprisingly little critical attention has been given to a racial discourse that pervades much of Wharton’s writing: Orientalism. This essay demonstrates that Orientalism informs several of Wharton’s novels and, in the case of late works like Twilight Sleep, The Glimpses of the Moon, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive, shapes them in fundamental and complex—if sometimes inconsistent—ways. Specifically, Wharton uses references to Orientalism as a vehicle through which to identify and critique various ills she perceives in modernist social and aesthetic trends. Attending to Wharton’s engagement with Orientalism, then, opens up new interpretations of her late works, particularly with respect to race, gender, and modernism. Moreover, understanding Wharton’s Orientalism allows us to situate her as a global citizen and grapple with the imperialist views subtending her fiction.
Afterword Edith Wharton and the Promise of Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Totten Gary
Published: May 2017

Edith Wharton’s travel writing is important to our understanding of the promise of cosmopolitan experience in her work. In these travel narratives, she represents herself in terms of what Melanie Dawson describes as Wharton’s “ideal cultural interlocutor”: “an appreciative viewer who witnesses and endeavors to understand history and artifacts, exploring a culture on its own terms and through its particular traces” (262). In ...
Women’s Education
Authors: Skinner Lee
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that the plasticity of discourses about modernity meant that both those who favored women’s full access to higher education and those who wanted more modest improvements that did not threaten the status quo deployed the same series of concepts about modernity, progress, and women’s role in the emerging nation-states. Ambivalence about women’s role is demonstrated in La emancipada by Miguel Riofrío, which limits its argument for education for women by depicting an overly educated heroine who is socially destructive. The chapter also analyzes essays in the periodicals La Aljaba, El Museo Literario, El Perú Ilustrado, and the positivist journal Violetas del Anáhuac as well as Juana Manuela Gorriti’s literary salons and another essay by Laureana Wright de Kleinhans.
Mapping the Terrain
Authors: Gallivan Martin D. , Thompson Victor D.
Published: May 2017

Chapter 2 considers the ways that Virginia Algonquian communities constructed places and made history, beginning with disparate and contradictory representations of the Chesapeake found in colonial-era maps. These include the Map of Virginia and the Zuñiga chart, both produced by English sources. Native mapping practices appear in Powhatan’s Mantle and in a divination ceremony performed by Pamunkey priests. These contrasting cartographic depictions of the Chesapeake colonial landscape highlight the distinct icons and tropes through which Natives and newcomers represented the Chesapeake region. While Virginia’s colonial historiography typically foregrounds early encounters understood from the perspective of English and Powhatan leaders, these maps illustrate how Tsenacomacoh’s past may be understood as a longer and deeper narrative keyed to geographic spaces, meaningful places, and a broadly inclusive notion of landscape.
The Coarse-Pounded Corn People
Authors: Gallivan Martin D. , Thompson Victor D.
Published: May 2017

Chapter 5 focuses on archaeological investigations along the Chickahominy River and a history of residential settlements, subsistence practices, and burial grounds during the Middle to Late Woodland transition. In the sixth century A.D., Native communities living along the Chickahominy River began to bury the deceased in communal burial grounds (ossuaries) located in the drainage’s swampy interior. During the Late Woodland period, new places were established along the Chickahominy with the construction of dispersed farmsteads, burial grounds, and a palisaded compound. In this history of placemaking we see evidence of the spatial practices whereby forager-fishers became the Chickahominy. As is apparent from colonial accounts of the Chickahominy, the “coarse-pounded corn people,” a horticultural economy was a part of this ethnogenetic process. Bioarchaeological study of skeletal remains from the Chickahominy, including stable isotope analysis, provides a basis for considering the history of maize-based horticulture in the region.