bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil
Authors: Buckley Eve E.
Published: January 2018

Eve E. Buckley’s study of twentieth-century Brazil examines the nation’s hard social realities through the history of science, focusing on the use of technology and engineering as vexed instruments of reform and economic development. Nowhere was the tension between technocratic optimism and entrenched inequality more evident than in the drought-ridden Northeast sertão, plagued by chronic poverty, recurrent famine, and mass migrations. Buckley reveals how the physicians, engineers, agronomists, and mid-level technocrats working for federal agencies to combat drought were pressured by politicians to seek out a technological magic bullet that would both end poverty and obviate the need for land redistribution to redress long-standing injustices. Scientists planned and oversaw huge projects including dam construction, irrigation for small farmers, and public health initiatives. They were, Buckley shows, sincerely determined to solve the drought crisis and improve the lot of poor people in the sertão. Over time, however, they came to the frustrating realization that, despite technology’s tantalizing promise of an apolitical means to end poverty, political collisions among competing stakeholders were inevitable. Buckley’s revelations about technocratic hubris, the unexpected consequences of environmental engineering, and constraints on scientists as agents of social change resonate with today’s hopes that science and technology can solve society’s most pressing dilemmas, including climate change.
Patronizing the Northeast
Authors: Buckley Eve E.
Published: January 2018

This chapter reviews the policy commitments and governing styles of the several national regimes led by Getúlio Vargas from 1930 to 1945, and it demonstrates how approaches to drought aid in the northeast were impacted by these changes. It focuses on the leadership of José Américo de Almeida as Minister of Transportation and Public Works (in charge of the department for Works to Combat Drought, among others) and discusses his eventual rift with Vargas in relation to Vargas’s unfulfilled promises to the northeast region. The devastating circumstances of the 1931-1932 drought are emphasized. Under Luiz Vieira’s direction, the drought works agency added an agronomy division in 1932 that grew in importance over subsequent decades but was often in conflict with the agency’s engineers over funding and priorities, particularly the construction of dams vs. irrigation networks.
Little Shell II’s World
Authors: Richotte Keith
Published: January 2018

Chapter two describes the early treaty and social history that defined the political stakes for the Plains Ojibwe and Métis into the future. This discussion includes a number of various treaties and their contexts that eventually came to define the boundaries of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Focusing primarily on the middle third of the nineteenth century, this chapter also demonstrates the growing colonial impositions that Plains Ojibwe and Métis were beginning to face in a rapidly changing world. The political environment that set the stage for the rest of what was to come was built in this time.
Religious Freedom
Authors: Wenger Tisa
Published: January 2018

Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it “religious freedom talk”--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire.
More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.
Making American Whiteness
Authors: Wenger Tisa
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the significance of religious freedom for American Jews, with particular attention to Jewish debates over Zionism and the emergence of the tri-faith movement in the early twentieth century. It argues that in an era of increasingly racialized anti-Semitism, American Jewish appeals for religious freedom both in the United States and abroad helped establish Jewishness as a primarily religious rather than racial identity in American life. In the process, religious freedom talk eased the access of American Jews to the racial status of whiteness in the United States.
It’s Up to the Women
Authors: Wilson Emily Herring
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes Eleanor's advice to readers about how to manage their home lives and become public activists. Describes her own problems trying to please her mother-in-law and traveling with her youngest boys and Marion and Nan in a difficult trip to Europe.
The Todhunter School
Authors: Wilson Emily Herring
Published: January 2018

In 1926 Eleanor and Marion purchased a private school for upper-class New York girls. Marion was principal and Eleanor became one of the most popular teachers, taking her students on field trips to visit court rooms and tenement districts to broaden their educations. Eleanor commuted back and forth to Albany, where she presided as First Lady during FDR's two two terms as NY Governer, assisted by his close friend and secretary, "Missy" LeHand.
Drifting Apart and a Tragic Talk
Authors: Wilson Emily Herring
Published: January 2018

Eleanor withdraws from Val-Kill Industries and Todhunter School. Marion travels without Nancy to Europe and while she is gone Nancy and Eleanor have a talk which Eleanor believes is insulting. Eleanor withdraws from the friendship while maintaining a pretence of inviting them on infrequent occasions.
Common Sense and a Little Fire
Authors: Orleck Annelise
Published: January 2018

Over twenty years after its initial publication, Annelise Orleck's Common Sense and a Little Fire continues to resonate with its harrowing story of activism, labor, and women's history. Orleck traces the personal and public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint on American politics. Though they have rarely made more than cameo appearances in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and the modern women's movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radical ferment of New York's Lower East Side and the gaslit tenements where young workers studied together. Orleck paints a compelling picture of housewives' food and rent protests, of grim conditions in the garment shops, of factory-floor friendships that laid the basis for a mass uprising of young women garment workers, and of the impassioned rallies working women organized for suffrage. Featuring a new preface by the author, this new edition reasserts itself as a pivotal text in twentieth-century labor history.
Jewish Internationalists
Authors: Wald Alan M.
Published: January 2018

The role of Jewish radicalism is the theme of this chapter, especially as it was expressed in the pages of Menorah Journal. The ideas of Isaac Deutscher in regard to the “Non-Jewish Jew” and of Horace Kallen about “cultural pluralism” are treated in relation to the debate about assimilation and internationalism. Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, and Herbert Solow are treated as representative figures.
Cannonites and Shachtmanites
Authors: Wald Alan M.
Published: January 2018

The Trotskyist political movement, a pole of attraction for many of the intellectuals, is examined through biographical portraits of two of its leaders—James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, who co-led the Communist League of America, the Workers Party of the United States, and the Socialist Workers Party during is first two years. Among the many controversies considered is the 1939-40 dispute that sundered this collaboration, a debate that involved the actions and then the class nature of the Soviet Union. Special attention to the part played by philosopher James Burnham.
The New York Intellectuals in Fiction
Authors: Wald Alan M.
Published: January 2018

The problematic relationship of literature to ideology is discussed, especially in light of the Marxist criticism of Terry Eagleton as against the pragmatist thinking to which many intellectuals were increasingly drawn. The new developments in politics are explored in creative writing by Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and James T. Farrell.
Apostates and True Believers
Authors: Wald Alan M.
Published: January 2018

The political and cultural landscape of the years after World War II are explored in relation to the deradicalization of one-time revolutionary intellectuals. The transformation of Stalinism into a kind of “Red Fascism” is one aspect, along with the activities of the intellectuals in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and in relation to McCarthyism. The problem of apostasy is addressed by looking at intellectuals such as Sidney Hook, Will Herberg, Felix Morrow, Jean van Heijenoort, and many more. On the other hand, the sectarianism associated with orthodoxy is treated in regard to the evolution of the Socialist Workers Party and the conflict with Bert Cochran as well as the career of George Novack.
Marxism and Intellectuals in the United States
Authors: Wald Alan M.
Published: January 2018

By use of some observations by Hannah Arendt, the argument of the book is reviewed. The assessment of the experience by Daniel Aaron is considered in light of the theoretical work of Raymond Williams about alignment and commitment, and the experience of Philip Rahv and Modern Occasions is examined more fully. The problems and promises of Marxist commitment are briefly summarized.
An African American School
Authors: Grundy Pamela
Published: January 2018

Tells the story of growth on Charlotte's west side from the 1920s through the 1950s, a time when the city's African American population was not only growing but also shifting from the center city to the new neighborhoods being built on the west side of time. Describes the multi-class community fashioned by west side residents in the 1920s and 1930s. Explores the school culture that developed by the highly qualified staff at West Charlotte High School, which opened in 1938, and which became a key focus of community activities and aspirations. Covers early civil rights activities, reactions to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board decision and examines the dilemma faced by African American education advocates: whether to focus on integration, or on securing more resources for all-black schools.
Marketing the Book of Mormon to Noah’s Three Sons
Authors: Mueller Max Perry
Published: January 2018

This chapter traces the different ways the Book of Mormon was marketed to “red,” “white,” and “black” Americans during the first three years after the church was founded in 1830. Because Native Americans (“Lamanites”) were seen as the Book of Mormon’s true heirs and the prophesied leaders of New Jerusalem, and because most American Indians did not belong to America’s English-language based print culture, Joseph Smith sent Mormonism’s first official mission to Delaware Indians on the frontier, west of Missouri where the Mormons hoped to build their New Jerusalem. Because most were literate in English, early Mormons attempted to reach white “Gentile” Americans of European descent through newspapers and other media produced and published through their own printing operations. Though the Book of Mormon’s past or future does not include people of African descent, early Mormons did allow, and even encouraged, some free black Americans to join the church.
Temporal variation of VOC fluxes measured with PTR-TOF above a boreal forest
Authors: Schallhart Simon , Rantala Pekka , Kajos Maija K. , Aalto Juho , Mammarella Ivan , Ruuskanen Taina M. , Kulmala Markku
Published: January 2018

Abstract. Between April and June 2013 fluxes of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were measured in a Scots pine and Norway spruce forest using the eddy covariance (EC) method with a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight (PTR-TOF) mass spectrometer. The observations were performed above a boreal forest at the SMEAR II site in southern Finland.We found a total of 25 different compounds with exchange and investigated their seasonal variations from spring to summer. The majority of the net VOC flux was comprised of methanol, monoterpenes, acetone and butene + butanol. The butene + butanol emissions were concluded to not originate from the forest and, therefore, be anthropogenic. The VOC exchange followed a seasonal trend and the emissions increased from spring to summer. Only three compounds were emitted during the snowmelt while in summer emissions of some 19 VOCs were observed. During the measurement period in April, the emissions were dominated by butene + butanol, while during the start of the growing season and in summer, methanol was the most emitted compound. The main source of methanol was likely the growth of new biomass. During a 21-day period in June, the net VOC flux was 2.1 nmol m−2 s−1. This is on the lower end of PTR-TOF flux measurements from other ecosystems, which range from 2 to 10 nmol m−2 s−1. The EC flux results were compared with surface layer profile measurements, using a proton transfer reaction quadrupole mass spectrometer, which is permanently installed at the SMEAR II site. For the major compounds, the fluxes measured with the two different methods agreed well.
Excess nitrogen as a marker of intense dinitrogen fixation in the Western Tropical South Pacific Ocean: impact on the thermocline waters of the South Pacific
Authors: Fumenia Alain , Moutin Thierry , Bonnet Sophie , Benavides Mar , Petrenko Anne , Helias Nunige Sandra , Maes Christophe
Published: January 2018

Abstract. As part of the Oligotrophy to UlTra-oligotrophy PACiﬁc Experiment cruise, which took place in the Western Tropical South Paciﬁc during the austral summer (March–April 2015), we present data on nitrate, phosphate and on particulate and dissolved organic matter. The stoichiometric nitrogen-to-phosphorus ratios of the inorganic and organic material and the tracer N* are described. N* allows to trace changes in the proportion of fixed nitrogen due to diazotrophy and/or denitrification. Our results showed that the Melanesian archipelago waters between 160° E and 170° W are characterized by a deficit of nitrate and phosphate in the productive layer, significant dinitrogen fixation rates and an excess of particulate organic nitrogen compared to the canonical ratio of Redfield. A positive N* anomaly was observed in the productive layer reflecting the combined effect of phosphate uptake by diazotrophic organisms and remineralization of excess particulate organic nitrogen. The South Pacific Gyre waters between 170° W and 160° W were depleted in nitrate but rich in phosphate. Surface waters exhibited very low dinitrogen fixation rates, an absence of excess particulate organic nitrogen and a N* signal close to zero. The higher iron availability coupled with an absence of nitrate in the suface water of the Melanesian archipelago could stimulate the diazotrophic activity, which in turn will introduce excess nitrogen, deplete the surface waters in phosphate and be the explanation for the positive N* anomaly in the Melanesian archipelago waters. In the thermocline waters, the N* tracer revealed its full complexity, with notably the cumulative effect of the remineralization of particulate organic nitrogen and the effects of the mixing of water masses. At the global ocean scale, calculation of N* signal from the new Global Ocean Data Analysis Project version 2 database showed a strong spatial decoupling between the thermocline waters of the Eastern Tropical South Pacific and those of the Western Tropical South Paciﬁc. A strongly positive N* anomaly was observed in the thermocline waters of the Western Tropical South Paciﬁc in the Coral/Tasman Seas and in the southern part of the subtropical gyre between latitude 23° S and 32° S. A strong negative N* signal was observed in the waters of the Eestern Tropical South Paciﬁc between latitude 5° S and 20° S–23° S. We hypothesise that the nitrogen excess observed in the thermocline waters of the Western Tropical South Paciﬁc is transported eastward and then northward by the circulation of the South Pacific subtropical gyre and could influence positively the thermocline waters of the South Pacific being thus at the origin of the westward increase of the strongly negative N* signal transported by the South Equatorial Current.
Technical College Students’ ARCS Learning Motivation on Hospitality English Vocabulary
Authors: Li Chiung-Li , Chen Yi-Hsuan , Li Hung-Yen
Published: January 2018

The purposes of the study were to examine technical college students’ hospitality English vocabulary learning performance and motivation. The subjects were 93 students from a technical college in southern Taiwan. The instruments included one questionnaire called ARCS questionnaire consisting of four factors about learning motivation on hospitality English vocabulary and one English test called Professional Vocabulary Quotient Credential (PVQC) on hospitality. The subjects accepted a 40-hour hospitality English vocabulary training course. Then, 93 subjects took a 50-minute PVQC test and 10-minute ARCS questionnaire in December, 2015. The researchers collected the data from the questionnaire and PVQC test and analyzed the data by descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. The results revealed that most of the subjects liked to learn hospitality English vocabulary, and found that learning hospitality English vocabulary was important for them, and most of them reported that English was associated with salary and promotion in the future; however, most of them spent little time learning English after school. The results also showed that some learning motivation factors had effects on hospitality English vocabulary learning performance, like being treated and assessed by teachers equally, getting recognition, or being willing to work hard. Finally, the researchers drew a conclusion based on the results and provided some teaching and research implications for the future.
FROTA ATUAL DE TRATORES POR TEMPO DE USO NO BRASIL
Authors: Bellochio Sabrina Dalla Corte , Alonço Airton Dos Santos , Vargas Francieli De , Oliveira Marília Boff de
Published: January 2018

A agricultura é fundamental para o desenvolvimento econômico e social do país. Desta forma, a mecanização agrícola permite ampliar as áreas cultivadas ou a escala de produção, sendo que a manufatura das primeiras unidades de tratores no Brasil se iniciou em 1960, com a instalação da indústria local. Isso possibilitou um novo direcionamento às atividades produtivas do país, que passaram a incorporar novas técnicas e equipamentos mais produtivos, com vistas à eficiência operacional. O objetivo deste estudo é calcular e demonstrar a evolução da composição da frota brasileira de tratores, por faixas de tempo de uso, desde a instalação da indústria de tratores no país até o ano de 2016. Para esta composição, foram utilizados os dados anuais de vendas de tratores agrícolas, divulgados pela ANFAVEA. A análise demonstrou que as vendas acompanham os ciclos econômicos, apresentando picos na década de 70 e de 2010. Ainda é possível observar que o Brasil apresenta quase um milhão de tratores e atualmente, possui a frota mais jovem dos últimos 29 anos, a qual iniciou sua renovação a partir do ano 2000, por políticas de acesso ao crédito.
The Human Faith Theme and the Whole-Tone Hypothesis
Authors: Gann Kyle
Published: January 2018

The Concord Sonata is a cyclic work based on a theme that occurs in all four movements, known as the “Human Faith” theme. The appearances of this theme in various keys suggest an overarching harmonic structure based on the whole-tone scale, giving way frequently to an opposition between the keys of A and E-flat. A whole-tone scale plus one other note serves as an importance source-chord for the entire sonata.
“Thoreau” The Essay
Authors: Gann Kyle
Published: January 2018

Ives’s “Thoreau” essay defends that writer from dismissive critical opinions that were still prevalent in the very early 20th century. Though clearly sympathizing with Thoreau, he feels a need to apologize for Thoreau in three areas: his antisocialness and sometimes rudeness; his self-distancing from organized religion; and his contemptuous attitude toward money.
A Harmony of ImperfectionsThe Epilogue
Authors: Gann Kyle
Published: January 2018

The final chapter of Essays Before a Sonata is a grand speculation on what separates the greatest, most indelible music (such as Bach and Beethoven) from music that is merely clever and competent. Our own essay examines, for the first time in the literature, Ives’s indebtedness to Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Hegel, and holds up to scrutiny his idea that the value of music depends on the intensity of the artist’s experience in making it; that “what music sounds like may not be what it is.”
Conclusion
Authors: Bjork Stephanie R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter summarizes the key points of the book and elucidates how the case study of Somalis in Finland furthers our understanding of kinship, identity, and diaspora. The chapter considers how and why telling clan will likely change with the return of Somalis to ancestral clan territories, south to north migration, linguistic changes, shifting political engagements, and identity constructions. The chapter also highlights the selected resettlement of Somali Bantu refugees in the United States by contrasting the author’s more recent work among this group in a large metropolitan area in the United States with Somalis in Finland.
Organized Anxiety
Authors: Cooper Brittney C.
Published: January 2018

This chapter expands the intellectual geography mapped in Beyond Respectability by examining the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) as a site of Black female knowledge production. In particular, this chapter uses the work of Fannie Barrier Williams, a Chicago based clubwoman, to map many of the key intellectual interventions of the NACW as a school of social thought. Drawing on Williams’ theorization of what she calls organized anxiety, Brittney Cooper takes up and critically examines her claim that the NACW was responsible for creating “race public opinion” and, by extension, giving shape and form to an emergent Black public sphere. As a concept, organized anxiety politicizes the emotional lives of Black women and constitutes one more iteration of the ways that race women invoked embodied discourse in their public intellectual work. The chapter also examines Williams’s invocation of a discourse the author terms American peculiarity, a kind of oppositional discourse challenging claims of American exceptionalism. Finally, the chapter interrogates her concept of racial sociality, a sophisticated way to think about ideas of racial unity and social connections between African Americans of different geographic and class backgrounds. Williams was a formidable political theorist, who, through her work in the NACW, introduced a rich conceptual milieu through which to think about Black politics, Black organizations, and gender politics in the late nineteenth century.
Outside Context Problems
Authors: Kincaid Paul
Published: January 2018

At the height of his career, Banks abandoned the Culture for two very different science fiction novels. Against a Dark Background presented an extreme capitalism that was a deliberate contrast to the communist character of the Culture; while Feersum Endjinn presented a structurally complex and linguistically dense account of a world in collapse. Civil war as a political manifestation of Laing’s divided self would also inform subsequent works of the Scottish fantastic, notably Whit and A Song of Stone. His return to the Culture with Excession and its companion Look to Windward were, it is proposed, intended to end the sequence by addressing the Sublime as a form of the death of civilization.
Baking Powder Wars
Authors: Civitello Linda
Published: January 2018

This book is about the Hundred Years War of food business, how a mid-nineteenth century American invention, baking powder, replaced yeast as a leavening agent and created a culinary revolution as profound as the use of yeast thousands of years ago. Before government regulation, the force controlling the market was not a visible or invisible hand, but advertising sleight of hand. Four companies—Rumford, Royal, Calumet, and Clabber Girl—fought advertising, trade, legislative, scientific, and judicial wars with proprietary cookbooks, lawsuits, trade cards, and bribes. In the process, they altered or created cake, cupcakes, cookies, biscuits, pancakes, quick breads, waffles, doughnuts, and other foods, and forged a distinct American culinary identity. This new American chemical leavening shortcut also changed the breadstuffs of Native Americans and every immigrant group and was a force for assimilation. The wars continued in spite of scandals exposed by muckraking journalists and investigation by President Theodore Roosevelt, through WWI, the 1920s, the Depression, and WWII in every state, territory, and kitchen in the United States until standardization finally occurred at the end of the twentieth century. Now, global businesses such as McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken depend on baking powder for their baked goods, and baking powder is in home and commercial kitchens around the world.
Afterword
Authors: Saylor Eric
Published: January 2018

The disparate approaches to English pastoralism considered within this book—whether evoking scenes and characters from classical poetry, depicting an imaginary past or a hoped-for future, responding to the landscape, commenting on contemporary social and political challenges, providing spiritual sustenance for the living, or eulogizing the dead—firmly banish outdated clichés of it as little more than folky-wolky roister-doistering. Instead, pastoralism stands revealed as a subtle and flexible expressive mode capable of transcending the circumstances and surroundings of its creation, conveyed by a distinctive and highly adaptable array of stylistic traits. But in the wake of Finzi’s death in 1956 and Vaughan Williams’s only two years later, English pastoral music fell into relative obscurity. Composers who had written pastoral works in previous decades (including Howells, Ireland, and Bliss) had either largely turned away from the idiom or limited it to certain smaller-scale or niche contexts (such as church music, in Howells’s case). Meanwhile, the rise of both a prominent British avant-garde musical movement during the later 1950s and an extraordinarily vital pop music scene in the following decade made it difficult for the older, less demonstrative pastoral style to hold the public or critical imagination....
Temporality and Existence
Authors: Dastur Françoise , Vallier Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter brings Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, whose different phenomenological styles are normally opposed, into dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's claim that temporality is not a contingent attribute of existence. According to Merleau-Ponty, consciousness and the world, the inside and the outside, sense and non-sense, are interdependent beings. For Merleau-Ponty, the problem of time is the problem of the subject's relation to time. The chapter examines how Merleau-Ponty's position in Phenomenology of Perception becomes the intermediary position between, on the one hand, the completion of the tradition and the fulfillment of modernity represented by Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and, on the other hand, the “new beginning for thought” that Heidegger wants to promote, insofar as he attempts to assume or take on metaphysics.
Introduction
Authors: Talbayev Edwige Tamalet
Published: January 2018

The introduction offers a broad introduction to the project. It delineates the stakes of the argument and situates it at the fertile intersection of Francophone literature and Mediterranean studies. By establishing the historical and critical context of its Mediterranean approach, it draws out its implications in relation to existing critical frameworks, such as deterritorialization, minor transnationalism, and dominant regional models in Mediterranean studies. It presents the Mediterranean Maghrebi corpus under study—a body of texts rooted in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma rather than Albert Camus’ colonial Mediterranean writings. The introduction shows how the book’s Mediterranean framework is used to reclaim and preserve the diversity of Maghrebi societies in a melancholic mode.
Hybridizing the Myth, Allegorizing Algeria
Authors: Talbayev Edwige Tamalet
Published: January 2018

This chapter teases out the ways in which Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma resists the cohesive power of the Algerian myth of origins elaborated around the time of independence to reveal a Mediterranean transnationalism. The chapter starts by interrogating the conflicted history of the colonial concept of Mediterranean hybridity as both cultural syncretism and biological assimilation from the 1890s to the late colonial period. It then examines exile and the predominance of subjective estrangement in Kateb’s writing. In light of virtually unknown fragments cut out of Nedjma, it shows that the quest for Algeria’s identity cannot be completed without spatial deployment in the Mediterranean island of Djerba. Djerba supplies a model of felicitous mixing between strata of Mediterranean migrations, providing late colonial Algeria with a mythical space where to hone the very workings of its nation-building aspirations in a plural context evocative of Algeria’s own diversity. Kateb’s text reveals a Mediterranean ethos at the core of Algeria’s founding narrative, performing what writer Nabile Farès later dubbed the “re-allegorization of national myth” in a Mediterranean mode.
Epilogue
Authors: Talbayev Edwige Tamalet
Published: January 2018

Drawing on the book’s conclusions, this last section moves beyond the corpus of Maghrebi literature to postulate a possible Mediterranean framework within which it would gain meaning. Could the Mediterranean idioms diversely appropriated in Maghrebi literature be encompassed in a broader form of regional transnationalism? The epilogue attempts to reveal the political cut of the Mediterranean concept, arguing for its relevance to the theorization of historical agency in the postcolonial era.
The Face of the Contemporary: Lost World Fantasies of Finding Lot’s Wife
Authors: Gallagher Lowell
Published: January 2018

Chapter six examines a relatively unknown Victorian lost-world romance fantasy, Alfred Clark’s The Finding of Lot’s Wife (1896). The novel converts the legend of Lot’s wife, traditionally a cautionary tale of moral turpitude, into a stark lesson on the perilous consequences of intercultural contact in the Orientalizing theatre of colonial Palestine. Clark’s central contribution to the Sodom archive, however, resides in the novel’s prescient staging of a world in which insights associated with Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology of myth converge with the theological residue in Levinas’s writings – notably, the self-emptying action of kenosis, which Levinas takes from Pauline incarnational theology. Clark is no theologian, but his interest in the ethical provocations of kenosis is as keen as Levinas’s—and perhaps more viscerally arresting because of its narrative immediacy. This feature powerfully contributes to the innovation The Finding of Lot’s Wife brings to the Sodom archive. Clark’s ingenious intertwining of Blumenbergian and Levinasian treatments of myth effectively imagines the urgent contemporariness of the legacy of Lot’s wife. Clark shows how the lethal and reparative dimensions of that legacy asymmetrically impinge on each other, producing an arresting narrative image of dread commingled with hope and urgent consequence.
Notes on Objectivity and Reality (n.d.)
Authors: Bugbee Henry
Published: January 2018

Notes on Objectivity and Reality explores the importance of aesthetic appreciation during the course of philosophical understanding. Aesthetic appreciation should not be understood merely in terms of noetic activity relative to the subject. Appreciation is a response to a revelation of reality that remains “patient of creation.”
The Quest for “Art”
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: January 2018

Nancy describes the various arts as sensuous. He discusses the role of the arts in the recreation and the expression of worlds.
The Problem of Trauma
Authors: Yusin Jennifer
Published: January 2018

This chapter brings to light the ways in which the concept of the psychic event, understood as a traumatic event, in the Freudian metapsychology blurs the distinction between interiority and exteriority in the form and functioning of psychical life. It demonstrates that Freud’s thinking of the compulsion to repeat traumatic scenarios distinguishes between the binding of repetition and the process of representing the drives. This difference shows that the character of compulsion is not purely determinist and the psychic elaboration of trauma is the formation of a materially real event. Unlike current trends in trauma studies, this chapter exposes how the relation between binding and repetition in trauma leads to the possibility of transforming the ontological meaning of destruction.
Portia’s Pauline Perversion: The Merchant of Venice and Romans 1
Authors: Stockton Will
Published: January 2018

Paul’s sexed exception of Christ from the Christian prohibition against male bodily penetration vexes Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a comedy about the power of marriage to simultaneously masculinize and Christianize. Dressed as a boy, Jessica elopes with Lorenzo, and later argues that she has thereby become a Christian. Also cross-dressed, Portia saves her husband’s friend Antonio from Shylock’s emasculating excision of flesh. Responding to Janet Adelman’s argument that the play shores up a Pauline ideology of Christian masculinity through Portia’s courtroom defeat of Shylock, this chapter juxtaposes contemporary queer biblical and Renaissance Protestant readings of Romans 1 to argue that the play instead perverts this ideology through its presentation of Christ as a penetrable eunuch in the character of Balthasar. As Portia/Balthasar’s ring trick opens the dyad of the married couple to the triad of married couple and friend, the “Pauline” distinction between monogamous, marital, Christian sexuality on the one hand, and sodomitical Jewish sexuality on the other, begins to erode.
Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, Jean-Luc Marion uses the “sacrifice of Isaac” as a touchstone for philosophical reflection on the idea of “the gift.” Genesis 22 offers an important insight: if Abraham’s actions on Mount Moriah amount to a “sacrifice,” then sacrifice is neither tantamount to destruction—after all, Isaac was not killed—nor is it a form of economic exchange, as if Abraham owed Isaac to God as “counter-gift” in return for the God’s promise. Rather, the “sacrifice” of Isaac ultimately reveals that Isaac is a gift given by God.
The Manifestation of the Father
Authors: Hart Kevin
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, Kevin Hart argues that Jesus’ parables present (or phenomenalize) a type of phenomenological reduction from world (kosmos) to kingdom (Basileia). The goal of the parables, then, is to “nudge” readers to live according to the kingdom even while still in the world. More radical than Husserl’s reduction, Jesus’ reduction proceeds from kenosis (an “emptying out” of worldly meaning and value) to epektasis (“stretching out” toward God). Focusing on the character of the father (and Father) in the “Prodigal Son” (Luke 15:11-32), Hart maintains that compassionate fatherhood is an important aspect of the kingdom, and is ultimately (and paradoxically, from a worldly perspective) inseparable from the realities of the cross and resurrection
Split Interpretations of a Split I
Authors: Chrétien Jean-Louis
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, Jean-Louis Chrétien tracks various interpretations of Romans 7:7-25, focusing on the use of first person pronouns in the passage. Does the “I/me” refer to Paul in a straightforward autobiographical sense? Is Paul inhabiting someone else’s experience by speaking in character (prosopopoiea)? Does the text reflect both possibilities at once? Chrétien argues that the passage describes, or better creates, a Christian interiority that is inherently agonistic. The “I” is both Paul’s and the reader’s; the varying interpretations ultimately reflect the real existential dilemmas of Christian life.
Response
Authors: Martin Dale B.
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, Dale Martin responds to the other essays in the volume. He offers poignant insights about each essay and the volume as a whole.
Jakobson’s Zeros
Authors: Pourciau Sarah M.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 6 treats the transformation to which the Russian structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson, following the deflationary tradition of Saussure, subjects the neo-Pythagorean acoustic poetics discussed in Chapter 5. The focus rests on a new reading of what Jakobson calls the “linguistic zero,” which he defines as the featureless half of a binary opposition between presence and absence. The chapter argues that this absolutely crucial and much-analyzed aspect of phonological theory can be shown to develop in rigorous, polemical conversation with the systems theories of 19th century language spirit. The zero operates, in essence, as a placeholder for the subtracted soul of structure. In the process, it manages to fulfill the seemingly impossible, because seemingly contradictory, condition of infusing by subtracting, grounding by evaporating, unifying by differing, inspiring by deflating.
Toward Dia-Phenomenology
Authors: Alloa Emmanuel
Published: January 2018

The conclusion speculates about what it would mean to continue where Merleau-Ponty left off. If throughout his writings, he criticized all ideologies of transparency (the self’s transparency to itself, the transparency of knowledge to the self, or the transparency to the self of others), this also entails to accept that to return to the things themselves doesn’t mean that there could be an immediacy of things. To take the entangled, perceptual situation seriously means to rebuke all dreams of full transparency, and to accept that what is only ever exists in a field in and through which it appears. The sensible is of diaphanous nature.
Gerson’s “Moralized” Primer of Spiritual Grammar
Authors: Longo F. Dominic
Published: January 2018

The chapter is a primer in “spiritual grammar” which provides a close reading of Gerson’s Moralized Grammar
(Donatus moralizatus). This theological and literary exposition initiates the reader into how this unusual text’s hybrid genre works. With appreciation of the author’s pastoral agenda and the theological content of the text, this interpretation of Moralized Grammar illuminates the considerable skill involved in transforming into a sermonic moral catechism the grammatical primer written by Aelius Donatus (fl. 350 CE), which was foundational to education for 1000 years in the West. In Moralized Grammar Gerson accomplished a feat of literary creativity for the purpose of crafting a synopsis of the Christian moral and spiritual life that would have been extraordinarily memorable for the growing class of literate Christians of his time. Moralized Grammar is also an example of Gerson’s overall effort to place the Ten Commandments at the center of Christian morality.
The World as It Runs—and as It Doesn’t
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: January 2018

In this chapter Marion discusses the problematic connotations of the term “value” especially when associated with God or morality, because “value” always depends on the evaluator. He refuses the titles of “intellectual” or Catholic “philosopher” and explains why. The chapter discusses in what way our present situation is one of nihilism and how one should respond to it. Marion argues that God is not in retreat and Catholicism not in crisis. He ends with a discussion of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism and a brief evaluation of the recent papacies.
Disciplines of the Neuro
Authors: Vidal Fernando , Ortega Francisco
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the emergence, since the 1990s, of fields whose names often combine the suffix neuro with the name of one of the human and social sciences, from anthropology and art history to education, law and theology. These “disciplines of the neuro” reframe the human sciences and their corresponding subjects on the basis of knowledge about the brain. Driven by the availability of imaging technologies, they look for neural correlates of behaviors and mental processes. Brain imaging studies since the early 1990s have increasingly dealt with topics of potential ethical, legal and social implications, such as attitudes, cooperation and competition, violence, political preference or religious experience. The media, both popular and specialized, has given much room to these new fields, thus underlining how rapidly neuroscientific knowledge spreads beyond the confines of brain research proper into different areas of life and culture as a whole. We provide an overview of these fields, as well as a more focused examination of neuroaesthetics and the “neurodisciplines” of culture. Though recurrently presented as a way of solving centuries-old riddles and offering solutions to supposed crises in the humanities, these new fields apply methods that are intrinsically inadequate to the objects and phenomena they claim to address.
Brains on Screen and Paper
Authors: Vidal Fernando , Ortega Francisco
Published: January 2018

The chapter addresses forms of the neuro in popular culture. Film and literature have in many ways rehearsed the connection between personal identity, having a body and being a brain, and have been major sites for elaborating and questioning the human as cerebral subject. Numerous works can be identified as “brain movies” and “brain novels:” most Frankenstein films since the 1940s; B-series productions from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, in which brains themselves are protagonists; science-fiction novels of the same period, which stage and exploit brain transplants or brains in vats. While we shall give room to this particular literary and filmic subgenres, our focus will be on later novels and films. We shall privilege works that explore existential, interpersonal, psychological, ethical and scientific aspects of the relations between having a brain and being a person less through the basic structure of their plots or the direct display of physical brains than through stylistic and formal features. In both areas we demonstrate that even the productions that start out treating humans as cerebral subjects end up contesting brain reductionism, and that such constitutive ambivalence is emblematic of the status of the cerebral subject in the modern and contemporary world.
From Research to Action
Authors: Klaf Suzanna , Walts Katherine Kaufka
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores institutional responses to undocumented undergraduate students from the perspective of staff. Data from 110 key staff members (employed in admissions, financial aid, student services, campus ministry, and so on) from across all twenty-eight institutions were collected through an online survey, were analyzed, and presented in this chapter. The first section highlights the results of the survey and interviews conducted with staff at Jesuit colleges and universities. The second section presents a five-part case study of Loyola University Chicago initiatives. These initiatives were informed by the engagement of Loyola University Chicago in the research partnership, the results of which are presented, and the dissemination of the Ford-funded report composed in collaboration with Fairfield University and Santa Clara University.
Introduction: Tangled Matters
Authors: Keller Catherine , Rubenstein Mary-Jane
Published: January 2018

It is not just that we are entangled in matter—we subjects who read, write, and ruminate on what “we” are. We are materializations entangled in other materializations; we happen in our mattering. What matters in our ethics, our politics, our worlds entangles us in and as new materializations. And at this juncture, it entangles scholarship in retrievals and rethinkings of matter itself. Even disciplines that struggle with long histories of disembodied transcendence are registering the effects.
What Flashes Up: Theological-Political-Scientific Fragments
Authors: Barad Karen
Published: January 2018

In “What Flashes Up,” Karen Barad exposes a startling new sense of matter. The “agential realist” interpretation of quantum physics in her monumental Meeting the Universe Halfway had already brought the indeterminacy and relationality—the “intra-activity”—of quantum ontology into resonance with human ethics: All beings compose and partake in the responsive structure of the world. “Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us flourish.” In the present discussion, Barad draws Walter Benjamin’s messianic “now-time” via Judith Butler and quantum field theory into a deep meditation on the matter of time, a time that breaks from the scientific and political modernisms of purportedly linear progress.
Tingles of Matter, Tangles of Theology
Authors: Keller Catherine
Published: January 2018

Any materialism that honors its matter will find itself entangled in a rich and contradictory history of religious bodies. This essay muses on the spectrum running from a conservative “Christian materialism” to a polyamorous panentheism, all by way of an ancient legacy manifesting, in for instance its biblical forcefield, in figures of creation and new creation, of material justice, incarnation, and ritual embodiment. By way of a Whiteheadian reading of Barad’s quantum entanglement of physics and ethics along with Bennett’s vital materialism, this essay considers—in the face of looming planetary catastrophe—the religious meaning of an apophatic matter sacramentally embodied in all our entangled differences.
Agents Matter and Matter Agents: Interpretation and Value from Cells to Gaia
Authors: Clayton Philip , Singleton Elizabeth
Published: January 2018

What happens to agency at the ends of the biological spectrum? On the standard scientific interpretation of biological evolution, single-celled organisms are not themselves agents, at least not in any serious sense; and the planet as a whole most definitely is not. This paper challenges both interpretations. Every participant in the dynamics of Darwinian evolution is an agent with interests, acting with and through its environment. Every living thing is thus teleological; each has a semiotic or “meaning-ed” relationship with its environment; and each possesses value in its own right. How far up can one extend this insight? Because organisms are communities cum individuals, the biosphere as a whole should be conceived as a living entity, Gaia. These conclusions are transformative for eco-theology and its pictures of God, which become “green” and teeming with life.