bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Write What You Know
Authors: Alsharif Lina Hesham
Published: March 2015

“Write what you know … I know that I am a Palestinian ….”
Not Just a Picnic: Settler Colonialism, Mobility, and Identity among Palestinians in Israel
Authors: Shihade Magid
Published: March 2015

Through the lens of picnics, this article narrates the social and political history of a village in Galilee and its residents since 1948, which serves as a picture for the larger Palestinian experience and the consequences of the rupture created by the Zionist colonization of Palestine.
The “I” in BDS: Individual Creativity and Responsibility in the Context of Collective Praxis — an Interview With Omar Barghouti and Falastine Dwikat
Authors: Aoudé Ibrahim G. , Cooper Morgan , Franklin Cynthia G.
Published: March 2015

Omar Barghouti and Falastine Dwikat reflect on the personal experiences and contributions of activists, artists, and academics in the Palestinian-led BDS movement, a vibrant example of a movement that embraces the dialectic between the individual and the collective, balancing individual responsibility and creativity with collective decision-making and action.
Dreaming of Never Land
Authors: Nimr Sonia
Published: March 2015

This essay focuses on the author’s journey to and three years incarceration in Maskoubiya prison, situating the experience in the broader context of Palestinian life under Israeli Occupation.
Locked Out
Authors: AlSharif Lina Hesham
Published: March 2015

Cut off from home and family, the author pays witness to the way the occupation affects the ability of Palestinians to return and to see their loved ones.
“Food is not our issue”: Reflections on Hunger Striking
Authors: Omar Sa’ed
Published: March 2015

The author discusses his reasons for going on hunger strike while in prison, attempts by Israel and the Palestinian Authority to break his spirit, and his refusal renounce his vision for a free Palestine.
Once Upon a Border: The Secret Lives of Resistance—the Case of the Palestinian Village of al-Marja, 1949–1967
Authors: Ghanim Honaida
Published: March 2015

This article explores how the Palestinian residents of al-Marja, a village adjacent to the Green Line, experienced the first appearance of the “borders” in their lives in 1949, and the traces left by the partition of their spatial sphere amongst enemy forces, separating them from the organic world to which they were accustomed. Based on stories from the villagers, the article focuses on the arrangements, techniques, and tools that residents developed to “recapture” their ordinary life.
From the West Bank: Letters and Acts of Resistance
Authors: Hamayel Yassmine Saleh , Jad Islah
Published: March 2015

Highlighting excerpts from letters written by Islah Jad at the height of the 2002 Israeli invasion of the West Bank cities, in this essay her daughter, Yassmine Saleh Hamayel, reflects on the letters as a daughter, as a high school student at the time of the invasion, and as a participant in the 2011–2013youth activism against the occupation in Palestine.
Incidental Insurgents : An Interview with Ruanne Abou Rahme
Authors: Cooper Morgan
Published: March 2015

Abou Rahme talks about her work with Basel Abbas on Incidental Insurgents . Structured like an audio visual novel, the project focuses on the figure ofc the bandit, investigating archival and oral histories while insisting on the recovery and import of incidental insurgents in the history of revolutions and particularly in the history of Palestinian resistance against oppression.
Life in Occupied Palestine: Three Cafés and a Special Issue
Authors: Franklin Cynthia G. , Cooper Morgan , Aoudé Ibrahim G.
Published: March 2015

Against the backdrop of Israel’s invasions of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2014, the coeditors introduce this special issue: its formation, and the importance and power of the contributors’ writings about life in Palestine under conditions of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism.
Life in Abu Dis Continues Quietly
Authors: Najjar Rima
Published: March 2015

“Life in Abu Dis Continues Quietly” explores how Rima Najjar makes strategic use of different forms of life writing on Facebook to communicate the human costs of the Israeli occupation and to foster resistance to the dehumanizing representations (or erasures) of Palestinians upon which the Israeli government’s continued human rights abuses depend.
Towards a New Language of Liberation: An Interview with Raja Shehadeh
Authors: Franklin Cynthia G.
Published: March 2015

Raja Shehadeh discusses the poetics of writing and the role the writer can play as witness and seeker of justice.
Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home
Authors: Shalhoub-Kevorkian Nadera , Ihmoud Sarah
Published: March 2015

Drawing on our personal histories navigating the violence of Israeli settler colonialism and militarization, we theorize the Palestinian home space as not only a physical, but also a psychological and epistemological space of yearning, of belonging, and of radical thinking and becoming. In light of the colonial state’s continued attempts to further fragment and dislocate indigenous Palestinians from their homeland, we posit an analytics of returning to our home/land as a space of reconstructing Palestinian socialities and identities, of re-rooting through a radical praxis of love that can give birth to new forms of resistance.
Traveling as a Palestinian
Authors: Aljamal Yousef M.
Published: March 2015

This article documents the difficulties a Palestinian from Gaza faces when travelling. It sheds lights on the main obstacles and challenges Palestinians face when obtaining visas and at borders and airports. What is taken for granted by many people in the world is not considered as such by Palestinians who have been living under Israeli occupation and siege for decades.
Gaza Writes Back : Narrating Palestine
Authors: Alareer Refaat R.
Published: March 2015

In Palestine, stories are sacred. In trying times, we turn to story-telling for solace. Mothers and grandmothers are the major source of stories in the families. And just when you are old enough, you realise that you have been shaped by these stories and that they go far beyond entertainment. As a Palestinian, I have been brought up on stories, and I learned early in my life that it’s both selfish and treacherous to keep a story to myself. If I allowed a story to stop, I would be betraying my legacy, my mother, my grandmother, and my homeland. This essay describes the creation of a collection of stories by young Palestinian authors that whet the much-needed talent for life.
Reciprocal Solidarity: Where the Black and Palestinian Queer Struggles Meet
Authors: Atshan Sa’ed , Moore Darnell L.
Published: March 2015

In this article, two queer men, one Black American and the other Palestinian, theorize “reciprocal solidarity” as a model of solidarity that thrives on love, friendship, storytelling, reciprocity, shared experiences, struggles, and queer kinship.
Ambrosiaster’s Second Thoughts about Eve
Authors: Bussières Marie-Pierre
Published: March 2015

Ambrosiaster followed closely the controversies inside the church of Rome at the end of the fourth century. That most of his work survived in two—sometimes three—versions helps the scholar follow the evolution of his thoughts as he pondered over his teaching, adjusting it to the preoccupations of the day. We propose here to explore a change of mind that he had about the virginity of Eve in Eden by comparing texts that belong to one or the other of his compilations of Quaestiones . Texts such as Qu. u. test . 40 and Qu. n. test . 58, belonging to Ambrosiaster’s neglected collection of 150 questions are in striking contradiction with longer, better-known texts, such as Qu. test . 127 “On the Sin of Adam and Eve,” which belongs to the collection of 127 chapters. On this single topic, Ambrosiaster’s thinking underwent some significant changes.
Chrysostom’s Serpent: Animality and Gender in the Homilies on Genesis
Authors: Dunning Benjamin H.
Published: March 2015

This article examines the interrelation of animality and gender in Chrysostom’s Homilies on Genesis via the elusive figure of the serpent. I argue that in seeking to shore up the serpent’s status as an irrational animal, Chrysostom renders it alternately masculinized and feminized. This ambiguous gendering of the (already ambiguously bestial) creature plays a central role as Chrysostom recasts post-lapsarian femininity in terms of slave-like subjugation. The serpent serves as the narrative device that allows him to align radical subjection, animality, and femininity—and thus as the transfer point for refiguring Eve’s own position after the fall in these terms.
Evergetism among the Bishops of Hispania between the Sixth and Seventh Centuries: A Dialogue between Archaeological and Documentary Sources
Authors: Utrero Agudo María de los Ángeles , Moreno Martín Francisco José
Published: March 2015

The role of the bishops of Hispania in the construction of churches in the late antique period has been highlighted by a traditional historiography which considered the religious unification under the Catholic creed by the Third Council of Toledo in the year 589 c.e. as the starting point of an active period of construction characterized by close collaboration between the church and the Visigothic monarchy. The principal objective of this paper is to call into question this hypothesis by presenting in an orderly fashion the documentary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence regarding the sixth and seventh centuries. Conclusions force to reconsider not only the role of the bishops, actually often recorded as responsible for consecration rather than for construction, but also of the private patronage and that of the church-monarchy alliance.
Compiling Narratives: The Visual Strategies of Early Christian Visual Art
Authors: Jensen Robin M.
Published: March 2015

Early Christian pictorial art arose within a Greco-Roman cultural environment, instinctively adapting the visual vocabulary of the world in which it appeared and developed. Yet, even while surviving examples of identifiably Christian art objects appear to have much in common with those made for polytheists, they also reveal differences that reflect evident and distinctively Christian practices of composing and viewing images. This involved more than transforming earlier pagan models, it signaled an intentional rejection of their form, content, and style. The results also aligned with certain exegetical strategies evident in early Christian sermons, commentaries, and catecheses and reflected the emergence of a characteristically Christian social identity that emphasized shared religious commitments and broadly understood interpretive approaches to biblical narratives.
Voluntary Martyrdom and Gnosticism
Authors: Tite Philip L.
Published: March 2015

Building on the recent surge of interest in early Christian martyrdom, especially with regard to voluntary martyrdom and social rhetorical processes, this article challenges the traditional view that Gnostics opposed martyrdom. A close analysis of the primary texts results in a more nuanced presentation of martyrdom in the late second and third centuries. While some early Christians may indeed have opposed martyrdom, it is far too simplistic to make such totalizing claims about Gnostic Christianity. This article argues that the debates over volunteerism are embedded within the rhetorical discourse of these texts.
Socio-Ecological Characterization of Forest Ecosystem Health in the South-Western Mau Forest Reserve, Kenya
Authors: Obati Gilbert O. , Breckling Broder
Published: March 2015

Assessment and documentation of the status of ecosystem health and analysis of the effects of human-induced changes on a Kenyan montane natural forest, characterized by a human-dominated landscape, were done. A socioeconomic assessment of the perceptions and attitudes of the inhabitants about the importance, status and causes of degradation was carried out between August 2006 and September 2007. The provisional capacity of the reserve for goods and services was also evaluated. In order to assess individual local actions at the household level and their effects on the overall health dynamics in the forest reserve, information about the direct and indirect drivers of forest degradation at the forest reserve level was sought from the time of inhabitation until the time of study. The perceptions and attitudes of the inhabitants regarding supply of ecosystem goods and services at the forest reserve scale were evaluated. This was executed using a household survey where one hundred and fifty household heads were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire. An integrated approach to defining the health of the ecosystem at the local level was attempted. Results indicated a chronological degradation in the condition of the forest over time. A continued reduction in the number and density of once dominant tree species as well as structural physiognomy was shown. Households in the South-western Mau experience an increasing decline in the supply of once abundant important goods, including fuelwood, timber, medicinal plants and poles. Disappearance of abundant and common wildlife species was also recorded. In the forest reserve, solutions to issues and problems related to encroachment on forestland and related disturbance activities lie in clear land use policy and legislation designating particular uses to particular land categories. This is urgently required to deal with the issues related to unsustainable land use.
Development Aid, Agricultural Value Chains And Farmers’ Benefits: The Case of Vanilla Growers in Kasese, Uganda
Authors: Kamya Innocent Royal
Published: March 2015

This article assesses farmers’ benefits from a donor-funded programme that promoted non-traditional agricultural export crops, specifically vanilla and hot pepper. Data was obtained from a survey of 125 famers from eight farmers’ associations working with a Dutch NGO and trading company, four focus group discussions and key informant interviews. Kasese Smallholder Income and Investment Programme used a value chain approach helping farmers at various stages. Farmers benefited from input loans, agricultural skills, extension services and a market for their produce. Vanilla producers were affected by the persistent drop in the crop prices, which affected the sustainability of associations beyond the Kasese Smallholder Income and Investment Programme. Stronger famers’ associations will give more benefits; the government should therefore promote a nationwide cooperative movement and crop regulatory authorities so as to be able to help farmers sustainably.
Determinants of Household Participation in Land Rental Markets in Amigna District, Arsi Zone of Oromiya Region, Ethiopia
Authors: Amare Abaineh , Beyene Fekadu
Published: March 2015

This study examines factors affecting household participation and intensity of the participation in land rental markets using data collected from 118 households. Results revealed that landholding and age of the household heads are important variables which had an inverse and significant influence on participation and the intensity of participation in land renting-in market, but positively affect renting-out market. On the supply side, having less oxen and being aged are more likely to affect renting-out. Credit market imperfection, tenure insecurity and poor infrastructure development remain important factors impeding the function of land rental markets. These suggest that interventions should emphasize facilitating land-related transactions through creating effective micro-finance institutions, public awareness and strengthening enforcement of formal rules in land rental markets.
Gender Differences in the Migration of Zimbabwean Teachers to South Africa
Authors: Ranga Dick
Published: March 2015

This paper explored the extent to which Zimbabwean professional women have joined the formal sector of South Africa and the determinants of their migration in large or small numbers. It is based on a questionnaire survey conducted in 2012 and involving 200 Zimbabwean teachers, one half in Zimbabwe and the other half in South Africa. Fewer female than male teachers migrated to South Africa mainly because of females’ tendency not to progress to degree level and not to specialise in mathematics or science. Other reasons included their greater vulnerability to some types of violence such as rape, which forced them to learn South African languages fast in order to conceal their foreign identity. Women’s child-care roles and ostracism of those who migrated alone were also used to discourage them from migrating to South Africa.
The Situation of Street Children in Selected Cities of South Sudan: Magnitude, Causes, and Effects
Authors: Tefera Belay
Published: March 2015

Although international declarations upholding children’s rights for survival and development were already enshrined in the domestic laws and policies of South Sudan, the reality on the ground appears to depict that scores of children in streets are as yet most marginalized and least investigated. The objectives of this study were to examine the magnitude, causes and effects of child streetism in six state capitals of South Sudan and suggest the way forward. Data on magnitude were collected using a Child Inventory Form. Then, a Child Questionnaire was administered to a sample of 756 street children. Findings indicated that child streetism was only emerging but growing at an alarming rate. The possible factors included war-induced displacement, family disruption, economic constraints, mistreatment at home, lack of access to education and child-related behavioural factors. Once in the street, children were also found exposed to a living arrangement deprived of parental supervision and support, disruption of developmentally-constructive routines, substance abuse and health concerns. In fact, the impacts were far from uniform and not all about “negatives”.
Caribbean Women, Creole Fashioning, and the Fabric of Black Atlantic Writing
Authors: Skeehan Danielle C.
Published: March 2015

This essay examines how the circulation of British-produced cotton “Guinea” or “check” cloth between England, West Africa, and the Caribbean shaped the contours of the black Atlantic diaspora in the mid- to late eighteenth century. This cloth was exchanged for African captives in West African slaving ports, as well as exported to Caribbean markets to clothe Caribbean slaves. However, enslaved Caribbean women often reworked this fabric as a means to memorialize personal and collective histories, signify kinship, advertise status and skill, and provide material links within slave communities and to distant or unknown homelands. Looking to slave narratives that record the exchange of people for cloth, journals written by men and women such as Lady Maria Nugent, Thomas Thistlewood, and Mrs. Carmichael that record enslaved women’s work with cloth, and visual representations produced by Agostino Brunias, this essay explores how enslaved women’s textiles serve to circulate and convey messages, as well as to incorporate their makers and users into a social world.
Landscapes of Lesbian Desire
Authors: Beynon John C.
Published: March 2015

A review essay of Lisa L. Moore’s Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (2011).
Circulating Stories and Narrative Currency in David Simple
Authors: Binhammer Katherine
Published: March 2015

This essay reads one of the first novels of sensibility -- Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) -- and its sequel Volume the Last (1753), to explore the mechanism through which sentimental fiction works in tandem with emerging discourses of capitalism. Sentimental discourse, with its repeated disavowals of wealth and insistence that money does not buy happiness, is thematically positioned as opposed to commercial culture. Yet many see it as part of a larger bourgeois revolution in which the unmooring of economic value from property to capital necessitates the recalculation of virtue that sentimentalism promotes. How do we account for the tension between the surface thematic of despising money and the depth of capital accumulation? This essay answers the question by arguing that narrative is the mechanism whereby moral feeling is exchanged for finance in late-eighteenth-century fiction: storytelling displaces money as the currency of exchange in David Simple.
Debunking Myth: Behind the Scenes at the Paris Opéra
Authors: Cuillé Tili Boon
Published: March 2015

A review of Mark Darlow’s Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opéra, 1789–1794 (2012), the first cultural history of the Opéra’s administration and repertory to challenge critical assumptions that it served as an instrument of state propaganda during the Terror.
“A Healthy State”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Medico-Politics
Authors: Mallory-Kani Amy
Published: March 2015

In A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft takes aim at Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a text that attempts to preempt political disease by pointing out the deleterious invasiveness of the democratic ideals fostered by the French Revolution. Burke’s Reflections interweaves analogical and literal versions of concepts like health, contagion, and organic growth, while Wollstonecraft breaks almost completely with a purely analogical connection between the body of the individual and the body of the state, by emphasizing the material implications of health at various levels of political society. In what might be properly termed her “medico-politics,” Wollstonecraft outlines the simultaneously medical and political behaviors which combine to form and maintain the components of “a healthy state.” The aim of this essay is to situate Wollstonecraft within the medico-political milieu of the late eighteenth century and to illustrate how her use of medicine, and specifically a form of preventative immunity
The Curious Case of the Unfortunate John Cleland
Authors: Nace Nicholas D.
Published: March 2015

A review of Hal Gladfelder’s Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (2012).
Gender, Translation, and Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists: Elizabeth Griffith’s The School for Rakes (1769) and María Lorenza de los Ríos y Loyo’s El Eugenio (1801)
Authors: Jaffe Catherine M. , Yagüe Elisa Martín-Valdepeñas
Published: March 2015

This essay uses gender to analyze translation and cultural influence in eighteenth-century drama by comparing two translations/adaptations of Beaumarchais’s Eugénie (1767): The School for Rakes (1769) by British writer Elizabeth Griffith (1727-1793); and El Eugenio (1801) by the Spanish ilustrada, María Lorenza de los Ríos y Loyo, the Marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar (1761-1821). By adapting the secondary role of the female go-between, the women playwrights critique gender roles and express ambivalence about the advantages of matrimony for women. Ríos and Griffith use nationalistic discourse to invoke the role of translation as cultural colonization.
News Craze: Public Sphere and the Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Depiction of Newspaper Culture
Authors: Heyd Uriel
Published: March 2015

This article examines the depiction of “newspaper culture” -- i.e, the increasing obsession with news and newspapers and current events — in the eighteenth-century London theater, through the prevalence of “Quidnunc” (or news-obsessed) characters of both genders and all social classes. It places this phenomenon in the context of current theories of publics and the public sphere, and as a “test-case” especially for Habermas's theories of the political public sphere.
Enlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds
Authors: Kareem Sarah Tindal
Published: March 2015

Critical discussions of the bubbles that make fleeting but memorable appearances in several well-known Romantic-era poems—most notably, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” (1796), Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “Washing-Day” (1797), and George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1818-1824)—tend to take the bubble’s properties and associations for granted. To do so is a mistake because the eighteenth century—the century of both Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1704) and the South Sea Bubble (1720)—redefines what bubbles mean. Inspired by the bubble’s redefined material and figural status, the three aforementioned poems articulate a poetics of the bubble that envisions aesthetic experience as a form of speculative play involving both illusion and disillusionment. By appropriating the bubble as a figure of aesthetic play, Barbauld, Coleridge, and Byron embrace a ludic imperative that is also at the heart of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophical experiments with soap-bubbles. In so doing they reveal how Romantic aesthetics is as much continuous with as it is self-consciously distinct from Enlightenment science.
Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach
Authors: Ahnert Ruth , Ahnert Sebastian E.
Published: March 2015

Literary historians are increasingly recognizing the ways in which quantitative approaches can transform the way we interact with the archives. This essay uses mathematical and computational techniques developed by network scientists to reconstruct and analyze the social and textual organization of the underground community of Protestants living in England during the reign of Mary I, using an important body of original letters now held in the British Library and Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge, as well as early printed correspondence. These measures and algorithms reveal certain expected trends, such as the fact that many of the Marian martyrs featuring in John Foxe’s famous “Book of Martyrs” were central to the organization of this network by every measure. But they also reveal the surprising importance of letter couriers and financial supporters to the survival of this community during a time of intense persecution.
The Tragic Immigrant: Duality, Hybridity and the Discovery of Blackness in Mark Twain and James Weldon Johnson
Authors: Hardack Richard
Published: March 2015

Around the turn of the twentieth-century, a number of American writers imagined that European culture could help them develop an external perspective with which to reinterpret racial double-consciousness in the United States. In Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, European culture winds affirmed the binaries of race in the American South; but in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, published eighteen years later, European culture helps foster ideas of cultural and racial hybridity, though they cannot be transferred entirely to America. I explore the “discovery” of blackness and final rejection of European identity common to Twain’s and Johnson’s novels. In Twain’s novel, the familiar figure of “the tragic mulatto” is juxtaposed with, and temporarily supplanted by, the more unexpected figure of the tragic immigrant, an outsider who can never become an assimilated American. Johnson then recalibrates Twain’s configuration of racial duality by turning the external conflict between African American mulatto and European immigrant twins into an internal struggle of double consciousness.
“Shapes of Grief”: Hamlet ’s Grammar School Passions
Authors: Knecht Ross
Published: March 2015

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is famous for its attempt to adumbrate an inward passion that transcends outward expression, best seen in Hamlet’s insistence that he has “that within which passes show” and lacks the necessary “art to reckon [his] groans.” This essay argues that the text’s subtle and widely overlooked echoes of grammar school pedagogy demonstrate the harmony of inward states and outward expressions in the play, contrary to Hamlet’s own protestations. By tracing the passions of its characters in the terms of the grammar school (as in Polonius’s discussion of the “declension” of Hamlet’s melancholy), the play reveals that passions are not ineffable inward states, but instead expressive practices that abide by social rules and conventions. In advancing this argument, the essay draws on recent Wittgensteinian approaches to Hamlet and the new historiography of the grammar school.
“Revolutionizing A Mode of Life”: Leftist Middlebrow Fiction by Women in the 1930s
Authors: Ewins Kristin
Published: March 2015

Revisionist accounts of 1930s literature have questioned conventional critical divisions between politicized and modernist writing of the decade. Similar attempts have been made to reassess the distinctions between middlebrow and highbrow literature, but these have tended to accept middlebrow art as an unproblematic vehicle for middle-class values. Little attention has been paid to the popularity of middlebrow modes of representation among interwar writers on the left. Reading Winifred Holtby and Storm Jameson in relation to Virginia Woolf, this essay explores how politically committed novelists incorporated socialist ideas into their fiction to influence middle-class readers.
The Resurrection of the Body and the Life of the Flesh in Henry Vaughan’s Religious Verse
Authors: Gil Daniel Juan
Published: March 2015

I ask how Henry Vaughan’s distinctive understanding of resurrection determines how he uses poetic language to represent biological and corporeal life. Vaughan holds a theory of resurrection that is distinctive in two ways: (1) it rejects body/soul dualism, seeing resurrection exclusively as a matter of the body living again, and (2) it sees resurrection as something that will happen in the future but also as something that is happening already now, and in that sense it is a theory of immanent resurrection. Vaughan’s theory of immanent materialist resurrection leads to a search in the here and now for the signs or seeds of an alien life that is already now moving in the direction of resurrection. Whereas we (in our modern biological frame of reference) think of the material body as the thing that “causes” the death of the socially conditioned person by becoming diseased or old, Vaughan’s apocalyptic perspective is the reverse: for him, it is the socially conditioned self that will necessarily die and the only thing that could possibly survive this apocalyptic end is precisely the “raw” body, the flesh that is left over after death and that he sees as the substrate of resurrection.
Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein
Authors: Cecire Natalia
Published: March 2015

I situate the controversial critical strategies of distant reading and surface reading in the reception history of Gertrude Stein, an author whose work was frequently declared “unreadable.” I argue that an early twentieth-century history of compromised forms of reading, including women’s reading and information work, subtends both the technology with which distant reading may be carried out and the ways in which an author’s work comes to be understood as a corpus in the first place.
“I remain, an airy phantasm”: Lucy Hutchinson’s Civil War Ghost Writing
Authors: Murphy Erin
Published: March 2015

The Restoration has often been described as a period haunted by the civil wars. The Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson , Lucy Hutchinson’s 1660s account of the wars and their aftermath, tells a very different kind of ghost story, one that challenges us to rethink both this narrative of national trauma, as well as the binary gender analysis that has limited our understanding of her wartime writing. Throughout her work, Hutchinson represents the instability of identity, from her detailing of impersonations in the life story of her husband, to her description of double images in her elegies, to her depiction of “pious fraud” in her Genesis poem, Order and Disorder . Drawing on recent work by historians on the experience of the civil wars, this essay investigates a range of Hutchinson’s genres, showing that her engagement with so-called “identity problems” reached far beyond the marital dyad, or even the hierarchy of God, husband, and wife. Responding to the civil wars, Hutchinson performs a series of improvisations in which she embraces the unstable and phantasmatic nature of earthly existence as part of divine will, and makes a series of subtle distinctions between the deceits of her opponents and the “pious frauds” of the Godly.
Avoiding “Aunt Tomasina”: Charles Dickens Responds to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Black American Reader, Mary Webb
Authors: Korobkin Laura
Published: March 2015

This essay analyses Charles Dickens’s April 1857 letter to the Earl of Carlisle about Mary E. Webb, a mixed-race American actress for whom Harriet Beecher Stowe had written a one-woman performing version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Webb tried to see Dickens, bringing a letter of introduction from the Earl. Though clearly familiar with her status as a refined, trained elocutionist sponsored by British aristocrats, Dickens’s letter mocks her as a stereotypically uncultivated “Aunt Tomasina expounding King Lear,” a racially inferior outsider attempting unsuccessfully to invade the precincts of high culture and respectable public readings. Though Dickens was staunchly antislavery, the letter shows Dickens as obviously racist; my analysis contextualizes his response to Webb in relation to Victorian racial attitudes, blackface minstrelsy, the history of public readings, and the reception of African Americans in Britain, as well as Dickens’s personal anxieties about the security of his class status and his rivalry with bestselling author Stowe.
Atmospheres of Liberty: Ruskin in the Clouds
Authors: Williams Daniel
Published: March 2015

John Ruskin’s cloud aesthetics develop a coherent, if figurative, inquiry into the nature of human liberty. His changing accounts of cloud formations across Modern Painters gradually place more emphasis on liberty within a framework of restraint and self-government. Attending to the shifting and equivocal senses of liberty in Ruskin’s aesthetic writings clarifies his scattered, often incompatible assertions in a range of later social and political tracts. Bridging aesthetic criticism with political writings uneasily poised between liberalism, republicanism, and authoritarian conservatism, this article discovers Ruskin as the theorist of a dynamic, aesthetic model of liberty and just social arrangements.
“Drink up all the Water in the Sea:” Contracting Relationships in Congreve’s Love for Love and the Way of the World
Authors: Caldwell Lauren
Published: March 2015

This essay argues that Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy’s pervasive representation of legal technicality substantially complicates our received picture of that most conventional of comic resolutions, marriage. The late plays of Congreve in particular demonstrate a period-wide tendency to assess marriage, understood as a resolutely legal process, within the context of other types of legal relationship. Even as they involve themselves in legal technicality, these comedies signally involve forms of obligation that push against or past the bounds of the law. They address the period’s broader legal culture with an improvisational flexibility unrivaled by case law and commentary alike.
Soviet Madness: Nervousness, Mild Schizophrenia, and the Professional Jurisdiction of Psychiatry in the USSR, 1918–1936
Authors: Zajicek Benjamin
Published: March 2015

В 1931−36 гг. советские психиатры диагностировали многочисленные случаи “мягкой шизофрении”, т.е. шизофрении по типу невроза, которая предположительно являлась характерной именно для СССР. В 1936 году в ситуацию вмешался Народный комиссариат здравоохранения, распустив исследовательский институт, развивавший концепцию “мягкой шизофрении”. Комиссариат здравоохранения фундаментально переориентировал психиатрическую науку с изучения “пограничных заболеваний” и проблем психологической адаптации на исследования базовых психических заболеваний и их биологических причин. Настоящая статья прослеживает эволюцию проблематики “мягкой шизофрении” в контексте противостояния психиатрической экспертизы и государства в годы высокого сталинизма. Концепцией “мягкой шизофрении” активно интересовались психиатры из Института невропсихиатрической профилактики под руководством директора Льва Розенштейна. В 1920-х годах они пытались создать новую дисциплину – психогигиену, которую понимали как составляющую международного движения за психическую гигиену, основанного американским психиатром Адольфом Мейером ( Adolf Meyer ). Советские психогигиенисты мечтали о сети “невропсихиатрических пунктов”, разбросанных по всей стране. Эти учреждения должны были изучать природные и социальные условия на местах с целью улучшить душевное здоровье и предотвратить заболевания. Деятельность в этом направлении привела к конфликту Розенштейна и его коллег с партийными органами. Работая с понятием “мягкой шизофрении”, психиатры стремились выразить нормальность в психометрических и социальных индексах, а не в терминах политического и социального сознания. Партийные власти, напротив, настаивали на том, чтобы юрисдикция медицинской экспертизы относилась только к специфическим типам заболеваний, но не к условиям работы и жизни в целом. Постулирование “мягкой шизофрении” как биологического заболевания и было ответом Розенштейна и коллег на партийную позицию. Распустив руководимый им институт и разоблачив концепцию “мягкой шизофрении”, власти установили жесткие границы юрисдикции психиатров. В итоге советская психиатрия оказалась четко ориентированной на концепцию психиатрического заболевания как биологического феномена.
On the Transnational Imaginary and the Sovereign Power of a Butterfly Wing
Authors: Murav Harriet
Published: March 2015

SUMMARY: Harriet Murav sees the interpretation of the supra in Harsha Ram’s article as advancing a third element within the binary opposition of the colonizer and the colonized: a national cultural form that escapes the confines of Benedict Anderson’s modular nationality. Murav accepts Ram’s approach, but problematizes the application of the term “sovereignty” (referring to Chatterjee, whose model Ram applies in his study) in the structural situation of absent political power. She discusses this in relation to Yiddish literature and the Jewish national imagination in the Russian empire and early USSR. She finds in Yiddish literature a number of different concepts of belonging that are not reducible to nationalism and have multiple cultural sources. She, however, does not see there the precolonial national sovereignty that Chatterjee finds in his analysis of Bengali culture. Georgians in the Russian empire as well as Jews as a Soviet nation did not have political sovereignty, and this should be taken into account when focusing on literary forms of the hybrid national imagination. The material conditions of freedom and unfreedom matter. Хэрриет Мурав интерпретирует выводы статьи Харши Рама так: супра – третий элемент между колонизатором и колонизированным, национальная культурная форма, которая не соответствует “модульной”, горизонтально воображаемой массовой нации печатного капитализма по версии Бенедикта Андерсона. В этой части Мурав согласна с выводами Рама, однако она проблематизирует понимание “суверенитета” (нации) в отсутствии политической власти, которое он разделяет с Партой Чаттерджи. Мурав обсуждает эту проблему на примере идишистской литературы и еврейского национального воображения в Российской империи и раннем СССР. В идишистской литературе она обнаруживает различные концепции принадлежности к сообществу, не сводимые к национальным и имеющие множественные культурные источники. Однако Мурав не усматривает там не-политического национального “суверенитета”, который Чаттерджи обнаруживает в бенгальской культуре. Грузины в Российской империи, также как евреи в СССР, не обладали политическим суверенитетом как нация, что нужно, по мнению Мурав, учитывать, анализируя гибридные формы национального воображения. Материальные условия свободы и несвободы имеют значение.
Счастье в борьбе. Пять писем Якова Новикова Габриэлю Тарду
Authors: Аль-Матари Сара
Published: March 2015

The archival publication includes letters from the Russian-French sociologist, Jaqcues Novicow, to Gabriel Tarde. The letters discuss these two sociologists’ works in the context of the emergence of sociology as a discipline. Among the problems touched on in the letters are social Darwinism, the role of psychology in social processes, pacifism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and criminality. Sarah Al-Matary’s introduction contextualizes the relationship between Jacques Novicow and Gabriel Tarde and explores their relationship. Based in Odessa, Jacques Novicow primarily wrote in French and built his scholarly career outside of Russia. This publication helps put in context the life and work of one of Europe’s first sociologists.
Ram, Chatterjee, and the Georgian Feast: Reading the National against the Grain
Authors: Prakash Gyan
Published: March 2015

SUMMARY: Gyan Prakash accepts the interpretation of the cosmopolitan origins of the supra as formulated in the article by Harsha Ram, but criticizes Ram’s reliance on Partha Chatterjee’s idea of the “spiritual” domain of the nation as some preexisting condition preceding colonization. Prakash suggests that Chatterjee merely reproduces the nationalist discourse by reestablishing dichotomies such as inner/outer, spiritual/material, and capital/community and placing them outside the sphere of modernity. Prakash insists that in the Indian tradition these notions were thoroughly elaborated and pondered in relation to modernity. He accuses Chatterjee and, by extension, Ram of failing to acknowledge the implications of the hybrid origins of those dichotomies. Prakash claims that when Chatterjee is read via Homi Bhabha, the nationalist “inner” and “spiritual” turn out to be constructed from a hybrid formation much like the supra . Гаян Пракаш принимает тезис о космополитическом происхождении супры, сформулированный в статье Харши Рама, но критикует методологическое основание этого вывода, заимствованное Рамом у Парты Чаттерджи. Чаттерджи выделяет “духовное” пространство национального воображения, существующее до колонизации и не затронутое ею. По мнению Пракаша, Чаттерджи тем самым воспроизводит дискурс национализма, используя такие характерные для него дихотомии, как внутренний / внешний, духовный / материальный и капитал / община (сообщество). Чаттерджи помещает эти концепции вне модерности, в то время как они, согласно Пракашу, были сформированы в индийской традиции как раз относительно модерности. Пракаш обвиняет Чаттерджи и, косвенно, Рама как его последователя, в неспособности оценить импликации такого гибридного происхождения. Если прочитывать Чаттерджи в свете концепции гибридности Хоми Баба, − заявляет Пракаш, − то “внутренний” и “духовный” домен национального окажется такой же гибридной формацией, какой является супра.
Humanities and Social Sciences in the Russian Empire and the USSR: An Unwritten History
Authors: Astafieva Elena , Berelowitch Wladimir
Published: March 2015

SUMMARY: This introduction to the forum places its contributions into a larger context of debates about dynamics in the fields of humanities and social sciences in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. This research perspective informed the focus of the collaborative research project “The Constitution of Humanities and Social Sciences in Russia: Networks and Circulations of Models of Knowledge from the Eighteenth Century to the 1920s.” The primary impetus for the project’s organizers came from the French academic tradition, specifically, studies of “cultural transfers,” or to use the terminology preferred by some project participants, “histoire croisée” or cultural circulation that have been popular since the 1980s. Of no less importance was the desire to modify this paradigm by introducing the approaches of imperial history and the repertoire of research problems characterizing studies of Soviet modernity. Введение в форум помещает вошедшие в него статьи в более широкий контекст дискуссий о гуманитарных и социальных науках в имперской России и СССР. Эта тематика стала определяющей для международного проекта “Становление гуманитарных и социальных наук в России: сети и циркуляции моделей знания с XVIII века до 1920-х годов”. Основным стимулом для организаторов проекта явилась французская традиция истории науки, и прежде всего, ставшие популярными в 1980-е годы исследования “культурных трансферов”, или, как предпочитают называть свою дисциплину некоторые участники проекта, “histoire croisée” (история культурной циркуляции). Не менее важным было стремление привнести в эту парадигму подходы имперской истории и проблематику изучения советской модерности.
Domestication of the Wild Supra
Authors: Manning Paul
Published: March 2015

SUMMARY: In a brief essay, Paul Manning comments on the article by Harsha Ram published in this issue of Ab Imperio . Manning stresses the carnal (“material semiotic”) dimension of the historical supra as the ritual of unruly feasting, a nondiscursive social practice of communication. The process of symbolic acculturation and appropriation of the supra by the nascent Georgian nationalizing discourse (described by Ram) was accompanied by “domestication” of the wild parties. Not only was the supra now structured by a rigid ceremonial ritual, it was also relocated to the domain of private spaces of family homes. Thus, it became an institution of modern public culture (whether Russian imperial or Georgian national) as part of the integrated private sphere, after it had been “domesticated” and regulated. The case of the supra thus refutes the series of clear-cut binary oppositions formulated by Partha Chatterjee and employed by Ram, especially between the inner and the outer, the public and the private. Пол Мэнниг в коротком эссе комментирует статью Харши Рама, публикуемую в этом номере Ab Imperio . Мэнниг подчеркивает телесную материальность исторической супры как ритуала безудержного пиршества, недискурсивной социальной практики коммуникации. Процесс символической аккультурации и освоения супры формирующимся грузинским национальным дискурсом, описываемый Рамом, сопровождался “одомашниванием” диких пирушек. Супра не только структурировалась теперь жестким церемониальным ритуалом, но и локализовывалась в пространстве частной жизни, в семейном доме. Таким образом, она превращалась в институт модерной публичной культуры (российской имперской или грузинской национальной) в качестве элемента частной сферы, будучи уже “прирученной” и регулируемой. История супры проблематизирует четкие бинарные оппозиции, сформулированные Партой Чаттержи и используемые Рамом, особенно между “внутренним” и “внешним”, “публичным” и “частным”.
“Описания городов, не имеющие для русского читателя особого интереса”: купюры в русских переводах иностранных путешествий по Сибири (вторая половина XIX в.) с точки зрения истории популярного географического знания
Authors: Корандей Федор
Published: March 2015

Статья посвящена истории русских переводов путевых описаний иностранных путешественников по Сибири в 1860–1880-х гг. В цен-тре исследования – пространство неэквивалентности текстов, ста-новящейся очевидной при сопоставлении оригиналов и популярных российских адаптаций. В статье исследуются три группы переводов, когда текст оригинала подвергался специфической редакции. Первая группа представлена переводческими проектами М. Вольфа второй половины 1860-х гг. Второй рассматриваемый сюжет − российский перевод отчета О. Финша о путешествии в Западную Сибирь в 1876 г. (1882). Третью группу составили четыре перевода “Сибири и ссылки” Дж. Кеннана, опубликованных в период отмены цензурных запретов (1906). Автор рассматривает историю переводов в контексте влияния издателей, цензуры и критико-библиографической реакции на текст.