Rethinking Decolonial and Postcolonial Knowledges beyond Regions to Imagine Transnational Solidarity

Hypatia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 542-547
Author(s):  
Kiran Asher ◽  
Priti Ramamurthy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Analytical Goals ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Transnational Solidarity ◽  
Colonial Encounters

Since the early twentieth century, various strands of “anticolonial” scholarship have been and are concerned with how colonial encounters and practices constitute differences. In recent years, this scholarship maps the uneven implications of “coloniality” for subjects and bodies marked as different, for example, “feminine,” “raced,” “queer,” or trans. Along with feminism, anticolonial scholarship's analytical goals—to link the body with body politics—are closely tied to its political ones: to correct the wrongs of colonial encounters and practices. The current avatars of anticolonial scholarship include postcolonial, decolonial, and settler-colonial variants.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

The Body as Art in Early-Twentieth-Century German Poetry

Monatshefte ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol XCVI (4) ◽  
pp. 503-520
Author(s):  
R. J. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Maurice

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-153
Author(s):  
Finn Fordham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Homosexual Orientation ◽  
The World ◽  
Resonant Term ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Edward Carpenter

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.

The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia: Observations on the Commentaries by Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg

Slavic Review ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 512-517
Author(s):  
Leopold h. Haimson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Revolution

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.

scholarly journals Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
HALLIE LIEBERMAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Household Appliance ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sex Toys

The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. Ads appeared in the pages ofThe New York TimesandScientific Americanand plastered street cars. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.Companies positioned vibrators within two major consumer product categories in the early 1900s: labor-saving household appliances and electrotherapeutic devices. By advertising the vibrator as both a labor-saving household appliance and a sexualized health panacea, companies could slip vibrator ads past the censors, while supplying user manuals that clued consumers into specific sexual uses. In household appliance ads, companies drew on traditional gender roles to present vibrators as emblems of domesticity and motherhood, whereas in electrotherapeutic ads they presented vibrators as symbols of progressive gender roles, the sexualized new woman and the body-conscious “self-made man.”

Frenzied Flappers: The Hysterical Female in Early Twentieth-Century Social Dance

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-350
Author(s):  
Hope Margetts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Distress ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Social Dancing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Tensions ◽  
Social Dances

Abstract It is widely acknowledged that the freer, more sexualized movements of social dancing in the early twentieth century (1900–1929) accompanied the beginnings of female emancipation both socially and politically. However, less explored are the similarities between the provocative, inelegant choreography of such social dances and the symptoms of female hysteria, a medical phenomenon that saw the body as a canvas for mental distress as provoked by social tensions. This essay will address the possible alignment of hysteria and popular social dance in relation to the evolving Modern Woman. It will examine the motivations of modern, ‘hysterical’ dances, and discuss their progressive status in terms of gender by considering perceived psychosomatic interactions within the female dancing body.

Influenza and Embodied Sociality in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-534
Author(s):  
Rachel Conrad Bracken
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
History Of Public Health ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Hygiene Measures ◽  
Community Belonging

Abstract This article reads two early twentieth-century American novels, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows (1937) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), in relation to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–19 and the history of public health. Beyond serving as a literary record of “America’s forgotten pandemic,” it interprets these novels as experiments in what I term “embodied sociality”: a biocultural model of social life encompassing both the abstract, symbolic dimensions of community belonging and the concrete, biological contours of collective living made visible through the spread of infectious disease. I argue that Swallows and Pale Horse challenge the logic of “modern health citizenship,” which prioritized personal hygiene measures to prevent the spread of influenza through a community, that was promoted in turn-of-the-century public health efforts. Instead, these novels destabilize perceptions of the body as a discrete and potentially impermeable entity, revealing how to belong to a community is to be susceptible to the unseen agents of disease that move between bodies in close proximity, as well as to be, albeit unwittingly, a potential carrier of disease. Attending to embodied sociality as made visible by the flu, these novels necessitate a new way of writing pandemic—one that blends the narrative conventions of plague writing and autopathography. In so doing, I contend, Pale Horse and Swallows invite us to reimagine embodiment and community belonging by holding the local and global, personal and political, individual and collective dimensions of pandemic together. When we recognize pandemic as simultaneously individual and communal, the boundaries that differentiate proximal bodies from one another and from a collective social body blur. And this knowledge, in turn, transforms the way we write pandemic.

scholarly journals A PERSONALIZED APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF THE PROBLEM OF EDUCATIONAL AND PEDAGOGICAL FORECASTING IN UKRAINE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherniak S. G.
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Native Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personalized Approach

The article is devoted to the study of a personalized approach to the problem of educational and pedagogical forecasting in Ukraine in the early twentieth century. The author emphasizes that a personalized approach to the study of the problem of educational and pedagogical forecasting in the early twentieth century is the main prerequisite for the development of forecasting pedagogical thought, which must be specified. I.Ya. Franco saw the direction of educational influence in the mastery of scientific knowledge, the harmonious improvement of the body in the process of physical labor. S.F. Rusova, as the coryphaeus of preschool pedagogy, laid the foundation for the content of the educational process through the introduction of the native language, national holidays, and Christian values of the Ukrainian people. G.G. Vashchenko took the Christian ideal as the basis for predicting pedagogical phenomena and processes. P.P. Blonsky defended the independent nature of pedagogical science. І.І. Ogienko stressed the importance of native education, the formation of Christian virtue, justice, and diligence. B.D. Grinchenko defended the inseparable connection of education with the life and culture of other peoples. L. Ukrainka had the same opinion. The teacher insisted on the importance of considering the role of the teacher in the public school, sharply raised the issue of the struggle for social and national liberation of the Ukrainian people. T.G. Lubnets is considered the luminary of the theory of pedagogy. H.D. Alchevskaya entered the history of pedagogy in Ukraine as a prominent figure in the field of adult education, organizer of Sunday schools. І.М. Steshenko advocated the nationalization of secondary and higher education. Minister P.M. Ignatiev defined the organizational and pedagogical principles of educational and pedagogical forecasting through the reform of the education system.

scholarly journals Choreographic Re-embodiment between Text and Dance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mechanical Function ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Rhythm ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This chapter explores the aesthetics of the experimental modernist fiction of Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett to open up debates about reenactment of dance in the twentieth century. Using the theories of Gabriele Brandstetter and Paul Ricoeur to explore correspondences in dance and literary skepticism about narrative, the discussion shows how both writers interpolate their stories with fleeting passages of gesture or movement phrases that syncopate and undermine the teleological flow of narrative. This discussion suggests a choreographic re-embodiment between dance and text that focuses on communication beyond words. The similarity of Conrad and Beckett lies in their uses of gesture, but while Conrad’s movement phrases re-embody early twentieth-century expressivism, Beckett’s look back to early twentieth-century innovations in abstraction which examine the mechanical function of the body, rhythm in time and space. Beckett does not reference a mental (or emotional) state, whereas Conrad’s gestures are affective, identifying an emotional interiority.

‘Frail but Fearless’: Dichotomies of femininity and strength at the New York Hippodrome, 1905‐17

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Merriman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Critical Responses

This article examines two women who performed athletic feats at the New York Hippodrome between 1905 and 1917, arguing that their approaches to costume and bodily display were integral to their widespread critical and public acclaim. The women examined are lion tamer Claire Heliot and swimmer and diver Annette Kellerman. I contend that these performers occupied a difficult position within the early-twentieth-century entertainment industry. The type of mainstream spectacle that the Hippodrome provided, combined with strict societal ideas of what constituted femininity and masculinity, created an environment that was not conducive to the success of athletic women.Their unusual acts therefore required them to negotiate their public image in such a way that emphasized their inherent femininity. Their costume was an essential element of this negotiation as it exposed the audience to a kind of woman with whom they were already familiar. Claire Heliot did this by occupying a traditional domestic womanhood that sharply contrasted with her dangerous lion-taming act, and Annette Kellerman emphasized her beauty through the sexually charged display of her body in form-fitting costumes and swimsuits. In addition to analyses of their costumes, critical responses to their performances are taken into consideration as evidence of these women’s success as performers. This article highlights how costume and the body can be used as tools to alter identity and reinforce gender norms for the purposes of subverting the physical expectations of women.

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