A Vertiginous Experience: Historical Ethics and Practice in the Age of Trump

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 894-901
Author(s):  
Simon Middleton
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
The Creation ◽  
History Of Race

AbstractThis essay considers Christopher Tomlins’ thoughts—as expressed in his In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History—on historical ethics and practice in the context of recent and ongoing controversies concerning the history of race and slavery in the American past. Tomlins endeavors to recover as much as he can relating to Nat Turner and his mentalité at the time of the infamous 1831 rebellion. He also promises a self-conscious engagement with the creation of history as an intellectual practice, and invites readers to reflect on their standpoint in the histories they create. For Tomlins this practice means a close reading of Turner’s “confession” through the work of social theorists, an approach that will likely prove controversial for some readers. For those who stay with him, however, Tomlins provides a bravura demonstration of historical methodology with implications for current debates and divisions within the wider field.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Lindsay Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Modern Racism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Many ◽  
History Of Race

This intellectual history focuses on racism: discriminatory concepts and practices that produce, accompany, or follow the (fictive) idea of race. The author identifies inferiority as a primary category of analysis, arguing that the creation of a hierarchy in which one group represents itself as superior to another constitutes a necessary element of racism. Attending to the tropes of subordinating differentiation helps trace racism’s history in drawing a line from medieval forms to contemporary white supremacism. The figural concept of cursed Jewish slavery developed in medieval Christian theology serves to construct racial inferiority. The introduction stresses the importance of theology in the history of race: the many studies of medieval discourses that articulate racial identities for Jews and Muslims do not focus on the theological texts from which these constructions emerge. Medieval Christian theology creates a status of hereditary inferiority, a concept that continues to shape modern racism.

Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
STEPHEN KNADLER
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Opioid Crisis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Accountability ◽  
History Of Race

“Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism” argues that stories of the opioid crisis disseminate an emerging white disability nationalism that functions to morph and reconsolidate the “machinery of whiteness” around an affectively charged disability politics. Through a close reading of HBO's 2017 documentary Warning: This Drug May Kill You, directed by Perri Peltz, as well as Beth Macy's New York Times best book of 2018, Dopesick, this essay contends that opioid storytelling redeploys a panic about lost agency and increased vulnerabilities into a melancholic reinvestment in a fantasy ideal of white immunity nationalism. Opioid storytelling's “relapsed” whiteness, which invokes a long history of fears about racial degeneration, restores whiteness's category crisis by presenting middle-class whites as abled disableds, or dopesick addicts, in contrast to an unredeemable noncompliant blackness, and, in doing so, resolves the contradictions within conservative neoliberal discourses between sympathetic addicts and a simultaneous insistence on individual accountability and family values. Opioid storytelling reveals not only a contemporary morphing of a complex history of race and public health, but offers new identifications for “fragile” white subjects to reinvest in intractable hierarchies of white supremacism, while simultaneously thinking of themselves as liberal antiracists.

The Triumph of Olemaun: Survivance, Empathic Unsettlement, and Restorying the History of Canadian Residential Schools

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-146
Author(s):  
Anah-Jayne Markland
Keyword(s):  
Residential Schools ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Mandatory Education ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Age Appropriate

The ignorance of many Canadians regarding residential schools and their traumatic legacy is emphasised in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a foundational obstacle to achieving reconciliation. Many of the TRC's calls to action involve education that dispels and corrects this ignorance, and the commission demands ‘age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples' historical and contemporary contributions to Canada’ to be made ‘a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students’ (Calls to Action 62.i). How to incorporate the history of residential schools in kindergarten and early elementary curricula has been much discussed, and one tool gaining traction is Indigenous-authored picturebooks about Canadian residential schools. This article conducts a close reading of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton and Christy Jordan-Fenton's picturebook When I Was Eight (2013). The picturebook gathers Indigenous and settler children together to contest master settler narratives regarding the history of residential schools. Using Gerald Vizenor's concept of ‘survivance’ and Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, the article argues that picturebooks work to unsettle young readers empathetically as part of restorying settler myths about residential schools and implicating young readers in the work of reconciliation.

Elite da Liberdade: a contribution to the history of black clubs in Brazil

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 396-411
Author(s):  
Petrônio José Domingues
Keyword(s):  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Educational Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

This article investigates the trajectory of the Grêmio Dramático, Recreativo e Literário Elite da Liberdade (the Liberdade Elite Guild of Drama, Recreation, and Literature), a black club active in São Paulo, Brazil, from 1919 to 1927. The aim is to reconstruct aspects of the club’s history in light of its educational discourse on civility, which was used as a strategy to promote modern virtues in the black milieu. By appropriating the precepts of civility, Elite da Liberdade helped construct a positive black identity, enabled the creation of bonds of solidarity among its members, and made itself a place of resistance and struggle for social inclusion, recognition, and citizens’ rights.

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Cottrol
Keyword(s):  
Antebellum America ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America 

The Russian Holy Synod and the Greeks

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 72-98
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Chrissidis
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Peter The Great ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Greek History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

Abstract The article first surveys Greek interpretations of the creation of the Russian Holy Synod by Peter the Great. It provides a critical assessment of the historiographical paradigm offered by N.F. Kapterev for the analysis of Greek-Russian relations in the early modern period. Finally, it proposes that scholars should focus on a Greek history of Greek-Russian relations as a complement and possibly corrective to the Kapterev paradigm.

History of the creation and activities of the League of Nations

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (09) ◽  
pp. 108-113
Author(s):  
Alexander Begichev ◽  
Alexander Galushkin ◽  
Andrey Zvonaryev ◽  
Victor Shestak
Keyword(s):  
League Of Nations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation
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