Breathing for Nerve Force, Posing for Poise

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-144
Author(s):  
Anya P. Foxen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Yoga Practice ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Yoga ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Dress Reform ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 3 examines the relationship between lingering harmonial ideas and the nineteenth-century evolution of physical culture. Specifically it relates the development of Ling Swedish gymnastics, the Movement Cure, and American Delsarteism with the rise of alternative medical therapies and gender dynamics. In doing so, it points to two trends that speak to modern yoga’s form as well as its gender demographics. First, modern yoga—especially the vastly popular dance-like flow styles—looks most like the light calisthenics that would have been prescribed for women during this period. Second, these types of calisthenics were elaborated to address distinctly feminine concerns, such as dress reform, which led to a special focus being placed on elements that would become central to modern yoga practice in the West, namely a generalized emphasis on deep breathing (rather than the more specific techniques of pranayama) and attention to aesthetic form.

The Neoliberal Yogi and the Politics of Yoga

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 772-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farah Godrej
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Western World ◽  
Yoga Practice ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Yoga ◽  
Political Norms

Can the theory and practice of the yogic tradition serve as a challenge to dominant cultural and political norms in the Western world? In this essay I demonstrate that modern yoga is a creature of fabrication, while arguing that yogic norms can simultaneously reinforce and challenge the norms of contemporary Western neoliberal societies. In its current and most common iteration in the West, yoga practice does stand in danger of reinforcing neoliberal constructions of selfhood. However, yoga does contain ample resources for challenging neoliberal subjectivity, but this requires reading the yogic tradition in a particular way, to emphasize certain philosophical elements over others, while directing its practice toward an inward-oriented detachment from material outcomes and desires. Contemporary claims about yoga’s counterhegemonic status often rely on exaggerated notions of its former “purity” and “authenticity,” which belie its invented and retrospectively reconstructed nature. Rather than engaging in these debates about authenticity, scholars and practitioners may productively turn their energies toward enacting a resistant, anti-neoliberal practice of yoga, while remaining self-conscious about the particularity and partiality of the interpretive position on which such a practice is founded.

scholarly journals Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

The Dilemmas of Male Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Argentina: Fashion, Consumerism, and Darwinism in Domingo Sarmiento and Juan B. Alberdi

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 771-795
Author(s):  
ADRIANA NOVOA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Luxury Consumption ◽  
Darwinian Revolution ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article explores how the relationship between luxury, consumption and gender in Argentina changed in response to the introduction of Darwinian ideas. Ideas surrounding consumerism were transformed by the 1870s, influenced by a scientific revolution that gave new meaning to gender categories. The introduction of Darwinism at a time of extreme ideological confusion about how to organise the nation only enhanced the perceived dangers about how economic changes and the expansion of markets would affect elites' ability to govern. The article focuses specifically on changing perceptions of gender and consumerism between 1830 and 1880, paying particular attention to the work of two of the most important intellectuals of the Generación del '37, Juan B. Alberdi and Domingo F. Sarmiento. By closely examining their reflections on the expansion of markets and accumulation of luxury goods, it reveals the nature of the cultural changes introduced by the Darwinian revolution.

The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Michael B. Gross. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. 2004. Pp. 376. $70.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-472-11383-6 (cloth); 0-472-03130-9 (paper).

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-314
Author(s):  
Siegfried Weichlein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

In recent years, a growing literature on nationalism has highlighted cultural and gender topics. At the same time, religion, most prominently Catholicism, has attracted the intellectual energy of more and more scholars. To date, however, the relationship between nationalism and religion has been undervalued. Helmut Walser Smith's study German Nationalism and Religious Conflict was one of the first to relate religious conflict to the character of German nationalism. Michael B. Gross now analyzes the relationship between German liberalism and religion.

The Sexual Politics of Nature Writing and Lepidoptery: ‘The siren song of entomology’

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-153
Author(s):  
Danielle Sands
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nature Writing ◽  
Vladimir Nabokov ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Ethical Awareness ◽  
Objectification Of Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Politics Of Nature ◽  
The Relationship

Arguing that the discourse of insect collecting is one of objectification and domination, and that entomological classification and practices continue to reflect concerns about sex and gender which were present in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instantiations, this chapter aligns the objectification of women with that of insects. It interrogates the notion of aesthetic disinterestedness as licence for such objectification, asking whether aesthetic disinterestedness permits an empathetic disengagement which, at its worst, leads to a sociopathic lack of ethical awareness. The chapter has three parts, focusing on John Fowles’s The Collector, insects (particularly butterflies and moths) in contemporary nature writing and, finally, the role of lepidoptery in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. The closing section examines the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, appealing to the simultaneous necessity of both cross-species empathetic engagement and of a distancing that is alert to its own subjective positioning.

Lieutenant Henry Pottinger and 150 Years of Baloch History

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-148
Author(s):  
Brian Spooner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
The West ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Vast Area

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the UK dispatched a number of envoys, agents and spies into the vast area between northern India and the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The information gathered by these adventurers provided the basis for British policy for the next hundred years, right down to the Great War of the twentieth century. Their publications have served as major sources of historical data, especially for Afghanistan, Iran and the area that later became Pakistan. But how their larger social context conditioned their work has not been examined sufficiently. In this chapter, I will focus on the adventures of Lieutenant Henry Pottinger, whose brief was one of the most challenging. However, he was well aware of being one of a number of Englishmen of different social classes who were doing similar things. What we learn about any one of them will shed additional light on the activities and significance of the work of the others, and in turn help us to understand the relationship between these countries and the West as it has evolved from the nineteenth century to the present day.

scholarly journals Walter Scott and the Islamic East: Ivanhoe and the Talisman

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 758-764
Author(s):  
Nisreen Tawfiq Yousef
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Interaction ◽  
The West ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
East West

This paper examines representations of the Islamic East in two novels by Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (1820) and The Talisman (1825). The paper’s argument is that Scott’s representations of the Islamic East seems influenced in very specific ways by dominant nineteenth-century portrayals of the East. Scott’s two novels present ambivalent depictions of the East, some of which deviate from standard patterns of representation of earlier centuries. For instance, on the one hand his novels attribute positive spiritual qualities to Saracens such as generosity, bravery and kindness to animals, while on the other, and often in the same passage, they sometimes depict Saracens as violent and atavistic. I argue that, through his various narrators and characters, Scott depicts the relationship between the Islamic East and the Christian West as a significant form of cultural interaction whereby the East is presented as complementing the West. However, Scott’s portrayal of East-West relation is complex, and it would be inaccurate to claim that this denotes total acceptance of Islamic manners, customs and perspectives. 

Introduction

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-372
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS CANNY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Preferences ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Public Record ◽  
The Moment ◽  
National Libraries ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

This Focus addresses the relationship between historians and the societies they serve, particularly since the later nineteenth century when, for the first time, historians began to define themselves as a distinct professional group. One of the conclusions that emerges from the four case studies pursued here is that the independence of judgement which professionalism implies, founders the moment it is perceived by a wider public that historians are no longer providing them with the moral guidance they expect from those who have studied their pasts. It is also shown that the challenges and responses did not prove identical in any two sets of circumstances. This introduction also makes reference to general challenges to which individual contributors do not necessarily refer, but which have impacted on the work and independence of all historians.Historians, both now and in the past, have been aware that what they write is, of necessity, influenced by their personal circumstances as also by their political and social preferences. Perhaps out of recognition of this, some writers of history in all centuries, and possibly from every culture, have celebrated their ability to shape policy in the present by citing experiences from past times. Then, in the nineteenth century, as governments in the west established Public Record Offices, National Archives and National Libraries, it came to be accepted in that part of the world that historians were professionals who, having undertaken a prescribed course of training, were uniquely equipped to assess how politicians and diplomats in the past had conducted their business.

Fucking the Body, Rewriting the Text: Proto-Queer Embodiment through Textual Drag in Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien (1973)

Paragraph ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-316
Author(s):  
Kayte Stokoe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Interaction ◽  
Gender Fluidity ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Lesbian Body ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Romance Narratives

Inspired by Judith Butler's conceptualization of drag as ‘gender parody’, I develop the conceptual frame of ‘textual drag’ in order to define and examine the relationship between parody, satire and gender. I test this frame by reading two seminal feminist works, Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien (The Lesbian Body) (1973). Both texts lend themselves particularly persuasively to analysis with this frame, as they each use parodic strategies to facilitate proto-queer satirical critiques of reductive gender norms. Orlando deploys an exaggerated nineteenth-century biographical style, which foregrounds the protagonist's gender fluidity and her developing critique of the norms and systems that surround her, while Le Corps lesbien rewrites canonical romance narratives from a lesbian perspective, challenging the heterosexism inherent in these narratives and providing new modes of thinking about gender, desire and sexual interaction.

The Psychic Chaitanya: Global Occult and Vaishnavism in Fin de Siècle Bengal

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-29
Author(s):  
Varuni Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article explores the intersections between Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and Bengali Vaishnavism in fin de siècle Bengal through the experiments in spirit communication conducted by the Ghosh family of Amrita Bazar Patrika Press fame. As a result of these engagements, the Amrita Bazar Patrika group proposed a novel understanding of Krishna Chaitanya/Gauranga (1486–1533) as a psychic who was able to channelize God through his unique powers of mediumship. It contributes to a nascent but growing body of scholarship around the relationship between religious modernity in colonial India and transnational occult networks. The article is written in three parts: part one discusses transnational occult networks crisscrossing Calcutta in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, with a focus on Theosophy and Spiritualism. It explores the initial goodwill between Madame Blavatsky and Sishir Kumar Ghosh, which dissipated later. The second part focuses on the Ghosh family séance, with the aim of parsing out how traditional and popular Bengali ‘ghosts’ were incorporated into a spectrum of occult knowledge about ‘higher’ spirits. This section also brings to light the caste and gender relationships exposed during séances held in the Ghosh family circle. Part three singles out the image of the ‘psychic Chaitanya’ from the pages of the Hindu Spiritual Magazine to bring into focus interactions between Yoga and occult in the context of the development of modern Bengali Vaishnavism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document