Artefacts of Writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
English Language ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
History Of

Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.

Invisible Bodies

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Lan A. Li
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Material Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis essay explores the ways in which Lu Gwei-djen (1904–91) served as a gatekeeper for interpreting medicine in China in the second half of the twentieth century. After retiring from science in 1956, Lu set out to write one of the first comprehensive English-language histories of medicine in China. Through a close study of Lu’s work notes and marginalia from later in her life, this essay examines how she carefully articulated the material characteristics of a “Chinese” medicine that gave rise to jingluo, or therapeutic paths often known as “meridians.” I argue that at the heart of this uneasy comparison was the difficult process of translating across multiple expressions of physiology. By placing Lu Gwei-djen at the center of a feminist intellectual history of medicine, this essay further shows how Lu’s translations were influenced by the social hierarchies in which she was embedded, including cultural, gender, and temporal dualities.

The Decline of Calvinism: An Approach to Its Study

1972 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Walker Howe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
British Colonies

One of the major themes in the intellectual history of the Western world has been the rise and fall of Calvinism. A militant and crusading ideology during the Reformation era, Calvinism was nevertheless showing signs of losing its expansive force by the time of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the Restoration of the English monarchy (1660). Before much longer, the inner conviction of Calvinist adherents as well as their determination to impose their beliefs upon others somehow faltered. Despite periodic ‘revivals’ such as the Great Awakening of the 1740s in the British colonies, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, for the most part, a time of gradual weakening for the Calvinist impulse. This weakening was by no means uniform; it occurred at different rates among different groups of people. (Indeed, even in the mid-twentieth century, a virtually undiluted Calvinism remains a powerful force in at least one part of the world: Afrikaans-speaking South Africa.)

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Forging a British World of Trade

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Thackeray
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
United Nations ◽  
International Collaboration ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The Eu

Brexit is likely to lead to the largest shift in Britain’s economic orientation in living memory. Some have argued that leaving the EU will enable Britain to revive markets in Commonwealth countries with which it has long-standing historical ties. Their opponents argue that such claims are based on forms of imperial nostalgia which ignore the often uncomfortable historical trade relations between Britain and these countries, as well as the UK’s historical role as a global, rather than chiefly imperial, economy. This book explores how efforts to promote a ‘British World’ system, centred on promoting trade between Britain and the Dominions, grew and declined in influence between the 1880s and 1970s. At the beginning of the twentieth century many people from London, to Sydney, Auckland, and Toronto considered themselves to belong to culturally British nations. British politicians and business leaders invested significant resources in promoting trade with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa out of a perception that these were great markets of the future. However, ideas about promoting trade between ‘British’ peoples were racially exclusive. From the 1920s onwards colonized and decolonizing populations questioned and challenged the bases of British World networks, making use of alternative forms of international collaboration promoted firstly by the League of Nations and then by the United Nations. Schemes for imperial collaboration amongst ethnically ‘British’ peoples were hollowed out by the actions of a variety of political and business leaders across Asia and Africa who reshaped the functions and identity of the Commonwealth.

Reinventing Ramanand: Caste and History in Gangetic India

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Pinch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

Tensions and Challenges of Intellectual History in Contemporary Latin America

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-115
Author(s):  
Roberto Breña
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

This article provides an overview of some prominent aspects of intellectual history as practiced today in Latin America, especially regarding conceptual history. It delves into the way this methodology arrived to the region not long ago and discusses the way some of its practitioners combine it with the history of political languages, often ignoring the profound differences between both approaches. Therefore, the text stresses some of the most significant contrasts between them. In its last part, the article is critical of the purported “globality” of global intellectual history, an issue that is inextricably linked with the pervasive use of the English language in the field. Throughout, the text poses several of the challenges that lie ahead for intellectual history in Latin America.

On History in Southwest Archaeology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Severin Fowles ◽  
Barbara Mills
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Resource Management ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Southwest Archaeology ◽  
American Military ◽  
Archaeological Practice ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
History Of

As an introduction to the Handbook, this chapter examines the question of history in Southwest archaeology in two senses. First, it traces the intellectual history of research in the region: from the nineteenth-century inauguration of Southwest archaeology as an extension of American military conquest, to the museum-oriented expeditions of the turn of the century, to the scientific advances and the growth of culture resource management during the twentieth century, to the impacts of Indigenous critiques and the development of collaborative approaches most recently. Second, the chapter explores the shifting status of “history” as a central goal of archaeological practice. How have archaeologists constructed—or resisted—narratives to account for the contingent unfolding of Indigenous and colonial societies in the region? What bodies of method and theory have guided these efforts? In addressing these questions, the chapter marks and participates in a growing historical turn in Southwest archaeology.

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