The Erotics of Urbanity

2021 ◽  
pp. 196-206
Author(s):  
Kathryn Babayan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Early Emergence ◽  
Discrete Moment ◽  
History Of

In the Conclusion, I draw on the analytical purchase of eroticism to provide a distinct vantage point onto the connections between urbanity, friendship, and spirituality. Adopting a different way of doing history in the field of early modern Persianate studies, I focus on a discrete moment in the story of Isfahan to think more broadly with historians of sexuality about the valences of erotic desires that bound together networks of friends living in previous centuries. Thinking sex with the early moderns compels me to see erasures that today silence passionate friendships and obscures the entangled history that love shared with eros and beauty. My history of Isfahan presents an early emergence of heteroerotic anxieties, provoked by the adab of urban love and Sufi homoerotic desire, that in the twentieth century were recuperated to make Iran modern.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

Unexpected Subversions: Modern Colonialism, Globalization, and Commodity Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Burke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Class ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Consumer Agency ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of

Scholars studying the history of modern colonialism have been more reluctant to make strongly contrarian claims about consumerism and commodification similar to those made by early modern Europeanists because they are more unsettled by some of the implications of their own studies. Modern consumer culture is strongly mapped to ‘Westernization’ and globalization. There is a very large class of scholarly studies that in some respect or another discuss the association between colonialism and consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global culture. Even constrained to the Western European states that created or extended formal empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific after 1860, studies such as Anne McClintock's intricate reading of British commodity culture indicate the extent to which colonial meanings and images were circulating within metropolitan societies. This article discusses modern colonialism, globalization, and commodity culture. It first examines the middle classes, nations, and modernity, and then considers consumer agency in the context of globalization.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-147
Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Philosophy ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Academic Dissertations

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.

A brief history of endocrinology

2011 ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Robert Arnott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Endocrine Disease ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces the history of endocrinology, principally through the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, but also looks further back to antiquity and the early modern period when the function of the glandular system was beginning to be recognized and partly understood. It also takes us through to later in the twentieth century, when therapeutics were developed that could tackle endocrine disease, and at the significant discoveries and those scientists and clinicians who made them, placing them in context of what appears later in this volume.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
J. V. Fesko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

This chapter introduces the topic of the history of the early modern Reformed doctrine of the covenant of works. It first defines the doctrine and then provides a state of the question through a survey of relevant secondary literature. After the state of the question, the chapter states the book’s main aim, which is to present an overview of the origins, development, and reception of the covenant of works. In contrast to critics of the doctrine, this book stands within another strand of historiography that sees the covenant of works as a legitimate development of ideas present in the early church, middle ages, and Reformation periods. The chapter then lays out the topics of each of following chapters: the Reformation, Robert Rollock, Jacob Arminius, James Ussher, John Cameron and Edward Leigh, The Westminster Standards, the Formula Consensus Helvetica, Thomas Boston, and the Twentieth Century.

Idleness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought

This essay examines the role that the specter of idleness played in the ongoing transformation of labor in England during the late medieval and early modern periods. It begins by tracing an historical shift in Christian conceptions of labor through a knotty genealogy of ideas about labor and idleness that extends from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The essay then turns to an early sixteenth-century text that is not often considered in either medieval or early modern histories of Christian thought about labor: Thomas More’sUtopia(1516). The essay contends thatUtopiais fundamentally shaped by More’s meditation on labor and idleness and that that meditation opens the utopian text out toward a vexed history of ideas concerning human work that extends forward from the fourteenth century. With its idiosyncratic but historically resonant meditation on human labor, More’sUtopiarepresents a particularly useful vantage point from which to address the ongoing transformation of Christian conceptions of work in late medieval and early modern England.

The Actual and the Possible

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Range ◽  
Selection Of

This volume offers a selection of essays by leading specialists on modality and the metaphysics of modality in the history of modern philosophy, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It revisits key moments in the history of modern modal doctrines, and illuminates lesser-known moments of that history. With this historical approach, the book aims to contextualize and even to offer alternatives to dominant positions within the contemporary philosophy of modality. Hence the volume contains not only new scholarship on the early-modern doctrines of Baruch Spinoza, G. W. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Immanuel Kant, but also work relating to less familiar nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexius Meinong and Jan Łukasiewicz, together with essays on celebrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Bertrand Russell, whose modal doctrines have not previously garnered the attention they deserve. The volume thus covers a variety of traditions, and its historical range extends to the end of the twentieth century, since it addresses the legacy of Willard Van Orman Quine’s critique of modality within recent analytic philosophy.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 190-210
Author(s):  
Y. Yvon Wang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
Semantic Evolution ◽  
Mao Era

This chapter presents a history of sexual representations in China, from classical “bedchamber arts” to Ming–Qing fiction and the pictorial magazines, translated books, and nude images at the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter shows that neither the early modern challenge to yin nor the global modern pornographic turn entirely overwrote older regimes of sexual politics and older forms of commodified sexual representations. The evolution of pornography has been a dialectical process. The chapter then presents further evidence that the global modern pornographic paradigm begun at the turn of the twentieth century continues to shape desires and discourse a century later. It traces the semantic evolution of the term huangse, “yellow,” and explores how pornography's global turn affected the legacies of some of the sexual representations discussed in previous chapters. Following a survey of these legacies in the Mao era and in contemporary China, the chapter ends on a speculative note, returning to the ethical questions raised in the introduction: Should we see pornography as a means of liberation that transcended yin ideology's fundamentally elitist model of legitimacy and power?

Queer Encounters in the Music of Billy Strayhorn

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 771-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Barg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Queer Identity ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Complex Relationships

AbstractThis article addresses issues of queer identity, aesthetics, and history in jazz through a focus on two midcentury works composed and/or arranged by Billy Strayhorn: a set of four pieces written in 1953 for an Off-Broadway production of Federico García-Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in Their Garden (Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín); and several movements from the Strayhorn-Ellington adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite (1960). My study considers how the two works engage artistic figures, themes, topics, and aesthetic practices that have strong queer historical affiliations. These include failed or impossible love, masking, stylized exotica, and other liminal spheres of identificatory ambiguity and reversal. Taken together, these works enable a positioning of Strayhorn within modernist queer cultural history and, more specifically, within the history of African American gay cultural production. At the same time, through showing how queerness inhabits jazz's past, my analyses of Strayhorn's queer musical encounters provide a critical vantage point from which to examine historical and cultural understandings of jazz at midcentury and, more broadly, the complex relationships between social identities (race, sexuality, gender) and composition, arrangement, and collaboration in twentieth-century music.

Numbing Aesthetics: Taste and Tempers of Peppercorn / Mountain Pepper / Sanshō

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 64-74
Author(s):  
Lan A. Li
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Hair Loss ◽  
Single Unit ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Molecular Components

This article explores a cultural history of peppercorn and its famous characterization as a “numbing spice.” It investigates how the quality of “numbing spice” extended from East Asian cosmologies that engaged with peppercorn, also known as mountain pepper or sanshō 山椒, as a medical, literary, and culinary object. Medieval and early modern encyclopedias in China described how the plant's vivid colors reflected cosmological relationships that promised better health and eternal youth. The plant's desirability represented what I call “numbing aesthetics,” in that its taste was directly tied to its appearance and utility. When burned, boiled, or crushed, forms of peppercorn could treat hemorrhages, hair loss, swollen scrotums, and toothaches. Beautiful peppers were more effective; ugly peppers were less effective. These many types of plants had many kinds of names with origin stories that derived from young girls, young couples, pigs, and frogs. As a social metaphor, pepper dust became a popular metaphor for describing confined concubines. This article later argues that these qualities fell away when biologists attempted to reduce the plant into its active molecular components in the twentieth century. Tokyo-based chemists imperfectly distilled numbing juices from the pepper's bark and fruit to define numbness as a single unit of flavor, even when numbness was not a classical kind of flavor and more closely resembled tingling vibrations. But by becoming a quasi-category of flavor, the molecularization of peppercorn would diminish its long history of cosmological associations that were gendered, practiced, and otherworldly.

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