Invisible Bodies

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Lan A. Li

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.

Author(s):  
Kateřina Lišková

Abstract Specific developments in reproductive health occurred in Eastern Europe, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. During state socialism, it was experts, not social movements, who furthered the agenda of women’s health and sexuality. New analyses from the region and written mostly by authors who speak the local languages attest to the wealth of histories, highlighting different timelines of reproductive health developments, the unexpected causes behind them, and the social actors and institutions which played decisive roles.


Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald

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.


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

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.


Author(s):  
Marek Korczynski

This chapter examines music in the British workplace. It considers whether it is appropriate to see the history of music in the workplace as involving a journey from the organic singing voice (both literal and metaphorical) of workers to broadcast music appropriated by the powerful to become a technique of social control. The chapter charts four key stages in the social history of music in British workplaces. First, it highlights the existence of widespread cultures of singing at work prior to industrialization, and outlines the important meanings these cultures had for workers. Next, it outlines the silencing of the singing voice within the workplace further to industrialization—either from direct employer bans on singing, or from the roar of the industrial noise. The third key stage involves the carefully controlled employer- and state-led reintroduction of music in the workplace in the mid-twentieth century—through the centralized relaying of specific forms of music via broadcast systems in workplaces. The chapter ends with an examination of contemporary musicking in relation to (often worker-led) radio music played in workplaces.


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