Prophetic Imagination and Empire in Asia

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Jude Lal Fernando
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Prophetic Imagination ◽  
Twenty First Century

The aim of this article is to identify the glimpses of prophetic imagination amongst the Christian communities in Asia, particularly in Korea and Japan, who are engaged in resisting the new round of militarization in the twenty-first century. This resistance denounces the globalist security complex in the region and announces a nonmilitaristic alternative forming a praxis that is necessary for a new theology of peace in East Asia and in Asia broadly. The political reality of the new round of military empire-building will be discussed with a personal narrative and a political analysis after which the theological meaning of prophetic imagination as opposed to imperial consciousness will be analyzed, correlating the personal and political with the theological. The ways in which the resistance to militarization resonates with the prophetic imagination of an alternative consciousness and community will be examined through an analysis of memories and renunciation of war by the churches. Broad implications of these resonances for a peace theology in Asia will be identified.

The Quartet in the Political Persona of Ida B. Wells

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joy James
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century

Antilynching activism and advocacy are codified in Wells’s writings, particularly the 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Wells presented an astute political analysis of racial-sexual violence within US democracy that remains influential from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A review of Wells’s advocacy for Afro-American autonomy and self-defense to counter racial terror and rape, and her critique of the duplicity of antirape discourse that demonizes blacks, suggests that the legacy of Ida B. Wells is discernible in contemporary analysis and activism found in organizations such as Black Lives Matter and the Black Women’s Blueprint.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex J. Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Cold War

Until recently, East Asia was a boiling pot of massacre and blood-letting. Yet, almost unnoticed by the wider world, it has achieved relative peace over the past three decades.1 At the height of the Cold War, East Asia accounted for around 80 percent of the world’s mass atrocities. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, it accounted for less than 5 percent....

American Custom, Ritual, and Holidays

2018 ◽  
pp. 255-276
Author(s):  
Jack Santino
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Course ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.

The Younghusband-Waddell Collection and Its People: the Social Life of Tibetan Books Gathered in a Late-colonial Enterprise

Inner Asia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Hildegard Diemberger
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Social Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Cultural Biography ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractIn this paper I follow the social life of the Tibetan books belonging to the Younghusband-Waddell collection. I show how books as literary artefacts can transform from ritual objects into loot, into commodities and into academic treasures and how books can have agency over people, creating networks and shaping identities. Exploring connections between books and people, I look at colonial collecting, Orientalist scholarship and imperial visions from an unusual perspective in which the social life and cultural biography of people and things intertwine and mutually define each other. By following the trajectory of these literary artefacts, I show how their traces left in letters, minutes and acquisition documents give insight into the functioning of academic institutions and their relationship to imperial governing structures and individual aspirations. In particular, I outline the lives of a group of scholars who were involved with this collection in different capacities and whose deeds are unevenly known. This adds a new perspective to the study of this period, which has so far been largely focused on the deeds of key individuals and the political and military setting in which they operated. Finally, I show how the books of this collection have continued to exercise their attraction and moral pressure on twenty-first-century scholars, both Tibetan and international, linking them through digital technology and cyberspace.

Coda

2018 ◽  
pp. 182-194
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Insko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Monuments ◽  
Twenty First Century

The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.

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