The (Critical) Edge of Tradition: Understanding Ġhālib as Valī in Contemporary Delhi

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-240
Author(s):  
Anand Vivek Taneja
Keyword(s):  
Public Culture ◽  
North India ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
Critical Edge ◽  
Radical Claim ◽  
Historical Moment

Abstract In this essay, I explore an emergent trend within both authoritative Islamic discourse and Urdu public culture in north India, in which the poet Mirzā Asadullāh Ḳhān “Ġhālib” (1797-1869) is portrayed as a saintly and prophetic figure. I aim to show that claiming Ġhālib as an authoritatively Islamic figure—and hence his life and poetry as Islamically authoritative and legible—at this historical moment of unprecedented Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bias in India is a profoundly radical claim. It gestures towards a Muslim—and crucially, also non-Muslim—reclamation of precolonial lifeways and intellectual, literary, and spiritual traditions as an antidote to the poisonous discourses of modern religious nationalism and sectarianism.

The Great Fizzle

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-125
Author(s):  
Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
Civic Leaders ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Social Unity ◽  
Diverse Community ◽  
Global Connection

This chapter explores the promise of social unity through networks by looking at the religious nationalism that emerged in the United States around the Atlantic telegraph. As Americans tensely watched the struggle to transmit the world’s first transatlantic telegram, a diverse community—from Protestant missionaries to civic leaders—spoke of the newly united world that electric speech would create in explicitly Christian terms. Public statements that claimed the telegraph as destined and blessed by God were not merely religious ways of speaking about the telegraph; the affective weight born by this Christian vocabulary and imagery forged the affiliation of the telegraph with dreams of global unity in particularly durable ways. This chapter examines alternative imaginaries of obsolete telegraphs (e.g., grapevine telegraph, spiritual telegraph, optical telegraph) that have lost cultural meaning to demonstrate that affect, not the technology itself, produced and sustained network imaginaries of national and global connection. The fragile cable of 1858 and the united “whole world” it was said to create point to the materiality and contingency inherent in the discursive and affective labor of forming public culture.

Ideas and Leaders in Contentious Politics: One Parish Priest in El Salvador's Popular Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (01) ◽  
pp. 76-101
Author(s):  
PETER M. SANCHEZ
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Resource Mobilisation ◽  
The Church

AbstractThis paper examines the actions of one Salvadorean priest – Padre David Rodríguez – in one parish – Tecoluca – to underscore the importance of religious leadership in the rise of El Salvador's contentious political movement that began in the early 1970s, when the guerrilla organisations were only just beginning to develop. Catholic leaders became engaged in promoting contentious politics, however, only after the Church had experienced an ideological conversion, commonly referred to as liberation theology. A focus on one priest, in one parish, allows for generalisation, since scores of priests, nuns and lay workers in El Salvador followed the same injustice frame and tactics that generated extensive political mobilisation throughout the country. While structural conditions, collective action and resource mobilisation are undoubtedly necessary, the case of religious leaders in El Salvador suggests that ideas and leadership are of vital importance for the rise of contentious politics at a particular historical moment.

Translating the Scribe: Lithographic Print and Vernacularization in Colonial India, 1857–1915

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
North India ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.

Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Historical Moment

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

A Machine for Feeling: Ping's Posthuman Affect

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Alys Moody
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Affective Quality ◽  
Contemporary Perspective ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Natural Emotion ◽  
Archival Quality ◽  
Historical Moment

Beckett's famous claim that his writing seeks to ‘work on the nerves of the audience, not the intellect’ points to the centrality of affect in his work. But while his writing's affective quality is widely acknowledged by readers of his work, its refusal of intellect has made it difficult to take fully into account in scholarly work on Beckett. Taking Beckett's 1967 short prose text Ping as a case study, this essay is an attempt to take the affective qualities of Beckett's writing seriously and to consider the implications of his affectively dense writing for his texts’ relationship to history. I argue that Ping's affect emerges from the rhythms of its prose, producing a highly ‘speakable’ text in which affect precedes interpretation. In Ping, however, this affective rhythmic patterning is portrayed as mechanical, the product of the machinic ‘ping’ that punctuates the text and the text's own mechanical rhythms, demanding the active involvement of the reader. The essay concludes by arguing that Ping's mechanised affect is a specifically historical feeling. Arising from a specifically twentieth-century anxiety about technology's tendency to evacuate ‘natural’ emotion in favour of inhuman affect, it participates in a tradition of affectively resonant but curiously blank or indifferent performances of cyborg embodiment. Read in this historical light, Ping's implication of the reader in the production of its mechanised affect grants it, from our contemporary perspective, an archival quality. At the same time, it asks us to broaden the way in which we understand the Beckettian text's relationship to history, pointing to the existence of a more complex and recursive relationship between literature, its historical moment, and our contemporary moment of reading. Such a post-archival historicism sees texts as generated by but not bound to their historical moments of composition, and understands the moment of reception as an integral, if shifting, part of the text's history.

Veiled Theory: The Transmutation of Anthropology in T. S. Eliot's Critical Method

Paragraph ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Trexler
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Human History ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Historical Moment

While literary criticism is often seen as an unself-reflective forerunner to literary theory, this article argues that T.S. Eliot's theory of critical practice was a philosophically informed methodology of reading designed to create a disciplinary and institutional framework. To reconstruct this theory, it enriches theoretical methodology with intellectual and institutional history. Specifically, the article argues that Eliot's early critical theory depended on the paradigms of anthropology and occultism, developed during his philosophical investigation of anthropology and Leibniz. From this investigation, Eliot created an occult project that used spiritual monads as facts to progress toward the Absolute. The article goes on to argue that Eliot's methodology of reading was shaped by anthropology's and occultism's paradigms of non-academic, non-specialist reading societies that sought a super-historic position in human history through individual progress. The reconstruction of Eliot's intellectual and institutional framework for reading reveals a historical moment with sharp differences and surprising similarities to the present.

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