scholarly journals A minor philosophy of world: From the anthropological illusion to Relation in area studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 31-48
Author(s):  
Travis Workman
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
World History ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
World Culture ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
A Minor

This article discusses Édouard Glissant’s theory of Relation as a minor philosophy of world that breaks from the spatialization of time and the anthropological cosmopolitanism of Enlightenment thought and Cold War area studies. The first part connects two dominant Cold War area studies discourses—modernization theory and cultural anthropology—to Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology and Michel Foucault’s reading of it, showing how area studies discourses participate in an old Enlightenment problem of what Foucault calls the “anthropological illusion.” The article then connects Glissant’s criticism of generalization and his idea of the “world” to the critique of area studies, showing how the spatiotemporality of Glissant’s Relation disarticulates the area studies framework and its mode of racializing the poetics of world history, world literature, and world culture.

Thirty years from Tiananmen: China, Hong Kong, and the ongoing experiment to preserve liberal values in an authoritarian state

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
World History ◽  
Tiananmen Square ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre marked China out as an exception in the chapter of world history that saw the fall of international communism. The massacre crystalized the mistrust between China and Hong Kong into an open ideological conflict—Leninist authoritarianism versus liberal democracy—that has colored relations between the two since then. This article tracks the hold that authoritarianism has gained over liberal values in Hong Kong in the past thirty years and reflects on what needs to be done in the next thirty years for the balance to be re-tilted and sustained beyond 2047, when China’s fifty-year commitment to preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy expires. Still surviving (just) as a largely liberal (though by no means fully democratic) jurisdiction after two decades of Chinese rule, Hong Kong is a testing ground for whether China can respect liberal values, how resilient such values are to the alternative authoritarian vision offered by an economic superpower, and the potential for establishing a liberal-democratic pocket within an authoritarian state. The territory’s everyday wrestle with Chinese pressures speaks to the liberal struggles against authoritarian challenges (in their various guises) that continue to plague the world thirty years after the end of the Cold War.​

scholarly journals The Air Torpedo of Bäckebo: Local Incident and World History

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Mats Burström ◽  
Anders Gustafsson ◽  
Håkan Karlsson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World History ◽  
Archaeological Survey ◽  
Southern Sweden ◽  
Space Flights ◽  
Future Space ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

In June 1944 a German V2-rocket exploded and crashed in Bäckebo in the province of Småland in southern Sweden. Technically the rocket represented the most modern the world had seen at the time. It laid the foundation for future space flights as well as for the fear of missiles of the Cold War. Today the incident in Bäckebo is largely forgotten or is unknown to people in Sweden. But what traces has the incident left locally? What kinds of memories still exist in the form of material remains and stories? Do parts of the rocket still remain in the ground? Can an archaeological survey for them trigger a process of remembering?

scholarly journals Thinking Across Hemispheres: Further notes on Oversights and Blind Spots in Disciplinary African Studies

Afrika Focus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Premesh Lalu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nationalist Sentiment ◽  
Sustained Effort ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Blind Spots

In the midst of ever-hardening nationalist sentiment across the world, the humanities may need to recall its long history of thinking across hemispheres. In such balkanised times, we may have to rethink the work that a hermeneutics of suspicion performs for a critical humanities as well as how Africa is bound to particular configurations of area studies that emerge out of the geopolitical distributions of knowledge during the Cold War. To the extent that we might develop a history of a critical humanities across hemispheres, this paper asks what it might mean to return to a concept of freedom formed through a sustained effort at reckoning with the worldliness specific to the anti-colonial struggles in Africa. There, a critical humanities may discover the sources of a creative work in which Africa is not merely bound to the binary of blind spots and oversights, but functions as that supplement which gives itself over to a liveable future.

scholarly journals Ethiopian Intellectual History and the Global

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128
Author(s):  
Sara Marzagora
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
The World

Abstract Through the literary and historiographical works written by Ethiopian intellectual Käbbädä Mikael in the 1940s and 1950s, this article problematizes the concept of the “world” in world literature. In some theories of world literature, the world is presented as a static a priori, a self-evident spatial referent, a background setting for literary activities. Contrary to this objectivist frame, I propose instead to look at the world as a performative category, and to conceive world literature as a study of worldmaking processes. Käbbädä Mikael’s worldmaking attempted to break into the Eurocentric exclusivity of hegemonic narratives of modernity, jostling for recognition within modernization theory but also, at the same time, activating polycentric connections along oblique South-South networks. For him, the world was not a cosmopolitan project, but a pool of symbolic resources from which to draw in building a better future for Ethiopia.

Net Work: Area Studies, Comparison, and Connectivity

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vilashini Cooppan
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Open Market ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Work Area ◽  
Disciplinary Field ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Temporal Measures ◽  
Globalization Theory

Area studies and world literature share a spirit of comparison, despite their distinct historical formations in cold war tactics of knowledge for power and the flurry of globalization theory that accompanied the neoliberal 1990s vision of open market as world stage, and notwithstanding recent critical narratives that cleave area studies' particularized zones of specialized, philologically deep knowledge from world literature's globe-spanning yet difference-erasing ambition. That spirit will not speak in these brief remarks, nor can I promise a report, readable or otherwise, to one disciplinary field (the comparative) from any other field (e.g., area studies). Area studies was always comparative. It emerged alongside a host of comparative methodologies whose slicing spatial divisions (continents, spheres of influences, West/East) and stealth temporal ladders (civilization, modernity, development) later comparatists of the literary-critical persuasion may question but whose gestures we are perhaps condemned to repeat in cutting the globe to new spatio-temporal measures. The task is not to redress historical error in the name of comparison (as if the verbal sense of discipline was intended and comparative literature could complete area studies) but rather to re-cognize comparison, which we are always learning how to do, through the remembrance of area studies' ambitions and omissions.

scholarly journals ON THE ISSUE OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN V. BRUSOV’S POETIC TEXTS

2019 ◽  
pp. 329-339
Author(s):  
AZNIV EYRAMJYAN
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
World Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Texts

The paper focuses on the notion of intertextuality and determines it as the world linguistic component. According to the author, culturological components are abundant on V. Brusov texts, thus reflecting his in-depth knowledge of the world literature. Consequently, reading V. Brusov’s poetry a reader also deepens his knowledge in the history of the world culture, thus broadening his mind.

scholarly journals Southern Studies as Area Studies: Faulkner and Provincial Nationalism during the Cold War

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-48
Author(s):  
Jordan J. Dominy
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Southern Studies ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Southern Identity ◽  
Culture Of Honor ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter considers William Faulkner’s role as a literary giant and cultural ambassador during the Cold War and how his canonization into both American and southern literature reveals the usefulness of southern identity and values to the diplomatic ambitions of America on the world stage. His canonization help establish connections between area studies, American studies, and southern studies. This role is explored through close reading of Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Faulkner’s prominence in Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert Jacob’s Southern Renascence (1953), the first published collection of scholarship on southern literature. Both cast the racial problems in the South as moral ones that can be solved by an exceptional culture of honor and tradition, which in turn bolsters American democratic values and dismisses race as a serious social and political problem at a moment when the country attempts to exert hegemonic influence on the world stage.

World Authorship

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Element ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Places ◽  
Different Parts

Booksellers, authors, and academics have been talking about world literature since Goethe made the term fashionable in the early nineteenth century. Yet amidst all the talk of books that ‘circulate’ and literature as a kind of ‘universal property’ that can function as a ‘window on the world’, how do we account for the people who live in real places, and who write, translate, market, and read the texts that travel on these global journeys? This handbook breaks new ground by showing how to bring together the real-world contexts of authorship with the literary worlds of fiction through the concept of the world author. ‘World authorship’ is a practical update on Michel Foucault’s ‘author function’ that significantly expands the network of people and practices involved with literature and is at the same time more grounded in the study of actual literary texts. The concept is set out in detail in a rigorous introduction followed by twenty-five keyword chapters that cover all core aspects of world authorship, from ‘Beginnings’ to ‘Voice’, and have been written by professionals who work right across the sector. In its entirety, the handbook illuminates how literature is made and shared in different parts of the world and at different times of world history. At the heart of all contributions, however, is one key question: where is the human element in world literature? Established authors, translators, publishers, prize judges, and festival coordinators as well as academics from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds collectively give us the answer.

scholarly journals Mapowanie kanonu. Literatura polska w perspektywie światowej

2021 ◽  
pp. 395-413
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Mikołajczak
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
World History ◽  
Research Proposal ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Concept ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

The article discusses the research proposal presented in Światowa historia literatury polskiej. Interpretacje [World History of Polish Literature. Interpretations], edited by Magdalena Popiel, Tomasz Bilczewski and Stanley Bill. Mikołajczak contrasts the research concept of world literature with the dominant approaches to the world literature in the area of contemporary literary studies and the traditional model of the history of literature. She reflects on the situation of Polish literature in the world, taking into account the ways in which Polish works circulate in other cultural circles, the possibilities and limitations of translation as well as shifts within the canon. She also indicates the opportunities that open up for Polish literature in the global context.

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