The Spaces of Black Experimental Poetry

2018 ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Experimental Poetry ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Rita Dove ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth

This chapter reads black experimental poetry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the lens of the sonnet. While scholars such as Aldon Nielsen and Anthony Reed have stressed the temporal dimension of this poetry, the popularity of the sonnet among black experimental poets draws attention to the spatial dimension. In close readings of sonnet sequences by Ed Roberson, Wanda Coleman, Rita Dove, G. E. Patterson, and Wanda Phipps, the chapter shows how these poets use techniques such as seriality and fragmentation to explore the interstices of contemporary discourses about blackness, question conventionalized meanings, and envision a sphere of semantic openness that overcomes racial stereotypes and limiting ascriptions.

Illuminating the Anthropocene: Ecopoetic Explorers at the Edge of the Naturecultures Abyss

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-335
Author(s):  
Bernard Quetchenbach
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Essay Review ◽  
Experimental Poetry ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Environmental Imagination

Abstract This essay-review considers three recent ecocritical texts that examine the environmental imagination at work in contemporary North American experimental ecopoetry. Compensating for decades of ecocritical neglect, the scholars represented by these volumes turn their attention to experimental poetry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Special attention is focused on the work of poets attempting to synthesize art and science, and to develop poetics as a means to forge and communicate new links between species. Striving to incorporate environmental systems into poetic structures, contemporary ecopoets promote a crucial role and an ambitious agenda for the genre. Spurred by the Anthropocene imperative to reconfigure relationships between human and nonhuman, civilization and planet, nature and culture, experimental ecopoets create art that is both playful and urgent, but often difficult and obscure. The criticism gathered in these texts provides timely and much-needed theory and context illuminating a vibrant and important movement, or series of related movements, meant to equip both poetry and human culture for coping with the challenges posed by Anthropocene conditions and necessities.

Exile, Diaspora, and Return

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Roniger ◽  
Leonardo Senkman ◽  
Saúl Sosnowski ◽  
Mario Sznajder
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Institutional Impact ◽  
Global Arena ◽  
Education Science ◽  
The Impact

This book explores how Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay have been affected by postexilic relocations, transnational migrant displacements, and diasporas. It provides a systematic analysis of the formation of exile communities and diaspora politics, the politics of return, and the agenda of democratization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, focusing on the impact of intellectuals, academics, activists, and public figures who had experienced exile on the reconstitution and transformation of their societies following democratization. Readers are offered a kaleidoscope of intellectual itineraries, debates, and contributions held in the public domain by individuals who confronted and fought authoritarian rule. The book covers their contributions to the restructuring and transformation of scientific disciplines and of the humanities and the arts, as well as their collective institutional impact on higher education, science and technology, and public institutions. Bringing together sociopolitical, cultural, and policy analysis with the testimonies of dozens of intellectuals, academics, political activists, and policymakers, the book addresses the impact of exile on people’s lives and on their fractured experiences, the debates and prospects of return, the challenges of dis-exile and postexilic trends, and, finally, the ways in which those who experienced exile impacted democratized institutions, public culture, and discourse. It also follows some crucial shifts in the frontiers of citizenship, moving analysis to transnational connections and permanent diasporas, including the diasporas of knowledge that increasingly changed the very meaning of being national and transnational, while connecting those countries to the global arena.

Financial Crises and the Public Discourse on Financial Elites

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youssef Cassis ◽  
Giuseppe Telesca
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Late Twentieth

Why were elite bankers and financiers demoted from ‘masters’ to ‘servants’ of society after the Great Depression, a crisis to which they contributed only marginally? Why do they seem to have got away with the recent crisis, in spite of their palpable responsibilities in triggering the Great Recession? This chapter provides an analysis of the differences between the bankers of the Great Depression and their colleagues of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century—regarding their position within, and attitude towards the firm, work culture, mental models, and codes of conduct—complemented with a scrutiny of the public discourse on bankers and financiers before and after the two crises. The authors argue that the (relative) mildness of the Great Recession, compared to the Great Depression, has contributed to preserve elite bankers’ and financiers’ status, income, wealth, and influence. Yet, the long-term consequences of their loss of reputational capital are difficult to assess.

Continuing Visions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Activism ◽  
William Blake ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ridley Scott ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Protest Group ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Dead Man

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.

American Obscurantism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lurie
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Hart Crane ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Ongoing Development

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.

Dewey and Pragmatist Feminist Philosophy

2017 ◽  
pp. 270-290
Author(s):  
Lisa Heldke
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Education ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
Feminist Epistemology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Small Field ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth

John Dewey’s record as a feminist and an advocate of women is mixed. He valued women intellectual associates whose influences he acknowledged, but did not develop theoretical articulations of the reasons for women’s subordination and marginalization. Given his mixed record, this chapter asks, how useful is Dewey’s work as a resource for feminist philosophy? It begins with a survey of the intellectual influences that connect Dewey with a set of women family members, colleagues, and students. It then discusses Dewey’s influence on the work of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century pragmatist feminist philosophers. Dewey’s influence has been strongest in the fields of feminist epistemology, philosophy of education, and social and political philosophy. Although pragmatist feminist philosophy remains a small field within feminist philosophy, this chapter argues that its conceptual resources could be put to further good use, particularly in feminist metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory.

History, the Hindu Right, and Subversion of Brahmanical-Hindu Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-260
Author(s):  
Stuart Gray
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Positive Answer ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Hindu Tradition ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Locus Classicus

How can scholars critically engage premodern Indic traditions without falling prey to Hindu conservatism or Brahmanical-Hindu apologism? This question is pressing for Indic political theory and contemporary Indian democracy because of ethnically exclusivist, Hindu nationalist movements that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter argues that a positive answer to the question must begin by taking seriously the tremendous pluralism in India’s political and philosophical history, which requires systematically engaging with premodern source material and uncovering the internal pluralism within a longer and larger Brahmanical-Hindu tradition of political thought. The author explains how it is both possible and politically necessary to internally subvert Brahmanical-Hindu political thought, which can help diffuse essentialist and exclusivist arguments coming from the Hindu right. Locating such plurality and engaging in internal subversion can help challenge historical justifications for Indian nationalism and contribute to decolonization, thus contesting the Hindu right on its own conceptual and genealogical turf. To advance this argument, the author provides a critical reinterpretation of the infamous “Puruṣa Sūkta,” which is often viewed as the locus classicus of the modern caste system, providing a novel interpretation that challenges caste hierarchy and supplies new resources for democratic thought and practice in India.

Abdelkébir Khatibi

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Transnational Studies ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
Abdelkebir Khatibi ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Arabic Calligraphy

Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) is one of the greatest Moroccan thinkers, and one of the most important theorists of both postcolonialism and Islamic culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book introduces his works to Anglophone readers, tracing his development from the early work on sociology in Morocco to his literary and aesthetic works championing transnationalism and multilingualism. The essays here both offer close analyses of Khatibi’s engagements with a range of issues, from Moroccan politics to Arabic calligraphy and from decolonisation to interculturality, and highlights the important contribution of his thinking to the development of Western postcolonial and modern theory. The book acknowledges the legacy of one of the greatest African thinkers of the last century, and addresses the lack of attention to his work in the field of postcolonial studies. More than a writer, a sociologist or a thinker, Khatibi was a leading figure and an eclectic intellectual whose erudite works can still inform and enrich current reflections on the future of postcolonialism and the development of intercultural and transnational studies. The book also includes translated excerpts from Khatibi’s works, thus offering a multilingual perspective on his writing.

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