The Land of Misfit Relics

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-120
Author(s):  
Chad Seales
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Communal Violence ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Dead

This chapter addresses the fascinations of Protestants with certain “relics” of racial, political, and communal violence. In contrast to Catholicism, blatant Protestant relics are rare. While the ones they have are significant, there are not enough of them to comprise a Protestant tradition of devotional use of relics. However, there are southern Protestants who have had two major sources of relics as understood as the sacred remains of the dead: those produced by death in the Civil War and those made through the lynching deaths of African Americans. There are three possible options for the presence and persistence of religious relics in popular culture. The first is the importance of religious relics to subcultural memory. The second is the significance of religious relics to the cultural production and ritual construction of racial difference. The third is the power of those relics to resurface and strain against historical amnesia.

scholarly journals Grief, resurrection, and the Nigerian Civil War in Isidore Diala’s The Lure of Ash

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Solomon Awuzie
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Third Generation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Rural World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Nigerian Civil War ◽  
War Experience

As part of the third generation of Nigerian poetry, Isidore Diala’s The Lure of Ash focuses on the Nigerian Civil War experience of 1967–1970, the grief associated with it, and the resurrection of the Biafran agitation. Being a collection that is derived from the rural world of the Igbo cosmology, Diala’s The Lure of Ash portrays the Nigerian Civil War in a sensuous and emotive tone. It accounts for the poet’s belief in the regeneration of the lives of the dead Biafran soldiers. The symbols of fire and ash are significant for interpreting the poet-speaker’s grief in the collection. The collection also succeeds in painting a picture of the Nigerian Civil War experience where the bitter memory of the war resonates, while representing poetry as the healer of the pain and wounds of the war.

Pèlerinages barrésiens

2013 ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Claire Bompaire-Evesque
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
The Self ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
The Third ◽  
National Importance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
The Dead

This article is a inquiry about how Barrès (1862-1923) handles the religious rite of pilgrimage. Barrès stages in his writings three successive forms of pilgrimage, revealing what is sacred to him at different times. The pilgrimage to a museum or to the birthplace of an artist is typical for the egotism and the humanism of the young Barrès, expressed in the Cult of the Self (1888-1891). After his conversion to nationalism, Barrès tries to unite the sons of France and to instill in them a solemn reverence for “the earth and the dead” ; for that purpose he encourages in French Amities (1903) pilgrimages to historical places of national importance (battlefields; birthplace of Joan of Arc), building what Nora later called the Realms of Memory. The third stage of Barrès’ intellectual evolution is exemplified by The Sacred Hill (1913). In this book the writer celebrates the places where “the Spirit blows”, and proves open to a large scale of spiritual forces, reaching back to paganism and forward to integrative syncretism, which aims at unifying “the entire realm of the sacred”.

The “Ghastly Spectacle”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Finseth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Ethical Challenge ◽  
The Dead ◽  
War Dead ◽  
Social Logic

This chapter focuses on how witneᶊes to Civil War death made sense of their traumatic experience. The ethical challenge was one of recognition: to see and know the often-anonymous dead for who and what they were. Yet the dead were invariably integrated into familiar frameworks of meaning and into the conventions of aesthetics and rhetoric. Drawing on insights from phenomenology, pragmatism, Freudian psychology, and affect theory, the chapter shows that the psychological proceᶊes of abstraction and typification underlay a social logic of necrophilic dependency that both thrived on the dead and yet resisted their complex individuality. This problem is then connected to a long-standing cultural and historical melancholia whereby the Civil War dead have been internalized and eternalized as representational artifacts within a society that remains divided and ambivalent over the meaning of the war.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Common ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
Maria Monk ◽  
People Today

Nuns in popular media today are a staple of kitsch culture, evident in the common appearance of bobble-head nuns, nun costumes, and nun caricatures on TV, movies, and the stage. Nun stereotypes include the sexy vixen, the naïve innocent, and the scary nun. These types were forged in nineteenth-century convent narratives. While people today may not recognize the name “Maria Monk,” her legacy lives on in the public imagination. There may be no demands to search convents, but nuns and monastic life are nevertheless generally not taken seriously. This epilogue traces opposition to nuns from the Civil War to the present, analyzing the various images of nuns in popular culture as they relate to the antebellum campaign against convents. It argues that the source of the misunderstanding about nuns is rooted in the inability to categorize these women either as traditional wives and mothers or as secular, career-driven singles.

Crispus Attucks Meets Jim Crow

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Community Organizations ◽  
White Americans ◽  
High Regard ◽  
American Memory ◽  
History Books

As Jim Crow segregation came to define black Americans’ place in the nation by the end of the nineteenth century, American memory also became largely segregated. African Americans continued to hold Attucks in high regard, but his name was invoked far less frequently in mainstream popular culture and historical scholarship. As white America all but abandoned its concern for the basic welfare and rights of black citizens, a black hero like Crispus Attucks had little chance to enter the heroic pantheon of the nation. School textbooks, mainstream popular culture, and white Americans in general virtually erased Attucks from the story of the American Revolution. African Americans kept his memory alive in history books, public commemorations, and memorial acts like the naming of children and community organizations.

Love Letters to the Dead: Resurrecting an Epistolary Art

2009 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy A. Lander ◽  
John R. Graham-Pole
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
End Of Life Care ◽  
Therapeutic Potential ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Life Care ◽  
University Teachers ◽  
Reflective Dialogue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead

This article explores the art of letter-writing, specifically to our beloved dead, as a form of autoethnographic research, pedagogy, and care work. As university teachers and qualitative researchers in palliative and end-of-life care, we review the literature and history of epistolary communications with the deceased, as a prelude to writing our own letters. John writes to his long-dead mother and Dorothy to her recently deceased spouse Patrick, each letter followed by a reflective dialogue between us. Through this dialogue, we highlight the potential application of this art, or handcraft, to formal and informal palliative care, and the implications for practice, pedagogy, policy, and research. We propose that such direct, non-mediated, communications can offer a valuable form of healing for bereaved people. The therapeutic potential of letter writing and the abundance of literary and popular culture exemplars of responses from the dead are also largely unexplored in death education and research.

The Mystery of Jesus' Teaching about “The Son of Man”

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-80
Author(s):  
Edward A. Beckstrom
Keyword(s):  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
High Priest ◽  
The Third ◽  
Son Of Man ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
Will Of God

For centuries a mystery has surrounded the meaning of Jesus' term “The Son of Man” in his ministry, and today it is often called “The Son of Man Problem.” Studying “Son of Man” in all of its biblical references, and apocryphal usages, together with insights from the Dead Sea Scrolls, I propose a solution that the idiom means “Priest” or “High Priest,” but most especially “Heavenly High Priest” and is framed in the third person by Jesus because it is expressed as his destiny given by God—it is the Will of God. “The Son of Man” is distinct from Jesus own will, but is the destiny he follows. It is also the use of this term that caused Caiaphas to cry “blasphemy” at Jesus' Sanhedrin trial, who then sent him to Pilate for crucifixion, yet asserting that Jesus proclaimed himself “King of the Jews.” Caiaphas, knew, I believe, that “Son of Man” was synonymous with “High Priest.”

“Stealing Stuff Is about the Stuff, not the Stealing”: Rick and Morty and Narrative Instability

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-94
Author(s):  
Łukasz Muniowski
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Video Games ◽  
The Third ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
Cultural Texts

Rick and Morty, one of the most popular presently-airing American TV series, is deeply rooted in popular culture. Each episode is full of allusions and references to other cultural texts, accentuating the show’s own status as a pop cultural text. This article analyzes the third episode of the fourth season of Rick and Morty, “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty,” using Stefan Schubert’s concept of narrative instability. The episode mocks twist films by introducing a ridiculous number of twists, eventually making the viewer immune to the element of surprise usually brought on by what Schubert understands as unstable moments. In doing so, the episode also emphasizes the overuse of that narrative device in recent decades in films, TV series and video games. “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty” deconstructs twist films while sticking to the rules of the sub-genre and remaining entertaining in its own right. Instability can pose quite a problem for the showrunners, who usually have to adjust to the norms of serialized storytelling. By using Schubert’s theory of narrative instability to discuss a singular episode of a series, I hope to demonstrate the extent to which this quality has permeated modern storytelling. The episode highlights the effects of over-reliance on narrative instability as a tool, as even the most elaborate form is not enough to make up for the lack of essence. This is exactly what Rick criticizes in the episode, when he states: “stealing stuff is about the stuff, not the stealing.”

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