Exemplarity and Encyclopedism at the Tomb of Eurysaces

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-107
Author(s):  
Nathaniel B. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Baking Process ◽  
Future Behavior ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Literary Devices ◽  
Organizational Principles ◽  
Image World

Roman writing of the late Republic and early Empire, especially historiography, is filled with exempla, stories of the past meant to serve as models for contemporary and future behavior. This period also witnessed the rise of an encyclopedic mode of composition among Latin authors, which purported to collect and organize the totality of knowledge in a given field. The following essay proposes that exemplarity and encyclopedism were not just literary devices, but deep organizational principles throughout Roman culture. It seeks to show how they were operative in the visual arts in the first century BCE, focusing especially on a frieze depicting the baking process on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces in Rome. By approaching a monument like the frieze of Eurysaces through such principles we may better articulate both visual and thematic relationships across a variety of genres within the broader Roman image world.

Surviving The Jungle Book: Trans-temporal Ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Mendes
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Temporal Ventriloquism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Political Intervention

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Kun
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
To Come ◽  
Musical Memory ◽  
A Current

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

Creating Meaning in the Present by Reviewing the Past: Communal Memory in the Psalms of Solomon

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-392
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Gordley
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Communal Memory ◽  
Psalms Of Solomon ◽  
Creating Meaning

This article examines Psalms of Solomon with an eye toward how these compositions may have functioned within the setting of a first-century B. C. E. Jewish community in Jerusalem. Several of these psalms should be understood as didactic hymns providing instruction to their audience through the medium of psalmody. Attention to the temporal register of Pss. Sol. 8, 9, and 17 shows how the poet’s use of historical review and historical allusion contributed to a vision of present reality and future hope, which the audience was invited to embrace. Issues relating to the place of these psalms in the tradition of Solomonic discourse are also addressed insofar as they contribute to the didactic function of this psalm collection.

Denouement: World Politics, Systemic Leadership, and Climate Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Thompson ◽  
Leila Zakhirova
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
World Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Climate Fluctuations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Historical Processes

In this final chapter, we conclude by recapitulating our argument and evidence. One goal of this work has been to improve our understanding of the patterns underlying the evolution of world politics over the past one thousand years. How did we get to where we are now? Where and when did the “modern” world begin? How did we shift from a primarily agrarian economy to a primarily industrial one? How did these changes shape world politics? A related goal was to examine more closely the factors that led to the most serious attempts by states to break free of agrarian constraints. We developed an interactive model of the factors that we thought were most likely to be significant. Finally, a third goal was to examine the linkages between the systemic leadership that emerged from these historical processes and the global warming crisis of the twenty-first century. Climate change means that the traditional energy platforms for system leadership—coal, petroleum, and natural gas—have become counterproductive. The ultimate irony is that we thought that the harnessing of carbon fuels made us invulnerable to climate fluctuations, while the exact opposite turns out to be true. The more carbon fuels are consumed, the greater the damage done to the atmosphere. In many respects, the competition for systemic leadership generated this problem. Yet it is unclear whether systemic leadership will be up to the task of resolving it.

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....

The Twenty-first Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
First Century ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Good News ◽  
Species Loss ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scientific Terms ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Open Question ◽  
New Generation

The cumulative environmental challenge of sustainable development in the twenty-first century is larger than anything humanity has ever had to deal with in the past. The good news is that solid progress is being reached in the understanding of issues in scientific terms and understanding what needs to be done. The bad news is twofold. First, although many of the environmental problems of earlier centuries are now being confronted, a new generation of difficulties is eclipsing what were the older difficulties. Secondly, much of the progress is being achieved by the wealthier parts of the planet, rather than the developing world. From population growth to climate change to unprecedented habitat and species loss, whether environmental sustainability can be achieved in the twenty-first century is an open question.

Reputation and Gossip in Game Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-229
Author(s):  
Charles Roddie
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Strategic Behavior ◽  
Third Party ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Behavior ◽  
Future Behavior ◽  
The Game Theory ◽  
Shed Light

When interacting with others, it is often important for you to know what they have done in similar situations in the past: to know their reputation. One reason is that their past behavior may be a guide to their future behavior. A second reason is that their past behavior may have qualified them for reward and cooperation, or for punishment and revenge. The fact that you respond positively or negatively to the reputation of others then generates incentives for them to maintain good reputations. This article surveys the game theory literature which analyses the mechanisms and incentives involved in reputation. It also discusses how experiments have shed light on strategic behavior involved in maintaining reputations, and the adequacy of unreliable and third party information (gossip) for maintaining incentives for cooperation.

scholarly journals The evolution of Darwinian sexualities

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
Gay Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Sexual Preferences ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sexual Behaviours ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract Charles Darwin's Descent of Man was suffused with questions of courtship, mating and sex. Following in his footsteps, biologists throughout the twentieth century interrogated the sexual behaviour of humans and animals. This paper charts the fate of evolutionary theories of sexuality to argue that – despite legal and social gains of the past century – when biologists used sexual selection as a tool for theorizing the evolution of homosexual behaviour (which happened only rarely), the effect of their theories was to continuously reinscribe normative heterosexuality. If, at the end of the nineteenth century, certain sex theorists viewed homosexuality as a marker of intermediate sex, by the late twentieth a new generation of evolutionary theorists idealized gay men as hyper-masculine biological males whose sexual behaviours were uncompromised by the necessity of accommodating women's sexual preferences. In both cases, normative assumptions about gender were interwoven with those about sexuality. By the twenty-first century, animal exemplars were again mobilized alongside data gathered about human sexual practices in defence of gay rights, but this time by creating the opportunity for naturalization without recourse to biological determinism.

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