scholarly journals Body, ancestry, and ecstasy: reading Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photographs in contemporary times

Vista ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 59-77
Author(s):  
Jânderson Albino Coswosk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Male Homosexual ◽  
Black Gay Men ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article addresses different appropriations and representations of the lives of Black gay men, from the African diaspora and with transits established in late twentieth-century Europe, concerning the photographic essays of the Nigerian artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989), who lived for a long time in late twentieth-century England. This work seeks, through the analysis of the transit experienced by the artist between Africa and Europe, as well as in the power of the most diverse languages used in his photo essays, to give a contemporary reading of the male homosexual black body based on an eroticism and spirituality that escape the hegemonic and heteronormative narratives that have long imprisoned these ways of seeing and narrating Black gay men in the enclosure of racial tensions, homophobic crimes and conflicts of other order of sexuality.

Archaeology, Historicity, and Homosexuality in the New Cultus of Antinous

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259
Author(s):  
Ethan White
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In the second century, the Roman Emperor Hadrian deified his male lover, Antinous, after the latter drowned in the Nile. Antinous’ worship was revived in the late twentieth century, primarily by gay men and other queer-identified individuals, with Antinous himself being recast as “the Gay God.”

Dissenting Traditions and Missionary Imaginations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin D. Livingstone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe ◽  
Directing Attention ◽  
Independence Movements ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter follows the long arc of the ‘missionary novel’, from the exhortation and promotion emanating from a missionary culture embraced by a Protestant Christendom to a dissenting literary culture under siege from imperial servants, secularists, and postcolonial independence movements. It notes that the African missionary novel in particular provides fertile material for the investigation of Dissenting Protestantism as it engaged with the twentieth century. Many ‘humanitarian’ novels disseminated knowledge about mission fields and ‘new’ peoples, and so were part of (and criticized for) the globalizing imagination of early twentieth-century Europe and the spread of the professions. Case studies include Elsie Milligan, Arthur E. Southon, Ambrose Haynes, Marion Percy Williams, Arthur Chirgwin, Harry H. Johnston, and Joyce Cary, among others. The chapter extends the debate on mission and empire by directing attention to issues of postcolonial reception, disclosing the ways in which the so-called ‘dissidence of Dissent’ was both challenged and appropriated by anti-colonial authors in the mid to late twentieth century.

Eschatology

2021 ◽  
pp. 213-253
Author(s):  
Peter J. Schmelz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
The Third ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The beginning of the third and final section of the book, Chapter 7, looks at another response to the anxieties accompanying the transition from Stagnation to Perestroika in the 1980s. The chapter studies the eschatological “postludes” cultivated by Valentin Silvestrov, including, most prominently, his monumental Fifth Symphony (1980–82), a nostalgic re-imagining of Bruckner and Mahler for the end of time. For Silvestrov the genre of the postlude represented a “collection of echoes, . . . a form . . . open not to the end, as is more usual, but to the beginning.” “It is not the end of music as art,” he added, “but the end of music, in which it may remain for a very long time.” This chapter thus considers the cultural work performed by Silvestrov’s resulting sense of “unending ending.” It treats his eschatology as a “useful fiction” to illuminate the conflicted sensations of stasis and acceleration that characterized the last decades of the USSR. Silvestrov, like many in the late twentieth century, began seeing the end everywhere. He responded by composing its echoes. The resulting music spoke to the sense of malaise and environmental catastrophe that gripped the USSR during its final years even as the promises of glasnost and perestroika took hold.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...

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