scholarly journals The Global Dialogics of the New Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carey Snyder
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
New Age ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
White Settlers

The London-based weekly the New Age, edited by A. R. Orage from 1907 to 1922, was known for promoting spirited debates on politics, literature, and the arts. Scholars have been attentive to what Ann Ardis terms the magazine’s ‘unusual commitment to […] Bakhtinian dialogics in the public sphere’, but less so to the role that the letters column played in facilitating these often contentious, often transnational debates. This essay argues that the letters column functioned as a forum for linking not only individual readers and contributors from around the world, but also wider discursive and periodical communities. A case study of global dialogics, the essay focuses on an eleven-month debate that unfolded in New Age correspondence concerning the so-called black peril — the purported epidemic of black men attempting to rape white women in South Africa, which historians today regard as a moral panic fuelled by a desire to reinforce white supremacy. The flames of the panic were stoked by the Umtali case of 1910, in which Lord Gladstone commuted the death sentence of an Umtali native convicted of attempted rape to life imprisonment. This decision sparked mass protests and petitions among the white community in South Africa and a heated discussion about race and racism that reverberated throughout the empire, including in the columns of the New Age. The letters column served as an international forum, drawing in white settlers from Johannesburg, Crisis editor and NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois, Sudanese-Egyptian writer Dusé Mohamed Ali, and British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, among others. This essay examines the gendered and racial politics of this debate and how it was shaped by its specific periodical context and by the national and ideological contexts of its interlocutors.

Weimar Bodies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ute Planert
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Human Reproduction ◽  
Gainful Employment ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Gendered Bodies ◽  
The Public Sphere

Like the arts and politics, sexuality, bodies, and the gender order in the Weimar Republic were sites of experimentation in and with modernity. The First World War and the revolution had accelerated the breakthrough of women into arenas such as politics, the public sphere, and professional gainful employment. Big cities provided space for sexual libertinage, in which the transgression of heterosexual norms was possible. A rationalization of sexuality took place, which combined increased freedoms and liberties with attempts at regulation. Sports became an important transmission belt for ideas of discipline, efficiency, and self-optimization. The Weimar welfare state combined the entitlement to live a healthy life with the duty to actively retain the health of one’s body. The latter included considering future generations via eugenicist ideas. A far-reaching consensus on the value of eugenics emerged, yet only under the pressure of the world economic crisis did it materialize in concrete proposals to recalibrate social policy. The final years of the Weimar Republic were marked by a remasculinization of the public sphere and a partial return to more traditional views on gender roles. Overall, gender and gendered bodies, sexuality and human reproduction, were inherent elements of the political conflicts that shaped modern society. At the end of the Weimar Republic, they were more contested than ever.

(Un)Liberated and Contested Narratives

2019 ◽  
pp. 334-347
Author(s):  
Bongani C Ndhlovu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many ◽  
Contested Narratives

This chapter analyses the influence of the state in shaping museum narratives, especially in a liberated society such as South Africa. It argues that while the notion of social cohesion and nation building is an ideal that many South African museums should strive for, the technocratisation of museum processes has to a degree led to a disregard of the public sphere as a space of open engagement. Secondly, the chapter also looks at the net-effect of museums professionals and boards in the development of their narrative. It argues that due to the nature of their expertise and interests, and the focus on their areas of specialisation, museums may hardly claim to be representative of the many voices they ought to represent. As such, the chapter explores contestations in museum spaces. It partly does so by exploring the notion “free-spokenness” and its limits in museum spaces. To amplify its argument, the chapter uses some exhibitions that generated critical engagements from Iziko Museums of South Africa.

Theorizing Religion and the Public Sphere: Affect, Technology, Valuation

2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 1008-1049
Author(s):  
M Gail Hamner
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Function

Abstract Religion scholars require a theory of public encounter that is evental, technological, and affective. Instead of a spatial public sphere, today’s encounters occur through technological mediations that are affective and image-laden. This essay examines the latter “publicness” and illustrates its roles as an affective technology of whiteness as that which frames and distributes the persevering powers of, and reluctantly tracks resistances to, white supremacy. Film is a fruitful cultural site for examining the whiteness of publicness. The essay turns to Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016) to demonstrate how film can resist and interrupt normative whiteness and to show how this transvaluative cultural labor can be seen as religious. The essay conceptualizes religion as a hinged form and function through which subjects and publics co-emerge and by which social and sedimented valuations are (re)bound. Grappling with religion as social forms and functions of valuation opens it to algorithmic variability that mandates attention to circulations of power as both capacity and intensity.

To Have and To Hold … Or Not? Deaccessioning Policies, Practices, and the Question of the Public’s Interest

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-159
Author(s):  
Deandra Rose Mann
Keyword(s):  
Financial Distress ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
George Washington ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
National Gallery Of Art ◽  
Washington University ◽  
Arts Community

Abstract:Shockwaves echoed through the media and the arts community when the Delaware Art Museum chose to deaccession pieces from its collection and when the public learned that the Detroit Institute of Arts might be forced to do the same. Further concern arose when financial troubles compelled the Corcoran Gallery of Art to merge with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University. An examination of the climate and legal battles surrounding these events shows how these institutions chose to cope with the financial adversity that put their collections at risk and illustrates the precarious position of works in a museum’s collection when that museum experiences financial distress. This article explores the ethical, judicial, and legislative frameworks currently governing deaccessioning and ultimately advocates for new legislative solutions to guide the deaccession process in order to provide the opportunity to maintain these works in the public sphere.

In the Stars: Astrology, Psychic Powers and the Australian Media

2014 ◽  
Vol 150 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-95
Author(s):  
Kate Darian-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
New Age ◽  
Broadcast Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
New Age Spirituality ◽  
Ubiquitous Presence

Although astrological divinations, demonstrations of psychic powers and the teachings of non-conventional and New Age spirituality have had a ubiquitous presence in the Australian print and broadcast media for almost a century, they have attracted scant attention from media scholars. This article surveys the history of astrological and psychic content in the Australian media from the 1920s, arguing that such content generated new genres of programming and entertainment, and challenged the established authority of religion and scientific knowledge in the public sphere.

Introduction to Stuart Hall

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Howe ◽  
Stuart Hall
Keyword(s):  
Culture Media ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black British ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Tv Show

Stuart Hall has inspired, influenced, and often provoked at least two generations of scholars and activists, across Britain and far beyond. He has held distinguished academic positions in both Cultural Studies (a discipline, or discourse, in whose making and remaking he has been a central figure) and Sociology. But his ideas and their impact have not been, and could not be, confined to any disciplinary mould, nor to the academic world alone. He has written on and been a significant and original voice in debates on popular culture, media and the arts, Thatcherism and the future of the Left, Marx and Gramsci, modernism and postmodernism, racial theories and race relations, concepts of diaspora, globalization, ethnicity, identity, and hybridity—and even that is just a near-random selection from among the themes that his work has addressed. His influence may be encountered, his name invoked, among artists and film-makers, especially younger black British ones, as well as academics. Strikingly, in a recent poll seeking to rank the ‘100 Greatest Black Britons’, Hall was the only living intellectual to feature at all prominently (at no. 10) among musicians, sportspeople, and TV personalities. This polymathic presence does not, however, extend to absolute ubiquity: it should be pointed out that the presenter of the once-popular TV show ‘It’s a Knockout’ was an entirely different Stuart Hall. Our Stuart Hall is, on the face of it, very much a ‘public intellectual’. This is a label more familiar in America than in Britain, and one which sometimes seems to mean ‘glib, media-friendly polemicist’. That is clearly not Hall at all, and perhaps the idea of the public intellectual fits him better if it is redefined: not (just) as someone who appears frequently in the public sphere, but as one whose efforts have always been directed towards defending and extending that sphere, its integrity, democracy, and inclusiveness. It is an ethical as well as a political endeavour. Hall’s lifelong adherence to it, no less than the subject-matter and intellectual power of his essay here, makes him an apt choice to open this collection of Oxford Amnesty Lectures.

Alternative Archaeology and New Age Traditionalism in Contemporary Russia

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-73
Author(s):  
Andrei Tiukhtiaev
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
The Public ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Southern Russia ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Krasnodar Region ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
New Age Spirituality

Abstract This article examines how esoteric traditionalism in contemporary Russia searches for legitimisation using alternative archaeology. Although New Age spirituality is often considered a private religion, some of its manifestations have a significant impact on the public sphere. The author demonstrates that the New Age in Russia contributes to redefining of categories of religion, science, and cultural heritage through the construction of sacred sites and discursive opposition to academic knowledge. The research is based on analysis of media products that present esoteric interpretations of archaeological sites in southern Russia and ethnographic data collected in a pilgrimage to the dolmens of the Krasnodar region.

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