Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Mushrooms ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Black Land ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  

Households and ‘Home Cultures’

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Buchli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Human Condition

The domestic sphere or ‘home cultures’ as the term is used here is the location of many disciplinary investigations into the home. It is in the domestic sphere that one investigates the key elements of the human condition. This article's essence happens to be households and home cultures. It is where family, gender, and the nature of the individual are understood. It is also where the basic elements of cosmology and religious life and the elemental context for the understanding of political and economic life are lived and perceived. Here public and private realms are forged; nature/culture boundaries are created and negotiated. The home is typically how we know the world and know about people who inhabit the world. It is the key point of orientation for members of a given society as it is to its visitors and outsiders. A study of the gradual change in the domestic realm in the twentieth century concludes this article.

scholarly journals EDITORIAL

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-164
Author(s):  
JOHN BUTT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
The Human Condition

I clearly remember that when this journal was first devised there lay some niggling doubt behind my tremendous enthusiasm for this timely initiative. Wasn’t there something problematic about viewing the eighteenth century as a whole? Did I intuit some sort of fundamental divide, perhaps somewhere between the deaths of J. S. Bach and Handel, one that somehow cast this century into two irreconcilable worlds? The seventeenth century was perhaps enough of a mess for its disunity to become a historiographical topic in its own right, its separate threads providing at least some narrative potential, even if these could never convincingly be drawn into a single whole. And the nineteenth century was perhaps sufficiently punctuated with various revolutions and restorations, together with an overriding story of industrial progress, to fall into a coherent (if divisive) family of narratives. Even the twentieth century – that which surely saw the largest number of changes in the human condition and the exponential pluralizing of ‘legitimate’ musical traditions – seems to have a clear enough trajectory, much of the music at its end having a discernible genealogical connection with that of its beginning. So what was it that was worrying me about the eighteenth century?

Global Beckett

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rónán McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Production History ◽  
Waiting For Godot ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
The Human Condition

Beckett, arguably the most important playwright of the twentieth century, has achieved an international reputation that goes well beyond his achievement as a writer. There is in effect a ‘Beckett brand’, a marketable image of the man and his works. The abstraction of his theatre work, its lack of definite geographical or specific referents, has led to a tenacious discourse of universalism. His global fame developed from the first production ofWaiting for Godot, seen as the epitome of modernist experiment, delivering a profound image of the human condition free of historical specificity and thus available to any number of different interpretive schemes. The production history of Beckett’s work in recent times, however, has shown that it is at its most effective in its trans-historical capacity, represented most tellingly in instances such as the productions ofGodotin Sarajevo or New Orleans. Beckett is ‘glocal’ rather than global.

Hannah Arendt’s Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-80
Author(s):  
Mimi Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Political Emancipation ◽  
Marxian Political Economy ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of political economy in the years prior to the publication of The Human Condition (1958). In the early 1950s her archival papers and diary entries display deep concern for a host of topics at the intersection of political and economic thought: labor, work, slavery, consumption, industrialization, and automation. Such interests, which were passed through the philosophical canon from Aristotle to Marx, would serve as the theoretical basis for many of the distinctions that define The Human Condition. When set within the context of midcentury debates around political economy, it becomes clear that Arendt conceived the distinctions not only to respond to the aporias of Western philosophy but also to contest contemporaries who put stock in dialectical materialist accounts of political emancipation. Understanding Arendt’s adversaries more clearly provides the chance to see her conceptual distinctions as interventions into concurrent attempts to revise Marxian political economy in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The Gospel according to Auerbach

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-473
Author(s):  
Jane O. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gospel Of Mark ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Rudolf Bultmann ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The University ◽  
The Human Condition

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) can usefully be read in the context of the Christian existentialist thought to which Auerbach was exposed during his years as a professor at the University of Marburg between 1929 and 1935–36. Specifically, placing Auerbach's account of Peter's denial of Christ as related in the Gospel of Mark in conversation with the work of Auerbach's Marburg colleague Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) helps us to understand Auerbach's indebtedness to Bultmann and to see Mimesis in new ways, as a project with a longer collaborative history that concerns not only literary “realism” but also the dargestellte Wirklichkeit (“represented reality”) of the finitude of the human condition. Acknowledging the importance of early-twentieth-century Christian existentialism in Germany for Auerbach's work helps explain the affective hold that Mimesis has had on lay and professional readers alike.

scholarly journals Aesthetics of Modernist Literature: a Style Analysis of Three Texts from T. S. Eliot, S. Beckett and V. Woolf´s Writings as Sample

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Nasr-edine OUAHANI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonlinear Structures ◽  
Style Analysis ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

This paper explores analytical and stylistic tools in the discourse of modernist literature as epitomized in three canonical works of three influential modernist literary figures: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. The paper shows how, upon meditation on the lived reality of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, modernist literature writers resort to fragmented language, mythical usages, and nonlinear structures to respond to the much ravaging and grotesque events witnessed by the world in general and Europe in particular in this epoch. Reflecting the compartmentalized and Balkanized reality of the world through its dazzling stylistic and figurative innovations, modernist literature sought to shock audiences, to lead bare the inconsistency of the human condition. This goes in parallel with an emerging philosophy that turned conventions upside down in different domains: ethics and morals, religion, history, economy, politics, aesthetics, arts, and language among others.  

ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
David Schmidtz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Old Field ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractOur modern observation-based approaches to the study of the human condition were shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment. Political Economy emerged as a discipline of its own in the nineteenth century, then fragmented further around the dawn of the twentieth century. Today, we see Political Economy’s pieces being reassembled and reunited with their philosophical roots. This issue pauses to reflect on the history of this new but also old field of study.

Art about ancient life as a chronicle for the human condition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary D. Rosenberg ◽  
Patricia Coorough Burke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Gold Deposits ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Geologic Time ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Human Responsibility ◽  
Vital Forces ◽  
The Human Condition

ABSTRACT Art about ancient life chronicles the human condition, less evidently but potentially as significantly, as it depicts life through geologic time. Selected examples surveyed here reveal human aspirations, values, conceits, sensibilities, and foibles and suggest that further in-depth study would be warranted. Greek bronzes embellished with griffins (625–575 B.C.E.) may represent ceratopsian fossils mythologized and commodified for their proximity to gold deposits. Encelius’ anthropomorphized drawing (1557) of a fossil bivalve exemplifies a conservative deference to outdated paradigms about nature; inversely, Nicolaus Steno prized geometry—then offering a new perspective on nature—and realized in 1667 that a drawing of “tongue stones” depicted not, as commonly held, simulacra of snake tongues molded by vital forces within the Earth but fossilized teeth of a once living shark; Beringer’s “lying stones” (1726) show how human conceit can bias the interpretation of “fossils.” Artworks since the mid-twentieth century record a growing recognition that ancient life and its habitats evolved together and therefore that art about ancient life has lessons for contemporary environmentalism: Rudolph Zallinger’s diachronous murals (mid-1940s) and the Milwaukee Public Museum’s diachronous dioramas (installed in 2001) display progressions of ancient and contemporary habitats; Alexis Rockman’s dystopian landscapes use ancient and extant life to critique human responsibility for degrading environments and endangering species. We conclude that studies of art about ancient life can deepen our understanding of the human condition and the cultural context in which it is created.

scholarly journals The Oxford Handbook of Levinas

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Human Condition

Emmanuel Levinas (1906—1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes—the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others—speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. Other essays focus on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized Levinas and found him wanting. This volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas’s philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying how his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers.

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