scholarly journals Towards a Decolonial Narrative Ethics

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Hille Haker
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Narrative Ethics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Intercultural Understanding ◽  
Ethics Of Reading ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Aesthetic Principle

This essay explores the contribution of two works of German literature to a decolonial narrative ethics. It analyzes the structures of colonialism, taking narratives as a medium of and for ethical reflection, and reinterprets the ethical concepts of recognition and responsibility. This essay examines two stories. Franz Kafka’s Report to an Academy (1917) addresses the biological racism of the German scientists around 1900, unmasking the racism that renders apes (or particular people) the pre-life of human beings (or particular human beings). It also demonstrates that the politics of recognition, based on conditional (mis-)recognition, must be replaced by an ethics of mutual recognition. Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978) uses the cross-reference of history and fiction as an aesthetic principle, narrating the history of the German genocide of the Nama and Herero people at the beginning of the 20th century. Intercultural understanding, the novel shows, is impossible when it is based on the conditional, colonial (mis-)recognition that echoes Kafka’s unmasking; furthermore, the novel illuminates the interrelation of recognition and responsibility that requires not only an aesthetic ethics of reading based on attentiveness and response but also a political ethics that confronts the (German) readers as historically situated agents who must take responsibility for their past.

Zufall, Erlösung und Politik

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-81
Author(s):  
Helmut König
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Mikhail Bulgakov ◽  
Life Threatening ◽  
History Of ◽  
Enduring Power ◽  
Master And Margarita

Master and Margarita is a masterpiece of literary modernity. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote the novel in the 1930s in Moscow under the life-threatening conditions of personal persecution. The novel shows how all rationalist claims to power fail because of the invincible power of chance. The utopian state of peace and freedom that the novel creates lies in a sphere beyond all real conflicts and tensions. The present Corona crisis puts the planning reason, which characterizes the history of Western rationality, in many ways questioned. It testifies to the enduring power of chance and thus to the principal limits of human domination of nature. This experience should sensitize our political thinking for the fundamental vulnerability of human beings and the existence of the unpredictable in a new way.

scholarly journals Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist: Protest, Fiction and the Ethics of Care

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
Isabel Alonso-Breto
Keyword(s):  
World Trade Organization ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Ethics Of Care ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Life Conditions ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Sunil Yapa’s politically engaged first novel vindicates the massive pacific protests that occurred during five days in Seattle in November-December 1999. These protests were summoned against the World Trade Organization summit. The novel responds to the wish to inscribe in the history of fiction a crucial event which would inspire and inflect the later anti-globalization movement and protests, and which according to some has not yet received the attention it deserves by media or criticism. This article discusses Yapa’s work in the light of the Ethics of Care, and develops an exegesis, which, incorporating elements of Hardt and Negri’s ideas about the Multitude, understands the novel mainly as a reflection of the crucial preoccupation thathumans have for other human beings, and the innate wish to actively take care of the Other and improve his or her life conditions.

Contempt No More

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-212
Author(s):  
Mathieu Gagnon
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
French Canadians ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Ecological Vision ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
Criteria For Evaluation

I have tried to show how criticism of aboriginal orthodoxy in discourse and measures taken by the current Conservative government and private commentators have set in motion a process of contempt, risking the harm associated with colonialism. Another critique of aboriginal orthodoxy, as presented by Jean-Jacques Simard, claims that First Nations are entitled to a certain level of self-government in defence of the rights of the abstract person: “it is first and foremost simply as human beings that all Amerindians possess the same rights as anyone else….” Yet this option ignores the history of First Nations’ relationships with French Canadians, English Canadians and the British. While appeal to the abstract person can protect people from a threat, it cannot eliminate that threat. It seems clear that contempt towards aboriginals is still present and that their emancipation without an honourable historical justification would also lead to the exacerbation of racism against aboriginals. To make mutual recognition possible between aboriginal and non-aboriginal, we need to have shared criteria for evaluation. It would seem, therefore, that if we were willing to integrate First Nations into the Canadian constitutional order by fully recognizing them, we must find a common project. If the Canadian government were to move more in the direction of an ecological vision of development rather than in the direction of a predatory capitalism based on infinite economic growth, I believe it would be easier to secure First Nations’ sense of belonging to Canada and to agree on models for joint territorial management. That awakening rings a bell we must hear: if seniority on the land and the role played by national groups in the founding of Canada are erased by a unitary, multicultural and monarchist vision of the country, the odds are high that Canadians of diverse origins will eventually suffer the blows of renewed authoritarianism and contempt.

His own Chernobyl: The embodiment of radiation and the resistance to nuclear extractivism in Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942093398
Author(s):  
Vivek Santayana
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Power ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
The People ◽  
Human Ecosystem ◽  
History Of ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Human Landscape

According to Gabrielle Hecht, nuclear energy in South Africa is mired in a wider history of colonial extractivism and racial oppression. Nadine Gordimer’s 2005 novel Get a Life critiques this politics of nuclear power and the way in which it extends the logic of colonialism to the exploitation of the non-human ecosystem in the interest of capital. However, the spatial and temporal scale of nuclear colonialism defy representation in discursive knowledge. This is because the threat posed by nuclear contamination, on both the non-human ecosystem and the people who have been exposed to radiation, is what Rob Nixon describes as a form of “slow violence”, dispersed across vast temporal and geographical scales that are unrepresentable within human understanding. In response, Get a Life marks a phenomenological shift in Gordimer’s strategies of engagement: through the ambiguities and contradictions of form, the novel demonstrates the reconfiguration in the human subject’s encounter with the non-human ecosystem following the impact of nuclear technology in neo-imperial contexts. Through the protagonist Paul Bannerman’s emerging radioactivity, the novel tentatively imagines a shared vulnerability of both human and non-human beings to nuclear catastrophe in a way that rejects the binary logic of human exploitation of the non-human landscape and characterizes what Donna Haraway terms “response-ability” towards the non-human. Through this embodied response-ability, Gordimer presents a new idiom that offers an alternative way of engaging with the unrepresentable scale of nuclear colonialism.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

Moralitas dalam Novel Negeri di Ujung Tanduk Karya Tere Liye

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-173
Author(s):  
Muhtadin Muhtadin ◽  
Sugi Murniasih
Keyword(s):  
Research Method ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Mutual Help ◽  
Analysis Techniques ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
Record Data ◽  
Morality Literature

The objective of this research was to describes the morality contained in the novel Affairs at the Negeri di Ujung Tanduk the works Tere Liye. The research method used content analysis. The data in this research is a sentence containing the moral values ​​contained by the novel of the State at Ujung Tanduk Karya Tere Liye. Technique of collecting data using documentation technique and record. Data analysis techniques with steps: data reduction, data tabulation and coding, interpretation, classification, and conclusion. The result of the research shows that morality in Tere Liye Negeri di Ujung Tanduk novel is: first, human relationships with other human beings in the form of self existence, self esteem, self confidence, fear, death, longing, resentment, loneliness, maintaining the sanctity of greed, developing courage, honesty, hard work, patient, resilient, cheerful, steadfast, open, visionary, independent, brave, courageous, optimistic, envy, hypocritical, reflective, responsible, principle, confident, disciplined , and voracious. Second, human relationships with other humans or social and nature in the form of cooperation, acquaintance, hypocrisy, caring, hypocrisy, caring, friendship, smile, mutual help, and betrayal. Third human relationships in the form of God's menthidising and avoiding shirk, piety and pleading with prayers, prayers performed by human beings, as an awareness that everything in this universe belongs to God. Keywords: morality, literature, novel

New Wars and Their Visual Representation: Dead Bodies without Graves/Mourne

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Tuncay Şur ◽  
Betül Yarar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Public ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
War Photography ◽  
New Wars ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This paper seeks to understand why there has been an increase in photographic images exposing military violence or displaying bodies killed by military forces and how they can freely circulate in the public without being censored or kept hidden. In other words, it aims to analyze this particular issue as a symptom of the emergence of new wars and a new regime of their visual representation. Within this framework, it attempts to relate two kinds of literature that are namely the history of war and war photography with the bridge of theoretical discussions on the real, its photographic representation, power, and violence.  Rather than systematic empirical analysis, the paper is based on a theoretical attempt which is reflected on some socio-political observations in the Middle East where there has been ongoing wars or new wars. The core discussion of the paper is supported by a brief analysis of some illustrative photographic images that are served through the social media under the circumstances of war for instance in Turkey between Turkish military troops and the Kurdish militants. The paper concludes that in line with the process of dissolution/transformation of the old nation-state formations and globalization, the mechanism and mode of power have also transformed to the extent that it resulted in the emergence of new wars. This is one dynamic that we need to recognize in relation to the above-mentioned question, the other is the impact of social media in not only delivering but also receiving war photographies. Today these changes have led the emergence of new machinery of power in which the old modern visual/photographic techniques of representing wars without human beings, torture, and violence through censorship began to be employed alongside medieval power techniques of a visual exhibition of tortures and violence.

Phytochemistry and Pharmacology of Genus Bombax

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 184-196
Author(s):  
Deepshikha Rathore ◽  
Geetanjali ◽  
Ram Singh
Keyword(s):  
Medicinal Plants ◽  
Health Care Needs ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
Pharmacological Activities ◽  
Therapeutic Applications ◽  
Chemical Structures ◽  
Supportive Role ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of

Background: The history of traditional systems of medicine goes parallel with the history of human beings. Even today people have faith in traditional systems of medicine based on medicinal plants to meet primary health care needs. Hence, the scientific evaluation and documentation of extracts and active ingredients of medicinal plants always play a supportive role in their medicinal applications. Objective: This review aims to present the phytochemicals isolated from the genus Bombax and their pharmacological applications. Methods: The literature from research and review papers was analyzed and the information was compiled to present the pharmacological applications of various secondary metabolites from genus Bombax. Results: The genus Bombax belongs to the family Malvaceae and known for its therapeutic applications. The crude, semi-purified and purified extracts of different parts of this plant have shown potential therapeutic applications. A total of 96 articles including research and review papers were referred for the compilation of isolated phytochemicals and their chemical structures. Conclusion: We systematically summarized 176 isolated compounds from the genus Bombax. The findings show that this plant shows potential towards pharmacological activities. The activities were found more from extracts than the single isolated compounds.

The Property Species

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart J. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Symbolic Thought ◽  
Core Property ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? The Property Species explores how Homo sapiens acquires, perceives, and knows the custom of property, and why it might be relevant for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing from some hard-to-dispute facts that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities—nor the social sciences squarely in the middle—are synthesizing a full account of property, this book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: All human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist. Integrating cognitive linguistics with the philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, this book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. The provocative implications are that property—not property rights—is an inherent fundamental principle of economics, and that legal realists and the bundle-of-sticks metaphor are wrong about the facts regarding property. Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is essential reading for experts and any reader who has wondered why people claim things as “Mine!,” and what that means for our humanity.

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