Tortured Poetics and Shared Humanity: Poems from Guantanamo and 9/11 Poetry

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Dinah Birch

George Eliot’s style developed during her early years as an exceptionally cultured journalist, translator, and editor, building a relation with her readers that rested on the authority of her wide-ranging scholarly and scientific references. But she also cautioned her readers about the limits of learning, and the need to locate knowledge in the context of sympathy. When she turned to fiction with the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life in 1857, she continued to build on these principles. An analysis of Middlemarch demonstrates that the flexible style of her mature writing continues to rest on a dazzling breadth of knowledge, coupled with an acknowledgement of the authority of feeling, and the moral responsibilities that are inseparable from our shared humanity.


Author(s):  
Hugh Starkey

This article comments on keynote speeches given by Keith Ajegbo and Audrey Osler. The programme of study for citizenship derived from the Crick report and did not emphasise race equality and national unity for security. Osler argues that the Ajegbo review addressed teaching of ethnic, religious and cultural diversity but did not confront the inadequacies of British democracy or reassert social justice, a sense of shared humanity and a commitment to human rights. Proposing, let alone imposing, a definition of Britishness is futile, but it is possible to promote cosmopolitan patriotism supported by explicit principles, concepts and values.


2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-336
Author(s):  
John Buchanan ◽  
Meera Varadharajan

In a world where we are being confronted with seemingly ever more distressing images of our inability or unwillingness to exercise and extend our humanity to one another, this paper discusses global development aid, and how education, and, more specifically, syllabus and policy documents, can contribute to a more informed and empathic response to people who see through eyes different from our own. This paper discusses curricular initiatives, to enhance students’ understanding and responses to issues of global inequalities. The paper embeds this discussion within an examination of elements shaping minds and hearts with regard to such issues, and on impediments to and opportunities for a more informed and humane response to our shared humanity.


Author(s):  
Erika Blacksher

This chapter argues against the use of stigma-inducing measures as tools of public health on grounds of social justice. The value of social justice in public health includes both a distributive demand for a fair share of health and the social determinants thereof and a recognitional demand to be treated as a peer in public life. The use of stigma-inducing measures violates the first demand by thwarting people’s access to important intra- and interpersonal, communal, and institutional resources that confer a health advantage; it violates the second by denying people’s shared humanity and ignoring complex non-dominant identities. The position taken in this chapter does not preclude public health measures that regulate and ban health-harming substances or try to move people toward healthier behaviors. It does require that public health partner with people to identify their communities’ health challenges and opportunities and to treat people as resourceful agents of change.


Author(s):  
Patricia Illingworth ◽  
Wendy E. Parmet

Using the 2015 Ebola epidemic and the global migrant crisis as examples, this chapter suggests that following a period of norm change, there is reason to be optimistic about the potential for solidarity between newcomers and natives for the sake of health. In health our shared humanity and vulnerability are evident. The Ebola epidemic in 2014 illustrates both how a slow global response to the disease resulted in the deaths of over 11,000 people and how a willingness on the part of nations and individuals to act in solidarity with the victims of Ebola brought an end to the epidemic. Responses to the recent global migration crisis, including a mix of public and private sponsorship of refugees in Canada, are also examined in this chapter. This chapter suggests policy recommendations to ensure that newcomers have their health needs met and indicates that equal access to health care for newcomers and natives is critical and will be facilitated by cultural competency and nonexclusionary health policy.


Author(s):  
John L. Culliney ◽  
David Jones

The last chapter highlights a sagely person whose work in international and intercultural education has exemplified the principles discussed in this book. The yin and yang of American culture and modern religious expression, however, represent uncertainties for constructive societal progress. Reflecting on future chances of success for humanity and human selves, the chapter points to the need for sagely leadership to promote biospheric conservation, environmental sustainability, and social justice. With urgency, the same prescription will help us to navigate the chaotic edge between future promise and existential risk in new fields such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. The chapter concludes with a view of the choice we face at the present moment: an exercise in free will, unique in the history of life. Each human individual has the potential to contribute something worthy and personally satisfying to the future. Our choice is: will we take the cooperative side of our evolutionary past to a new level and embrace the kind of nurturing philosophical wisdom that confirms our shared humanity. Or will we choose to reject that ancestral path in favor of accelerating self-aggrandizement, aggressive religion, and destructive tribal integrity that threatens societal and planetary well-being?


Author(s):  
Laura Brace

This book insists on the connections between freedom, belonging and labour for understanding the politics of slavery. This chapter seeks to show how constructions of race and labour were inextricable from one another, and how thinking about slavery as a labour system is inseparable from understanding freedom as a contested concept, forged out of experience and struggle. Part of that struggle was about trying to find and define the limits of enslavability, and its location in a constellation of concepts of self-possession, labour power, race and property. Labour as a moral and political category was caught up with ideas about autonomy, morality and honour that were deeply contested, and the mobile borders between free and unfree labour, labour and capital, persons and property were inseparable from questions about who belonged, and who was eligible to be incorporated into civil society. Through a focus on slave hiring and slave provisioning grounds, this chapter explores how and why the abolitionist arguments about freedom, rationality and shared humanity could not help them to escape the sheer adaptability of bondage, as it resurfaced in questions about the command over labour, trustworthiness, the appearance of inferior capacities, and the division between the industrious and the idle.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document