Science, Technology and Religion: The Exchange Between Enlightenment Europe and Imperial China

The European Enlightenment fostered a sense of progress through a delineation of universal human rights as well as through a reductionist mathematization of nature. Science, technology and religion became a form of cultural currency between Europe and Imperial China. The Jesuits bartered mathematics, geographic surveys and military technology to win religious permissions with Chinese emperors. Other Europeans were convinced ancient Chinese texts corresponded to the Old Testament. China sent to Europe a Confucian model of a social ethic that demonstrated non-Christian civic virtues. This article examines this exchange using the intercourse in science, technology and religion as the metric.

Detecting the Diagnosis: Parasitology, Crime Fiction, and the British Medical Gaze

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie traces the cultural encounters between the parasitologist and the scientific detective in the medico-popular imagination, revealing how such meetings helped to embed the figure of the doctor-detective in public understandings of science. Parasitologists like Ronald Ross and David Bruce were routinely reported in newspapers using detective fiction’s most famous archetype: Sherlock Holmes, a frame of reference that blurred the boundaries between romance and reality. Recognising the continued cultural currency of Holmesian detection in clinical and diagnostic medicine, she re-immerses the ‘great detective’ and his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, in the literary-historical contexts of the fin de siècle, demonstrating how material and rhetorical entanglements between criminality, tropical medicine, and empire constructed the microscopic world as new kind of colonial encounter.

The I/Indian Not-In-The-Textbook: Native/Indigenous Post-Structuralism, Critical Methodologies, Epistemologies, and Tribal Realities as Agency toward the Decolonization of the Territorial Divide In American Indian Studies Courses

This article focuses upon how, within American Indian Studies courses, there is a necessary border crossing between territorialized Native and non-Native students. Taking the literal borders of Indian reservations, and repositioning these realities as a metaphor for critical epistemological deconstruction, I argue that there is a necessary educational border crossing which is necessary for Native/Indigenous equity and socio-political justice to be realized and acquired as cultural currency. As students within these courses begin to understand, embrace, and challenge American Indian Studies (AIS) courses, and the dynamics of the discipline, there is a self-defined border crossing between, and within, the Native/Indigenous ideological territories, and literal, physical reservation borders, which the curriculum represents. Each student may – or will – find their own point of critical Native/Indigenous inquiry, from which they are challenged and welcomed to embrace, as well as depart from previous scripted Euro American rhetorical references regarding Native/Indigenous cultures. Following this critical epistemology, for the student participant, a new territory of knowledge, cultural, and expressed understanding from, and about, Native/Indigenous Peoples becomes manifest; a new academic frontier is possible. Applying this methodology, for academic decolonization, the i/Indian image/icon need not exist within the textbook(s); the potential for recognizing and decolonizing the physical reservation borders becomes possible. The realities of Native lives – both historic and contemporary - do matter, beyond these limitations and scripted inclusions within textbooks. Whereas a text may prove as a site of disenfranchisement, inequity, and, tribal marginalization, there, then, lies the necessity for Native V/voices to be heard, reviewed, and function as sovereign references and expressions, which advances beyond the terminal reservation borders as agency. This article seeks to challenge pre-determined academic references, mis-representations and re-presentations of Native Peoples, read: the i/Indian image/icon, as well as providing a critique of how Native/Indigenous realities are, then, able to sovereignly relate to the large non-Native population beyond the limitations of a physical reservation border. Taking note that there is no one single educational methodology, which can be applied within American Indian courses, multiple academic perspectives begin to surface, which address the educational process about Native Peoples. The 3 views of Indian education – anthropological/archeological/ethnographic/historical, sympathetic, activist - as I argue, become, and are maintained as antiquated points of articulation, which continue to be employed about Native Peoples, replacing the active dynamics of Native cultures, customs, traditional knowledge, and expressions. This article, therefore, challenges these 3 views of Indian education - anthropological/archeological/ethnographic/historical, sympathetic, activist - noting that the classroom, textbook(s), and their references, mis-representations and re-presentation(s) about Native Peoples, need to be decolonized, following the importance, ideology, dialectics and dynamics of tribal sovereignty, equity, and socio-political justice.

The I/Indian Not-In-The-Textbook: Native/Indigenous Post-Structuralism, Critical Methodologies, Epistemologies, and Tribal Realities as Agency toward the Decolonization of the Territorial Divide In American Indian Studies Courses

This article focuses upon how, within American Indian Studies courses, there is a necessary border crossing between territorialized Native and non-Native students. Taking the literal borders of Indian reservations, and repositioning these realities as a metaphor for critical epistemological deconstruction, I argue that there is a necessary educational border crossing which is necessary for Native/Indigenous equity and socio-political justice to be realized and acquired as cultural currency. As students within these courses begin to understand, embrace, and challenge American Indian Studies (AIS) courses, and the dynamics of the discipline, there is a self-defined border crossing between, and within, the Native/Indigenous ideological territories, and literal, physical reservation borders, which the curriculum represents. Each student may – or will – find their own point of critical Native/Indigenous inquiry, from which they are challenged and welcomed to embrace, as well as depart from previous scripted EuroAmerican rhetorical references regarding Native/Indigenous cultures. Following this critical epistemology, for the student participant, a new territory of knowledge, cultural, and expressed understanding from, and about, Native/Indigenous Peoples becomes manifest; a new academic frontier is possible. Applying this methodology, for academic decolonization, the i/Indian image/icon need not exist within the textbook(s); the potential for recognizing and decolonizing the physical reservation borders becomes possible. The realities of Native lives – both historic and contemporary – do matter, beyond these limitations and scripted inclusions within textbooks. Whereas a text may prove as a site of disenfranchisement, inequity, and, tribal marginalization, there, then, lies the necessity for Native V/voices to be heard, reviewed, and function as sovereign references and expressions, which advances beyond the terminal reservation borders as agency. This article seeks to challenge pre-determined academic references, mis-representations and re-presentations of Native Peoples, read: the i/Indian image/icon, as well as providing a critique of how Native/Indigenous realities are, then, able to sovereignly relate to the large non-Native population beyond the limitations of a physical reservation border. Taking note that there is no one single educational methodology, which can be applied within American Indian courses, multiple academic perspectives begin to surface, which address the educational process about Native Peoples. The 3 views of Indian education – anthropological/archeological/ethnographic/historical,sympathetic, activist – as I argue, become, and are maintained as antiquated points of articulation, which continue to be employed about Native Peoples, replacing the active dynamics of Native cultures, customs, traditional knowledge, and expressions. This article, therefore, challenges these 3 views of Indian education – anthropological/archeological/ethnographic/historical, sympathetic, activist – noting that the classroom, textbook(s), and their references, mis-representations and re-presentation(s) about Native Peoples, need to be decolonized, following the importance, ideology, dialectics and dynamics of tribal sovereignty, equity, and socio-political justice.

Another Rock, Another Hong Kong Story: Lion Rock from Below and Above

Chapter 5 brings the book back to the present times. As an actual hill in Hong Kong named after the shape of its ridge, Lion Rock marks its appearance, both physical and textual, in different realities. Meanwhile, Lion Rock still possesses a high degree of cultural currency in today’s Hong Kong. As an emblematic icon since the 1970s, Lion Rock is understood by the local population as a synonym for Hong Kong’s unbeatable spirit, a site of collective memory and a symbol of Hong Kong at large, intersecting cultural representations with real-life scenarios. By tracing the pre-1997 and post-1997 trajectories of Lion Rock, the chapter discusses the experiences of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment in the making of the city’s own myth across generations.

The New Immaterialism? On Spirituality in Modern Thought

Postsecular thought and criticism involves heightened attention to religious feeling as well as to religious practices. Such feeling, often described as spirituality, enjoys broad cultural currency, though it is far less frequently an object of scholarly attention in the humanities. For this reason, spirituality remains an undertheorized and widely misunderstood category in the humanities, even as it implicitly informs several sites of humanistic inquiry. The aim of this essay, therefore, is to shed light on the presence of evocatively (and sometimes overtly) spiritual thinking in humanities contexts, suggesting different ways that spirituality inflects such areas of thought as the humanities in a posthuman age, tensions between ideological and aesthetic theories, and postcritique.

Barefaced: Ageing women stars, ‘no make-up’ photography and authentic selfhood in the 2017 Pirelli calendar

Celebrity culture has long been driven to seek out and appraise signifiers of authenticity. For women celebrities, a willingness to share photographs of themselves make-up free has become a hazy but provocative marker of a certain ‘barefaced’ daring, in which they (seemingly) come closer to imparting their ‘real self’. In practice, these images are still heavily mediated, often contested and have become part of the celebrity machine itself; indeed, I argue here that, for all the staging of candour and spontaneity they can enact, they are increasingly even an expected component of women’s celebrity performance. What happens to women’s star status or signification, then, when they forego the comfortingly illusionary and perfecting properties of cosmetics for ‘make-up free’ photography? And how are the stakes entailed in such photography more challengingly laden, more hazardous, but also more potentially gratifying, for ageing women stars? This analysis looks most particularly at the widely debated 2017 Pirelli calendar as a pre-eminent example of the contentious cultural currency of such star-imagery, photographed ‘make-up free’ by Peter Lindbergh and featuring mature woman actors, including Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman and Robin Wright. Constructing a brief critical timeline of the escalation of the make-up free movement across popular culture and social media in recent years, incorporating extant research drawn from disciplines including cultural and celebrity studies and cultural gerontology, undertaking textual analysis of the 2017 calendar and critical discourse analysis of its promotion and media reception, the work brings interdisciplinary approaches together with a breadth of allied cultural artefacts. Interrogating how ageing women stars may effectively marshal make-up free photography to signal their growing gravitas, I forge new insights into both the polemical meanings of the repudiation of make-up in contemporary visual culture and the import of make-up for conceptualising the nexus of ageing, gender and stardom.