The Object of Jewish American Literary History

This essay explores assumptions underwriting literary categorization, focusing on Jewish American literary history in particular (mostly), and considers the scalar logic that allows us to link the singular text, with all of its luminous possibility, with the particular world of a given literary category. The essay’s first section critiques major claims about Jewish American literary history made over the last 20 years by observing the persistently underexamined use of a metaphorical and metaphysical concept of identity, and then lays out problems with scaling up between select texts and the larger category of a given field of literature. Problems of scale in Jewish American literary history are highlighted by comparison with recent critiques of African American literary history. Scale itself harbors problems of commensurability insofar as scaling between a single object and a set to which the object belongs requires acts of comparison which leap over differences of kind, a problem explored in the essay’s second section through analogies with problems of commensurability in the discipline of physics. The third section locates those problems of commensurability in Nicole Krauss’s novel Forest Dark (2017) and reads that novel’s direct confrontation with literary history as exemplifying how literary scholars can foreground multiplicity and possibility, precisely through the foregrounding of their own situated practice as interested agents. Rather than reproduce that figment by projecting a historically continuous and recognizable Jewishness across two centuries of literature, Jewish American literary studies should ally and coordinate itself with the field-questioning work occurring among Black and Latinx studies scholars who substantiate the salience of their field’s identity-based study, even as they depart from its historical formation.

Let’s Clean Up and Bring Some Order Here! Moral Regulation of Markets in Yaoundé, Cameroon

This study examines activities and processes through which projects of moral regulation are implemented as well as lived, transformed, and resisted by their targeted actors. Our ethnographic study focuses on discourses and practices of civic duty for orderly and hygienic conduct in the rehabilitation of marketplaces in Yaoundé, Cameroon. By drawing on the inhabited institutions approach and the literature on ethics as practice, our analysis extends research on moral work to put forward a perspective on moral regulation as a situated practice. We show how moral work is built on individual reflections but is simultaneously negotiated through actors’ relationships, that is, responsibilities to family, interactions within the community, and personal history.

Social work in confinement: the spatiality of social work in carceral settings

Social work in prisons not only works with and for people who are confined; it also constitutes a form of social work that is carried out under conditions of confinement. This article draws on carceral geography to understand the corporeal and spatial aspects of social work in prison settings. Based on insights from two prisons in Switzerland, we argue that understanding carceral social work as a spatial and materially situated practice helps to gain deep insight into the intricate layers of meaning and powerful modes of functioning of prisons and of the people involved. In particular, it shows how the way social work is carried out in prison is supported and strongly structured by the spatiality of the prison itself, allowing for counselling, desk-type social work, rather than for social work that actively initiates and creates spaces for encounters or activities.

The body center stage

This article examines Marie Chouinard’s choreography Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des délices (2016) as an intermedial translation of Bosch’s homonymous painting. Taking the concepts of distribution of the sensible and esthetic regime developed by Rancière (2004) as groundwork, I consider how dance and translation participate in the political by challenging traditional hierarchal author–translator relationships, by introducing new corporealities and discourses in the realm of the visible and by exploiting the slippage of meaning that can be produced in the reiteration of discourse and citationality that characterize these two disciplines. I conclude by arguing that in engaging with these three lines of thought, Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des délices offers a model of translation as an embodied and situated practice that combines the esthetic and the political by bringing a dialogue between equally participating subjects to bear upon a specific context.