History of the In-Between: World Literature and the Contemporary African Novel

The African novel has had an uneasy relationship with world literature, but a way to locate the historical novel in world literature lies in the emphatic turn of African fiction to the historical novel. Positing a temporality of a decolonization not yet achieved, the contemporary African novel returns to the particulars of national histories to explain change that has remained unacknowledged or misrepresented for political reasons. It grapples with the writing of history as a conscious process of what Edward W. Said describes as “textualization”: a narration that stresses voice and style in order to convey the particularity of historical circumstance, not as reportage but as lived experience. The world making of world literature comes into play as historical becoming revealed in the retrospective account conscious of the conditions of its own telling.

A Brief History of Gravity

This chapter describes the evolution of gravity in the development of international criminal law’s legal and moral norms. It shows that the regime’s strong reliance on gravity is more a matter of historical circumstance than of moral necessity. Gravity’s centrality in international criminal law was not inevitable. International criminal law could have developed to address crimes like drug trafficking that cross borders, or crimes like piracy that are committed outside any state’s territory. Instead, due to the historical context in which it evolved, international criminal law came to rely for its legitimacy on the idea that it addresses particularly serious crimes.

Fifty Shades of Blackness: Recovering an Aesthetics of the Afrifuge

Black lives and histories are to the fore at the moment: from #BlackLivesMatter in the United States to the movement to decolonize syllabi and pedagogy in South African universities. The film Black Panther is watched within a visual and political terrain in which the black body is presented no longer only within histories of previous abjection—slavery and apartheid—but in visions of future reconstitution. This article will put together the changing representation of T’Challa from 1966 to the present in Marvel Comics and the film and argue that blackness has meant different things at different times to the creators as much as within the historical circumstance within which the black superhero has been seen and understood. Central to this has been the dilemma of bringing together the histories of “Africa” and the tenements of the United States—Wakanda and Oakland, California, in the film, and Harlem, New York, in the comic books.

Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo

Dennis Hirota is a modern master of Shin Buddhism who for several decades has explicated the role of natural language in fostering Buddhist awakening. At the core of his oeuvre is the claim that Shin Buddhism’s founder, Shinran Shonin (1173-1263), accepted the earlier Mahayana teaching of nondual awareness as a necessary condition for awakening. Shinran’s unique contribution was to insist that ordinary persons were, as a matter of historical circumstance, incapable of the disciplines required to arrive at non-dual awareness. It was just this circumstance that the historical Buddha foresaw when he taught the Larger Pure Land Sutra, in which the mind of the Buddha Amida, perfect wisdom and compassion, became available to ordinary people who call his Name in joyful sincerity. This is a difficult teaching of “non-practice” that embraces many subtleties. As a heuristic to ease the way into Shinran as Hirota presents him, this paper introduces a painting by the modern Japanese scientist and artist, Iwasaki Tsuneo. This is not a “Shin painting,” but certainly a “Mahayana painting” that connects the aspiration of an ordinary person to ultimate truth through the text of the Heart Sutra, arguably the quintessential Buddhist teaching of non-dual awareness.

Why Public Culture Fails at Diversity

Public culture in the United States fails at diversity. Due to historical circumstance, disparities in the accumulation and use of wealth, long-standing tradition, and a hundred years of governmental policies, the cultural preferences of a small and powerful minority is promoted to the virtual exclusion of all others. ‘Culture’ in the United States has been defined and represented to all Americans to exclusively mean the red-carpet ‘classical’ arts. The cultures of Blacks, Latinos, Asians—and most Whites—are not included or welcomed. So pervasive is this system of elitism, that it calls into question the legitimacy of public art practice in the United States. Is the American public cultural sector, taken as a whole—with community music a distinct component—an intrinsically racist enterprise? This chapter examines our exclusionary history and its trajectory in community arts, and offers the concept and practice of cultural democracy as an alternative.

Sizing Up the Beast

Horror fiction has been a legitimate object of academic study for several decades now. There are many competing theoretical approaches to horror and the Gothic, but the most prevalent approaches are seriously flawed. Constructivist approaches, which see horror as a product of historical circumstance, ignore the genre’s psychological and biological underpinnings and its deep history. Horror stretches back in time beyond the Gothic novel through folk tales to earlier oral narratives. Psychoanalytical approaches, which build on Freud’s theories of psychology, are scientifically obsolete and have a distorting effect on the subject matter, reducing horror to representations of psychosexual complexes. The chapter critically discusses existing approaches to horror, as well as horror as an affectively defined genre, and it argues for a consilient, biocultural approach which integrates other viable approaches within a framework based on biology and which builds on current social science.

The role of intentions in conceptions of prejudice: An historical perspective

As a morally charged subject with great relevance to society, prejudice has captured the attention of social psychologists since the field's inception. However, these characteristics have also made the study of prejudice particularly susceptible to the vicissitudes of historical circumstance. In this chapter, we trace how the study of prejudice has been affected by historical events. We argue that changing conceptions of prejudice have been particularly affected by changing views about whether it is primarily intentional. We conclude by arguing that a full conception of prejudice requires attending to both its intentional and unintentional aspects.

Albert Camus

The identity of Albert Camus (b. 1913–d. 1960) as a philosopher is ambiguous, and his own relation to philosophy was ambivalent. He hesitated to identify as a philosopher, and following his publication of The Rebel, and his confrontation with Jean-Paul Sartre, his standing and ability as a philosopher was often dismissed. In the popular imagination, he became an existentialist, the “philosopher of the absurd,” and the “conscience of postwar France.” There seem to be two explanations for the ambiguity and ambivalence. First, Camus clearly wasn’t, and didn’t see himself as or desire to be, a discursive theoretical philosopher. He was skeptical of the efficacy of systematic philosophy and metaphysical thinking, and none of his mature writing fits this mold. He is instead what Alexander Nehamas has called a “philosopher of the art of living,” like Socrates, Nietzsche, or Foucault. Or, as Matthew Sharpe (see Sharpe 2015, cited under Intellectual Biographies of Camus) and others have claimed, Camus was a “philosophe,” an expression evoking 18th-century, mainly French, thinkers such as Rousseau, de Condorcet, and Voltaire: public intellectuals focused on worldly, political problems, rather than abstract concerns of theoretical philosophy. Second, much of Camus’s writing, both the clearly fictional and the more clearly philosophical, can be understood as a response to contingent historical circumstance, and his work might therefore be seen, from a philosophical perspective, as anachronistic and of little philosophical relevance. However, while this is partly true, it is perverse to deny the continuing relevance of a writer who addresses issues such as the challenge for an individual finding himself or herself in a meaningless life or an impossible situation, the difference between enlightened rebellion and reactionary irrationalism, the ethics of violence, and the complexity of anti- and postcolonialism. The approach taken in this bibliography is that Camus is not a theoretical philosopher, but a philosopher in Nehamas’s or Sharpe’s sense. After his death, and perhaps in the period leading up to his death, Camus lost prominence. His novels remained in print, and L’Étranger became a standard high school text around the world, but Camus the thinker and activist was relegated to a historical niche. Outside France he retained popularity among the New Left, offering a progressive alternative to Stalinism, but that movement had waned by the 1970s. Since the last decade of the 20th century, however, there has been a significant revival of interest, and the majority of the works in this bibliography have been drawn from this “revival.”

Introduction

Doubt is a promising subject of inquiry for historians. Its initial definition in the Oxford English Dictionary reads ‘[t]he (subjective) state of uncertainty with regard to the truth or reality of anything; undecidedness of belief or opinion’, which might be advocated as a necessary mindset for any historically inclined investigator embarking on research. Although not always articulated, historians constantly face the ‘state of uncertainty’ of knowledge of the past and the continuous need, therefore, to test the evidence. The compilers of the OED then, perhaps unwittingly, underscore the particular relevance of ‘doubt’ as a subject for ecclesiastical historians by further defining it as ‘uncertainty as to the truth of Christianity or some other religious belief or doctrine’. The prominent placing of this second definition acknowledges the reality that doubts about religious ideas and individual doctrines, if not faith itself, have long been conspicuous in human language, and not just when speaking about Christianity. Nonetheless, the means and the consequences of communicating doubt depend on, and are intensely revealing of, changing historical circumstance.

Covenant, History, and the Holocaust: Revisiting Emil Fackenheim's Jewish Philosophy

In the twentieth century, historical circumstance in the form of the Holocaust led to theodicy's returning to the forefront of the philosophical agenda, particularly in Jewish thought. As a result, post-Holocaust theology is almost always an element of introductory courses on modern and contemporary Jewish philosophy, if not introductory courses on modern Judaism simpliciter. Many working in the field of Jewish philosophy, therefore, probably first encounter Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003), and the infamous turn of phrase that ensured his immortality in the realm of Jewish thought, early on in their studies. Fackenheim was one of the most influential post-Holocaust philosophical voices in what soon became a cacophony. This German-born philosopher's (and ordained Reform rabbi's) concept of the 614th commandment—not to grant Hitler a posthumous victory (in his own words “the only statement of mine that ever became famous”)—has captured the imagination of many a student and often made a lasting impression. Yet it seems that one of the concerns at the forefront of this new expansive monograph on Fackenheim's philosophy is that for the majority, this constitutes both their first and last exposure to his thought, leaving them with an extremely contracted view of his conceptual palate. The result, noted in the book's introduction, is that Fackenheim has never really been considered a Jewish philosopher worthy of mention in the same breath as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, or even latterly Emmanuel Levinas and Joseph Soloveitchik. In this volume, a case is presented for including him on that list.