Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic

This book poses questions about viewing modernity today from the vantage point of traditionally disparate disciplines engaging scholars from sociology to science, philosophy to robotics, medicine to visual culture, mathematics to cultural theory, etc., including a contribution by Alain Touraine. From coloniality to pandemic, modernity can now represent a global necessity in which awareness of human and environmental crises, injustices, and inequality would create the possibility of a modernity-to-come.

Electrohydrodynamic Drying in Agribusiness: Literature Review

In agribusiness, drying is a unitary operation that optimizes the production and preservation of products and raw materials. Drying is performed through different traditional methods, one of the most recently studied is the electrohydrodynamic drying EHD which uses an electric field that allows decreasing the processing time thus increasing the drying speed of raw materials and consuming less energy. In this article, a review was carried out through Scopus using a search equation with the keywords “Electrohydrodynamic drying,” “food” and “AGRI” which resulted in a total of 145 articles; which were analyzed through in-depth reading, analyzing aspects such as year, author, keywords, countries, quartile, journal, relationship with agroindustry, mathematical models used and applications in agro-industrial products, this analysis was complemented with the application of Vantage Point software through co-occurrence matrices and cluster analysis. Recent applications were found in Carrot, Chicken, Sea Cucumber, Goji Berry, Peppermint Leaf, Quince, Potato, Blueberry, Aquatic Products, Banana Slices, Grape Pomace, Blueberry, Apple, Mushroom, Wheat, and Mushroom Slices, mathematical models with application in EHD drying were also found, such as Henderson and Pabis, Page, Logarithmic, Quadratic, Newton/Lewis, Diffusion and exponential.

Ghosts and Religious Life in Early China

For modern people, ghost stories are no more than thrilling entertainment. For those living in antiquity, ghosts were far more serious beings, as they could affect the life and death of people and cause endless fear and anxiety. How did ancient societies imagine what ghosts looked like, what they could do, and how people could deal with them? From the vantage point of modernity, what can we learn about an obscure, but no less important aspect of an ancient culture? In this volume, Mu-chou Poo explores the ghosts of ancient China, the ideas that they nurtured, and their role in its culture. His study provides fascinating insights into the interaction between the idea of ghosts and religious activities, literary imagination, and social life devoted to them. Comparing Chinese ghosts with those of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, Poo also offers a wider perspective on the role of ghosts in human history.

George IV’s Coronation as Festival

This article analyzes George IV’s coronation as a multisensory festive experience in order to understand the meanings of diamonds within British material culture in 1821. Reframing the coronation as a festival allows historical scholars to bridge the premodern/modern divide in early nineteenth-century historiography and demonstrates the ongoing centrality of festivals in consumer culture in the modern era. It also offers a vantage point from which to study sensory paradigm shifts and clashes that occurred in this context and evaluate diamonds in relation to other pieces of material culture outside of the confines of a formal marketplace. The article argues that the coronation shifted how diamonds were thought about in Britain, though this shift was subtle and deeply embedded in the turmoil of the moment. On a widespread scale, the event normalized the association of diamonds with monarchy, imperial power, and light, in ways that made diamonds seem like quotidian items. The article is based on accounts of the event in newspapers, periodicals, and official histories.

The issue is moot: Decolonizing art/artifact

This article seeks to step back from the long-standing debate between art and artifact—aesthetics and science-- understood as terms that reference central concerns of the quintessentially modern Western disciplines of art history and anthropology. In their landmark edited volume The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, George Marcus and Fred Myers explored the growing convergences exhibited by the concerns and methods of practitioners of the two disciplines, both in the academy and the museum. By training our attention on contemporary artworlds—understood as systems-- they illuminated the exchanges of aesthetic and conceptual ideas and forms that have brought Western and non-Western arts into shared discursive and real spaces. Yet in the quarter century since the book’s publication there has been a noticeable retreat from attempts by the proponents of visual studies and an expanded visual anthropology to actualize disciplinary convergences. The boundaries that separate art and anthropology have not been dissolved. Art historians and anthropologists continue to ask different questions and to support different regimes of value. From the author’s vantage point in a settler society currently directing considerable energies to institutional projects of decolonization the old debates have rapidly been receding as a new ‘third term’ – Indigenous Studies-- intrudes itself on the well trodden terrain. Not (yet) definable as a discipline but, rather, maintaining itself as an orientation, Indigenous Studies nevertheless renders the earlier disciplinary debates moot. Place, rather than time-based, collective rather than individual, holistic rather than either disciplinary or interdisciplinary, Indigenous Studies formulations exert decolonizing pressures on institutions that are rapidly mounting. Using Anishinaabeg: Art and Power, a show in 2017 at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), as a case study, this article shows how an exhibition moved representation away from the art/artifact dichotomy as well as from contested strategies of ‘inclusion’ and pro forma recognitions of ‘Indigenous ontology’ toward a genuine paradigm shift.

The Tall Building and Urban Space

If public spaces in the urban environment are seen as extensions of one’s home, then what role do tall buildings play in this setting? In terms of space, they can have various roles. They are visible from afar and often act as landmarks, but at the same time they give one a possibility to see the urban whole in its entirety, from above. One of most iconic images of modern urban planning and modern urban space – Le Corbusier’s plan for Paris – is shown from such a vantage point, depicting an urban area dotted with individual buildings set within a continuous spatial field. This modern space has often been described as open and homogeneous. The simplified general interpretation has further been complemented by the concept of heterogeneous space, paving the way for a more diverse spatial theory. Heterogeneous space has brought much needed complexity to interpretations of architectural space. Modernist space is revisited in this article, explored through two particular cases. In addition to Le Corbusier, the study includes the work of another architect and urban planner of the early 20th century, Eliel Saarinen. The role of tall buildings in the designs and writings of the two architects is compared, with a specific focus on the spatial implications of these buildings in the cityscape. The comparison illustrates the fact that modern architects were not unanimous in their visions of urban space, although they shared the knowledge of a contemporary spatial theory.

Forgetting and Remembering the Socialist Past

In the early 1990s, the cultural landscape of Croatia went through radical changes, one of them being the destruction of the monuments built under socialism. Drawing on the author’s research on the monuments in the capital city of Zagreb, and on the existing research on the politics of memory in the broader post-Yugoslav region, this article asks about the disappearance of the monuments to partisan women in contemporary Zagreb. The main research question regards the gender dimension of the under-representation of women in public space. The hypothesis is that egalitarian gender relations, analyzed here through memorial representation, are important for the democratization of post-socialist societies. Additional focus is on ethnic belonging as an influential explanatory category in accounting for the disappearance of monuments to minority women in contemporary Croatia. The article adds a new empirical vantage point to help better understand the comparative framework of how the socialist past is remembered through monuments.

Continuation or Evolution? Changes in Pottery Production and Vessel Types Used in Pomerelian (Gdańsk Pomerania) Towns in the Early-Modern Period

The article discusses changes in production and the of the pottery used in towns in Pomerelia in the early-modern period. These considerations are based on advanced research on late-medieval pottery-making of the region and the relatively poorer state of knowledge about the continuity of transformations at the beginning of the early-modern period. The vantage point for this study is a characterisation of the source base, including both the artefactual and written evidence. This enables the tracing of changes, and characteristic features of goods used, in the 16th century.

Lenguaje político y giro panhispánico en el primer manifiesto del movimiento Poesía ante la incertidumbre

Political Language and Reflections on the Concept of Canon from a Transatlantic Perspective in the First Manifesto of the Movement POESÍA ANTE LA INCERTIDUMBRE. In this article I intend to examine the strengths of Panhispanic or Transatlantic Studies, which represent an appropriate line of research into and analysis of the current circumstances of literature written in Spanish, from a vantage point capable of observing the plurality of changes in the Hispanic-American poetics of twenty-first century works. First of all, I define what is traditionally understood as a literary canon and outline the theoretical support on which I rely to argue my point of view. Secondly, I add the notes of the critics who propose a Transatlantic literary analysis, that is, the ideas of Panhispanism, as a way of analyzing current poetic productions, which I exemplify with the Poetry Facing Uncertainty movement. Keywords: canon, Hispanic American – Transatlantic literature, Panhispanic studies, Spanish poetry, Poetry Facing Uncertainty