Review Essay: Enlightenment Lost?

Lost Enlightenment and Polymaths of Islam, each analyzing a different but linked period of Central Asian civilization, is each a masterwork of scholarship. Each author, now at a different stage in his academic career, has put to good use a bevy of languages to unveil the achievements of societies and ways of life smothered by the Sturm und Drang of life including great power aggressions. S. Frederick Starr has led Soviet as well as Central Asian research institutes based in Washington, D.C. He was the first director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and later the founding chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program, now affiliated with the American Foreign Policy Institute. James Pickett is Assistant Professor of Eurasian History at the University of Pittsburgh. Each author has done research in Russia and Central Asia.

Book Review: Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

The second edition of Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (2019) updates the 1998 first edition. Routledge Publishers hailed the first edition as “a ground-breaking critical introduction to the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies”. John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University since 2014, Leela Gandhi has been researching the cultural history of the Indo-British colonial encounter. As a renowned scholar on transnational literatures, postcolonial theory and ethics, she is the founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and editorial board member of Postcolonial Text. Her position as director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and her research on intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are part of her varied and important contributions.

Book Review: Barry Cunliffe, The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The Scythians is an expansive study of a lost civilization with everlasting characteristics and a rich cultural and artistic heritage. It provides a sympathetic account of a nomadic civilization encompassing a wide variety of sources. Most significantly, it utilizes interdisciplinary methodology to exemplify a model of how to research a nomadic culture doing justice to its historical understanding. The book is arranged into twelve chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of the Scythians: its people, geography, culture, military, art, and history. Rather than following a chronological format, Cunliffe focuses on tracing the evidence in historical records as well as archeological findings in compiling a picture of the Scythians as complete as possible with available material. The book is rich with visual material: pictures, illustrations, maps, images of objects and crafts, as well as an addendum gallery with ten objects presented and interpreted in detail providing depictions of the Scythian life.

Ethno-Religious Conflict, Human Security and Peacebuilding in Contemporary Lagos

Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria and economic hub of the country, is a mirror of complex ethnic and religious configuration of the Nigerian federation. This diverse ethnic and religious character, among other factors, makes Lagos a hotbed of violent ethnic conflicts. This condition is exacerbated by mutual fear and anxiety among various ethnic groups, particularly Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo, about domination, coupled with the pervasive feeling by some groups that other groups are the cause of their socio-economic and political misfortunes. In this setting, hopes and aspirations that antagonism and possible triumph may guarantee socio-economic benefits have often turned minor disagreements into violent conflicts, in which ordinary people are foot soldiers and greatest victims. The core problematic of this research is to investigate the fundamental causative factors and implications of ethno-religious conflict in modern Lagos, Southwest Nigeria. Thus, this paper is a historical inquiry into the basis and impact of Yoruba-Hausa inter-ethnic violence on human security in contemporary Lagos society. The study also explores the opportunities for the attainment of sustainable peace and security within Nigeria. This study posits that the ethno-religious emotion and conviction that continuous antagonism and ultimate triumph against a particular ethnic group(s) assures socio-economic progress is false. The paper concludes that the best recipe for sustainable human well-being, peace and security for Nigerians is to collectively launch a sustained legitimate advocacy against corruption and abuse of public office rather than wasting precious human and material resources on divisive and counter-productive violent ethno-religious conflicts. The study adopts the historical method of data collection and analysis.

Book Review: Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019.

In 2010, Claus Leggewie, a German professor of Political Science, tried to define what he called “the seven circles of European memory”, common memories shared, in theory, by all Europeans: - European unification as a success story which, however, has had little impact on European self-confidence; - the notion of Europe as a continent of immigrants; - European colonialism and colonial massacres, such as the Herero massacre, as forerunners of the Holocaust; - War and wartime memories, specially about World Wars I and II; - Population transfers and ethnic cleansings as pan-European traumas (for example, the Armenian genocide or the Ukranian Holodomor); - Soviet communism; - The Shoah as Europe’s negative founding myth. At that time, he saw the possible problems caused by the imposition of the Holocaust as “the matrix for dealing with communist state crimes against humanity across the whole of Eastern Europe” (Leggewie 4), which might lead “these nations to exploit this consensus [Eastern European countries having been victims of the Soviet empire] in order to relativize or conceal their participation in the murder of the Jews” (Leggewie 5).

Book Review: Christine M. Philliou, Turkey: A Past Against History. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.

This book depicts transformation of the Ottoman and Turkish society between the Second Constitutional Monarchy (1908) of the late Ottoman Empire and the 1960s of modern Turkey with a focus on the life and works of Turkish journalist author Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965). Karay is known with his short stories and novels in Turkish literature. Using excerpts from Karay’s newspaper articles, stories, and novels, Philliou shows how an Ottoman liberal criticized the policies of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the nationalists in Ankara during the Turkish War of Independence and the subsequent regime in the early years of the Turkish Republic. Using the term muhalefet [opposition], Philliou focuses on the transition of Karay from a dissident figure into a discontent patriot. While doing this, Philliou skillfully draws the framework of Turkish modernity between 1908 and 1960.

Book Review: Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary, The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

A preface, eight chapters, notes, a bibliography, and an index are what constitute Barro and McCleary’s in-depth analysis of the “wealth” of religions. The book’s title is very attractive, and at the same time quite provocative, as politics, economics and religions are widely debated topics in most societies these days, but people remain reserved to tackle certain aspects, in particular the link between money, markets and religious beliefs and belonging. Bringing together the views of an economist, Barro, and a moral philosopher, McCleary, leads to an interesting approach to religion as different from a social construct, the main idea upon which reflecting and debating religion has been based upon for years, if not centuries.

Book Review: Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.

Learning from the Germans. Race and the Memory of Evil examines German efforts to atone for Nazi atrocities and identifies lessons on how the United States might come to terms with its legacy of slavery and racism. Divided into three parts (German lessons, Southern discomfort, and Setting things straight), the book brings together historical and philosophical analysis; interviews with politicians, activists, and contemporary witnesses in Germany and the United States; and Neiman’s own first-person observations as a white woman growing up in the South and a Jewish woman who has lived for almost three decades in Berlin.

Review Essay: The Beginnings of Civilization

What can contemporary social scientists learn from ancient history? Key features of modern civilization began in the fertile crescent of today’s Middle East many thousands of years ago. Thanks to geography and other factors, these innovations spread—east and west. Not just agriculture and engineering but monotheistic religion and alphabetic writing took root there. Parallels to or offshoots of Sumerian culture emerged in the Indus River, Persia, and Egypt. Their distinctive ways of life took shape, waxed, and then waned. Social scientists who try to keep up with a world in turmoil by listening to the BBC or reading Le Monde may be tempted to ask: “How did all this begin and where are we going?” The Singapore-based political analyst Parag Khanna answers: “Asia.” Civilization began in Western Asia and is now being shaped by “Asianization” of the planet. (See Khanna, The Future is Asian, 2019). Whether or not Khanna’s hypothesis about the future proves correct, the importance of Western Asia in global history is documented in the books Uruk and Mesopotamia.

The Abject in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, discusses hopelessness and desolation and shuns them at every turn. The speakers spurn it and despair at the desolate state of humankind and society. This paper aims to read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in light of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Jacques Lacan’s notion of jouissance. The main claim is that despite the apparent horror of desolation, the more the poem tries to repel desolation, the more it cannot help but repeatedly allude to it, as if unwillingly drawn to it, so that death and desolation are not the subject, nor are they the object, but rather the abject of the poem. The sections of the poem I feel are most relevant for such an analysis are “The Burial of the Dead” (lines 1-30) and “What the Thunder Said” (lines 322-375).