Sword,Priest and Conversion: On Religion and Apostasy in South Slav Literature in the Period of National Revival

Abstract

This article examines the works of four writers of Croatian, Slovene, Serbian and Bosniak literature in the period of National Revival, in their literary, historical and discursive contexts: Pre?ern’s Krst pri Savici, Ma?urani?’s Smrt Smail-age ?engi?a, Njego?’s Gorski vijenac and Ba?agi?’s Abdullah Pa?a. Three of the four authors were also statesmen, and all four are considered canonical national writers. There is a striking similarity between their otherwise different works, resulting from speeches by priests who either demand and justify conversion, or vehemently oppose it and call for vengeance. In all four works, the enemy is not a foreign conqueror, but an apostate who sides with the conqueror by accepting his faith. Although in all four works the values of the epic and heroic world are pronounced dead, epic action — a ’sword’ — is still very much alive. Though the central act of conversion is accompanied by religious symbolism which gives rise to the impression of a clash of religions, in all four works conversion does not have a religious meaning, it is purely political.     

Conversational Modernism: Talking Czech Men into Being Gentlemen by Way of The Gentleman, 1924–30

The article provides a profile of the Czech life-style magazine Gentleman (The Gentleman), published in Prague from 1924 to 1930. The gendered nature of the magazine is stressed and discursive mechanisms effective in the formation of modern masculinity are discussed. Issues of ‘democratic aristocratism’, male fashion, gender identity, but also traces of a local inflection (T. G. Masaryk as a modern man) are among the select points of attention. While some aspects of the magazine may appear instructional, the analysis draws attention to the fact that The Gentleman actually moves between the instructional and the represented, thus leaving ample space for the reader to negotiate his position on the map of masculine modernity. Other instances of media (e.g., the nineteenth-century Konversationslexikon) and authors (Karel ?apek, Milena Jesenská) are adduced to broaden the context and to explicate the meaning of ‘conversational modernity’, that is, a negotiated representation of modernity.     

‘What makes one an Israeli?’ Negotiating identities in everyday representations of ‘Israeliness’*

Abstract. This paper examines the construction of a sense of Israeli identity which is not deducible from the public political discourse. It analyses common verbal representations of ‘being an Israeli person’, namely, what people in contemporary Israeli culture repeatedly say about Israelis, and how they position themselves vis‐à‐vis the commonsensical agreements they exchange, assuming that the massive use of such clichés in certain contexts creates a discursive routine that has ‘a life of its own’, through which people constantly negotiate their self‐images and their sense of belonging. It investigates the ways these representations create solidarity or demarcation and how such current popular representations relate to canonical veteran images of Israeli identity, notably that of the pre‐state ‘Native Israeli’ (Sabra) archetype. The analysis is based on 295 anonymous open responses to the question ‘What makes one an Israeli?’ published weekly in the Weekend Supplement of Maariv, the second largest newspaper in Israel, between 1996 and 1998. The analysis has led to the following observations: (1) Instead of the most expected grand ideological (ethnic, national, religious, etc.) issues of conflict, the responses reveal a ‘pursuit of culturedness’, using an implied scale of mastering good manners and possessing a ‘genuine culture’ which form the dominant parameter of judging the ‘Israeli person’. (2) A tension between mainstream and marginalised groups is shaped by a ‘chase and flight’ dynamic of embracing and rejecting the mythological Sabra image (in asymmetry with these groups' assumed political stances), which image is believed to be a symbol of the once hegemonic veteran elite. (3) This tension paradoxically contributes to the persistence of the canonical image of the Sabra that is currently delegitimised by much intellectual discourse.     

The vague nouvelle and the Nouvelle Vague: The Critical Construction of le jeune cinéma français

One of the commonplaces in critical writing on the 1990s movement known as le jeune cinéma français is the idea that it constituted a new ‘New Wave’. At the same time, the critical reception of the 1990s and 1960s ‘new waves’ could not be more different, with le jeune cinéma français being seen invariably as aesthetically inferior to its 1960s ‘antecedent’. This article examines the two key discursive mechanisms used to link le jeune cinéma français to the Nouvelle Vague, those of political commitment and ‘auteur’ cinema. It is argued that the mechanisms used to construct le jeune cinéma français as a distinct cinematic category become increasingly divorced from the kinds of films actually being made and that it is this discursive disjuncture which is, in part, responsible for its negative critical reception.     

Demagoguery as Pathology: Interpreting European Politics Today

The End of Europe by James Kirchick and The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray evince many of the very same political and discursive pathologies which they successfully diagnose in European politics. Both authors have discovered that Europe’s current situation is as much a result of irresponsible public policies and mismanaged crises as of a decay in European political thinking, a decay manifested in Europe’s ever-more simplistic, anti-deliberative—in a word, demagogic—public discourse. And yet, Europeans of today find themselves in a social, political, and economic crisis in part because they lack the discursive means to recognize and deliberate on the very crisis they are in. The result is a damaging political state of affairs which makes escape from itself nearly impossible—a political pathology. Kirchick and Murray do a fine job of capturing the true character of this discourse in their books, yet they do so by unwittingly reproducing it themselves, thereby revealing the difficulties inherent in reforming a political culture from within.     

Enlightenment,Haskalah, and the State of Israel

ABSTRACT

This article charts the broad and transforming effects of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah on Zionism and on modern Israel’s government, judiciary, and political discourse. It traces this complex legacy using a semantic distinction between two Modern Hebrew terms for the Enlightenment, haskalah and ne’orut, that illustrates their importance in the political and discursive legacies of the State of Israel. The article then explores the recent populist and nationalist assaults against some of these legacies.     

Becoming-minoritarian in Paco Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones

Abstract

Marginalization is at the core of Paco Bezerra’s work. The dramatic themes explored in his plays are varied, ranging from molestation, feminism, ecoterrorism, and immigration to bullying and many others. However, on another level throughout his oeuvre, there is always another element that stems from the marginalization aspect embedded in the dramatic conflict: a far more insidious and entrenched rotten core that affects everything and everyone on stage. While most of his characters are clearly beleaguered on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or a combination of several biases that act unabashedly on the surface, there is also an unrelenting criticism toward a higher form of political oppression or authoritarianism that pervades each play. In this article, I examine Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones as enunciative acts of oppositional discursive strategy to show how the marginalization process, at the two levels sketched above, occurs. By analyzing the plays under Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minoritarian, minor literature and becoming-minoritarian, we can witness how marginalization functions to rupture the fragile order in Bezerra’s plays at both levels. Hereby we can see that the playwright has created works that belong to a minor language as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. Examining the move from the particular issue at hand, the dramatic motor, to some larger unspecified phenomena, suggests a potentially troubling forecast for Spanish society.     

A Picturesque Modernity in 1920s Peru and Argentina: Ruins,Cuzco and Americanism in the Photographic Reportages of Variedades and Plus Ultra

This essay focuses on a series of pictorial reportages on the city of Cuzco and the surrounding region published in the Peruvian illustrated magazine Variedades in 1924 and 1925. Looking at the interplay of the aesthetic and documentary value of photographs, I analyse how the reportages on Cuzco’s architecture and ruins contributed to the indigenista proposal of regional and national identity and how, in so doing, they articulated an idea of modernity which opposed the main narrative of Western modernization produced by the magazine. I argue that Variedades became the discursive place of an interplay between opposite ideas of modernity since it afforded its readers-viewers a dual, almost conflictive, experience. Moreover, I posit that the magazine ‘mediated’ the regional discourse for the Limeño readers through the discourses of tourism and the picturesque familiarizing them with those ‘unknown’ regions. By comparing the reportages with similar documents published in the same decade by the Argentine magazine Plus Ultra, I also show that this was not something exclusive to Peru, but rather part of a broader Americanist trend that was shaping the relationship between native tradition and modernization as well as giving form to a proposal for a ‘pan-American’ identity in the 1920s.     

Thomas Mann und Luther

At the center of Sophocles’ Antigone is a struggle to reconcile personal beliefs with the needs or dictates of society. At no time is such a struggle more relevant than in periods of war, so it is not surprising that new adaptations of Antigone cluster around periods of armed conflict, whether between nations or within a single nation itself. In Luis Rafael Sánchez’s The Passion of Antígona Pérez (1968)—the subject of this essay—the nation or territory in question is one not typically featured in Western anthologies of drama: Puerto Rico, in the troubled possession of the United States.     

One River,Two Ukraines? Yurii Andrukhovych’s Imagined Geography of East-Central Europe

This article discusses the role that the Dnipro River (formerly Dnieper River) plays in the discursive construction of Yurii Andrukhovych’s idea of East-Central Europe. In his essays ‘Like Fishes in Water’ (Yak ryby u vodi. 29 richkovykh pisen’, 2004) and ‘Atlas. Meditations’ (Atlas. Medytatsiyi, 2005), the author chooses to emphasize the Dnipro’s function as a border between two distinct regions of Ukraine. In his portrayal, the right bank (the western part of Ukraine) seems culturally traditional, whereas the left bank (the eastern part of Ukraine) appears to be uncultivated, proletarian, nomadic and generally an area of wilderness. The author concludes: ‘At least in the context involving this specific map the two Ukraines are divided’. Is this a hidden ideologization or a new mythologization of the Dnipro? Certainly, the conceptualization of the river transcends its mere physical dimensions and provides the landscape with a symbolic function. Andrukhovych’s essay volumes Disorientation on Location (Dezoriyentatsiya na mistsevosti, 1999), The Devil’s Hiding in the Cheese (Dyyavol khovayet’sya v syri, 2006) and The Lexicon of Intimate Cities (Leksykon intymnykh mist, 2016) provide additional insights into this imagined geography. The research presented in this article discusses Andrukhovych’s ideas with reference to the concept of ‘Two Ukraines’ by Mykola Riabchuk and ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ by Samuel Huntington. Central European discourse, post-colonial studies and geopoetical theory complement the discussion and enable its integration into a larger context.     

The fallen hero: masculinity,shame and farmer suicide in Australia

The drought-stricken Australian rural landscape, cultures of farming masculinity and an economy of value, moral worth and pride form a complex matrix of discourses that shape subjective dynamics that render suicide a possibility for distressed farmers. However, the centrality of a ‘mental health’ perspective and reified notions of ‘stoicism’ within this discursive field operate to exclude consideration of the ways in which cultural identity is linked to emotions. To illuminate and explore complex connections between subjectivity, moral worth and affect in relation to understanding farmer suicide, this article draws on theory and literature on agrarian discourses of masculine subjectivity and shame to analyze empirical data from interviews with farmers during times of environmental, social and economic crisis. The idealized notion of the farming man as ‘Aussie battler’ emerges from romantic agrarian mythology in which pride and self-worth are vested in traditional values of hard work, struggle and self-sacrifice. However, the structural context of agriculture, as it is shaped by the political economy of neoliberalism, threatens farm economic viability and is eroding the pride, self-worth and masculine identity of farmers. The article suggests that the notion of the ‘fallen hero’ captures a discursive shift of a masculinity ‘undone’, a regress from the powerful position of masculine subjectivity imbued with pride to one of shame that is of central importance to understanding how suicide emerges as a possibility for farmers.     

Geopolitical television at the (b)order: liminality,global politics,and world-building in The Bridge

This article interrogates the geopolitical content of the internationally popular television series Bron/Broen (‘The Bridge’) and its two subsequent adaptations. In my analysis of The Bridge as a global phenomenon, I make a threefold contribution to the literature of popular geopolitics and cultural geography. First, in a normative contribution intended to challenge mainstream assumptions regarding the banality of the medium of television, I situate TV-viewing within the discursive battlefield of global politics as an affective act of world-building, a phenomenon enabled by the emergence of a third phase of television (Television 3.0). Second, via a theoretical contribution, I conceive of Bridge-gazing as a form of quotidian geopolitical interaction, wherein the spectator maps their own emplacement in the world’s various (b)order regimes, while also engaging with the distant politics of the series’ narratives. And, third, in an empirical contribution, I provide a exegetic analysis of the three iterations of The Bridge by interrogating the three series’ geopolitical interventions into pressing issues associated with unfettered globalisation, the purported victory of neoliberalism and the waning of the nation-state.     

Migrations and militant research? Some brief considerations

Abstract

The first part of the essay raises some doubts about the possibility of understanding research on migrations as ‘militant research’. A brief analysis of the discourse where research work is confined allows to glimpse at the deferral of two moments, that of militancy and of research. In such deferral a temporal dimension is at stake: first, the researcher wanders in the world or ‘wanders through the texts’, then he/she lingers on for a while in order to produce a discourse. It is necessary to interrogate this deferred dimension, not to elude it hence running the risk of reproducing the classical philosophical gesture of placing the speaking (and thinking or researching) subject at a ‘theoretical distance’. In the second part of the essay, the deferral between militancy and research is developed with reference to the struggle of the mothers and the families of Tunisian migrants, who left towards Italy and Europe right after the Tunisian revolution and who are ‘missing’ in the Mediterranean. The stubbornness of Tunisian mothers' struggle, which interrupts the path of virtualization of their sons, is countered to the oscillating ontology that migration policies enact, oscillating between the being and the not-being there of persons, dealing with the physicality of people, produced as migrants and rendering the bodies not completely adhering to space and as fantoms. The essay closes with a few considerations on the topic of a politics of testimony and its risks.     

To justify a nation: Inter-war soviet nationalism

In 1972 an anonymous author wrote in the Soviet journal Veche: Why during the Fatherland War, when mortal danger hung over the country and when extraordinary strength of spirit was needed did “Soviet patriotism” prove insufficient, and it was necessary urgently to call to remembrance the Church, Aleksandr Nevskii, Peter I, and Suvorov that is princes, tsars and reactionary generals? Why were not the cult of the heroes of the civil war and the cult of the heroes of the class struggle not enough? ¹      

Do ‘in vitro children’ exist? The ‘ontological choreography’ between public debates and private experiences in Poland

ABSTRACT

Children who were born used IVF in Poland are subject of vivid discussion nowadays. In this article, we probe the ontology of the in vitro child: do in vitro children exist? If so, how and where? We analyse how an ‘IVF child’ is constructed through public discourses and private narratives. We explore media publications, as well as doctors’ and parents’ narratives concerning IVF children. A very strong voice in the debate has Catholic Church, which opposes medically assisted reproduction. Our main interest in this text are the answers of children and adults born using in vitro. Even young children recognize some focal points from the debate over assisted reproduction and refer to them. Their narratives show that they feel interpellated into existence by various discourses. In this manner, we argue, being an ‘in vitro child’ in Poland is a political status, not a biological one.     

National stereotypes and music

Music became a marker of national identity in nineteenth‐century Europe. Western art music consists of tonal systems that are universally intelligible, but certain rhythms and musical idioms have been associated with national styles. How, when, and why does a musical phrase or piece become national? What political and cultural circumstances contributed to the development of national styles and facilitated the emergence of resonant topographies? What was the relationship between music as cultural practice and nineteenth‐century national thought as discursive space? These questions are addressed with a particular focus on verbunkos, which came to be characteristic of Hungarian national style, and on the Rákóczy March which became famous thanks to Berlioz's Faust. This essay traces the complex process of cultural transfer through which these martial tunes of mixed ethnic origins have become emblematic of Hungarian music.     

Days of those made like me: retrospective pleasure,sexual knowledge,and C. P. Cavafy's homobiographics

Abstract

This article begins with a comparison between the anonymous Roman d'un inverti (1894/5) and Cavafy's poem ‘Να με?νει’, and then proceeds to read Cavafy's private notes and key erotic poems in the context of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses about non-normative sexuality. During that period, and in a discursive domain dominated by sexological case studies, the deviant sexual life story was published in order to titillate, check, control and medicalize. In Cavafy's texts we see, instead, a network of homosexual life stories proposed as a platform for the conceptualization of novel sexual, aesthetic and social technologies, as well as a new ethics of contact.     

Republic in early modern China: The cross-cultural dissemination of a political concept

ABSTRACT

The English term republic and the Chinese term Gonghe (共和, “joint harmony”; i.e., “republic” in modern Chinese) stem from different conceptual origins and carry different connotations. When they first encountered the term republic, the intellectuals of China and Japan could only understand it by drawing on the political knowledge of Chinese antiquity. But soon after, two different concepts corresponding to the term republic emerged in the form of Chinese characters within the Chinese and Japanese linguistic environments—minzhu (民主, “people's rule”) and gonghe, which gradually shed their ancient Chinese significations. After its coining as an early modern political concept in the Japanese language, the term gonghe sporadically filtered into the Chinese linguistic context during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1898–1902, the concept of gonghe rapidly gained popularity in China, primarily due to its introduction by Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929) and other figures, with a clearly demarcated line separating the term from its ancient Chinese significance. As the concept of gonghe spread in China, it became embroiled in the contemporary tide of political reform, both influencing and being influenced by this trend. In the first decade of the 20th century, two competing interpretations of the term gonghe appeared. The moderates, represented by Liang Qichao, maintained that the evolution of the political system had a natural order; that their contemporary China did not yet have the conditions to adopt a republican system; and that it was necessary to first improve the citizens’ character, and cultivate the habits of self-governance among the people. The radicals, represented by Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, 1866–1925), held that China should overleap a constitutional monarchy, overthrow the Manchu emperor through violent revolution, and directly establish a republican form of government. The views of the radical party won discursive power, but their discussions and deliberations on the implications of a republic were clearly inadequate. Following the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, a republican form of government was quickly established, but its functional results fell far short of people's expectations, causing the concept of a republic to be distrusted, criticized, and even shelved.     

Colonial emulation: sinophobia,ethnic stereotypes and imperial anxieties in late eighteenth-century economic thought

In 1799 Dirk van Hogendorp published a Report on the Current Conditions of Dutch Possessions in the East Indies, a document that has garned comparisons to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) for its condemnation of the Dutch East India Company and for its insistence on the importance of property rights to economic growth. The text is also an anti-Chinese diatribe, castigating the supposedly inveterate avarice of Java’s Chinese minority. Hogendorp’s advocacy of colonial reform and sinophobia intertwine in his use of the term ijver, then the standard Dutch translation of ‘emulation’, a keyword of eighteenth-century political economy. Read against the status of emulation in European thinking, Hogendorp’s employment of the ijver offers an opportunity to re-examine emulation’s fraught, ambivalent quality, which has been noted by scholars like Istvan Hont and Sophus Reinert concerned primarily with a division between benevolent domestic emulation and dangerous international emulation. The colonial sphere, neither wholly domestic nor wholly foreign, was a discursive site wherein the tensions of emulation were worked out in new ways.