Modernity Disavowed

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Modernity Disavowed

Author : Sibylle Fischer
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822385503
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernity Disavowed by : Sibylle Fischer

Download or read book Modernity Disavowed written by Sibylle Fischer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernity Disavowed is a pathbreaking study of the cultural, political, and philosophical significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Revealing how the radical antislavery politics of this seminal event have been suppressed and ignored in historical and cultural records over the past two hundred years, Sibylle Fischer contends that revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal are central to the formation and understanding of Western modernity. She develops a powerful argument that the denial of revolutionary antislavery eventually became a crucial ingredient in a range of hegemonic thought, including Creole nationalism in the Caribbean and G. W. F. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Fischer draws on history, literary scholarship, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to examine a range of material, including Haitian political and legal documents and nineteenth-century Cuban and Dominican literature and art. She demonstrates that at a time when racial taxonomies were beginning to mutate into scientific racism and racist biology, the Haitian revolutionaries recognized the question of race as political. Yet, as the cultural records of neighboring Cuba and the Dominican Republic show, the story of the Haitian Revolution has been told as one outside politics and beyond human language, as a tale of barbarism and unspeakable violence. From the time of the revolution onward, the story has been confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, and confidential letters. Fischer maintains that without accounting for revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal, Western modernity—including its hierarchy of values, depoliticization of social goals having to do with racial differences, and privileging of claims of national sovereignty—cannot be fully understood.

Modernity Disavowed

Author : Sibylle Fischer
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822332909
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (329 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernity Disavowed by : Sibylle Fischer

Download or read book Modernity Disavowed written by Sibylle Fischer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA study of the ways that knowledge of the slave revolt in Haiti was denied/repressed/disavowed within the network of slave-owning states and plantation societies of the New World, and the effects and meaning of this disavowal./div

The Libertine Colony

Author : Doris L Garraway
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822386518
Total Pages : 431 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis The Libertine Colony by : Doris L Garraway

Download or read book The Libertine Colony written by Doris L Garraway and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-08 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting incisive original readings of French writing about the Caribbean from the inception of colonization in the 1640s until the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, Doris Garraway sheds new light on a significant chapter in French colonial history. At the same time, she makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the cultural contact, creolization, and social transformation that resulted in one of the most profitable yet brutal slave societies in history. Garraway’s readings highlight how French colonial writers characterized the Caribbean as a space of spiritual, social, and moral depravity. While tracing this critique in colonial accounts of Island Carib cultures, piracy, spirit beliefs, slavery, miscegenation, and incest, Garraway develops a theory of “the libertine colony.” She argues that desire and sexuality were fundamental to practices of domination, laws of exclusion, and constructions of race in the slave societies of the colonial French Caribbean. Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.

Liberalism Disavowed

Author : Chua Beng Huat
Publisher : NUS Press
ISBN 13 : 9814722502
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis Liberalism Disavowed by : Chua Beng Huat

Download or read book Liberalism Disavowed written by Chua Beng Huat and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Liberalism Disavowed, Chua Beng Huat examines the rejection of Western-style liberalism in Singapore and the way the People's Action Party has forged an independent non-Western ideology. This book explains the evolution of this communitarian ideology, with focus on three areas: public housing, multiracialism and state capitalism, each of which poses different challenges to liberal approaches. With the passing of the first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew and the end of the Cold War, the party is facing greater challenges from an educated populace that demands greater voice. This has led to liberalization of the cultural sphere, greater responsiveness and shifts in political rhetoric, but all without disrupting the continuing hegemony of the PAP in government.

European Modernity and Beyond

Author : Göran Therborn
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 9780803989351
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (893 download)

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Book Synopsis European Modernity and Beyond by : Göran Therborn

Download or read book European Modernity and Beyond written by Göran Therborn and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1995-03-06 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book one of Europe's foremost sociologists offers a profound and accessible overview of the trajectory of European societies, East and West, since the end of World War II. Combining theoretical depth with factual analysis, Göran Therborn addresses the questions that underpin an understanding of the nature of European modernity, including: To what extent is the period 1945-2000 producing fundamental change and what are the areas of continuity? Have the societies of Europe become more similar to others on the globe or more distinctively European? What are the prospects of Europe after decades of postwar change and the end of the Cold War? Issues covered include the division of paid and unpaid labour,

Tree of Liberty

Author : Doris Lorraine Garraway
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813926865
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis Tree of Liberty by : Doris Lorraine Garraway

Download or read book Tree of Liberty written by Doris Lorraine Garraway and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, thus bringing to an end the only successful slave revolution in history and transforming the colony of Saint-Domingue into the second independent state in the Western Hemisphere. The historical significance of the Haitian Revolution has been addressed by numerous scholars, but the importance of the Revolution as a cultural and political phenomenon has only begun to be explored. Although the path-breaking work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Sibylle Fischer has illustrated the profound silences surrounding the Haitian Revolution in Western historiography and in Caribbean cultural production in the aftermath of the Revolution, contributors to this volume argue that, while suppressed and disavowed in some quarters, the Haitian Revolution nonetheless had an enduring cultural and political impact, particularly on peoples and communities that have been marginalized in the historical record and absent from the discourses of Western historiography. Tree of Liberty interrogates the literary, historical, and political discourses that the Revolution produced and inspired across time and space and across national and linguistic boundaries. In so doing, it seeks to initiate a far-reaching discussion of the Revolution as a cultural and political phenomenon that shaped ideas about the Enlightenment, freedom, postcolonialism, and race in the modern Atlantic world. Contributors: A. James Arnold, University of Virginia * Chris Bongie, Queen's University * Paul Breslin, Northwestern University * Ada Ferrer, New York University * Doris L. Garraway, Northwestern University * E. Anthony Hurley, SUNY Stony Brook * Deborah Jenson, University of Wisconsin, Madison * Jean Jonassaint, Syracuse University * Valerie Kaussen, University of Missouri * Ifeoma C.K. Nwankwo, Vanderbilt University

Europe (in Theory)

Author : Roberto M. Dainotto
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822389622
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Europe (in Theory) by : Roberto M. Dainotto

Download or read book Europe (in Theory) written by Roberto M. Dainotto and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-09 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe (in Theory) is an innovative analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about Europe that continue to inform thinking about culture, politics, and identity today. Drawing on insights from subaltern and postcolonial studies, Roberto M. Dainotto deconstructs imperialism not from the so-called periphery but from within Europe itself. He proposes a genealogy of Eurocentrism that accounts for the way modern theories of Europe have marginalized the continent’s own southern region, portraying countries including Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal as irrational, corrupt, and clan-based in comparison to the rational, civic-minded nations of northern Europe. Dainotto argues that beginning with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (1748), Europe not only defined itself against an “Oriental” other but also against elements within its own borders: its South. He locates the roots of Eurocentrism in this disavowal; internalizing the other made it possible to understand and explain Europe without reference to anything beyond its boundaries. Dainotto synthesizes a vast array of literary, philosophical, and historical works by authors from different parts of Europe. He scrutinizes theories that came to dominate thinking about the continent, including Montesquieu’s invention of Europe’s north-south divide, Hegel’s “two Europes,” and Madame de Staël’s idea of opposing European literatures: a modern one from the North, and a pre-modern one from the South. At the same time, Dainotto brings to light counter-narratives written from Europe’s margins, such as the Spanish Jesuit Juan Andrés’s suggestion that the origins of modern European culture were eastern rather than northern and the Italian Orientalist Michele Amari’s assertion that the South was the cradle of a social democracy brought to Europe via Islam.

Re-centring the City

Author : Jonathan P. G. Bach
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781787354128
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (541 download)

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Book Synopsis Re-centring the City by : Jonathan P. G. Bach

Download or read book Re-centring the City written by Jonathan P. G. Bach and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of monumentality, verticality and centrality in the twenty-first century? Are palaces, skyscrapers and grand urban ensembles obsolete relics of twentieth-century modernity, inexorably giving way to a more humble and sustainable de-centred urban age? Or do the aesthetics and politics of pomp and grandiosity rather linger and even prosper in the cities of today and tomorrow?Re-Centring the City zooms in on these questions, taking as its point of departure the experience of Eurasian socialist cities, where twentieth-century high modernity arguably saw its most radical and furthest-reaching realisation. It frames the experience of global high modernity (and its unravelling) through the eyes of the socialist city, rather than the other way around: instead of explaining Warsaw or Moscow through the prism of Paris or New York, it refracts London, Mexico City and Chennai through the lens of Kyiv, Simferopol and the former Polish shtetls. This transdisciplinary volume re-centres the experiences of the 'Global East', and thereby our understanding of world urbanism, by shedding light on some of the still-extant (and often disavowed) forms of 'zombie' centrality, hierarchy and violence that pervade and shape our contemporary urban experience.

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

Author : Susan Buck-Morss
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN 13 : 0822973340
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History by : Susan Buck-Morss

Download or read book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History written by Susan Buck-Morss and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2009-02-22 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a “new humanism,” one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.

Universal Emancipation

Author : Nick Nesbitt
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Universal Emancipation by : Nick Nesbitt

Download or read book Universal Emancipation written by Nick Nesbitt and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Haitian Revolution was the first in a modern state to implement human rights universally and unconditionally. Going beyond the selective emancipation of white adult male property owners, the Haitian Revolution is of vital importance, the author argues, in thinking today about the urgent problems of social justice, human rights, imperialism, torture, and, above all, human freedom. He explores the invention of universal emancipation both in the context of the Age of Enlightenment (Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel) and in relation to certain key figures (Ranciere, Laclau, Habermas) and trends (such as the turn to ethics, human rights, and universalism) in contemporary political philosophy.

Facing Racial Revolution

Author : Jeremy D. Popkin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226675858
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (266 download)

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Book Synopsis Facing Racial Revolution by : Jeremy D. Popkin

Download or read book Facing Racial Revolution written by Jeremy D. Popkin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only truly successful slave uprising in the Atlantic world, the Haitian Revolution gave birth to the first independent black republic of the modern era. Inspired by the revolution that had recently roiled their French rulers, black slaves and people of mixed race alike rose up against their oppressors in a bloody insurrection that led to the burning of the colony’s largest city, a bitter struggle against Napoleon’s troops, and in 1804, the founding of a free nation. Numerous firsthand narratives of these events survived, but their invaluable insights into the period have long languished in obscurity—until now. In Facing Racial Revolution, Jeremy D. Popkin unearths these documents and presents excerpts from more than a dozen accounts written by white colonists trying to come to grips with a world that had suddenly disintegrated. These dramatic writings give us our most direct portrayal of the actions of the revolutionaries, vividly depicting encounters with the uprising’s leaders—Toussaint Louverture, Boukman, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines—as well as putting faces on many of the anonymous participants in this epochal moment. Popkin’s expert commentary on each selection provides the necessary background about the authors and the incidents they describe, while also addressing the complex question of the witnesses’ reliability and urging the reader to consider the implications of the narrators’ perspectives. Along with the American and French revolutions, the birth of Haiti helped shape the modern world. The powerful, moving, and sometimes troubling testimonies collected in Facing Racial Revolution significantly expand our understanding of this momentous event.

Wizards and Scientists

Author : Stephan Palmié
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822383640
Total Pages : 413 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Wizards and Scientists by : Stephan Palmié

Download or read book Wizards and Scientists written by Stephan Palmié and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-03-19 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmié offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them. Highlighting the ways that Afro-Cuban discourses serve as a means of moral analysis of social action, Palmié suggests that the supposedly irrational premises of Afro-Cuban religious traditions not only rival Western rationality in analytical acumen but are integrally linked to rationality itself. Afro-Cuban religion is as “modern” as nuclear thermodynamics, he claims, just as the Caribbean might be regarded as one of the world’s first truly “modern” locales: based on the appropriation and destruction of human bodies for profit, its plantation export economy anticipated the industrial revolution in the metropolis by more than a century. Working to prove that modernity is not just an aspect of the West, Palmié focuses on those whose physical abuse and intellectual denigration were the price paid for modernity’s achievement. All cultures influenced by the transcontinental Atlantic economy share a legacy of slave commerce. Nevertheless, local forms of moral imagination have developed distinctive yet interrelated responses to this violent past and the contradiction-ridden postcolonial present that can be analyzed as forms of historical and social analysis in their own right.

Genealogies of Political Modernity

Author : Antonio Cerella
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350079456
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Genealogies of Political Modernity by : Antonio Cerella

Download or read book Genealogies of Political Modernity written by Antonio Cerella and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is political modernity? And how much of its concepts and structures has changed or remained the same with the advent of the so-called globalization? What does it mean, from a political perspective, that we live in a postmodern era? This book discusses these issues in light of the key authors and texts of the continental philosophical tradition: from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben, from Thomas Hobbes to Michel Foucault. Looking at the roots of the current historical crisis that characterizes Western political regimes, this book gazes into the past in order to trace the possible development of our current global era, in which all the classical concepts and our symbolic resources seem to be called into question, leaving a vacuum of meaning for political action as much as for political theory.

Simon Bolivar

Author : Maureen G. Shanahan
Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 0813055970
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Simon Bolivar by : Maureen G. Shanahan

Download or read book Simon Bolivar written by Maureen G. Shanahan and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2016-07-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Latin America's most famous historical figures, Simón Bolívar has become a mythic symbol for many nations, empires, and revolutions, used to support wildly diverse--sometimes opposite--ideas. From colonial Cuba to Nazi-occupied France to Soviet Slovenia, the image of "El Libertador" has served a range of political and cultural purposes. Here, an array of international and interdisciplinary scholars shows how Bolívar has appeared over the last two centuries in paintings, fiction, poetry, music, film, festivals, dance traditions, city planning, and even reliquary adoration. Whether exalted, reimagined, or fragmented, Bolívar's body has taken on a range of different meanings to represent the politics and poetics of today's national bodies. Through critical approaches to diverse cultural Bolivarianisms, this collection demonstrates the capacity of the arts and humanities to challenge and reinvent hegemonic narratives and thus vital dimensions of democracy.

When Men Meet

Author : Henning Bech
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226040226
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis When Men Meet by : Henning Bech

Download or read book When Men Meet written by Henning Bech and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-03-15 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For sociologist Henning Bech, the image of the male homosexual has become emblematic of the modern urban condition, in which freedom and mobility contend with transience and superficiality, in which possibility, energy, and engagement vie with uncertainty and restlessness. In this powerful and frankly provocative critique, Bech skillfully examines the distinctive relationship between urban modernism and the gay experience, exploring in compelling fashion its growing ramifications for the cultural mainstream. Gay society has persevered, even flourished, in this highly charged urban environment, aestheticizing and sexualizing the spaces, both public and private, where men meet. With profound insight and honesty, Bech details this world, candidly reflecting on sex, friendship, love, and life as manifest in the homosexual form of existence. He convincingly demonstrates that, in the face of modern alienation, successful coping strategies developed by gay men are gradually being adopted by mainstream heterosexual society. These adaptations are often masked by what Bech calls an "absent homosexuality, " in which sublimated themes of homosexuality and masculine love surface, only to be disavowed in expressions of social anxiety. This "absent homosexuality" acts as a kind of cultural filter, allowing key traits of gay life to be absorbed by the mainstream, while shielding heterosexual males from their own homophobic anxieties. Ultimately, Bech foresees, a postmodern convergence of hetero- and homosexual forms of exisce emergent from this urban landscape and, with it, a new masculine synthesis. Certain to ignite immediate controversy, When Men Meet offers both a penetrating scholarly analysis of the modern homosexual condition and an unflinching cultural vision of the masculine in transition.

Conflicted Antiquities

Author : Elliott Colla
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822390398
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Conflicted Antiquities by : Elliott Colla

Download or read book Conflicted Antiquities written by Elliott Colla and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-11 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflicted Antiquities is a rich cultural history of European and Egyptian interest in ancient Egypt and its material culture, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth. Consulting the relevant Arabic archives, Elliott Colla demonstrates that the emergence of Egyptology—the study of ancient Egypt and its material legacy—was as consequential for modern Egyptians as it was for Europeans. The values and practices introduced by the new science of archaeology played a key role in the formation of a new colonial regime in Egypt. This fact was not lost on Egyptian nationalists, who challenged colonial archaeologists with the claim that they were the direct heirs of the Pharaohs, and therefore the rightful owners and administrators of ancient Egypt’s historical sites and artifacts. As this dispute developed, nationalists invented the political and expressive culture of “Pharaonism”—Egypt’s response to Europe’s Egyptomania. In the process, a significant body of modern, Pharaonist poetry, sculpture, architecture, and film was created by artists and authors who looked to the ancient past for inspiration. Colla draws on medieval and modern Arabic poetry, novels, and travel accounts; British and French travel writing; the history of archaeology; and the history of European and Egyptian museums and exhibits. The struggle over the ownership of Pharaonic Egypt did not simply pit Egyptian nationalists against European colonial administrators. Egyptian elites found arguments about the appreciation and preservation of ancient objects useful for exerting new forms of control over rural populations and for mobilizing new political parties. Finally, just as the political and expressive culture of Pharaonism proved critical to the formation of new concepts of nationalist identity, it also fueled Islamist opposition to the Egyptian state.

The Violence of Modernity

Author : Debarati Sanyal
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421429292
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis The Violence of Modernity by : Debarati Sanyal

Download or read book The Violence of Modernity written by Debarati Sanyal and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Violence of Modernity turns to Charles Baudelaire, one of the most canonical figures of literary modernism, in order to reclaim an aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Works of modern literature are commonly theorized as symptomatic responses to the trauma of history. In a climate that tends to privilege crisis over critique, Debarati Sanyal argues that it is urgent to rethink literary experience in terms that recall its contestatory potential. Examining Baudelaire's poems afresh, she shifts the focus of critical attention toward an account of modernism as an active engagement with violence, specifically the violence of history in nineteenth-century France. Sanyal analyzes a literary current that uses the traditional hallmarks of modernism—irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and formalism—to challenge the historical violence of modernity. Baudelaire and the committed ironists writing in his wake teach us how to read and resist the violence of history, and thereby to challenge the melancholy tenor of our contemporary "wound culture." In a series of provocative readings, Sanyal presents Baudelaire's poetry as an aesthetic form that contests historical violence through rhetorical strategies of complicity, counterviolence, and critique. The book develops a new account of Baudelaire's significance as a modernist by dislodging him both from his traditional status as a practitioner of "art for art's sake" and from his more recent incarnation as the poet of trauma. Following her extended analysis of Baudelaire's poetry, Sanyal in later chapters considers a number of authors influenced by his strategies—including Rachilde, Virginie Despentes, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre—to examine the relevance of their interventions for our current climate of trauma and terror. The result is a study that underscores how Baudelaire's legacy continues to energize literary engagements with the violence of modernity.