Cultural Sitings – serie

A Stanford University Press classic.

A Stanford University Press classic.

A Stanford University Press classic.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the study of intellectual and cultural history was often denigrated for its alleged elitist and canonical nature. Today, the situation has changed dramatically. Enriched by the methods and insights of such neighboring areas of inquiry as social history, the history of mentalités, linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and art history, intellectual and cultural history is experiencing a renewed vitality. The far-ranging essays in this volume, by an internationally distinguished group of scholars, represent a generous sampling of these new studies.The book is in five parts: The Enlightenment and Its Heritages; Mind and Culture in the Victorian Middle Classes; European Cultural Modernism; Culture, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany; and Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis. Striking for its interdisciplinarity, the volume includes essays in political theory, historical philosophy, cultural criticism, theology, literature, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Among the topics are Thomas Hobbes's civil science, Enlightenment philosophies of history, ancien régime pornography, German modernist architecture, T. S. Eliot's social criticism, the history of cultural censorship in Germany, German-Jewish women during the Nazi persecution, and Freud's attitudes toward death and dying.The essays have been written in honor of Peter Gay, one of the most provocative and influential historians of the twentieth century and one of the leading American scholars of European thought and culture today; the essays reflect themes and issues running through his work. The contributors are W. F. Bynum, David Cannadine, Stefan Collini, Robert Darnton, Robert L. Dietle, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Judith Hughes, Martin Jay, Peter Jelavich, Marion A. Kaplan, Thomas A. Kohut, Peter Loewenberg, Mark S. Micale, Harry C. Payne, Quentin Skinner, John Toews, R. K. Webb, Dora B. Weiner, and Jay Winter.

Museums today are more than familiar cultural institutions and showplaces of accumulated objects; they are the sites of interaction between personal and collective identities, between memory and history. The essays in this volume consider museums from personal experience and historical study, and from the memories of museum visitors, curators, and scholars.Representing a variety of fields—history, anthropology, art history, and museum scholarship—the contributors discuss museums across disciplinary boundaries that have separated art museums from natural history museums or local history museums from national galleries. The essays range widely over time (from the Renaissance to the second half of the twentieth century), and place (China, Japan, the United States, and Germany), in exhibitions explored (photography, Native American history, and "Jurassic technology"), and institution (the Chinese Imperial Collection, Renaissance curiosity cabinets, and modern art museums).Memory operates thematically among the essays in diverse and provocative ways. The papers are organized according to three suggestive themes: experimental ways of theorizing and designing contemporary museums with an explicit interest in history and memory; discussions of personal encounters with historical exhibits; and the professional risks at stake for collectors and curators who shape the institutional presentation of history and memory.The contributors are Susan A. Crane, Wolfgang Ernst, Michael Fehr, Paula Findlen, Tamara Hamlish, Alexis Joachimides, Suzanne Marchand, Julia A. Thomas, and Diana Drake Wilson.

Are the conflicts that accompany the growth of postcolonial ethnic, cultural, and religious diasporas undermining the political culture of first-world nations? AlterNatives explains why the hope of a harmonious, fully consensual society is misguided. Ranu Samantrai argues that the proliferation of sources of dissent can hold liberal democratic nations accountable for their political promises. Eschewing the settlements between majority and minority groups proposed by liberal and communitarian theorists, she proposes a radicalization of democracy grounded in poststructuralist analysis of contingent individual and collective subjects.The black British women's movement of the 1980s (comprising women of African Caribbean and South Asian origin) is the occasion for this historical investigation of a national field of similitudes and differences. Through parliamentary papers and political history Samantrai charts the changing definition of Britain in the post-W.W.II period and tracks a new nationalization of disparate peoples into a narrowly territorial, homogeneous community of kin. In an innovative reading of nationality and immigration law she uncovers the gender anxieties that justified the legal racialization of British national identity.Black British feminism was born in response to the privileging of race as the marker of collective identity and the containment of gender as an internal and relatively insignificant communal matter. In that context the multiracial constituency and anti-communal politics of the movement exposed the instability of majority and minority communities and undermined the ambitions of would-be representatives. Samantrai examines newsletters, political pamphlets, memoirs, conference proceedings, scholarly essays, fiction, and poetry to demonstrate how the movement turned the identity discourse of British racial politics against its intended purposes. Dissensions within its own ranks prompted members to pursue political strategies that value heterogeneity and conflict as motivators of change. AlterNatives tests the efficacy of their strategies in case studies of seemingly intractable disagreements between cultural traditionalists, anti-racists, and feminists regarding the continuity of troubling but culturally significant gender practices.

Are the conflicts that accompany the growth of postcolonial ethnic, cultural, and religious diasporas undermining the political culture of first-world nations? AlterNatives explains why the hope of a harmonious, fully consensual society is misguided. Ranu Samantrai argues that the proliferation of sources of dissent can hold liberal democratic nations accountable for their political promises. Eschewing the settlements between majority and minority groups proposed by liberal and communitarian theorists, she proposes a radicalization of democracy grounded in poststructuralist analysis of contingent individual and collective subjects.The black British women's movement of the 1980s (comprising women of African Caribbean and South Asian origin) is the occasion for this historical investigation of a national field of similitudes and differences. Through parliamentary papers and political history Samantrai charts the changing definition of Britain in the post-W.W.II period and tracks a new nationalization of disparate peoples into a narrowly territorial, homogeneous community of kin. In an innovative reading of nationality and immigration law she uncovers the gender anxieties that justified the legal racialization of British national identity.Black British feminism was born in response to the privileging of race as the marker of collective identity and the containment of gender as an internal and relatively insignificant communal matter. In that context the multiracial constituency and anti-communal politics of the movement exposed the instability of majority and minority communities and undermined the ambitions of would-be representatives. Samantrai examines newsletters, political pamphlets, memoirs, conference proceedings, scholarly essays, fiction, and poetry to demonstrate how the movement turned the identity discourse of British racial politics against its intended purposes. Dissensions within its own ranks prompted members to pursue political strategies that value heterogeneity and conflict as motivators of change. AlterNatives tests the efficacy of their strategies in case studies of seemingly intractable disagreements between cultural traditionalists, anti-racists, and feminists regarding the continuity of troubling but culturally significant gender practices.

This vanguard collection of original and in-depth essays explores the intricate interplay of the aesthetic and psychological domains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers the reasons why a common Modernist project took shape when and in the circumstances that it did. These changes occurred precisely when the distinctively modern disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis established their "scientific" foundations and achieved the forms in which we largely know them today. This volume examines the dense web of connections joining the aesthetic and psychological realms in the modern era, charting historically the emergence of the ongoing modern discussion surrounding such issues as identity-formation, sexuality, and the unconscious. The contributors form a distinguished and diversified group of scholars, who write about a wide range of cultural fields, including philosophy, the novel and poetry, drama, dance, film and photography, as well as medicine, psychology, and the occult sciences.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the French naturalist Buffon contended that the New World was in fact geologically new—that it had recently emerged from the waters—and that dangerous miasmas had caused all organic life on the continents to degenerate. In the "dispute of the New World" many historians, naturalists, and moral philosophers from Europe and the Americas (including Thomas Jefferson) sought either to confirm or refute Buffon's views. This book maintains that the "dispute" was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the continent and its peoples?The author traces the cultural processes that led early-modern intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to question primary sources that had long been considered authoritative: Mesoamerican codices, early colonial Spanish chronicles, and travel accounts. In the process, he demonstrates how the writings of these critics led to the rise of the genre of conjectural history. The book also adds to the literature on nation formation by exploring the creation of specific identities in Spain and Spanish America by means of particular historical narratives and institutions. Finally, it demonstrates that colonial intellectuals went beyond mirroring or contesting European ideas and put forth daring and original critiques of European epistemologies that resulted in substantially new historiographical concepts.

This book tells the extraordinary story of a village of peasants and miners in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cuba who were slaves belonging to the king of Spain and whose local patroness was a miraculous image of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre. In reconstructing this history, the book reveals that in Cuba's eastern region, slavery to the King became a very ambiguous form of slavery that evolved into forms of freedom unprecedented in other colonial societies of the New World.The author studies the relations that developed between the Virgin, the King, and the royal slaves as the enslaved villagers imagined and negotiated social identity and freedom in this Caribbean frontier society. In the process, she examines several dimensions of the royal slaves' daily and imaginary lives. Drawing on a range of cultural, social, political, and economic sources, this book presents a multisided history of enslaved people as they remade colonial spaces and turned them into a new homeland in El Cobre. As they produced social memory and appropriated popular religious traditions centered on the Virgin of Charity, they reinvented their past and present as a new people within the structures and strictures of Spain's colonial world.

This vanguard collection of original and in-depth essays explores the intricate interplay of the aesthetic and psychological domains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers the reasons why a common Modernist project took shape when and in the circumstances that it did. These changes occurred precisely when the distinctively modern disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis established their "scientific" foundations and achieved the forms in which we largely know them today. This volume examines the dense web of connections joining the aesthetic and psychological realms in the modern era, charting historically the emergence of the ongoing modern discussion surrounding such issues as identity-formation, sexuality, and the unconscious. The contributors form a distinguished and diversified group of scholars, who write about a wide range of cultural fields, including philosophy, the novel and poetry, drama, dance, film and photography, as well as medicine, psychology, and the occult sciences.

Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly during the last fifteen years, the human need to amend immoral wrongs has been expressed in political discourse as a propensity to apologize for acts of past injustice. Can apology, by bringing closure to conflicts and by opening new possibilities for communication and mutual understanding, cultivate reconciliation and ameliorate the present? Taking Wrongs Seriously examines the increasingly potent role of apology as a social force. Contributors explore in a comparative and interdisciplinary framework the role and function—as well as the limitations—that apology has in promoting dialogue, tolerance, and cooperation between groups confronting one another over past injustices. Fourteen essays draw on a variety of disciplines—including history, international relations, transition studies, sociology, legal studies, psychology, and religion—to explore the real and symbolic transactions that lie at the core of apology. There is no similar introductory text on this subject that includes multiple disciplinary perspectives as well as such a wide geographical and historical spectrum of case studies.

Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly during the last fifteen years, the human need to amend immoral wrongs has been expressed in political discourse as a propensity to apologize for acts of past injustice. Can apology, by bringing closure to conflicts and by opening new possibilities for communication and mutual understanding, cultivate reconciliation and ameliorate the present? Taking Wrongs Seriously examines the increasingly potent role of apology as a social force. Contributors explore in a comparative and interdisciplinary framework the role and function—as well as the limitations—that apology has in promoting dialogue, tolerance, and cooperation between groups confronting one another over past injustices. Fourteen essays draw on a variety of disciplines—including history, international relations, transition studies, sociology, legal studies, psychology, and religion—to explore the real and symbolic transactions that lie at the core of apology. There is no similar introductory text on this subject that includes multiple disciplinary perspectives as well as such a wide geographical and historical spectrum of case studies.

This book is about the social history of the Arab Jews—Jews living in Arab countries—against the backdrop of Zionist nationalism. By using the term "Arab Jews" (rather than "Mizrahim," which literally means "Orientals") the book challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a dichotomy that renders the linking of Arabs and Jews in this way inconceivable. It also situates the study of the relationships between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews in the context of early colonial encounters between the Arab Jews and the European Zionist emissaries—prior to the establishment of the state of Israel and outside Palestine. It argues that these relationships were reproduced upon the arrival of the Arab Jews to Israel. The book also provides a new prism for understanding the intricate relationships between the Arab Jews and the Palestinian refugees of 1948, a link that is usually obscured or omitted by studies that are informed by Zionist historiography. Finally, the book uses the history of the Arab Jews to transcend the assumptions necessitated by the Zionist perspective, and to open the door for a perspective that sheds new light on the basic assumptions upon which Zionism was founded.