{"title":"Photography and the Oppressed: On Photographing the Palestinian Refugees","authors":"Issam Nassar","doi":"10.1163/22130624-00801005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22130624-00801005","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines photography of the Palestinian refugees by the staff photographers of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, unrwa. It attempts to find ways through which a reading of the reality of refugee life can be unearthed from the images that initially were intended to document the work of the aid agency rather than the lives of the refugees.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116034288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aesthetics and Materiality of Knowledge: (Un)sighted Archives of Migration","authors":"Cathrine Bublatzky","doi":"10.1163/22130624-00801001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22130624-00801001","url":null,"abstract":"Many private or artistic migratory archives remain unnoticed by the wider public or are endangered by loss, misuse or destruction by human or non-human agents, especially when institutional infrastructures are missing. If archives are considered to be dynamic, it is essential to ask how the aesthetics and materiality of knowledge, as they are stored in (un)sighted archives of migration, are to be investigated. How can we look at archives of migration in their performative sense when cultural memory implies dynamism and represents ‘an ongoing process of remembrance and forgetting’? Bringing together anthropologists, artists, photographers, historians and activists with and without migration experiences, the workshop ‘Aesthetics and Materiality of Knowledge – (Un)sighted Archives of Migration’ initiated a comparative and non-hierarchical exchange among experts on archives of migration as historical and aesthetic resources. This article explores the themes raised during these discussions and reflects on the variety of perspectives that emerged.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"11 10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115966825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Post-Soviet Heritages in the Making","authors":"G. Plets","doi":"10.18352/hcm.600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.600","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the growing interest in post-Soviet space (the countries formerly located in the Soviet Union or its sphere of influence) in the field of memory studies, researchers have only just begun to the study how ‘things and practices’ from the past are mobilized, institutionalized and repackaged in this particular part of the world. This special collection explores how heritage is being made in a highly diverse and multicultural space where Soviet modernist conceptions of culture and identity interact with local deeply rooted attitudes as well as post-Soviet economic and political challenges.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129858200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Measures of Modernity: The New Quantitative Metrics of Historical Change Over Time and Their Critical Interpretation","authors":"Jo Guldi","doi":"10.18352/hcm.589","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.589","url":null,"abstract":"What can digital methods tell us about modernity? This article reviews a series of recent traditional and quantitative attempts to define ‘modernity’ in the nineteenth century. Mass digitization allows scholars to track modernity through counts of words per year, the study of discourses (through topic modelling), and relative statistical expression over time (through divergence measurement). The results of this work confirm recent scholarship in social history that demonstrates the rising importance of meat, other food and water to national policy, as well as understudied debates on the history of fisheries. It also demonstrates that different parties in parliament had different relationships to futurity. A case study compares Liberal and Conservative party relationships to past and future through an overview of particular speakers’ lexicons. As a survey of methods, this article’s conclusion is that digital methods can demonstrate not only shifting values, but also require us to think about different relationships to chronology and periodization of individuals and ideas embedded in the past.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124399362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Forging the American Century: World War II and the Transformation of U.S. Internationalism","authors":"F. Mehring, J. V. D. Berk","doi":"10.18352/hcm.597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.597","url":null,"abstract":"This essay introduces the special issue on the forging of the ‘American Century’, which brings together American and European scholars to revisit the time between the entrance of the U.S. into World War II and the era of the European Reconstruction. Exploring the multivalent agents and forces involved in forging the American Century, the various articles bring into play national and transnational trajectories that inform politics, media and popular culture. Rather than adhering to a single theoretical approach, the articles offer a wide range of intercultural, theoretical and methodological perspectives.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121021526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment in Russia? Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment in Russia? Century","authors":"Natalie Bayer","doi":"10.18352/hcm.599","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.599","url":null,"abstract":"The article explores the themes of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment through the lens of Freemasonry, and, more specifically, Freemasons in Russia who wrote history. It tests the approaches of Masonic history writers against Berlin’s definitions of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Whilst a definitive break between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment seems attractive, the article advances a more nuanced picture of the plurality of religious and secular discourse in Russia. Instead of opposing the Enlightenment, many late eighteenth-century Masonic writers of history provided their own, alternative interpretative models of history as a way out of the perceived crisis between the mind and the soul.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124083385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"For the Nation and the World: Malcolm Cowley, the Making of American Literature and the Cultural Cold War","authors":"H. Bak","doi":"10.18352/hcm.596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.596","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay I examine the extent to which Malcolm Cowley’s mid-century efforts on behalf of ‘the making of American literature’ – as critic, editor, publisher’s advisor and literary gatekeeper – dovetailed with the aims of U.S. cultural diplomacy and (wittingly or unwittingly) played a part in the ‘cultural Cold War’. I analyze in particular ‘American Books Abroad’, Cowley’s concluding chapter to Literary History of the United States (1948), and examine his role as guest editor and critic of the Autumn 1953 issue of Perspectives USA, a quarterly launched by James Laughlin of New Directions and funded by the Ford Foundation. The latter aimed to correct a widespread European perception of American culture as imperialist and steeped in mass entertainment, by demonstrating it was at least as highbrow and distinguished as the best of Europe – and an effective beacon of individual freedom against totalitarian communism.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124052003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Or, Is it Time to Reconsider the Great Divergence Debate?","authors":"J. Sooter","doi":"10.18352/hcm.598","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.598","url":null,"abstract":"Twenty years ago, Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000) reshaped debates over the historical causes of Europe’s rapid nineteenthcentury industrialization and economic growth. By comparing the Yangzi Delta region of China to Britain, Pomeranz asserted that Europe was not exceptionally dynamic before the nineteenth century and that its divergence from Asia owed to colonial exploitation of the Americas and ecological contingencies, namely abundant coal deposits. Some recent studies have sought to refute or refine Pomeranz’s thesis using the Indian subcontinent as an historical case study. This essay reviews three of these works and, in doing so, demonstrates current methodological limitations of this debate. Specifically, recent scholarship, although seeking to critique Pomeranz, employs his two-way comparative methodology, but in a manner that operates within a Eurocentric teleology and takes the European historical experience as normative. Instead, I propose that scholars inquire after the historical connections among societies’ plural-yet-connected historical trajectories.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129229842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Life Writing and European Identities","authors":"M. Huisman, M. Rensen","doi":"10.18352/hcm.595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.595","url":null,"abstract":"Since the turn of the millennium, life writing has been a burgeoning field, with identity formation as one of its key themes. In terms of identity ‘Europe’ is still relatively understudied, despite the fact that biographies and autobiographies have long been used to constitute or foster European identities, as is the case, for example, with respect to the so-called ‘founding fathers’ of the EU. Life writing bears at least as much potential to challenge such master narratives of Europe and make an important contribution to the ongoing debate about European identity. This special issue on life writing and European identity illustrates this, in articles ranging from Ai Weiwei’s art exhibition #SafePassage (2016) and the (contested) dichotomy of Western and Eastern European modernity in Vesna Goldsworthy’s memoir Chernobyl Strawberries (2005), to life in post-war Norway in Karl Ove Knausgard’s bestselling novel cycle Min Kamp (2009–2011) and the meta-biographical work of novelist A.S. Byatt.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"425 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126715662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Funding Bodies and Late Modern Science","authors":"N. Jacobs, P. Huistra","doi":"10.18352/hcm.584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.584","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the twentieth century, funding bodies have become a dominant force in scientific practice, influencing the success of certain types of research as well as certain types of researchers. As a late modern institution, they are part of a process of rationalization and planning in science. At the same time, however, funding bodies draw upon resources such as trust and familiarity that are usually identified as premodern.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123908992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}