{"title":"Seven Aspects in Search of a Narrative: A Review of The West: A New History by Anthony Grafton and David Bell","authors":"M. Kimmage","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9644569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9644569","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Michael Kimmage reviews a textbook recently published by Anthony Grafton and David Bell, The West: A New History, identifying this book as a splendidly researched and written contribution both to the history of Europe and to ongoing debates about the scope, meaning, and historiographical salience of the West. This review isolates seven features of Western history from The West's narrative and analysis: a style of learning pioneered in ancient Greece; the importance of cities; an alternating series of political forms, including monarchy, democracy, republic, and empire; a tendency toward violence; an emphasis on constitutions; an attraction to trade, commerce, and technological innovation; and a long attachment to the institution of slavery. This review concludes by exploring the relationship between the “core” and the “periphery” of the West, which is to say the place of Turkey, Russia, and the United States, within the narrative that Grafton and Bell so skillfully develop in The West.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42130477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revenant of the Future","authors":"D. Lloyd","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9644604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9644604","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This review of Seamus Deane's posthumously published volume of essays, Small World: Ireland, 1798–2018, is also a preliminary effort to assess the career and intellectual importance of a major Irish scholar, critic, and public intellectual. While the essays gathered in Small World focus on Deane's lifelong contributions, critical and polemical, to the analysis of Irish culture and the Troubles (1969–98), they reveal Deane to have been a thoroughly cosmopolitan intellectual whose work on Ireland and colonialism is of global import.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49588315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Minneapolis, Prince, and the Minneapolis Sound","authors":"R. Kay","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9644576","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9644576","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Prince was an artist who challenged many conventional notions of race, sexuality, and music. His music, characterized as the Minneapolis Sound, is a continuation and extension of America's indigenous music, the blues. This article is an explanation of the designation “Minneapolis Sound.” The first part establishes the Minneapolis milieu, specifically that of the black neighborhoods, and how it formed Prince and his cohort, such as James “Jimmy Jam” Harris Jr., Terry Lewis, André Cymone, Morris Day, and others. The second part is a close analysis of Prince's music and its sonic effects and how Prince engages and extends the blues idiom.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46331716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Always Thinking in Motion: An Interview with Anthony Bogues","authors":"R. Judy","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9644541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9644541","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This interview with Anthony Bogues was conducted over two days in March 2021 as part of a larger project initiated by Paul Bové, editor of boundary 2, to constitute an archive, for the historical record, of the intellectual formation of members of the boundary 2 Editorial Collective. The idea of that project was somewhat along the lines of Count Gian Artico di Porcía's Enlightenment enterprise to solicit from Italy's preeminent scholars what he termed their “periautography”—what Leibniz, who most likely inspired Porcía through the mediation of Louis Bourguet and Abbé Conti, characterized as the history of their discoveries and the steps by which they have arrived at them—for the education of the young.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47139096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Experience of Peril in Secular Criticism","authors":"T. Zartaloudis","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9644562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9644562","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay offers a reading of Stathis Gourgouris's The Perils of the One (2019). The peril of the One is primarily, Zartaloudis suggests, its poverty of experience. The impoverishment of experience is the purpose of transcendental foundations of the One, which, in Western traditions, is presupposed through a binary schema of power whereby potency is exhausted in actuality. This binary of power corresponds historically to the Christian Trinitarian oikonomia that predates the transcendental foundationalism of sovereign power/law and secular government. Hence, the age-old discourses that have been produced over many centuries over heteronomy and/or autonomy, across the theological, philosophical, juridical, and political spectrum, revolve around the same false paradox of how to form order in the world from a transcendental vantage point, without being able, by definition, to unfold it in the world. Determined to separate the false paradox (the “world” according to the One) from the true paradox (the cosmological abyss) within which it unfolds, humanity is thought to be destined to an inevitable state of war as if by nature. Secular criticism (in the manner of Edward Said and Gourgouris) as a tradition of thought offers an alternative to the polemic between traditions that are structured according to a false paradox (a world as the world) attempting to erase the unmappable cosmos. Such criticism, it is proposed, could become ever more creative and inviting if it reached out across traditions to compose an impassioned poietic thread that is premised on the negation neither of traditions nor of the irreparable cosmological abyss that marks our species.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46429559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tolerance from Below: Unsettling the Sovereign Subject","authors":"D. Simpson","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9644590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9644590","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay takes issue with the common assumption, ably represented by Herbert Marcuse and Wendy Brown, that tolerance belongs only to the powerful and is deployed to prevent access to political redress on the part of vulnerable groups or persons. But tolerance can also be understood as an unstable concept that does not finally support a sustainable sovereignty among those claiming a position to extend it. Engaging with the work of Wendy Brown, Rainer Forst, and others, a case is made for adding an “endurance conception” of tolerance that restores the early sense of the term as specifying a capacity to bear degrees of pain and suffering. Examples from William Wordsworth and Adam Smith, and from contemporary South Africa and the United States, suggest that such an expanded conception can lead us to imagine political agency as thinkable for persons more usually described as passive and subordinate.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48221546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Song Time, the Time of Narratives, and the Changing Idea of Nation in Postindependence Cinema","authors":"Rochona Majumdar","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9615417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615417","url":null,"abstract":"What changes in our understanding of Indian films when we treat the song sequence as a separate medium situated both within and outside the film text? I argue for treating the song text as operating simultaneously on multiple levels, both within the film and in its afterlife. Through a close reading of select song sequences from both popular and art cinema, I demonstrate how they may be read as allegories of temporal sensibilities at odds with the temporality presented in the main narrative of the film. Songs condense a heterogeneous variety of pasts and possible futures into a singular experience of the present, doing so by way of multiple registers of affect. This work is found not only in popular film songs but also in those of Indian art films; the anxieties over a transition to modernity is common to both varieties of filmmaking in the post-independence moment.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43546706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Archaeology of a Medium: The (Agri)Cultural Techniques of a Paddy Film Farm","authors":"Weihong Bao","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9615389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615389","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores a critical dialogue between methods and conceptions of cultural techniques—the second wave of media archaeology—and a case in contemporary Chinese documentary. I examine filmmaker Mao Chenyu, who is also an organic farmer, a critical thinker and writer, and a film exhibitor. Mao provides an intriguing case of how ethnography, ecology, and cosmology intertwine; how media art can take the form of media activism by redefining its boundaries and exhibition space; and how media art can be rethought by replacing its usual focus on media as object with a focus on media as space, community, and social process. By engaging Mao's film practice and critical writings, I test the promise and limits of cultural techniques to reopen the question of culture and public sphere without privileging the a priori of technical operations as the programmability of society.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46231899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New Media, Neo-Media: The Brief Life of Socialist Television in Ghana","authors":"Jenny L. Blaylock","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9615459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615459","url":null,"abstract":"Television in Ghana was born at a radical time when Africans across the continent were boldly inventing systems of governance resistant to imperialism and racial inequality. Alongside the formation of the new state, the new medium was designed to help realize visions of Pan-Africanism and African socialism promoted by Kwame Nkrumah. With the February 24, 1966, coup d’état seven months after its first broadcast, Ghanaian socialist television ended. Based on archival research and interviews with Ghanaian television pioneers, in this essay I argue that this Afrofuturist segment of Ghana's media past provides a counternarrative to new media discourse from the colonial era that positioned Africa as the passive receiver of television. I show how transnational influences were actively adapted to theorize the new medium in opposition to racial capitalism and propose that media archaeologies attuned to Afrofuturism may reorient the field toward social and political justice in the present.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49087286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Documentary Imaginary of Brotherhood and Unity: Nonfiction Film in Yugoslavia, 1945–51","authors":"Joshua Malitsky","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9615431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615431","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how nonfiction film in postwar Yugoslavia (1945–51) expressed a fundamental ambivalence that negotiated a desire for and image of a unified nation-state (supranationalism) with that of one made up of multiple nations (nationalism). I argue that nonfiction film became a key vehicle for communicating the ideological principle of “brotherhood and unity” (“bratstvo i jedinstvo”), a slogan Yugoslav Communists used to articulate a solution to the challenges of a unified, multinational, and multiethnic Yugoslavia. This effort, I contend, emerged not simply through cinematic textuality but also through the social experiences people have with cinema: not just by seeing national bodies laboring and cooperating with other peoples but also by viewing them together in a presentational space, by experiencing a film program with overlapping and conflicting thematics, and by the industrial and institutional organization of nonfiction film itself. Mobilizing Peircean semiotics and Taylor's concept of the social imaginary, I argue that the documentary imagination of “brotherhood and unity” emerges from a combination of textual and extratextual factors, an interrelation of materiality and discursivity.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48548659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}