The civil rights and black power movements expanded popular awareness of the history and culture of African Americans. But, as Stephen Hall observes, African American authors, intellectuals, ...ministers, and abolitionists had been writing the history of the black experience since the 1800s. With this book, Hall recaptures and reconstructs a rich but largely overlooked tradition of historical writing by African Americans.Hall charts the origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and maturation of African American historical writing from the period of the Early Republic to the twentieth-century professionalization of the larger field of historical study. He demonstrates how these works borrowed from and engaged with ideological and intellectual constructs from mainstream intellectual movements including the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. Hall also explores the creation of discursive spaces that simultaneously reinforced and offered counternarratives to more mainstream historical discourse. He sheds fresh light on the influence of the African diaspora on the development of historical study. In so doing, he provides a holistic portrait of African American history informed by developments within and outside the African American community.
As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early ...modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon known as the "suffering scholar" reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon illustrated by the popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres, first published in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor and physical disorder was embraced with particular vigor there, as was the tendency to imbue intellectuals with an aura of otherness and detachment from the world. Intellectuals and artists were portrayed as peculiarly susceptible to altered states of health as well as psyche—the combination of mental intensity and somatic frailty proved both the privileges and the perils of knowledge-seeking and creative endeavor.In Suffering Scholars, Anne C. Vila focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around great intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme de Staël, responded to the "suffering scholar" syndrome and helped to shape it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced the cultural perceptions of iconic personae such as the philosophe, the solitary genius, and the learned lady. By showing how crucial the so-called suffering scholar was to debates about the mind-body relation as well as to sex and sensibility, Vila sheds light on the consequences book-learning was thought to have on both the individual body and the body politic, not only in the eighteenth century but also into the decades following the Revolution.
How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the ...essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking.Consuming Pleasuresreveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate. Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
In memoriam: L. H. M. Ling
International feminist journal of politics,
10/2/2018, Letnik:
20, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Just as we were putting this issue to press, the news that L. H. M. Ling – Lily – has passed came through. “Impossible to think of Lily not here” – one of the many thoughts shared about Lily soon ...after the devastating news. It is hard to write this – not wanting the news to be true, and not knowing how to put into words something that feels right to share of her brilliant career, her personality, and her creative gifts. One thing will be easy – remembering Lily and keeping her in our hearts and minds: “a kind and compassionate soul in addition to all her good work,” “she called out racism and sexism in so many places, laughed so heartily and was so generous in spirt.”
At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government enlisted the aid of a select group of psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists to blueprint enemy behavior. Not only did these ...academics bring sophisticated concepts to what became a project of demonizing communist societies, but they influenced decision-making in the map rooms, prison camps, and battlefields of the Korean War and in Vietnam. With verve and insight, Ron Robin tells the intriguing story of the rise of behavioral scientists in government and how their potentially dangerous, "American" assumptions about human behavior would shape U.S. views of domestic disturbances and insurgencies in Third World countries for decades to come. Based at government-funded think tanks, the experts devised provocative solutions for key Cold War dilemmas, including psychological warfare projects, negotiation strategies during the Korean armistice, and morale studies in the Vietnam era. Robin examines factors that shaped the scientists’ thinking and explores their psycho-cultural and rational choice explanations for enemy behavior. He reveals how the academics’ intolerance for complexity ultimately reduced the nation’s adversaries to borderline psychotics, ignored revolutionary social shifts in post-World War II Asia, and promoted the notion of a maniacal threat facing the United States.
Remembering Jayne Werner Shepherd, Robert
Critical Asian studies,
06/2018, Letnik:
50, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Jayne Werner, one of the leading experts of her generation on the contemporary politics of Vietnam, passed away in New York City on February 1, 2018. Jayne was a co-editor of the Bulletin of ...Concerned Asian Scholars (BCAS) from 1976 until 1980, a member of the BCAS and Critical Asian Studies editorial boards from 1976 until her death, and a regular contributor of articles and reviews to BCAS.
In recent years the work of Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) has been deeply reexamined, which has led researchers to explore this intellectual legacy from new angles. In order to contribute to this ...debate, in this article I will analyze the way in which Freyre incorporates South Brazil in his wider interpretation of the Brazilian culture, at the same time that he develops a dialogue with intellectuals from the South of Brazil. I understand that this double movement is part of Freyre's intellectual project of valorizing the province, articulating the idea of a region with that of national unity, with a Portuguese and Catholic cultural base.
With a Foreword by Vijay Prashad and an Afterword by Gary Okihiro
How might we understand yellowface performances by African Americans in 1930s swing adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado ..., Paul Robeson's support of Asian and Asian American struggles, or the absorption of hip hop by Asian American youth culture?
AfroAsian Encounters is the first anthology to look at the mutual influence of and relationships between members of the African and Asian diasporas. While these two groups have often been thought of as occupying incommensurate, if not opposing, cultural and political positions, scholars from history, literature, media, and the visual arts here trace their interconnections and interactions, as well as the tensions between the two groups that sometimes arise. AfroAsian Encounters probes beyond popular culture to trace the historical lineage of these coalitions from the late nineteenth century to the present.
A foreword by Vijay Prashad sets the volume in the context of the Bandung conference half a century ago, and an afterword by Gary Okihiro charts the contours of a “Black Pacific.” From the history of Japanese jazz composers to the current popularity of black/Asian “buddy films” like Rush Hour , AfroAsian Encounters is a groundbreaking intervention into studies of race and ethnicity and a crucial look at the shifting meaning of race in the twenty-first century.
Intellectuals and their Publics Fleck, Christian; Hess, Andreas
2009, 20160523, 2008, 2009-04-01, 2016-05-23, 2016-05-31, 20090101
eBook
How do intellectuals engage with and affect their publics? What is the role of the public intellectual in the new age of political uncertainties? What challenges face female intellectuals and those ...speaking from an ethnic, national or class position? This exciting collection responds to these questions by offering a broad-ranging account of the changing role of intellectuals in public life. The volume opens with provocative essays on the idea and role of the public intellectual from Alexander, Evans and Zulaika. Chapters from Rabinbach on intellectuals' responses to totalitarianism, Outhwaite on what it means to be a European intellectual, and Auer's discussion of the dissident intellectual in the collapse of communism lead onto vigorous debate of earlier points discussed through specific intellectual case studies from Tocqueville to Hayek. Intellectuals and their Publics will attract a broad readership interested in the role of the intellectual, with particular appeal for sociologists, political theorists and historians of ideas.
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