Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan [Toc], Marc Redfield

Philosophy & Theory

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronunce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities, and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context …

Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, And The Post-Sovereign State [Toc], Gareth Williams

Literature

This book proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It does this in in order to make a case for “infrapolitics” as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. In Infrapolitical Passages the politics of contemporary global capital is a race to the bottom of reason itself, extended in the wake of the subordination of all forms of living to the economized relation between means and ends. It is this relation which, thanks …

Arvo Pärt: Sounding The Sacred [Toc], Peter Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt, Robert Saler

Religion

Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology (analyzing Pärt’s signature “tintinnabuli” method), cultural and media studies (Pärt’s audience is uncannily broad within and beyond the contemporary classical world) and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality (Pärt is primarily a composer of sacred music). For the most part, this work is centered around the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In …

Museum Exhibits Or Ill-Gotten Gains: A Legal And Philosophical Look At Cultural Property Law, Anthony E. Gambino

Fordham Undergraduate Law Review

The foundation of cultural property laws was laid at the Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. The convention, which usually revolved around the discussions on former laws of warfare, had to switch gears to respond to the Nazi’s new tactic of intentionally stealing or destroying cultural property as a means to demoralize the enemy. The convention’s focus was inclusivity, which defined cultural property as any “movable or immovable property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people.”

However, that overly simplistic definition that intended to serve as a source of …

Reading Plague Images: Visual Literacy In The History Classroom, Katherina Fostano

Developing Pedagogy Graduate Student Showcase

In 2016 Peter Felten, Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching and Learning at Elon University, wrote, “Our students live in a highly visual world, where images are fundamental in shaping their understandings of history before they ever enter our classrooms.” This observation prompted me to create a series of exercises that introduce students to general visual literacy skills in the History classroom. These exercises aim to help students use visual sources to make evidence-based interpretations of the past with rigor and efficacy. In this presentation, I focused on images of past plagues since the recent proliferation of plague-related …

Literary Response To Plague, Mark Host

Developing Pedagogy Graduate Student Showcase

This is a unit with a series of assignments that has been conceptualized as a drop-in that can be included in a variety of classes such as History/Western Civilization, English, Humanities, etc. and uses The Decameron to illustrate how react to the trials of disease through artistic expression. The target students would be advanced high school students or freshman-level college students. The assignments progress to higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, starting from asking the students to simply answer reading comprehension questions about the introduction to asking students to develop their own imitative stories in the vein of The Decameron and …

Teaching The Black Death During Covid-19, Rachel Podd

Developing Pedagogy Graduate Student Showcase

On the 13th of November 2020, the Renaissance Society of America, in conjunction with Fordham University, hosted on a symposium, “Plagues, Pandemics, and Outbreaks of Disease in History”, including a series of presentations focused on pedagogical strategies related to the topic of disease in Early Modern History. As part of this pedagogy roundtable, Rachel Podd developed a variety of materials suitable for educators in secondary or higher education; these materials use the current pandemic, COVID-19, as a teaching tool and analytical lens for the study of historical pandemics and, more specifically, of the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Conceived …

Loving,Julia, Mark Naison

Oral Histories

Julia Loving, Summary of Interview with the Bronx African-American History Project

October 14th, 2020

Dr. Mark Naison and Alison Rini

Summarized by Amy Rini August, 2023

Bronx born public school librarian and high school educator Julia Loving’s parents were from Nelson County, Virginia. She has two older brothers, Jesse and Mark. Her grandparents were the only black store owners in 1920s Roseland, Virginia. In 1960, they moved up to New York City because their parents did not want their children to stay South in the height of Jim Crow. They met while going to colored schools and Baptist and Pentecostal …

Like A Lake, Carol Mavor

Sociology

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History at the University of Manchester. Her most recent books are Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale, Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, and Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil and Hiroshima mon amour.

In Search Of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations [Toc], John D. Caputo

Religion

This sparkling collection of essays invites readers to join a seasoned scholar on his journey to catch “radical theology" in action, both in the church and our culture at large.

Capturing a career’s worth of thought and erudition, this rich volume treats readers to creative thought, careful argumentation, and sophisticated analysis transmitted through the lucid, accessible prose that has earned the author a wide readership of academics and non-academics alike. In tackling “radical theology,” John D. Caputo has in mind the deeper stream that courses its way through various historical and confessional theologies, upon which these theologies draw even while …

No Innocence Here: How Irish, Jewish And Italian New Yorkers Benefited From Their Whiteness In Post-World War Ii Nyc, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

No Innocence Here: How Irish, Jewish And Italian New Yorkers Benefited From Their Whiteness In Post-World War Ii Nyc, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

Inventing America's First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism In The Antebellum West, Luke Ritter

History

Why have Americans expressed concern about immigration at some times but not at others? In pursuit of an answer, this book examines America’s first nativist movement, which responded to the rapid influx of 4.2 million immigrants between 1840 and 1860 and culminated in the dramatic rise of the National American Party. As previous studies have focused on the coasts, historians have not yet completely explained why westerners joined the ranks of the National American, or “Know Nothing,” Party or why the nation’s bloodiest anti-immigrant riots erupted in western cities—namely Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. In focusing on the antebellum …

Study Guide For Scenery, José Felipe Alvergue

Discussion Questions & Study Guides

Discussion topics, questions, and an outline for classroom use.

Teaching Guide For My Daily Actions, Or The Meteorites, S. Brook Corfman

Discussion Questions & Study Guides

Discussion Questions, Prose Poem Writing Exercises, Resources Questions for Discussion

Merleau-Ponty's Poetic Of The World: Philosophy And Literature [Table Of Contents], Galen A. Johnson, Emmanuel De Saint Aubert, Mauro Carbone

Philosophy & Theory

Merleau-Ponty’s Poets and Poetics offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Thus also arise the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation …

In The Wake Of Medea: Neoclassical Theater And The Arts Of Destruction [Table Of Contents], Juliette Cherbuliez

Literature

In the Wake of Medea examines the violence of seventeenth-century French political dramas. French tragedy usually appears as a passionless, cerebral genre that refused all forms of violence. In the Wake explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence persisted. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, can serve as a paradigm for this violence. Paradigmatic also of the refugee who is welcomed yet feared, who confirms our concept of the social while threatening its integrity, Medea’s presence is this book’s organizing principle. An alternative …

Carolyn Bowman, Mark Naison

Oral Histories

Interviewees: Carolyn Bowman

Interviewers: Mark Naison, Avery Russell, Diana Joseph, Saudah Muhammad

Date:August 2020

Transcriber: Kate Caperan

Soror Carolyn Bowman was initiated on the first line of the Eta Omega Omega Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in 1966. Bowman was born and raised in Harlem, Manhattan. After graduating from Julia Richmond High School, Bowman attended the City College of New York (CCNY) for her undergraduate years, and the Rabinowitz School of Social Work at Hunter College from which she received a Master’s Degree in 1964. She then briefly worked at the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service in Foster …

Everette Brown, Jacqueline, Mark Naison

Oral Histories

Interviewees: Jacqueline Everette Brown

Interviewers: Mark Naison

Date: August 2020

Summarized by Trystan Edwards

Jacqueline Everette Brown was born in the Bedstuy community of Brooklyn, New York. She fondly recollects her childhood as one of three girls in her family. Her mother and father migrated to New York from Georgia during the great migration in the late thirties. Brown and her family moved back to Georgia in the early 1950’s. It is during this time that she faced more overt racism, evidenced by her having to ride in the back of the bus. Nevertheless, Brown and her family quickly adjusted. …

Clement, Irma, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Interviewee: Irma Clement

Interviewers: Mark Naison,Lionel Spencer and Donna Joseph, and Saudah Muhammad

Transcribed by Amy Rini, 10-17-22, revised 3.23

Ms. Irma Clement is the oldest member of Eta Omega Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., ®and has been a member of the Sorority for over seventy-five years. She was born 1920 in Joliet, Illinois and grew up in Alcoa Tennessee.

Ms. Clement attended segregated schools and noted that the “all black” teachers inspired her and sparked a fire of determination to continue her education beyond the poverty and limitations of the circumstances. She graduated from high school …

Noir Affect [Table Of Contents], Christopher Breu, Elizabeth A. Hatmaker

Literature

Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir as defined by negative affect. This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time period (the mid-twentieth century) or national tradition (the U.S.). Instead the essays in Noir Affect trace noir’s negativity as it manifests in different national contexts (from the U.S. to Mexico, France and Japan) manifests in a range of different media (films, novels, video games, and manga). The forms of affect associated with noir are resolutely negative: these are narratives centered …

Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies In Nineteenth-Century America [Table Of Contents], Jason Berger

Literature

Sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to an end—or, at least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens returns to the antebellum United States in order to intervene in a wide field of responses to our present economic and existential precarity. In this incisive study, Berger challenges a shaken but still standing scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, the book uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Xenocitizens glimpses …

Ood For The Ghosts: Reading Ruin’S Being With The Dead With Nietzsche, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

A focus on roots, localizations, usurpations, and obliterations together with commemoration and different fields of scholarly research, along with a thematic focus on Homer’s Nykia, permit Hans Ruin to revisit the foundations of history in Being with the Dead. Ruin draws on cultural sociology, including the work of Alfred Schütz, as well as Heideggerian historicity and the dead of the distant past, including archaeology and ethnography, paleography and physical anthropology. Ruin also engages Michel de Certeau’s Writing of History and its focus on the other in a necropolitical account tracked through interdisciplinary fields. In my reading I supplement Ruin’s critical …

Dreaming Of New Realities In Fatima Mernissi's Dreams Of Trespass, A Harem Girlhood, Abigail Grace Lee

Senior Theses

This thesis aims to analyze and place Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass, Tales of a Harem Girlhood, within the broader scholarship of feminist thought in the Muslim-Arab world and the global understanding of gender dynamics. As one of the most prolific and magnetic scholars, authors and feminists, Fatima Mernissi’s books, papers and stories are published around the globe. However, her personal semi-autobiography, Dreams of Trespass and the contradictory themes it presents has largely escaped in depth analysis by feminist scholars of the Muslim-Arab world. After establishing comprehensive backgrounds of different previous Muslim-Arab feminist methodologies used to analyze Mernissi’s works, the …

Textures Of The Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein [Table Of Contents], Veena Das

Philosophy & Theory

Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question – how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, does …

A Is For Asylum Seeker / A De Asilo [Toc], Rachel Ida Buff, Alejandra Oliva

Sociology

A clear and concise A to Z of keywords that echo our current human rights crisis

As millions are forced to leave their nations of origin due to political, economic, and environmental peril, rising racism and xenophobia has led to increasingly harsh policies. A mass-mediated political circus obscures both histories of migration and longstanding definitions of words for people on the move, fomenting widespread linguistic confusion. Under this circus tent, there is no regard for history, legal advocacy, or jurisprudence. Yet in a world where the differences between “undocumented migrant” and “asylum seeker” can mean life or death, words have …

Circling The Elephant: A Comparative Theology Of Religious Diversity [Table Of Contents], John J. Thatamanil

Religion

Christian theologians have for some decades affirmed that they have no monopoly on encounter with God or ultimate reality; other religions also have access to religious truth and transformation. If so, the time has come for Christians not just to learn about but also from their religious neighbors. Circling the Elephant affirms that the best way to move toward the mystery of divinity is to move toward the mystery of the neighbor.

In this book, Thatamanil employs the ancient Indian allegory of the elephant and blindfolded men to argue for the integration of three, often-separated theological projects: comparative theology, constructive …

At Wit's End: The Deadly Discourse On The Jewish Joke [Table Of Contents], Louis Kaplan

Sociology

Scholarly and thought-provoking work that places Jewish humor at the center of a discourse about Jewish and German relations through most of the 20th century

At Wit’s End explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically-charged backdrop of anti-Semitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust.

The first in-depth study to explore the Jewish joke as a crucial rhetorical figure in larger cultural debates in Germany, author Louis Kaplan presents …

Living With Tiny Aliens: The Image Of God For The Anthropocene [Table Of Contents], Adam Pryor

Religion

Astrobiology is changing how we understand meaningful human existence. As astrobiologically aware human beings, we must confront our deepened anxiety arising in the face of our own contingency—realizing how deeply tethered we are to the moments this pale blue dot exists in the universe. At the same time, our astrobiological awareness is opening a horizon to the exciting possibility of understanding our humanity in relation not only to a planet burgeoning with life, but a cosmos pregnant with living-possibilities.

Touching upon both these issues, this work provides an approach to astrobiological humanities: helping figure expressive modes by which human beings …

Urban Formalism: The Work Of City Reading [Table Of Contents], David Faflik

Sociology

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at …