Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Princes, Patriarch, And The People: William Of Tyre And Popular Legitimacy In The People’S Crusade And The Principality Of Antioch, 1095-1143, Nicholas T. Thompson

The Purdue Historian

This paper will focus on popular legitimacy in regard to William of Tyre’s coverage of the People’s Crusade in the 1090s and the Principality of Antioch from 1130-1143. This paper involves a discussion of Peter the Hermit, Alice of Antioch, Ralph of Domfront, and Raymond of Antioch as depicted in A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea. In his discussion of these political figures, William reveals his understanding of popular legitimacy, namely what makes popular action acceptable and unacceptable. The analysis focuses on how William uses popular action to tailor legitimacy in accordance with his political narrative. This work …

Alexander Ramsey And The Ojibwe, Tyler Kliegl

The Purdue Historian

Alexander Ramsey had a long political career within state and national branches of the United States government. A lesser-known part of his actions in government were his interactions with the Ojibwe Native Americans. His personal actions led to the creation of multiple Ojibwe reservations, but in different Ojibwe bands, they chose to resist. Never in the same way and always at a disadvantage. The hope is to demonstrate how an individual may lead to U.S. policies involving Native Americans and how Native Americans were not passive in these decisions and found multiple routes in dealing with the United States government.

Medicinal Vibrations, Lauren E. Gardner

The Purdue Historian

In the course of the mid to late 20th and 21st centuries the term "vibrator" has been synonymous with sexual gratification and the female sex drive. However, its original usage is more in line with a therapeutic medical treatment administered and recommended by medical professionals. In this article the history of the vibrator discusses the roots of medicines views on the female body and the ways in which their ailments were treated, with medicine not fully understanding the female sexual gratification of clitoral stimulation until the 1920s. These previous decades are colored by ancient understandings of the female sex and …

The Ugliness Movement: Riot Grrrl's Use Of Ugliness As Feminist Subversion, Maylee Rollins

The Purdue Historian

In the 1990s, Riot Grrrl took the punk and feminist worlds by storm. It emphasized community and represented third-wave feminism in radical form. One particular example that represents the Riot Grrrl ideology well is ugliness. Throughout the movement, artists like Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna used their musical platform to show the world their view of femininity. This involved body writing and reclaiming words used to degrade women, as well as dressing up in controversial outfits dubbed as “kinderwhore.” The aims of these women in using ugliness in their music were to subvert sexism in the punk scene and bring …

A Sense Of Loss: The Effect Of Prisoner Camp Conditions On German Pows’ Masculinity During The First World War, Analucia Lugo

The Purdue Historian

During the First World War, almost a million German soldiers became prisoners of war (POW) and held captive in enemy camps. The moment of capture and arrest caused these men to experience debilitating emotions, including guilt and fear. Varied conditions at POW camps bolstered these responses and often determined prisoner health and morale throughout the war. This article examines how camps in Britain, France, and Russia treated German POWs, and how German nationalism affected these soldiers' senses of masculinity and patriotism during and after the war.

The Death Of Glasnost And Perestroika, Matthew B. Zechiel

The Purdue Historian

This paper covers the rise, fall, and ultimate destruction of the twin policies of Glasnost and Perestroika in Russia as they existed under the regimes of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. After ascending to the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to liberalize the USSR through his policies of Glasnost and Perestroika. While these policies were not always followed under Gorbachev, it is clear that they were relatively successful at creating a freer society and state. However, these policies began to whither under Yeltsin, as the state, particularly the office of President, …

Where To Test A Nuclear Bomb, Tyler Kliegl

The Purdue Historian

The United States detonated three underground nuclear bombs on a far-off Alaskan island called Amchitka in the 1960s and 70s. The goal is to understand what the motive of the United States in selecting Amchitka over the endless potential sites to test at were. What makes a place worthy in being tested on, or unworthy in being left alone. How does the United States deal with resistance from locals and other organizations, fighting to prevent their tests.

The American West And Nozick’S Theory Of Entitlements, Kaitlyn E. Price

The Purdue Historian

Customary law emphasizing the protection of private property rights rather than the authoritative assertion of the law characterized expansion into the American West from 1848-1895. The subsequent legal systems developed in a minarchistic manner that aligned with Robert Nozick’s “theory of entitlements,” leading to the adoption of a “night-watchman state.” This theory asserts that a society built upon customary law that focuses on the protection of individual rights will undoubtedly develop a protective body to safeguard these rights in pursuit of the third principle, the “rectification of justice.” Thus, the chaotic and often disorganized way the West’s extralegal and formal …

Design Students’ Perspectives On Safety Concerns When Designing Future Tourism Services, Minna Virkkula, Laura Hokkanen, Jonna Häkkilä

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference Sweden April 23, 2024

The safety of services is essential part of a company's social responsibility. In the tourism industry, ensuring the safety of services is crucial, but often overlooked in the design process. Incorporating safety aspects during the initial design phase can eliminate potential safety issues and improve quality of the services. By addressing safety concerns early on, unnecessary worries related to activities and services can be resolved. This paper examines the design perspective on safety in Lapland outdoor activities. Two studies were conducted with art and design students, including an online survey to identify safety concerns in various tourist scenarios, and a …

Clarice Lispector: From Brazil To The World, Earl Fitz

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Clarice Lispector: From Brazil to the World explains why the Brazilian master was so transformative of modern Brazilian literature and why she has become such a celebrity in the world literature arena. This book also shows why Lispector is not one writer, as many think, but many writers. By offering close readings of her novels, stories, and nonfiction pieces, Earl E. Fitz shows the diverse sides of her literary world. Chapters cover Lispector’s devotion to language and its connection to identity; her political engagement; and her humor, eroticism, and struggle with the concept of God. The last chapter seeks to …

From The Outside, Looking In: Reflections On The Complex Infrastructures Of African Art History, Joanna Gardner-Huggett

Artl@s Bulletin

This essay engages with the five articles featured in this issue from the perspective of a non-specialist. Each contribution considers challenges facing scholars of African arts when confronted with incomplete and not always reliable historical evidence. The author contends that given the escalating demands for the repatriation of African objects, all art historians— not only art historians focused on African arts—should better understand the important strategies proposed by contributors to this issue. These interventions encourage the development of a more critical audience for African arts and also model ethical research, a slow critical archival practice, and sustainable provenance and digital …

Art And Evidence In Totems Of Uganda (2014), Margaret Nagawa, Taga F. Nuwagaba

Artl@s Bulletin

In his painting and book project, Totems of Uganda: Buganda Edition (2014), Ugandan artist Taga Nuwagaba asks: What is the function of a totem? In Buganda, the historical kingdom in current-day Uganda, totems serve as unique identifiers for fifty-two distinct patrilineal descent groups designated as clans, or ebika in the Luganda language, forming the primary scheme of social and political organization. Yet, totems also serve as a conservation practice. In this 2022 interview, Nuwagaba discussed his art and the evidence he relies upon to create his images, demonstrating that identities and knowledges are complex.

Munna Uganda Taga Nuwagaba abuuza nti: …

You Cannot See It: Navigating Yorùbá Religious Artistic Materials, Stephen A. Fọlárànmí

Artl@s Bulletin

My research spanning two decades in Ọ̀yọ́ Palace generated series of questions about access to artistic materials in site-locational spaces, archives and private collections. I probe how scholars have navigated and negotiated these terrains, especially artworks created for religious functions. I explore alternatives to resolve field challenges and consider the effects of such hindrances in art historical research. Drawing on the concept of ọ̀gbẹ̀rì, anecdotes and personal scholarly experiences, I interrogate research access and propose approaches based on personal experience on the importance of Yoruba religion, and practice of initiation.

Iṣẹ́ ìwádì mi fún bíi ogún ọdún sẹ́yìn lórí ààfin …

Shaky Foundations: Cultural Classifications In Museum Collections Management Systems And The Endurance Of Colonial-Era Terminology, Carlee S. Forbes, Erica P. Jones

Artl@s Bulletin

This article uses two musical instruments with attached ancestral remains and labeled as “Asante” from the Fowler Museum at UCLA to consider effects of style-based cultural classifications that appear in museum databases today. We highlight the sway of past classifications over our current understanding of objects that is prolonged by the problem of confirmation-bias in museum collections management systems. We then indicate how working across disciplines stimulated a more nuanced understanding about the complexities of artistic styles for musical instruments with attached human remains in the Akan-speaking region of West Africa.

Cet article étudie deux instruments de musique incorporant des …

Shifting Approaches, Innovative Methods: Collection Histories As A Tool To Move Beyond William Fagg’S ‘Lower Niger Bronze Industry Mystery’, Imogen Coulson, Julie Hudson, Sam Nixon

Artl@s Bulletin

At the end of 2019, the British Museum launched a new research project focusing on copper alloy objects associated with the Lower Niger Bronze Industry. The aim was to increase knowledge of these objects through a combination of provenance and collection history research and scientific analysis. This paper will outline the earlier art historical-focused approach to the Lower Niger Bronzes corpus and will then describe the new research and its methodology. Initial findings will be presented through a case study of objects from the Forcados River in the Niger Delta region of present-day Nigeria. In doing so, we aim to …

Making Absences Present: The Process Of Visualizing Knowledge Production In Museum Records, Caitlin Glosser

Artl@s Bulletin

In this paper, I evaluate the development of data visualizations as an art historical approach. By visualizing data for Senufo-labeled objects in the Musée Africain de Lyon’s collection, I demonstrate how the museum’s knowledge infrastructure privileges European collectors over African makers. I use Tableau visualizations to decenter this narrative by making silences present in a more impactful manner than through text alone. The visualizations also reveal the complex role that one maker, Bèma Coulibaly, played in the life of the collection. The addition of the individual narrative to the data was necessary to bring a human element into view.

Nous …

Technologies Of Recovery And Discovery: The Poetics Of “Artefacts”, Kathryn Simpson

Artl@s Bulletin

This article discusses the ways that objects, specifically personal belongings, held in British collections have their stories muted to become imperial signifiers. Using two pieces of jewellery acquired in 1859 by David Livingstone, British missionary and traveller (1813-1873), a lip ring from a Mang’anja woman in present day Malawi and a bracelet from the Kafue valley in present day Zambia, this article evidences how digital tools can be used to layer, in a palimpsestic way, the information available about colonially collected objects, to locate them physically, in the space they inhabit, and narratively, in the space they create.

En este …

What Does It Mean To Keep Kissing-Close To The Evidence, And Why Might It Matter?, Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Constantine Petridis

Artl@s Bulletin

African art specialists often lack detailed information to assess the original meanings, uses, and contexts of so-called historical or traditional arts of Africa, and they rely on indirect evidence to interpret the works. Thus, claims about African arts often reflect speculation rather than irrefutable details. When specific documentation for an object does exist, the circumstances of its creation require careful evaluation as well. The assessment of the quality and reliability of any claim is of particular importance in attempts to determine an object’s place of origin in the ongoing debates about restitution.

Western Theory’S Chinese Transformation: Postscript, Liu Kang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Out Of The Myths Of “Revolutionary China”: Liu Kang Versus Žižek & Badiou, Liu Xin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The highlight of the 2011 special issue of Positions on Slavoj Žižek is the debate between Liu Kang and Žižek on “Revolutionary China.” It unpacks the Western left’s political unconsciousness and myths about China in several respects. First, revolution is not a parody-travesty of the “tradition” that Žižek concocts from romanticized fantasies of a “retrospective tradition” drawn from Jorge Luis Borges and T. S. Eliot. Second, revolution is not Alain Badiou’s “truth event,” which tends to reduce the Chinese Cultural Revolution to an abstract “event” in process, neglecting the real calamities of the so-called utopian experiment. Third, the key problematic …

Two Imagined Chinas In Tel Quel, Wang Yichen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

From the mid-1960s, the literary review Tel Quel shifted its anti-traditional and avant-garde stance in arts and literature toward politics within the radical political context in France. Its editor Philippe Sollers initiated a “political turn,” marked by its transformation from its “structuralist period” to its “China period.” Its “China period” inadvertently created a “textual spectacle” of two imagined Chinas: first, a poetic, static “ancient China” represented by Daoism (Taoism), Chinese ideograms, and classical Chinese art and poetry; and second, a revolutionary, subversive “modern China” represented by Maoism along with Lu Xun and other left-wing writers. Taking appropriation, rather than misreading, …

Deleuze’S Challenge To Hegel’S Aesthetics—Chinese Aesthetics In The Confrontation Between German Classical Aesthetics And Postmodernism, Wu Yuyu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

German classical aesthetics, featuring a systematic analysis of concepts and theories, plays a fundamental role in the founding of Chinese modern aesthetics. From the 1980s, when the spread of Western theories began to flourish, Chinese scholars assimilated deconstructionist thought (for example, that of Deleuze) and started to reflect on German classical aesthetics as represented by Kant and Hegel. Chinese aesthetics presents various characteristics in the confrontation between German classical aesthetics and French deconstructionist thought. From the perspective of German classical aesthetics, China has no philosophy, tragedy, or system. The Chinese culture became a thinking resource for criticizing essentialism and dualism …

French Left-Wing Literary Theory And Mao Zedong Thought, Han Zhenjiang, Zhang Yuling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

French left-wing literary theories have continued to accept and interpret Mao Zedong’s thought (including his theories on literature and art) from the 1960s to today. This intellectual communication enabled the formation of Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism and contemporary left-wing literary theory. Mao’s theory of contradiction and his thoughts on reliance on the popular masses, aesthetics and politics, and people’s literature and art are the major intellectual resources for Louis Althusser’s, Alain Badiou’s, and Slavoj Žižek’s theories and are fully integrated into their theoretical system and critical practice. Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek innovated materialistic dialectics on the basis of Mao’s theory …

“China Form” And The Question Of The Frankfurt School, Duan Jifang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Theories of the Frankfurt School were introduced into aesthetics studies in China at the end of the 1970s. After more than 40 years of theoretical journey, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have undergone a process from “criticism/query/opposition” to “recognition/acceptance/approval,” and have also substantially completed “theoretical linkage” with Chinese aesthetics. As a Western discourse, the theories of the Frankfurt School, like other theories, are faced with scrutinization in the Chinese context. China’s acceptance of the School plays an objective role in promoting the transformation of its contemporary aesthetic discourse, making contemporary aesthetic research in China more obvious in its problem …

Knowledge Production In The Theory Of Literature And Art In Contemporary China: From A Generations Perspective, Tao Dongfeng, Zhang Chun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In the field of theory of literature and art (i.e., the discipline of Wenyi xue) in contemporary China, the post-1930s and the post-1950s generations (scholars who were born between 1930 and 1939 and between 1950 and 1959, respectively) are the most influential ones. They are father and son generations both in a physiological and a sociocultural sense; both occupied or are still occupying important positions in Chinese academia. Their profound differences in life experiences, educational background, intellectual structures, cultural stances, and literary perspectives significantly affect their knowledge production in Chinese literary theory. This article attempts to use Karl Mannheim’s …

Chinese Modern Leftist Affect And Aesthetic-Affective Modernity In The Global Affective Turn, Yan Fang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Influenced by China’s distinctive “qing” tradition, ranging from the “affective Enlightenment” to the sentimental/affective revolution, both China’s modern Enlightenment movement and the Chinese leftists’ endeavors for social transformation and revolution heavily relied on the emotions and affect, especially those within literature, art, and aesthetics. The dyna mics of “moods” proposed by Qu Qiubai, the “national form” movement, and the Maoist affect not only foreshadowed and actualized but also enriched the conceptualizations of feelings, emotions, and affect by Western theorists such as Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière. With its meticulous portrayal and innovative theorization of the …

Traveling Theory And Discursive Transformation: The Reception Of Walter Benjamin And Emmanuel Levinas In China, Wang Jiajun, Tang Qilin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Chinese scholars are increasingly interested in Jewish philosophy and culture and the philosophical concept of redemption. That is bringing about more and more studies on Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas, two of the most well-known Jewish philosophers. In these studies, conducted with different approaches and from diverse perspectives, Chinese scholars are attempting to connect the philosophers’ theories with some of their Chinese counterparts. Overall, they are well received or Sinicized, but in different fields, and to different extent, deserving an in-depth comparative study. Obviously a large amount of works have been produced in attempts to have dialogues with Benjamin and …

The Many Afterlives Of Orientalism: Translation, Reception, And Appropriation Of Saidian Theory In China, Wu You

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

During the mass translation of Western “post-isms” since the 1990s, Saidian postcolonial theory, Orientalism in particular, was introduced to China through interpretation, reception, and appropriation in the Chinese academe, becoming an important discursive tool for the debate about China. The translated work is perceived as the “afterlife” of the original work, and Saidian theory achieves its constantly renewed and comprehensive unfolding through translation and critical reception in China. In this sense, translation contributes to the complexity and multiplicity of traveling theories, which plays an important part in the formation of Chinese literary theories. Arguably, theoretical transformation occurs through debates and …

The Making Of Chinese Meixue, Li Qingben, Wang Gang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “The Making of Chinese Meixue,” Li and Wang discuss the Chinese translation of the term “aesthetics.” It had been believed that it was the German missionary Ernst Faber who first coined the Chinese term “meixue,” which is refuted in this paper. The view that the term “shenmeixue” in Japan was derived from Wilhelm Lobscheid’s English and Chinese Dictionary also lacks factual basis. It is true that the term “meixue” was introduced to China from the West via Japan, but it was then a term that had not yet developed within a specific …

Introduction: Western Theory’S Chinese Transformation, Zeng Jun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.