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Comparative Civilizations Review

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Comparative Civilizations Review

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Editor’S Note: Want To Help Develop A Textbook On Comparative Civilizations?, Joseph Drew

Comparative Civilizations Review

Is anyone here in the United States or elsewhere teaching a course in the comparative study of civilizations at the undergraduate level these days?

Since I was thinking about organizing the writing of a textbook on the topic, I began recently by considering what the major areas were to be covered in such a book. What, I wondered, have been the significant approaches scholars have taken over the past century or so to address the fluid, debatable, tenuous meanings and shapes of civilizations?

Ethiopia: Ancient Glory, Awaiting Recovery, Tseggai Isaac

Comparative Civilizations Review

The name Ethiopia is associated in the Book of Genesis with the creation of the world, indicating a sacred and ancient heritage. We find Ethiopia mentioned as having relations with the ancient Biblical nations such as Israel, Egypt, Assyria, and Mesopotamia. Ethiopians get uplifting gratification in reading specific scriptural references from the Bible and applying them to the country. These Biblical allusions include discussion of the Queen of Sheba and her son, King Menelik the First, born from her relationship with King Solomon, who was himself the son of King David, the founder from whom came the lineal parentage of …

Russia’S Geopolitical Civilizational Narratives And Strategic Direction In The Contemporary Multipolar World Order, Sharyl Cross, Igor Okunev

Comparative Civilizations Review

This article sets forth the foundations for recent geopolitical civilizational narratives in Russia that are influencing Moscow’s contemporary foreign policy behavior and the future direction of the Russian “civilizational state” in the global multipolar world order. This article is not intended to provide justification for Russia’s foreign policy choices and actions, but rather the purpose is to explain Moscow’s official geopolitical narratives, and thus to provide a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the considerations informing Russia’s foreign policy behavior.

Vladimir Putin has been at the helm of leadership in Russia exerting unparalleled influence as President and Prime Minister since …

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Christopher Dawson And The Challenges Of Interdisciplinary Studies, Joseph T. Stuart

Comparative Civilizations Review

The following interview was conducted by Ms. Bibi Pelic, the Director of Communications for the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. The recording is available on the ISCSC YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-hS2SdoZc

How Companies Heal And Maintain Health: A Unique Function Of Corporate Museums In Japan, Aki Kinjo

Comparative Civilizations Review

Capitalism is embedded in our civilization. Despite its faults, weaknesses, and sins, modern civilization cannot prosper without capitalism. Companies are the engine of capitalism. Yet, just like humans, companies make mistakes, sometimes gross. How do companies overcome unforgivable mistakes? This paper argues that corporate museums in Japan play an important role in helping companies heal from their sufferings, recover, and maintain organizational health.

I deploy a cultural approach to management, analyzing corporate museums as a platform for conveying explicit and hidden narratives. A cultural approach to Japanese management helps us understand why Japan has so many corporate museums, well …

How The State Replaces Civilization: The Japanese Exception, Robert Bedeski

Comparative Civilizations Review

By conceptualizing civilization and state as integrated systems consisting of interacting subsystems, their similarities and differences can be analyzed. The central hypothesis is that civilization consists of three material subsystems — economy, government, and knowledge — and one non-material subsystem, transcendence. When the transcendent subsystem is diminished or destroyed by decree or overwhelming rational and scientific evidence, the emergence of the state occurs as in the cases of the Mongol Empire, the Soviet Union, and communist China.

The apparent universality of this observation is countered by an examination of the Japanese civilization and state, where imperial transcendence dominated and reinforced …

The Rise Of China And The Concept Of Civilization: Constructing A Conceptual Apparatus For Cross-Civilizational Comparisons, Liah Greenfeld

Comparative Civilizations Review

The Rise of China and the Concept of Civilization: Constructing a Conceptual Apparatus for Cross-Civilizational Comparisons

The paper examines the deficiencies of the current understanding of “civilization” in the social science literature, among others exemplified by “civilizational analysis,” and proposes a new concept that adds to the conceptual apparatus of sociological theory — a new, fully independent of others, variant of the cultural process. This independence makes distinctions between civilizations as the root cause of socio-cultural diversity.

Combined with the idea of humanity as a culturally constituted reality sui generis, this concept allows the construction of the theoretical scaffolding …

Civilization, Civilizations, Civilizational State: Untangling Civilizational Discontents In International Relations Theory, Vlad Alalykin-Izvekov

Comparative Civilizations Review

Recently, a herd of terminological hybrids have trampled onto the field of International Relations Theory. These include civilizational state, civilization-state, state-civilization, civilizational nation-state, civilizational privilege, and geopolitical civilizational narrative. What do those notions tell us about global tendencies and trends today?

This paper explores the origin, evolution, and meaning of these terms; it also proposes solutions for problems of a nascent, multi-polar, and multi-civilizational world within the framework of an Integralistic Paradigm in IR Theory.

Books Of Interest Spring 2025, Stephen T. Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Books that may be of interest to scholars of the comparative study of civilizations and may add significantly to the body of scholarship in the civilizational field are highlighted in this new regular feature. These books are also available for book reviews in future editions of Comparative Civilizations Review. Any suggestions for books to be added to this list may be emailed to Book Review Editor Stephen T. Satkiewicz: [email protected].

The Germanic Legends Of The Gold Of The Rhine And Their Āryan Sources, Alexander Jacob

Comparative Civilizations Review

Medieval German legends regarding the gold of the Rhine have both a mythological source, as the gold of the Nibelung dwarf Andvari, and a historical Burgundian one, as a hoard possessed by the Burgundian princes. Here we point to more ancient sources of these legends, ones that are to be found in the cosmological myths and rituals of the Āryans.

Civilizational States And Nation States: A Few Preliminary Thoughts, Stephen Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Over the first two decades of the 21st century, the older certainties that shaped how we looked at the world have been shaken to their core. Most conceptions of how the world works were the byproduct of the postwar order that governed during the Cold War (1945-1991) and were expanded in the immediate post-Cold War era of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Inherited Wounds: Generational Trauma In Postcolonial Film And Narrative Fiction Of The Global South, Sabrina Testi Melgarejo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The theorization of trauma in literary studies emerged in the 1990s, evolving from its physiological origins to a multidisciplinary framework encompassing literature, psychology, and history. However, classical trauma theory, rooted in Western scholarship and focused on singular traumatic events, has been criticized for its limitations in addressing collective and ongoing trauma in non-Western contexts. This thesis responds to a call for a more inclusive approach to trauma studies, examining how multi-generational and cultural trauma is represented in non-Western postcolonial films and literature from the Global South, including works from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, and Lebanon.

The …

Ahp's Tribute To Dr. Stan Charnofsky, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

The Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) mourns the “transition” of a very dear soul, Dr. Stan Charnofsky. And, while his transition is a tremendous loss to his family, friends, and colleagues, we also want to honor and celebrate a life well-lived. As a former AHP president, Stan provided outstanding leadership. Upon his passing, he also held the distinction of being the longest-serving AHP board member. He was very much cherished and highly respected by all board members throughout his long, dedicated and remarkable service to AHP and its members.

Prison Sentences: Spaces Of Liberation In Arab Prison Writing, Joseph Farag

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Spatial and temporal motifs predominate throughout the extensive corpus of Arabic prison writing. However, far from establishing the prison as an exceptional space, and periods of imprisonment as “time outside time,” this paper argues that modern Arabic prison literature tends instead to blur the distinction between “inside” and “outside” prison space and time. In place of a rigid spatial demarcation, dramatically exemplified by images of towering, razor wire-tipped walls, Arabic prison writing consistently seeks to create continuity between the punishment meted out to those within the prison’s walls and the repression endured by those beyond it. Consequently, these texts figuratively …

Punish Yet Cannot Discipline: Two Iraqi Prison Novels, Hanan Jasim Khammas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Al-Munāḍil (The Militant) (1972) by ʿAzīz al-Sayyid Jāsim, and Iʿjām (Iʿjaam) (2004) by Sinan Antoon are two prison novels about the historical turning points which mark the rise and fall of the Baʿth regime in Iraq. While the first employs imprisonment as a lens through to expose the corruption and injustice exercised by the monarchy against the emergent revolutionary power, the second shows the Baʿthist government applying similar methods of surveillance, and of physical and psychological torture. Reading these texts by al-Sayyid Jāsim, who died in the Baʿth prisons, and by Antoon who wrote Iʿjaam …

Hold Fast The Rope Of God: Space, Authority, And Speech In Muslim Prison Narratives, Basit Kareem Iqbal, Walaa Quisay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Scholarship about Muslims in prison has been overwhelmingly dominated by security studies’ radicalization thesis and by a superficial reading of incarcerated Muslims’ “religious resilience.” Such approaches caricature the force of Islam in prison and indeed in Muslim prison narratives. This essay draws on interviews with survivors of prisons in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria in order to develop other terms for analysis. Across our textual and ethnographic engagements, we read for varied permutations of carceral space, formations of religious authority, and an intimate (witnessing) relation between speech and violence. Muslim prison narratives see a broad emphasis on the …

The Networks Of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality And Making Narrative In Assad’S Syria, Anne-Marie Mcmanus

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article argues for a new reading of collectivity – in both narrative voice and scenes of shared experience – in works of Syrian prison literature. Although these texts were published and are interpreted as the products of single author figures, the wider narrative field from which they emerge is shaped by numerous collective practices, from the oral and written to the digital. Breaking disciplinary boundaries around prison literature, this article introduces the term “prison narrative” and foregrounds diverse efforts by Syrian writers and former prisoners to imagine alternative formations of national experience and community under the Assad regime (1970-2024). …

Prison As A Living Being: ‘Assad’S Syria’ As A Model For The Imprisonment State, Jaber Baker

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Syrian Assad regime used prisons as tools of domination. As such, prisons had the power not only of active repression but also as places of detention and disappearance for Syrians. The expansion of political detention in Syria over fifty years transformed prison into a living being in the sense that prison became a part not just of Syrians' political life, but also of their social identity. One can recognize it in voices, attitudes, lifestyles, and even written and oral culture. Syrian cities are full of weapons since a large area of the urban space is inhabited by the buildings …

From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), Teresa Pepe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article analyses Ahmed Naji’s Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence) and Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated through the lens of ‘prison literature’, that is “literary works produced in, about, or through the experience of political detention” (Taleghani 13). Comparing them to previous forms of prison literature from Egypt, it shows that both books depart from the social-realistic mode that has prevailed throughout the 20^th century. Rather they renovate the genre with aesthetic traits drawn from postmodern and digital literature, exemplified by autofictional or anonymous modes of authorship and co-authorship, narrative fragmentation, and bodily exposures. These aesthetic …

Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist, Sarali Gintsburg

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been demonstrated by Soviet/Russian and, to a limited extent, Western Arabists, this research remains limited to a few names. However, the role that the Russian/Soviet literary tradition had in shaping contemporary genres of Arabic literature is complex and diverse. This is, for instance, the case with prison literature—Russian/Soviet literature has a long tradition of turning to the topic of imprisonment. It was Dostoyevsky, who turned to the genre of katorzhnaya proza (prison literature) and popularized it. Later, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky dedicated a number of their influential literary works to further …

Terrorists, Spies, And Diplomatic Crises: The Birth Of Morocco’S Multimedia Prison Literature, Brahim El Guabli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article captures the literary shift that accompanied the transformation of the nature of political imprisonment in Morocco in the last twenty years. Focusing on the new victims of state violence, who fall within two categories: prisoners accused of terrorism and those accused of heinous sexual crimes, this article argues that the emergence of these new criminal profiles has led to the establishment of a transnational “Multimedia Prison Literature” (MPL). Drawing on the cases of Ali Arras, a Belgian-Moroccan whom Spain delivered to Morocco for terrorist charges, and Mohamed Hajib, a German-Moroccan citizen whom Germany extradited to his country of …

The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives, Hakima Choukri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Moroccan prison narratives have been credited with major political and social changes, yet their existential value is equally worth acknowledging. The prison narratives of Aziz Binebine, Mohamed Raiss, Malika Oufkir, and Fatna El Bouih, to mention but a few, are fraught with existentialist patterns that are uncovered upon reading them comparatively. One pattern that persists through these narratives is the absurdity of liberation. Borrowing Camus’ concept of the absurd, this article highlights the absurdity of the post-prison chapter for being nothing more than an extension of the prison episode that makes the impossibility of freedom acutely felt. The absurdity of …

Captivity, Resistance And Political Consciousness In Walid Daqqa’S Prison Literature, Ashjan Ajour

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines the prison literature of the Palestinian intellectual Walid Daqqa who has been serving a life sentence for resistance since 1986 in Israeli prisons. From the depth of his experience he writes about his conceptualization of captivity, colonial violence, the resistance of the Palestinian political prisoners in the Israeli prison system and the construction of Palestinian national imagination in his book Consciousness Molded: or The Re-Identification of Palestinian Torture (2010) Published in Arabic and his first young adults novel The Story of the Oil’s Secret (Ḥikayat Sir al-Zeit) published in 2018 in Arabic. Daqqa has become …

Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing From Captivity, Basil Farraj

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article discusses writings by Palestinian political prisoners and the broader body of prison literature situating them as practices of ‘smuggling freedom’ from Israel’s carceral regime, shedding light onto their political and social meaning. Through discussing writings by prisoners, the article points to a long history through which Palestinian prisoners confronted the Israeli regime’s torture and violent practices, and its broader project of eliminating the political nature of captivity. The article argues that prisoners’ writings reveal much about the dynamics of carceral power and violence, and the logic behind the confrontation practices used by prisoners in Palestine and beyond. These …

New Approaches To Mena Prison Literatures After 2011, Anne-Marie Mcmanus

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Eros And The Sublime: Tools For Reaching Toward An Altered Ecological Consciousness, Aineka Carlson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis explores connections between the Kantian sublime and Anne Carson’s ideas regarding “eros.” Since Kant’s Critique of Judgement was published in 1790, the Kantian sublime has grown in popularity and been utilized by theorists and creative writers alike. While the Kantian sublime is often associated with nature in popular culture, there are certain egocentric and phallocentric elements of this mode of thinking that might inhibit a biocentric mindset. Through a character study of Oryx from Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, this thesis draws relations between the subjugation of women, nature, and the ways in which the popularized …

Worlds Built And Borrowed: A Paracosmic Exploration Of The Metatextual Unconscious, Ryleigh Michele Roberts

Master’s Theses

This thesis explores literary phenomenology through the lens of fictional world-building and borrowing, integrating psychoanalytic play theories and reader response criticism, primarily through the works of D.W. Winnicott, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser. In applying this theoretical approach, the thesis investigates how fictional worlds function as intermediary phenomena through which creators can externalize and process their individual or collective experiences of being. Employing a comprehensive literary survey framework, the project spans a diverse range of texts, from canonical literature, such as the Brontës’ juvenilia and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, to contemporary works like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and E.L. James’ Fifty Shades …