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Literature and the Work of Universality
In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature – and modes of literary thinking – as a key resource for such a task. "Universality" is understood here not as an established "universalism", but as a horizon towards which intellectual inquiry and literary practices orient themselves. In the field of world literature, there is by now a wide repertoire of epistemological resources through which claims to universality can be both questioned and reconfigured. If, at one end...
The Trouble With Art
Art troubles anthropology. Anthropologists have often taken a philistine, sceptical position of distance towards art and aesthetics as a predominantly Western bourgeois institution. But art, not only as a Western institution, generated its own philistine and iconoclastic revisions and undoings, its anti-art, that have engaged anthropology into its theory and practice. Anthropology is thus part of the trouble with art. But trouble doesn’t necessarily obfuscate, it can also reveal and render visible fault lines and problems; troubles can be assemblages of disparate and even contradictory parts that paradoxically do work together. This volume proposes an anthropology that moves beyond philistinism and the contradictions between critical anthropologies of art and collaborative and experimental anthropologies with art.
Philology and the Appropriation of the World
This book sheds new light on the work of Jean-François Champollion by uncovering a constellation of epistemological, political, and material conditions that made his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs possible. Champollion’s success in understanding hieroglyphs, first published in his Lettre à M. Dacier in 1822, is emblematic for the triumphant achievements of comparative philology during the 19th Century. In its attempt to understand humanity as part of a grand history of progress, Champollion’s conception of ancient Egypt belongs to the universalistic aspirations of European modernity. Yet precisely because of its success, his project also reveals the costs it entailed: after examining and welcoming acquisitions for the emerging Egyptian collections in Europe, Champollion travelled to the Nile Valley in 1828/29, where he was shocked by the damage that had been done to its ancient cultural sites. The letter he wrote to the Egyptian viceroy Mehmet Ali Pasha in 1829 demands that excavations in Egypt be regulated, denounces European looting, and represents perhaps the first document to make a case for the international protection of cultural goods in the name of humanity.
Minor Universality / Universalité Mineure
In times of relativism - marked by the critique of Western universalism on the one hand, and resurgent identitarian and neo-nationalistic claims to identity on the other, this volume tracks the development and relevance of cultural and social practices that posit forms of minor universality, asking: Where and how do contemporary practices open up concrete settings so as to create experiences, reflections and agencies of a shared humanity?
Universalism(e) & ...
This book confronts the history and legitimacy of Western Universalism. In the form of conversations, it documents thinking-in-process about how new forms of universality after hegemonic universalism can be thought and practised. Bringing into play their practices and theories, the interlocutors of Universalism(e) & ... lay their own traces of a minor universality, situated in the troubling present of our times. Ce livre s'attaque à l'histoire et à la légitimité de l'universalisme occidental. Sous la forme de conversations, il documente la réflexion en cours sur les façons de penser et de pratiquer de nouvelles formes d'universalité après l'universalisme hégémonique. À partir de l...
Chinesia
Our perception of the Others is based on our conception of ourselves. In theory the Others should be different. If necessary, we alter their images to accommodate the apperception of ourselves. Thus Chinesia, an amalgamation of facts and fiction, was created. In order to avoid previous repetition of stereotypes and prejudices, the present study re-examines the parameters which created Chinesia and traces its development to the end of the 18th century. It discusses the reports of the European seafarers and trade embassies to China and analyzes the situation of the Jesuit missionaries and their European publications on China. These helped to develop a wondrous China during Baroque and early En...
Objects Observed
Objects Observed explores the central place given to the object by a number of poets in France and in America in the twentieth century. John C. Stout provides comprehensive examinations of Pierre Reverdy, Francis Ponge, Jean Follain, Guillevic, and Jean Tortel. Stout argues that the object furnishes these poets with a catalyst for creating a new poetics and for reflecting on lyric as a genre. In France, the object has been central to a broad range of aesthetic practices, from the era of Cubism and Surrealism to the 1990s. In the heyday of American Modernism, several major poets foregrounded the object in their work; however, in postwar twentieth-century America, poets moved away from a focus on the object. Objects Observed illuminates the variety of aesthetic practices and positions in French and American poets from the years of high Modernism (1909-1930) to the 1990s.
The Epoch of Universalism 1769–1989 / L’époque de l’universalisme 1769–1989
2019 witnessed the 30th anniversary of the German reunification. But the remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall coincided with another event of global importance that caught much less attention: the 250th anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s birth. There is an undeniable historical and philosophical dimension to this coincidence. Napoleon’s appearance on the scene of world history seems to embody European universalism (soon thereafter in the form of a ‘modern’ imperial project); whilst scholars such as Francis Fukuyama saw in the events of 1989 its historical fulfilment. Today, we see more clearly that the fall of the Berlin Wall stands for an epistemic earthquake, which generated...
The Colonial Unconscious
France between the two World Wars was pervaded by representations of its own colonial power, expressed forcefully in the human displays at the expositions coloniales, films starring Josephine Baker, and the short stories of Paul Morand, and more subtly in the avant-garde writings of René Crevel and Raymond Roussel. In her lively book, Elizabeth Ezra interprets a fascinating array of cultural products to uncover what she terms the "colonial unconscious" of the Jazz Age—the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of exoticism and the double bind of a colonial discourse that foreclosed the possibility of the very assimilation it invited.Ezra situates the apotheosis of French colonialism in rel...
