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Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang's work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process criti...
Cosmopolitanism is a theory about how to live together. The earliest formulation of cosmopolitanism in the West could be dated to as early as the fourth century BCE in ancient Greece by Diogenes, who famously said that he was a "citizen of the world", kosmopolitês, an idea later picked up by Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who proposed a philosophy of a world of perpetual peace. When cosmopolitanism first emerged as a political idea for modernity in the European Enlightenment, the project embraced the liberal promises of a globalizing economy, yet remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalism, slavery and colonialism. It centered on the male, bourgeois, and white liberal ...
Neolithic Childhood examines how in the interwar years the artistic avant-gardes in Europe and beyond reacted to the "crisis" of almost everything, from the barbarism of technological mass war to the hypocrisies of colonial discourse. The perceived need to re-establish European civilization after the disaster of the First World War led to an interminable reconstruction of origins and beginnings - making ground zero the limiting function of modernity. Based on the writings of the anti-academic art historian Carl Einstein (1885-1940), the exhibition is devoted to despair over the present and the pressing interest in altering humanity, as manifested from the 1920s to the 1940s in the artistic avant-gardes and the sciences. Exhibition: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (13.04.-09.07.2018).
This book borrows from the intellectual labor of queer theory in order to unsettle—or “queer”—the discourses of “religion” and “science,” and, by extension, the “science and religion discourse.” Drawing intellectual and social cues from works by influential theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, chapters in this volume converge on at least three common features of queer theory. First, queer theory challenges givens that on occasion still undergird religiously and scientifically informed ways of thinking. Second, it takes embodiment seriously. Third, this engagement inevitably generates new pathways for thinking about how religious and scientific “truths” matter. These three features ultimately lend support to critical investigations into the meanings of “science” and “religion,” and the relationships between the two.
Religion is much queerer than we ever imagined. Nature is as well. These are the two basic insights that have led to this volume: the authors included here hope to queerly go where no thinkers have gone before. The combination of queer theory and religion has been happening for at least 25 years. People such as John Boswell began to examine the history of religious traditions with a queer eye, and soon after we had the indecent theology of Marcella Althaus Ried. Jay Johnston, one of the authors in this issue, is among those who have used the queer eye to interrogate authority within Christian theological traditions. At the same time, there have been many queer interrogations of "nature," per...
This book describes and analyzes the impact of COVID-19 on the relationship between the United States and China in its human, social and political dimensions. It does so through the experience of faculty and students at Duke University and Duke Kunshan University, a US-China joint venture university. The book reveals the intimate stories of Chinese people trapped in quarantine, situating these stories in a longer historical perspective of plagues and disease prevention in China. It describes the impact of the virus on the racialized perceptions of Chinese-Americans and Chinese students in America. Finally, it offers a preliminary assessment of the impact of the coronavirus on the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, and on US-China relations. Featuring the work of artists, student journalists, historians, anthropologists and political scientists, this book presents a breadth of insights into the impact of COVID-19.
"In 1843, the Victorian political theorist John Stuart Mill outlined a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer shows that it survived in the work of Victorian novelists, who cultivated a narrative science of human nature. Brilmyer explores this characterological project in the work of such novelists as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, Victorian realists used fiction to investigate the nature of embodied experience, how traits and behaviors in human and nonhuman organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features-s...
"Camp" is often associated with glamour, surfaces and an ostentatious display of chic, but as these authors argue, there is an underside to it that has often gone unnoticed: camp’s simultaneous investment in dirt, vulgarity, the discarded and rejected, the abject. This book explores how camp challenges and at the same time celebrates what is arguably the single most important and foundational cultural division, that between the dirty and the clean. In refocusing camp as a phenomenon of the dark underside as much as of the glamorous surface, the collection hopes to offer an important contribution to our understanding of the cultural politics and aesthetics of camp.
"Since 9/11, gay men and women have experienced relative liberation in parts of the Western world. Coinciding with queer and transgender mobilisations, contemporary queer identity is changing, homosexuality has become acceptable within the army and the police, and (heavily de-sexualised) images of same-sex affection have become mainstream. In Queer Lovers and Hateful Others, however, Jin Haritaworn challenges this progression by exposing what happens to this discourse when sexuality and the racial or religious 'Other' collide. He discusses how the sexual understanding of 'terror' has become increasingly prevalent across the globe in a destructive and overarching ideology. For example, he dis...
Homelessness--the state of having no home--is a growing global problem that requires local discussions and solutions. In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, it has noticeably become a collective concern. However, in recent years, the official political discourse in many countries around the world implies that poverty is a personal fault, and that if people experience homelessness, it is because they have not tried hard enough to secure shelter and livelihood. Although architecture alone cannot solve the problem of homelessness, the question arises: What and which roles can it play? Or, to be more precise, how can architecture collaborate with other disciplines in developing ways to permane...