Thomas Tryon,Sheep and the Politics of Eden

The English writer Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) believed that sheep were survivors from the original earthly paradise, and that as morally perfect beings they could serve as role models for humans. Tryon advocated vegetarianism, pacifism and an end to slavery as it was practiced in the Caribbean. He was an ambitious and influential reformer on several fronts, but the restoration of Eden was his ultimate goal. Tryon celebrated sheep-like meekness, a stance that complicated his reform efforts. His agenda and sheep-inspired persuasive strategy reflect the momentous intellectual and moral ferment surrounding human relations with animals in the seventeenth century.     

Spinoza on the Politics of the Passions

Both Spinoza's replacement of the Cartesian ego by the notion of an all-inclusive substance called ‘Deus sive Natura’ and his analysis of man's passionate life seem to question the relevance of the distinction between the public and private spheres. His emphasis on the need to establish powerful states, however, including his insistence on the necessity to demand obedience to the laws of the land, implies a recognition of the wisdom to uphold constitutional boundaries between the public and the private. According to Spinoza, freedom demands the execution of force by the political authorities, and private sentiments the expression of which may be harmful to the public good should not be tolerated.     

Prisons before Modernity: Incarceration in the Medieval Indo-Mediterranean

Over the course of the sixth/twelfth century, a new literary genre entered the Eastern Islamic world: the Persian prison poem (?absiyyāt). Far from being an isolated event, the prison poem was forged when punishment came to be reconfigured as incarceration. This development was reflected in literary texts extending across South Asia, Azerbaijan, and continental Europe. Locating the institution of the prison outside European modernity, this study traces the material grounds for this new literary form and situates this archive globally. Concomitantly with studying the medieval literature of incarceration, it evaluates the Indo-Mediterranean as a discursive rubric for the study of pre-modern literary cultures.     

Giacomo Casanova: Three Episodes from His Life as a Charlatan

This paper will analyse three major episodes of Casanova's Histoire de ma vie during which Casanova comes to grips with practices of charlatanism or magic, either as a “patient” or actively: 1. His cure, as a child by the sorceress of Murano to whom he is taken by his beloved grandmother.

2. His guest in the little Italian village of Cesena for a buried treasure whic he prides himself on being able to discover with the help of a sacred knife.

3. His inventive, libertine scenarios elaborated for the particular purpose of “regenerating” (dazzling and pleasuring) the marquise d'Urfé, known as Séramis, an old aristocrat with a passion for occult knowledge.

Casanova's attitude towards all that has to do with gambling, deception, chance, and all the ways to influence it is thoroughly complex and ambiguous. It is one of the features of his Venetian mentality; and it is also a phenomenon of the time, which is wrongly called the “century of the Enlightenment”. More narrowly, close scrutiny of these three occasions should allow us to grasp how Casanova saw his place in the couple of the dupe and the trickster. This paper will show how he understood the world and its underlying forces, and what type of intelligence — more baroque than Cartesian in inspiration — was at work in him.     

A prison audience: women prisoners,Shakespeare and spectatorship

ABSTRACT

In 2017 the Donmar Warehouse presented The Tempest to women prisoners at HMP New Hall, UK. The production was part of a trilogy of Shakespeare plays directed by Phyllida Lloyd, each staged with an all-female cast and each set within a women’s prison. Over the five years of developing this trilogy the Donmar undertook extensive research and development into the prison context, including in collaboration with York St John University’s Prison Partnership Project. This paper explores the prison audiences’ experiences of The Tempest, examining how they responded to seeing their own lived experiences on stage, filtered through the prism of Shakespearian plot, characterisation and language. In particular, this paper focuses on moments of identification, where the women found direct resonance and self-recognition with the characters and experiences in The Tempest. At the same time it draws on discourses from dramatherapy and aesthetic theory to argue for the importance of various forms of emotional, empathetic and psychical distance. Using close analysis of the spectators’ responses, it describes how for the prison audience the result was an oscillation between identification and distance, a reading of “me but more than me” that produced a powerful affective and reflective impact.     

Fierce Urgency of Now: Building Movements to End the Prison Industrial Complex in Our Schools

This article argues that prison abolition and education must be thought and practiced together, now more than ever. Drawing on a forum, Without Walls: Abolition & Rethinking Education in Oakland, CA to dialogue about strategies to challenge carceral logics in classrooms and communities, this article contextualizes the intensification of policing and the criminalization of young people and communities that continues to reach into and beyond all levels of K-12 schools. We share a number of suggestions and starting places based on the ways many educators and youth advocates are building the capacity to challenge the prison industrial complex.     

A Ṭā’ifa in Exile: Sayf al-Dawla and the Survival of the Banū Hūd

In 1145–1146, Sayf al-Dawla returned to al-Andalus to create an independent kingdom and return the Banū Hūd of Zaragoza to prominence. His task was a difficult one, not least because he’d spent a decade serving the Christian king Alfonso VII. After a year of campaigning, Sayf al-Dawla secured a base of support in Murcia. However, he died shortly after his coronation in a battle with Christian allies who were allegedly sent by Alfonso to help him. In addition to providing an explanation for the battle and his death, the article examines how Sayf al-Dawla promoted the legitimacy of his state through his coinage, adherence to Andalusī traditions, and a network of fellow exiles. It interprets the Zaragozan ?ā’ifa as a moveable faction rather than a fixed geographical entity and connects Sayf al-Dawla’s kingdom to later movements to demonstrate how his actions preserved the Banū Hūd’s prestige in Andalusī imaginations.     

Life is not complete without critique: Chua Beng Huat as model

This essay outlines an intellectual portrait of Chua Beng Huat and offers a critical appreciation of his contributions as an academic, a scholar, and an intellectual. I highlight key biographical details: his family upbringing in Bukit Ho Swee, schooling in the Chinese and English mediums, higher education and academic experience in Canada, his return to Singapore, and serving as a sociology faculty at the National University of Singapore, which he made a home base for inter-Asia studies. I discuss his pedagogical approach, which extends to his research and public engagement. In reviewing his works, I focus on the theme of communitarianism as a basis of political legitimacy in East Asia, with housing provision in Singapore as a prime example. His project presents an alternative to Western liberal democracy taken as the universal bedrock of political modernity. I characterize it as the recuperation of the social in the face of capitalist modernity, which is conducive to atomization and corrosive of solidarity. Yet, he projects the possibilities of a more politically liberalized communitarianism. What he offers is not a set of ready answers that reconcile Marx’s “realm of necessity” and “realm of freedom,” but a lucid exposition of the tensions between the two realms under contemporary conditions.     

A Color Feature Film——FAREWELL TO DEATH

Luo Tianyang, a talented photographer, runs a photo studio. He is the pride of his mother and wife. However, under pressure from some friends, he begins taking drugs. His wife, a gentle and kind-hearted young woman, encourages him to get clean and sticks with him through thick and thin, helping him fight the agony of drug addiction. At last, Luo Tianyang says goodbye to drugs and returns to a happy life with help from his mother, his wife, friends and police officers.Director: Wang Wei Dire…     

Marx,and Marxism as method in Stuart Hall’s thinking

The task here is to consider what I would call Stuart Hall’s theoretical “legacy” in the field of social and cultural thoughts. As a materialist of articulation rather than of reductionism, Hall taught us how to profoundly understand and intensely describe the “concrete” in cultural and social fields. The “concrete,” according to Hall, is a result of “non-necessary correspondence” between various forces, relations and situations, that is, the contingent and articulated determination in history. In my view, he was after all a Marxist in this sense. In the earlier stage of his thinking, Hall was very much indulged in reading and learning from Marx. This is characteristic in his “Marx’s Notes on Method: A Reading of the 1857 ‘Introduction.’” His Marxism then showed a unique twist in later stage, which was explicitly expressed in his article “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debate.” Reading these two texts, I aim to comprehend the way Hall has read Marx and the way his thoughts resonated. His lesson helps us to tackle our ongoing agendas in this half-dead Capitalist world, such as the crisis of culture, subjectivity and politics.     

The Execution of the Forty-two Martyrs of Amorion: Proposing an interpretation

On the 6th of March 845 the Arabs executed forty-two Byzantine prisoners, some of them very eminent, who had been captured after the fall of the city of Armorion in Asia Minor. This seems, on the face of it, to defy logic, as it was common practice in those days to keep prisoners in custody while negotiating an exchange, particularly of high-ranking officials. It seems even more perverse when one considers that the forty-two prisoners had been kept in custody for six-and-a-half years before their execution and that an agreement for an exchange had been concluded between the caliph and the emperor some months before. Moreover, the Byzantines had a greater number of Arab prisoners awaiting exchange. However, by looking at the internal policies of the caliph, al-Wāthiq, one can see a different picture: His determination to impose the religious Mu'tazila doctrine, by force if necessary, provoked a series of uprisings (842, 844-46). The public decapitation of the forty-two officers after they had refused to pray with the caliph, was a valuable propaganda exercise, a show of power, which mattered much more to him in those circumstances than the freedom of a number of his soldiers and officials.     

Malay(sian)’s image in Indonesian media prior to Konfrontasi era December 1962

This article presents the Malay(sian)’s image in Indonesian media in the early days of the Indonesia–Malaysia conflict at the beginning of 1960s. The dispute started when Tunku Abdul Rahman announced his plan to include Singapore, Brunei, Sarawak and North Borneo into the Federation of Malaya. Yet Indonesia regarded it as the British’s neocolonialist project. Left-wing nationalists expressed their opposition to this plan in their daily, Bintang Timur, with illustrations made by Delsy Syamsumar (1935-2001). His artworks may represent how Malaysia was seen by Indonesian artists during the dispute. On the other hand, most of Syamsumar’s artworks demonstrate his sympathy with Azahari, Borneo’s local political leader, who staged the insurgence against the plan on 8 December 1962. This article intends to highlight Syamsumar’s pioneering artworks, picturing the Indonesia–Malaysia dispute published in Bintang Timur in December 1962.     

Usāma Ibn munqidh's book of the staff: autobiographical and historical excerpts

Usāma ibn Munqidh (d. 584/1188) is best known to historians for his “memoirs” entitled Kitāb al-i‘tibār, which provides a very personal and detailed window into the world of an aristocratic Syrian Muslim in the period of the Crusades. But historians have almost completely ignored a lesser-known work by Usāma called Kitāb al–‘a.(s)ā, or The Book of the Staff. This anthology consists mostly of poetic excerpts relating to walking-sticks and staves, but, scattered throughout, it also contains a handful of narrative anecdotes about Usāma and his times very much akin to the material found in his “memoirs”: tales of miracles, of encounters with the Franks, of Usāma's family, and the courts of the amirs and atabegs of his day. This article presents these extracts translated into English for the first time, with commentary, in the hope that the Book of the Staff will attract the attention of historians that it deserves.     

Capitalizing the big man: Yao Ming,Asian America,and the China Global1

In summer 2002, Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball player from Shanghai, was drafted by the Houston Rockets as the overall first‐pick. His advent to the NBA quickly brought about a phenomenal impact, both economically and culturally. He was not only voted by the fans to the All‐Star game and replaced Shaquille O'Neal as one of the starting five in the Western Conference team, but also boosted the ticket sales of the Rockets' game to an increasing Asian American spectatorship. Instantly, he is more than the ‘little giant’ from China, but the great ‘yellow hope’ for Asian Pacific Americans — representing the ‘Chinese’ and the Chinese market in the age of globalization. Considering entertainment sports as a distinct place for transnational labour and commodity transactions, this paper takes Yao and his proliferating cultural economic impact as an occasion to analyse and critique the China Global as a national‐capitalist fantasy that is materialized at the expense of ‘stylized’ bodies. Acknowledging, although not endorsing, Julianne Malveaux's crude metaphor of basketball plantation, this paper suggests that Yao articulates a different mode of global capitalism than that represented by Michael Jordan in the 1990s. This mode of global capitalism is not so much about the labour of conquest as epitomized by black athletes, but about the attraction of the market and the availability of labour supply as inscribed in the history of Chinese immigration. The American dream of Yao, ultimately, is the capitalist and nationalist desire for ‘bigness’.     

Piracy as Statecraft: The Mediterranean Policies of the Fifth/Eleventh-Century Taifa of Denia

The taifa of Denia on the Iberian eastern seaboard was one of the most dynamic of the regional polities that emerged from the disintegrated Cordovan caliphate. Mujāhid al-‘āmirī based his state not only on its continental territories, but especially on the maritime networks that linked it with the Mediterranean. Commerce with Muslim and Christian ports played a role in Denia's success, but both Latin and Arabic sources emphasise its practice of piracy on a grand scale. In fact, Mujāhid al-‘āmirī built his state as a continuation of the maritime policies of the Cordovan caliphate under which the piracy of independent coastal communities was adopted and expanded into a state-sponsored guerre de course. Mujāhid's pursuance of this policy stemmed from his role in the erstwhile caliphate, but was also motivated by a combination of religious, political and economic factors. The legitimacy provided by his “jihād on the sea” helped to shore up his power at a time of political instability. This policy also provided the taifa's economic foundation for much of its history. In fact, the Mediterranean maritime lanes became as much an extension of Denia as its continental territories. Denia's piracy thus reflects a coherent form of statecraft, informing definitions of the medieval state and territoriality.     

Bastardy and Nationality

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex law of illegitimacy in the nineteenth century and its relationship to questions of national belonging and subject-hood, thorough the use of a specific legal case study – that of Shedden v Patrick, a dispute over legitimacy and property which opened in 1804 and lasted until 1869. William Shedden was born in America of a Scottish father, who had married his mother, but after his birth. His claim that he should inherit the Shedden family estate in Scotland, as both his father's lawful son and a natural-born British subject, brought together a bewildering array of laws, as formal and informal partnerships in the former colony, together with the discrepant legitimacy codes of England and Scotland, were brought to bear on inheritance claims based on laws of nationality and domicile. Shedden's fight to prove his legitimacy led to the passing of the Legitimacy Declaration Act in 1858, but it also gave rise to a series of legal debates on the nature of personal status, and to the complex ways in which both personal legitimacy and nationality operate as legal fictions. Here I trace how the twists and turns of the case, in 1808, the 1840s and the 1860s, illustrate different facets of these debates on legitimacy and national belonging, and also their intersection with other lines of exclusion drawn around the legal identities of both family and nation. ‘Bastardy’ was a profoundly troubled category in the mid-nineteenth century, partly because it highlighted the difficulties of defining legal identity itself.     

From Scholarship Boy to Social Historian: J.F.C. Harrison (1921-2018): An Appreciation

ABSTRACT

John F. C. Harrison, who has recently passed away, was one of the founders of British social and labour History. Along with figures such as E.P. Thompson and Asa Briggs, Harrison put nineteenth-century social history on the scholarly map. He traced the histories of adult education, Owenism and popular millenarianism. Many came to Victorian history through his textbooks about the period. This appreciation traces his life and work, attempting to establish what was distinctive about his work. Harrison eschewed theory but built important bridges between social, labour and intellectual history which give his work an enduring importance.     

Convention and Conversion: The Saracen Ending of the Taill of Rauf Coilzear

Uniquely among representatives of the "king-and-commoner" plot type (a king takes refuge with a humble fellow, who is then summoned to court for a reward), the fifteenth-century Taill of Rauf Coilzear adjoins a lengthy encounter between the newly knighted "hero" and a Saracen opponent. The narrative logic of this continuation has resisted explanation. I argue that the inclusion of the Saracen ending and other material derived from popular romance is motivated by the poet's desire to represent Rauf's entry into the nobility not as idle fantasy or as mere absorption, but as an ideal synthesis consistent with his pre-existing code of personal, and class, honour. In his assertive, temperamental otherness Rauf resembles the stock figure of the Saracen champion. The poet builds on this analogy (notably in a scene opposing Rauf to the martial-elitist Roland), so that the eventual conversion of the Saracen - presented conventionally as a matter requiring no ideological reconstruction - supplies the model for Rauf's own decidedly unconventional transition from commoner to aristocrat.