Pub Date : 2021-10-29DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1298
R. Schine
The signal works of poetry that prominently feature racialized Blackness in early Arabic literature (c. ad 500–1250) include works composed by authors of Afro-Arab heritage as well as by Arab authors who satirized and panegyrized Black subjects. These poets include the pre-Islamic author ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād and the ʿAbbasid-era figures al-Mutanabbī and Ibn al-Rūmī, and thus reflect the shift, across an extensive timeline, from a local, Bedouin poetics to a self-styled cosmopolitan, courtly aesthetic characterized as muḥdath, or modernist. The works are situated not only within the changing conventions of genre, but also within an arc that traces the emergence of new race concepts and racialized social institutions in the transition from the pre-Islamic era to Islam and from the early conquests to ʿAbbasid imperialization. Critical instances of these works’ intertextual movements demonstrate how racial logic accretes in various Arab-Muslim textual traditions, showing how poetry intersects with popular epic as well as high literary geographical, ethnological, and commentarial corpuses. As verse moves across a myriad of later literary forms, its context-specific representations of racial difference are recontextualized and received in ways that contribute to a broader transregional and transtemporal discourse of racialized Blackness.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-29DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1282
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
In the last quarter of the 20th century theories of the postcolonial were usually closely tied to the experience of British and French colonialism in a band of North African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian colonies stretching from Morocco to Malaysia. During this period, Edward Said’s book Orientalism and the early work in subaltern studies both challenged the supposedly dispassionate character of Western scholarship on North Africa and Asia by demonstrating the degree to which it had been skewed by racial and class bias. Although architectural historians took more than a decade to fully absorb its implications, there are few humanities or social sciences disciplines that since the 1990s have been more thoroughly transformed by this once radical shift in perspective, which has changed how the architecture of almost all parts of the world is understood. Whether or not they fully engaged with the theories articulated in scholarship whose initial focus was the analysis of literature, in the case of Said, or of history, in that of subaltern studies, 21st-century architectural historians have paid unprecedented attention to the post-1500 architecture of the Global South, to colonial architecture and its relationship to economic exploitation, to post-independence architecture especially in relation to international modernisms, and to the impact that colonialism had on the architecture of the metropole. While the second and third of these had long been addressed in relation to British settler colonies, architectural history’s global turn meant that they could no longer be considered in isolation from new comprehensive histories of imperialism.
{"title":"Postcolonial Thought and the Emergence of Global Architectural Histories","authors":"Kathleen James-Chakraborty","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1282","url":null,"abstract":"In the last quarter of the 20th century theories of the postcolonial were usually closely tied to the experience of British and French colonialism in a band of North African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian colonies stretching from Morocco to Malaysia. During this period, Edward Said’s book Orientalism and the early work in subaltern studies both challenged the supposedly dispassionate character of Western scholarship on North Africa and Asia by demonstrating the degree to which it had been skewed by racial and class bias. Although architectural historians took more than a decade to fully absorb its implications, there are few humanities or social sciences disciplines that since the 1990s have been more thoroughly transformed by this once radical shift in perspective, which has changed how the architecture of almost all parts of the world is understood. Whether or not they fully engaged with the theories articulated in scholarship whose initial focus was the analysis of literature, in the case of Said, or of history, in that of subaltern studies, 21st-century architectural historians have paid unprecedented attention to the post-1500 architecture of the Global South, to colonial architecture and its relationship to economic exploitation, to post-independence architecture especially in relation to international modernisms, and to the impact that colonialism had on the architecture of the metropole. While the second and third of these had long been addressed in relation to British settler colonies, architectural history’s global turn meant that they could no longer be considered in isolation from new comprehensive histories of imperialism.","PeriodicalId":207246,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature","volume":"146 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133851256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-29DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1190
Joseph M. Ortiz
William Shakespeare entertained many ideas about music, some of them conflicting, and he frequently represented these ideas in his plays. Music was a multifaceted art and science in early modern England, and debates over the nature and interpretation of music played out in a variety of contexts: academic, religious, political, commercial, and aesthetic. At the same time, music was a vital part of Shakespeare’s theatrical practice. He made use of his company’s musical resources to include performed music in his plays, and his characters frequently sing and quote popular ballads and songs that would have been recognized by his audiences. The combination of words about music and musical performances gave Shakespeare the opportunity to test various theories of music in complex and original ways. His plays are especially demonstrative of the ways in which certain views of music were connected to other ideological perspectives. Shakespeare’s most modern idea about music is the notion that musical meaning derives from its contexts and conventions rather than from an inherent, universal nature. Taken together, his plays provoke skepticism about unified theories of music. At the same time, they demonstrate that the seeming universality of music makes it an extremely powerful tool for both the polemicist and the dramatist.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-29DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1209
Emily Drumsta
Among the many challenges facing Arabic literature in translation, the question of gender has historically been one of the most fraught, particularly as it presses upon Arab women writers. The persistence of Orientalist tropes such as the veil and the harem; the continual othering of the exotic and supposedly untranslatable East; the frequent lumping together of Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern identities; the slippage between memoir, or autobiography, and fiction; and the tendency to isolate gender issues from their political, historical, and social contexts—these are some of the many phenomena that scholars and translators have examined in the Western academy. Some issues, such as the burden of mimesis, the tendency to depoliticize the work of controversial authors, and the continual association of Arabic with the Qurʾān (and thereby with the untranslatable and the sacred), face all works of Arabic in their translation for the English-language marketplace. Other issues, such as the stereotyping of Arab women as either helpless victims, exceptional escapees, or deluded pawns of Arab patriarchy, in Mohja Kahf’s reading, affect Arab women’s writing (and literature featuring Arab women characters) with particular force. Many scholars have highlighted the division between the simplistic, flattening representations of Arab women writers offered in mainstream Western publishing and the more nuanced, literarily sensitive presentations in translated works published by small, specialist, and university presses. Pressing issues of genre are also at play: the desire among American publics for a sociological, ethnographic “glimpse behind the veil” of Middle Eastern society has created a preference for both documentary memoirs and mimetic–realist works of fiction that has drawn attention away from works of experimental prose and—most notably—from poetry. Whereas male poets such as the Palestinian Maḥmūd Darwīsh (Mahmoud Darwish) and the Syro-Lebanese Adūnīs (Adunis) have multiple discrete volumes in English translation, Arab women tend to be confined to the realm of anthologies, where one or two poems are meant to represent an entire life of variegated poetic creation, and where the emphasis on their personal identity (“Arab woman”) is highlighted above their role in a more complex literary, social, and historical world. Although several contemporary poets have managed to break from the anthology loop, early-21st-century works in translation suggest that the stereotype of the Muslim woman in need of “saving” has not yet gone away. Still, scholars and translators have also offered numerous strategies and tactics for “rewiring the circuits” that govern the representation of Arab women in the West.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1151
F. Black, J. M. Martin, B. MacDonald
Scholars working in the multidisciplinary field of book history pose diverse research questions, work with numerous sources of data and information, and employ a variety of analytical methods and tools. Geographic questions have been considered by book historians, notably since the groundbreaking work of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in the 1950s. Geographic information systems (GIS) technology, which was developed in Canada in the 1960s, was initially devised to support new methods of analysis and visualization in the physical and life sciences relating to spatial conditions, patterns, trends, and projections. Since the late 1990s, social scientists have used GIS increasingly, and, since the early 21st century, humanities scholars have also begun to use GIS as a result of digital and spatial turns within their fields. The application of GIS as an analytical method to investigate research questions in book history, first suggested in 1997, is now employed across a range of scholarly endeavors. Examples from the sciences that illustrate the required data structures, as well as the scope and analytical power of GIS, illuminate the development of geographies of the book. Such examples also illustrate the types of questions for which GIS is appropriate for advancing knowledge. Limited training for book historians in the application of GIS, along with the complexities of the technology, have resulted in the need for partnerships with quantitative researchers. These collaborations are increasing understanding of the spatial dimensions of book and print history. In addition, new programs of study in digital humanities, and initiatives of innovative scholarly societies, are helping to forge a generation of technologically trained scholars to propel the field of book history further.
{"title":"Geographic Information Systems and Book History","authors":"F. Black, J. M. Martin, B. MacDonald","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1151","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars working in the multidisciplinary field of book history pose diverse research questions, work with numerous sources of data and information, and employ a variety of analytical methods and tools. Geographic questions have been considered by book historians, notably since the groundbreaking work of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in the 1950s. Geographic information systems (GIS) technology, which was developed in Canada in the 1960s, was initially devised to support new methods of analysis and visualization in the physical and life sciences relating to spatial conditions, patterns, trends, and projections. Since the late 1990s, social scientists have used GIS increasingly, and, since the early 21st century, humanities scholars have also begun to use GIS as a result of digital and spatial turns within their fields. The application of GIS as an analytical method to investigate research questions in book history, first suggested in 1997, is now employed across a range of scholarly endeavors. Examples from the sciences that illustrate the required data structures, as well as the scope and analytical power of GIS, illuminate the development of geographies of the book. Such examples also illustrate the types of questions for which GIS is appropriate for advancing knowledge. Limited training for book historians in the application of GIS, along with the complexities of the technology, have resulted in the need for partnerships with quantitative researchers. These collaborations are increasing understanding of the spatial dimensions of book and print history. In addition, new programs of study in digital humanities, and initiatives of innovative scholarly societies, are helping to forge a generation of technologically trained scholars to propel the field of book history further.","PeriodicalId":207246,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115677071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1206
Huda J. Fakhreddine
Modern Arabic poetic forms developed in conversation with the rich Arabic poetic tradition, on one hand, and the Western literary traditions, primarily English and French, on the other. In light of the drastic social and political changes that swept the Arab world in the first half of the 20th century, Western influences often appear in the scholarship on the period to be more prevalent and operative in the rise of the modernist movement. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental forces that drove the movement from its early phases is its urgent preoccupation with the Arabic poetic heritage and its investment in forging a new relationship with the literary past. The history of poetic forms in the first half of the 20th century reveals much about the dynamics between margin and center, old and new, commitment and escapism, autochthonous and outside imperatives. Arabic poetry in the 20th century reflects the political and social upheavals in Arab life. The poetic forms which emerged between the late 1940s and early 1960s presented themselves as aesthetically and ideologically revolutionary. The modernist poets were committed to a project of change in the poem and beyond. Developments from the qas̩īdah of the late 19th century to the prose poem of the 1960s and the notion of writing (kitābah) after that suggest an increased loosening or abandoning of formal restrictions. However, the contending poetic proposals, from the most formal to the most experimental, all continue to coexist in the Arabic poetic landscape in the 21st century. The tensions and negotiations between them are what often lead to the most creative poetic breakthroughs.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1186
S. Altman
At the advent of England’s Reformation, the monarch assumed sovereignty over the English Church. This created an established state church, which was designed to counter the papacy’s assertion of supremacy. In doing so, the English Church more emphatically linked itself to the monarchy’s temporal control and its attendant realpolitik than was the case with the Pope’s authority over Roman Catholic territories, barring the small Papal States. For those in England who remained faithful to Roman Catholicism, this created an environment where some Protestants took “popery” to be akin to sedition. Whereas during Mary I’s regime, where the English Church was back under papal authority and martyrs died under heresy statutes rather than treason statutes, it was held under Protestant regimes that to act against the English Church was to act against the English state. Given the wide sway of perspectives within English Protestantism from Presbyterianism to Arminianism, as well as the old faith’s continuing appeal among many, English subjects were confronted with competing notions of what it meant to be a good Christian and, consequently, conflicting views about who qualified as a Christian martyr and what precisely Christian martyrdom involved. Martyrologies and other discourses on martyrdom were powerful tools for defining true religion and influencing the behavior of religious adherents, even if the popular representation of the martyr-figure that arises from these works did not necessarily reflect all of the views on martyrdom held by Catholics and Protestants in contemporary society.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1191
Nicole Mennell
The burgeoning field of animal studies has facilitated the exploration of human-animal relations across a variety of disciplines. Following the animal turn in humanities scholarship, a number of studies published in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have demonstrated that animals reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of the early modern period in a unique manner due to a shift in the ways in which animals were viewed and valued. This shift was largely caused by the increasing commodification of animals, the discovery of new creatures through global exploration, a renewed interest in investigating and documenting all earthly beings, and an enhanced concern for animal welfare. A range of early modern texts reflect this shift in the perception of animals through engaged interaction with conceptions of the human-animal divide and interrogation of human exceptionalism. Animals also inhabit a multitude of early modern texts in a less prominent manner because, as is the case in the modern world, animals lived alongside humans and were a fundamental part of everyday life. While these texts may not at first seem to reveal much detail about the lives of animals and how they were viewed in the early modern period, the field of animal studies has provided a method of bringing nonhuman beings to the fore. When analyzing the representation of nonhuman beings in early modern texts through the lens of animal studies a thorough consideration of the context in which such texts were written and investigation of the lived experience of the animals they seek to portray is required in order to capture, what leading animal studies scholar Erica Fudge terms, a holistic history of animals.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1267
Susan McHugh
In countless ways, plants have been in literature from the start. They literally provide surfaces and tools of inscription, as well as figuratively inspire a diverse body of writing that ranges from documenting changing social and ecological conditions to probing the limits of the human imagination. The dependence of human along with all other life on vegetal bodies assures their omnipresence in literatures across all periods and cultures, positioning them as ready reference points for metaphors, similes, and other creative devices. As comestibles, landscape features, home décor, and of course paper, plants appear in the pages of virtually every literary text. But depictions of botanical life in action often prove portentous, particularly when they remind readers that plants move in mysterious ways. At the frontiers of ancient and medieval European settlements, the plant communities of forests served as vital sources of material and imaginative sustenance. Consequently, early modern literature registers widespread deforestation of these alluring and dangerous borderlands as threats to economic and social along with ecological flourishing, a pattern repeated through the literatures of settler colonialism. Although appearing in the earliest of literatures, appreciation for the ways in which plants inscribe stories of their own lives remains a minor theme, although with accelerating climate change an increasingly urgent one. Myths and legends of hybrid plant-men, trees of life, and man-eating plants are among the many sources informing key challenges to representing plants in modern and contemporary literature, most obviously in popular genre fictions like mystery, horror, and science fiction (sf). Further enlightening these developments are studies that reveal how botanical writing emerges as a site of struggle from the early modern period, deeply entrenched in attempts to systematize and regulate species in tandem with other differences. The scientific triumph of the Linnaean “sexual system” bears a mixed legacy in feminist plant writing, complicated further by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) writers’ creative engagements with the unevenly felt consequences of professionalized plant science. Empowered by critical plant studies, an interdisciplinary formation that rises to the ethical challenges of emergent scientific affirmations of vegetal sentience, literature and literary criticism are reexamining these histories and modeling alternatives. In the early 21st century with less than a fraction of 1 percent of the remaining old growth under conservation protection worldwide, plants appear as never before in fragile and contested communal terrains, overshadowed by people and other animals, all of whose existence depends on ongoing botanical adaptation.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1283
Monika Albrecht
The new framework of critical post-colonial studies adds the innovative feature of a broader geopolitical view to an existing branch of critique that challenges the postcolonial regime of knowledge as a whole, simultaneously taking into account the impact of the “traveling concepts” of postcolonial theories on contemporary thought. A radical scrutiny of its core tenets questions postcolonial studies’ perception and representation of colonialism that are selectively confined to the areas of the West and the formerly colonized non-West. The new research field of critical post-colonial studies, by contrast, deploys a multidirectional framework that strives to unthink the quasi-Manichean reverse division of the world into a devalued West and an upgraded non-West characteristic of the postcolonial mainstream. Critical post-colonial studies is thus not intended to be yet another subdivision of the wide academic field of postcolonial studies but one that departs from a broadening of the geopolitical space and shows how this inevitably inflects conventional understanding of the postcolonial. Important steps for a critical dismantling of mainstream postcolonial studies are a conceptual disengagement of the mechanisms of “othering” and a disentanglement of the components of the specific postcolonial continuity thesis. Discarding these and other restrictions makes room for the urgently needed paradigm shift in postcolonial scholarship and for the fashioning of a new academic language of critical post-colonial studies that, on the one hand, meets the needs of the multidirectional conditions of imperialism and colonialism and their various semantics and is, on the other hand, able to grasp universal patterns in different geopolitical and historical conditions.
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