Humanities — Open Access Journal

In 167/6 BCE, the Roman senate granted a request from Athens to control the island of Delos. Subsequently, the Delians inhabiting the island were mandated to leave and an Athenian community was installed. Polybius, who records these events, tells us that the Delians left and resettled in Achaea in the Peloponnese. Scholars have tended to focus on Rome’s motivations for siding with the Athenians rather than on what happened to the Delians. Furthermore, translations have tended to use the broad terminology of ‘migration’ to describe the Delians’ movement. Comparatively, this contribution suggests that modern categories connected to ‘displacement’ can help us recover aspects of the Delians’ experience. Particularly, a shift to the vocabulary of ‘displacement’ highlights the creative agency of the Delians in holding the Athenians accountable for their expulsion and in seeking recognition from Rome of their integration into the Achaean state. The application of these modern categories necessitates reflection on differences in the political, institutional landscapes that have shaped the experience of displacement in the ancient Hellenistic and modern contexts, as well as on variations in experience amongst the Delians. Ultimately, recognizing what these individuals experienced within the evolving third-party arbitration system of the ancient world leads us to think about the indirect violence of expanding political institutions in ‘globalising’ worlds, both ancient and modern. Full article

This essay proposes a narrative of the Nordic countries’ relationship to modernism and other major literary trends of the late 19th and 20th centuries, that situates them in conjunction with the rest of Europe. “Masterpieces of Scandinavian Literature: the 20th Century” is a course that has been taught to American college students without expertise in literature or Scandinavia for three decades. This article describes the content and methodologies of the course and how Nordic modernisms are explained to this particular audience of beginners. Simple definitions of modernism and other related literary movements are provided. By focusing on this unified literary historical narrative and highlighting the pioneers of Scandinavian literature, the Nordic countries are presented as solid participants in European literary and cultural history. Further, the social realism of the Modern Breakthrough emerges as one of the Nordic countries distinct contributions to world literature. Full article

While some war poets amplify the concept of anonymity for enemy soldiers, projecting an “us vs. them” mentality, other defining voices of war counter this militaristic impulse to dehumanize the enemy. This pivot toward describing the World Wars more like humanitarian crises than an epic of good and evil is most notable in poems that chronicle both real and imagined close-range encounters between combatants. The poem “Strange Meeting” by British First World War soldier Wilfred Owen uses the vision of two enemy soldiers meeting in hell to reinforce his famous notion that war is something to be pitied. As a result of technological advancements in the Second World War and the increasing distance of combat, the poems “Vergissmeinnicht” and “How to Kill” by British Second World War soldier Keith Douglas wrestle with dehumanizing the enemy and acknowledging their humanity. “Protocols” by American Second World War soldier Randall Jarrell is an imagined view of civilian victims, and is a reckoning with the horrors human beings are capable of committing. Full article

This paper discusses artistic documentary photography from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the mid-1970s until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and suggests that it functioned as a substitute public–Ersatzöffentlichkeit–in society. This concept of a substitute public sphere sometimes termed a counter-public sphere, relates to GDR literature that, in retrospect, has been allocated this role. On the whole, in critical discourse certain texts have been recognised as being distinct from GDR propaganda which sought to deliver alternative readings in their coded texts. I propose that photography, despite having had a different status to literature in the GDR, adopted similar traits and also functioned as part of a substitute public sphere. These photographers aimed to expose the existing gap between the propagandised and actual life under socialism. They embedded a moral and critical position in their photographs to comment on society and to incite debate. However, it was necessary for these debates to occur in the private sphere, so that artists and their audience would avoid state persecution. In this paper, I review Harald Hauswald’s series Everyday Life (1976–1990) to demonstrate how photographs enabled substitute discourses in visual ways. Hauswald is a representative of artistic documentary photography and although he was never published in the official GDR media, he was the first East German photographer to publish in renowned West German and European media outlets, such as GEO magazine and ZEITmagazin, before the reunification. In 1990, he founded the ‘Ostkreuz–Agency of Photographers’ with six other East German documentary photographers. Full article

This paper addresses the paradoxes and possibilities for academic feminism in the Third Millennium drawing on feminist linguistics. It targets the role of language in the construction of social gender, focusing on data from Greek, and shows that gendering discourse can effect cultural change. It is suggested that academic feminists can be agents of cultural change when they promote feminist language reform in the service of challenging the dominant gender order. Full article

This essay examines Byzantine military manuals created between the sixth to the tenth centuries for what they can reveal about Byzantine imperial attitudes toward the landscapes of war and those who inhabit them. Of foremost concern in these sources is the maintenance of ‘security’ (Greek: asphaleia) by commanders with the necessary quality of ‘experience’ (Greek: peira). Experience meant knowing how to best exploit the land, including the villages under Byzantine authority, in the prosecution of war. Exploitation in the name of security involved destroying villages, using villages and their inhabitants in ambushes, poisoning and seizing crops, evacuating villages, and using villages for the billeting of, at times undisciplined, soldiers. Villages were thus central to a Byzantine military strategy that is identified here as the ‘village war,’ a strategy that is analogous to security strategies evident in more recent conflicts. Through the juxtaposition of premodern and modern modalities of war, this essay intends to be a pointed reminder that the village war has deep roots in imperialist thought, and that the consequences of the village war profoundly reshape the lives of those caught up in its midst, particularly the peasantry. Full article

In this autoethnographic essay, the author argues for the use of poetic inquiry as a feminist methodology by showing her use of poetry as research method during the past 13 years. Through examples of her poetic inquiry work, the author details how poetry as research offers Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies scholars a means of doing, showing, and teaching embodiment and reflexivity, a way to refuse the mind-body dialectic, a form of feminist ethnography, and a catalyst for social agitation and change. The author uses examples of her ethnographic poetry that critique middle-class White motherhood, address the problems of White feminism, and reflects the nuances of identity negotiation in research and personal life to show the breadth of topics and approaches of poetic inquiry as feminist research practice and feminist pedagogy. Full article

This paper explores the intersections between feminism and communication in an Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program course that is cross-listed with Social Justice and Women’s and Gender Studies. The paper focuses on the alignment of the Inside-Out curriculum with feminist pedagogical principles and explores, through the structure and content of the course, the ways in which these feminist principles interconnect with communication concepts. Full article

Song Yuan Huaya (the Huaya of the Song and Yuan Dynasties) is a type of seal featuring figurative patterns and sometimes decorated with ciphered or ethnic characters. Their origins are the Song and Yuan Dynasties, although their influence extends to the Ming (1368–1644 CE) and Qing (1644–1912 CE) Dynasties. Although it is based on the Chinese Han seal tradition, Song Yuan Huaya exhibits various elements from the influence of the Silk Road. This is thought to be the first time in Han seal history that the Steppe culture can be seen so abundantly on private seals. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach to analyse, probably for the first time in the field, some cases of Song Yuan Huaya, in which a dialogue between the Han seal tradition and Silk Road culture occurs. The findings will hopefully advance the understanding of the complicated nature of the art history, society, peoples, and ethnic relationships in question, and will serve as the starting point for further studies of intercultural communication during specific historical periods. Full article

The rapid extension of what has become known as the Digital Humanities has resulted in an array of online resources for researchers within the subdiscipline of Victorian Studies. But the increasingly acquisitive nature of these digital projects poses the question as to what happens once all the information and material we have related to the Victorians has been archived? This paper is an attempt to anticipate this question with specific reference to future digital resources for the study of ‘Victorian murder culture’, and in particular, the essentially textual nature of the nineteenth-century experience of crime. It will argue that there is potential for new forms of digital-humanities archive that offer a more participatory user experience, one that nurtures a cognitively empathic understanding of the complex intertextuality of Victorian crime culture. Full article

Joanna Bourke’s account of the ways that changing ideas of rape reflect the gendered norms of the times, and Eric Reitan’s proposal that rape ought to remain a contested concept amenable to evolving principles of ethical sexual relationships, speak to the ways that social, cultural, and political contexts influence our understanding of sexual violence. Though the criteria that are used to define rape change, one thing remains constant: the raped person is shamed. As she is shamed, she is degraded. This paper argues that until we understand the role that shame plays in enabling sexual violence by humiliating, silencing, and stigmatizing its victims, changes in our depictions of rape will neither disable the personal devastation of being raped nor dismantle the social practices and political institutions that rely on rape to maintain misogynous inequalities. Following the Introduction (Section 1) it is divided into three parts. Section 2, The Shame of Being Human, discusses the psychological and phenomenological accounts of shame. It alerts us to the ways that shame defines us insofar as it reveals the truth of human intersubjectivity and mutual interdependency. Section 3, Debilitating Shame, describes the ways that shame has been exploited to enable and enforce sexed and gendered inequalities. Section 4, Shame: Demanding Justice, examines the ways that shame, in its role as the protector of the self, undermines the effects of debilitating shame and fosters a politics of sexual integrity by affirming the dignity of the interdependencies that tie us to each other. Full article

The African American rhetorical tradition could be described as a shelter in an alien environment or as a way station on a long journey. A focus on ethos suggests that such a narrow approach to African American literature cannot do justice to these literary texts: how these writers employ images and symbols, craft and deploy examine identities, blend, criticize, and create traditions, explore contemporary issues, and create community. Because of cultural and racist narratives, African Americans could not simply use either the pre-Socratic or Aristotelian approaches to ethos in their fight for social justice. This essay demonstrates how a postclassical approach to ethos that draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and is focused on community-building and self-healing is central to the African American literature and rhetoric. Full article

A common convention in comics and animation is the use of animal stand-ins to provide an access point for human experiences. Whether representing anthropomorphized characters navigating very human experiences or depicting four-legged creatures impacted by human action, this strategy has the manifest intent of fostering viewer identification and empathy. In particular, artists sometimes deploy animal avatars in representations of persecution and historical trauma to avoid depicting identity categories such as race, nationality and sexuality, which constitute the ostensible basis for persecution. In this way, the use of animals to represent human suffering universalizes experiences for which difference matters. In this essay, I explore how these animal stand-ins enable or foreclose empathy with Palestinian victims in the close reading of two primary texts, “War Rabbit” and Waltz with Bashir, which employ animal avatars in place of a direct depiction of Palestinian suffering. These illustrated narratives, one a comic and one an animated film, visually rhyme animal and human suffering and verbally lament the deaths of animals. I argue that both texts fail to unpack the analogies they construct, such that these constructions ultimately represent the actual Palestinians victims as being mute and irrational. Thus this use of animal avatars, which is meant to be foster empathy, is instead oblique, and risks further dehumanizing victims and negating their experiences. Full article

The aim of this essay is to introduce, contextualize, and provide rationale for texts published in the Humanities special issue, Histories of Ethos: World Perspectives on Rhetoric. It surveys theories of ethos and selfhood that have evolved since the mid-twentieth century, in order to identify trends in discourse of the new millennium. It outlines the dominant theories—existentialist, neo-Aristotelian, social-constructionist, and poststructuralist—while summarizing major theorists of language and culture (Archer, Bourdieu, Foucault, Geertz, Giddens, Gusdorf, Heidegger). It argues for a perspectivist/dialectical approach, given that no one theory comprehends the rich diversity of living discourse. While outlining the “current state of theory,” this essay also seeks to predict, and promote, discursive practices that will carry ethos into a hopeful future. (We seek, not simply to study ethos, but to do ethos.) With respect to twenty-first century praxis, this introduction aims at the following: to acknowledge the expressive core of discourse spoken or written, in ways that reaffirm and restore an epideictic function to ethos/rhetoric; to demonstrate the positionality of discourse, whereby speakers and writers “out themselves” ethotically (that is, responsively and responsibly); to explore ethos as a mode of cultural and embodied personal narrative; to encourage an ethotic “scholarship of the personal,” expressive of one’s identification/participation with/in the subject of research; to argue on behalf of an iatrological ethos/rhetoric based in empathy, care, healing (of the past) and liberation/empowerment (toward the future); to foster interdisciplinarity in the study/exploration/performance of ethos, establishing a conversation among scholars across the humanities; and to promote new versions and hybridizations of ethos/rhetoric. Each of the essays gathered in the abovementioned special issue achieves one or more of these aims. Most are “cultural histories” told within the culture being surveyed: while they invite criticism as scholarship, they ask readers to serve as witnesses to their stories. Most of the authors are themselves “positioned” in ways that turn their texts into “outings” or performances of gender, ethnicity, “race,” or ability. And most affirm the expressive, epideictic function of ethos/rhetoric: that is, they aim to display, affirm, and celebrate those “markers of identity/difference” that distinguish, even as they humanize, each individual and cultural storytelling. These assertions and assumptions lead us to declare that Histories of Ethos, as a collection, presents a whole greater than its essay-parts. We conceive it, finally, as a conversation among theories, histories, analyses, praxes, and performances. Some of this, we know, goes against the grain of modern (Western) scholarship, which privileges analysis over narrative and judges texts against its own logocentric commitments. By means of this introduction and collection, we invite our colleagues in, across, and beyond the academy “to see differently.” Should we fall short, we will at least have affirmed that some of us “see the world and self”—and talk about the world and self—through different lenses and within different cultural vocabularies and positions. Full article

A photograph of a basketmaker and photographs of other refugee artisans published in the August 1956 issue of Interiors magazine iterated some common themes of refugee narratives during a decade of significant migration that saw the United Nations sponsor World Refugee Year in 1959. Of particular interest are the ways the publication of the basketmaker photograph helped to demonstrate how Vietnamese refugee artisans suited the needs of an American State Department-led aid project directed by the industrial designer Russel Wright in South Vietnam from 1955–61. The project aimed to export Vietnamese craft to the American middle class as a way to bring South Vietnam into the Free World during the Cold War. This essay explores how the photograph served the American State Department agenda by characterizing its subject in terms of pathos and need. To this point, it helped to allay American anxieties about supporting refugee artisans by depoliticizing the “refugee problem” and resolving it. In this case, refugee photography expressed how the interests of American diplomacy were linking to the American middle class as a demographic becoming synonymous with consumption and whiteness. Full article

Images of atrocity are deeply problematic, in that they potentially create a tension between form and content and are often accused of re-victimization, aesthetization of suffering, compassion fatigue and exploitation. As an alternative, therefore, there is considerable potential in examining images associated with atrocity that do not depict the actual act of violence or the victim itself, but rather depict the material presence of the spaces and objects involved in such acts. The temporality of the photograph is also fluid in this type of approach. This paper considers the work of four photographers (Edmund Clark, Ashley Gilbertson, Shannon Jensen, and Fred Ramos) who have used a “forensic aesthetic” in their practice. Full article

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 contains yet another assault on higher education in its unprecedented tax on private university endowment income. This paper argues, first, that this and other attacks should not be seen as anti-intellectual efforts to dismantle higher education but rather as intellectually elitist efforts to rid universities of certain programs and personnel and, second, that viewing these efforts as motivated primarily by racism and (hetero)sexism is an analytical and political mistake. Women’s, gender, and sexualities studies programs undermine basic assumptions that ground contemporary right-wing political and economic policy—namely, individualism and economism—by presenting empirical evidence and developing theoretical frameworks focused on historical formations of power networks that produce subjects, preferences, and systems of oppression. The main goal of the radical right is not to purge women and people of color from academia, but to prevent analysis and discussion that reveals the inadequacy of right-wing ontological commitments and neoliberal social theory. Full article

By drawing attention to Hélène Berr’s use of foreign languages and literature as acts of translation, arguably one of the most prominent features of her Journal, this paper hopes to lay the foundation for a more sustained discussion of what translation means for victims of Nazi persecution, as well as of what translation does to their voices and for the continued transmission of their memories. The first section of this paper considers how Hélène Berr uses translation as a communicative aid to expression and argues that foreign languages, literary forms of expression, and also literature itself form part of a broader network of substitute vocabularies that function to help Berr to narrate, or even to translate, the ineffable. After considering the important role that heterolingualism and these substitute vocabularies play in Berr’s narrative, the paper raises some of the distinct challenges that linguistic plurality poses to translators of narratives of Nazi persecution. By drawing on, and comparing, examples from a textual analysis of the (2008) English version of Berr’s Journal, translated by David Bellos, and from the (2009) German edition, translated by Elisabeth Edl, and crucially through assessments of citations from the translators themselves, this paper highlights the significant role that translators, and the practice of translation, play in shaping memories of Nazi persecution. Full article

Central Asia has one of the deepest and richest histories of any region on the planet. First settled some 6500 years ago by oasis-based farming communities, the deserts, steppe and mountains of Central Asia were subsequently home to many pastoral nomadic confederations, and also to large scale complex societies such as the Oxus Civilization and the Parthian and Kushan Empires. Central Asia also functioned as the major hub for trans-Eurasian trade and exchange networks during three distinct Silk Roads eras. Throughout much of the second millennium of the Common Era, then under the control of a succession of Turkic and Persian Islamic dynasties, already impressive trading cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand were further adorned with superb madrassas and mosques. Many of these suffered destruction at the hands of the Mongols in the 13th century, but Timur and his Timurid successors rebuilt the cities and added numerous impressive buildings during the late-14th and early-15th centuries. Further superb buildings were added to these cities by the Shaybanids during the 16th century, yet thereafter neglect by subsequent rulers, and the drying up of Silk Roads trade, meant that, by the mid-18th century when expansive Tsarist Russia began to incorporate these regions into its empire, many of the great pre- and post-Islamic buildings of Central Asia had fallen into ruin. This colonization of the region by the Russians, and its later incorporation into the Union of Society Socialist Republics in 1919, brought Central Asia to the attention of Russian and Soviet archaeologists and urban planners. It was these town planners and engineers who were eventually responsible for preserving many of the decaying monuments and historic urban cores of Central Asia, despite the often-challenging ideological constraints they were forced to work under. The paper focuses particularly on the effect of these preservation policy decisions in Uzbekistan, where the process has been best documented. It argues that Soviet authorities struggled constantly with ways of recognizing the need for historical preservation while at the same time creating a new society that had cast off the shackles of its ‘feudal past’. Full article