Search Results (8)

Surrealism persistently resisted its own historicization, defining itself not as a literary or artistic movement but as an activity of the mind aimed at total liberation. This essay re-examines surrealism’s internal contradictions: its rejection of literature alongside its dependence on literary institutions; its commitment to psychic freedom alongside political orthodoxy; and its hostility to authorship alongside the production of canonical works. Drawing on manifestos, journals, performance practices, and postwar critical reception, the essay situates surrealism at the fault line between modernism, Dada, and later poststructuralist theory. It argues that surrealism’s most enduring legacy lies less in its aesthetic products than in its reconfiguration of cultural authority among artist, artwork, and reader, a redistribution that continues to shape contemporary literary, media, and performance studies. Full article

This paper is a follow-up to the research conducted in 2021 titled James Anta: missionary, martyr, and the unsung hero of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Zimbabwe. The paper was a reconstruction of Anta’s life, ministry, and martyrdom. The research found out that although the blood of Anta was the seed of Methodism in Zimbabwe, the church was reluctant to honour him. The research also noted that the Wesleyan Methodist church created a biased history of African cultural epistemology, which has no place for people who die young and unmarried. The paper concluded with a call for the Wesleyan Methodist church to rewrite its historiography, giving space to its martyrs like Anta. After reading the 2021 publication, the Wesleyan Methodist church leadership made urgent actions towards the re-historicization of Methodism in Zimbabwe with Harare West District dubbing its April 2022 Synod as James Anta Synod. The Synod further resolved to name the school they were intending to build after Anta. Moreover, Kadoma District agreed to rename Banket Circuit (where Anta was assassinated) as James Anta Circuit. The Wesleyan Methodist church further erected a monument of Anta and made the site a pilgrimage shrine. The fast responses by the church to honour Anta in 2022 justify their zeal to rewrite their history after 136 years of reluctancy. This paper used both primary and secondary sources to gather data. The paper concludes by challenging missionary churches to honour African agents whose history and sacrifice were seldomly considered and yet they were the key people in the Christianisation of Africa. Full article

The early medieval Pampa tirtha (pilgrimage), in the Hampi area, Bellary District, Karnataka, South India, is largely presented in research as a relatively homogenous, albeit sacred space. This paper describes a nuanced understanding of the Pampa tirtha through the lens of spatial organization and pilgrim movement. The natural and built landscape features of the area were digitized through Esri’s ArcMap to historically situate extant stone monuments. Devotee movement through the pilgrimage space was then modelled on time-sensitive maps of architectural and natural features. Pathways of movement across the site were subsequently explored in the immersive panoramic imagery captured in Google Street View. By combining these digital tools, a historicized analysis of the character and qualities of place, born from the organization of the site, are identifiable. The results demonstrate how devotees moved through a network of distinct nodes of shrines, temples, and gateways. Each node possessed a unique relationship to microtopographic features of the hill, and to the earliest deities of the site that originally anchored and oriented the sacred space: Pampa and Bhairava. The pilgrimage space that developed between these two deities was tied together through a path of movement, running south to north. Trends of re-ordering the Pampa tirtha spatial network also reveal patron and artisan mechanisms to privilege and prioritize the 12th-century addition of the god Virupaksha into the sacred space. Full article

Framed within religious historicism, the present study reviews, through historical and empirical insights, the lessons that Philippine RE can learn from the liberating function of religion and liberated religious undercurrents parallel to institutional religion in the Philippines. The liberating function of religion is often overlooked in post-colonial discourses while religious undercurrent views seem neglected due to pre-occupations with untangling power imbalances submerged in the voices of institutional religion in post-colonial analysis. Hence, in this presentation, I give particular attention to the liberating role of contemporary religion in contrast to the post-colonial thrust to rid institutional religion of power and control and secondly, the liberated religious views of young Filipino audiences from empirical findings I found from my previous studies. For religious undercurrents, I limit myself to current unorthodox religious interpretations of young Filipino audiences departing from conventional assumptions of religion and culture. My analysis of liberating religion and liberated religious views from empirical findings show epistemological shifts from the Christian interpretation in a post-colonial context. These shifts point to de-institutionalized but theocentric religious ideas inspired by moral and communal considerations, which form the basis of RE content. Full article

Today, Bilād-Shinqīṭ or Mauritania is often portrayed as an unparalleled center of classical Islamic tradition supposedly untouched by modernity. While previous scholarship has concerned itself mostly with Mauritania’s local intellectual history on one hand and its recent global fame on the other, in this paper, I document instead how, in less than two centuries, Mauritania has become not only a point of scholarly reference and symbolic/representational space of excellence in Islamic knowledge, but also one with an astonishing amount of global reach. Thus, I explore the ways in which Mauritania has continued to asserts its relevance and scholarly authority on a global scale. Drawing on a variety of historical, literary, and anthropological sources, I historicize the rise and mythologization of Mauritania as a peerless center of traditional sacred scholarship. I specifically examine how a number of widely different Muslim actors under changing circumstances continue to invoke, perform and re-invent Shinqīṭ/Mauritania. In documenting what I call Global Shinqīt over the longue durée, rather than simply illustrate how the so-called Muslim peripheries shape central traits of transnational normative Islamic authority, I argue instead that mobility, historical circumstances, and scholarly performance combined are at least as instrumental in the credible articulation of authoritative Islamic knowledge as normative discourses issued by supposedly central institutions, personalities, and religious bodies located in the so-called “heartland of Islam.” In so doing, I destabilize the center/periphery framework altogether in order to explore how Islamic religious authority is actually construed and operates under shifting cultural and political conditions. Full article

The resurgence of a deterministic mode of representation mythologizing Arabs as figuring (threatening) Saracen by judging their epistemological commitments as hostile to Enlightened reason-based ideals is demonstratively identifiable after 9/11, and more so following the Arab uprisings in 2011, when we notice that the Arab in general, and Muslim in particular, was historicized as the “new barbarian” from which (liberal-secular) Westphalian society must be defended. Such neo-Orientalist representations disseminate powerful discursive (symbolic) articulations (i.e., culture talk) —in tandem with the (re)formulation of legal concepts and doctrines situated in jus gentium (i.e., sovereignty, immanence, and pre-emptive defense strategy)—legally adjudicating a redemptive war ostensibly to “moralize” a profane Arabia. Proponents of neo-Orientalism define their philosophical theology as not simply incompatible with Arab epistemology (Ar. العربية المعرفة نظرية), but that Arab-Muslims are an irreconcilable threat to Latin-European philosophical theology, thus, accentuating that neo-Orientalism is constituted by an ontological insecurity constituting Arab-Islamic philosophical theology as placing secular modern logic under “siege” and threatening “civil society”. This legal-historical research, therefore, argues that neo-Orientalism not only necessitates figuring the Arab as Islamist for the ontological security of a “modern” liberal-secular mode of Being, but that such essentialist imaginary is a culturalist myth that is transformed into a legal difference which proceeds to argue the necessity of sanctioning a violent episode transforming a supposed lawless “Middle East” receptive to terror, into a lawful “New Middle East” receptive to reason. This sacrilegos process reveals the “inclusive exclusion” temporal ethos of (a positivist) jus gentium which entails maintaining a supposed unbridgeable cultural gap between a (universalized) sovereign Latin-European subject, and a (particularized) Arab object denied sovereignty for the coherence of Latin-European epistemology. Full article

The field of Critical Disability Studies (CDS) includes a diverse range of methodologies for the ethical re-evaluation of literary texts. CDS has a growing relationship with Romanticism, addressing themes such as sublime aesthetics and poetic symbolism. A major function of CDS is the re-reading of texts in terms authors’ lived experience of disability, and the social environments in which they produced. To that extent, CDS is a continuation of the process of re-historicizing Romantic literature. Complementary to the historicizing function, a range of more conceptual theories continues to impact on Romantic studies, opening up new possibilities for reading and scholarship. This article attempts to provide a critical overview of this ongoing work, and a sense of its diverse and at times contradictory nature. Concepts and theories for discussion include disability aesthetics, deformity, metaphor, and the Romantic fragment. The article includes a close analysis of Byron’s poem “Prometheus”, which connects revolutionary myth with ideas of pain and silence, demonstrating the fundamental contribution made by ideas of disability to literary Romanticism. CDS can help to disrupt the canonical and institutional nature of Romanticism, and to include dissident voices—not only the witness of the non-normatively embodied, but of difference in general. Full article

Performance has long been recognized to be a meaningful component in the worship of the Jina. This paper will focus on a particular aspect of devotional performance and historicize the phenomenon of ritual re-enactment of the Jina’s biography, a practice that remains significant to temple worship today. This paper will argue that the performance of the enlightened soul’s biography was familiar to Jains already in the early centuries of the common era and was not confined to the five auspicious events (kalyāṇakas). In a Śvetāmabara canonical text called the Rāyapaseṇiyasutta, this re-enactment is part of a greater, highly pleasurable spectacle that evokes a variety of aesthetic emotions, including erotic emotion, in the audience of monks. Through this discussion I will question the dichotomies between aesthetic pleasure and ritual efficacy and between drama and meritorious conduct and show that aesthetic pleasure, which lies at the heart of Jina worship, defines its meritorious value in the eyes of the devotees. The more splendid and aesthetically pleasing one’s expression of devotion, the more efficacious it is believed to be. I propose that the significance of the aesthetic element in devotional performance for laypeople stems from their temporary transformation into gods and goddesses. Celestial beings, as the paradigmatic enjoyers (bhoktṛ) of sensual pleasures, spend their life-spans relishing joy and rapture. As such, the pleasurable experiences of laypeople are essential for the veracity of their ritual transformation. Full article