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Our contemporary society is obsessed with the idea of self-optimization, a concept that implies the need to constantly work on improving oneself and one’s appearance. The roots of postmodern self-optimization, however, lie in the cultural industries that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its equally profound and transient interest in new forms of expression, new ways of life, and new technologies, modernism thoroughly and critically embraced the idea of the self as something that can be created and recreated, either in accordance with or in contradiction to social norms. This book explores strategies of self-optimization developed in modernist literature and culture. In doing so, it offers a panoramic view of an often-overlooked aspect of European and North American modernity that anticipates our current postmodern crisis of the self.
Series:
Literary Modernism, Volume: 9
Our contemporary society is obsessed with the idea of self-optimization, a concept that implies the need to constantly work on improving oneself and one’s appearance. The roots of postmodern self-optimization, however, lie in the cultural industries that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its equally profound and transient interest in new forms of expression, new ways of life, and new technologies, modernism thoroughly and critically embraced the idea of the self as something that can be created and recreated, either in accordance with or in contradiction to social norms. This book explores strategies of self-optimization developed in modernist literature and culture. In doing so, it offers a panoramic view of an often-overlooked aspect of European and North American modernity that anticipates our current postmodern crisis of the self.
Urban Ecotones in the Global South
Series:
Francopolyphonies, Volume: 37
Global South cities are magnets of immigration flows. They are vivid crucibles of human diversity, cultural interactions, but also of political tensions and social violence. From Kolkata to Bogota, from Harare to Fort-de-France, from Bamako to Cape Town, this book offers a unique set of studies on cities where multifarious diaspora flows converge. Building on the concept of the ecotone, i.e. a contact zone between populations of different backgrounds, it elicits a multidisciplinary dialogue between social science and humanities scholars, exploring the articulation between the postcolonial and the neoliberal city. Following Ananya Roy’s proposition of a worlding the South (Roy 2014), this book contributes to forging a situated world view rooted in the experience and the imaginary of Southern cities.
Urban Ecotones in the Global South
Series:
Francopolyphonies, Volume: 37
Global South cities are magnets of immigration flows. They are vivid crucibles of human diversity, cultural interactions, but also of political tensions and social violence. From Kolkata to Bogota, from Harare to Fort-de-France, from Bamako to Cape Town, this book offers a unique set of studies on cities where multifarious diaspora flows converge. Building on the concept of the ecotone, i.e. a contact zone between populations of different backgrounds, it elicits a multidisciplinary dialogue between social science and humanities scholars, exploring the articulation between the postcolonial and the neoliberal city. Following Ananya Roy’s proposition of a worlding the South (Roy 2014), this book contributes to forging a situated world view rooted in the experience and the imaginary of Southern cities.
Editor:
Thamyris seeks to initiate alternative forms of criticism by analysing the ways in which cultural and theoretical discourses intervene in the contemporary world. This criticism should pursue a re-politicizing and remobilizing of theoretical perspectives and cultural practices, preferably through case studies. Thamyris hopes to contribute to the productive interaction between art, activism, and theory. We understand cultural practices to include those of literary, visual, digital, and performance arts, but also social practices related to gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. In short, Thamyris aims at exploring the ways in which varying cultural practices, separately or in interaction, can be effective as agents of social and cultural change.
Editor:
Thamyris seeks to initiate alternative forms of criticism by analysing the ways in which cultural and theoretical discourses intervene in the contemporary world. This criticism should pursue a re-politicizing and remobilizing of theoretical perspectives and cultural practices, preferably through case studies. Thamyris hopes to contribute to the productive interaction between art, activism, and theory. We understand cultural practices to include those of literary, visual, digital, and performance arts, but also social practices related to gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. In short, Thamyris aims at exploring the ways in which varying cultural practices, separately or in interaction, can be effective as agents of social and cultural change.
Author:
Abstract
The article analyzes a 2002 edition of Tuḥfat al-murīd ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd, a supercommentary written by Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) on Ibrāhīm al-Laqānī’s (d. 1632) base text in Ashʿarī theology. The edition was edited by the Muslim religious scholar and former grand mufti of Egypt, ʿAlī Jumʿa (b. 1952). The article shows that in Jumʿa’s edition taḥqīq is a practice of selecting a text that has been widely available, reframing its importance in the introduction and footnotes, and making the text understandable to contemporary readers. In his selection and framing of the text, Jumʿa situates al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya against Salafī opponents, while his explicit audience for the edition consists of Muslim students. The article argues that Jumʿa’s taḥqīq, which is both ideologically and pedagogically oriented, reflects his larger religiopolitical project of bolstering the authority and intellectual legacy of al-Azhar in the context of inter-Sunni rivalry in the late twentieth century.
A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries is a subseries of Avant-Garde Critical Studies providing a comprehensive overview and in-depth analysis of the cultural manifestations of the avant-garde in the Nordic countries from 1900-2010s.
Due to its success and the continued need to decenter the avant-garde we are continuing the format of the Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in a Companion Series, poignantly called: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde: A Companion Series. Here you can explore more regions covered.
Due to its success and the continued need to decenter the avant-garde we are continuing the format of the Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in a Companion Series, poignantly called: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde: A Companion Series. Here you can explore more regions covered.
Systematic and Historical Perspectives on Intermedial, Transmedial, and Multimodal Theory and Practice
Editor:
The multidisciplinary series Studies in Intermediality comprises monographs and essay collections that explore dynamic relations between media, that is, complex processes of medial exchange, transformation, interaction, or interplay. The series highlights the fact that the field of Intermediality Studies has become increasingly variegated and that it advances overlapping, yet distinct theories of intermediality, transmediality, multimodality, and adaptation. These theories acknowledge an extensive range of relationships established among various media and investigate how more general conceptualizations of mediality emerge from ever-diversifying mediascapes, which incorporate media that have persisted for centuries as well as new formats (digital or otherwise) that continue to evolve.
The peer-reviewed volumes of Studies in Intermediality, which have been appearing since 2006, critically assess the internationally far-reaching and innovative scope of Intermediality Studies and related fields.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts to the publisher at BRILL, Masja Horn.
The peer-reviewed volumes of Studies in Intermediality, which have been appearing since 2006, critically assess the internationally far-reaching and innovative scope of Intermediality Studies and related fields.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts to the publisher at BRILL, Masja Horn.
Author:
Abstract
Information regarding the provenance of papyrological material that was acquired in the Egyptian antiquities market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is scarce and often unreliable. This article investigates the provenance of Hamburg’s Papyrus Bilinguis 1, famed for containing the apocryphal Acta Pauli. By researching archival files documenting the acquisition and the context of the find, the papyrus is shown to have been acquired in breach of the Egyptian antiquities law of 1912. The article reveals how Carl Schmidt (1868–1938), the collector who acquired the manuscript for the Hamburg library, by concealing information, tried to cover up his own criminal involvement in the smuggling of the manuscript. Through the investigation of a manuscript that was acquired by a public German institution in awareness of its illegality, the article hopes to contribute to current debates on the translocation of cultural heritage artefacts to Europe and the US in the age of European colonialism and imperialism.
Author:
Abstract
The article discusses the first attempts of Soviet culture to produce a hybrid genre of film opera in the mid-1930s. It traces the artistic background of Ukrainian sculptor and filmmaker Ivan Kavaleridze who was chosen to pioneer the new genre, as well as the complex national dynamic between Russian and non-Russian Soviet republics amidst the stabilization of Socialist Realist conventions and the launch of the anti-formalist campaign in the ussr. Finally, it addresses the issues of russification, exoticization and alienation of Ukrainian film culture of the time.