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THE CRISIS OF HUMANITY: OR, WHAT IF WE HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN?

März 9, 2017, 8:52 a.m., Adam Dodd, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

This collection of nine essays brings together a variety of responses to the question of the “nonhuman turn” within the humanities and the social sciences, understood broadly as a developing concern with overcoming anthropocentrism in its diverse manifestations. Emerging from The Nonhuman Turn conference held at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2012, which was hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies, it represents the first attempt to account for and consolidate the many intellectual approaches and developments that may now be regarded as constituting the nonhuman turn. The nonhuman turn is contextualized as both “yet another” turn but also a necessary one, and as something critically distinct from “the posthuman turn”—whereas the posthuman turn is concerned with what comes after the human (ways of being, ways of thinking), the nonhuman turn insists (according to editor Richard Grusin) that “we have never been human.” My reading of this volume suggests that this claim is not borne out across the chapters it contains, and that the notion that we have never been human, though a noble gesture to Bruno Latour's widely lauded claim that “we have never been modern,” does not enable a new philosophy, nor does it advance the two primary streams of philosophical thought featured here: object-oriented ontology (OOO) and new materialism.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12010

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BOOKS IN SUMMARY

März 9, 2017, 8:52 a.m., History and Theory, Allgemein.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12012

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5. MILLENNIAL SOVEREIGNTY, TOTAL RELIGION, AND TOTAL POLITICS

März 9, 2017, 8:52 a.m., A. AZFAR MOIN, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

Discussions of kingship and sovereignty in early modern India have struggled to fully comprehend and assess the work and life of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), the celebrated and most famous ruler of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal emperor's incomparable energy and imagination had lit up, like never before in the history of Islam, the vast networks and institutions of knowledge and practice that could be deployed in the service of sacred kingship. Rather than demonstrate a local history of Indic kingship, Akbar's intersections with networks and institutions show a history that stretched back centuries and linked South Asia to post-Mongol Iran and Central Asia, and were the crucibles in which a “millennial science” was cultivated. The implications for studying “millennial science” extend beyond the early modern world and into a consideration of sovereignty in modern South Asia.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12006

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POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE TWO SITES OF HISTORICITY

März 9, 2017, 8:52 a.m., RITWIK RANJAN, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the two sites of historicity, namely history-writing and historical agency, and their interrelationship. I borrow the idea of “sites of historicity” from historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). For the purpose of analyzing how the relationship between the two sites changes with time and context, using Trouillot's theoretical lens, I examine the philosophies of history of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. By citing instances from these two philosophers, I claim that with the rise of nineteenth-century colonialism, the two sites of historicity became discursively related in a specific way, whereby historical agency came to be predicated on history-writing. Hence, in contrast to Kant's work, in Hegel's philosophy of history the relationship between the two sites of historicity acquired a decidedly colonialist form. As a result of this predication of historical agency on history-writing, the alleged lack of historiography of certain cultures began to be considered as a token of their lack of political ability. The essay ends with the suggestion that the postcolonial thinkers and commentators who deal with historiography should challenge the foregoing predication, as it continues to inform contemporary thought concerning historiography.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12001

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3. BUDDHIST TECHNOLOGIES OF STATECRAFT AND MILLENNIAL MOMENTS

März 9, 2017, 8:52 a.m., ANNE M. BLACKBURN, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

There are striking family resemblances between models and modes of kingship in the Safavid and Mughal worlds discussed by Azfar Moin and those that characterized Buddhist kingship in the premodern Indian Ocean arena, which encompassed polities including Poḷonnāruva, Dambadeṇiya, Koṭṭē, Bagan, Sukhothai, and Chiang Mai. In courtly contexts, Buddhists—operating at the intersection of intellectual traditions in Pali and Sanskrit languages—depended upon protective technologies including astrology and interpreted threats and prospects according to millennial science. Working comparatively, across the premodern Indian Ocean and Indo-Persian worlds, can help historians of Buddhism and Islam to understand more clearly the intellectual histories and repertoires of royal practice according to which kings and strongmen within each sphere sought to gain and retain the throne.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12004

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