| The Civil War and American Literature Posted: 28 Apr 2011 08:09 AM PDT Randall Fuller explains the effect of the Civil War on American lit in From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010). According to a recent Boston Globe review, the author reminds us that the 1860s featured as talented a cohort of American writers as any decade could ask for — authors now known and loved by only their last names: Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Melville. Fuller carefully details how these writers experienced the war in their daily routines, their family lives, and their interlocking friendships.
What this group portrait reveals is that, while the Civil War may not have led to any lasting works of literature, it had a profound impact on the most important writers of its era. The war changed what they believed and how they wrote. After the shots at Fort Sumter, the North came quickly and patriotically together — "flush'd in the face," in Whitman's words, "and all its veins fiercely pulsing and pounding." But Fuller suggests that Whitman and his literary cohort soon became uncomfortable with this kind of certainty, even though they had played a large part in putting that certainty into place. America's first generation of great writers began experimenting with new literary forms, and began questioning their most dogmatic assumptions about the morality and effects of war. More here.  |
| Illusion and Critique At the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century Posted: 28 Apr 2011 07:55 AM PDT Igor Stramignoni, London School of Economics, Law Department, has published Illusion and Betrayal: The City, the Poets, or an Ethics of Truths? in volume 7 of the Utrecht Law Review (2011). Here is the abstract. A nagging feeling of great expectations turned sour is in the air, at least at this end of the globe. The illusion appears to have been twofold. Those liberals who after the Cold War had imagined finally to see the Western city win over competing forms of self-regulation, self-reproduction, and homeostasis can no longer fail to see how, by the time the twenty-first century has commenced, democracy and the rule of law, the West's own blueprint for living together, have lost some of their lustre, when they have not been bluntly rejected. Those amongst the poets who, by contrast, had argued all along that another world was possible or, alternatively, that democracy and the rule of law could at most be promised or tendered rather than fully achieved or imposed, sometimes today worry whether in the process they may not have become somewhat problematically fixated with what in the age of mass culture and information technology might be a potentially self-defeating aesthetics of the Other. |
Alain Badiou's Platonism of the multiple and, specifically, his ethics of truths invite us to consider whether the widespread sense of disappointment and closure which follow from such an unsatisfactory situation should not be grasped as a figure of nihilism, specifically as a figure of 'betrayal', and whether, on the other hand, what is required may not be discernment, courage, and caution and to remain alert to the possible occurrence of new signal events. Thus to a poetics of illusion and of consequent disappointment Badiou prefers an ethics of truths which starts from the obvious existence of certain generic truths and yet is never closed-off to the invention of new ones. As presented, Badiou's ethical proposal is far from being fully developed and it is bound to be contentious. And yet it does contribute to a unique and powerful critique of current events as they ceaselessly appear on the horizon of a more interconnected world, specifically a critique which purports to offer a more affirmative, and even optimistic, message than many competing analyses of democracy and the rule of law.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
The Development of National Identities
Posted: 28 Apr 2011 08:04 AM PDT
Hannibal Travis, Florida International University College of Law, has published
On the Existence of National Identity Before 'Imagined Communities': The Example of the Assyrians of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Persia. Here is the abstract.
Studies on nationalism and the emergence of modern ethnic identities rarely examine sources dating from the period 0 CE (A.D.) and 1453 CE, or the period between the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the mid-first millennium CE and the Age of Discovery in the mid-second millennium CE. Testing generally accepted theories of national and ethnic distinctiveness against these sources reveals that a similar case exists for the existence of an Assyrian identity and/or nation as for a Greek, Kurdish, Jewish, or Persian identity or nation. Assyrian populations, religions, and political formations survived in present-day Iraq, Iran, and Turkey from 0 CE well into the 1800s CE.
Commentators on modern nationalism in relation to Assyrian identity have assumed, with little evidence, that the non-Arab, non-Jewish peoples of the East lacked the agency or the intellect to maintain a consistent identity, and that these peoples relied in their ignorance and indolence concerning their own identities on the theories of Western missionaries and colonial officials. After a long tradition of historical and cultural work assumed nations and peoples as subjects of analysis without critically examining the linguistic, cultural, or religious foundation of these groups of individuals or families, a new generation of scholars emerged who questioned this approach by positing that nations and peoples emerged in conjunction with modern capitalistic cultural forms and secular nationalistic liberalism. This theory, however, has the risk of degenerating into a vulgar instrumentalism, which assumes that identity entrepreneurs can manufacture ethnic, racial, or religious identity for their own purposes and little objective foundation. Thus, more recent studies point out the flaws in grounding national and ethnic distinctions in modern nationalism by compiling evidence that nations and peoples perceived themselves and were perceived by other collectivities as such long before the rise of European humanism or the Enlightenment.
This study attempts to show that the longevity and diversity of national and ethnic distinctions undermines a one-size-fits-all explanation such distinctions in the manner of Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities." The evidence from the Assyrian case suggests that the undifferentiated hordes of Asia did not coalesce and order themselves in modern times and under Western influence into nations created and sustained by advanced technology. This "Imagines Communities" narrative suffers from hindsight bias and an exaggerated Eurocentrism. It also insults and infantilizes the peoples and nations of premodern eras and non-Western regions by assuming they lacked the intelligence with which modern Europeans constructed national cultures, laws, literatures, schools, and economies. Historians have long since disproved such ideas.
By examining translations of and academic commentary on Aramaic, Greek, Roman, and Persian literature and inscriptions, among other sources, this Essay demonstrates that the British Empire invented neither the modern Assyrians as a people, nor the territory of modern Assyria that was considered for statehood by the League of Nations after World War I. Rather, the identification of present-day northern Iraq, northwestern Persia, and southeastern Turkey as "Assyria" draws support from the Middle Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian usage of the second and third millennia BCE, and the Greek, Roman, Persian, and Aramaic usage in the first millennium CE. Finally, the contribution of ancient Assyria to the cultures, languages, and religions of the non-Muslim populations of contemporary Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, especially Assyrian Christians, Mandaeans, and Yezidis, may no longer be doubted. This contribution is present in these peoples' daily vocabularies, place-names, and indigenous beliefs.
Download the paper from SSRN at the link.
