本文运用理论旅行视角和文化中间人概念,从研究者的学术想象和实践入手,考察中国学界如何译介、挪用、移植媒介社会学,探究媒介社会学跨越时空的"旅行",理解传播学"中西之间"的互动。对问卷调查和深度访谈以及历史文献的分析发现,中国学界对欧美媒介社会学的想象呈"经典化"趋势,这在很大程度上是经由翻译完成的"再经典化"的后果。与此相应,媒介社会学的本土实践则带有强烈的"当代性"。经由经典想象、再经典化和当代实践,媒介社会学被"驯化"为新闻社会学,为在地学术实践提供了建设性的"话语资源"... more
This article examines Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera’s use of concepts originating in the work of Antonio Gramsci and Bolivian sociologist René Zavaleta Mercado. Zavaleta’s concept of sociedad abigarrada (usually translated... more
This article examines Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera’s use of concepts originating in the work of Antonio Gramsci and Bolivian sociologist René Zavaleta Mercado. Zavaleta’s concept of sociedad abigarrada (usually translated as ‘motley society’) has a history of misappropriation in which García Linera participates by articulating it with the related concept of the estado aparente to claim that the merely apparent’ state which does not effectively represent the heterogeneous social reality of a country like Bolivia is abolished with the official establishment of the Plurinational State in 2009. This ideologeme of the Plurinational State as one that faithfully represents Bolivia’s abigarramiento is equated with the Gramscian stato integrale, which in Gramsci refers to the state proper plus civil society where these are thoroughly integrated to function as an organic whole (the modern capitalist nation-state). Beyond merely misusing the borrowed terms of this discursive operation, García Linera gives a prescriptive value to concepts developed for an analytical purpose to validate the existing regime.
Dass auch Theorie einer Historisierung bedarf steht mittlerweile außer Frage. Wie dies aber zu tun und davon ausgehend auch eine Theoriegeschichte zu denken und vor allem zu schreiben sei, scheint sehr viel weniger klar und ist in den... more
Dass auch Theorie einer Historisierung bedarf steht mittlerweile außer Frage. Wie dies aber zu tun und davon ausgehend auch eine Theoriegeschichte zu denken und vor allem zu schreiben sei, scheint sehr viel weniger klar und ist in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten immer wieder aufs Neue diskutiert worden.
Etabliert haben sich in diesem Zusammenhang v.a. die Paradigmen ‚Reise‘ (Edward Said, James Clifford) und ‚Verflechtung‘ (in Anlehnung an die in der Geschichtswissenschaft geführten Debatten über eine ‚histoire croisée‘ bzw. ‚entangled history‘) sowie in jüngster Zeit ‚Übersetzung‘ (z.B. Barbara Cassins Versuch, Philosophiegeschichte in Form eines Dictionnaire des intraduisibles zu schreiben).
Der Workshop fragt nach den Möglichkeiten, Voraussetzungen und Konsequenzen von Theoriegeschichte und -geschichtsschreibung. Von wem wird Theoriegeschichte ‚gemacht‘? Wo, in welchen Gattungen und Medien wird sie geschrieben? Wie verhält sich Theorie- zur Wissenschafts- und auch zur Literaturgeschichte? Dabei sollen neben den genannten Paradigmen auch solche theoriegeschichtlichen Rhetoriken, Denkfiguren und Metaphern in den Blick genommen werden, die an unvermuteten Orten aufzufinden sind, etwa in der Theorie selbst oder auch in der Literatur.
This paper demonstrates one way to reconsider pluralism in international relations theory through Japan's appropriation of European geopolitics. It is argued that the absence of non-Western theory often suggests the absence of non-Western... more
This paper demonstrates one way to reconsider pluralism in international relations theory through Japan's appropriation of European geopolitics. It is argued that the absence of non-Western theory often suggests the absence of non-Western subjectivity in world politics. In this debate, Japan, the sole non-Western country that abuses geopolitics to become a colonial empire, is a conundrum, particularly in terms of the relation of power and space. This paper shows how geopolitical theory can be differently interpreted by local political practices and its historical language, and how such mutations have been overlooked in the wider debate by examining conceptual divergence in the theory. Japanese geopolitics during the Second World War, called Daitōa Chiseigaku (Greater East Asia Geopolitics), envisaged the state as a territory without borders, in contrast to common assumptions in Anglophone international relations theory that modern Japan followed the European imperial order of territorial states. By excavating this story of Japanese geopolitics, this paper neither wants to assert another Japanese exceptionalism, nor to exhaust the hidden richness of Japanese theory to propose an alternative geopolitical discourse. Rather, it wants to reconsider the ways in which even state-centric geopolitical theory can be diverse in order to better understand the complex development of the map of modern states.
Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality investigates how the story of the 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth has come to be an iconic feminist story, and explores the continued relevance of this story for... more
Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality investigates how the story of the 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth has come to be an iconic feminist story, and explores the continued relevance of this story for contemporary feminist debates in general, and intersectionality scholarship in particular.
Tracing various academic reception histories of the story of Sojourner Truth and the famous "Ain’t I a Woman?" speech, the book gives insight into how this story has been taken up by feminist scholars in different times, places, and political contexts. Exploring in particular how and why the story of Sojourner Truth has become a key reference for the theoretical and political framework of intersectionality, the book examines what the consequences of this connection are both for how intersectionality is understood today, and how the story of Sojourner Truth is approached. The book examines key intersecting dimensions within the story of Truth and its reception, including gender, race, class and religion.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars in gender, women’s and feminist studies. In particular, the book will be of interest to those wishing to learn more about intersectionality and Sojourner Truth.
Situated at the intersection of literary theory and translation theory, the paper deals with the history of foreign literary theory in 1980s Czechoslovakia. Focusing on both the published works and the archival legacy of Czech literary... more
Situated at the intersection of literary theory and translation theory, the paper deals with the history of foreign literary theory in 1980s Czechoslovakia. Focusing on both the published works and the archival legacy of Czech literary scholar Vladimír Macura (1945-99), it studies the peculiar intertwining of reading, commentary, and translation involved in the reception of foreign language theory from Russian Formalism to North American deconstruction, the translation of which had been hindered for ideological or political reasons, as well as its mediation through Macura's publication of paraphrasing excerpts in his 1988 "Guidebook to International Literary Theory".
For the last two decades, the postcolonial theory has become one of the most dominant perspectives in the study of literature and culture in the Western Academia. Together with its increasingly more authoritarian voice, the postcolonial... more
For the last two decades, the postcolonial theory has become one of the most dominant perspectives in the study of literature and culture in the Western Academia. Together with its increasingly more authoritarian voice, the postcolonial theory has also become able to influence peripheral scholar communities, including those coming from cultures with no direct link with the historical phenomenon of colonialisation. This influence seems to be of two distinct types. The first one is a mimetic one (i.e. unintermediated by local experiences) which has generated an imitative postcolonial discourse in local academia, mostly used by members of English language departments. The second one, which I can call particularizing (i.e. intermediated by local cultural experiences), has tried to adapt (to various degrees of intensity) the postcolonial perspective to local conditions. This second type of influence can be seen, for example, in the adaptation of the postcolonial theory to the analysis of the postcommunist cultural phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe. The same thing has happened in Romanian literary studies, although at a low degree of intensity. In this paper, I will try to analyze the impact of postcolonial theoretic speculation on the Romanian literary studies of the last two decades.
« Les sorcières sont revenues » « Les sorcières ne sont jamais parties »... Depuis à peu près dix ans on assiste en Italie à un nouvel élan et à un renouveau des mobilisations féministes et queer, tant au niveau local que national. Ces... more
« Les sorcières sont revenues » « Les sorcières ne sont jamais parties »... Depuis à peu près dix ans on assiste en Italie à un nouvel élan et à un renouveau des mobilisations féministes et queer, tant au niveau local que national. Ces mobilisations collectives, très variés et hétérogènes à leur intérieur, ont investi l'espace public mettant en place des coalitions politiques inédites. Cette communication se propose d'explorer l'actualité féministe des politiques de coalition dans le contexte italien, donnant à voir des expériences concrètes de luttes en cours, et mobilisant des réflexions théoriques plus transversales.
Egypt’s cultural world mourns the passing, on Thursday October 3, of Ibrahim Fathi, one of the country’s most outstanding intellectuals whose literary criticism, translations, mentorship of generations of writers, and, above all,... more
Egypt’s cultural world mourns the passing, on Thursday October 3, of Ibrahim Fathi, one of the country’s most outstanding intellectuals whose literary criticism, translations, mentorship of generations of writers, and, above all, unwavering integrity have made their mark on several generations. Below, we reprint a profile of Fathi, written by Hala Halim in 2002, in which she pays tribute to the man and his work.
Classical geopolitics is the theory that was originally developed in the late nineteenth century Europe and disseminated some parts of the world including wartime Japan. Japanese geopolitics has been an abandoned field of study due to its... more
Classical geopolitics is the theory that was originally developed in the late nineteenth century Europe and disseminated some parts of the world including wartime Japan. Japanese geopolitics has been an abandoned field of study due to its anathematic past, despite its significance in wartime intellectual life. Meanwhile, Europe’s role in disseminating knowledge globally to shape the world according to its standards is an unchallenged premise in world politics. Its utmost example is the concept of the state, by which the world is assumed to be divided into bounded territories. The present study challenges this ground by taking interdisciplinary approaches in which contributions of academic literature in the West and studies of intellectual history in Japan are carefully bridged. It shows how political theory as text travels inter-regionally by interrogating the way how Japan imported classical geopolitics as the theory of the modern state however to explain regional developments in which the states were considered to be dissolved in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that the same theory can invoke diverged imaginations. It is, therefore, a study that focuses on the transformation of power, knowledge and subjectivity in time and space.
In his free verse anti-manifesto from 1976, Class Warrior – Taoist Style, Abdelkebir Khatibi warns readers against the dangers of turning metaphor into an idée fixe, challenging them to “hold to poetic knowledge without creating a fetish”... more
In his free verse anti-manifesto from 1976, Class Warrior – Taoist Style, Abdelkebir Khatibi warns readers against the dangers of turning metaphor into an idée fixe, challenging them to “hold to poetic knowledge without creating a fetish” (2017: 17). Such a formulation sums up one core impulse of Khatibi’s body of work, which activates the opaque force of language in the elaboration of a decolonial idiom that shutters back and forth between critique and poetics. This injunction also offers a productive frame for understanding a central task of Edward Said’s Orientalism, namely the imperative of detailing the violence involved in the figuration of worldly experience. Thinking through the legacy of Said’s groundbreaking study forty years after its publication, and particularly the book’s continued relevance both in the Maghreb and for critical work about the Maghreb, prompts us to ask how critique today can resist turning knowledge about the Maghreb – poetic or otherwise – into a fetish. In what follows, I work through some of the ramifications of this confluence of Khatibi and Said regarding figuration and knowledge as it relates to the disciplines of Francophone studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial criticism.
