Common Knowledge

Bynum, Caroline Walker;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464754

Caroline Walker Bynum has written extensively about medieval religious objects and about the background to medieval understandings of materiality in theology, natural philosophy, and science. Here she turns to a very different consideration of objects, asking how they reflect and sharpen personal and contemporary memories. Using autobiographical reminiscences of her mother's Virginia girlhood a hundred years ago and of her own encounters with that Southern past, she considers how the story of two lost or destroyed objects—a photograph of a house and a portrait of a Southern beauty—help anchor the story of two lives, yet leave it mysteriously open as well. memories of the American South materiality autobiography theories of objects the state of Virginia

de Almeida, Djaimilia Pereira;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464768

“Publish or perish” is an admonition that academics learn early in their careers. In this essay—a guest column—the author, a young academic, argues instead that publishing is a means of dignifying the discontinuity of the self. One both publishes and perishes in a single act. Publishing, it is suggested, resembles leave-taking: it is a way of saying good-bye to who you are. publish perish self-image

Tamen, Miguel;Urita, Michiko;Nagler, Michael N.;Morson, Gary Saul;Kharkhordin, Oleg;Diggelmann, Lindsay;Watkins, John;Zipes, Jack;Trilling, James;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464780

It is often argued that a shared culture, or at least shared cultural references or practices, can help to foster peace and prevent war. This essay examines in detail and criticizes one such argument, made by Patrick Leigh Fermor, in the context of his discussing an incident during World War II, when he and a captured German general found a form of agreement, a ground for peace between them, in their both knowing Horace's ode I.9 by heart in Latin. By way of introducing the sixth and final installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” this essay proposes that Leigh Fermor's narrative be understood in terms of commerce, rather than consensus. It concludes by examining Ezra Pound's use of the word commerce in his poem “A Pact” (“Let there be commerce between us”) to define his relationship with his “detested” and “pig-headed” poetic “father,” Walt Whitman. Patrick Leigh Fermor Horace peace culture war

Urita, Michiko;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464792

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means” demonstrates how, even as religious strife is pervasive in India, classical Hindustani music has remained a transreligious and intercommunal medium. Indeed, music is one of the few domains in which Hindu-Muslim tension is absent: in North India it is common for audiences composed of both Hindus and Muslims to attend performances in which Hindu vocalists sing devotedly of Allah, and Muslim vocalists of Krishna. Hindustani musicians of whatever faith, it is argued, worship Nada-Brahman, the Hindu “Sound-God.” Three kinds of religious tradition in India have nurtured the perception that sound is sacred: Hindu bhakti , Sufism, and Santism, all of which this essay explores in case studies both of the formative period of devotional music in North India and of the current state of the genre and its venues of performance. Hindu-Muslim relations Hindustani music Nada-Brahman bhakti dhrupad

Nagler, Michael N.;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464804

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890–1988), also called Badshah (“the king”) Khan, is a nearly unknown champion of nonviolence in South Asia and a forgotten Muslim ally of Mohandas Gandhi. The story of Khan's Khudai Khidmatgars (“Servants of God”) movement in what was to become Pakistan is not only inspirational but also instructive, exploding as it does several widespread myths about nonviolence. Today, the United States (with some allies) is embroiled in that region in the longest war in American history and among the Pashtun people from whom Khan arose. Thus his story, according to this article, has a revolutionary potential. When young Malala Yousafzai cited Badshah Khan in a speech at the United Nations in 2013, therefore, she may have done more good than she realized. Badshah Khan Malala Yousafzai nonviolence “paradox of repression” Pashtuns (Pathans)

Kharkhordin, Oleg;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464828

In the context of a symposium on enmity, this article—the product of extensive research done by a group of colleagues in St. Petersburg—concerns characteristic types of friendship in Russia. The author distinguishes in particular between instrumental political friendship, which Russians tend to scorn, and the intensely emotional and intimate sort of friendship, usually shared in a group rather than a dyad, that Russians consider uniquely their own. Both types, however, have long histories in Russia, which this article undertakes to trace. Intimate friendship appears to be an overlay of attitudes and characteristics, originating in the age of sensibility, onto medieval notions about friendship in Christ. An argument is made for a more general acceptance by Russians of instrumental friendship, since even friendship in Christ can be shown to depend extensively on things held in common. The essay argues too, however, for bringing some of the peculiarities, especially the linguistic peculiarities, of intimate friendship to Russian political friendship, in both domestic and international contexts. friendship politics Russia communion international relations

Diggelmann, Lindsay;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464935

As is well known, marriage was frequently employed as an instrument of diplomatic policy in premodern Europe. Dynastic leaders used the marriages of their own family members to create or confirm alliances with other ruling houses. Peace was often the aim and the outcome of such agreements, but the reality of marital politics was far more complicated. Arranging a marriage could be a statement of enmity by two families toward a third party. Attempts to dissolve or prevent marriages already arranged by one's rivals amounted to viable political tactics. During the twelfth century, as rules around the formation and dissolution of Christian marriage were in flux, opportunities for manipulation of accepted practices abounded. This article examines a series of marriages between members of the Anglo-Norman and Angevin ruling families, focusing especially on the reign of Henry I (1100–35), to demonstrate the complexity of marital practices and their links to peace and war. Literary works of the age, notably Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae , offer further cultural perspectives on the nature of political marriages. Whereas short-term tactical considerations meant that marriages were often tied to episodes of conflict and rivalry, from a longer-term perspective the usefulness of marriage as a means of securing and maintaining peace remained an important element of premodern diplomacy. peace marriage diplomacy Henry I Geoffrey of Monmouth

Watkins, John;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464949

This article examines the declining prestige and utility of one of the mainstays of pre-Enlightenment peacemaking: treaties uniting once belligerent dynasties through marriage. By the late Middle Ages, interdynastic marriages had become such a common feature of the diplomatic landscape that the practice seemed almost transhistorical, something that was done always and everywhere. By the reign of Louis XIII, however, statesmen began stressing the limits of interdynastic marriage as a diplomatic strategy. This transformation of French affairs of state coincided with the appearance of prose romances that scholars identify retrospectively as the first French novels. This essay focuses on two of the most popular and influential of these novels, César Vichard de Saint-Réal's Dom Carlos (1672) and the Countess of La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), as responses to the devaluation of the marriage diplomacy that had established dynastic networks between France and the Mediterranean world for centuries. Both works center on the 1559 Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis between France and Spain, which married Henri II's daughter Elisabeth de Valois to King Philip II. While Saint-Réal does not condemn such arrangements wholesale, he suggests that their success is highly subject to fortune. La Princesse de Clèves owes much to Saint-Réal's portrayal of the personal costs of marriages of state, as well as to Madame de La Fayette's own observations of the French and Savoyard courts. Although her focus on the interior life of her heroine limits explicit political commentary, her allusions to miserably unhappy queens-consort cast marriage diplomacy in an overwhelmingly negative light. peacemaking marriage diplomacy Madame de La Fayette Saint-Réal history of the novel

Zipes, Jack;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464961

This essay proposes that storytelling be reintroduced into schools and universities, at all levels and in all languages, though in a new and quite particular way. Instead of traditional storytelling that reaffirms the values of a mindlessly competitive and materialist world, the author suggests an alternative form of storytelling that fosters peace and humane values. No matter how original and authentic our own life stories may seem to us, we rarely are able to break away from a master narrative that sets the frame in which our personal stories are shaped and interpreted. Our economic system and the social order that it secretes are structured like a war: our master narrative figures human life as an affair of winners and losers. Children need encouragement to question and bypass the master narrative by rethinking and rewriting traditional tales, fables, myths, and even epics and tragedies. Research conducted by the author at schools in the United States and United Kingdom shows that, through free play, alternatives to rivalry, bullying, brutality, cruelty, ruthlessness, vehemence, and enmity occur naturally to children of all ages. fairy tale master narrative subversive storytelling concrete utopia Homeric epics

Trilling, James;

2016 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464973

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means” rereads the works of J. R. R. Tolkien as a study of pyrrhic victory. It argues that the origin of Tolkien's cycle of tales is inseparable from his experience of World War I, which ended in anomie and widespread fear of the coercive power of modern society. The price of the victory over evil, in these tales, is disenchantment. Tolkien is the first author to imagine disenchantment on a near-global scale, using literal disenchantment as a metaphor for a kind he could expect his readers to know firsthand. Like disenchantment, this-worldly evil, centralized in a single figure such as Mordor, is a twentieth-century idea, an emanation of totalitarianism: the transformation of Elves into orcs is a horror that only our knowledge of the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulag has equipped us to imagine. If disenchantment is the price of victory over absolute evil, few would doubt that it was worth paying—within the framework of the tales. For the far future of Middle-Earth, however, the implications are less benign. The Elves accept their fate and either dwindle or depart. But the orcs, personifying disenchantment in its most radical and terrifying form, are routed but not all killed, and they do not depart. disenchantment World War I J. R. R. Tolkien pyrrhic victory evil