Common Knowledge

Richmond, Colin;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815772

This Common Knowledge guest column is a partly comical, partly biographical speculation on how Anthony Woodville, brother-in-law of King Edward IV, passed the time while being held under guard at the “Newe Inn” Norwich, from August 20 to 25, 1469. Anthony Woodville crisis of 1469 Wars of the Roses Edward IV

Gossman, Lionel;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815784

The topic of this guest column is Beaumarchais's endeavor, as a dramatist, to overcome the irreconcilable polarities of high and low, spirit and body, noble and base, tragedy and comedy that are essential to French classical theater by adapting traditional comedy to the less rigid, more pragmatic and optimistic outlook of the Enlightenment and a new middle class and by experimenting with “bourgeois drama,” notably in the third play of the Figaro trilogy. The bourgeois drama—and the trilogy itself, as it moves the same cast of characters from The Barber of Seville through The Marriage of Figaro to The Guilty Mother— is seen as an attempt to bypass not only the conventional opposition of comedy and tragedy but also the even more fundamental polarity of epic and dramatic through the infusion of elements of the new bourgeois novel into works for the theater. Roles and situations in Beaumarchais are not fixed and eternal but evolve in historical time. Figaro himself emerges as a characteristically modern figure, neither noble nor base but mixed, many-sided, energetic, and enterprising, an individual rather than a type, and thus a more realistic representative of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment humanity than the Scapinos and Frontinos of traditional comedy. classical genre polarities bourgeois drama roles and individuals Figaro

Perl, Jeffrey M.;Garcia, Humberto;Halevy, Noa;Valdina, Peter;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815796

In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the editor explains the rationale of the new project, citing increases in aggressive xenophobia internationally. He comments on the intergroup-relations theorist Todd Pittinsky's argument that, since tolerance is not logically the antithesis of negative feelings toward out-groups, even long-established traditions of toleration are inadequate to prevent intergroup aggression. Pittinsky proposes that tolerance be replaced, as a principle of peacekeeping, by the encouragement of positive feelings toward out-groups, and the author of this essay responds by showing how the Freudian theory of ambivalence and the history of literature on which Freud drew in constructing it support Pittinsky's viewpoint. Enemies regularly fall in love, above all in Shakespearean drama, which Freud explains by arguing that all human relations are love-hate relations. Thus, this essay suggests, it takes as much psychic energy to repress the love in what appear to be relationships of hatred as to repress the hatred in what appear to be relationships of love. There is a metaphysical component as well to this argument: the xenophobe and xenophile equally presuppose that the identity principle ( a = a ) is applicable to society as well as to mathematics; both assume that each discrete social group is self-identical and differs from all other groups more or less radically. The main difference between –phile and –phobe is the latter's relative incapacity to live with ambivalence. Given these arguments, one must expect to find negative as well as positive motives in the etiology and conduct of xenophilia—and the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium is said to focus on cases of xenophilia in which varieties of enmity accompany that singular and underrated variety of love. xenophilia xenophobia self-identity ambivalence Todd Pittinsky

Garcia, Humberto;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815808

A contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, this article examines the travelogue of Mirza Abu Taleb ibn Muhammed Isfahani (1752–1805), the Muslim Indo-Persian scholar, poet, and Lucknow nobleman who sympathized with the Irish during his travels to England and Ireland in 1799–1802. Translated from Persian to English by an Irish scholar working for the British East India Company, Charles Stewart, and published in London in two editions (1810, 1814), The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan records the author's love for the Irish and theirs for him. This mutual xenophilia, the article argues, is politically motivated by Abu Taleb's strong, but mostly tacit, reservations about the English, his imperial patrons. He realigns the relationship between metropole and colony by casting Ireland as the bridgehead of a glorious Islamic-Persianate culture that spread westward, a transcultural fantasy that takes two forms. First, the unconditional hospitality Abu Taleb experiences among his Irish and Anglo-Irish hosts leads him to imagine a linguistic-ethnic kinship between ancient Celts and Persians, recalled in the similarities he sees between a subimperial capital, Dublin, and an Indian Mughal city, Lucknow. Second, in his detailed account of a patriotic performance that he attended in Dublin of the British siege of Seringapatam in 1799, he identifies with the skeptical audience who, he assumes, are self-conscious about this propagandistic medium. India Ireland empire Abu Taleb Khan Persian travel writing

Halevy, Noa;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815820

This article is the first installment of a three-part contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia. The series of three examines the ways in which Anglo-American writers, from the mid-nineteenth until the late twentieth century, turned to Russian literature and literary theory to escape the otherwise inevitable influence of French avant-garde literary movements. These writers—Henry James in part 1, Donald Davie in part 2, and the “American Bakhtinian” critics in part 3—found in Russian examples a responsible yet radical and morally oriented alternative to what they considered the extravagant, haughty, and corrupt aestheticism of French literary culture. Thus, these essays concern the interplay of xenophilia with xenophobia. Part 1 treats James's turn, commencing around 1875, to the example of Ivan Turgenev as a way of getting beyond the example of Flaubert and the other “grandsons of Balzac” with whom he was then keeping company in Paris. Turgenev and Flaubert were both Realists, but the Russian writer, in contrast to the French, cared not only for verbal beauty but also for what James called “moral glamour” in the art of fiction. xenophilia Russophilia xenophobia Henry James Ivan Turgenev

Valdina, Peter;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815832

The basic argument of this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia is that colonial attitudes toward South Asian religion and Hindus' attitudes toward Western intellectual discourse reveal an ambiguous mix of xenophilia and xenophobia. This articles focuses on yoga, whose macrohistory comprises a global case of xenophilia, beginning with Vivekananda's address at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago and still ongoing today. Before that watershed speech in 1893, however, indigenous scholars were translating Sanskrit texts into Bengali as part of an effort to articulate a unified vision of Hindu traditions that could be used to engage with the science, medicine, and other attractive aspects of British and Western culture. Comparing Bengali renderings of Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra, this essay concludes that one of them, the translation of paṇḍit Kālīvar Vedāntavāglīś, exposed elements of ambiguity in the original work that expanded the possibilities for the engagement of yoga with Western discourses, while at the same time legitimating the Sanskritic past as a resource for addressing new realities. In the process, Kālīvar's translation helped enable the globalization of yoga as we know it today. This article concludes by suggesting that microhistorical work on the activities of translators may aid in understanding the part that local knowledge can play in our global future. xenophilia xenophobia yoga translation Patañjali Kālīvar Vedāntavāglīś

Sztutman, Renato;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815846

This article is a belated contribution to a Common Knowledge symposium on the “unanticipated conceptual practice” of “anthropological philosophy.” The basic argument is that the groundwork for this emerging approach, associated foremost with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's book Métaphysiques cannibales of 2009, was laid in the 1970s by the controversial French anthropologists Pierre and Hélène Clastres. It is argued that the Clastres took the intellectual practices of Guarani shamans and prophets as analogous to the those of ancient Greek philosophers but also as sharply critical of the principles (in particular, the principle of non-contradiction) that underlay early Western metaphysics. Guarani Pierre and Hélène Clastres metaphysics cosmopolitics Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Girke, Felix;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815858

Kent, Dale V.;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815894

Malešević, Siniša;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3815930