THE WOMEN'S MARCH New York, January 21, 2017Bynum, Caroline Walker;
2017 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3987717
Written two days after the women's march in New York on January 21, 2017, this essay — a guest column in Common Knowledge — describes the event and emphasizes two aspects: its multi-issue focus and its response to the denigration of women's expertise represented in much of the hostility to Hillary Clinton's candidacy. Comparing the widespread resistance to Donald Trump's proposals in early 2017 with recent single-issue protests, the author suggests that it is a strength of the current moment that women confront a wide range of issues, from sexual harassment to gun violence to reproductive choice to immigration restriction. She also argues that a pernicious and often unrecognized denigration of female voices and female expertise forms an undercurrent of contemporary political debate that needs to be much more widely resisted. She writes out of forty years of personal experience with women's issues, hoping that the progress made earlier will continue but predicting an uphill battle. Women's March January 2017 female expertise political activism 2017 women's movements anti-Trump protests
IN OUR PLACE Performance, Dualism, and Islands of StabilityPickering, Andrew;
2017 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3987761
This Common Knowledge guest column concerns performance , understood in its simple ur-sense of “doing things” in the world. It continues the author's analysis, in his book The Mangle of Practice (1995), of cultural evolution as a “dance of agency”: a performative, decentered, and emergent back-and-forth between a multiplicity of actors, variously human and nonhuman. The author's concern in this new essay is with apparently stable and dependable technologies, such as cars, computers, and power stations, which he conceptualizes here as “islands of stability” in the flux of becoming. On islands of stability, Cartesian dualism is simply true: humanity achieves command over entities that reliably serve our will. Still, while our worlds are built on them, their stability is not complete. To remain on islands of stability requires continual constructive work, and sometimes we fall off them anyway, with disastrous results, for stability is necessarily accompanied by performative excess. The performative analysis of islands of stability cuts humanity down to size and puts us in our place. performance ontology dance of agency dualism control
Introduction: Coherent MixturesPerl, Jeffrey M.;Halevy, Noa;Bruder, Edith;Gilham, Jamie;
2017 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3987979
In his introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the journal's editor tours the reader through two private apartments (T. S. Eliot's in London and the anthropologist Jeannette Mirsky's in Princeton) and through two public art collections (the Michael Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Ménil Collection in Houston) in an effort to establish that aesthetically coherent mixtures of apparently immiscible objects from widely divergent cultures are possible and also morally glamorous. Xenophobia at its least reprehensible, he argues, is a fear of ecumenism and its consequences, as well as a fear of one's own conversion — of “turning Turk.” Xenophilia at its most admirable is a pursuit of coherent mixtures where others cannot imagine their possibility. Bits lifted from reputedly pure and organic wholes may be transformed by means of overlap and mediated juxtaposition into a novel milieu that has a wholeness, authenticity, and charisma of its own. Such coherence depends on minds (a) that are capable of loving what does not satisfy their narcissism and (b) that can sense in the products of their own culture elements or signs of enervation, anomie, lack, derangement, waywardness, rigidity, preciousness, or warping. The author concludes that xenophilia neither signals nor facilitates the adulteration that xenophobes so fear. xenophilia xenophobia Jeannette Mirsky T. S. Eliot Ménil Collection
ENGLISH EMERGENCIES AND RUSSIAN RESCUES, c. 1875 – 2000 Part 2: Pasternak and Donald DavieHalevy, Noa;
2017 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3988198
This second installment in a chronologically arranged, three-part sequence continues the author's examination of Anglo-American literati who, in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, turned — in acts of combined xenophilia and xenophobia — to Russian literature and literary theory in order to escape the dominant influence of avant-garde movements in France. These Anglophone writers found in Russian exemplars a responsible, morally rigorous, and pragmatic, yet philosophically sophisticated, alternative to what they described as the amoral, superficial, and pretentious aestheticism of French literary culture. Part 2 treats the poetry and criticism of the English “Movement” poet Donald Davie in light of his turn, in 1958, toward the example of Boris Pasternak as a way of escaping the influence of French Symbolist poetics and the post-Symbolist poetics of anglophone modernism. Although Davie understood that Pasternak was as much a modernist as T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, he also argued that the Russian's poetry, unlike theirs, sought, on explicitly moral grounds, to maintain conventional syntax and purity of diction, with the result that Pasternak's verse communicates with the reader more as prose than as music does. Donald Davie “Movement” poets Boris Pasternak French Symbolism Augustan poetry
PHILO-SEMITISM AND AFFILIATION TO JUDAISM IN AFRICABruder, Edith;
2017 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3988210
A contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, this article examines the ethnic groups (more than a dozen) on the African continent that have proclaimed their connections to ancient Israel and have developed versions of their tribal histories that place them as a part of the worldwide Jewish Diaspora. Members of these communities may number in the hundreds of thousands and have been striving for Jewish recognition. These developments comprise one facet of the burgeoning phenomenon of African philo-Semitism. This essay, which is in equal measure chronological and thematic, seeks to characterize African affiliation with Jews with respect to three themes or phases. The first involves the figural associations, learned in Christian missionary contexts, that have influenced the adaptation of Judaism within African tribal religions. The second concerns the study and legitimization of extant African traditions said to be of Hebrew origin. The third addresses cultural transactions between biblical model and African tradition that have favored the rationale of a common historical and theological provenance. African philo-Semitism African Judaism Judaizing movements Ten Lost Tribes the Old Testament in Africa
THE BRITISH MUSLIM BARON Lord Headley and Islam, 1913 – 35Gilham, Jamie;
2017 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3988223
This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia documents and discusses the life and work of an important but neglected early British convert to Islam, the fifth Baron Headley, Rowland George Allanson Allanson-Winn (1855 – 1935), and also comments on the nature of the kind of xenophilia that can lead to conversion. The essay argues that Lord Headley's attraction to the Muslim world and his religious conversion in 1913 were typical of a small minority of Britons who chose Islam with the guidance of Indian Muslim missionaries in the first half of the twentieth century. But it also shows that Headley's privileged social position enabled him to become a leader of the nascent British Muslim community and an international ambassador for Islam between the wars. A staunch defender of Islam and Muslims, Headley was not wholly uncritical of them and made public pronouncements especially about the spread of sectarianism in Islam and about how that faith needed to be practiced differently in the West. conversion to Islam fifth Baron Headley British Muslims xenophilia Islamophilia