The Political Lives of Dead Bodies

The Political Lives of Dead Bodies PDF Author: Katherine Verdery
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231112314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Representative works are interpreted in light of the two great political movements of the nineteenth century: the abolition of slavery and the women's rights movement. By reexamining Emerson, Poe, Melville, Douglass, Walt Whitman, Chopin, and Faulkner and others, Rowe assesses the degree to which major writers' attitudes toward race, class, and gender contribute to specific political reforms in nineteenth and twentieth-century American culture.

The Political Lives of Dead Bodies

The Political Lives of Dead Bodies PDF Author: Katherine Verdery
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231112314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
Representative works are interpreted in light of the two great political movements of the nineteenth century: the abolition of slavery and the women's rights movement. By reexamining Emerson, Poe, Melville, Douglass, Walt Whitman, Chopin, and Faulkner and others, Rowe assesses the degree to which major writers' attitudes toward race, class, and gender contribute to specific political reforms in nineteenth and twentieth-century American culture.

The Political Lives of Dead Bodies

The Political Lives of Dead Bodies PDF Author: Katherine Verdery
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231500432
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery investigates why certain corpses—the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk—have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics—and how it can breathe new life into old bones.

The Political Lives of Saints

The Political Lives of Saints PDF Author: Angie Heo
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520297970
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Since the Arab Spring in 2011 and ISIS’s rise in 2014, Egypt’s Copts have attracted attention worldwide as the collateral damage of revolution and as victims of sectarian strife. Countering the din of persecution rhetoric and Islamophobia, The Political Lives of Saints journeys into the quieter corners of divine intercession to consider what martyrs, miracles, and mysteries have to do with the routine challenges faced by Christians and Muslims living together under the modern nation-state. Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork, Angie Heo argues for understanding popular saints as material media that organize social relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt toward varying political ends. With an ethnographer’s eye for traces of antiquity, she deciphers how long-cherished imaginaries of holiness broker bonds of revolutionary sacrifice, reconfigure national sites of sacred territory, and pose sectarian threats to security and order. A study of tradition and nationhood at their limits, The Political Lives of Saints shows that Coptic Orthodoxy is a core domain of minoritarian regulation and authoritarian rule, powerfully reversing the recurrent thesis of its impending extinction in the Arab Muslim world.

Unburied Bodies

Unburied Bodies PDF Author: James R. Martel
Publisher: Amherst College Press
ISBN: 1943208115
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
The human body is the locus of meaning, personhood, and our sense of the possibility of sanctity. The desecration of the human corpse is a matter of universal revulsion, taboo in virtually all human cultures. Not least for this reason, the unburied corpse quickly becomes a focal point of political salience, on the one hand seeming to express the contempt of state power toward the basic claims of human dignity—while on the other hand simultaneously bringing into question the very legitimacy of that power. In Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead, James Martel surveys the power of the body left unburied to motivate resistance, to bring forth a radically new form of agency, and to undercut the authority claims made by state power. Ranging across time and space from the battlefields of ancient Thebes to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and taking in perspectives from such writers as Sophocles, Machiavelli, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Thomas Lacqueur, and Bonnie Honig, Martel asks why the presence of the abandoned corpse can be seen by both authorities and protesters as a source of power, and how those who have been abandoned or marginalized by structures of authority can find in a lifeless body fellow accomplices in their aspirations for dignity and humanity.

A Traffic of Dead Bodies

A Traffic of Dead Bodies PDF Author: Michael Sappol
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691059259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.

The Quick and the Dead

The Quick and the Dead PDF Author: Joy Williams
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030776382X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert. Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career. Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood."

Time in the Medieval World

Time in the Medieval World PDF Author: Chris Humphrey
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9781903153086
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
A look at the competing notions of time in the middle ages, from the spiritual - death, the Last Judgement - to the practical - lawyers' calculations, clocks and calendars. By exploring some of the more important senses of time which were in circulation in the medieval world, scholars from a wide range of disciplines trace competing definitions and modes of temporality in the middle ages, explainingtheir influence upon life and culture. The issues explored include anachronism as a feature in earlier senses of time, perceptions of death and of the Last Judgement, time in literary narratives and in music, constructions of timeas used in the professions, and original work on the particular systems and technologies which were used for the keeping of time, such as clocks and calendars. Contributors: PAUL BRAND, PETER BURKE, MARY J. CARRUTHERS, DEBORAH DELIYANNIS, CHRISTOPHER HUMPHREY, ROBERT MARKUS, AD PUTTER, HOWARD WILLIAMS.

Dead Matter

Dead Matter PDF Author: Margaret Schwartz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145294539X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Taking as its starting point the significant role of the photograph in modern mourning practices—particularly those surrounding public figures—Dead Matter theorizes the connections between the body and the image by looking at the corpse as a special instance of a body that is simultaneously thing and representation. Arguing that the evolving cultural understanding of photographic realism structures our relationship to the corpse, the book outlines a new politics of representation in which some bodies are more visible (and vulnerable) in death than others. To begin interpreting the corpse as a representational object referring to the deceased, Margaret Schwartz examines the association between photography and embalming—both as aesthetics and as mourning practices. She introduces the concept of photographic indexicality, using it as a metric for comprehending the relationship between the body of a dead leader (including Abraham Lincoln, Vladimir Lenin, and Eva Perón) and the “body politic” for which it stands. She considers bodies known as victims of atrocity like Emmett Till and the Syrian boy Hamsa al-Khateeb to better grasp the ways in which the corpse as object may be called on to signify a marginalized body politic, at the expense of the social identity of the deceased. And she contemplates “tabloid bodies” such as Princess Diana’s and Michael Jackson’s, asserting that these corpses must remain invisible in order to maintain the deceased as a source of textual and value production. Ultimately concluding that the evolving cultural understanding of photographic realism structures our relationship to the corpse, Dead Matter outlines the new politics of representation, in which death is exiled in favor of the late capitalist reality of bare life.

Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context

Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context PDF Author: Bernard Faure
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134431163
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The essays in this volume attempt to place the Chan and Zen tradition in their ritual and cultural contexts, looking at various aspects heretofore largely (and unduly) ignored. In particular, they show the extent to which these traditions, despite their claim to uniqueness, were indebted to larger trends in East Asian Buddhism, such as the cults of icons, relics and the monastic robe. The book emphasises the importance of ritual for a proper understanding of this allegedly anti-ritualistic form of Buddhism. In doing so, it deconstructs the Chan/Zen 'rhetoric of immediacy' and its ideological underpinnings.

African Political Activism in Postcolonial France

African Political Activism in Postcolonial France PDF Author: Gillian Glaes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351698621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
African Political Activism in Postcolonial France engages with several areas of scholarly inquiry, ranging from the study of immigrants to the investigation of surveillance and the legacy of colonialism. Within migration studies, many important analyses have focused on integration, yielding critical contributions to our understanding of immigration and identity. This work moves in a different direction. Factoring in the dynamics of colonialism, decolonization, and their effect on immigrant political activism and state policy in the postcolonial, Cold War era reveals that immigrants from francophone Sub-Saharan Africa were key players who shaped the development of public policy toward immigrants. Through this approach, we can understand how republicanism, colonial ideology, immigration policy, and immigrant political activism intersected in the post-colonial era, shaping the reception of African workers and affecting their lives and experiences in France.