Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? This book presents compelling new research on how homophobia, suicide, gender violence, abuse, racism, and the impact of war and colonialism shaped the emergence of modern homosexual rights activism. It examines forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism and foundational transgender work. In 1919 he opened the world's first Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin. Attracting international visitors including doctors, artists, writers and political activists, it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. Attacks against queer life play a formative role in modern same-sex culture. Yet remembering the victims is only part of the task of queer history. The Hirschfeld Archives attends to the queer dead and injured, but it also demonstrates that the development of homosexual rights politics in the West had gendered and racialized limits.
Benito Mussolini constantly portrayed his regime as a protector of nationalism and the ultimate promoter in the re-discovery of Italian culture. The 1930s represent the highest involvement of the regime in cultural activities. Such events had the specific propagandistic goal of ingraining the idea of fascism as a solution to poverty and cultural disunity between north and south. An ongoing theme of propaganda was connecting fascism's mission to the glory of the Italian past and of its most illustrious protagonists. The Duce and his followers built the idea of a new political establishment that legitimized its rule through a reassertion of the past. My study displays the regime's involvement in Sicily as a sponsor of culture and national renovation through the reinterpretation of Italy's most popular figures. Vincenzo Bellini's centenary reveals the regime's plans of achieving national unity between north and south in a culturally and economically divided Italy. With an emphasis on the history of the Risorgimento, I ultimately show the regime's endeavor in forging cultural unification between north and south through the exaltation of a Sicilian figure. As fascists planned to invade Ethiopia in late 1935, Bellini's centennial played a critical role in showing the regime's commitment to modernization and the relevance of Sicily in the creation of a new Italian-Mediterranean empire.
Nineteenth-century Vienna is well known to medical historians as a leading centre of medical research and education, offering easy access to patients and corpses to students from all over the world. This article seeks to explain how this enviable supply with cadavers was achieved, why it provoked so little opposition at a time when Britain and the United States saw widespread protests against dissection, and how it was threatened from mid-century. To understand permissive Viennese attitudes we need to place them in a longue durée history of death and dissection, and to pay close attention to the city's political geography as it was transformed into a major imperial capital. The tolerant stance of the Roman Catholic Church, strong links to Southern Europe and the weak position of individuals in the absolutist state all contributed to an idiosyncratic anatomical culture. But as the fame of the Vienna medical school peaked in the later 1800s, the increased demand created by rising student numbers combined with intensified interdisciplinary competition to produce a shortfall that professors found increasingly difficult to meet. Around 1900, new religious groups and mass political parties challenged the long-standing anatomical practice by refusing to supply cadavers and making dissection into an instrument of political struggle. This study of the material preconditions for anatomy at one of Europe's most influential medical schools provides a contrast to the dominant Anglo-American histories of death and dissection.
My doctoral research concerns the material and visual culture of modern Ireland with particular focus upon the role of exhibition display in commemoration and collective memory. Like many countries, Ireland has a chaotic past which results in challenges for museums in presenting history to satisfy the education and expectation of both national and transnational audiences. The Easter Rising of 1916 is the pivotal event in the creation of the modern Irish state and is widely recognised as a historical event upon which the cultural identity of Ireland is founded and consolidated. My research examines the challenges of displaying death and violence through images and artefacts in 1916 commemorative exhibition displays at three national cultural institutions in Ireland. My analysis to date has indicated that the images and artefacts in my case study commemorative exhibitions are displayed in a way which confronts the tensions and violence of the 1916 Rising which were overlooked in previous exhibitions. This is largely achieved through the display of ordinary objects with visible traces of use such as James Connolly's bloodstained vest which he wore during the rebellion. Such an artefact requires an examination of the actions carried out by the cultural institution in collecting and conserving the object; an analysis of how the visible traces of use authenticates the artefact as a tangible link to a nation's past; and an analysis of the narrative strategies of its display. My research project uses commemorative exhibitions to link together the three disciplines of visual culture, material culture and museology.
This dissertation explores the ways in which sutura--a Wolofized Arabic concept that can mean discretion, modesty, privacy, or protection--mediates the production of the boundary between gendered life and ungendered death in Senegalese literature and popular culture. In the ethics of the Wolof caste system, the order of slavery, and local Sufism, the unequal distribution of sutura produces a communal "inside" of those who possess a refined, ideal form of life and humanness, and an abject "outside" comprised of subjects who possess a bare form of life that is exposed to social and moral death. While sutura is one of several concepts that constitute the Wolof code of honor, it serves as the very membrane between the state of honor and the state of shame. The inherent lack of sutura attributed to subjects like the slave and the griot reproduces their permanently shamed state, and sutura's transgression exposes the previously honorable, high-status subject to a publicly visible dishonor, a death-like state worse than physical death. The gender hierarchy is one of the many overlapping hierarchies that comprise Wolof society, thus entangling the possession of a legible gender with the possession of sutura in the production of normative humanness and virtuous life. This study tracks this entanglement in its investigation of the production of ungendered, socially dead subjects in contemporary Senegalese culture, revealing that inclusion in the honorable community of the nation is predicated on the possession of a gendered legibility mediated by sutura. The chapters are organized around media scandals that exemplify this dynamic and suggest that contemporary figures of bare life--rogue wives of Sufi sheikhs, maids, prostitutes, gay/trangendered men--are abjected through a mechanics inherited from older Wolof ethical orders. However, as the novels and video melodramas that I foreground as a counterpoint reveal, the ethics generating those mechanics are contested. Indeed, the ethics of sutura are challenged by various liberal-secular, feminist, and Muslim ethical orders currently vying for dominance in the Senegalese public sphere. The new regime of exposure that has taken hold of the media in the wake of the mass democratic movements of the 1990s provides a stage not only for unprecedented scales of abjection via the generation of moral panics, but also for popular contestation of that abjection and the production of new inclusive humanisms. In the midst of the raging pro-sutura versus anti-sutura debate, I propose that a recasting of sutura within a progressive Muslim ethos would disarticulate sutura from social hierarchies, thus enabling the formation of an ethics of communal care and protection that could still be coded as Wolof and Muslim.
The decadence question in the Ottoman Empire became a common ground for intellectual debates about language, translation, and authenticity at the turn of the century. It was part of the manifold translational processes among French, high Ottoman, and the rising Ottoman vernacular, as well as the unexpected circulations of literary movements and genres in the Ottoman literary field. The decadents and the conservative modernizers – who were all cosmopolitan author-translators – negotiated and transformed Eurocentric norms of literariness and, by using local forms, introduced new genres and styles into the emergent field of modern Ottoman-Turkish literature. This study discusses decadent aesthetics in relation to the burgeoning performance scene in Istanbul at the turn of the century. It analyses two domestic family dramas written by prominent authors of the time, Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem's Vuslat (1874) and Muallim Naci's Heder (1909), by recontextualizing them within the literary history of fin-de-siècle pessimism and decadent aesthetics. It revisits Ottoman literary historiography, which typically follows conservative views on decadence as degeneration and over-westernization, by discussing aesthetic decadence in Ottoman Turkish literature. It reorients Naci's work within innovative currents and offers a uniquely nuanced reading of both Ekrem's and Naci's plays. Finally, this study introduces decadent performance of the late Ottoman Empire to global decadence studies, underlying its inner social, political and aesthetic dynamics.
Today, despite daily struggles in courtrooms against capital punishment, there appears little legal room to challenge the death penalty. Most constitutional questions appear "settled. Given the present composition of the Supreme Court, there is scant expectation of any major reversals. Also, the Court's future is to be decided by a President who was governor of a state that has executed more people since 1976 than any other state in the nation. While abolitionist scholars and activists continue to raise constitutional issues, the most dramatic events challenging the death penalty have occurred in the larger political arena outside the courtroom. The many gestures across the country advocating moratoriums on executions give hope to abolitionists that the political terrain of the death penalty could be shifting.
Today, despite daily struggles in courtrooms against capital punishment, there appears little legal room to challenge the death penalty. Most constitutional questions appear "settled. Given the present composition of the Supreme Court, there is scant expectation of any major reversals. Also, the Court's future is to be decided by a President who was governor of a state that has executed more people since 1976 than any other state in the nation. While abolitionist scholars and activists continue to raise constitutional issues, the most dramatic events challenging the death penalty have occurred in the larger political arena outside the courtroom. The many gestures across the country advocating moratoriums on executions give hope to abolitionists that the political terrain of the death penalty could be shifting.
WOS: 000508133700029 ; A new Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project brings together multiple strands of investigation to probe the relationship between ritual, violence, and early state formation. David Wengrow and Brenna Hassett will coordinate an international team combining biomolecular analysis (stable isotopes, ancient DNA), bioarchaeology, and archaeology to examine a remarkable set of Early Bronze Age funerary deposits (c. 3100-2800 BC), excavated at the multi-period site of Basur Hark, in South-eastern Turkey. They include evidence of extraordinary wealth combined with radically new cultural practices, such as mass death pits and burials of retainers or other human victims. Such findings add to a growing body of archaeological data from the Middle East, which is now prompting researchers to rethink key aspects of social and political change at the start of the Bronze Age. ; Arts and Humanities Research Council UK Research Grant; BIAA ; Initial support for the physical anthropological investigation at Basur Hoyuk was provided by the BIAA Study Grant Scheme. Ongoing funding is provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK Research Grant, and small grants from the BIAA.
Abstract Background In 2007, 95% of women in Botswana delivered in health facilities with 73% attending at least 4 antenatal care visits. HIV-prevalence in pregnant women was 28.7%. The maternal mortality ratio in 2010 was 163 deaths per 100 000 live births versus the government target of 130 for that year, indicating that the Millennium Development Goal 5 was unlikely to be met. A root-cause analysis was carried out with the aim of determining the underlying causes of maternal deaths reported in 2010, to categorise contributory factors and to prioritise appropriate interventions based on the identified causes, to prevent further deaths. Methods Case-notes for maternal deaths were reviewed by a panel of five clinicians, initially independently then discussed together to achieve consensus on assigning contributory factors, cause of death and whether each death was avoidable or not at presentation to hospital. Factors contributing to maternal deaths were categorised into organisational/management, personnel, technology/equipment/supplies, environment and barriers to accessing healthcare. Results Fifty-six case notes were available for review from 82 deaths notified in 2010, with 0–4 contributory factors in 19 deaths, 5–9 in 27deaths and 9–14 in nine. The cause of death in one case was not ascertainable since the notes were incomplete. The high number of contributory factors demonstrates poor quality of care even where deaths were not avoidable: 14/23 (61%) of direct deaths were considered avoidable compared to 12/32 (38%) indirect deaths. Highest ranking categories were: failure to recognise seriousness of patients' condition (71% of cases); lack of knowledge (67%); failure to follow recommended practice (53%); lack of or failure to implement policies, protocols and guidelines (44%); and poor organisational arrangements (35%). Half the deaths had some barrier to accessing health services. Conclusions Root-cause analysis demonstrates the interactions between patients, health professionals and health system in generating adverse outcomes for patients. The lessons provided indicate where training of undergraduate and postgraduate medical, midwifery and nursing students need to be intensified, with emphasis on evidence-based practice and adherence to protocols. Action plans and interventions aimed at changing the circumstances that led to maternal deaths can be implemented and re-evaluated.
The article asks about the place given to culture and knowledge and its relationship with the hegemonic role of nation statuses in the context of contemporary global capitalism. To this end, it analyses the traditional conceptions of culture and the need for a critical reconceptualisation of culture. It also refers to the location and importance of knowledge and ideology as part of the globalised capitalist production system. Against this background, the author wonders whether that cultural relocation and the centrality of knowledge have effectively transformed capitalist accumulation processes. He also wondered about the loss of hegemony of nation countries in view of the current processes of economic and cultural transnationalisation. In the final part of the article, an answer to the initial question is sought by attempting to articulate the contemporary discussion that favours ideological and symbolic mechanisms of domination and cultural subalterance with the class domination that remains inside the nation states. This, moreover, from the need for social sciences to regain their critical and transformative view of reality. ; El artículo se pregunta por el lugar que se le asigna a la cultura y al conocimiento y su relación con el papel hegemónico de los estados-nación en el contexto del capitalismo global contemporáneo. Para ello, analiza las concepciones tradicionales de cultura y la necesidad de una reconceptualización crítica de la misma. Replantea también la ubicación y la importancia del conocimiento y la ideología como parte del aparato productivo capitalista globalizado. Con este trasfondo, el autor se pregunta si esa reubicación cultural y la centralidad del conocimiento han transformado efectivamente los procesos de acumulación capitalista. Así mismo, se pregunta por la pérdida de hegemonía de los estados-nación de cara a los actuales procesos de transnacionalización económica y cultural. En la parte final del artículo, se intenta una respuesta a la pregunta inicial intentando articular la discusión ...
Es ist die mutmaßlich wirkmächtigste 'Meistererzählung' der Weimarer Republik: Die Erinnerung an die gefallenen Soldaten entfaltete in den Jahren von 1918 bis 1933 eine suggestive Massenkraft, die hinsichtlich ihrer nachhaltigen Sinnstiftung keine ernstzunehmende Konkurrenz hatte: Weder die junge Republik noch das untergegangene Reich generierte Erinnerungsszenarien, die in dieser nachhaltigen Form rezipiert wurden. Am Beispiel der zweitgrößten Stadt des Reiches - Hamburg - geht es in diesem Text um Funktionsweisen, Akteure und Sinnstiftungen im Rahmen des politischen Totenkultes in der Weimarer Republik, der sich maßgeblich an Gedenktagen wie Volkstrauertag und Totensonntag etablierte. Entwickelt wird hierbei die Kernthese, dass der Volkstrauertag mit der starken Einbeziehung nationalprotestantischer Sinnstiftungen in erster Linie zur vorbereitenden Entwicklung eines Heldenkultes diente, den wenig später die Nationalsozialisten für wirkmächtige Propaganda-Zwecke nutzten. ; It might be Weimar Republic's master-narrative: In the years 1918-1933, the remembrance of dead soldiers developed a suggestive inertia force which hasn't had any serious rivalry in terms of creating sense for a suffering community: Neither the young 'Republic' nor the lost 'Reich' succeed in generating scenarios of remembrance which were absorbed comparably. Using the example of Hamburg as the second largest city in German Reich, this text deals with functions, players and options of creating sense within covering a Weimar cult of the dead, which primarily was established within memorial days of 'Volkstrauertag' and 'Totensonntag'. In this regard, the following main point is supposed to be designed: Implying a strong national-Protestant sense, the Volkstrauertag was providing a basis for an upcoming 'Heldenkult', which contemporarily was used by the National Socialists to create a powerful, effective propaganda.
Since Michel Foucault aligned the 'power of sovereignty' with the 'disqualification of death' in his 1975 essay 'Society Must be Defended', death has been at the forefront of biopolitical and geopolitical debates. Through a contemporary lens Achille Mbembe, writing in 2003, stated that the expression of sovereignty ultimately resides 'in the capacity to dictate who may live and who may die.' Yet Mbembe's necropolitics also questions the sufficiency of biopower to account for the question of death and sovereignty in the twenty-first century. This themed issue in many ways extends Mbembe's challenge by taking up the complex, often contentious subject of death in present-day culture as it is thought, and as it operates, within and beyond biopolitics. In bringing together articles from scholars across the fields of politics, biomedicine, law, philosophy, and literature, this issue interrogates the conceptual status of death in biopolitical discourse by considering emerging post-biopolitical and post-human contexts. Foucault understood the status of death in 1975 as 'something to be hidden away.' With twenty-first century global conditions, death as a subject has become more visible, imbricated with, and paramount to ideas of the postcolony, necro-economics, the necropolitical, and ethical and legal debates surrounding the right-to-die. At the same time, new technologies of warfare in the 'War on Terror' have meant that death has acquired new forms, through modes of violence that often annihilate the body. Such forms of death challenge traditional ritualizations of death and render death increasingly invisible. The issue intervenes at the intersection of biopolitical and post-biopolitical fields of knowledge, entering current debates on critical social and political issues such as euthanasia, the death penalty, and contemporary geopolitics. A number of the essays collected in the volume examine new forms of geopolitical violence, reveal unacknowledged bioethical states of exception, and engage with new liminal states of death created by medical advances. These articles are brought into a transdisciplinary dialogue with studies that explore the way in which contemporary visual art and literature offer new ways of representing death and emerging biomedical phenomena. In doing so, the scholarship of this issue offers theoretical means to navigate contemporary conceptions of death at the juncture of biopolitical and post-biopolitical discourses.
Осмысливаются процессы взаимовлияния культур, прослеживаются особенности образостроения в только что формирующейся художественной прозе адыгов. Отмечено, что имеющиеся схождения поэмы А. С. Пушкина «Кавказский пленник» и рассказа Ю. Ахметукова «Геройская смерть» вызваны, прежде всего, типологически конфликтными узлами произведений, вытекающими из единого общественно-политического пространства изображаемого времени. Рассматривается своеобразие нравственно-философской проблематики, касающейся вопросов войны. Установлено, что исторический процесс истолковывается А. С. Пушкиным как неизбежное столкновение носителей противоположных культурных идей, что приводит к гибели культуры одной из противоборствующих сторон. ; The paper deals with the thinnest processes of interference of cultures using an example of research of intertextual aspects in Yu.Akhmetukov's story «Heroic death». The author studies features of an image formation in newly-formed art prose of the Adyghes. It is noted that an available convergence of the poem by A.S. Pushkin "The Caucasian Captive" and Yu.Akhmetukov's story "Heroic death" is caused, first of all, by typologically conflict knots of works originating from uniform political space of represented time. The originality of the moral and philosophical perspective concerning questions of war is considered. It is established that historical process is interpreted by A.S. Pushkin as inevitable collision of carriers of opposite cultural ideas that leads to death of culture of one of warring parties.