Download or read book A Cosmopolitics of Conversion written by Kristen Bergman Waha and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While nineteenth-century cosmopolitan ideals of world citizenship are often painted as a secular replacement for religious commitments, nineteenth-century Indian and British religious discourses could also create transnational solidarities across political, cultural and literary communities. This project, "A Cosmopolitics of Conversion," maintains that women's religious conversion narratives in British and Indian autobiographies and novels nurture a cosmopolitan ethos--an ethos that imagines a moral, social or even political responsibility to an Other that is located beyond the geographically local, the culturally or religiously particular and/or the national. Drawing on their knowledge of multiple religious traditions surrounding Theosophy, Hinduism, Protestantism, Catholicism and even agnosticism or Freethought, these women converts not only make comparisons between traditions but also seek to bridge gaps between them. In stressing similarities in ethical commitments and women's subjective experiences in multiple religious traditions, these converts and their narratives, written in English, Tamil and French, forge political solidarities, advance social reform efforts, or form intellectual or literary friendship ties with those outside their cultural or linguistic local milieus. In particular, women's education reform initiatives in both Britain and India attract female converts who can approach religious differences with sensitivity and empathy. These reformers and authors not only challenge and revise middle-class Victorian and high caste Hindu domestic discourses that would limit women's access to education, but also act as cultural translators between religious communities to establish common ethical ground for promoting women's education. Each chapter is centered on a case study that contextualizes female conversion narratives within women's educational reform efforts in Britain, India and France. Chapter 1 argues that Annie Besant's 1893 Theosophist revision of her 1885 Autobiographical Sketches challenges the Enlightenment paradigm of religious belief as individual choice. Besant's belief in reincarnation, based on her reading of Hindu and Theosophist texts, subverts the genre of autobiography as an index of linear progressive maturity and suggests that religious "conversion" itself operates as a trans-historical, trans-temporal phenomenon. Chapter 2 examines A. Madhaviah's Satyananda (1909) and Indian Christian Krupabai Satthianadhan's autobiographical English novel Saguna (1889-1890) as revisions of the elite Indian male Protestant conversion narrative. Both authors imagine women's education as a vehicle that will allow Indian Christian coverts to experience conversion as the product of intellectual study and furthermore take on leadership roles within their communities. Chapter 3 argues that colonial Indian and British Victorian women's narratives actively participate in French religious and national literary traditions. Comparing Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and Toru Dutt's French language novel Le Journal de Mlle d'Arvers (1879), I suggest that exposure to Catholicism in Continental French-language learning contexts allows both these Protestant authors to engage sympathetically with a sentimental, Continental Catholicism that emphasizes compassion and marital companionship. The final chapter examines the rising nineteenth-century interest in comparative ethics among European Orientalists, British missionaries and Indian and British novelists. Both George Eliot's Romola (1863) and A. Madhaviah's English novel Clarinda (1915) are historical novels featuring convert heroines who synthesize ethical values from multiple religious traditions in their marriages and acts of philanthropy, thus demonstrating the similarities between these traditions themselves. In comparing Clarinda with the Hindu heroine of A. Madhaviah's Tamil novel, Padmavati Carittiram (1898,1899), the Hindu wifely ideal of pativrata emerges as a transnational and trans-religious figure that accommodates Protestant and Hindu ideals of femininity in colonial and metropolitan contexts. In considering colonial Indian participation in British and French literary contexts, and vice versa, this project expands on Margaret Cohen and Carole Dever's call to assess British and French nineteenth-century texts as the product of intersecting, rather than separate, literary traditions and languages. This work moves beyond studies of British influence on Indian literary culture to argue that exchanges centered on religious difference influence metropolitan and colonial cultures and allow European and colonial Indian prose to shape one another.
Download or read book Indigenous Perceptions of the End of the World written by Rosalyn Bold and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-29 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume constructs a ‘cosmopolitics’ of climate change, consulting small-scale sustainable communities on whether the world is ending and why, and how we can take action to prevent it. By comparing scientific and indigenous accounts of the same phenomenon, contributors seek to broaden Western understandings of what climate change constitutes. In this context, existing cosmologies are challenged, opening spaces for hegemonic narratives to enter into conversation with the non-modern and construct ‘worlds otherwise’—situations of world change and renewal through climate change. Bold brings together perspectives from Central America, Mexico, the Amazon, and the Andes to converse with scientific narratives of climate change and create cracks that bring new worlds into being for readers.
Download or read book Cosmopolitics written by Paris Arnopoulos and published by Guernica Editions. This book was released on 1998 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defined as the 'public affairs of outer space,' Cosmopolitics deals with the international legal, economic, and military issues arising out of the exploration and exploitation of extraterrestrial space resources. This book describes the global situation of cosmopolitics and analyzes its policies in resolving them.
Download or read book The Cosmopolitics of Solidarity written by Johanna Leinius and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume discusses how commonality and difference are negotiated across heterogeneous social movements in Latin America, especially Peru. It applies cosmopolitics as an analytical lens to understand the intricacies of social movement encounters across difference, without imposing colonial hierarchies or categorizations. The author blends multiple theoretical approaches—such as social movement research, postcolonial feminism, and post-foundational discourse theory—with ethnographic insights to develop a theory of cosmopolitical solidarity. Providing a transnational and intersectional perspective on the politics of social justice in a postcolonial context, this book will appeal to students of social movements, gender studies, racism, Latin American studies, and international relations, as well as practitioners involved in activism, social work, or international cooperation.
Download or read book The Social Construction of Climate Change written by Mary E. Pettenger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individuals, international organizations and states are calling for the world to confront climate change. Efforts such as the Kyoto Protocol have produced intractable disputes and are deemed inadequate. This volume adopts two constructivist perspectives - norm-centred and discourse - to explore the social construction of climate change from a broad, theoretical level to particular cases. The contributors contend that climate change must be understood from the context of social settings, and that we ignore at our peril how power and knowledge structures are generated. They offer a greater understanding of why current efforts to mitigate climate change have failed and provide academics and policy makers with a new understanding of this important topic.
Download or read book The Empty Seashell written by Nils Bubandt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-06 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Empty Seashell explores what it is like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral and contradictory to be an object of belief. In a book based on more than three years of fieldwork between 1991 and 2011, Nils Bubandt argues that cannibal witches for people in the coastal, and predominantly Christian, community of Buli in the Indonesian province of North Maluku are both corporeally real and fundamentally unknowable.Witches (known as gua in the Buli language or as suanggi in regional Malay) appear to be ordinary humans but sometimes, especially at night, they take other forms and attack people in order to kill them and eat their livers. They are seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The reality of gua, therefore, can never be pinned down. The title of the book comes from the empty nautilus shells that regularly drift ashore around Buli village. Convention has it that if you find a live nautilus, you are a gua. Like the empty shells, witchcraft always seems to recede from experience.Bubandt begins the book by recounting his own confusion and frustration in coming to terms with the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft realities in Buli. A detailed ethnography of the encompassing inaccessibility of Buli witchcraft leads him to the conclusion that much of the anthropological literature, which views witchcraft as a system of beliefs with genuine explanatory power, is off the mark. Witchcraft for the Buli people doesn't explain anything. In fact, it does the opposite: it confuses, obfuscates, and frustrates. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of aporia—an interminable experience that remains continuously in doubt—Bubandt suggests the need to take seriously people's experiential and epistemological doubts about witchcraft, and outlines, by extension, a novel way of thinking about witchcraft and its relation to modernity.
Download or read book Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future written by D. Morgan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1795 Immanuel Kant proclaimed that humans had entered into a 'universal community'. Since then, connections have grown ever more pronounced, with the notion of 'cosmopolitics' defining the modern age. This interdisciplinary volume makes a timely contribution to debates on international law, global ecology and economy and transnational synergies.
Download or read book Biopolitics Necropolitics Cosmopolitics written by C.L. Quinan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics have increasingly gained scholarly attention, particularly in light of today’s urgent and troubling issues that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others, including the migration crisis, rise of populism on a global scale, homonationalist practices, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic ‘others’. This book aims to nuance this conversation by emphasising feminist and queer investments and interventions and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to ongoing debates around life/living and death/dying in the current political climate. In this way, we move forward toward envisioning feminist and queer futures that rethink categories such as ‘human’ and ‘subjectivity’ based on classical modern premises. Informed by feminist/queer studies, postcolonial theory, cultural analysis, and critical posthumanism, Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics engages with longstanding questions of biopolitics and necropolitics in an era of neoliberalism and late capitalism, but does so by urging for a more inclusive (and less violent) cosmopolitical framework. Taking account of these global dynamics that are shaped by asymmetrical power relations, this fruitful posthuman(ist) and post-/decolonial approach allows for visions of transformation of the matrix of in-/exclusion into feminist/queer futures that work towards planetary social justice. This book is a significant new contribution to feminist and queer philosophy and politics, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of gender studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, philosophy, politics, and law. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Gender Studies.
Download or read book Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art written by Modesta Di Paola and published by Edicions Universitat Barcelona. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics seeks to trace cosmopolitical aesthetics understood not only as the union of art, science, and the right to survive, but also as the prism through which artistic practices are developed around questions connected to transculturality, migration, nomadism, post-gender subjectivities, social and natural sustainability, and new digital technologies. This book’s authors fashion a narrative that moves in the territory of “inbetweenness”, between hospitality and hostility, between welcoming and conflict, between languages and intermediate languages, science, and survival in a world that is “common” more than global.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity written by David Thomas Orique and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By 2025, Latin America's population of observant Christians will be the largest in the world. Nonetheless, studies examining the exponential growth of global Christianity tend to overlook this region, focusing instead on Africa and Asia. Research on Christianity in Latin America provides a core point of departure for understanding the growth and development of Christianity in the "Global South." In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity an interdisciplinary contingent of scholars examines Latin American Christianity in all of its manifestations from the colonial to the contemporary period. The essays here provide an accessible background to understanding Christianity in Latin America. Spanning the era from indigenous and African-descendant people's conversion to and transformation of Catholicism during the colonial period through the advent of Liberation Theology in the 1960s and conversion to Pentecostalism and Charismatic Catholicism, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity is the most complete introduction to the history and trajectory of this important area of modern Christianity.
Download or read book Struggles over Difference written by Yoshiko Nozaki and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disrupts popular myths about education in Asia and the Pacific.
Download or read book The Global Work of Art written by Caroline A. Jones and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists’ engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, this book argues that “globalism” was incubated in a century of international art contests and today constitutes an important tactic for artists. As world’s fairs brought millions of attendees into contact with foreign cultures, products, and processes, artworks became juxtaposed in a “theater of nations,” which challenged artists and critics to think outside their local academies. From Gustave Courbet’s rebel pavilion near the official art exhibit at the 1855 French World’s Fair to curator Beryl Madra’s choice of London-based Cypriot Hussein Chalayan for the off-site Turkish pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale, artists have used these exhibitions to reflect on contemporary art, speak to their own governments back home, and challenge the wider geopolitical realm—changing art and art history along the way. Ultimately, Caroline A. Jones argues, the modern appetite for experience and event structures, which were cultivated around the art at these earlier expositions, have now come to constitute contemporary art itself, producing encounters that transform the public and force us to reflect critically on the global condition.
Download or read book The Democracy Makers written by Nicolas Guilhot and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicolas Guilhot looks at how the U.S. government, the World Bank, political scientists, NGOs, think tanks have appropriated the movements for democracy and human rights. His work charts the various symbolic and political meanings that have developed around the movement for human rights and democracy as well their strategic importance for the West. Guilhot suggests that these shifting meanings reflect the transformation of a progressive, emancipatory movement into an industry, dominated by "experts," rather than grassroots leaders.
Download or read book Debating Cosmopolitics written by Daniele Archibugi and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosmopolitics, the concept of a world politics based on shared democratic values, is in an increasingly fragile state. While Western democracies insist ever more vehemently upon a maintenance of their privileges-freedom of speech, security, wealth-an increasing number of the world's inhabitants are under threat of poverty, famine and war. What is needed, the writers suggest, is a deliberate decision to extend the principles and values of democracy to the sphere of international relations. Recent experience does not bode well, but their arguments, which range from reform of the United Nations, reduction of military weapons, additional power for international judiciary institutions and an increase in aid to developing countries, urge new and inspired action.
Download or read book Global Filipinos written by Deirdre McKay and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contract workers from the Philippines make up one of the world's largest movements of temporary labor migrants. Deirdre McKay follows Filipino migrants from one rural community to work sites overseas and then home again. Focusing on the experiences of individuals, McKay interrogates current approaches to globalization, multi-sited research, subjectivity, and the village itself. She shows that rather than weakening village ties, temporary labor migration gives the village a new global dimension created in and through the relationships, imaginations, and faith of its members in its potential as a site for a better future.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Political Theory written by Mark Bevir and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2010-03-18 with total page 1585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at the roots of contemporary political theory, this three-volume set examines the global landscape of all the key theories and the theorists behind them, and provides concise, to-the-point definitions of key concepts, ideas, schools and figures.
Download or read book Cloud of the Impossible written by Catherine Keller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experience of the impossible churns up in our epoch whenever a collective dream turns to trauma: politically, sexually, economically, and with a certain ultimacy, ecologically. Out of an ancient theological lineage, the figure of the cloud comes to convey possibility in the face of the impossible. An old mystical nonknowing of God now hosts a current knowledge of uncertainty, of indeterminate and interdependent outcomes, possibly catastrophic. Yet the connectivity and collectivity of social movements, of the fragile, unlikely webs of an alternative notion of existence, keep materializing--a haunting hope, densely entangled, suggesting a more convivial, relational world. Catherine Keller brings process, feminist, and ecopolitical theologies into transdisciplinary conversation with continental philosophy, the quantum entanglements of a "participatory universe," and the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, Walt Whitman, A. N. Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler, to develop a "theopoetics of nonseparable difference." Global movements, personal embroilments, religious diversity, the inextricable relations of humans and nonhumans--these phenomena, in their unsettling togetherness, are exceeding our capacity to know and manage. By staging a series of encounters between the nonseparable and the nonknowable, Keller shows what can be born from our cloudiest entanglement.
