Browsing by Subject "Modernity"

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12

Open Access
Ali Yaycioglu, Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016)
(The Hungarian Historical Review, 2017) Mestyan, A
Open Access
Configuring Modernities: New Negro Womanhood in the Nation's Capital, 1890-1940
(2010) Lindsey, Treva Blaine
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a cadre of black women merged the ideals of the "New Woman" and the "New Negro" to configure New Negro Womanhood. For these women, the combining of these two figurations encapsulated the complexity and strivings of black women attempting to achieve racial and gender equality and authorial control of their bodies and aspirations. New Negro women challenged racial and gender inequality and exclusion from participating in contemporaneous political and cultural currents. New Negro women are meaningful in understanding how ideas about black women's political, economic, social and cultural agency challenged New Negro's ideological focus on black men and New Woman's ideological focus on white women. At the core of the New Negro woman ethos was a transformation in how black women thought about the possibility of moving into the public sphere. Black women etched out the parameters of individual and collective aspirations and desires within a modern world in which they were treated as second-class citizens.

My dissertation explores New Negro womanhood in Washington, D.C. The nation's capital functioned as a preeminent site for the realization of African American possibility. The District of Columbia also offered unique opportunities for African American political, civic, social and cultural involvement. More specifically, the city was a fruitful site for the development of African American women's leadership, entrepreneurship and creativity. I use black beauty culture, performance activism, women's suffrage activism, higher education, and black leisure spaces in Washington to examine how black women grappled with and configured ideas about black modernity. Each of these areas provided a distinct context in which African American women in Washington transgressed boundaries of both racial and gender hierarchies and aspired to greater visibility, mobility, and legibility within the modern world. African American women in Washington embraced New Negro Womanhood as a conduit to black modernity.
Open Access
Crafting an Egyptian Evangelicalism: Revolution, Revival, and Reform
(2020) Dowell, Anna Jeannine
This dissertation research explores the practices and aspirations to national belonging among Evangelical Egyptians, converts to a distinctively Euro-American form of Protestant Christianity through the proselytizing efforts of European and American missionaries between the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although Evangelical Egyptians have historically been known as politically quietist, in the wake of the January 25 Revolution, leading Evangelicals began to adjust their practices of public engagement with the revolution, civil society, and political activism. Through participant observation, in-depth person centered interviews, and archival research, this dissertation argues that far from severing Evangelical Egyptian imaginations, desires for, and practices of national belonging, conversion from the historic Coptic Orthodox church and to a more internationally connected form of Christian community, in fact provides Evangelicals with some of their most potent tools for articulating their historical and contemporary place in the nation-state of Egypt. This dissertation aims to bring timely and productive debates on the anthropology of religion to bear on the shape of global evangelicalism in the global south as a key shape of politics and sociality. Indeed, this dissertation argues that it is precisely the ‘will to the global’ as the future imagined community of ‘God’s kingdom’ that paradoxically roots Evangelical Egyptians in a robust nationalistic articulation of their faith.
Open Access
Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century
(2017) Cole, Matthew Benjamin
My dissertation offers an interpretation of twentieth century political thought which emphasizes the influence of dystopian images, themes, and anxieties. Drawing examples from philosophy, literature, and social science, I show how negative visions of future society have played an important critical function in our contemporary understanding of freedom, power, and responsibility. In contrast to those who associate dystopia with cynicism or despair, I aim to provide a more nuanced and sympathetic account of a mode of thinking which gives twentieth century political thought much of its distinctiveness and vitality, and continues to inform ethical and political judgment in our time. Throughout the dissertation, I offer commentaries on the emergence and decline of modern utopianism (Chapter 1); Huxley’s and Orwell’s seminal dystopian novels (Chapter 2); the role of paradigmatic dystopian images related to totalitarianism, mass society, and technocracy in post-war political discourse (Chapter 3) and; the innovative contributions to these discourses made by Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault (Chapter 4).
Open Access
Ethics in the Afterlife of Slavery: Race, Augustinian Politics, and the Enduring Problem of the Christian Master
(2019) Elia, Matthew
This project rereads the political thought of Augustine of Hippo in the Black Lives Matter era. In the last two decades, scholars of religion and politics made a striking return to the constructive resources of the Augustinian tradition to theorize citizenship, virtue, and the place of religion in public life. However, these scholars have not sufficiently attended to Augustine’s embrace of the position of the Christian slaveholder in light of the fact that the contemporary situation to which they apply his thought is itself the afterlife of slavery. The ghosts of slaves and masters live on, haunting the ongoing social meanings of blackness and whiteness in American life. To confront a racialized world, the Augustinian tradition must reckon with its own entanglements with the afterlife of the white Christian master. This reckoning demands a constructive encounter, at once timely and long overdue, between Augustine’s politics and the resources of modern Black thought. Drawing from these two intellectual traditions, this constructive religious ethics dissertation develops a critical account of the problem of the Christian master, even as it presses toward an alternative construal of key concepts of ethical life—agency, virtues, temporality—against and beyond the framework of mastery.
Restricted
From Status to Contract: Domesticating Modernity in Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss and Dracula
(2011-04-04) Foreman, Violeta
In England, the nineteenth-century was a time of change. The social developments instigated by the French Revolution in France were making way across the channel, intensified by the technological innovation generated by the Industrial Revolution. As social hierarchies were altered by the rise of the middle class, so too was political organization disturbed with the passage of the Great Reform act of 1832. The final transition to a constitutional monarchy at home, together with the fall of the ancient Spanish, Chinese, Holy Roman, Portuguese and Mughal empires abroad, made the period a time of unprecedented and fundamental change. Modernity, with a unique concentration on the present rather than the glorification of the past found in classicism or romanticism, would become the measure of social life. While the principles that would define modernism were evolving, as Bram Stoker notes, “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” The literature of the time reflected the transitional phase within the realism of the newly popular medium – the novel. Exploring the role of self and society, the novel, with the genre of realism as its distinguishing feature, allowed for a theoretic space in which social change could be understood and mastered. With antecedents in autobiographic and epistolary works, the novel offered an intimate and ‘real’ microcosm of the contemporary social landscape, contributing new, or literally novel, case studies that reflect how individuals could, and did, come to terms with modernity. Literary critics often use twentieth-century theories of social or psychological development to explicate character motivations or plot progression in the nineteenth-century. Yet, would not such analysis be more fruitful if the works were read in context of Victorian theory that is able to offer a glimpse into how Victorians themselves understood their relation to history and their role in society? To capture this very notion I will turn to the Victorian comparative jurist and historian Sir Henry Maine and his book Ancient Law (1861), which will provide the theoretical framework to my analysis. Henry Maine is pertinent to this study because his legal theories reveal how writers of the period theorized the emergence of modernity. The novels I have chosen precede, are concurrent with, and follow the publication of Maine’s work, so that the impact and progression of social development can be perceived over the span of the century. It is known that George Eliot read Maine’s work and thus his influence can be more directly surmised in The Mill on the Floss. By the time Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, Maine’s theories were ubiquitous and although it is unknown whether the author encountered Maine’s work personally, the ideas put forth in Ancient Law would inevitably have influenced Stoker via popular culture. In the case of Emily Brontë, however, Wuthering Heights predates the insight offered by Maine, but in some ways it follows Maine’s thesis. The work of both authors can be seen as a response to the issues of 1840s-1850s. The move from status to contract that Maine identified, was not isolated to the time of his publication, but was the impetus behind the French Revolution, and the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité that were expressed almost a century earlier. While Emily Brontë, unlike George Eliot, would not have read Maine’s work, the social changes later identified by Maine could not have escaped her. Wuthering Heights explores concepts later solidified in Ancient Law and thus Maine’s theory is critical in explicating the novel. The achievement of Henry Maine is perhaps best summarized by John Hartman Morgan who introduced Ancient Law with the following lines: Published in 1861, it immediately took rank as a classic, and its epoch-making influence may not unfitly be compared to that exercised by Darwin's Origin of Species. The revolution effected by the latter in the study of biology was hardly more remarkable than that effected by Maine’s brilliant treatise in the study of early institutions. Discussing the development of law in the nineteenth century A.W.B. Simpson went so far as to claim that Henry Maine “wrote the only legal best seller of that, or perhaps any other century.” Immensely well written, the book had a cross-generational appeal, as well as the propensity to reference multiple topics fashionable at the time. It participated in the contemporary debate about progress, as Maine sought “constantly to assess whether or not certain practices encouraged or impeded the development of societies.” Unlike previous, prominent jurists, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, who perceived law as a wholly abstract entity “independent of any particular place in which it functions,” Maine understood law as inextricable from social practices and historical events. Hailed as one of the forefathers of modern sociology of law, as well as anthropology, Maine’s project was to trace the emergence and development of the modern concepts of contract and the Individual. By using Maine’s work, we are able to understand the status quo and status quo ante as Victorians themselves did. It is important to note, however, that Ancient Law divulges the evolution of modern law from an earlier Roman prototype, rather than analyzing ancient jurisprudence in isolation. Indeed, Maine’s objective is “to indicate some of the earliest ideas of mankind, as they are reflected in Ancient Law, and to point out the relation of those ideas to modern thought (italics mine).” The transformations his book takes into account can be said to project the metamorphosis of his own culture onto that of antiquity. The need to rationalize the breach between modes of association is evident in the work of Maine and the literary authors in question. While Brontë, Eliot, and Stoker address the changing social landscape in the private sphere, Maine does so in the public. Putting the texts into dialogue will reveal a more complete understanding of how the novelists rationalized the developments of the milieu. By extrapolating Maine’s theories of social progression and applying them to Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, and Dracula, we are able to understand character motivations as products of complex historic transformations. In the pre-modern past, social and economic life was organized in terms of kin. The attainment of prestige and influence of certain independent, but consanguine groups, over time, led to the development of aristocracies. In history, membership in this privileged class offered status and power, but as Maine argues, its benefits were bestowed at the cost of individualization. At such a point in societal development, according to Maine, a person’s “individuality was swallowed up by his family,” never was he “regarded as himself, as a distinct individual.” Thus, a society like ancient Rome, “[had] for its units, not individuals, but groups of men united by the reality or fiction of blood-relationship.” Modernity, however, provided an opportunity for volte-face; it nurtured individualization. In multi-national, multi-ethnic imperial societies, like Imperial Rome and Modern Britain, kinship was no longer a viable way of social organization. In Britain, “the decline of kinship solidarities was understood as a necessary consequence of the economic specialization and bureaucratic rationalism associated with modernity and industrial development.” Status was no longer “colored by, the powers and privileges anciently residing in the Family,” as was the case in ancient Rome and pre-industrial England, according to Maine. Instead, there appeared a “gradual dissolution of family dependency,” replaced by “the growth of individual obligation in its place.” As Maine concisely stated, “the movement of progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.” Contract refers to the “tie between man and man which [replaced] by degrees those forms of reciprocity in rights and duties which have their origin in the Family.” The “free agreement of Individuals” superseded ties of affinity. With the move towards a contract-based society came new forms of social association. People were no longer grouped though blood, rather, they were organized via the places they shared. The move from consanguinity to contiguity was crucial to the individualization of modern society. Maine defined the development of social categories that the novels explore in the microcosm of a fictional reality. In novels we are able to see Maine’s ideas set in motion, affect characters as they would real people, and determine a range of outcomes depending on the characters’ individual proclivities, prejudices, adaptive capacities and environment. The genre of realism that gained prominence in the nineteenth-century’s prevailing medium, the novel, allowed for “new realities” that mirrored the non-fictional world, but which also attempted to solve or fathom change. This need for reflection is a search for something to ground reality in a world that was rapidly and fundamentally changing from old sensibilities of custom, family ties, nobility, and other sentiments of the old order, to the new rationale of independence in the public and private spheres. Maine’s narrative is theoretic in nature and seeks to give meaning to the nineteenth-century developments that the novelists addressed within the private spheres of each narrative. The novel’s relation to the social is unique, for it can be both descriptive and speculative, without being merely reflexive. It is able to go beyond mere representation by exploring novel scenarios in which new realities pose new challenges for the characters, and offer new ways of mastering social change. While Maine abstracted the development of the Individual in law, the novels depicted his relation to society. In the chapter on Wuthering Heights, I identify Heathcliff as a product of both antiquity and modernity, which differs from the critical precedent that attempts to pigeonhole his identity. At the outset, I explore the implications of his absent surname, which I argue qualifies him as an individual who is independent from familial ties. I then explore the subject of kinship, particularly the ways in which the adoption of individuals into the family unit, discussed by Maine, is played out in narrative form of Wuthering Heights. Additionally, I argue that there is no clear marker in the novel to identify which moment in history the Heights belongs to, for it could function as both a feudal and modern manifestation of an estate. In the third section, I look at Heathcliff’s largely capitalistic maneuvering. By targeting the Linton and Earnshaw families Heathcliff is acting as an individual capitalist pivoted against the old symbol of social order – the family – as identified by Maine. Next, I analyze Heathcliff’s entanglement with revenge and patriarchy both of which cast him as an individual tied to ancient forms of social relations. Finally, in the last section, I take on the subject of Hareton and Catherine, arguing that their union is characterized by the creation of a nuclear family, one that is independent from generational ties and its symbols in the form of heirlooms. In the second chapter, I argue that Eliot’s realism in The Mill on the Floss embarks on a demystification of ancient social paradigms, focusing on the evolution of power, function, and structure of the family. The “givens” of the past familial social structure are no longer viable, according to Eliot, so that the archetypes of Gemeinschaft – consanguinity and hereditary status – are undermined in the novel. In their place, Eliot introduces a new kind of “objectivity,” in which I suggest, identity is no longer colored by family name, status is not derived from ancestry, education is removed from family dominion, and extended kinship alliances are supplanted by the nuclear family. In The Mill on the Floss this new “objectivity” is firstly exemplified by Mr. Tulliver’s lawsuit and Mr. Deane’s rise to prominence, both of which signify the rise of contractual modes of association outside the bounds of status derived from heredity. Secondly, the new order is epitomized by Tom’s remote education, which, I will argue, signifies the birth of the Tulliver nuclear family. This differs from Joshua Esty’s argument, which identifies the premature birth of the Tulliver nuclear family as the result of the bankruptcy. Thirdly, the new objectivity is represented by Mrs. Glegg’s financial independence, a point contrary to critical precedent thus far, which places Mrs. Glegg in the “givens” of the past social structure. I will prove that Mrs. Glegg’s financial autonomy is not only a foil to Mrs. Tulliver’s fiscal dependency, but Eliot’s commentary on women’s property rights. Finally, I will discuss the Dodson family as an example of the status quo ante that is not entirely untouched by the new objectivity, as well as Maggie’s ahistoric station as a consequence of insufficient discernment. Focusing the discussion on secondary characters, I hope to avoid the idiosyncratic tendency of many scholars who center their study exclusively on Maggie. Invoking the theories of Eliot’s contemporary, Henry Maine, I will show the ways in which the subjects of Eliot’s social experiment grapple with individuation wrought by modernity and obligation to consanguinity imposed by kinship. In the chapter on Dracula, I argue that the Count displays dualistic tendencies not unlike Maggie and Heathcliff. First, I analyze the relations of the human characters stressing the egalitarian nature of their union and identify Quincey Jr. as a foil to Dracula. Secondly, I turn to the family structure of the un-dead, classifying their union in terms of Maine’s theory concerning the adoption of individuals into the family unit. I then explicate the familial roles arguing that not only does incest cast the coterie in an antiquated light, but that the type of incest committed can further tie the union to an older model of social relations, explored in Romanticism. In the section on Dracula’s domesticity and sociality, I identify his opulent castle, as well as his commitment to hospitality and revenge, as antiquated penchants that reveal the Count’s reliance on outmoded social obligations. In the following section, the discussion on patriarchy and nationality centers on Dracula’s understanding of society, which reflects Maine’s theories of consanguinity and contiguity. The final section focuses on the juxtaposition of Dracula’s embodiment of the family corporation, with the individuality he displays in his single-handed invasion of England. Coming to terms with modernization and the resulting social evolutions are the subjects that Brontë, Stoker, and Eliot explore, whether consciously or unconsciously, in their respective novels. The temporal setting of both Wuthering Heights (1847) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) is antecedent to the novels’ publication, while Dracula’s (1897) setting is conspicuously concurrent. If looking back is a form of coming to terms with the present, Brontë and Eliot had, perhaps, more reason to do so, for at the time of the novels’ publication the gears of change were spinning arguably faster, fueled by its novelty, while at the fin-de-siècle, when Stoker penned Dracula, pervasive change was ubiquitous requiring less rationalization. Stoker, of course, is no exception, for he too turned to antiquity, and in particular, the medieval past in constructing the novel. Even Maine, as discussed previously, referred to the ancient Roman jurisprudence to draw comparison and contrast to modern law. Rationalizing modern developments by turning to the stability of antiquity is a pervasive theme in the nineteenth-century. As people grapple with modern advances in virtually every area of life, the past provides a safe haven to which habit or fear often reverts. Indeed, the main, and even some secondary, characters of the three novels repeatedly conflate antiquity and modernity. They, however, must pay with their lives for their muddled fluctuations, for regression cannot belong to a world of progress, and if survival of the fittest truly describes the human condition then in the case of these novels the fittest are the most adept at assuming change.
Open Access
Martin Heidegger's Mathematical Dialectic: Uncovering the Structure of Modernity
(2016) Beattie, Darren Jeffrey
Martin Heidegger is generally regarded as one of the most significant—if also the most controversial—philosophers of the 20th century. Most scholarly engagement with Heidegger’s thought on Modernity approaches his work with a special focus on either his critique of technology, or on his more general critique of subjectivity. This dissertation project attempts to elucidate Martin Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity, and, by extension, his thought as a whole, from the neglected standpoint of his understanding of mathematics, which he explicitly identifies as the essence of modernity.
Accordingly, our project attempts to work through the development of Modernity, as Heidegger understands it, on the basis of what we call a “mathematical dialectic.“ The basis of our analysis is that Heidegger’s understanding of Modernity, both on its own terms and in the context of his theory of history [Seinsgeschichte], is best understood in terms of the interaction between two essential, “mathematical” characteristics, namely, self-grounding and homogeneity. This project first investigates the mathematical qualities of these components of Modernity individually, and then attempts to trace the historical and philosophical development of Modernity on the basis of the interaction between these two components—an interaction that is, we argue, itself regulated by the structure of the mathematical, according to Heidegger’s understanding of the term.
The project undertaken here intends not only to serve as an interpretive, scholarly function of elucidating Heidegger’s understanding of Modernity, but also to advance the larger aim of defending the prescience, structural coherence, and relevance of Heidegger’s diagnosis of Modernity as such.
Open Access
Modernity and Gender in Arab Accounts of the 1948 and 1967 Defeats
(International Journal Middle East Studies, 2000) Hasso, FS
Open Access
Swaying between Grace and Pomposity: The Imagined Modernity of Soong Mayling
(2021-04) Liu, Qianyu Thea
This paper is centrally concerned with the inconsistencies between the practices of the Orientalized modernity and the Chinese indigenous sociocultural situation in the Republic of China. I focus on Soong Mayling, the first lady of Generalissimo and President Chiang Kai-shek, by tracing her early education in the US, marriage life, as well as her political involvement after returning to China. I examine Orientalized figures’ attempts and possibilities to reconcile the discrepancies that existed between western countries and China. I argue that Soong and her husband endeavored to take outer forms of the West to construct their imagined naive modernity. Their ignorance of Chinese culture and a complete adaptation of linear (evolutionary) ideology cut their reforms off from Chinese people’s sentiments. Their reforms were inconsistent with China’s socio-cultural situation and found no echo in people’s hearts. Failure was inevitable. For sources, the core of the paper is mainly drawn from the speeches, written works, and diaries of Soong Mayling and Chiang Kai-shek, while a major portion of this paper includes news from both China domestic and worldwide newspapers and magazines. I have also supplemented this information with the works and diaries of several intellectuals such as Hu Shih, Sun Yat-sen, and Lin Yutang to enrich my portrait of Soong Mayling.
Open Access
Technologies of Illusion: Enchanting Modernity's Machines
(2017) Spinner, Cheryl
Technologies of Illusion: Enchanting Modernity’s Machines confronts how the
disenchantment of modernity has occluded nineteenth-century Spiritualist archives. By
incorporating literary, visual, and archival methodologies, the dissertation recovers the
non-normative supernatural histories that are preserved within photographs, novels,
and supernatural testimonies. By eschewing scholarly method that is rooted in parsing
out fact from fiction, Technologies of Illusions gives dignity to the Spiritualist artifacts that
eschew such demarcations, and, by extension, the communities who believed in them.
Open Access
Transforming Orthodoxies: Buddhist Curriculums and Educational Institutions in Contemporary South Korea
(2015) Kaplan, Uri
What do Buddhist monks really know about Buddhism? How do they imagine their religion, and more importantly, how does their understanding of their tradition differ from the one found in our typical introduction to Buddhism textbooks? In order to address these fundamental questions, this dissertation concentrates on the educational programs and curricular canons of Korean Buddhism. It aims to find out which part of their enormous canonical and non-canonical literature do Korean Buddhist professionals choose to focus on as the required curriculum in their training (and what do they leave out), why is it chosen and by whom, and how does this specific education shape their understanding of their own religion and their roles within it. It tracks down the 20th-century invention of the so-called `traditional' Korean monastic curriculum and delineates the current 21st-century curricular reforms and the heated debates surrounding them. Ultimately, it illustrates how instead of Buddhist academics learning from the Buddhists about Buddhism, it is actually often the Buddhists in their monasteries who end up simulating the educational agendas of Buddhist studies.
Research for this work involved diverse methodologies. Multiple-sited ethnographic fieldwork in monasteries was supplemented by archival digging in the Chogye Order's headquarters in Seoul and textual analysis of historical records, Buddhist media reports, and online blogs. I have visited the current official 17 monastic seminaries in Korea, as well as many of the new specialized monastic graduate institutes and lay schools, interviewed teachers and students on site, and inspected classrooms and schedules. During winter 2013-4 I have conducted a full-scale participant observation attending the Buddhist lay school of Hwagyesa, during which I engaged some of my classmates with in-depth interviews, and distributed a written attitude survey among the class.
Open Access
Virtue, Vice, and Western Identities: A Thomistic Approach to the Sins of White Power
(2018) Goocey, Joshua Matthew
How did our world’s wealth become so unevenly distributed? How did a small group of Europeans and Americans manage to acquire and retain so much wealth while so many others struggled to acquire enough to sustain their basic life functions? Why did some individuals desire to accumulate massive amounts of wealth? In answering those questions, this dissertation first examines the physical, emotional, intellectual, and social forces that inhibited wealth acquisition and the technologies that overcame those forces. The primary technologies under consideration are not of the mechanical type, like guns and steel. This dissertation primarily examines social technologies that relate to practical human action: patterns of buying and selling, rhythms of speaking, and structured systems of ideas about truth, goodness, and beauty. I call these action and idea patterns “technologies” because they were, like all technologies, intentionally constructed over an extended period of time, and they served a critical function. They executed valuable work and facilitated wealth accumulation. After examining the essential forces working against and the technologies working for wealth accumulation, this dissertation uses slave narratives and the theology of Thomas Aquinas to explore how distorted human passion, in the form of greed, served as a principal motive force in unjust wealth accumulation. Finally, this dissertation attempts to construct a Christian anthropology that redefines human life and purpose in order to heal greed distorted passions.