Humanities & Social Sciences

No Country for Travellers? explores the rise and nature of British travel to Spain and Portugal between 1760 and 1820, across a region that is conventionally overlooked in studies of British travel to Europe. Drawing on extensive archival and printed sources left by travellers in the period, Rosemary Sweet and Richard Ansell reveal the unheralded significance of the two countries to eighteenth-century British culture, and their attraction as destinations long before the Peninsular War and nineteenth-century romanticism. Along the way, the book’s compelling narrative reveals the realities of Iberian travel, the different itineraries that travellers followed, the place of Spanish and Portuguese cities in the British imagination, and the importance of mediators in cultural exchange, on the Iberian side as well as the British. The travellers’ memoirs reflect changing perceptions of Spain and Portugal as modernisation raised new hopes that vied with pessimism and ancient prejudice, and also the persistence of cultural stereotypes, while the counterintuitive relationship between civilian travel and armed conflict emerges through a case study of the Peninsular War. Finally, focusing on contemporary fascination with the Alhambra in Granada, the authors examine the rise of British interest in Iberia’s Islamic history, with its significance for contemporary understandings of ‘Europe’.

Organic waste composting is another excellent example to demonstrate the power and the benefits of nexus thinking. Even though organic waste composting itself is not a new topic, those who want to start a new project or align an ongoing project with nexus thinking, find it difficult to gather the necessary information. With nine case studies from four continents, this book aims to fill above gap in literature. While current literature on composting is often found to be limited to either soil/agriculture sector or waste management sector, this book presents a combined point of view. This open access book starts with an introductory chapter that describes the need to bring the waste management aspects and soil nutrient management aspects of compost production into one integrated theme. The relevance of nexus thinking and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are also presented in this introduction. The first three chapters after the introduction covers composting from the solid waste management and its policy aspects, taking examples from three developing countries. The next three examples are mostly about the benefits composting can provide to the soil and agriculture. These examples are also from three developing countries, but with a mixture of urban as well as rural settings. Last three chapters present more insight into the latest developments taking examples from Europe, as well as new methods adapted from the traditional styles from Africa.

This book presents a multi-voice narrative of the history and significance of current contestations over the increasing prominence of expressive piety in Hui Muslim women’s mosques in central China. By drawing on a ‘Song Book’ of chants, collected from the tradition of women’s mosques, as context it reveals just how the increasing prominence of female voices has given rise to considerable misgivings among senior religious leaders over the potential destabilization of orthodox Islamic gendered practices. Providing a historical introduction to the place and function of Islamic chants,jingge and zansheng, the book gives a conceptual framing of female silence, sound, and agency in local translations of Confucian and Islamic precepts, and women’s personal accounts of the role played by traditional and modern soundscapes in transmitting and celebrating Islamic knowledge and faith. As a study of women's soundscapes and the significance of legitimacy, ambiguities, and implications of female sound, this book will be of considerable interest to students and scholars of Chinese society and culture, gender studies, cultural anthropology, and Islam.

With the rise of modernity, law faces an irreducible contradiction. It must stem the State’s available strength, while at the same time use this strength to make its decisions binding. The author, starting from this paradox, analyses the legal, philosophical and literary discourses of modernity to find the right tools to properly differentiate law and “vis”, overcoming two philosophical and juridical traditions: the one depicting law as a Leviathan, and the one wanting to make it immune to all forms of violence. In particular, through an unedited reading of Kafka and Melville’s narratives, she demonstrates how the modern legal systems, rather than just being instruments of control, are dreams and fantasies of non-violence.

Since the eighteenth century, societies have been increasingly orienting the way they think and act around the future. This is not the result of a natural process, but can be attributed to a complex discursive formation: the modern temporal regime. This study outlines the positions toward this key concept of modernity taken by Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, and Gottfried Keller, which oscillate between affirmation and critique.

This contribution discusses the representation of rape and violence against women in late 19th century Italian literature. In doing so, I focus on a short story, La Vergine Orsola, initially written by Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1884 as part of a short story collection titled Il Libro delle Vergini, later re-published in 1902 in Le Novelle della Pescara. This contribution looks at how the idea of rape is used in this short story as a narrative escamotage to bring to the attention of the reader the question of female entitlement to sexual desire as part of a social critique that D’Annunzio brings forward in his fin-de-siècle novels and short stories.

This volume revisits one of the great challenges of our time - the global circulation of technology and the resulting technicisation. Together, the introductory essay and six case studies argue that while circulation inevitably leads to the global standardisation of some forms, successful technicisation depends on local appropriation that takes place in the interstitial zones of translation. These zones, characterised by their asymmetrical power relations, need to be constantly renegotiated, recreated, and maintained in order to sustain decolonial translations. The aim of this volume is to stimulate further experimental praxiographic studies of decolonial translation in processes of technicisation, and thereby ignite novel, forward-looking theoretical debates. Contributors are Sarah Biecker, Marc Boeckler, Jude Kagoro, Jochen Monstadt, Sung-Joon Park, Eva Riedke, Richard Rottenburg, Klaus Schlichte, Jannik Schritt, Alena Thiel, Christiane Tristl, Jonas van der Straeten.

A professor of poetry uses a deck of playing cards to measure the time until her lover returns from Afghanistan. Congolese soldiers find their loneliness reflected in the lyrics of rumba songs. Survivors of the siege of Sarajevo discuss which book they would have never burned for fuel. A Romanian political prisoner writes her memoir in her head, a book no one will ever read. These are the arts of survival in times of crisis. Rumba Under Fire proposes we think differently about what it means for the arts and liberal arts to be “in crisis.” In prose and poetry, the contributors to Rumba Under Fire explore what it means to do art in hard times. How do people teach, create, study, and rehearse in situations of political crisis? Can art and intellectual work really function as resistance to power? What relationship do scholars, journalists, or even memoirists have to the crises they describe and explain? How do works created in crisis, especially at the extremes of human endurance, fit into our theories of knowledge and creativity?

Racial reckoning was a recurrent theme throughout the summer of 2020, a response to George Floyd’s murder and the unprecedented impact of COVID on marginalized groups. Theater and Crisis proposes a literary and theatrical study of how Floyd's killing could possibly happen in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era, and in the supposedly post-racial era following the election of Barack Obama. In the days and months following Floyd's death, there were nightly protests in streets across the United States and broader world. At the same time, theater performances were forced to shift online to video conferencing platforms and to find new ways to engage audiences. In each case, groups made shared meaning through storytelling and narrative, a liberatory process of myth-making and reverence that author Patrice D. Rankine calls “epiphanic encoding.” Rather than approaching the problem of racial reckoning through history, where periodization and progress are dominant narratives, Theater and Crisis argues that myth and memory allow for better theorization about recurring events from the past, their haunting, and what these apparent ghosts ask of us. Building on the study of myth as active, processual storytelling, Rankine acknowledges that it grounds and orients groups toward significant events. Theater and Crisis aligns narratives about Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, among others, with ancient, mythic figures such as Christ, Dionysus, Oedipus, and Moses. As living and verbal visitations, these stories performed on stage encode the past through their epiphanies in the present, urging audiences toward shared meaning. Rankine traces the cyclical hauntings of race through the refiguring of mythic stories across the past 75 years in the plays of James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Antoinette Nwandu, and many more, and in response to flashpoints in US racial history, such as the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the wars on drugs and crime, and the continued violence against and disenfranchisement of Black people into the twenty-first century. Theater and Crisis explores the appearance of myth on the American stage and showcases the ongoing response by the theatrical establishment to transform the stage into a space for racial reckoning. This timely book is essential reading for scholars of theater studies, classics, and American studies.

In recent years, the terms "ethics," "politics," "performativity," and "experience" have proliferated throughout the discourse of the humanities. However, it is rarely noted that their contemporary understanding has been shaped by the works of Jacques Derrida, who has employed all these concepts since the mid-1960s. The aim of this book is to present the lesser discussed topics of Derrida’s thought – not only as the creator of a specific mode of interpretation called "deconstruction" but also as an initiator of recent ethical and political reflection, a pioneer of performatics, and a precursor of current research on experience. At the same time, the book provides a panorama of the most important changes in the humanities of the last thirty years, and in particular – the ethical, performative, and empirical turns.

In 2013, the Hirsch Institute of Tropical Medicine was officially inaugurated as a branch of the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Infectious Diseases at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf under the direction of Professor Dieter Häussinger. The HITM serves as a place of scientific medical knowledge transfer, postgraduate medical training, and of conducting scientific projects relating to tropical medicine and infectious diseases.

Ausgehend vom griechischen Begriff des agon (Wettstreit) hat die Politikwissenschaftlerin Chantal Mouffe ein politisches und ästhetisches Formgesetz demokratischer Selbstverständigung vorgeschlagen: ein Wechselspiel von Impulsen der demokratischen Dynamisierung und Institutionalisierung, das sich in offenem Austausch und polemischem Streit ausdrückt. Welche ästhetischen Implikationen ergeben sich aus diesem Konzept der Agonistik in Literatur, Film und bildender Kunst, aber auch für den Kunstbegriff als solchen? Die Beiträge verhandeln das Phänomen der Agonistik von der antiken Tragödienform über aufklärerische Staats- und Kunstkonzeptionen und frühromantische Poetiken bis hin zur zeitgenössischen Film- und Serienästhetik. Sie bezeugen die wesentliche Rolle, die das Agonistische als thematischer Bezugspunkt spielt, aber auch als Antriebsmoment künstlerischer Prozesse und als Reflexionsfigur für gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder.

A színház kultúrában betöltendő szerepe, finanszírozásának mértéke újra társadalmi viták középpontjában áll. Ezt a napjainkban érzékelhető színházi modellváltást törekszem kultúrtörténeti kontextusba helyezni a két világháború közötti magánszínházi működés feltételrendszerének és szakmai érdekvédelmi szerveződéseinek áttekintésével. A szaktanulmányokból álló kötet levéltári alapkutatásra épül: a Budapesti Színigazgatók Szövetségének az Országos Széchényi Könyvtár Színháztörténeti Tárában található, az 1918– 1942-es időszakot felölelő anyagára, valamint a Vígszínház szintén ott őrzőt iratanyagára támaszkodik elsősorban. A cél, hogy a vígszínházi vezetés és a pesti magánszínházi igazgatók szervezetének kulturális rezilienciáját, a kihívásokra reagáló alkalmazkodási technikáit döntően nem nyilvánosságnak szánt, eddig ismeretlen szempontokat tartalmazó jegyzőkönyvekből, belső dokumentumokból ismerhessük meg. A transznacionális színháztörténet szemszögét alkalmazó tanulmányok nem elsősorban alkotók (színészek, rendezők), hanem a magánszínházak működését, profilját, repertoárját döntően meghatározó magyar és külföldi tulajdonosok, bérlők, színigazgatók tevékenységének és szakmai hálózatának vizsgálatát célozzák. Hiszen a Budapesti Színigazgatók Szövetségének vezetőségét alkotó, tőkével rendelkező vagy tőkéstárssal működő színigazgatók nyerték el a székesfővárostól a koncessziót, ők szerződtették és fizették a művész- és kiszolgálószemélyzetet. Gyakran ők döntöttek a bemutatandó darabok lekötéséről, befolyásolva ezzel a repertoárt és a befogadói ízlést. A mindig kiemelt jelentőségű fővárosi színházi életben az állami támogatást élvező Nemzeti Színház önmagában nem lett volna képes külföldön is piacképes produkciókat létrehozó színházi ipart fenntartani, és partnerként bekapcsolódni a kozmopolita szórakoztatóipari hálózatokba.

This book covers five historical moments of the long and conflictive relationships between philosophy and literature: Greek Antiquity, the French Middle Ages, the Spanish Golden Age, the Age of Enlightenment and Modernity. It is a commitment to illuminate different hermeneutical constellations, presented by some cases of philosophy and others of literature, and to review the possibilities for a generic literary theory that guides the understanding of human history.

This book is a study of the life and thought of the Polish Jew Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767-1838). Arriving in London, he encountered an educated group of English literati who found him useful for their own intellectual purposes while respecting his commitment to Judaism and his talents as a biblical exegete and translator of the Hebrew Bible.