Minor Universality / Universalité Mineure
Minor Universality / Universalité Mineure

Author: Markus Messling

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-08-21

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 3110798492

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The circulation and entanglements of human beings, data, and goods have not necessarily and by themselves generated a universalising consciousness. The "global" and the "universal", in other words, are not the same. The idea of a world-society remains highly contested. Our times are marked by the fragmentation of a double relativistic character: the inevitable critique of Western universalism on the one hand, and resurgent identitarian and neo-nationalistic claims to identity on the other. Sources of an argumentation for a strong universalism brought forward by Western traditions such as Christianity, Marxism, and Liberalism have largely lost their legitimation. All the while, manifold and situated narratives of a common world that re-address the universal are under way of being produced and gain significance. This volume tracks the development and relevance of such cultural and social practices that posit forms of what we call minor universality. It asks: Where and how do contemporary practices open up concrete settings so as to create experiences, reflections and agencies of a shared humanity? With contributions by Isaac Bazié, Anil Bhatti, Jean-Luc Chappey, Elsie Cohen, Leyla Dakhli, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Nicole Fischer, Albert Gouaffo, Stefan Helgesson, Fatma Hotait, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Christopher M. Hutton, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Mario Laarmann, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Olivier Remaud, Gisèle Sapiro, Bénédicte Savoy, Maria-Anna Schiffers, Laurens Schlicht, Sergio Ugalde, Hélène Thierard, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll.

Universality After Universalism
Universality After Universalism

Author: Markus Messling

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-10-23

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 311112830X

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The idea of universalism inherited from the French Revolution has been strongly discredited by its colonial history; today, it is also the target of nationalist attacks. What remains of it? Now available in English, Markus Messling's critically acclaimed study shows how contemporary Francophone literatures seek, after European universalism, approaches to a new universality, without which knowledge and justice cannot be organised in world society. With a foreword by Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Literature and the Work of Universality
Literature and the Work of Universality

Author: Alice Duhan

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-07-22

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 3111209156

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In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature - and modes of literary thinking - as a key resource for such a task. "Universality" is understood here not as an established "universalism", but as a horizon towards which intellectual inquiry and literary practices orient themselves. In the field of world literature, there is by now a wide repertoire of epistemological resources through which claims to universality can be both questioned and reconfigured. If, at one end of the spectrum, world literature confronts us with the spectre of homogenisation and the commodification of difference under a regime of global capitalism, at another end renewed forms of philological, anthropological and ecological attentiveness to the particulars of languages and texts within the crucible of connected histories allow for defamiliarising perspectives both on received historical narratives and aesthetic practices. Vernacularity emerges here as a central point of reference for constructing the universal from within the particular, the idiomatic, and the experiences of social subordination or complicity.

Minor Universality
Minor Universality

Author: Markus Messling

Publisher: de Gruyter

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783110798487

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The circulation and entanglements of human beings, data, and goods have not necessarily and by themselves generated a universalising consciousness. The "global" and the "universal", in other words, are not the same. The idea of a world-society remains highly contested. Our times are marked by the fragmentation of a double relativistic character: the inevitable critique of Western universalism on the one hand, and resurgent identitarian and neo-nationalistic claims to identity on the other. Sources of an argumentation for a strong universalism brought forward by Western traditions such as Christianity, Marxism, and Liberalism have largely lost their legitimation. All the while, manifold and situated narratives of a common world that re-address the universal are under way of being produced and gain significance. This volume tracks the development and relevance of such cultural and social practices that posit forms of what we call minor universality. It asks: Where and how do contemporary practices open up concrete settings so as to create experiences, reflections and agencies of a shared humanity? With contributions by Isaac Bazié, Anil Bhatti, Jean-Luc Chappey, Elsie Cohen, Leyla Dakhli, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Nicole Fischer, Albert Gouaffo, Stefan Helgesson, Fatma Hotait, Christopher M. Hutton, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Mario Laarmann, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Olivier Remaud, Gisèle Sapiro, Bénédicte Savoy, Maria-Anna Schiffers, Laurens Schlicht, Sergio Ugalde Quintana, Hélène Thierard, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll.

The Epoch of Universalism 1769–1989 / L’époque de l’universalisme 1769–1989
The Epoch of Universalism 1769–1989 / L’époque de l’universalisme 1769–1989

Author: Franck Hofmann

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-11-23

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 3110691507

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2019 witnessed the 30th anniversary of the German reunification. But the remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall coincided with another event of global importance that caught much less attention: the 250th anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s birth. There is an undeniable historical and philosophical dimension to this coincidence. Napoleon’s appearance on the scene of world history seems to embody European universalism (soon thereafter in the form of a ‘modern’ imperial project); whilst scholars such as Francis Fukuyama saw in the events of 1989 its historical fulfilment. Today, we see more clearly that the fall of the Berlin Wall stands for an epistemic earthquake, which generated a world that can no longer be grasped through universal concepts. Here, we deal with the idea of Europe and of its relation to the world itself. Picking up on this contingency of world history with an ironic wink, the volume analyses in retrospect the epoch of European universalism. It focusses on its dialectics, polemically addressing and remembering both 1769 and 1989. L’année 2019 a été marquée par le 30e anniversaire de la réunification de l’Allemagne, éclipsant un autre événement d’envergure mondiale : le 250e anniversaire de Napoléon Bonaparte. La dimension philosophico-historique de cette coïncidence ne peut pourtant pas être négligée : si l’arrivée de Bonaparte sur la scène de l’histoire mondiale semble incarner l’avènement de l’universalisme européen (bientôt amené à prendre sa forme « moderne » et impériale), certains penseurs ont suggéré, avec Francis Fukuyama, que « 1989 » marquait son accomplissement historique. Aujourd’hui, il apparaît au contraire que la chute du mur de Berlin a été un véritable tremblement de terre épistémique, et rendu inopérants les concepts universels. Dans le monde d’après, c’est à l’idée d’Europe et à sa relation au monde que nous avons affaire. Revenant par un geste ironique sur cette contingence historique, le présent volume se veut une analyse rétrospective de l’époque de l’universalisme, dans toute la dialectique que les commémorations de 1769/1989 ont fait surgir.

State of the Arts
State of the Arts

Author: Jonas Tinius

Publisher:

Published: 2023-08-02

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1009321161

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This is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society.

Elective Affinities
Elective Affinities

Author: Agnieszka Helena Hudzik

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-09-02

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 3111247864

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From the nineteenth century to the present, literary entanglements between Latin America and East Central Europe have been socio-politically and culturally diverse, but never random. The Iron Curtain, in particular, forced both regions to negotiate transatlantic «elective affinities», to take a stance in relation to the West, and to position themselves within world literature. As a result, the intellectual fields and creative productions of these regions have critically engaged with notions such as «post-imperial», «marginal», or «peripheral». In this edited volume, scholars from Germany, Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain cross the globe from South to East and back to uncover transcultural and transareal convivialities. Their papers explore literary history, poetics, intellectual networks, and aesthetic theory, while discussing new key concepts in global literary history.

Palimpsests of Themselves
Palimpsests of Themselves

Author: Asad Q. Ahmed

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-07-19

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0520975766

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A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Palimpsests of Themselves is an intervention in current discussions about the fate of philosophy in postclassical Islamic intellectual history. Asad Q. Ahmed uses as a case study the most advanced logic textbook of Muslim South Asia, The Ladder of the Sciences, presenting in English its first full translation and extended commentary. He offers detailed assessments of the technical contributions of the work, explores the social and institutional settings of the vast commentarial response it elicited, and develops a theory of the philosophical commentary that is internal to the tradition. These approaches to the commentarial text complicate presuppositions upon which questions of Islam’s intellectual decline are erected. As such, Ahmed offers a unique and powerful opportunity to understand the transmission of knowledge across the Islamic world.