Religion and the Specter of the West

Religion and the Specter of the West
Author: Arvind-Pal S. Mandair
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2009-10-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 023151980X

Arguing that intellectual movements, such as deconstruction, postsecular theory, and political theology, have different implications for cultures and societies that live with the debilitating effects of past imperialisms, Arvind Mandair unsettles the politics of knowledge construction in which the category of "religion" continues to be central. Through a case study of Sikhism, he launches an extended critique of religion as a cultural universal. At the same time, he presents a portrait of how certain aspects of Sikh tradition were reinvented as "religion" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. India's imperial elite subtly recast Sikh tradition as a sui generis religion, which robbed its teachings of their political force. In turn, Sikhs began to define themselves as a "nation" and a "world religion" that was separate from, but parallel to, the rise of the Indian state and global Hinduism. Rather than investigate these processes in isolation from Europe, Mandair shifts the focus closer to the political history of ideas, thereby recovering part of Europe's repressed colonial memory. Mandair rethinks the intersection of religion and the secular in discourses such as history of religions, postcolonial theory, and recent continental philosophy. Though seemingly unconnected, these discourses are shown to be linked to a philosophy of "generalized translation" that emerged as a key conceptual matrix in the colonial encounter between India and the West. In this riveting study, Mandair demonstrates how this philosophy of translation continues to influence the repetitions of religion and identity politics in the lives of South Asians, and the way the academy, state, and media have analyzed such phenomena.

Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts

Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts
Author: Hwa Yol Jung
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2011-04-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0821443690

Transversality is the keyword that permeates the spirit of these thirteen essays spanning almost half a century, from 1965 to 2009. The essays are exploratory and experimental in nature and are meant to be a transversal linkage between phenomenology and East Asian philosophy. Transversality is the concept that dispels all ethnocentrisms, including Eurocentrism. In the globalizing world of multiculturalism, Eurocentric universalism falls far short of being universal but simply parochial at the expense of the non-Western world. Transversality is intercultural, interspecific, interdisciplinary, and intersensorial. Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts means to transform the very way of philosophizing itself by infusing or hybridizing multiple traditions in the history of the world. Like no other scholar, Jung bridges the gap between Asian and Western cultures. By engaging Western philosophers as diverse as Bacon, Descartes, Heidegger, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Glissant, Barthes, Fenollosa, McLuhan, and Eastern philosophers such as Wang Yang-ming, Nishida Kitaro, Nishitani Keiji, Watsuji Tetsuro, Nhat Hanh, and Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, this book marks an unparalleled contribution to comparative philosophy and the study of philosophy itself.

Excessive Subjectivity

Excessive Subjectivity
Author: Dominik Finkelde
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231545770

How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the prevailing order? These acts challenge long-standing hidden or silently tolerated injustices, but as they are unsupported by existing ethical rules they pose a drastic challenge to dominant norms. In Excessive Subjectivity, Dominik Finkelde rereads the tradition of German idealism and finds in it the potential for transformative acts that are capable of revolutionizing the social order. Finkelde's discussion of the meaning and structure of the ethical act meticulously engages thinkers typically treated as opposed—Kant, Hegel, and Lacan—to develop the concept of excessive subjectivity, which is characterized by nonconformist acts that reshape the contours of ethical life. For Kant, the subject is defined by the ethical acts she performs. Hegel interprets Kant's categorical imperative as the ability of an individual's conscience to exceed the existing state of affairs. Lacan emphasizes the transgressive force of unconscious desire on the ethical agent. Through these thinkers Finkelde develops a radical ethics for contemporary times. Integrating perspectives from both analytical and continental philosophy, Excessive Subjectivity is a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the ethical subject.

Affect and Literature

Affect and Literature
Author: Alex Houen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2020-02-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108424511

Explores a wide range of affects, affect theory, and literature to consolidate a fresh understanding of literary affect.

Traces 2

Traces 2
Author: Meaghan Morris
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9622095615

This book explores complex relations between violence, historical memory, and the production of "ethnicity" and "race." Some essays analyze the panicked "othering" that has led to violence against Chinese Indonesians, and to the little-known massacres of Hui Muslims in nineteenth century China and of Cheju Islanders in Korea in 1948.

Violence and the Third World in International Relations

Violence and the Third World in International Relations
Author: Randolph B. Persaud
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000708519

Violence and the Third World in International Relations is intended as a contribution to the decolonization of international relations, and especially of international security studies, much of which is dominated by a self-sustaining Eurocentrism. Rather than focusing on the motivations of violence, this volume is concerned with the devastating and debilitating consequences of war against the Third World. Contributors delve into the violent structuring of Third World societies during colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization. A wide range of topics are systematically examined, including, but not restricted to, the role of racism in the construction of the international system; evangelical universalism and colonial conquest in Africa; American civilizational security as Grand Strategy in Asia; the colonial roots of guerrilla war in India; the widespread suffering and death inflicted on Iraqis through sanctions; violence against indigenous peoples in Colombia related to ‘war capitalism’; the complicated legacies of genocide in Cambodia; the Saudi-led, (US and UK backed) war against Yemen; the relationalities between violence in the US and the Third World during Obama’s presidency; the structural location of gang violence in Central America in the aftermath of foreign intervention; and a broader understanding of security and insecurity in the Caribbean. Violence and the Third World in International Relations will be of particular interest to scholars of postcolonial and decolonial international relations, international security studies, and race and international relations. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Interventions into Modernist Cultures

Interventions into Modernist Cultures
Author: Amie Elizabeth Parry
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2007-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 082238986X

Interventions into Modernist Cultures is a comparative analysis of the cultural politics of modernist writing in the United States and Taiwan. Amie Elizabeth Parry argues that the two sites of modernism are linked by their representation or suppression of histories of U.S. imperialist expansion, Cold War neocolonial military presence, and economic influence in Asia. Focusing on poetry, a genre often overlooked in postcolonial theory, she contends that the radically fragmented form of modernist poetic texts is particularly well suited to representing U.S. imperialism and neocolonial modernities. Reading various works by U.S. expatriates Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Parry compares the cultural politics of U.S. canonical modernism with alternative representations of temporality, hybridity, erasure, and sexuality in the work of the Taiwanese writers Yü Kwang-chung and Hsia Yü and the Asian American immigrant author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Juxtaposing poems by Pound and Yü Kwang-chung, Parry shows how Yü’s fragmented, ambivalent modernist form reveals the effects of neocolonialism while Pound denies and obscures U.S. imperialism in Asia, asserting a form of nondevelopmental universalism through both form and theme. Stein appropriates discourses of American modernity and identity to represent nonnormative desire and sexuality, and Parry contrasts this tendency with representations of sexuality in the contemporary experimental poetry of Hsia Yü. Finally, Parry highlights the different uses of modernist forms by Pound in his Cantos—which incorporate a multiplicity of decontextualized and ahistorical voices—and by Cha in her 1982 novel Dictee, a historicized, multilingual work. Parry’s sophisticated readings provide a useful critical framework for apprehending how “minor modernisms” illuminate the histories erased by certain canonical modernist texts.

Why Traditional Chinese Philosophy Still Matters

Why Traditional Chinese Philosophy Still Matters
Author: Ming Dong Gu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-02-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351356003

Traditional Chinese philosophy, if engaged at all, is often regarded as an object of antiquated curiosity and dismissed as unimportant in the current age of globalization. Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars, this book, however, challenges this judgement and offers an in-depth study of pre-modern Chinese philosophy from an interdisciplinary perspective. Exploring the relevance of traditional Chinese philosophy for the global age, it takes a comparative approach, analysing ancient Chinese philosophy in its relation to Western ideas and contemporary postmodernist theories. The conversation extends over a broad spectrum of philosophical areas and themes, ranging from metaphysics, hermeneutics, political theory, religion and aesthetics to specific philosophical schools including Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. By engaging many time-honoured philosophical issues from a comparative perspective, this book bridges the gap between Eastern and Western thought and emphasises the need for a newly fortified global humanism and a deeper appreciation of different philosophical and religious values in an age gripped by large-scale crises. Arguing that traditional Chinese philosophy has immediate relevance to the many challenges of modern life, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Asian Philosophy and Asian Studies in general.