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Persistence realism is the view that ordinary sentences that we think and utter about persisting objects are often true. Persistence realism involves both a semantic claim, about what it would take for those sentences to be true, and an ontological claim about the way things are. According to persistence realism, given what it would take for persistence sentences to be true, and given the ontology of our world, often such sentences are true. According to persistence error-theory, they are not. This Element considers several different views about the conditions under which those sentences are true. It argues for a view on which it is relatively easy to vindicate persistence realism, because all it takes is for the world to be the way it seems to us. Thereby it argues for the view that relations of numerical identity, or of being-part-of-the-same-object, are neither necessary nor sufficient for persistence realism.
This chapter develops an analytically functional concept of EV and begins to identify its sources, pathways, and outlets into the global ecosystem and everyday life. The chapter then expands on the core concepts of Earth Systems theory, complex adaptive systems and human niche construction to address topics such as vulnerability and violence, especially cultural, structural, and direct violence. The next step will be to build and parse a heuristic model that conveys the range of the concept’s applications and traces EV’s production, pathways, mediators, and outlets, as well as its facilitators and effects throughout its cycling. Next, the chapter examines previously developed and related concepts of ecologically associated violence. The purpose of this is not to take issue with them, but rather to synthesize and build upon previous iterations. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the nuances and politics of EV. These ideas will be developed further in Chapter 6. Nevertheless, a brief presentation is useful here because it helps to understand how EV has become normalized and ingrained in the everyday life of the contemporary human niche.
Beginning with “multidisciplinary approaches to the study of self,” the chapter explores the “collective experience” of Africa through poetry. The chapter, in its depiction of the interwoven relationship between self and narrative, establishes the perpetuity of self with words such as “ever-changing,” “evolving,” “becoming,” and “actualization.” Further, the chapter establishes how self is discovered through a consciousness of belonging to a larger society vis-à-vis self’s relationship with other aspects of the society. Poetry gives the reader the opportunity to feel a larger expression of the narrative, such as the energies, events, and experiences felt by the poet. However, understanding these expressions requires the possession of the same level of sensitivity by the reader. With references to his poetic collection, the author proceeds to examine the narration of self to portray existing socio-cultural values/desires and their importance in Africa. They include eulogizing and celebrating individuals, extolling the mother both as the carrier and nurturer of life, and the pride in face marks as ethnic identity, amongst others.
This chapter explores cultural themes in Africa with “narrative politics” and its cultural values central to the discourse. In expounding “narrative,” the chapter brings to the fore its two most potent modes (literature and history), which reflect reality but are different in their modus operandi – through imagination (creativity) and verifiable facts. Written beautifully and with references, this chapter blurs the contrast between the two “narrative devices” and focuses instead on espousing their working togetherness. This is because a co-adoption of both in the narrative adds creativity to facts presentation, which thus makes it interesting to read and sustain readers’ interest just as their Yoruba derivative, Alo and Itan, is often a mixture of both.
The chapter also asserts the importance of autoethnography and how through personal experience and identity, the society’s “collective consciousness” is exhibited and manifested. Also, there are references made to the cultural relevance and implication of “time and season,” “taboos and superstitions,” “greetings and reverence,” as well as “namings and places” in Yorubaland.
This essay explores how the drafters of international humanitarian law (IHL) incorporated the past into their work between 1860 and 2020, and how they approached time, memory and history as indicators for this view of the past. Its sources consist of the complete series of general conventional and customary IHL instruments as well as the leading commentaries on them. For the IHL view of time, the impact of legal principles on the perception of time is scrutinized. Balancing nonretroactivity against customary international law and the humanity principle broadens the temporal scope towards the past, while balancing legal forgetting against imprescriptibility and State succession broadens it towards the future. For the IHL view of memory, dead persons and cultural heritage are seen as crucial vectors. Attention to the fate of the dead has been a constant hallmark of IHL, while care for cultural heritage has an even longer pedigree. For the IHL view of history, the essay highlights that the International Committee of the Red Cross has consistently advocated State duties to the war dead and has organized an archival infrastructure to satisfy the need – later converted into a right – of families and society to search for the historical truth about them.
Furthermore, the responses of IHL drafters to five major historical challenges are examined. First, while in the realm of war crimes impunity prevailed for most of history, after World War II a system of war crimes trials was mounted, culminating in the International Criminal Court. Second, soul-searching about the atrocities of World War II, including the Holocaust, helped create Geneva Convention IV of 1949, which protects civilians in wartime. Third, the human rights idea was not fully embraced by IHL treaty drafters until 1968. Fourth, the IHL approach to civil wars was slow and incomplete, but its appearance in 1949 and coming of age in 1977 were breakthroughs nevertheless. Fifth, colonial conflicts were not recognized as international wars in 1949, when this could have had considerable impact, but only in 1977, when decolonization was largely over. In all cases, the responses to these historical challenges came after long delays. Clearly, the IHL view of the past has to be assessed on a transgenerational scale.
This chapter explores the critical consensus that children are always figures of the future anchored to cisgendered heterosexual reproduction, as proposed by critics like Rebekah Sheldon, Lee Edelman, Lauren Berlant, and Robin Bernstein. Against this view of the child, this chapter foregrounds the experiences of children in the U.S. educational system and in racially differentiated ways that don’t necessarily spare white children from a high disregard for their welfare. What it finds is that the “sacralization of the Child,” as Edelman put it, is a thin discursive tissue that distracts from pervasive negligence and racial anxiety. It concludes with a meditation on Ezra Pound’s famous imagist poem “In the Station of the Metro,” which the critic Josephine Park has identified as an important figure in Asian American literature because of the ways in which it popularized a highly orientalized idea of Chinese and Japanese culture. What is the view from the crowd the poem conjures, which is racially diverse and getting more so? What kind of claim on childhood does this crowd make?
While DeLillo’s entire oeuvre has been concerned with the exigencies and mysteries of time as it is shaped by human hands into history, time seems to saturate the pages of his more recent works in a new, immersive way, prompting us to consider more carefully art’s capacity to reflect, influence, and challenge not only what we choose to do with the time we have, but our methods of measuring it.
Repentance is central to the doctrinal philosophies of all major religions. From a theoretical point of view, however, the practice poses significant challenges. As the past cannot be altered, the guilt that obtains from already committed sins appears forever fettered to the sinner. In this article, I explore this conundrum and discuss a number of solutions that have been proposed in religious traditions. I show how these solutions fail to satisfy from both theological and philosophical perspectives. Finally, I propose a novel approach that, I believe, solves the problem.
Chapter 9 introduces the Q’eqchi’-Maya institution of replacement (eeqaj), a set of practices and beliefs, which determine when various kinds of entities and agents must be replaced, as well as what kinds of entities and agents may substitute for them, and thereby serve as their replacements. It uses this institution as a means to articulate various modes of temporality that underlie social practices and material processes: temporality as repetition (and interruption); temporality as irreversibility (and reversibility); temporality as reckoning (and regimentation); temporality as roots and fruits; and temporality as cosmology and worldview. In addition, it highlights the important role that thresholds play in mediating such practices and processes.
Chapter 10 is about four aspectual adverbs in Q’eqchi’-Maya, which may be loosely glossed as ‘already’ (ak), ‘not yet’ (maaji’), ‘still’ (toj), and ‘no longer’ (ink’a’ chik). It shows the presupposition and assertion structure of these forms in unmarked usage (as sentential operators acting on imperfective predicates), and it argues that they constitute a dual group in the tradition of Loebner (1989) who worked on similar operators in German. This chapter shows the wide range of other functions such forms serve in more marked usage and the ways they may co-occur with each other in the same clause (and thereby ‘double’), leading to constructions like ‘still no longer’ and ‘already not yet’. It offers a semantics that accounts for the multiple functions of all such constructions, highlighting the ways these forms are similar to, and different from, their German and Spanish counterparts.
The literature on moral responsibility is ripe with accounts of what it takes for an agent to become blameworthy. By contrast, very little has been written about what it takes for an agent’s blameworthiness to cease or diminish. It seems that there are certain things a wrongdoer can feel or do that might make her less blameworthy than she would otherwise have been. She might experience guilt, atone, apologize, and make reparations. In this chapter, I will argue that prominent accounts of blameworthiness are unable to explain how such actions and emotions can influence one’s blameworthiness. I will then present an alternative account. If we understand blameworthiness in terms of deserved guilt rather than fitting resentment, we can give a plausible account of how blameworthiness can change over time. The fact that a wrongdoer has already experienced guilt, atoned, or apologized will make her less deserving of guilt, and therefore less blameworthy.
Chapter 5 considers texts in which music acts upon queer bodies to subject them to temporal flux or dislocation. Reading such texts through the lens of both Victorian evolutionary accounts of music’s origins and contemporary theory’s concern with ‘queer temporalities’ makes it possible to better articulate the tropes of backwardness and retrogression that attach to those queer desires awakened by music. In Browning’s ‘Charles Avison’ music’s association with both the evolutionary primitive and sexually abject presents a challenge to the teleological impetus underpinning Victorian ideals of progressive time. Similar motifs also emerge with particular prominence in stories relating to the figure of Pan by Machen, Forster and Benson. Here, the music of Pan unleashes queer desires that act upon bodies to subject them to the reverse flow of evolutionary time. In Forster’s text, Pan’s queerness is also made evident in the narrator’s paranoid fixation with masturbation, revealed in the text’s obsessive patterning of images invoking tactile contact. For Benson, Pan’s music leads his protagonist towards a queer sexual encounter that is simultaneously alluring and horrific.
This chapter considers the shifting meanings and capacities of American and British seasonal literature and media in light of anthropogenic climate change. Via two case studies, it compares seasonal work before and after widespread concerns about altered seasonal patterns in the United States and Europe. Beginning with a discussion of the seasonal aspects of Rachel Carson’s writing – most notably her sea trilogy – and its literary contexts, this chapter examines seasonal prose produced prior to the climate crisis. It also reflects on contemporary scholars’ tendency to revisit Carson’s work when ruminating on climate change, suggesting a nostalgia for seasonal reassurance. The chapter then turns to the contemporary production of seasonal media, using the BBC series Springwatch as a second case study. Placing Springwatch within a British tradition of seasonal broadcasting, it analyses the intersection of environmental and cultural seasonality in this series. As a show produced during a period of heightened climate anxiety, Springwatch actively works to generate seasonal data for climate research in the United Kingdom. In this sense, seasonal media unfolding within – and responding to – perceptible season creep can route seasonal sentimentality into the observation of phenological change.
The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies of East Germany has privileged white German perspectives on material culture at the expense of non-white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting the spatial lens to the global South, and to the foreign students and workers who lived for extended periods in East Germany, I trouble the implicit whiteness in the study of GDR cultural memory. Popular identification with GDR goods extended beyond the borders of Germany to newly decolonized countries that were the beneficiaries of the GDR’s solidarity policies. Using the example of Vietnam, I challenge formulations of Ostalgie as a site of white German memory production only, highlighting consumption of East German products by racialized foreign Others. In examining the objects that Vietnamese migrants amassed and transported back to Vietnam, and their subsequent use and circulation through today, I offer a different take on the temporal and spatial relationship between people and commodities, one that assigns value and agency to imported socialist things. In contrast to reunified Germany, where socialist-era goods were deemed disposable and obsolete, in Vietnam, East German products did not lose their utility and associations with modernity. The essay argues for a more inclusive exploration of memory and approach to Ostalgie that takes seriously the alternative logics of time, space, and materiality that informed the circuits of consumption, trade, and meaning of GDR things.
Numenius (second century AD), the only witty Platonist after Plato himself, memorably described Plato as ‘Moses talking Attic’. He did not mean thereby to rate Eastern wisdom more highly than Platonic philosophy, as is sometimes suggested, but to recognise in the words ‘I AM THAT I AM’, spoken to Moses by the God of the Hebrews, an anticipation, unique in Eastern lore, of the conception Numenius championed of the Platonic first principle One or Good as Being itself. This paper proposes that his further exploration of that idea shows him to have construed the Timaeus account of such being as an eternal present, or in Boethius’s words ‘the complete possession all at once of an infinite life’, not as timelessness (the Timaeus interpretation advocated by Richard Sorabji). It is argued that this was both a correct interpretation of Plato’s text, and one shared in much subsequent ancient and medieval philosophy, including Plotinus, Augustine, and Aquinas. From our own human perspective, a present tense without past or future connections might be considered ‘a kind of logical torso’, a defective remnant of ordinary time. For Plato that human conception of present time is itself a mere image of eternity.
This study examines differences in gesture production in narrative contexts between American and Chol Mayan speakers at the narrative, metanarrative, and paranarrative levels of discourse, as well as differences in the production of linear temporal gestures. First, a comparison is made between the gestures produced by speakers of American English and Chol, a Western Maya language, as they tell the story of A Christmas Carol to an interviewer. The study shows a dire contrast between the American and Chol interpretation of this classic novel, and notable differences in the speech-accompanying gestures used by Americans and Chol Mayans respectively. American speakers’ temporal utterances are often accompanied by the well-documented lateral timeline gestures, where earlier events are located to the left of the gestural space, and later events are located to the right of the gestural space. By contrast, in Chol utterances no lateral, sagittal, or vertical timeline gestures accompany any form of temporal reference; the vast majority of gestures co-occur with metanarrative and paranarrative statements and have no explicit temporal content. The second part of the study analyzes the gestures made by a Chol speaker while telling a traditional story. A qualitative analysis of this traditional narrative shows that, when telling a story of the Chol tradition that is well known to the speaker, pragmatically-motivated gestures that occur at the metanarrative and paranarrative levels are much fewer than gestures occurring at the narrative level. In this traditional narrative, the gestures co-occurring with sequential, deictic temporal expressions and temporal metaphors did not reflect any kind of timeline that resembled those made by the American speakers in the Dickens in Chol task.
Chapter 7 explores voices at the margin of society in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. To the extent this novel on seafaring is autobiographical, it also explores Conrad himself as a marginal subject. The novel is one of the most sympathetic portrayals of a class of people frequently considered to be marginal: a multinational group of physical laborers paid a meager wage, living in harsh and deadly conditions, executing their menial jobs heroically (with notable exceptions). To move from the margin to the center, take up the pen and write a compelling story about this life for the middle-class literary establishment – first published in the conservative W. E. Henley’s The New Review in 1897 – is the part of Conrad’s achievement I focus on in this chapter. The chapter explores how Conrad makes his readers listen to the voice of the sailors, reflect on the value of their work, and appreciate the importance of seemingly menial, physical labor – like the heroism of serving coffee, which the novel discusses.
In 2019, the Museum of Black Civilizations was inaugurated by President Macky Sall. The concept for this museum had been launched by President Senghor during the First World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966. More than 50 years later, the museum finally opened its doors. Its timely opening made headlines across the world as it coincided with a global debate on the restitution to the countries of origin of objects illicitly acquired under colonial rule. Funded by the Republic of China, the Museum of Black Civilizations offered itself as a recipient for the restitution of 100 objects collected on Senegal’s territory. This chapter discusses the realization both of Senghor’s concept for a museum of Black Civilizations in the twenty-first century and of a project for the recuperation of African civilization. Through an analysis of its programme and exhibitions, the chapter examines how the museum decolonizes the concept of the museum by focusing on its exhibition of Abrahamic religions, as well as on the sabre of El Hadj Oumar Tall, an object that the Restitution Report advised should be a priority for return. Analysing the museum’s politics of restitution and repair, it frames the museum’s concept of Blackness as a technique to repair the legacies of race science.
The Introduction situates the book’s themes in three different debates. First, it situates the question of Senegal’s decolonization in a debate about non-national futures as they were imagined by Negritude and Pan-African thinkers at the time of decolonization. Although these non-national futures have now become unthinkable, this book demonstrates that they are remembered as futures past in Senegal’s colonial heritage sites. Second, it situates the interpretation of Senegal’s cultural heritage in a debate about the legacy of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude. Senegal’s politics of heritagization are indebted to the Negritude philosophy of Senegal’s first president, whose politics of heritage were aimed at the reclamation of African dignity and respect, promising liberation through recuperation. Hence, this book situates the reclamation of African heritage in a temporality of return and frames cultural heritage as a technique of repair. Third, it situates the reclamation of African heritage in debates about world heritage, arguing that Senghor’s archiving project and support for UNESCO’s World Heritage List constituted parallel heritage projects pointing towards the decolonization of world heritage. The book posits that decolonization as envisioned by UNESCO and Senghor is a project to repair the traumas of modernity.
Since the rise of the ruling Justice and Development Party in the early 2000s, Turkey has invested in several mega transport and infrastructure projects for the purposes of economic transformation, growth, and development. This article explores the impact of a recently completed mega-project—the Osman Gazi Bridge—on material change and popular imagination about the future. It claims that, while the Bridge created a colossal material change that can be observed by everyone, it also animated an imagined post-industrial transition and inclusive development in the industrial town of Dilovası. Although the dream of a better future serves as a medium for the industrial town’s underprivileged inhabitants to connect and socialize, along with the current marginalizing conditions, it also has the potential to fuel future resistance, if imagination is unable to be transformed into reality.