Billy Higgins in the Zone: Brushwork, Breath, and Imagination

This Chapter presents an analysis of the late drummer and community leader Billy Higgins’s improvised brushwork and breathing strategies in his performance on Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” on his frequent collaborator’s Charles Lloyd’s recording The Water Is Wide (2000). Connecting with the book’s theme of political and cultural considerations of what it means to create Black musical space, Ashon Crawley’s “black pneuma” interpretive frame is used to help understand Higgins’s breathing strategies relative to his drumming as an orchestration of individual and community sound. Higgins’s breathing strategies during improvisation are theorized as a way to cross bar lines, accessing all colors of the human condition while creating a Black sense of musical place. Higgins’s values of musical place-making thrive through his ego-denying philosophy for the benefit of group sound throughout his career and within the social movement of Leimert Park.

Patrilocality in the Harivamsa’s Visnuparvan

This article suggests that the principle of patrilocality, as espoused by Krsna and Baladeva, can be applied as an interpretive frame to almost all of the narrative material that Vaisampayana presents to Janamejaya in the Harivamsa’s Visnuparvan (Hv 46–113), and that the principle of patrilocality is thus a key theme of the Visnuparvan, with Krsna and Baladeva as its heroes. This suggestion is supported by an overview of the Visnuparvan’s narrative from beginning to end, in eleven sections which repeatedly feature—or can be interpreted to feature—conflict with in-law families about where a couple will have children, and which of the two families the children will be raised for.

What Is Natural Is Best: A Qualitative Exploration of Women’s Engagement in Attachment Parenting

Attachment Parenting is a form of “intensive parenting” and involves a set of caretaking practices that are perceived by proponents of Attachment Parenting to nurture a strong maternal–child bond. Based on semi-structured interviews with 15 women who self-identified as Attachment Parents and observations of La Leche League meetings, this study investigates the ways in which parenting behaviors are understood and rationalized in relation to the philosophies of Attachment Parenting and the wider parenting culture. Study findings illustrate how the women in this study account for their parenting practices through both an appropriation and rejection of Attachment Parenting expertise and engagement in a discursive appeal to “what is natural is best.” Given a wider sociocultural environment characterized by multiple forms of expertise and risk, the ways in which Attachment Parenting serves as an interpretive frame and moral road map for the women in this study are discussed.

Childhood drawing: The making of a deficit aesthetic

This article introduces and explores the concept of the deficit aesthetic. Particular attention is given to how the deficit aesthetic was made and the extent to which it continues to be sustained in early art education, especially in the United States. For many children, particularly at this time, the deficit aesthetic factors as yet another lingering obstacle to negotiate, one that re-centers the assumption of childhood drawing as a neutral practice for a natural child. As an interpretive frame, the deficit aesthetic distorts the experience of drawing by disempowering the child, decontextualizing their drawing, and re-prioritizing white Western and middle-class subjectivities.

Race, SIGNS, and the Body

This chapter considers the utility of a racial semiotics, or raciosemiotics, to further explore the ways race, language, and the body co-construct one another via multiscalar signification. It begins with a brief overview of semiotic theory, underscoring contemporary scholars’ focus on context and materiality. Drawing from Fanonian phenomenology and from ethnographic research with Black-identified young people in the United States and Liberia, the chapter discusses how antiblackness, as a transhistorical interpretive frame, compounds the semiotic weight of Black bodies and shapes how individuals in such bodies make meaning with others. Finally, by focusing on the racialized body in the construction of meaning, I suggest that attending closely to young people’s raciosemiotic labor—meaning-making about and through race—can move us closer towards developing a theory of racial semiotics.

Hungarian, Jew or Hungarian-Jewish? Parallels and Differences of Two Historians’ Careers

This article looks at the careers of two school-founding Hungarian historians and university professors, the reconstruction, interpretation and comparison of their perceptions of history, their views on the role of the historiographer, and their opinions on the history of Jews in Hungary. Since both openly professed to be Hungarian Jews, I also try to find out what that meant for them. My interpretive frame follows the ‘speech-act’ approach of the Cambridge contextual school of the history of ideas, the description of notions of meaning/attribution of meaning, and the ‘drama triangle’ (the identification of the traumatized roles of the victim, persecutor and rescuer) in the literature of trauma elaboration.

Contemporary Israeli Fiction

Central to the transformation of Israeli literature in the early 21st century is the emergence of new genres and forms of writing. In this essay, I try to relate these new literary developments to socio-econoic transformations.. I address the emergence of three genres: Israeli speculative fiction (in works by Ofir Touché-Gafla, Vered Tochterman, Gail Hareven, and others), detective fiction (in novels by Dror Mishani and Noa Yedlin), and diasporic novels—novels whose interpretive frame of reference tries to bypass the Zionist-Israeli world of meaning (in novels by Maya Arad and Ruby Namdar). I suggest that these genres emerge as a response to the crisis of older forms of literary representation, registered in Israeli postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that these older forms become unable to provide concrete figures for the social and a sense of historicity, the emerging genres begin fulfilling precisely these functions, taking the place of the older genres. In particular, I demonstrate how the three new genres unconsciously map the unevenly developed socioeconomic structure of Israel, developing spatial allegorical languages through which to consider the antagonism between older welfare-state social form and the newer neoliberal structures in Israel (contrasting both to utopian states of existence). I suggest that Israeli detective fiction is useful in capturing the commodification of older national political projects and the rise of new neoliberal social forms; that diasporic novels help develop new allegorical understanding of individual existence that bypass national allegories; and that Israeli SF both captures the antagonism between welfare state and neoliberalism, as well as unconsciously imagine non-capitalist futurity.

Renaissance, Reformation, and the Road to Westphalia

The purpose of this chapter is to challenge the ubiquitous narrative that portrays the transition from medieval to modern as the start of the progressive secularization of international relations. Setting the emergence of the modern states system against the backdrop of medieval institutions and practices privileges evidence of change, while concealing evidence of continuity. The discourse of Westphalia provides the dominant interpretive frame of this narrative. This chapter recovers threads of continuity, without denying the significance of change, by explaining the transition from medieval to modern in the context of change within inherited continuity. It examines the role of the Renaissance and Reformation, events regularly portrayed as harbingers of revolutionary change, in carrying ideas associated with the theory of imposed order into the modern world. The main contention is that the boundary that separates medieval and modern is less fixed and more porous than most theorists of international relations seem to realize. Neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation inaugurate a turn away from religion. Both emphasize the primacy of the will, consistent with the theory of imposed order, which is given to imagining political order as a construction born of word and deed. Recovering the threads of continuity that connect medieval and modern is a crucial step in advancing the larger argument of this book, namely that modern theories of international order reflect a medieval inheritance that can be traced to nominalist theology.

Inclusivity through Asynchronous Interactions that Extend Past Barriers to Education

This paper explores a case study of how educators reach out to and edify individuals behind barriers to educational opportunities. The scope of this paper does not address all barriers to education, but researches three: distance as a barrier that keeps a student physically distanced from the classroom, time as a barrier that forces communication to be asynchronous, and extendibility as a barrier that begs the question, “Can a teacher’s influence be satisfactorily extended through the barriers of distance and time?” Edifying, within this interpretive frame, is defined as inviting the alma mater presence, guiding the learning experience, and revealing the previously out of reach or concealed context to the learner. Through an examination of artifacts and conducting of interviews, five themes describe how one organization successfully reaches out to and edifies learners behind the barriers of distance, time, and extendibility. These themes are the significance of feedback, overcoming the burden of asynchronicity, genuine concern for the student, true to brand, and cost consciousness.

Stiegler, Foucault, and Epictetus

Why does Bernard Stiegler speak of “this culture, which I have named, after Epictetus, my melete?” In the first part of this article, I elucidate Stiegler’s claims about both Stoic exercises of reading and writing and their significance for the interpretive questions he has adapted from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In particular, I address the relations among care for oneself and others, the use of material technologies, and resistance to subjection or “freedom.” In the second part, I consider the merits and limitations of Stiegler’s comments about reading and writing in Stoicism, with particular attention to Epictetus. We will see that Stiegler’s interpretive frame-work casts considerable light on ancient texts and contexts, on the condition that it be combined with close reading of ancient texts and engagement with specialist scholarship. Finally, in the conclusion, I will suggest that the history of technology in Epictetus’s time contributes to a debate about Stiegler’s theories.Bernard Stiegler signale à plusieurs reprises l’importance des exercices stoïciens de lecture et d’écriture. Dans la première partie de cet article, j’essaye de clarifier ces assertions et d’expliquer leur lien aux oeuvres de Michel Foucault et de Jacques Derrida. Il s’agit en particulier des rapports entre le souci de soi et d’autrui, l’usage des techniques et des matériaux et la résistante à la soumission ou à la « liberté ». Dans la deuxième partie, je considère les mérites ainsi que les limites des remarques de Stiegler sur la lecture et l’écriture au sein du stoïcisme, en portant une attention particulière à Épictète. Le point du vue stieglerien donnera de nouvelles significations à quelques passages des oeuvres d’Épictète, à condition qu’il soit conjugué à une lecture attentive d’études spécialisées et de textes anciens. Je conclurai, dans la troisième partie, en proposant que l’histoire des techniques à l’époque d’Épictète pourrait alimenter un débat à l’égard des théories de Stiegler.