Vedanta and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Indian Poetry

Bashabi Fraser is known the world over as a Scottish-Bengali aka diasporic writer. Further she has also been slotted as a feminist scholar with a huge corpus on Tagore. This essay proves the fallacy of such pigeon-holeing of Fraser and shows that she is as mainstream as Yeats and even before that, like unto Blake. The essay also makes a point for rejecting every other mode of poetry except the Romantic mode. It established the Vedantic nature of the poetic genius. The endnotes are copious and comment on how/why/(what of) Fraser should compulsory reading at which age. The essay speaks at length on the nature of poetry. It stresses the value of Vedanta in assessing true poetry written even in English. This essay is also valuable since it has within it acute observations on Fraser as a Tagore scholar

All in the same boat? East Anglia, the North Sea World and the 1147 expedition to Lisbon

Unpaginated submission version of chapter published in East Anglia and the North Sea World

Writing space, living space: time, agency and place relations in Herodotus’s Histories

This chapter examines lived space in Herodotus’s Histories’ and explores how the picture that emerges differs from abstract depictions of space. Such overly schematic representations we see articulated by the Persians at the very beginning of the Histories, or explicitly challenged by Herodotus when he ‘laughs at’ the maps produced by his Ionian contemporaries that similarly divide the world into two regions of equal size (4.36.2), or more subtly undercut when Aristagoras turns up with just such a map and puts it to service an argument in favour of conquest. In particular, we want to challenge conventional readings of a polarised world of East versus West, which, while grounded in Herodotus’s concern to show how ‘Greeks and barbarians came into conflict with each other’ (1.1), fail to take into account either Herodotus’s implicit rejection of the Persian model of an Asia-Europe divide in favour of an inquiry that recognises that places change over time, or the extent to which Herodotus or his historical agents relate those places to each other. Using key features of lived space—time, agency and relation—, we sketch out the beginnings of a network analysis of book 5, backed up by a close textual study of the book’s opening episode. Both methods help to unpack the idea of the Histories’ lived space that underpins and greatly complicates the historical agents’ own understanding of the world around them

"The Land of Liberty": Henry Bibb's Free Soil Geographies

This essay situates "The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave" within the political context of the antislavery Free Soil movement, arguing that Bibb's representations of land and labor reflect the concerns of Free Soil. In particular, it argues that Bibb's narrative simultaneously critiques Free Soil ideology for its lack of a full-throated call for immediate abolition and its privileging of the white working class over both free and enslaved Black people. In addition, these aspects of Bibb’s Free Soil critique— both in condemning slavery and in reflexively challenging elements of Free Soil ideology—are more ecological than established Free Soil discourse, reflecting a deeper, more sensitive, and more radical understanding of material interconnection in regards to bodies, means of production, and topographies

The Production of Hrönir: Albanian Socialist Realism and After

Discussion of the work of Albanian artist Armando Lulaj in relation to the heritage of Albanian socialist realist art

Götter, Tempel und Kult der Judäo–Aramäer von Elephantine: archäologische und schriftliche Zeugnisse aus dem perserzeit-lichen Ägypten

A review of Angela Rohrmoser's book, Götter, Tempel und Kult der Judäo–Aramäer

Toward a Multicultural Mid-Tudor England

Through close-readings of Mary Tudor's royal entry, the anonymous interlude Wealth and Health, and John Christopherson's Exhortation alongside anecdotes of popular resistance to Mary Tudor's antiimmigrant proclamations, this article shows that rather than a strong identification with the monarch or some sense of Englishness, Londoners more closely identified with their multicultural metropolitan community for religious and economic reasons

Equitable Self-Ownership for Animals

This Article proposes a new use of existing property law concepts to change the juristic personhood status of animals. Presently, animals are classified as personal property, which gives them no status or standing in the legal system for the protection or promotion of their interests. Professor Favre suggest that it is possible and appropriate to divide living property into its legal and equitable components, and then to transfer the equitable title of an animal from the legal title holder to the animal herself. This would create a new, limited form of self-ownership in an animal, an equitably self-owned animal. Such a new status would have two primary impacts. First, the animal would have access to the legal system, at least in what has historically been the realm of equity, for the protection and assertion of his or her interests. Secondly, the human holder of legal title will, like a traditional trustee, have obligations to the equitable owner of the animal, that is the animal himself. As the subject matter of this trust-like relationship would be a living being, not money or wealth, the legal owner would best be characterized as a guardian, rather than by the traditional category of trustee. The Article concludes with a short discussion of the use of anti-cruelty law and human guardianship concepts as providing a context for the further development of this new concept of equitable self-ownership

A New Strategy for Pursuing Racial and Ethnic Equality in Public Schools

Article published in the Duke Forum for Law & Social Change

Oedipus of many pains: Strategies of contest in Homeric poetry

In this paper we analyse Oedipus’ appearance during Odysseus’ tale in book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey in order to outline and test a methodology for appreciating the poetic and thematic implications of moments when ‘extraneous’ narratives or traditions appear in the Homeric poems. Our analysis, which draws on oral-formulaic theory, is offered partly as a re-evaluation of standard scholarly approaches that tend to over-rely on the assumed pre-eminence of Homeric narratives over other traditions in their original contexts or approaches that reduce such moments to instances of allusions to or parallels with fixed texts. In conjunction with perspectives grounded in orality, we emphasise the agonistic character of Greek poetry to explore the ways in which Odysseus’ articulation of his Oedipus narrative exemplifies an attempt to appropriate and manipulate a rival tradition in the service of a particular narrative’s ends. We focus specifically on the resonance of the phrases algea polla and mega ergon used by Odysseus as a narrator to draw a web of interconnections throughout Homeric and Archaic Greek poetry. Such an approach, in turn, suggests to what extent the Homeric Oedipus passage speaks to the themes and concerns of Homeric poetry rather than some lost Oedipal epic tradition and illustrates the importance of recognizing the deeply competitive nature of Homeric narratives vis-à-vis other narrative traditions