Difference with a Difference: Wild Men, Gods and Other Protagonists

Seth, Vanita

doi:10.1080/1353464032000142381

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Fleming 1997;Smiles 2009, 106-12. On racial difference and animality cf. Seth 2003;Davis 2016. 39 Cited in Fleming 1997 savage warrior from travel narratives all illustrate the same preoccupation with the coupling of diverse forms of life and their implications in terms of creative ingenuity -be it artistic, natural, or, in the case of monsters, demonic.…”

Section: Francesca Borgomentioning

confidence: 99%

32 | 2023

2023

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I testi degli articoli qui raccolti sono distribuiti con Licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione 4.0 Internazionale. The texts of the articles here collected are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. cbk nd Le immagini sono distribuite con Licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale-Non opere derivate 4.0 Internazionale. Si rinvia alle didascalie per i crediti specifici. The images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Please refer to the captions for the credits of each image.Certificazione scientifica delle Opere pubblicate da Edizioni Ca' Foscari: tutti gli articoli pubblicati hanno ottenuto il parere favorevole da parte di valutatori esperti della materia, attraverso un processo di revisione doppia anonima, sotto la responsabilità del Comitato scientifico della rivista. La valutazione è stata condotta in aderenza ai criteri scientifici ed editoriali di Edizioni Ca' Foscari. Scientific certification of the works published by Edizioni Ca' Foscari: all the articles published in this issue have received a favourable opinion by subject-matter experts, through an anonymous double-blind peer review process under the responsibility of the Scientific Committee of the journal. The evaluations were conducted in adherence to the scientific and editorial criteria established by Edizioni Ca' Foscari.

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Section: Francesca Borgomentioning

confidence: 99%

32 | 2023

2023

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“…Unlike what we saw in the previous appeals to the Chinese bound foot, here it is situated at the center of Europe, symbolizing its very essence. This troubles the model of racial alterity that emerged in the late eighteenth century and was stabilized by the nineteenth, 54 positing instead a continuum or commensurability. But only momentarily; for the entire justificatory edifice of the empire relied upon asserting a radical difference between East and West.…”

Section: Imperial Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes

Kotef

2015

Political Theory

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This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global (imperial) and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we see that European freedom-as-movement emerged on the backdrop of two imperial contrasts: (1) images of nomadism (in the contexts of America, and later Africa and the Middle East), which are only marginally considered in this paper, and (2) an assumed stagnation, that presumably prevailed in the East. Yet surprisingly, the image was often evoked to say something about Europe itself, rather than about its "others." Therefore, it also reveals the corporeal dimensions of a concept of freedom that has underlaid a long liberal tradition. The crushed and squeezed feet of girls in China thus marked both a gendered and an imperial divide between those who can move freely, and therefore rule, and those who cannot rule because of their Kotef 335 lack of mobility; yet at the same time, it undid this division by allowing the East and its stationariness to permeate Europe through a multiply foreign body: feminized, racially alien, and geographically distanced.It is quite perplexing, Dorothy Ko once observed, that foot-binding, "a practice in a land five thousand miles away and that ended over half a century ago, still exercises such a grip on our imagination." The practice, whose origin is unclear and whose particularities are so diverse that Ko warns us against seeing it as a single practice, 1 can generate-indeed has generatedmany stories and inquiries. It evokes questions of sexuality (questions of beauty, desirability, or kinship); of sexuality as oppression (but, Ko proposes, also as a mode of finding one's power within an oppressive framework: a secret language of women, cultivating female networks in a man's words); of orientalism (the image of the East and its eroticization in the justification of imperial formations); of disability (questions concerning health, physical (im)mobility, and willful maiming); and of global distribution of both national and gender-based modes of domination. In this brief essay, I mark one narrow path, traversing some of these questions. Within this path, I refer not to the practice itself, but its circulation in the West, and in particular the deployment of the image in a specific lineage within Western political thought.Following a brief framing, the three main sections of this essay are largely organized alongside five main layers. First, via this image, I show the corporeal dimensions of the liberal concept(s) of freedom. 2 "Compressed and hindered from its due expansion," as Locke would put it, 3 the bound foot is often an index for the lack of freedom. It is this tie between freedom and able, unimpeded movement that I want to examine here. Bo...

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“…• Secondly, in terms of moral ambiguity ('the wild man, like beasts, was often represented as oblivious to social norms and ethics'); • Thirdly, in terms of geographical displacement (the wild men and monsters were commonly situated beyond the boundaries of one's own community). 59 In Julia Kristeva's terms, monsters are abject. Like the object, the abject is opposed to the subject.…”

Section: Monsters and Otherness In Social And Political Thoughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

the gothic scene of international relations: ghosts, monsters, terror and the sublime after september 11

Devetak

2005

Rev. Int. Stud.

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accepting furet’s claim that events acquire meaning and significance only in the context of narratives, this article argues that a particular type of international relations narrative has emerged with greater distinction after the traumatic experience of september 11: the gothic narrative. in a sense the political rhetoric of president bush marks the latest example of america’s fine tradition in the gothic genre that began with edgar allan poe and nathaniel hawthorne and extends through henry james to stephen king. his discourse of national security, it will be shown, assumes many of the predicates of gothic narratives. the gothic scenes evoked by bush as much as poe involve monsters and ghosts in tenebrous atmospheres that generate fear and anxiety, where terror is a pervasive tormentor of the senses. poe’s narratives, for example, turn on encounters with dark, perverse, seemingly indomitable, forces often entombed in haunted houses. similarly, bush’s post-september 11 narratives play upon fears of terrorists and rogue states who are equally dark, perverse and indomitable forces. in both cases, ineffable and potently violent and cruel forces haunt and terrorise the civilised, human world.

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Difference with a Difference: Wild Men, Gods and Other Protagonists

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

32 | 2023

32 | 2023

Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes

the gothic scene of international relations: ghosts, monsters, terror and the sublime after september 11

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