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Updating Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetic Function’ with Vector Semantics
Read more: Updating Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetic Function’ with Vector SemanticsKurzynski discusses how poetry extends beyond sound and rhythm and taps into a deeper network of meanings.
How to Get Banned from Teaching the Quran: Medieval Cairo Edition
by Shuaib Ally, McGill University Around the turn of the 15th century in Cairo, a hadith scholar named Salah al-Din al-Aqfahsi heard Salah al-Din al-Kalai, a scholar associated with the Sufi Shadhili order, teaching the Quran. Part of his teaching…
Roland Barthes’ Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse: Translating Again, Writing Again
Patrick ffrench and Timothy Mathews discuss the special issue of CounterText they've recently edited.
Journalism under hybrid politics
by Kjetil Selvik, Jacob Høigilt Only a few years ago, Tunisia was the freest country in the Arab world, with a flourishing media scene. Journalists were scrambling to reinvent their role in the public sphere that emerged after the Jasmine…
Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865-1914
by Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi How did patients feel when visiting mission hospitals built by British missionaries in Asia and Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? I am preoccupied with this question in my book, Emotion, Mission, Architecture:…
Phenomenology of regular spirit
The phrase "phenomenology of regular spirit” rolled off the tongue easily, quickly, and thoughtlessly. How else would one distinguish between two books with such similar titles? Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, that text that needs no introduction and our text, Phenomenology of Black Spirit. But in the invisible regularity of calling Hegel’s text “regular,” we were reminded of how irregular Blackness and Black people are and have been.
‘Believers in Biology’: a coordinated effort to disrupt the 2022 census
by Sarah Pederson On the night of 2 April 1911, around 100 suffragettes spent the night sheltering in the Café Vegetaria in Nicholson Street, Edinburgh. Completion of the national census returns for 1911 had been politicised by leaders of the…
Writing from the margins: Bosnian Hajjis’ understanding of the world
by Dženita Karić As I was doing research on the Hajj discourses in Bosnia from the 16th to the 21st century, I encountered a range of texts, published and unpublished, in Bosnian, Arabic and Ottoman Turkish languages. Some of the…
A conversation with Demet Çaltekin on ‘Conscientious Objection in Turkey’
by Demet Aslı Çaltekin Can you tell us a bit about Conscientious Objection in Turkey: A Socio-legal Analysis of the Right to Refuse Military Service? My book is about the interplay between the socio-cultural norms and non-recognition of the right…
Kelsenians, war and peace are calling (yet again)
by Robert Schuett I often get asked: ‘What would Hans Kelsen say about the state of democracy and world politics today?’ ‘How do we make sense of Carl Schmitt’s comeback in the twenty-first century?’ And ‘considering President Vladimir Putin’s war…