Pathways
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!
In the London Review of Books, David Trotter reviews Corridors: Passages of Modernity. While social histories of various objects are sometimes more curious than enlightening, the choice of the corridor as an emblem of modernity is perhaps less arbitrary than it seems. Walter Benjamin undertook such a project in his sprawling (and unfinished) Arcades Project. This work focuses on how corridors are essential to the utopian—and dystopian—imagination of a redistribution of public and private space.
One of the hand-drawn maps of the Carribean from Kleiser’s class
Vast Early America. This is the banner of a push for new genealogies of the Americas that asks us to think beyond the narrow confines of the national history of the United States and its emergence from colonial states. As the Humanities article reminds us, though “nations need histories,” national histories “reflect artificial and retroactive borders of all kinds.” Yet incorporating this into inquiry can sometimes lead to potential areas of conflict. Grant Kleiser reflects on what happens in his classroom when he asks students to “draw the Carribean.”
Two other new works offer new genealogies that unsettle the received accounts of the American War of Independence. In Gerald Horne’s work, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, “modernity arrived in the seventeenth century on the three horsemen of the apocalypse: slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism.” The American Revolution was an engine of this, for instance, in the American revolutionaries’ refusal to enlist black and native soldiers leading to the Dunmore Proclamation. Even more closely focused on the war is Matthew Lockwood’s To Begin the World Over Again, a radical reassessment of the War and its impact on the rest of the world. Check out the full author interview over at the New Books Network.
Longreads continues their series on “Queens of Infamy” with Mariamne I, known to us as the wife of King Herod: “On top of the ick factor of being a 12-year-old engaged to a married, 33-year-old man, she also couldn’t believe that she was going to marry a non-royal. And not just any non-royal — the deeply unpopular governor of Galilee who was known for being a tyrant.” Just in time for the holidays!
What does a voice look like? Because narratives of modernity so often are pegged to the gradual development of technology into what is recognizably ours, those forms of technical wonder that were not commercially viable or were not successful for some other reason are often left out. The Voice Figures of Welsh singer Margaret (Megan) Watts-Hughes have recently been recovered and are incredibly beautiful. She created them with her “‘Eidophone’ which she had conceived of and produced in order to measure the power of her voice.”
A single pitch impression of Margaret Watts-Hughes’ voice.
