Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

WOMEN Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, by Saba Mahmood Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2004 xvi + 199 pages Gloss, to p 203 Refs to p 223 Index to p 233 $55 cloth; $1795 paper This book explores "the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt" (p 2) However, Saba Mahmood promises more than an ethnography based on two years of fieldwork (1995-1997) She embarks on an intellectual journey of selfreflection in which she has come "to believe that a certain amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism is essential regarding the certainty of my own political commitments, when trying to understand the lives of others who do not necessarily share these commitments" (p xi) By refusing to take her own political stance as the necessary lens through which the analysis proceeds, the author opens up the possibility that "my analysis may come to complicate the vision of human flourishing that I hold most dear and which has provided the bedrock of my personal existence" (p xii) It is necessary, the author cautions as she embarks upon her inquiry, not to assume that the political position we uphold will necessarily be vindicated or provide the ground for our theoretical analysis As readers, we are invited to join her in "parochializing our assumptions, about the constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority - that inform most feminist judgments from across a broad range of the political spectrum about non-liberal movements such as the women's mosque movement" (p 38) It is within that spirit that I have critiqued this book The five chapters are a running argument with and against key analytic concepts in liberal thought as these concepts have come to inform various strands of feminist theory through which non-liberal movements, such as the women's mosque movement, are analyzed Through each chapter Mahmood makes her ethnographic talk back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable "The Subject of Freedom" illustrates the different ways in which the activism of the mosque movement challenges the liberal conception of politics Mahmood analyzes the conception of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this non-liberal movement in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded in a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status "Topography of the Piety Movement" provides a brief sketch of the historical development against which the contemporary mosque movement has emerged and critically engages with themes within scholarship of Islamic modernism regarding such movements We sense the broad-based character of the women's mosque movement through the author's description and analysis of three of six mosques where she concentrated her fieldwork Despite the differences among the mosque groups - ranging from the poorest to the upper-middle income neighborhoods of Cairo - they all shared a concern for the increased secularization of Egyptian society and illustrate the increasing respect accorded to the da 'iya preacher/religious teacher (who undertakes da'waliterally call, summons or appeal that in the 20th century came to be associated with proselytization activity) "Women and the Da'wa" (pp 64-72) is particularly insightful, as the author juxtaposes the emergence of secular liberalism with the da'wa movement and concludes that "the modernist project of the regulation of religious sensibilities, undertaken by a range of postcolonial states (and not simply Muslim states), has elicited in its wake a variety of resistances, responses and challenges …

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

ion, Metaphor and Mimesis Southwest is very conscious of its own corporate ‘way of life’. A list is given on its website under the heading ‘culture’ of the desired characteristics of a Southwest person (perseverant, egalitarian, passionate), and these qualities are abstracted into the more general injunctions to be low cost and have high customer service delivery, and the mission statement talks of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit. So there are clear abstractions here that create a unity and coherence to activities across domains. Throughout this book I have shown how entanglements involve material and conceptual components. In Chapter 2 I described a pebble on a beach that was brought into different assemblies with other things depending on how it was recognized, remembered and owned. In that chapter too I described how the equipmental totality of a thing depended on the different theories about and perspectives towards it. In Chapter 3 I used the quote from Gibson that ‘an affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer’ (1986: 129). In Chapter 4 I noted that the maintenance of walls in the Yorkshire Dales depended on expert ideas about organic foods and recent collective nostalgia for a rural way of life. In Chapter 5 I showed how a sail boat had different entanglements, and different affordances depending on the perspectives of sailing, entertaining and protecting the ecosystem of the bay. These ideas about the boat are themselves tied to wider ideas about what is leisure and how the environment should be protected. So entanglements and affordances and functions are always tied to abstractions (ideas, thoughts, words, feelings and senses). These abstractions are hierarchical and nested as noted above, and they often cross domains so that humans seek unities, coherence, metaphor within different realms of experience. Abstractions are general and can often be applied to more than one domain of activity. Their transferability Hodder_c06.indd 120 2/3/2012 12:14:59 PM

Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things

(1974). History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 167-170.

History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics

Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols

In May 1906, the "Atlantic Monthly" commented that Americans live not merely in an age of things, but under the tyranny of them, and that in our relentless effort to sell, purchase, and accumulate things, we do not possess them as much as they possess us. For Bill Brown, the tale of that possession is something stranger than the history of a culture of consumption. It is the story of Americans using things to think about themselves. Brown's captivating new study explores the roots of modern America's fascination with things and the problem that objects posed for American literature at the turn of the century. This was an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of things suddenly came to define a national culture. Brown shows how crucial novels of the time made things not a solution to problems, but problems in their own right. Writers such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James ask why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears, and to shape our wildest dreams. Offering a remarkably new way to think about materialism, "A Sense of Things" will be essential reading for anyone interested in American literature and culture.

A sense of things : the object matter of American literature

The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism)

What fallacy do we risk when we pause to grant a text some extratextual dimension? What hazards do we chance (naivet6, banality, empiricism, humanism?) when we read a literary text to write a history of the referent? What fetishism do I commit? Or, more important, what fetishism am I trying to overcome? For only an unseemly investment in the object of reference, perhaps, can explain that object as the precipitate of other investments. Perhaps only an analytic overvaluation of the object allows literature to teach not just a history of things but also the history in them. If the history of things can be understood as their circulation, the commodity's "social life" through diverse cultural fields, then the history in things might be understood as the crystallization of the anxieties and aspirations that linger there in the material object.' And such a history might yet be explored, however provisionally and problematically, be-

How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story)

175 This essay is a belated response to a question posed by Jay Fliegelman about object culture and thinghood in the U.S. For their responses to previous versions of the argument, there are audiences I should thank, and individuals I’ll thank here: Sara Blair, Eduardo Cadava, Edgar Dryden, Frances Ferguson, Jacqueline Goldsby, Scottie Parrish, Eric Slauter, Bärbel Tischleder, and Christina Zwang. 1. See Peter Schwenger, The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minneapolis, forthcoming); Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York, 2004); Elaine Freedgood, Ideas in Things: Realism, Fetishism, Fugitive Meaning (Chicago, forthcoming); and “The Secret Life of Things,” touring exhibition sponsored by the Australia Council for the Arts (2003), including work by Clare Baldwin, Elouise Brear, Jonathan Carson, and Rosie Miller. Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/500700

Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny

George Stocking, the historian of anthropology, edited and published Objects and Others in 1985. That was the year after New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged its blockbuster show “‘Primitivism’ in TwentiethCentury Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” which provoked a steady, indeed roaring, stream of commentary. The essays Stocking collected on “museums and material culture” were historical, “institutionally oriented studies, focusing on what has been called the ‘Museum Period’ in the history of anthropology” (1880–1920) while raising decidedly broader issues—about the “relationship of humanist culture and anthropological culture, and of ethnic artifact and fine art; and most generally the representation of culture in material objects.”2 The Stocking collection was ask-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/648523

Bill Brown

Papers

A sense of things : the object matter of American literature

The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism)

How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story)

Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny

Objects, Others, and Us (The Refabrication of Things)