text: Humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities Latest open access articles published in Humanities at http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/1/4 My introductory essay discusses some of transculturalism's enduring conceptual challenges from the perspective of the history of German cultural and political theory. I am particularly interested in the discursive space between Immanuel Kant's individualism and Johann Gottfried Herder's and Moses Mendelssohn's concepts of cultural identity. My hope is that such a discussion can enrich some of our current questions, such as: Have culture studies placed too much emphasis on difference, rather than on commonality? Can a renewed interest in the cosmopolitan individual surpass the privileged position of academic or upper-class internationalism? Can concepts of transculturality avoid the pitfalls of homogenizing politics or overstretched individualism? After mentioning a few challenges to current conceptions of transculturalism that may arise in the wake of recent developments in the natural sciences, I end my remarks with a brief example of a possible intersection of literary studies and science. The essay engages three topics: (a) the question of culture; (b) transcultural participation; and (c) transcultural empathy and the sciences. Humanities 2017-02-24 6 1 Article 10.3390/h6010004 4 2076-0787 2017-02-24 doi: 10.3390/h6010004 Bernd Fischer http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/1/3 As a result of its topic and its narrative style, Uwe Timm's novel 'Morenga' (1978) marks an important step in the development of postcolonial German literature. The main theme of the book is the bloody suppression of the Herero and the Nama uprisings through the German army in South-West Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. With recourse to historical and fictional documents and by using different narrative perspectives, the text achieves a plurality of voices and thereby destabilizes a one-dimensional view on colonialism. The present article discusses the functions of the nonhuman animals appearing in 'Morenga'. It is assumed that the animal representations are an essential part of the plot and underscore the criticism of colonial rule in a narrative manner too. The novel contains several descriptions of suffering animals and links them to the harm of the Herero and the Nama in order to point out the ruthlessness of the colonists. Moreover, the book features a story-telling ox, which initiates a reflection process about possible ways of narrating colonial history. The talking ox adds a specific animal-centered perspective on colonial oppression and raises questions about emancipation, self-determination, and the agency of the nonhuman 'other' Humanities 2017-02-10 6 1 Article 10.3390/h6010003 3 2076-0787 2017-02-10 doi: 10.3390/h6010003 Steffen Röhrs http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/1/2 This article presents a critical reading of the function of the animal-human allegory or the "humanimallegory" in both the animated films Animal Farm and Chicken Run. Based on George Orwell's novel of the same name, Animal Farm provides an allegorical representation of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union by relaying Orwell's story of a revolution led by a group of farm animals and its aftermath. Animal Farm ultimately reduces its fictional animal characters to simple metaphors for real human subjects, thus serving the most common function of the animal-human allegory in literature as well as film. In contrast, improvising on the many prisoner-of-war films that were produced during the first few decades following World War II, Chicken Run tells the story of a group of chickens who attempt to escape from an egg farm. Chicken Run complicates the function of the animal-human allegory, though, by resisting the allegorical reduction of its fictional animal characters to simple metaphors for real human subjects. By presenting a critical reading of these two different films, this article suggests that the literary concept of allegory itself remains circumscribed within the philosophical tradition of humanism. Humanities 2017-01-22 6 1 Article 10.3390/h6010002 2 2076-0787 2017-01-22 doi: 10.3390/h6010002 Sean Meighoo http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/1/1 n/a Humanities 2017-01-10 6 1 Editorial 10.3390/h6010001 1 2076-0787 2017-01-10 doi: 10.3390/h6010001 Humanities Editorial Office http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/86 n/a Humanities 2016-12-21 5 4 Editorial 10.3390/h5040086 86 2076-0787 2016-12-21 doi: 10.3390/h5040086 Bernd Fischer http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/85 This article continues my earlier work of reading Jung with Lacan. This article will develop Zizek's work on Lacan's concept of objet petit a by relating it to a phenomenological interpretation of Jung. I use a number of different examples, including Zizek's interpretation of Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Hans Holbein and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to describe the objet petit a and its relationship to a phenomenological interpretation of complexes. By integrating other Lacanian concepts, such as subject, drive, fantasy, jouissance, gaze, desire, and ego as well as the imaginary, symbolic and Real, this work also highlights how Hegel and Heidegger can elucidate the relationship between objet petit a and complexes. Jung's transcendent function and the Rosarium Philosophorum also elucidate the relationship between Jung and Lacan. Humanities 2016-11-16 5 4 Review 10.3390/h5040085 85 2076-0787 2016-11-16 doi: 10.3390/h5040085 Matthew Gildersleeve http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/84 Following the recent "animal turn" in literary studies, which has inspired scholars to revisit traditional human-centered interpretations of texts narrated by animals, this article focuses on the convergence of animal studies and trauma theory. It offers new animal-centered close readings of Tolstoy's Strider and Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, paying attention to animal pain rather than seeing it, and the text as a whole, as an allegory of human society. Like many other authors of literary fiction featuring animal narrators, Tolstoy and Bulgakov employ a kind of empathic ventriloquism to narrate animal pain, an important project which, however, given the status of both the animal and trauma outside human language, and thus susceptible to being distorted by it, produces inauthentic discourse (animal-like, rather than animal narration); therefore, these authors get closest to animal pain, not through sophisticated narration, but through the use of ellipses and onomatopoeia. Ultimately, any narratological difficulty with animal focalization is minor compared to the ethical imperative of anti-speciesist animal-standpoint criticism, and the goal is to reconceive the status of animals in literature so as to change their ontological place in the world, urging that this critical work and animal rights advocacy be continued in the classroom. Humanities 2016-11-15 5 4 Article 10.3390/h5040084 84 2076-0787 2016-11-15 doi: 10.3390/h5040084 Anastassiya Andrianova http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/83 The author wishes to make the following correction to the paper published in Humanities [1].[...] Humanities 2016-11-08 5 4 Correction 10.3390/h5040083 83 2076-0787 2016-11-08 doi: 10.3390/h5040083 Ana Pais http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/82 In engaging with acts of self-narration that cross species lines, creators of animal autobiographies also broach questions about genre, truth status, and the structure as well as the politics of narrative representation. To address these questions, the present article draws not just on scholarship on (animal) autobiography but also on ideas from the fields of linguistic semantics, politeness theory, and discourse analysis, including the "framing and footing" approach that focuses on talk emerging in contexts of face-to-face interaction and that derives most directly from the work of Erving Goffman. On the basis of this research, and using case studies that range from animal riddles to Ceridwen Dovey's Only the Animals (2014), a collection of life stories posthumously narrated by a variety of nonhuman tellers, I profile autobiographical acts that reach beyond the human as ways of speaking for or in behalf of animal others. Some animal autobiographies correlate with acts of telling for which humans themselves remain the principals as well as authors; their animal animators remain relegated to the role of commenting on human institutions, values, practices, and artifacts. Other examples, however, can be read as co-authored acts of narrating in behalf of equally hybrid (or "humanimal") principals. These experiments with narration beyond the human afford solidarity-building projections of other creatures' ways of being-in-the-world—projections that enable a reassessment, in turn, of forms of human being. Humanities 2016-10-18 5 4 Article 10.3390/h5040082 82 2076-0787 2016-10-18 doi: 10.3390/h5040082 David Herman http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/81 Ever since the beginning of the 21st century, the fairy tale has not only become a staple of the small and silver screen around the globe, it has also migrated into new media, overwhelming audiences with imaginative and spectacular retellings along the way. Indeed, modern fairy-tale adaptations pervading contemporary popular culture drastically subvert, shatter, and alter the public's understanding of the classic fairy tale. Because of the phenomenally increasing proliferation of fairy-tale transformations in today's "old" and "new" media, we must reflect upon the significance of the fairy tale for society and its social uses in a nuanced fashion. How, why, and for whom have fairy-tale narratives, characters, and motifs metamorphosed in recent decades? What significant intermedial and intertextual relationships exist nowadays in connection with the fairy tale? This special issue features 11 illuminating articles of 13 scholars in the fields of folklore and fairy-tale studies tackling these and other relevant questions. Humanities 2016-09-27 5 4 Editorial 10.3390/h5040081 81 2076-0787 2016-09-27 doi: 10.3390/h5040081 Claudia Schwabe http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/80 In the midst of the proliferation of post-discourses, this essay investigates how Toni Morrison's God Help the Child (2015) offers a timely exploration of the hurting Black female body that calls into question, if not outright refutes, whether Americans have entered a post-racial, post-Black, and post-feminist era. This essay opens with a critical context section that situates God Help the Child within and against post-discourses, before examining how resemblances with Morrison's prior works like Beloved (1987) and The Bluest Eye (1970) confirm that the legacy of slavery still dictates the way Black female bodies are seen and treated in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, what this study intends is to speak the unspeakable: race still matters despite the silencing effects of post-discourses. Humanities 2016-09-27 5 4 Article 10.3390/h5040080 80 2076-0787 2016-09-27 doi: 10.3390/h5040080 Delphine Gras http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/79 This article uses an affect theory framework to show how the audience has the power to intensify the circulation of affect in the theatrical encounter, and to impact on the unique felt quality of the performance. Assessment is made of the vital function of affect to performance through the images, sensations and expressions that performers use to describe audience engagement. Intermittently, from 2010 to 2012, the author embarked on practice-led research to find out how performers describe the experience of being on stage with regard to their engagement with an audience. Conversations were recorded with more than 50 performers (mainly actors and dancers) from the USA and Brazil, as well as Portugal and other European countries. Humanities 2016-09-20 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030079 79 2076-0787 2016-09-20 doi: 10.3390/h5030079 Ana Pais http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/78 This is an article in three movements. Each takes as its object a public phenomenon of emotion: first, the representation of human emotions as homunculi in a recent children's movie; second, the performance of the Australian cricket captain at a press conference concerning the death, on the field, of a team-mate; and, finally, the mass contagion of public grief in response to that death. Using these three episodes, the article develops an understanding of Martin Heidegger's thought in relation to, first, the "enframing" of human being within technology, in which the nothing from which being is brought into presence is concealed; second, the mood of anxiety in and through which Dasein—Heidegger's term for the kind of being we "are"—asserts itself into that nothing; and, finally, the potential for post-aesthetic art to move beyond the logics of representation and subjectification, and in so doing, to reveal what Heidegger understands as the struggle between earth and world. The former refers to the "background" against and through which any particular "world" exists with the latter referring to a particular web of significances in which Dasein lives, and allowing truth to spring forth. Humanities 2016-09-18 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030078 78 2076-0787 2016-09-18 doi: 10.3390/h5030078 Ian Maxwell http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/77 This article brings together two ideas that authors in theoretical humanities tend to consider in isolation—of affect and of sentiment—and investigates what conceptions or imaginaries of the subject these ideas have historically relied on and reproduced. When viewed from the lens of the theory of subjectivation, the contemporary notions of affect and the modern sentiment tradition not only reveal significant conceptual, epistemic and ideational overlaps, but they are both kinds of critique of the liberal individualistic subject. Engaging the methodology of juxtaposition, I bring together the affective porous subject (drawing on the work of Teresa Brennan) with the modern sentiment idea of the sensible body, focusing in particular on the 17th- and 18th-century neurological discourses of sensibility in the work of Albrecht von Haller, Georg Ernst Stahl and others. I argue that the modern sentiment tradition forms part of the genealogy of affect in that its ideas of sensibility and sympathy foreground one of the tenets of affective subjectivity: namely, that the subject emerges through (rather than predates) ecological exposure, membranous permeability and nervous responsiveness. In this sense, both the sentimental and affective notions of the subject operate as forms of critique of the idea of Cartesian self and of the disavowal of relational and/or dialogical subject in Western philosophy. Humanities 2016-09-08 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030077 77 2076-0787 2016-09-08 doi: 10.3390/h5030077 Magdalena Zolkos http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/75 This article focuses on the emotional lives of, and interactions between, female characters in two plays about Iraqi wars: The Hymn of the Rocking Chair (1987) by Farouk Mohammed and A Feminine Solo (2013) by Mithal Ghazi. These plays show life in Iraq in times of war. The article argues that it is significant that Iraqi women are depicted in drama and theatre, during those times of war when extreme emotional suffering and trauma prevail, in the role of storytellers. In addition, societies at war present a methodological problem for research in that playscripts might not survive intact. This reveals another type of emotional loss through war—one that involves culture itself. Humanities 2016-09-07 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030075 75 2076-0787 2016-09-07 doi: 10.3390/h5030075 Hadeel Abdelhameed http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/76 When Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, it was primarily for his novels. Less well recognised is the significance of White's dramatic literature and his involvement in the theatre. This article offers a new analysis of White's first notable breakthrough into theatre and drama, The Ham Funeral, which he wrote in postwar London and which was produced in Adelaide in 1961. This article argues that a modernist idiom of 20th-century Australian drama can be found in this play that laid the groundwork for a poetics of language, image and theatricality. The play's aesthetic modernism is found primarily in the blend of expressionist and surrealist elements, the poetic language, the alienated creative subject and the representation of sexuality and the unconscious. White's thematics also become political, concerned with power, masculinity and gendered assumptions about rationality and emotion, poetry and the body. Having lived in London during the interwar years, White was also part of the networks that included Australian-born artists, and he was exposed to influences from visual arts as well as theatre. Of these, the artist William Dobell was central to the genesis of The Ham Funeral, as was the Polish-born modernist artist S. Ostoja-Kotkowski, who was critical to the design of the brooding expressionist set that set the standard for subsequent stage realisations of the play. Humanities 2016-09-07 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030076 76 2076-0787 2016-09-07 doi: 10.3390/h5030076 Denise Varney http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/73 Since the 1990s, surveillance camera images have experienced a function creep from their juridical uses into journalism and entertainment. In these contexts, the images have also become memory media. This article, for the first time, analyses CCTV images, meaning closed circuit surveillance camera images, as memory media and discusses the implications of our use of artefacts of control within a frame of mediated constructions of social memory. The article undertakes this work by analyzing remediations of the CCTV images of Diana Spencer and Dodi Al-Fayed in the Ritz Hotel in Paris on 30 August 1997 in television news and a documentary from 2007 and 2011, respectively. It is shown how social memory of Diana's death is a contested site, in which the images play a specific role. Humanities 2016-09-01 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030073 73 2076-0787 2016-09-01 doi: 10.3390/h5030073 Nicole Falkenhayner http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/74 This article is a reflection on the disjointed and submerged cultural consciousness of the city of Buffalo, New York. It outlines the concept of subjectivity as put forward by the philosopher Alain Badiou, and maps it onto the history of Studio Arena, Buffalo's main theatre company. Studio Arena Theatre (1927–2008) was one of the oldest and best known regional theatres in the USA. Its closure is a story fraught with conflict, misunderstanding and loss. That there has been no replacement theatre of comparable size and mandate says something about Buffalo's diminished civic imaginary. While the link between the Theatre and the City is hard to formularise, it is a historically important relationship, going back to the time of Aristotle when theatre functioned as an informing resource for the lives of citizens. Those interested in urban renewal in Buffalo and other rust-belt US cities can profit not only from an understanding of Studio Arena Theatre's history, but from a consideration of the kind of emotional engagement that this regional theatre represented. Humanities 2016-09-01 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030074 74 2076-0787 2016-09-01 doi: 10.3390/h5030074 Julian Meyrick http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/72 This case study of Tony Sheldon considers how an actor develops versatility in emotional delivery and the capacity to work in all theatre genres. Sheldon is one of Australia's best known and most successful stage actors. He has appeared in Shakespearean drama, cabaret, musical theatre and contemporary plays written by Australian, British and American playwrights. He is one of a sizeable group of Australian actors of his generation to have learned to act 'on the job' with directors and other actors rather than undertaking formal qualifications in an institution or studio. This article examines Sheldon's experience of learning to act, drawing on a life interview with the actor. It considers the opportunities and the difficulties Sheldon experienced in his early career in relation to boundary blurring and self-belief, trauma, directorial rehearsal styles, typecasting, comic acting in partnership and managing one's character in long seasons. The article explores some of the problems that the actor has overcome, the importance of specific directors in his development, and the dynamics of informal training in the context of an overall ecology of theatre over half a century. Humanities 2016-08-26 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030072 72 2076-0787 2016-08-26 doi: 10.3390/h5030072 Anne Pender http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/71 This essay offers an intervention in biopolitical theory—using the term "vulnerable life" to recalibrate discussions of how life is valued and violence is justified in the contemporary bioinsecurity regime. It reads the discursive structures that dehumanize and pathologize figures in U.S. zombie narratives against the discursive structures present in contemporary legal narratives and media reports on the killing of black Americans. Through this unsettling paralleling of structures, the essay suggests how the current ubiquity of zombies and the profusion of racial tension in the U.S. are related. In the process, the essay emphasizes the highly racialized nature of the zombie itself—which has never been the empty signifier it is often read as—and drives home just how dangerous the proliferation of postracial and posthuman discourses can be if they serve to elide historical limitations about the highly political determinations of just who is quite human. Humanities 2016-08-25 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030071 71 2076-0787 2016-08-25 doi: 10.3390/h5030071 Steven Pokornowski http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/70 This discussion introduces ideas of emotion and affect for a volume of articles demonstrating the scope of approaches used in their study within the humanities and creative arts. The volume offers multiple perspectives on emotion and affect within 20th-century and 21st-century texts, arts and organisations and their histories. The discussion explains how emotion encompasses the emotions, emotional feeling, sensation and mood and how these can be analysed particularly in relation to literature, art and performance. It briefly summarises concepts of affect theory within recent approaches before introducing the articles. Humanities 2016-08-24 5 3 Editorial 10.3390/h5030070 70 2076-0787 2016-08-24 doi: 10.3390/h5030070 Peta Tait http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/69 The othering of whole groups of people in a biopolitical discourse during the Third Reich has caused many to re-assess ethics that is based on specific categories. Adorno and Horkheimer reckoned with both Enlightenment as well as classical "humanist" discourses to question whether they imply structures that lead to fascism. In the wake of these arguments, classical humanist (or sometimes also called anthropocentric) ethics have also been criticized by philosophers such as Agamben, Derrida, and Wolfe. It is thus time to work on posthuman(ist) ethics that avoids the traps of a narrow human ethics and that is inclusive rather than exclusive. The short stories by postwar German author Wolfdietrich Schnurre, written in the wake of the Holocaust, reckon with a purely human-centered worldview and draw a bleak picture of an anthropocentrically structured and valued world. Under the surface that portrays a speciesist world, Schnurre employs a network of sub-discourses to "cave out" carno-phallogocentric discourses and point towards a different, post-human ethics. This paper examines how anthropocentric discourses of power lead to inhumane violence and how a different approach to the Other, based on empathy and shared vulnerability, might just move us beyond it. Humanities 2016-08-19 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030069 69 2076-0787 2016-08-19 doi: 10.3390/h5030069 Belinda Kleinhans http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/68 The article has two primary objectives: it presents an analysis of the representation of animals in selected Italian literary works; and it utilizes that analysis as an example of how to incorporate the visual arts in teaching literature in the undergraduate classroom. The literary works discussed include Dante's Inferno and the myth of Romulus and Remus as preparation for Boccaccio's Decameron, specifically novelle IX.7 and V.8, with a thematic focus on portrayals of canines. The article argues that the use of artwork from the medieval and Renaissance periods, such as statuary, illustrated manuscripts, images in bestiaries, and works by Botticelli and other well-known artists, can be used to complement and reinforce interpretations of the texts, and are a powerful and effective tool in the learning process. Humanities 2016-08-18 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030068 68 2076-0787 2016-08-18 doi: 10.3390/h5030068 Julia Cozzarelli http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/67 This article compares Ursula K. Le Guin's short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1974) to the book of Job. Both stories feature characters who can be read as innocent victims, but whereas the suffering in Le Guin's tale benefits many, Job is the victim of useless suffering. Exploring this difference, I draw on George Bataille's theory of sacrifice as useless expenditure, and developed his concept of the "will to chance" in my reading of how each set of characters responds to the complex moral impasses faced. In the end, I read both stories as being about the struggle to create a viable, meaningful life in a world that is unpredictable and structurally unjust. Humanities 2016-08-09 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030067 67 2076-0787 2016-08-09 doi: 10.3390/h5030067 Alexander Hirsch http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/66 This article considers the relationship between what would generally be viewed as a postmodern perspective and the rise and multiple use of the prefix "post" by those arguing that we are finally beyond certain oppressive political, cultural and social issues, and dynamics, such as the racist and sexist ideologies that have historically permeated and plagued our nation's institutions, including higher education. Many of those who champion the prefix "post" assert that they offer us a narrative, description and framework of a post-racial and post-feminist era that they want us to acknowledge and embrace. I, however, claim that such a utilization and imposition (as opposed to the more generous sounding "offer") of the various "posts" that we have been presented with are, more often than not, precisely little more than reactionary moves to reestablish and reaffirm the very type of thinking and structure that we have allegedly moved beyond. Humanities 2016-08-02 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030066 66 2076-0787 2016-08-02 doi: 10.3390/h5030066 Ron Scapp http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/65 The present contribution explores the topic of literary interpretation from a transcultural perspective. We employ two dramas by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Die Juden and Nathan der Weise) and one by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Iphigenie auf Tauris) as models for the investigation of intercultural and transcultural readings of literary texts. We first consider the epistemologies of Johann Martin Chladenius and Johann Gottfried Herder in order to distinguish between intercultural and transcultural studies. As a field of inquiry, transcultural literary studies does not employ one particular approach or advocate one specific method since it seeks to create new knowledge by opening up literary texts. For the first time, the article differentiates clearly between intercultural and transcultural studies and offers a clearer definition of transcultural spheres or spaces than has been advanced before. The critique of Karl-Josef Kuschel's reading of Lessing's Nathan der Weise opens up the literary-dramatic text to new possibilities. The field does not focus on what cultures do with human beings but with what different human beings do with culture. In sum, the transcultural dimensions of literary texts foster transcultural mentalities. They also have the potential to identify shared experiences and to develop common understandings while respecting the authenticity of difference. Humanities 2016-07-30 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030065 65 2076-0787 2016-07-30 doi: 10.3390/h5030065 Steven Martinson http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/64 The debate on universality in current human rights scholarship has been overly limited. Commonly, the idea is either dismissed as Eurocentric or it is compared to a global political consensus. I evoke certain alternate and underexplored views on the topic from literary and culture studies. Scholars like Kwame Appiah, Patrick Hogan and Seyla Benhabib have articulated principles that include patterns of non-coercive ethical thinking emergent across diverse cultures, particularly the way minority cultures ethically respond to oppression. I argue that human rights practices may be fruitfully guided by the way minority cultures around the world evoke ethical universals to challenge violations. To develop this, I consider Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies that treats the issue of colonialism in South Asia during the 19th century. Ghosh foreshadows the arrival of human rights in two ways. He shows that a conception human rights has origins in Western colonialism, precisely in the colonial idea of civilizing mission. But more importantly, he demonstrates that ethical universals allow colonized characters in the novel to form cross-cultural solidarities that subvert colonialism through conceptions of universal human rights. This understanding of universality is largely missing in current human rights scholarship, with consequences that extend well beyond Ghosh's novel. Humanities 2016-07-29 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030064 64 2076-0787 2016-07-29 doi: 10.3390/h5030064 Arnab Dutta Roy http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/63 "If you've ever wondered why Disney tales all end in lies," then ask YouTube artist Paint—aka Jon Cozart. He has created a video for YouTube.com that re-imagines what happened after four of Disney's leading ladies' "dreams came true." Continuing a tradition that is as old as the tales he sings about, the artist combines characters and melodies that have become culturally ubiquitous since the media domination of the Disney Corporation with an interpretation of the material that tries to make sense of the world in which it exists. Continuing the criticisms of post-modernism and feminist theory, Cozart challenges the "happily ever afters" that have become the stock endings for the genre. Through comedic satire he creates parodied storylines that bring four animated princesses out of their Disney realms and into the real world where they must deal with environmental destruction, racism, and colonialism, among other issues. The use of a video-sharing site such as Youtube.com not only allows for the expanded distribution of fan-created material, but it also directly addresses a wider audience than traditional oral story tellers could possibly reach: the Internet. This case study looks at the ways in which the global recognition of Disney culture allows for the creation of social commentary through familiar and beloved characters, while an increasingly digitally-connected world impacts the capabilities and understanding of both the creator and the viewers of the material. While far from being a new phenomenon, the reinterpretation of fairy tales takes on content and a form that reflects the increasingly globalized and digitized world in Cozart's Disney parody. Humanities 2016-07-27 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030063 63 2076-0787 2016-07-27 doi: 10.3390/h5030063 Kylie Schroeder http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/52 The Environmental Humanities constitute an emerging transdisciplinary enterprise that is becoming a key part of the liberal arts and an indispensable component of the twenty-first-century university.[...] Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Editorial 10.3390/h5030052 52 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030052 Karen Thornber http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/53 During the twentieth century, indigenous peoples have often embraced the category of indigenous while also having to face the ambiguities and limitations of this concept. Indigeneity, whether represented by indigenous people themselves or others, tends to face a "double bind", as defined by Gregory Bateson, in which "no matter what a person does, he can't win." One exit strategy suggested by Bateson is meta-communication—communication about communication—in which new solutions emerge from a questioning of system-internal assumptions. We offer case studies from Ecuador, Peru and Alaska that chart some recent indigenous experiences and strategies for such scenarios. Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030053 53 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030053 Francis Ludlow Lauren Baker Samara Brock Chris Hebdon Michael Dove http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/54 This article explores how global environmental organizations unintentionally fostered the notion of indigenous people and rights in a country that officially opposed these concepts. In the 1990s, Beijing declared itself a supporter of indigenous rights elsewhere, but asserted that, unlike the Americas and Australia, China had no indigenous people. Instead, China described itself as a land of "ethnic minority" groups, not indigenous groups. In some sense, the state's declaration appeared effective, as none of these ethnic minority groups launched significant grassroots efforts to align themselves with the international indigenous rights movement. At the same time, as international environmental groups increased in number and strength in 1990s China, their policies were undergoing significant transformations to more explicitly support indigenous people. This article examines how this challenging situation arose, and discusses the unintended consequences after a major environmental organization, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), carried out a project using the language of indigeneity in China. Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030054 54 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030054 Michael Hathaway http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/55 This article approaches contemporary extractivism as an environmentally and socially destructive extension of an enduring colonial societal structure. Manifested in massive hydroelectric developments, clearcut logging, mining, and unconventional oil and gas production, extractivism removes natural resources from their points of origin and dislocates the emplaced benefits they provide. Because externally imposed resource extraction threatens Indigenous peoples' land-based self-determination, industrial sites often become contested, politicized landscapes. Consequently, I also illuminate the struggles of those who strive to turn dreams for sovereign futures into reality through extrACTIVIST resistance to extractivist schemes. Presenting four case synopses—from across Canada's boreal forest and spanning a broad range of extractive undertakings—that highlight both sides of the extractivism/ACTIVISM formulation, this article exposes the political roots of resource-related conflicts and contributes to an emerging comparative political ecology of settler colonialism. While extractivism's environmental effects are immediate and arresting, these physical transformations have significant cultural consequences that are underlain by profound political inequities. I ultimately suggest that because extractivism is colonial in its causal logic, effective opposition cannot emerge from environmentalism alone, but will instead arise from movements that pose systemic challenges to conjoined processes of social, economic, and environmental injustice. Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030055 55 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030055 Anna Willow http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/56 This article explores the social, economic, cultural and political issues bound up in two matters relating to the environment in the Sololá and Lake Atitlán region of the Guatemalan Mayan highlands in 2004–2005: the violent breakup of an anti-mine protest and the various reactions to a tropical storm that threatened the lake ecosystem. It views these events as part of a historical conjuncture and centers them in a larger discussion of Maya political activism, environmentalism and neoliberal development in Guatemala from the 1990s–mid-2010s. It begins with the transition from war to peace in the 1990s, charting how Maya participation in municipal politics soared even as the official Mayan movement waned as the state turned to neoliberalism. Zooming in on municipal development and politics in Sololá in the early 2000s, it then traces at the ground level how a decentralizing, "multicultural" state promoted political participation while at the same time undermining the possibility for that participation to bring about substantive change. The center of the article delves deeper into the conjuncture of the first decade of the new millennium. By mapping events in Sololá against development, agrarian transformation and rural urbanization, it argues that resilient Maya community structures, although unable to stop the exploitative tide, continued to provide local cohesion and advocacy. Activists and everyday citizens became more globally attuned in the 2000s. The article's final section analyzes municipal plans made between 2007 and 2012, arguing that creating and controlling community structures became increasingly important to the state in a time when Guatemala's "outward" global turn was accompanied by an "inward" turn as people confronted spiraling violence in their communities. Critics called young people apolitical, but in 2015, massive demonstrations led to the imprisonment of the nation's president and vice-president, showing that there is a chapter of Guatemala's history of activism yet to be written. Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030056 56 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030056 J. Way http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/57 The food sovereignty movement initiated in 1996 by a transnational organization of peasants, La Via Campesina, representing 148 organizations from 69 countries, became central to self-determination and decolonial mobilization embodied by Indigenous peoples throughout the world. Utilizing the framework of decolonization and sustainable self-determination, this article analyzes the concept of food sovereignty to articulate an understanding of its potential for action in revitalizing Indigenous food practices and ecological knowledge in the United States and Canada. The food sovereignty movement challenged the hegemony of the globalized, neoliberal, industrial, capital-intensive, corporate-led model of agriculture that created destructive economic policies that marginalized small-scale farmers, removed them from their land, and forced them into the global market economy as wage laborers. Framed within a larger rights discourse, the food sovereignty movement called for the right of all peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right to define their own food and agricultural systems. "Indigenizing" food sovereignty moves beyond a rights based discourse by emphasizing the cultural responsibilities and relationships Indigenous peoples have with their environment and the efforts being made by Indigenous communities to restore these relationships through the revitalization of Indigenous foods and ecological knowledge systems as they assert control over their own foods and practices. Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030057 57 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030057 Charlotte Coté http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/58 Among American Indian nations, the White Mountain Apache Tribe has been at the forefront of a struggle to control natural resource management within reservation boundaries. In 1952, they developed the first comprehensive tribal natural resource management program, the White Mountain Recreational Enterprise (WMRE), which became a cornerstone for fighting legal battles over the tribe's right to manage cultural and natural resources on the reservation for the benefit of the tribal community rather than outside interests. This article examines how White Mountain Apaches used the WMRE, while embracing both Euro-American and Apache traditions, as an institutional foundation for resistance and exchange with Euro-American society so as to reassert control over tribal eco-cultural resources in east-central Arizona. Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030058 58 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030058 David Tomblin http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/59 Recognized as Japan's indigenous peoples in 2008, the Ainu people of Hokkaido have sought to recuperate land and self-determination by physically reenacting Ainu traditional knowledge through ecotourism in Hokkaido. Colonization and assimilation have severed most contemporary Ainu from relations with nonhuman sentient beings (A. kamuy) rooted in land and waterways. Ecotourism provides a context for reenacting an ancestral ontology through engaging in wild food gathering, relearning subsistence practices for cultural transmission, and reinscribing Ainu cultural logics onto the land through stewardship and language. At the same time, the Japanese government's campaign to have Siretok nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site can be interpreted as an attempt to legitimate Japanese claims to Shiretoko and reinscribe the authority of Japan, as both the proper steward to ensure responsible conservation of Shiretoko but also the rightful owner and proper occupant of the promontory and its surrounding waterways. The article reveals how Ainu attempts to establish relationships and assert ancestral claims with the kamuy in the landscape are stymied by the ongoing reality of settler colonialism and erasure of Ainu presence in the landscape. Further, it explores how a capitalist-driven economy of ecotourism unleashes new dynamics in relations between local Ainu fishers and farmers in Shiretoko and outsider Ainu who seek to develop ecotourist initiatives. Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030059 59 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030059 ann-elise lewallen http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/60 This article examines a new set of policies embraced by indigenous leaders in the Upper Napo region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, driven, in part, by a growing appreciation for "wilderness" —large areas where humans exercise a very light touch. In the past few years, leaders have pursued wilderness conservation initiatives while simultaneously promoting petroleum extraction in their own backyards. Both political positions run counter to those pursued in previous decades, when opposition to both oil development and strict forms of conservation within their territory was strong. To address this reversal, I trace some of the development interventions and North-South collaborations that have contributed to the emergence of "nature" as a meaningful imaginary for Amazonian indigenous leaders and for a new generation of young people, drawing connections to William Cronon's critical analysis of how wilderness conservation became a priority in the United States. I conclude that more than two decades of conservationist interventions in the Upper Napo region have led to some largely unintended consequences, as Amazonian leaders increasingly subscribe to Northern environmentalists' romanticization of "the Amazon" as a wild place, one that therefore must be distant from the places where they work and live. Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030060 60 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030060 Juliet Erazo http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/61 Yolŋu mathematics refers to the complex matrix of patterns, relationships, shapes, motions and rhythms of time and space that underpin the ways that Yolŋu people, Indigenous people of North East Arnhem Land in northern Australia, nourish and are nourished by their environments. Through its fundamental reliance on human and more-than-human connectivity and situatedness, Yolŋu people mobilise the concept of Yolŋu mathematics to challenge Western knowledges, including Western ideas of mathematics and environment. This paper discusses Yolŋu mathematics and the relationships between humans and more-than-humans, which co-produce a world that is living and interconnected, and which reveals all knowledge as situated. Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030061 61 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030061 Bawaka Lloyd Sandie Suchet-Pearson Sarah Wright Laklak Burarrwanga Ritjilili Ganambarr Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs Banbapuy Ganambarr Djawundil Maymuru http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/62 This article examines how Native places are made, named, and reconstructed after colonization through storytelling. Storying the land is a process whereby the land is invested with the moral and spiritual perspectives specific to Native American communities. As seen in the oral traditions and written literature of Native American storytellers and authors, the voices of indigenous people retrace and remap cartographies for the land after colonization through storytelling. This article shows that the Americas were storied by Native American communities long before colonial contact beginning in the fifteenth century and demonstrates how the land continues to be storied in the present as a method of decolonization and cultural survivance. The article examines manifestations of the oral tradition in multiple forms, including poetry, interviews, fiction, photography, and film, to demonstrate that the land itself, through storytelling, becomes a repository of the oral tradition. The article investigates oral narratives from precontact and postcolonial time periods and across numerous nations and geographical regions in the Americas, including stories from the Mayan Popol Vuh; Algonkian; Western Apache; Hopi; Haudenosaunee/Iroquois; and Laguna Pueblo stories; and the contemporary poetry and fiction of Joy Harjo (Mvskoke/Creek Nation) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo). Humanities 2016-07-15 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030062 62 2076-0787 2016-07-15 doi: 10.3390/h5030062 Ivanna Yi http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/51 Pointedly nostalgic in both its source material and storytelling approach, Over the Garden Wall's vintage aesthetic is not merely decorative, but ideological. The miniseries responds to recent postmodern fairy tale adaptations by stripping away a century of popular culture references and using motifs, not to invoke and upset increasingly familiar fairy tales, but as an artist's palette of evocative, available images. In privileging imagery and mood over lessons, Over the Garden Wall captures something that has become vanishingly rare in children's media: the moral ambiguity of fairy tale worlds.1 Humanities 2016-07-05 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030051 51 2076-0787 2016-07-05 doi: 10.3390/h5030051 Kristiana Willsey http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/50 Based on fieldwork by the author conducted in Tibetan cultural areas of the Indian Himalayas, this paper explores Himalayan understandings of what defines a fairy tale, in contrast to the Western understanding. In parts of the Himalayas, a distinction is made between "lakshung" (fairy tales) and "kyakshung", which are shorter stories, the kind one might tell over tea. In light of the proposals to record and disseminate many of these stories using new media, this paper seeks to examine these genre definitions and investigates the various contexts in which these stories are told. Humanities 2016-07-05 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030050 50 2076-0787 2016-07-05 doi: 10.3390/h5030050 Jane Orton http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/49 Alexander von Humboldt was internationally known as a world traveler, having collected data and analyzed samples from five of the world's seven continents. He spoke several languages fluently, and split most of his adult life between the cosmopolitan centers of Berlin and Paris. The great deal of time Humboldt spent in Latin America, along with his staunch belief in human equality, led to his reverence in those countries. Indeed, Humboldt was a world citizen in the truest sense of the word. But what of the United States? What claim can this nation make to the heritage and legacy of the world-exploring baron? A brief stop in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. at the end of Humboldt's expedition to the equatorial regions of the Americas seems to suffice. This short stay, along with the Humboldt-Jefferson correspondence, constitutes the great American link in Humboldt studies, a link whose nature and importance has, over the years, received an exaggerated amount of attention from authors writing for an American audience. The following analysis, using the tools of transcultural memory studies, investigates why this relatively insignificant event in a long and storied life assumes an inflated role in current accounts of the life and work of Alexander von Humboldt. Humanities 2016-07-01 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030049 49 2076-0787 2016-07-01 doi: 10.3390/h5030049 James Howell http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/48 This article examines the use of the zombie (or the "returned," the literal translation of the French term "revenant") in Fabrice Gobert's French series Les Revenants (2012–2015) as a narrative trope that evokes the recent wave of migration from Syria into Europe. In parallel, this article addresses Robin Campillo's 2004 original feature Les Revenants as it served as an inspiration for Gobert's work in 2012. Campillo's work, like Gobert's, is rooted in the treatment of refugees in France. Following the forceful closing of the Sangatte refugee camp in Calais in 2002, the Moroccan-born French filmmaker expressed his concern for the treatment of Others in France through the figure of the zombie, eventually initiating a new genre in French fiction that would serve to express and denounce the characterization of Others in France as "non-human." Humanities 2016-06-23 5 3 Article 10.3390/h5030048 48 2076-0787 2016-06-23 doi: 10.3390/h5030048 Claire Mouflard http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/47 Alice Kaplan's memoir French Lessons (1993) is a story that deals as much with the issue of language learning as with that of cultural belonging(s). This "language memoir," as it is typical of this sub-genre, is an intimate tale of the transition between languages and cultures. French Lessons recounts her evolving relationship with French language and culture in various phases of her life: starting from childhood, continuing through her graduate student years at Yale and finally as professor of French at Duke. Soon, however, in this unconventional Bildung, the second language turns out to be a verbal safe-house, an instant refuge when her first language and culture happen to be too uncomfortable. Ultimately, French provides a psychic space and a hiding place. Ultimately, however, as Derrida has shown, we are alienated from both the first and the second; we find ourselves to be more comfortable in one than in the other. This essay will analyze such processes with special attention to the part played by the body in Kaplan's building as a student and eventually as a teacher. The analysis will be linked with the text's peculiar narrative style: fast-paced, with simple, concise sentences, nevertheless extremely effective and moving. Humanities 2016-06-20 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020047 47 2076-0787 2016-06-20 doi: 10.3390/h5020047 Eleonora Rao http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/46 This article, "Post What? The Liminality of Multi-Racial Identity," argues that the successes and failures of 21st-century satire reveal the myth of post-raciality while simultaneously dismissing racial essentialism. I focus on three critical moments: the commercial success of Mat Johnson's Loving Day, a text and forthcoming television show that examines the shifting self-identities of mixed-race individuals; the inability of a potential love interest on the television series, Louie, to accept a black woman as the ex-wife of the titular protagonist's phenotypically white daughters; and Barack Obama's self-designation as "black" on the census shortly after his election. I argue that the widespread reach of these instances, coupled with audience engagement and response, underscores the ways that the public realm frames a contemporary understanding of race as both meaningful and absurd. Humanities 2016-06-18 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020046 46 2076-0787 2016-06-18 doi: 10.3390/h5020046 Danielle Morgan http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/44 This article undertakes a comparative analysis of two oil company advertisements—British Petroleum's (BP) "Persian Series", published in London in 1925, and Cenovus Energy's "Canadian Ideas at Work", published across Canada in 2012. These advertisements are separated by eighty-seven years, and were produced in different countries, by different companies, and for different audiences. Yet, a closer reading of these documents reveals that they are two sides of the same coin: both narrate the extraction of oil as a great game of commercial conquest, whereby exotic prizes trapped beneath wild and empty landscapes are unlocked by oil companies. How could two advertisements that appear so radically distant feel so close? In what ways do the oil cultures of the past inflect those of the present? This article engages with such questions by critically deconstructing and comparing the imagined worlds of oil presented in BP and Cenovus' advertisements, tracing the ways in which the resource is represented through the binaries of ancient and modern, empty and urban, wild and civilized. By configuring oil as a constellation of ideas rather than a system of things, this investigation reveals how the colonial legacies of the past continue to seep through the oil cultures of the present. Humanities 2016-06-13 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020044 44 2076-0787 2016-06-13 doi: 10.3390/h5020044 Ian Wereley http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/45 In his adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, Campe sets out to examine the legitimacy of his contemporary social reality (in Europe in the broadest sense) by tracing its origin back to the most basic roots conceivable. The experimental character of his book is emphasised and—to an extent—explicitly introduced through the frame narrative which constitutes Campe's most important addition to Defoe's story: Here the emergence of the rules and routines are extensively mooted by the father (who relates Robinson's story as a framed narrative) and his children who still have to internalise, grasp, and situate the moral rules around them and frequently offer divergent perspectives in the process. The frame narrative connects the moral "ontogeny" of the children to the "phylogenetics" of civilisation and suggests that both can be superimposed on one another. I will work with concepts that focus on the differentiation between "innate" moral characteristics and their social transformation on a cognitive, evolutionary level, from which Campe clearly deviates. However, his short-circuiting of the individual and the phylogeny leads to very similar specifications as laid out by, for instance, Moral Foundations Theory. Humanities 2016-06-13 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020045 45 2076-0787 2016-06-13 doi: 10.3390/h5020045 Claudia Nitschke http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/43 Fan fiction alternate universe stories (AUs) that combine Game of Thrones characters and settings with fairy tale elements construct a dialogue between realism and wonder. Realism performs a number of functions in various genres, but becomes a particularly tricky concept to tie down in fantasy. Deployments of realism in "quality TV" series like Game of Thrones often reinforce social stigmatization of feminine genres like the romance, melodrama, and fairy tale. The happily-ever-after ending receives significant feminist criticism partly because it falls within a larger framework of utopian politics and poetics, which are frequently accused of essentialism and authoritarianism. However, because fan fiction cultures place all stories in dialogue with numerous other equally plausible versions, the fairy tale happy ending can serve unexpected purposes. By examining several case studies in fairy tale AU fan fiction based on Game of Thrones characters, situations, and settings, this paper demonstrates the genre's ability to construct surprising critiques of real social and historical situations through strategic deployment of impossible wishes made manifest through the magic of fan creativity. Humanities 2016-06-09 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020043 43 2076-0787 2016-06-09 doi: 10.3390/h5020043 Anne Kustritz http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/42 Alessandro Spina, né Basili Shafik Khouzam, was born in Benghazi in 1927 into a family of Maronites from Aleppo and spent most of his life between Libya and Italy, speaking several languages and writing in Italian. He may be described as the "unsung" writer of Italian colonial and post-colonial past in North Africa. Spina's oeuvre—collected in an omnibus edition, I confini dell'ombra. In terra d'oltremare (Morcelliana)—charts the history of Libya from 1911, when Italy invaded the Ottoman province, to 1966, when the country witnessed the economic boom sparked by the petrodollars. The cycle was awarded the Premio Bagutta, Italy's highest literary accolade. In 2015, Darf Press published in English the first instalment of Spina's opus with the title The Confines of the Shadows. In Lands Overseas. Spina always refused to be pigeonholed in some literary category and to be labeled as a colonial or postcolonial author. As a matter of fact, his works go beyond the spatial and imaginary boundaries of a given state or genre, emphasizing instead the mixing and collision of languages, cultures, identities, and forms of writing. Reading and re-discovering Spina in a transcultural mode brings to light the striking newness of his literary efforts, in which transnational lived life, creative imagination, and transcultural sensibility are inextricably interlaced. Humanities 2016-06-09 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020042 42 2076-0787 2016-06-09 doi: 10.3390/h5020042 Arianna Dagnino http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/41 In season one, episode 15 of the television show Once Upon a Time, viewers are given a glimpse into the history of Ruby/Red, the series' version of Red Riding Hood. The episode reveals that, contrary to most oral and written versions of the ATU 333 tale, Red herself is the wolf: a werewolf who must wear an enchanted red cloak in order to keep from turning into a monster. The episode also features the beginnings of the close friendship between Red and Snow White. The sisterly bond that quickly forms between the two women, combined with the striking images of their respective red and white cloaks, easily calls to mind a less familiar fairy tale not explicitly referenced in the series: "Snow White and Rose Red" (ATU 426). Taking queer readings of this text as starting points, I argue that this allusion complicates the bond between the two women, opening up space for a compelling reading of Red's werewolf nature as a coded depiction of her then latent but later confirmed bisexuality. Humanities 2016-06-08 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020041 41 2076-0787 2016-06-08 doi: 10.3390/h5020041 Brittany Warman http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/40 This paper considers transforming forms and their purposes in the popular culture trope of the televised Monster of the Week (MOTW). In the rare televised appearances outside of Slavic nations, Baba Yaga tends to show up in MOTW episodes. While some MOTW are contemporary inventions, many, like Baba Yaga, are mythological and fantastic creatures from folk narratives. Employing the concept of the folkloresque, we explore how contemporary audiovisual tropes gain integrity and traction by indexing traditional knowledge and belief systems. In the process, we examine key affordances of these forms involving the possibilities of wonder and the portability of tradition. Using digital humanities methods, we built a "monster typology" by scraping lists of folk creatures, mythological beasts, and other supernatural beings from online information sources, and we used topic modeling to investigate central concerns of MOTW series. Our findings indicate connections in these shows between crime, violence, family, and loss. The trope formulates wonder and families through folk narrative and monster forms and functions. We recognize Baba Yaga's role as villain in these episodes and acknowledge that these series also shift between episodic and serial narrative arcs involving close relationships between characters and among viewers and fans. Humanities 2016-06-03 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020040 40 2076-0787 2016-06-03 doi: 10.3390/h5020040 Jill Rudy Jarom McDonald http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/39 Although Raymond De Young points out the current response to energy descent he terms localization "is not globalization in reverse", the writers of modernity's energy ramp-up used many of the same techniques De Young proposes for adapting to the downslope of M. King Hubbert's fossil-fuels peak. Among these is pre-familiarization, the construction of mental models that "help people to feel at home in a place they have not yet inhabited." Long before William Catton's depiction of the West's outsized energy user as Homo colossus, for example, Joel Barlow provided early national Americans with a reflection of themselves as gigantic consumers of the continent's bounty in his 1787 Vision of Columbus. In the epic poem, Barlow puts in place foundational elements of the myth of progress that will develop with an increasingly extravagant energy consumption: a refutation of the classical republican model of history as cyclical; a conflation of the process of resource extraction with that of production; a characterization of this "production" as the natural trait of the knowledgeable, moral Western subject; the pairing of this characterization with a racialized discourse; and an assertion of climate melioration that anticipates by two centuries the counter-arguments of anthropogenic climate-change denialists. The poem invites its reader to inhabit the skin of a lofty and distanced observer of natural life, drawing on the earlier century's infatuation with the prospect view, to help the reader become "pre-familiarized" with an idea of him- or herself fitting an economic model of endless growth. In the work, therefore, might be found not only the blueprints for an as-yet inchoate Anthropocene, but also the design of a new humanity to go along with it. Humanities 2016-06-03 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020039 39 2076-0787 2016-06-03 doi: 10.3390/h5020039 Matthew Pangborn http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/38 Fossil fueled energy production and consumption are the basis of global industrialised societies, with the deleterious biophysical effects of such production and consumption also forming the basis of the advent of Anthropocene. In the context of science and environmental policy, hope denotes rapid decarbonisation across the globe. Meanwhile, in art and the humanities, the study of such energy and decarbonisation remains nascent and nebulous. To account for these discrepancies, this article outlines the scale of the biophysical challenges by first establishing the relationship between outspoken climate scientists and international organisations determining climate and energy policy. This relationship—between marginalised and mainstream—is used to frame the analogous challenges for two cultural fields that have recently emerged in direct response: energy humanities and the arts of energy. The discussion centers on the challenge common to all fields—between the outspoken marginal and the orthodox mainstream—to speculate on how the arts of energy may recalibrate a context-contingent hope for energy futures, drawing on case studies of ISEA Bright Future and Facing Futures Free From Fear, two installations simultaneously staged by the author in 2013 about the relationship between energy and climate change. Humanities 2016-06-03 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020038 38 2076-0787 2016-06-03 doi: 10.3390/h5020038 Josh Wodak http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/37 This article uses literary sources to draw ontological distinctions among three distinct energy sources: wind power, biomass, and fossil fuels. The primary aim is to demonstrate how radically our fossil fuel regime has changed human ontology in the last two centuries during which we have entered the Anthropocene. Because this radical transformation contains myriad elements, this article will focus on transportation: the speed, quality, and quantity of travel permitted by successive energy sources. To consider the comparative literatures of energy as they relate to transportation, we will begin with wind, then consider muscle-driven biomass giving way to coal locomotion, and conclude with the highest octane fuel, petroleum. The central interest is in how the fuel depicted in literature illuminates historical moments in which the interfaces between self, society, and nature are configured by specific energy regimes. By using literature as a source text, we may arrive at an emotionally and philosophically more robust synthesis of energy history than the social and natural sciences, relying upon objective accounts and statistics, are able to provide. By re-reading literature through the lens of the Anthropocene, we gain perspective on how earlier insights into the relationship between energy and experience can inform our explorations of today's ontological reality. Energy literature instructs us out of the fossil fuel mindset of world domination and back to a physical realm in which we are small actors in a world guided by capricious forces. Such a reality requires hard muscular work and emotional immersion to restore an ethic of care and sustainability. Humanities 2016-06-03 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020037 37 2076-0787 2016-06-03 doi: 10.3390/h5020037 Heidi Scott http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/36 Oil is currently over-represented in the energy humanities, a state of affairs I describe as petromyopia. While oil constitutes a vital source of energy in the modern world, focusing too heavily on petroleum can distract scholars from giving proper attention to other aspects of the social and cultural dimensions of energy. The goal of this article is to encourage those in the energy humanities to cast a broader net in their analyses and recognize the full diversity of energy systems in their scholarship. Humanities 2016-06-03 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020036 36 2076-0787 2016-06-03 doi: 10.3390/h5020036 Christopher Jones http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/35 Environmental themes and representations on screen are examined as a part of environmental social studies and can be considered a way of creating awareness of environmental issues. However, how often do we consider the environmental impact of a film or television shoot as an industrial process? In this article, I examine the sustainability practices in the motion picture industry and challenges to that by focusing on the British film and television industry as a case study. Using the interviews with industry representatives and some case studies, I discuss the possibilities of creating a change in behavior in the film industry, not only in terms of embedding green measures but also reconstituting industrial mechanisms on behalf of environmental sustainability. Humanities 2016-06-03 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020035 35 2076-0787 2016-06-03 doi: 10.3390/h5020035 Ekin Gündüz Özdemirci http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/34 The National Broadcasting Company's (NBC) Grimm uses fairy tales and an altered history to explore modern issues in American society such as environmental concerns, individuality, and social and cultural change through magic and magic-tinged science. Worldwide chaos and strife are easily explained as part of the Grimm universe (Grimmverse) through Wesen (humanoid creatures who share characteristics with animals such as appearance and behavior), leading to a more united view of humanity and equality of human experience. Evil is often more scientifically explained, and what may appear random within our reality becomes part of a pattern in Grimm. Grimm gives its American audience a form of societal unity through historic folklore and a fictional explanation for the struggles Americans perceive to be happening within their own society as well as in other parts of the world. Humanities 2016-05-27 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020034 34 2076-0787 2016-05-27 doi: 10.3390/h5020034 Julianna Lindsay http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/33 Though it is now a decade since its release, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) remains a work of filmic art which plays upon our deep-rooted and mercurial relationship with fairy tales and folklore. By turns beautiful and grotesque, Pan's Labyrinth is a complex portrait of the clash between Ofelia's fairy tale world and that of the brutal adults around her. This article will provide an analysis of the juxtaposition of the film's imagery of closed/open circles, their respective realms, and how Ofelia moves between the two. I will argue that these aspects create an unusual relationship between the fairy tale universe and the physical one, characterized by simultaneous displacement and interdependency. Ofelia acts as a mediatrix of these spheres, conforming to neither the imposed rules of her historical reality nor the expected structural rules of fairy tales, and this refusal ultimately allows her transcendence from the circumscribed realm of the liminal into Victor Turner's "liminoid" space, escaping the trap of binarism. Humanities 2016-05-25 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020033 33 2076-0787 2016-05-25 doi: 10.3390/h5020033 Savannah Blitch http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/32 Bill Willingham's Fables comic book series and its spin-offs have spanned fourteen years and reinforce that fairy-tale characters are culturally meaningful, adaptable, subversive, and pervasive. Willingham uses fairy-tale pastiche and syncreticism based on the ethos of comic book crossovers in his redeployment of previous approaches to fairy-tale characters. Fables characters are richer for every perspective that Willingham deploys, from the Brothers Grimm to Disneyesque aesthetics and more erotic, violent, and horrific incarnations. Willingham's approach to these fairy-tale narratives is synthetic, idiosyncratic, and libertarian. This tension between Willingham's subordination of fairy-tale characters to his overarching libertarian ideological narrative and the traditional folkloric identities drives the storytelling momentum of the Fables universe. Willingham's portrayal of Bigby (the Big Bad Wolf turned private eye), Snow White ("Fairest of Them All", Director of Operations of Fabletown, and avenger against pedophilic dwarves), Rose Red (Snow's divergent, wild, and jealous sister), and Jack (narcissistic trickster) challenges contemporary assumptions about gender, heroism, narrative genres, and the very conception of a fairy tale. Emerging from negotiations with tradition and innovation are fairy-tale characters who defy constraints of folk and storybook narrative, mythology, and metafiction. Humanities 2016-05-19 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020032 32 2076-0787 2016-05-19 doi: 10.3390/h5020032 Jason Harris http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/30 This article focuses on African literature published since 2000 by authors of French expression. While contemporary authors' subjects are varied—ranging from climate change, human rights, to ethnic cleansing—they also imagine new "what ifs" and other utopic spaces and places that extend beyond postcolonial, Africa-as-victim paradigms. Literarily, authors such as Abdelaziz Belkhodja (Tunisia) and Abdourahman A. Waberi (Djibouti) have effectuated a transnational turn. In this literary transnational turn, Africa is open to new interpretations by the African author that are very different from the more essentialist-based, literary-philosophical movements such as Negritude and pan-Africanism; cornerstones of the postcolonial literary frameworks of the past. Belkhodja and Waberi offer original narratives for Africa that, while describing their countries as utopias, also traverse the very dystopic realities of our time. Humanities 2016-05-18 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020030 30 2076-0787 2016-05-18 doi: 10.3390/h5020030 Valérie Orlando http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/31 In this essay, I turn to Shakespeare for advice about how to alleviate the crisis in the humanities. University faculty and PhD students develop what I've called a dispositional immobility, a disposition to do what they do only in an academic setting. I think humanities faculty and doctoral students can learn from Shakespeare a good deal about how to mobilize themselves and what they do as well as a lot about how to change the institution of the humanities, especially by following his practice of institution blending. Shakespeare, I will argue, can teach us how to move. Humanities 2016-05-18 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020031 31 2076-0787 2016-05-18 doi: 10.3390/h5020031 Paul Yachnin http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/29 When examining the history of fairy tale iconography in advertising, folklore scholar Donald Haase's fairy tale encyclopedia compared the Pied Piper of Hamelin to a symbol of advertising who could "play his pipe ever so sweetly and the consumers following him without resisting his charming and manipulative music." In contrast, a 2012 episode of Mad Men, advertising luminary Don Draper shoots down a shoe commercial pitch featuring Cinderella, calling the idea "cliché". The temptation for advertisers to rely on fairy tale figures and iconography continues today and many ignore Don's aversion for cliché because it still gets the job done. However, there are some ads featuring fairy tales which avoid cliché and are truly innovative for their time. I'll examine how, and for whom, these fairy tale figures have been adapted decade by decade in order to examine popular culture's commercialized and hypnotic relationship with fairy tales in the most direct format available: television commercials. Humanities 2016-05-06 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020029 29 2076-0787 2016-05-06 doi: 10.3390/h5020029 Preston Wittwer http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/28 (1) As a long time writer, I always found, even before I began to publish, that my work was difficult to categorise, even while categories seemed essential for publication, reception and visibility. (2) In this personal essay, I apply the notion of the transcultural to a short writing [auto]biography. The methodology adopted for this purpose is a form of autoethnography: "a form of self-reflection and writing that explores the researcher's personal experience and connects this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings"1 to explore how my immigrant background and transcultural lived experience is reflected in my creative writing, and to give an account of how my literary output has been placed in various but always restrictive pre-existing categories. I am also encouraged by Mikhail Epstein's proposed "scriptorics", the study of the one who writes Each section of the essay is divided into two: the first sections provide a succinct version of the issues in a developing writer's life, framed by the need for the practice and production to "belong" somewhere; the second sections take them to a posited "Transcultural Space" where the work seems more authentically to have originated and in which it seems to be more perceptively read. (3) The result is not so much a conventional academic article as a fiction writer's reflection on her work in the embrace of an inclusive and meaning-making realm. Humanities 2016-05-05 5 2 Essay 10.3390/h5020028 28 2076-0787 2016-05-05 doi: 10.3390/h5020028 Inez Baranay http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/27 Artists figure fairly frequently in novelle, so it is not unreasonable to suppose that they may have taken more than a passing interest in the genre. Although much scholarly effort has been dedicated to the task of exploring how Horace's adage "ut pictura poësis" affected the course of the visual arts during the Italian Renaissance and vast scholarly effort has been assigned to the study of Boccaccio's literary efforts (much more so than the efforts of his successors), relatively little effort has been spent on the dauntingly interdisciplinary task of estimating how the development of prose literary imagination may have affected habits of perception and may also have augmented the project of integrating quotidian observations into pictorial compositions. In contrast to these issues of "realism", the essay also addresses questions of how the literary conventions of novelle, although they may have been created in deliberate defiance of current social norms, may eventually have helped to shift those norms. More specifically, the gender norms of the novelle offer intriguing precedents for characterizations that we find in the visual arts, from Botticelli to Leonardo to Michelangelo, ones that rarely match what we know of societal expectations of the day. The argument, though necessarily speculative, is addressed as much to the question of how readers and viewers might have had their thinking shaped by their combined aesthetic experiences as by the more traditional question of identifying artists' sources. Did theorizing about style, or simply thinking about what made for vividness or impressiveness, shift readily between the verbal and the visual, and perhaps more easily then than now? Can we create a history of art that seeks evidence from the whole literary record rather than consistently prioritizing poetry and the "poetic"? Humanities 2016-05-05 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020027 27 2076-0787 2016-05-05 doi: 10.3390/h5020027 Patricia Emison http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/26 It is in Risorgimento Italy that there is an incessant quest for a definition of what it means to be Italian amongst a reality of economic paucity and clear social divisiveness. During this tenuous yet crucial epoch, there is a cohesive attempt to define Italian taste with an ideological terminology previously absent from sensorial and aesthetic discourse. A fundamental purveyor of this novel approach is the self-defined "poligamo delle scienze," Paolo Mantegazza. To the plurality of roles attributed to the medic (anthropologist, pathologist, senator, writer, etc.), there is one yet to be explored—Mantegazza as didactic gastronome. In the attempt to combat what he considers the anti-hygienic conditions plaguing the nation, the medic inaugurates a pedagogic process that would ideally lead to the formation of the Italian citizen. With the goal of creating a stronger and more capable Italian populace, the author goes to great lengths to provide guidelines for maximizing nourishment through the humblest of foods. Ultimately, Mantegazza's pedagogic gourmandism is integral in the propagation of a social model of comportment that defines the Positivist framework of biological and nationalistic renewal and to a new vision of taste. Humanities 2016-05-04 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020026 26 2076-0787 2016-05-04 doi: 10.3390/h5020026 Daniele De Feo http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/25 I begin by introducing the standoff between the transculturalist aim of moving beyond cultural inheritances, and the worry that this project is itself a product of cultural inheritances. I argue that this is rooted in concerns about the meaning of life, and in particular, the prospect of nihilism. I then distinguish two diametrically opposed humanistic responses to nihilism, post-Nietzschean rejections of objective truth, and the moral objectivism favoured by some analytic philosophers, claiming that both attempt, in different ways, to break down the distinction between description and evaluation. I argue that the evaluative sense of a "meaningful life" favoured by moral objectivists cannot track objective meaningfulness in human lives, and that there are manifest dangers to treating social meaning judgements as a secular substitute for the meaning of life. I then conclude that the problems of the post-Nietzscheans and moral objectivists can be avoided, and the transculturalist standoff alleviated, if we recognise that nihilism is descriptive, and maintain a principled distinction between description and evaluation. Humanities 2016-04-26 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020025 25 2076-0787 2016-04-26 doi: 10.3390/h5020025 James Tartaglia http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/24 The marriage of literature and science might not be possible strictly speaking, but a marriage of humanities with philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, ecology, and social studies, for instance, might well work, as a close analysis of some medieval narratives will illustrate. This paper intends to demonstrate once again what the humanities could truly mean, insofar as the discussion will not only lay bare textual elements or philological concerns, but it will also indicate how much relevant literature helps us to address crucial questions of religious, ethical, social, moral, and philosophical kinds, building powerful bridges between the past and the present. In order to test this premise even in extreme situations, here a number of medieval texts will be introduced and analyzed as to their timeless message and hence their extremely important function of creating meaning for readers/listeners both from the Middle Ages and today. Humanities 2016-04-22 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020024 24 2076-0787 2016-04-22 doi: 10.3390/h5020024 Albrecht Classen http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/23 International popular culture continues to remediate and perpetuate the link between food and ideas of Italian identity. A range of analytical approaches have become concerned with food and drink in Italian culture: the importance of food industries in patterns of Italian migration and Italy's economy, the recurrence of the Mediterranean diet in public health debates, the emotive value attached to foodways, and their role in constructing subjectivity are all recognized as fertile terrain for research. Nevertheless, a lack of audience-reception research on the social and cultural uses of both food and food-related media has been identified. Responding to this inviting opening, the following article is based on data collated between October 2014 and January 2016 as part of the ongoing "Transnationalizing Modern Languages" project. Focusing on London as a particular axis of both contemporary and historic Italian migration to England and the UK, my research utilizes selected small-medium food enterprises in the UK capital, and the personal narratives of migration they form part of, to reflect simultaneously upon the contemporary appeal of foodways read as Italian in Britain and the practical implications of meanings ascribed to foodways by subjects identifying as Italian. Positing the intersection between public and private represented in these food narratives as one of the most productive sites for reflection upon more general social development and experience, I offer a critical reading of "Sud Italia", a mobile pizzeria in which the contradictory dynamics of subjectivity/objectivity and mobility/fixity are symbolised. Drawing on participatory ethnography, the article seeks to contribute further understanding to the multifaceted concepts of "belonging", "home" and "heritage" by grounding their relevance in practical, day-to-day realities. Humanities 2016-04-21 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020023 23 2076-0787 2016-04-21 doi: 10.3390/h5020023 Georgia Wall http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/22 Food and cooking techniques play key roles in preserving cultural sustainability and individual identity. Everything people eat becomes a part of not only their biological being, but also represents and identifies a part of a community's sociocultural fabric. Using the loom approach, a new model to heritage interpretation, this paper intends to examine the sociocultural and economic dynamics during the preparation, cooking, and eating of mansaf—Jordan's national dish—throughout its history. To reconstruct the heritage of mansaf and present it as a complete picture, both the tangible heritage, such as cooking equipment, whether modern or traditional, and the intangible heritage, such as the cooking techniques and associated traditions and activities, were analyzed. Mansaf has changed greatly over the past decades; however, living memory does not extend much beyond the 1940s within the informants to further examine mansaf's changes in the case study of the village of Hartha, Northwest Jordan. Mansaf still remains an important signifier of major occasions, a tie to local heritage, and part of local and national identities. Humanities 2016-04-21 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020022 22 2076-0787 2016-04-21 doi: 10.3390/h5020022 Ammar Alobiedat http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/21 Jean Watson's Theory of Human Caring and the caring moment are based in part in the concepts of transpersonal psychology. This paper will provide a historical background around transpersonal psychology and how it relates to Watson's human caring moment. The purpose of explicating these humanities-based concepts is to support nurses and nurse educators in creating a deeper understanding of Watson's caring-healing moment as a time-space continuum, where the nurse's caring supports a mutually created environment for healing. The article provides useful background information, as well as outlining simple steps to revising nursing curricula so that they become supportive of nursing students' growth as transpersonal-caring beings. Humanities 2016-04-16 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020021 21 2076-0787 2016-04-16 doi: 10.3390/h5020021 Carey Clark http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/20 In the magical girl anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, middle-school girls receive the power and responsibility to fight witches in exchange for making a wish. The series has connections to many different genres and narrative traditions within the realm of folkloristics. However, the folkloric genre most relevant to the ethos and aesthetics of Madoka is that of the fairy tale. Drawing on Bill Ellis's concept of "fairy-telling" and scholarship on new media composition, in this paper we seek to investigate labyrinths as acts of embodied composing—not lairs of evil or destruction but rather creative material memory work that negotiates grief and despair. Many of the series' action sequences unfold in "labyrinths," the magical spaces controlled by witches. By composing a labyrinth, witches can simultaneously reshape their environment and create a powerful statement about identity through personalized performance in narrative spaces that they control. In particular, we argue that both the frameworks of "fairy tale" and "new media" give us useful analytical resources for beginning to make sense of the intricately complex phenomenon of Madoka's labyrinths. Humanities 2016-04-06 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020020 20 2076-0787 2016-04-06 doi: 10.3390/h5020020 Sara Cleto Erin Bahl http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/19 This article revisits, reviews and revises the much cited and magisterial description of successive historical death mentalities from the Middle Ages to modern society as proposed several decades ago by French historian Philippe Ariès. The article first outlines Ariès's position starting out with the medieval "tamed death," then moves on to point to several inherent limitations in his history-writing, before suggesting a revision and update of it. Whereas Ariès ended his history-writing with modern "forbidden death," the author suggests that contemporary death mentality in Western society rather be labelled "spectacular death" in which death, dying and mourning have increasingly become spectacles. Moreover, the author proposes that what is currently happening in contemporary Western society can be interpreted as an expression of a "partial re-reversal" of "forbidden death" to some of the characteristic features of previous historical death mentalities, which—coupled with contemporary scientific and technological possibilities—creates several paradoxical tendencies making death linger uneasily between liberation and denial as well as between autonomy and control. Humanities 2016-03-29 5 2 Article 10.3390/h5020019 19 2076-0787 2016-03-29 doi: 10.3390/h5020019 Michael Jacobsen http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/18 This paper critically reviews assertions that near-death and out-of-body experiences (ND/OBE) offer proof of extra-corporeal existence when the brain is supposedly "dead". While this field has almost moved away from mere anecdotal recording, the current trend is focussed on demonstrating existence without functional brains. These endeavours have fallen far short of anticipated results—that cardiac patients would report on strategically-placed markers around acute resuscitation units. Two problems arise: a failure to produce corroborative empirical evidence for extra-corporeal cognition (a) when the brain is "dead", (or "clinically dead", so-called) and (b) how the memory required for recall could paradoxically be set down at that critical time-point. The view advanced here is that ND/OBE occur as subjects' states are returning to complete resumption of conscious-awareness and which, from several published accounts, is particularly abrupt but which nevertheless accounts perfectly for memory—and recall. Similar transcendental adventures accompanying returns to conscious-awareness occur with other preceding states of reduced consciousness. Most recollections are intensely geo-physical, anthropomorphic, banal and illogical: their dream-like fantasy provides nothing revelatory about life without a brain, or importantly, about other supposed cosmic contexts. Additionally, it is proposed that since prevalence rates are so extremely low (<1% globally), the few subjects undergoing ND/OBE may have predisposed brains, genetically, structurally or resulting from previous psychological stress. In a somewhat similar vein to post-traumatic stress disorder, subjects with predisposed brains exhibit markedly changed post-experiential phenotypes, so that the ND/OBE itself could be viewed as a transient, accompanying epiphenomenon. Humanities 2016-03-28 5 2 Concept Paper 10.3390/h5020018 18 2076-0787 2016-03-28 doi: 10.3390/h5020018 Michael Marsh http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/17 What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? The pull of engineering on every aspect of our lives, the impact of machines on how we represent ourselves, the influence of computers on our understanding of free-will, individuality and species, and the effect of microorganisms on our behaviour are so great that one cannot discourse on humanity and humanities without considering their entanglement with technology and with the multiple new dimensions of reality that it opens up. The future of humanities should take into account AI, bacteria, software, viruses (both organic and inorganic), hardware, machine language, parasites, big data, monitors, pixels, swarms systems and the Internet. One cannot think of humanity and humanities as distinct from technology anymore. Humanities 2016-03-01 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010017 17 2076-0787 2016-03-01 doi: 10.3390/h5010017 Ollivier Dyens http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/16 The role of the nurse has become considerably more demanding in the past twenty years through increased complexity of patient care within a rapidly changing health care environment. Research is needed to expand the pedagogical literacy of nurse educators and address the needs of students entering a complex health care system. Narrative Pedagogy was identified as a research-based nursing pedagogy and has been enabled in nursing education for over a decade. The Concernful Practices emerged from Narrative Pedagogy research, which helped identify what teachers, students, and clinicians considered meaningful in teaching. Listening was one of the Concernful Practices and became the focus of this study. This hermeneutic phenomenological study provided new understandings of the experience of listening in nursing education. The research question addressed "How do nurse educators who enable Narrative Pedagogy experience Listening: knowing and connecting?" One of the themes, Listening as Dialogue, emerged from the study and included ways nurse educators can open and interpret a dialogue, shift the way they think about teaching, and make connections with students. Humanities 2016-02-24 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010016 16 2076-0787 2016-02-24 doi: 10.3390/h5010016 Wendy Bowles http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/15 Every place has a story. Hotels, however, have thousands of stories that are multilayered, interwoven, and imbricated. Their puzzled fictions resemble films in that they both overlap unrelated tales, phenomena, and characters within a short temporal fragment. Mysteries, secrets, love, cabal, fraud, hate, cheating, shows, fun, prostitution, gambling, falls, and so on—all of these conditions and emotions pertain to hotels, as well as films. Working under this framework, then, this paper aims to approach hotels as a temporal experience which goes beyond space for the purpose of both analyzing hotel deaths as a symbolic case of urban living and in order to interpret films as a type of testimony regarding social change. Beyond all of the bright surfaces, hotels represent and reproduce insincerity, insusceptibility, omission, coldness, and distance. Hotels represent gaps, desolateness, devastation, homelessness, and timelessness. Humanities 2016-02-06 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010015 15 2076-0787 2016-02-06 doi: 10.3390/h5010015 Sertaç Demir http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/14 The health of Indigenous girls in Canada is often framed and addressed through health programs and interventions that are based on Western values systems that serve to further colonize girls' health and their bodies. One of the risks of the recent attention paid to Indigenous girls' health needs broadly and to trauma more specifically, is the danger of contributing to the "shock and awe" campaign against Indigenous girls who have experienced violence, and of creating further stigma and marginalization for girls. A focus on trauma as an individual health problem prevents and obscures a more critical, historically-situated focus on social problems under a (neo)colonial state that contribute to violence. There is a need for programs that provide safer spaces for girls that address their intersecting and emergent health needs and do not further the discourse and construction of Indigenous girls as at-risk. The author will present her work with Indigenous girls in an Indigenous girls group that resists medical and individual definitions of trauma, and instead utilizes an Indigenous intersectional framework that assists girls in understanding and locating their coping as responses to larger structural and systemic forces including racism, poverty, sexism, colonialism and a culture of violence enacted through state policy and practices. Humanities 2016-02-05 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010014 14 2076-0787 2016-02-05 doi: 10.3390/h5010014 Natalie Clark http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/13 Based on his experiences during a journey through mainland Southeast Asia in 1923, Somerset Maugham wrote a book of colonial travel entitled The Gentleman in the Parlour. As the work of one of the most popular writers of the twentieth century, Maugham's travelogue both expressed and helped to shape contemporary thinking about Southeast Asia and Western imperialism. Focusing especially on his representations of Burma and Cambodia, an analysis is presented of Maugham's book in the light of postcolonial scholarship, especially the theoretical insights developed under the inspiration of Edward Said's Orientalism. Despite its pretensions to be apolitical, Maugham's travel book is shown to be a repository of Western colonial ideas and attitudes, integrally involved in the circulation of the prevailing European discourse of high imperialism. As such, it is a valuable resource for historians and other scholars who wish to understand the way that discourse worked at the level of popular literature. Humanities 2016-02-05 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010013 13 2076-0787 2016-02-05 doi: 10.3390/h5010013 Christine Doran http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/11 This essay surveys the state of the humanities at this critical time. What will be the role of the humanities at the end of this century and beyond? I discuss the "crisis of the humanities" by examining the current challenges of globalization, economic shifts, and extensive budget cuts. I also discuss the social and political divisions that contribute to a crisis within the humanities. Since the culture wars that began in the 1960's, the content, scope, and focus of the humanities have changed dramatically, and this has impacted how the humanities are perceived and valued by the general public. The second half of the essay makes the case for the vital importance of the humanities. I argue that the fate of the humanities is inseparable from the future of human beings. I highlight the current problems of war, environmental degradation, and mass surveillance that must be managed before they overwhelm and derail the potential for dramatic progress. Following recent scholarship and research trends, I explain how technological advancements will lead to the most significant evolutionary changes to the human being in aeons. Through technologies such as bionics, transgenesis, robotics, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence, Homo sapiens might be enabled to transcend its former limits and usher in an era of transhumanism. The relevant question is: What do we want to be? I argue that enhancement technologies will make their beneficiaries more robotic and less human, and explain why we must treasure the advantages of our distinctly human capacities and resist the prospect of empowering ourselves to become automatons. My underlying thesis is that developing an understanding of the most insightful ideas and cultivating an appreciation for the greatest creative works that humankind has produced will be crucial for maintaining our humanity. The humanities thus make a unique and indispensable contribution to defining what and who we want our descendants to be. Humanities 2016-02-04 5 1 Essay 10.3390/h5010011 11 2076-0787 2016-02-04 doi: 10.3390/h5010011 Don Habibi http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/12 The dramatic expansion of Taiwan universities/colleges from about 100 to 160 from the late 1980s has encountered problems due to social and global changes. What should Taiwan universities move toward and how? This research relies on secondary data to explore the issues Taiwan universities currently face—a low birth rate and global competition. The decreasing number of incoming students will result in a lower registration rate and less tuition revenue, which will make some universities struggle to survive. Hence, government policies, proposed by the Ministry of Education, have been implemented to assist Taiwan universities to adjust to external changes. The Innovative Transformation Policy, adopted in 2015, consists of strategies for university–industry cooperation, university mergers, university closures, and a re-shaping of the university paradigm. This policy has begun to be implemented and its initial outcome will be continually evaluated. In accordance with the Innovative Transformation Policy, this study encourages Taiwan universities to improve governance, set prominent unique characteristics of development, and enhance global competitiveness. Humanities 2016-02-03 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010012 12 2076-0787 2016-02-03 doi: 10.3390/h5010012 Yu-Ying Kuo http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/10 This personal essay describes what influenced my development as a creative writer, in my childhood and adolescence. It delineates the effect on my imagination of family story-telling and of images—paintings and prints. I grew up in Italy, where I spent the first thirty years of my life. Humanities 2016-01-22 5 1 Essay 10.3390/h5010010 10 2076-0787 2016-01-22 doi: 10.3390/h5010010 Barbara Alfano http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/9 The editors of Humanities would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2015. [...] Humanities 2016-01-22 5 1 Editorial 10.3390/h5010009 9 2076-0787 2016-01-22 doi: 10.3390/h5010009 Humanities Editorial Office http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/8 In antiquity, the relationship between "music", "poetry", and "language" was very different from the way they relate to each other today, for back then each of these mediums was endowed with a distinct, independent signifying code expressing a semiosis all its own. However, these separate "semiospheres" nonetheless never ceased growing towards and into one another. This is so because music and "melic" poetry were believed to have the capacity to denote something ordinary language could not denote but could not do without, namely "etymonic truth". As a result, the users of ordinary language were obsessed with divining the "hyponoia" poets encoded in music and chant. Above all, they wanted this hyponoia to constitute the signifié of their language. For this reason, the meaning expressed in language was subject to a process in which it was constantly being "deported" from its ordinary acceptations and transported towards meanings encoded in music. However, this "deterritorialization" of ordinary meaning never resulted in a full "reterritorialization" upon the terrain of the truth encoded in music. Musicians and poets would not tolerate it. As far as they were concerned, music and poetry would cease being "truthful" if the semiosis they conveyed and the semiosis conveyed by language were interchangeable. For, again, as a signifying code, prosaic language was sui generis incapable of representing the truth. Hence, the relationship between these three codes consisted of a sort of intersemiotic dynamic equilibrium in which language was continuously evolving towards a non-linguistic expression of meaning which conferred truth upon it and what it means. And yet the music and poetry which were the source of that truth deliberately kept language from consummating the aspiration of accosting the truth they encoded. This paper explores the mechanics of this intersemiotic dynamic equilibrium. Humanities 2016-01-20 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010008 8 2076-0787 2016-01-20 doi: 10.3390/h5010008 Fionn Bennett http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/7 The movement to decolonize trauma theory conceptualizes traumas as rooted in particular contexts. Scholars working within this framework caution against the monumentalism of traumas as singular events and press for the acknowledgment of traumas experienced by minorities and liminal groups. In addition, this body of literature suggests a question of fundamental significance to memory politics: How to make sure that postcolonial attempts to memorialize the traumatic histories of colonialism do not become sources of state subjugation and oppression? Using examples from Eastern Europe, this article analyzes the complexity of memory landscapes in this region and the difficulty of acknowledging traumas of "non-Western" groups on their own terms. Drawing on works by three authors from the region (Ene Kõresaar, Svetlana Aleksievich and Jasmina Husanović), this essay identifies alternative ways of thinking about the nexus of trauma and difference by addressing how complexity and vulnerability can help to transcend competing victimhoods in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Humanities 2016-01-18 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010007 7 2076-0787 2016-01-18 doi: 10.3390/h5010007 Dovile Budryte http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/6 Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida delle nozze d'Emilia (1339–1341?) is an innovative vernacular text in which Teseo (Theseus) and the Scythian Amazons are reinvented as antagonists in a war fought to determine how women are meant to live their lives. Boccaccio's characterization of these figures and their interactions offer an effective counter-narrative to the prevailing ethos that women's inborn proclivities and deficiencies preclude, perforce, their participation in the public arena. In the absence of written criticism, cassone (marriage chest) paintings constitute the quattrocento Nachleben of the text, whose readership comprised a wide swath of the literate populace through the 15th century. I will argue that painters, in conjunction with their patrons and humanist advisors, fashioned Teseida visual narratives that undermined Boccaccio's vision of the potential of women to productively and autonomously engage in the governance of successful societies. Humanities 2016-01-15 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010006 6 2076-0787 2016-01-15 doi: 10.3390/h5010006 Margaret Franklin http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/5 This paper provides an introduction to the Humanities Special Issue on "Deep Mapping". It sets out the rationale for the collection and explores the broad-ranging nature of perspectives and practices that fall within the "undisciplined" interdisciplinary domain of spatial humanities. Sketching a cross-current of ideas that have begun to coalesce around the concept of "deep mapping", the paper argues that rather than attempting to outline a set of defining characteristics and "deep" cartographic features, a more instructive approach is to pay closer attention to the multivalent ways deep mapping is performatively put to work. Casting a critical and reflexive gaze over the developing discourse of deep mapping, it is argued that what deep mapping "is" cannot be reduced to the otherwise a-spatial and a-temporal fixity of the "deep map". In this respect, as an undisciplined survey of this increasing expansive field of study and practice, the paper explores the ways in which deep mapping can engage broader discussion around questions of spatial anthropology. Humanities 2016-01-14 5 1 Editorial 10.3390/h5010005 5 2076-0787 2016-01-14 doi: 10.3390/h5010005 Les Roberts http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/4 Since the second half of the 20th century, the life sciences have become one of the dominant explanatory models for almost every aspect of human life. Hand in hand with biomedical developments and technologies, the life sciences are constantly shaping and reshaping human lives and changing human biographies in manifold ways. The orientation towards life sciences and biomedicine from the very beginning to the end of human life is driven by the utopian notion that all forms of contingency could be technologically and medically controlled. This paper addresses the interrelatedness of life sciences and human biographies in a field where contingency and risk become essential and existential parts of lived experience: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). On the one hand, this diagnostic entity is related to (neuro-)biological underpinnings of (a lack of) psychic resilience as well as to those of contemporary pharmacotherapy. On the other hand, PTSD is also understood as based on a traumatic life event, which can be accessed through and addressed by talk therapy, particularly narrative exposure therapy (NET). We argue that a novel focus on concepts of narrativity will generate pathways for an interdisciplinary understanding of PTSD by linking biological underpinnings from neurobiological findings, to brain metabolism and pharmacotherapy via the interface of psychotherapy and the specific role of narratives to the lived experience of patients and vice versa. The goal of our study is to demonstrate why therapies such as psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy are successful in controlling the disease burden of PTSD to some extent, but the restitutio ad integrum, the reestablishing of the bodily and psychic integrity remains out of reach for most PTSD patients. As a test case, we discuss the complementary methods of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and the established procedures of talk therapy (NET) to show how a methodological focus on narratives enhanced by notions of narrativity from the humanities grants access to therapeutically meaningful, enriched notions of PTSD. We focus on TCM because trauma therapy has long since become an intrinsic part of this complementary medical concept which are more widely accessible and accepted than other complementary medical practices, such as Ayurveda or homeopathy. Looking at the individual that suffers from a traumatic life event and also acknowledging the contemporary concepts of resilience, transdisciplinary concepts become particularly relevant for the medical treatment of and social reintegration of patients such as war veterans. We emphasize the necessity of a new dialogue between the life sciences and the humanities by introducing the concepts of corporeality, capability and temporality as boundary objects crucial for both the biomedical explanation, the narrative understanding and the lived experience of trauma. Humanities 2015-12-30 5 1 Concept Paper 10.3390/h5010004 4 2076-0787 2015-12-30 doi: 10.3390/h5010004 Norbert Paul Mita Banerjee Thomas Efferth http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/3 A devotion to music in Chinese classical texts is worth noticing. Early Chinese thinkers saw music as a significant part of human experience and a core practice for philosophy. While Confucian endorsement of ritual and music has been discussed in the field, Daoist understanding of music was hardly explored. This paper will make a careful reading of the Xiánchí 咸池 music story in the Zhuangzi, one of the most interesting, but least noticed texts, and reconstruct a Zhuangzian perspective from it. While sounds had been regarded as mere building blocks of music and thus depreciated in the hierarchical understanding of music in the mainstream discourse of early China, sound is the alpha and omega of music in the Zhuangzian perspective. All kinds of sounds, both human and natural, are invited into musical discourse. Sound is regarded as the real source of our being moved by music, and therefore, musical consummation is depicted as embodiment through sound. Humanities 2015-12-28 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010003 3 2076-0787 2015-12-28 doi: 10.3390/h5010003 So Park http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/2 The arrival and rapid spread of digital media can help the humanities better discern general patterns in human societies and cultures, and single out instances or moments which need an in-depth analysis. However, the process of digitization also poses certain threats to the humanities: it introduces new and possibly distorting filters between ourselves and our object of research, it can make us blind to the social, political and cultural situatedness of the sources, and it can cause us to forget that certain aspects of human life are simply too complex to be digitally understood. Briefly elaborating on the case of parliamentary irony in Belgian history, I try to demonstrate the need to combine "flat" digital searches with multilayered hermeneutic approaches based on traditional philological research. Humanities 2015-12-25 5 1 Article 10.3390/h5010002 2 2076-0787 2015-12-25 doi: 10.3390/h5010002 Marnix Beyen http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/1/1 Pre-publication peer-review forms the basis of how scholarly journals assess whether an article is suitable for publication. [...] Humanities 2015-12-23 5 1 Editorial 10.3390/h5010001 1 2076-0787 2015-12-23 doi: 10.3390/h5010001 Martyn Rittman Albrecht Classen http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/977 Human preferences, practices and actions are the main drivers of global environmental change in the 21st century. It is crucial, therefore, to promote pro-environmental behavior. In order to accomplish this, we need to move beyond rational choice and behavioral decision theories, which do not capture the full range of commitments, assumptions, imaginaries, and belief systems that drive those preferences and actions. Humanities disciplines, such as philosophy, history, religious studies, gender studies, language and literary studies, psychology, and pedagogics do offer deep insights into human motivations, values, and choices. We believe that the expertise of such fields for transforming human preferences, practices and actions is ignored at society's peril. We propose an agenda that focuses global humanities research on stepping up to the challenges of planetary environmental change. We have established Environmental Humanities Observatories through which to observe, explore and enact the crucial ways humanistic disciplines may help us understand and engage with global ecological problems by providing insight into human action, perceptions, and motivation. We present this Manifesto as an invitation for others to join the "Humanities for the Environment" open global consortium of humanities observatories as we continue to develop a shared research agenda. Humanities 2015-12-21 4 4 Article 10.3390/h4040977 977 992 2076-0787 2015-12-21 doi: 10.3390/h4040977 Poul Holm Joni Adamson Hsinya Huang Lars Kirdan Sally Kitch Iain McCalman James Ogude Marisa Ronan Dominic Scott Kirill Thompson Charles Travis Kirsten Wehner http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/958 Nursing presence, although it involves action at times, is a humanitarian quality of relating to a patient that is known to have powerful and positive implications for both nurse and patient. However, this phenomenon has not been well understood. Three theories, drawn from the work of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, served as the boundaries for both data collection and analysis. The theories were narrative identity, play and solicitude. This study follows a critical hermeneutic approach to field research and data analysis. Literature regarding nursing presence is reviewed and discussed, and in-depth conversations with eleven participants are recorded. Examining the phenomenon of nursing presence through the hermeneutic lenses of narrative identity, play and solicitude has elucidated the role of ethical orientation, creativity and connection with the human experience through exploration of self and other. This more nuanced and complex understanding adds depth to the conversation and offers new possibilities to the effort to encourage and support presence in nursing practice. Humanities 2015-12-09 4 4 Article 10.3390/h4040958 958 976 2076-0787 2015-12-09 doi: 10.3390/h4040958 Alicia Bright http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/938 Based in oral traditions and song cycles, contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry is full of allusions to the environment. Not merely a physical backdrop for human activities, the ancient Aboriginal landscape is a nexus of ecological, spiritual, material, and more-than-human overlays—and one which is increasingly compromised by modern technological impositions. In literary studies, while Aboriginal poetry has become the subject of critical interest, few studies have foregrounded the interconnections between environment and technology. Instead, scholarship tends to focus on the socio-political and cultural dimensions of the writing. How have contemporary Australian Aboriginal poets responded to the impacts of environmental change and degradation? How have poets addressed the effects of modern technology in ancestral environments, or country? This article will develop an ecocritical and technology-focused perspective on contemporary Aboriginal poetry through an analysis of the writings of three significant literary-activists: Jack Davis (1917–2000), Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993), and Lionel Fogarty (born 1958). Davis, Noonuccal, and Fogarty strive poetically to draw critical attention to the particular impacts of late modernist technologies on Aboriginal people and country. In developing a critique of invasive technologies that adversely affect the environment and culture, their poetry also invokes the Aboriginal technologies that sustained (and, in places, still sustain) people in reciprocal relation to country. Humanities 2015-12-09 4 4 Article 10.3390/h4040938 938 957 2076-0787 2015-12-09 doi: 10.3390/h4040938 John Ryan http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/924 The present article aims at highlighting the connections that can be drawn between Wittgenstein and Marx(ism) from a historical point of view, through developing a synoptic account of the available relevant historical and biographical data. Starting with a discussion of Wittgenstein's relation to the Italian Marxist economist Piero Sraffa, it then moves to a presentation of Wittgenstein's broader circle of Marxist friends. Our account continues and concludes by examining and comparing Wittgenstein's stance towards the Two World Wars and Stalin's U.S.S.R. The approach developed in this article not only challenges the widespread image of Wittgenstein as a philosopher indifferent to issues of a political nature. It also traces Marxism as a significant aspect of the context in which Wittgenstein's philosophy, and particularly its later phase, was developed. Humanities 2015-12-04 4 4 Article 10.3390/h4040924 924 937 2076-0787 2015-12-04 doi: 10.3390/h4040924 Dimitris Gakis http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/905 This round-table, which featured literary critics Professor Stef Craps, Professor Bryan Cheyette and Dr. Alan Gibbs, was recorded as part of the "Decolonizing Trauma Studies" symposium organized by Dr. Sonya Andermahr and Dr. Larissa Allwork at The School of The Arts, The University of Northampton (15 May 2015). Convened a week after the University of Zaragoza's "Memory Frictions" conference, where Cheyette, Gibbs, Andermahr and Allwork gave papers, the Northampton symposium and round-table was sponsored by The School of The Arts to coincide with Andermahr's guest editorship of this special issue of Humanities. Craps, Cheyette and Gibbs addressed five questions during the round-table. Namely, does trauma studies suffer from a form of psychological universalism? Do you see any signs that trauma studies is becoming more decolonized? What are the challenges of a decolonized trauma studies for disciplinary thinking? How does a decolonized trauma studies relate to pedagogical ethics? Finally, where do you see the future of the field? While this edited transcript retains a certain informality of style, it offers a significant contribution to knowledge by capturing a unique exchange between three key thinkers in contemporary trauma studies, providing a timely analysis of the impact of postcolonial theory on trauma studies, the state of the field and its future possibilities. Issues addressed include the problematic scholarly tendency to universalize a western model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); the question of the centrality of the Holocaust in trauma studies and the implications of this for the study of atrocities globally; the vexed issues posed by the representation of perpetrators; as well as how the basic tenets of western cultural trauma theory, until recently so often characterized by a Caruth-inspired focus on belatedness and afterwardness, are being rethought, both in response to developments in the US and in answer to the challenge to 'decolonize' trauma studies. Humanities 2015-11-30 4 4 Meeting Report 10.3390/h4040905 905 923 2076-0787 2015-11-30 doi: 10.3390/h4040905 Stef Craps Bryan Cheyette Alan Gibbs Sonya Andermahr Larissa Allwork http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/885 The so-called "crisis of the humanities" can be understood in terms of an asymmetry between the natural and social sciences on the one hand and the humanities on the other. While the sciences approach topics related to human experience in quantificational or experimental terms, the humanities turn to ancient, canonical, and other texts in the search for truths about human experience. As each approach has its own unique limitations, it is desirable to overcome or remove the asymmetry between them. The present article seeks to do just that by advancing and defending the following two claims: (a) that humanity is ubiquitous wherever language is used; and (b) that anything that can be experienced by humans is in need of an interpretation. Two arguments are presented in support of these claims. The first argument concerns the nature of questions, which are one of the fundamental marks or manifestations of human language. All questions are ultimately attempts to find meanings or interpretations of what is presented. As such, in questioning phenomena, one seeks to transcend the negative space or oppression of imposed structures; in doing so, one reveals one's humanity. Second, all phenomena are textual in nature: that which astrophysicists find in distant galaxies or which cognitive neuroscientists find in the structures of the human brain are no less in need of interpretation than the dialogues of Plato or the poems of Homer. Texts are ubiquitous. The implications of these two arguments are identified and discussed in this article. In particular, it is argued that the ubiquity of humanity and textuality points to a view of human nature that is neither individualistic nor collectivist but rather integrational in suggesting that the realization of oneself is inseparable from the realization of others. Humanities 2015-11-27 4 4 Article 10.3390/h4040885 885 904 2076-0787 2015-11-27 doi: 10.3390/h4040885 Daihyun Chung http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/861 This paper will present research that explored the experiences of couple and family therapists learning about and using an evidence-based practice (EBP). Using a phenomenological approach called Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, three themes emerged from the participants' experiences: the supports and challenges while learning an EBP, the experience of shame while learning, and the embodiment of a therapy practice. This paper will focus on the theme of embodiment. Research participants' experiences will be reviewed and further explored using Merleau-Ponty's notion of embodiment and Gendlin's (1978) more internally focused understanding of how awareness of a felt sense is experienced as a move "inside of a person". As researchers, educators, administrators, policy makers, and counsellors struggle with what works best with which populations and when, how best to allocate resources, how best to educate and support counsellors, and the complexity of doing research in real-life settings, this research has the potential to contribute to those varied dialogues. Humanities 2015-11-27 4 4 Article 10.3390/h4040861 861 884 2076-0787 2015-11-27 doi: 10.3390/h4040861 Robert Allan Virginia Eatough Micahel Ungar http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/834 This article starts by engaging in a dialogue with the most relevant postcolonial emendations to trauma theory, addressed to both its aporetic and its therapeutic trends, and it goes on to reflect on the state of the decolonizing trauma theory project, critically examining the motivations behind it as well as some of the problems it still encounters, like the risk of objectification and revictimization of postcolonial peoples, the blurring of their trauma particularities, and the appropriation of their experience. Then, it proposes an alternative understanding of postcolonial trauma theory as a contact zone where trauma criticism and the postcolony are interrelated and mutually transformed, and where unequal power relations are also attended to. Acknowledging the postcolony as a site of theory production rather than the object of external definition, it proceeds to analyze Edwidge Danticat's short story cycle Claire of the Sea Light: its strategic representation of grief—which she achieves through the short story cycle structure and overall in-betweenness and ambivalence in symbols and characterization—puts Haitians on the critical map of trauma, fighting invisibility and oblivion, but it simultaneously resists an appropriation of Haitian experience by rejecting any monolithic view on Haiti and refusing to fit into a predetermined template. Humanities 2015-11-20 4 4 Article 10.3390/h4040834 834 860 2076-0787 2015-11-20 doi: 10.3390/h4040834 Silvia Martínez-Falquina http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/818 After interrogating the (non-)referential status of the Holocaust for Asians, this essay examines Frank Ephraim's Escape to Manila and Juergen Goldhagen's Manila Memories. In particular, cross-traumatic affiliation is studied between two groups of people: the Manilaner and the Manileños: the former were Europeans who fled Nazism and sought refuge in Manila; the latter were Filipino residents of Manila who, during the Second World War, found themselves under Japanese Occupation. A closer reading of the memoirs, however, also reveals latent orientalism in the portrayal of Filipinos. This essay thus echoes present postcolonial concerns in recent Trauma Studies research which ask the place of serial colonisations, martial law, climate catastrophes and the sacred in Trauma theory. Humanities 2015-11-19 4 4 Article 10.3390/h4040818 818 833 2076-0787 2015-11-19 doi: 10.3390/h4040818 Jocelyn Martin http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/797 This article looks at how English critics, biographers, and poets once sported with the image, idea, and biomaterial of John Milton's hair. Their play is contextualized within the materialist and instrumental values that were instituted in eighteenth-century literary criticism and biography and that remain central to the humanities today. It was the philologists, antiquarians, bibliophiles, biographers, and anecdotalists of the long eighteenth century who linked the value of cultural objects to their work in the cultural world. The objects sheltered from that world—aesthetic ones in the modern sense—were meanwhile endowed with qualities purloined from an otherwise debunked supernatural register. These contradictory values, all object-centered, cultivated skepticism in observers and thus scripted still-privileged affective postures of mourning and melancholia with respect to objects of inquiry. Dynamic entanglement with Milton's hair in eighteenth-century critical writing tells a different story. It teaches us to approach that writing as writing and to value "Milton's hair" as auratic in the communicative sense later displaced by diffident, object-centered models of the aura. Can we define and engage our "material" along the lines of eighteenth-century "entanglement" with Milton's hair? Humanities 2015-11-11 4 4 Article 10.3390/h4040797 797 817 2076-0787 2015-11-11 doi: 10.3390/h4040797 Jayne Lewis