| 1. |
- Ahmad, Suhail, et al.
(författare)
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Bio-Medical Discourse and Oriental Metanarratives on Pandemics in the Islamicate World from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
- 2024
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Ingår i: Humanities. - : MDPI. - 2076-0787. ; 13:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper examines the writings of European travelers, chaplains, and resident doctors on pandemics in the Mediterranean regions from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Using French comparative literary theory, the article highlights how Muslim communities in Egypt, Turkey, Aleppo, and Mecca were stereotyped based on their belief in predestination, their failure to avoid contamination, and their lack of social distancing during plague outbreaks. This paper argues that travelers were influenced by Renaissance humanism, Ars Apodemia, religious discourses, and texts, such as plague tracts, model town concepts, the book of orders, and tales, and that they essentialized Mediterranean Islamicate societies by depicting contamination motifs supposedly shaped by the absence of contagion theory in prophetic medicines. Regarding plague science, this paper concludes that Christian and Muslim intellectuals had similar approaches until the Black Death and that Arabs were eclectic since the Abbasid period. This paper further maintains that the travelers' approaches fostered chauvinism and the cultural hegemony of the West over the Orient since the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, driven by eschatology, conversion, and power structure narratives.
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| 2. |
- Meyer, Tirza
(författare)
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Ghosts of the Techno-Fix Ocean? A Short History of Periphylla periphylla in the Norwegian Fjords
- 2024
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Ingår i: Humanities. - : MDPI AG. - 2076-0787. ; 13:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In 1980, reports of deep-sea jellyfish blooms in Norwegian fjords led researchers to investigate the problem. The helmet jellyfish, Periphylla periphylla, has since migrated far north into Arctic waters. This paper examines what happened when the jellyfish blooms were noticed in 1980 from a historical and ethnographic perspective. It traces four research projects and business ideas that proposed solutions to the jellyfish problem and asks how they are representative of the ways in which humans meet the challenges of anthropogenic climate change. The paper concludes that the jellyfish problem was met with a “techno-fix” attitude that sought to “turn a problem into a resource”, which eventually leads to what Julia Livingston has termed “self-devouring growth”. In a final outlook, the article asks how we can engage with questions of conservation from a humanities perspective and concludes that the jellyfish story can help us to ask questions about “conservation for whom”.
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| 3. |
- Nilsson Skåve, Åsa, 1970-
(författare)
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"Until It Suddenly Isn't" : Two Novels on Life After a Pandemic Disaster
- 2024
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Ingår i: Humanities. - Basel : MDPI. - 2076-0787. ; 13:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article investigates two recent novels that deal with environmental and pandemic disasters: Severance (2018) by Ling Ma and Under the Blue (2022) by Oana Aristide. The analysis is based on ecocritical and posthumanist perspectives and on a division made by Chakrabarty (Planetary Crises and the Difficulty of Being Modern), in two different understandings of the globe: one connected to the planetary-focused discourse on global warming and the other on human-centered globalization. The clashes of these discourses are highlighted in the novels. They illustrate a process of understanding that humans are not separate from the natural world, through the disease itself and through the sudden need to survive without modern healthcare and all the comfort we are used to being able to buy. The gradual insight of the depicted characters, and perhaps also the readers of the novels, is that we live on a planet of extreme complexity and interdependence.
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