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4 On waves of passion: London 1860 L ondon was the fountainhead of international statistics. Adolphe Quetelet enjoyed visiting the British capital. Early in his career he had discovered that many British thinkers shared his vision of statistics. He had a hand in the establishment of the Statistical Section (Section F) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Statistical Society of London. In 1851 he chose the Great Exhibition of London as the stage for launching the European statistical congress. He expected the British to be very
This article traces how the queer Black writer James Baldwin’s transnational palate and experiences influenced the ways he wrote about Black domestic spaces in the late twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, while Black feminist cooks and writers like Edna Lewis, Jessica B. Harris, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor developed new theories of soul food in relation to the Black American community and broader American cuisine, Baldwin incorporated these philosophies and transnational tastes into his lifestyle and works. He traveled and worked around Europe, settling in places like Paris, Istanbul, and Saint-Paul de Vence for years at a time. In Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent his last years, he set up his own welcome table, at which he hosted internationally renowned guests and shared his love of cuisine. Inevitably, Baldwin’s passion for cooking and hosting meals became a large, though scholarly neglected, component of his novels and essays. In his novels Another Country, which he finished in Istanbul and published in 1962, and Just Above My Head, which he finished in Saint-Paul de Vence and published in 1979, Baldwin’s depictions of food and Black kitchens take a queer turn. Instead of lingering on traditional Black family structures, these texts specifically present new formulations of intimate home life and reimagine relationships between food, kitchens, race, and sex in the late twentieth century.
6 Epilogue: in the beginning was song And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. (John 1.5) We have (rather deliberately) said very little about the subject of music, as this is not obviously a part of Rousseau’s social philosophy. Yet music was – though scholars have often forgotten this1 – Rousseau’s main passion, and this passion spilled over into his political writings in more ways than one. Rousseau, the musician and note-copier, was an accidental philosopher. Had he not seen the prize question from the Academy in Dijon on
, this opened a space for defendants to make claims about their state of mind. In Zurich, claims about ‘diminished intent’ seem to have increased in the seventeenth century. 4 In eighteenth-century English courts, the language of mental excuses increased from the 1730s and 1740s onward. 5 Similarly, many suspects in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Southern Netherlands professed that they had some kind of ‘true’ or at least ‘regular’ self that could be ‘displaced’ by something else – by drunkenness or passion, for instance, or by more incisive events such
populace in order to clear the way for new and better ones: Revolutions are, for the political body they shake, what medicines are for the impaired human body whose harmony they must restore. In both cases, the first effect is a disorder, the first sensation pain. 1 Petit thereby claimed that the ‘shock of all passions’ which had
therefore, to address the ways in which the passions, humours and senses merge within the complex physiology of the human body. To understand ourselves and our own sensory engagement with the world is one justification for a cultural history of the senses. But we may ask ourselves why this book and others like it (as there are more studies on the senses in early modern England on the way) are particularly important and why they are important at the moment. In October 2011, Globe Education launched a series of lectures, staged readings and conferences on Shakespeare and
3 Personal perspectives A Call: The Tale of Two Passions, was published in 1910, and declares its interest in the plurality of passion in its title. A splintered image of the protagonist emerges early on: Grimshaw’s father was English, his mother Greek; orphaned at 3, he was adopted by relations who also died; Greek Orthodox until public-school age, he assumed the mantle of the Church of England on entering Winchester; when older, close friendships with women confuse further an inability to decide which of them he desires – and whether he can legitimately
had to do with the potential spouses’ family relationship relative to each other and with the question of where the line should be drawn between acceptable family relationships and prohibited ones. Views on love and passion Ideas about love and passion in society have varied over time, in ways that have affected how incestuous relationships have been perceived and dealt with. In earlier times, love was an ambiguous concept. Conjugal love was described as a positive energy that strengthened the bond between spouses, whereas
of language. It comes as no surprise that the writing of the writer’s vocation in the novel L’Ecrivaillon ou l’enfance de l’écriture is intermingled with the writing of body parts, focusing on the writer’s hands, the veins and the passion and pain flowing through the long apprenticeship of the literary profession.26 The stigmata are shown in the ‘poignets tellement simples, si bleus’ (wrists, so simple, so blue) of the ‘écorché vif ’ (p. ) (writer flayed alive), as well as in the books he wants to write, seen as ‘blue veins’ on the whiteness of church marble (p
passions, cousin relationships occupy a curious space in which the incestuous nature of the bond is at once diminished and heightened by its relative acceptance by both English society and the law. Cousin marriages may be more permissible than other relationships between blood kin because the consanguineal tie, in terms of shared genetic material, is weaker than those between the more taboo incestuous relationships