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"Primitivism"
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Worlds of Freedom and Unfreedom: The Totalitarian Imaginaries of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Gay Hunter and Antoni Słonimski’s Two Ends of the World
This paper analyses the visions of totalitarian futures in two works written in the interwar period, namely Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Gay Hunter (1934) and Antoni Słonimski’s Two Ends of the World (1937). In both novels, the rise of Fascism, supported by the use of advanced technologies, is shown as directly responsible for the destruction of the known world and for the suppression of individual and collective freedom. While addressing the rise of totalitarianism, both authors also envision humanity’s return to a more primitive state, however, for different purposes. This paper, therefore, explores the intersections as well as differences in the authors’ perceptions of modernity, progress, civilisation and primitivism, as crucial to their extrapolations of humankind’s destiny.
Journal Article
Digital Colonialism, Ecological Crisis and the Limits of Techno-Primitivism
This article examines the intertwined dynamics of ecological crisis, digitalisation, and techno-primitivism through a genealogical and syncretic lens. It argues that the global ecological crisis is rooted not in a generalised “human impact,” but in the historical processes of colonialism and capitalist extractivism that have systematically depleted the Global South while concen-trating power and privilege in the Global North. As digital infrastructures expand, new forms of extractivism – especially data colonialism and digital colonialism – have intensified these global inequalities and externalised environmental harms. The paper critically assesses tech-no-primitivism as a reaction to technological alienation, highlighting its risk of reproducing co-lonial logics of othering by framing “primitive” or non-Western lifeways as static alternatives. Instead of technocratic or primitivist solutions, the study advocates for a transformative re-sponse based on decolonisation and relationality. Drawing on Indigenous, African, and plural philosophical traditions, it proposes centring the knowledge, rights, and agency of those most affected by ecological and digital injustices. The article contends that only by dismantling ex-tractivist, dualistic, and colonial paradigms and fostering reciprocal, relational approaches can more just, sustainable, and inclusive futures be achieved in both ecological and digital do-mains.
Journal Article
Savage tales : the writings of Paul Gauguin
\"An original study of Gauguin's writings, unfolding their central role in his artistic practice and negotiation of colonial identity. As a French artist who lived in Polynesia, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) occupies a crucial position in histories of European primitivism. This is the first book devoted to his wide-ranging literary output, which included journalism, travel writing, art criticism, and essays on aesthetics, religion, and politics. It analyzes his original manuscripts, some of which are richly illustrated, reinstating them as an integral component of his art. The seemingly haphazard, collage-like structure of Gauguin's manuscripts enabled him to evoke the \"primitive\" culture that he celebrated, while rejecting the style of establishment critics. Gauguin's writing was also a strategy for articulating a position on the margins of both the colonial and the indigenous communities in Polynesia; he sought to protect Polynesian society from \"civilization\" but remained implicated in the imperialist culture that he denounced. This critical analysis of his writings significantly enriches our understanding of the complexities of artistic encounters in the French colonial context.\"--Publisher's description.
BOOK
Ignorance is Bliss
This article reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688) as a rewriting of the paradise story of Adam and Eve largely identified with John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) by literary circles. Meeting the true colours of civilization via slavery, the paradisal innocence of Oroonoko and Imoinda grows into a horrible experience that brings their downfall from African paradise, similar to Adam and Eve losing their innocence for the sake of knowledge. Drawing on the principles of primitivism, Behn emblematicizes a black Adam and Eve as representatives of mankind which subverts colonial and patriarchal discourses all in the same breath. In this respect, the article finally asserts that Oroonoko serves as a microcosm of humanity at large which delineates the unremitting war between nature and civilization, and innocence and experience as foregrounded in recent ecological studies, as well as men and women.
Journal Article
Gauguin : portraits
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) broke with accepted conventions and challenged audiences to expand their understanding of visual expression. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in his portraits, a genre he remained engaged with throughout all phases of his career. Bringing together more than 60 of Gauguin's portraits in a wide variety of media that includes painting, works on paper, and sculpture, this handsomely illustrated volume is the first focused investigation of the multifaceted ways the artist approached the subject. Essays by a group of international experts consider how the artist's conception of portraiture evolved as he moved between Brittany and Polynesia. They also examine how Gauguin infused his work with symbolic meaning by taking on different roles like the Christ figure and the savage in his self-portraits and by placing his models in suggestive settings with alluring attributes. This welcome addition to the scholarship on one of the 19th century's most innovative and controversial artists reveals fascinating insights into the crucial role that portraiture played in Gauguin's overall artistic practice.
BOOK
Naive Art
Naive art first became popular at the end of the 19th century.Until that time, this form of expression, created by untrained artists and characterised by spontaneity and simplicity, enjoyed little recognition from professional artists and art critics.
eBook
Laws beyond spacetime
Quantum gravity’s suggestion that spacetime may be emergent and so only exist contingently would force a radical reconception of extant analyses of laws of nature. Humeanism presupposes a spatiotemporal mosaic of particular matters of fact on which laws supervene; primitivism and dispositionalism conceive of the action of primitive laws or of dispositions as a process of ‘nomic production’ unfolding over time. We show how the Humean supervenience basis of non-modal facts and primitivist or dispositionalist accounts of nomic production can be reconceived, avoiding a reliance on fundamental spacetime. However, it is unclear that naturalistic forms of Humeanism can maintain their commitment to there being no necessary connections among distinct entities. Furthermore, non-temporal conceptions of production render this central concept more elusive than before. In fact, the challenges run so deep that the survival of the investigated analyses into the era of quantum gravity is questionable.
Journal Article
Primitive Revolution
In this intriguing study, Jason Dormady examines the ways members of Mexico’s urban and rural poor used religious community to mediate between themselves and the state through the practice of religious primitivism, the belief that they were restoring Christianity—and the practice of Mexican citizenship—to a more pure and essential state. Focusing on three community formation projects—the Iglesia del Reino de Dios en su Plenitud, a Mormon-based polygamist organization; the Iglesia Luz del Mundo, an evangelical Protestant organization; and the Union Nacional Sinarquista, a semi-fascist Mexican Catholic group—Dormady argues that their attempts to establish religious authenticity mirror the efforts of officials to define the meaning of the Mexican Revolution in the era following its military phase. Despite the fact that these communities engaged in counterrevolutionary behavior, the state remained pragmatic and willing to be flexible depending on convergence of the group’s interests with those of the official revolution.
eBook