The Enemy of Morality Is Not Modernity, It’s Me
Genealogies of Modernity
The great English essayist and linguist Samuel Johnson was writing during the Enlightenment – the period some historians identify as the beginning of the modern age. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace worked more than two centuries later, in the “post-modern” style. But these two writers shared a common problem: once modernity fractured society’s sense of shared moral norms, how could you write persuasively about morality? This episode looks at how Johnson and Wallace attempted to solve this problem; what struggles plagued their solutions; and why our modern,...
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A Genealogy of Gun Violence
Genealogies of Modernity
The problem of gun violence is as old as guns themselves. According to historian Priya Satia, America’s present epidemic of gun violence has its roots in the industrial revolution. Satia tells the story of British gun-maker Samuel Galton, Jr., who was called to task by his Quaker community for manufacturing rifles. As a professed pacifist, Galton had to wrestle with the large-scale uses to which his weapons were put. So where do we look for answers about how to regulate guns? Some claim the answer has to lie in the past, in the nation’s founding documents. Others argue that novel...
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A Medieval Anti-Racist
Genealogies of Modernity
What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adorno, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery. His intellectual rebellion spurred slavery’s apologists to more strident and sinister modes of defense – but also laid a lasting Christian groundwork for the fight against racial injustice....
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Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico
Genealogies of Modernity
Race is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread – and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings – featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations set in domestic scenes – to represent these theories as reality. She also shares the strange challenges of curating these paintings in the present, when the paintings’ insidious ideologies have been debunked, but...
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Jamestown and the Myth of the Sovereign Family
Genealogies of Modernity
What is the “traditional American family?” Popular images from the colonial and pioneer past suggest an isolated and self-sufficient nuclear family as the center of American identity and the source of American strength. But the idea of early American self-sufficiency is a myth. Caro Pirri tells the story of the precarious Jamestown settlement and how its residents depended on each other and on Indigenous Americans for survival. Early American history can help us imagine new kinds of interdependent and multi-generational family structures as an antidote to the modern crisis of loneliness...
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What Is Genealogy?
Genealogies of Modernity
Genealogy, in Charles Darwin’s terms, is the study of “descent with modification.” Taken as an analogy for the study of history, genealogy can guard against the potential dangers of claiming modernity. Against the effort to erase the past, genealogy asserts that our ancestry will always be with us. Against the effort to master the past, genealogy reminds us that our descendants have the freedom to create new futures. Sociologist Alondra Nelson tells the story of how African Americans have used DNA-informed genealogy to recover African identity despite slavery’s erasure of family...
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What Is Modernity?
Genealogies of Modernity
We often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes us. Yet people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back to ancient China, when a series of emperors laid claim to modernity in order to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood not as a period on a timeline but as a claim to freedom from the past. By recognizing how “modernity claims” try either to erase the past or to master it for our own...
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Climbing the Mountains of Modernity
Genealogies of Modernity
We all know many stories about how modernity came about. But what does it mean to be “modern?” This episode comes at the question through the test case of mountain climbing and rock climbing. Claims to becoming modern through climbing often point back to Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux in 1336, a climb that made him, according to many historians, “the first modern man.” But Petrarch was by no means the first person to climb Mt. Ventoux, and his own account is, if anything, counter-modern. By surveying evidence of much earlier climbing in Europe and...
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Chris Nygren – Giorgio Vasari and Genealogies in Art History
Genealogies of Modernity
This week’s episode is based on Chris Nygren’s session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with him afterwards. Chris is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. He discusses the genealogy of art written by Giorgio Vasari in 16th century Florence, and the ways that it is taken to be normative in what constitutes ‘modernity’ in art even into the 21st century.
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Eileen Reeves - Galileo and Early Modern Science
Genealogies of Modernity
This week’s episode is based on Eileen Reeves’ session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with her afterwards. Eileen is a professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She speaks to us about the new ground that natural philosophy was broaching in the 17th century, with an emphasis on Galileo, and questions the usefulness of the monolithic concept of ‘The Scientific Revolution’ in telling that story.
info_outlineRace is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread – and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings – featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations set in domestic scenes – to represent these theories as reality. She also shares the strange challenges of curating these paintings in the present, when the paintings’ insidious ideologies have been debunked, but when mixed-race viewers also appreciate images that testify to their presence in the past.
Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Christopher Nygren, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
Featured Scholar: Ilona Katzew, Curator and Head of Latin American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Special thanks: Elise Lonich Ryan, Nayeli Riano, Jennifer Josten