The symbolic meaning of plants, their relevance to religion and the metaphorical provocations in the order of knowledge, culture and political power underline the role of plants as something more than passive objects. Current theoretical and artistic discourses have been seeking access to the world independently of man by focusing on the nonhuman other. The contributors to this volume examine the historical, philosophical and scientific findings that generate this idea. In what way are such perspectives manifest in contemporary art? Do artists develop a particular approach that enables nonhuman life forms like plants, insects or animals to have an impact?

Entangled Objects threatens to dislodge the cornerstone of Western anthropology by rendering permanently problematic the idea of reciprocity. All traffic, and commerce, whether economic or intellectual, between Western anthropologists and the rest of the world, is predicated upon the possibility of establishing reciprocal relations between the West and the indigenous peoples it has colonized for centuries.

Age of Entanglement explores patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. Kris Manjapra traces the intersecting ideas and careers of a diverse collection of individuals from South Asia and Central Europe who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. Moving beyond well-rehearsed critiques of colonialism towards a new critical approach, this study recasts modern intellectual history in terms of the knotted intellectual itineraries of seeming strangers. Collaborations in the sciences, arts, and humanities produced extraordinary meetings of German and Indian minds. Meghnad Saha met Albert Einstein, Stella Kramrisch brought the Bauhaus to Calcutta, and Girindrasekhar Bose began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Rabindranath Tagore traveled to Germany to recruit scholars for a new Indian university, and the actor Himanshu Rai hired director Franz Osten to help establish movie studios in Bombay. These interactions, Manjapra argues, evinced shared responses to the cultural and political hegemony of the British empire. Germans and Indians hoped to find in one another the tools needed to disrupt an Anglocentric world order. As Manjapra demonstrates, transnational intellectual encounters are not inherently progressive. From Orientalism and Aryanism to socialism and scientism, German–Indian entanglements were neither necessarily liberal nor conventionally cosmopolitan, often characterized as much by manipulation as by cooperation. Age of Entanglement underscores the connections between German and Indian intellectual history, revealing the characteristics of a global age when the distance separating Europe and Asia seemed, temporarily, to disappear.

The impulse for the recent transformations in the Arab world came from the Maghreb. Research on the region has been on the rise since, yet much remains to be done when it comes to interdisciplinary comparative research. The Maghreb is a heterogeneous region that deserves thorough investigation. This volume focuses on Entanglements as a cross-field and cross-lingual concept to generate a new approach to the region and its inner interdependencies as well as exchanges with other regions. Eminent researchers conceptualize Entanglements through the description of various thematic fields and actors in motion, addressing culture, politics, social affairs, and economics.

Recent scholarly and popular attempts to define the Enlightenment, account for its diversity, and evaluate its historical significance suffer from a surprising lack of consensus at a time when the social and political challenges of today cry out for a more comprehensive and serviceable understanding of its importance. This book argues that regnant notions of the Enlightenment, the Radical Enlightenment, and the multitude of regional and religious enlightenments proposed by scholars all share an entangled intellectual genealogy rooted in a broader revolutionary "culture of enlightening" that took shape over the long-arc of intellectual history from the waning of the sixteenth-century Reformations to the dawn of the Atlantic Revolutionary era. Generated in competition for a changing readership and forged in dialog and conflict, dynamic and diverse notions of what it meant to be enlightened constituted a broader culture of enlightening from which the more familiar strains of the Enlightenment emerged, often ironically and accidentally, from originally religious impulses and theological questioning. By adapting, for the first time, methodological insights from the scholarship of historical entanglement (l'histoire croisée) to the study of the Enlightenment, this book provides a new interpretation of the European republic of letters from the late 1600s through the 1700s by focusing on the lived experience of the long-neglected Catholic theologian, historian, and contributor to Diderot's Encyclopédie, Abbé Claude Yvon. The ambivalent historical memory of Yvon, as well as the eclectic and global array of his sources and endeavors, Burson argues, can serve as a gauge for evaluating historical transformations in the surprisingly diverse ways in which eighteenth-century individuals spoke about enlightening human reason, religion, and society. Ultimately, Burson provocatively claims that even the most radical fruits of the Enlightenment can be understood as the unintended offspring of a revolution in theology and the cultural history of religious experience.

In addition to being a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and essayist, Langston Hughes was also a globe-trotting cosmopolitan, travel writer, translator, avid international networker, and—perhaps above all—pan-Africanist. In Cultural Entanglements, Shane Graham examines Hughes’s associations with a number of black writers from the Caribbean and Africa, exploring the implications of recognizing these multiple facets of the African American literary icon and of taking a truly transnational approach to his life, work, and influence. Graham isolates and maps Hughes’s cluster of black Atlantic relations and interprets their significance. Moving chronologically through Hughes’s career from the 1920s to the 1960s, he spotlights Jamaican poet and novelist Claude McKay, Haitian novelist and poet Jacques Roumain, French Negritude author Aimé Césaire of Martinique, South African writers Es’kia Mphahlele and Peter Abrahams, and Caribbean American novelist Paule Marshall. Taken collectively, these writers’ intellectual relationships with Hughes and with one another reveal a complex conversation—and sometimes a heated debate—happening globally throughout the twentieth century over what Africa signified and what it meant to be black in the modern world. Graham makes a truly original contribution not only to the study of Langston Hughes and African and Caribbean literatures but also to contemporary debates about cosmopolitanism, the black Atlantic, and transnational cultures.

Investigates how data production and consumption territorialize the physical landscape filtered through Ireland’s role in global communications and, as told by the Irish Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, features an installation that focuses on the materiality of data infrastructure in space. As our everyday lives become increasingly entangled with data technologies, the book addresses the utopian fantasy that surrounds the Cloud, as transcending physical presence or resourcing. By bringing the physical infrastructure around data, and its impact on the environment under the spotlight, it hopes to reframe how we understand data production and highlight the myth that information technologies are hidden and without major material manifestations on the landscape. The context for the book is Ireland which has a significant historical role in the evolution of global communications and data infrastructure. In 1866, the world’s first transatlantic telegraph cable landed on the West coast of Ireland. In 1901, the inventor of the radio Guglielmo Marconi transmitted some of the world’s first wireless radio messages from Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Today, Dublin has overtaken London as the data centre hub of Europe, hosting 25% of all available European server space. And by the year 2027, data centres are forecast to consume a third of Ireland’s total electricity demand. The book aims to raise awareness around the hardware of the global internet and Cloud services, which is interwoven with the Irish landscape—made manifest through the vast constellation of data centres, fibre optic cable networks, and energy grids that have come to populate its cities and suburbs over recent decades. The publication accompanies and supports Entanglement, the Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale by archiving the production of the pavilion filtered through a series of poetic excerpts that describe the form, components, content and furniture that make up the installation. At the same time the book is conceived as more than just a catalog by positioning some of the cultural and spatial implications of data technologies in Ireland within a more universal context through contributions by ANNEX, the team selected to produce the pavilion, as well as invited contributors from the disciplines of Media Theory; Journalism; Computer Science, Geography; History and Architecture.