Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal

https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/issue/feed Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2024-12-11T10:58:07+01:00 Katherine Ludwin (for all inquiries regarding the journal) Katherine.Ludwin@mpft.nhs.uk Open Journal Systems Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal is the humanities and arts journal that publishes scholarship on topics that investigate the critical intersections of the arts and humanities with the aging process and with age across the lifespan. https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/143105 Writing Life, Writing Time, Writing the Mother 2024-01-22T16:26:02+01:00 Margery Vibe Skagen Margery.Skagen@uib.no

This article focuses on Ernaux’s later life memories of a twentieth century daughter-mother relationship, rendered in the light of this era’s historical transformations and its tensions between individual freedom and collective "fate," and between pre- and post 1968 conceptions of a fulfilled life. It refers to Ernaux’s most monumental work of self-writing, Les Années (2008) and this book’s links to what she has previously written in remembrance of her mother. The purpose is to investigate how these works seek to come to terms with, not only the loss of a mother, but also the narrator’s own aging. Ernaux exemplifies the adult daughter-senescent mother relationship in ways that are characteristic for her generation of women and suggestive of general historical changes in human relationships in Western societies since 1968. Can Ernaux’s writing provide, in the terms of Kathleen Woodward, “cultural models of older women as a way of generating alternative futures for ourselves”? Or does it fail to reconciliate the stereotypical binary of female aging as either graceful or awful, conveying tabooed aspects of old age that need to be brought to light, and even more urgently so in a socio-cultural context privileging youthfulness, individualism and uncertain human bonds? Keywords: Annie Ernaux, The Years; aging daughter-mother relationship; filiation narratives; auto-socio-biography; memory and time; autonomy and dependency; social exclusion; abjection and purification.

2024-11-03T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Margery Vibe Skagen https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/150067 Utopian Method 2024-10-05T07:12:54+02:00 Jade Elizabeth French j.e.french@lboro.ac.uk Melanie Lovatt melanie.lovatt1@stir.ac.uk Valerie Wright Valerie.Wright@ed.ac.uk

We analyze reader responses to Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book to suggest the novel offers a platform from which to imagine new, often utopian, thresholds of aging and intergenerational relationships. We suggest the way literature encourages utopian thinking is two-fold, allowing readers to reflect on the current state of the world around them and encouraging them to reimagine new possibilities. The aim of the reading groups was to use the novel to reflect on current age norms – socially, culturally, and politically – and reimagine new social futures relating to intergenerational relationships. In this paper, we discuss the findings from using The Summer Book as a platform to discuss attitudes to aging, time, intergenerational relationships, and age expectations. Participants opened up a number of avenues to reimagine age expectations, categories, and relationships, whilst also relating the fiction to their own experiences, which then often translated into discussions of how age-based stereotypes and intergenerational relationships need to be radically rethought. There were three main themes that we identified from these discussions: 1) countering age-expectations on the intergenerational island, 2) creating counter-narratives through the character of the Grandmother, 3) using the novel’s relational behaviors and practices to imagine better futures for intergenerational relationships.

2024-10-08T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Jade Elizabeth French, Melanie Lovatt, Valerie Wright https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/144726 Camille Pissarro’s Late Self-Portraits and The Mirror Stage of Old Age 2024-09-06T07:04:41+02:00 Shira Gottlieb shira.go@gmail.com

This article analyzes the late self-portraits of French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) in light of Leni Marshall’s argument on the positive potential of misrecognition—the psychological outcome of Kathleen Woodward’s concept of the Mirror Stage of Old Age. Around the age of seventy, Pissarro, predominantly known as a landscape painter, was compelled to abandon working outdoors due to a chronic eye infection. Two of his three selfportraits from this period were executed with the aid of a mirror, depicting the artist in an interior setting with a window revealing an urban landscape. I suggest that Pissarro channels the physical limitations he faced due to age and health into new modes of production and expression, as conveyed in these portraits. Additionally, this article considers Pissarro’s self-portraits within the framework of Old Age Style, proposing that his adaptation to new practices represents a metamorphosis of OAS––not in traditional formalistic terms, but rather in terms of creativity and practice.

2024-11-26T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Shira Gottlieb https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/150834 Special Issue 2024-11-08T16:39:17+01:00 Anita Wohlmann wohlmann@sdu.dk Aagje Swinnen a.swinnen@maastrichtuniversity.nl 2024-11-08T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Anita Wohlmann; Aagje Swinnen https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/151878 Old Age before Modernity. Case Studies and Methodological Perspectives, 500 BC – 1700 AD 2024-12-04T14:04:25+01:00 J. Ludwig Pelzl johannes.pelzl@eui.eu 2024-12-07T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 J. Ludwig Pelzl https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/152154 Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life, 2024-12-11T10:58:07+01:00 Saskia Fürst saskia.furst@ub.edu.bs 2024-12-11T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Saskia Fürst https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/147427 Aging Experiments 2024-07-11T13:35:50+02:00 Scott Herring scott.herring@yale.edu 2024-08-07T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Scott Herring https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/149002 Critical Humanities and Ageing 2024-09-04T15:51:22+02:00 Caitlin Doley caitlindoley@gmail.com 2024-09-05T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Caitlin Doley https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/145285 Mediterranean Timescapes 2024-05-14T13:16:22+02:00 Nina Van der Sype nina.vandersype@ugent.be 2024-07-07T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Nina Van der Sype https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/145935 Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel, by Samira Aghacy 2024-05-29T11:07:14+02:00 Anna Stanton azstanton@psu.edu 2024-06-24T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 João Guimarães https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/144147 Fictions of Dementia 2024-03-17T20:51:40+01:00 Mousana Nightingale Chowdhury mousana2017@gmail.com 2024-07-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Mousana Nightingale Chowdhury https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/144780 Ashton Applewhite in Conversation with Anita Wohlmann 2024-04-15T10:17:40+02:00 Anita Wohlmann wohlmann@sdu.dk Ashton Applewhite ashton@thischairrocks.com

This interview is part of the forum “Too old for the job? The 2024 US American Presidential Elections." It was recorded on April 10, 2024, transcribed with otter.ai, and edited for clarity by Ashton Applewhite. An audio version is available <a href="https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/libraryFiles/downloadPublic/193">here</a>.

2024-04-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Anita Wohlmann; Ashton Applewhite https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/144464 When Does Old Become Too Old? 2024-03-29T10:54:06+01:00 Kathleen Woodward kw1@uw.edu

“For Voters, When Does Old Become Too Old?”: this question heads the February 9, 2024 subscriber-only piece by Nate Cohn in The New York Times referring to the presumptive presidential contest in the U.S. between Joseph Biden and Donald Trump. The answer? “Polling shows it’s a broad concern expressed about President Biden, not just one person’s opinion.” Cohn’s piece, which prompted 1236 comments that very day (they constitute my dataset for this reflection), is only one in an avalanche in the news and on social media in the U.S. and beyond that provides us with a window into attitudes toward aging in general and aging in relation to the American presidency in particular.

2024-04-17T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Kathleen Woodward https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/144508 What “Too Old” Really Means in the COVID Era 2024-04-02T09:48:49+02:00 Margaret Morganroth Gullette mgullette@msn.com 2024-04-19T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Margaret Morganroth Gullette https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/145209 Performing Presidential Age 2024-05-07T20:34:32+02:00 Valerie Barnes Lipscomb vklipscomb@gmail.com

During a February surprise appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, President Joe Biden whipped out his trademark aviator sunglasses and traded quips with Meyers about a supposed conspiracy with Taylor Swift, much to the delight of the younger live audience. The next day, reviews were mixed about whether the president was trying too hard or did in fact manage to look hipper. To look younger. While US presidential nominees have been consciously performing their campaigns for decades, during this cycle, considering age as a performance has been especially prominent. Commentators and critics have specifically addressed the careful staging of persona that is central to presidential politics but is not always acknowledged as such.

2024-05-23T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Anita Wohlmann; Valerie Barnes Lipscomb https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/146460 It’s Not Just About Age Anymore: 2024-06-04T18:10:57+02:00 Kate de Medeiros kate.demedeiros@concordia.ca

The U.S. presidential elections have been the site of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and ageism among other problematic issues. While the 2024 U.S. presidential election continues to be fraught with numerous “isms” and accusations, the focus in this essay is on a new and powerful discrediting tactic: the whisper of cognitive decline. Accusations of cognitive decline not only cast doubt on a politician’s ability to think and act clearly—an unpardonable sin in leadership—but also builds on ageist stereotypes that make such accusations seem credible despite evidence. Ultimately, I argue that because Donald Trump and Joe Biden are wealthy, white, educated men of roughly similar ages, seventy-seven and eighty-one respectively, targeting their cognitive status feeds into social stigmas and fears that are difficult to counter and that, unfortunately, the harm caused by this new level of attack negatively affects older people and people living with neurocognitive disorders.

At age eighty-one, Joe Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. Donald Trump, his predecessor, held the same status during his term in office. When the next chief executive is inaugurated on January 20, 2025, Biden will be eightytwo years old and Trump seventy-eight. Whoever wins will be the oldest president in history. No wonder that age figures prominently in the presidential election campaign of 2024.

2024-06-06T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Jørn Brøndal https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/146878 Geriatric Politics and the American Presidential Election 2024-06-21T11:08:09+02:00 Stephen Katz skatz@trentu.ca W. Andrew Achenbaum skatz@trentu.ca

When Anita Wohlmann and Aagje Swinnen invited me to write a commentary on age and ageism in the upcoming 2024 American presidential election, I was entranced by the idea. As a Canadian, I have watched with fascination the dramas of American elections from the front row of our international border, beginning with the 1960 debates between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon, the first on TV. Both were experienced politicians. Kennedy was a senator and Nixon had been Vice President under Dwight Eisenhower for eight years, thus expected to be debate winner and next President. But TV was not kind to him. Kennedy appeared fit, handsome, charismatic, camera friendly, and most importantly, much younger than Nixon, who was awkward, uncomfortable, hesitant, and sweaty (also recovering from a knee injury). Both were in their forties, Nixon only five years older than Kennedy (see Kraus, 1977).

2024-06-21T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Stephen Katz, W. Andrew Achenbaum https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/147326 Beyond the Impasse 2024-07-04T19:59:30+02:00 Cynthia Port cport@coastal.edu 2024-07-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Cynthia Port https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/147380 Polarizing Uses of Older Age 2024-07-07T20:04:51+02:00 Anita Wohlmann wohlmann@sdu.dk

The Forum in Issue 8 of Age, Culture, Humanities is dedicated to the timely topic of the 2024 US American presidential elections, where the role of older age has loomed over the campaign. We invited distinguished colleagues from the USA, Canada, and Denmark to contribute short comments and reflections from an age studies perspective. Eight of them accepted, despite the short deadline, and their essays were published in instalments from mid-April to mid-July 2024.  In this introduction, I expand on one topic that popped up again and again, namely the polarizing tendencies many observed in the current discourse. I ask:  What is the role of age in the context of polarization?