Questioning territories and identities in the precolonial (nineteenth-century) Lake Kivu region

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-515
Author(s):  
Gillian Mathys

AbstractThroughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority functioned in this region, and therefore they affected identity. The presumption that territories could be constructed in which ‘culture’ and ‘political power’ neatly coincided was influenced by European ideas about space and identity, and privileged the perceptions and territorial claims of those ruling the most powerful centres in the nineteenth century. Thus, this article questions assumptions that continue to influence contemporary views of the Lake Kivu region. It shows that local understandings of the relationship between space and identity differed fundamentally from state-centred perspectives, whether in precolonial centralized states or colonial states.

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.


Romantik ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gry Hedin

During the first part of the nineteenth century, geologists developed a history of the earth so different from that accepted in previous centuries that it encouraged a rethinking of the relationship between man and nature. In this article I will argue that painters followed these changes closely and that some of them let the narratives and images of geology inform the way they depicted nature. In arguing my point, I will focus on images and descriptions of the chalk cliffs on the Danish island of Møn by both geologists and painters. I will follow the scientific advances in geology by referring to the texts and images of Søren Abildgaard, Henrich Steffens, Johan Georg Forchhammer, and Christopher Puggaard, and discuss how their changing theories correspond with paintings of the cliffs by four artists: Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg, Frederik Sødring, Louis Gurlitt, and Peter Christian Skovgaard.


Author(s):  
Nikolas Rose ◽  
Joelle M. Abi-Rached

This chapter focuses on the question of diagnosis of psychiatric disorders and examines the relationship between neuroscience and psychiatry from this perspective. Despite the penetrating gaze of neuroscience, which has opened up the brain to vision in so many ways, psychiatric classification remains superficial. This neuromolecular vision seems incapable of grounding the clinical work of psychiatry in the way that has become routine in other areas of medicine. Despite the conviction of most practitioners that they deal with conditions that have a corporeal seat in the brain of the afflicted individual, psychiatry has failed to establish the bridge that, from the nineteenth century on, underpinned the epistemology of modern clinical medicine—the capacity to link the troubles of the troubled and troubling individuals who are its subjects with the vital anomalies that underpin them.


Tact ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
David Russell

This introductory chapter outlines some basic claims about tact, the subjects it touches upon, and the way this book is framed. In broadest terms: tact privileges encounters over knowledge, and an aesthetic of handling over more abstract conceptualization or observation—whether of people or objects. Tact can be described as a close and haptic attention to the moment, preferring a present ambivalence to a future perfection. Tact lends itself to political uses just where—in its refusal of assertion—it seems most impertinent to practical ends. It is a literary art that draws upon the particular resources of the essay as form; and it provides the grounds for a claim about the relationship between art and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy. Tact has its origins in a particular time and place, the British nineteenth century, but it is also a more generalizable and available style.


Author(s):  
Josephine McDonagh

Conrad’s 1901 short story ‘Amy Foster’ has influenced postcolonial and human rights critics who link it to post-1945 forms of migration. But the story also reveals its indebtedness to the nineteenth-century novel. Published first in a weekly magazine, surrounded by advertisements for colonial commodities and articles about imperial military campaigns, the story draws attention to many of the same issues, and uses the same techniques, as the fictions explored in earlier chapters of the book. That the story also resonates with the conditions of exile faced by refugees in more recent times suggests that the continuing significance of the nineteenth-century novel lies in the way in which it established, and also interrogated, paradigmatic and persistent assumptions about the relationship between human mobility and freedom. While it bears traces of the colonial regimes in which it was produced, another important legacy of the nineteenth-century novel is that it presents us with an analytical frame in which to understand and interrogate the types and patterns of human mobility on which these were built.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-41
Author(s):  
Jessica Collier

This short article explores the relationship between sexual perversion, as defined by Estela Welldon and illustrated by the late architect and author, Martin Frishman, and the work of the nineteenth-century artist, Aubrey Beardsley. It primarily argues that in both the acting out of sexual perversion and the creation of illustrations considered perverse, there is a shared desire to transform the experience of shame into the experience of fame. In the perpetrating of a perverse sexual offence, the assault can be regarded as an uncontrollable compelling urge for immediate action. Despite knowing this action is wrong, the offender cannot resist the impulse. The action of the assault offers immediate relief from unbearable anxiety and ultimately transfigures shame, however briefly, into fame. In the creation of sexualised and scandalous drawings, it is argued that the feeling of shame is sublimated, and the desire for fame is achieved without the destructive and perverse use of violence. It contemplates how Beardsley’s provocative drawings, in particular his illustrations for Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, may have influenced the aesthetic of Frishman’s images explaining perversion as a manic defence against depression. Lastly, it considers the way in which unconscious societal prejudice may lead to confusion between sexual perversion and sexual difference.


PMLA ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 78 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 369-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
George M. Ridenour

Browning is one of Shelley's main heirs in the nineteenth century. As a boy he had worshipped Shelley, who is the most obvious single influence in both Pauline (pub. 1833) and Paracelsus (pub. 1835), his earliest published works. He grew uneasy about the relationship later, but he never stopped being in important ways a poet in the tradition of Shelley. One of the enduring likenesses between them is the way both use their strong sense of the weakness of language in developing the meaning of poems. Shelley uses it most fully in Epipsyckidion, where it serves a vision of the inadequacy of all human satisfactions. His solution is to set up a number of more or less satisfactory terms, calling attention to the fact that no one of them will do, and that they all together “do” only in special ways. This corresponds in language to the tendency to resist restrictions on personal relationships that appears in the Shelleyan “harem.” The solution in both cases can be awkward, but in the case of language, at any rate, the awkwardness is part of the meaning.


Romanticism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Kerri Andrews

In 1845 Harriet Martineau experienced a rapid recovery from a debilitating but mysterious illness that had kept her house-bound for half a decade. She measured her increasing health by the miles she was able to walk, and rapidly found herself capable of considerable distances. Shortly after she moved to the Lake District. Here she set about consolidating her recovery and becoming acquainted with her new home by walking hundreds of miles across the whole area. These walks would be the basis for her guides to the Lakes, first a series of essays published in ‘A Year at Ambleside’ in 1850, then A Complete Guide to the English Lakes in 1855. This essay places Martineau's Lakeland guides in the broader context of nineteenth-century tourism, especially the picturesque guidebooks that recent scholarship has demonstrated both responded to and shaped the way visitors understood the area. Martineau's guides, unusual for being female-authored, offer, I argue, suggestive ways of further developing our understanding of the relationship between genre, place and literary authority during the mid-century Lakeland tourist boom.


Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ellis

Chapter 4 explores the relationship between territoriality and economic development in late-nineteenth-century Egypt. It argues that this period witnessed a raft of projects aimed at what, in the French colonial context, was called mise en valeur—the reclamation of barren, unprofitable land. After surveying a number of such projects undertaken under the auspices of the Egyptian government, the chapter then turns its attention to the Khedive’s own grand development schemes in the Egyptian West. Foremost among these was the Maryut Railway, which he intended to run from the outskirts of Alexandria all the way to the Libyan border. The Maryut Railway functioned as one of several projects through which the Khedive sought to transform the Egyptian West into a more personalized realm of territorial sovereignty. In this regard, the Khedive strove to outdo the British Residency at its own logic of “economism” as a doctrine of ruling legitimacy.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 255-274
Author(s):  
Jane Garnett

When, in 1904–5, Max Weber published his famous essay on The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’, he set out to explore the reasons for an affinity, the existence of which was a commonplace in large parts of Europe and North America. Whilst the literature on the strengths and weaknesses of Weber’s thesis is vast, much less attention has been paid to the contours of the mid to late nineteenth-century debate out of which his interest developed. Yet the neglect of that context has continued to foster over-simplified views of the world with which Weber’s argument originally engaged. His essay forms part of a much more extensive discourse on the role of religious belief in economic life. This paper discusses one particular nexus of that debate: the way in which British Protestants shaped their economic ethic by reference both to their ideas of Catholicism and to perceived oversimplifications of Protestant virtue; and the way in which Catholics in Italy responded to the promotion by secular liberals of what was seen by them as ‘puritan’ economics – that is, the maxims of British classical political economy. To compare the British and Italian contemporary literatures on this theme helps to draw out and to clarify some significant complexities in nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between economics and morality. Underpinning each religious critique in Britain and in Italy was an emphasis on the necessary closeness of the relationship between attitudes to work and attitudes to the rest of life. In each case this implied an assertion at the philosophical level that economics had a metaphysical dimension which needed to be justified, and at a practical level that time spent both working and not working was devotional. Because each was engaging with a popularized model of political economy there were in fact methodological affinities between their respective positions in this context, little though each would often have liked to acknowledge it. These have been obscured by obvious distinctions of cultural and political development which have in turn produced different historiographical traditions. Moreover, the predominance, since the early twentieth century, of a supposedly ‘objective’ model of economics which tacitly denies its metaphysical dimension has meant that nineteenth-century Christian economic thought has been discussed rather as part of the multiple stories of denominational social action than as what it more crucially set out to be: that is, a radical intellectual challenge to the premises of mainstream economic assumptions.


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