The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
JACOB KRIPP
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
International Order ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
Race War ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Indirect Rule

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.

In International Pursuit of a Caliphate

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Age ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Models ◽  
Muslim Intellectuals ◽  
Post War

This chapter analyzes the vibrant discussions of the early twentieth century over how to revive a caliphate best suited to the post-war era. While some advocated preservation of a traditional caliphal figurehead, many Muslim intellectuals were greatly persuaded by new models of internationalism embracing the nation-state and proposed international caliphal councils and organizations, similar to the League of Nations, or other purportedly spiritual institutions, similar to the refashioned papacy, to preserve the bonds of a transregional religious community. To varying degrees, all the participants in the debate over reviving a twentieth-century caliphate were influenced by an intriguing confluence of both the historic transregionalism of the Muslim community as well as the modern thrust of the new age of global internationalism.

Arab Self-Determination and the Rise of the Modern State

The Hijaz ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 71-98
Author(s):  
Malik R. Dahlan
Keyword(s):  
International Order ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
Paris Peace Conference ◽  
Mandate System

This chapter covers Arab self-determination: as a wide Arab national self-determination movement that engages a worldview with the new international order imposed by WW1. It covers Arab Nationalism: The Great Arab Revolt of 1916; The British Alliance with the Arab Nationalist Movement; The Kingdom of Hijaz declaration of Arab independence; French and German outlook on Arab statehood; The era of the League of Nations; The Mandate System and Its Legal Challenges; Arab Representation in the Paris Peace Conference; San Remo conference and finally; the collapse of the Hijazi–British alliance.

scholarly journals The “Idiot Sticks”: Kwakwaka'wakw Carving and Cultural Resistance in Commercial Art Production on the Northwest Coast

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Jack Davy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Columbia ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Northwest Coast ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Commercial Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art Production ◽  
Historical Accounts

“Idiot sticks” was a derogatory term used to describe miniature totem poles made as souvenirs for white tourists by the artists of the Kwakwaka'wakw people of British Columbia in the early twentieth century. Tracking the post-contact history of the Kwakwaka'wakw using a combination of historical accounts and interviews with contemporary Kwakwaka'wakw artists, this article explores the obscured subversive and satirical nature of these objects as a form of resistance to settler colonialism, and in doing so reconsiders who really could be considered the “idiot” in this exchange.

“Spectacles in Color”: The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 798-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam See
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Down Low ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Universe

The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.

National Languages and Neutral Idioms

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tekla Mecsnóber
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Language Play ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Languages

This essay considers laws governing display and use of languages in locales present to James Joyce—early twentieth-century Trieste, Zurich, and the British Empire—as well as attempts in the 1920s to have certain languages officially recognized by the League of Nations. Tekla Mecsnóber argues that these developments and statutes contribute to the polyglot sensibility of Joyce's work and the implications of political resistance in his language play.

Preference in Paris

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-77
Author(s):  
Christina Luke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Economic Gain ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

The pursuit of knowledge, cultural relations and diplomatic practice are discussed in this chapter in the context of the Treaty of Sèvres, the framing the League of Nations, and the role of early twentieth-century philanthropy and academia. The boundaries of where European and US scholars and businessmen penetrated Anatolia are defined as much by the lure of antiquity, recalling the vision of the Megali Idea, as by political posturing and economic gain embedded in the Wilsonian agenda. I trace the strategic diplomacy of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Learned Societies, and two members of the Princeton Expedition to Sardis, Howard Crosby Butler and William Hepburn Buckler, during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Turkish War of Independence. I argue that colonial networks writ large framed the nineteenth-century Western gaze of entitlement that underwrote duplicitous claims to Anatolian soil between 1919 and 1922.

Picking Battles

2019 ◽  
pp. 216-232
Author(s):  
Rotem Giladi
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
International Society ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Genocide Convention ◽  
Mandate System

Race is one of the more ubiquitous, yet least explored, shifts in twentieth-century international law. From law that was founded in key areas and concepts on racial distinctions, international law quickly came to denounce various manifestations of race theories and racial discrimination. The establishment of the UN reflected a racialized understanding of the international society assumptions of the League of Nations mandate system. The 1948 Universal Declaration addressed entitlement to human rights without distinction of race, yet the Genocide Convention extended protection to racial (identity of) minority groups. In South Africa, race policies provided both the impetus and multiple occasions for formulating claims about a new, de-racialized international law from 1946 onwards. At these struggles against apartheid, binary political confrontations could take form as competing visions of international law, both old and new. This chapter charts the sites of contestation over apartheid and its effects on international law.

scholarly journals Suggestive Therapeutics: New Thought's Relationship to Modern Yoga

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Singleton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Positive Thinking ◽  
Personal Power ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Yoga ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Universe

Modern, transnational yoga in the early twentieth century often defined itself in terms and ideologies borrowed from the popular current of esoteric American Protestantism known as New Thought. Like its forebear Transcendentalism, the New Thought movement was itself receptive to Indian ideas, albeit radically reworked to fit the doctrine of divinised self-hood and cosmic healing that it purveyed. Such adaptations were dialectically reabsorbed by exponents of the yoga renaissance, in a mutually reinforcing, cross-cultural rewriting of the theoretical bases and practices of yoga. New Thought provided a convenient and familiar spiritual lexicon with which to convey the arcane truths of yoga to Europeans, Americans and (increasingly) modern Hindus. The result was a new understanding of yoga in terms of the cult of positive thinking, personal power and affluence, and health through perfect harmony with the universe.

scholarly journals Bronislaw Malinowski, “Indirect Rule,” and the Colonial Politics of Functionalist Anthropology, ca. 1925–1940

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Freddy Foks
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
The Future ◽  
Bronislaw Malinowski ◽  
Bronisław Malinowski ◽  
Indirect Rule ◽  
Colonial Science

AbstractFunctionalist anthropology has a contested legacy. Some scholars have praised functionalism as a contributor to the relativizing of civilizations and cultures while others have criticized it as a colonial science smoothing the interwar workings of indirect rule. This article argues that the colonial politics of functionalist anthropology can only be understood against the background of resurgent settler colonialism in British East Africa. Supporters of indirect rule increasingly relied on a language of scientific administration and welfarist policies associated with the League of Nations to bolster their position against the settlers in the 1920s and 1930s. Functionalism offered them some means of support on this count. The functionalists, meanwhile, co-opted the language of indirect rule to pursue their own intra-disciplinary ends. This combination of interests was pragmatic and flexible rather than ossified and ideological, marked more by what both opposed (settler colonialism) than a shared ideal towards which they aspired (indirect rule). Anthropologists and colonial administrators possessed very different ideas of indirect rule, with strikingly different implications for the future of Britain's African Empire.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document