Left Liberalism and Race in the Evolution of Colombian Popular National Identity

2000 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. John Green

Though a nation of discordant regionalism and historically weak central institutions, Colombia can paradoxically claim strong currents of popular national identity. It is well known that long centuries of relative economic isolation, coupled with Colombia's largely subsistence internal economy and torturous topography, provided few opportunities to integrate the nation's different regions. Such conditions resulted in fractured regional identities and racial compositions. What few links to the world market Colombia enjoyed before the late nineteenth century came from the mining of gold, with short episodes of tobacco and quinine exportation. Only in the 1880s and later did coffee production finally reorient the nation's economy and introduce new questions of land tenure and social relations. Colombia's fiercely partisan political system evolved during the nineteenth century, therefore, when the country was still overwhelmingly rural, inward-looking, and little more than a collection of semi-autonomous regions. Keith Christie noted that before the 1950s, regionalism was so strong that “Bogotá was essentially just another provincial capital.” As a consequence, the national army in the nineteenth century seldom proved more powerful than the many rebel armies it faced. Indeed, according to the basic Weberian definition of the “state” as the entity that controls a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and evidenced by the fact that the national government still does not control large portions of the country's territory, Colombia's central state structures continue to be glaringly weak at the end of the twentieth century.

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 731-763 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela García Sebastiani ◽  
David Marcilhacy

This article is a study of the national holiday of 12 October, one of the most long-lasting and least transitory of the symbolic components of Spanish nationalism. Transnational in nature, this celebration of Spain’s existence constitutes an exception among similar national holidays, in that it is based upon the country’s role in the Americas and nostalgia for empire as founding elements of national identity. By analysing the changing ways in which this anniversary was celebrated in the course of the twentieth century, in rituals and language, the article highlights both the different imaginaries that were evoked and the roles played by particular actors and institutions in different stages of the construction of the national state and the definition of the regional and local identities of which it is composed. Our analysis of the progress of this celebration, from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present day, as first Fiesta de la Raza, then Día de la Hispanidad and now just ‘National Day’, suggests that its durability, which has been maintained for nearly a century, stems from the notably ductile nature of the myths associated with it. Adaptable to regimes and political challenges of varied kinds, this commemoration melds together the inheritance of liberalism, the national-Catholic tradition and ‘regionalized nationalism’, all of which have been key elements in Spanish political history in the twentieth century.


2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.


Author(s):  
Mae M. Ngai

This chapter examines how the issues of language, labor, and justice intertwined in the murder trial of Ah Jake, a Chinese gold miner in nineteenth-century California. The focus is on the transcript of the Sierra County court's hearing in October 1887, on whether to bring the charge of murder against Ah Jake for the killing of another miner, Wah Chuck. Much of the hearing took place in pidgin, or Chinglish. The chapter first tells the story of Ah Jake and how he came to stand trial for murder before discussing the cross-cultural relations between Anglo, Mexican, and Chinese workers in the gold fields of nineteenth-century California. It suggests that the traces of history that can be gleaned from Ah Jake's trial and pardon, when considered within the frame of transpacific circulations of people, language, and organization, produce new knowledge about social relations in the late-nineteenth-century California interior.


2019 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Marco Pinfari

This chapter explores the use of monster metaphors in framing “terrorist” actors since the French Revolution. While acknowledging that these metaphors effectively present the “terrorist” as an abject “other,” it argues that the main purpose of the use of monster imagery in framing “terrorists” is to highlight their unmanageability, which may be instrumental in securing popular backing for specific types of rule-breaking behavior in counterterrorism. It presents these arguments while reviewing examples drawn from the origins of modern terrorism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include the gorgon Medusa, which appears for instance in relation to Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror,” and the many-headed hydra—one of the oldest metaphors for representing unruly behavior that proves unmanageable. It then introduces another type of unmanageable monster that would become particularly popular to frame terrorists—Frankenstein’s monster—and its use in the late nineteenth century to frame Irish nationalism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Diederik F. Janssen

I am pleased to introduce Boyhood Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1. This issue’s authors unanimously invite an appreciation of the many regional, temporal and contextual inflections of manliness-in-the-making. After all: “Among boys, as among men, there are ‘all sorts and conditions;’ environment moulds them” (Anon. 1890: 147). This merits a bit of intercontinental timetravel. Ecce puer: from Lord Baden-Powell’s and American contemporaries’ middle ages to late nineteenth-century Mexico’s French Third Republic, back to Baden-Powell and into the Great War, and back again to presentday Mexico. In Mexico, on both visits, we are travelling back and forth as well, between the rural and urban experience.


Antiquity ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 83 (320) ◽  
pp. 488-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Murray

Much has been written about the extraordinary impact of Darwinism during the mid- to late nineteenth century, expressed in the scholarship of 'reception studies' (see for example Ellegård 1958; Glick 1988; Numbers & Stenhouse 1999). A significant focus has been on developing an understanding of the impact of Darwinian thinking on just about every aspect of Victorian society, particularly on literature, science, politics and social relations (see for example Beer 1983; Frayter 1997; Lorimer 1997; Moore 1997; Paradis 1997; Browne 2001). A great deal of attention has also been paid (by historians and philosophers of science) into the specifics of how the Darwinian message was disseminated so quickly and so broadly. Here the interest lies in the links between the rhetoric of scientific naturalism and the politics of the day, be it Whig-Liberal or Tory (see for example Clark 1997; Barton 1998, 2004; Cliffordet al.2006). A consequent interest lies in the ways in which science was popularised in Victorian Britain (see especially Lightman 1997, 2007).


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 72-99
Author(s):  
Alice Bellagamba

This study examines the historical linkages that developed between experiences of enslavement, the legacies of slavery, and ideas of freedom before and after abolition in the early twentieth century in an area of southern Senegal known today as the Kolda region. In the Fulfulde language, spoken by the majority of the population, there are several terms and expressions to talk about freedom. The first is ndimaaku, which people tend to equate with nobility and dignity. This is the freedom of the olden days of slavery, when the capacities and qualities of the male or female freeborn stood in stark contrast to those of the slave, and being free meant not having been a slave in the first place. The second term is heɓtaare, i.e., freedom in the sense of tranquility, economic well-being, and a general ease in life and social relations. The expression jeyaal-hoore mun conveys a sense of independence, self-mastery and autonomy, while heɓtugol hoore mun literally means to retrieve one’s head, the center of individual thought and capacity for independent action. Politically, heɓtugol hoore mun stands for the end of colonial rule and the achievement of national independence. Socially, it refers to the emancipation of subordinated groups, like the youth and women, and it describes slaves who freed themselves from their masters. Drawing from archival sources and oral history, this essay attempts to reconstruct the discursive reconfigurations of local ideas of freedom within the context of the political and social changes that affected the Kolda region in the late nineteenth century, the early colonial period, and the years before decolonization. Each historical period had its own actors, dynamics and complexities in which slavery and then legacies of slavery played a role in the definition of freedom and the entitlement of people to its benefits. As demonstrated here, however, liberation paved the way for other forms of subjugation.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEFANIE GÄNGER

This essay explores the journeys of Andean pre-Columbian antiquities across the Americas and the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century along the veins of intellectual networks, between Andean communities and European, North American and Creole collectors and museums. Centred on the studies and collection of José Lucas Caparó Muñíz, the essay focuses on the Creole and European practice of lifting pre-Columbian objects preserved or “still” in use in Andean communities out of their context and taking them to European and Creole private and public collections. Intellectual history has long paid scant attention to the many voices that its authors silenced, disfigured and suppressed. By looking at the journeys of Andean artefacts—at their owners, their brokers and their losers—this erssay traces the systemic hierarchies and the chasms of an expanding modern intellectual culture.


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