The Violence Within: Canadian Modern Statehood and the Pan-territorial Residential School System Ideal

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Bridget Murray
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
School Violence ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
School System ◽  
Indian Education ◽  
The Political ◽  
Residential School ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Inherent Feature ◽  
Dominant Narratives

AbstractDrawing upon Walter Benjamin's “principle of montage,” this article excavates the political salience of what is referred to herein as the residential school system's “pan-territorial ideal.” The pan-territorial ideal materialized in 1930 with the opening of the Shubenacadie Residential School in the Maritimes, the system's final frontier. It was envisioned, forged and secured, in part, with the overt understanding that so called Indian education could be used as a vector of violence to control Indigenous peoples and their lands. This history clashes with dominant narratives that interpret residential school system violence as the product of mismanagement and neglect. From the early days of Confederation to its almost full legal autonomy from Britain in the early twentieth century and beyond, the Dominion's pursuit of the pan-territorial vision involved the selective harnessing of the residential school system as a field of state-sanctioned force to quell Indigenous resistance. In this, residential school violence cannot be reduced to a deviation from the norm. In crucial respects, it was an inherent feature of the system and Canadian modern statehood itself.

Counterweight: Helen Samuels, Archival Decolonization, and Social License

2021 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 420-444
Author(s):  
Greg Bak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
School System ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Residential School ◽  
Archival Appraisal ◽  
Social License ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT Helen Samuels sought to document institutions in society by adding to official archives counterweights of private records and archivist-created records such as oral histories. In this way, she recognized and sought to mitigate biases that arise from institution-centric application of archival functionalism. Samuels's thinking emerged from a late-twentieth-century consensus on the social license for archival appraisal, which formed around the work of West German archivist Hans Booms, who wrote, “If there is indeed anything or anyone qualified to lend legitimacy to archival appraisal, it is society itself.” Today, archivists require renewed social license in light of acknowledgment that North American governments and institutions sought to open lands for settlement and for exploitation of natural resources by removing or eliminating Indigenous peoples. Can a society be said to “lend legitimacy” to archival appraisal when it has grossly violated human, civil, and Indigenous rights? Starting from the question of how to create an adequate archives of Canada's Indigenous residential school system, the author locates Samuels's work amid other late-twentieth-century work on appraisal and asks how far her thinking can take us in pursuit of archival decolonization.

My Journey

2021 ◽  
pp. 101-136
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Family Life ◽  
School System ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Educational Practices ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Second World

This chapter concerns the larger political, social, and religious setting in which Vera Vasilevskaia and Elena Men lived. It provides a more intimate picture of the political and social framework of the early twentieth century and later Stalinist times in which the descriptions and analyses are intensely personal and evocative. It also illustrates the school system in late tsarist Russia and educational practices, their classmates, and their teachers in the 1920s that had a lifelong influence. The writings of Vera and Elena are transparent about their struggles, presenting a first-hand view of family life, society, and religious quest in Russia during the revolutionary years, the 1920s, the Second World War, and the late 1940s. The chapter notes how Vera and Elena wrote for the “desk drawer” with the intention of keeping a personal record of their experiences with catacomb priests and the community.

scholarly journals The Message of the Carillon: Bells as Instruments of Colonialism in Twentieth-Century Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-25
Author(s):  
Patrick Nickleson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
School System ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Residential School ◽  
Old World ◽  
Harmonious Community ◽  
Do So

Bells and carillon have long symbolized the harmonious community in Euro-American political discourse. In this article, I denaturalize this rhetorical position by taking into account the context of bells and carillon in interwar Canada. I do so by reading William Lyon Mackenzie King’s address at the inauguration of the Parliament Hill carillon within the broader context of Canada’s colonial “Old World” nostalgia for the carillon. I then turn to testimony from survivors of the residential school system to argue that the link between bells, harmony, and community had to be forcefully imposed by settlers to banish any potential discord.

Prophetic Tendencies: Egyptian Translators of the Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-49
Author(s):  
Maya I. Kesrouany
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Adaptation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Muhammad Husayn Haykal

The introduction explores the complex history of literary translation into Arabic from Napoleon’s arrival in Alexandria in 1789 until the 1950s. It considers the formative correlation between the stylistics of translation, the promise of fiction, and the political context as they relate to the ‘modernity’ of the novel form. Focusing on the works of four major translators - Muṣṭafa Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī, Muḥammad al-Sibā‘ī, and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn – it highlights the different translation aesthetics from free adaptation to literal copying and biographical rewriting. It situates these trends in conversation with translation theory to offer a novel way of approaching literary adaptation in colonial situations. The introduction tackles the debate on ‘arabization’ (ta‘rīb) as opposed to pure translation (tarjama) in Egypt and considers how it has informed genealogies of the Arabic novel more broadly. Precisely because translation appears as failed emulation, the chapter addresses how through the playful adaptation of European influence of romanticism and realism, translation stages the emergence of a secular, prophetic narrative voice in the works of the four translators that challenges dominant narratives of Arab literary modernity.

The Trauma of Meter

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Martin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
School System ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
World War ◽  
Shell Shock ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Stability ◽  
First World

This chapter shows how metrical poetry was used as an allegory for order, and examines in particular the metrical cultures of the Craiglockhart War Hospital. Reading early psychological and sociological theories by W. H. R. Rivers and Arthur Brock, it relates how treatments for shell shock included writing metrical poetry. Poems written in or inspired by time in the hospital, as well as the letters and articles published in the hospital magazine The Hydra, show how soldiers turned to writing as therapy. The chapter illustrate how poets reconfigured metrical form as an artificial yet necessary order, one to which their identities as English soldiers and subjects were bound. It recontextualizes First World War poets as the products of Edwardian and Georgian metrical culture and as sites for reinterpreting the nuances of meter's narrative in the early twentieth century. The fact that these poems occupy a middle ground between the aesthetic and the political, bridging the divide that the school system helped foster between “poetry” and “verse,” complicates the stability of each category.

Balancing Reconciliation at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet

2021 ◽  
pp. 298-317
Author(s):  
Bridget Cauthery ◽  
Shawn Newman
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
School System ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Residential School ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Indigenous Representation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Histories

As part of efforts across Canada to address and reconcile the nation-state’s violent colonial histories, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB) premiered Mark Godden’s newest work, Going Home Star: Truth and Reconciliation, in 2014. The work narrates one element of settler colonialism in Canada: the Indian Residential School System. With no Indigenous dancers in the company, and few Indigenous people involved in the production overall, the project has received criticism as yet another non-Indigenous endeavor speaking for Indigenous peoples. In this chapter, we approach Going Home Star in ways that question the appropriateness of contemporary ballet as a medium for negotiating contemporaneous reconciliation between Indigenous and settler peoples in Canada and its checkered history of Indigenous representation.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

Ethnocratic Policies and Indigenous Resistance: Bedounin Arabs and the Israeli Settler State

2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Yiftachel
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Arab Population ◽  
Land Planning ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
Economic Strategies ◽  
Basic Services ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Structural Conflict

This article examines the evolving relations between Israel and the indigenous Bedouin Arab population of the southern Beer-Sheba region. It begins with a discussion of theoretical aspects, highlighting a structural conflict embedded in the ‘ethnocratic’ nature of nation-building typical of ‘pure’ settler states, such as Israel. The place of the Bedouin Arab community is then analyzed, focusing on the impact of one of Israel's central policies—the Judaization of territory. The study traces the various legal, planning and economic strategies of Judaizing contested lands in the study area. These have included the nationalization of Arab land, the pervasive establishment of Jewish settlements, the forced urbanization of the Bedouin Arabs, and the denial of basic services to Bedouins who refuse to urbanize. However, the analysis also finds a growing awareness among indigenous Arabs of their being discriminated against on ethnic grounds, and the emergence of effective resistance. In recent years, this has resulted in a deadlock between state authorities and the indigenous peoples. The case of the Bedouin Arabs demonstrates that the ethnocentric settler state is weakening and fragmenting, partially at least, due to its own expansionist land, planning and development policies.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

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