scholarly journals ENTERTAINING THE EMPIRE: THEATRICAL TOURING COMPANIES AND AMATEUR DRAMATICS IN COLONIAL INDIA

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-725 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOBIAS BECKER
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
Racial Hierarchies ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTThis article argues that theatre in colonial India – both in the form of touring companies and amateur dramatics – offered much more than mere entertainment: first, it was an important social space where the British diaspora constituted itself as a community. Secondly, it served as a lifeline to the home country. By watching theatrical performances either brought to them straight from London or which they performed themselves, colonial Britons felt in touch with their homeland. Finally, theatre not only allowed colonial audiences to participate in the metropolitan culture; it inadvertently helped to unify the British empire. Whether living in London, the provinces, or a colonial city, all British subjects consumed the same popular culture, forming in effect one big taste community. Theatre, therefore, lends itself to a discussion of central issues of imperial history, as, for example, the relationship between the metropolitan centre and the imperial periphery, the colonial public sphere, social and racial hierarchies, the perception of the ‘Other’, and processes of cross-cultural exchange and appropriation.

China–India Myths in Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-93
Author(s):  
Gal Gvili
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Ancient India ◽  
China And India ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter analyses the scholarship of prominent May Fourth writer Xu Dishan as gateway for understanding his fiction. A close examination of his engagement with Indian religions and mythology in his fiction constitutes a vision of a China–India literary horizon through a literary device termed as ‘transregional metonymy’: tropes that travelled between China and India through the cultural exchange of myths. The chapter elaborates on this literary device through a close reading of Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’ (1923). The reading shows how a shared China–India figurative domain emerges in the story to offer a new understanding of myths and how they function in modern life. It also suggests that instead of rewriting the past, myths can rewrite the present; instead of using myths to establish a national culture, literature can use myths to imagine a transregional horizon. Focusing on India to think about the nature of storytelling and the relationship between myth and reality, Xu Dishan undid the binary distinction between ancient India as a soul brother and colonial India as a cautionary tale.

Integration through participation: The effects of participating in an English Conversation club on refugee and asylum seeker integration

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aliya Sorgen
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Host Community ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Linguistic Proficiency ◽  
Psychological Integration ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe integration of refugees/asylum seekers is a complex process that is affected by factors such as reasons for fleeing one’s home country, linguistic proficiency, education, housing issues, and reception from the host community. While past research has focused on these issues, there is a lack of attention on the development of practical and psychological integration skills through participation in a social space ofmutual accommodation(Berry 2005). This article fills this gap by analysing the relationship between mutual accommodation and integration in relation to spaces for language acquisition and the resulting impact of participation. This study illustrates, from the migrant perspective, how language acquisition in terms of resettlement not only focuses on linguistic proficiency but also on how such spaces provide a supportive place of refuge and support. This research underscores a deeper discussion of the migrantnew speakerprofile, providing evidence for ways in which to broaden an understanding of this key shift away from previously held notions of thenativeversusnon-nativeindividual. Ethnographic research was conducted in two UK-based conversation clubs. Data analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) Thematic Analysis structure.

Novel and Empire

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markman Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Slave System ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Folk Beliefs ◽  
Oriental Tale ◽  
The Relationship

This essay examines novel’s relation with empire through the relationship between the form of the novel and the ideology of empire. It analyses the themes of colony and cross-cultural global encounters in popular prose subgenres of the eighteenth century, including the robinsonade, imitations of Crusoe’s island adventures, and the oriental tale, free imitations of the Islamic story collection. Although contemporary discourse on the British Empire argued that it was founded on ideas of liberty, commerce, and Christianity, the problem of slavery presented a powerful contradiction and growing controversy. Depictions of slavery in the sentimental novel advertised the asymmetrical violence endemic to the slave system, contributing to the emerging campaign for the abolition of the slave trade and, eventually, the emancipation of the slaves. Nonetheless, Gothic fictions found creative potential in the terrors of slavery and in folk beliefs derived from slave society, such as obeah and the zombie.

Sovereignty, Religion and Law in the British Empire: Raja Rammohan Roy’s Public Hermeneutics in His Times

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-249
Author(s):  
Rahul Govind
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religion And Law ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

Raja Rammohan Roy has been called various things, from the first Indian liberal and a ‘maker of modern India’ to one who could bring about little more than a caricature of promised transformation. That Roy saw himself as a subject of the English King is much less analysed. The following essay takes this self-perception of Roy as a ‘British subject’ as a clue to develop a twofold problematic on the nature of religion and law in Roy’s lifetime, that is, between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. (a) We emphasize the importance of the King of England, and the importance of Kingship in which religion and law cannot be disentangled. This is established through an examination of the institutional arrangements in relationship to Kingship in the British Isles and the subcontinent, a study of S. T. Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State (London: Hurst, Chance and Co., 1830) and John Austin’s Province of Jurisprudence Determined (Delhi: Universal Publishers, 2012), amongst lesser known texts. (b) From an investigation into this religio-political constitution, we will explore the other dimensions opened up in Roy’s self-perception as a subject, that is, the relationship between religion, law and public reason in colonial India. By Roy’s ‘public hermeneutics’, we mean his arguing in the public medium of print as much as for a public (the colonial state and the reading public). But we also mean his use of reason in a sustained fashion so as to critique social and legal conditions. His arguments in structural and substantive terms, as we show, allow one to re-think the relationship between religion, law and universality.

THE CHANGING SHAPE OF THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 429-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
TONY BALLANTYNE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Cultural Pattern ◽  
Clear Shift

ABSTRACTThis historiographical review assesses recent studies of the development of the modern British empire. It appraises works that explore the transformation of the empire, its changing cultural pattern, and the forces that radically reshaped the empire during the twentieth century. I argue that within the clear shift towards cultural interpretations of the imperial past, three main areas of analytical concern have taken shape: the importance of information and knowledge in empire building, the centrality of cultural difference within imperial social formations, and the place of imperial networks and patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the operation of the empire. The review suggests that the relationships between the economic and cultural domains of empire require close examination and that historians of empire must remain attentive to the weight and significance of pre-colonial structures and mentalities in moulding the shape of colonial political and cultural terrains.

Sino-Soviet Romance: An Emotional History of Revolutionary Geopolitics

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 853-873
Author(s):  
Elizabeth McGuire
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The Other ◽  
Chinese Revolution ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Emotional Complexity ◽  
The Relationship

This article argues that the relationship between the Russian and Chinese revolutions can be interpreted as a romance, to create an emotional history of elite revolutionary geopolitics. Tracing the stories of two prominent Sino-Soviet couples – President of Taiwan Jiang Jingguo and his wife Faina Vakhreva, and PRC Labor Minister Li Lisan and his wife Elizaveta Kishkina – against a larger backdrop of cultural exchange highlights continuities in a relationship most often described in terms of its ruptures. In the 1920s, when Jiang Jingguo first arrived in the Soviet Union, attitudes toward love and sex in both cultures were shifting, and the Chinese Revolution was celebrated in Moscow, rendering early Chinese experiences there romantic on several levels. The Liza-Li affair, begun in the difficult circumstances of the 1930s, highlights the ways in which the choices of one partner, personal or geopolitical, could come to constrain those of the other, through the 1950s and beyond. Such deeply felt and publicly prominent cross-cultural romances gave China’s relationship with Russia an emotional complexity and cultural depth that were lacking before the advent of twentieth century communism – and have survived its demise.

Of Frames and Cultures - A Cross-Cultural Comparison of TV Newscasts

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 160-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Senokozlieva ◽  
Oliver Fischer ◽  
Gary Bente ◽  
Nicole Krämer
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Comparison ◽  
Explorative Study ◽  
Cross Cultural Comparison ◽  
Tv News ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract. TV news are essentially cultural phenomena. Previous research suggests that the often-overlooked formal and implicit characteristics of newscasts may be systematically related to culture-specific characteristics. Investigating these characteristics by means of a frame-by-frame content analysis is identified as a particularly promising methodological approach. To examine the relationship between culture and selected formal characteristics of newscasts, we present an explorative study that compares material from the USA, the Arab world, and Germany. Results indicate that there are many significant differences, some of which are in line with expectations derived from cultural specifics. Specifically, we argue that the number of persons presented as well as the context in which they are presented can be interpreted as indicators of Individualism/Collectivism. The conclusions underline the validity of the chosen methodological approach, but also demonstrate the need for more comprehensive and theory-driven category schemes.

Imagining the Sudan in British Film, 1925–53

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-354
Author(s):  
Zach Bates
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
The Relationship

Due to its status as a territory under the joint rule of Egypt and Britain, the Sudan occupied an awkward place in the British Empire. Because of this, it has not received much attention from scholars. In theory, it was not a colony, but, in practice, the Sudan was ruled primarily by British administrators and was the site of several developmental schemes, most of which concerned cotton-growing and harnessing the waters of the Nile. It was also the site of popular literature, travelogues and the most well-known of Alexander Korda's empire films. This article focuses on five British films –  Cotton Growing in the Sudan (c.1925), Stark Nature (1930), Stampede (1930), The Four Feathers (1939) and They Planted a Stone (1953) – that take the Sudan as their subject. It argues that each of these films shows an evolving and related discourse of the region that embraced several motifs: cooperation as the foundation of the relationship between the Sudanese and the British; Sudanese peoples in conflict with a sometimes hostile landscape and environment that the British could ‘tame’; and the British being in the Sudan in order to improve it and its people before leaving them to self-government. However, some of the films, especially The Four Feathers, subtly questioned and subverted the British presence in the Sudan and engaged with a number of the political questions not overtly mentioned in documentaries. The article, therefore, argues for a nuanced and complex picture of representations of the Sudan in British film from 1925 to 1953.

Flesh Searches in China

Asian Survey ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Chinese State ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the relationship between netizens and the Chinese Communist Party by investigating examples of “flesh searches” targeting corrupt officials. Case studies link the initiative of netizens and the reaction of the Chinese state to the pattern of management of social space in contemporary China.

Two Gambling Women

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Tzu-Hui Chen
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Immigrant Population ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mail Order ◽  
Foreign Brides ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Relationship

This narrative aims to explore the meaning and lived experiences of marriage that a unique immigrant population—“foreign brides” in Taiwan—possesses. This convergence narrative illustrates the dynamics and complexity of mail-order marriage and women's perseverance in a cross-cultural context. The relationship between marriage, race, and migration is analyzed. This narrative is comprised of and intertwined by two story lines. One is the story of two “foreign brides” in Taiwan. The other is my story about my cross-cultural relationship. All the dialogues are generated by 25 interviews of “foreign brides” in Taiwan and my personal experience.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document