POVERTY'S PASTS: A CASE FORLONGUE DURÉESTUDIES

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
RHIANNON STEPHENS

AbstractThis article examines how historians have approached the history of poverty in Africa before European colonisation. From an earlier focus on the emergence of class difference to more recent studies on the emergence of poverty, scholars have demonstrated the longevity of economic inequality in Africa. This historiography counters a linear view of the growth of economic inequality and the idea that poverty is a necessary corollary of wealth. The article then considers how historians have studied the meanings of poverty within particular societies to the nineteenth century allowing us to move beyond the inadequacy of quantitative data. It ends by arguing for morelongue duréestudies of poverty in Africa with a focus on the qualitative and on the internal dynamics of particular societies. This will improve our knowledge about how colonial rule changed the experience and reality of poverty for people across the continent and form a basis for comparative studies.

Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel

The introduction shows that the historical parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East during the nineteenth century are an underresearched topic in history, demonstrating that Eurocentric tendencies have led to a separation between historical studies on cities in these two regions. It shows how a comparison between Berlin and Cairo contributes to the study of potential parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East. It is in this context that the history of emotions opens up a new perspective. While older comparative studies have focused on the origins of urban change, the introduction argues that a history of emotions shifts the focus towards the study of how contemporaries negotiated urban change. In this way, the history of emotions helps to overcome Eurocentric pitfalls and offers the possibility of a more global urban history, in which the histories of Berlin and Cairo begin to speak to each other.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?


2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Brown ◽  
Gabriel Paquette

The independence of Latin America from colonial rule in the first decades of the nineteenth century is generally held to have broken the bonds which had linked Europe to the Americas for three centuries. This article contends that a re-examination of the decade of the 1820s reveals the persistence, as well as the reconfiguration, of connections between the Old World and the New after the dissolution of the Iberian Atlantic monarchies. Some of these multi-faceted connections are introduced and explored, most notably commercial ties, intellectual and cultural influences, immigration, financial obligations, the slave trade and its suppression, and diplomatic negotiations. Recognition and appreciation of these connections has important consequences for our understandings of the history of the Atlantic World, the ‘Age of Revolutions’, and Latin American Independence itself.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 191-197
Author(s):  
Nicole Haitzinger

This paper is concerned with resonances of the tragic in twentieth-century central-European dance theatet, to be discussed with particular reference to Pina Bausch's 1975 Orpheus and Eurydice. In my study Resonances of the Tragic: Between Event and Affect (2015), I have argued that in terms of a history of the “longue durée,” the evocation of the tragic occurs in a field of tension between technique, the mise-en-scène, and conceptions, as well as procedures and moments of interruption, of suspension, of disruption and of the indeterminable resulting from ecstatic corporeality. Its structure and function can generate an event in the emphatic sense of the term; consequently, it provides a paradigm for recognizing structures of form and of an aesthetic of reception, structures emerging from individual constellations of the fictional and choric, absence and presence. From the perspective of dance studies, the tragic emanates from the representation of horrendous monstrosity testing the limits of what can be imagined by means of the moved body in all senses of the word; but how exactly does Bausch produce the qualities of the ambivalent, ambiguous, and paradoxical—and, consequently, the tragic?


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAN EDELSTEIN

Antiquity is back. In some respects, it is surprising it ever went away: for the last forty years, Peter Gay's magisterial survey, which connected the “little flock” ofphilosopheswith “pagan” authors, has loomed large over the field of Enlightenment studies. But shortly after its publication, a methodological sea change pulled the field in an opposite direction. Robert Darnton hailed this rising tide of social and cultural history in a 1971 largely critical review of Gay's two volumes. The hyper-longue duréeof Gay's historical panorama, which extended from the age of Virgil to that of Voltaire, was soon to be displaced by more focused inquiries into the history of the book, forms of enlightened sociability, and national difference. Intellectual history, particularly of Gay's epic brand, soon became scarce, despite the lasting presence of Gay's two volumes on bibliographies and course syllabi.


2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD REID

The appearance of these two books marks the continuation of what has been a veritable resurgence of interest in Ugandan history in the last decade or so, facilitated in part by the relative stability provided by Yoweri Museveni's presidency. The renaissance dates to the early and mid-1990s: while scholars of a more senior generation published work which seemed to encapsulate several decades' thinking on the region – Christopher Wrigley and Jean-Pierre Chrétien foremost among them – a new generation turned its attention to Uganda in a manner that had not been possible since the 1960s. A number of doctoral theses produced by European and North American scholars during the 1990s have progressed into monograph form or given rise to flurries of articles. Holly Hanson's book is part of that wave; Gardner Thompson's research was undertaken a little earlier, but the Ph.D. thesis that forms the basis of his book was completed at the beginning of the 1990s. While not all of this work has been concerned with Buganda, it is clear that the kingdom continues to loom large in the scholarly imagination. The centrality of Buganda in Ugandan history is a theme which has linked together much of the work of the last decade, in terms of the nature of the precolonial kingdom, its relationship with the British and its role in the protectorate, and later independent nation, of Uganda. Other critical issues have been raised, too, such as the need to revisit both the precolonial and the colonial pasts, and discontinuity, in terms of understanding the degree to which the colonial ‘moment’ was as disruptive as it was transitory.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 373-383
Author(s):  
Michel Cahen

A certain historiography of Unita, the main Angolan rebellion fighting against the MPLA regime between 1975 and 2002, presents this movement as the natural product of an ethnic (ovimbundu) and religious (American congregationnalism) maturation in the central Highlands of Angola. Didier Péclard, in his book Les incertitudes de la nation en Angola. Aux racines sociales de l’Unita, deconstructs this argument methodically. He does not deny or underplay ethnic and religious factors, but he studies them in the longue durée, thus avoiding any teleological approach. It is not because Unita took root among the umbundu population and gained important support from a section of the American congregationalist church after 1975 that we can say that this destined to happen. Thereafter Didier Péclard offers us a fine historical sociology of politics which offers an excellently textured contribution to the history of Angola and, more specifically yet, of Unita: one of the Angolan liberation movements which remains the least studied.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
Janken Myrdal

This article analyzes all extant agricultural treatises produced before the sixteenth century throughout Eurasia, in order to highlight their importance for the study of agricultural praxis, their significance for constructing a transnational intellectual history of the medieval globe, and their relevance for the development of pragmatic literacies. Such texts emerged both in China and around the Mediterranean before 200 BCE, and somewhat later in India, but few have been preserved and many are difficult to date. Thereafter, the medieval transmission of agricultural knowledge moved via several different regional trajectories and traditions, with Anglo-Norman England becoming a fourth and largely independent birthplace of the agricultural treatise genre during the thirteenth century. The proliferation of these texts becomes evident throughout Eurasia around 1000 CE and increases further from the fourteenth onward. Throughout this longue durée, the contents of these treatises reflect real changes in agricultural technologies, dominant crops, and climate.


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