Emptiness in the Colonial Gaze: Labor, Property, and Nature

2011 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Rich People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Many who study colonialism have noted that the same words used by the colonizer to describe the colonized—“dirty,” “backward,” “uncultured,” and “possessing an improper understanding of the value of work and property”—were often identical to those that rich people used to describe the poor. They were the terms the “modern” used to describe the “not yet modern”; the urban the rural; the educated the uneducated. To use a British example: Those who wrote from positions of power (the urban, educated bourgeoisie) looked down upon, first, the urban poor, then the rural poor, then the Scottish, then the “half-civilized” Natives of North America; then, finally, they squinted from on high upon the Aborigines of Australia. All of these groups fell short of the “norm,” the way the colonizer understood the very height of modern progress. All of these groups were “lacking” something. Thus, in sometimes surprising ways, colonialism merely seems to be another manifestation of the exertion of power over the powerless, a relationship much closer to that of “class” than many expect. This is especially so in a field that produces much of the best work in cultural history, and where anything hinting at old-fashioned “labor history” is gauche (no pun intended). Yet, as the authors of the books under review argue, understandings of labor and property, and the manner with which they are tied to an understanding of nature, are more fundamental to the history of modern colonialism than, for example, race, the latter a category almost always invoked by the colonizer in a completely instrumental fashion.

Definitions of Poverty and the Rise of the Muslim Urban Poor

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bonner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Poor ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Preliminary Attempt ◽  
The Poor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medieval Islam ◽  
The Way

Poverty in medieval Islam is an enormous topic. It is worth considering from a historian's point of view, especially in the light of what has been accomplished by historians of Rome, Byzantium, and the medieval and modern West who have dealt with poverty and the poor. But as always, the sources for Islamic history, especially for the formative early centuries, present difficulties. Here I wish to make a preliminary attempt at dealing with part of this problem. I shall begin by considering an event which represents a turning point in the history of the Muslim poor, or more accurately, in the way poverty and the poor have been represented in modern historical scholarship on medieval Islam. Then I shall suggest a way in which this event may be set in context, and a possible strategy for handling some of the relevant sources. This strategy involves the identification of different, competing ways in which the poor were defined in the first centuries of Islam.

scholarly journals From the Social History of the Reformation (1960-1980) to the Reformation as Communication Process (1990-2000)

HISTOREIN ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Costas Gaganakis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Communication Process ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

<p>This article attempts to chart the “paradigm shift” from social history, dominant until the early 1980s, to new cultural history and the various interpretive trends it engendered in the 1990s and 2000s. The privileged field of investigation is the history of the Protestant Reformation, particularly in its urban aspect. The discussion starts with the publication of Bernd Moeller’s pivotal <em>Reichsstadt und Reformation </em>in the early 1960s – which paved the way for the triumphant invasion of social history in a field previously dominated by ecclesiastical or political historians, and profoundly imbued with doctrinal prerogatives – and culminates in the critical presentation of interpretive trends that appear to dominate in the 2010s, particularly the view and investigation of the Reformation as communication process.</p>

Marketing Gum, Making Meanings: Wrigley in North America, 1890–1930

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Robinson
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Chewing Gum ◽  
Direct Communication ◽  
Marketing Function ◽  
Market Dominance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Sales Forces

This essay is a business and cultural history of Wrigley marketing in North America from the 1890s until the early 1930s. Wrigley relied on wholesalers at a time when consumer goods makers were expanding their sales forces. A prolific advertiser, Wrigley provided favorable terms to retailers carrying chewing gum, countering the view that advertising, by enabling direct communication between manufacturer and consumer, diminished retailer clout in the chain of distribution. Wrigley advertising constructed meanings on multiple levels, discussed here with the theoretical tools of liminality and semiotics. The text of Wrigley ads championed relief for two modern conditions: indigestion and stress. The imagery, mainly that of the liminal “Spearman,” evoked notions of unworldly escape and infantile nostalgia. The ads were richly polysemic. Accordingly, Wrigley's widespread popularity and market dominance by 1930 should be assessed in terms of both marketing function and representational process.

scholarly journals READING TOURS INTO MALAYSIAN NARRATIVES: LOCALES IN THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS AND THE NIGHT TIGER

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Swagata Sinha Roy ◽  
◽  
Kavitha Subaramaniam ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Written Narratives ◽  
Cameron Highlands ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Japanese Gardens ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Way

If one has not read local English novels like The Garden of Evening Mists and The Night Tiger, one would never be able to imagine the wonders of locales depicted in these two books. One of the reasons the authors here want to visit a said destination is because of the way a certain place is pictured in narratives. Tan Twan Eng brings to life the beauty of Japanese gardens in Cameron Highlands, in the backdrop of postWorld War II while Yangsze Choo takes us into several small towns of Kinta Valley in the state of Perak in her beautifully woven tale of the superstitions and beliefs of the local people in Chinese folklore and myth in war torn Malaysia in the 1930s and after. Many of the places mentioned in these two novels should be considered places to visit by tourists local and international. Although these Malaysian novelists live away from Malaysia, they are clearly ambassadors of the Malaysian cultural and regional heritage. In this paper, a few of the places in the novel will be looked at as potential spots for the coming decade. The research questions considered here are i) what can be done to make written narratives the new trend to pave the way for Visit Malaysia destinations? ii) how could these narratives be promoted as guides to the history and culture of Malaysia? The significant destinations and the relevant cultural history of the regions will be discussed in-depth to come to a relevant conclusion.

Linguistic Turns, 1890-1950

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Hirschkop
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Dynamic Change ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

Linguistic Turns rewrites the intellectual and cultural history of early twentieth-century Europe. In chapters that range over the work of Saussure, Russell, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Cassirer, Shklovskii, the Russian Futurists, Ogden and Richards, Sorel, Gramsci, and others, it shows how European intellectuals came to invest ‘language’ with extraordinary force, at a time when the social and political order of the continent was in question. By examining linguistic turns in concert rather than in isolation, Hirschkop changes the way we see them—no longer simply as moves in individual disciplines, but as elements of a larger constellation, held together by common concerns and anxieties. In a series of detailed readings, he reveals how each linguistic turn invested ‘language as such’ with powers that could redeem not just individual disciplines but Europe itself. We see how, in the hands of different writers, language becomes a model of social and political order, a tool guaranteeing analytical precision, a vehicle of dynamic change, a storehouse of mythical collective energy, a template for civil society, and an image of justice itself. By detailing the force linguistic turns attribute to language, and the way in which they contrast ‘language as such’ with actual language, Hirschkop dissects the investments made in words and sentences and the visions behind them. The constellation of linguistic turns is explored as an intellectual event in its own right and as the pursuit of social theory by other means.

The End of Outrage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Breandán Mac Suibhne
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Moral Indignation ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of

In 1856 Patrick McGlynn, a young schoolmaster in west Donegal, Ireland, turned informer on the Molly Maguires, a secret combination that, from the Great Famine of the late 1840s, had been responsible for a wave of violence and intimidation—offences that the state termed ‘outrage’. Here, a history of McGlynn’s informing, backlit by episodes over the previous two decades, sheds light on that wave of outrage, its origins and outcomes, the meaning and the memory of it. More specifically, it illuminates the end of outrage—the shifting objectives of those who engaged in it, and also how, after hunger faded and disease abated, tensions emerged in the Molly Maguires, when one element sought to curtail such activity, while another sought, unsuccessfully, to expand it. And in that contention, when the opportunities of post-Famine society were coming into view, one glimpses the end, or at least an ebbing, of outrage—in the everyday sense of moral indignation—at the fate of the rural poor. But, at heart, The End of Outrage is about contention among neighbours—a family that rose from the ashes of a mode of living, those consumed in the conflagration, and those who lost much but not all. Ultimately, the concern is how the poor themselves came to terms with their loss: how their own outrage at what had been done unto them and their forebears lost malignancy, and ended.

Labour History and the Rural Poor, 1850–1980

Rural History ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alun Howkins
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
The Poor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Labour History ◽  
General Secretary

The history of the labouring poor in the late nineteenth century has been shaped by different and often competing ‘ways of seeing’. Rural labourers occur in histories of social policy as clients or victims of the Poor Law; to the historian of crime they are social bandits or deviants; even to the historian of conventional politics they are the ‘objects’ of reform. All these ways of seeing are important, but I want to concentrate on one in particular, that ‘created’ by the discourse of ‘labour history’. This area laid down, and to a limited extent still continues to define, a structure which concentrates on the formal and quasi-formal organisations of labour. As such it still owes a good deal to the Webb's view of a kind of inevitable and desirable progress from ‘barbarianism’ or non-organisation, through struggle with unjust wages and hard masters, to the organised union with the general secretary and the enlightened employer sitting down together to fix a fair day's work and a fair day's pay.

Here/There, Now/Then, Both/And

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Publication ◽  
Publication History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Reading Edith Wharton’s Old New York through the genre of regionalism reveals the complexity of her cosmopolitanism, and strengthens the case for reading the volume as a unified work. The chapter discusses relevant aspects of the cultural history of the decades in which the four stories are set (such as the associations of tuberculosis in “False Dawn” and the ormolu clock in “The Old Maid”) and reviews the early publication history of each story and the collection. Close readings trace how Wharton connects and contrasts the United States and Europe (especially New York City and Italy) and puts their correspondences with historical eras into play—challenging received notions of progress and the assumption that cultivated taste correlates with integrity. The chapter argues that the way Old New York maps time onto place enables the projection of alternative values within a work that remains publishable and legible in its own moment.

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