scholarly journals Redefining the Feminine in Kathakali

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (02) ◽  
pp. 169-186
Author(s):  
Arya Madhavan

In this article Arya Madhavan examines the significance of the female protagonist Asti from the new Kathakali play, A Tale from Magadha (2015), in the four-hundred-year-old patriarchal history of Kathakali. The play is authored by Sadanam Harikumar, a Kathakali playwright and actor, whose contemporary retelling of Hindu myths and epics afford substantial agency to the female characters, compelling radical reimagining of Kathakali’s gender norms and a reconsideration of the significance of female characters, both on the stage and in the text. Asti unsettles the conventional norms of womanhood that have defined and structured the ‘Kathakali woman’ over the last five centuries. Although several new Kathakali plays have been created in recent decades, they seldom include strong female roles, so Harikumar’s plays, and his female characters in particular, deserve a historic place in the Kathakali tradition, whose slowly changing gender norms are here analyzed for the first time. Arya Madhavan is a senior lecturer in the University of Lincoln. She has been developing the research area of women in Asian performance since 2013 and edited Women in Asian Performance: Aesthetics and Politics (Routledge, 2017). She is a performer of Kutiyattam, the oldest Sanskrit theatre form from India, and serves as associate editor for the Indian Theatre Journal.

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


2021 ◽  

In this podcast, we talk to Dr. Melissa Mulraney, Senior Lecturer and co-leader of the Child Mental Health Research Centre at the Institute for Social Neuroscience in Melbourne, Australia, Honorary Research Fellow at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne, and Associate Editor of CAMH.


2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-128
Author(s):  
Kamran Asghar Bokhari

Many scholars have attempted to tackle the question of why democracy has seemingly failed to take root in the Islamic milieu, in general, and the pre dominantlyArab Middle East, in particular, while the rest of the world has witnessed the fall of"pax-authoritaria" especially in the wake of the demercratic revolution triggered by the failure of communism. Some view this resistance to the Third Wave, as being rooted in the Islamic cultural dynamics of the region, whereas others will ascribe it to the level of political development (or the lack thereof). An anthology of essays, Challenges to Democracy in the Middle East furnishes the reader with five historical casestudies that seek to explain the arrested socio politico-economic development of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and the resulting undemercratic political culture that domjnates the overall political landscape of the Middle East. The first composition in this omnibus is "The Crisis of Democracy in Twentieth Century Syria and Lebanon," authored by Bill Harris, senior lecturer of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Haris compares and contrasts the political development of Syria and Lebanon during the French mandate period and under the various regimes since then. He examines how the two competing forms of national­ism, i.e., Lebanonism and Arabism, along with sectarianism, are the main factors that have contributed to the consolidation of one-party rule in Syria, and the I 6-year internecine conflict in Lebanon. After a brief overview of the early history of both countries, the author spends a great deal oftime dis­cussing the relatively more recent political developments: Syria from 1970 onwards, and Lebanon from I 975 to the I 990s. Harris expresses deep pes­simism regarding the future of democratic politics in both countries, which in his opinion is largely due to the deep sectarian cleavages in both states. The next treatise is "Re-inventing Nationalism in B􀀥thi Iraq 1968- 1994: SupraTerritorial Identities and What Lies Below," by Amatzia Baram, professor of Middle East History at the University of Haifa. Baram surveys the Ba·th's second stint in power (1968-present) in lraq. Baram's opinion is that a shift has occurred in B􀀥thist ideology from an integrative Pan-Arab program to an Iraqi-centered Arab nationalism. She attributes this to Saddam's romance with the past, on the one hand, which is the reason for the incorporation of themes from both the ancient Mesopotamian civiliza­tion and the medieval Abbasid caliphal era, and, on the other hand, to Islam and tribalism, that inform the pragmatic concerns of the Ba'thist ideological configuration ...


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Simonne Horwitz

This paper charts the history and debates surrounding the introduction of academic, university-based training of nurses in South Africa. This was a process that was drawn out over five decades, beginning in the late 1930s. For nurses, university training was an important part of a process of professionalization; however, for other members of the medical community, nursing was seen as being linked to women's service work. Using the case-study of the University of the Witwatersrand, one of South Africa's premier universities and the place in the country to offer a university-based nursing program, we argue that an historical understanding of the ways in which nursing education was integrated into the university system tells us a great deal about the professionalization of nursing. This paper also recognises, for the first time, the pioneers of this important process.


Author(s):  
Christian Waldhoff

Abstract„Selfdescription“ Ulrich Stutz. Ulrich Stutz closed his „selfdiscription“ in May 1934 and handed it to the library of the University of Basel with the remark „strictly confidential during the lifetime of the author“. It has been quoted very rarely and is published here for the first time. Ulrich Stutz is not only the founder of the history of canon law, but he was also for a long time its spiritus rector. The „selfdiscription“ is preceded by brief remarks on the life and work of this great scholar.


2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Saunders

Sarah Kane's notorious 1995 debut, Blasted, has been widely though belatedly recognized as a defining example of experiential or ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. However, Graham Saunders here argues that the best playwrights not only innovate in use of language and dramatic form, but also rewrite the classic plays of the past. He believes that too much stress has been placed on the play's radical structure and contemporary sensibility, with the effect of obscuring the influence of Shakespearean tradition on its genesis and content. He clarifies Kane's gradually dawning awareness of the influence of Shakespeare's King Lear on her work and how elements of that tragedy were rewritten in terms of dialogue, recast thematically, and reworked in terms of theatrical image. He sees Blasted as both a response to contemporary reality and an engagement with the history of drama. Graham Saunders is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and author of the first full-length study of Kane's work: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester University Press, 2002). An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium’ conference in Brussels, May 2001. Saunders is currently working on articles about Samuel Beckett and Edward Bond.


2010 ◽  
Vol 663 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Grae Worster

The tenth anniversaries of the deaths of George Batchelor and David Crighton occurred, respectively, in March and April this year. In commemoration and celebration of their lives and works, an afternoon of talks was held in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge on 19 April 2010. Three of those talks are summarised here: Keith Moffatt and Shon Ffowcs-Williams give impressions of the lives and spirits of these two prominent figures in the history of Jfm – George its founder and David its Editor from 1996, having been an associate editor since 1979; John Hinch gives insight into MicroHydrodynamics, a term coined by George to describe the research area that dominated the second half of his career.


1989 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
S A Bwala

The case records of 53 consecutive Nigerian inpatients with stroke in the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, Maiduguri were retrospectively reviewed. The mean age at presentation was 55 years and the male to female ratio was 2.5: 1. The mean duration of symptoms before presentation was 11.1 weeks and the average duration of stay in hospital was 3 weeks. Thirty-three (63%) of the lesions were infarctive and 19 (37%) were haemorrhagic. Only 3 (6%) patients gave a history of prior transient ischaemic attacks (TIAs). Forty-two (79%) patients were hypertensive at presentation out of which 27 (64%) had the hypertension diagnosed for the first time. Four (8%) patients were non-insulin dependent diabetics. There were 11 hospital deaths (21%). Thus hypertension, more than half undiagnosed at admission, was the most common risk factor for stroke in the hospital population studied.


1991 ◽  
Vol 7 (28) ◽  
pp. 303-314
Author(s):  
Margaret Eddershaw

The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow has a long and honourable tradition of serving its neighbourhood and its city, and a directorial team which remarkably combines professional distinction with loyalty to their theatre. In view of its reputation for productions of great visual brilliance, it is surprising to be reminded that, of all British repertory theatres, ‘national’ or regional, it has also the strongest continuous tradition of playing Brecht. Margaret Eddershaw, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, outlines the history of this tradition, which stretches back even beyond the present triumviral management, and proceeds to look at the most recent encounter of ‘the Cits’ with Brecht, Philip Prowse's 1990 production of Mother Courage. This was significant not only for the director's attitude to Brechtian theory, theatrical and political, in the aftermath of the previous year's events in Eastern Europe, but for its inclusion of an international ‘star’, Glenda Jackson, within the Cits' usually close-knit ensemble – its consequences also, arguably, of ‘political’ as well as theatrical interest.


2014 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Alan Morris

Alan G. Morris is Professor in the Department of Human Biology at the University of Cape Town.  A Canadian by birth and upbringing, Professor Morris is also a naturalised South African.  He has an undergraduate degree in Biology from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo Ontario, and a PhD in Anatomy from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.  Professor Morris has published extensively on the origin of anatomically modern humans, and the Later Stone Age, Iron Age and Historic populations of Kenya, Malawi, Namibia and South Africa. In more recent years he has extended his skeletal biology knowledge to the field of forensic anthropology.  Professor Morris’ book ‘Missing and Murdered’ was the winner of the WW Howells Prize for 2013 from the American Anthropological Association.  He has an additional interest in South African history and has published on the history of race classification, the history of physical anthropology in South Africa and on the Canadian involvement in the Anglo-Boer War. Professor Morris was selected as a visiting Fulbright Scholar in 2012-2013 and spent 9 months at The Ohio State University where he worked with American scholars on the ‘Global History of Health’ project.  He is a council member of the Van Riebeeck Society for the Publication of Southern African Historical Documents, an associate editor of the South African Journal of Science and an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.


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