The Drama of Colonialism: National Identity and the Construction of theIndian/Otherin Early-19th-Century American Plays

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 87-110
Author(s):  
Zoe Detsi-Diamanti
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
Hierarchical Relationship ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

This essay offers insights into the American nation's persistent denial and deep-seated fears of its own inextricably multicultural identity at the time of the American Revolution and the first half of the 19th century. American imperialism, and perhaps this is true of all imperialisms, was founded upon a stable hierarchical relationship between “civilized” and “savage.” Rhetorically, indigenous tribespeople seem to have fitted Frantz Fanon's description of “the realotherwhom the white man perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the non-self – that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable” (161 n.). On the one hand, the imperialistic drive across the continent in the name of Manifest Destiny, and, on the other, the nation's wishful thinking to constrict the boundaries ofAmerican identityinto a fixed, pure and homogeneous body of values, unleashed the forces of cultural exclusion. In this essay, I try to show how the dominant white society's narcissistic view of itself as an empire operating under the auspices of Divine Providence actually resulted in a series of political acts of nativist violence. I have deliberately chosen to focus on the dramatic literature of the 19th century as a still largely unexplored territory of American literature in order to trace and expose the contradictory representations of the Native American as both historically absent and integral to the nation's conception of its own identity as the “center.”The palefaces are all around us, and they tread in blood. The blaze of our burning wigwams flashes awfully in the darkness of their path. We are destroyed — not vanquished; we are no more, yet we are forever.

Brazilian Colonial Art and the Decolonization of Art History

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Berbara
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Minas Gerais ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Colonial Art ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

There are at least two ways to think about the term “Brazilian colonial art.” It can refer, in general, to the art produced in the region presently known as Brazil between 1500, when navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the coastal territory for the Lusitanian crown, and the country’s independence in the early 19th century. It can also refer, more specifically, to the artistic manifestations produced in certain Brazilian regions—most notably Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—over the 18th century and first decades of the 19th century. In other words, while denotatively it corresponds to the art produced in the period during which Brazil was a colony, it can also work as a metonym valid to indicate particular temporal and geographical arcs within this period. The reasons for its widespread metonymical use are related, on the one hand, to the survival of a relatively large number of art objects and buildings produced in these arcs, but also to a judicative value: at least since the 1920s, artists, historians, and cultivated Brazilians have tended to regard Brazilian colonial art—in its more specific meaning—as the greatest cultural product of those centuries. In this sense, Brazilian colonial art is often identified with the Baroque—to the extent that the terms “Brazilian Baroque,” “Brazilian colonial art,” and even “barroco mineiro” (i.e., Baroque produced in the province of Minas Gerais) may be used interchangeably by some scholars and, even more so, the general public. The study of Brazilian colonial art is currently intermingled with the question of what should be understood as Brazil in the early modern period. Just like some 20th- and 21st-century scholars have been questioning, for example, the term “Italian Renaissance”—given the fact that Italy, as a political entity, did not exist until the 19th century—so have researchers problematized the concept of a unified term to designate the whole artistic production of the territory that would later become the Federative Republic of Brazil between the 16th and 19th centuries. This territory, moreover, encompassed a myriad of very different societies and languages originating from at least three different continents. Should the production, for example, of Tupi or Yoruba artworks be considered colonial? Or should they, instead, be understood as belonging to a distinctive path and independent art historical process? Is it viable to propose a transcultural academic approach without, at the same time, flattening the specificities and richness of the various societies that inhabited the territory? Recent scholarly work has been bringing together traditional historiographical references in Brazilian colonial art and perspectives from so-called “global art history.” These efforts have not only internationalized the field, but also made it multidisciplinary by combining researches in anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, history, and art history.

Religion and Native American Assimilation, Resistance, and Survival

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tammy Heise
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
White American ◽  
Cross Cultural Communication ◽  
Reservation System ◽  
The 19Th Century

Since the early 19th century, the expansion of American empire has constrained Native American autonomy and cultural expression. Native American history simply cannot be told apart from accounts of violent dispossession of land, languages, and lifeways. The pressures exerted on Native Americans by U.S. colonialism were intense and far-reaching: U.S. officials sought no less than the complete eradication of Native cultures through the assimilation policies they devised in the 19th century and beyond. Their efforts, however, never went uncontested. Despite significant asymmetries in political power and material resources, Native Americans developed a range of strategies to ensure the survival of their communities in the complicated colonial context created by American expansion. Their activism meant that U.S. colonialism operated as a dynamic process that facilitated various forms of cultural innovation. With survival as their goal, Native American responses to U.S. colonialism can be mapped on a continuum of resistance in which accommodation and militancy exist as related impulses. Native Americans selectively deployed various expressions of resistance according to the particular political circumstances they faced. This strategy allowed them to facilitate an array of cultural changes intended to preserve their own cultural integrity by mitigating the most damaging effects of white rule. Because religion provided the language and logic of U.S. colonial expansion and Native American resistance, it functioned as a powerful medium for cross-cultural communication and exchange in the American colonial context. Religion facilitated engagement with white (mostly Protestant) Christian missionaries and allowed Native Americans to embrace some aspects of white American culture while rejecting others (even within the context of Native conversion to Christianity). It also allowed for flexible responses to U.S. consolidation policies intended to constrain Native autonomy still further by extending the reservation system, missionary oversight of indigenous communities, and land use in the late 19th century. Tribes that fought consolidation through the armed rebellions of the 1870s could find reasons to accept reservation life once continued military action became untenable. Once settled on reservations, these same tribes could deploy new strategies of resistance to make reservation life more tolerable. In this environment of religious innovation and resistance, new religious movements like the Ghost Dance and peyote religion arose to challenge the legitimacy of U.S. colonialism more directly through their revolutionary combinations of Native and Christian forms.

Nannette and Johann Andreas Streicher - their role in shaping musical life in Vienna in the early 19th century

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (13) ◽  
pp. 49-80
Author(s):  
Dominika Maszczyńska
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Piano Technique ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fruitful Cooperation ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

Nannette and Andreas Streicher were important figures in the musical life of Vienna in the early 19th century. The article introduces their profiles, describes the history of their company, their social, cultural and teaching activity as well as different types of artistic activity. It also explains how keyboard instruments shaped sound and aesthetics-related piano ideals at the turn of the 19th century. The versatile activity of the Streichers, which first of all included instrument building, piano play- ing, composition, teaching and organisation of musical life, made a great contribution to Europe’s cultural heritage. We can notice their numerous connections with outstanding figures of musical life of that time, one that deserves particular attention is their acquaintance with Beethoven. Nannette Streicher was an extremely talented builder who not only coped with the typically masculine craft at that time, but she was also significantly successful in that field. Her instruments were popular, earning general recognition, and the innovative solutions introduced by her also influenced the work of other builders and further development of the piano. Their marriage became the basis for a very fruitful cooperation. Andreas’s numerous connections and his familiarity with the community became an important part of the activity of the company and contributed to its development. Nannette and Andreas shared their passion and passed it on to their son Johann Baptist, who successfully continued their piano making tradition and introduced further improvements, earning a great reputation as well. Social, cultural and teaching activities of the Streichers also played an important role in the musical life of Vienna. Andreas Streicher taught his students the secrets of piano technique and apart from that he shaped their musical and aesthetical awareness. His Kurze Bemerkungen are a valuable source of knowledge also for modern-time performers who can – thanks to this text – learn more about the piano playing aesthetics at the turn of the 19th century as well as a number of universal music and performance topics, which remain accurate to this day. Concerts organised in their house had an educational function too, on the one hand they shaped the tastes of music lovers and supported composers, allowing them to present their latest pieces, and on the other hand they contributed to the promotion of young performers for whom concerts there were often the first step leading towards Vienna’s professional musical stage. The development of the topic of the article in this issue of “Notes Muzyczny” is the trans- lation of the text by Andreas Streicher entitled: Some observations on the playing, tuning and maintenance of pianos built in Vienna by Nannette Streicher nee Stein.

Currents in Dominican American Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Kang ◽  
Silvio Torres-Saillant
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
American Literature ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Civic Belonging ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Dominican American

Dominican American literature comprises the body of creative writing in various genres by US-based authors of Dominican ancestry. Here, “Dominican” refers to people who trace their origins by birth or descent to the Dominican Republic, not to the island of Dominica in the Anglophone West Indies. “Dominican American,” in turn, applies to writers born, raised, and/or socialized in the United States, who received their schooling in general and, in particular, their literary education in this country irrespective of the extent of their involvement in the life of their ancestral homeland. Writing by Dominicans in the United States has a long history. Its existence reaches back at least to the first half of the 19th century, shining forth meaningfully in the 1990s, and showing little sign of abatement in the early decades of the 21st century. While this article concerns itself primarily with Dominican American writing, it seeks to answer predictable questions regarding the rapport of this corpus with the literary production of Dominican Republic-based writers and Dominican authors who have settled in the United States largely as immigrants, using Spanish as their literary language. The article distinguishes Dominican American literature from the writings of people who, beginning in the 19th century, came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as travelers, adventurers, and individual settlers, having left home for political or economic reasons. They could be exiles escaping danger or immigrants seduced by the possibility of enhancing their lives in the proverbial “land of milk and honey.” They tended to regard their time in the United States as temporary and yearned for the change of fortune—political or economic—that would bring them back home. However, having had their return either thwarted or delayed, they would often build families or raise any offspring that came with them to the receiving society. Their children, US-born or brought to the land while young enough to be socialized as US citizens, became Dominican American by default. US-born children of foreign parents who have pursued writing as a vocation have been able to vie for recognition in the American literary mainstream. English speakers by virtue of their US upbringing, they would have their ears attuned to the rhythms of US literature writ large. Dominican American writers in the 21st century have shown their mettle, making themselves heard in the ethnically partitioned map of the country’s letters. As with other Caribbean-descended American writers, they typically inhabit their US citizenship with an awareness of the contested nature of their civic belonging. Family legacies, personal memories, and their own process of self-discovery keep them reminded of the effects of US foreign policy on the land of their forbears. As a result, their texts tend to reflect not only an ethnic American voice, but also a diasporic perspective.

‘POUND FOOLISH PENNY WISE’ SYSTEM: THE ROLE OF ACCOUNTING IN THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE RIVER TYNE, 1800–1850

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susie Brackenborough
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The Body ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Accounting Data ◽  
The Press ◽  
Emancipatory Practice ◽  
The 19Th Century

The relationship between accounting and governmentality, and the increasing statutory regulation of companies by central government during the 19th century have attracted a great deal of attention from accounting historians. Conversely, accounting change within local authorities in this period has attracted far less attention. The paper examines the consequences of the increase in public accountability of local authorities in England and Wales in the context of the Newcastle Corporation, the body responsible for collecting and distributing the town's wealth. During the first half of the 19th century Newcastle Corporation was heavily criticized for neglecting the improvement of the River Tyne. The paper illustrates how the Newcastle Corporation and those opposed to it used accounting as a lobbying tool to promote their interests. Gallhofer and Haslam [2001, p. 29] showed how, in the late 19th century, “radical political activists” used accounting data through the medium of the press as an “emancipatory” practice. In many ways, the case of the improvement of the River Tyne during the early 19th century also reveals the use of accounting as an ‘emancipatory’ force by opposition groups. The paper finds that the Corporation used accounting data to justify inaction and the opposition used accounting data to promote its objectives. These contests resulted in the control of the River Tyne being taken from the Corporation and placed in the hands of a trust in 1850.

scholarly journals Conflicts in Jewish Families of the Russian Empire as a Consequence of the Maidens’ Leaving the Family and their Baptism (According to Archival and Memoir Sources of the Early 19th Century)

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Dmitry Feldman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Family Conflicts ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

Тhe article, based on published and archival sources, is devoted to the problem of Jewish family conflicts occurred in Russia at the beginning of the 19th century due to the daughters’ leaving the family and their baptism. There are non-conflict cases of assimilation of Jewish girls in the article. These girls became representatives of the Russian aristocracy through marriage. It is noted that Jewish family conflicts were the result of more active and close contacts between the Jewesses and non-Jews. They took place during progressive changes in the education and upbringing of children, on the one hand, and the crisis phenomena in the social and economic life of the Russian Jewry at that time, on the other.

scholarly journals Doubtful democrats: Democracy in Britain since 1800

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Saunders
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Political Warfare ◽  
The One ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Governing Institutions ◽  
Court Of Appeal ◽  
Opening Up

Over the ‘long’ 19th century, British politics underwent a quiet revolution: a revolution, not in its governing institutions, but in the ideas that underpinned them. In little more than a century, the idea of ‘democracy’—once a term of abuse, from which even radical politicians sought to disassociate themselves—established itself as the civic religion of British politics: the one authority against which there could be no court of appeal. Like other religions, democracy spawned a variety of sects and denominations, each of which sought to defend it against false democratic creeds: ranging from ‘social democracy’ and ‘industrial democracy’ to ‘Tory democracy’, ‘the property-owning democracy’, and ‘the democracy of the market’. The result, paradoxically, was to establish democracy both as the universal principle of British politics and as its central battlefield: an idea to which all paid tribute, but which seemed permanently under siege. This article explores the peculiar voyage of British democratic thought over the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on its usage as an instrument of political warfare. The first section charts its emergence as the most potent challenge to the dominant narratives of the early-19th century: Whig constitutionalism and ‘reform’. A second section then charts the absorption of democracy into the core narratives of British political thought, while exploring the very different ends to which its authority could be put. A final section identifies three narrative battlegrounds for democracy in the 19th century, opening up fault lines that continue to structure British politics in the present.

Prosody and Meter: Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Glaser
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Black ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

If the 19th century was marked by competing systems, debates about how to write metrical poetry in English and disagreement over how to read and teach that poetry once written, then the 20th century was marked by first an artificial consolidation and subsequent rejection of so-called 19th-century “traditions” by the poets and critics associated with literary modernism and second, a reification of stress on the one hand (via Pound and the increased acceptance of “accentual-syllabic” verse form) and the attempt to measure verse form, in all its valences, scientifically, linguistically, and objectively (though never successfully) on the other. On the literary side, debates about “form” and value cycled throughout the century. On the linguistic side, unseating the false dominance, and abstraction, of stress as the main feature of meter was a main goal. Though overviews, histories, theories, and practical guides presented contrary paths, most focus on an unspoken concept of “the literary” as opposed to “the vernacular.” This bibliography therefore has not included a variety of work relating to particular prosodic traditions (Welsh, Irish, “African American,” Black) nor has it included the robust history of Black poetics, with its complicated relationship to the very terms “English prosody” and “English meter” and the latter’s underlying concepts of meter and rhythm. Indeed Black poetics deserves its own bibliography, as does Native American poetics, quite apart from the often exclusionary critical tradition outlined here.

On the nature of chemistry

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric R. Scerri
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent History ◽  
History Of Chemistry ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Fundamental Unity ◽  
The 19Th Century

<span>The very nature of chemistry presents us with a tension. A tension between the exhilaration of diversity of substances and forms on the one hand and the safety of fundamental unity on the other. Even just the recent history of chemistry has been al1 about this tension, from the debates about Prout's hypothesis as to whether there is a primary matter in the 19th century to the more recent speculations as to whether computers will enable us to virtually dispense with experimental chemistry.</span>

scholarly journals Variations in American marketing practices of early 19th-century ceramic importers and dealers, reflecting culture and identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-375
Author(s):  
Neil Ewins
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Marketing Research ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Advertising Strategy ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The 19Th Century

Purpose This paper explores the advertising strategy of crockery importers and dealers in relationship to their origins and backgrounds. This is a departure from earlier ceramic-history literature which tended to focus on the Staffordshire producers, with limited awareness on how the identity of importers and dealers influenced what products were sold, and their individual approaches to marketing. Design/methodology/approach Within a context of historical marketing research, this paper analyses newspaper advertising and commentary. It combines an examination of marketing practices with a wider consideration of the cultural identities of ceramic importers and dealers. The digitalization of historical records, combined with sophisticated search engines, makes it more feasible to examine a broader range of sources. Thus, modern research methods can enhance our understanding of production and demand and reveal how marketing strategy was diverse. Findings Awareness on how advertising was influenced by the backgrounds and socio-political views of importers and dealers demonstrates ways in which Anglo-American ceramic trade could be far more market-led. More significantly, marketing approaches were not necessarily responding to American demand, but rather that importers could engage in commissioning goods which reflected their own views on politics, religion or slavery. Originality/value Examining the advertising of importers demonstrates the complex relationship between production and ceramic demand. This paper opens up debates as to how far the advertising of other merchandise in the USA shows evidence of taking a more individual approach by the 19th century.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document