The Archives of the Municipality and the High Court of Asmara, Eritrea: Discovering the Eritrea “Hidden from History”

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 469-478
Author(s):  
Francesca Locatelli
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
High Court ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

Eritrean independence in 1993 raised fundamental questions regarding the Eritrean past. Inevitably, scholars initially focused their analysis on the history of the Eritrean nationalist movement and liberation struggle. The long guerrilla war against the Ethiopian regime attracted the interest of numerous researchers, not only because of its implications for the redefinition of the political landscape of the Horn of Africa, but also because of the ways in which it had mobilized and reorganized Eritrean society. While this literature has shed much light upon interesting aspects of the political history of independent Eritrea, further investigation of the precolonial and colonial past is still required to gain a deeper understanding of the formation of Eritrean national identity in all its intricate facets.The question of Eritrean national identity is intimately connected to its colonial history, which in many ways remains marginalized in the analysis of Eritrean past. The Italian colonial period between 1890 and 1941 was a crucial moment in the definition of those social and political transformations which contributed to the formation of Eritrea-as-a-nation. Nevertheless, this historical phase remains underexplored. The colonial past has been an issue that European powers to varying extents have had to confront since the end of empire. Both historians of colonialism and Africanist historians have collaborated in the reconstruction of the past of colonized societies. In Italy this process remains in embryonic form. Many Africanist historians, such as Irma Taddia and Alessandro Triulzi, have already addressed the problem concerning the gaps left by Italian historiography on both the colonial past and the history of the colonized societies in its various aspects. As Triulzi points out, both practical and political reasons slowed the development of those debates that were emerging in the historiographies of other excolonial powers.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

Multicultural and Transnational Novels

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Meffan
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
The Other ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Return Home ◽  
Access Rights ◽  
The One

This chapter discusses the history of multicultural and transnational novels in New Zealand. A novel set in New Zealand will have to deal with questions about cultural access rights on the one hand and cultural coverage on the other. The term ‘transnational novel’ gains its relevance from questions about cultural and national identity, questions that have particularly exercised nations formed from colonial history. The chapter considers novels that demonstrate and respond to perceived deficiencies in wider discourses of cultural and national identity by way of comparison between New Zealand and somewhere else. These include Amelia Batistich's Another Mountain, Another Song (1981), Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home (1973) and Black Rainbow (1992), James McNeish's Penelope's Island (1990), Stephanie Johnson's The Heart's Wild Surf (2003), and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006).

What, Where and Why is Europe? Some Answers from Recent Historiography

2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 701-713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
The Political ◽  
Clear Definition ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Alexander Von Humboldt ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
History Of ◽  
Institutional Expansion ◽  
Definition Of

Writing the history of a continent is generally a tricky business. If the continent is not even a real continent, but rather ‘a western peninsula of Asia’ (Alexander von Humboldt) without a clear definition of where the continent becomes peninsula, things do not get any easier. Despite these problems there is no dearth of trying. In fact, writing European histories seems to become more fashionable by the year — ironically just as the political and institutional expansion of Europe is losing steam. While the European Union is catching its breath, the historians are catching up. With the first wave of post-Euro and post-big-bang-Enlargement literature written, it is time for the reviewer to survey the landscape — and to provide some guideposts for future exploration.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter extends the book’s insights about nature, technology, and nation to the larger history of the modern period. While the modern nation loses its grip as a locus of identity and analysis, attempts to understand the operation, disruption, and collapse of continental and global infrastructures continue to mix the natural and the machinic in ways that define them both. Those vulnerabilities emphasize large-scale catastrophe; historiographically, they mask the crucial role of small-scale failures in the experience and culture of late modernity, including its definition of nature. Historical actors turned the uneven geographical distribution of small-scale failures into a marker of distinctive local natures and an element of regional and national identity. Attending to those failures helps not only situate cold-war technologies in the larger modern history of natural and machinic orders; it helps provincialize the superpowers by casting problematic “other” natures as central and primary.

Fighting for the Empire

2019 ◽  
pp. 16-42
Author(s):  
Dónal Hassett
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
The Political ◽  
Great War ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

This chapter explores the history of military service in Algeria and across the colonial world before and during the Great War. It introduces the reader to key concepts from the fields of colonial history and First World War studies that are crucial to understanding the political legacies of the entanglement of the colonies and, especially, Algeria with the Great War. Taking a comparative approach, it explains the range of legal categories that underpinned colonial rule within the different empires and considers how the rights and responsibilities they implied were connected to and altered by military service. The chapter also examines the variety of attitudes toward the use of colonial soldiers in the different imperial polities and asks how these influenced the expectations of post-war reform in the colonies.

The Poles as an Integrating and Disintegrating Factor

1967 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henryk Wereszycki
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

The question of whether the Poles were an integrating or a disintegrating factor within the Habsburg monarchy has yet to be fully studied by Polish historians. Up to now they have concerned themselves mainly with the part played by the Austrian empire in the history of the Polish nation after the eighteenth century partitions and have overlooked the role of the Poles in the Austrian empire. They have concentrated their attention on the fate of the territories of the historic Polish state which fell under Habsburg rule and have studied the social, cultural, and political transformations which affected Galicia during the century and a half of Austrian domination. Polish historians have even studied the contributions made by former Habsburg subjects to the reconstruction of the Polish state after the dissolution of the monarchy, but they have rarely discussed the part which the Poles took in the political life of the multinational empire.

scholarly journals To count or not to count? Insights from Kenya for global debates about enumerating ethnicity in national censuses

Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682110563
Author(s):  
Samantha Balaton-Chrimes ◽  
Laurence Cooley
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnicity And Race ◽  
Divide And Rule ◽  
Identity Groups

There is an impasse on the question of whether or not to enumerate identity groups in national censuses, given their potential to variously facilitate dominance and an emergence from marginalisation. In this paper, we theorise the impasse in Kenya as relating to a colonial history of the strategic use of ethnicity to divide and rule; a demographic makeup with both some large ethnic groups and many small ones; and the local social construction of ethnicity, which allows significant latitude for collapse, disaggregation and change of group identities. This case corrects the dominance of Europe and the Americas in census studies and offers insights for assessing the political stakes of counting, namely, the need to bring past and present into conversation; to consider the varied political effects of demography; and to consider the particular significance and meaning of ethnicity and race in context.

scholarly journals Poznański Czerwiec i rok 1956 – historia i pamięć po sześćdziesięciu latach

2017 ◽  
pp. 42-54
Author(s):  
Paweł Sasanka
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Defining Moments ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Communist System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
Survey And Evaluation

The article is a brief survey and evaluation of historical research on Poznań 1956 protests, the political change in October 1956, and the year in general. An important gap was filled by the publication of Piotr Grzelczak’s book on the long-term consequences of the Poznań protests, and the conflict over its remembrance between government representatives and local inhabitants of the region, since the protests were one of the defining moments in recent history of Poznań. The article also includes a summary of the controversy between historians over the importance of 1956 as a watershed in Polish history, with some historians arguing that a more liberal image of the communist system in Poland was formed in 1956, while others argued that the communist dictatorship was stabilized by winning wider social support. The author has indicated an increasing separation between narratives about the Poznań protests in June and the political transformations in October, which has consequences and threats related to polarized perception of history, leading to meagre and simplified understanding of social realities of the Polish People’s Republic after 1956.

Is there a non-socialist Swedish feminism?

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Molina
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Postcolonial Feminism ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Structural Class ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Gender Research ◽  
History Of

Based on a narrative of the recent history of postcolonial feminism within and outside the Swedish academic world, this article discusses the controversial relationship between feminism and politics. Installing a socialist inspired perspective on intersectionality in Swedish feminist debates and in gender research has been a hard task for postcolonial feminists in a society whose self-imagination excludes the recognition of racism as a fundamental component of the national identity. Moreover, as the country moves rapidly towards a neoliberalization of the former Keynesian Swedish welfare state, racism and homo-nationalism spreads out and permeates the political sphere and state institutions. The author emphasizes the importance for postcolonial feminists to continuously highlight the chasm that exists between neoliberal understandings of gender equality, which are not meant to eradicate structural class, gender, racial or other social inequalities, and those emanating from socialist and anti-racist feministic ontologies.

scholarly journals The Role of Landscape Art in Cultural and National Identity: Chinese and European Comparisons

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 5472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaojing Wen ◽  
Paul White
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Landscape Art ◽  
Political Role ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constant Feature ◽  
Definition Of

The depiction of landscape in art has played a major role in the creation of cultural identities in both China and Europe. Landscape depiction has a history of over 1000 years in China, whilst in Europe its evolution has been more recent. Landscape art (shan shui) has remained a constant feature of Chinese culture and has changed little in style and purpose since the Song dynasty. In Europe, landscape depictions have been significant in the modern determination of cultural and national identities and have served to educate consumers about their country. Consideration is given here to Holland, England, Norway, Finland and China, demonstrating how landscape depictions served to support a certain definition of Chinese culture but have played little political role there, whilst in Europe landscape art has been produced in a variety of contexts, including providing support for nationalism and the determination of national identity.

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