“THE INEFFACEABLE CURSE OF CAIN”: RACE, MISCEGENATION, AND THE VICTORIAN STAGING OF IRISHNESS

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Boltwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Scientific Communities ◽  
Irish Identity

THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY both the English popular and scientific communities increasingly argued for a distinct racial difference between the Irish Celt and the English Saxon, which conceptually undermined the Victorian attempt to form a single kingdom from the two peoples. The ethnological discourse concerning Irish identity was dominated by English theorists who reflect their empire’s ideological necessity; thus, the Celt and Saxon were often described as racial siblings early in the nineteenth century when union seemed possible, while later descriptions of the Irish as members of a distant or degenerate race reflect the erosion of public sympathy caused by the era of violence following the failed revolt of 1848. Amid this deluge of scientific discourse, the Irish were treated as mute objects of analysis, lacking any opportunity for formal rejoinder; nonetheless, these essentially English discussions of racial identity and Irishness also entered into the Irish popular culture.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farish A. Noor ◽  
Peter Carey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Identity And Difference ◽  
The Way

This collection of essays revisits the colonial wars that were fought across Southeast Asia throughout the nineteenth century and studies them through the lenses of racial difference as it was understood at the time. The authors have chosen to bring to the fore the manner in which understandings of racial identity and difference were instrumental in the way in which the colonial powers viewed their local adversaries, and argue that the wars that were fought during that century need to be understood as race wars as well. In the course of these conflicts – some small and some on a much larger scale – essentialised and reductive racial identities were also being constructed; and in some instances borrowed and internalised by the native Southeast Asian communities as well.

Nineteenth-Century Racial Thought and Whitman's "Democratic Ethnology of the Future"

1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Biological Indicators ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Future ◽  
Racial Thought ◽  
Typical American

Whitman's apparently positive depictions of racial others are intepreted in the light of his assumptions about biological indicators of racial identity and the role literature plays in recording that identity. Part one demonstrates that in the context of nineteenth-century racial thought a poem like "Salut au Monde!" seems directed less toward celebrating cultural diversity and more toward indicating the less-evolved status of other races compared to Americans. Whitman cannot describe the typical American as fulsomely as he can others, however, who serve in his poems as models of racy individuality-however backward they may seem. Part two therefore looks at Whitman's examination of various "specimens" of American identity, such as Lincoln, and at the ironies and contradictions that frustrate this examination. The problem for Whitman was not racial difference (racial others being for him and his contemporaries known quantities) but racial sameness. What Whitman needs, then, is some symbolic means of bridging the gap between actual American diversity and the ideological imperative of American identity, and this he finds in the concept of similitude (adumbrated in "Song of Myself"). But Whitman's poetry offers resolutions unavailable (and undesirable) in American culture. Part three describes Whitman's cultural discontent, chiefly as expressed in Democratic Vistas, where he chastises Americans for their bodily grossness and bad manners and discusses what he calls "the democratic ethnology of the future," a racial solution to America's cultural problems.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Common ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
Maria Monk ◽  
People Today

Nuns in popular media today are a staple of kitsch culture, evident in the common appearance of bobble-head nuns, nun costumes, and nun caricatures on TV, movies, and the stage. Nun stereotypes include the sexy vixen, the naïve innocent, and the scary nun. These types were forged in nineteenth-century convent narratives. While people today may not recognize the name “Maria Monk,” her legacy lives on in the public imagination. There may be no demands to search convents, but nuns and monastic life are nevertheless generally not taken seriously. This epilogue traces opposition to nuns from the Civil War to the present, analyzing the various images of nuns in popular culture as they relate to the antebellum campaign against convents. It argues that the source of the misunderstanding about nuns is rooted in the inability to categorize these women either as traditional wives and mothers or as secular, career-driven singles.

Viktor Vasnetsov’s New Icons

Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Paris Exposition ◽  
The Many ◽  
Modern Orthodox ◽  
Human Hands

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 32

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Jewish Involvement

With its five thematic sections covering genres from cantorial to classical to klezmer, this pioneering multi-disciplinary volume presents rich coverage of the work of musicians of Jewish origin in the Polish lands. It opens with the musical consequences of developments in Jewish religious practice: the spread of hasidism in the eighteenth century meant that popular melodies replaced traditional cantorial music, while the greater acculturation of Jews in the nineteenth century brought with it synagogue choirs. Jewish involvement in popular culture included performances for the wider public, Yiddish songs and the Yiddish theatre, and contributions of many different sorts in the interwar years. Chapters on the classical music scene cover Jewish musical institutions, organizations, and education; individual composers and musicians; and a consideration of music and Jewish national identity. One section is devoted to the Holocaust as reflected in Jewish music, and the final section deals with the afterlife of Jewish musical creativity in Poland, particularly the resurgence of interest in klezmer music. The chapters do not attempt to define what may well be undefinable—what “Jewish music” is. Rather, they provide an original and much-needed exploration of the activities and creativity of “musicians of the Jewish faith.“

Our Mutual Friend

2018 ◽  
pp. 284-298
Author(s):  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Savage Mind ◽  
Mutual Friend

This chapter situates Our Mutual Friend at the intersection of nineteenth-century projects of culture: the antiquarian, pedagogical, and anthropological. Silas Wegg and the doll’s dressmaker, Jenny Wren, represent competing versions of the novel’s imaginative sources in popular culture, attached to successive historical stages. Wegg is a corrupt avatar of the Romantic ballad revival, with its commitments to antiquarian nationalism and a degenerationist cultural history. Jenny personifies a communal heritage of folktales, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes, absorbed organically in childhood, anticipating the anthropological claim on these materials, in the decades after Dickens’s death, as relics of a universal ‘savage mind’. Our Mutual Friend resists both programmes, the anthropological as well as the antiquarian, in counterpoint to its well-studied critique of the acquisition of culture through formal schooling.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document