FOCUS: Through Chinese Eyes

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Theo D’haen

In this FOCUS, eight contemporary Chinese literature scholars, in four articles, give their view of (some aspects of) the reception of Chinese literature and theory in Europe during the twentieth century. In the first article, Shunqing Cao and Zhoukun Han discuss how Chinese literature has been read and misread in Europe, but also how it has given rise to literary innovations in European literature and theory. Peina Zhuang and Yina Cao detail how the earliest English-language history of Chinese literature at the turn of the twentieth century presented a very one-sided perspective of its subject. Qilin Fu and Shubo Gao trace the reception of Maoist Marxism in European literature and philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. Yirong Hu and Lin Mei, finally, hold a plea for a redefinition of imagology to better account for the image of China in Europe and the West in an age of new global media.

2021 ◽  
pp. 128-161
Author(s):  
Laura Carter

The second part of this book, of which this chapter is part, is about the ‘history of everyday life’ in practice. This chapter examines the ‘history of everyday life’ in local community settings. It argues that folk museums were the museological vehicles of popular social history in mid-twentieth-century Britain. The British folk museum movement is traced via museum case studies in Luton, Cambridge, York, and the Highlands. Collecting practices, curation, visitors, and the educational programmes within each museum are analysed. The practices of several curator-collectors of everyday life, notably Enid Porter and Isabel Grant, are explored in depth. The chapter argues that folk history, so often thought of as a talisman of the extreme right, was recast at a community level into a feminized and conservative ‘history of everyday life’ for ordinary people. The final part of the chapter connects the ‘history of everyday life’ to debates about the emergence of commercial and industrial heritage in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.


2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Brouillette

This article establishes the importance of UNESCO’s role within the global history of the book. Its focus is the research on the book in the developing world that UNESCO sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s, and how that research supported claims that government should intervene in book and media industries in order to shift the disastrous imbalance in the global media system. It shows how these claims were undermined by the interests of the developed world and sidelined by the emerging discipline of book history.


2001 ◽  
Vol 75 (6) ◽  
pp. 1065-1078 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Rowland

Archaeocyaths are calcareous, conical, Cambrian fossils with a long history of phylogenetic uncertainty and changing interpretations. The history of phylogenetic interpretation of archaeocyaths reveals five distinct schools of thought: the coelenterate school, the sponge school, the algae school, the Phylum Archaeocyatha school, and the Kingdom Archaeata school. Late nineteenth century and early twentieth century paleontologists worked within a paradigm of inexorably increasing diversity through time, and they did not believe in the concept of extinct phyla. Consequently, prior to about 1950, archaeocyaths were bounced around from coelenterates to sponges, to algae. By the 1930s, after considerable study, all workers agreed that archaeocyaths were sponges of one type or another. In the mid-twentieth century a significant paradigm shift occurred in paleontology, allowing the viability of the concept of a phylum with no extant species. Correspondingly, two new schools of thought emerged regarding archaeocyathan taxonomy. The Phylum Archaeocyatha school placed them in their own phylum, which was inferred to be closely related to Phylum Porifera within Subkingdom Parazoa. A second new school removed archaeocyaths and some other Paleozoic problematica from the animal kingdom and placed them in Kingdom Archaeata (later Kingdom Inferibionta). The Phylum Archaeocyatha school was the mainstream interpretation from the 1950s through the 1980s. However, the widespread use of SCUBA beginning in the 1960s ultimately led to the rejection of the interpretation that archaeocyaths belong in a separate phylum. SCUBA allowed biologists to study deep fore-reef and submarine cave environments, leading to the discovery of living calcareous sponges, including one aspiculate species that is morphologically similar to archaeocyaths. These discoveries in the 1960s and 1970s stimulated a re-examination of sponge phylogeny generally, and comparisons between archaeocyaths and sponges in particular. The result was the abandonment of the Phylum Archaeocyatha school in the 1990s. Present consensus is that archaeocyaths represent both a clade and a grade—Class Archaeocyatha and the archaeocyathan morphological grade—within Phylum Porifera.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Macekura

AbstractFew concepts in the history of twentieth-century history proved as important as economic growth. Scholars such as Charles Maier, Robert Collins, and Timothy Mitchell have analysed how the notion that an entity called ‘the economy’ (defined by metrics such as Gross National Product, or GNP) could be made to grow came to define economic thought and policy worldwide. Yet there has been far less attention paid to the fact that neither growth nor GNP went without challenge during their emergence and global diffusion. This article focuses on one set of growth critics: those who advocated for ‘social indicators’ in international development policy during the 1960s and 1970s. It advances three overlapping arguments: that advocates for social indicators harkened back to early twentieth-century transnational efforts to make workers’ ‘standard of living’ the primary statistical framework for policy-makers; that, while supporters of social indicators expressed frustration with technocratic governance, their reform efforts nevertheless represented technocratic critiques of modernity; and finally, that one of the major reform efforts, Morris David Morris’s advocacy on behalf of the ‘Physical Quality of Life Index’ (PQLI), as an alternative measure of national wellbeing, ultimately struggled to challenge the GNP growth paradigm, and yet proved influential in spawning subsequent research into new measures and approaches to development.


Author(s):  
Cynthia Sugars

This chapter examines the history of the English-language novel in Canada since 1950. It first considers how the promotion of Canadian cultural identity and attempts to articulate a distinctly Canadian social ethos became increasingly mobilized in the decades following World War II. It then discusses the newfound optimism about the future of Canadian literature and culture that flourished following the Massey Commission initiatives, as well as Canadian novels published during the 1960s and 1970s — a period regarded as a time of social emancipation, sexual freedom, and counter-culture revolution. It also explores developments in the 1980s and 1990s and during the period 2000–2015, citing a number of important novels published in these years, including Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees (1996), Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe (2002), Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005), and David Chariandy's Soucouyant (2007).


Author(s):  
Matt Eisenbrandt

This chapter provides an overview of the recent history of El Salvador, with a focus on the importance of coffee as a crop that built fortunes for a small group of families. The wealth concentrated in the hands of oligarchs led to massive economic inequality throughout the twentieth century, and an uprising in the 1930s was put down in such a brutal manner that it stifled opposition for decades and came to be known as the Matanza. This chapter chronicles U.S. government support for anti-Communism and counterinsurgency efforts that created the death squads in El Salvador, continued military repression amid growing cries for reform in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of insurgent groups targeting the oligarchs, and the bloody response of the military and death squads. After a reformist military coup in 1979, Roberto D’Aubuisson and civilian supporters carried out a public crusade denouncing advocates of reform as Communists, with the country getting closer to civil war.


Author(s):  
Guðrún Stefánsdóttir

This chapter considers the history of people with intellectual disabilities in Iceland, paying particular attention to the last quarter of the twentieth century when ideas about a normal life began to influence Icelandic disability policy and legislation, which has emphasised social equality and participation for over 30 years. The first half of the twentieth century can be characterised by negative social perception and isolation at institutions. The ´professional community´ pursued aggressively restrictive meassure such as controlled marriage, sterilization and segregation through institutionalization. During the 1960s and 1970s ideologies (sometimes problematic) of normalization and social role valorisation replaced ideas of segregation and institutionalization, calling for a ‘normal life’ for people with intellectual disabilities and advocating their right to take part in regular community life. Historically they played a huge role in de-institutionalization. However, often there was a gap between experiences of people with intellectual disabilities and the normalization principle which assumed that people with intellectual disabilities should have the right to self-determination and to a normal life.


Author(s):  
Megan Raby

Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American "tropical biologists" developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity. Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.


Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.


2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Connah ◽  
S.G.H. Daniels

New archaeological research in Borno by the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has included the analysis of pottery excavated from several sites during the 1990s. This important investigation made us search through our old files for a statistical analysis of pottery from the same region, which although completed in 1981 was never published. The material came from approximately one hundred surface collections and seven excavated sites, spread over a wide area, and resulted from fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s. Although old, the analysis remains relevant because it provides a broad geographical context for the more recent work, as well as a large body of independent data with which the new findings can be compared. It also indicates variations in both time and space that have implications for the human history of the area, hinting at the ongoing potential of broadscale pottery analysis in this part of West Africa and having wider implications of relevance to the study of archaeological pottery elsewhere.


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