Universalising Aspirations: Community and Social Service in the Ismaʻili Imagination in Twentieth-Century South Asia and East Africa

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
SOUMEN MUKHERJEE
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
South Asia ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Social Service ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Social Commitment ◽  
Community Membership ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

AbstractTaking the example of the Ismaʻilis in colonial South Asia and East Africa, this article examines some aspects of the complexities involved in the identity formation of communities seeking gradual redefinitions in a deterritorialised global context, reformulating notions of community membership in the process. The Ismaʻili case illustrates an intertwined history of the development of community identity, and a language of social service that became the hallmark of the community under a religious leadership that virtually redefined its position through a vigorous and increasing emphasis on the idiom of social commitment. At one level, this thrust marks a passage from the translocal to the global context, intelligible in terms of the conceptual rubric of global assemblages. At another level, the article also seeks to evaluate the nature of the community's diasporic experience in Africa. It suggests that the ideational framework and praxis of social service — and in more recent times grander developmental endeavours addressing the needs of both Ismaʻilis and non-Ismaʻilis across the world — both reflect, and are mutually constitutive of, more fundamental experiments with identity and repositioning of religious authority that the Ismaʻilis first witnessed in colonial South Asia and East Africa. This article is thus an effort to retrieve some of the continuities and ruptures in the historical process.

The Middle Niger in Pre-Antiquity and Global Context

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Michael A. Gomez
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Central America ◽  
Climatic Variability ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Human Endeavor ◽  
The World ◽  
Archaeological Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vedic Period ◽  
Early Human

This chapter discusses the consistent omission of early and medieval Africa in world and imperial histories. West Africa is certainly left out of the narrative of early human endeavor, and only tends to be mentioned, with brevity, in conjunction with European imperialism. Nevertheless, substantial archaeological work has been underway in West Africa for decades, particularly in the middle Niger valley. For it was during the period of the Shang, Chou, Shin, Han, and Tang dynasties of China, the Vedic period in India, and the Mayans in central America, that another urban-based civilization flourished in West Africa, in the Middle Niger region. The chapter then considers the history of civilization in the Middle Niger, which is a study of the multiple ways in which communities continually adjust to and engage with one of the more “variable and unpredictable” environments in the world. Indeed, the story of the Middle Niger connects directly with the celestial preoccupations of big history in that much of its climatic variability is explained by slight alterations in solar radiation, produced in turn by the intricacies of the sun's cyclical patterns.

Building an African Department of History at Makerere, 1950–1972

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 253-282
Author(s):  
Carol Sicherman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
Technical School ◽  
The World ◽  
University College ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
New Generation

Once upon a time, in the euphoric 1960s, a new generation of historians of Africa undertook to write the history of Africa and Africans through the ages, overturning previous Western suppositions that Africa had no precolonial history worth investigating. As J.D. Hargreaves has written, they were “excited by the challenge to apply their craft to the continent which Hegel had judged ‘no historical part of the world’.” Among the explorers of the largely unmapped territories of prccoloniai history were members of the Makerere Department of History and their students, many of whom were to become professional historians. This essay sketches the construction of a modern Department of History at Makerere, a task requiring a new curriculum and a new staff.Makerere began in 1922 as a government technical school for Africans. Courses in medicine and teacher training soon replaced the original more “vocational” instruction in carpentry, surveying, mechanics, and the like. The next several decades saw an evolution into a “higher college,” preparing students from all over East Africa for examinations leading to university degrees. By the late 1930s, a top-level commission recommended fulfilment of an early forecast that Makerere would one day become a university college. In the meantime, as World War II put off any substantial changes, it loomed ever greater as the legendary “mountain” that only the best could ascend. In 1950, finally fulfilling the forecast, Makerere joined in a Special Relationship with the University of London to become the University College of East Africa.

scholarly journals History, Sovereignty, Capital: Company Colonization in South Australia and New Zealand

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Matthew Birchall
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
South Australia ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Arguments ◽  
Tribal Land ◽  
The One

Abstract This article takes a fresh look at the history of private colonial enterprise in order to show how companies influenced British settlement and emigration to South Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s, thus connecting the settler revolution to global capitalism. Bringing into a single analytical frame the history of company colonization in the antipodes and its Atlantic predecessor, it examines how and why the actors involved in the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand invoked North American precedent to justify their early nineteenth-century colonial ventures. The article shows how the legitimating narratives employed by the colonial reformers performed two key functions. On the one hand, they supplied a historical and discursive tradition that authorized chartered enterprise in the antipodes. On the other hand, they furnished legal arguments that purportedly justified the appropriation of Aboriginal Australian and Māori tribal land. In illuminating how language and time shaped the world-making prophesies of these colonial capitalists, the article aims to extend recent work on corporations in global context.

IRAN'S ACCESSION TO THE SCO: ENERGY AND SOCIO-POLITICAL ASPECTS

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Ali Ebrahimitorkaman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Shanghai Cooperation Organization ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Stabilization

The article covers the history of founding the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the interaction of Iran and this organization, as well as the prospects and benefits that Iran will receive if it joins it. The author supposes that if such a union happens, among the advantages and benefits of Iran in foreign policy there will be overcoming of isolation on the international arena, the ability to successfully resist the Western pressure, strengthening of peace, security and good neighborliness in the vast region of Eurasia, as well as intensifying of political and economic relations with the culturally close states of Central and South Asia. Furthermore, Iran’s entry into the organization will bring about its economic stabilization: Iran will have the opportunity to increase exports of its main source of income – oil, and begin to actively export its goods to the member countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This will lead to a significant increase in the standard of living within Iran, as well as to an increase in its economic power, and therefore to its political weight in the region and the world.

Conflict Plagued East Africa Region and its Global Impact

2016 ◽  
pp. 61-70
Author(s):  
Endris Mekonnen Faris
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Global Impact ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Interstate Conflicts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Deep Crisis

East Africa is one of the most politically complex, unstable and poorly administered parts of the world. The region has been such insecure and chaotic since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Somalia is a failed state. Sudan is still in state of both intra and interstate conflicts. The newly born South Sudan recently is in a deep crisis that already has resulted in the widely anticipated ethnic based civil war. The recent terrorist attack in Kenya is a signal of the long standing of its vulnerability. Ethiopia has been in border conflict with its former member state, Eritrea in addition to their perspective domestic political ups and downs. It is impossible to find a single country with a history of free-conflict both internally and beyond its territory. Horn of Africa is the quintessence state of conflict and remains to be center of research. This paper further investigates closely these conflicts in the region and its global impact in such away the region becomes the focus of the major global actors and international organizations.

African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
African American ◽  
World History ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
The Relationship

This book asks why, from some moment onwards, ‘Europe’ and ‘the rest of the world’ entered into a particular relationship. This relationship was not merely one of domination but one that was conceived as a kind of superiority; more specifically, as an ‘advance’ in historical time. Toward this end, the book first analyses the emergence of this Atlantic modernity, then proceeds to compare aspects of contemporary Southern modernity, focusing on Brazil, Chile and South Africa. Finally, it explores the dynamics of contemporary modernity worldwide, looking at the relationship between past oppression and injustice and expectations for future freedom and justice. The book firmly links the history of Europe to world history, situating European modernity in its global context.

Dialogism and Territoriality in a Mughal History of the Islamic Millennium

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 220-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
European Literature ◽  
The Third ◽  
New Information ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe sixteenth century witnessed the flowering of European literature that claimed to describe the encounter between Western travelers and the indigenous population of the rest of the world. Similarly, some Persianate writings of the same period present a dialogical encounter, not so much with the Europeanother, but with rival Muslim empires. One of the writers in this genre was Jaʿfar Beg Qazvīnī, sole author of the third part of theTaʾrikh-i alfī(Millennial History), supervised by the Mughal emperor Akbar. In his book, Jaʿfar Beg drew on an unprecedented store of sources from rival courts and treated the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids as essentially equal political and cultural units following identical historical trajectories. He also developed one of the earliest Mughal expressions of “Hindustan” encompassing South Asia in its entirety. While most analyses of this outstanding example of dialogical historiography have downplayed its value because of its paucity of new information, the present article will seek instead to demonstrate its significance for its unusual worldview.

scholarly journals In Search of Emotions Under the Skies of South Asia, or an Invitation to the ‘Affective Discourse’. Part V. The Global Context. From Thesis to Antithesis to Synthesis, and Again Around

2020 ◽  
pp. 198-210
Author(s):  
I. P. Glushkova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Modern World ◽  
First Episode ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The Road ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
George Lakoff ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Cultures

This five-episode survey deals with main theoretical and methodological approaches within the field of emotional / affective studies, well established in the Western academic scholarship but are still of unspectacular character in Russia. Briefly prefacing a publication of the 5th volume of the ‘Under the Skies of South Asia’ project (USSA) which starts the road to the analysis of the emotional paradigms of the South Asian milieu, the paper also asks ourselves if a discourse on emotions in one cultural model can be applicable to another? The first episode drawing from classical works in philosophy and psychology dealt with terminological definitions, and, taking into account the domination of Anglo-Saxon school of thought, dwelt on semantic correlates from alien linguo-cultural contexts. The second episode, drawing from the studies of social and cultural anthropologists of an “exotic other,” demonstrated the divergence of a universalist concept that affirms the sameness of emotions for different cultures and times, and a constructivist one that considers them culturally conditioned and / or socially constructed. The 3rd episode focused on two principal approaches — metaphorical and semantic — towards description of the linguistics of emotions, and to their promoters, including George Lakoff, Zoltan Kövecses, Anna Wierzbicka and Victor Shakhovsky. The 4th episode highlights the most important works and concepts in the field of “history of emotions” already widely recognized as an independent discipline, and traces its historiography with insights to William Reddy and Barbara Rosenweine. The concluding 5th episode describes the intensity of the modern world, traumatically overwhelmed with negative emotions of literally destructive power, which confirms the high relevance of affective studies and turns them into applied science.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Spanish Literature ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Archival Documentation ◽  
La Lozana Andaluza

The introduction begins with a quote from a work of Renaissance Spanish literature entitled La Lozana Andaluza. This quote describes the world of sex work and prostitution in the sixteenth century. Much of the introduction discusses the historiography of gender and sexuality in Spanish America and Spain, the use of literary sources to contextualize archival documentation, as well as theory related to historians’ use of archives, the idea of agency, and sex work in a global context. The introduction positions the book as unique in terms of presenting an in-depth history of sex work in the viceroyalties.

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