Growing up in nineteenth-century Ireland: a cultural history of middle-class childhood and gender

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Shannon Devlin
Author(s):  
Toufoul Abou-Hodeib

A Taste for Home is a cultural history of the middle-class home in late Ottoman Beirut that is at once global and local. Focusing on the period from the second half of the nineteenth century until World War I, the book shows how middle-class domesticity took form amid changing urbanity, politicizations of domesticity in public debates, and changing consumption patterns. Engaging with postcolonial theory, works on material culture, and consumption and gender studies, the book uses the notion of taste in both its aesthetic and political sense to critique the idea of “Westernization,” showing instead how “Europe” and the “West” are actively produced as places of difference. The privileged place the home occupied in discussions over the nature of the private and public spheres turned it into a model for members of the middle class in Beirut attempting to create a cultural niche and seeking greater influence in society. They strove to distinguish themselves not only from the class above, but also from a putative Western or European culture. The idealized home was forwarded as a model where modernity could be localized and an “Oriental” identity could be cultivated. The book argues that this model was in no way hegemonic, and that even as the home served to discursively localize difference, taste tied its most intimate spaces to modern forms of urbanity and to globalized modes of production.


1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Michèle Powles

This article traces the development of the New Zealand jury system. Most noteworthy in thisdevelopment has been the lack of controversy the system has created. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of equality in the legal system generally led to debate and reform of juries in relation to representation, race and gender.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Ajeng Triwuri Widyastuti ; Giosia P. Widjaja

Abstract - The Arab Panjunan kampong serving as the research object happens to be one of the heritage areas of Cirebon Town. This urban kampong has certain ethnic characteristics typical of Arab quarters that make it unique, thus contributing to the rich cultural history of Cirebon. As a heritage area, it is important for this ethnic Arab neighbourhood of Panjunan to draw up an inventory of the specific architectural elements that are still traceable, such as the urban lay-out and its contents as well as the landmarks of this area observed from a physical-spatial angle. The aim of this research project is to find out about this kampong’s various architectural elements that are recognized as such by the locals. This will be the contributing factor in the process of determining which environmental elements can be classified as typical landmarks. The first step taken in the research conducted is field observation in order to establish the elements that have survived in the kampong, including the architectural, social, and cultural ones. The observation related to architectural elements has been identified in accordance with the theory concerning Elements of Urban Design as proposed by Hamid Shirvani in his book The Urban Design Process. The next step is conducting research using the Cognitive Method as applied to the kampong dwellers in Panjunan by way of sketched maps and guided interviews. The respondents, classified based on ethnic heritage (descent) and gender, were requested to describe the environmental elements in this ethnic Arab kampong as far as they could recognize or identify them. Those who experienced difficulties in describing the sketches were assisted by the researcher based on the stories that had been supplied. Based on the acquired data containing these environmental elements, the aspect of memories contained therein was studied by way of interviews linked to the Continuity Theory by Breakwell. Subsequently, an analysis was made of the basis underlying the recognition of these elements based on the Landmark Theory by Kevin Lynch, and classified based on the criteria drawn up by Eko Budihardjo. Through the analysis, it was discovered that Panjunan’s Merah Mosque and its Asy Syafi’i Mosque indeed qualify as as architectural elements that show continuity of memory, gaining validity as iconic elements or landmarks on the regional scale of Cirebon’s ethnic Arab kampong of Panjunan. Keywords : mosque, landmark, recognition, local community, Arab Panjunan kampong


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Josephine Hoegaerts

The nineteenth century saw a rise in the categorization and systematic observation of manifestations of dysfluent speech. This article examines how, from the 1820s onward, different vocabularies to distinguish between different speech impediments were developed in France, Germany and Britain. It also charts how different meanings, categories and chronologies of ‘stammering’ knowledge were exchanged transnationally. The universalist medical models emerging around stammering were, despite this constant exchange, also closely connected to cultural imaginations of speech, the particular values assigned to one’s (national) language and political modes of belonging. Although the analysis is largely based on prescriptive texts, it also reveals how embodied experiences of dysfluency informed the medical and pedagogical work undertaken in the nineteenth century: a remarkable number of ‘experts’ on speech impediments claimed to be ‘former sufferers’. The history of dysfluency in the nineteenth century is therefore not one of linear medicalization and pathologization, but a continuous exchange of vocabularies between different actors of middle-class culture. Expertise on speaking ‘well’ was shared in medical treatises, but also on the benches of parliament, in cheap self-help pamphlets, in the parlour, or in debating clubs – suggesting that the model of ‘recovery’ was a manifestation of (middle class) culture rather than of a strictly medical discourse.


Author(s):  
David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.


Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan

This chapter shows how Europe's colonial expansion and imperial economic exploitation contributed to the rise of European middle classes and at the same time shaped European bourgeois culture and values. It points out that Britain's nineteenth-century middle class was as much a product of imperial expansion and the integration of global markets as it was one of religious introspection or the politics of bourgeois respectability. The chapter reveals that the Victorian middle class made, and was made by, the domestic and imperial reform movements of the nineteenth century. Campaigns for reform in imperial governance, for the end of slavery in British colonies, and for the expansion of the British missionary movement shared practices, ideas, and key personnel with many vigorous domestic reform programs. The chapter locates the connections between the imperial and domestic faces of Victorian values in the history of Britain's place in an emerging global capitalism and points to the spread of “Victorianism” far beyond the British archipelago.


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