John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer: Tales about Race and Music

2006 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Olwage
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Choral Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black South African ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Compositional Practice ◽  
Race And Culture

This article intervenes in debates on the status of ‘race’ in ethno/musicological writings. It does so through an examination of the compositional discourse of colonial black South African choral music, particularly detailed analyses of the work of John Knox Bokwe (1855–1922) and their metropolitan sources such as late nineteenth-century gospel hymnody, exploring both how Bokwe's compositional practice enacted a politics that became anticolonial and how early black choral music became ‘black’ in its receptions. The article concludes that ethno/musicological claims that colonial black choral music contains ‘African’ musical content conflate race and culture under a double imperative: in the names of a decolonizing politics and a postcolonial epistemology in which hybridity as resistance is racialized.

‘Our passion for legality’: international law and imperialism in late nineteenth-century Britain

2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
CASPER SYLVEST
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
South African ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Congo Free State

AbstractThis article deploys a historical analysis of the relationship between law and imperialism to highlight questions about the character and role of international law in global politics. The involvement of two British international lawyers in practices of imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century is critically examined: the role of Travers Twiss (1809–1897) in the creation of the Congo Free State and John Westlake’s (1828–1913) support for the South African War. The analysis demonstrates the inescapably political character of international law and the dangers that follow from fusing a particular form of liberal moralism with notions of legal hierarchy. The historical cases raise ethico-political questions, the importance of which is only heightened by the character of contemporary world politics and the attention accorded to international law in recent years.

scholarly journals Debating Scientific Medicine: Homoeopathy and Allopathy in Late Nineteenth-century Medical Print in Bengal1

2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinjini Das
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Systems ◽  
Scientific Medicine ◽  
Medical Journals ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Print Market

AbstractThe historiography of medicine in South Asia often assumes the presence of preordained, homogenous, coherent and clearly-bound medical systems. They also tend to take the existence of a medical ‘mainstream’ for granted. This article argues that the idea of an ‘orthodox’, ‘mainstream’ named allopathy and one of its ‘alternatives’ homoeopathy were co-produced in Bengal. It emphasises the role of the supposed ‘fringe’, ie. homoeopathy, in identifying and organising the ‘orthodoxy’ of the time. The shared market for medicine and print provided a crucial platform where such binary identities such as ‘homoeopaths’ and ‘allopaths’ were constituted and reinforced. This article focuses on a range of polemical writings by physicians in the Bengali print market since the 1860s. Published mostly in late nineteenth-century popular medical journals, these concerned the nature, definition and scope of ‘scientific’ medicine. The article highlights these published disputes and critical correspondence among physicians as instrumental in simultaneously shaping the categories ‘allopathy’ and ‘homoeopathy’ in Bengali print. It unravels how contemporary understandings of race, culture and nationalism informed these medical discussions. It further explores the status of these medical contestations, often self-consciously termed ‘debates’, as an essential contemporary trope in discussing ‘science’ in the vernacular.

Opiates and the ‘Therapeutic Revolution’ in Japan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Vitale
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Health Policies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Edo Period ◽  
Public Health Policies ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Short Span

Summary This article argues that the widespread use of opiate-compounded medicines in late-nineteenth-century Japan was partly a result of Meiji period (1868–1912) public health policies. An overview of the status of opiates in Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries is intended to explain possible reasons: pharmaceutical reforms in the 1870s and 1880s were based on Edo-period (1603–1868) protostructures of regulated drug manufacture; in contrast, the Meiji government failed to introduce Western clinical practice within a short span of time. As a result opiates, marketed as Western ‘modern’ medicines, were smoothly integrated into pre-existing beliefs, according to which drugs and diets maintained bodily health.

Memories of Sexual Abuse: Janet's Critique of Freud, a Balanced Approach

1998 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 1027-1043 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Brown ◽  
Onno van der Hart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Sexual Trauma ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recovered Memories ◽  
Balanced Approach ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Since the late nineteenth century explanations of sexual trauma have invoked unconscious mental mechanisms of forgetting. Memories have been seen as submerged only to be therapeutically recovered. Explanations and related therapies have tended to be either hotly advocated or decried, not the least were those of Janet and Freud. Once again there is a vigorous debate surrounding the status of recovered memories. This paper was undertaken to contribute to reasoned and balanced dialogue by exploring an historical dimension. There is a renaissance of interest in the oeuvre of Janet. In this article Janetian sources are examined in which he criticised Freud's views on sexual trauma and elaborated his own position, a position which is yet significant today.

Dom Bede Camm (1864-1942), Monastic Martyrologist

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 371-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Aidan Bellenger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

One of the soldiers asked him what religion he was of. He readily answered, ‘I am a Catholic’ ‘What!’ said the other, ‘a Roman Catholic?’ ‘How do you mean a Roman?’ said Father Bell, ‘I am an Englishman. There is but one Catholic Church, and of that I am a member.’These words of a Franciscan priest, Arthur Bell, executed at Tyburn in 1643, could have been taken as his own by Dom Bede Camm, the Benedictine martyrologist, who was one of the great propagandists of those English and Welsh Catholic martyrs who died in the period from the reign of Elizabeth to the Popish Plot. The lives of the martyrs were familiar to English Catholics through the writings of Richard Challoner (1691–1781), whose Memoirs of Missionary Priests had been available in various forms since its publication, as a kind of Catholic reply to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in two volumes in 1741–2, but in the late nineteenth century, as the English Catholics, reinforced by many converts from the Church of England, grew more combative in controversy following the relative calm of the Georgian period, the martyrs came more to the forefront. The church authorities sought recognition of the English martyrs’ heroic virtue. In 1874 Cardinal Manning had put under way an ‘ordinary process’, a preliminary judicial inquiry, to collect evidence to elevate the ‘venerable’ martyrs to the status of ‘beati’. In 1895, and again in 1929, large batches of English martyrs were declared blessed. In 1935 Thomas More and John Fisher were canonized. It was not until 1970 that forty of the later martyrs, a representative group, were officially declared saints.

Dialectics of Sovereignty, Compromise, and Equality in the Discourse on the “Tibetan Question”

boundary 2 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 153-179
Author(s):  
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Real Solution ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Project ◽  
East And West ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Since 1950, the Chinese government has determined the status and position of Tibetans, but it has not won the battle for Tibetans’ hearts and minds. Ongoing Tibetan resistance under Chinese rule points to serious fissures in the Chinese state’s ideological and cultural project of “liberating” Tibet. Wang Hui’s article “The ‘Tibetan Question’ East and West: Orientalism, Regional Ethnic Autonomy, and the Politics of Dignity” analyzes the March 2008 “riots” in and around Lhasa in order to understand the impediments to a real solution to the crisis in Tibet. This piece suggests that although Wang Hui offers productive ways of moving beyond the status quo, his analysis of Tibet is limited by multiple ideological contradictions that ultimately fail to lift Tibet out of the advanced/backward binary that typifies late nineteenth-century orientalism.

Mourning Imam Husayn in Karbala and Kabul: The political meanings of ʿAshura in Afghanistan

Afghanistan ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-236
Author(s):  
Robert D. Crews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Lay People ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ritual Practices

This article explores Afghan Twelver Shiʿi commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala. It shows how the rites of remembrance and mourning celebrated on ʿAshura in Afghanistan has evolved in important ways from the late nineteenth century to the recent past. More than a pivotal event in the ritual calendar of Shiʿism, ʿAshura has served as an index of Afghan politics—and a field of contestation among state officials, clerical authorities, and the Shiʿi faithful. It has thus been at the center of struggles over the identity of the Afghan nation, the status of the Shia, and ritual practices in public life. Drawing on representations of ʿAshura produced by government authorities, state media, clerics, and lay people, this article examines how different actors have competed to give ʿAshura meaning and to develop distinctively Afghan forms of commemoration.

Unveiling Musical Production: Strauss, Mahler and Commodity Fetishism in the Late Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Jonathan Gentry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
Musical Production ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Subordination

This article locates social relationships within late-nineteenth-century German orchestral music by examining orchestration practices and aesthetics. Wagner's innovations in tone colour, Liszt's use of programmes, and Hanslick's formalism all took attention away from orchestra performers and forged a more direct relationship between audience and composer. This article argues that commercial exchange of serious music displaced social relationships between composer, performer and audience into aesthetic dictums. In particular, the widely agreed upon subordination of orchestration and colour to compositional ‘content’ was a manifestation of the social subordination of performers to composers and resulted in the decreased visibility of performers to consumers. In ultimately breaking from both New German and formalist conventions, Strauss's Don Juan and Mahler's First Symphony brought unwanted attention to orchestration and a renewed focus on performance and performers. In contrast to Wagner's use of doublings, which created timbres without clear instrumental provenance, the orchestration choices of Strauss and Mahler emphasize distinctions between instruments and themes, further highlighting the virtuosic demands they place on performers. Strauss and Mahler made performers into co-producers of their music and raised orchestral colour to the status of content. By employing Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, which Adorno himself largely obscures, this article goes beyond Adorno's and Dahlhaus's analysis of the ‘emancipation of colour’ to show how concert consumption objectified social relations and hierarchies as issues of mere aesthetic form, while compositions themselves became imbued with life-like subjectivity.

Annihilating Space, Time, and Difference Experiments in Cultural Homogenization

1990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Marvin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Functional Capabilities ◽  
Single Person ◽  
The Status ◽  
Cultural Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Orders ◽  
Cultural Homogenization

The most admired feats of the telephone, cinema, electric light, phonograph, and wireless were their wonderful abilities to extend messages effortlessly and instantaneously across time and space and to reproduce live sounds and images without any loss of content, at least by the standards of the day. Experts and publics agreed on the brilliance of this achievement. But wherever these extraordinarily sensitive new nerve nets extended, there was little genuine sense of cultural encounter and exchange. In electrical publications of the late nineteenth century, newly accessible lands and people were seldom cherished for any cross-cultural opportunities they offered, except abstractly. Concretely, they appeared as islands of cultural anomaly that new techniques of communication made available for absorption into the mainstream. Those who controlled the new electrical technologies not infrequently dismissed vastly different cultures as deficient by civilized standards, lacking even the capacity for meaningful communication. What late-nineteenth-century writers in expert technical and popular scientific journals practiced was a species of cognitive imperialism. Theirs were visions of a globe efficiently administered by Anglo-Saxon technology, perhaps with exotic holidays, occasions, and decorations in dress and architecture, perhaps filled with more items and devices than any single person could imagine, but certainly not a world to disturb the fundamental idea of a single best cultural order. What these writers hoped to extend without challenge were self-conceptions that confirmed their dreams of being comfortably at home and perfectly in control of a world at their electric fingertips. Even when, in the Utopian manner, their declared goal was to turn the status quo upside down in pursuit of a better world, few of their schemes failed to reconstitute familiar social orders and frameworks of interpretation. Only the scale of the community in which they imagined themselves as participants had changed. Changes in the functional capabilities of new media of communication were a matter of interested discussion by electrical scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and camp followers. Suggestions that the future of these devices lay in the organization of public intelligence systems to promote cultural harmony and perfection by displaying it to one and all were sympathetically received.

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