A Public Is a Place and Time

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Megan Eaton Robb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
North India ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Market Town ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
United Provinces

Founded in 1912 in Bijnor, a small town in northwest United Provinces, the newspaper Madīnah became one of the most successful newspapers of any language circulating in North India and the Punjab. This paper’s ultimate success is not something most observers could have predicted. It was published in a qasbah, a market town with an Islamic hue, and its proprietor, Majīd Ḥasan, was not influential or rich. Nonetheless, despite its isolated beginnings, the paper Madīnah went on to become popular across North India and the Punjab and to play an important role in the independence movement. The story of Madīnah newspaper shows how understanding the relationship between distinctive urban spaces and attitudes to time is important for understanding the early twentieth-century public sphere that orbited around the star of Urdu, a sphere that increasingly emphasized ties to Islamic space and time.

Putting the Public House of Madīnah on the Muslim Map

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-56
Author(s):  
Megan Eaton Robb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Small Town ◽  
North India ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public House ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter traces a network of regionally, nationally, and locally significant publications, with Madinah newspaper at its center. The threads of this newspaper publication are placed in context with periodicals, associations, and publishing houses to make clear newspapers’ contribution to the delineation of an Urdu public sphere in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Qasbahs not only contributed to the deeper penetration of the public sphere in North India but also influenced the path and formation of that fragmented public. In an age of urbanization where the qasbah, or Islamicate small town, has been overlooked as critical to the construction of Muslim identity, this chapter highlights the language and visual culture of these ancestral towns as influential in the development of a Muslim public in th), ^#e early twentieth century through print publishing.

Poetry, Politics, and Provinces

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-110
Author(s):  
Ali Khan Mahmudabad
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Town ◽  
North India ◽  
The Way

Chapter 2 will continue to chart the changes observed in Chapter 1, using examples of a variety of mushā‘irahs, including relatively small ones held in provincial towns and larger ones held in cities in conjunction with political rallies and conferences. The second chapter will look at the way in which the space changed in the twentieth century by looking at a mushā‘irah in a small town in north India and then larger political mushā‘irahs in the 1930s.

Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth: the Local and the Global in Glastonbury

Numen ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Considerable Degree ◽  
The South ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
South West ◽  
Variety Of Groups ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Spiritual Seekers

AbstractGlastonbury, a small town in the south west of England, is the focus for a variety of spiritual seekers and religious practitioners. It therefore provides an interesting and appropriate context in which to explore the relationship between the local and the global in the contemporary spiritual milieu.This article explores the extent to which Glastonbury has claimed a "serial centrality" over the centuries in relation to different religious trends, first within Christianity and, in the course of the twentieth century, within a growing number of worldviews.Highlighting similarities and tensions between the competing visions and discourses to be found there, the article examines issues surrounding the negotiation of the local and the global for a variety of groups and individuals.Despite the element of change (indeed exoticism) in some of the manifestations of contemporary spirituality in Glastonbury, there is, nevertheless, a considerable degree of continuity in relation to the vernacular tradition there.

Conclusion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Allan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter concludes that the book has explored the relationship between literature and secularism during the reforms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. It has discussed textual analysis from the standpoint of competing interpretative worlds: in one instance, a discussion of Charles Darwin within the context of a family, and in another, frames for understanding the relationship of literature and religion in the work of Taha Hussein. The chapter draws together some of the underlying arguments at stake across the chapters and considers their implications for our work as comparatists. It raises a number of questions and challenges regarding the study of literature by assessing the presumptions of a global public sphere and the parameters of critique and opinion in a literary world. Finally, it comments on Erich Auerbach's 1952 essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” in which he traces the relationship between history, philology, and world literature.

Theatre and Urban Space: the Case of Birmingham Rep

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-147
Author(s):  
Claire Cochrane
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Civic Consciousness ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

In NTQ61, Deborah Saivetz described the attempts over the past decade of the Italian director Pino DiBuduo to create ‘invisible cities’ – performances intended to restore the relationship between urban spaces and their inhabitants, through exploring the actual and spiritual histories of both. Earlier in the present issue, Baz Kershaw suggests some broader analogies between the theatre and its macrocosmic environment. Here, Claire Cochrane, who teaches at University College, Worcester, narrows the focus to a particular British city and the role over time of a specific theatre in relation to its urban setting. Her subject is the history and development of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in relation to the city – of which its founder, Barry Jackson, was a lifelong resident – as an outcome of the city's growth in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, which made it distinctive in terms of its manufactures, the workers and entrepreneurs who produced them, and a civic consciousness that was disputed yet also shared. She traces, too, the transition between old and new theatre buildings and spaces which continued to reflect shifting class and cultural relationships as the city, its politicians, and its planners adapted to the second half of the twentieth century.

Mirrored Imaginaries: Urban Chroniclers in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1910-1936

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 541-560
Author(s):  
Daniel Richter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Metropolitan Growth ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the intertwined urban and cultural histories of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay during the early twentieth century. During the years from 1910 to 1936, Buenos Aires and Montevideo’s relationship evolved from being “mirrored” and “symbiotic” into an uneven relationship as Buenos Aires’s skyline and cultural commerce expanded to compare to larger metropolitan centers in the Atlantic world. This article examines how the relationship between the two cities was understood by flâneurs, travel writers, and cultural producers in the crucial period of metropolitan growth and cultural commerce for both Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The cultural connections between the two cities transpired in a wider transnational and transatlantic context of urban capitalism that spurred the construction of modern urban spaces such as skyscrapers, theaters, and department stores. The relationship between Buenos Aires and Montevideo was mirrored by neighboring and competing metropolises across the globe in the early twentieth century.

‘Innocent’ Victims/‘Guilty’ Migrants: Hindi public sphere, caste and indentured women in colonial North India

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 1345-1377 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARU GUPTA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
British Empire ◽  
North India ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Transnational Movements ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

AbstractThis article analyses representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi print-public sphere of colonial north India in the early twentieth century. There have been sophisticated studies on the condition of Indian women in the plantation colonies of the British Empire, this article focuses instead on the vernacular world within India, showing how the transnational movements of these women emigrants led to animated discussions, in which they came to be constructed as both innocent victims and guilty migrants, insiders and outsiders. The ways in which these mobile women came to be represented reveal significant intersections between nation, gender, caste, sexuality, and morality. It also demonstrates how middle-class Indian women attempted to establish bonds of diasporic sisterhood with low-caste indentured women, bonds that were also deeply hierarchical. In addition, the article attempts to grasp the subjective experiences of Dalit migrant, and potentially migrant, women themselves, and illustrates their ambivalences of identity in particularly gendered ways.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

The Dynamics of Egypt’s “Semi-opposition,” 2004–11

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-103
Author(s):  
Mai Mogib Mosad
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political System ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

This paper maps the basic opposition groups that influenced the Egyptian political system in the last years of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. It approaches the nature of the relationship between the system and the opposition through use of the concept of “semi-opposition.” An examination and evaluation of the opposition groups shows the extent to which the regime—in order to appear that it was opening the public sphere to the opposition—had channels of communication with the Muslim Brotherhood. The paper also shows the system’s relations with other groups, such as “Kifaya” and “April 6”; it then explains the reasons behind the success of the Muslim Brotherhood at seizing power after the ousting of President Mubarak.

Poetic Trespass

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lital Levy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Old World ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Emile Habiby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

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