Blackface and Drag in the Palliata

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-72
Author(s):  
Amy Richlin
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Slave Women ◽  
Current Circulation

This chapter continues the preceding chapter’s mobilization of post-colonial perspectives and interrogation of traditional accounts of beginnings of Latin literature relative to Greece by studying the ‘double-drag’ of slave-women characters wearing blackface masks in Plautine comedy. It begins from the premise that some palliata texts, often taken to be foundational in Roman self-fashioning vis-à-vis Greece, are not strictly Roman at all, but that they do deliberately adopt an inferior position—indeed, multiple inferior positions: at the time the palliata was developed and performed, it belonged to acting troupes of lower-class and slave men, none Roman by birth, who traveled around central Italy, making the palliata out of bits and pieces of comedy in current circulation. Focusing in particular on Plautus’ Poenulus, this chapter offers reflections on the identity politics of the palliata as assertions of a barbarian identity, spoken by and to displaced and deracinated people.

scholarly journals Liturgy and non-colonial thinking: Speaking to and about God beyond ideology, religion and identity politics – Towards non-religion and a unbearable freedom in Christ

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann-Albrecht Meylahn
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Specific Group ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Voice

It has been argued that most countries that had been exposed to European colonialism have inherited a Western Christianity thanks to the mission societies from Europe and North America. In such colonial and post-colonial (countries where the political administration is no longer in European hands, but the effects of colonialism are still in place) contexts, together with Western contexts facing the ever-growing impact of migrants coming from the previous colonies, there is a need to reflect on the possibility of what a non-colonial liturgy, rather than a decolonial or postcolonial liturgy, would look like. For many, postcolonial or decolonial liturgies are those that specifically create spaces for the voice of a particular identified other. The other is identified and categorised as a particular voice from the margins, or a specific voice from the borders, or the voices of particular identified previously silenced voices from, for example, the indigenous backyards. A question that this context raises is as follows: Is consciously creating such social justice spaces – that is determined spaces by identifying particular voices that someone or a specific group decides to need to be heard and even making these particular voiceless (previously voiceless) voices central to any worship experience – really that different to the colonial liturgies of the past? To give voice to another voice, is maybe only a change of voice, which certainly has tremendous historical value, but is it truly a transformation? Such a determined ethical space is certainly a step towards greater multiculturalism and can therefore be interpreted as a celebration of greater diversity and inclusivity in the dominant ontology. Yet, this ontology remains policed, either by the state-maintaining police or by the moral (social justice) police.Contribution: In this article, a non-colonial liturgy will be sought that goes beyond the binary of the dominant voice and the voice of the other, as the voice of the other too often becomes the voice of a particular identified and thus determined victim – in other words, beyond the binary of master and slave, perpetrator and victim, good and evil, and justice and injustice, as these binaries hardly ever bring about transformation, but only a change in the face of master and the face of the slave, yet remaining in the same policed ontology.

6. The role of identity in African politics

2018 ◽  
pp. 68-80
Author(s):  
Ian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Family ◽  
Colonization Period

‘The role of identity in African politics’ explains that identity politics are symptoms of Africa’s underdevelopment, not the cause, and the prominence of such political mobilization reflects much deeper structural problems facing many post-colonial states. Before the colonial era, African societies were based on notions of identity, such as the family, ancestral lineage, the clan, or the community. Colonial rule forced together different communities (some of which were traditionally hostile to each other) and was mainly responsible for producing the situation found today where very few nation states exist. Colonial authorities concretized differences among and between the subjugated and the de-colonization period further contributed to the politicization of identity.

Applying Syed Hussein Alatas’s Ideas in Contemporary Malaysian Society

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 319-338
Author(s):  
Sharifah Munirah Alatas
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Education System ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The 1950S

Abstract What do Malaysians understand by the term, “intellectual”? Is the intellectual in the Malaysian context undefined, or insignificant? Do Malaysians see the need for intellectuals? Answers to these questions reflect the extant to which Malaysia has advanced in her post-colonial development. Amidst the race towards IR 4.0 and Society 5.0, Malaysia’s education system lags behind and leaders continue to be embroiled in identity politics. Syed Hussein Alatas, a world-renowned Malaysian intellectual, raised these questions in the 1950s. His writings focus on social change, corruption, and intellectual captivity. Even though his writings are easily accessible, his ideas have not been widely assimilated by Malaysia’s ruling elite, as part of the reform agenda. This article highlights the relevance of Alatas’s ideas in Malaysia’s current socio-political transformation. It concludes that leadership’s failure to identify relevant problems is because they have neglected the vital role of intellectuals, such as the critical ideas of Syed Hussein Alatas.

scholarly journals L’artiste contemporain dans les musées d’ethnographie ou la « promesse » d’un commissariat engagé

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-56
Author(s):  
Julie Bawin
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Ethnographic Museums ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
Exhibition Strategies

For over three decades, ethnographic museums have been engaged in a process of redefining both their missions and their collections. Forced to reinvent themselves, as well as develop exhibition strategies in response to post-colonial theory, many of these museums have adopted a self-critical attitude and invited artists to intervene in their collections. What do such practices reveal ? When artists turn their attention to the collecting, archiving, and exhibition practices of colonial museums, does it follow that their approach is more engaged ? By considering the first exhibitions of this kind, while also tracing the evolution of this phenomenon since the 1980s, this paper seeks to respond to these questions. It also strives to understand the specific nature of critical curating as it is practiced in museums that are, more than any others, loci for identity politics.

scholarly journals Masterji’s Resistance in Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower: An Embodiment of the Struggle of the Marginalized Class

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-93
Author(s):  
Badiuzzaman Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Entire Country ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The Rich

Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, published in 2011, is a trenchant critique on the effects of globalization, urbanization, privatization and capitalism in the post-colonial era in India. All these changes in the contemporary society have effectively bifurcated the entire country into two groups—the rich and the poor, the centre and the margin, the privileged upper class and the underprivileged lower class. In the novel Dharmen Shah, a real estate mogul represents the first group of people who are socio-politically and economically highly influential, whereas Yogesh A. Murthy, aka Masterji, is the embodiment of the marginalized class that are constantly dominated and exploited by the former group. My present paper aims to analyse in detail how far Masterji is able to resist the scabrous sufferings unleashed by the rich realtor Dharmen Shah, and how far Masterji’s resistance becomes an incarnation of the resilience of marginalized people in the contemporary society.

How Do You Solve a Problem like Horace?

2018 ◽  
pp. 29-48
Author(s):  
Sebastian Matzner
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Critical Knowledge ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Cultural Paradigm ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Considerations

Taking its cue from Horace’s paradoxical dictum that ‘Greece took captive its brutish conqueror and brought its arts to rustic Latium’ (Ep. 2.1.156–7), this chapter explores parallels between the history of Latin literature and theoretical models elaborated by scholars of post-colonial literature. Continuing the first chapter’s broader methodological considerations, it models a post-colonially inflected reading strategy to analyze more lucidly the inter- and intracultural dynamics and politics of Latin texts shaped by (and, in turn, shaping and sustaining) the fraught Greco-Roman cultural relationship: how, where, and to whose (dis-)advantage does Greece work—and is made to work—as a silent referent in Roman literary and literary-critical knowledge? Horace’s Letter to Augustus serves to illustrate the insights this approach can generate in the study of individual Latin texts, of Roman philhellenism as a cultural paradigm, and in current debates on the status of European literature within post-colonial frameworks of world literature.

Of Origins and Colonial Order: Southern Nigerian Historians and the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ c. 1870–1970

1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip S. Zachernuk
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
West African ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
Hamitic Hypothesis ◽  
New Treatments

The professional Nigerian nationalist historiography which emerged in reaction against the imperialist Hamitic Hypothesis – the assertion that Africa's history had been made only by foreigners – is rooted in a complex West African tradition of critical dialogue with European ideas. From the mid-nineteenth century, western-educated Africans have re-worked European ideas into distinctive Hamitic Hypotheses suited to their colonial location. This account developed within the constraints set by changing European and African-American ideas about West African origins and the evolving character of the Nigerian intelligentsia. West Africans first identified themselves not as victims of Hamitic invasion but as the degenerate heirs of classical civilizations, to establish their potential to create a modern, Christian society. At the turn of the century various authors argued for past development within West Africa rather than mere degeneration. Edward Blyden appropriated African-American thought to posit a distinct racial history. Samuel Johnson elaborated on Yoruba traditions of a golden age. Inter-war writers such as J. O. Lucas and Ladipo Solanke built on both arguments, but as race science declined they again invoked universal historical patterns. Facing the arrival of Nigeria as a nation-state, later writers such as S. O. Biobaku developed these ideas to argue that Hamitic invasions had created Nigeria's proto-national culture. In the heightened identity politics of the 1950s, local historians adopted Hamites to compete for historical primacy among Nigerian communities. The Hamitic Hypothesis declined in post-colonial conditions, in part because the concern to define ultimate identities along a colonial axis was displaced by the need to understand identity politics within the Nigerian sphere. The Nigerian Hamitic Hypothesis had a complex career, promoting élite ambitions, Christian identities, Nigerian nationalism and communal rivalries. New treatments of African colonial historiography – and intellectual history – must incorporate the complexities illus-trated here.

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