Community Spaces and Public Buildings

2018 ◽  
pp. 147-218
Author(s):  
Pilar Maria Guerrieri

With the arrival of the British (1803) in the capital there is a noticeable change in public buildings. Churches and missionary schools joined mosques and temples of various faiths; the market takes the place of the market-road and the bazar or there is a progressive transition towards buildings of power. After 1947, instead, the most significant aspect is the focus on buildings for the collective. The trend, however, was to add rather than to re-build or demolish, the city absorbed pre-existing buildings, making them become part of the present, shows the inclusive attitude the capital had established with regard to time and cultures. Nonetheless, more than in other urban elements, many buildings, both from the colonial and the post-colonial period, pose the question of how to be ‘Indian’.

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 26-38
Author(s):  
Maurizio Marinelli

Between 1860 and 1945, the Chinese port city of Tianjin was the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions, functioning side by side. Rogaski defined it as a ‘hyper-colony’, a term which reflects Tianjin's socio-political intricacies and the multiple colonial discourses of power and space. This essay focuses on the transformation of the Tianjin cityscape during the last 150 years, and aims at connecting the hyper-colonial socio-spatial forms with the processes of post-colonial identity construction. Tianjin is currently undergoing a massive renovation program: its transmogrifying cityscape unveils multiple layers of ‘globalizing’ spatialities and temporalities, throwing into relief processes of power and capital accumulation, which operate via the urban regeneration's experiment. This study uses an ‘interconnected history’ approach and traces the interweaving ‘worlding’ nodes of today's Tianjin back to the global connections established in the city during the hyper-colonial period. What emerges is Tianjin's simultaneous tendency towards ‘world-class-ness’ and ‘China-class-ness’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 75-97
Author(s):  
Sakariyau Alabi Aliyu

Poised between its Emirate heritage and the mixed-religious culture of fellow Yoruba-speakers, the city of Ilorin has long served as a centre of Islamic learning in Yorubaland. In the colonial period Yoruba Muslims became strongly aware of the need to compete educationally with Christians who had access to Western education, Ilorin also became a location for the modernisation of Islamic schooling. This article explores two pedagogical models that were successfully established in Ilorin during the colonial and post-colonial period, the Adabiyya and Markaziyya. While the emergence of these madrasa-type educational systems reflects some epistemological changes away from embodied learning, the variation between different models illustrates that there are many different ways in which Islamic education can be modernised. The article also highlights that practices of embodiment continue to play an important role in Ilorin, which demonstrates the ongoing importance of Sufi values in modern Islamic education.


2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1465-1498 ◽  
Author(s):  
GERARD McCANN

AbstractThe historiography of South Asian diaspora in colonial Southeast Asia has overwhelmingly focused on numerically dominant South Indian labourers at the expense of the small, but important, North Indian communities, of which the Sikhs were the most visually conspicuous and politically important. This paper will analyse the creation of various Sikh communities in one critical territory in British Asia—Singapore, and chart the development of the island's increasingly unified Sikh community into the post-colonial period. The paper will scrutinize colonial economic roles and socio-cultural formation, whilst links of Singaporean Sikhs to Punjab and their place within the post-colonial Singaporean state will preoccupy the latter portion of the paper. It will argue that more complicated notions of division relative to the social norms of Punjab must be acknowledged in this region of Sikh diaspora and indeed others. The final sections will assess the remarkable success of local Sikhs in utilizing statist policies of ‘domesticating difference’ towards altered ‘community’ ends. Such attachment to the state and the discursive parity of Singapore's Sikhs with official values, moreover, stymied the appeal of transnational Sikh militant movements that gained momentum in the West in the 1980s. The result has been the assertion of ‘model minority’ status for Singapore's Sikhs and notably successful socialization into Singaporean society.


1970 ◽  
pp. 36-47
Author(s):  
Fadwa Al-Labadi

The concept of citizenship was introduced to the Arab and Islamic region duringthe colonial period. The law of citizenship, like all other laws and regulations inthe Middle East, was influenced by the colonial legacy that impacted the tribal and paternalistic systems in all aspects of life. In addition to the colonial legacy, most constitutions in the Middle East draw on the Islamic shari’a (law) as a major source of legislation, which in turn enhances the paternalistic system in the social sector in all its dimensions, as manifested in many individual laws and the legislative processes with respect to family status issues. Family is considered the nucleus of society in most Middle Eastern countries, and this is specifically reflected in the personal status codes. In the name of this legal principle, women’s submission is being entrenched, along with censorship over her body, control of her reproductive role, sexual life, and fertility.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Martin Soukup ◽  
Dušan Lužný

This study analyzes and interprets East Sepik storyboards, which the authors regard as a form of cultural continuity and instrument of cultural memory in the post-colonial period. The study draws on field research conducted by the authors in the village of Kambot in East Sepik. The authors divide the storyboards into two groups based on content. The first includes storyboards describing daily life in the community, while the other links the daily life to pre-Christian religious beliefs and views. The aim of the study is to analyze one of the forms of contemporary material culture in East Sepik in the context of cultural changes triggered by Christianization, colonial administration in the former Territory of New Guinea and global tourism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-3) ◽  
pp. 238-246
Author(s):  
Olga Dzhenchakova

The article considers the impact of the colonial past of some countries in sub-Saharan Africa and its effect on their development during the post-colonial period. The negative consequences of the geopolitical legacy of colonialism are shown on the example of three countries: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Angola, expressed in the emergence of conflicts in these countries based on ethno-cultural, religious and socio-economic contradictions. At the same time, the focus is made on the economic factor and the consequences of the consumer policy of the former metropolises pursuing their mercantile interests were mixed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942199245
Author(s):  
Kavithaa Rajamony ◽  
Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to explore how these narratives respond to the new reality of Chennai, to what extent they see the city producing a standardized experience, and how the fictional characters corroborate or contest institutional change. In the process, the texts are brought to converse with the postcolonial desire for cultural autonomy, its mediation by a nativist agenda, as well as the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in such a desire. The texts betray the inadequacies of the new name as a stable container of cultural meanings and propose an idea of the city that is internally incoherent and multi-experiential.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-35
Author(s):  
Adebukola Dagunduro ◽  
Adebimpe Adenugba

AbstractWomen’s activism within various ethnic groups in Nigeria dates back to the pre-colonial era, with notable heroic leaders, like Moremi of Ife, Amina of Zaria, Emotan of Benin, Funmilayo Kuti, Margaret Ekpo and many others. The participation of Nigerian women in the Beijing Conference of 1995 led to a stronger voice for women in the political landscape. Several women’s rights groups have sprung up in the country over the years. Notable among them are the Federation of Nigerian Women’s Societies (FNWS), Women in Nigeria (WIN), Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND) and Female in Nigeria (FIN). However, majority have failed to actualize significant political, social or economic growth. This paper examines the challenges and factors leading to their inability to live up to people’s expectations. Guided by patriarchy and liberal feminism theories, this paper utilizes both historical and descriptive methods to examine these factors. The paper argues that a lack of solidarity among women’s groups, financial constraints, unfavourable political and social practices led to the inability of women’s groups in Nigeria to live up to the envisaged expectations. The paper concludes that, for women’s activist groups to survive in Nigeria, a quiet but significant social revolution is necessary among women. Government should also formulate and implement policies that will empower women politically, economically and socially.


1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara M. Cooper

This essay argues that female participation in agriculture and limited seclusion in Maradi (Niger) today do not stem from the absence of agricultural slavery in the pre-colonial period but rather result from the resistance of the Katsinawa élite to the Islamic reforms of the Sokoto Caliphate and from the absence of rimji (plantation) slavery in the region. The abolition of slavery did not mark a watershed in the rise of seclusion, as M. G. Smith argues was the case in Nigeria, but rather triggered a series of reformulations of marriage and female hierarchy. Semi-legitimate and legitimate polygynous marriages permitted men and women of the wealthier classes to retain the labor of former female slaves as ‘concubines’ and later enabled them to use junior wives to perform the duties once carried out by slaves. Women countered the ambiguities of such marriages by asserting their worth through wedding ritual and later by adopting the veiling of élite women. As economic and cultural ties with northern Nigeria grew during the colonial and post-colonial periods, and as goods and services reduced some of the labor demands upon urban women, seclusion gained in popularity. By acquiescing to the dependency implicit in purdah women could protect themselves from the labor demands of others and could sometimes free themselves up to earn independent incomes of their own. Thus the recent adoption of seclusion in Maradi has not arisen out of a unilateral decision on the part of newly freed women to adopt seclusion as a sign of status, as Smith claimed for Northern Nigeria, but resulted instead from of a series of redefinitions, contestations and negotiations of marriage in which both men and women have been active.


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