Reading Ngũgĩ Reading Conrad

Author(s):  
Mark Wollaeger

This chapter considers points of intersection between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Joseph Conrad. By Ngũgĩ’s own account, his rewriting of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) as A Grain of Wheat (1967) triggered a crisis of audience that ultimately led him to abandon English for his native Gikuyu. To further complicate the question of influence, Wollaeger also examines the relationship between two works of nonfiction: Conrad’s A Personal Record (1912) and Ngũgĩ’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986). At the heart of Ngũgĩ’s attempt to fashion premodern tribalism into a utopian space are two problems that still animate critical discussion. What is the status of the local and the indigenous? Does attention to influence reinstate a center-periphery model in postcolonial criticism? This chapter shows the extent to which Conrad and Ngũgĩ both anticipate and generate theoretical models later used to articulate modernism and postcolonialism as fields of inquiry.

Author(s):  
Oindrila Dey ◽  
Swapnendu Banerjee

This article provides a critical discussion on the working of status as an instrument to elicit desirable effort within an organization. It postulates a comprehensive survey of the studies on incentive, especially non-monetary incentives like status. Different studies are summarized concisely and elaborate comments on the divergent views on valuation for status, the relationship between monetary and status incentives, the technique of modelling status and the cost of introducing status have been illustrated. The article underlines some probable adverse consequences associated with the use of the status incentive. Status works by creating inequality and has strong unwarranted influence even beyond organizational purview. It emphasizes the need for profound research to account for the optimal and prudent use of status as incentives. JEL Classification: L2, D21, D86


Author(s):  
Freya Sierhuis

This chapter champions the erotic sonnets of the Caelica cycle, often ignored in favour of the philosophical and religious poems of the middle, and final section of the sequence; highlighting both their playful eroticism and philosophical depth. The love poetry which scrutinizes the relationship between the mistress and the lover in terms of projection and fetishization, on closer inspection turns out to share the same philosophical grounds as the poems which examine the mechanisms of spiritual slavery later in the cycle. While certain poems, such as Caelica 39, 43, and 56 explicate the link between courtly love and idolatry, this chapter argues how Greville’s poetry contributes to the debates on the status of the imagination in Renaissance poetics, faculty psychology, and religious controversy, by exploring its affective investment in the act of poetic fiction-making.


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-72
Author(s):  
Morteza Karimi-Nia

The status of tafsīr and Qur'anic studies in the Islamic Republic of Iran has changed significantly during recent decades. The essay provides an overview of the state of Qur'anic studies in Iran today, aiming to examine the extent of the impact of studies by Western scholars on Iranian academic circles during the last three decades and the relationship between them. As in most Islamic countries, the major bulk of academic activity in Iran in this field used to be undertaken by the traditional ʿulamāʾ; however, since the beginning of the twentieth century and the establishment of universities and other academic institutions in the Islamic world, there has been increasing diversity and development. After the Islamic Revolution, many gradual changes in the structure and approach of centres of religious learning and universities have occurred. Contemporary advancements in modern sciences and communications technologies have gradually brought the institutions engaged in the study of human sciences to confront the new context. As a result, the traditional Shīʿī centres of learning, which until 50 years ago devoted themselves exclusively to the study of Islamic law and jurisprudence, today pay attention to the teaching of foreign languages, Qur'anic sciences and exegesis, including Western studies about the Qur'an, to a certain extent, and recognise the importance of almost all of the human sciences of the West.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-102
Author(s):  
Tasnim Rehna ◽  
Rubina Hanif ◽  
Muhammad Aqeel

Background: Widespread social paradigms on which the status variances are grounded in any society, gender plays pivotal role in manifestation of mental health problems (Rutter, 2007). A hefty volume of research has addressed the issue in adults nonetheless, little is vividly known about the role of gender in adolescent psychopathology. Sample: A sample of 240 adolescents (125 boys, 115 girls) aging 12-18 years was amassed from various secondary schools of Islamabad with the approval of the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE), relevant authorities of the schools and the adolescents themselves. Instruments: Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (Taylor & Spence, 1953) and Children’s Negative Cognitive Errors Questionnaire (CNCEQ) by Leitenberg et al., (1986) were applied in present study. Results: Multiple regression analysis revealed that cognitive errors jointly accounted for 78% of variance in predicting anxiety among adolescents. Findings also exhibited that gender significantly moderated the relationship between cognitive errors and adolescent anxiety. Implications of the findings are discoursed for future research and clinical practice.


2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 237-257
Author(s):  
Ravi Vasudevan

This article focuses on the specific Indian cinematic form of the Hindu devotional film genre to explore the relationship between cinema and religion. Using three important early films from the devotional oeuvre—Gopal Krishna, Sant Dnyaneshwar, and Sant Tukaram—as the primary referent, it tries to understand certain characteristic patterns in the narrative structures of these films, and the cultures of visuality and address, miraculous manifestation, and witnessing and self-transformation that they generate. These three films produced by Prabhat Studios between the years 1936 and 1940 and all directed by Vishnupant Damle and Syed Fattelal, drew upon the powerful anti-hierarchical traditions of Bhakti, devotional worship that circumvented Brahmanical forms. This article will argue that the devotional film crucially undertakes a work of transformation in the perspectives on property, and that in this engagement it particularly reviews the status of the household in its bid to generate a utopian model of unbounded community. The article will also consider the status of technologies of the miraculous that are among the central attractions of the genre, and afford a reflection on the relation between cinema technology, popular religious belief and desire, and film spectatorship.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerstin Andermann

The discussion over the befallenness (Widerfahrnis) of experience illustrates how the philosophical tradition has substantially assumed an active and conscious subject. The constitutive meaning of the pre-egoistic and passive, anonymous dimensions of perception and agency become apparent through what befalls us, what we are suffering from, through befallenness, accidentalness and events beyond our control. This article deals with the status of the sovereign subject through a critical discussion of the principles of intentionality and the constitution of world in transcendental subjectivity, showing the development of phenomenology, above all between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, as emphasising passivity and anonymity.


Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Schupmann

Chapter 2 reinterprets Schmitt’s concept of the political. Schmitt argued that Weimar developments, especially the rise of mass movements politically opposed to the state and constitution, demonstrated that the state did not have any sort of monopoly over the political, contradicting the arguments made by predominant Weimar state theorists, such as Jellinek and Meinecke. Not only was the political independent of the state, Schmitt argued, but it could even be turned against it. Schmitt believed that his contemporaries’ failure to recognize the nature of the political prevented them from adequately responding to the politicization of society, inadvertently risking civil war. This chapter reanalyzes Schmitt’s political from this perspective. Without ignoring enmity, it argues that Schmitt also defines the political in terms of friendship and, importantly, “status par excellence” (the status that relativizes other statuses). It also examines the relationship between the political and Schmitt’s concept of representation.


This survey of research on psychology in five volumes is a part of a series undertaken by the ICSSR since 1969, which covers various disciplines under social science. Volume Five of this survey, Explorations into Psyche and Psychology: Some Emerging Perspectives, examines the future of psychology in India. For a very long time, intellectual investments in understanding mental life have led to varied formulations about mind and its functions across the word. However, a critical reflection of the state of the disciplinary affairs indicates the dominance of Euro-American theories and methods, which offer an understanding coloured by a Western world view, which fails to do justice with many non-Western cultural settings. The chapters in this volume expand the scope of psychology to encompass indigenous knowledge available in the Indian tradition and invite engaging with emancipatory concerns as well as broadening the disciplinary base. The contributors situate the difference between the Eastern and Western conceptions of the mind in the practice of psychology. They look at this discipline as shaped by and shaping between systems like yoga. They also analyse animal behaviour through the lens of psychology and bring out insights about evolution of individual and social behaviour. This volume offers critique the contemporary psychological practices in India and offers a new perspective called ‘public psychology’ to construe and analyse the relationship between psychologists and their objects of study. Finally, some paradigmatic, pedagogical, and substantive issues are highlighted to restructure the practice of psychology in the Indian setting.


Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou

The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous films belonging to the New Migrant cinema in Italy. The article also explores how certain aspects of more contemporary studies of migrant cinema in Italy could illuminate our understanding of Neorealist cinema and its relation to national narratives. To connect gender representation and migrant roles in Italian cinema, the article focuses on the analysis of the status of certain roles of women, paying particular attention to Anna Magnagi’s roles.


Author(s):  
Rachel J. Crellin ◽  
Oliver J.T. Harris

In this paper we argue that to understand the difference Posthumanism makes to the relationship between archaeology, agency and ontology, several misconceptions need to be corrected. First, we emphasize that Posthumanism is multiple, with different elements, meaning any critique needs to be carefully targeted. The approach we advocate is a specifically Deleuzian and explicitly feminist approach to Posthumanism. Second, we examine the status of agency within Posthumanism and suggest that we may be better off thinking about affect. Third, we explore how the approach we advocate treats difference in new ways, not as a question of lack, or as difference ‘from’, but rather as a productive force in the world. Finally, we explore how Posthumanism allows us to re-position the role of the human in archaeology,


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