scholarly journals Memorializing a Legendary Figure: Bayajidda the Prince of Bagdad in Hausa Land

Afrika Focus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-136
Author(s):  
Abubakar Aliyu Liman

This paper examines the various ways in which the Bayajidda legend is memorialized. In its current manifestations, the legend can be seen as an important agency for the remembrance of the past in the context of rapid socio-historical change in Africa, under the influence of modernity, technology and globalization. The analysis begins by highlighting the interface between folklore and history in everyday cultural practices in postcolonial northern Nigeria. The signposts that give a coherent structure to the paper include the chronicles of the Bayajidda legend, the essential oral version circulating in its different forms in Hausa society. Over the years, reference to the legend of Bayajidda has always been made through the use of different modes of cultural expression such as song, dramatic performance, film and other forms of narration. This range has served the political and ideological interests of the dominant power elite who are consistently alluding to the Bayajidda legend. The survival of the essential oral narrative therefore depends solely on a strategy of alluding to the legend in its various guises, including the form of museum artifacts, drama, films and musical songs. However, the paper explores each of the specific historical periods from the pre-colonial down to the colonial and postcolonial epochs with a view to highlighting how specific forms of the legend are deployed by hegemonic structures for the purposes of legitimation.

Afrika Focus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abubakar Aliyu Liman

This paper examines the various ways in which the Bayajidda legend is memorialized. In its current manifestations, the legend can be seen as an important agency for the remembrance of the past in the context of rapid socio-historical change in Africa, under the influence of modernity, technology and globalization. The analysis begins by highlighting the interface between folklore and history in everyday cultural practices in postcolonial northern Nigeria. The signposts that give a coherent structure to the paper include the chronicles of the Bayajidda legend, the essential oral version circulating in its different forms in Hausa society. Over the years, reference to the legend of Bayajidda has always been made through the use of different modes of cultural expression such as song, dramatic performance, film and other forms of narration. This range has served the political and ideological interests of the dominant power elite who are consistently alluding to the Bayajidda legend. The survival of the essential oral narrative therefore depends solely on a strategy of alluding to the legend in its various guises, including the form of museum artifacts, drama, films and musical songs. However, the paper explores each of the specific historical periods from the pre-colonial down to the colonial and postcolonial epochs with a view to highlighting how specific forms of the legend are deployed by hegemonic structures for the purposes of legitimation. KEYWORDS: BAYAJIDDA, LEGEND, HISTORY, HAUSA KINGDOM, MEMORIALIZATION, RECREATION


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlasta Jalušič

Reinhard Koselleck has long been regarded as a particularly eminent theorist of socio-political concepts, while Hannah Arendt had not been in focus as a conceptual author until recent times. This article explores the common thinking space between Arendt and Koselleck through their thesis about the gap, rupture, crisis, or break in the tradition of political thinking and historical periods and how this is linked to their notion of conceptuality, i.e. Begreifen (understanding). Despite the impression that each of them focused on the one main break between the past and the future, Arendt and Koselleck both studied multiple breaks and crises in the Western political tradition. The article attempts to show how their distinctive thinking and rethinking of political concepts (Begreifen) are related to these breaks through several direct and indirect encounters and how these are both close and apart at the same time. While they have different concepts of politics and the political, their understanding of the breaks in time and crises can be read as complementary, especially considering their concern with returning the responsibility for actions and concepts to the human sphere.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanran Li

<p><b>The impacts of globalisation has lead towards the loss of culture, such as overpopulation, forestation and global intergration. The lost culture has mostly been preserved through written text and oral narratives as a way of illustrating a long-gone reality. Similarly, narratives have the power to connect people with imagination and allow them to experience the uniqueness of a specific site in their own terms. However, oral narrative and written text lacked the interaction between communities, or human to Landscape. New technologies have the potential to reconnect these oral narratives or written text with both the wider public and the site. </b></p><p>This research will explore the historical change of Lake Fuxian, from 500 million years ago to present day, through the illustration and experience of Landscape narratives. This research aims to utilize Augmented Reality as a way to physically connect to the past, while still retaining the existing landscape. Augmented Reality has the ability to combine many types of narratives, such as oral, written and drawn, resulting in an educated relationship to Lake Fuxian. Additionally, modernizing these narratives for a larger demographic such as visitors and locals to engage with the landscape, promoting respect for cultural diversity and adaption. </p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 837-867 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUNIL PURUSHOTHAM

Jawaharlal Nehru was both a historian and a self-conscious agent of historical change. This essay explores his political thought by bringing these two perspectives together. I argue that his approaches to a number of issues, including the state project that has been his most significant legacy, shared a concern with linking together the past, present and future. My concern here is primarily with the post-1947 phase of Nehru's career, which was marked by key shifts in his political thought due to a perceived transformation of temporal experience and an altered relationship with history. By attending to the way his thought worked through notions of temporality and historicity, this article offers insights into Nehru's understanding of technological modernity, violence, socialism, the individual, the nation and the role of the state.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inari Sakki ◽  
Eemeli Hakoköngäs ◽  
Katarina Pettersson

This article focuses on nationalist political rhetoric in two historical periods in Finland. We analysed the rhetorical changes and continuities in anticommunist newspaper articles from the past (1930s) and in anti-Islam blogs in the present (2010s). We identified two similar discourses in the political rhetoric of both eras, each discourse constructed around two different Others: the external Other, the stranger from the outside world, and the internal Others, those within our own society. Our analysis identified some significant differences pertaining to the form of the rhetoric in the two studied time periods. The writers in the past used unproblematic and blatant rhetoric that often relied on metaphorical and hyperbolic expressions. The present-day bloggers painted a negative picture of the Other more often than did their counterparts of the 1930s by using factuality-enhancing strategies such as giving details, citing statistics, and drawing on expert knowledge. Importantly, moreover, the present-day discourse was characterised by defensive and counterattacking rhetorical formulations, as illustrated by the extensive denials and reversals of racism. Our analysis suggests that the discourse of Otherness seems to require much more rhetorical work and justifying proclamations in the present than in the past nationalist political rhetoric.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanran Li

<p><b>The impacts of globalisation has lead towards the loss of culture, such as overpopulation, forestation and global intergration. The lost culture has mostly been preserved through written text and oral narratives as a way of illustrating a long-gone reality. Similarly, narratives have the power to connect people with imagination and allow them to experience the uniqueness of a specific site in their own terms. However, oral narrative and written text lacked the interaction between communities, or human to Landscape. New technologies have the potential to reconnect these oral narratives or written text with both the wider public and the site. </b></p><p>This research will explore the historical change of Lake Fuxian, from 500 million years ago to present day, through the illustration and experience of Landscape narratives. This research aims to utilize Augmented Reality as a way to physically connect to the past, while still retaining the existing landscape. Augmented Reality has the ability to combine many types of narratives, such as oral, written and drawn, resulting in an educated relationship to Lake Fuxian. Additionally, modernizing these narratives for a larger demographic such as visitors and locals to engage with the landscape, promoting respect for cultural diversity and adaption. </p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Benoit Challand ◽  
Joshua Rogers

This paper provides an historical exploration of local governance in Yemen across the past sixty years. It highlights the presence of a strong tradition of local self-rule, self-help, and participation “from below” as well as the presence of a rival, official, political culture upheld by central elites that celebrates centralization and the strong state. Shifts in the predominance of one or the other tendency have coincided with shifts in the political economy of the Yemeni state(s). When it favored the local, central rulers were compelled to give space to local initiatives and Yemen experienced moments of political participation and local development.


Author(s):  
Nguyen Van Dung ◽  
Giang Khac Binh

As developing programs is the core in fostering knowledge on ethnic work for cadres and civil servants under Decision No. 402/QD-TTg dated 14/3/2016 of the Prime Minister, it is urgent to build training program on ethnic minority affairs for 04 target groups in the political system from central to local by 2020 with a vision to 2030. The article highlighted basic issues of practical basis to design training program of ethnic minority affairs in the past years; suggested solutions to build the training programs in integration and globalization period.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
D. A. Abgadzhava ◽  
A. S. Vlaskina

War is an essential part of the social reality inherent in all stages of human development: from the primitive communal system to the present, where advanced technologies and social progress prevail. However, these characteristics do not make our society more peaceful, on the contrary, according to recent research and reality, now the number of wars and armed conflicts have increased, and most of the conflicts have a pronounced local intra-state character. Thus, wars in the classical sense of them go back to the past, giving way to military and armed conflicts. Now the number of soldiers and the big army doesn’t show the opponents strength. What is more important is the fact that people can use technology, the ideological and informational base to win the war. According to the history, «weak» opponent can be more successful in conflict if he has greater cohesion and ideological unity. Modern wars have already transcended the political boundaries of states, under the pressure of certain trends, they are transformed into transnational wars, that based on privatization, commercialization and obtaining revenue. Thus, the present paper will show a difference in understanding of terms such as «war», «military conflict» and «armed conflict». And also the auteurs will tell about the image of modern war and forecasts for its future transformation.


Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.


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