Native Foreigners and the Ambiguity of Order and Identity: The Case of African Diasporas and Islamic Law in British Cameroon

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 97-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harmony S. O'Rourke

Abstract:In 1947, the colonial government in British Cameroon established an Islamic court in the Grassfields to try cases involving the region's Muslim population, primarily comprised of Fulani and Hausa diaspora communities that had settled the area since the late nineteenth century. Colonial debates over the creation and purview of the court reveal uncertainties that permeated Indirect Rule's legal categories of native and non-native, or tribe and race, which were to be governed by customary and civil law, respectively. Comparing legal regimes in British Cameroon with Northern Nigeria, the homeland of “native” Hausa and Fulani, shows that Islamic law sat uneasily across the divide between customary and civil law. With the importation of the court to the Grassfields, where Fulani and Hausa transformed into “native foreigners,” the delineation between customary and civil law was rendered even more obscure, illustrating that it could never neatly correspond to constructions of race and tribe.

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Minault

Sometime in the late 1890s, Sayyid Mumtaz Ali visited Aligarh and happened to show Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan the manuscript of his treatise in defense of women's rights in Islamic law, Huquq un-Niswan. As he began to read it, Sir Sayyid looked shocked. He then opened it to a second place and his face turned red. As he read it at a third place, his hands started to tremble. Finally, he tore up the manuscript and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Fortunately, at that moment a servant arrived to announce lunch, and as Sir Sayyid left his office, Mumtaz Ali snatched his mutilated manuscript from the trash. He waited until after Sir Sayyid's death in 1898, however, to publish Huquq un-Niswan.


Author(s):  
Tobias Harper

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Nathan Cardon

Chapter 2 examines the creation of and role played by the Negro Buildings at the Atlanta and Nashville fairs. These African American–run buildings gave southern black professionals and clerics an opportunity to voice their own story of the South’s past, present, and future. The buildings presented an image of a “New Negro” who was well versed in the modern techniques of industry and agriculture. The Negro Building exhibits presented black southerners as a progressive and future-oriented people who challenged much of the evolutionary thinking and racial science of the late nineteenth century. At the same time, the Negro Buildings make clear the ways some African American leaders embraced the language of progress and civilization to accommodate white southern society.


2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Ooghe

Since the creation of its first disciplinary histories in the late nineteenth century, Near Eastern archaeology has perceived its origins largely in terms of individual breakthroughs, following the common precepts of a pre-Annales historiography. The founding figures mentioned in the works of Rogers, Hilprecht, Budge or Parrot were either great explorers, great scholars or, most importantly, great excavators. From Della Valle's first tentative explorations at Babylon in 1616 to the major excavations at Nineveh and Babylon three centuries later, Near Eastern archaeology saw itself as the fruit of individual discovery. ‘Real’ archaeology was furthermore perceived as a natural rather than a human science and subsequently taken to have originated in nineteenth-century positivism; earlier accounts were hinted at in only the briefest fashion.


Target ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Weissbrod

Abstract Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Hebrew underwent a process of revival. Despite the growing stratification of the language, literary translations into Hebrew were governed by a norm which dictated the use of an elevated style rooted in ancient Hebrew texts. This norm persisted at least until the 1960s. Motivated by the Hebrew tradition of employing the elevated style to produce the mock-epic, translators created mock-epic works independently of the source texts. This article describes the creation of the mock-epic in canonized and non canonized adult and children's literature, focusing on the Hebrew versions of Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls, Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise and A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.


1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anand A. Yang

The late nineteenth century was a period of selective institution-building by the British in India. Government's efforts were directed primarily towards the development of a more effective control and communications infrastructure. The initial impetus for such changes in Bengal came during the energetic administration of Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant Governor from 1871 to 1874. Under his auspices, attempts were made to extend the administrative machinery down to the sub-district levels by the creation of sub-deputy collectorships and the revitalization of such local officials as kanungos (registrars), patwaris (village accountants) and chaukidars (village watchmen). Better connections to local society were also sought through institutions which linked government to its allies, such as municipal, local, and district boards, and the Court of Wards.


2020 ◽  
pp. 163-172
Author(s):  
Nurfadzilah Yahaya

This chapter recounts how the members of the Arab diaspora attempted legal arbitrage under colonial rule. It analyses the members' expansion and modification of Islamic law, while at other times they policed the boundaries of Islamic law even as mere translators. The chapter tells the story of the surprising involvement of the outsider — the Arab diaspora — in aiding colonialists to accumulate legislative power. The pace of change from the mid-nineteenth century onward was brisk, and the Arab diaspora capitalized on it while attempting to navigate uncertainty and risk. This chapter also investigates how Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia were able to influence the shape of law to a great extent. It takes a look on how concessions to Arabs in the Straits Settlements, in the form of the Mohamedan Marriage Ordinance, and their appointments as members of the Mohamedan Advisory Board after the Sepoy Mutiny subsequently tied them more closely to the British colonial government, along with the rest of the Muslim population in the colony.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Steven Huebner

Saint-Saëns's incidental music for Sophocles’ Antigone (Comédie-Française, 1893, trans. Meurice and Vacquerie) gives witness both to his engagement with culture classique and an experimental orientation in the context of fin-de-siècle music theatre. This essay situates Saint-Saëns's highly idiosyncratic score within the frame of late nineteenth-century research into ancient Greek music by François-Auguste Gevaert and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray. It documents how Saint-Saëns aimed to participate in the creation of an authentic experience of ancient Greek theatre, one enhanced by the initiative of the Comédie-Française to stage its production at the open air Théâtre d'Orange in southern France. The article also shows the limitations of authenticity resulting from the nature of the translation as well as from Saint-Saëns's own compositional instincts.


1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wright

The introduction of modern Western science into late imperial China naturally involved the creation of new linguistic spaces through the translation of science textbooks and the formation of a modern scientific lexicon, but it also required translation in another, physical, sense through the creation of institutions whereby the new system of practices and ideas could be transmitted. The Shanghai Polytechnic, opened in 1876 under the direction of John Fryer, was promoted as an academy for the ‘extension of learning’; this paper explores the role John Fryer and his Polytechnic played in making space for science in late nineteenth-century China.


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