scholarly journals Câm lặng (silence) in Receptions of Rabindranath Tagore in Colonial Vietnam

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chi Pham
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Class Struggles

<p>This article analyses the state of <em>câm l</em><em>ặ</em><em>ng </em>(silence) embodied in Vietnamese literary reactions to Rabindranath Tagore and his works during the French colonial period to address the question of why the Vietnamese colonial reception of Tagore was marginalized from the socialist Vietnamese historiography. The article argues that silence – an image of Annamite spirituality promoted by Tagore and his works as well as by Vietnamese intellectuals – conforms to the Orientalist discourse of spiritual East. Such colonial appreciations of Tagore do not meet any Vietnamese national and class struggles, thus they are made invisible in postcolonial Vietnamese historiography.</p>

Women, Power, and the State in Guinea

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Dessertine
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Political Involvement ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Political Resource ◽  
French Colonial

Women’s involvement in the processes of state formation is marked by a strong ambivalence in Guinea: female political mobilizations appear as an indispensable advantage for state power when they are deployed in support of it, but these mobilizations can likewise disrupt and generate major problems for the state when they are directed against it. The efficacy of female political involvement is closely linked to the historiography of relationships between women and the state in Guinea, a country that helped construct an image of female activism outside of areas considered to be exclusively political, and as a guarantor of social justice. During the colonial period, as was the case for many other countries under French colonial rule, the influence of women was restricted to the domestic sphere: once households ceased to constitute a political resource for the colonial regimes (in contrast to the precolonial era), the influence that women were able to wield within, for example, matrimonial alliances was considerably reduced. Yet, women played a highly important role in nationalist conflicts and under the regime of Sékou Touré, who served as Guinea’s first president from 1958 to 1984. Presented as the “women’s man,” Touré sought high integration of women into his political party, based on structures inspired by the Soviet socialist model. This was a Guinean political originality. In this context, even though women were given official prominence, their demands nonetheless drew on conservative models that relied on a politicization of the maternal figure. Yet the domestic and apolitical character of female mobilization still lends it a spontaneous efficacy in a context in which laws supporting women are seldom enforced and in which the situation seems to have become increasingly precarious for women due to male emigration and inequalities in property rights.

Suffering Spectators of Development

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjun Chowdhury
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Central Government ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Alternative View

This chapter offers an alternative view of the incidence and duration of insurgencies in the postcolonial world. Insurgencies and civil wars are seen as the primary symptom of state weakness, the inability of the central government to monopolize violence. Challenging extant explanations that identify poverty and low state capacity as the cause of insurgencies, the chapter shows that colonial insurgencies, also occurring in the context of poverty and state weakness, were shorter and ended in regime victories, while contemporary insurgencies are longer and states are less successful at subduing them. The reason for this is the development of exclusive identities—based on ethnicity, religion, tribe—in the colonial period. These identities serve as bases for mobilization to challenge state power and demand services from the state. Either way, such mobilization means that popular demands for services exceed the willingness to disarm and/or pay taxes, that is, to supply the state.

scholarly journals The History of Cultural Policy in Indonesia 1900s-2000s

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Wildan Sena Utama
Keyword(s):  
National Culture ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Relationship

This book investigates how culture, particularly national culture, in Indonesia has been shaped by the government policies from the Dutch colonial period in 1900s to the Reformation era in 2000s. It is an attempt to show the relationship between the state and culture around the process of production, circulation, regulation and reception of cultural policy through different regimes. Although this book discusses government policy, the author has realized that the book needs to overcome contradictions and confusions of cultural discourse by incorporating people as explanatory element. Many aspect of culturality may be influenced by the state, but according to Jones, “it is a field that is not stable and easy to shift that facilitates resistance, and is able to turn against the state, market and other institutions” (p. 31). Jones employs two postcolonial cultural policy tools to review the history of cultural policy in Indonesia: authoritarian cultural policy and command culture. The first means that the state has assumption if majority of citizen do not have capability to inspirit a responsible citizenship and need a state’s direction in the choice of their culture. On the contrary, command culture shows that the cultural idea that is planned in fact always been placing the state as center in planning, creating policy and revising cultural practice.

Zooarchaeological evidence that the brown mussel (Perna perna) is a bioinvader of coastal Brazil

The Holocene ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (11) ◽  
pp. 1771-1780 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edson P Silva ◽  
Rosa CCL Souza ◽  
Tania A Lima ◽  
Flávio C Fernandes ◽  
Kita D Macario ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Native Species ◽  
Radiocarbon Dating ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
Brazilian Coast ◽  
Perna Perna ◽  
Great Probability ◽  
Haplotypic Diversity ◽  
Brazilian Populations

Interactions between invader species and the local biota may lead to disequilibria in regional ecosystems. For such reason, the cultivation of nonnative species may be prohibited in specific regions, as a means of protecting native species. On the other hand, the question of whether a species is a bioinvader or not may not be straightforward. This is the case of the mollusc Perna perna, presently naturalized and widely distributed along Brazilian coast, from the Bay of Vitória, in the state of Espírito Santo (ES), to the state of Rio Grande do Sul (RS). Following previous works that explored the hypothesis that P. perna invaded the coast of Brazil at the colonial period, attached to slave ships, we discuss zooarchaeological data, radiocarbon dating, and molecular genetics analyses. Out of the 578 archeological shellmounds investigated, 542 (93.8%) had no records of P. perna. From the radiocarbon dating results, it is possible to infer that the presence of the two P. perna specimens from the Saquarema shellmound, in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the other shells from the top layer, is likely related to a recent occupation of the site in the colonial period, with a great probability of being from the XVII or XVIII centuries. Data on genetic population structure of P. perna along the Brazilian coast showed higher genetic identities between the African and the Brazilian populations than among the Brazilian populations, while haplotypic diversity shows a pattern which relates to trade routes of slaves (XVII and XVIII centuries) between Africa and Brazil. These data reinforce the argument that the appearance of P. perna along the Brazilian coast is due to invasion during historical time.

An Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities in the Americas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Native American ◽  
New World ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
Ancien Régime

This chapter provides a historical and geographical background and situates the volume’s contributions in the context of previous archaeological research into the French in the New World. The chapter discusses the ways in which French settlers made their presence felt on the landscape and on Native groups through a wide range of settlement types, economic and social networks, and successive generations of habitation. The chapter reviews both the well-studied French colonial period and the lesser known post-Conquest period, after the Treaty of Versailles and after the ancien régime fell, during which communities of Francophone peoples (ethnic French, Native American, and African) continued to live in the New World.

Phan Chu Trinh's Democratic Confucianism

2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-620
Author(s):  
Kevin D. Pham
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Exclusive Property ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Foreign Ideas

AbstractA consensus on three claims has emerged in literature that explores the relationship between Confucianism and democracy: democracy is not the exclusive property of Western liberalism, Confucianism and liberalism are opposed, and democracy in East Asia would be best buttressed by Confucianism, not liberalism. Why, then, does Phan Chu Trinh (1872–1926), Vietnam's celebrated nationalist of the French colonial period, argue that liberalism and democracy are Western creations that cannot be decoupled, and, if adopted by the Vietnamese, will allow Confucianism to find its fullest expression? The answer is that Trinh ignores liberalism's individualism while celebrating other aspects of liberalism and Western civilization. Trinh's interpretation of Western ideas, although naive, is a creative one that offers political theorists a lesson: it may be useful to view foreign ideas as foreign, to interpret them generously, and to import the creative distortion to revive our own cherished, yet faltering, traditions.

Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1621-1629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salah D. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North American ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
American Writer ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
State Form

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

The Cwezi-Kubandwa Debate: Gender, Hegemony and Pre-Colonial Religion in Bunyoro, Western Uganda

Africa ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane Doyle
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Domestic Institutions ◽  
Organizational Resources ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Western Uganda

AbstractThe Cwezi-kubandwa cult was the most prominent form of religious belief in the interlacustrine region of East Africa during the pre-colonial period. It has long been regarded as providing ideological support to monarchical regimes across the region. Recently, though, scholars have contrasted the hegemonic ambitions of the state with evidence that Cwezi-kubandwa also provided opponents of pre-colonial authority structures with both ideological and organizational resources. In particular historians of the cult have hypothesized that Cwezi-kubandwa offered women a refuge from patriarchal political and domestic institutions, and that Cwezi-kubandwa was dominated by women in terms of its leadership, membership and idioms. This article challenges the new orthodoxy by suggesting that both traditional religion's hegemonic and counter-hegemonic roles may have been over-estimated. A re-examination of the Nyoro sources indicates instead that Cwezi-kubandwa was far from homogeneous and dominant, that kubandwa was not obviously oppositional to other, supposedly male-dominated, religious beliefs, and that Cwezi-kubandwa brought female exploitation as well as empowerment. These findings require either a re-evaluation of the nature of Cwezi-kubandwa across the region, or recognition that the cult was much more geographically diverse than has hitherto been believed.

A New Name for an Old Practice: Vigilantes in South-Western Nigeria

Africa ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Fourchard
Keyword(s):  
Community Policing ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
New Name ◽  
Marked Decline ◽  
State Monopoly ◽  
Legitimate Violence ◽  
New Phenomena

It is often considered probable that the recent rise of vigilante groups in Nigeria means an erosion of the state monopoly of legitimate violence as well as a marked decline in state sovereignty over the national territory. However, this conclusion does not take into consideration the fact that in Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a term initially proposed by the police in the mid-1980s as a substitute for an older practice known in the western part of the country since the colonial period as the ‘hunter guard’ or ‘night guard’ system. Hence, instead of looking at vigilante groups as a response to a supposed increase in crime or a supposed decline of the police force, we should consider them – initially at least – as a first attempt to introduce forms of community policing in order to improve the appalling image of the police. As such, in south-western Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a new name for an old practice of policing that should be considered in an extended timeframe (from the 1930s onward), a period in which violent crime has been perceived as a potential danger. Finally, within the ongoing debate on the ‘privatization of the state’ in Africa, non-state policing in Nigeria testifies to a continuum existing since the colonial period rather than to the appearance of new phenomena in the 1980s or the 1990s.

Anthropological Reflections on the Breakup of Sudan

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leif Manger
Keyword(s):  
South Sudan ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
North And South

The division of Sudan into two countries on 9 July 2011 following the self-determination referendum of 9 January represents a rare development in Africa. Few examples exist of new state formations in the continent after the end of the colonial period. Answering the call of the IJMES editor to reflect on what this event will mean for our understanding of Sudan might take us in several directions. Let me use this opportunity to comment on two themes that have concerned me lately: the role of the state and the possibility that multiple national identities will evolve in North and South Sudan.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document