Review: I'd Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music by Peter La Chapelle

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-139
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
Country Music ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Breathing in India, c. 1890

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 283-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
NILE GREEN
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political History ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis essay examines a series of ‘Hindustani’ meditation manuals from the high colonial period against a sample of etiquette and medicinal works from the same era. In doing so, the essay has two principal aims, one specific to the Indian past and one pertaining to more general historical enquiry. The first aim is to subvert a longstanding trend in the ‘history’ of religions which has understood meditational practices through a paradigm of the mystical and transcendent. In its place, the essay examines such practices—and in particular their written, and printed, formulation—within the ideological and technological contexts in which they were written. In short, meditation is historicised, and its ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ expressions, compared in the process. The second aim is more ambitious: to test the limits of historical knowledge by asking whether it is possible to recount a history of breathing. In reassembling a political economy of respiration from a range of colonial writings, the essay thus hopes to form a listening device for the intimate rhythms of corporeal history. In doing so, it may suggest ways to recount a connected and necessarily political history of the body, the spirit and the world.

After the Lion

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-170
Author(s):  
Priya Atwal
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eventual Collapse

This chapter begins delving into the politics surrounding and embedded into the historiography concerning the fall of the Sikh Empire. It particularly focuses on deconstructing narratives about Ranjit Singh’s death and how historically pivotal this event is thought to have been in leading to the internal problems and eventual collapse of the kingdom in the decade between 1839 and 1849. Instead, the chapter argues for greater attention to be paid to the gendered and colonial politics influencing the British and European writings on the Punjab’s royal elite and the kingdom’s affairs during this crucial period. Such sources have considerably constituted the basis of subsequent histories and biographies about Ranjit Singh and his family, but have rarely been critically interrogated for their internal debates and biases. This chapter instead attempts to piece together a political history of such colonial writings on the Punjab – together with drawing upon a range of less-studied Persian, Punjabi and Sanskrit courtly sources – to resurrect a vista of the world of Ranjit Singh’s heirs, as they sought to maintain the independence of their kingdom into the 1830s.

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