Transcending Postcolonial Frontiers: Re-envisaging the Grand Trunk Road

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 305-326
Author(s):  
Priya Singh ◽  

The essay calls for a re-imagining and reshaping of colonial constructs. It concisely encapsulates the history of the Grand Trunk Road (GT Road), from the 16th century when it was referred to as ‘Sadak-e-Azam’ to the late 19th century, when the road was completed under the administration of Lord William Bentinck and was renamed as ‘The Grand Trunk Road’ to contemporary times when it connects multiple cities with National Highways as part of the Golden Quadrilateral project and remains a ‘continuum’ that covers a distance of over 2,500 kilometres. While highlighting its importance in terms of its criticality as a geopolitical/strategic connect, the essay concludes on the note that there is much more to the GT Road than being a mere logistical, infrastructural tool. It serves as a political and cultural connect as well as embodies a way of life and these historic and organic connections require reinforcement. The essay underlines the symbolic value of the GT Road, while it comprises the mainstay of commerce in the subcontinent but, at the same time is significant in terms of rearranging social and political hierarchies, in other words, it constitutes an intrinsic part of the broader narrative of the south Asian space.

2019 ◽  
pp. 256-281
Author(s):  
E.M. Kopot`

The article brings up an obscure episode in the rivalry of the Orthodox and Melkite communities in Syria in the late 19th century. In order to strengthen their superiority over the Orthodox, the Uniates attempted to seize the church of St. George in Izraa, one of the oldest Christian temples in the region. To the Orthodox community it presented a threat coming from a wealthier enemy backed up by the See of Rome and the French embassy. The only ally the Antioch Patriarchate could lean on for support in the fight for its identity was the Russian Empire, a traditional protector of the Orthodox Arabs in the Middle East. The documents from the Foreign Affairs Archive of the Russian Empire, introduced to the scientific usage for the first time, present a unique opportunity to delve into the history of this conflict involving the higher officials of the Ottoman Empire as well as the Russian embassy in ConstantinopleВ статье рассматривается малоизвестный эпизод соперничества православной и Мелкитской общин в Сирии в конце XIX века. Чтобы укрепить свое превосходство над православными, униаты предприняли попытку захватить церковь Святого Георгия в Израа, один из старейших христианских храмов в регионе. Для православной общины он представлял угрозу, исходящую от более богатого врага, поддерживаемого Римским престолом и французским посольством. Единственным союзником, на которого Антиохийский патриархат мог опереться в борьбе за свою идентичность, была Российская Империя, традиционный защитник православных арабов на Ближнем Востоке. Документы из архива иностранных дел Российской Империи, введены в научный оборот впервые, уникальная возможность углубиться в историю этого конфликта с участием высших должностных лиц в Османской империи, а также российского посольства в Константинополе.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Francesco Bono

This essay deals with a number of Italian and Austrian films produced around the mid-1930s as a result of the cinematic cooperation that developed between Rome and Vienna at the time. The essay’s goal is to investigate a complex chapter in the history of Italian and Austrian film which has yet received little attention. The Austro-Italian cooperation in the field of film, which developed against the backdrop of the political alliance between Fascist Italy and Austria’s so-called Corporate State, involved some of the biggest names in Italian and Austrian cinema of the time, including Italian directors Carmine Gallone, Augusto Genina and Goffredo Alessandrini, Viennese screenwriter Walter Reisch, and Italian novelist Corrado Alvaro. In particular, the essay will consider the Italian film Casta Diva (1935) and its debt to one of the most famous Austrian productions of the 1930s, Willi Forst’s film Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933). Further films to be discussed include Tagebuch der Geliebten (1935), Una donna tra due mondi (1936), Opernring (1936), and Blumen aus Nizza (1936). Tagebuch der Geliebten was based on the diary of Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff, who lived in Paris in the late 19th century. Una donna tra due mondi starred Italian diva Isa Miranda, Opernring Polish tenor Jan Kiepura, Blumen aus Nizza German singer Erna Sack.These films should be truly regarded as transnational productions, in which various cultural traditions and stylistic influences coalesced. By investigating them, this essay aims to shed light on a crucial period in the history of European cinema.


2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Bryan Gilling

The history of the Assets Co v Mere Roihi decision, a well-known early Privy Council authority on indefeasibility of title under the Torrens system of land registration, illustrates the vulnerability of Maori to irregular land acquisition methods during the late 19th century. It also highlights the inadequacies of the Native Land Court system at the time. The author argues that the policy demands for legal certainty created a hidden and undue cost on the Maori participants: as a result of the case, Maori lost their main opportunity to gain redress for effectively or actually fraudulent dealings in their lands, and for mistakes made by the Land Court.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-533
Author(s):  
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan

The history of the archive is the history of the state. Or so say conventional approaches to the archives. Until recently, the archive has been seen solely as a site, or rather a repository, of modern state power and governmentality, and a crucial medium for the making and preservation of national memory in the late 19th century. There is a truth to this state-centric perspective: the archive was conceived as a place where governments keep their records; they usually contain a term such as “state,” “government,” or “national” in their names; and they are often funded by and connected to a governmental body.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-393
Author(s):  
Manisha Desai

In this article, I focus on the work of the South Asian Network for Gender Transformation (SANGAT) to show how it goes beyond the current turn to the Global South in much contemporary transnational feminisms. It does so in two ways. One, as evident in the name, it defines a regional imaginary, which is place-based and informed by the long history of interactions in the area beyond the colonial, postcolonial, and recent global forces, as well as in conversation with discourses and practices from the North. Second, its praxis connects activists across borders in a process of mutual learning that acknowledges power inequalities and draws upon local as well as transnational feminist theories and methodologies to enable sustainable collaborations for social and gender justice in the region. Thus, rather than reproducing the North/South binaries with its attendant erasures SANGAT seeks to go beyond them to develop place-based yet connected ‘solidarities of epistemologies’ and praxis.


2001 ◽  
Vol 38 (8) ◽  
pp. 1141-1155 ◽  
Author(s):  
G D Osborn ◽  
B J Robinson ◽  
B H Luckman

The Holocene and late glacial history of fluctuations of Stutfield Glacier are reconstructed using moraine stratigraphy, tephrochronology, and dendroglaciology. Stratigraphic sections in the lateral moraines contain tills from at least three glacier advances separated by volcanic tephras and paleosols. The oldest, pre-Mazama till is correlated with the Crowfoot Advance (dated elsewhere to be Younger Dryas equivalent). A Neoglacial till is found between the Mazama tephra and a paleosol developed on the Bridge River tephra. A log dating 2400 BP from the upper part of this till indicates that this glacier advance, correlated with the Peyto Advance, culminated shortly before deposition of the Bridge River tephra. Radiocarbon and tree-ring dates from overridden trees exposed in moraine sections indicate that the initial Cavell (Little Ice Age (LIA)) Advance overrode this paleosol and trees after A.D. 1271. Three subsequent phases of the Cavell Advance were dated by dendrochronology. The maximum glacier extent occurred in the mid-18th century, predating 1743 on the southern lateral, although ice still occupied and tilted a tree on the north lateral in 1758. Subsequent glacier advances occurred ca. 1800–1816 and in the late 19th century. The relative extent of the LIA advances at Stutfield differs from that of other major eastward flowing outlets of the Columbia Icefield, which have maxima in the mid–late 19th century. This is the first study from the Canadian Rockies to demonstrate that the large, morphologically simple, lateral moraines defining the LIA glacier limits are actually composite features, built up progressively (but discontinuously) over the Holocene and contain evidence of multiple Holocene- and Crowfoot-age glacier advances.


2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Miriam Velázquez Martínez

The existence of the Franz Mayer Museum is due to the German philanthropist and naturalized Mexican, Franz Gabriel Mayer Traumann Altschul (1882-1975), who bequeathed to the Mexican people his library and decorative arts collection. Considered the most important of its kind in the country, it includes works from the 16th through the 19th centuries, from America, Europe and Asia. It is located in Mexico City, in a building dating from the second half of the 16th century, and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2011. The Library, which is open to researchers, is currently made up of around 22,000 volumes, and specializes in decorative arts and the history of Mexico in the 19th century, among other subjects. As well as displaying the Mayer Collection the Museum also presents temporary exhibitions on decorative arts, contemporary design and photography, while the library holds two exhibitions a year highlighting the bibliographic collections.


2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 633-658
Author(s):  
Prakash Kumar

India's agrarian history has for the most part been cast within colonial and nationalist frameworks or in analyses of modernity and development in the South Asian historiography on both sides of the independence divide. This leaves plenty of space to discuss both the vast engagement of American actors with Indian elite formations and modifications to the agrarian projects contingent upon those interactions. A focus on the Americanist drive for agrarian modernization in India allows for exploring the distinct cultural location of modernization in a long-term perspective and its engagement with colonial “development.” A study of their mutual interaction gives insights into modernization's somewhat distinct itinerary on the subcontinent and provides specificity to the history of the otherwise spatially wider American intervention in global and inter-Asian contexts.


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