scholarly journals Curriculum, knowledge, and the idea of South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Crain Soudien
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Curriculum Project

South Africa is an important social space in world history and politics for understanding how the modern world comes to deal with the questions of social difference, and the encounter of people with different civilizational histories. In this essay I argue that a particular racial idea inflected this encounter. One of the ways in which this happened was through the dominance of late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century positivism. In setting up the argument for this essay, I begin with a characterization of the nature of early South Africa's modernity, the period in which the country's political and intellectual leadership began to outline the kinds of knowledges they valued. I argue that a scientism, not unlike the positivism that emerges in many parts of the world at this time, came to inform discussions of progress and development in the country at the end of the nineteenth century. This was continued into the early twentieth century, and was evident in important interventions in the country such as the establishment of the higher education system and initiatives like the Carnegie Inquiry of 1933. The key effect of this scientism, based as it was on the conceits of objectivity and neutrality, was to institute suspicion of all other forms of knowing, and most critically that of indigenous knowledge. In the second part of the paper, I show that this scientism persists in the post-apartheid curriculum project. Finally, I make an exploratory argument, drawing on the concept of the 'transaction' in John Dewey, for a new approach to knowing.

Danxia Burns a Buddha

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Art Collecting ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Photographic Reproduction ◽  
Art Canon ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Modern Artists

Chapter 3 focuses on a medieval painting in the Zen art canon—Yintuoluo’s painting of Danxia Tianran (738/39-824), a Chinese monk said to have burned a wood statue of the Buddha—and situates it within its modern surround, particularly in relation to Zen iconoclasm, a prominent trope in postwar Zen cultural production including Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and other countercultural works. The chapter suggests how premodern representations of the Danxia tale circulated in the modern world through art collecting, photographic reproduction, translations of hagiography into modern Japanese and English for lay and non-practicing readers, and “reverse orientalist” critique of Western views of Buddhism. It notes too the tale’s representation by modern artists in Japan, including Yamamoto Shunkyo and Okamoto Ippei. Whatever the representation of Danxia burning the Buddha meant in preceding centuries, in the early twentieth century, it responded to new prospects, ambitions, and conflicts, as much geo-political as personal.

Lunatic Forms

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-86
Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Character Types

Chapter 1 examines derivation and re-animation in Djuna Barnes’s early-twentieth-century lyric novel, Nightwood, focusing on redeployed aesthetic figures: the sleepwalker, the unstoppable narrator, the animate statue. It shows how Barnes’s resurrection of character types is informed by the genre-fusing innovations of the commedia dell’arte. It reads Barnes in dialogue with both Laforgue’s and Verlaine’s development of the Pierrot-figure, and the sad and ominous clowns in grotesque theatre, which inform Chaplin’s Tramp and Beckett’s clowns, as well as Barnes’s characterization of the ‘doctor’. Does Nightwood cast its characters in stone, locking them into old, ritualized narrative strategies? Or are these types themselves on the move; re-animating generations of performances and forms, from Shakespeare’s bawdy, to Rabelais’s carnivalesque, to Aphra Behn’s moon-philosopher, Doctor Balierdo?

The limits of comparison: institutional mortality rates, long-term confinement and causes of death during the early twentieth century

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Waltraud Ernst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
Modern World ◽  
British India ◽  
Psychiatric Institution ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material

This article presents a case study of institutional trends in a psychiatric institution in British India during the early twentieth century. It focuses on mortality statistics and long-term confinement rates as well as causes of death. The intention is two-fold: first, to provide new material that potentially lends itself to comparison with the few existing institutional case studies that have explored this particular period; second, to highlight some of the problems inherent in the status of the statistics and the conceptual categories used, and to consider the challenges these pose for any intended comparative and transnational assessment. Furthermore, it is suggested that historians working on the history of western institutions ought to look beyond the confining rim of Eurocentric self-containment and relate their research to other institutions around the world. It is important for social historians to abstain from uncritically reproducing hegemonic histories of the modern world in which western cultures and nations are posited by default as the centre or metropolis and the rest as peripheries whose social and scientific developments may be seen to be of exotic interest, but merely derivative and peripheral.

scholarly journals Seeking the Dharma on the World Stage: Lü Bicheng and the Revival of Buddhism in the Early Twentieth Century

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 558
Author(s):  
Peng Liu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Space ◽  
New Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Animal Protection ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The New Woman

This article focuses on the Chinese woman writer Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1883–1943) and her relationship with the worldwide movement for the revival of Buddhism in the early twentieth century. Lü rose up in the context of the “new woman” ideal and transcended that ideal as she rejected the dualistic thinking that was prevalent in her time. She embraced both reason and religion, as well as both modern and traditional ideas. Her story demonstrates that religion and the creation of the “new woman” were not mutually exclusive in her life. In the 1920s and 1930s, Lü traveled extensively in the United States and Europe and eventually converted to Buddhism after she witnessed its popularity in the West. During this period, she successfully created a social space for herself by utilizing Buddhist sources to engage in intellectual dialogues on paranormal phenomena and animal protection. At the same time, she carved out a place for Buddhism in the discourse on the convergence and divergence of science and religion after the First World War (1914–1918).

People of Adam: Divine Healing and Racial Cosmopolitanism in the Early Twentieth-Century Transvaal, South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 557-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Cabrita
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Faith Healing ◽  
Divine Healing ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biological Race ◽  
Healing Group

AbstractThis article analyses the intersection between cosmopolitanism and racist ideologies in the faith healing practices of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. Originally from Illinois, USA, this organization was the period's most influential divine healing group. Black and white members, under the leadership of the charismatic John Alexander Dowie, eschewed medical assistance and proclaimed God's power to heal physical affliction. In affirming the deity's capacity to remake human bodies, church members also insisted that God could refashion biological race into a capacious spiritual ethnicity: a global human race they referred to as the “Adamic” race. Zionist universalist teachings were adopted by dispossessed and newly urbanized Boer ex-farmers in Johannesburg, Transvaal, before spreading to the soldiers of the British regiments recently arrived to fight the Boer states in the war of 1899–1902. Zionism equipped these estranged white “races” with a vocabulary to articulate political reconciliation and a precarious unity. But divine healing was most enthusiastically received among the Transvaal's rural Africans. Amidst the period's hardening segregation, Africans seized upon divine healing's innovative racial teachings, but both Boers and Africans found disappointment amid Zion's cosmopolitan promises. Boers were marginalized within the new racial regimes of the Edwardian empire in South Africa, and white South Africans had always been ambivalent about divine healing's incorporations of black Africans into a unitary race. This early history of Zionism in the Transvaal reveals the constriction of cosmopolitan aspirations amidst fast-narrowing horizons of race, nation, and empire in early twentieth-century South Africa.

A Systematic Re-evaluation of the Sources of Old Norse Astronomy

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (1 and 2) ◽  
pp. 119-130
Author(s):  
Christian Etheridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
First Century ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Tripartite Model ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Secondary Material ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Linguistic Evidence

The field of Old Norse astronomy is in a very fragmented state. There is no primary source that describes all the heavenly bodies and constellations known to the Old Norse culture. Instead the researcher must go to a wide variety of sources, which sometimes only convey snippets of information. These sources range from Eddic poems to tales of early Icelandic astronomers and through to linguistic evidence, archaeology and folklore. The secondary material on these sources is also fragmented, since from the early twentieth century there have only been a few attempts at an overall grand narrative. In this paper a new approach is proposed to collecting and assessing this data. By using multi-disciplinary scholarship and a tripartite model, this paper will show how a new assessment of Old Norse astronomy can be put into practice for the twenty-first century.

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