scholarly journals Hunger Habitus: State, Society, and Starvation in Twentieth-Century Bengal

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
Janam Mukherjee

This article offers a brief summary of the complex factors leading to the famine in Bengal in the 1940s and discusses its longer-term impacts—the afterlife, so to speak—of famine. This episode of starvation claimed as many as five million lives in Bengal, and had long lasting social, political, and economic consequences. Several different paradigms emerged that impacted the socio-political landscape of Bengal in the midst of the famine. Famine studies often focus on causality and on peaks of starvation deaths. However, periods of mass starvation such as the famine in Bengal do not simply end when mass starvation ends. Rather, famine inscribes itself into a famine society in elaborate fashion, impacting post-famine societies in abiding ways for generations to come.

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 302-321
Author(s):  
Marion Bowman

This essay focuses upon a significant place, Glastonbury, at an important time during the early twentieth century, in order to shed light on a particular aspect of Christianity which is frequently overlooked: its internal plurality. This is not simply denominational diversity, but the considerable heterogeneity which exists at both institutional and individual level within denominations, and which often escapes articulation, awareness or comment. This is significant because failure to apprehend a more detailed, granular picture of religion can lead to an incomplete view of events in the past and, by extension, a partial understanding of later phenomena. This essay argues that by using the concept of vernacular religion a more nuanced picture of religion as it is – or has been – lived can be achieved.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. MacDiarmid ◽  
Sean J. Korney ◽  
Melanie Teetaert ◽  
Julie J.M. Taylor ◽  
Robert Martz ◽  
...  

Rights of first refusal and other preferential or pre-emptive rights (together, ROFRs, and individually a ROFR) routinely find their way into oil and gas industry agreements. Disputes often arise because of the complex nature and significant economic consequences of ROFRs. In recent years, a number of reported cases, either relating directly to ROFRs or more generally relating to contractual interpretation, have clarified (or at times muddied) the waters surrounding the use, application, and interpretation of ROFRs. However, most ROFR disputes never result in a reported decision because the parties typically negotiate solutions long before trial.The authors consider current trends involving ROFRs in oil and gas agreements, and how they believe the law and legal practice surrounding ROFRs might continue to evolve in the years to come. The authors do not attempt to rehash the fundamentals of the law surrounding ROFRs; instead, they focus on how the courts have dealt with ROFRs in recent cases as well as how corporate lawyers and in-house counsel grapple with ROFRs day-today. The authors utilize the ROFR provisions found in industry standard contracts to analyze outstanding areas of uncertainty as well as what lawyers should contemplate prior to including a ROFR in an agreement. Additionally, the article examines the implications of recent rulings on the duty of good faith that may affect ROFRs. Finally, the article considers selected subjects of topical interest, including ROFRs in the context of busted butterfly transactions, insolvency proceedings, and package deals.


CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Corby

In this essay James Corby questions the dominant future-oriented nature of the ethical turn of theory and philosophy in the final decades of the twentieth century and its aesthetic influence. Focusing in particular upon the ethical position of Jacques Derrida, Corby argues that the desire to avoid the closure of the contemporary and to preserve the possibility of difference by cultivating a radical attentiveness to that which is ‘to come’ often risks a too complete disengagement from the present, leading to an empty and ineffectual ethical stance that actually preserves the contemporary situation that it seeks to open up. Corby makes a case for this theoretical investment in the possibility of a non-contemporary (typically futural) rupture as being understood as forming part of a far-reaching romantic tradition. In opposition to this tradition he sketches a post-romantic alternative that would understand difference as an immanent, rather than imminent, matter. He argues that this should be considered congruent with a countertextual impulse oriented not towards a revelatory futurity, but, rather, towards the possible displacements, dislocations, and transformations already inherent in the contemporary. The final part of the essay develops this idea, positioning countertextuality as the articulation of alternative contemporaries. In this regard, the literature of the future is not ‘to come’, it is already here. The challenge is to recognise it as such, and this means being prepared to modify and change the conceptual apparatus that guides us in our thinking of literature and the arts.


Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the British constitution in the twentieth century. The findings reveal that while there was widespread confidence in the virtues of the constitution at the beginning of the twentieth century, that confidence seemed to have evaporated. This loss of confidence coincided with a collapse of national self-confidence that had begun in the 1960s when British political and intellectual elites began to come to terms with the fact that Great Britain was falling economically behind her continental competitors.


2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Angel Adams Parham

This essay places Louisiana Creole culture and identity into comparative perspective with the evolution of Creole identity and créolité in Haiti and the French Antilles. While Haitian and Antillean intellectuals wrestled at the crossroads of French and African culture over the course of the twentieth century, the leading intellectuals of Louisiana’s Creole society were more likely to embrace French language and culture than to work self-consciously to integrate African influences into their understanding of themselves. A similar kind of cultural reckoning did not occur among Louisiana Creole writers and intellectuals until late in the twentieth century. The essay uses a comparative approach to examine the factors that have led to Louisiana taking such a different approach to Creole identity and cultural expression and considers how the community may evolve in the years to come. Cet essai situe la culture et l’identité créoles louisianaises dans une perspective comparée avec l’évolution de l’identité créole et de la créolité en Haïti et aux Antilles françaises. Lorsque des intellectuels haïtiens et antillais travaillaient au carrefour des cultures française et africaine au parcours du vingtième siècle, les intellectuels du chef de file de la société créole de la Louisiane tendaient plus à engager la langue et la culture françaises que de chercher à intégrer consciemment les influences africaines dans leur conception identitaire. Ce n’est que plus tard dans le vingtième siècle que nous témoignons d’une reconnaissance culturelle similaire chez les écrivains et les intellectuels de la Louisiane créole. Cet essai aborde de manière comparée les éléments qui contribuaient à une approche si différente à l’identité et l’expression culturelle créoles en Louisiane et considère comment la communauté pourraient évoluer à l’avenir.


Author(s):  
Angelos Koutsourakis ◽  
Mark Steven

This book examines the oeuvre of Theo Angelopoulos, whose films are deeply immersed in the historical experiences of his homeland, Greece, while the international appeal of his work can be attributed to his firm commitment to modernism as a formal response to the crises and failures of world history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers some of the main themes in Angelopoulos' filmography, including the crisis of representation and the force of mediation; the question of representing history and how to come to terms with the past; the failures of the utopian aspirations of the twentieth century; issues of forced political or economic migration and exile; and the persistence of history in a supposedly post-historical present. This introduction discusses the lack of critical attention that Angelopoulos' cinema has received in the Anglophone scholarship and provides a historical overview of Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. It also summarises the individual chapters that follow.


Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 5-25
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe

This opening chapter contains a discussion of two early twentieth-century European art and cultural movements, Dadaism and Futurism, whose adherents rejected established modes of artistic expression and often staged provocative events to gain the public’s attention. In addition, there is a detailed look at the seminal works of three major composers, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Béla Bartók, whose innovative use of percussion in their compositions gave license to those who followed. Each of the three composers exploited percussion in a unique manner, contributing to the standard literature and presaging what was to come.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Mohammad Owais Khan ◽  
Saudi Arabia

The aim of this paper is to express the idiocy and forlorn elements in Samuel Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’. To achieve the goals of the research, it is necessary to investigate deeply a blend of comic and pathos involved in the play. These elements are: first, the idiocy which basically depends on the special language of the play, the pitiful and deplorable elements and the use of irony and satire. The play was written in 1949, translated into many languages and it is still performed in many countries all around the world. Waiting for Godot is hailed as one of the masterpieces of the theatre of absurd. With the manifestation of this play on the horizon there came a revolution in the theatre of the twentieth century that was to continue for a long time to come and influence many writers thereafter. Beckett shades light on the sociological and moralistic perspective with the tinge of humour and pathos. His excellent imagination and literary skill create an unforgettable imprint in the minds of his readers. 


Author(s):  
Marianne Wheeldon

This book examines the vicissitudes of Debussy’s posthumous reception in the 1920s and early 1930s and analyzes the confluence of factors that helped to overturn the initial backlash against his musical aesthetic. In tracing this overarching narrative, this study enters into dialogue with research in the sociology of reputation and commemoration, examining the collective nature of the processes of artistic consecration. Key in this regard is identifying the networks of influence that had to come together and act in several spheres—textual, performative, material—to safeguard the composer’s legacy. Today, Debussy’s position as a central figure in twentieth-century concert music is secure: this book examines how and why this seemingly inevitable state of affairs came about. Although this study focuses on one particular instance of reputation building, its scope is also broader in that it addresses the more general processes by which reputations are constructed, contested, and consolidated. And by analyzing the forces that came to bear on the formation of Debussy's legacy, this book contributes to a greater understanding of the interwar period—the cultural politics, debates, and issues that confronted musicians in 1920s and 1930s Paris.


2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-308
Author(s):  
JUHANI KLEMOLA

A number of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century dialect descriptions refer to an unusual adverb + infinitive construction in southwestern and west Midlands dialects of English. The construction is most often reported in the form of a formulaic phrase away to go, meaning ‘away he went’, though it is also found with a range of other adverbs. In addition, the same dialects also make use of a possibly related imperative construction, consisting of a preposition or adverb and a to-infinitive, as in out to come! ‘Come out!’ and a negative imperative construction consisting of the negator not and the base form of the verb, as in Not put no sugar in!. These construction types appear to be marginal at best in earlier varieties of English, whereas comparable constructions with the verbal noun are a well-established feature of especially British Celtic languages (i.e. Welsh, Breton, and Cornish). In this article I argue that transfer from the British Celtic languages offers a possible explanation for the use of these constructions in the traditional southwestern and west Midlands dialects of English.


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