scholarly journals 'Salimu': from Memory to Literary Narrative in Twentieth-Century manding Culture

Afrika Focus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tai Tamari

This essay explores the creation of new literary narratives, many inspired by true incidents, from the late nineteenth century to the present, among Manding- (specifically Maninka-) speakers in Mali and Guinea. It simultaneously queries the relationships between Manding and Western literary categories, showing that the traits typically associated with African ‘epics’ – including poetic language, alternation of sung and recited passages to continuous instrumental accompaniment, and multi-generic qualities – characterise some (but not all) examples of several distinct Manding literary categories (fasa, tariku and maana); furthermore, these traits appear in narratives of various lengths, centred on sentimental as well as heroic themes. It then focuses on the stories and songs inspired by the apparently contradictory personality of Salimou Haidara (ca. 1930-1991), an eccentric who claimed sharifian descent. A performance by Amadou Kouyaté and Jekoriya Doumbia, a bard couple based in the village of Dabadou near Kankan (Guinea), is transcribed, translated, and analysed1. KEYWORDS: EPIC, LITERARY GENRE, GRIOTS, MANINKA, KANKAN (GUINEA), CHEIKH MOUHAMMAD CHÉRIF

Afrika Focus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-124
Author(s):  
Tal Tamari

This essay explores the creation of new literary narratives, many inspired by true incidents, from the late nineteenth century to the present, among Manding- (specifically Maninka-) speakers in Mali and Guinea. It simultaneously queries the relationships between Manding and Western literary categories, showing that the traits typically associated with African ‘epics’ – including poetic language, alternation of sung and recited passages to continuous instrumental accompaniment, and multi-generic qualities – characterise some (but not all) examples of several distinct Manding literary categories (fasa, tariku and maana); furthermore, these traits appear in narratives of various lengths, centred on sentimental as well as heroic themes. It then focuses on the stories and songs inspired by the apparently contradictory personality of Salimou Haidara (ca. 1930-1991), an eccentric who claimed sharifian descent. A performance by Amadou Kouyaté and Jekoriya Doumbia, a bard couple based in the village of Dabadou near Kankan (Guinea), is transcribed, translated, and analysed.


2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Johnson

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as conceptual tools for interpreting the place of Chinese drums in the early drum kit. Why were distinctly Chinese drums used in the early drum kit? How did the Chinese drums shape the future of the drum kit? The drum kit has been at the heart of most popular music throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and, as such, this article will be beneficial to educators, practitioners and scholars of popular music education.


Author(s):  
Melissa Van Drie

This article presents a historical and theoretical reflection of the théâtrophone, a late nine- teenth-century telephone broadcast service that allowed users at a distance to listen in live to local theatre performances (spoken theatre, opera and musical concerts). Often cited as the first binaural experience in 1881, the théâtrophone’s much longer history as a subscription service, which operated in Paris from 1889 through the mid-1930s, is relatively unknown. This article considers what hearing through a théâtrophone meant to nineteenth- and twentieth- century users beyond its initial 1881 prototype. To hear through the théâtrophone means adopting a methodology mirroring the artefact itself: moving between social, professional, artistic, sensory registers. In doing so, the ways in which the théâtrophone was attuned to dis- course and practice emerge, as do more subtle processes involved in new nineteenth-century constructs of hearing and listening. Precisely the théâtrophone’s development is examined in relation to its particular social context: its installation on the spectacular Parisian boulevards and its relation to fin de siècle theatre culture. The article first investigates how theatrophonic listening was accorded to existent practices of theatre-going. Second, the article explores the more radical propositions of the théâtrophone in relation to important aesthetic and prac- tical changes occurring simultaneously in theatre culture. The théâtrophone’s virtual sonic experience multiplied the forms of a performance and its modalities of creation and recep- tion. Through accounts of ‘listening in’ the aspects of the new sonically constructed space are described, as are postures of early mediatised listening. The article posits that new modalities of listening are articulated through the théâtrophone, with certain users, including Proust, defining it as a monitoring and creative tool. In this capacity, ‘theatrophonic’ listening contrib- uted to the development of a refined ear, capable of detecting sonic nuance, which was central to artistic sensibilities at the time. 


2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Foley

For over a hundred years the Irish céilí, as an ‘invented’ social dance event and mode of interaction, has played a significant and changing role. This paper examines the invention of this Irish dance event and how it has developed in Ireland throughout the twentieth century. From the Gaelic League's cultural nationalist, ideological agenda of the late nineteenth century, for a culturally unified Ireland, to the manifestation of a new cultural confidence in Ireland, from the 1970s, this paper explores how the céilí has provided an important site for the construction, experiencing and negotiation of different senses of community and identity.


Author(s):  
Leah Price

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.


Author(s):  
Sarah Palmer

This essay charts the considerable decline of the British shipping industry in the twentieth century. Sarah Palmer demonstrates that growing distance between shipowners and shipbuilders; tremendous decline in liner shipping; unwillingness to innovate; and inconsistent policies established by the government that played significant roles in the decline from the turn of the century’s forty percent global tonnage rates to the meagre three percent reported in 2007.


Author(s):  
Brianna Theobald

This chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s use of the Crow Reservation in Montana as an extended case study. After providing an overview of Crow history to the late nineteenth century, the chapter sketches the parameters of a Crow birthing culture that prevailed in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Crow women navigated pregnancy and childbirth within female generational networks; viewed childbirth as a sex-segregated social process; and placed their trust in the midwifery services of older women. The chapter further explores government employees’ attitudes toward and interventions in Indigenous pregnancy, childbirth, and especially family life in these years, as these ostensibly private domains emerged as touchstones in the federal government’s ongoing assimilation efforts.


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