scholarly journals Migration and the French Colonial Atlantic as Imagined by the Periodical Press, 1740–61

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
François Dominic Laramée
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Many ◽  
Theater Games

Why did the French show so little enthusiasm for emigration to their early modern colonies, compared to other European peoples? In 2006, historian Yves Landry proposed that the image of America communicated to the French reading public by print media might have played a role in this phenomenon. This article examines this question by showing how America in general, and French colonies in particular, were represented in the Ancien Régime's three most prominent periodicals: the weekly news Gazette, the literary Mercure de France and the learned Journal des Savants. Through a combination of distant reading methods, the article builds a three-layered portrait of the New World as displayed to French readers. The first layer, made up of references to America in theater, games and other cultural artefacts built upon common knowledge, shows an unchanging, alien land filled with riches and glory for the few, mortal threats for the many, and the best, perhaps, set aside for foreigners. A second layer, made up of the periodicals' coverage of the slow production of knowledge through science and exploration, edulcorates this picture to some extent by showing that the New World is in the process of being domesticated, but that this process is very much still in its infancy. Finally, the top layer, represented by the Gazette's news coverage, shows a French colonial world that is dominated by Britain, virtually invisible in peacetime, and fraught with chaos at every moment. This top layer is especially important since it was the only one visible to the majority of readers, as the Gazette reached an audience perhaps ten times larger than the other periodicals. Therefore, the article largely supports the original hypothesis.

Digital Curation, AustLit, and Australian Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Amy Cross ◽  
Cherie Allan ◽  
Kerry Kilner
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Critical Spaces ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
Digital Curation ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Significant Attention

This paper examines the effects of curatorial processes used to develop children's literature digital research projects in the bibliographic database AustLit. Through AustLit's emphasis on contextualising individual works within cultural, biographical, and critical spaces, Australia's literary history is comprehensively represented in a unique digital humanities space. Within AustLit is BlackWords, a project dedicated to recording Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling, publishing, and literary cultural history, including children's and young adult texts. Children's literature has received significant attention in AustLit (and BlackWords) over the last decade through three projects that are documented in this paper. The curation of this data highlights the challenges in presenting ‘national’ literatures in countries where minority voices were (and perhaps continue to be) repressed and unseen. This paper employs a ‘resourceful reading’ approach – both close and distant reading methods – to trace the complex and ever-evolving definition of ‘Australian children's literature’.

scholarly journals Beyond Darwinian Distance: Situating Distant Reading in a Feminist Ut Pictura Poesis Tradition

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Marie Rhody
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Sister Arts ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Ut Pictura Poesis

The challenge facing “distant reading” has less to do with Franco Moretti's assertion that we must learn “how not to read” than with his implication that looking should take the place of reading. Not reading is the dirty open secret of all literary critics-there will always be that book (or those books) that you should have read, have not read, and probably won't read. Moretti is not endorsing a disinterest in reading either, like that reported in the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts' Reading at Risk, which notes that less than half the adult public in the United States read a work of literature in 2002 (3). In his “little pact with the devil” that substitutes patterns of devices, themes, tropes, styles, and parts of speech for thousands or millions of texts at a time, the devil is the image: trees, networks, and maps-spatial rather than verbal forms representing a textual corpus that disappears from view. In what follows, I consider Distant Reading as participating in the ut pictura poesis tradition-that is, the Western tradition of viewing poetry and painting as sister arts-to explain how ingrained our resistances are to Moretti's formalist approach. I turn to more recent interart examples to suggest interpretive alternatives to formalism for distant-reading methods.

An Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities in the Americas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Native American ◽  
New World ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
Ancien Régime

This chapter provides a historical and geographical background and situates the volume’s contributions in the context of previous archaeological research into the French in the New World. The chapter discusses the ways in which French settlers made their presence felt on the landscape and on Native groups through a wide range of settlement types, economic and social networks, and successive generations of habitation. The chapter reviews both the well-studied French colonial period and the lesser known post-Conquest period, after the Treaty of Versailles and after the ancien régime fell, during which communities of Francophone peoples (ethnic French, Native American, and African) continued to live in the New World.

Architectural Remains at Fort St. Joseph

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika K. Hartley ◽  
Michael S. Nassaney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Structural Materials ◽  
New France ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Construction Techniques ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
Function Construction

This chapter reveals the architectural remains recovered at Fort St. Joseph. Unlike other colonial settlements, no detailed maps, drawings, or descriptions have come to light to illuminate the physical appearance of the fort. Here, we trace the origins of French colonial architectural styles and how they were adapted to the New World. We then employ archaeological and documentary sources to ascertain the types of buildings that may have existed at Fort St. Joseph, their functions, and what they may have looked like. This information will help in our interpretations of the function, construction techniques, and materials used to construct buildings as revealed through the architectural remains and associated structural materials found at Fort St. Joseph. This examination of eighteenth-century buildings in New France provides a better appreciation and understanding of colonial architecture and the conservative nature of French building practices.

Environmental and Climate Perspectives on New World, Old World, and South-East Asian Societies’ Achievements in the Hydraulic Sciences

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles R. Ortloff
Keyword(s):  
Water Resource ◽  
New World ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Maximum Flow ◽  
Old World ◽  
Canal Irrigation ◽  
Mountain Watersheds ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Canal Systems ◽  
The Many

The foregoing chapters detail the many technical innovations in water supply, distribution, and management for several Old World, New World, and South- East Asian societies. For most of the New World’s societies, basic water resource problems evolved around securing their agricultural base given the unique environmental and water resource conditions prevalent in their locations. Diverse New World societies occupying different environment niches from dry coastal margins to wet highlands, often subject to vastly different average temperatures, crop types, and water variation cycles, were shown to devise different approaches to the development of their agricultural bases. While rainfall runoff from mountain watersheds sourced the many rivers of coastal Peruvian valleys and provided the basis for canal irrigation, excessive rainfall and cold in Andean highland locations allowed groundwater-based farming using raised Welds that had thermodynamic advantages based on conservation of the sun’s heat to prevent root crop destruction during freezing nights. The presence of varying climate cycles (excessive rainfall and drought) was seen to influence modifications in coastal canal systems. Alterations in canal size and placement to accommodate reduced-water supplies were evident in intravalley coastal systems where modifications were relatively straightforward in sandy environments. Intervalley water transfers through massive canal systems were a further characteristic of a flexible response to maintain the water resource base and this often involved the transfer of river water from one valley to another depending on agricultural, economic, and political priorities. With increased need for more agricultural lands to meet population demands, increasingly lower slope canals were surveyed to include further downslope lands. Here technical innovation was a key factor in providing surveying expertise to maintain low-slope contour canals. While such canals are found at very early Formative and Preceramic sites, surveying techniques became more refined in time to permit greater use of land areas reachable by low-slope canals. Here both Old and New World societies share their dependence on surveying technology to meet water transfer demands. While Roman surveying favoured the most direct aqueduct routing necessitating long, linear aqueduct structures interspersed with siphons and multitier aqueducts structures where appropriate, New World surveying was different in that canal designs following landscape contours were prevalent and, in some cases, optimized to produce specific and/or maximum flow rate designs. Specific measures to create hydraulic control structures to defend against El Niño destruction are evident in the New World archaeological record indicating an active, innovative engineering response to climate and weather-induced disasters, probably based on the memory of prior destructive events.

Word Wars

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-230
Author(s):  
Ralph Keyes
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
English Language ◽  
New World ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
John Adams ◽  
New Words ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Noah Webster ◽  
The Many

Pitched battles have long been fought between neology advocates and those who think we have enough words already. Centuries ago language purists such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift railed against the many new words they thought were defiling the English language. Britons and Americans subsequently squabbled fiercely over Americanisms, the neologisms that settlers began to create soon after they arrived in the New World (e.g., foothill, skunk, eel grass). Jefferson’s coinage belittle raised particular hackles in the mother country. Jefferson – a self- proclaimed “friend to neology” – joined John Adams, Noah Webster and others in defending the coinage-rich American version of English that they thought was integral to establishing a sense of independence from the mother country. Guardians of the King’s English in Great Britain considered this attitude impudent. Protecting their national franchise and sense of ethnic privilege proved to be integral to that guardianship.

Blacks Jews: the religious challenge or politics versus religion

1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-240
Author(s):  
Ulysses Santamaria
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New World ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Dual Identity ◽  
The Many

Amongst the many religious groups to be found in the United States, one is remarkable and very little known : the Black Hebrews. This group shares structural characteristics common to many minorities, but is also distinguished by a dual identity derived from the experience of slavery and the cultural mix specific to the New World.

West African Cinema

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. McCall
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Video Production ◽  
Video Technology ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Francophone Africa ◽  
African Cinema ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
French Colonial

Motion picture technology developed at the dawn of the 20th century, just as the formal colonization of Africa was launched at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. While it took a few decades for cinema houses to spread in West Africa, by mid-century the colonial administrations began to use film as a means for conveying colonial culture to African subjects. For the British and French colonials, film was a means to shape public opinion. Both British and French colonial administrations criminalized indigenous filmmaking for fear of the subversive potential of anti-colonial messages—film communicated in one direction only. When West African nations became independent in the late 20th century, these restrictions vanished and Africans began to make films. This process played out differently in Francophone Africa than in Anglophone countries. France cultivated African filmmakers, sponsored training, and funded film projects. Talented and determined filmmakers in Anglophone Africa also struggled to produce celluloid films, but unlike their counterparts in former French colonies, they received little support from abroad. A significant number of excellent celluloid films were produced under this system, but largely in Francophone Africa. Though many of these filmmakers have gained global recognition, most remained virtually unknown in Africa outside the elite spaces of the FESPACO film festival and limited screenings at French embassies. Though West African filmmakers have produced an impressive body of high-quality work, few Africans beyond the intellectual elite know of Africa’s most famous films. This paradox of a continent with renowned filmmakers but no local film culture began to change in the 1990s when aspiring artists in Nigeria and Ghana began to make inexpensive movies using video technology. Early works were edited on VCRs, but as digital video technology advanced, this process of informal video production quickly spread to other regions. The West African video movie industry has grown to become one of the most prominent, diverse, and dynamic expressions of a pan-African popular culture in Africa and throughout the global diaspora.

Archaeological Perspectives on the French in the New World

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
New World ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
French And Indian War ◽  
Early American ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Indian War ◽  
Do So ◽  
Descendant Communities

This collection offers a new understanding of communities of French heritage in the New World, drawing on archaeological and historical evidence from both colonial and post-Conquest settings. It counters the prevailing but mistaken notion that the French role in New World histories was confined largely to Québec and New Orleans and lasted only through the French and Indian War. Some chapters in the volume reveal new insights into French colonial communities, while others concern the post-Conquest Francophone communities that thrived under British, Spanish, or American control, long after France relinquished its colonies in the New World. The authors in this collection engage in a dialogue about what it meant to be ethnic French or a French descendant, Métis, Native American, enslaved, or a free person of color in French areas of North America, the Caribbean, and South America from the late 1600s until the late 1800s. The authors combine archaeological remains (from artifacts to food remains to cultural landscapes) with a rich body of historical records to help reveal the roots of present-day New World societies. This volume makes clear that, along with Spanish, British, and early American colonial influences, French colonists and their descendant communities played an important role in New World histories, and continue to do so.

A Conqueror's Wealth: Notes on the Estate of Don Pedro de Alvarado

1969 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Sherman
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Good Will ◽  
The Many

The remarkable career of the adelantado don Pedro de Alvarado is associated in the minds of most with his exploits during the conquest of the Aztec state. To a somewhat lesser degree he is remembered as the conqueror, and later governor, of Guatemala. But in retrospect, perhaps his most significant, though less dramatic, achievement was the fact that he was able to maintain his preëminence for two decades. In an age when Charles V followed a policy of removing conquistadores from positions of political power, Alvarado not only retained the good will of the Crown, but also enhanced his authority and prestige. Despite the many crimes of which he was accused, he was not replaced by royal officials. At his death in 1541 he was one of the most powerful men in the New World, overshadowed perhaps only by Viceroy Mendoza, with whom Alvarado had the shrewd sense to make an alliance.

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