Images of an African Ruler: Kabaka Mutesa of Buganda, ca. 1857–1884

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 269-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Reid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Surgical Tools ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of

There can be few areas of the world which have been more systematically misrepresented than Africa, especially that part of the continent south of the Sahara. For centuries, and certainly since the Midas-like Mansa Musa sat astride West Africa on the maps of fourteenth-century Spain, the weird and wonderful imagery of Africa has flooded Europe's vision of that continent. Much of this imagery has been generated by Europeans, and even where it has been generated by Africans themselves, the original meaning and intention is often difficult to discover. The imagery has, to the non-African world, become Africa; this is the case to the point where, at the end of the twentieth century, almost every adjective placed before the name “Africa” is loaded, has some ideological or political currency, and indeed has a history of its own.Most famously, perhaps, Africa was for a long time “dark”, and still that image periodically appears in assorted Western media, a comforting crutch to an audience which remains somewhat confused as to what to make of the continent. Africa is often supposed to have a “heart,” in a way that neither Europe nor North America does. This is perhaps related to the continent's geographical shape, for it is rather more self-contained than Europe, Asia, or the Americas. It is more likely, however, that an African “heart” is sought precisely because it cannot, using the clumsy surgical tools of Western culture, be found. In more recent times, Africa's “dark heart” has been replaced by its “troubled heart;” but the idea remains unchanged.

The Air Factor in West Africa's Colonial Defence 1920–1945: A Neglected Theme

Itinerario ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Yomi Akinyeye
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Capital Intensity ◽  
Military History ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Naval Warfare ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of

The colonial military history of British and French West Africa has received copious attention from historians and soldiers. The role of the region in the two world wars has also been discussed in one way or the other. However, in the discussion of West Africa's colonial military history and the role of the colonies in the two world wars, hardly any reference is made to the air factor. While discussions of colonial military history concentrate on infantry and naval exploits, those on the role of the colonies in the world wars concentrate on their importance as sources of raw materials and manpower for British and French war efforts in other theatres of the wars. The wrong impressions thus given are that the air factor was alien to West Africa's colonial defence and that the region was largely outside the strategic manoeuvres of the two world wars. This is understandable in that the Maxim gun and the gunboat had largely been responsible for the conquest and policing of West Africa. Moreover, while infantry and naval warfare had been the mode of combat in all societies from time immemorial the air as a factor of warfare is largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century. Lastly, strategists in British West Africa ignored the air factor for a very long time because of its capital intensity.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

The Cambridge History of America and the World

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The World ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.

Some Thoughts About Genre in Old Javanese Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter John Worsley
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Work

Robson in 1983 and 1988 in his reconsideration of the poetics of kakawin epics and Javanese philology drew readers’ attention to the importance of genre for the history of ancient Javanese literature. Aoyama in his study of the kakawin Sutasoma in 1992, making judicious use of Hans Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectation”, offered the first systematic discussion of the genre of Old Javanese literary works. The present essay offers a commentary on the terms which mpu Monaguna and mpu Prapañca, authors of the thirteenth century epic kakawin Sumanasāntaka and the fourteenth century Deśawarṇana, themselves, employ to refer to the generic characteristics of their poems. Mpu Monaguna referred to his epic poem as a narrative work (kathā), written in a prakṛt, Old Javanese, and rendered in the poetic form of a kakawin and finally as a ritual act intended to enable the poet to achieve apotheosis with his tutelary deity and his poem to be the means of transforming the world, in particular to ensure the wellbeing of the readers, listeners, copyists and those who possessed copies of his poetic work. Mpu Prapañca described his Deśawarṇana differently. Also written in Old Javanese and in the poetic form of a kakawin—he refers to his work variously as a narrative work (kathā), a chronicle (śakakāla or śakābda), a praise poem (kastawan) and also as a ritual act designed to enable the author in an ecstatic state of rapture (alangö), and filled with the power and omniscience of his tutelary deity, to ensure the continued prosperity of the realm of Majapahit and to secure the rule of his king Rājasanagara. The essay considers each of these literary categories.

Power Lies in the Barrel of a Gun: Diplomacy Without Strategic Military Capability Is Futile

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 77-99
Author(s):  
Moorosi Leshoele
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Military Capability ◽  
Black Africa ◽  
Mineral Wealth ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pipe Dream

Abstract The United States of America invests heavily on their military capability and it is estimated that it spends, alone, approximately 40 per cent of what the whole world spends on military. Four of the other super powers that make up the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UN-SC) also spend a significant percentage of their national budgets on military. Chinweizu has for a long time argued that Africa needs a well-resourced African Standby Force (or the Black Africa League) that will protect the interests of the continent so as to prevent the history of Africans enslavement and colonialism repeating itself. This article seeks to analyse Africa’s investment on its military defense capability vis-à-vis the five permanent members of the UN-SC and North Korea, by critiquing two case studies of two of the continent’s economic giants – South Africa and Egypt. Realist and Sankofa perspectives are used as the prisms through which the article was researched. In line with Chinweizu’s observation, the article argues that without serious political will and dedication to building Africa’s nuclear weapons capability and ensuring that Africa is economically self-reliant, diplomatic engagements with the rest of the world as (un)equal partners will remain a pipe dream and the looting of Africa’s mineral wealth will continue unabated. It is clear that given the reality of the African Holocust if African countries fail to collectively defend themselves, Africa will continue to be a political football for the rest of the world.

Regarding Electronic Music

Tempo ◽  
1966 ◽  
pp. 2-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelio de la Vega
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Electronic Medium ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Long Time

For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.

Going West

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Zahra
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
European History ◽  
East European ◽  
European Context ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

“Going West” explores the potential of integrating East European History into broader histories of Europe and the world. Placing the history of Eastern Europe in a European context, I argue, may enable us to challenge the tropes of backwardness, pathology, and violence that still dominate the field. I also suggest that historians explore the extent to which conceptions of minority rights, development, and humanitarianism first developed in Eastern Europe radiated beyond the region in the twentieth century.

André Martinet (1908–1999)

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-293
Author(s):  
Johannes Klare
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Position ◽  
Research Director

André Martinet holds an important position in the history of linguistics in the twentieth century. For more than six decades he decisively influenced the development of linguistics in France and in the world. He is one of the spokespersons for French linguistic structuralism, the structuralisme fonctionnel. The article focuses on a description and critical appreciation of the interlinguistic part of Martinet’s work. The issue of auxiliary languages and hence interlinguistics had interested Martinet greatly from his youth and provoked him to examine the matter actively. From 1946 onwards he worked in New York as a professor at Columbia University and a research director of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). From 1934 he was in contact with the Danish linguist and interlinguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943). Martinet, who went back to Paris in 1955 to work as a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne), increasingly developed into an expert in planned languages; for his whole life, he was committed to the world-wide use of a foreign language that can be learned equally easily by members of all ethnic groups; Esperanto, functioning since 1887, seemed a good option to him.

Why England and not China and India? Water systems and the history of the Industrial Revolution

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terje Tvedt
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Water System ◽  
Water Systems ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Investment Capital ◽  
System Factor ◽  
Historical Accounts

AbstractGlobal history has centred for a long time on the comparative economic successes and failures of different parts of the world, most often European versus Asian regions. There is general agreement that the balance changed definitively in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when in continental Europe and England a transformation began that revolutionized the power relations of the world and brought an end to the dominance of agrarian civilization. However, there is still widespread debate over why Europe and England industrialized first, rather than Asia. This article will propose an explanation that will shed new light on Europe’s and England’s triumph, by showing that the ‘water system’ factor is a crucial piece missing in existing historical accounts of the Industrial Revolution. It is argued that this great transformation was not only about modernizing elites, investment capital, technological innovation, and unequal trade relations, but that a balanced, inclusive explanation also needs to consider similarities and differences in how countries and regions related to their particular water systems, and in how they could exploit them for transport and the production of power for machines.

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