Of Sand or Soil

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Oral Narrative ◽  
Soil P ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Historical Tradition

Why do tribal genealogies matter in modern-day Saudi Arabia? What compels the strivers and climbers of the new Saudi Arabia to want to prove their authentic descent from one or another prestigious Arabian tribe? This book looks at how genealogy and tribal belonging have informed the lives of past and present inhabitants of Saudi Arabia and how the Saudi government's tacit glorification of tribal origins has shaped the powerful development of the kingdom's genealogical culture. The book presents the first extended biographical exploration of the major twentieth-century Saudi scholar Hamad al-Jāsir, whose genealogical studies frame the story about belonging and identity in the modern kingdom. It examines the interplay between al-Jāsir's genealogical project and his many hundreds of petitioners, mostly Saudis of nontribal or lower status origin who sought validation of their tribal roots in his genealogical texts. Investigating the Saudi relationship to this opaque, orally inscribed historical tradition, the book considers the consequences of modern Saudi genealogical politics and how the most intimate anxieties of nontribal Saudis today are amplified by the governing strategies and kinship ideology of the Saudi state. Challenging the impression that Saudi culture is determined by puritanical religiosity or rentier economic principles, the book shows how the exploration and establishment of tribal genealogies have become influential phenomena in contemporary Saudi society. Beyond Saudi Arabia, this book casts important new light on the interplay between kinship ideas, oral narrative, and state formation in rapidly changing societies.

Misrepresentation of Orientals in Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for The King

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-258
Author(s):  
Samal Marf Mohammed
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Real Image ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Real ◽  
Postcolonial Discourse ◽  
Economic Motives ◽  
At Home

      This study deals with the colonial perspectives in Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for The King (2012), according to the postcolonial approach. Although colonialism era is over by now, colonial perspectives remain strong in some literary works. Since its advent in the second half of the twentieth century, postcolonial theory confronts colonial attitudes and experiences as colonialism has been justified in many works of Western writers and scholars who have distorted the real image of non-Europeans and non-Westerners via different means and techniques in masquerade of orientalism. Postcolonial discourse opposes the misrepresentation of non-Europeans and argues that such falsification is driven by political, social, religious and economic motives. In the current study, the researcher aims at explaining the notions of colonialism, otherization and other falsified images of non-Westerners in A Hologram for the King. This paper mainly questions Eggers’s portrayal of the protagonist, Alan Clay, who after bankruptcy and failure at home, flies to Saudi Arabia and capitalizes on the physical and moral assets of the Orientals in this country to convert his story of failure to a success. The characterization of the oriental world and its setting show Eggers’s being biased against the Eastern world and ironically mirror clear hints of colonialism and eurocentrism.

The Emergence of a National Economy: An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800–2000. By Howard Dick, Vincent J. H. Houben, J. Thomas Lindblad, and Thee Kian Wie. Crows Nest NSW, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002. Pp. xvii, 286. $38.00.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 268-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siddarth Chandra
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Economic Integration ◽  
National Economy ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Easy Task ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fundamental Forces ◽  
Economic Regions

Written by four leading economic historians of Indonesia from three continents, this book is an excellent account of the emergence of the Indonesian economy in the twentieth century from what was a cluster of disparate economic regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Using an innovative and, in the context of Indonesia, highly appropriate theme, the authors identify three fundamental forces that shaped the emergence of the Indonesian national economy: successive waves of globalization (and dislocation), state formation, and economic integration. The book is admirably successful in fulfilling its claim, not an easy task given the volume of literature that had to be mastered and put into perspective in order to comprehensively describe this process.

SOUTHERN IRISH NATIONALISM AS A HISTORICAL PROBLEM

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN M. REGAN
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Public History ◽  
The South ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Revolutionary Period

To what extent has the recent war in Northern Ireland influenced Irish historiography? Examining the nomenclature, periodization, and the use of democracy and state legitimization as interpretative tools in the historicization of the Irish Civil War (1922–3), the influence of a southern nationalist ideology is apparent. A dominating southern nationalist interest represented the revolutionary political elite's realpolitik after 1920, though its pan-nationalist rhetoric obscured this. Ignoring southern nationalism as a cogent influence has led to the misrepresentation of nationalism as ethnically homogeneous in twentieth-century Ireland. Once this is identified, historiographical and methodological problems are illuminated, which may be demonstrated in historians' work on the revolutionary period (c. 1912–23). Following the northern crisis's emergence in the late 1960s, the Republic's Irish governments required a revised public history that could reconcile the state's violent and revolutionary origins with its counterinsurgency against militarist-republicanism. At the same time many historians adopted constitutional, later democratic, state formation narratives for the south at the expense of historical precision. This facilitated a broader state-centred and statist historiography, mirroring the Republic's desire to re-orientate its nationalism away from irredentism, toward the conscious accommodation of partition. Reconciliation of southern nationalist identities with its state represents a singular political achievement, as well as a concomitant historiographical problem.

The Origins of the Benin Kingship in the Works of Jacob Egharevba

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 141-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Eisenhofer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Early History ◽  
Short History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

The kingdom of Benin has the reputation of being one of the most important examples for a king-oriented state-formation in sub-Saharian Africa. In the past few decades much research has appeared on the early history of this kingdom, the origin of its kingship, and the time of the early Ogiso kings, who are considered by many historians as the autochthonous founders of Benin kingship around 900. These Ogiso rulers are assumed to have been replaced between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries by kings of the later Oba dynasty, which supposedly descends from the Yoruba town of Ife and which continues in office at the present.The abundance of literature on the early history of the Benin kingdom often hides the fact that, apart from sporadic—and for the most part isolated—reports from travelers, a few archeological accounts, and some vaguely dated objects from Benin, the reconstruction of the early history of Benin is based almost exclusively on the data of the Bini local historian Jacob Egharevba, who published prolifically on Benin history and culture from 1930 to 1970. The most famous of his works is the Short History of Benin—a small publication, where the author deals with the history of the kingdom from its origins until the twentieth century.

Majimaji and the Millennium: Abrahamic Sources and the Creation of a Tanzanian Resistance Tradition

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 365-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Sunseri
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
German Colonialism ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Resistance Movement

Writing thirty years ago the historian of the Majimaji rebellion, Gilbert Gwassa, emphasized the purely Tanzanian nature of the uprising, as seen in the ideology which he believed was the inspiration for the widespread war against German colonialism. To Gwassa, southern Tanzanians created an innovative, secular ideology after the turn of the twentieth century which enabled Africans to resist German colonialism supra-ethnically rather than locally. Gwassa was adamant that the Majimaji ideology owed nothing to outside influences.Gwassa's contention has been largely unchallenged despite obvious paradoxes. Majimaji emerged in a region widely permeated with Islamic influences by 1905, the time of the rebellion. Moreover, the Christian colonial power structure had been present in the outbreak region for some twenty years by 1905, while Christian missionaries had been active in Tanzania for almost forty years. By the time the Majimaji historical tradition was being written in Tanzania in the 1960s, the nation included many Muslims and Christians, including many of Gwassa's research informants, who helped shape his interpretation of Majimaji. Aside from these circumstantial suggestions of the possibility of an externally-influenced Majimaji tradition, a close reading of archival sources from the German period, including several documents which have not been considered in the historiographical tradition, suggest that Christian and Islamic influences helped to shape the writing of Majimaji, if not the resistance movement itself. This paper will examine some of these “Abrahamic” sources of the Majimaji tradition, and consider how they might have been used to formulate a Majimaji epic which has become a standard icon of early African colonial history.

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