‘Beast of No Nation’: Bribery, Corruption and Late Colonial Administration in

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-106
Author(s):  
Katherine Isobel Baxter

Chapter Four explores the competing demands made upon young Nigerian civil servants in the colonial administration, through an examination of Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease. The chapter contextualizes the social and sexual pressures under which the novel’s protagonist, Obi, buckles through discussion of contemporary popular culture and the experiences of real-life Nigerian colonial administrators. The novel is also discussed in relation to the British colonial texts to which it responds, notably Joyce Cary’s Mr Johnson and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. Achebe’s own reflections on the social uses of fiction are also considered. The chapter argues that as readers we are invited by Achebe into judgement of Obi, and in doing so we are brought into larger debates about the nation state and the law.

2010 ◽  
pp. 2263-2279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikhail Simonov ◽  
Marco Mussetta ◽  
Riccardo Zich

Since energy use is a type of consumer behavior reflecting the interests to maximize some objective function, the human being activities seen in energy terms might be used to create the social aggregations or groups. Electric energy generated from ecologic sources brings some unpredictability. Authors model the unpredictability of the distributed generation in order to create a tool for minimization. Authors propose the novel method to build real life smart micro grids in the distributed generation context characterized by zero emissions. The proposed tool becomes an instrument to create the social aggregation of users and negotiate locally the “social” energy in real time, strengthening and mastering a virtual neighborhood of the local community.


2019 ◽  
pp. 54-84
Author(s):  
Katherine Isobel Baxter

Chapter Three examines a later incarnation of the District Commissioner in Joyce Cary’s Mr Johnson. The chapter shows how, despite the novel’s ironic critiques of the figure of the District Commissioner and the policy of indirect rule, Cary reinstates the heroized exceptionalism dramatized in earlier popular District Commissioner fiction. The chapter also explores the precarious position of Mr Johnson himself as educated southerner within the administration of the North. The chapter presents the novel in terms of its animation of legal questions and the state of exception that underpinned indirect rule. The chapter’s discussion is contextualised through reference to W. R. Crocker’s scathing memoir of colonial service, Nigeria: A Critique of British Colonial Administration (1936).


1968 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong Ching Fatt

Under the direct rule of the British Colonial Government in nineteenth-century Singapore, the Chinese leaders held little political power. They were essentially community leaders, charitable and enterprising. They worked for peace and harmony in a multiracial society and were closely attached to the British Colonial administration. Though the Chinese leadership played various roles in economic, political, diplomatic and social fields, it was in the social arena that it contributed most. These nineteenth-century leaders were essentially social workers who had established no radical traditions nor shaped any unique patterns of leadership.


Author(s):  
Henry James

‘She will do as I have bidden her.’ Catherine Sloper is heiress to a fortune and the social eminence associated with Washington Square. She attracts the attention of a good-looking but penniless young man, Morris Townsend. His suit is encouraged by Catherine's romantically-minded aunt, Mrs Penniman, but her father, a clever physician, is convinced that his motives are merely mercenary. He will not consent to the marriage, regardless of the cost to his daughter. Out of this classic confrontation Henry James fashioned one of his most deftly searching shorter fictions. First published in 1880 but set some forty years earlier in a pre-Civil War New York, the novel reflects ironically on the restricted world in which its heroine is marooned, seating herself at its close ‘for life, as it were’. In his introduction Adrian Poole reflects on the book's gestation and influences, the significance of place, and the insight with which the four prinicipal players are drawn. The edition includes an account of the real-life tale that sparked James's imaginative genius.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 5723-5731
Author(s):  
Shereen Zaidi, Nitin Bhatnagar

Loneliness is a feeling in which makes a person feel lack of togetherness with others. In this state, whether a person is alone or in company with others, feels emptiness. If this condition persists for a long time, its consequences can be disastrous, mentally as well as physically. Loneliness is a serious problem of the 21st century and is the cause of suffering for many people today. Many psychologists and scholars have discussed its causes and ways to come out of its cluthes. Anuradha Roy, in her novel “The Folded Earth” has raised the social as well as psychological concerns related to loneliness. The present paper is an attempt to study not only its implications in the novel, but also to explore its causes and ways to deal with in real life. This research can be helpful especially for loners to understand their loneliness and recognize how it can be overcome


2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Ferguson ◽  
Stephanie M. Rueda

This article explores commonly discussed theories of violent video game effects: the social learning, mood management, and catharsis hypotheses. An experimental study was carried out to examine violent video game effects. In this study, 103 young adults were given a frustration task and then randomized to play no game, a nonviolent game, a violent game with good versus evil theme (i.e., playing as a good character taking on evil), or a violent game in which they played as a “bad guy.” Results indicated that randomized video game play had no effect on aggressive behavior; real-life violent video game-playing history, however, was predictive of decreased hostile feelings and decreased depression following the frustration task. Results do not support a link between violent video games and aggressive behavior, but do suggest that violent games reduce depression and hostile feelings in players through mood management.


This research article focuses on the theme of violence and its representation by the characters of the novel “This Savage Song” by Victoria Schwab. How violence is transmitted through genes to next generations and to what extent socio- psycho factors are involved in it, has also been discussed. Similarly, in what manner violent events and deeds by the parents affect the psychology of children and how it inculcates aggressive behaviour in their minds has been studied. What role is played by the parents in grooming the personality of children and ultimately their decisions to choose the right or wrong way has been argued. In the light of the theory of Judith Harris, this research paper highlights all the phenomena involved: How the social hierarchy controls the behaviour. In addition, the aggressive approach of the people in their lives has been analyzed in the light of the study of second theorist Thomas W Blume. As the novel is a unique representation of supernatural characters, the monsters, which are the products of some cruel deeds, this research paper brings out different dimensions of human sufferings with respect to these supernatural beings. Moreover, the researcher also discusses that, in what manner the curse of violence creates an inevitable vicious cycle of cruel monsters that makes the life of the characters turbulent and miserable.


Author(s):  
Mary Youssef

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.


2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Mullin

Abstract This essay argues that the complex political resonances of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) can be further elucidated through closer critical attention to one of its more marginal characters, the shop-girl Millicent Henning. Ebullient, assertive, and, for many early reviewers, the novel's sole redeeming feature, Millicent supplies the novel with far more than local color. Instead, James seizes on a sexual persona already well established within literary naturalism and popular culture alike to explore a rival mode of insurrection to that more obviously offered elsewhere. While the modes of revolution contemplated by Hyacinth Robinson and his comrades in the Sun and Moon public house are revealed to be anachronistic and ineffectual, Millicent's canny manipulation of her sexuality supplies her with an alternative, effective, and unmistakably modern mode of transformation. The novel's portrait of ““revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort”” is thus set against Millicent's brand of quotidian yet inexorable social change.


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