Phillis Wheatley and the Political Work of Ekphrasis

Author(s):  
Mary Louise Kete

Wheatley redefines herself and her prospects by choosing to open her collection of poems with the rhetorical device of ekphrasis applied to her own situation. This act of agency asserts her equality as an educated person with men and with white people in the face of society’s claims that she—as a woman, a Negro, and a slave—is inherently inferior. She rejects the ways in which her master, the eighteenth-century evangelical clergy, a noble patron, and her publisher try to control her by defining her as their creation. Instead, her use of ekphrasis to compare her situation to those of classical literary figures such as Homer, Maecenas, Virgil, and especially Terence (a freed African slave turned playwright) invokes the classical tradition in order to assert that it inspires her radical claims of gender and racial equality. In doing so, she asked many of the same questions posed by radical elements in revolutionary America, including who has the right to define what we are or will be, and what our reputation will be? She anticipates the use of ekphrasis by familiar Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Keats, and Hemans as way to define and claim the ethos of the poet.

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Smyth

ABSTRACTIreland in the 1690s was a protestant state with a majority catholic population. These protestants sometimes described themselves as ‘the king's Irish subjects’ or ‘the people of Ireland’, but rarely as ‘the Irish’, a label which they usually reserved for the catholics. In constitutional and political terms their still evolving sense of identity expressed itself in the assertion of Irish parliamentary sovereignty, most notably in William Molyneux's 1698 pamphlet, The case of Ireland's being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated. In practice, however, the Irish parliament did not enjoy legislative independence, and the political elite was powerless in the face of laws promulgated at Westminster, such as the i6gg woollen act, which were detrimental to its interests. One possible solution to the problem of inferior status lay in legislative union with England or Great Britain. Increasingly in the years before 1707 certain Irish protestant politicians elaborated the economic, constitutional and practical advantages to be gained from a union, but they also based their case upon an appeal to the shared religion and ethnicity of the sovereign's loyal subjects in the two kingdoms. In short the protestants insisted that they were English. This unionist episode thus illustrates the profoundly ambivalent character of protestant identity in late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century Ireland.


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
João Campos

During the eighteenth century Portugal developed a large military construction process in the Ultramarine possessions, in order to compete with the new born colonial trading empires, mainly Great Britain, Netherlands and France. The Portuguese colonial seashores of the Atlantic Ocean (since the middle of the sixteenth century) and of the Indian Ocean (from the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century) were repeatedly coveted, and the huge Portuguese colony of Brazil was also harassed in the south during the eighteenth century –here due to problems in a diplomatic and military dispute with Spain, related with the global frontiers’ design of the Iberian colonies. The Treaty of Madrid (1750) had specifically abrogated the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) between Portugal and Spain, and the limits of Brazil began to be defined on the field. Macapá is situated in the western branch of Amazonas delta, in the singular cross-point of the Equator with Tordesillas Meridian, and the construction of a big fortress began in the year of 1764 under direction of Enrico Antonio Galluzzi, an Italian engineer contracted by Portuguese administration to the Commission of Delimitation, which arrived in Brazil in 1753. In consequence of the political panorama in Europe after the Seven Years War (1756-1763), a new agreement between Portugal and Spain was negotiated (after the regional conflict in South America), achieved to the Treaty of San Idefonso (1777), which warranted the integration of the Amazonas basin. It was strategic the decision to build, one year before, the huge fortress of Príncipe da Beira, arduously realized in the most interior of the sub-continent, 2000 km from the sea throughout the only possible connection by rivers navigation. Domingos Sambucetti, another Italian engineer, was the designer and conductor of the jobs held on the right bank of Guaporé River, future frontier’s line with Bolivia. São José de Macapá and Príncipe da Beira are two big fortresses Vauban’ style, built under very similar projects by two Italian engineers (each one dead with malaria in the course of building), with the observance of the most exigent rules of the treaties of military architecture.


1984 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 618-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Evans

While the man is contending with the sterner duties of life, the whole time of the noble, affectionate and true woman is required in the discharge of her … duties … in the family circle … I believe that (women) are better than men, but I do not believe that they are adapted to the political work of this world … I would not … degrade woman by giving her the right of suffrage … because … woman as she is today, the queen of home and of hearts, is above the political collisions of this world, and should always be kept above them.1 See what a record of blood and cruelty the pages of history reveal! … The male element has held high carnival thus far … overpowering the female element everywhere, crushing out the diviner qualities in human nature … The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines, railroads, or specie payments, but a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man up into the higher realms of thought and action …2


1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret DeLacy

The depiction of influenza as a separate species of disease first became common during the eighteenth century. During that period, physicians developed competing theories about its etiology (causation) and transmission, including the theory that influenza was contagious. Theories of contagion were held by an increasing number of physicians during the course of the eighteenth century, although the issue remained a contested one, as symbolized by the publication of two separate reports on the epidemic of 1782 by the Royal College of Physicians and the Society for Promoting Medical Knowledge: reports that differed on the question of transmission.It was because this issue was not settled by an overwhelming preponderance of the evidence that physician's views on this question had political implications that reflect the political and social fissures underlying medical practice in the eighteenth century. This article will examine the political, social, religious, and educational factors that influenced the initiative to investigate influenza as a separate disease, and will argue that these factors also influenced the readiness of some groups of physicians to entertain the hypothesis of contagion in the face of conflicting information. It will also suggest that the divergence of opinion on epidemic diseases reflected the social and educational differences between the graduates of English universities who were eligible for Fellowship in the College of Physicians, and the often equally distinguished “outsiders” who had obtained their medical degrees from other institutions, and who formed competing medical associations.


Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard

This chapter considers Phillis Wheatley as a political actor within the context of revolutionary-era Boston, and her political poetry as representative of the genre eighteenth-century readers would have known as the poem on the affairs of state. Within this larger category the chapter identifies two distinct yet related literary modes in Wheatley’s work. The first, her neoclassical poetics of political identification, engages with the revolutionary rhetoric of freedom as a means of linking the struggle of American revolutionaries with that of enslaved people in America. While this poetics of identification is rooted in a sense of optimism linked to the ethos of revolution, Wheatley simultaneously develops a poetics of opposition, which registers a lingering skepticism as to the likelihood of liberation for enslaved and free blacks in post-revolutionary America.


2011 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-259
Author(s):  
Émilie Pontanier

The author discusses the political and legal implications of French secularism in an Islamic context. To this purpose, she focuses on the French educational system in Tunisia, which allows the distinction between public and private spheres to be emphasized. By way of a discursive analysis of conversations with parents who school their children there, the author shows that the school system strengthens, on the one hand, the religious autonomy of families and, on the other hand, religious abstention. Secularism is therefore analyzed as a vector of religious resistance in the face of the transformation of Tunisian society in that it promotes a modern or “moderate” Islam and recognizes the right to be atheist.


Author(s):  
Evgenij Vodyasov

В статье публикуются итоги исследований мусульманских захоронений на могильнике «Тоянов городок», который является одним из самых ранних памятников ислама в Нижнем Притомье. Делается вывод, что в середине – второй половине XVII в. на кладбище сосуществовали две разные группы мусульманских захоронений. Первая группа мусульманских захоронений объединяет безынвентарные погребения с положением умерших головой на северо-запад с доворотом лица направо. Сделан вывод, что эта традиция не характерна для погребального обряда Нижнего Притомья и является привнесенной с территории Тарского Прииртышья. Появление на «Тояновом городке» захоронений с северо-западной ориентацией связано с переселением в окрестности Томска чатских татар в первой трети – середине XVII в. Для второй группы характерно соблюдение киблы положением умершего головой на юго-восток с доворотом лица налево. Инвентарь в этих захоронениях присутствует, что отражает пережитки доисламских верований. Происхождение этой группы захоронений объясняется трансформацией местного погребального обряда. Во второй половине XVII в. происходит исчезновение курганного способа захоронения, и растет количество безынвентарных погребений в связи с укреплением новой веры. При этом в обряде фиксируются пережитки доисламских верований, что само по себе закономерно для распространения любой религии в мире. Автор приходит к заключению, что на рубеже XVII–XVIII вв. исчезает обычай укладывать умерших головой на юго-восток, и «северо-западная» кибла вытесняет местную традицию. В начале XVIII в. в погребальном обряде происходят существенные перемены: окончательно исчезают курганные насыпи, могилы становятся глубже, появляются ниши (подбои), чего не отмечалось в более ранних мусульманских некрополях. Перемены связаны с прибытием мусульманского населения из Поволжья и Предуралья и их расселением в Татарской Слободе. С начала XVIII в. вплоть до рубежа XIX–XX в. мусульманский обряд унифицировался и существовал в неизменном виде.The article presents the results of research on Muslim burials in the hillfort named ‘Toyanov gorodok’ – one of the oldest Islamic sites in the Lower Tom region. The conclusion is drawn that in the middle to the second half of the seventeenth century, two different groups of Muslim burials coexisted here. The first group of the Muslim burials encompasses graves with no inventory, with the deceased placed with their heads to the north-west and their faces turned to the right. It is concluded that this tradition is not consistent with the burial rite spread in the Lower Tom and was brought in from outside, namely, the Tar Irtysh region. The emergence of such burials in the Toyanov Gorodok was associated with the settlement of the Chat Tatars on the outskirts of Tomsk in the first third to the middle seventeenth century. Characteristic of the second group was the placement of the deceased according to the Qiblah, with the head turned to the south-east and the face turned to the left. Some inventory was found in these burials, which is indicative of pre-Islamic beliefs. The origins of this group are accounted for by the transformation of the local burial rite. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the kurgan type of burials disappeared, whereas the number of burials with no inventory grew due to the strengthening of the new faith. At the same time, the vestiges of pre-Islamic beliefs can be seen in the burial rite, which in itself is natural for the spread of any religion in the world. The author concludes that at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, the rite of placing the deceased with their heads to the south-east ceased to exist, and the ‘Qiblah north-west orientation’ replaced the local tradition. In the early eighteenth century, the burial rite changed significantly: the kurgan type of burials ceased to exist completely, the graves became deeper, and grave niches started to appear which were not reported to be found in older Muslim necropolises. These changes were connected with the arrival of the Muslim population from the Volga and the Ural regions and its settlement in the Tatar Sloboda. From the early eighteenth century up until the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Muslim rite was consolidated and remained unchanged since.


Author(s):  
Kent Eaton

This chapter examines Ecuador as a case of policy regime juxtaposition, marked by the success of the first type of subnational policy challenge and the failure of the second. With respect to the first challenge, two dynamic mayors on the right of the political spectrum—León Febres Cordero (1992–2000) and Jaime Nebot (2000–18)—were able to design, build, and consolidate a distinctly neoliberal model in the critical port city of Guayaquil. Thanks to high levels of administrative capacity and strong internal coalitions, the architects of this model subsequently managed to defend it in the face of repeated assaults after 2006 by leftist President Rafael Correa. While the mayor of Guayaquil has managed to defend its neoliberal policy regime, he and his allies have been unable to moderate the President’s statist project at the national level owing to Guayaquil’s declining structural leverage and the absence of external coalitions with other like-minded subnational officials.


k ta ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-23
Author(s):  
Goran Omar Mustafa

ABSTRACT Revolution as a phenomenon is considered as a way to a complete change of a situation or system of government to a better one. Dose revolution really is the right way to fulfil our dreams and have a better way of life? Or simply it is just changing the face of rulers or the name of the governments.  Many writers and novelists wrote about this issue. George Orwell which is considered as apolitical writer, is one of them. He wrote many novels. Animal Farm, as one of them, is an allegorical story of some animals in a farm. They begin a revolution against the humans with the dream of getting rid of Man as the root cause of their problems, and to be rich and free. They have a short period of honeymoon revolution, but then their dream of building a utopian farm crashes by the pigs and would find themselves in dystopia. This paper aims to study the nature of revolution generally in the shed light of human history. Then to explore how this phenomenon is treated by Orwell in his novel. Can we consider revolution as a right way to have a complete change in the political system and thinking of people? The researchers try to illuminate and find answer for those questions by providing examples from the story of Animal Farm. 


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Bohdana Kurylo

Abstract IR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.


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