scholarly journals From Pari Khanas to Lal Bazaars and Further Away: Female Performers in Nineteenth Century Awadh

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 01-20
Author(s):  
Tanya Burman

While there are a lot of contestations over the identity and subjectivity of women performers and entertainers of Awadh, three terms denote the most popular representations of these women in the nineteenth century. These are: the trained and sophisticated tawaʾif of the Nawabi court, the vulgar and titillating ‘nautch’ girls of the city and the ill-mannered and promiscuous “prostitute” of the British cantonment. For long, these terms have been used to weave a linear narrative about the courtesan’s eventual fall from grace, which does not take into account the politics behind these categorisations nor women’s participation therein. This paper focuses instead, on the making and unmaking of these ontological categories to argue that, while these categories are neither exhaustive nor holistic, they are reflective of the institutions wherein they flourished, the cultural specificities of their existence and the peculiarities of their labour practices. An analysis of these dynamics shall present a more detailed and genealogical history of how women inhabited, embodied, extended and/or negotiated with power structures. This holds the utmost importance in the context of contemporary reminiscence of Lucknow’s past, which, while being marked by a celebration of the courtesan culture, is often accompanied by erasure of their lived experiences, presenting unidimensional imagery that is both unhistorical and ahistorical. 

Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.


Author(s):  
Angela Bartie ◽  
Alistair Fraser

This chapter unites perspectives from history and sociology in excavating the lived experiences of everyday masculinities and violence that lie behind the persistent image of the Glasgow ‘hard man’, while also interrogating popular representations of the ‘hard city’. Drawing on oral history interviews with individuals involved in violent territorialism – specifically through street-based ‘gangs’ of young men – c. 1965-1975, it contrasts popular representations of the Glasgow ‘hard man’ with the lived experiences of those living and working in the city at that time. Focusing specifically on Easterhouse, it highlights the prominence of ‘the street’ in narrative accounts of masculine identity formation for young working-class men and links this to the specific social, cultural and economic composition of the locale. Overall, it argues that such ‘street’ masculinities should be understood in historical context, recognising the influence of local cultures of machismo on the persistence of forms of masculine identity.


Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.


2007 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 157-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Jones

AbstractThéodore Vacquer (1824–99) was an archaeologist who excavated, directed excavations in and visited all archaeological sites in Paris between the 1840s and his death. In the latter part of his career, he served as assistant curator at what became the Musée Carnavalet, specialising in the Roman and early medieval history of the city. Taking advantage of the reconstruction of the city in the nineteenth century associated with the work of Paris prefect, Baron Haussmann, he was able to locate far more of Roman Paris than had been known before. His findings remained the basis of what was known about the Roman city until a new wave of archaeological excavations after 1950. Vacquer aimed to highlight his discoveries in a magnum opus on the history of Paris from earliest times to ad 1000, but he died with virtually nothing written. His extensive archive still exists, however, and provides the substance for this essay. The essay seeks to rescue Vacquer from the relative obscurity associated with his name. In addition, by setting his life and work in the context of the Haussmannian construction of Paris as the arch-city of modernity it aims to illuminate the history of archaeology, conservation and urban identity in nineteenth-century Paris.


1986 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-111
Author(s):  
T.G. Holt

THE HISTORY of Catholicism in Salisbury from Reformation times until the earlier years of the nineteenth century has been told in so far as it is known in the Victoria County History of Wiltshire, in the volume of the Catholic Record Society devoted to recusancy in that county and in an article in The Month: ‘John Peniston's Reminiscences’.’ As an introduction to what follows the information contained in these may be briefly summarized.


2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (s1) ◽  
pp. s309-s338
Author(s):  
Laurie K. Bertram

How did marginalized and racialized ethnic immigrants transform themselves into active, armed colonial agents in nineteenth-century Western Canada? Approximately twenty Icelanders enlisted to fight Louis Riel’s forces during the North-West Resistance in 1885, just ten years following the arrival of Icelandic immigrants in present-day Manitoba. Forty more reportedly enlisted in an Icelandic-Canadian battalion to enforce the government’s victory in the fall. This public, armed stance of a group of Icelanders against Indigenous forces in 1885 is somewhat unexpected, since most Icelanders were relatively recent arrivals in the West and, in Winnipeg, members of the largely unskilled urban working class. Moreover, they were widely rumoured among Winnipeggers to be from a “blubber-eating race” and of “Eskimo” extraction; community accounts testify to the discrimination numerous early Icelanders faced in the city. These factors initially make Icelanders unexpected colonialists, particularly since nineteenth-century ethnic immigration and colonial suppression so often appear as separate processes in Canadian historiography. Indeed, this scholarship is characterized by an enduring belief that Western Canadian colonialism was a distinctly Anglo sin. Ethnic immigrants often appear in scholarly and popular histories as sharing a history of marginalization with Indigenous people that prevented migrants from taking part in colonial displacement. Proceeding from the neglected history of Icelandic enlistment in 1885 and new developments in Icelandic historiography, this article argues that rather than negating ethnic participation in Indigenous suppression, ethnic marginality and the class tensions it created could actually fuel participation in colonial campaigns, which promised immigrants upward mobility, access to state support, and land.


Author(s):  
Holly J. McCammon ◽  
Verta Taylor ◽  
Jo Reger ◽  
Rachel L. Einwohner

The introduction to The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women’s Social Movement Activism, begins with an “aerial” view of the history of scholarship on U.S. women’s collective action, tracing the roots of this body of research to the early nineteenth century and following its trajectory to the present. In recent decades, the scholarly study of U.S. women’s activism has increased dramatically, with a wide range of investigations that reveal both the broad diversity of women’s politicized collective action and the theoretical sophistication in our understanding of the causes, processes, and consequences of women’s collective struggles. The introduction concludes with an overview of the Handbook’s five sections, which explore the history of women’s activism, the issues mobilizing women, the strategies and tactics women have employed, the targets and forums of women’s activism, and women’s participation in a variety of social movements, in addition to those concerned with women’s issues.


Transfers ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward J.M. Rhoads

Introduced into China in the late nineteenth century, the bicycle had to compete with a variety of alternative modes of personal transportation that for a number of years limited its appeal and utility. Thus, during the 1920s and 1930s it took a back seat to the hand-pulled rickshaw and during the 1940s to the pedicab (cycle rickshaw). It was only in the 1950s that the bicycle became the primary means of transportation for most urban Chinese. For the next four decades, as its use spread from the city to the countryside, China was the iconic “bicycle kingdom.“ Since the 1990s, however, the pedal-powered bicycle has been overtaken by the automobile (and motorcycle). Nevertheless, with the recent appearance and growing popularity of the e-bike, the bicycle may yet play an important role in China's transport modal mix. This overview history of the bicycle in China is based on a wide range of textual sources in English and Chinese as well as pictorial images.


2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
GAVIN DALY

In the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon allowed English smugglers entry into the French ports of Dunkirk and Gravelines, encouraging them to run contraband back and forth across the Channel. Gravelines catered for up to 300 English smugglers, housed in a specially constructed compound known as the ‘city of smugglers’. Napoleon used the smugglers in the war against Britain. The smugglers arrived on the French coast with escaped French prisoners of war, gold guineas, and English newspapers; and returned to England laden with French textiles, brandy, and gin. Smuggling remains a neglected historical subject, and this episode in particular – the relationship between English smugglers and the Napoleonic state between 1810 and 1814 – has attracted little scholarly interest. Yet it provides a rich historical source, illuminating not only the history of Anglo-French Channel smuggling during the early nineteenth century, but offering insights into the economic, social, and maritime history of the Napoleonic Wars.


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