Richard Murphy’s The God Who Eats Corn: A Colonizer’s Critique of British Imperialism in Ireland and Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
J.R. Sackett
Keyword(s):  
Colonial History ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Native Identity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
British Imperialist

With the passing of Richard Murphy in 2018, Ireland lost its last poet of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.  Yet his poetry often displays the poet’s sense of unease with his background and features attempts to reconcile Ireland’s colonial history with feelings of guilt and self-consciousness as an inheritor to the gains of the British imperialist project. A dedicatory poem to his aging father who had retired to what was then known as Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe), ‘The God Who Eats Corn’ draws parallels between Irish and African colonial experiences. Yet far from celebrating the ‘civilizing’ mission of British imperialism, Murphy deftly challenges and questions the legitimacy of his family legacy.  I argue that rather than reinforcing the poet’s image as representative of the Ascendancy class, ‘The God Who Eats Corn’ reveals sympathies with the subject peoples of British imperialism and aligns Murphy with a nationalist narrative of history and conception of ‘native’ identity.  For this reason, the poem should be considered a landmark of modern Irish poetics in its articulation of trans-racial anti-colonial solidarity.

Imperialism and Nationalism in India

1973 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil Seal
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
World History ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
The West ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

Among the dominant themes of world history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been the imperialism of the west and the nationalism of its colonial subjects. Nowhere were these themes developed more spectacularly than in South Asia; its history quite naturally came to be viewed as a gigantic clash between these two large forces. The subject then was held together by a set of assumptions about the imperialism of the British and the reactions of the Indians against it. That imperialism, so it was thought, had engineered great effects on the territories where it ruled. Those who held the power could make the policy, and they could see that it became the practice. Sometimes that policy might be formulated ineptly or might fall on stony ground or even smash against the hard facts of colonial life. But for good or ill, imperial policy seemed to be the main force affecting colonial conditions. It emerged from an identifiable source, the official mind of Whitehall or the contrivances of pro-consuls; and so the study of policy-making made a framework for investigations into colonial history.

A Note on Some Central African Forenames

Africa ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 384-390
Author(s):  
J. H. Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
The Subject ◽  
Southern Rhodesia

IntroductionAny associate or employer of Africans is aware of a great diversity of forenames among them; this habit has been discussed by Jackson for Southern Rhodesia, and for Northern Rhodesia in two papers by Munday. It is these last which this note is intended to supplement by giving quantitative examples and drawing attention to one or two further aspects of the subject.

Panicker, K.C.S. (1911–1977)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Clark
Keyword(s):  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
International Level ◽  
Visual Material ◽  
The Past ◽  
Active Life ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Invented Tradition ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Subject

Kovalezhi Cheerampathoor Sankaran Paniker was of Malayali background but spent most of his active life as a painter, teacher, and organizer in Madras, now Chennai, in Tamil Nadu. His work is important for three reasons: it shows his own stylistic trajectory out of the modernist dilemmas faced by an artist before and after Indian Independence; it indicates the way Indian visual material from Malayalam script to magical diagrams could be mobilized to produce a kind of abstract pictorial discourse; it manifests how a regionally based artist could link up with and generate significant modernist work at a national and international level. Modernism is a reflexive discourse where the subject is how an art form manifests the modern, the position which relativizes the past, to make new selections of pre-modern exemplars where the modern becomes a pair with an invented tradition, and distances practice from a naturalized, unconscious customary. Modernism’s subject is the modality of the modern. Paniker’s work clearly shows this shift from a humanist identification with the Indian poor or politically oppressed using the practices of Post-Impressionism to the early-1950s. He moves to an identification with the Indian folk as a repository of visual experience but also a public visuality with considerable pre-colonial history.

Woolf’s Imperialist Cousins: Missionary Vocations of Dorothea and Rosamond Stephen

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor McNees
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Negative Reaction ◽  
Religious Schools ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Missionary Zeal ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
The Church

Now largely ignored, perhaps because Virginia Woolf mercilessly disparaged them in her diaries and letters, the two youngest daughters of James Fitzjames Stephen (Leslie Stephen’s older brother), Rosamond and Dorothea, together created a modest historical and literary legacy in their vocations and writings. Both embodied a characteristic Woolf and her father most despised—a religious missionary zeal reminiscent of the Stephen family’s strong evangelical roots in the Clapham sect of the 1830s. Dorothea’s and Rosamond’s writings reflect a desire to convert their respective audiences to a particularly English Christian perspective. Both moved to former British colonies, Dorothea to southern India where she taught in Christian religious schools, and Rosamond to Ireland where she founded the Church of Ireland-affiliated Irish Guild of Witness. In their separate endeavors they espoused and promoted their father’s beliefs in British superiority with its consequent civilizing mission. This essay reads Dorothea’s and Rosamond’s written records as examples of a revived British imperialism that Woolf inherited but strongly criticized. It suggests that Woolf’s negative reaction to her Stephen cousins who embodied that religious/imperialist ethos is more complex than has been previously acknowledged.

The Cultural Significance of "Jack and the Beanstalk"

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 53-76
Author(s):  
Madeline M.H. Grosh ◽  
Aidan S. McBride ◽  
KJ Ross-Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Cultural Norm ◽  
Cultural Ideologies ◽  
Full Picture ◽  
British Imperialist

“Jack and the Beanstalk” is a widely known fairy tale with a longstanding tradition of rewrites to fit the cultural norm. Andrew Lang’s version from 1890 is just another such version of the classic story. However, his version has distinct influence from the culture around him at the time, namely those of Marxism and British imperialism mindsets, which were wildly influential at the time. It is within these cultural ideologies that Lang’s Jack exists, as Jack the oppressor and Jack the oppressed. Along with other artifacts of the time, this paper seeks to position Lang’s version against the Marxist and British imperialist influences to paint a full picture of the cultural significance of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Madeline

2. Colonial India: impoverishment

2017 ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
Craig Jeffrey
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Development ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Three Phases

‘Colonial India: impoverishment’ considers why India is poor and divided. India has been wealthy historically and so the ubiquity of poverty in contemporary India needs to be explained with reference to colonial history rather than imagined as somehow an inevitable feature of the subcontinent. Three phases in the imperial dominance of the English (then British after 1707) in India are identified and the ruinous impact of British imperialism is described. Despite the ‘impoverishment’ of India there were some positive aspects to British rule, particularly in infrastructural and institutional development. The combination of economic and political disempowerment seeded Indian nationalism, with self-rule finally achieved in 1947.

Radiocarbon Dates for Sub-Saharan Africa

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. M. Fagan
Keyword(s):  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
African History ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Radiocarbon Dates ◽  
Carbon 14 ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Absolute Dating ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Southern Rhodesia

In the belief that the results of this system of absolute dating are of considerable interest to historians and others concerned with the pre-colonial history of Africa, the Journal of African History has decided to publish from time to time lists of dates since c. 1000 B.C. which are being established for sub-Saharan Africa by the Radiocarbon (Carbon 14) method. (A description of this technique will be found in Professor F. E. Zeuner's Dating the Past.) The Rhodes-Livingstone Museum has kindly agreed to compile these lists for the Journal, and would be most grateful if those possessing relevant results could send a note of them to the Director, the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, P.O. Box 124, Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia. The attention of readers is also drawn to the new dates for Southern Rhodesia published in the appendix to Mr Roger Summers'ps article in this number of the Journal.

scholarly journals Strategic Hypocrisy: The British Imperial Scripting of Tibet's Geopolitical Identity

2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dibyesh Anand
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
The West ◽  
Significant Aspect ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
British Imperialist

The protests in and around Tibet in 2008 show that Tibet's status within China remains unsettled. The West is not an outsider to the Tibet question, which is defined primarily in terms of the debate over the status of Tibet vis-à-vis China. Tibet's modern geopolitical identity has been scripted by British imperialism. The changing dynamics of British imperial interests in India affected the emergence of Tibet as a (non)modern geopolitical entity. The most significant aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the first half of the twentieth century was the formula of “Chinese suzerainty/Tibetan autonomy.” This strategic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibet's status, culminated in the victory of a Western idea of sovereignty. It was China, not Tibet, that found the sovereignty talk most useful. The paper emphasizes the world-constructing role of contesting representations and challenges the divide between the political and the cultural, the imperial and the imaginative.

scholarly journals RESISTING DOMINANT CULTURE IN THE LONELY LONDONERS: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (15) ◽  
pp. 1275-1279
Author(s):  
Kawa Sherwani ◽  
Saman Dizayi
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Cultural Dominance

This paper investigates the resistance of immigrants to cultural dominance of London society in The Lonely Londoners, a postcolonial novel by Sam Selvon. The Lonely Londoners (1956) depicts the miserable life of Caribbean people who migrated in hope to find better condition of living than their countries. The paper furnishes a theoretic ground for analyzing the discourse of the novel which presents the subject of resisting dominant culture throughout events and language used by the novelist. The paradigm of immigrants, their trauma and shock have always been the spot line of discussion after WWII. Through the colonial history there was a dominant discourse of Western cultural superiority imposed on colonized, with the postcolonial era a different discourse emerged through intellectual presentations such as Fanon, Said, Bhabha ideas and others who enlightened literary theory and criticism and theorized resistance and cultural identity. Thus, this paper will critically analyze the discourse of resistance of Postcolonial people in exile to ascertain their existence and identity. Keywords: Post colonialism, Discourse analysis, Resistance, Identity

scholarly journals Morocco in Colonial Photography

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (12) ◽  
pp. 01-08
Author(s):  
Soufiane Laachiri Laachiri
Keyword(s):  
Military Officers ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Photographic Documentation ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Travel Writers

This article represents an attempt to approach the notion of colonial discourse and photography more closely with the exigencies that put Morocco under the zoom of the colonial lens. This photographic documentation shows that nations, Morocco, in this case, were annexed to imperial powers through the utilization of various means of representation. This annexation was carried out not only by military officers, missionaries and spies but also by cartographers, travel writers and photographers who never ceased to polish the lens of their cameras so as to be able to represent indigenous identities, as well as their social lifestyles, and cultures. Therefore, the purpose of the present work is to sketch the colonial experience that links the imperializers with the imperialized through chronological documentation of colonial power and domination. Therefore, the main interest centres around the question of rereading this colonial history by analyzing and questioning colonial photography and its role in colonial expansion over Morocco. Besides, it is to unmask the alleged objective embedded in this country's 'civilizing mission'.

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