Het gruwelijke gezicht van de geschiedenis

2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-144
Author(s):  
Sarah Badwy ◽  
Yra van Dijk

Abstract The memory of colonialism and slavery is finally becoming more widespread in the Netherlands. However, the field of literary studies still falls behind compared to the central place of the Dutch-Caribbean slavery past in recent societal debates. One of the reasons could be that the representation of trans-Atlantic slavery in literature is often oblique and allegorical. This article proposes a reading of such allegories in The Sign of Jonah (Van Leeuwen 1995) by the Dutch-Antillean writer Boeli van Leeuwen. The novel’s intertextual references to both the Biblical story of Jonah and numerous other intertextual references, connect European, South-American and religious texts with the violent colonial history of the Caribbean. Using European (Walter Benjamin) and Caribbean (Eduard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo) theory, we argue that it is precisely this hybrid and postmodern practice of meaning-making that shapes the depiction of slavery and colonial memory in Van Leeuwen’s novels. Binary oppositions between Europe and South-America, masters and slaves, humans and nature, are deconstructed and readers are encouraged to understand man as fundamentally entangled with his other, be it animal, botanical and mineral. The postmodern use of the allegory turns out to produce cultural memory, and also to announce a future of ‘ecobe-comings’.

Author(s):  
Faizullah Jan ◽  
Syed Irfan Ashraf ◽  
Sayyed Fawad Ali Shah

This paper looks at the question of partition of British India in 1947 and the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan through an analysis of internationally acclaimed and award-winning Pakistani film Khamosh Pani (silent waters). The paper uses Symbolic Interactionism and Feminist Theory with a critical perspective to establish how the present-day religious extremism in Pakistan has its roots in the colonial history of the country. However, it also highlights the diagnostic inability of Symbolic Interactionism as it smacks of the volunteerism and overlooks how statist and organized institutional power infringes upon socio-political meaning making processes. This paper argues that the film connects the communal nature of pre-partition violence to grassroots contemporary religious extremism in Pakistan to show how the rupture of a village life is the continuation of colonial heritage of communal violence. We argue based on the findings of this study that religious extremism that is manifest in today’s Pakistan is not a break from the past; instead, it is rooted in the colonial history connecting the national Pakistani elite with the regional neo-colonial interests.


Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.


Author(s):  
Ihsan Sanusi

This article in principle wants to examine the history of the emergence of the conflict of Islamic revival in Minangkabau starting from the Paderi Movement to the Youth in Minangkabau. Especially in the initial period, namely the Padri movement, there was a tragedy of violence (radicalism) that accompanied it. This study becomes important, because after all the reformation of Islam began to be realized by reforming human life in the world. Both in terms of thought with the effort to restore the correct understanding of religion as it should, from the side of the practice of religion, namely by reforming deviant practices and adapted to the instructions of the religious texts (al-Qur'an and sunnah), and also from the side of strengthening power religion. In this case the research will be directed to the efforts of renewal by the Padri to the Youth towards the Islamic community in Minangkabau. To discuss this problem used historical research methods. Through this method, it is tested and analyzed critically the records and relics of the past. In analyzing the data in this research basically used approach or interactive analysis model by Miles and Huberman. In this analysis model, the three components of the analysis are data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing or verification, the activity is carried out in an interactive form with the process of collecting data as a process that continues, repeats, and continues to form acycle.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Catherine Cumming

This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.  


1999 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Omar Khaleefa

The study is an investigation of the origins of psychophysics and experimentalpsychology. According to historians of psychology. FrancisBacon had the most crucial influence in the history of the experimentalmethod, because he emphasized the importance of induction, skepticism,quantification, and observation. The present study, however,attempts to show that Ibn al-Haytham laid the foundations of the aboveaspects of the experimental method. Furthermore, a number of historiansof psychology believe that Fechner was the founder of psychophysicswith his application “Filements of Psychophysics” in 1860.This study shows that in the eleventh century, Ibn al-Haytham made anoriginal contribution to the study of vision, wherein his psychophysicsborrowed its structure from physics and its spirit from psychology.Several aspects of visual perception were investigated by him, includingsensation (which occupies a central place in psychophysics), variationsin sensitivity, perception of colors. sensation of touch, perceptionof darkness, the psychological explanation of moon illusion, and binocularvision. This study presents five experiments by Ibn al-Haythamregarding the errors of vision, which is called in contemporary psychology“visual illusion.” These experiments have been applied andverified in Bahrain from both the physical and psychological perspectives.Finally, the study concludes that Ibn al-Haytham deserves the title“founder” of psychophysics as wellp the “founder” of experimentalpsychology. In this respect. Kitab ul-Manazir by Ibn al-Haytham.which appeared in the fmt half of the eleventh century, and not the“Elements of Psychophysics” by Fechner. which was published in thenineteenth century, marks the official “founding” of psychology,because it provides not only new concepts and theories but new methodsof measurement in psychology.


Author(s):  
Andrzej Marzec

The author analyzes Sven Agustijnen's Specters from the philosophical perspective. He tries to prove that the cinema of the Belgian director is haunted because it presents the reality as made out of traces, which disturb the traditional division into presence and absence. The author analyzes Augustijnen's film techniques and uses Jacques Derrida hauntology to show, how contemporary cinema tries to face the difficult and unfinished colonial history of Belgium (the genocide in Congo during the reign of the Belgian king Leopold II and the murder of the first prime minister of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba).


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
R. R. Palekha ◽  

Introduction. Right understanding is the most live, interesting and, at the same time, the uncertain and changeable area of researches which takes the central place as in the general theory of the right, and gains the increasing value in industry jurisprudence that is connected with its considerable teoretiko-methodological and applied potential which is shown in spheres of lawmaking and law-enforcement activity. Thus, right understanding represents research tools of the subject of knowledge which allow to study all range legal and, the based on them, state phenomena for the purpose of obtaining reliable knowledge of state and legal reality. In this regard integrative approach in right understanding which has rich history of the formation and development is of special interest, allows to perceive the right as integrally complete phenomenon, as much as possible retrieves its regulatory abilities and, provides achievement of criteria of scientific research: comprehensiveness, objectivity, historicism. Materials and Methods. In article an attempt of the analysis of integrative approach in right understanding from a position of history of origin of his ideas and assessment of the current state is made. A result of studying of scientific literature, generalization and comparison of the different points of view fat formulation of author’s determination of category “right understanding” and submission of the evidence-based integrative theory of right understanding which as much as possible conforms to requirements of time and has essential regulatory and guarding potential. Results. In article the category right understanding is comprehensively considered, different integrative theories of right understanding from a position of their origin and development are submitted, the value of modern integrative approach in right understanding is shown, perspectives of its further development are evaluated. Discussion and Conclusion. The author comes to the conclusion about the theoretical and methodological consistency and inevitability of the integrative approach in law understanding, which acts as a scientifically grounded type of legal thinking capable of comprehending the law on a truly scientific basis.


Author(s):  
Benjamin E. Reynolds

The central place of revelation in the Gospel of John and the Gospel’s revelatory telling of the life of Jesus are distinctive features of John when compared with the Synoptic Gospels; yet, when John is compared among the apocalypses, these same features indicate John’s striking affinity with the genre of apocalypse. By paying attention to modern genre theory and making an extensive comparison with the standard definition of “apocalypse,” the Gospel of John reflects similarities with Jewish apocalypses in form, content, and function. Even though the Gospel of John reflects similarities with the genre of apocalypse, John is not an apocalypse, but in genre theory terms, John may be described as a gospel in kind and an apocalypse in mode. John’s narrative of Jesus’s life has been qualified and shaped by the genre of apocalypse, such that it may be called an “apocalyptic” gospel. Understanding the Fourth Gospel as “apocalyptic” Gospel provides an explanation for John’s appeal to Israel’s Scriptures and Mosaic authority. Possible historical reasons for the revelatory narration of Jesus’s life in the Gospel of John may be explained by the Gospel’s relationship with the book of Revelation and the history of reception concerning their writing. An examination of Byzantine iconographic traditions highlights how reception history may offer a possible explanation for reading John as “apocalyptic” Gospel.


Author(s):  
James Meffan

This chapter discusses the history of multicultural and transnational novels in New Zealand. A novel set in New Zealand will have to deal with questions about cultural access rights on the one hand and cultural coverage on the other. The term ‘transnational novel’ gains its relevance from questions about cultural and national identity, questions that have particularly exercised nations formed from colonial history. The chapter considers novels that demonstrate and respond to perceived deficiencies in wider discourses of cultural and national identity by way of comparison between New Zealand and somewhere else. These include Amelia Batistich's Another Mountain, Another Song (1981), Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home (1973) and Black Rainbow (1992), James McNeish's Penelope's Island (1990), Stephanie Johnson's The Heart's Wild Surf (2003), and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006).


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