The Revolutionary Formalism of France

2020 ◽  
pp. 72-95
Author(s):  
David Faflik

This chapter addresses how the divergent city experience of the Paris métropole accumulated contrary meanings (overtly political in the minds of some, artfully performative in the minds of others) for interested onlookers during the tumultuous middle decades of the nineteenth century. The signature rhythms of the city’s divided politics in this period constituted a form unto themselves. For some observers of Paris, the distinguishing characteristic of these forms is that they were being placed under great strain by the domestic factions coalescing in France around a number of longstanding social grievances there, which together found expression in the country’s capital city. Another group of observers might have recognized the revolutionary potential of such grievances, but they were preoccupied instead by the captivating drama that was politics in Paris. These readers monitored the city’s politics less to understand its core issues than to enjoy what was effectively a form of street theatre for a viewing public. In the Paris of 1848, readers met with an urban “text” the content of which was sometimes indistinguishable from the enormity of its historical forms.

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raf Gelders

In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India. The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture. However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from. This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-73
Author(s):  
Ayla Akbash

In this study certain educational institutions such as madrassahs, kulliyes and mosques that contributed to environment in terms of education in the Ottoman period (middle of the fifteenth century-beginning of the nineteenth century)are researched with regards to educational system, curriculum, mudarrises, students and training. The functions and effects of the madrassahs at that time as well as their reflection in our time are dealt with. In this context, some educational institutions included by certain Anatolian madrassahs such as darulkurra, darulhadith, sahnıseman and schools, which are currently existed and not, have been taken in examination. Incorporating madrassahs, which are public instutions in the Ottoman period, in the state organisation has been started with the Fatih madrassahs that were established by Fatih (Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror) and structuring of madrassah order was quickened after the conquest. In time, the cities such as İstanbul (capital city), Edirne, Bursa, İznik, Trabzon, Konya and Diyarbakır have had the most madrassahs. The large majority of madrassahs of Sinan the Architect have been built in Anatolia and in other cities of the Empire. The first Ottoman madrassah was established in İznik and has become widespread in time. In consequence of being institutions in which training was giving according to the curriculum and ratification of mudarris and having distinctive architectural characteristics in their cubicles, porches, classes, iwans and şadırvans gave rise to them having a respectable position in the society. It is commented that the madrassahs that are the symbol of classical Ottoman arcitecture have been retrograded later on. In the scope of madrassahs located in the Antalya region the importance and contribution of them, which have been improved as the reflection of the social changes and have been opened to changes with their internal/external dynamics, and their capability of being met the requirements of society have been examined and explained descriptively together with their contributions to educational mantality in our time.


1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Balmori ◽  
Robert Oppenheimer

This paper is derived from the authors' detailed studies of two groups of nineteenth-century families—eighteen families in Argentina and twenty-four in Chile. The studies revealed such remarkable similarities in the evolution of the two groups that it is possible to propose a broad generalization in respect to the social organization and national formation of both countries: there was, in each country, a three-generation sequence during which a number of families came together to form clusters that became the controlling entities of a region. Their base for political and economic control was either the existing capital city or a city that had been designated as the capital by these families.


2019 ◽  
pp. 009614421987786
Author(s):  
Joe Curran

Nineteenth-century Dublin and Edinburgh were “stateless capitals”; they were no longer home to parliaments but still had many of the characteristics of a capital city. This article begins to explore the idea that the stateless capital constitutes a particular type of city. It analyses philanthropic activity to assess how middle-class life in each city was affected by their positions as stateless capitals. In particular, it examines the significance of the close interactions between central state and philanthropy that helped to shape stateless-capital status in early nineteenth-century Dublin but not Edinburgh. It argues that central state intervention in Dublin did not dampen the vibrancy of associational culture, but it did politicize philanthropy, reducing voluntary organizations’ ability to mediate social conflict. More seriously, the provision of parliamentary grants to Dublin’s charities damaged the city’s image, making it appear unable to perform basic urban functions. This was in sharp contrast to Edinburgh’s image as Scottish metropolis.


2002 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alec Gordon ◽  
Napat Sirisambhand

With the burning of central Thailand's capital city, Ayudhya, in 1767 and the destruction of virtually all the records kept there by the centralized bureaucracy of that kingdom, and with the Burmese occupation of the north and the devastating years of fighting around 1800 to drive them out, there is virtually no written record left at all for Thailand prior to the nineteenth century. There is a little material on rulers and some of their activities, but for social history the record is nearly blank. Is there then no way to write a social history or a gender history for Thailand?


1989 ◽  
Vol 102 (405) ◽  
pp. 365
Author(s):  
Rachelle H. Saltzman ◽  
Susan G. Davis

1984 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Sternstein

When Bangkok was named the capital of Siam it held an inconsiderable population of some fifty thousand. Now, two hundred years later, this capital city boasts some five million residents. A prodigious population increase, indeed: a hundredfold gain generated by an ever-increasing rate of growth, which, after gathering momentum only gradually during the greater part of the nineteenth century, rose rapidly around the turn of this century and has since soared. The foregoing compendious description is shown on Figure I as the curve which charts the march of the population of the built-up area of the city. I have calculated this particular population by reworking the numbers reported at particular times by certain “eyewitnesses”. Since the turn of this century, the “eyewitnesses” have been censuses and registration counts for administrative areas; earlier “witnesses” are the postal census of 1882 and the considered estimate of the population of the city proper in 1822 by the “very trustworthy” Dr John Crawfurd, Head-of-Mission to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China deputised by the Governor-General of India. I have forsaken all the many other pre-twentieth century eyewitness estimates of the population of Bangkok. Why?


1987 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Graham Hodges ◽  
Susan G. Davis

1975 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 59-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry H. Bucher

The Mpongwe people of the Gabon estuary live today in the immediate area of Libreville, the capital city of the Gabon Republic. Libreville is built on Mpongwe ancestral lands, and its history is only a small and comparatively recent chapter in the longer story of the Mpongwe and their neighbors. In the nineteenth century the expression “les Gabonais” or “the Gaboon people” had only one meaning—the Mpongwe of the estuary who were the coastal trading aristocracy.The Mpongwe are only one of the six peoples belonging to the Myèné-speaking group of Gabon. The other five are the Orungu, Nkomi, Galoa, Adyumba, and Enenga. Only the Mpongwe are patrilineal. Myèné is purely a linguistic classification, a subdivision of the Bantu language. All six of these societies fit into a circle whose circumference includes the three largest cities in Gabon today—Libreville, Port Gentil (formerly Cape Lopez), and Lambaréné (Map 1). From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Myèné was the coastal lingua franca between the southern Cameroun and Cabinda. The Myèné societies in general, and the Mpongwe in particular, have played a key role in Gabon's past, and continue to be an influential minority in modern Gabon. In the early nineteenth century, and for an unknown previous period, the closest non-Myèné neighbors of the Mpongwe were the Benga and the related societies to the north, and the Shekiani and Bakélé to the east. The Shekiani were the couriers in the Mpongwe trade with the Bakélé and other interior societies.


2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lowrey

In the early nineteenth century, the city of Edinburgh cultivated a reputation as "the Athens of the North." The paper explores the architectural aspects of this in relation to the city's sense of its own identity. It traces the idea of Edinburgh as a "modern Athens" back to the eighteenth century, when the connotations were cultural, intellectual, and topographical rather than architectural. With the emergence of the Greek revival, however, Edinburgh began actively to construct an image of classical Greece on the hilltops and in the streets of the expanding city. It is argued that the Athenian identity of Edinburgh should be viewed as the culmination of a series of developments dating back to the Act of Union between the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707. As a result, Edinburgh lost its status as a capital city and struggled to reassert itself against the stronger economy of the south. Almost inevitably, the northern capital had to redefine itself in relation to London, the English and British capital. The major developments of Edinburgh in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the New Town and the urban proposals of Robert Adam, are interpreted in this light. As the eighteenth century progressed, the city grew more confident and by the early nineteenth century had settled upon its role within the Union and within the empire, which was that of cultural capital as a counterbalance to London, the political capital. The architectural culmination of the process of the redefinition of Edinburgh, however, coincided with the emergence of another mythology of Scottish identity, as seen through the Romantic vision of Sir Walter Scott. It implied a quite different, indigenous architecture that later found its expression in the Scots Baronial style. It is argued here, however, that duality does not contradict the idea of Edinburgh as Athens, nor, more generally, does it sit uneasily with the Scottish predilection for Greek architecture, but rather that it encapsulates the very essence of Scottish national identity: both proudly Scots and British.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document