scholarly journals Representations of the East: Orientalism in Emily Eden’s Travel Writing

Author(s):  
Amalie Due Svendsen

The publication of Orientalism by Edward W. Said in 1978 gave rise to a new area of studies examining how representations of the East were influenced by an Orientalist discourse, which functioned to maintain and justify Western hegemony. Emily Eden’s letters from her travels in Colonial India are examples of such representations, as they depict her meeting with and perception of the colonial Other. I argue that Eden’s writing displays Orientalism, as she tends to dissociate herself from the Indians through othering, in order to preserve her national identity. However, Eden’s letters are distinguished from other Orientalist travel writing in the sense that she does not articulate justification of Western superiority. Thus, I argue, that the Orientalist discourse demonstrated in Eden’s letters serves the personal purpose of self-definition rather than the political purpose of justifying colonial rule.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adib Rifqi Setiawan

The Critical Discourse Analysis is often applied to analyze political discourse including the political speech. This article analyzes Grace Natalie Louisa’s Speech, mainly in Festival 11 by Partai Solidaritas Indonesia (PSI), that is exclusively based on the perspective of Teun Adrianus van Dijk. It reveals that we can learn how to deliver our ideology to public. Moreover, we can have a better understanding of the political purpose of these speeches.


Author(s):  
Supriya Mukherjee

This chapter focuses on Indian historical writing. The end of colonial rule in 1947 was a turning point in Indian historical writing and culture. History emerged as a professional discipline with the establishment of new state-sponsored institutions of research and teaching. Attached to the institutionalization was the political imperative of a newly independent nation in search of a coherent and comprehensive historical narrative to support its nation-building efforts. At the same time, there was a desire to establish an autonomous Indian perspective, free of colonial constraints and distortions. In this, post-independence historiography owed much to earlier strands of nationalist historiography. During the first two decades after independence, three main trajectories of historical writing emerged: an official and largely secular nationalist historiography, a cultural nationalist historiography with strong religious overtones, and a critical Marxist trajectory based on analyses of social forms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 186810262110214
Author(s):  
Straton Papagianneas

This article reviews how Chinese scholars debate the policy of building smart courts in the context of judicial reform. This policy entails the automation and digitisation of judicial processes. It is part of broader judicial reforms that aim to create a more accurate and consistent judiciary. The article identifies four reform concepts that guide the debate: efficiency, consistency, transparency and supervision, and judicial fairness. This review is a meta-synthesis, using practices of narrative and systematic literature reviews, focusing on evaluating and interpreting the Chinese scholarship and reform concepts. It reviews how Chinese scholars discuss the implications of judicial automation and digitisation. Additionally, it analyses the normative concepts behind the reform goals within China’s political-legal context. The analysis finds that the generally positive evaluation in the debate can be explained by an instrumentalist understanding of the reform concepts and the political purpose of courts in the Chinese political-legal context.


2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Webster

“In Malaya,” theDaily Mailnoted in 1953, “three and a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.” The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror were central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoire of imagery deployed in theDaily Mailfor the “miniature fortress” in Malaya was extended to Kenya, where the newspaper noted wire over domestic windows, guns beside wine glasses, the charming hostess in her black silk dress with “an automatic pistol hanging at her hip.” Such images of English domesticity threatened by an alien other were also central to immigration discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representations of the empire and its legacy—resistance to colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis—increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries.Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early postwar Britain, but the articulation of racial difference through immigration discourse, and its significance in redefining the postimperial British national community has been widely recognized. As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging.


1985 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toyin Falola

The view that Ibadan society in the nineteenth century did not discriminate against strangers, irrespective of their origins in Yorubaland, is now firmly entrenched in the literature. To be sure, Ibadan, a new nineteenth-century Yoruba city-state, founded as a consequence of the political crises of the early decades of the century, did maintain an ‘open door’ policy to strangers, many of whom went there as adventurers, craftsmen and traders, hoping to acquire wealth and fame. This article, however, controverts the view that Ibadan society gave the strangers and the indigenes equal opportunities to wealth and power. It argues that all the key political offices went only to the Oyo-Ibadan group which dominated the city-state. Strangers were also not allowed to participate fully in the leading heights of the economy, with the result that most of the wealthy citizens were also of Oyo-Yoruba origin.In the 1890s discrimination against strangers was such that a number of moves were made to expel them. However, the British, who imposed colonial rule on Ibadan in 1893, were against the expulsion of strangers.


2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-154
Author(s):  
Martin Rohmer

In Zimbabwean society, what may not be spoken sometimes becomes acceptable in song – whether to avoid social taboos and enable a wife to complain against her mother-in-law, or in broadening the boundaries of political protest. In this article, Martin Rohmer looks back to the ways in which song enabled forms of protest against forced labour and other aspects of colonial rule – in times of outward compliance as well as of direct struggle – and considers how urban theatre groups in independent Zimbabwe have adapted the tradition to their own, contemporary ends. Martin Rohmer spent almost two years studying Zimbabwean theatre when a research assistant at the University of Bayreuth, and completed his doctorate on Theatre and Performance in Zimbabwe at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1997. Since then he has been working in the field of cultural management for the Young Artists' Festival in Bayreuth. The present paper was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in San Francisco in November 1996.


2008 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
MEGAN VAUGHAN

ABSTRACTThe elaborate mortuary rites of the Chitimukulu (the paramount chief of the Bemba people) attracted the attention of both colonial administrators and anthropologists in inter-war Northern Rhodesia. This paper examines the political and symbolic significance of these rites before turning to an analysis of accounts, by the anthropologist Audrey Richards, of the deaths of two ‘commoners’ in the 1930s. The paper argues that chiefly power resided less in the threat of death which was enacted spectacularly in the Chitimukulu's mortuary rituals than in the promise to create and protect life, located in the practices of quotidian life. This promise of the creation and protection of life was being progressively undermined by the conditions of colonial rule.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurdistan Saeed

This study deals with the political parties’ pluralism in Iraq under the Parties Law No. 36 of 2015. The importance of the study lies in the fact that it looks at a topic that is at the heart of democracy and it is necessary for the success of any democratic processes. The study focuses on parties’ pluralism in Iraq since the establishment of the Iraqi state in 1921 until the end of the Baath Party regime in 2003, it also covers the period after 2003 and pays particular attention to the Parties Law No. 36 of 2015. It focuses on the legal framework of political parties after the adoption of the Political Parties Law and studies the impact of this law on parties’ pluralism in Iraq after its approval in 2015. The study concludes that Law No. 36 of 2015 is incapable of regulating parties’ pluralism for reasons including: the lack of commitment by the political parties to the provisions of the law, the inability of the Parties Affairs Department to take measures against parties that violate the law the absence of a strong political opposition that enhances the role of political parties, the association of most Iraqi parties with foreign agendas belonging to neighboring countries, and the fact that the majority of Iraqi parties express ethnic or sectarian orientations at the expense of national identity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (02) ◽  
pp. 179-210
Author(s):  
Len Scales

AbstractThis article reassesses the reputation enjoyed by Charles IV of Luxemburg, emperor and king of Bohemia (r. 1346/1347–1378), as the author of a program aimed at projecting his monarchy via visual media. Current scholarship, which stresses the centrally directed character of this program, regards it as serving clear political goals, as “propaganda” to unify Charles's far-flung territories. This article challenges that view. It contends that a straightforward political purpose is often less detectable than usually claimed, and the political “success” of Caroline image-making easily overstated. Above all, it argues for the necessity of decentering Caroline visual culture by stepping away from the familiar focus on the Prague court, to explore instead provincial viewpoints. Focusing on northeastern Bavaria, it shows that local examples of Caroline imagery are often best understood not as impositions from the “center,” but rather as products of interactions between court and locality, through which local perspectives and interests also found expression.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document