scholarly journals Colonial media ecologies

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-112
Author(s):  
Lene Asp Frederiksen
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
Field Trip ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Parallel Movement ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
Danish West Indies ◽  
The 1960S

In this mixed-media essay I document a field trip to Ghana where I, so to say, travel in the footsteps of the Danish colonizers to the Gold Coast in a bid to dialogically challenge the genre of the monologizing colonial traveloguei. My methodological retracing of the slave route is inspired by Danish author Thorkild Hansen’s book trilogy Coast of Slaves, Ships of Slaves and Islands of Slaves from the 1960s in which he visits the former Danish West Indies and the Gold Coast (in the, at the time of his visit, still very young Ghanaian nation, which had gained its independence from Great Britain in 1957). Hansen was one of the first Danish authors to voice a strong critique of the Danish colonial past and of a neglectful historiography through his docu-fiction. I was curious to explore in a parallel movement to Hansen’s the landscape as prism and archive today. Hence, the ‘reenactment’ of the travelogue in this essay functions as an attempt to recast and refracture colonial  narratives of past and present. My own documentary audio recordings from the field trip are presented here along with methodological reflections on how to voice dialogical narratives about colonialism in new digital media.

scholarly journals Rethinking savagery: Slavery experiences and the role of emotions in Oldendorp’s mission ethnography

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 28-42
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Van Gent
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
West Indies ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The People ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Love ◽  
Danish West Indies ◽  
Colonial Contact

By the late 18th century, the Moravian mission project had grown into a global enterprise. Moravian missionaries’ personal and emotional engagements with the people they sought to convert impacted not only on their understanding of Christianity, but also caused them to rethink the nature of civilization and humanity in light of their frontier experiences. In this article I discuss the construction of ‘savagery’ in the mission ethnography of C. G. A. Oldendorp (1721–87). Oldendorp’s journey to slave-holding societies in the Danish West Indies, where Moravian missions had been established in the 1730s, and his own experiences of the violence of these societies had such an impact on him that his proto-ethnographic descriptions of all the inhabitants of the Danish West Indies – from slaves to slaveholders – broke with traditional representations of savagery. He suggested two different paths for emotional transformation: one for slaves, and another for slaveholders. His views aligned with those of the later abolitionists, yet he was writing sixty years before those movements first gained public momentum in Great Britain. In many ways, therefore, this early mission ethnography reshaped contemporary understandings of ‘savagery’. I consider how Oldendorp did this in relation to a Moravian theology of the heart and love of Christ, the emerging Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of ‘love of humanity’ and its use in colonial encounters between missionaries and local people, and especially the emotions that were provoked by the extreme violence of the slavery system in this colonial contact zone.

Rewriting the Narrative

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The 1960S

A vibrant American Indian art scene developed in California from the 1960s to the 1980s, with links to a broader indigenous arts movement. Native American artists working in the state produced and exhibited paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media, and other art forms that validated and documented their cultures, interpreted their history, asserted their survival, and explored their experiences in modern society. Building on recent scholarship that examines American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in the twentieth century, this article charts these developments and argues that American Indian artists in California challenged and rewrote dominant historical narratives by foregrounding Native American perspectives in their work.

“Untold Stories of Issei Women: Collective Images and Individual Experiences in Japanese American Oral History”

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-40
Author(s):  
Ryoko Okamura
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Cultural Consensus ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
The Family ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Redress Movement ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article examines the relationship between the Japanese American redress movement and the oral interviews of two Japanese immigrant women, known as Issei women. Focusing on the shared images of Issei women in the Japanese American community and the perspectives and self-representations of the interviewees in the oral interviews, it explores how cultural consensus produced stereotypical, collective images of Issei women as submissive, persevering, and quiet persons. As the redress movement progressed in the 1960s to the 1980s, the Japanese American community conducted oral history projects to preserve memories and legacies of their wartime experiences. There are dissimilarities between the original audio recordings and the published transcripts regarding the perspectives of Issei women. This article shows how the community’s desire to preserve idealized images of Issei men and women reduced the accuracy and nuances in the women’s self-representations and the complexities of family relations. Also, contrary to the collective images, Issei women demonstrated how they were independent, assertive, and open individuals expressing their perspectives, complicated emotions, and importance in the family.

Meeting Africa’s Challenge: The Story of the American Committee on Africa

1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 16-26
Author(s):  
George M. Houser
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Reference Book ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
American Interest ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Town ◽  
Relevant Material

In the early 1950s when the American Committee on Africa was formed, American interest in and knowledge about Africa was something of a joke. There was a Tarzan mentality in the US about the continent. Few books about Africa were known even by the reading public. Gunther’s Inside Africa, when it came out in 1956, served as a reference book for years for those Americans who wanted to get a perspective on the continent. I remember listening to Chester Bowles, who served as under secretary of state briefly in the Kennedy administration, speak about his own attempt to find relevant material about Africa in a Connecticut town. He told about his visit to the town public library, where he culled through the card catalogue. To find books on the Congo he said he had to search under “B” for “Belgium.” In searching for material on Ghana (then the Gold Coast) or Nigeria, he had to look under “Great Britain.” He found books about Liberia and Ethiopia under “Miscellaneous.” Knowledge of Africa was minimal, and the continent was on the whole looked upon as an extension of Europe.

Conclusion

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Intellectual Elites

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the British constitution in the twentieth century. The findings reveal that while there was widespread confidence in the virtues of the constitution at the beginning of the twentieth century, that confidence seemed to have evaporated. This loss of confidence coincided with a collapse of national self-confidence that had begun in the 1960s when British political and intellectual elites began to come to terms with the fact that Great Britain was falling economically behind her continental competitors.

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