Archaeology and Cultural Policy in Ottoman Tunisia Part II: Muhammad Khaznadar (1871–99)

This article is the second part of a study focusing on Muhammad Khaznadar’s role in the history of archaeology in nineteenth-century Tunisia. Whereas part I traced the meteoric rise of Muhammad Khaznadar as a Tunisian cultural figure, the second part of this inquiry examines Khaznadar’s fall from power and the end of his monopoly over the country’s antiquities. Following the dismissal of his father, Mustafa Khaznadar, as grand vizier in 1873, Muhammad’s artifacts were seized by the bey. The Khaznadar collection then attracted the attention of the new grand vizier, Khayr al-Din (1873–78). Influenced by the activities of Muhammad Khaznadar, Khayr al-Din sought to create a national museum of antiquities. However, this project came to an end with Khayr al-Din’s dismissal and the subsequent arrival of French colonizers, who established the Bardo Museum (then called the Alaoui Museum) in 1888. The historical narrative written by the French colonial authority erased the memory of prominent Tunisian archaeologists and collectors who had been active in the preceding decades. This article seeks to highlight the important contributions of local Tunisians to the development of archaeological research and policies surrounding Tunisian cultural heritage in the nineteenth century.

“You Won’t Even Know Who You Are Anymore”: Bakthinian Polyphony and the Challenge to the Ludic Subject in Disco Elysium

When approaches to the notion of the ‘self’ as it exists in the game have been discussed in game studies – for instance, through work in existential ludology or through discussions of agency – the ‘self’ in question, explicitly or implicitly, has tended to be the rational, stable, unified and coherent self of the humanist tradition. By fracturing the ludic subject into a set of contrasting and conflicting voices, each with their own apparent motivations and goals, Disco Elysium presents a challenge to this singular and unified understanding of selfhood. That this challenge is situated within the representation of a figure who, at face value, seems to represent the very locus of the authoritative, self-possessed subjectivity of humanism – not only a straight, middle-aged white man, but also a figure of police and colonial authority – strengthens the game’s critical slant. Drawing on theories of ludic and virtual subjectivity, this paper will approach Disco Elysium with a focus on this undermining of stable and unitary understanding of subjectivity. First, the game will be considered in relation to the tradition of film noir, and the way the genre both established and subverted the figure of the detective as the avatar of stable, rational, authoritative masculine selfhood. Next, its treatment of the theme of amnesia will be considered, drawing a parallel to Jayemanne’s (2017) reading of Planescape: Torment to examine how the loss of memory creates structures of discontinuity and rupture in the represented ludic self. Finally, Bakhtinian notions of polyphony will be invoked to address the game’s plurality of different voices not (as it is usually present) in a dialogue between individual subjects but within a single, fragmented subjectivity.

Small-scale Growers’ Struggle against Marginalization in the Cotton Value Chain

This article analyses the marginalization of the native small-scale cotton growers during British colonial rule in the Western Cotton Growing Area (WCGA), Tanzania, and their struggle against it. Marginalization was practiced mainly by Indian cotton traders for three decades to maximize profit at the expense of natives who farmed the crop. The Indian traders who were licensed by the colonial authority to buy and export marginalized the growers through underpaying and cheating on them. From the 1930s local chiefs and their subjects (growers) began to protest against this situation, but were ignored by the colonial authority. At the end of the 1940s, growers formed groups which took initiatives that led to minimized marginalization with limited support from some colonial officials. Minimized marginalization did not imply control of the cotton value chain. With the support of native traders, local growers fought on until co-operatives were formed, which allowed them to gain the upper hand over the Indian merchants in the cotton value chain.

THE POLICY OF ARABIZATION OF EDUCATION IN ALGERIA BETWEEN LINGUISTIC PLANNING AND SOCIAL REALITY: ARABIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION AS A MODEL

This article is concerned with research on the sociolinguistic reality in Algeria, by studying one of its issues, which is the issue of the arabization of education. And if the linguistic policy is affected and influenced by social life, then planning in arabization has a relationship with social reality. Therefore, our research aimed at studying the relationship between the applied arabization policy and the linguistic requirements of social reality. The most important results reached were the inconsistency of the applied arabization policy with the linguistic base established by the colonial authority , which continued after independence, and led to the emergence of fundamental problems, resulting from the total arabization of the basic and secondary training and some specializations in higher education. So that students in arabized disciplines largely lost control over the foreign language, which is a prerequisite for contemporary changes and for national needs that require control over bilingualism. As for those enrolled in specializations that depend on the French language, they found difficulty with the language of formation, because their basic formation was in the Arabic language.

METAMORFOSA WAJAH KURIKULUM: Sejarah Perkembangan Acuan Pendidikan di Indonesia

The curriculum transformation started from before independence, where its existence was still under the Dutch of colonial authority. The design and implementation of education were only to oriented to the interests of colonial colonialism. When Indonesia's independence was proclaimed in 1945, the entire system in Indonesian was reconstructed, including in the field of the education. The change in the curriculum was caused by several factors, including irrelevance for the national goals, government of policies, and the projections of future human resource needs. The aims of paper is to retrospect on the curriculum development in order to answer or reconstruct of educational curriculum in the future. That is important in to seeing to influence of the curriculum on the direction of national development. This paper uses literature study by exploring library sources and packaged in descriptive analysis. The results obtained from this paper are that the Leerplan curriculum is the beginning of the education curriculum in Indonesia, which is still simple in shape. The development of the New Order government to the old order, curriculum changes experienced a significant increase, especially to carry out the ideals of the Constitution and Pancasila. And then, the curriculum in the reform era, the uniqueness of the curriculum at this time, is starting to explore the skills that are input on the educational foundation, refined again in the competency-based curriculum phase, KTSP and then K13.

Contested Colonial Metrological Sovereignty: The daching riot and the regulation of weights and measures in British Malaya

Drawing on materials from the National Archives of Malaysia, newspapers, literature on historical metrology, and the colonial history of Malaya, this article weaves a social history of Malaya's colonial metrological reform by taking into account the roles of both European and Asian historical actors. Prior to the 1894 reform, people in Malaya used customary scales and weight units, which varied across districts, for commercial transactions. Initiated by colonial administrators, the reform was both welcomed and resisted. In 1897, a riot against the Sanitary Board broke out in Kuala Lumpur for its attempt to mandate that previously exempted traders use only government-verified and -stamped scales. The colonial government managed to maintain order and restore its authority at the end of the riot, but four types of merchants—goldsmiths, silversmiths, opium dealers, and drug sellers—managed to remain exempted. Metrological reform continued to be contested in the following century, but the central concerns of the regulation moved from easing taxation, facilitating cross-district trade, and taming Chinese traders to protecting consumers. More emphasis was placed on educating the public to be able to read scales, in addition to using police force to raid businesses. The enforcement was, however, compromised due to inadequate funds. The reality on the ground contradicts the image of an omnipresent colonial authority and reveals the fragility of colonial administration.

Indigenous Studies: Australia

Contemporary Indigenous Australian literature draws on tens of thousands of years of sustained cultural continuity and diversity, while bearing witness to the destructive impacts of colonization and assimilation, and imagining new horizons of restoration, healing, and sovereign expression. The late 18th-century arrival of the English language amid complex Indigenous societies presented Indigenous peoples with a set of unfamiliar literary, linguistic, and rhetorical conditions and forms, the sudden appearance of Western literary modernity forever changing Indigenous modes of expression. This “intercultural entanglement” of Indigenous Australian literature is central to an appreciation of its achievements, from its earliest appearances in letters, petitions, and chronicles aimed at negotiating with or at times subversively mimicking modes of colonial authority, to its growing confidence and autonomy in the 20th century as Indigenous Australians fought back again colonization, asserted civil and land rights, and began the long process of cultural restoration and healing, through to the sovereign expressions of Aboriginal consciousness today. Across various modern literary genres, from mythological narratives to political manifestos, in poetry, plays, short stories, and novels, Indigenous Australian authors have borne witness to tragic and humiliating histories of violence, incarceration, and cultural suppression and fragmentation, but have also assertively developed new and at times revolutionary reimaginings of Western literary modes and styles. Realist testimonial narratives and lyrics in prose and poetry are today complemented by assured works of the imagination in which genre and mode are transformed in the recovery of blood memory, country, and language. The literature of Indigenous Australia continues to make a profound contribution to the literature of the world.

An Archive of Upset : the Shift from Commissioning to Curating through South Africa’s Representations at the Bienal de São Paulo and the Interstitial Nexus of Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso

This thesis explores the distinction between commissioning and curating, adopting the Bienal de São Paulo (or Bienal) as its conceptual propeller and point of departure. The thesis regards exhibitions as palimpsests, in other words, platforms built on previous conscious or sublimated models, beyond the Venetian model inaugurated in 1895. By looking at world expositions, particularly the Cape presence at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, this project traces a lineage of commissioners, from Sir Henry Cole to Sydney Cowper through to the Director of the Pretoria Art Museum, Albert Werth. It distinguishes these men, their vision and allegiances from the curatorial model instantiated in South Africa by the late Okwui Enwezor as a consequence of the Second Johannesburg Biennale, held in 1997. The aim of this research has been to provide a partial but crucial account of this shift, and to remain attentive to the silences and deletions, to what happens in the interstice, at transitionary moments of ‘betweenness.’ I ask that readers consider the 1979 Bienal as an instance of an interstice where the occluded and silenced ghost of modernist artist Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso, who represented South Africa at the 1973 edition of the Bienal, garnering a substantial award for his work in drawing, resides. Matsoso was the first and only Black South African artist to receive this accolade. This thesis posits that Matsoso’s absence from the exhibition in 1979, an exhibition where he would rightly have featured, constitutes a curatorial haunting, wedged in the archive of the Bienal’s history, and an opportunity for revision and evaluation of commissioning vis-àvis curating. In reading the exhibition histories’ archive “along the grain” (Stoler 2002), the commissioner emerges as a man of letters, a privileged social category found in the archive; a colonial authority whose status was founded as much on his display of European learning as on his studied ignorance of local knowledge; an implementer of the taxonomic state and modernist art historical canon (in the case of Werth); a cultivator of the fine arts of deference, dissemblance and persuasion. At a later stage and moment of dissonance and disruption, the independent curator emerges to reconsider, question and expand the canon, distancing him/herself from the (South African) State to serve the artist or artists and a wider community. This research aims to contribute, albeit in a small way, to a reappraisal of the position of Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso in South African modernism, and the distinction between commissioning and curating.

Decolonisation and the African Dilemma Tale: A Feast of African Superheroes, Magicians and Beautiful Princesses

The African consciousness has been wholly subsumed by Western ideology and resurfaces only in misrecognition and habitual disavowal. Valorising everything European, a history of haplessly succumbing to the seductions of Western rationality and perspectives has led to the denial and erasure of self and culture. In its place, the morbid African has been birthed, confronting his othering in self-defeating acquiescence and accepting his servile status as natural and ordained. Indeed, there is no ready panacea for centuries of exploitation and domination. This article suggests that one way to counter these ideological formations is to provide pathways to recognise the self. There can be no better way of doing this than to rekindle the myth, folklore and aphorisms long extinguished on the altar of Western education. Consequently, this study explores African dilemma tales as counter hegemonic narratives that may shape our consciousness, remind us of cultural wisdom effaced by colonial authority, and afford us the opportunity to celebrate our own African superheroes, magicians and extraordinarily beautiful princesses. The tales are drawn from the Ovimbundu from Angola, the Bura in Nigeria, the Bete of the Ivory Coast, the Vai and Hausa from Liberia, the Mano and Gio from Liberia, the Krachi from Togo and the Mossi of the Upper Volta, with an intertextual reference to other tribes on the continent. Using the lens of postcolonialism (eclectically drawn from Looma, Wiredu, Said, Heleta, Fanon and Ng?g? wa Thiong’o, amongst others), this article enthuses over African dilemma tales and motivates a trenchant case for its transformational and pedagogical value in our curriculum.