Wang Tao in Hong Kong and the Chinese “Other”

Wang Tao, a prominent member of the Chinese literati, arrived in Hong Kong in 1862 and found it a baffling place, inhabited not only by foreigners but also by southern Chinese, who were (in his view) uncivilized, unable to speak his dialect and possessing weird tastes in food. Merchants, who belonged to an inferior class in China, played a prominent role in society, flaunting their wealth and status with little restraint, funding charitable works, claiming political influence over the colonial government and earning respect from officials in China and Chinese overseas. During his 20 or more years in Hong Kong Wang Tao came to terms with the colony. He made history by founding the first Chinese-language newspaper, the Xunhuan ribao. He came to appreciate the different versions of Chineseness that had at first bewildered him, and molded new versions of Chineseness out of this jumbled assortment of Chinese identity.

PENGARUH KOLONIALISME TERHADAP PERUBAHAN PSIKOLOGIS WANITA PRIBUMI DALAM CERPEN “PEREMPUAN DALAM PERANG” KARYA CHINUA ACHEBE

Cerpen “Perempuan dalam Perang” merupakan salah satu cerpen yang terdapat dalam Kumpulan Cerpen Afrika: Kenapa Tidak Kau Pahat Binatang Lain. Kumpulan cerpen terbit tahun 2005 dan diterjemahkan oleh Sapardi Djoko Damono. Cerpen ini menceritakan masa keterpurukan Negara Afrika yang menjadi sorotan para kolonialis untuk menjajahnya. Masyarakat Afrika diperlakukan sebagai golongan inferior di tanah mereka oleh pihak Barat, akibat konflik yang terjadi berkenaan dengan sosiologis dan psikologis penderitaan wanita pribumi dalam kolonialisme. Salah satu penderitaan psikologis yang dialami oleh masyarakat pribumi, yaitu perubahan ideologi yang menuju kemerosotan moral. Banyak dari mereka yang berpindah tempat, berpindah pola pikir, dan berubah dalam tindakan. Metode yang digunakan adalah close reading, dengan menggunakan pendekatan teori poskolonialisme yang akan dihubungkan dengan prespektif feminisme karena dalam cerita ini terkandung isu gender yang cukup kental. Yang terjadi dalam cerpen “Perempuan dalam Perang” adalah perubahan pola pikir seorang wanita yang berjuang melawan penjajah, berubah menjadi seorang yang berjuang untuk dirinya. Wanita itu berusaha memertahankan hidupnya dengan menjual harga dirinya. Isu gender juga melekat dalam cerpen ini. Dilihat dari sudut pandang feminisme, ada hal-hal yang dibenarkan dalam pola pikir feminis dan ada penyimpangan-penyimpangan yang mengakibatkan perspektif feminis tidak dihargai.Abstract:The short story of “Perempuan dalam Perang” is one of the short stories in Kumpulan Cerpen Afrika (A collection of African short stories) entitled Kenapa Tidak Kau Pahat Binatang Lain. The collection of the short stories published in 2005 and translated by Sapardi Djoko Damono. The story told us about the downturn of African countries that became the attraction of imperialism to colonize them. African society is treated as an inferior class of their own land by the West, due to the conflict regarding the sociological and psychological suffering of native women in colonialism. One of the psychological suffering experienced by the native is the change in ideology leading to moral degradation. Many of them change their mindset and action.The applied method is close reading, using a theoretical approach post-colonialism linked to the perspective of feminism because this story contained the strong gender issue. What happened in the story was a change in a woman mindset who fought against the colonialist, turned into a struggle for herself. She was trying to survive by selling her own esteem. The gender issues are also inherent in this short story. From feminism point of view, there are things justified in feminist mindset and there are deviations resulting in a feminist perspective that is not appreciated.

Research on Evaluation of the Landscape and its Functions in Houtan Park of the World Exposition 2010 Shanghai, China

Construction of urban waterscape parks based on ecological concepts and functions is becoming the tendency of modern urban parks. Unfortunately, there are no suitable evaluation systems for these parks. This study establishes a comprehensive evaluation system for a landscape and its functions via the analytic hierarchy process and the comprehensive index method. The evaluation model consisted of 3 evaluation indexes and 23 evaluation indicators relevant to the landscape characteristics of Houtan Park of the World Exposition 2010 Shanghai, China. The evaluation indicators were monitored from 2006 to 2010, and the results of the investigation led to the following conclusions: the park fulfills a range of desirable functions, and ranks high in aesthetic, economic and societal values; ecological functions were applied well within the landscape, and following ecological restoration and the construction of a functional aquatic ecosystem, the water quality of Houtan River has been continuously purified from inferior class V~ class V to class III~ class I range, while the heavy metals in the sediment were improved from inferior class V~ class V to class I; the biodiversity was improved from 0.72 into 1.49; and the results for other indicators were improved overall. In general, the comprehensive score of the evaluation increased from 1.227 to 4.341. Although minor problems remain to be solved, the results indicate that the design concept and construction methods applied in Houtan Park are well applicable to sustainable landscapes, and the evaluation system as a whole can be extended and applied in similar cases.

“Shami” A Public Life Narrator

The public life of people in most cases are among forgotten parts of the Persian literature; in other words, most of the poets because of their too much attention to the kings and their actions and behaviors, followed by their disconnection with the inferior class of the society, have rarely composed poems on the public life of the people. The constitutional revolution to a great extent shifted this balance in favor of the public. In this paper, the anthology of the Kurdish blind poet “Shami” - which deals with the poor class of the society and the issues relating to it from a linguistic and thematic perspective - has been investigated and on the basis of the issues that embody most in the anthology, the poems relating to the public life have been categorized into four groups: 1. Life appliances and equipment, 2.Number of people, 3. Speech and 4. Customs and etiquette. This investigation showed that Shami is a poet that understands the pains and woes of the people and tries through an eloquent language to express pains and sufferings of his own class in a poetic form, offering it to the public. Hence, he can be called a social poet as such

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BUILDING ACTIVITY IN LATE ANTIQUE ROME

This article charts the transformation of the organisation of building work at Rome during Late Antiquity and the social changes that underlay it. In Late Antiquity, the reduction and total cessation of brick manufacture, and the use instead of recycled materials, made it much harder to maintain the standardised, large-scale building methods of the Early Roman period. The scarcity of good-quality materials led to a growing discrepancy between monumental public works, sponsored by imperial and ecclesiastical authorities, and private and residential architecture. Such a development was not merely a sign of ‘decadence’ or ‘decline’, but resulted from the emergence of a society rigidly divided between a ruling class that controlled the means of production and an oppressed inferior class, responsible for production activity.

John Wilkes, Debt, and Patriotism

The career of John Wilkes was full of paradoxes. John Brewer's description of him as “a mercurial elusive rake” is apt in two senses: Wilkes eluded those who sought to crush him, and, posthumously, he continues to frustrate those who seek to understand him. He was a libertine who was lauded for political virtue; an aspiring aristocrat who rose to prominence as the self-proclaimed champion of those he dubbed the “middling and inferior class of people.” He would succeed in achieving a remarkable rapport with his plebeian followers, yet all the while preserving an ironic detachment from them. The judgment of one of his contemporaries still contains solace for the historian: “It is … not altogether unpardonable if a writer should err in the portrait of a character so equivocal.”Understandably, one response to the problematic issues of Wilkes's personality and conduct has been to steer clear of them, treating them as irrelevant to the supposedly larger questions of those movements conducted in his name or in response to his persecution. From this kind of perspective, his presence on the political scene is construed as merely the occasion and not in any significant sense the cause of campaigns assumed to have separate, deep-seated origins. Such an approach offers some advantages that have been realized in distinguished studies of the crusades with which Wilkes was associated. But it is also limiting in that it forecloses the possibility that the nature of the movements that swirled around him was influenced by the idiosyncracies of his character and behavior.

Personal Adjustment and Authoritarian Attitudes toward the Mentally ILL

The relationship between authoritarian attitudes, which reflect the belief that mentally ill persons comprise an inferior class requiring coercive handling, and personal adjustment was examined for 77 female psychiatric aides at a large state mental hospital. Correlations and analysis of variance suggested the lack of a systematic association between the two variables.