Sailing too close to the wind in 1880s Wellington

The 1880s and early 1890s have been widely recognised as a time of depression in New Zealand. While well-known architects with substantial clienteles were generally able to survive the downturn in business, others struggled to make ends meet, showed signs of extreme stress, or occasionally resorted to sharp practices. Few in-depth studies have been able to show the broad spectrum of architects working in Wellington at a particular time as, until recently, it has been extremely difficult to accumulate the necessary data. The introduction of Papers Past has considerably simplified this task. We can now find and assess almost all the architects who made the news in different ways. Although more than 30 men claimed to be Wellington architects in the 1880s, not all of them were working. Some, such as Frank Mitchell, produced relatively large numbers of plans throughout the decade; many others appear to have been less successful, and to have turned their hands to other activities, for better or worse. In this paper we select a few of the more colourful "architects" residing in Wellington in the 1880s. Our candidates range from the aforementioned Frank Mitchell, through to Christopher Walter Worger, who being bankrupted in Christchurch, moved to Wellington in 1889. Leaving no record of any building designs, he had gone to Dunedin by 1906. Another enigmatic character was James Henry Schwabe, who escaped Dunedin and a rather public humiliation for Wellington in the late 1870s. Similarly, we discuss the erratic behaviour of W.J.W. Robinson, also escaping scandal in Dunedin to practise in the capital. Charles Zahl we find making a fleeting visit in early 1887, before absconding with a large sum of investors' money en route to Rio de Janeiro or Britain. We finish with the case of Ernest Wagner, released into the community after a year's hard labour in 1880. He never practised as an architect again - preferring, or being forced, to live as a farmer in the country south of Auckland. The examples we discuss are the exception rather than the rule. Of the bankruptcies recorded at the time, few came from the upper echelons of society. Some architects who were later prominent in Wellington moved offshore to better conditions in Australia (such as Joshua Charlesworth), whereas others such as William Turnbull were protected to some extent in successful partnerships in which they had a junior role.

Baudelaire's Creole Gothic : A Postcolonial Afterlife for Les Fleurs du mal

Baudelaire’s verse poetry is informed by a pervasive Creole Gothic resonance. Two separate but related topoi, the Undead and the Living Dead, lie at the heart of the collection’s necrological imaginary of slave and zombie labour. It is this Gothic double-trope of death-in-life/life-in-death that activates the Gothic Creole strain running through Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, those poems that seem to evoke most directly the Creole world that Baudelaire encountered in 1841, firstly in Mauritius and then in Réunion, avoid all evocation of plantation slavery. Conversely, the city poems associate modern metropolitan life with the idea of slavery, representing it as a living death and death as a merely temporary and reversible escape. The collection’s representation of this ‘living death’ foreshadows the construction (by Orlando Patterson, most notably) of transatlantic chattel slavery as ‘social death’. As for the poetic representation of the ‘Undead’, this centres on the figure of the zombie. The zombie is essentially a slave for whom death has proved no guarantee against an endless ‘living death’ of hard labour. If the Creole inflection of Baudelaire’s imagery relates primarily to the realities of industrialized plantation labour and to the chattel slavery on which it was based, it is further reinforced by indices of tropical localisation and of racial difference, more specifically pigmentation. However subliminal its resonance, this Creole Gothic strain guarantees for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal a vivid postcolonial afterlife.

The story of Nana Sita and the Group Areas Act

Nana Sita (1898–1969) is best known for being the secretary of the Transvaal Indian Congress and for his leadership in the passive resistance movement for which he was incarcerated three times. This article focusses specifically on three more times he was sentenced to hard labour for refusing to submit to the Group Areas Act and to leave his (business and) house at 382 Van Der Hoff Street in Hercules, Pretoria. The main sources for telling the story of Nana Sita’s resistance are interviews with his 93-year-old daughter, a chapter written on him by E.S. Reddy and other unpublished material placed at the author’s disposal by Maniben Sita herself. The focus of the article will be on the religious arguments against the Group Areas Act put forward by Nana Sita himself in his defense during his final trial in 1967.Contribution: Historical thought and source interpretation are not limited to historic texts but include social memory in the endeavour of faith seeking understanding. People of faith in South Africa can only come to grips with reality by engaging with the stories of the past, like that of Nana Sita.

A fogvatartottak munkáltatásának egyes kérdéseiről

"The history of the development of the employment of prisoners has come a very long way, from hard labour to resocialization. Today the rights of prisoners are respected in their work, but these rights are sometimes different from the normal labour rights. In this study, I review the most relevant difference between the prisoners’ labour rights and the ordinary labour rights. Beyond that, I examine if the intentions formulated in 2015 − full employment and self-sustaining prisons in Hungary − have been achieved or not. In my study, I present some criminal statistics of the employment rates in Hungarian prisons."

Postscript: From Forced Labour to Penal Servitude

This chapter discusses the impact of Cesare Beccaria's work on philosophers, jurists, politicians and church leaders in Italy and abroad. The debates and controversies that it provoked concerned far more than the death penalty, for he had surveyed the whole system of criminal justice with a fiercely critical eye. It reviews Beccaria's surrogate penalty of hard labour, which has received rather less attention than his views on the death penalty and other aspects of criminal justice. The chapter also explores the process by which the favoured surrogate penalty of the two Italian reformers (for Giuseppe Pelli as well as Beccaria advocated forced labour) evolved into the punishment that is routinely characterised as 'penal servitude' by contemporary legal historians and criminologists. Ultimately, the chapter investigates preliminary observations of Beccaria's surrogate penalty as slavery or servitude, and both Pelli and Beccaria's reference to their preferred alternative punishment as forced labour, not as imprisonment at hard labour.

Speaking and Speaking Differently: Language as Resistance, Liberation and Celebration in Dalit Women’s Autobiographical Narratives

This article undertakes a close reading of Dalit women’s autobiographical narratives to underline the folly of generalizing Dalit women as helpless exploited beings and to explore other important aspects of their lives. It is the intent of this article to explore how Dalit women use specific linguistic expressions as a symbolic way of claiming their distinct identity which in consequence results in an act of resistance against the dominant linguistic culture of Brahminical inheritance. Gopal Guru states that Dalit women ‘talk differently’ (Guru, [2016], Economic & Political Weekly, 30[42], 2548–2550), because their talking differently functions as a potential act of resistance against both casteism and patriarchy along with signifying a mark of distinct identity of their own. Furthermore, the article locates different passive strategies used by Dalit women to resist the oppressor in their everyday life, because, in many conditions, an open resistance is found to be counterproductive for them. Finally, the article investigates Dalit women’s strategies to carve a space for enjoyment and avenues of entertainment amid the pain and suffering, mostly in their work space. It is instructive to see how the work field, which is generally seen to be a place of pain and hard labour, is often used by Dalit women as a place of freedom and enjoyment.