Introduction

Author(s):  
William Ghosh

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most internationally acclaimed twentieth-century writers from the Caribbean region. Yet it is usually assumed that he was neither much influenced by the Caribbean literary and intellectual tradition, nor very influential upon it. This chapter argues that these assumptions are wrong. It situates Naipaul’s life and work within the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century Caribbean. Naipaul’s work formed part of a larger historical debate about the sociology of slavery in the Caribbean, the specificity of Caribbean colonial experience, and the influence of that historical past on Caribbean life, culture, and politics after independence. The chapter closes with a reading of Naipaul’s late, retrospective book about Trinidad, A Way in the World.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker

How did “reading for the message,” a mark of shame among literary critics, yet in many ways an ordinary reading practice, become so marginalized? The origins of this methodological commitment ultimately are intertwined with the birth of literary studies itself . The influential aestheticist notion of “art for art’s sake” has several implications crucial for understanding the intellectual history of literary criticism in the twentieth century: most important was the belief that to “extract” an idea from a text was to dismiss its aesthetic structure. This impulse culminated in the New Critical contention that to paraphrase a text was a “heresy.” Yet this dominant tradition has always co-existed with practical interpretation that was much less formalist in emphasis. A return to the world of American literary criticism in 1947, when Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was published, shows this clearly: many now-forgotten critics were already practicing a form of criticism that emphasized literary content, and often overly rejecting Brooks’s insistence that reading for the content or meaning of a poem betrayed its aesthetic nature.


Author(s):  
John Nott

Summary Throughout the twentieth century it was widely assumed that African diets were grossly deficient in protein, that childhood protein deficiency was a natural result of this generalised diet and that a relative lack of meat and milk went some way to explaining African economic underdevelopment. This article explores why these conclusions took hold; the European deification of animal protein in previous centuries; structural changes to African diets and food economies under colonial government; and the political value of such a consensus. Unlike elsewhere in the world, where deficiency was removed from the exceptionalism of tropical medicine, protein malnutrition was constructed as a particularly African concern. Focusing this discussion on the history of the severe childhood deficiency, kwashiorkor, this article explores how the politically informed othering of African nutrition came to direct, or misdirect, the medicine of malnutrition in twentieth-century Africa.


1984 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Moore

On 4 February 1976 the Federal Military Government of Nigeria promulgated Decree No. 6, initiating the removal of the national capital from Lagos to Abuja. Thus Nigeria followed Brazil, Botswana, Malawi, Pakistan, and Tanzania to become the most recent developing country to arrange for a transfer of its centre of government. The proliferation of new capitals constructed in the twentieth century has captured the world-wide attention of geographers, architects, planners, and demographers, but the literature on the subject examines these projects almost exclusively with a focus on planning for national development. This viewpoint too often neglects politics as the paramount force in the relocation of a nation's capital city.


ARTMargins ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 92-110
Author(s):  
Faride Mereb

“Graphic design” was not a proper term until the beginning of the twentieth century. This led to confusion in credits/authorship for book covers, typography, which was exacerbated by the fact that printers, in addition to being in charge of the production process of books, were also making decisions regarding their finishings. Venezuela presents an interesting chapter in the history of publishing in the world given the hybrid character of publishing in the country in which traditional national artists, illustrators, and publicists comprised a mix of European and North American immigrants. The lack of current bibliographic material inspired me, as a researcher, to make a timeline of the political and graphic history of the country through its colophons. Colophons, which appear at the end of books and thus are often ignored, are nonetheless providers of essential information—witnesses of our progress in authorship and as a society.


Author(s):  
Franciel José Ganancini

Resumo: Este artigo aborda uma parte da história política do Brasil, situando o período compreendido entre os governos de Getúlio Vargas, a partir de 1930, e o golpe civil-militar de 1964. O referido período esteve marcado por profundas mudanças econômicas, políticas e culturais, seja no Brasil, seja no restante do mundo. No artigo abordaremos a ascensão de Getúlio Vargas, o seu relacionamento com os militares, bem como o fortalecimento das Forças Armadas e sua atuação na política brasileira do século XX. Palavras-chave: Getúlio Vargas. Forças Armadas. Golpe de 1964. FROM A CIVIL DICTATOR TO MILITARY DICTATORS Abstract: This article discusses some of the political history of Brazil, closing the period between Getulio Vargas’s governments, in 1930, and civil-military coup in 1964. This period was marked by deep economic, political and cultural changes, both in Brazil and in the world. In this article we discuss the rise of Getulio Vargas’s government, his relationship with the military, as well as the strengthening of the armed forces and its role in the twentieth century Brazilian politics. Keywords: Getúlio Vargas. Military Forces. Coup of 1964.


Author(s):  
Jan Bryant

The disappointments that flowed from the squashing of the student uprisings in 1968 is discussed as a way to underline a rupture in progressive thinking in the latter years of last century. Of particular concern for Marxists was a loss of faith in the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. It introduces three case studies that form the content of the next chapters, each revealing intellectual differences which became apparent the post 1968 era: (1) Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino; (2) Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot; and (3) the political aesthetic of Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). The aim is to offer detailed encounters between left thinkers, not only to reveal a clash of approaches to resisting forms of power, but to offer an alternative for understanding how recent intellectual history has informed contemporary political aesthetics. It is also a way to avoid restaging another history of art, or received canon, to offer instead a non-totalising picture of history. [157]


1972 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Walker Howe

One of the major themes in the intellectual history of the Western world has been the rise and fall of Calvinism. A militant and crusading ideology during the Reformation era, Calvinism was nevertheless showing signs of losing its expansive force by the time of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the Restoration of the English monarchy (1660). Before much longer, the inner conviction of Calvinist adherents as well as their determination to impose their beliefs upon others somehow faltered. Despite periodic ‘revivals’ such as the Great Awakening of the 1740s in the British colonies, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, for the most part, a time of gradual weakening for the Calvinist impulse. This weakening was by no means uniform; it occurred at different rates among different groups of people. (Indeed, even in the mid-twentieth century, a virtually undiluted Calvinism remains a powerful force in at least one part of the world: Afrikaans-speaking South Africa.)


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-115
Author(s):  
Margo Groenewoud

This essay traces the roots of marginalization of the Dutch Caribbean in Caribbean studies, approaching these roots as an integral part of a shared Caribbean intellectual history. In the era of twentieth-century Caribbean anticolonialism, nationalism, and decolonization, local intellectuals emerged in the public arena throughout the Caribbean region. The author studies the intellectual interplays and incubations taking place, asking if and how Dutch Caribbean thinkers and writers were involved. Her analysis finds that neglect and erasure impacted Dutch Caribbean studies first and foremost from within. Mid-twentieth-century Dutch Caribbean anticolonial intellectuals have confronted strong oppression and retaliations, leading to obscured publications as well as to considerable societal and archival silences. This reflects on the self-image of the Dutch Caribbean and an observed otherness attitude among Dutch Caribbean intellectuals.


1963 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond T. Smith

The territories of the circum-Caribbean region contain some of the most complex societies in the world. Their complexity lies not in their size, degree of internal differentiation or technological development, but in the dependent and fragmented nature of their cultures, the ethnic diversity of their populations, the special nature of their dependent economies, the peculiarities of their political development and the apparent incoherence of their social institutions. It has been suggested that many Caribbean societies have no history of their own but should be viewed as an extension of Europe. Dr. Eric Williams, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, has recently written in reference to his country:On August 31st 1962, a country will be free, a miniature state will be established, but a society and a nation will not have been formed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 707-736
Author(s):  
HUGO CANIHAC

AbstractThis essay investigates the intellectual history of one of the purportedly most “revolutionary” concepts of post-1945 international thought—the concept of supranationality. While the literature has generally analyzed the concept as a direct continuation of progressive cosmopolitan ideas, or, to the contrary, as a political watchword formulated after 1945 to promote the European project, this essay highlights other, more ambiguous origins for the concept. It retraces the early uses of the concept in French debates. It argues that the irruption of supranationality in the political and legal vocabulary was far from revolutionary, as is typically claimed—without referring directly to the writings of the great classical philosophers. Rather, the concept drew on earlier discourses whose emergence can be identified in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates, ranging from Catholic thought to international law. To retrace the genealogy of supranationality in the decades preceding the supranational vogue of the 1950s contributes to illuminating the complex intellectual origins of the European Union and of international thought more generally.


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