Jodh Singh, The Ghadar Movement and the Anti-Colonial Deviant in the Anglo-American Imagination*

2019 ◽  
Vol 245 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gajendra Singh

Abstract This article is a study of an early Indian anti-colonial revolutionary movement (the Ghadar Movement) through the life and testimonies of Jodh Singh. Jodh Singh straddled the worlds of official imaginaries and revolutionary realities. He was a Punjabi Sikh and had been a migrant labourer, revolutionary, turncoat and approver before being imprisoned for refusing to give evidence in a courtroom in San Francisco in 1917 and suffering a psychotic breakdown in the early weeks of 1918. The detailed interviews and analyses of Jodh Singh’s madness offer some measure of intimacy with the rank and file of the Ghadar Movement about whom very little was ever recorded or preserved. It also becomes a prism through which an understanding can be reached of the neuroses that plagued both the United Kingdom and the United States. The desire to prosecute a trans-national and trans-Pacific conspiracy about which they knew very little, resulted in Ghadar assuming a fictive, nightmarish quality in the Anglo-American imagination. And Jodh Singh, diagnosed as possessing all the degenerative qualities of the ‘homosexual type’was one such victim.

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 27-43
Author(s):  
Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson ◽  
Will Kaufman

“What's in a name?” Janice A. Radway asked in her 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association (1), invoking, without explicit comment, a transatlantic literary reference to explore the Americanness of the ASA's title. Such a gesture speaks to the increasingly transatlantic or comparative element apparent in studies of American culture, both in the United States and elsewhere. What's in a collective proper noun? one might also ask. (And don't those words — proper, collective — just itch to be explored themselves?) If anything, American Studies presents itself as neither collective nor proper, but as an arena for the multiple explorations of mythical Americanness and the boundaries and borders of the term. Lee E. Heller argues that the very term American Studies is “reflective of a variety of imperialist erasures and appropriations” (337), but even Radway could come up with no better term to replace it, trying out a variety of cumbersome titles before returning to the original as the inadequate but perhaps inevitable designation of what we as Americanists do.If Radway (rightly) questioned the American designation, here we might look again at the second term, for American Studies is delineated with a capital S in the United Kingdom, and often (though not always) by a lowercase s in the United States. Does size matter? Is American Studies in the United Kingdom different from American studies as written, read, produced, and enacted in the United States? The clear divisions suggested here — Americans write studies, Britons write Studies — may be as false as the old, nationally bounded constructions of French feminism versus Anglo-American feminism, and the peregrinations of academics across the globe mean that many British Americanists, like ourselves, have America hiding in our backgrounds (if you don't know us) and foregrounded in our accents (if you do).


1952 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-326

Austrian State Treaty: In furtherance of the September 14, 1951, statement of the French, United Kingdom and United States foreign ministers, that there was “no justification for any further delay in the conclusion of a treaty for the reestablishment of a free and independent Austria”,1 the United States deputy for the Austrian State Treaty (Reber) issued an invitation on December 28, 1951, suggesting that a meeting of the deputies be held at London on January 21, 1952. The governments of the United Kingdom and France immediately accepted the invitation, but the Soviet reply, dated January 18, made the following objections that: 1) no action had been taken on the Soviet proposal to conduct an investigation on the extent of Austria's implementation of the four powers' decisions on demilitarization and denazification; and 2) conclusion of an Austrian treaty was unwise until the western powers had implemented their obligations under the Italian treaty, particularly with regard to the creation ofthe Free Territory of Trieste which had been “turned into an Anglo-American military base. The reply of the western powers, dated January 19 pointed out that: 1) their views on denazification and demilitarization had been made clear in the Allied Council in Vienna, “the proper body to consider such questions”; 2) the Trieste issue had no relation to the Austrian treaty; and 3) that the express purpose of the meeting which had been called for January 21 was to conclude an Austrian treaty as speedily as possible, to which end they reiterated their invitation to the Soviet deputy.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Rehana Cassim

Abstract Section 162 of the South African Companies Act 71 of 2008 empowers courts to declare directors delinquent and hence to disqualify them from office. This article compares the judicial disqualification of directors under this section with the equivalent provisions in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States of America, which have all influenced the South African act. The article compares the classes of persons who have locus standi to apply to court to disqualify a director from holding office, as well as the grounds for the judicial disqualification of a director, the duration of the disqualification, the application of a prescription period and the discretion conferred on courts to disqualify directors from office. It contends that, in empowering courts to disqualify directors from holding office, section 162 of the South African Companies Act goes too far in certain respects.


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