The People’s Two Bodies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheldon S. Wolin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Body ◽  
American History ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Defense Spending ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Advanced Economy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
At Home

In the span of a few short years, as Americans have watched the visible deterioration of their nation's power at home and abroad, they have experienced something unknown to American history since the early nineteenth century: a sense of collective vulnerability. Perhaps the clearest proof of the widespread perception of powerlessness is in the eagerness with which virtually all segments of the American public have supported the extraordinary increases in defense spending over the past decade. This chapter asks, what does it mean for America to ground its collective existence upon the type of power embodied in a highly advanced economy whose destructive effects upon nature, society, and the human body and psyche are documented daily with depressing regularity? The question is about political identity, about who Americans are as a people.

WOMEN, MARGINALITY AND THE ZULU STATE: WOMEN'S INSTITUTIONS AND POWER IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN HANRETTA
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Government ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Definition Of

For a number of years the historiography of Southern Africa has been dominated by a materialist framework that has focused upon modes of production and forms of socio-political organization as the determining factors in historical change. Those historians concerned with the history of women in pre-colonial societies – even those who have privileged gender relations in their analyses – have largely been content to construct women's history by applying the insights of socio-economic and political analyses of the past to gender dynamics, and by projecting the insights of anthropological analyses of present gender relations into the past. Some of these historians have concluded that until the arrival of capitalism no substantial changes in the situations, power or status of women took place within Zulu society, even during the period of systemic transformation known as the mfecane in the early nineteenth century.More recently, Zulu gender history has become part of a larger debate connected to the changing political and academic milieu in South Africa. Representatives of a revived Africanist tradition have criticized materialist historians for writing Zulu history from an outsider's perspective and of focusing overly on conflict and power imbalances within the nineteenth-century kingdom in an effort to discredit contemporary Zulu nationalism. To counter this, historian Simon Maphalala has stressed the harmony of nineteenth-century Zulu society, the power advisors exercised in state government, and the lack of internal conflict. Maphalala also claims that women's subordinate role in society ‘did not cause any dissatisfaction among them’, and argues that ‘[women] accepted their position and were contented’. In recent constitutional debates many South African intellectuals including members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA), invoked this ‘benign patriarchy’ model of pre-colonial gender relations to oppose the adoption of gender-equality provisions in the new constitution. As Cherryl Walker has noted, the hegemonic definition of traditional gender relations to which such figures have made rhetorical appeals often masks not only the historicity of these relations but also hides dissenting opinions (often demarcated along gender lines) as to what those relations are and have been.

Other-Worldly and This-Worldly Islam and the Islamic Revival

2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Revival ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Islamic Society

In his Islam in Modern History, published in 1957, yet still a work remarkable for its insights, Wilfred Cantwell Smith refers to the extraordinary energy which had surged through the Muslim world with increasing force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He talks of:dynamism, the appreciation of activity for its own sake, and at the level of feeling a stirring of intense, even violent, emotionalism…The transmutation of Muslim society from its early nineteenth-century stolidity to its twentieth-century ebullience is no mean achievement. The change has been everywhere in evidence.This surge of energy is closely associated with a shift in the balance of Muslim piety from an other-worldly towards a this-worldly focus. By this I mean a devaluing of a faith of contemplation of God's mysteries and of belief in His will to shape human life, and a valuing instead of a faith in which Muslims were increasingly aware that it was they, and only they, who could act to fashion an Islamic society on earth. This shift of emphasis has been closely associated with a new idea of great power, the caliphate of man. In the absence of Muslim power, in the absence, for the Sunnis at least, of a caliph, however symbolic, to guide, shape and protect the community, this awesome task now fell to each individual Muslim. I hazard to suggest that this shift towards a this-worldly piety, and the new responsibilities for Muslims that came with it, is the most important change that Muslims have wrought in the practice of their faith over the past one thousand years. It is a change full of possibilities for the future.

Colonies at Home: Loudon's Encyclopaedia, and the architecture of forming the self

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-258
Author(s):  
John Macarthur
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Agricultural Reform ◽  
Social Technologies ◽  
Small House ◽  
At Home

In the early nineteenth century, the small house in its own garden formed a crucial image of agricultural reform in Britain and in the aspirations of those leaving for North America and Australasia. The material and social technologies of the ‘cottage’ became not only equipment for the colonial enterprise, but a kind of colonization of the home by a new kind of family. These issues are apparent in J. C. Loudon's Encyclopaedia where the whole gamut of architecture is re-examined as a subject of interest to agricultural reformers, colonists, democrats and homemakers, especially women.

Austerity and U.S. Strategy

2019 ◽  
pp. 303-316
Author(s):  
Melvyn P. Leffler
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Defense Spending ◽  
Domestic Economy ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
Means And Ends ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
The World ◽  
At Home

This chapter argues that austere times presented opportunities to reassess strategic concepts, think rigorously about goals, recalibrate priorities, and link means and ends. Constraints on defense spending forced policymakers to think more creatively about diplomatic solutions. This sometimes catalyzed bold initiatives to reassure friends and engage adversaries. In the past, budgetary austerity also forced officials to wrestle more forthrightly with the trade-offs between priorities at home and commitments abroad. It was an exercise that invariably reminded all Americans that the real sources of U.S. strength in the world were the health of its domestic economy, the vitality of its people, and the resilience of its political institutions.

Water and Agriculture in Nineteenth-century Tamilnad

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 485-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
PRASANNAN PARTHASARATHI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
South India ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Agricultural Activity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Agricultural Enterprise ◽  
Diverse Environment ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

AbstractWith a focus by scholars on states and classes, the environment of India and its impact on agriculture has been neglected, except to provide a context—which was largely unchanging—in which states extracted and classes struggled. One example of environment as the backdrop is the distinction between ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ areas in Tamilnad and South India more widely. This distinction is based on the availability of water and on the local categorization of agricultural activity (nanjai versus punjai). There are two problems with this approach, however. First, it is a narrow treatment of the environment as it neglects other features of the land such as forests, grasslands, scrublands, and other so-called wasteland. Second, it sees the environment as a fixed entity, but the landscape has changed dramatically in the past, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If changes in the environment are included in the mix, the development of agriculture in nineteenth-century Tamilnad may be seen in some new ways. Agricultural production existed in symbiosis with the complex and varied environment of the region. In the early nineteenth century Tamilnad contained extensive tracts of forests, widespread wastelands, and abundant surface water. This diverse environment made it possible to maintain high levels of agricultural productivity as it provided the resources to maintain the fertility of the soil and the supplies of water that were critical for agricultural enterprise, as well as the well-being of the rural population. The consequences of changing regimes of water is the focus of this article.

Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 411-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
The Past ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
Storm Center ◽  
Verbal Construction ◽  
The University

Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural pre-suppositions of its day.South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, long-lived, and monolithic “history.” Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that themfecane—the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the “storm-center” of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence—was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa.

Hazlitt as a Shakespearean Critic

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry T. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Literary Fame ◽  
The French Revolution

When William Hazlitt died, in 1830, his literary fame was obscured by his political views. The man who admired Napoleon and wrote a biography of him and who championed the radical creed of the French Revolution could hardly have been expected to be popular among Englishmen of the early nineteenth century. During the past twenty-five years, however, several volumes containing selections from his essays have been issued; and most editions of Shakespeare enrich themselves by quoting his opinions. His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, printed in 1817, is still very much alive. Heine, in his volume Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen (1838), declared: “With the exception of William Hazlitt, England has given us no Shakespearean commentator of any consequence.” And this verdict, though decidedly exaggerated, gains new interest when we append the Teutonic explosion: “It takes the very heart out of me when I remember that Shakespeare is an Englishman, and belongs to the most repulsive race which God in his wrath ever created.”

scholarly journals Mobility, Transport and Social Inclusion: Lessons from History

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Pooley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
British Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mobility System ◽  
The Rich

This paper argues that although it is now possible to travel more quickly and easily than ever before, transport-related social exclusion is more likely than it was in the past. Using evidence drawn from life writing and oral testimonies I examine the ways in which people accessed everyday transport over the past two centuries. In the early nineteenth century mobility options were limited and most people travelled in similar ways, though the rich always had access to the fastest and most comfortable transportation. From the mid-nineteenth century the railways provided fast travel for most people. Progressively, in the twentieth century British society became car dependent so that those without access to a car were disadvantaged. Such transport-related social exclusion was exacerbated by the denuding of public transport, and by heightened expectations for mobility which often could not be achieved. It is argued that a return to a less differentiated mobility system could increase transport-related social inclusion.

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