Search Results

This chapterk presents preliminary historical geographic evidence from three sites discovered in and near the ancient city-state of Kano, in northern Nigeria, that shows that as early as the 1500s, royal concubines in the Kano palace held exclusive rights over the production of indigo-dyed cloth; and that they did so because of indigo blue's association with human and earthly fertility over which royalty was understood to have control. The data suggest that over subsequent centuries, royal women and non-royal women across Hausaland (a linguistic region straddling Nigeria and Niger of which Kano was a leading economic and cultural part) began producing indigo-dyed cloth for domestic and commercial purposes. It was only after a reformist jihad in the 1800s that men effectively wrested industry control away from royal and non-royal women alike. The findings indicate that while the gendered makeup of Kano's nineteenth-century indigo dyeing industry was indeed anomalous in West Africa, it was so for only a relatively brief period of time.

This chapter traces the stages in Niasse's emergence as a Muslim saint, to the point where he came to be regarded by many West Africans as the ghawth or supreme saint of his time. It submits the conventional narratives to analytical scrutiny by juxtaposing them with the versions given in primary sources, most importantly Niasse's own accounts of his pilgrimages and travels. The chapter returns to the analytical tools developed in the Introduction by highlighting differences in perceptions and interpretations among leaders and followers, which constitute a decisive element of the movement's dynamics. Ultimately, Niasse's success depended more on this dynamic than on the endorsement of influential individuals, such as Abdallah Bayero, Emir of Kano until 1953, and the Moroccan Tijani scholar Ahmad Skiraj (d. 1944). It was after Niasse's public appearance in Kano in 1951 that his reputation as the ghawth began to spread rapidly throughout West Africa.

I suggest that exhibitions can serve as a model for re-narrating the history of painting across the Edo to Meiji divide. Rather than presenting the “opening” of Japan to trade and diplomacy with the West as a stark temporal boundary between premodern and modern modes of artistic production, exhibitions enable us to understand such epochal events as opportunities for objects and ideas to be re-framed, and the framing process might then be adjusted or undone outside the temporary space of the exhibition hall. I also point out that historically, the public exhibition has been a fraught metaphor, a global symbolic form that structured and confirmed the originally Western perception of a break between pre- and post-Restoration art.

This chapter explores the ways in which the iconography of Japanese paintings and craft objects made the transition from the shogunal era to the more cosmopolitan Meiji era. Images of hawks and eagles by Hōgai and other artists expose the layered values attached to the attitude of natural depiction, while also showing how compelling works from this period retained existing iconographic resonances while also acquiring new meanings.

This chapter describes a network of prominent preachers, the “Ahlussunnah” (People of the tradition of the Prophet) of contemporary Kano, northern Nigeria. Of these preachers, roughly half are graduates of the Islamic University of Medina (IUM). By looking at leading figures within the network, the chapter shows how exposure to new thinkers and texts at the university, as well as physical distance from the bitter struggles in northern Nigeria, launched a process of reflection that culminated in the Medina graduates' decision to break with the anti-Sufi movement, Izala. The students felt that Izala had become too rigid in its approach and was excluding non members. Moreover, study in Medina, the chapter argues, increased these preachers' intellectual self confidence and led them to seek models of leadership based more on individual reputation than on the backing of hierarchical organisations.

This chapter uses the Kano, Nigeria, pediatric trials of the oral antibiotic Trovan and the litigation it produced to explore the remedies available to individuals suing U.S.-based multinational corporations and the foreign states that host their clinical drug trials. It concentrates on litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). In 2001 families of children with bacterial meningitis filed lawsuits against Pfizer in the United States under ATS for violating a norm of customary international law prohibiting nonconsensual medical experimentation. The allegation of nonconsensual medical experimentation on human subjects had stated a claim under the ATS for a violation of the law of nations. Litigation under the ATS may continue to be the only path through which pharmaceutical corporations will be held accountable for nonconsensual experimentation. It is noted that these corporations will continue outsourcing some experiments from the United States to relatively poor nations.

This chapter analyzes Kano Hōgai’s efforts to confront a new set of challenges brought on by the Meiji Restoration and by the demand for images to display at public exhibitions. Instead of reiterating the traditional emphasis on Hōgai as a heroic actor involved in the creation of a new mode of modern painting, I shift the emphasis toward the changing audiences and markets for the Kano artist’s paintings. I also detail how Fenollosa’s agenda intersects with painting production by Hōgai and other members of Kangakai, the Painting Appreciation Society.

This chapter situates Hōgai’s painting production within broader artistic trends of the 1880s, when the style and subject matter of Japanese painting first became a topic of outright debate. This development solidified the existence of the category of nihonga on a discursive plane well before nihonga became a named entity in ostensible contrast to yōga, or Western (oil) painting.

This chapter explores nihonga’s relationship to past painting in the Meiji period and beyond through Shibata Zeshin’s variations on the seventeenth-century Hikone Screen, Hōgai’s Merciful Mother Kannon, and Hishida Shunsō’s Fallen Leaves (1909). Prior to the nineteenth century, compelling compositions became famous through reiteration. The most celebrated images necessarily existed in multiple versions, and the boundary between the original and the copy was indistinct. During the Meiji period, the emergence of juried exhibitions, art journals, and photographic reproduction changed the ways in which a painting could be known in the public sphere.

Japonisme in its earliest phase (until roughly 1900) is most commonly understood as the nineteenth-century Western discovery or even invention (per Oscar Wilde) of Japan. Yet members of the Japanese government and artistic community quickly became aware of Western expectations for Japanese art. Nihonga first emerged in the 1880s within this context.

This chapter delves into Nigeria’s experience with British colonialism, which culminated in the death of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1903. The chapter opens with pro-1999 shari’ah proponents reflecting on how they understand this experiment to redeem the trauma and rupture Nigerian’s suffered under colonialism. These pro-shari’ah proponents also understand international human rights standards as a form of neo-colonialism and take pride in opposing them. The chapter ends by showing how the British declaration of the “Native Courts Proclamation” in 1903 whereby stoning was outlawed exacerbated Nigerian tensions, as stoning was never practiced in Nigeria before this point. Therefore the declaration was considered an attack on Islamic law itself, called “legal warfare.”

After the Napoleonic wars, the years 1815-1841 saw a consolidation of British maritime domination of the Mediterranean, the French occupation of Algiers, and Ottoman manoeuvres to counter these trends. The impact of these developments on the slave trade is examined in chapter 4. During this period, Tunisian beys' heavy borrowing from European merchants culminated in the imperious European intervention in the politics and economy of Tunis, which greatly affected European influence in the flow of slaves from the Regency to Ottoman domains.

This chapter focuses on the partnership between the Kaminoseki municipality and Chugoku Electric Power Company. Chugoku Electric's involvement with the town began when mayor Kanō Shin was asked about the possibility of constructing an atomic power station in the municipality. The chapter provides two reasons for studying this issue. First, it adds to the understanding of how and why controversial Japanese infrastructure projects have been sited in the postwar period. Second, the nuclear story shows the extent to which Meiji period hometown structures endured into the late twentieth century. Although the dispute over nuclear power in many ways ripped apart the social fabric of Kaminoseki, the ways in which it was first introduced in Kaminoseki nevertheless underlines the survival of older forms of political and social interaction.

This chapter considers the transmission of artistic practice through teaching and printed books as a collaborative exchange between teacher, apprentices and the larger floating world audience. Although overlooked today, Toriyama Sekien was regarded in his own time as a master painter and he trained several of ukiyo-e’s most influential designers, including Kitagawa Utamaro and others. A practitioner of the highly appreciated, albeit conservative, Kano workshop painting style, Sekien transmitted that style through his teaching as well as through printed illustrated books, rebranding the Kano style under his name and making its evaluation of painting available to his students and a new audience interested in the connoisseurship of pictures. Sekien was part of a larger artistic network, wherein his partners were his teachers, poetry networks, students, publishers, period connoisseurs, and the broader Edo audience, and was participant in the overlapping artistic, literary, and publishing milieus that transformed ukiyo-e in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

The dispersion trail forged the image of the peaceful cleric as an itinerant for whom any motherland is a foreign country and any foreign country a motherland. At home anywhere, the cleric everywhere is a sojourner and a supplicant of local hospitality and goodwill. With Muhammad Rumfa, the ruler, as his patron, the career of Abd al-Rahman Jakhite in Kano demonstrates both clerical range and appeal. After the breakup of Diakha-Bambukhu, Bundu became the regional center of pacifist teaching, with a radiating influence over the region. The patronage of Malik Sy, the seventeenth-century Tukulor founder of the Bundu state, was a turning point. The ruler gave his daughter in marriage to a leading Jabi-Gassama cleric whose descendants created in Futa Jallon the most important clerical practice since al-Hajj Salim Suware’s founding community at Diakha-Bambukhu. With safeguards against deviation from the canon, Sufi inspiration energized clerical teaching and deepened pacifist commitment.

Kyōsei (symbiosis) is a Japanese philosophical paradigm that is the cornerstone for the Caux Round Table Principles of business ethics. Though this notion comes from the idea of mutualistic symbiotic relationships in the biological sciences, it has only recently been applied to the discipline of environmental ethics. Kyōsei is a normative ethical principle, and the adoption of kyōsei (symbiosis) by individuals, corporations, and governments can promote kyōei (mutual flourishing). The concept of noninterference (jū) promotes ethical conduct by encouraging respect for others and minimizes waste through the promotion of maximal efficiency. By using kyōsei as the guiding principle for international business and politics, we can create policies and laws that allow us to live sustainably and to flourish, both economically and ecologically.