Antoinette Burton
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195144253
- eISBN:
- 9780199871919
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195144253.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
This book uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial ...
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This book uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial modernity. Janaki Majumdar was the daughter of the first president of the Indian National Congress. Her unpublished “Family History” (1935) stages the story of her parents' transnational marriage as a series of homes the family inhabited in Britain and India — thereby providing a heretofore unavailable narrative of the domestic face of 19th century Indian nationalism. Cornelia Sorabji was one of the first Indian women to qualify for the bar. Her memoirs (1934 and 1936) demonstrate her determination to rescue the zenana (women's quarters) and purdahnashin (secluded women) from the recesses of the orthodox home in order to counter the emancipationist claims of Gandhian nationalism. Last but not least, Attia Hosain's 1961 novel, Sunlight on Broken Column, represents the violence and trauma of partition through the biography of a young heroine called Laila and her family home. Taken together, their writings raise questions about what counts as an archive, offering insights into the relationship of women to memory and history, gender to fact and fiction, and feminism to nationalism and postcolonialism.Less
This book uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial modernity. Janaki Majumdar was the daughter of the first president of the Indian National Congress. Her unpublished “Family History” (1935) stages the story of her parents' transnational marriage as a series of homes the family inhabited in Britain and India — thereby providing a heretofore unavailable narrative of the domestic face of 19th century Indian nationalism. Cornelia Sorabji was one of the first Indian women to qualify for the bar. Her memoirs (1934 and 1936) demonstrate her determination to rescue the zenana (women's quarters) and purdahnashin (secluded women) from the recesses of the orthodox home in order to counter the emancipationist claims of Gandhian nationalism. Last but not least, Attia Hosain's 1961 novel, Sunlight on Broken Column, represents the violence and trauma of partition through the biography of a young heroine called Laila and her family home. Taken together, their writings raise questions about what counts as an archive, offering insights into the relationship of women to memory and history, gender to fact and fiction, and feminism to nationalism and postcolonialism.
Antoinette Burton
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195144253
- eISBN:
- 9780199871919
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195144253.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
This chapter discusses that Cornelia Sorabji was at the center of debates about the role that the zenana, and by extension the precints of house and home, should play in shaping modern Indian ...
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This chapter discusses that Cornelia Sorabji was at the center of debates about the role that the zenana, and by extension the precints of house and home, should play in shaping modern Indian culture. It adds that Sorabji, a Parsi Christian who was trained as a barrister at Oxford in 1889-1892, aimed to improve the conditions for purdahnashin and publicizing those conditions to reform-minded audiences in Britain and India. It narrates that she used her legal skills and her official connections to investigate the homes and detail the lives of hundreds of “secluded” women in the first three decades of the 20th century. It tells of Sorabji's biography as well as her family's history. It suggests that Sorabji's determination to preserve her Purdahnashin in the domain of memory signals the uneven and unlooked-for terrains of colonial modernity itself.Less
This chapter discusses that Cornelia Sorabji was at the center of debates about the role that the zenana, and by extension the precints of house and home, should play in shaping modern Indian culture. It adds that Sorabji, a Parsi Christian who was trained as a barrister at Oxford in 1889-1892, aimed to improve the conditions for purdahnashin and publicizing those conditions to reform-minded audiences in Britain and India. It narrates that she used her legal skills and her official connections to investigate the homes and detail the lives of hundreds of “secluded” women in the first three decades of the 20th century. It tells of Sorabji's biography as well as her family's history. It suggests that Sorabji's determination to preserve her Purdahnashin in the domain of memory signals the uneven and unlooked-for terrains of colonial modernity itself.
Jed Esty
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199857968
- eISBN:
- 9780199919581
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199857968.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
“Scattered Souls” situates the main argument of this book within broad studies of modernism and modernity, gender and sexuality, colonial and post-colonial literature, and the politics of formalism. ...
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“Scattered Souls” situates the main argument of this book within broad studies of modernism and modernity, gender and sexuality, colonial and post-colonial literature, and the politics of formalism. It reads Kipling's Kim as an exemplary text in which colonial anachronism and uneven development provide the symbolic basis for an anti-teleological model of subject formation. Kipling's novel of youth thus introduces the analysis of a central, yet surprisingly under-explored, nexus between modernist aesthetics and modern colonialism: the disruption of developmental time in reciprocal allegories of self-making and nation-formation. Separating adolescence from the dictates of Bildung, modernist writing created an autonomous value for youth and cleared space for its own resistance to linear plots while registering the crumbling of various western discourses of progress. Although a sedimented logic of organic development lingers on necessarily in the bildungsroman's ideology of form, modernist writers take account of the genre's own aging and transformation, objectifying its progressive conventions with an unprecedented degree of ironic distance. The novels at the center of this study give vivid narrative form to the central contradiction of modernity, a contradiction made most conspicuous in the colonial contact zones of the last century, i.e. that modernity is a state of permanent transition. Its most trenchant literary incarnation is the story of unseasonable youth.Less
“Scattered Souls” situates the main argument of this book within broad studies of modernism and modernity, gender and sexuality, colonial and post-colonial literature, and the politics of formalism. It reads Kipling's Kim as an exemplary text in which colonial anachronism and uneven development provide the symbolic basis for an anti-teleological model of subject formation. Kipling's novel of youth thus introduces the analysis of a central, yet surprisingly under-explored, nexus between modernist aesthetics and modern colonialism: the disruption of developmental time in reciprocal allegories of self-making and nation-formation. Separating adolescence from the dictates of Bildung, modernist writing created an autonomous value for youth and cleared space for its own resistance to linear plots while registering the crumbling of various western discourses of progress. Although a sedimented logic of organic development lingers on necessarily in the bildungsroman's ideology of form, modernist writers take account of the genre's own aging and transformation, objectifying its progressive conventions with an unprecedented degree of ironic distance. The novels at the center of this study give vivid narrative form to the central contradiction of modernity, a contradiction made most conspicuous in the colonial contact zones of the last century, i.e. that modernity is a state of permanent transition. Its most trenchant literary incarnation is the story of unseasonable youth.
C. J. W.-L. Wee
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622098596
- eISBN:
- 9789882207509
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622098596.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter examines some of the key terms and contextual concerns within East Asia. It attempts to provide a limited genealogy of the “nativizations” of modernity, which it sees as problematic if ...
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This chapter examines some of the key terms and contextual concerns within East Asia. It attempts to provide a limited genealogy of the “nativizations” of modernity, which it sees as problematic if they are to be conceptualized as alternative sets of modernities that have come about due to their Otherness to their Western colonial origins. Given the book's central concern with the recognition and misrecognition of the Asian relationship with the Anglo-American West and the assumption that new modernities manifest themselves in old ways, the chapter addresses the relation of the West to East Asia. It looks at how the perceived “rest of the world” for the West produced and still produces itself out of the very same postcolonial experiences. The chapter examines the former European empires to see their transformations and adaptations, as well as some of the parts of colonial modernity that have led to the emergence of the New Asia.Less
This chapter examines some of the key terms and contextual concerns within East Asia. It attempts to provide a limited genealogy of the “nativizations” of modernity, which it sees as problematic if they are to be conceptualized as alternative sets of modernities that have come about due to their Otherness to their Western colonial origins. Given the book's central concern with the recognition and misrecognition of the Asian relationship with the Anglo-American West and the assumption that new modernities manifest themselves in old ways, the chapter addresses the relation of the West to East Asia. It looks at how the perceived “rest of the world” for the West produced and still produces itself out of the very same postcolonial experiences. The chapter examines the former European empires to see their transformations and adaptations, as well as some of the parts of colonial modernity that have led to the emergence of the New Asia.
Ben Tran
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823273133
- eISBN:
- 9780823273188
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823273133.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Elaborating upon the concept of the “post-mandarin” and its historical context, the introduction draws the connection between post-mandarin intellectuals, masculinity, and altered gender and sexual ...
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Elaborating upon the concept of the “post-mandarin” and its historical context, the introduction draws the connection between post-mandarin intellectuals, masculinity, and altered gender and sexual relations during colonial modernity, while situating these claims within the fields of Vietnam and Southeast Asian studies, as well as modernist and postcolonial studies.Less
Elaborating upon the concept of the “post-mandarin” and its historical context, the introduction draws the connection between post-mandarin intellectuals, masculinity, and altered gender and sexual relations during colonial modernity, while situating these claims within the fields of Vietnam and Southeast Asian studies, as well as modernist and postcolonial studies.
Dipesh Chakrabarty
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520205406
- eISBN:
- 9780520918085
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520205406.003.0012
- Subject:
- Anthropology, European Cultural Anthropology
This chapter focuses on colonial modernity and on debates concerning domesticity in British Bengal. It aims to provide a better understanding of nineteenth-century Bengali contestations over received ...
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This chapter focuses on colonial modernity and on debates concerning domesticity in British Bengal. It aims to provide a better understanding of nineteenth-century Bengali contestations over received bourgeois models for relating the personal to the public world of civil and political life. The chapter describes how the Bengali modern has negotiated the distinction between personal/domestic and communal/public in reconstituting itself within a world system fashioned by imperialism.Less
This chapter focuses on colonial modernity and on debates concerning domesticity in British Bengal. It aims to provide a better understanding of nineteenth-century Bengali contestations over received bourgeois models for relating the personal to the public world of civil and political life. The chapter describes how the Bengali modern has negotiated the distinction between personal/domestic and communal/public in reconstituting itself within a world system fashioned by imperialism.
Saikat Majumdar
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231156950
- eISBN:
- 9780231527675
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231156950.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book identifies the way the banality of everyday life and the boredom that often accompanies it paradoxically shape a ...
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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book identifies the way the banality of everyday life and the boredom that often accompanies it paradoxically shape a narrative instinct along the margins of the global British Empire from late colonial modernism to the present day, as revealed in the fiction of four writers: James Joyce from Ireland, Katherine Mansfield from New Zealand, Zoë Wicomb from South Africa, and Amit Chaudhuri from India. This is a body of English-language fiction in which the banality of everyday life comes to define a globally mappable narrative impulse that has mostly been understood in a linear continuity with the formal innovations of metropolitan modernism. Instead, the book proposes a reading in which this impulse narrativizes a colonial problematic that significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of literary modernism. If narrative is triggered by the tremor, velocity, and eventually the excitement of the event, the temporal and affective lack embodied in the banal in these late colonial and postcolonial fictions comes to shape a narrative impulse that is aesthetically oppositional. It is this oppositionality that has primarily been interpreted in terms of literary modernism's radical aesthetic. Rather than being driven predominantly by the subjective idiosyncrasy of formal experimentation, it is suggested that the narrative energization of banality is just as significantly rooted in the social experience of colonial modernity.Less
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book identifies the way the banality of everyday life and the boredom that often accompanies it paradoxically shape a narrative instinct along the margins of the global British Empire from late colonial modernism to the present day, as revealed in the fiction of four writers: James Joyce from Ireland, Katherine Mansfield from New Zealand, Zoë Wicomb from South Africa, and Amit Chaudhuri from India. This is a body of English-language fiction in which the banality of everyday life comes to define a globally mappable narrative impulse that has mostly been understood in a linear continuity with the formal innovations of metropolitan modernism. Instead, the book proposes a reading in which this impulse narrativizes a colonial problematic that significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of literary modernism. If narrative is triggered by the tremor, velocity, and eventually the excitement of the event, the temporal and affective lack embodied in the banal in these late colonial and postcolonial fictions comes to shape a narrative impulse that is aesthetically oppositional. It is this oppositionality that has primarily been interpreted in terms of literary modernism's radical aesthetic. Rather than being driven predominantly by the subjective idiosyncrasy of formal experimentation, it is suggested that the narrative energization of banality is just as significantly rooted in the social experience of colonial modernity.
Wenqing Kang
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622099807
- eISBN:
- 9789882207233
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099807.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This is a serious study on the topic of male same-sex relations in China during the early twentieth century, illuminating male same-sex relations in many sites: language, translated sexological ...
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This is a serious study on the topic of male same-sex relations in China during the early twentieth century, illuminating male same-sex relations in many sites: language, translated sexological writings, literary works, tabloid newspapers, and opera. Documenting how nationalism and colonial modernity reconfigured Chinese discourses on sex between men in the early twentieth century, the book utilizes a wealth of material previously overlooked by scholars, such as the entertainment news and opinion pieces related to same-sex relations published in the tabloid press. It sheds new light on several puzzles, such as the process whereby sex between men became increasingly stigmatized in China between the 1910s and 1940s, and shows that the rich vocabulary and concepts that existed for male-male relations in pre-modern China continued to be used by journalists and writers throughout the Republican era, creating the conditions for receiving Western sexology.Less
This is a serious study on the topic of male same-sex relations in China during the early twentieth century, illuminating male same-sex relations in many sites: language, translated sexological writings, literary works, tabloid newspapers, and opera. Documenting how nationalism and colonial modernity reconfigured Chinese discourses on sex between men in the early twentieth century, the book utilizes a wealth of material previously overlooked by scholars, such as the entertainment news and opinion pieces related to same-sex relations published in the tabloid press. It sheds new light on several puzzles, such as the process whereby sex between men became increasingly stigmatized in China between the 1910s and 1940s, and shows that the rich vocabulary and concepts that existed for male-male relations in pre-modern China continued to be used by journalists and writers throughout the Republican era, creating the conditions for receiving Western sexology.
Prathama Benerjee
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195681567
- eISBN:
- 9780199081677
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195681567.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
This chapter demonstrates that in colonial Bengal, history and history-writing emerged through a re-articulation of the ‘problem’ of practice. ‘Primitives’ were incapable of valid practice. Literary ...
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This chapter demonstrates that in colonial Bengal, history and history-writing emerged through a re-articulation of the ‘problem’ of practice. ‘Primitives’ were incapable of valid practice. Literary theories today distinguish the symbol from figures like irony and allegory precisely in terms of its temporal significance. Rabindranath’s poetics and critique of nationalism stopped short of becoming a political strategy of resistance to universal forms of knowledge and representation. Bengali middle classes continued to imagine poetics as a site removed from the everyday of colonial unfreedom, and continued to imagine it as a surrogate of nationalist practice. Despite the poetic and potentially political insight—that ‘primitives’ were the last inappropriable location in colonial modernity—the Bengali discourse of poetics as practice failed to produce an alternative politics of time, which, as Rabindranath thought possible, would free the nation from the debilitating linearity of progress.Less
This chapter demonstrates that in colonial Bengal, history and history-writing emerged through a re-articulation of the ‘problem’ of practice. ‘Primitives’ were incapable of valid practice. Literary theories today distinguish the symbol from figures like irony and allegory precisely in terms of its temporal significance. Rabindranath’s poetics and critique of nationalism stopped short of becoming a political strategy of resistance to universal forms of knowledge and representation. Bengali middle classes continued to imagine poetics as a site removed from the everyday of colonial unfreedom, and continued to imagine it as a surrogate of nationalist practice. Despite the poetic and potentially political insight—that ‘primitives’ were the last inappropriable location in colonial modernity—the Bengali discourse of poetics as practice failed to produce an alternative politics of time, which, as Rabindranath thought possible, would free the nation from the debilitating linearity of progress.
Albert L. Park
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824839659
- eISBN:
- 9780824869434
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824839659.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Studying the history of Japanese colonialism in Korea is a challenging exercise because it has traditionally fallen along two lines of inquiry: colonialism as a form of exploitation or modernization. ...
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Studying the history of Japanese colonialism in Korea is a challenging exercise because it has traditionally fallen along two lines of inquiry: colonialism as a form of exploitation or modernization. As a new paradigm to study the period, colonial modernity carefully distinguishes the many layers of life that emerged from diverse forms of behavior, practice, and thought to develop multifaceted and nuanced conceptions of reality that complicate the dichotomous modes of analysis of modernization versus exploitation. However, because studies of colonial modernity have configured modernity only as a linear form of development that emphasizes the secular, bourgeois / proletariat, urban spaces, and industrial capitalism, any movements that do not fit this definition of modernity have been labeled anti-modern, such as the YMCA, Presbyterian, and Ch’ŏndogyo rural movements. Overcoming the mischaracterization of certain movements as anti-modern requires a careful reconceptualization of modernity by studying the YMCA, Presbyterian, and Ch’ŏndogyo rural movements’ emphasis of the present as a key component of being modern.Less
Studying the history of Japanese colonialism in Korea is a challenging exercise because it has traditionally fallen along two lines of inquiry: colonialism as a form of exploitation or modernization. As a new paradigm to study the period, colonial modernity carefully distinguishes the many layers of life that emerged from diverse forms of behavior, practice, and thought to develop multifaceted and nuanced conceptions of reality that complicate the dichotomous modes of analysis of modernization versus exploitation. However, because studies of colonial modernity have configured modernity only as a linear form of development that emphasizes the secular, bourgeois / proletariat, urban spaces, and industrial capitalism, any movements that do not fit this definition of modernity have been labeled anti-modern, such as the YMCA, Presbyterian, and Ch’ŏndogyo rural movements. Overcoming the mischaracterization of certain movements as anti-modern requires a careful reconceptualization of modernity by studying the YMCA, Presbyterian, and Ch’ŏndogyo rural movements’ emphasis of the present as a key component of being modern.
Manishita Dass
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199394388
- eISBN:
- 9780199394418
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199394388.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, World Literature
The introduction situates the book in relation to existing scholarship on colonial modernity in India, the making of publics and the public sphere in late colonial India, and the relationship between ...
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The introduction situates the book in relation to existing scholarship on colonial modernity in India, the making of publics and the public sphere in late colonial India, and the relationship between cinema and modernity. It then outlines how a focus on reception and elite discourses about cinema can not only provide a new and important perspective on cinema’s role in making publics but also generate a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between cinema and modernity. The chapter explains the author’s conceptual approach to colonial modernity, early cinema, vernacular modernism, and the public sphere. It ends with an overview of the subsequent chapters.Less
The introduction situates the book in relation to existing scholarship on colonial modernity in India, the making of publics and the public sphere in late colonial India, and the relationship between cinema and modernity. It then outlines how a focus on reception and elite discourses about cinema can not only provide a new and important perspective on cinema’s role in making publics but also generate a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between cinema and modernity. The chapter explains the author’s conceptual approach to colonial modernity, early cinema, vernacular modernism, and the public sphere. It ends with an overview of the subsequent chapters.
Dafna Zur
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503601680
- eISBN:
- 9781503603110
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503601680.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Children’s literature in Korea emerged in the early twentieth century under Japanese colonial rule. This literature was marked by what Korean writers called the child-heart, the conflation of nature ...
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Children’s literature in Korea emerged in the early twentieth century under Japanese colonial rule. This literature was marked by what Korean writers called the child-heart, the conflation of nature and culture whose shaping and interaction was deeply implicated in colonial modernity. The Introduction argues that what made children’s literature possible was a combination of internal and external factors, including influences from Japan and educational and psychological theories of childrearing from the West. Children’s literature was recognized as important enough to warrant censorship, and as key to shaping ideologies of gender and politics. The movement of the child from the periphery of culture to the center and the interest in visual culture combined to produce a range of visually compelling magazines for children. Writers conveyed their visions of the past and present, and their future aspirations at a time of growing uncertainty about the fate of the Korean nation.Less
Children’s literature in Korea emerged in the early twentieth century under Japanese colonial rule. This literature was marked by what Korean writers called the child-heart, the conflation of nature and culture whose shaping and interaction was deeply implicated in colonial modernity. The Introduction argues that what made children’s literature possible was a combination of internal and external factors, including influences from Japan and educational and psychological theories of childrearing from the West. Children’s literature was recognized as important enough to warrant censorship, and as key to shaping ideologies of gender and politics. The movement of the child from the periphery of culture to the center and the interest in visual culture combined to produce a range of visually compelling magazines for children. Writers conveyed their visions of the past and present, and their future aspirations at a time of growing uncertainty about the fate of the Korean nation.
Lucie Ryzova
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199681778
- eISBN:
- 9780191761591
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199681778.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History, Social History
In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of “modern men” emerged, the efendiyya (sg. efendi). Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals and public intellectuals, the ...
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In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of “modern men” emerged, the efendiyya (sg. efendi). Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals and public intellectuals, the efendis represented new middle class elites. They were the experts who drafted and carried out the state’s modernisation policies, and the makers as well as majority consumers of modern forms of politics and national culture. As simultaneously “authentic” and “modern,” they assumed key political role in the anti-colonial movement and in the building of a modern state both before and after the revolution of 1952. This book tells the story of where did these self-consciously modern men come from, and how did they come to be through multiple social, cultural, and institutional contexts. These contexts included social strategies pursued by “traditional” middling households responding to new opportunities for social mobility; modern schools as (non-exclusive) vehicles for new forms of knowledge opening possibilities to redefine social authority; but they also included new forms of youth culture, student rituals and peer networks, as well as urban popular culture writ large. Through these contexts, a historically novel experience of being an efendi emerged. New social practices (politics, or writing) and new cultural forms and genres (literature, autobiography) were its key sites of self-expression. Through these venues, an efendi culture imbued with a sense of mission, duty, and entitlement was articulated, and defined against and in relation to two main contrastive others: “traditional” society and western modernity-cum-colonial authority. Both represented the efendis’ social, cultural and political nemeses, who, in some contexts, could also become his allies.Less
In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of “modern men” emerged, the efendiyya (sg. efendi). Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals and public intellectuals, the efendis represented new middle class elites. They were the experts who drafted and carried out the state’s modernisation policies, and the makers as well as majority consumers of modern forms of politics and national culture. As simultaneously “authentic” and “modern,” they assumed key political role in the anti-colonial movement and in the building of a modern state both before and after the revolution of 1952. This book tells the story of where did these self-consciously modern men come from, and how did they come to be through multiple social, cultural, and institutional contexts. These contexts included social strategies pursued by “traditional” middling households responding to new opportunities for social mobility; modern schools as (non-exclusive) vehicles for new forms of knowledge opening possibilities to redefine social authority; but they also included new forms of youth culture, student rituals and peer networks, as well as urban popular culture writ large. Through these contexts, a historically novel experience of being an efendi emerged. New social practices (politics, or writing) and new cultural forms and genres (literature, autobiography) were its key sites of self-expression. Through these venues, an efendi culture imbued with a sense of mission, duty, and entitlement was articulated, and defined against and in relation to two main contrastive others: “traditional” society and western modernity-cum-colonial authority. Both represented the efendis’ social, cultural and political nemeses, who, in some contexts, could also become his allies.
Lucie Ryzova
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199681778
- eISBN:
- 9780191761591
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199681778.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History, Social History
This introductory chapter outlines the main themes of the book—local Egyptian middle-class modernity articulated by and embodied in the category of the efendi—and sets them within existing ...
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This introductory chapter outlines the main themes of the book—local Egyptian middle-class modernity articulated by and embodied in the category of the efendi—and sets them within existing historiographical traditions. A “history from the middle” is proposed to fill the gap in histories written from the perspective of political elites or the subaltern. “Representation,” while often a crucial site of historical evidence, is cast aside in favour of working with concepts of social experience and social context. The book’s key themes and arguments are outlined through a thick reading of a key text of modern Egyptian literature, Yahiya Haqqi’s The Saint’s Lamp. Read contextually along countless non-canonical texts, the content of this novel encapsulates the social experience of becoming an efendi. Read as literary act, it represents a cultural practice (one of many) through which a rising efendi social formation made and expressed itself.Less
This introductory chapter outlines the main themes of the book—local Egyptian middle-class modernity articulated by and embodied in the category of the efendi—and sets them within existing historiographical traditions. A “history from the middle” is proposed to fill the gap in histories written from the perspective of political elites or the subaltern. “Representation,” while often a crucial site of historical evidence, is cast aside in favour of working with concepts of social experience and social context. The book’s key themes and arguments are outlined through a thick reading of a key text of modern Egyptian literature, Yahiya Haqqi’s The Saint’s Lamp. Read contextually along countless non-canonical texts, the content of this novel encapsulates the social experience of becoming an efendi. Read as literary act, it represents a cultural practice (one of many) through which a rising efendi social formation made and expressed itself.
Joshua D. Pilzer
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824869861
- eISBN:
- 9780824875695
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824869861.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Korea’s colonial modernity (1910-45) notably produced both female pop stars and legions of sex workers, a sex-industrial development which reached its zenith in the “comfort women,” the Japanese ...
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Korea’s colonial modernity (1910-45) notably produced both female pop stars and legions of sex workers, a sex-industrial development which reached its zenith in the “comfort women,” the Japanese military’s wartime system of sexual slavery during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). The concurrent rise of the female voice in Korean popular music and the rise of colonial sex industries are not the result of opposing forces of modernization and barbarism, but deeply intertwined parts of the search for the place of women in colonial modernity. This chapter, through a detailed analysis of the references to popular music and dance in the testimony of former Korean “comfort women,” seeks to reconstruct the place of these performing arts in the “comfort women” system. Legitimization of colonial modernization, the commodification of women, and new opportunities for women enabled by the figure of the colonial female pop star can also be found in her dystopian sibling, the “comfort woman.” The musical life of the “comfort women” system provides a stark example of the deeply ambivalent place of entertaining women in emergent Japanese and Korean popular cultures, and of the grain of the voice of East Asian colonial modernity.Less
Korea’s colonial modernity (1910-45) notably produced both female pop stars and legions of sex workers, a sex-industrial development which reached its zenith in the “comfort women,” the Japanese military’s wartime system of sexual slavery during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). The concurrent rise of the female voice in Korean popular music and the rise of colonial sex industries are not the result of opposing forces of modernization and barbarism, but deeply intertwined parts of the search for the place of women in colonial modernity. This chapter, through a detailed analysis of the references to popular music and dance in the testimony of former Korean “comfort women,” seeks to reconstruct the place of these performing arts in the “comfort women” system. Legitimization of colonial modernization, the commodification of women, and new opportunities for women enabled by the figure of the colonial female pop star can also be found in her dystopian sibling, the “comfort woman.” The musical life of the “comfort women” system provides a stark example of the deeply ambivalent place of entertaining women in emergent Japanese and Korean popular cultures, and of the grain of the voice of East Asian colonial modernity.
Prathama Benerjee
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195681567
- eISBN:
- 9780199081677
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195681567.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
This chapter tries to clarify the unfinished nature of both the work of colonial modernity and its critique. As the nation seeks to ‘liberalize’ its economy and mirror the trajectory of global ...
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This chapter tries to clarify the unfinished nature of both the work of colonial modernity and its critique. As the nation seeks to ‘liberalize’ its economy and mirror the trajectory of global capital, it claims the purity and righteousness of cultural conservatism. It is noted that by the 1930s, the colonized, by way of reclaiming ‘modern’ knowledge-disciplines from the colonizer, hinted at his/her own marginality and lateness in the present. The temporality of re-presentation neutralizes the temporality of encounter, and therefore the temporality of collective practice. Peoples like the Santals became ‘primitive’ in colonial modernity not only because of colonial strategies of other-ing but also because the colonized themselves tried to assume the representational location necessary for modern monetary and epistemological rationalities. Social practices need not necessarily generate others in any epistemological sense.Less
This chapter tries to clarify the unfinished nature of both the work of colonial modernity and its critique. As the nation seeks to ‘liberalize’ its economy and mirror the trajectory of global capital, it claims the purity and righteousness of cultural conservatism. It is noted that by the 1930s, the colonized, by way of reclaiming ‘modern’ knowledge-disciplines from the colonizer, hinted at his/her own marginality and lateness in the present. The temporality of re-presentation neutralizes the temporality of encounter, and therefore the temporality of collective practice. Peoples like the Santals became ‘primitive’ in colonial modernity not only because of colonial strategies of other-ing but also because the colonized themselves tried to assume the representational location necessary for modern monetary and epistemological rationalities. Social practices need not necessarily generate others in any epistemological sense.
Eli Jelly-Schapiro
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520295377
- eISBN:
- 9780520968158
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520295377.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
When in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for Asia but instead happened on the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, his error inaugurated a specifically colonial modernity. This is, Security and Terror ...
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When in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for Asia but instead happened on the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, his error inaugurated a specifically colonial modernity. This is, Security and Terror contends, the colonial modernity within which we still live. And its enduring features are especially vivid in the current American century, a moment marked by a permanent War on Terror and pervasive capitalist dispossession. Resisting the assumption that September 11, 2001, constituted a historical rupture, Eli Jelly-Schapiro traces the political and philosophic genealogies of security and terror—from the settler-colonial conquest of the New World to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. A history of the present crisis, Security and Terror also examines how that history is registered and reckoned with in significant works of fiction and theory. In critical dialogue with novels by Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Junot Díaz, and Roberto Bolaño, and the theoretical interventions of Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others, Jelly-Schapiro reveals how the erasure of colonial history enables the perpetual reproduction of colonial culture.Less
When in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for Asia but instead happened on the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, his error inaugurated a specifically colonial modernity. This is, Security and Terror contends, the colonial modernity within which we still live. And its enduring features are especially vivid in the current American century, a moment marked by a permanent War on Terror and pervasive capitalist dispossession. Resisting the assumption that September 11, 2001, constituted a historical rupture, Eli Jelly-Schapiro traces the political and philosophic genealogies of security and terror—from the settler-colonial conquest of the New World to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. A history of the present crisis, Security and Terror also examines how that history is registered and reckoned with in significant works of fiction and theory. In critical dialogue with novels by Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Junot Díaz, and Roberto Bolaño, and the theoretical interventions of Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others, Jelly-Schapiro reveals how the erasure of colonial history enables the perpetual reproduction of colonial culture.
Laurie J. Sears
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824836832
- eISBN:
- 9780824871031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824836832.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This chapter examines the transnational movement of bodies, fashions, phantasies, and memories between colony and metropole by focusing on the fiction of Tirto Adhi Soerjo and Louis Couperus as ...
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This chapter examines the transnational movement of bodies, fashions, phantasies, and memories between colony and metropole by focusing on the fiction of Tirto Adhi Soerjo and Louis Couperus as “situated testimonies” in fin-de-siècle Dutch and Dutch Indies literary archives. It compares Dutch metropolitan culture as portrayed in Couperus's novels of Den Haag with Dutch Indies colonial culture as depicted in the novellas and short fiction of Tirto. It explores the themes of colonial modernity and sexual degeneracy that permeate the works of both authors, producing dread and melancholia in Couperus's writings and haunting anxiety in Tirto's fiction. It also situates Tirto's Malay-language writings in another kind of minor literature: that written in the Sino-Malay language, or what Pramoedya Ananta Toer calls lingua franca Malay. Finally, it discusses the implications of Couperus's study of melancholia and darkness for scholars of psychoanalysis, colonialism, and Sigmund Freud.Less
This chapter examines the transnational movement of bodies, fashions, phantasies, and memories between colony and metropole by focusing on the fiction of Tirto Adhi Soerjo and Louis Couperus as “situated testimonies” in fin-de-siècle Dutch and Dutch Indies literary archives. It compares Dutch metropolitan culture as portrayed in Couperus's novels of Den Haag with Dutch Indies colonial culture as depicted in the novellas and short fiction of Tirto. It explores the themes of colonial modernity and sexual degeneracy that permeate the works of both authors, producing dread and melancholia in Couperus's writings and haunting anxiety in Tirto's fiction. It also situates Tirto's Malay-language writings in another kind of minor literature: that written in the Sino-Malay language, or what Pramoedya Ananta Toer calls lingua franca Malay. Finally, it discusses the implications of Couperus's study of melancholia and darkness for scholars of psychoanalysis, colonialism, and Sigmund Freud.
Alicia Turner
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824839376
- eISBN:
- 9780824869571
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824839376.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
This book examines the ways in which Buddhist discourse shaped a sense of collective belonging distinct from nation by focusing on Burma's colonial history. More specifically, it considers how ...
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This book examines the ways in which Buddhist discourse shaped a sense of collective belonging distinct from nation by focusing on Burma's colonial history. More specifically, it considers how Burmese Buddhists in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century contested colonial categories that impinged on their lives and ultimately renegotiated the terms of colonialism. The book looks at the local conflicts and confrontations in which Burmese Buddhists chose to engage as well as the ways in which they brought together divergent aspects of Buddhist discourse and colonial innovations to create new means of understanding themselves individually and collectively. Three formative discourses set in motion by the colonial encounter during the period 1890–1920 are explored: the concept of sāsana, collective belonging organized through moral community, and the category of religion. The book analyzes the worldview and inner workings of the discourse of sāsana as one alternative to the logics of nationalism and colonial modernity.Less
This book examines the ways in which Buddhist discourse shaped a sense of collective belonging distinct from nation by focusing on Burma's colonial history. More specifically, it considers how Burmese Buddhists in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century contested colonial categories that impinged on their lives and ultimately renegotiated the terms of colonialism. The book looks at the local conflicts and confrontations in which Burmese Buddhists chose to engage as well as the ways in which they brought together divergent aspects of Buddhist discourse and colonial innovations to create new means of understanding themselves individually and collectively. Three formative discourses set in motion by the colonial encounter during the period 1890–1920 are explored: the concept of sāsana, collective belonging organized through moral community, and the category of religion. The book analyzes the worldview and inner workings of the discourse of sāsana as one alternative to the logics of nationalism and colonial modernity.
Luke Gibbons
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226236179
- eISBN:
- 9780226236209
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226236209.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Joyce's Ghosts realigns haunting from the romantic Gothic genre to the spectral forms of Ireland's colonial modernity. The new psychology sought to exorcise the ghost by reducing it to a projection ...
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Joyce's Ghosts realigns haunting from the romantic Gothic genre to the spectral forms of Ireland's colonial modernity. The new psychology sought to exorcise the ghost by reducing it to a projection of the mind, but in Joyce's Ireland, inner life itself was an incomplete project, and was in no position to internalize the ghost. Though originally seen as an exploration of bourgeois subjectivity, Joyce's modernism is more concerned to explore the limits of interiority, unsettling the boundaries between inner and outer worlds, past and present, representation and reality. Central to Joyce's innovative technique is the idiomatic cast given to free indirect style, which is less concerned with stream of consciousness than the “dialect of the tribe,” the inner speech of a culture in crisis. Ireland thus achieves articulation not only as subject matter or content but also as form, allowing Joyce to pioneer a mode of vernacular modernism. The shock of modernity in the colonial periphery ensured that the city, nation, and empire harbored their own phantoms, the shadows thrown by the Great Famine and the fall of Parnell in Ireland becoming part of the “involuntary memory” of the colonial subject. It was if the colonial past weighed so heavily that it could not be contained within the minds of the living. Instead of giving up the ghost, memory in Joyce's work slips its psychological moorings and returns as the nightmare of history.Less
Joyce's Ghosts realigns haunting from the romantic Gothic genre to the spectral forms of Ireland's colonial modernity. The new psychology sought to exorcise the ghost by reducing it to a projection of the mind, but in Joyce's Ireland, inner life itself was an incomplete project, and was in no position to internalize the ghost. Though originally seen as an exploration of bourgeois subjectivity, Joyce's modernism is more concerned to explore the limits of interiority, unsettling the boundaries between inner and outer worlds, past and present, representation and reality. Central to Joyce's innovative technique is the idiomatic cast given to free indirect style, which is less concerned with stream of consciousness than the “dialect of the tribe,” the inner speech of a culture in crisis. Ireland thus achieves articulation not only as subject matter or content but also as form, allowing Joyce to pioneer a mode of vernacular modernism. The shock of modernity in the colonial periphery ensured that the city, nation, and empire harbored their own phantoms, the shadows thrown by the Great Famine and the fall of Parnell in Ireland becoming part of the “involuntary memory” of the colonial subject. It was if the colonial past weighed so heavily that it could not be contained within the minds of the living. Instead of giving up the ghost, memory in Joyce's work slips its psychological moorings and returns as the nightmare of history.
