Translation And The Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldûn Orientalist

Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth–century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères , the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post–colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an "imaginary" by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation–in Ricoeur's words, a "restructuring of semantic fields."     

The Almshouse in Dutch and English Colonial North America and its Precedent in the Old World: Historical and Archaeological Evidence

To establish historical and archaeological contexts for the case studies presented in this volume, this paper presents a review of the literature on the history and archaeology of almshouses. Because both English and Dutch colonial almshouses were based on European precedents, this paper examines historical research and archaeological work conducted in The Netherlands and England, as well as their North American colonies.     

Colonial Cottage to State House: One Century of Housing Styles in Gisborne,New Zealand

The small New Zealand city of Gisborne, with its roots in the lute Wth century, contains house styles characteristic of New Zealand's urban residential history. Small cottages, Colonial bungalows, simple Colonial Georgian and Regency styles, Victorian Gothic style houses, “villas,” “Bay Villas,” “California Bungalows” and “State Houses” are all found in Gisborne. Questions of the origin of each style and whether these styles display any distinctive New Zealand characteristics are addressed in this study.     

Seductive Landscapes: Gender,Race and European Representations of Nature in the Dutch East Indies during the Late Colonial Period

A common assumption in current scholarship on imperialism is that representations of colonised landscapes were gendered female and that European expansion was a male‐gendered enterprise. In the Dutch East Indies (colonial Indonesia), a Dutch possession in south‐east Asia, this association was by no means consistent in artistic and literary representations of nature and landscape. The gendering of Indies landscapes as feminine and their association with erotic conquest in colonial representations was most strongly evident in paintings. However, in photographs and literature, race figured more prominently in the designation of colonised landscapes as tropical and other. This was particularly true from the late nineteenth century onwards, when an ideological shift towards increased racial segregation occurred among colonial intellectuals and officials. In literature particularly, Indies landscapes and nature appeared as gender‐neutral, but were clearly raced native. In such instances, colonial representations were more likely to convey a fear of seduction and engulfment by Indies nature than titillation at the prospect of erotic opportunity or colonial conquest.     

The Victorian Fathers Of The Irish Literary Revival

This essay won the Inaugural British Association of Irish Studies Postgraduate Essay Prize. Lucie received her prize of £500 of Cambridge University Press books at the Irish Embassy on 4 May 2005.     

Twentieth Century Revival Architecture and The Gentry

This case study focuses on the 20th century revival houses of a Midwestern University city, Urbana, Illinois. English Revival houses are most closely associated with faculty families viewed as constituting a “gentry class” housed in a traditional “faculty row.” Other people (businessmen, managers, operatives and self-employed professionals) have occupied the Colonial Revival and Dutch Colonial houses and Cape Cod cottages. Initially, the Early American style (the Colonial Revival diluted for use on ranch houses) was employed by developers and builders to house lower-middle class families in the new subdivisions of the 1960s. The occurrence of various style houses in Urbana is compared with national architectural trends as reflected in a leading builders' magazine.