From the Little Tree,Half a Block Toward the Lake: Popular Geography and Symbolic Discontent in Post‐Sandinista Managua

Abstract: The inhabitants of Managua, Nicaragua have a sophisticated, often bitingly ironic, popular geography that they use to navigate the city. The Nicaraguan capital has been destroyed twice by earthquakes, ravaged by war, left to decay for lack of funds, transformed by the creative destruction of speculative capitalism and subjected to a series of ideological impositions. Few people know the official names of streets, and recent governments have not had the ability to put up signs. So a supple system of popular geography dominates, resisting and ridiculing attempts to impose an official order, and adapting to change while preserving a bottom‐up sense of memory, history and place. Drawing on Allan Pred's classic account of popular geography in late nineteenth century Stockholm, I use Managua's language of spatial orientation as a window into peripheral modernity and the politics of everyday life.     

Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History

This paper reviews critical developments in the internationalhistory of oral history and outlines four paradigmatic revolutionsin theory and practice: the postwar renaissance of memory asa source for 'people's history'; the development, from the late1970s, of 'postpositivist' approaches to memory and subjectivity;a transformation in perceptions about the role of the oral historianas interviewer and analyst from the late 1980s; and the digitalrevolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Threaded throughdiscussion of these paradigm shifts are reflections upon fourfactors that have impacted oral history and, in turn, been significantlyinfluenced by oral historians: the growing significance of politicaland legal practices in which personal testimony is a centralresource; the increasing interdisciplinarity of approaches tointerviewing and the interpretation of memory; the proliferationfrom the 1980s of studies concerned with the relationship betweenhistory and memory; and the evolving internationalism of oralhistory.     

Disruptive marginality: The representation of wildness in Lope de Vega’s Baroque dramatic art

Abstract

The theatrical production of Baroque Iberia exhibits an obsession with wildness that remains to be fully explored. By the time Segismundo takes the stage dressed in animal pelts in Calderón’s La vida es sueño, the wild figure had already enjoyed a long history on the Spanish stage, first appearing in Lope de Vega’s El nacimiento de Ursón y Valentín in 1588. Enduring popularity until Bances Candamo’s 1693 comedia, La piedra filosofal, this steady preoccupation with the concept of wildness offers unique insights on the evolving landscape of Baroque ideologies over time, which are rarely considered diachronically. Dramatic representations of wildness signify the transgression of a prescribed norm—be it social, political, racial, or otherwise—which leads to its necessary elimination to resolve the conflict of a given play. In this article, I will plot the trajectory of dramatic conventions in their diminishing ability to resolve the recurring problem of wildness, thus offering a literary history of the comedia’s social efficacy as it struggled to sustain the weight of its own ideological commitments. Furthermore, I will examine the implications of my approach on longstanding debates on the ideological function of Baroque Iberian drama by analyzing the theoretical problem inherent in the existence of the marginal terrain wildness inhabits. My approach considers who stands to benefit from social order and those who, like the wild figure, find themselves excluded. At a time of renewed energy for exclusionary ideologies, aspirations of encompassing the marginalized are as important today as they were in 1588.     

Elite Burials on the Iberian Peninsula in the 4th to 7th Centuries ad

EARLY CHRISTIANITY in Portugal and Spain resulted in changes to the urban setting of graves and cemeteries. The arrival of a seasonal liturgy that embraced sacred locations and honoured the memory of illustrious figures of the Christian faith was an agent in the transformation of late antique and early medieval townscapes. The material versatility evidenced in the reframing and design of new funerary zones reflects Christianisation, but also the status and agency of local elites. This paper argues that these processes were influential in changing the urban landscape in Iberia, introducing new monumentalised and sacred spaces, but that these changes were felt in rural areas too.     

Historical materials from the post-Cistercian abbey in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki (southwestern Poland)—application of mineralogical methods for identification of source of raw materials

In this paper, we use a set of methods applied for geosciences to reveal the provenance of raw materials and historical aspects of technology of lime production from the post-Cistercian church (southwestern Poland). Two types of building stones (mica schists and sandstones) and two groups of mortars, related with two different construction phases (Gothic and Baroque), were used for construction of the church façade. Principal difference between binding materials involves the presence of Mg-rich phase within Baroque mortars as a result of carbonation of a dolomitic lime whereas Gothic mortars are devoid of hydromagnesite. Mineral composition of the fillers of both mortars is similar, suggesting the same origin represented by local eluvium. Binders of studied mortars are composed of calcite and/or hydromagnesite and rich in lime lumps suggesting incomplete calcination. Studied mortars are weathered which is manifested by presence of gypsum. However, there is no evidence of commonly occurring Mg-rich secondary phases within Baroque mortar probably due to higher solubility of these salts comparing to gypsum. Mineralogical study combined with archeological and geological information enables us to indicate potential sources for the studied building materials. Metamorphic rocks, prevailing within the façade, come from abandoned quarries located in the closest vicinity of the church, whereas sandstones were acquired from the deposits located at a distance of tens of kilometers from the Kamieniec Z?bkowicki. Raw materials used for lime burning were gathered from Przeworno (Gothic mortars) and Z?oty Stok area (Baroque mortars) located approximately 25–30 and 12 km from studied church.     

重返巴洛克承上启下的时代

2011年7月15日～9月15日,由中华世纪坛与意大利文化遗产与活动部共同主办的“重返巴洛克那不勒斯的黄金时代绘画展”将在世纪坛世界艺术馆拉开帷幕,为中国的广大观众与艺术爱好者呈现意大利巴洛克时代的油画杰作。本次展览系那不勒斯卡波迪蒙蒂博物馆藏品展。40件300余年前的艺术精品,将令国内观众大饱眼福,更足以弥补国内艺术展对于17、18世纪西方艺术史作品引介的空白。     

Coming to Terms with Violence: Sacrifice,collective memory and reconciliation in inter-war Finland

This article connects notions of collective memory to the notion of cultural memory. Special interest is given to the role of national myths and other cultural reservoirs in organizing Finnish collective memories during the period from the Civil War of 1918 until the beginning of the Second World War. First the author seeks to uncover the ways both sides of the conflict utilized cultural reservoirs in their memory cultures. Then the author looks into ways in which the Social Democrats especially tried in the late 1930s to transform divisive and even traumatic experiences resulting from the Civil War into socially productive narratives. The transformation of the memory of the internal and reciprocal violence into unifying self-sacrifices proved to be the most crucial act in Finnish memory culture during the first half of the 20th century. This interpretation dates the first acts of public reconciliation to the late 1930s, or the time before the Winter War.     

美国史学界关于内战记忆研究述评

书写内战史有助于美国人内战记忆的形成,记忆的调整又推动着内战叙事的演变。通过南部老兵与妇女的努力,“失去的事业”从一种地方记忆上升为民族记忆。从20世纪开始,这种南部记忆主导了美国史学界对内战史的书写。直到越战后期,学界才从社会文化与政治需要的角度剖析“失去的事业”记忆的兴起及其影响,其研究对象主要为群体记忆、英雄记忆,以战场旧址、军事公墓及其纪念碑为中心的有形记忆场。因服务于国家重聚与民族和解之需,存在多种面相的“联邦事业”记忆被美国人长时期遗忘。直到20世纪80年代末,为突出黑人对美国历史的贡献,学界开始重新评析这一强调联邦统一与解放黑人的内战记忆。总之,美国学界对内战记忆的探究总体遵循“失去的事业”与“联邦事业”这两种叙事路径,但其研究并未完全摆脱意识形态的干扰。从21世纪开始,内战记忆史的研究逐步走向了多元社会化的发展方向。     

THE MIGRATION OF NORTHERN PEASANTS FROM THE 16th TO THE EARLY 18th CENTURY

Data from cadasters and censuses indicate that farmstead abandonment in Pomor'ye was slight before the middle of the 16th century, with migrants going from the European Center and Novgorod Land to western Pomor'ye, from western to eastern Pomor'ye, and later from eastern Pomor'ye to Siberia, attracted by the absence of manorial serfdom, the presence of the landsharing village, and the availability of arable land. From the late 16th century this process was intensified by the development of the White Sea route to Europe, the annexation of Siberia, and improvements in agricultural methods and implements. At the same time, farmstead abandonment increased in response to the economic crisis of Ivan IV's reign, and it increased even more from the late 17th century. Many northern peasants were mobilized by the state as soldiers or workers; many others fled to Siberia or went roaming. (The translation was prepared by James R. Gibson of York University, Toronto.)     

Foreword

This second issue of Colonial Latin American Review for 2003 offers four articles that focus primarily on colonial Mexico, if from different disciplinary perspectives. In “El misterio de los cap?´tulos perdidos de la Cro´nica mexicana de Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc”, Roc?´o Corte´s does some detailed scholarly sleuthing to propose a reconstruction of the original text of Tezozomoc's late sixteenth-century chronicle. Professor Corte´s suggests a solution to the supposed lacunae in this chronicle, and in so doing helps to establish a more accurate sense of the range of the chronicler's historical concerns. The article by art historian Ilona Katzew, “The Virgin of the Macana: Emblem of a Franciscan Predicament in New Spain”, surveys the iconographical history of the cult of this Virgin, a cult born of a seventeenth-century event in the Mexican missionary borderlands, but actively and broadly promulgated by the Franciscan order throughout the following century for reasons apparently as pragmatic as devotional. In “ ‘El plato ma´s sabroso’: Eucarist?´a, plagio diabo´lico y la traduccio´n criolla del can?´bal”, Carlos Ja´uregui studies the trope of cannibalism as it emerged in the writings of a series of colonial writers, from early historians of the Encounter through the Mexican Creole Baroque as represented by Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz. Professor Ja´uregui is particularly interested in the evolution of this trope over time as a means to articulate notions of similarity and difference with regard to indigenous peoples and Europeans. In our fourth article, “A Reinterpreation of Nahuatl Poetics: Rejecting the Image of Nezahualcoyotl as a Peaceful Poet”, Professor Jongsoo Lee offers a persuasive revisionist argument regarding the work traditionally attributed to the Texcocan “poet king”.     

The continuities of counter‐memory: French republicanism and the revolutionary tradition

Although republicanism in France was discredited in 1815, being associated with dictatorship and terror, it provided the foundations for the political consensus of the late 1870s. Republican ideas survived through the creation of a collective ‘counter‐memory’ by a persecuted minority of republicans in the early nineteenth century; this tradition kept republicanism alive and available for later generations to adopt it more widely. This paper examines ways in which this counter‐memory was developed, from historical writings to popular customs, and how it was able to become part of the political mainstream once again.     

Spinoza's counter-aesthetics

ABSTRACT

Spinoza says very little about art or literature in his work; a fact which partly explains the absence of references to him by the German initiators of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, including Baumgarten, Kant and Hegel. Spinoza's resolute opposition to teleology, however, provides an even more compelling reason for his absence, given the teleological conception of literary and artistic form common to the notion of aesthetics at the time of its emergence. Is it possible to fashion a counter-aesthetics from the materials provided by Spinoza's philosophy? I argue that his reading of the great Spanish Baroque writers, especially Luis de Góngora and Baltasar Gracián (whose works were found in his library), provided him with an alternative conception of literary form based on a rejection of formal coherence and closure in favor of constitutive incompleteness and an opening to the infinite.     

The shadow of the civil war: A historiography of civil war memory

The memory of the Civil War has become one of the most vibrant and contested subjects in nineteenth-century American history over the past two decades. Studies of Civil War memory potentially can reveal much about the cultural, political, and intellectual world of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Whereas the Civil War has often been studied in historical isolation, histories of memory thrust off the standard constraints of periodization to emphatically link the Civil War with late nineteenthcentury history. David W Blight's award-winning synthesis Race and Reunion (2001) both indicates the topic's rapid maturation and heightens the need for a historiographical excursion to assess the collective strengths and weaknesses of this burgeoning subfield. The following essay explores the convergence of factors, both within and outside of the historical profession, which have encouraged the boom in memory studies. In addition, it traces the emerging historiography to examine both the creative diversity of the field as well as its common assumptions, insights, and strategic limits.     

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Symbol as Experience

Dreams and Discourses (1627) by Francisco de Quevedo is a Baroque satirical work composed by five dreamlike narrations that criticize the moral decadence of seventeenth-century Spanish society. Traditionally, it has been read as a conservative Catholic text that conveys an official view of truth and morality. This article attempts to question that reading by addressing the use of subversive strategies, such as wordplay and ambiguity. Through an analysis of the paratext, the narrative voices, and the satire of popular trades—e.g., bankers—the article sheds light on the text's self-erosion of established moral and epistemological values. It concludes that behind its apparent religious correctness, the work reflects on the fundamental opacity of language. Theoretically, Quevedo's satire is understood as a disseminatory artifact following Derrida in Dissemination.     

Two places and three times: fragments retrieved of India and Australia in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s.

This article uses memory and specifically my memories to build up a sense of how Australians perceived India in the second half of the 20th century. I focus first on the late 1950s to consider Australian perceptions of India as seen through my eyes as a university student. I then present my observations as a student studying in India in the first half of the 1960s to track the limited awareness of Australia in India. The final section, based mainly on newspaper clippings of the late 1980s, assesses how India featured in Australian perceptions some two decades on and in the very different world of the day – one that was much more knowledgeable but not necessarily significantly more involved.     

Putting People on the Page: Material Culture as a Way in to Everyday Life behind the Facades of Tallis’s London Street Views

Tallis’s Street Views describe London as a commercial and professional centre but the visual representation of the street elevations gives an impression of quiet emptiness; it is hard to get a sense of the activity in and around the businesses portrayed. The household inventory of one of Tallis’s advertisers, a dentist who died in 1850, suggests a way of redressing this. An interpretive reading of the list of the dentist’s belongings, disposed around the different spaces of the premises, which housed his residence, his business and other households, gives some sense of the complexity and struggle at a daily level behind Tallis’s apparently orderly professional and commercial facades. This indicates that we can look more generally to material culture – whether in textual and visual representations or as actual artefacts – to provide a deeper understanding of people’s everyday life in a developing city.     

河南登封市法王寺二号塔地宫发掘简报

2000年3月至5月,经国家文物局批准,河南省文物考古研究所对登封法王寺二号塔地宫进行了抢救性考古发掘。该地宫由踏道、宫门、甬道和宫室四部分组成,室内北部的砖砌长方形台基上有一泥质趺坐高僧真身像,出土有白釉盒、白釉细颈瓶、黑陶钵、鎏全镂空铜炉、铜净瓶及迦陵频伽盒等20余件珍贵文物。该地宫的发掘,为唐代佛教考古的研究提供了新的内容。     

评西方学者的"萨摩亚问题"研究

19世纪末以来,西方学学术界在萨摩亚问题研究方面取得了很大进展,新的理论和方法的逐步采用使得对问题的研究到20世纪60、70年代时达到高峰。丰富的研究成果不仅提供了对萨摩亚国际争端基本状况、与此相关的大国政策和大国关系的基本描述,而且还能让我们从中清晰地寻见20世纪以来国际史学研究领域包括国际关系研究领域理论的发展脉络。     

House of Lords Committee Accommodation and Its Use: Restoration and Renewal in the 19th and 20th Centuries*

Following the 1834 fire, the work of house of lords committees continued virtually without interruption, at first in temporary accommodation and, from 1846, in rooms in the new palace designed by Charles Barry. This article charts the history of house of lords committee activity and the varied use of its accommodation at Westminster from 1834 to the present. Major committee work immediately following the fire included an inquiry into prison reform. Barry's accommodation was scantily fitted out, and quickly needed technical and other adaptations. Committees themselves changed too, with the heaviest phase of private bill activity needed for the creation of the railways tailing off by the late 1860s. Following a low point in committee activity between 1940 and 1970 committee work has developed in fits and starts from 1971 onwards. The further expansion of committees following the Jellicoe committee report of 1992 was accommodated by the reform of private bill procedure, which helped free up committee rooms, and in October 2009, the establishment of the Supreme Court meant that the law lords no longer sat judicially in the large committee rooms 1 and 2. Since 2012, however, the further expansion of committee activity has not been matched by an increase in its accommodation.