Jiang Jin ed., Yuyue dazhong： minguo Shanghai nuxing wenhua jiedu （Performing Women in Republican Shanghai）

This handsome book is a fascinating addition to the growing literature on the history of women and popular culture of republican Shanghai. Richly illustrated, it contains twelve chapters written by both graduate students and established scholars such as Luo Suwen and Yah Ni, plus an extended introduction by the editor, Jiang Jin. These chapters cover an impressive array of popular cultural subjects, ranging from filmmaking and dance halls, to Yue and Huai operas, and the various ways in which women were involved in them.     

Performing science amongst the filing cabinets. Women,anthropology and museums in Belgium (1930–1970)

I trace the scientific trajectory and identity of Olga Boone (1903–1992), the first female scientist working in the Belgian Congo Museum's ethnography section. Uncovering Boone's relatively unknown and remarkably diverse research in ‘ethnic’ geography, musicology and bibliography, and her fieldwork in Congo, serves as a point of entry into a less well-known period in and ‘unofficial’ history of Belgian twentieth-century anthropology. It also provides a window into museums as gendered spaces, particularly aspects of (in)visibility and materiality in collections and archives.

Abbreviations: AA: African abstracts; BCM: Belgian Congo Museum; ESA: Ethnographic survey of Africa; IAI: International African Institute; IRCB: Institut Royal Colonial Belge; IRSAC: Institut de Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale; MFA-AA: Ministry of Foreign Affairs – African archives; OB: Olga Boone; RMCA(A): Royal Museum for Central Africa (archives)     

Colonial Dreams and Nightmares: British and French Perceptions of Republican Policies in Spanish Morocco (1931–1936)

Historians’ continuing interest in the origins of the Spanish Civil War has recently extended to the colonial policies of the Spanish Second Republic in Morocco, a relatively unexplored issue in previous decades, which has informed new approaches to the military uprising of July 1936. Foreign sources and archives, however, have been generally overlooked in this context. This article claims that British and French delegates in Morocco made critical observations about republican reforms in Spanish Morocco, which have much to add to this debate. They raised questions regarding the continuity of republican policies in Morocco and the anti-republican attitudes within the Army of Africa. They also challenged conventional knowledge concerning the difficulties encountered by alternative colonial projects in Morocco. In the end, their reports not only questioned metropolitan options but also anticipated the attitudes of the British and French governments, vis-à-vis the military rebellion.     

State and Society in the Hsün Tzu: A Philosophical Commentary

With an affectionate “萬旗” this study is dedicated to Hellmut Wilhelm, who contributed so persuasively to my appreciation of a grand philosophical tradition.     

Dieter B. Kapp (ed.), Nānāvidhaikatā. Festschrift für Hermann Berger

Indo-Iranian Journal -     

Italian diplomacy in China: the forgotten affair of Sān Mén Xiàn (1898–1899)

ABSTRACT

In March 1899, about one year before the Boxers’ siege at the diplomatic quarter in Beijing (June 1900), the Kingdom of Italy presented an ultimatum to the imperial government of China, aiming to the occupation of Sān Mén bay (in the Chinese province of Zhèjiāng). The unsuccessful attempt was not considered of significant political relevance at that time. However, diplomats have suggested and subsequently historians have commented that those events convinced the imperial Chinese government to change the strategy towards the Western colonial Powers and finally to support the Boxers’ rebellion against the foreigners and the Christian religion. This article is based on the original diplomatic documents, mainly available at the historical archive of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome. Those primary sources reveal the most controversial aspects of that forgotten episode of diplomatic history.     

Mixing/Medicines: Healing Exchanges among Women in Early Colonial New Spain (1530–1650)

Part of a broader project that studies the exchange of medical knowledge across boundaries of language and ethnicity in the colony of New Spain, this article uses records from the Mexican tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to examine women healers’ participation in the exchange of healing materials and treatments and women’s networks as loci of knowledge and healing exchanges. The article finds that women in early-colonial New Spain (1530–1650) participated in complex multi-ethnic and multi-class networks, sharing healing recipes and remedies, transmitting and hybridising medical traditions and medicines and helping forge a diverse healing culture.     

Suffragettes and Shrews: Unruly British Women in the Early Chinese Press (1900s–1910s)

This article examines the image of the British suffragettes in the early Chinese press up to the 1910s. By widely surveying newspapers and magazines, it shows that the common adoption of the shrew trope in depicting the suffragettes went beyond a reductive translational interaction between the West and the East. People's Stand, The Eastern Miscellany and other periodical publications present different ways in which diction, images, literary legacy, gender tradition and cultural demands all came into play in reconfiguring the Chinese shrew and her connections to the Western suffragettes. The shrew–suffragette linkage debunks notions of selling strategies and editorial ambivalence underlying the gesture of the press. Yet it was precisely this ambiguity that rendered the shrew image so polysemic and fruitful, eventually allowing this traditional character type to be positively associated with the new woman models in Chinese progressive discourses.     

Huacayñán (1952–1953) and the biopolitics of in(ex)clusion

The foundation of the modern Ecuadorian State in the 1940s and early 1950s coincides with a series of attempts to synchronize and incorporate certain “problematic” sectors of the population that were supposedly resistant to progress and whose forms of life were incompatible with modernity, a capitalist economy, and a cohesive nation. This biopolitical project for the modernization and governance of the population also had repercussions on—and analogous manifestations within—the discourse of national identity, the design of cultural policies, and the production of State-sponsored national art. This article analyzes Huacayñán / El camino del llanto / The Way of Tears (1952–1953), a collection of FIGURE 3 aintings by Oswaldo Guayasamín that was commissioned by the government of Ecuador in 1951. Huacayñán was conceived within the ideology of mestizaje as an instrument of aesthetic cultural modernization and as a visual artistic showcase of the harmonious integration of ‘Ecuadorians.’ Despite, or even because of its governmental overdetermination, however, this article shows how Huacayñán instead materialized the exclusionary logic of the syncretic and biopolitical policies of the State, displaying dystopic visions of violence and exclusion, and of a fractured nation inhabited by monsters and resistant to mestizo-ization.     

Feeding the Community: Women’s Participation in Communal Celebrations,Western Sicily (Eighth–Sixth Centuries BC)

In the study of the Sicilian Iron Age, most of the works devoted to their main communal ritual spaces—the so-called “acropolis”—have stuck mainly to describe both their architectures and those artifacts registered in them. However, in the realization of this practice, those objects traditionally considered as imported or exceptional have been emphasized. The return of this selective practice is that other artifacts could not be considered as extraordinary, but being also present in these spaces and, therefore, with a certain role in these celebrations, they have long been dismissed and undervalued. This is the case of all those objects that are directly related to the domestic sphere and, particularly, with those activities usually associated with the women’s world, such as cooking pots or loom weights. The invisibility of these objects relative to the domestic sphere and, above all, to the feminine sphere has led to validate and perpetuate a biased glaze over these ceremonies where only male elite actors could participate. In response to these androcentric and classist discourses, the main aim of this paper is to recover the agency of certain women in the development of these communal celebrations and to show their importance in the construction and representation of a sense of community that was created constantly through these ceremonies through the study of these long-forgotten household objects.