Germans from Russia in Saskatchewan: An Oral History

The Germans from Russia are a prominent settlement group in the rural landscape of Saskatchewan. Perhaps because they came incrementally, by chain migration, rather than by organized group colonization, they compose an ethnic group little noticed by historians. Also, their immediate origins are divided, inasmuch as earlier German-Russian immigrants came directly from Russia, whereas many twentieth-century German-Russian immigrants came to Canada from the United States, mainly from North Dakota and South Dakota. This article offers the first focused, scholarly historical treatment of German-Russian immigration and life in Saskatchewan. Drawing on oral histories collected with the support of the Faculty Research Program of the Canadian Embassy, it focuses particularly on growing up German-Russian on the prairies, positing a German-Russian ethnic identity distinct both from neighbor immigrant groups in Saskatchewan and from origin communities in the United States.     

Mapping Past and Present: Leonardo Bufalini's Plan of Rome (1551)

Leonardo Bufalini's plan of Rome (1551) was the first printed map of the Eternal City and a landmark in the history of city plans. This article fills several lacunae in the scholarship on the map by reconsidering its intended function and audience and by situating it at the intersection of technical and antiquarian endeavour in sixteenth‐century Rome. At issue are Bufalini's methods for making the map, along with the distinctive combination of practical and scholarly interests that motivated him. The anomalous status of Bufalini's plan in the realm of popular printed imagery of the city signals, moreover, that the Renaissance audience had a marked preference for pictorial city views over maps.     

Flexibility or exploitation? Corporate social responsibility and the perils of universalization (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

As anthropologists and other critics of capitalism turn their attention to the controversial and burgeoning corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, most focus on conflicts in community relations and environmental degradation. Few scholars have examined equally pertinent questions of labor restructuring, even though these transformations emerged at about the same time as the rise of CSR. In this article, we draw on research in two Peruvian mining communities to explore the potential contradiction between the simultaneous mandate for corporations to present themselves as responsible employers, on the one hand, and the drive to rationalize labor and reduce financial responsibility for the workforce, on the other. We suggest that for both corporate officials and some scholars, this tension remains a latent one because CSR discourses and documents generalize corporate interests as the interests of mines as a whole.     

Perceptions of Britishness

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to contribute to scholarly debate about the nature of national identity by exploring a set of empirical data relating to the complex case of Britishness. The paper considers, with reference to the findings of field-work conducted within a Pakistani community in London, what can be learnt about Britishness from the attitudes of young British Pakistanis. It is apparent that for such young people British national identity does not have a fixed content: their remarks draw attention to several different ‘boundaries of Britishness’ which operate in the popular imagination of people in Britain. These include the civic boundary, according to which citizenship is the primary criterion of nationality; the ‘racial’ boundary which defines as British those individuals believed to have British ancestry or ‘blood’; and the cultural boundary, according to which Britishness is a matter of the culture, values or lifestyle to which one adheres.     

Defending Empire at the United Nations: The Politics of International Colonial Oversight in the Era of Decolonisation

This article argues that, although anti-colonial delegations to the 1945 San Francisco Conference did not succeed in bringing all colonial territories under the umbrella of international trusteeship, the threat of expanding international oversight shaped the relationship between colonial governments and international organisations in powerful ways. By focusing on how the UN Special Committee on Non-Self-Governing Territories evolved as a de facto supervisory system for dependent territories, this article considers the ways that representatives at the United Nations defined dependency and self-government and explores the crusade that colonial governments led to justify imperialism in the post-war world. Through a consideration of the diplomatic actions of France, Great Britain and Belgium, this article explores the ways that colonial empires jointly mobilised to defend colonialism at the level of the United Nations. In the face of evolving supervisory mechanisms at the United Nations, the French, British and Belgian delegations joined forces in an attempt to expose some of the inherent contradictions in UN policy towards dependent populations, and to make the case that subject populations living in independent territories often endured worse conditions than those living in formal overseas empires.     

Irony made manifest: cultural contention and Córdoba’s Mosque-Cathedral

ABSTRACT

Córdoba’s Mezquita (“mosque”) has been the focus of much recent attention, following decisions that are both significant for the building’s future and indicative of larger issues in Spain. In March of 2016 a report concluded that the mosque-cathedral does not “belong” to anyone; that same month the Catholic Church, which administers the site, announced it will revert to “Mosque-Cathedral” in official literature after attempts to refer to the site as the “Córdoba Cathedral.” Efforts to change the name align with policy that forbids Muslim worship in the monument; the Church denied formal proposals requesting permission for such worship in 2004 and 2006, and tensions escalated in 2010 when Muslim visitors were arrested upon attempting to pray. A World Heritage Site for the express use of all peoples, the Mezquita and the contentions surrounding it are thus fraught with ironic meaning. This article examines the ironies of the space and the related debates that are both symbolic and symptomatic of more extensive tensions in Spain. Amid a broader context of terrorism, Islamophobia and the European Migrant Crisis, the medieval Mezquita engages with the present moment as Spain struggles with its heritage and its contemporary relationship with the Muslim world.