The Antinomies of Black Identity Formation in West Africa, 1820–1848

Abstract

During the mid-nineteenth century, a group of United States-born property-holding free blacks struggled to establish themselves and fashion a new polity on the coast of West Africa. In doing so, these Liberians embraced a pair of simultaneously complementary and opposing aspirations: first, the insertion, entrenchment and expansion of a successful black commercial bourgeoisie into the global Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century, an aspiration tied to and dependent upon the accumulation of capital and the creation of a state which would operate in the interest of this group and no other. Secondly, they aspired to the creation and institutionalisation of a separate and distinct black nationality - a black identity - that covered the entire spectrum of people of African descent, that held out the prospect of solidarity for all black people in republican equality and citizenship, and that subsumed all other classes and categories of black people under the tent of the imagined black nation. In this way they contributed to the uneven, reciprocal and trans-Atlantic work of black identity formation during the middle of the nineteenth century.     

Crisis,challenge and choice: recent theoretical trends of anti-modernism and Western studies in Chinese history

During the last three decades, so-called “postism” (a Chinese non-professional, invented referent to postcolonialism, postmodernism and poststructuralism) has powerfully criticized and challenged the hegemonic ideology of the long-standing Euro–American centralism and the authoritative discourse of modernism in Western intellectual and academic circles, albeit it with various different resonances in Chinese and other non-Western societies. By tracing the trajectory of Western conceptual ideas from classical “rational” interpretations of history, this article tries to construct the inner connections and evolution between these conceptions and ways of thinking, and to summarize their impacts on and reactions from the field of Chinese historical studies. This article suggests that these new trends have definitely cast light on macro ideological and perspective concerns but have been less fruitful in concrete historical studies.     

The Threefold Logic of Papua‐Melanesia: Constitution‐writing in the Margins of the Indonesian Nation‐State

Clashes over the status of West Papua and the political future of the territory proliferated markedly following the end of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998. Amid a wide variety of demands for justice and independence, and a series of demonstrations, mass gatherings and prayers, only a few Papuans mused on how Papua could become a state and what would constitute its nature as being distinctly Papuan and/or Melanesian. One exception is the work put into the Constitution for West Papua entitled Basic Guidelines, State of West Papua, a document edited by Don A.L. Flassy, a bureaucrat, writer and thinker, with a preface by late Theys H. Eluay, then chairman of the Papuan Council. In this article I analyse this Constitution to show how a combination of Christianity and local customs, and a mimicry of elements of Indonesian nation building and symbols of the Indonesian nation‐state are reshaped to oppose Indonesian nation‐building agendas. The Constitution shows that when Papuans imagine an independent state, forms of vernacular legality play a central role. ‘The state’ has journeyed to Papua and encouraged faith in ‘the law,’ and Basic Guidelines is partly the effect of this growing vernacular legality. My analysis shows that it is essential to see how legal mobilisations and imaginations of the state articulate with other normative systems and practices – in particular Christianity and custom (adat) – and how they mutually allow for and invite strategies.     

Sign Geography

Signs are significant elements of cultural landscapes throughout the world. Through their form and content, signs reveal a variety of information about places ranging from locational and physical geographic data through social, economic and political characteristics. Signs, which tell of past events, current conditions and future expectations, are landscape notes on the geography of change. Signs are frequently evidence of cultural diffusion and convergence. Many signs give direction to human activity and symbolize societal quest for order. Others reflect tastes, values and attitudes, in concert with prevailing belief systems. Signs are both cultural phenomena and landscape statements that attest to the way of life in a place.     

The last north American indian ethnography

Locating the proper relationship between material and cultural aspects of human life has been an enduring, discipline-defining, and divisive problem in anthropology. Recent studies of the local effects of globalization have exacerbated the divide. Although case studies seem to have lost their luster for many anthropologists, the renewed ethnography considered in this review demonstrates that local research can clarify international economic processes. When people choose to make foreign commodities part of their lives, the results are neither inevitable nor predetermined. Local and global, cultural and material, never totally subsume each other.     

Apollo and the Virgin: The Changing Meanings of a Sacred Site on Anafi

The ruins of an ancient Greek temple on a Cycladic island form part of an Orthodox Christian shrine. To local people and returning migrants, the site is that of their patron saint; its pre‐Christian past is irrelevant except in so far as it establishes their specific link with the ancient world, and thus with national claims of unbroken continuity between modern and ancient Greece. To early travellers and antiquarians, and to today’s archaeologists, it has been primarily the ancient site which is of interest, while tourists are more concerned in finding “an unspoilt island”. A historical survey of information about the ancient and the Christian site reveals ambiguities and confusions about both. These multiple meanings for locals and scholars are discussed.     

Übersicht der Tätigkeit internationaler Geographenkongresse auf dem Gebiete der Geschichte der Kartographie

Abstract

This paper surveys the career of Benedetto Bordon as a miniaturist, designer of woodcuts, and cartographer. Although from Padua, Bordon worked primarily in Venice where he illuminated religious and classical texts and official ducal documents destined for Venetian noblemen. The writer argues that Bordon designed woodcut illustrations for books printed by Aldus Manutius and others, in addition to the woodcut maps in his 1528 book on islands in the MediteiTanean, Atlantic, and Caribbean. Bordon's lost world map of 1508 is discussed in relation to the map‐making activities of Francesco Rosselli, the Florentine miniaturist and engraver who was in Venice in 1504 and 1508, and in relation to a circle of Venetian scholars and patricians interested in Ptolemy's Cosmographia and in the mapping of the New World.     

Bridging Cultures: The Forging of the China Consular Mind

ABSTRACT

This article examines the imperial socialisation of young consular officials and how they were prepared for their role as intermediaries between Britain and China. Drawing on private papers and public archives, it uses the career of one such official to analyse the processes which took place when they joined the China Consular Service and how their evolving mentality reflected and further shaped its collective mind. It argues that such officials learned to develop a cultural sensitivity towards China which would be key to their ability to forge the collaborative relationships that underpinned the British presence. Whilst it is generally acknowledged that that presence was marked by an unquestioning belief in the imperial mission, there has been less focus on how that sensitivity enabled Britain to maintain its dominant position in China until the outbreak of the First World War. The article argues that, although that sensitivity was self-serving, and notwithstanding the unequal treaties, it derived from a genuine interest in and sympathy for the country which was instilled into officials from the outset of their careers. However, those elements also helped perpetuate the degradation of China's sovereignty during this period. To understand how this took place and why China continues to characterise the period as ‘the century of humiliation’, we need first to explore how that sensitivity, with its underlying ambiguities and tensions, was forged and sustained as part of the mind-set of the consular service.