寿县李三孤堆楚器的研究与探索

本文介绍了李三孤堆楚墓所出青铜器的流散和收藏慵况,回顾了自20世纪30年代初至今学者们对这批楚器的研究历程及成果,并从铭文释读、器物形制、器群主人及其埋葬环境几方面分别阐述了各家之说,最后通过回顾和分析总结出目前这一研究中存在的问题,提出了深入进行这一研究的重要意义,并指出了今后的研究方向。     

川西古镇安仁印象

全面记述川西历史文化名镇安仁保护、利用、管理的新探索,充分发挥其社会效益与经济效益有机统一的文物功能及其所积累的可供借鉴的成功经验。     

Godot’s Shakespeare

While the connection between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and King Lear has become something of a critical commonplace, references to other Shakespeare plays can also be found throughout. This essay traces Godot’s debt to two plays in particular. First it argues how Godot not only draws on Hamlet’s graveyard scene for macabre imagery, but how it also construes an extended meta-theatrical parody of Hamlet’s soliloquies about the contrast between acting and talking/thinking. The second half of the essay proposes a number of connections with The Tempest, and specifically with its “salvage and deformed slave” Caliban. It argues how the figure of Caliban not merely functions as a model for a colonial power-dynamic that can be seen to operate here and elsewhere in Beckett, but how Caliban is equally significant as a lyrical figure whose great speech about sleeping, waking, and dreaming informs Beckett’s play in a number of ways.     

The Palace of Westminster: Another Window of Opportunity?

The Palace of Westminster is in need of urgent, substantial repairs. This provides a ‘window of opportunity’ for change. This essay traces the restoration and transformation (or lack of) that the Palace of Westminster has seen in the last half a century, before assessing its current state, and considering whether parliament is fit for purpose. It provides a ‘long‐view’ understanding of previous missed ‘windows of opportunity’. The essay focuses on drawing insights from history in order to add a depth of understanding to the contemporary issue. An understanding of the preceding renewal and restoration projects enables us, potentially, to avoid some of the problems that have been previously experienced, and finally seize this opportunity to build a parliament which is fit for purpose.     

Liberia an(d) Empire?: Sovereignty, ‘Civilisation’ and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century West Africa

ABSTRACT

In the 1840s, Liberia was a black settler state on the West African coast which avowedly supported the connected ideologies of Christianity, commerce, and ‘civilisation’. However, from the 1870s, as the rest of West Africa began to be divided up into colonies, adherence to these ‘Western’ values did not spare Liberia’s leaders from some of the disruptive consequences of European expansionism. This article frames these consequences in the context of commercial clashes between the Liberian state and European traders (and their companies). These clashes predated Liberia’s declaration of independence in 1847, worsened thereafter, and later became increasingly politicised with the stricter enforcement of colonial law in the region in the 1870s, partly as a result of economic crisis. On the coast, Liberian officials struggled legally and militarily to stave off the activities of European smugglers with diplomatic backing. In the interior, commercial alliances were forged with local authorities in an attempt to keep out the French and the British, in particular. Conflicts over the collection of customs duties, the setting of borders, and, ultimately, the nature and extent of Liberian sovereignty, reached a climax during the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). The Conference led Liberia, by 1904, to implement its own version of colonial ‘indirect rule’: first and foremost to safeguard its independence, secondarily as a tool of expansion. In spite of major losses Liberian leaders were ultimately able to strengthen the country’s standing as a member of the international community of nations.     

What does a republican government with Donald Trump as President of the USA mean for children,youth and families?

This viewpoint outlines the likely impact of the election of a Republican government with Donald Trump as President on children, youth and families. It focuses primarily on the impact on undocumented and mixed-status families, and briefly addresses the impacts on children’s health services, juvenile justice and education.     

The Option for the Poor as a Decolonial Option: Latin American Liberation Theology in Conversation with Teología India and Womanist Theology

Decolonial theorists pose a new challenge to liberation theology: Does its formulation of the option for the poor address the coloniality that distinguishes the modern context? This article argues that an option for the poor within theology, as a decolonial option, has to retrieve and deepen two central concerns of liberation theologians’ early articulation of the option for the poor: (1) the commitment to the poor and the way the divine is manifested historically, and (2) the affirmation of the need for social analysis and the need for this analysis to impact the commitment to God. The article draws on Teología India and womanist theology to indicate how these two interrelated commitments within the option for the poor can strengthen the option for the poor as a decolonial option.