Colonial Beginnings Research Articles

Freedom from Heaven

Abstract From the beginning of European colonialism in the New World, Africans and people of African descent used religious language and ideology to protest the interlocking of religion, the state, and slavery. Throughout the Americas, slavery was built on a legal superstructure undergirded by imperial, national, and local power. Government produced and enforced the slave codes that defined human beings as property and legalized their torture, maiming, and execution. Therefore, any protest or act of resistance against slavery was by definition directed against the state as well. From slave rebellions to freedom petitions to protests against the U.S. Fugitive Slave Law, religion inspired resistance against the terror of state-sponsored slavery.

James G. Basker, American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation. New York, NY: The Library of America, 2012. Pp. 970. Cloth $40.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessJames G. Basker, American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation. New York, NY: The Library of America, 2012. Pp. 970. Cloth $40.00.Abu Jaraad ToureAbu Jaraad ToureColumbus State Community College Search for more articles by this author Columbus State Community CollegePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 100, Number 2Spring 2015The Legacy of Malcolm X: Black Nationalism, Internationalism, and Transnationalism A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.2.0309 Views: 12Total views on this site Copyright 2015 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The anthropology of the state and the state of anthropology in Brunei

This article provides a detailed account of the process of invention of a nationalist tradition for Brunei, the most tradition-conscious nation in Southeast Asia. It shows how Brunei's nationalist tradition emerged at the interface of colonial records, indigenous oral and written sources, ethnographic fieldwork, and anthropological theories. For this purpose the article traces the history of anthropological research in northern Borneo from its colonial beginnings to its postcolonial role in nation-building and shows how anthropology and anthropologists have — sometimes unknowingly, sometimes deliberately — played an active role in the shaping of Negara Brunei Darussalam.

Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society by Valérie K. Orlando

Reviewed by: Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society by Valérie K. Orlando Carla Calargé (bio) Orlando, Valérie K. Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. 190pp. Valérie Orlando’s last work, Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society, is not a simple study of Moroccan films produced and distributed between 1999 and 2010. The book is also a wonderful overview of the development of the film industry in Morocco from colonial times until the present and as such, represents a valuable introduction for students and scholars interested in learning more about a vibrant and promising young cinema. Orlando’s choice of the time interval for the films she studies is justified by the drastic changes that have occurred in Morocco’s society since 1999, that is, after the death of King Hassan II and the end of what is commonly referred to as the “Lead Years,” an era of repression characterized by strong censorship, human right abuses, and the disappearance of thousands of political opponents and activists who were arrested, detained, and tortured in secret prisons. The films produced in the first decade of the new millennium, Orlando argues, reflect the magnitude of the cultural and socio-political change that has taken place in the country and constitute some of the most thought-provoking cinematic productions of the Maghreb today. Indeed, according to Orlando, contemporary Moroccan cinema is very much engaged in participating in, and thus, shaping the dialogue taking place in Morocco today around issues such as national identity, modernity, globalization, immigration, women’s rights and their place in society. While it is resolutely anchored in the present and definitely concerned with the future of Moroccan society, this cinema has also actively joined the national effort of recollection of the repressed memory of the recent past. Several films explore stories of human right abuses committed under Hassan II in order to make this dark and silenced chapter of national history known to citizens so that such atrocities can never be repeated in the future. In addition to the thematic examination of the films she analyzes, Orlando retraces the development of Moroccan cinema as an industry and identifies some of the major problems filmmakers have to face when making a film. As in the case of Francophone West African cinema, the choice of language (whether Arabic, French, Berber, or any combination of the those three languages) constitutes a big hurdle since it has significant repercussions on audience reception both in Morocco and abroad, but also, on marketing and distribution, notably in Europe and North America. And while the language chosen for the film can be dictated by the film’s funding sources, it can also be a realistic consequence of the social classes represented in the story. The increasing number of films made by Moroccan filmmakers who live abroad and whose works are [End Page 177] considered by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) as part of the national cinema raises other issues as imperative as that of the choice of language. For example, it begs the question of whether challenging socio-political and cultural norms and issues are better achieved when filmmakers are not subject to the state’s censorship since, even today, films cannot “overtly criticize the king and Islam” nor can they “promote themes that are pornographic” (xii). It is not possible to understand the present-day Moroccan cinema industry without retracing its problematic colonial beginnings, declares Orlando in the introduction to her book. She then goes on to explain that unlike in Algeria, where France tried to erase indigenous culture, language, religion, and customs, the “oriental” character of Morocco was preserved, highlighted, and exacerbated as the country was imagined and constructed as “a vast theme park for the colonizers’ unfettered exploits” (4). Furthermore, in order to protect her authority from being challenged, France encouraged schisms and divisions between Arabs and Berbers and wrote a problematic history of the nation that accentuated such invented divides; literary and filmic productions portrayed a “fictional” country plagued by internal divisions, and whose perception of its fragmented identity would be kept and maintained by Hassan II so that his...

Crime, Justice, and Inequality: Oh Canada, Where Art Thou?

Since Canada’s colonial beginnings, it has become increasingly riddled with classism, racism, sexism, and other damaging outcomes of structured social inequality. In 2006, however, many types of social injustice were turbo-charged under the federal leadership of the Harper government. For example, a recent southern Ontario study shows that less than half of working people between the ages of 25 and 65 have full-time jobs with benefits. The main objective of this paper is to critique the dominant Canadian political economic order and the pain and suffering it has caused for millions of people. Informed by left realism and other progressive ways of knowing, I also suggest some ways of turning the tide.

Education and social change: contours in the history of American schooling

In this brief, interpretive history of American schooling, John Rury focuses on the evolving relationship between education and social change. The book considers the impact of social forces, such as industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and cultural conflict on the development of schools and other educational institutions. It also examines the various ways that schools have contributed to social change, particularly in providing avenues of social mobility and success for certain social groups and not for others. Detailed accounts of the experiences of women and minority groups in American history explain how their lives have been affected by education. Key features include: *Content Coverage--Provides a concise, comprehensive, and interpretive coverage of American educational history that ranges from colonial beginnings to the present. Key social science concepts, such as social and cultural capital are used throughout to explain historical developments related to social change and education. *Engaging Storyline--Provides a clear, interpretive storyline in which descriptive text is repeatedly punctuated by in-depth explorations of specific historical issues or events that increase the level of student engagement and response. *Teaching Flexibility--Its content, modest length, and price make it appropriate for students in any of the following courses: Social and Historical Foundations of Education, Introduction to Education, History of Education, or Educational Policy Studies.

“Poetics of Landscape”: Édouard Glissant’s Creolized Ecologies

“Poetics of Landscape”Édouard Glissant’s Creolized Ecologies Carine M. Mardorossian (bio) Over the last few decades, Caribbean studies has been instrumental in reconfiguring the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies had traditionally defined difference. Specifically, its attention to trans-cultural exchanges both inside and across national, racial, linguistic, and class boundaries radically challenged the nationalist and identitarian rubrics through which postcolonialism had heretofore framed its subject. The groundbreaking vision this New World perspective embodies is best represented through Édouard Glissant’s concept of creolization, which epitomizes the transnational and crosscultural processes of intermixing and transformation that produce a Creole society. Insofar as creolization’s cultural crossfertilization contests the exclusionary logic of identitarian thought, its dynamics have been widely praised as emancipatory. Indeed, if racial, national, and cultural differences are no longer seen as discrete and categorical sites of alterity, then the process of establishing hierarchies based on such differences is thwarted. Creolization’s democratizing ethos thus transcends boundaries by bringing races, classes, and people together and by replacing separatism with relationality (or in Glissant’s deceptively simple term, with “Relation”). While the coming together of cultures, languages, and races epitomized by a Caribbean creolized aesthetics is a development that is almost uniformly endorsed, the environmental counterpart of this cultural crossfertilization is far from being viewed as emancipatory. When it is life forms rather than cultural forms that are at stake, the interaction between organisms from widely disparate places of origin often entails environmentally perverse rather than progressive effects and, as such, an ecologically conservationist ethics would seem incompatible with the creolizing impulses of Caribbean literature and culture. The enormous threat Caribbean islands and their unique biodiversity have been experiencing from introduced invasive species since the beginning of colonialism in the region is a case in point.1 It is hard to endorse a hybridized logic if the latter seemingly obscures the repercussions of such a threat on the Caribbean biotope. This essay investigates—via Glissant—the problematic of tracing the ecological ramifications of a creolized model for the Caribbean environment. Specifically, I examine the development of Glissant’s environmental consciousness from his first novel La Lézarde in which landscape functioned fairly conventionally as an allegory for history to his much later work Une nouvelle région du monde in which the environment is no longer reduced to its metaphorical dimension. Glissant foregrounds humanity’s relationship with “the land” as “one that is even more threatened because the community is alienated from that land” and as one that has been, like culture, historically [End Page 983] sanitized and wiped clean by our whitewashed memories (Caribbean Discourse 105). I discuss his “poetics of landscape” as an alternative creolized environmentalism that neither relativizes environmental destruction nor reproduces the pitfalls of deep ecological thought (Caribbean Discourse 150). Scholars have made much of the ways in which the poetics of hybridity that dominates postcolonial studies today does not sit well with the ethics of mainstream environmentalism.2 They have pointed to the ways in which, in contrast to the crosscultural and hybridizing impulses of postcolonialism, mainstream American ecocritics have traditionally shored up a notion of wilderness and pristine natural purity as a “retreat from the social and environmental pollution of modernity” (DeLoughrey and Handley 23). This framing of the two fields’ apparent incompatibility is on the face of it reasonable. Yet, once we look at its implication more closely, issues emerge that go to the heart of the reason why science and the humanities have such a hard time communicating across disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, the two sides that ground the contrast between environmentalism and postcolonialism simply do not operate on an equivalent plane, and contrasting them consequently creates a sense of opposition where there was none. Indeed, in opposing hybrid forms of one culture’s interactions with another to environmentalism’s endorsement of a pristine, unadulterated nature, this framing obscures the fact that the opposite of environmentalism’s ideal of an untouched wilderness (and hence the equivalent of cultural hybridity) would be a landscape where organisms would mix with other natural organisms that did not originally, regionally, or “naturally” belong to that biotope. The equivalent of...

“La Negrita” Queen of The Ticos: The Black Roots of Costa Rica's Patron Saint

In sharp contrast to her mestizo and mulatto neighbors, Costa Rica is one of a handful of Latin American countries commonly regarded as “white.” For more than a century, national elites and foreign observers alike attributed Costa Rica's relative political stability, high rate of literacy, and prosperity to the nation's supposed racial homogeneity. The “Switzerland of Central America” was rarely regarded as part of the African Diaspora, yet people of African descent have been part of Costa Rican society since its colonial beginnings. In fact, the patron saint of Costa Rica has always been depicted as black. Known affectionately as La Negrita, the Virgen de los Angeles is believed to have appeared with a divine mandate of harmony at a remote time when Costa Rica was divided by racial tensions. In the legend of her apparition some have found the key to Costa Rica's tradition of “rural democracy.”

“La Negrita” Queen of The Ticos: The Black Roots of Costa Rica's Patron Saint

In sharp contrast to her mestizo and mulatto neighbors, Costa Rica is one of a handful of Latin American countries commonly regarded as “white.” For more than a century, national elites and foreign observers alike attributed Costa Rica's relative political stability, high rate of literacy, and prosperity to the nation's supposed racial homogeneity. The “Switzerland of Central America” was rarely regarded as part of the African Diaspora, yet people of African descent have been part of Costa Rican society since its colonial beginnings. In fact, the patron saint of Costa Rica has always been depicted as black. Known affectionately as La Negrita, the Virgen de los Angeles is believed to have appeared with a divine mandate of harmony at a remote time when Costa Rica was divided by racial tensions. In the legend of her apparition some have found the key to Costa Rica's tradition of “rural democracy.”

Character Formation and Service: A Millennial Student's Experience

The author, a millennial college student, describes how his international service experiences positively influenced his social and moral development. He suggests ways educators may inspire students to develop core character values. He also argues that promoting these core values has been a primary purpose of the academy in the United States since its colonial beginnings.

The Art Library: A New Art Landmark at Rutgers Mall

The Library of Rutgers University is located in a new facility on the historic Voorhees Mall. The mall is one of the oldest parts of the University. Some of its buildings date back to the university's early colonial beginnings. The mall is dominated on one end by the administration building, Old Queen's, and on the other end by the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. A historic sculpture of William the Silent presides at one extremity of the mall, while on the other, a modern sculpture in front of the art museum proclaims its contemporary role. The mall serves as the nucleus of an otherwise dispersed university. It is a ceremonial and symbolic place where every year hundreds of new graduates march the traditional path from Old Queen's, past the Library to Murray Hall, to receive their diplomas in celebration of the affirmation of their achievement. On this historic mall stands the Library: it observes, participates, and educates. The Library was transferred in 1966 from Alexander Library to Voorhees Hall, an already existing building and the former main library for the university in New Brunswick. The move was accomplished with the initiative and active participation of the History Department under the chairmanship of James Stubblebine. Roger Tarman, a newly hired art librarian, organized the transfer. James Stubblebine expressed his enthusiasm and approval of the new arrangement in his article Art Finds Home: Part of the old bookstack area has been made into an art library, with its attractive reading room, which is one of the triumphs of the building. In the same building and at the same time, the Gallery was established. This arrangement provided for a working symbiosis among three related but separate parts—the Gallery, the History Department, and the Library—and defined the center of the art community at Rutgers. Although the library was now well-located, the space it occupied had not been specifically planned to accommodate the Library's needs.

The ideological origins of American federalism

Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia. In this groundbreaking book, Alison LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix thus challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work; it was the system. Connecting the colonial, revolutionary, founding, and early national periods in one story reveals the fundamental reconfigurations of legal and political power that accompanied the formation of the United States. The emergence of American federalism should be understood as a critical ideological development of the period, and this book is essential reading for everyone interested in the American story.

Building with Bousillage: Perpetuation of a Construction Tradition in Louisiana

LAURA EWEN BLOKKER 44 ARRIS I vo 1U1v\E TW ENT Y 2009 Figure 20 Overseer's House, Oakland Plantat1on, Natchez, Louisiana, 1861, detail of later mud and moss plaster applied over bousillage and posts.(Photograph by author) LAURA EWEN BLOKKER BUILDING WITH BOUSILLAGE: PERPETUATION OF A CONSTRUCTION TRADITION IN LOUISIANA LAURA EWEN BLOKKER INTRODUCTION B ousiLLage is a nagging composed of a mixture of clay and Spanish moss that builders applied over riven staves betvveen posts in the timber framing of French Colonial, Creole, and Acadian buildings . Earthen noggings were common in the traditional building practices of cultures around the world, and immigrant groups in North America employed several variations for brief periods, but bousiLLage stands out for its enduring popularity with generations of builders in Louisiana. The technique can be found in a multitude of existing structures, from the modest to the grand, across the state today. Brick manufacturing began in New Orleans in 1726, and from that time, bricks became a more prevalent nagging in that city and in its immediate surroundings. In other areas, though brick was available and often used for foundations, bousiLLage remained popular for the nagging of the timber frame. Among documented surviving examples, most bousiLLage structures date to the 1830s, but the technique was popular from the beginning of the eighteenth century well into the nineteenth and may still have been used sparingly at the turn of the twentieth. Nevertheless, scholars have neglected this important vernacular building technique. There is no comprehensive study of the history and technology of bousiLLage, and studies of Louisiana's architectural traditions usually mention it only briefly. The definitions often pro\~ded may be unreliable because the information has been gathered orally or it is of unidentified origin and cannot be verified. 1 This important, but overlooked, part of our built heritage deserves more rigorous study. This article documents an extensive field study of forty-two buildings supplemented by archival research, and it may explain why bousiLLage became such a fixture in a large part of Louisiana. The author argues that this earthen infill technique flourished in parts of the state with significant Creole or Acadian populations, despite the presence of more expedient alternatives, because these areas were home to a unique union of formerly separate cultures.2 In this environment, traditional daubing practices from different parts of the world were combined with local materials to produce a construction technique well-suited to regional conditions. As such, it illustrates the process of creolization, which influenced many aspects of Louisiana's architecture and culture.3 In much the same way that the unique culture of the state resulted from the mixture of the people who settled there, bousiLLageendured as the vernacular building method of choice because it too was a mixture- a product of lessons learned across time and place and transformed by immigrants to meet their needs. This article explains bousiLLage as the product of three very broad geographical areas-the Gulf Coast of the United States, France, and \Nest Africa-to emphasize the compatible building traditions that guided the development of bousiLLage in Louisiana. The state's complete '0 U M E T W ENTY 2009 I ARRIS 45 LAURA EWEN BLOKKER immigration and settlement history is, of course, far more complex and included Germans, Spanish, Isleiios, Anglo Americans, and many other groups. It was through the unique cultural mix created by these major migrations, and all the minor ones in between, that the practice of bousdLage vvas continually reaffirmed and perpetuated. COLONIAL BEGINNINGS AND THE MEETING OF CULTURES French colonists arrived on the Gulf Coast in 1699 as a group led by Iberville and Bienville with the objective of securing territory up the ~~Iississippi River. Their first buildings were unique combinations of their old and nevv worlds. At the time the French arrived, many groups of Native Americans inhabited the lmver :.Mississippi Valley. In 1700, ajesuit priest named Father Paul du Ru began missionary endeavors with the Native Americans the French encountered. In his interactions with the different tribes, he observed their building techniques and noted that they began with posts in the ground and pieces between as in wattle and daub construction. Through further...

<em>Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of</em> The King and I <em>Governess</em>, by Susan Morgan

Reviewed by: Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of The King and I Governess Philippa Levine (bio) Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of The King and I Governess, by Susan Morgan; pp. xviii + 274. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2008, $24.95, £17.95. Susan Morgan's absorbing biography of Anna Leonowens represents both an extraordinary adventure (for subject and biographer alike) and a superb piece of research. Morgan has patiently disentangled layers of myth and falsification to reveal what is surely a more accurate history of the woman whose life and writings have spawned musicals and films of immense popularity. Leonowens's own account of her life was a glittering web of deceit designed to elevate her from her humble racially mixed and colonial beginnings. Despite the snobbery of her reinvention, as well as the condescension toward Siam that helped her sell books, it's hard not to admire a Victorian woman who so thoroughly took charge of her own life and avoided so many of the constraints that might have prevented her travels and her choices. Morgan, while recognizing and never minimizing Leonowens's capacity for, and skills in, large-scale deception, is nonetheless captivated by her subject. The result is a lively, carefully researched, and loving biography of one who lived life to the full, covered her tracks brilliantly, and lied her way into genteel society with panache. While Leonowens's biography is the book's central concern (and consumes its title utterly), Morgan is too good a scholar not to explore a slew of related and important questions. Thus we are given a biography of Margaret Landon (Leonowens's biographer) and her husband Ken, whom Morgan sees as "possibly the most influential arbiters of U.S.-Thai relations in the middle years of the twentieth century" (222). Morgan also uses Leonowens's early years as a stage on which to consider the impact and consequences of nineteenth-century colonialism, for Leonowens grew up in British India, the child of low-born parents who over time improved their standing. As a mixed-race female, her future should have been quite predictable and not overly exciting, more like that of her sister Eliza who married an East India Company soldier in 1845 with whom she had two children before becoming widowed. Her daughter, Eliza Sarah, married "up"—as Leonowens had done in 1849—to a twice-widowed lieutenant in the Company army. Leonowens, unlike Eliza, married an Irishman, and a middle-class Protestant Irishman at that. Had Tom not died young in 1859, Leonowens's life might have followed a more conventional path. Widowed with two small children, Leonowens's new and fantastical identity began to emerge in earnest, and for the rest of her life as she criss-crossed the globe she would represent herself as a Welsh gentlewoman of good family forced to earn her own living. As Morgan frequently notes, her considerable intellect and near-photographic memory served her well, and she kept her secret close throughout her life (she died in 1915). A 1976 revisionist biography revealed her Indian origins, but it is only in Morgan's new work that the rest of her days come more clearly [End Page 713] and accurately into focus. What sets Morgan's work apart is not just the indefatigable research that has allowed her to fill in many of the blanks and correct many errors (mostly caused by Leonowens's own diversionary and creative lies), but her understanding of what it means to write the biography of a subject intent on derailing such a project, one who also held a number of distinct careers—from wife and mother to teacher, writer, lecturer, and journalist, and thence to full-time grandmothering. Morgan, more than her predecessors, proves up to the task and has written an engaging and readable as well as impressively researched biography. The book is marred by an odd and avoidable factual error. Singapore did not become a Crown Colony in 1858, as Morgan claims on page 84. As one of a group of British colonies in the Malay Archipelago, it was part of the Straits Settlements...

Diversity and Its Discontents: Scientific Surveys and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century Numeric American

From the time our colonial beginnings to the present day, debates over what it means to be have been embedded within the cultural politics each generational cohort, resulting in some the nation's most distinctive works literature, art, and political thought in the process. That these debates have also had a reciprocal impress on what it means to be a holds true as well, even if innovations in scientific practice have received less attention on this score than other forms cultural production. Within the American context, the scientific strategies for measuring, tabulating, quantifying, and statiscizing bears as fully on the study cultural preoccupations about American identity as does the social thought in its more familiar forms. Empirical efforts to capture the metrics the nature American life have deep cultural roots, with shifts in scientific practice often serving to advance efforts to reconfigure self and society. These quantitative dynamics encompass an array disciplinary enterprises that are usually written about as subfields within the science-the history of economics, management, political science, psychology, sociology, statistics, and the like. While the disciplinary perspective has proven to be a useful and productive methodological shift for historians science-resulting in studies scientific practice that provide ever-finer understandings how particular scientists produced scientific knowledge, constructed their identities as members various professional networks, and inhabited worlds specialized thought and action-a focus on disciplinary imperatives has often allowed only glancing attention to questions wider meaning that concern many American historians, even though the subject matter may clearly bear on historiographic issues such as debates over national identity or the politics individuality and collectivity. In turn, American historians have often shied away from digging into the seemingly dry and tedious inner workings

Imagining Australia: literature and culture in the new new world

Beginning in the last third of the twentieth century, Australian literary and cultural studies underwent a profound transformation to become an important testing ground of new ideas and theories. How do Australian cultural products project a sense of the nation today? How do Australian writers, artists, and film directors imagine the Australian heritage and configure its place in a larger world that extends beyond Australia's shores? Ranging from the country's colonial beginnings to its more globally oriented present, the nineteen essays by distinguished scholars working on the cutting edge of the field present a multi-faceted view of the vast land down under. A central theme is the relation of cultural products to nature and history. Issues explored include problems of race and gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, individual and national identity, subjective experience and international connections. Among others, the essays treat major authors such as Peter Carey, David Malouf, and Judith Wright.

Muslim Women: Between Cliché and Reality

Clichés about the Orient and Oriental women, which imposed themselves with considerable force on the popular imagination, have been perpetuated in Europe since the Middle Ages. The projection of evil onto marginal or ineffectual groups within a society has always been an easy and useful method for making scapegoats. Jews in Medieval Europe were stereotyped and tried for a number of fictitious crimes such as poisoning wells, killing children for their blood and crucifying and cannibalizing their victims. Along the same lines women were associated with the devil and regarded as enemies of the Church, hence the witch-hunts that tried women for sexual voraciousness, cannibalism and consorting with evil spirits. The projection of evil onto an alien culture was also a distinctive aspect of medieval Europe's intolerance, due to its ignorance of such cultures.

Satellites over South Asia: broadcasting, culture and the public interest

Introduction Colonial Beginnings and National Imperatives South Asia Goes Global The Lure of the Indian Market Whose Popular Culture? India North and South The South Asian Footprint The Response of the Nation State Broadcasting and Community Redefining the Public Interest Agendas for Change

Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa: The Case Of Disgrace

Coetzee's latest novel is placed in the context of those other modern European literary constructions of sub-equatorial Africa that project the subcontinent as a purgatorial space beyond the pre-modern options of the infernal and paradisiacal. This high-cultural intertext, mediated by the hero's (cultivated) consciousness, should be given as much weight as the contemporary historical transformation of South Africa, which is here seen as replaying some of the motifs of its early colonial beginnings. In the old frontier territory to which Lurie goes after his 'disgrace', he encounters the new and frighteningly unmarked temporal 'frontier' of decolonization. This wider argument is then anchored textually in: (a) a description of the novel's narrative mode as a stylistic hybrid connoting a somewhat dated high modernism; and (b) the hero's habit of inwardly experimenting with the shapes and meanings of words. This verbal obsession subserves his continuing battle against the bureaucratic rationalization both of the academy and of late-modern global culture in general. The very imperfection of his protest - its compromise by his 'disgrace' - is a 'grace' of sorts, protecting him as it does from the orthodoxies of subversion. 'Africa' names an afterlife in this world, compounded at once of gratuitous violence and gratuitous revelation.

Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863

Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 16131836. By Graham Russell Hodges. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 413. Illustrations, maps, tables. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95.) Graham Russell Hodges has taken on the commendable and consuming task of writing the history of black New York from its colonial beginnings in 1613 through the tumultuous early years of the Civil War. Root & Branch examines the cultural, social, and political development of black men and women in New York and east New Jersey, chronicling the successes and failures in their long struggle for freedom. Through church records, tax lists, wills, slave trade statistics, diaries, and other sources, Hodges has contributed tremendously not only to the historiography of African-American life, but also to the narratives of colonial, early American, and antebellum history. In his introduction, Hodges acknowledges that his project builds upon the work of other historians such as Shane White, Edgar McManus, and Roi Ottley. His construction of black New York begins with the arrival of the first black in New Netherland in June 1613 and ends with the Draft Riots of 1863. The first two chapters of his work explore the development of the legal codification of slavery in New York as well as the evolution of a distinct slave culture in both the infant city and the rural countryside. Just as Virginia's slave laws evolved over the first few decades of the seventeenth century, slavery in New York took form in a similar fashion. As the legal status of slavery in the colony was unclear, African men and women existed in an ambivalent environment. These men and women were by no means free. However, the future of their enslavement was ambiguous, as Holland did not recognize slavery at home and as chattel bondage was still an emerging concept. According to Hodges and many other historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, race did not determine the free or enslaved status of a man or woman in colonial New York. As the West India Company utilized both white and black servants, Hodges's argument concerning the fluidity of race relations in seventeenth-century New York is fairly convincing. However, by the 1640s the West India Company began the legacy of black slavery as a handful of black men along with their wives were given their freedom with weighty stipulations. Annual fees in the form of maize, wheat, peas, beans, and hogs were to be paid by the Africans to the government in return for their freedom. However, the final stipulation of freedom rested upon the condition that their existing children were to serve as slaves. Hodges points to this moment as a turning point in black slavery for New Amsterdam and North America, for Dutch officials ruled that slavery would descend through the mother, a practice that became standard in America (13). Perhaps the most impressive section of Hodges's work focuses upon the development of slavery and slave culture during the eighteenth century through the American Revolution. Hodges spends a great deal of time examining what he labels as the Thirty Year Rebellion, an intensified period of slave resistance following the passage of strict slave codes in New Jersey and New York. …