Colonial Culture Research Articles

Slavery, Colonialism and Civic Culture: The Development of Philanthropic Institutions in North East Scotland

This article explores the links between the development of civic culture, philanthropic endeavours, and the proceeds of enslavement and colonialism in North East Scotland. Assessment of the financial records of establishments dedicated to improving health, poor relief and education in this region underpins this article. This article demonstrates that the North East's colonial elite were keen philanthropists in ways similar to their counterparts elsewhere in Britain. Colonial capital played a discernible – if at times minor – role in funding North East philanthropy. There were differing degrees of impact across each institution, both in the scale of the financial contribution and its geographical provenance. Moreover, the evidence detailed in this article suggests that the Caribbean and South Asia milieu in the North East took different approaches to philanthropy. The former contributed more regularly and often to existing institutions; the latter tended toward endowing new projects. Deriving its conclusions from under-examined evidence and a Caribbean-South Asia comparative framework, this article shows that research on philanthropic organisations can generate a clearer understanding of the legacies of enslavement and colonialism in Scotland.

A gay autoethnography: Gender, sexuality, and organizations

AbstractWould the effeminate boy be an outsider or a fruit that grew far from the tree? Understanding the trajectory of a male child with effeminate traits can unveil practices of various institutions regarding boys and men with these characteristics, bringing to light organizational practices that are not limited to homophobia but also to “effeminophobia.” This autoethnography is an exercise in reclaiming one's own history, marked by violent exclusions, domination, and subjugation, with the aim of explaining how heterosexual normativity impacts the bodies and subjectivities of effeminate individuals. This account begins in the 1990s in the city of Barra do Piraí, a locality located in the interior of Rio de Janeiro, which was governed by male domination and influenced by a colonial culture. In this context, it is important to note that I do not consider it possible to define a period for analysis in terms of years, but rather within a biological time frame, encompassing the stages of life. Therefore, this delimitation begins in childhood and extends into adulthood. This autoethnography is dedicated to discussing effeminophobia directed toward children and adults in various institutions, especially in the workplace. To do so, it utilizes the social and professional trajectory of a young gay man who managed to become an adult.

“That Light Beyond Metaphor”: Derek Walcott’s Ekphrases

This article looks at Derek Walcott’s ekphrastic writing, i.e. its combined use of poetry and painting, from a twofold perspective: 1) the primal employment of a densely visual language for descriptive purposes which carries out the proverbial Walcottian ‘naming’ of the Caribbean reality, often in conjunction with the memory of Walcott as a young painter; 2) the transforming dialogue with actual paintings of the European canon in mature works like Tiepolo’s Hound, The Prodigal and White Egrets. I will especially explore the dramatic figure of the ‘failed painter’ that first emerges in the poetic autobiography Another Life as a ‘self-portrait’ of Walcott’s ekphrastic writing itself and the ways ‘the failed painter’ subject evolves assuming a functional role to accomplish an overall dismissal of the received ‘colonial visuality culture’ and the establishment of an Antillean aesthetics.

Rocking in Kasba: “band” music, contemporary Bengali cinema, and Anjan Dutta’s lost Kolkatas

ABSTRACT With the gradual obsolescence of the lip-synched romantic duet, the sonic texture of Bengali popular cinema has transformed radically in the new millennium. One of the most remarkable components of the rise of the Original Soundtrack in Bengali film specifically has been the incorporation of local pop, folk, and rock bands, whose lyrics are written in Bengali but whose music retains a decidedly western flavour. This paper situates this relationship between cinema and what has traditionally been understood as ‘band’ music in Kolkata in a longer history of the city and its colonial and postcolonial musical cultures. With the incorporation of the pop/rock stars into the diegesis, the productive tensions between star and singer, visible and invisible bodies and voices have been overturned in recent years. Conversely, the music that is commissioned by these films now contribute to the bands’ larger discography and bring their music to a wider listening audience. In some of these films, musicians and bands appear as themselves, bringing together multi-modal sites of fandom and entertainment. Finally, this essay demonstrates that singer/songwriter/filmmaker/actor, Anjan Dutta’s oeuvre emerges as the canvas on which many of these developments come to be visible.

Phytochemical analysis and antioxidant activity of honeys from wild colony and bee culture from five regions of the ivory coast

Honeys have a very complex biological activity due to their composition of phenolic compounds which are very useful for the treatment of certain conditions. The objective of this study is to analyze the phenolic compounds and antioxidant activity of honeys from wild colonies and beekeeping on the Ivory Coast. This study was carried out in five regions of Côte d’Ivoire (Poro, Tchologo, Hambol, Bélier and N’zi). Twenty (20) samples from honey from wild colonies and beekeeping were collected and analyzed. The polyphenol content was quantified by the Folin-Ciocalteu colorimetric method. The aluminum trichloride (AlCl3) method was used to quantify the flavonoids in the extracts. The quantitative evaluation of the antioxidant potential of honeys was carried out by the DPPH test. The tests revealed the presence of polyphenols, tannins and flavonoids. High polyphenol contents were obtained with MSP (4.32 ± 0.02 mgEAG/g), MSH (3.7 ± 0.01 mg EAG/g), MAIPH (3.16 ± 0.02 mgEAG/g) honeys. g), MST (2.95 ± 0.01 mgEAG/g) and MSB (2.74± 0.02 mgEAG/g). MSH honey samples (1.48 ±0.05 mg QE/100 g); MSP (1.36 ± 0.03 mg QE/100 g) recorded the highest flavonoid values. The MAPIH sample (2.56 ± 0.04 mg EQ/g) recorded the highest tannin value. Significant antioxidant capacities were observed in honeys from wild Poro MSP colonies (82.384% at 80 mg/ml) IC50= (44.86 mg/ml).

Writing Confucian History in an Indian Language

Abstract This article uses a case study of an Urdu translation of the classical Chinese Shujing (Book of Documents) to bring to light a process of multiperson, mediated, and ultimately transimperial translation in which European source texts played crucial roles in transmitting detailed knowledge of China to the Indian public sphere. After outlining the theoretical approach of transimperial history and its value for Asian intellectual history, the article positions the Urdu Shujing in relation to earlier Indian and Middle Eastern accounts of China whose triangulated transmission—from East Asia to Europe and thence to South or West Asia—set various precedents for the translation of the Shujing from a prior English translation. The article then focuses on the Urdu version to reveal the transimperial mechanisms it used to not only translate and transliterate classical Chinese, but also to “transcalculate” dates and render Chinese history comparable to both Europe's and India's past. The conclusions argue that, from Ming China via the early modern Catholic empires to the occult subcurrents of British colonial culture, the transimperial pathways along which Confucian history reached India were ultimately Eurasian rather than narrowly inter-Asian in scope. This reliance on earlier European translations would later recur with the spread of “world literature” in the postcolonial era.

Have You Eaten?

Abstract Throughout history, empires have promised perpetual peace and justice for all; however, they have constantly bathed in blood while expanding their colonies and control. This paper intends to explore the theological concept of peacemaking from the experiences of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (uccp) and the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea (prok), both of which suffered from U.S. (neo)colonialism. It also aims to study how we can live faithfully amidst the empire by decolonizing theology and the church. To achieve this, I will begin by reviewing the concept of peace as proclaimed by empires, from the Roman to the American, and contrast it with the biblical concept of peace. This will be followed by analyzing and evaluating the impact of the received colonial American Protestant cultures and the churches’ responses to the colonial gospel. The final part will propose peace as a way of peacemaking amid the empire. This paper suggests that the concept of peacemaking is essential to decolonizing theology, particularly the theology of sallim (life-giving).

Center and Periphery in the Early Modern Spanish Empire: An Art-Historical Perspective on Colonial Latin America

ABSTRACT Art history’s center-periphery paradigm holds metropolitan centers as the originators of artistic models that the periphery copies. Accordingly, European artworks were the primary models for colonial Latin America’s artists who dutifully copied them. Scholarship that accounts for complex artistic negotiations characteristic of colonial societies complicates the long-held view of colonial Latin America as a replicative artistic periphery to Europe. It recognizes mutually constitutive relationships between different groups and artistic practices in the Spanish imperial order. This article highlights select examples of cross-cultural artistic interactions in colonial Mexico and argues that they often operated outside the European/Renaissance preoccupation with artistic originality/innovation as it is characterized in the artist biography genre of early modern Europe. Significantly, Christian global designs were the justification for Spanish power in the Americas, and colonial religious art has often been used to measure the success of that order. Accounting for the strategic copresence of European and Indigenous cosmologies and aesthetics in colonial visual culture is crucial to developing a more rounded and critical understanding of the Christian colonial order in Latin America. It also offers one alternative to the binary and largely unidirectional center-periphery model by highlighting the multidirectional flow of ideas, beliefs, and forms.

Interrogating the Algerian Folkloric Identity in Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night

This paper is an attempt to explore Folkloric material in Yasmina Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night, to reconsider folklore, not as a remnant of the past, but as an artistic vehicle to locate cultural belonging. It examines the different elements by which folklore shapes individual and collective identity in colonial Algerian literature. The novel of Yasmina Khadra represents material and spiritual folk constituents of the Algerian national and cultural identity during the French colonization, mainly the moral struggle of the protagonist between his Algerian cultural heritage and the French-acquired culture. The novel is rich in cultural, artistic, and folkloric elements of the Algerian individual and collective identity. It also exhibits the contrast between the local, and everyday French habits, causing a chasm between the two cultures the protagonist is struggling to bear and fill. This research indicates that the protagonist’s internal conflict reflects the larger struggle that nearly all Algerians went through during French colonization by imposing the colonial culture on their own. Research findings demonstrate that folklore is a popular material that springs out from recurrent situations of everyday life. Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night expresses verbal art as academic parlance to encounter identity issues. Khadra effectively captures the essence of Algerian society and its diverse cultural fabric through vivid descriptions and storytelling, shedding light on the intricate nature of identity in a colonized nation.

Dimensions of privacy and its implications for learning analytics. Preliminary insights from/for African higher education

ABSTRACT This paper delves into dimensions of privacy within the African context, especially in relation to Learning Analytics (LA) in higher education. It highlights how prevailing notions of privacy, influenced by Global North perspectives, may not fully encapsulate the cultural and contextual nuances in Africa. Through phenomenological interpretive research, the study gathers insights from 13 African higher education experts, revealing that African understandings of privacy are complexly interwoven with factors like colonial history, culture, religion, and education. The findings challenge the universality of current privacy notions, suggesting that African perspectives offer a more diversified view that intertwines individual and communal aspects. This research underscores the need for contextually sensitive approaches to student data privacy in LA, particularly as African higher education increasingly digitises. The paper concludes with implications for developing inclusive, culturally aware privacy standards in LA, contributing to a more nuanced global understanding of privacy in the digital age.

Managing Luso-Utopia in Guinea-Bissau: Imperial Fictions and Dwelling Practices in Late Portuguese Colonialism (1945-74)

Portugal ruled Guinea-Bissau (then Portuguese Guinea), one of the last European colonial empires, until 1974, when the fifty-year dictatorship was overthrown and the colony dismantled. Until that time, its power had been maintained through the productive nationalist fiction, commonly referred to as luso-tropicalism, that the Portuguese created peaceful multi-racial colonial cultures through miscegenation. This paper examines the spatial production of this fiction as a concrete political utopia in the empire’s last phase in Africa, from 1945 to 1974, by looking at how colonial spatial practices in Guinea-Bissau contributed to both the assembling and the disassembling of empire. Grounded in original archival and field research conducted in Guinea-Bissau from 2019 to 2023, this paper asks what architectural and urban planning practices supported the fruition of a luso-tropical horizon. This involves analysing not only experts and their designs, but also how these contributed to everyday experiences of space through which Portuguese and Guineans dwelled in the luso-tropical utopia. Dwelling is here understood as both a set of architectural practices that define housing and city as well as the lived experience of urbanity. This approach enables a critical examination of how Portugal’s enduring imperial fiction was produced, managed, and lived in colonial spatialities, while also identifying the residue from colonialism that has persisted from these dwelling experiences into the present. This article, thus, expands the field of colonial architecture historiography by presenting a little-known case study which exposes architecture’s ties to governance, violence and resistance; it also assesses the political effects and residues of a colonial utopia in the present, by addressing the lived experience and agency of Guineans in architecture history.

Versatile filter membrane for effective sampling and real-time quantitative detection of airborne pathogens

Construction of air filter membranes bearing prominent collecting and transferring capability is highly desirable for detecting airborne pathogens but remains challenging. Here, a hyaluronic acid air filter membrane (HAFM) with tunable heterogeneous micro-nano porous structures is straightforwardly constructed through the ethanol-induced phase separation strategy. Airborne pathogens can be trapped and collected by HAFM with high performance due to the ideal trade-off between removal efficiency and pressure drop. By exempting the sample elution and extraction processes, the HAFM after filtration sampling can not only directly disperse on the agar plate for colony culture but also turn to an aqueous solution for centrifugal enrichment, which significantly reduces the damage and losses of the captured microorganisms. The following combination with ATP bioluminescence endows the HAFM with a real-time quantitative detection function for the captured airborne pathogens. Benefiting from high-efficiency sampling and non-traumatic transfer of airborne pathogens, the real-world bioaerosol concentration can be facilely evaluated by the HAFM-based ATP assay. This work thus not only provides a feasible strategy to fabricate air filter membranes for efficient microbial collection and enrichment but also sheds light on designing advanced protocols for real-time detection of bioaerosols in the field.

The Optimal Storage Condition and Storage Time of Umbilical Cord Blood from Collection to Preparation

To explore the optimal storage condition and time of umbilical cord blood from collection to preparation. Collect cord blood samples from 30 healthy newborns, with each new born's umbilical cord blood was divided into two parts on average. One part was stored in cold storage (4 ℃) and the other was stored at room temperature (20-24 ℃). Samples were taken at 24, 36, 48, 60 and 72 h, respectively, total nucleated cells (TNC) count and TNC viability was analyzed. Flow cytometry was used to detect the ratio of viable CD34+ cells to viable CD45+ cells and viability of CD34+ cells, and colony-forming unit-granulocyte-macrophage (CFU-GM) count was performed by hematopoietic progenitor cell colony culture. The change trend of each index over time was observed, and the differences in each index was compared between cold storage and room temperature storage under the same storage time. The TNC count (r 4 ℃=-0.9588， r 20-24 ℃=-0.9790), TNC viability (r 4 ℃=-0.9941， r 20-24 ℃=-0.9970), CD34+ cells viability (r 4 ℃=-0.9932， r 20-24 ℃=-0.9828) of cord blood stored in cold storage (4 ℃) and room temperature storage (20-24 ℃) showed a consistent downward trend with the prolongation of storage time. The percentage of viable CD34+ cells (r 4 ℃=0.9169， r 20-24 ℃=0.7470) and CFU-GM count (r 4 ℃=-0.2537， r 20-24 ℃=-0.8098) did not show consistent trends. When the storage time was the same, the TNC count, TNC viability, CD34+ cells viability and CFU-GM count of cord blood stored in cold storage were higher than those stored at room temperature. Under the same storage time (24, 36, 48, 60 or 72 h), TNC viability in room temperature storage was significantly lower than that in cold storage (P <0.001), but TNC count, percentage of viable CD34+ cells and CFU-GM count were not significantly different between room temperature storage and cold storage. When stored at room temperature for 24 h and 36 h, the viability of CD34+ cells was significantly lower than that in cold storage (P <0.001, P <0.01), when the storage time for 48, 60 and 72 h, there was no significant difference in the CD34+ cells viability between room temperature storage and cold storage. It is recommended that cord blood be stored in cold storage (4 ℃) from collection to preparation, and processed as soon as possible.

Assembling Collections: Isabella Parry and the Distribution of Aboriginal Material Culture at the Port Stephens Australian Agricultural Company Settlement, 1830–1834

This article revisits a suite of Worimi objects in the British Museum whose collection is attributed to Sir Edward Parry, Australian Agricultural Company commissioner from 1830–1834, and brings into view the oft-overlooked diaries and letters of his wife, Lady Isabella Parry. By foregrounding Lady Parry as the primary distributor of material, I shed light on her circulation of objects from Port Stephens to her family estate in Cheshire. Finding herself isolated in an unfamiliar environment, Parry wrote letters and assembled collections in an attempt to exert control over her surroundings and reassert connections to England. While Parry never achieved a sense of belonging within the colony, her material legacy illustrates the importance of collecting and gift-giving to imperial women’s identity formation. Her archive speaks to the value ascribed to colonial material culture within British families, generating knowledge about some of the many Aboriginal objects housed in museums throughout Britain.

Critical Review of Postcolonial Theory of Homi Bhabha’s Hybridity: A Study of “The Location of Culture”

Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture, published in 1994, is one of the foundational texts of the branch of literary theory known as postcolonialism. Although postcolonialism has many facets, the central question lies in the interpretation and understanding of the encounters between the Western colonial powers and the nations of the world to which they belong, and colonization is not only an economic, military or political process but also a process that profoundly affects cultures and identities around the world. This is an area in which interpretation takes centre stage, and its strength depends in large part on its ability to address the complex legacy of colonial encounters with careful and constant attention to the significance of the marks they left on colonial cultures. What Bhabha do writings show, like so much other postcolonial thought, is that the art of clarification and definition underpinning good interpretation is rarely the same as simplification. Indeed, making good interpretations often involves pointing out and dividing the different types of complexity going on within a single process or term. For Bhabha, the main object is identity, as embodied in the idea of colonial powers. According to his interpretation, what at first glance appears to be the cohesive set of ideas behind colonialism quickly breaks down into a complex mass of shifting views – creating something much closer to postcolonial thought than it might seem at first glance.

Science, Law and the Raj: Cultural Fields of Fish(y) Fact

Nineteenth century fact-making in British India was a cultural endeavour shared among its diverse colonial experts. Through a critical sociological reading of archival documents and official records, this paper contributes to aquatic-marine historiography by unpacking utterances and deeds of irrigation engineers, pisciculture proponents, naturalists and administrators regarding the facts of ‘injury to fish supplies’ and the preservation of these supplies by law. It argues that early scientific fisheries investigation and their culmination in the Indian Fisheries Act, 1897 were not the result of a successful separation of science and politics, or of fact from interest. Rather, colonial cultures of fact-making were forged in the interplay of the imperial utilitarianism and hybridity inherent to rule-making in the colony, which renders early fisheries science in India as a field of postcolonial politics by other means.

Label-Free and High-Throughput Removal of Residual Undifferentiated Cells From iPSC-Derived Spinal Cord Progenitor Cells.

The transplantation of spinal cord progenitor cells (SCPCs) derived from human-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) has beneficial effects in treating spinal cord injury (SCI). However, the presence of residual undifferentiated iPSCs among their differentiated progeny poses a high risk as these cells can develop teratomas or other types of tumors post-transplantation. Despite the need to remove these residual undifferentiated iPSCs, no specific surface markers can identify them for subsequent removal. By profiling the size of SCPCs after a 10-day differentiation process, we found that the large-sized group contains significantly more cells expressing pluripotent markers. In this study, we used a sized-based, label-free separation using an inertial microfluidic-based device to remove tumor-risk cells. The device can reduce the number of undifferentiated cells from an SCPC population with high throughput (ie, >3 million cells/minute) without affecting cell viability and functions. The sorted cells were verified with immunofluorescence staining, flow cytometry analysis, and colony culture assay. We demonstrated the capabilities of our technology to reduce the percentage of OCT4-positive cells. Our technology has great potential for the "downstream processing" of cell manufacturing workflow, ensuring better quality and safety of transplanted cells.

Listen, Tell, Show: Recreation and the Black and Decolonial Storytelling in Sport and Physical Culture Research

Stories are always grounded in personal, collective, and ancestral experiences and come in a variety of visual, performance, textile, and text-based forms. Physical culture participation and politics can be better understood by engaging with the stories of people facing ongoing colonial and epistemic injustices, intersectional oppressions, as well as structural and cultural racism. In contrast to dominant trends in the cultural politics of sport, this article offers an ontological, epistemological, and methodological alternative. Following Black and decolonial scholars, we must honor non-Western storytelling modalities to listen to, tell, show, and center many experiences to resist Western colonial culture's binary structures and hierarchies, introduce alternate theorizations, and inject other ways of knowing and being into the sport and physical cultures and into physical cultural studies. This article highlights several areas of Black and decolonial studies that will be essential to efforts at transformative justice in sport and sports scholarship: interdisciplinarity, the bios–mythoi relationship, counter-storytelling, and creation stories.

Creating Colonial Christian Cultures in Canterbury: St. Augustine's Missionary College

Throughout the nineteenth century, religion and Empire became increasingly fused in the Victorian imagination through a lens of providentialism that saw Empire as an instrument for worldwide Christianisation. This article uses the case of St. Augustine's Missionary College to explore the creation of a distinctly colonial Christian culture in Canterbury. This culture was both created and curated through networks and connections made between Canterbury and colonial dioceses, the imagined world of letters fostered by the College, and the presence in Canterbury of “foreign students” whose apparently exemplary lives brought the Empire home to the “garden of England.” Reinforcing the important point that Britain was part of a mutually‐constituted Empire, this article demonstrates how colonial cultures in Britain could be sustained through various means–cultural, social, and here institutional. It moreover uses the case of St. Augustine's to showcase the increasingly self‐conscious links between religion and Empire within Established Anglicanism as colonisation forged the city of Canterbury into the head of a colonial and global Anglican Communion.

A study on the block pattern and spatial characteristics of gara in Surat, India

Surat is a major port and trading city in the northwestern state of Gujarat, India, boasting a rich multicultural background where colonial, religious, and commercial cultures coexist. Field research conducted on the historical districts of Surat indicates that the traditional residential buildings in Surat are not havelis; rather, their planar features bear a remarkable similarity to shophouses in Southeast Asia. The urban formation, spatial pattern of historical blocks, and architectural characteristics of Surat were thoroughly analyzed at three levels: macro, meso, and micro, using methods such as the examination of historical maps, reading historical literature, gathering oral histories, and conducting field investigations. The analysis of the political culture of Asian port cities reveals that Surat has been involved in cross-cultural exchanges in Asia. Through document analysis, the study delves into the formation process of Surat City and the spatial pattern of its historical blocks. To gain a comprehensive understanding, an exploration of the types of planes and profiles of the existing gara cases was carried out, along with a study of the spatial characteristics and evolution of gara. Finally, a comparative analysis between gara and the local architecture haveli was conducted, examining the factors for gara formation from multiple aspects, such as politics, religion, and policy. It can be concluded that the formation of Surat&amp;rsquo;s city and architecture was not only influenced by the spread of Asian culture at that time but also integrated with local traditional characteristics.