Intertwined History Research Articles

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Hematopoietic Stem Cells and Regeneration.

Hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) regeneration is the remarkable process by which extremely rare, normally inactive cells of the bone marrow can replace an entire organ if called to do so by injury or harnessed by transplantation. HSC research is arguably the first quantitative single-cell science and the foundation of adult stem cell biology. Bone marrow transplant is the oldest and most refined technique of regenerative medicine. Here we review the intertwined history of the discovery of HSCs and bone marrow transplant, the molecular and cellular mechanisms of HSC self-renewal, and the use of HSCs and their derivatives for cell therapy.

‘No Afghan Refugees in India’: Refugees and Cold War Politics in the 1980s

This article locates the Government of India’s refusal to grant refugee status to Afghans in Delhi in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 within the Cold War politics of the era. I trace this history through internal communications of the Ministry of External Affairs of the Government of India from 1979 to 1983. I argue that the Indian government’s response to Afghan arrivals was shaped by geopolitical and diplomatic contingencies rather than humanitarian ones. I also examine the intertwined history of Afghan refugees and the establishment of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ office in Delhi, India.

Philippine Ayta possess the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world

SummaryMultiple lines of evidence show that modern humans interbred with archaic Denisovans. Here, we report an account of shared demographic history between Australasians and Denisovans distinctively in Island Southeast Asia. Our analyses are based on ∼2.3 million genotypes from 118 ethnic groups of the Philippines, including 25 diverse self-identified Negrito populations, along with high-coverage genomes of Australopapuans and Ayta Magbukon Negritos. We show that Ayta Magbukon possess the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world—∼30%–40% greater than that of Australians and Papuans—consistent with an independent admixture event into Negritos from Denisovans. Together with the recently described Homo luzonensis, we suggest that there were multiple archaic species that inhabited the Philippines prior to the arrival of modern humans and that these archaic groups may have been genetically related. Altogether, our findings unveil a complex intertwined history of modern and archaic humans in the Asia-Pacific region, where distinct Islander Denisovan populations differentially admixed with incoming Australasians across multiple locations and at various points in time.

Note from the Editors

Note from the Editors

The Nature of Ruins

The nature of ruins is that they consist of entangled narratives, the human story often becoming concealed and at one with the landscape. A ruin is described as something in a state of deterioration caused by lack of maintenance or by a willful act of destruction. This can be extended to our mental well-being. Theories of ruin and entanglement provide models for reflection and unravelling of uncomfortable truths revealed in postcolonial landscapes and related migration stories. Plants offer an element of balance and healing.Textiles played a significant role in African history, with traditions of skillful weaving and dyeing that can be traced back thousands of years. Textiles were also hugely important in Caribbean plantation economy, traded alongside and sometimes for enslaved Africans. The interweaving of warp and weft forms the structure of cloth. Pulling threads symbolizes a controlled manipulation of the cultural fabric of societies, weakening the structure. Reconstructed threads create a hybrid, giving life to something damaged or ruined. Once pulled, do threads retain traces of their original source? Working with textiles and natural dyes allows for a more sustainable and rooted practice, with metaphorical “play” helping in processing the complexities of intertwined history and cultural identity. The unspoken, the dislocation, the hole is often where the healing lies.Our history blows in the wind, and threads unravel with time. Empty patches of knowledge lost, some never to be regained. How do we weave new narrative and connect to the lands where we live? It is interesting, the sense of urgency I felt to connect to a stone pillar of Nubian design seen on a ruined 1835 flax mill in Northern England. The pillar kept me strong, helped me identify with an ancient part of my African heritage in a land where I was classified as “minority ethnic.” Great Britain, land of my birth, land that fought for ownership of Waitukubuli. Her tall green body divided into tiny economic plots, sold, abused, and then abandoned.After many years of mental tug-of-war, I have returned “home” to Dominica, land of sunshine, hurricanes, and volcanic energy. Living here, I feel a greater sense of belonging and connection to my drumbeat pulse. Nature lures me to the rusty sugarcane rollers shrouded by an entanglement of healing herbs. Roots dig deep, cracking solid stone walls of abandoned mills, reducing them back to dust. I dig hands in rich red soil, grow things and extract botanical color for textile works. It is the plants such as the wah-wah and noni that speak, revealing hidden stories of survival and African retention. Wah-wah, an indigenous wild yam (Rajania cordata), a means of survival for the Maroons who escaped the plantations.I feel there is also a sense of loss and pain buried in the core of every living thing that roots itself here, for even the plants have been transplanted. What connects us to the soil as Caribbean people? We plant, pick bush, talk herbal talk. Elders speak of bush baths and rubs for achy joints. What do we use here to heal residual trauma?I think of Stuart Hall, the sadness in his eyes, and know that through his struggle, through his work, he too, like the Nubian pillar, has strengthened me, kept me upright in times of yearning to be home. Can we, I wonder, as Caribbean people, ever embrace ruins from a purely romantic stance?

The intertwined history of non-human primate health and human medicine at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute

In April 2020, the Bronx Zoo made a headline-grabbing announcement: one of their tigers tested positive for COVID-19, a striking example of zoos as microcosms of human health and medicine. Indeed, many diseases and health problems experienced by zoo animals are found in, and frequently linked to, humans. Furthermore, the veterinary care they receive often incorporates knowledge, tools and treatments used in human health care. Here, we analyse these developments across the history of non-human primate health at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZP), one of the oldest zoos in the United States. From NZP's opening in 1891, we distinguish five historical time periods within its first century based on how animal health was described, treated and understood. Concentrating on descriptions of primates in annual Smithsonian reports, we see notable changes in NZP activities focused on housing and environment (1889–1900), disease diagnosis and prevention (1901–1916), human–animal connections (1917–1940), research and collaboration (1941–1973) and conservation (1974–1989). We relate these shifts to concurrent medical events and trends in the United States, and interpret NZP's history in a broader scientific and societal context leading to a ‘One Health’ approach to animal care and welfare today.

Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson

In Great Crossings, Christina Snyder documents the creation, development, and eventual closure of the Choctaw Academy located in Great Crossings, Kentucky. US expansion, racist rhetoric, and a Jacksonian ideology of white American identity during the era of forced Indian removal are all common themes as Snyder uses the Choctaw Academy and its locale to chart an “intimate view of the ambitions and struggles of Indians, settlers and slaves” in the antebellum period (16). Great Crossings itself illustrated the transformation of American identity, from one that the Indian students at the Choctaw Academy could personally join in constructing, to one of racial exclusion and forced removal. With a compelling narrative and an intertwined history located at the heart of the continent, Snyder defines a changing America through the eyes of Choctaw Academy students.The residents, enslaved peoples, instructors, and Native students of the school and community illustrate the complexities and contradictions inherent in the tri-racial antebellum South. Choctaw Academy founder Richard Johnson illustrates this dichotomy, as he championed the education and so-called civilization of Native communities, publicly displayed his relationship with enslaved Black woman Julia Chinn, and even covertly used the Choctaw Academy to educate their two daughters while he actively participated in the slave market and plantation economy. Native students also complicated the racial and social characteristics in Great Crossings, as they were often connected to elite families in their nation and refused to be treated as a racial underclass. Snyder deftly illustrates the agency of Indigenous and Black actors as they “asserted that they were not savages or wenches, but rather gentlemen and ladies” (123).The primary foci of Snyder’s work are the Choctaw and other Native students at Great Crossings. Choctaws themselves were at the “vanguard of the education movement,” but many other Indian communities from throughout the eastern Plains and Trans-Appalachia sent young men to the Choctaw Academy (13). Hundreds of students attended the Choctaw Academy, and Snyder painstakingly details the lived experiences of these students as they “became a different type of warrior,” one that used their education at the Choctaw Academy to advance themselves and defend their nations from American predation (40). Students learned skills such as Italian bookkeeping and surveying, while a select few learned advanced degrees in law and medicine. By the 1830s, however, forced removal and the hardening of racial identities in the United States had repercussions at the Choctaw Academy, as education now included manual labor as well as poorer food and lodging. Snyder catalogs how the students responded to these shifts and their agency as they fought to change the Choctaw Academy, shutter it, or go home. As Snyder notes, these battles over the curriculum of the school illustrate the influence and agency of students like Potawatomi Joseph Bourassa and Choctaw William Trahern. As Johnson fell into debt, he “increasingly relied on them to act as spokesmen, monitors, and teachers” to maintain school funding, and these students demanded he provide them access to advanced studies in return (183).The dissolution of the Choctaw Academy in 1848, and the forced removal of Choctaws to Indian Territory, was not the death knell of Choctaw educational programs. Instead, Snyder’s final chapters describe the considerable educational advances in Choctaw country, the foundation of public-school systems, elite academies, and women’s education that preceded the educational revolutions in most of the United States. Leaders of the new school systems, led by Peter Pitchlynn and other Choctaw Academy graduates, changed American conceptions of educational pageantry, such as the annual examinations of students at Choctaw Academy, from a “showcase for a white audience” to a festive event for students’ families (276).Snyder’s concluding chapter reads more as an epilogue, detailing the lives of Choctaw Academy graduates after the Civil War, and it connects the history of Indian country to that of the development of the United States. Through her history of the Choctaw Academy, Snyder uncovers a multicultural and intertwined American South, in which Indian students, white settlers, and enslaved Blacks navigated the “thousand anxieties over race, citizenship, and America’s destiny” that consumed the antebellum era (17). Aptly named, Snyder’s book illustrates the necessary inclusion of Native voices, agency, and dispossession in the creation of an American identity.

Traversing a Tightrope between Ecumenism and Exclusivism: The Intertwined History of South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church and the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian in Nyasaland (Malawi)

During the first few decades of the 20th century, the Nkhoma mission of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa became involved in an ecumenical venture that was initiated by the Church of Scotland’s Blantyre mission, and the Free Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia mission in central Africa. Geographically sandwiched between these two Scots missions in Nyasaland (presently Malawi) was Nkhoma in the central region of the country. During a period of history when the DRC in South Africa had begun to regressively disengage from ecumenical entanglements in order to focus on its developing discourse of Afrikaner Christian nationalism, this venture in ecumenism by one of its foreign missions was a remarkable anomaly. Yet, as this article illustrates, the ecumenical project as finalized at a conference in 1924 was characterized by controversy and nearly became derailed as a result of the intransigence of white DRC missionaries on the subject of eating together with black colleagues at a communal table. Negotiations proceeded and somehow ended in church unity despite the DRC’s missionaries’ objection to communal eating. After the merger of the synods of Blantyre, Nkhoma and Livingstonia into the unified CCAP, distinct regional differences remained, long after the colonial missionaries departed. In terms of its theological predisposition, especially on the hierarchy of social relations, the Nkhoma synod remains much more conservative than both of its neighboring synods in the CCAP to the south and north. Race is no longer a matter of division. More recently, it has been gender, and especially the issue of women’s ordination to ministry, which has been affirmed by both Blantyre and Livingstonia, but resisted by the Nkhoma synod. Back in South Africa, these events similarly had an impact on church history and theological debate, but in a completely different direction. As the theology of Afrikaner Christian nationalism and eventually apartheid came into positions of power in the 1940s, the DRC’s Nkhoma mission in Malawi found itself in a position of vulnerability and suspicion. The very fact of its participation in an ecumenical project involving ‘liberal’ Scots in the formation of an indigenous black church was an intolerable digression from the normative separatism that was the hallmark of the DRC under apartheid. Hence, this article focuses on the variegated entanglements of Reformed Church history, mission history, theology and politics in two different 20th-century African contexts, Malawi and South Africa.

Intertwined Histories: 150 Years of Finnish-Namibian Relations ed. by Marjo Kaartinen, Leila Koivunen and Napandulwe Shiweda

Reviewed by: Intertwined Histories: 150 Years of Finnish-Namibian Relations ed. by Marjo Kaartinen, Leila Koivunen and Napandulwe Shiweda Mark Nygard Intertwined Histories: 150 Years of Finnish-Namibian Relations. Edited by Marjo Kaartinen, Leila Koivunen, and Napandulwe Shiweda. Turku, Finland: University of Turku, 2019. 173 pp. Available at: https://www.utupub.fi The term “ethnic Festschrift” comes to mind as one seeks to describe this collection of essays. In this case, it is not an esteemed colleague who is being honored, but a venerable relationship—the cultural interaction between Finns and Namibians since the first Finnish missionary arrived in Owambo a century and a half ago. As with most Festschrifts there is a gently organizing focus—here, the ongoing Finnish-Namibian relationship that has developed since then—but as with many Festschrifts, the diversity of articles is vast, ranging from an analysis of a missionary letter collection to the evolution of a particular Namibian cloth design, from stories of a Namibian child brought to Finland by a missionary family to the use of Namibian parish registries for demographic research, from discussion of mission architecture in Owambo to the fate of a Namibian artifact collection in Helsinki. As the editors state, “This volume by no means claims to offer a complete history of the relations, but rather presents a selection of various perspectives that introduce some recent scholarship to the reader” (10). An essay that epitomizes the goal of the book is “Stories from South West Africa for Young Finnish Readers” (154–161). Here Raita Merivirta uses three children’s stories published by the Finnish Missionary [End Page 482] Society in the 1950s and ’60s to analyze what impression of Namibian children was being offered to Finnish children. On the one hand they “advocate missionary work as a progressive and civilizing force in the area and are often patronizing towards South West Africans [Namibians].” On the other hand, they have very relatable and likeable young South West African protagonists with whom the reader is able to sympathize and who act as guides in a region foreign to the readers. Thus, while the novels may have emphasized and also helped to consolidate some differences at the time of their publication, they also leveled others . . . , crossing cultural boundaries and bringing Owambo and its people closer to young Finnish readers on an emotional level (161). Two separately authored essays consider the intriguing story of Rosa Clay, the Namibian girl who through missionary intervention was taken from her native Omaruru to live life as “the only black Finn” (55) before her immigration to the United States. In “Lessons to Learn in the Story of Rosa” (53–59), Anna Rastas discusses the importance of Rosa’s story for later generations of Finns of African descent as they search for identity and meaning in their adopted country. More, the story is an occasion for original Finns to ponder their “colonial complicity” (57), though their nation never held a colony, and to think how subtle racial attitudes may prejudice their approach to others today. The book is impressively illustrated in color with historic and current photographs and charts. The articles, though short (averaging under eight pages) and unfootnoted, usually conclude with bibliographies, many of them extensive. The pagination does not correspond with the table of contents, perhaps a software error of the online edition. (I’ve used the online pagination for this review.) My impression that the book emphasizes an academic approach was strengthened by the cryptic concluding comment of Napandulwe Shiweda and Romie Nghitevelekwa’s article: “[T]he current discourse on Finnish influence remains firmly grounded in the precepts of modernism, and not necessarily on the significance of alterations in material culture and local practices” (52). I take this to mean that they disciplined themselves to describe the data, with restrained interpretive comments or attempts at synthesis. I would [End Page 483] propose this is generally true of the articles. It means that readers with a scientific epoché-style reserve will be more satisfied with this volume than those seeking historical or philosophical integration. Mark Nygard St. Paul, Minnesota Copyright © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc

Science Fiction, Spectacle, and the Art of Political Distraction

Science Fiction, Spectacle, and the Art of Political Distraction Gregory S. Aldrete One of the few concepts about ancient Rome that has penetrated the mass cultural consciousness is the notion that its rulers kept the populace complacent and politically inert by distracting them with violent entertainments and free food, an idea often expressed by the phrase "bread and circuses," which appears in a poem by the Roman author Juvenal. Unlikely as it might seem, the dynamic encapsulated in Juvenal's poetry has exerted widespread influence on science-fiction films and TV shows from the 1960s to the 2010s, and indeed has functioned as the inspiration behind some of the most popular sci-fi plots of that time. This article examines how the "bread and circuses" motif has been manifested in these celluloid visions of futuristic dystopias, focusing on one representative example from each decade: the "Bread and Circuses" episode of the original Star Trek series and the films Rollerball, The Running Man, The Matrix, The Hunger Games, and Ready Player One. The genre of science fiction is often useful more for what it reveals about the fears, concerns, and desires of the era that produces it than for offering accurate predictions of the future, and, for each film, this article additionally considers how its particular take on "bread and circuses" reflects the zeitgeist of the decade in which it was created. Juvenal's "Bread and Circuses" Dictum What unites all of the following films: The Hunger Games, Rollerball, The Matrix, The Running Man, and Ready Player One? One obvious answer is that they are all popular science-fiction films, but another, more interesting commonality is that all their basic plots revolve around a premise encapsulated in and popularized by a 2000-year-old line of poetry written by the Roman satirical poet Juvenal, who lived during the latter half of the first century CE. In his 10th Satire, Juvenal writes of the Roman citizenry: "the people who once upon a time bestowed military commands, high civil offices, legions, and everything else, now restrains itself, and instead, eagerly hopes for just two things: bread and circuses" (10.77-81). The "bread" that Juvenal refers to was the free monthly grain dole that citizens of the capital city were eligible to collect, and the "circuses" were violent public spectacles, such as gladiator games in the amphitheater and chariot races staged in the enormous racetrack called the Circus Maximus. What Juvenal is asserting here is that, during the Roman Empire, the previously highly engaged and politically active Roman people traded away their political power in exchange for basic sustenance and mindless entertainment. Rome's rulers deliberately kept the populace in a complacent and inert state by continually plying them with handouts of free food and lavish, violent shows. This concept is usually expressed in shorthand by the expression "bread and circuses," or occasionally in the original Latin version, panem et circenses. Unlikely as it might sound, the idea expressed in Juvenal's poetry has exerted widespread influence on science-fiction films of the last half-century, and indeed this line has sometimes even functioned as a direct inspiration for some of the most popular sci-fi plots of that time. There are dozens of films that could be included under the "bread and circuses" rubric, but, in order to keep this article to a reasonable length while still suggesting how the theme has developed over [End Page 4] time, the analysis will focus on just one representative film from each decade.1 While ancient Roman poetry and cinematic sci-fi dystopias might seem an odd combination, because of the popularity of the sci-fi film genre, investigating their intertwined history is also illuminating for what it reveals about classical reception in mass culture. Indeed, my interest in this subject was aroused when, on the first day of class in a course on Roman civilization that I regularly taught, I asked my students to jot down what came to mind when they thought of ancient Rome, and the three most common responses were these: a man reclining on luxurious pillows, being fed grapes by half-naked women; the cartoon-figure mascot of the...

The Intertwined History of Malingering and Brain Injury: An Argument for Structural Competency in Traumatic Brain Injury.

Every year millions of people suffer minor brain injuries, many of which occur in collision sports. While there has been substantial commentary and debate about the nature of this public health crisis, it is clear that the scientific and clinical arguments reflect values preferences and judgments that are often invisible in documents which combine artful language with undue focus paid to sources of uncertainty at the cost of clarity and transparency. This essay gives a brief history of these patterns and proposes a remedy.

The Pacific Proving Grounds and the Proliferation of Settler Environmentalism

Runit Dome is an eighteen-inch thick concrete dome covering the buried nuclear waste from twenty-three atomic tests conducted by the US military in the 1940s and ’50s in Pikinni Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Known to locals as “The Tomb,” it is leaking into the Pacific Ocean, in part because of the rising sea levels produced by global warming. Runit Dome brings climate change into direct relation with the legacies of nuclear imperialism in the Marshall Islands. This essay examines how Cold War securitization paradigms problematically inform the ecological management strategies developed by international policy-making entities such as the United Nations in the mid-twentieth century. While much literary and cultural scholarship on the rise of the nuclear age has focused on the concomitant rise of insecurities about body and environment under the duress of wartime, this essay crafts a different but intertwined history, showing how the transformation of the Pacific Ocean into a nuclear testing ground was parlayed into governmental projects for the remaking of life itself under the auspices of risk management. Military-backed and government-funded scientific experiments with nuclear and other weapons throughout the Pacific suggest a new phase in US imperial world-making, as the ecologies of waters, islands, sea creatures, and Pacific Islanders were turned into experimental materials for modeling shifts in social and ecological forms of governance. When environmental protections take for granted concepts such as enclosure, risk management, and Enlightenment formulations of property-owning and rights-bearing subjects, they manifest a settler environmentalism that too easily paves the way for capitalist regeneration under the aegis of eco-development projects rather than systemic change that understands human, nonhuman, and environment to be always already in relation. To break from perpetually extractive relations to land, sea, and life, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s video poem “Anointed” models how environmental futures must reckon with the causes of past and ongoing harm, and this essay concludes with a brief reflection on this poet-activist’s work.

New books & media

x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking GenderSection:ChooseTop of pagex + y: A Mathematician’s ... <<Tycho Brahe and the Measu...Anti-vaxxers: How to Chal... x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender, Eugenia Cheng, Basic Books, 2020, $28.00 Women face more barriers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics than men. To get at the root of the problem, Eugenia Cheng explores personal characteristics in her new book, x + y. She argues that society values ingressive behaviors, such as being competitive and independent, more than congressive ones, such as being collaborative and caring toward others. But if we focus less on whether those characteristics have masculine and feminine connotations and instead redefine successful people to include those with predominantly congressive behaviors, the representation of women and other underrepresented groups in science may improve. —al Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the HeavensSection:ChooseTop of pagex + y: A Mathematician’s ...Tycho Brahe and the Measu... <<Anti-vaxxers: How to Chal... Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens, John Robert Christianson, Reaktion Books, 2020, $22.50 A new biography aims to restore early modern Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe to what the author, historian John Robert Christianson, asserts is his rightful place as a “world-class figure of the late Renaissance.” Richly illustrated and based on a detailed analysis of Tycho’s surviving texts, Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens also draws on significant new scholarship written in the Nordic languages. Christianson deftly depicts Tycho’s tumultuous relationship with his one-time assistant Johannes Kepler, while paying careful attention to the context of Tycho’s position in the Danish and Bohemian courts and the sociopolitical ramifications of the Reformation. Ultimately, Christianson argues that Tycho’s empirical methods had a “profound and enduring” effect on the history of science. The book is required reading for scholars of early modern astronomy. —rd Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed MovementSection:ChooseTop of pagex + y: A Mathematician’s ...Tycho Brahe and the Measu...Anti-vaxxers: How to Chal... << Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement, Jonathan M. Berman, MIT Press, 2020, $19.95 (paper) Written by renal physiologist and science educator Jonathan Berman, Anti-vaxxers is a how-to guide for those looking to counter rising anti-vaccine sentiment across the globe. Nevertheless, much of the book describes the intertwined history of vaccinations and anti-vaccine movements; surprisingly, Berman shows that anti-vaccine sentiment has existed since the first vaccine was developed in the 19th century. Today the movement is fueled by social media, “fake news,” and other disinformation. Berman argues that “community-based” strategies that consider the identity and values of parents and groups targeted by anti-vaxxers are the most likely to succeed in convincing them of vaccine safety. The book will be of interest to science-minded parents and policymakers alike. —rd © 2020 American Institute of Physics.

The Intertwined Histories of Resident Education and Pediatric Hospital Medicine in the US.

The histories of pediatric resident education and pediatric hospital medicine (PHM) are intertwined. PHM, now a new subspecialty, is generally considered to have emerged from the hospitalist movement in the late 1990s but is actually what some influential pediatricians in the 19th century envisioned for pediatrics in the United States, comparable to the British model. The prime focus of resident education during the 20th century remained hospital care, even during the years of national concern regarding the need for more primary care physicians. Various changes in resident education have contributed to the rise of PHM as a subspecialty. Requirements for subspecialty certification in PHM have implications for general residency training in pediatrics.

‘No better story to tell’: framing anti-colonialism in the aid exposé documentary

ABSTRACT This essay identifies the emergence of the aid exposé documentary, a set of contemporary films that overtly challenge the moral benevolence and economic function of humanitarian and development aid. These films are situated within a broader twenty-first century public critique of aid but constitute an aesthetic divergence from the images of suffering found in the long, intertwined history of visual media and humanitarianism. Against that backdrop, aid exposé films frame themselves as anti-colonial correctives to aid’s structural exclusion, elevating conflicting notions of entrepreneurialism and the process of popular sovereignty. The essay argues that the aid exposé is a malleable genre, mobilised to both consolidate and challenge the conditions of neoliberalism, and thus marks an important popularisation of the ongoing ‘aid debate’.

Graphic geography: drawing territories at the Po Delta (Italy)

Geography and the graphic image have a long, intertwined history of exchange. In recent scholarship, the graphic image plays an important role in geography’s creative (re)turn and geographers are experimenting with new visual languages and creative practices to carry out research and communicate with wider audiences. This paper explores geography as a ‘graphic’ discipline that represents and produces spatial knowledge by experimenting with scribing, a verbo-visual technique. In the first part of the article, we propose an auto-ethnographic account of a residential seminar with students in Local and Sustainable Territorial Development, held in 2017 at the Po Delta (Italy), where we experimented with scribing as a tool for geographical fieldwork and spatial storytelling, understanding it as a practice for seeing beyond representing territories. The second more theoretical part of the paper presents scribing as a means to respond to the increasing need for more creative visualisation tools in qualitative research and highlights the performative potential of scribing as a practice/product for thinking about space. The graphic product of scribing results from an intersubjective dialogue and is used to develop spatial analyses and disseminate geographical research beyond academic boundaries, engaging non-expert audiences and local communities.

The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, by Caoimhín De Barra

Reviewed by: The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales by Caoimhín De Barra Lisa Weihman (bio) The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, by Caoimhín De Barra; pp. xi + 360. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018, $45.00. The myth of a shared Celtic origin in Ireland and Wales during the nineteenth century was a powerful force in the intertwined history of both nations, as Caoimhín De Barra’s beautifully written, deeply researched book, The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, brings to light. Using newspaper archives to search for the terms Celt and Celtic, De Barra finds relatively little use of the label prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Celtic identity emerges from a hazy origin myth into an ideal vehicle for nationalist aspirations. “Over a twenty-year period, linguistic scholars gave the Celts a sense of prestige, scientists gave them a racial categorization, archaeologists gave them a glorious past, and littérateurs gave them easily identifiable characteristics,” De Barra writes. In response to the repression of the Irish language and the rapid Anglicization of both Wales and Ireland, De Barra argues, Celtic identity “offered a durable foundation upon which to construct a national identity, as well as a sense of a common bond among the other groups in the United Kingdom in the face of England’s growing political, industrial, and demographic might” (28). The relative success of the Welsh in preserving their language and culture during the nineteenth century inspired Irish cultural nationalists and language revivalists to do the same, and the relationship between the Irish and the Welsh during these years is the primary focus of De Barra’s research. To the Irish, the thriving population of Welsh speakers and vibrant Welsh print culture offered a vision of hope. The Society for the [End Page 661] Preservation of the Irish Language, founded in 1876, and the Gaelic League, in 1893, established ties with similar groups in Wales. As De Barra writes, “Many Irish nationalists were enthralled by the example of the Welsh language because they believed that the circumstances faced by the Irish language at the end of the nineteenth century were identical to those faced by the Welsh a century earlier” (39). De Barra convincingly argues that this vision of Welsh success was inaccurate; Wales had never faced the sort of devastation that the Great Famine brought to Ireland, and the proportion of the population who spoke Welsh decreased substantially throughout the nineteenth century. From the Irish point of view, however, the preservation of the Welsh language, music, and literature was a goal Ireland should strive to match. While celebrating a shared if largely invented Celtic identity brought Irish and Welsh language enthusiasts and cultural nationalists into an ongoing conversation about what it meant to be Celtic, there were also cross-cultural barriers beyond the mutual incomprehensibility of the two languages. How the Irish read the Welsh and how the Welsh read the Irish is one of the most compelling aspects of De Barra’s work, grounded in his analysis of contemporary periodicals. The largely Nonconformist population of Wales often associated the Irish with criminality, poverty, and Catholicism; the rise of Catholic nationalism in the ranks of the Gaelic League would provoke similar suspicion of the Welsh by the Irish. De Barra traces the concurrent rise of Home Rule movements in both countries from the 1880s onward, from the rise of the Land League in Ireland to its influence on the Cymru Fydd movement in Wales between 1885 and 1896. De Barra’s central chapters trace the foundation of Pan-Celtic organizations in an era when many pan-nationalist groups were rising out of racial, linguistic, and geographic affinities across Europe, strengthened by the rise of mass literacy throughout the nineteenth century. From the ashes of the short-lived Pan-Celtic Society came Edmund Fournier and Lord Castletown’s Celtic Association, through which Fournier believed “the Celtic love of beauty would save humanity from the soulless excess of the modern world” (115). The Celtic Association promoted regular contact among...

“Fatally Tied Together”: The Intertwined History of Kurds and Armenians in the 20th Century

More than a century years ago Talât Pasha declared famously that in the Eastern Provinces “The Armenian question does not exist anymore”. Today, far from being resolved, the former binary coding (Armenian/Turkish) is even further complicated by a third element— the ongoing Kurdish question (doza Kurdistanê). While most research and journalistic works frame the Armenian issue and the Kurdish issue as two separate events that merely coincide(d) in the same geographical space, this work explores their interdependence and the historical trajectories of two peoples fatally “tied together” across a spatio-temporal scale. In my paper I identify two opposing lines of continuity through which both peoples are tied together: friendly and fatal ties. With regard to the first (friendly ties), I turn to the SSR Armenia and her role in fostering Kurdish culture and advancing Kurdish nationalism. Hereby, I argue that a marginalized community of Kurmanji-speakers—the Yezidis, previously othered as “devil-worshippers” (şeytanperest)— emerged as the vanguard in forging a novel, secularized Kurdish national identity. With regard to the latter (fatal ties), I link the irrevocable erasure of Ottoman Armenians to the emergence of an imagined “Northern Kurdistan” stretching over large parts of historic Armenia. This, finally, raises the question of Kurdish complicity in the Armenian Genocide—as state-mobilized regiments, tribal members and ordinary residents—in a geography where, as Recep Maraşlı put it, the descendants “are the children of both perpetrators and victims alike”.

Archives of German Anthropology and Colonialism in Philip Scheffner’sThe Halfmoon Files

This article examines German filmmaker Philip Scheffner’s 2007 film The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story about the Halfmoon Camp, a German WWI colonial prisoner-of-war camp. Extensive anthropological research was carried out upon its prisoners, and the camp was also the subject of popular colonial representations. Scholars and others made sound recordings, photographs, films, and drawings and recorded details of prisoners, this documentation now located in German archives. The film considers intertwined histories of German anthropology and colonialism at the camp by means of such documents and is also drawn to traces and mediated presences of individuals held there, evoked especially through sound recordings. Moreover, it looks searchingly at contemporary landscapes for traces and repression of this colonial history. Overall, the film is characterised by a sense of incompleteness of the archive, a layering of visual and aural techniques of display and absence, and metaphors of haunting, producing a ‘ghost story’.