Mainstream History Research Articles

Church and State relations in Lesotho: A historical review locating the voice of the church in Lesotho’s political and mainstream history

The year 2024 sees Lesotho celebrate 200 years since the formation of Basotho as a nation. In these 200 years, the church has played a significant role in nation building and development. This article explores and seeks to locate the voice and presence of the church both as an ecumenical body and as a prophetic voice within the tumultuous history of Lesotho’s politics with a specific timeframe from 1833-2002. A literature review of relevant academic articles as well as historical works is used to ensure that the accounts recorded are factually correct. The formation of Basotho in the 18th century is a direct result of violence and war in the form of Lifaqane. King Moshoeshoe I, founder of the Basotho nation believed that peace could be procured via the presence of missionaries, therefore denoting the establishment of the church as an important factor. Within Lesotho’s mainstream history, the role played by the church has often been referred to in passing. Common sayings like “Baruti ba Moshoeshoe (Moshoeshoe’s pastors/ministers), and Lesotho ke naha ea Bokresete (Lesotho is a Christian nation)” are often quoted, and yet the actual role that the church has played and continues to play in Lesotho’s history and development has been an after-thought. In light of this, this article locates the role that the church has played in different eras of Lesotho’s history. From the establishment of the 1 st church (Protestant Church) in Morija, to the formation of ecumenical bodies such as The Heads of the Churches and Church Council of Lesotho to the current emerging coalition democracies under the constitutional monarchy.

Novelistic heteroglossia in Khwabnama and its aesthetical ventures in reshaping historical narratives

ABSTRACT The present article critically appreciates the novel Khwabnama by the famous Bengali writer Akhteruzzaman Elias. I have carried out a reading emphasizing the artistic possibilities the novel can provide in re-viewing history. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the novel, I have shown that Khwabnama provides a picture of collective human existence in tandem with a particular moment in political history through its primary focus on subaltern lives, often omitted or “misrepresented” in mainstream history. In this respect, it is consistent with some of the main assumptions of Subaltern Studies. However, the novel is more interested in discovering the form of actual living than in formulating a fixed structure for the history of the underprivileged. To this end, the book skillfully uses some of the techniques of fiction—such as magical realism—in its style. The essay shows that the novel hints at some structural propositions about history and human existence, which can only happen through the mediation of literary aesthetics.

Built environment of community enterprise and culture against odds-the case of Kochi on the west coast of India

PurposeThis study aims to read ritual performances, built forms and cultural undertones of traumatic migration in the settlements of people at the periphery of mainstream history at Mattancherry in Kochi, India. Interactions between their culture, faith, location, ethnicity and community enterprise are explored. This study is essential in the context of negative social perceptions of internal migration and migrants.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology is ethnography and includes interdisciplinary fieldwork of transect walks, participant observations, unstructured interviews and architectural documentation. Secondary references were community publications and scholarly journals.FindingsConstant resilient rebuilding was possible through shared identity and community enterprise. Community temples, monastic institutions, volunteer groups and emerging high-net-worth individuals contributed to nurturing this identity. The temple rituals encouraged an egalitarian outlook. Throughout the settlement’s existence, the centrality of the temple and its religious activities remained constant. Community cohesion and endogamous practices create a cultural island distinct from the general population. Community enterprise also meant contribution to prosperity as productive citizens in the region and beyond.Originality/valueReligion and shared history-based ethnic community enterprise for survival and prosperity postmigration are observed in this settlement. The conducive entrepreneurial atmosphere is set in its historical, cultural and religious context. This study can, therefore, provide insights for policymakers and academia about the interactions between culture, faith and history during the entrepreneurial process. The cultural context is explored as a backdrop of community enterprise posttraumatic migration, informing societal perceptions about migration and migrants.

Ethos of Revisionist History in Krishna Sen Ichchhuk’s Poems

This study attempts to explore and analyze how Ichchhuk revisits the official history of Nepal and rewrites it from the perspective of marginalized group in his poems “Haata Lagyo Sunya” (Achieved Zero in Hand), “Machha-Machha Bhyaguto” (Fish-Fish Frog) and “Euta Gauleko Diary” (One Villager’s Diary). It also projects how the poet blurs the boundary between fact and fiction in the light of new-historicist perspective that gives equal value to both history and literature. This research seeks to find out how the poet brings forth the history from the below and problematizes the history from the top model that has been characterized with the deceptive discourse of freedom, equality, democracy and human rights. The paper displays what contributing factors are responsible to dismantle the mainstream history and write history of the people. It also depicts the poet’s appeal to people with optimistic feeling and revolutionary spirit to create unity among the people of the margin and fight back against the powerful rulers to bring new sunshine in human life being liberated from the oppressive clutch of the feudal and fascist leaders who always deceive the people with illusive fish history. This article demonstrates Ichchhuk’s courage, will power and life force to valorize the common people’s history and to defy the official history. To justify how history should be rewritten, the researcher uses the new-historicist ideas of Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher. This research work shows how poets like Ichchhuk raise consciousness in marginalized people of the world and raise voice in order to establish an egalitarian human society dismantling the official history and writing the inclusive history of the people.

Early Black Thought Leaders and the Reframing of American Intellectual History

Abstract: This essay examines the broad impact of African American thought leadership on early American intellectual history. Though marginalized in many mainstream histories of American intellectual life–which often focus on the emergence of Black philosophers and Black professional historians later in the 19th century -- early national Black thinkers helped shape public understanding of critical ideas in American society and politics, including the meaning of citizenship and civil rights, emancipation and equality, and racial justice. African Americans also influenced public discourses on other key topics in American intellectual life, including the nature of human dignity and spiritual redemption in the Second Great Awakening, the meaning of Romanticism and Transcendentalism in American reform culture, and the authority of science and technology in antebellum society. Using the concept of thought leadership as a framing device to understand the power and impact of early Black ideas, I follow recent trends in the field of African American intellectual history that focus on that way that African American men and women became public authorities on key ideas and issues in American culture between the American Revolution and Civil War. Though they did not often occupy positions of educational, institutional, or legal power (the main provinces of intellectual leadership), Black thought leaders had a significant impact on early American intellectual history.

The making of neoliberal legality: the legal imagination of business elites and the ‘social constitutionalization’ of ‘free enterprise’ in Latin America

AbstractThe ‘free enterprise’ system is a normative cornerstone of many Latin American political constitutions and a formative principle of neoliberal legality. However, the way in which this economic model shapes the legal field and conceptions of the rule of law remains understudied. Though lawyers, judges, and legal experts have played an important role in the legal buttressing of the free enterprise model, this article explores the shaping of neoliberal legality from the periphery of the juridical system. We argue that the rise of neoliberal legality in Latin America owes much to the legal imaginary crafted by business associations. In line with this, we examine the ‘norm entrepreneurship’ undertaken since the 1940s by an organization barely noted in mainstream histories of neoliberalism: the Inter‐American Council for Commerce and Production (IACCP). Drawing on the concept of social constitutionalism and archival work, we investigate the IACCP's role in the struggle to give business activities social legitimacy and establish free enterprise as a socio‐legal norm and a source of public law.

The Subaltern Precincts of 'Kakkukali' by Francis Norona

This paper attempts to establish that Kakkukali' (Hop-Scotch) , a short fiction in Malayalam by Francis Norona is a proof of the existence of subaltern consciousness, praxis and agency. Mainstream historians and narrators have systematically submerged the social, political and cultural contributions of the subaltern communities into the larger rubrics like nationalism, freedom fight, feminism, marxism etc. Latin Catholic community ,a subaltern community in Kerala is represented in the story mapping the culture of a community through its language, life style and the way the main character constitutes the meaning of life.

The Unnamed: Exploring the Erasure of Women from the History of Ghana

In this paper, I reflect on the contribution of Ghanaian nationalist women towards the independence struggle and post-independence nation building (1950–1970), and their erasure from the mainstream history of Ghana. I rely on the literature on women’s political participation in Ghana and the scholarship on memorializing people for meritorious service in Ghana to explore women as victims of historical erasure. I also deploy other sources like the national currencies, commemorative dates, and naming of monuments to highlight the relative weight we attach to women’s and men’s political contribution to nation building. I argue that despite women’s frontal roles, including movement making, organizing prowess, founding parties, leading civil disruptions, and even funding the independence of Ghana, state-led commemorative acts and memorializing practices belie women’s effort and historize men as founders of Ghana. Such de-historizing is often endorsed by male-led political regimes. To ameliorate this masculinization of the memorializing concern, the paper proffers guidelines to enable a fairer memorializing practice. This includes acknowledging the gender biases in our memorializing practices, researching the unnamed leading women, making their information mainstream, renaming our already named monuments to include leading women, and embossing their portraits on our national currencies alongside the men.

The Echoes of Subaltern’s Misery in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

In his magnum opus, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini mirrors the misery and dehumanization of indefensible Hazaras, an ethnic group of Afghanistan. The novel illustrates the pathetic conditions of the Hazaras as a subaltern minority in the background of the political turmoil in Afghanistan. As marginalized people, they endure both physical and psychological oppression imposed by the Pashtuns, who believe themselves as superior and consider the Hazaras as others. Though the Hazaras are suppressed with physical violence, verbal abuse, slavery, genocide, etc., they are found indefensible in behaviour. Their silence to social domination points to how the mainstream history has gauged the voice of lower strata working class peasants in Afghanistan. The paper aims to explore the misery of Hazaras as a subaltern group, illuminating their endurance in response to injustice imposed on them. It primarily focuses upon the silence of Ali and Hassan to injustice and discrimination which signifies them as subaltern characters. The paper employs subaltern approaches as suggested by Antonio Gramsci, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The paper ultimately agrees with the view of Spivak that subalterns cannot speak for their rights and justice.

Studying and Teaching Gender-Caste Histories in India: Problems, Possibilities, and Pleasures

Amid a larger context of political and social changes in India, this article reflects on a personal-academic trajectory and the problems, possibilities, and pleasures of teaching and researching histories of gender and caste in modern India at the University of Delhi for more than three decades. As a feminist historian, the author first points to some of the limitations in her early years of teaching courses on gender, where she occluded caste as a category of analysis. However, an examination of the conjunctions between anti-caste thought and gender through a Dalit feminist pedagogical lens led to shifts in her curriculum and academic scholarship. The article goes on to discuss how preparing and teaching courses on gender-caste histories pose many challenges in terms of queries from the university administration, curriculum design, pedagogic practices, and student responses. Classroom spaces are highly politicized in India, with pronounced gender, caste, class, and linguistic identities that often overlap with each other, which has implications for teaching and research. Finally, the article deliberates on the creative possibilities of such courses and pedagogical strategies, as students critique the crafting of mainstream history writing, feel drawn to new theoretical tools and methodologies that rely on different archival registers, and question the erasure of caste as an analytic, in the process also making the classroom a more democratic space.

Putting Russia's Ban in Historical Perspective: A Curated Interview

Putting Russia's Ban in Historical Perspective: A Curated Interview

Born on the bombsite: reconstruction and the maternal body in Beth Jukes’s The Cradle (1949)

This article considers an unknown work by an overlooked sculptor: Beth Jukes’s The Cradle (1949), which she carved from a salvaged block of stone on a reclaimed bombsite opposite the Sir John Cass Technical Institute, where she taught sculpture between 1946 and 1975. Women sculptors such as Jukes, who moved between their own practice and teaching, have fallen out of the more mainstream histories of sculpture, thus limiting the attention that their work deserves. This article draws on material in the Jukes family archive to introduce her contribution as a pioneering woman to studies of post-war British sculpture, pedagogy and narratives around reconstruction. Placing a mother and child work in the context of the bombsite, The Cradle affords new perspectives on sculpture and motherhood, linking reproduction and reconstruction directly through the location. Read against the backdrop of women’s roles in the post-war period, when the ‘mother figure’ became a symbol of social restoration and the bedrock of reconstruction after the Blitz, this article questions to what extent the maternal reproductive body was the site of recovery.

Sound of Silence: Locating the Agency of Voice in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide operates in the archipelago of the Sunderbans and explores characters who reside in different quadrants of the socio-political map, navigating the difficult nexus between the survival of humans and conservation of the non-human. The key to this navigation is an important, and often ignored, historical event in his fiction—the Marichjhapi massacre of 1979. The massacre was enabled by West Bengal government’s primacy on ecology and disregard for the fundamental rights of the people. This massacre and its impact on subsequent generations of that locality have been brushed aside in Indian mainstream history. Events of Marichjhapi have been deemed problematic for both nationalist sentiment and environmental conservation—two things that were of growing popularity during that time. In his narrative of deltas and dolphins, Ghosh manages to carve out the space for such a difficult event regarding people through a literary device that is often personal—a diary. Ghosh’s narrativization of the events in Marichjhapi through Nirmal’s diary, along with his characterization of local representatives such as Fokir, gives new understandings of the sufferings faced by the marginalized communities and the narrative challenges of relaying their voices—while showing the interconnectivity of people and their environment at large.

Sexuality as a Subversive Force in Erica Jong’s Fear of Dying

Women have been marginalized and pushed to the periphery of the society all these years. They are marginalized in terms of gender and sexuality. They were confined to private sphere and was restricted from participating in the public sphere or mainstream society. There was no representation of women in the mainstream history. With the passage of time, women started to claim their rights. They started deconstructing the popular notion of mainstream history in order to provide equal space for women. Erica Jong in Fear of Dying also displays the anxiety of ageing in a woman’s perspective. Through the work, the author unsettles the notion of fear towards ageing and death. Erica Jong in Fear of Dying is trying to give women an authoritative and rational voice by challenging the patriarchal rules. Vanessa, a 60 year old actress in the story, reflects the condition of women and challenges the patriarchal rules. The novel explicitly represents those activities and lifestyles which helps women to move from passive agents to active agents. Through Vanessa, Jong exhorts women to move out of existing patriarchal system and discover their identity as separate from male defined identity of women.

Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States by Samantha Seeley

Reviewed by: Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States by Samantha Seeley Alaina E. Roberts (bio) Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States. By Samantha Seeley. (Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 368. Cloth, $34.95.) Historians have often traced the deliberate delineation of the American populace by analyzing the development of political or social rights in the United States. In Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain, Samantha Seeley adds to these two categories the trajectory of national removal policy. Seeley puts a welcome spin on the history of migration in North America by linking the historiographies of white western expansion, Native American history (intertribal power struggles, Euro-American invasion, and Native resistance), and African American history (colonization, Black homesteading, and legal petitions). She argues that removal, or refusal to move, was used by Native Americans and African Americans as ways to assert their identities as citizens (or their desires not to become such), express freedom and humanity, shift policy, and build community—even as white Americans attempted to use it, conversely, to “shape the racial geography of the nation” in an exclusionary manner (3). Rightfully laying bare the fallacy that forced Native American migration began in the so-called removal era, Seeley builds on the work of such scholars as Kathleen DuVal, John P. Bowes, Claudio Saunt, and Stuart Banner, among others, to demonstrate the long lineage of land cessions, theft, and violence that forced Native people out of their homes from the 1700s on. [End Page 566] The white Americans pressuring Native and Black people to move off their homelands or to not move to certain regions could be political leaders, but they also were everyday settlers using violence or the law. Furthermore, Seeley draws out the complexities in Native American movement. Native people, themselves, such as the Powhatan, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the tribal alliance that precipitated Pontiac’s War, pursued efforts to control regions, peoples, and goods, often ending in the death, enslavement, and dispersal of Native women and men. Some of these power struggles were directly related to Euro-Americans, while others were not. The book is broken up into two parts, the first dedicated to Native American history and the second to African American history (though there is some overlap within). This is a stylistic choice that allows Seeley to provide breadth on each group’s interactions with the American settler state before bringing them together to emphasize their similarities and differences in her two concluding chapters. While I appreciated part 1, part 2 does the most work to not only prove Seeley’s argument, but also bring together scholarship that is not always thoughtfully connected. Native history is nearly always conceived in terms of movement, even if only with regard to the 1830 Removal Act. On the other hand, outside of the Great Migration, the importance and commonplace nature of Black movement still seemingly has not made its way into most mainstream histories of African America. Seeley offers a way to rectify this. We know, through the work of Manisha Sinha, Claude Clegg, and others, that the movements for abolition and colonization were complex; they included both African Americans who looked to emigration as the solution to issues of racism and economic opportunity and Black people who viewed staying in the United States as a right, if not a duty. Moreover, a number of books examine Black homesteading in the 1700s and early 1800s as a way of claiming rights and citizenship and of avoiding racism. Some recent works in this vein include Anna-Lisa Cox’s The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality (2018) and Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021). Seeley’s analysis connects these two schools, while also broadening our view of the varied reasons African Americans saw place as an important facet of their identities, a source of protection, and something valuable enough to fight to...

This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s ed. by Sara Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin

Reviewed by: This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s ed. by Sara Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin Julie McCown This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s. Edited by Sara Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. ix + 281 pp. Illustrations, selected bibliography, contributors, index. $24.95 paper. With a title that evokes both a quintessential American folk song and a foundational work of feminist utopian fiction, This Land Is Herland centers on Oklahoma as a space of juxtapositions and contrasts. Editors Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin bring together a collection of thirteen essays exploring how women in Oklahoma engaged in community and political activism. These biographical essays present narratives of Oklahoma women, offering “a glimpse into the complexities of women’s activism as they sought to define the physical, social, and political spaces in which they lived” (279). The activist causes taken up by these women range from suffrage, child welfare, civil rights, Native rights, and LGBTQ rights. The book is organized into three loosely themed chronological sections. Part 1, which spans from the 1870s to the 1920s, looks at the years surrounding Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and “[explores] the fluidity of power with which women took advantage of a society in flux by fashioning their own communities and identities” (3). Part 2, perhaps the most cohesively themed section, focuses exclusively on the “gendered politics in civil rights activism in Oklahoma from the 1920s through the 1960s” (121). Part 3, covering the 1970s to the 2010s, explores various “contested notions of equality” involved in the issues of “Indigenous rights and sovereignty, the Equal Rights Amendment, LGBTQ+ rights, and the conservative politics of motherhood” (4–5). [End Page 365] Across all sections, the writers frequently emphasize how stories of Oklahoma women have often been neglected and marginalized, as well as how the women self-fashioned identities and wielded significant political power founded in community and relationships. Although focusing exclusively on cisgender women, the book tells the stories of several BIPOC women, as well as women from all ends of the political spectrum. While the chapters carefully catalog and showcase the accomplishments and successes of each woman, they also reveal the costs resulting from the women’s activism. Janda and Loughlin conclude that “Oklahoma is a land that has been shaped by generations of determined women who skillfully—some more so than others—navigated gender role constructions, legal and political constraints, and racial and ethnic discrimination to create change” (280). This Land Is Herland is an accessible, readable collection that shines a spotlight on women’s lives and work that often fall outside mainstream histories of the American West, and as such, it is a useful entry point into further research for both scholars and students. Julie McCown English Department Southern Utah University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s ed. by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin

Reviewed by: This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010sed. by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin Courtney Kisat This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s. Edited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin. Women and the American West. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 303. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6926-2.) Scholars of gender, rural, and western American history will find much to celebrate in This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s. The first installment of the Women and the American West series, which is edited by Renée M. Laegreid and published by the University of Oklahoma Press, the volume presents thirteen essays that profile Oklahoma women over time and space. Central to these essays are the notions of belonging and agency: to whom do the rights of a citizen belong, how have they been claimed and refuted, and how does this reshape our understanding of the American West? This scholarship is merely the latest effort at correcting the historiography of the American West, a movement that began in 1982 when the Coalition [End Page 600]for Western Women's History formed to highlight the lack of historical attention on western women's lived experiences and to refute the mainstream, overmasculinized version of the American West. Since then, historians looking to see the past through a more gendered lens have produced valuable scholarship shaped by more inventive ways of imagining the spaces in which women have worked, lived, and died. This Land Is Herlandcontributes much to this vibrant field of western women's history. The anthology's editors, Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, both of whom are noted historians of gender and the American West, have woven a historical tapestry that artfully represents the activism of Oklahoma women from a variety of socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds between the 1870s and the 2010s. The anthology is organized into three parts and represents the work of a dozen professional historians, adding much to a field that is finally receiving well-deserved attention in mainstream history. Part 1 examines themes of activism, radicalism, and maternalism through the lives of five remarkable women who worked within the bounds of gender norms to help shape their fledgling communities in the postbellum era through statehood in 1907. Part 2 delves into the long civil rights movement in Oklahoma, offering profiles of four courageous women from the 1920s through the 1960s, women who remained determined to improve society even as opposition mounted and consequences loomed large. Part 3 concludes the anthology with four essays covering women who fought for their vision of equality from the 1970s through the 2010s. As the culture wars of the times increased in intensity, the authors explain, so too did each woman's determination to win the day, even in the face of devastating consequences to their liberty and property. By way of critique, the subjectivity of some authors raises questions about potentially overcorrecting the historical record, while other points are weakened by unsubstantiated claims. For example, one author explains that an illustration is "possibly" that of her subject, but as "there are no confirmed" photographs of her, the reader is asked to instead imagine the woman in the photo as representative of the women who occupied that space and time (p. 136). If a specific figure becomes impossible to document through traditional research, where does the historian's due diligence lie, and where does it factor into an imagining of the spaces occupied by people such as those under study in this volume? These questions will continue to provoke scholars who produce scholarship on women's experiences across time and place. The women profiled in This Land Is Herlandremained fluid in tactics, rhetoric, and activism by necessity, because they operated in a world dominated by men. Each utilized the tools of maternalism, social capital, and political persuasion to advance their particular view of a society in Oklahoma. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote Herlandin 1915, describing a society as a feminist utopia completely free from male presence. As the historians in...

Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History by Germano Maifreda

Reviewed by: Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History by Germano Maifreda Elena Lolli Germano Maifreda, Italya. Storie di ebrei, storia italiana [Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History]. Laterza: Bari-Roma, 2021. 341 pp. €24.00. ISBN: 9788858143896 A melting pot of cultures in the heart of Western Christendom, Italy, or the "island of divine dew," as described by the creative Hebrew etymology I-tal-ya, has seen a diversified presence of native, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic Jews for over two millennia. The Italian-Jewish coexistence and interaction has had a great historical impact on society that contributed to the identity-making and evolution of the country. However, despite an exceptionally long Jewish existence in the peninsula that dates back to Roman times, most Italians still think about Jews' vicissitudes as something apart from the nation's mainstream history. Jews have always been seen as an isolated, passive, and persecuted minority, and thus, their history is usually considered separate from the general one. As the title underlines, Germano Maifreda aims to dismantle such historiographical misconceptions, which are principally due to the fact that for many years the events relating to Italian Jews have been mainly reconstructed by scholars through the documentation produced by the majority society, thus leading to the emergence of fallacious metanarratives. The author argues that without taking into account the sources produced within the Jewish communities, the historical process of assimilation between Jews and Christians may appear distorted, like the one described through the medium of "pink spectacles" by eminent historians such as Jacob Burckhardt and Cecil Roth, or merely reduced to a histoire larmoyante, whose partiality was denounced by Salo Baron's famous thesis. In order to understand Italian history as inclusive of the Jewish experience, Maifreda suggests going beyond the antisemitism parameters and reflect on how the Jews have systematically negotiated their own position within the Italian authorities over the centuries. With the art of diplomacy, Jewish mediators operated discreetly through trying to use their influence and various expedients to moderate rulers' decrees. Yet, the history of Jewish diplomatic efforts contradicts the myth of Jewish passivity, because in reality, their efforts involved a much broader web of interactions than just the "vertical relationship" between sovereigns, communities, and Court-Jews. According to the author, it is necessary to develop an overall approach devoted to articulating the meaning of "identity" in the history of Italian [End Page 263] Jewry, taking into account the reciprocal influence between Jewish communities and their Christian counterparts. Also, thanks to newly discovered documents, Maifreda proposes some case studies that cover multiple relationship issues and environments that occurred over the course of several centuries. In 1516, the governor of Venice declared that Jews had to live in a ghetto, which was the first of many Jewish enclosures ordered by political powers in the Italian peninsula. The Jewish community became an important cosmopolitan center of the Republic, bringing significant economic growth for the city, including nuanced networks with Christian neighbors. In the first chapter, the author sheds fresh light on this complex interfaith encounter by showing us different types of integration, or even prohibited unions, such as the forbidden love between the Christian sailor, Moretto, and the Jewish woman, Rachel, a story that reminds us of Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, but in an early-modern Venetian ghetto. In the court of Ferrara, Jewish refugees from the Iberian peninsula, invited by the Duke of Este, played a fundamental role, thanks to their financial skills. Most of the conversos in Ferrara were wealthy bankers and traders, with international relations with partners based in Middle Eastern markets or in various ports located in the Mediterranean. An emblematic figure of the complex social stratification experienced by Ferrarese Judaism after the arrival of Portuguese Marranos is that of the influential Gracia Nasi, alias Beatriz de Luna. She openly professed the Jewish religion, financing, among other things, a translation of the Bible in Judeo-Spanish printed in Ferrara between 1551 and 1553. In Chapter 2, the story of Gracia Nasi demonstrates that there was not one single Italian-Judaism model, nor a single way of living as Jews. At the start of the sixteenth century, we witness the birth of...

An Excerpt from Carl Gibson-Hill: Boats, Birds, Photography, and History in Late-Colonial Malaya

An Excerpt from Carl Gibson-Hill: Boats, Birds, Photography, and History in Late-Colonial Malaya Brendan Luyt Ed. Note. Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill edited JMBRAS throughout the 1950s, and made notable contributions to photography, ornithology, museology, and the writing of Malayan history. In another era, Gibson-Hill might have been accounted a major figure in colonial scholarship, but he lived in Singapore at a time when British authorities were putting an end to British rule and overseeing the localization of their own positions, and the achievements of this somewhat eccentric individual went unheralded. As Brendan Luyt shows in his biography, Gibson-Hill found many opportunities in Malaya and took full advantage of them, becoming director of the Raffles Museum in Singapore, helping initiate a photographic society, surveying the boats plying Malayan waters, studying Malayan birds, editing the journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and conserving information about the region's past. But the Malaya he inhabited as a member of the colonial elite was crumbling, and independence marginalized both the colonial past and those who served it. The Federation of Malaya became independent in 1957, and while Singapore remained a colony until it joined Malaysia in 1963, the powers and authority associated with colonial rule were eroding. Gibson-Hill's work at the museum gave him influence and access to information, shaping not only his daily activities but also his very identity. In August 1963, at the age of 52, facing the prospect of early retirement and suffering from failing eyesight and bouts of depression, he took his own life. The following excerpt from Luyt's biography is part of a chapter discussing Gibson-Hill's work as a historian. Gibson-Hill anticipated the Asian-centric history that began to emerge in the 1960s, but a second transition in the discipline—a shift in the 1950s towards the institutionalization of history writing in the hands of the academy—diminished the impact of his work. Those employed in the history department of the University of Malaya all had advanced degrees in the subject, and the Museum could no longer claim to be the centre of knowledge production for regional history. Furthermore, other publications competed with the JMBRAS for submissions, including the Far Eastern Quarterly (renamed the Journal of Asian Studies in 1956) and Pacific Affairs, while locally the Department of History at the University of Singapore launched the Journal of Southeast Asian History in 1961. Similarly, academic publishers began to handle greater amounts of material on Southeast Asian history.1 Gibson-Hill showed little interest in new approaches to history. As we have seen, he did not publish a monograph with a major university press, contenting himself with the Memoirs series of the Raffles Museum for a few of his larger works. Neither did he bother to publish in journals other than JMBRAS. In the field of historical writing, he was entirely reliant on the publishing resources of the Museum that he ran from 1955 to 1963, not a good way to win wider recognition in any discipline, especially when the JMBRAS itself [End Page 89] was under something of a cloud, with John Gullick reporting that at the London School of Economics it was always the target 'of a jibe or two at its superficiality'.2 His focus on character, biography, and genealogy also had limited appeal for mainstream historians, who were abandoning these earlier forms of history writing in favour of studies that subordinated individuals to social forces. Gibson-Hill remained fascinated by individuals in history, something he made very clear in a 1952 piece on John Clunies-Ross and Alexander Hare where he observed that in dealing with Hare, he had to discipline himself to write empirical history. 'I have tried to keep the fragments of him on a 2-D plane, presenting only the facts so far apparent and the conclusions that can legitimately be drawn from them. Anything else would have been fatal: had Hare been allowed one breath he would have bulged out from the page, taken possession of the pen, and turned the whole into the picaresque novel to which he really belongs'.3 These are the words of a...

American Borderlands: Reflections on Margins, Mainstreams, and Alternatives

Written as the keynote for the 2018 Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS) conference, this article draws on the author’s personal experience, half-century of historical research, and American art and fiction to examine American mainstreams and alternatives from the boundaries and borderlands of American social relationships and discourses. In the contexts of the Trump administration’s alleged “fake news” and “alternative facts,” it probes who defines the mainstream, who decides what stories are mainstream (or canonical), whose accounts are more “authentic” or “alternative” or just plain lies. Adding marginalized people and movements to history destabilizes “mainstream” histories distorted by skewed sources, silenced stories, and an assumed historical “mainstream” or “consensus.” Marginalized actors push the boundaries of national histories that do not easily accommodate multiple actors or perspectives. “Mainstream” histories of the nation that focus on public politics and powerful actors can make most people appear insignificant and erase the daily acts and grass-roots movements that change the historical mainstream. From unexamined margins, people start or catalyze social change with daily acts that begin to transform social relationships. Changes born in marginalized borderlands can become mainstream truths.