Vernacular Public Research Articles

Minatory Monsters for Turbulent Times: “The devil in the shape of a great fish” that presaged the English Civil War and other piscatorial prodigies

Monsters, by the Latin definition of their name, are omens that portend turbulent times. The pamphlet A Relation of a terrible Monster called a Toad-fish, published in London in 1642, told of “a fiend, not a fish; at the least a monster, not an ordinary creature” which had become entangled in a fishing net and then put on display in London. The creature was described as resembling a giant toad, with a wide, toothy mouth and human characteristics of ribs, hands, and fingers. Discovery of the Thames monster instilled a sense of worry throughout the realm. The landing of the “Toad-fish” was linked in the tract to a bloody encounter that occurred between two well-known members of the British aristocracy fighting on opposing sides at the onset of the Civil War. The present paper describes how this vernacular publication was part of a flourishing of providential pamphlets in the 17th century wherein natural anomalies were invested with wider ecclesiastical and political meaning. Also undertaken herein is a review of various candidate species from which to suggest that the mysterious Toad-fish may have been another example of the angelshark’s (Squatina squatina) monstrous alter ego. This is an animal that has previously been suggested as being responsible for the ‘sea monk’ noted in several prominent natural histories of the Renaissance.

Advertising Community: Union Times and Singapore’s Vernacular Public Sphere, 1906–1939

Newspapers have long played an important role in Singapore’s vernacular public sphere. Drawing on scholarly work in the fields of sociology, economics, history, and communications, this paper analyzes advertisements in the Chinese-language newspaper Zonghui bao (Union times) between 1908 and 1941. At the most simple level, advertisers told consumers what to wear, ingest, and drive. Additionally, ads defined worldviews, gender relations, and cross-cultural associations. However, advertisers also responded to the needs and demands of their audience. It was within this public sphere between seller and consumer that Singapore’s multiethnic society developed.

Media, Mediation and the Vernacular Public Arena in India

This article analyses the rise of the vernacular public arena in India and the ways in which various media have contributed to the mediation of the multiplicity of the vernacular and the universality of the public. With increasing access by different social groups to various media, space opens up for the participation of the wider public in the activities of the mediated public arena. The participation of a multitude of publics in market-driven media networks has led to a change in the nature and function of the media, which not only have ensure that they survive in a capitalist marketplace, but need to cater to a requirement to serve wider audiences. There is thus a simultaneous presence in the public arena of viewpoints and interests of the urban middle classes, along with the poor and the marginalised. This hybrid character of the public arena is often overlooked in the discussion on democratic transformation in India. The vernacular public arena is thus the expanding space of socio-political negotiation, interaction and contestation, in which a diversity of voices get mediated and remediated to reassemble and redefine the publics. The mediation has led to the subjectification of the diversity of people, but is far from consensual politics, as it often involves severe debate, criticism, oppression and resistance. This article focuses particularly on the role of the media in the rise of the vernacular public arena, and how it has helped to connect diverse social groups in a network of dialogues and negotiations, which has contributed to the democratisation of the public arena.

Vernacular Publics and Political Modernity: Language and Progress in Colonial South India

AbstractThe late-nineteenth century in India, usually scrutinized for the emergence of anti-colonial nationalist thought and politics, witnessed broader, and potentially more radical changes in the making and re-making of political subjectivities as articulated within burgeoning vernacular public spheres. Vernacular publics coalesced around the emergence of new communicative forms, the formation of voluntary and political associations, and the restructuring of literary communities. It is within this context I place the writings of Gidugu Venkata Ramamurti (1863–1940). He proclaimed at the turn of the twentieth century that Telugu as a language had to be reformed in order for it to become an appropriate medium for the newly emergent Telugu public spheres. Through his study of linguistics, his commitment to educational reform, and his study of Telugu language and literature, Ramamurti became the spokesperson for a new Telugu that would be able to traverse the boundaries of modern genres of writing that flourished in the colonial era. Fully immersed in linguistic theories of the day, Ramamurti's concerns were primarily with language reform and its centrality in the remaking of political subjectivities.‘In this era there is an important challenge facing us. There is no Telugu word for ‘challenge,’ nevertheless, the word, ‘dhikaaramu’ or defiance, comes close. For that reason, I am calling this era, ‘dhikaara yugamu,’ the age of defiance. In the past, society was divided between free people and the enslaved. Soon, the enslaved defied the power of the free and freed themselves. In the past, women were not allowed to be educated nor were they allowed to work. Now they are asking themselves why they were not considered more productive in society? These days, women are performing all kinds of work. . . .Until recently, in most countries the wealthy held power. And now the poor are challenging the power of the rich’.1

Indigenization of Cinema in (Post)Colonial South Asia: From Transnational to Vernacular Public Spheres

This article investigates the indigenization of cinema, from production to reception, within the broader social, political, and cultural domain of early- to mid-twentieth-century East Bengal/Pakistan. As an attempt to fill certain gaps in South Asian film studies, Raju’s essay locates the early encounters of the East Bengal population with film through multiple public spheres. Raju demonstrates how cinema was a site of contest between various social groups from the 1900s through the 1960s in East Bengal. He challenges the dominant mode of nationalist, empirical-teleological historiography to interpret the absorption of cinema in the East Bengali cultural milieu. He further argues that the cultural adoption of the film medium may be seen through overlapping public spheres for different publics during the first six decades of the twentieth century in East Bengal, where and when the nationhood was always in mutation. This article thus elaborates how colonial rulers, non-Bengalis, as well as Bengali Muslims of colonial East Bengal appropriated cinema in different ways and later in postcolonial East Pakistan how both urban and rural Bengali Muslims indigenized film to construct their preferred identities. It identifies such events related to appropriation of cinema as and within various public spheres: from transnational and colonial to cultural-national and rural-vernacular. In this way Raju attempts to understand the specific processes of cultural appropriation of cinema, a Western technological medium in a largely Islamic and agrarian society of South Asia.

‘House of Believers’: irony and commensurability in Tanganyikan colonial discourse

This article is an historical analysis of a colonial vernacular (Kiswahili) newspaper. As Mambo Leo (‘Today's Events’) was sold across Tanganyika to a Kiswahili readership of new East African British subjects, the task necessarily requires an appreciation of irony. In fact, it is irony and humour that was crucial to Mambo Leo reaching its audience, crossing thresholds between Western news reporting and East African oral performance, between literacy and orality. In particular, it was the newspaper's cartoons that attracted its readership. Like cartoons elsewhere, Mambo Leo's represent captured moments of laughter, which, for want of these comic strips, might escape history's notice. Crafted by coastal Tanganyikans (for whom Kiswahili was at least a familiar second language) under editorial direction of British editors, they attempt to plumb the contentious process of identity construction in a colonial cultural milieu for all of its comedic potential. The vernacular news publication, ostensibly a vehicle of British Imperial hegemony, ingratiated itself to Tanganyikan readers by observing the absurd in fraught relationships between Africans and Europeans, with both categories finding themselves reified in stark ink black and paper white.

Vernacular geometry: between the senses and reason

In 1571, Thomas Digges saw a work entitled A geometrical practise, named pantometria (hereafter Pantometria) through the press. The first three books of the work were based heavily on manuscripts prepared by Thomas’ father, Leonard, and instructed on the measurement of lengths, areas, and volumes respectively. To these three books, Thomas added his own appendix on geometrical solids. In offering these materials together in one vernacular publication, Digges suggested the feasibility of uniting abstract geometry with practical pursuits for presentation to an English-reading audience.

Rereading Henry VIII in Foxe’s <i>Acts and Monuments</i>

John Foxes Acts and Monuments (the Book of Martyrs) was perhaps the most frequently read English vernacular publication during the sixteenth century besides the Bible. Its importance as a source te...

Official and Vernacular Public History: Historical Anniversaries and Commemorations in Newcastle, NSW

The city of Newcastle commemorated two bicentenaries within the space of seven years. In 2004, the city marked 200 years since the permanent establishment of the settlement on 30 March 1804. But 2004 was not the city’s first bicentennial. In 1997, Newcastle celebrated the 1797 journey of Lieutenant John Shortland, who named and sketched the Hunter River and brought back samples of coal to Sydney. These anniversaries, and earlier ones such as Newcastle’s centennial in 1897 and its sesqui-centennial in 1947, were crucial moments of history making in the public sphere. History was evoked to celebrate progress, encourage civic loyalty and, more recently, to emphasise the city’s transition into a post-industrial era.
 
 This article will explore the way in which commemorative dates in Newcastle’s history were interpreted, utilised and presented to the general public. It will examine how history, heritage, politics and policy come together to use the past in a public way. Utilising US historian John Bodnar’s terms, the shift in the themes and tenor of public history in Newcastle over this period has been from an ‘official’ to a more ‘vernacular’ style. Official public history emphasised unitary notions of progress while vernacular styles presented more diverse and occasionally more critical versions of public history. By the time of the 2004 commemorative events there was more scope for active popular participation. Newcastle public history was being nourished by community groups often with conflicting notions of public history, generating a multivalent, multilayered sense of the past, though older themes persisted with remarkable durability.
 
 In a city where ‘history’ has such an ambivalent position, large-scale historical commemorations make for intriguing analysis. After a review of the principal themes in the Newcastle commemorations of 1897, 1947, and 1997, I consider the 2004 ‘Newcastle 200’ programme. In particular, I will be considering my own movement from an apparently objective historical analyst of the earlier commemorative events to a participant in the history-making process in the 2004 program.

Thomas Gataker and the Use of Print in the English Godly Community

Thomas Gataker (1574-1654) was one of the most prolific and respected authors among the Puritan clergy, and in this article Diane Willen investigates the development of his use of vernacular publication. After expressing formulaic reluctance, Gataker began publishing at age forty-five with an original treatise on causality, followed by works of practical divinity and support for Continental Protestantism. Largely silent during the Arminian ascendancy, he resumed publication during the Revolution with the aim of protecting the integrity and cohesion of the godly community. Even as his rhetoric turned increasingly polemical, vitriolic, and autobiographical, in his attacks against antinomians and astrologers, print became integral to his piety.

Rereading Henry VIII in Foxe's Acts and Monuments

John Foxes Acts and Monuments (the Book of Martyrs) was perhaps the most frequently read English vernacular publication during the sixteenth century besides the Bible. Its importance as a source text for the history and literature of the period is unrivaled, and yet scholars have not fully appreciated how its approach to Henry VIII evolves over the course of four editions (1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583) published during the lifetimes of Foxe and John Day, his publisher. Tension inherent within Henry's apparent simultaneous Protestantism and Catholicism forced Foxe to work toward a single-minded viewpoint in his revisions between separate editions and in his use of paratext, marginal annotation, and other textual features. Nevertheless, movement toward unanimity over the meaning of Henry's life produced ambivalent analysis. Although Henry's split from the Church of Rome provided the Elizabethan church with its most powerful legitimating narrative, Foxe's network of compilers and informants hesitates to praise Henry as an evangelical Protestant. This essay revisits the first (1563) and second (1570) editions of the Book of Martyrs in order to reassess the generic and rhetorical function of its praise of Henry for breaking from the Church of Rome. It then discusses selected martyrological narratives in which Henry's behavior appears inauspicious. It concludes that the form and content of the book's analysis of the Henrician Reformation evolves in response to the challenge of discussing the Elizabethan church's most important forbearer.

Born in the U.S.A.: Vernacular Music and Public Education

As we celebrate our Sesquicentennial year, it seems appropriate to reflect on some of the uniquely American contributions to music teaching. American music education, like American music, has been heavily influenced by European traditions. Many elements of music education that did originate in the New Worldcertain types of music, shape notes, and jazz education-met with considerable resistance.

Some Continuing Traditions in English Devotional Literature

One of the things that most surprises the student of the sixteenth century is the place held by religious literature even in the realm of vernacular publication. The product of the early English presses is religious to an extent that the modern reader finds quite outside his experience. It has been estimated that more than forty per cent of all English books published between the beginning of printing in England and 1640 belong to the various types of religious literature. That preponderance is easy to explain in the light of the ecclesiastical traditions of learning, and there is no doubt that certain aspects of the earlier body of publication as compared with that of more recent times are to be explained in terms of those origins, but the fact is that even when the machinery of religious life had been gravely disturbed, the relative predominance of the genre persisted.