Journal ArticleDOI
A Staggered Orientalism: The Cape-to-Cairo Imaginary
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TLDR
Cecil Rhodes's vision of an all-British "Cape-to-Cairo" road, rail, and telegraph route is addressed by a reconstruction of the cultural matrix that appears to have held this concept before the public eye for nearly five decades as mentioned in this paper.Abstract:
Cecil Rhodes's vision of an all-British
"Cape-to-Cairo" road, rail, and telegraph route is addressed
by a reconstruction of the cultural matrix that appears to have held this
concept before the public eye for nearly five decades. This cultural
matrix constitutes a kind of colonial and imperial imaginary, which
generated a particular founding myth for the colonial state of the Union
of South Africa in 1910 and which also lent to foreign visitors, tourists,
and immigrants a readily understood interpretation of South Africa and the
Cape as "Mediterranean" rather than as "African."
This essay approaches the material from four broad emphases: first,
the neo-Hegelian tropology of pre–World War I Oxford idealist
philosophy, which celebrates the "dawning of consciousness"
in the subcontinent with the advent of union in 1910 and which the essay
relates to Hegel's views on Africa and Egypt; second, the ubiquitous
influence of Freemasonry in Britain and the British Empire at the turn
of the nineteenth century, in particular Freemasonry's concern with
Egyptology; third, the varied impulses behind the concept of the Cape as
Mediterranean, from climate to architecture, tourism, and ethnography;
and fourth, the mutually supporting roles of journalism, travel, and
performance in rehearsing a national act of identity formation.
The Cape-to-Cairo idea coincides with the historical moment of the
forging of union. It also coincides with a period of transition in
Western culture from the late Victorian age to modernism. This essay
suggests that these broad issues of national identity formation and of
simultaneous transition between two different cultural milieus, which are
evident as much in the dominant nations of Europe at the time as they
are in the making of South Africa, may be tracked in a reconstruction
of the complex of cultural epiphenomena that surrounded and propagated
for several decades the fantasy of the Cape-to-Cairo axis.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Affective politics and colonial heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford
TL;DR: In this article, the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town (UWC) and University of Ox...
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Geographical Imagination and Technological Connectivity in East Africa
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyse and compare two transformative moments of technologically-mediated change in East Africa, the construction of the Uganda railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria (1896-1903) and the introduction of fibre-optic cables that landed into the ports of Dar Es Salaam and Mombas in 2009, and explore the origins of the expectations of connectivity and the hope and fear associated with them.
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Geographical imagination and technological connectivity in East Africa
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse and compare two transformative moments of technologically mediated change in East Africa, the construction of the Uganda railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria (1896-1903) and the introduction of fibre-optic cables that landed into the ports of Dar Es Salaam and Mombas in 2009, and explore the origins of the expectations of connectivity and the hope and fear associated with them.
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Non-urban Motoring in Colonial Africa in the 1920s and 1930s
TL;DR: In this article, the authors use multiple English-language texts to indicate the nature and extent of other kinds of motoring outside urban areas and document diversity of drivers and passengers, their journey purposes, and the common experiences and symbolism of motor vehicle use.
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The “bit-less” corpse or mannequin manqué: South African Great War poetic embodiment 1914-1918
TL;DR: The authors discuss South African Great War poetry within a psychoanalytical, post-colonial and poststructuralist framework, and reveal the embodiment of blackness, whiteness, masculinity, colonialism and empire during the early twentieth century South Africa.
References
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Book
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
TL;DR: In this paper, Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality and explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialisation of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time.
Book
Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race
TL;DR: The authors argues that the theories advanced today about post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century, arguing that Englishness has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.
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Margins of philosophy
TL;DR: In this densely imbricated volume Derrida pursues his devoted, relentless dismantling of the philosophical tradition, the tradition of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger each dealt with in one or more of the essays.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
TL;DR: The Seven Lamps of Architecture as discussed by the authors are: 1. The lamp of sacrifice 2.The lamp of truth 3. The lamps of truth 4. The light of truth 5. The lights of power 6. The liveness of memory 7.
Book
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
TL;DR: The Seven Lamps of Architecture as discussed by the authors are: 1. The lamp of sacrifice 2.The lamp of truth 3. The lamps of truth 4. The light of truth 5. The lights of power 6. The liveness of memory 7.