Showing papers on "Emancipation published in 1995"

Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification

Abstract: In his article "How Many Revolutions Can a Linguist Live Through?" Hill (1980:74) thus reflected on one by-product of the generativist revolution in linguistics, the critique of the taxonomic phoneme. Hill's lament exhibits a certain topicality for anthropology during a period in which culture, the discipline's longstanding darling, is increasingly embattled. The utility, not to mention the integrity, of the construct of culture-as expounded by Tylor, relativized by Boas, and thereafter refracted through diverse functionalist, ecological, cognitive, transactionalist, structuralist, Marxian, and hermeneutic perspectives-is increasingly being challenged. These recent objections to culture receive both absolutist and historically relativist phrasings, the former holding that the culture concept has been flawed from its inception and the latter that culture-viable enough as a device in earlier historical moments-can no longer engage a world in which social identities, practices, and ideologies are increasingly incongruent and volatile. What I propose to do here, in brief compass, is to examine the defects of the culture construct as currently represented in anthropological writing, to discuss in somewhat more detail the characteristics of three critiques of the concept (by James Clifford, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Pierre Bourdieu), and finally to reflect on the essentialist ideology at play in the current disciplinary self-consciousness of paradigmatic transition or emancipation. The objective is neither to defend the received culture concept from its critics (indeed, most of the criticisms are well founded) nor to articulate a version of the fatigued message that no new critical perspectives exist in the profession today, that "it's all been said" earlier and better. Rather, my purpose is to indicate how

The restructuring of international relations theory

Abstract: In this book Mark Neufeld argues that the predominance of the positivist approach to the study of international politics has meant that theory committed to human emancipation remains poorly developed. He suggests that International Relations theory must move in a non-positivist direction, and takes recent developments in the discipline (including Gramscian, postmodernist, feminist and normative approaches) as evidence that such a shift is already under way. In a comprehensive treatment, he argues that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School can be used to reorient the study of world politics. Drawing on recent work in social and political theory, as well as International Relations, this book offers an accessible analysis of recent developments in the study of international politics.

Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa

Abstract: This is a sequel to Fredrickson's "White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History" (OUP USA 1981) Where that book dealt with white domination of blacks in both societies, "Black Liberation" focuses on the efforts of African Americans and South African blacks to combat this domination The book starts in the 1860s, following the emancipation of slaves after the Civil War, and ends with the conclusion of apartheid in South Africa

Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History

Abstract: Theories and Narratives explores the relationship between social theory and historical writing. Its aim is to establish the contribution that theory can make to understanding the past. Pursuing this objective, Alex Callinicos critically confronts a number of leading attempts to reconceptualize the meaning of history, including Francis Fukuyama's rehabilitation of Hegel's philosophy of history and the postmodernist efforts of Hayden White and others to deny the existence of a past independent of our representations of it. In these cases philosophical arguments are pursued in tandem with discussions of historical interpretations of, respectively, Stalinism and the Holocaust. Leading theories of history - Marx's and Weber's - are then critically compared in the context of the work of recent writers such as Michael Mann, W. G. Runciman, and Robert Brenner. Finally, the politics of historical theory is explored in a discussion of Marxism's claims to be a universal theory of human progress. Swimming against the tide of contemporary fashion, Theories and Narratives seeks to rebut the claim made by many postmodernists that Marxism is inherently Eurocentric in both its conceptual structures and its political practice. Marx's project of human emancipation, it concludes, still defines our political horizons.

Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World

Abstract: Plantations, especially sugar plantations, created slave societies and a racism persisting well into post-slavery periods: so runs a familiar argument that has been used to explain the sweep of Caribbean history. Here one of the most eminent scholars of modern social theory applies this assertion to a comparative study of most Caribbean islands from the time of the American Revolution to the Spanish American War. Arthur Stinchcombe uses insights from his own much admired "Economic Sociology" to show why sugar planters needed the help of repressive governments for recruiting disciplined labour. Demonstrating that island-to-island variations on this theme were a function of geography, local political economy, and relation to outside powers, he scrutinises Caribbean slavery and Caribbean emancipation movements in a world-historical context. Throughout the book, Stinchcombe aims to develop a sociology of freedom that explains a number of complex phenomena, such as how liberty for some individuals may restrict the liberty of others. Thus, the autonomous governments of colonies often produced more oppressive conditions for slaves than did so-called arbitrary governments, which had the power to restrict the whims of the planters. Even after emancipation, freedom was not a clear-cut matter of achieving the ideals of the Enlightenment. Indeed, it was often a route to a social control more efficient than slavery, providing greater flexibility for the planter class and posing less risk of violent rebellion.

Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South

Abstract: In Reconstructing the Household , Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio's analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes. |Based on literary and legal sources, this study reveals how legal contests involving women, children, African-Americans, and the poor of the 19th-century South led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order.

Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s

Abstract: Christina Kelley Gilmartin rewrites the history of gender politics in the 1920s with this compelling assessment of the impact of feminist ideals on the Chinese Communist Party during its formative years. For the first time, Gilmartin reveals the extent to which revolutionaries in the 1920s were committed to women's emancipation and the radical political efforts that were made to overcome women's subordination and to transform gender relations. Women activists whose experiences and achievements have been previously ignored are brought to life in this study, which illustrates how the Party functioned not only as a political organization but as a subculture for women as well. We learn about the intersection of the personal and political lives of male communists and how this affected their beliefs about women's emancipation. Gilmartin depicts with thorough and incisive scholarship how the Party formulated an ideological challenge to traditional gender relations while it also preserved aspects of those relationships in its organization.

Where Is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions

Abstract: This article examines where consensus does and does not exist among American economic historians by analyzing the results of a questionnaire mailed to 178 randomly selected members of the Economic History Association. The questions address many of the important debates in American economic history. The answers show consensus on a number of issues, but substantial disagreement in many areas—including the causes of the Great Depression and the aftermath of emancipation. They also expose some areas of disagreement between historians and economists.

Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship

Abstract: Throughout the nineteenth century, legal barriers to Jewish citizenship were lifted in Europe, enabling organised Jewish communities and individuals to alter radically their relationships with the institutions of the Christian West. In this volume, one of the first to offer a comparative overview of the entry of Jews into state and society, eight leading historians analyse the course of emancipation in Holland, Germany, France, England, the United States, and Italy as well as in Turkey and Russia. The goal is to produce a systematic study of the highly diverse paths to emancipation and to explore their different impacts on Jewish identity, dispositions, and patterns of collective action. Jewish emancipation concerned itself primarily with issues of state and citizenship. Would the liberal and republican values of the Enlightenment guide governments in establishing the terms of Jewish citizenship? How would states react to Jews seeking to become citizens and to remain meaningfully Jewish? The authors examine these issues through discussions of the entry of Jews into the military, the judicial system, business, and academic and professional careers, for example, and through discussions of their assertive political activity.

On the homefront and in the workplace: integrating immigrant women into feminist discourse

Abstract: This article focuses on the experiences of Dominican immigrant women in the United States. It examines ways in which research with immigrant women challenges certain claims advanced by feminist theorists regarding the nature of unpaid domestic work, the relationship between waged work and women's emancipation, and the interdependence between struggles in the family and factory. Attention is drawn to traces of essentialism in the ways in which several middle-class feminists have characterized working-class women. [women, immigration, Dominicans, United States, feminism]

The abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861

Abstract: Within the American antislavery movement, abolitionists were distinct from others in the movement in advocating, on the basis of moral principle, the immediate emancipation of slaves and equal rights for black people. Instead of focusing on the "immediatists" as products of northern culture, as many previous historians have done, Stanley Harrold examines their involvement with antislavery action in the South--particularly in the region that bordered the free states. How, he asks, did antislavery action in the South help shape abolitionist beliefs and policies in the period leading up to the Civil War? Harrold explores the interaction of northern abolitionist, southern white emancipators, and southern black liberators in fostering a continuing antislavery focus on the South, and integrates southern antislavery action into an understanding of abolitionist reform culture. He discusses the impact of abolitionist missionaries, who preached an antislavery gospel to the enslaved as well as to the free. Harrold also offers an assessment of the impact of such activities on the coming of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Africans in the Americas : a history of the Black diaspora

Abstract: Preface - PART 1 AFRICA, EUROPE, AND THE AMERICAS - Africa to 1500 - Africa and Europe Before 1700 - Early African Experiences in the Americas - PART 2 THE SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS - Africans in the Caribbean - Africans in Brazil - Africans in Mainland Spanish America - Africans in the Thirteen British Colonies - PART 3 ENDING THE SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY - Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade - Emancipation in the Caribbean and Spanish America - Emancipation in the United States - Emancipation in Brazil - PART 4 AFRICANS IN THE AMERICAS SINCE SLAVERY - African Americans in Post-emancipation Economies - Race and Politics in the United States - Race and Politics in Latin America - The Americas' Continuing Ties with Africa - Afterword - Glossary - Bibliographic Essay - Index - About the Authors

Populism and Feminism in Iran: Women's Struggle in a Male-Defined Revolutionary Movement

Abstract: Preface to the 1996 Reprint - Preface - Introduction - PART 1: WOMEN AND SOCIAL CHANGE - The Emerging Women's Movement - Women and Social Reforms - PART 2: WOMEN AND OTHER POLITICAL FORCES - Islamists and Women's Rights - Secular Intellectuals and the 'Emancipation of Women' - Sexual Politics of the Left - PART 3: WOMEN'S MOVEMENT, REVOLUTION AND THE LEFT - The Fedayeen and Women's Struggle - The National Union of Women - A Failed Socialist-Feminist Experience - Conclusion: Finding a Space, Reclaiming Politics - Notes - References - Index

Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia

Abstract: In Women's Work, Men's Work, Betty Wood examines the struggle of bondpeople to secure and retain for themselves recognized rights as producers and consumers in the context of the brutal, formal slave economy sanctified by law. Wood examines this struggle in the Georgia lowcountry over a period of eighty years, from the 1750s to the 1830s, when, she argues, the evolution of the system of informal slave economies had reached the point that it would henceforth dominate Savannah's political agenda until the Civil War and emancipation. In considering the quasi-autonomous economic activities of bondpeople, Wood outlines the equally significant but quite different, roles of bondwomen and bondmen in organizing these economies. She also analyzes the influence of evangelical Protestant Christianity on bondpeople, and the effects of the fusion of religious and economic morality on their circumstances. For a combination of practical and religious reasons, Wood finds, informal slave economies, with their impact on whites, became the single most important issue in Savannah politics. She contends that, by the 1820s, bondpeople were instrumental in defining the political agenda of a divided city - a significant, if unintentional, achievement.

Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa

Abstract: What was it like to be a slave in colonial South Africa? What difference did freedom make? The questions themselves are simply put, but John Edwin Mason has found complex answers after delving deeply into the slaves' experience within the slaveholding patriarchal household, the work that slaves performed, the families they created, and the religions they practiced. Grounding his analysis within the context of South Africa's incorporation into the British Empire - primarily examining the period of 1820-50 - Mason investigates a wealth of documentation from the British Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. Colonial officials, particularly the slave protectors, created and preserved a rich archive within which the voices of slaves and slaveholders, free blacks, and poor whiles are recorded, and from which Mason presents vividly descriptive and telling accounts of slave life. In Social Death and Resurrection Mason draws upon Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson's theory that a slave's social degradation rendered him socially dead. "Social death" defined slavery in the ideal, slavery as it would have been had the slaves played along. But in colonial South Africa slaves did not play along: they fought the lash and resisted domination, retaining a cultural and moral community of their own. Mason investigates the subsequent "resurrection" of slaves following their successful struggle to preserve family, faith, community ties, and human dignity, despite their class domination and racial subjugation by slaveowners. Although slavery officially came to an end with a series of reforms during a mid-nineteenth-century period of modernization and reform, the British colonial state's commitment to formal equality was in fact compatible with continued class domination. As a result, slaves did not entirely cease to be slaves, but through their own efforts and some governmental assistance, they achieved at least a partial victory over slavery's violence, marginalization, and degradation.

The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation

Abstract: With the conclusion of the Civil War, the beginnings of Reconstruction, and the realities of emancipation, former slaves were confronted with the possibility of freedom and, with it, a new way of life. In "The Times Were Strange and Stirring," Reginald F. Hildebrand examines the role of the Methodist Church in the process of emancipation--and in shaping a new world at a unique moment in American, African American, and Methodist history.Hildebrand explores the ideas and ideals of missionaries from several branches of Methodism--the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and the northern-based Methodist Episcopal Church--and the significant and highly charged battle waged between them over the challenge and meaning of freedom. He traces the various strategies and goals pursued by these competing visions and develops a typology of some of the ways in which emancipation was approached and understood.Focusing on individual church leaders such as Lucius H. Holsey, Richard Harvey Cain, and Gilbert Haven, and with the benefit of extensive research in church archives and newspapers, Hildebrand tells the dramatic and sometimes moving story of how missionaries labored to organize their denominations in the black South, and of how they were overwhelmed at times by the struggles of freedom.

Indigenous knowledge, emancipation and Alienation

Abstract: Recently indigenous knowledge has received increasing academic (see, e.g., Warren et al., 1993; Brokensha et al., 1980; Gomez-Pompa and Kaus, 1992) and institutional (see World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987;Agenda 21, 1992) attention. The study, application, and recording of indigenous knowledge, viewed as indigenous technologies for living with natural environments, has become a field of great interest and promise to nonindigenous and indigenous people; the ways in which the present interest is expressed, however, could also become a source of disappointment for the latter. I begin by considering the meaning of the expression “indigenous knowledge.” Next, I examine whether indigenous knowledge is fundamentally different from scientific knowledge. Finally I discuss the potential for emancipation, but also for alienation, resulting from the current ways of focussing on indigenous knowledge.

Embodying God: from imperial progresses to national progress in India

Abstract: Modernists have represented the world and its history as divided into ‘medieval’ (or traditional) and ‘modern’, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, and claimed that they will bring about humanity's ‘emancipation’ from the medieval. I argue that the world which modernists wish to bring into existence, far from entailing the erasure of the medieval, as claimed, involves the complex rearticulation of the medieval. Vital to the modern is not just the secularization of a previously sacred realm, upon which scholars have concentrated, but the sacralization of the mundane, pointed to by Foucault. The agent of modernist emancipation is a hypostatized sovereign Agent. The medievals engaged in certain practices which were supposed to embody a transcendent God in the human world and lead them to a celestial paradise. the moderns, silently transposing that god intoa foundational reason, assert that its manifesation in enlightened institutios will take them to a utopia which is none other than the surreptitious imporatation...

The Economics of Emancipation: Jamaica and Barbados, 1823-1843

Abstract: The British Slavery Abolition Act of 1834 provided a grant of u20 million to compensate the owners of West Indian slaves for the loss of their human 'property.' In this first comparative analysis of the impact of the award on the colonies, Mary Butler focuses on Jamaica and Barbados, two of Britain's premier sugar islands. The Economics of Emancipation examines the effect of compensated emancipation on colonial credit, landownership, plantation land values, and the broader spheres of international trade and finance. Butler also brings the role and status of women as creditors and plantation owners into focus for the first time. Through her analysis of rarely used chancery court records, attorneys' letters, and compensation returns, Butler underscores the fragility of the colonial economies of Jamaica and Barbados, illustrates the changing relationship between planters and merchants, and offers new insights into the social and political history of the West Indies and Britain.

Locke and feminism on private and public realms of activities

Abstract: Feminist critics of Locke perceive a conflict between his promise of political liberty and equality and women's individual and social circumstances. Many feminists point to an incongruence in Locke's thought between formal political rights and the substantive inequalities women experience in a variety of social relationships. Emphasizing Locke's liberal distinction between private and public, these feminists explore how women's actual personal, marital, familial and economic (i.e., private) positions mitigate against the possibility of political emancipation for women. Opposing this interpretation, this article will argue that Locke's feminist critics misread Locke and misinterpret his distinction between private and public. What some feminists represent as a dichotomy between public and private is actually for Locke a multitude of interacting spheres in which individuals live. An examination of these spheres will reveal a latent potential in Locke's philosophy for addressing women's particular circumstances.

Leftist Sexual Politics and Homosexuality: A Historical Overview

Abstract: For almost a full century now, the revolutionary prospect of socialism has fuelled opening forays first of the homosexual emancipation and later of the gay liberation movements, both in Europe and in North America. It inspired Edward Carpenter and Magnus Hirschfeld at the turn of the century; Andre Gide and Richard Linsert in the post-World War I years; Harry Hay and Jim Kepner in the post-World War II era; and the British and American Gay Liberation Front, the Italian Fuori!, the French FHAR, the German "Rotzschwule," and the Dutch Red Faggots following the Stonewall rebellion. While the official socialist parties of Northwestern Europe may have made only limited contributions to homosexual emancipation, they certainly have a better record than conservative and Christian parties and even the liberals, who have consistently, if contradictorily, underlined the freedom of private life. Even so, parties across the entire political spectrum have gradually come to endorse at least some of the movement's goals. As it has advanced, the gay movement has changed as well, and it now finds itself pulled in divergent directions. Gay leftists who still subscribe to the ideals expressed in Marxist and utopian socialist writings now find themselves at demonstrations shoulder-to-shoulder with members of ACT UP and Queer Nation, to say nothing of gay conservatives and gay Christians. The successes achieved by the contemporary gay movement despite or precisely because of its diversity support Foucault's argument that "there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case...." At the close of the twentieth century, the welfare state has reached its apogee in Northwestern Europe. As blue-collar workers historically committed to class struggle have become relatively well-to-do and minoritarian, socialist parties have increasingly lost their traditional base of support and been forced into the defensive. Depending only on the socialists would mean relying on an ineffectual partner, for nowhere are they in a stable position of power. Long before the collapse of "really existing socialism" in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, gay and lesbian movements began developing their own autonomous politics independent of parties. They moved in this direction in part because the coalition with leftism so frequently led to disappointment, particularly when gays and lesbians working within socialist parties were called upon to subordinate or abandon their own goals in favor of party platforms. In other cases the gay-left coalition failed to yield results because a single-minded reliance on one party placed limits on lobbying other parties and entering compromises. We have reached a time when inherited ideologies are no longer capable of laying claim to the undivided loyalty of the gay movement, if indeed they ever were. As it has developed autonomous theories and practices, the gay movement's choice of coalition partners has increasingly come to be based on pragmatism and success in advancing the gay agenda. Indeed, the roles of the gay movement and political parties have undergone a notable switch in recent years, with parties currying the support of the gay movement rather than vice versa. This signals a shift from the desire for politics to a politics of desire, going far beyond traditional socialist ideologies.

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947

Abstract: Ferninism incorporates a doctrine of equal rights for women, an organ- ized movement to attain these rights, and an ideology of social trans- formation aimed at creating a world for women beyond simple social equality. It is broadly the ideology of women's liberation, since intrinsic to it is the belief that women suffer injustice because of their gender. In recent years the definition of feminism has gone beyond simply meaning move- ments for equality and emancipation which agitate for equal rights and legal reforms to redress the prevailing discrimination against women. The word has now been expanded to mean an awareness of women's oppres- sion and exploitation within the family, at work, and in society, and conscious action by women to change this. However, in the first phase of feminism in India (1917-1947) with which this essay deals, the women's movement was primarily concerned with demanding equal political, social, and economic rights and for the removal of all forms of discrimina- tory procedures against women Although feminism was a middle-class ideology, it presupposed the idea of women as a distinct group, who despite their differences of class, caste, religion, and ethnicity, shared certain common physical and psychological characteristics and mani- fested certain common problems. Nationalism is a broad concept which includes many values but is basically a belief that a group of people sharing a common territory, culture, and history, and often, also a common language and religion, possess a common national identity and therefore are entitled to a nation state. This claim did not negate the fact that there were indigenous differ- ences of class, caste, and gender; but people were able to launch struggles which blurred these divisions and stressed the commonality of a national identity against the foreign enemy. A national movement in India can be said to have begun with the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885. The process of nation- building and the creation of a national identity was paralleled, in fact, preceded by the growth of social reform movements focusing on women's issues. Since the status of women in society was the popular barometer of "civilization," many reformers had agitated for legislation that would improve their situation. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, social reformers began deploring the condition of women. Under British rule, with its new agrarian and commercial relations and the introduction of English educa- tion, law courts, and an expanding administrative structure, an urban

The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art

Abstract: Surrealism was ostensibly directed at the emancipation of the human spirit, but it represented only male aspirations and fantasies until a number of women artists began to redefine its agenda in the later 1930s.The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art addresses the former, using a "thick description" of the historically specific circumstances which required the male Surrealists to manufacture a sexual reputation of narcissism and misogyny. These circumstances were determined by "hegemonic masculinity," an ideological construct which had little to do with individual masculinities. In male Surrealism, the "beribboned bomb" signified something both attractive and volatile, a specific instance of the Surrealist principle of convulsive beauty. In hegemonic masculinity, similar devices served as metaphors of the sexuality all men were supposed to possess. The intersection of these two axes produced an imagery of unrepentant violence.

Black England: Life Before Emancipation

Abstract: This work, going back to the Elizabethan times, shows how numerous black people have always been in England. Certainly, by the 18th century, all kinds of artists were depicting black people in their work. Other aspects covered here include slavery and abolition and their respective adherents.

The Emancipation of Prisoners: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Dutch Prison Experience

Abstract: The dismal life in prison (1775-1825) death, discipline and depravity in crowded prison factories (1821-1850) socialization by social isolation - experiments with penitentiaries in England and the US barbarian scaffold versus civilized solitude - from external to internal constraint.