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5287P IMPOSTURES MUP-PT/lb.qxd 14/10/09 15:12 Page 110 Chapter 6 . Ethnic impostors n 1703, a young man appeared in London, claiming to be a native of Formosa, and presented to the Royal Society an entire cultural and geographical description of a remote civilisation. How was it possible to succeed in pretending to be of a different ethnicity and engage members of the Society and the wider public for a considerable time? A category of ‘ethnic impostors’ might come as a surprise, for there was hardly a clear concept of ethnicity in the early modern period
In the poem ‘The haggis’, composed by Robert Francis, a Scottish poet in New Zealand, several ethnic groups were linked to particular national foods, including the English with plum pudding and roast beef; the Welsh with leeks; the Irish with potatoes; the Spanish with garlic; the French with ‘froggies an’ slimy, crawly snails’; the Italians with olives; and the Germans
Inspired both by debates about the origins of the modern ideology of race and also by controversy over the place of Ireland and the Irish in theories of empire in the early modern Atlantic world, Renaissance Humanism and Ethnicity before Race argues that ethnic discourse among the elite in early modern Ireland was grounded firmly in the Renaissance Humanism and Aristotelianism which dominated all the European universities before the Enlightenment. Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant, all employed theories of human society based on Aristotle’s Politics and the natural law of the medieval universities to construct or dismantle the categories of civility and barbarism. The elites operating in Ireland also shared common resources, taught in the universities, for arguing about the human body and its ability to transmit hereditary characteristics. Both in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, these theories of human society and the human body underwent violent changes in the late seventeenth century under the impact of the early Enlightenment. These changes were vital to the development of race as we know it.
1 Ethnic patriotism The birth of the nation Citizens of Madrid: With the imminent approach of the anniversary of the day that is the most glorious for our people and the most memorable in the annals of the Spanish nation, your constitutional town hall addresses you to announce that the day of the most noble and heroic remembrances, THE SECOND OF MAY, has arrived. On that day, in the name of independence, you made the throne of the most successful soldier of the century tremble beneath him, and, by offering your lives for the sake of your patria, you declared to
attracted the attention of historians of Roman Catholicism. The Canadian Catholic Church’s efforts to attach itself to organisations such as the St Patrick’s Society and the Hibernian Society in 1850s Toronto have been seen as an example of a Catholic attempt to fuse Roman Catholicism to an Irish ethnic consciousness. 4 Historians of Anglicanism have so far said little about the Church of
1 Two problems in the history of Irish humanism and ethnicity ሉሊ Shortly after the battle of Julianstown on 29 November 1641, the leaders of the Gaelic Irish who had risen in rebellion in Ulster met with representatives of their fellow Catholics from the English Pale at the hill of Crofty.1 Writing in the 1670s, Richard Bellings, himself a Pale Catholic, assigned one of the Gaelic Irish a short speech explaining his recourse to arms. This man, Rory O’More, complained that Irish Catholics were forced to choose either slavery in this world, because they were
This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and them.
This book is a full-length study of the role of the Scots from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It highlights the interaction of Scots with African peoples, the manner in which missions and schools were credited with producing ‘Black Scotsmen’ and the ways in which they pursued many distinctive policies. The book also deals with the inter-weaving of issues of gender, class and race, as well as with the means by which Scots clung to their ethnicity through founding various social and cultural societies. It contributes to both Scottish and South African history, and, in the process, illuminates a significant field of the Scottish Diaspora that has so far received little attention.
This book examines the changing nature of Catholicism in modern Scotland by placing a significant emphasis on women religious. It highlights the defining role they played in the transformation and modernisation of the Catholic Church as it struggled to cope with unprecedented levels of Irish migration. The institutions and care-networks that these women established represented a new age in social welfare that served to connect the church with Scotland's emerging civil society. The book examines how the church reacted to liberalism, legislative reform, the rise of evangelicalism and the continued growth of Irish migration between the late 1820s and the late 1850s. A mutual aversion to the Irish and a loyalty to nation and state inspired a recusant and ultramontane laity to invest heavily in a programme of church transformation and development. The recruitment of the Ursulines of Jesus, the first community of nuns to return to Scotland since the Reformation, is highlighted as a significant step towards legitimising Catholic respectability. The book focuses on the recruitment and influence of women religious. It also focuses on the issue of identity by considering how gender and ethnicity influenced the development of these religious communities and how this was connected with the broader campaign to transform Catholic culture in Scotland. The book also examines the development of Catholic education in Scotland between the late 1840s and 1900 and prioritises the role played by women religious in this process.
Italy's declaration of war on Britain in June 1940 had devastating consequences for Italian immigrant families living in Scotland signalling their traumatic construction as the 'enemy other'. This book takes a case study of a long-established immigrant group and explores how notions of belonging and citizenship are undermined at a time of war. The experiences of the Italian population in Britain during World War Two illuminate the complex and diverse ways in which ethnicity interacts with a sense of belonging to a nation at a time of conflict. There is a tendency within leading British Italian texts to portray the Italians as somehow immune from the difficulties faced by other ethnic minority groups. This book looks at the role of the Fasci all'estero, clubs set up by Benito Mussolini's regime in order to 'fascistise' Italian diasporic communities in the inter-war period. It shows how the wartime configuration of Italians as the 'enemy within' served to dramatically reinforce a sense of 'otherness' and not 'belonging' already prevalent amongst the children of Italian immigrants. The book also offers a critical overview of current representations of Italian internment in Britain, in particular the ways in which the rhetorical device of 'Collar the lot!' is utilised to give the misleading impression that 'all' Italians were interned. The impact of the government's policy of relocating Italian women from coastal regions, the narratives of the Pioneer Corps, and the Italians' declarations of alienage are also discussed.