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no expense in pursuing his passion – the building of a hothouse stood testament to his botanical ambitions. 111 He employed a gardener, Joseph Knight, who resided full time on the property, tending to the collection. Knight remained in George’s employ until the family removed from Clapham in 1820, at which point he gave Knight his living collection. Knight went on to form the
back to families, 9 helped to keep the existence and significance of colonies continually in the forefront of the public imagination. Earlier manifestations It is important to recognise that in the British case, these imperial passions were not wholly new in the nineteenth century. Kathleen Wilson has charted the significance of aspects of popular imperialism in the eighteenth
This essay considers the space of the museum as a dissident of location of postcolonial critique, inspired by Daljit Nagra’s poetic sequence ‘Meditations on the British Museum’ (2017). It fully acknowledges the Western institution of the museum as complicit in articulating colonial perspectives, but also challenges the views of those who regard museums as forever compromised by their indebtedness to empire. To this end, the essay combines recent thinking in museum studies concerning ‘diasporic objects’ with the critique of origins central to critical adoption studies in order to query the problematic nativism and unexplored passion for the patrial that sometimes underwrites ‘decolonial’ attitudes to object provenance and legitimate heritage. Drawing, too, upon Nicholas Thomas’s work regarding ‘curiosity’, it reframes the museum as a site of postcolonial critique where emergent relations might be struck through uncommissioned encounters between the museum’s visitors and its galleries. The new constellations of meaning created as a consequence empower us not only to admit but also redeploy our contact with colonialism’s plunder for purposefully resistant ends. A cognisance of exactly these possibilities resides at the core of Nagra’s poetic sequence, which imagines a diasporic visitor to London’s British Museum wandering at will among its myriad objects drawn from, but not confined to, a plethora of empires, ancient and modern. In his exploration of the museum as a space of generative opportunities for resistant thinking, Nagra curates in his poetry a generative encounter between the present’s enduring coloniality and the contestatory constellations yielded by unchartered diasporic curiosity.
. 17 Ferguson, Empire , p. xxviii. 18 Ferguson, Empire , p. xxviii. 19 Jon Wilson , ‘ Niall Ferguson’s Imperial Passion ’, History Workshop Journal , 56
‘high art’. Samran Rathore: In terms of the kinds of black and Asian stories that you do get on stage, there’s an element of playing safe in the industry. There’s a sense of only telling certain stories that won’t really ignite any kind of passion between the communities, that are nicely contained
avail: ‘he seemed dead to every passion but revenge; forgot his affection to his old friends; and, instead of complying with the request they made, furiously brandished his sword at the governor, and called aloud for his hatchet to dispatch the unhappy victim of his barbarity’. 24 Onlookers were bewildered to know the cause of Bennelong’s ‘inveterate inhumanity’. Eventually, Bennelong revealed that in a recent battle
accustomed to an authoritarian, racially stratified social order and convinced of the inferior nature of ‘the African’. 20 He had returned to Africa during the Second World War as an officer in the British Army, and, as his personal recollections of this time document, the move reignited his white-supremacist passions. 21 He returned from military service and secured a position as assistant editor and leader
physical punishment. Most of all, the failure of the prison as a humanitarian project was a product of the nature and purpose of punishment in a colonising situation. It is hard to see how a punishment explicitly designed to terrorise people into submission could make the cultural values of an alien settler society attractive to prisoners. As Salvado perceptively noted, the prisoners hated the island with a passion and when they
’ in Britain’s history, the ethnic populist passions which fuelled imperialism during the late Victorian period later stoked the fires of Powellism and other reactionary responses to decolonisation. 36 The distinction between England and Britain requires some complicating in our discussions. Schwarz, among others, has reiterated the importance of discussing ‘Englishness’ as opposed to
Society (BFBS) – some of the most influential religious organisations and organs of the missionary movement. His passion for abolition and emancipation reflected his interest in morality and justice for slaves as well as British society in general – he was very concerned about the general lack of piety and virtue in British society. For him, religion was a key component in a moral society as it dignified ‘the conduct of