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were partly built on a Prussian intellectual heritage in the canton that emphasized the importance of philology and the natural sciences (cf. Harries 1998, 2000). But conventions of representation developed at home also framed what they chose to write about in Africa (cf. Harries 1997). In particular, they carried to Africa the European images, themes and attitudes employed to
the organisers attempted to imbue the site with an optimistic modernism, the Exposition was saturated with an abrasive nationalism which served only to confirm the irreconcilability of major European states. 48 It was to be the cultural equivalent of the military engagement shortly to follow. The steady policies of France and Britain with regard to national profile were made to seem ambiguous and feeble compared with the
Let me begin by summarising the argument of this book in one paragraph. The first generation of European intellectuals to encounter Darwin’s The Origin of Species grew up with a radically altered view of human nature. Accepting the animal basis of existence carried the implication that inner urges to rage, fight, pillage and rape were not the snares of the devil but
museological fraternity. Published in English and French, Restituer le Patrimoine Africain 12 is a deftly aimed polemic targeted at a French public largely convinced of the benefits of viewing non-Western art within a value system defined by the high call of arts premiers , and thus more wedded to artistic movements which remain of value in France such as modernism and primitivism. 13 This habitual mise en valeur distinguishes French attitudes to the objects emerging from a colonial context in an ever-expanding European debate, as the French cultural establishment
understand and reject his prejudice and assumes parental responsibility for an orphaned Kenyan child named Joshua, whose innocent face fills the entire frame for the last few seconds of the film. Simba seems to be asserting that, as Empire evolves into Commonwealth, it is this type of relationship, in which the kindly paternalistic hands of white Europeans guide the essentially
and Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment and Modernism. In other words Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to earlier selves, rather than by geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education over the past one thousand years. 109 In the first few paragraphs of the Saracens Freeman set out his views on Western identity, which were based on the idea of the unity of European history which he learned from Arnold. ‘In studying the records of Greece, of Rome, of medieval Europe
not as a simple description nor as a state of being but as a contested historical marker with very particular and peculiar ties to modern imperialism. Early modern European explorers – the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese alongside the British – emphasised in their travel accounts the lack of clothing they encountered on their travels, a deficiency regarded as representative of a primitive state of
quarters were ‘fossilised’, preserved as living ethnographic exhibits, but starved of public funds. Matters were very different in Morocco’s more northerly cities that attracted larger European populations. Casablanca and Rabat especially became laboratories for architectural modernism and unrestricted social engineering. 91 By the 1920s Rabat and Oudja on the Morocco
At least since Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest (1989), literary scholars have argued that the logic of teaching English literature in a colonial setting was a logic of displacement – the substitution of a ‘single shelf of a good European library’ for ‘the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, to use Macaulay’s notorious terms. 1 Alternatively, in the
boat, Marlow travels towards the Inner Station with the General Manager of the Central Station who has begun to express concern about Kurtz’s well-being. During the trip, Marlow admires the restraint of his cannibal crew. When he finally reaches Kurtz, after first meeting a disciple of his, whom he describes (because of his appearance) as a harlequin, Marlow gives us the picture of a European gone native. There
