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The escalation of systematic, if random, violence in the contemporary world frames the concerns of the article, which seeks to read Baldwin for the present. It works by a measure of indirection, arriving at Baldwin after a detour which introduces Chinua Achebe. The Baldwin–Achebe relationship is familiar fare. However, here I explore not the shared congruence between their first novels, but rather focus on their later works, in which the reflexes of terror lie close to the surface. I use Achebe’s final novel, Anthills of the Savanah, as a way into Baldwin’s “difficult” last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, suggesting that both these works can speak directly to our own historical present. Both Baldwin and Achebe, I argue, chose to assume the role of witness to the evolving manifestations of catastrophe, which they came to believe enveloped the final years of their lives. In order to seek redemption they each determined to craft a prose—the product of a very particular historical conjuncture—which could bring out into the open the prevailing undercurrents of violence and terror.
(mental) health with the practice of global history. Nationalism, anti-colonialism and Nigerian psychiatry In the Nigerian context the transformation of colonial psychiatry into a cross-cultural and global psychiatry was spearheaded mostly by indigenous Nigerian psychiatrists, trained in British or British-modelled universities and hospitals in the 1950s and 1960s, who took over mental health institutions as part of Nigerian decolonization and practised in the first few decades after independence in 1960. Initially, these
. ( 1993 ), ‘ Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures) ’, Boundary 2 , 20 : 3 , 65 – 76 . Dussel , E. ( 2008 ), Twenty Theses on Politics ( Durham, NC : Duke University Press ). Grosfoguel , R. and Cervantes-Rodriguez , A. M. ( 2002 ), ‘ Introduction: Unthinking Twentieth-century Eurocentric Mythologies: Universal Knowledge, Decolonization, and Developmentalism ’, in Grosfoguel , R. and Cervantes-Rodriguez , A. M. (eds
Development, 1940s–1960s ’, in Smith , A. W. M. and Jeppesen , C. (eds), Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect ? ( London : UCL Press ) pp. 43 – 61 . Riley , C. L. ( 2019 ), ‘ Labour’s International Development Policy
Macmillan ). Kalter , C. ( 2016 ), The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c.1950–1976 ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press ). Knoch , H. ( 2001 ), Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in
Global white nationalism is a path-breaking transnational history of white nationalism in the English-speaking world from the post-World War II period to the present. Nine chapters from leading experts in the histories of Australia, Britain, southern Africa, and the United States explore the roots of the contemporary resurgence of white supremacy evident in terrorist violence and electoral gains by the racist right. After 1945, this book shows, white nationalism emerged across the English-speaking world as a response to the forces of decolonization, civil rights, mass migration, and the rise of international institutions such as the United Nations. Far from a disappearing ideology, white supremacy proved resilient and adaptive. As opposition to apartheid rallied anti-racists globally, apartheid and Rhodesian independence sustained white nationalists who fantasized about bygone eras of imperial British or American greatness. In the era of decolonization and civil rights, white nationalists—those on the far right and those closer to the mainstream of conservative politics—formed key connections with counterparts throughout the world. Uncovering this transnational history for the first time, Global white nationalism is essential to understanding white nationalism today.
This book explores the processes through which nation-building policy approaches originated and developed over the last seven decades as well as the concepts and motivations that shaped them. In the process, the book explores the question of how the US became involved in nation building overseas in the first place, and explores the persistent questions about the relationship between order, security and development in nation-building projects. At the same time, the book points out lessons that should have been retained from America's Cold War nation-building efforts in developing areas. At the cost of a great deal of treasure and no small amount of blood, the United States implemented nation building and other internal security programs in dozens of developing countries at the height of the Cold War. A generation after these policies peaked in scope and intensity, the US embarked on similar projects in a range of countries, the most ambitious in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, recent studies of America's experience with nation-building neglect these Cold War experiences in the developing world, ignoring costly lessons from efforts by which the US attempted to build functioning, cohesive state institutions in less developed contexts, including new states emerging from the decolonization process.
This book is the first full-length study of the 1947 drawing of the Indo-Pakistani boundary in Punjab. It uses the Radcliffe commission, headed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe , as a window onto the decolonisation and independence of India and Pakistan. Examining the competing interests that influenced the actions of the various major players, the book highlights British efforts to maintain a grip on India even as the decolonisation process spun out of control. It examines the nature of power relationships within the colonial state, with a focus on the often-veiled exertion of British colonial power. With conflict between Hindus , Muslims and Sikhs reaching unprecedented levels in the mid-1940s , British leaders felt compelled to move towards decolonization. The partition was to be perceived as a South Asian undertaking, with British officials acting only as steady and impartial guides. Radcliffe's use of administrative boundaries reinforced the impact of imperial rule. The boundaries that Radcliffe defined turned out to be restless divisions, and in both the 1965 and 1971 wars India and Pakistan battled over their Punjabi border. After the final boundary, known as the 'Radcliffe award', was announced, all sides complained that Radcliffe had not taken the right 'other factors' into account. Radcliffe's loyalty to British interests is key to understanding his work in 1947. Drawing on extensive archival research in India, Pakistan and Britain, combined with innovative use of cartographic sources, the book paints a vivid picture of both the partition process and the Radcliffe line's impact on Punjab.
Explaining how leprosy was considered in various historical settings by referring to categories of uncleanliness in antiquity, is problematic. The book historicizes how leprosy has been framed and addressed. It investigates the history of leprosy in Suriname, a plantation society where the vast majority of the population consisted of imported slaves from Africa. The relationship between the modern stigmatization and exclusion of people affected with leprosy, and the political tensions and racial fears originating in colonial slave society, exerting their influence until after the decolonization up to the present day. The book explores leprosy management on the black side of the medical market in the age of slavery as contrasted with the white side. The difference in perspectives on leprosy between African slaves and European masters contributed to the development of the 'Great Confinement' policies, and leprosy sufferers were sent to the Batavia leprosy asylum. Dutch debates about leprosy took place when the threat of a 'return' of leprosy to the Netherlands appeared to materialise. A symbiotic alliance for leprosy care that had formed between the colonial state and the Catholics earlier in the nineteenth century was renegotiated within the transforming landscape of Surinamese society to incorporate Protestants as well. By 1935, Dutch colonial medicine had dammed the growing danger of leprosy by using the modern policies of detection and treatment. Dutch doctors and public health officials tried to come to grips with the Afro-Surinamese belief in treef and its influence on the execution of public health policies.
Stirring language and appeals to collective action were integral to the battles fought to defend empires and to destroy them. These wars of words used rhetoric to make their case. This book explores the arguments fought over empire in a wide variety of geographic, political, social and cultural contexts. Essays range from imperialism in the early 1900s, to the rhetorical battles surrounding European decolonization in the late twentieth century. Rhetoric is one of the weapons of war. Conquest was humiliating for Afrikaners but they regained a degree of sovereignty, with the granting of responsible government to the new colonies in 1907 and independence with the Act of Union of 1910. Liberal rhetoric on the Transvaal Crisis was thus neither an isolated debate nor simply the projection of existing political concerns onto an episode of imperial emergency. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's principles of intervention in response to crimes against civilization, constituted a second corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The rhetorical use of anti-imperial demonology was useful in building support for New Deal legislation. The book argues that rhetoric set out to portray the events at Mers el-Kebir within a culturally motivated framework, drawing on socially accepted 'truths' such as historic greatness and broad themes of hope. Now, over 175 years of monarchical presence in New Zealand the loyalty may be in question, devotion scoffed, the sycophantic language more demure and colloquialized, the medium of expression revolutionized and deformalized, but still the rhetoric of the realm remains in New Zealand.