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In this period of the global warping of time-space topologies and of increasing awareness of disorganisation and catastrophe, it is a matter of urgency to ask how we ‘new world’ settler peoples come to imagine that we belong to our beloved homelands. We cannot help but know that we are here through dispossession and death. What are some of the stories we tell to help us inscribe a moral presence in places we have come to through violence? I approach this question through an analysis of landscape stories presented
This essay analyzes how James Baldwin’s late novel If Beale Street Could Talk represents Black women’s care work in the face of social death as an example of how Black women act as surrogates for Black liberation giving birth to a new world and possibilities of freedom for Black (male) people. Within the politics of Black nationalism, Black women were affective workers playing a vital role in the (re)creation of heteronormative family structures that formed the basis of Black liberation cohered by a belief in the power of patriarchy to make way for communal freedom. This essay demonstrates how Beale Street’s imagining of freedom centers not on what Black women do to support themselves or each other, but on the needs of the community at large, with embodied sacrifice as a presumed condition of such liberation.
In American Gods, Neil Gaiman characterises ‘America’ – to use Gaiman’s own anachronistic and in many ways problematic term – as a country of immigrants from its very earliest times to the present day. Gaiman’s starting point is what might be called the emigration of mythology – how gods and the heroes of folklore are exported to the New World along with each wave of emigration. 1 One of his inspirations was the work of academic folklorist Richard Dorson, who is quoted in the novel’s epigraph pondering the fates of these supernatural emigrants: ‘what happens
under the watchful eye of landholder and magistrate. 53 In the later 1690s, Locke himself prepared a paper for the Board of Trade, the committee that advised the English government on New World plantations, saying colonisation could be a last resort for the problems of unemployment and petty crime in England. 54 Likewise, both the humanist thinker Thomas More and the booster of Virginian settlement Richard Hakluyt believed that a variety of social problems could be solved via the
of the York God suggests that, in these early days of the world, he believes it is possible to erase and make his work anew. Yet as the play develops it becomes clear that an entirely new beginning is not possible. Like all discourses of erasure and beginning employed by those seeking to annihilate or overwrite an uncomfortable history, the new world must accommodate remnants of the old. 25 These remnants, however, are not particularly promising. God’s choice of Noah to select and preserve what Sarah Elliott Novacich has called the ‘archive’ of the ark meets its
101 4 The New World ‘sans-culottes’: French revolutionary ideology in Saint-Domingue Johnhenry Gonzalez In February 1794, two and a half years after slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue initiated the Haitian Revolution by taking up arms against their former masters, the Jacobin-controlled National Convention in Paris issued the first ecumenical decree of slave emancipation in modern history. While the Haitian and French Revolutions occurred contemporaneously, scholars of the period have long been at odds with regard to the extent and the nature of
The war on terror has shaped and defined the first decade of the twenty-first century, yet analyses of Britain's involvement remain limited and fragmentary. This book provides a comprehensive, detailed and critical analysis of these developments. It argues that New Labour's support for a militaristic campaign was driven by a desire to elevate Britain's influence on the world stage, and to assist the United States in a new imperialist project of global reordering. This included participation in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, support for extra-legal measures and a diminution of civil liberties through punitive anti-terror legislation. Ostensibly set within a political framework of promoting humanitarian values, the government's conduct in the war on terror also proved to be largely counter-productive, eroding trust between the citizenry and the state, putting the armed forces under increasing strain, reducing Britain's global position and ultimately exacerbating the threat from radical Islamic terrorism. While new imperialism is typically treated as either an ‘economic’, ‘political’, ‘militaristic’ or ‘humanitarian’ endeavour, this study seeks to enhance current scholarly accounts by setting the events and dynamics of the war on terror within a more holistic and multi-dimensional account of new imperialist forces.
What does global health stem from, when is it born, how does it relate to the contemporary world order? This book explores the origins of global health, a new regime of health intervention in countries of the global South, born around 1990. It proposes an encompassing view of the transition from international public health to global health, bringing together historians and anthropologists to explore the relationship between knowledge, practices and policies. It aims at interrogating two gaps left by historical and anthropological studies of the governance of health outside Europe and North America. The first is a temporal gap between the historiography of international public health through the 1970s and the numerous anthropological studies of global health in the present. The second originates in problems of scale. Macro-inquiries of institutions and politics, and micro-investigations of local configurations, abound. The book relies on a stronger engagement between history and anthropology, i.e. the harnessing of concepts (circulation, scale, transnationalism) crossing both of them, and on four domains of intervention: tuberculosis, mental health, medical genetics and traditional (Asian) medicines. The volume analyses how the new modes of ‘interventions on the life of others’ recently appeared, why they blur the classical divides between North and South and how they relate to the more general neoliberal turn in politics and economy. The book is meant for academics, students and health professionals interested in new discussions about the transnational circulation of drugs, bugs, therapies, biomedical technologies and people in the context of the ‘neoliberal turn’ in development practices.
The introduction explores the ways in which history and anthropology have approached global health and its origins. It suggests that this new regime of health intervention in countries of the global South, born around 1990, differs from the previous regime of international public health at three levels: the actors involved, the targets prioritized and the tools mobilized. The introduction further identifies two gaps left by historical and anthropological studies of the governance of health outside Europe and North America: (1) a temporal gap between the historiography of international public health through the 1970s and the numerous anthropological studies of global health in the present; (2) a gap originating in problems of scale. Macro-inquiries of institutions and politics abound, as do micro-investigations of local configurations. Pleading for a strong engagement between the two disciplines and the harnessing of common concepts, the introduction explores why and how the four domains of interventions selected in the book (tuberculosis, mental health, medical genetics and traditional (Asian) medicines) can contribute to a better understanding of the new modes of ‘interventions on the life of others’ and how they relate to the more general ‘neoliberal turn’.