This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond.
Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or temporal categories.
Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964, the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili’s standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East Africa.
The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors, editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers. The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond.
Multilingualism is an ever-present feature in political contexts around the world, including multilingual states and international organizations. Increasingly, consequential political decisions are negotiated between politicians who do not share a common native language. Nils Ringe uses the European Union to investigate how politicians’ reliance on shared foreign languages and translation services affects politics and policy-making. Ringe's research illustrates how multilingualism is an inherent and consequential feature of EU politics—that it depoliticizes policy-making by reducing its political nature and potential for conflict. An atmosphere with both foreign language use and a reliance on translation leads to communication that is simple, utilitarian, neutralized, and involves commonly shared phrases and expressions. Policymakers tend to disregard politically charged language and they are constrained in their ability to use vague or ambiguous language to gloss over disagreements by the need for consistency across languages.
The first book of its kind, this richly informative and comprehensive guide to the world of late antiquity offers the latest scholarship to the researcher along with great reading pleasure to the browser. In eleven comprehensive essays and in over 500 encyclopedic entries, an international cast of experts provides essential information and fresh perspectives on the history and culture of an era marked by the rise of two world religions, unprecedented political upheavals that remade the map of the known world, and the creation of art of enduring glory.
By extending the commonly accepted chronological and territorial boundaries of the period--to encompass Roman, Byzantine, Sassanian, and early Islamic cultures, from the middle of the third century to the end of the eighth--this guide makes new connections and permits revealing comparisons. Consult the article on "Angels" and discover their meaning in Islamic as well as classical and Judeo-Christian traditions. Refer to "Children," "Concubinage," and "Divorce" for a fascinating interweaving of information on the family. Read the essay on "Barbarians and Ethnicity" and see how a topic as current as the construction of identity played out in earlier times, from the Greeks and Romans to the Turks, Huns, and Saxons. Turn to "Empire Building" to learn how the empire of Constantine was supported by architecture and ceremony.
Or follow your own path through the broad range of entries on politics, manufacturing and commerce, the arts, philosophy, religion, geography, ethnicity, and domestic life. Each entry introduces readers to another facet of the postclassical world: historic figures and places, institutions, burial customs, food, money, public life, and amusements. A splendid selection of illustrations enhances the portrait.
The intriguing era of late antiquity emerges completely and clearly, viewed in a new light, in a guide that will be relished by scholars and general readers alike.
First published in English in 1990 as Latin American Politics: A Theoretical Framework, a translation of Torcuato S. Di Tella's original Sociología de los procesos políticos, this new edition also focuses on the prerequisites for democracy in any society and on the role of the popular classes in social change. Di Tella draws on the work of Montesquieu, Burke, Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim in formulating his explanatory theories. These theories are then tested against crucial events in Latin American history—from the rebellions of the eighteenth century to the caudillos of the nineteenth century and the militarism of the twentieth century.
This edition is more attuned to an English-speaking audience, with a new chapter addressing the historical process in Argentina from the 1930s to 2000. Latin American Politics is written in a style easily accessible to the general reader or student, while its emphasis on the growth of democracy in Latin America makes it particularly timely.
In the late fifties and early sixties, Govan Mbeki was a central figure in the African National Congress and director of the ANC campaigns from underground. Born of a chief and the daughter of a Methodist minister in the Transkei of South Africa in 1910, he worked as a teacher, journalist, and tireless labor organizer in a lifetime of protest against the government policy of apartheid. Over two decades of imprisonment on Robben Island did not consign him to obscurity. Along with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, his name has become a symbol of resistance, not only to the oppressed people of South Africa, but also to the international community who have conferred on him many honors and awards.
Learning to Love offers a range of perspectives on the embodied, relational, affective, and sociopolitical project of “learning to love” at the New Life Center for Holistic Growth, a popular “mind-body-spirit” bookstore and practice space in northeast China, in the early part of the 21st century. This intimate form of self-care exists alongside the fast-moving, growing capitalist society of contemporary China and has emerged as an understandable response to the pressures of Chinese industrialized life in the early 21st century. Opening with an investigation of the complex ways newcomers to the center suffered a sense of being “off,” both in and with the world at multiple scales, Learning to Love then examines how new horizons of possibility are opened as people interact with one another as well as with a range of aesthetic objects at New Life.
Author Sonya Pritzker draws upon the core concepts of scalar intimacy—a participatory, discursive process in which people position themselves in relation to others as well as dominant ideologies, concepts, and ideals—and scalar inquiry—the process through which speakers interrogate these forms, their relationship with them, and their participation in reproducing them. In demonstrating the collaborative interrogation of culture, history, and memory, she examines how these exercises in physical, mental, and spiritual self-care allow participants to grapple with past social harms and forms of injustice, how historical systems of power—including both patriarchal and governance structures—continue in the present, and how they might be transformed in the future. By examining the interactions and relational experiences from New Life, Learning to Love offers a range of novel theoretical interventions into political subjectivity, temporality, and intergenerational trauma/healing.
In late 2007 and early 2008, world-renowned historians gathered in Kansas City for a series of public forums on World War I. Each of the five events focused on a particular topic and featured spirited dialogue between its prominent participants.
Thomas Hobbes laid the theoretical groundwork of the nation-state in Leviathan, his tough-minded treatise of 1651. Leviathan 2.0 updates this classic account to explain how modern statehood took shape between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, before it unraveled into the political uncertainty that persists today.
Modern states were far from immune to the modernizing forces of war, technology, and ideology. From 1845 to 1880, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina were all reconstituted through territorial violence. Europe witnessed the unification of Germany and Italy, while Asian nations such as Japan tried to mitigate foreign incursions through state-building reforms. A global wave of revolution at the turn of the century pushed the modernization process further in China, Russia, Iran, and Ottoman Turkey. By the late 1930s, with the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the momentum of history seemed to shift toward war-glorifying totalitarian states. But several variants of the modern state survived World War II: the welfare states of Western democracies; single-party socialist governments; and governments dominated by the military, especially prevalent in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, all of these forms stood in growing tension with the transformative influences of globalized capitalism. Modern statehood recreated itself in many ways, Charles S. Maier concludes, but finally had to adopt a precarious equilibrium with ever more powerful economic forces.
Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.
Libya faces a bleak humanitarian crisis, the result of the country’s descent into civil war in the summer of 2014 following the 2011 revolution.
Hundreds of thousands of Libyan citizens are uprooted within the country and many more are sheltering in neighboring states, particularly Tunisia. Drawing on in-depth interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and displaced Libyans both inside and outside the country, Megan Bradley, Ibrahim Fraihat, and Houda Mzioudet present a brief, yet thoroughly illuminating assessment of the political, socioeconomic, security, humanitarian, and human rights implications of the continued displacement of Libyan citizens within and outside their country.
Assessing the complex dimensions and consequences of the situation, Libya’s Displacement Crisis lays the groundwork for what comes next. Acknowledging that the resolution of this crisis hinges on a negotiated end to the Libyan civil war, the authors present ideas to improve assistance strategies and to support durable solutions for displaced Libyans with implications for refugee crises in other parts of the world, including Syria and Iraq.
Georgetown Digital Shorts—longer than an article, shorter than a book—deliver timely works of peer-reviewed scholarship in a fast-paced, agile environment. They present new ideas and original texts that are easily and widely available to students, scholars, libraries, and general readers.
In June 1976 political demonstrations in the black township of Soweto exploded into an insurrection that would continue sporadically and spread to urban areas across South Africa. In their assault on apartheid the youths who spearheaded the rebellion attacked and often destroyed the state institutions that they linked to their oppression: police stations, government offices, schools, and state-owned liquor outlets. In Soweto alone during the first days of the revolt protestors smashed and burned eighteen beerhalls and a similar number of bottle stores; as the rebellion spread more were destroyed. This study sets out to demonstrate that liquor outlets were not simply convenient symbols of oppression. The anger that launched gasoline bombs into beerhalls across South Africa had specific origins in deep and complicated struggles over the control of alcohol production and consumption in South Africa.
Conflict over alcohol has continuously intruded upon the lives of the black residents of southern African towns, cities, and labor compounds and upon the rural communities to which these people traced their origins. Yet the subject has received little systematic scholarly attention until now. In Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa scholars explore the complex relationship between alcohol use and the emergence of the modern urban-industrial system. In examining the role of alcohol in social control and the state, they also reveal the vibrant subcultures nurtured in beerhalls and underground shebeens and expose the bitter conflicts over alcohol that run along the fault lines of age, gender, class, and ethnicity.
From the intense and brooding Magellan and the glamorous and dashing Sir Francis Drake; to Thomas Cavendish, who set off to plunder Spain’s American gold and the Dutch circumnavigators, whose numbers included pirates as well as explorers and merchants, Robert Silverberg captures the adventures and seafaring exploits of a bygone era.
Over the course of a century, European circumnavigators in small ships charted the coast of the New World and explored the Pacific Ocean. Characterized by fierce nationalism, competitiveness, and bloodshed, The Longest Voyage: Circumnavigators in the Age of Discovery captures the drama, danger, and personalities in the colorful story of the first voyages around the world. These accounts begin with Magellan’s unprecedented 1519–22 circumnavigation, providing an immediate, exciting, and intimate glimpse into that historic venture. The story includes frequent threats of mutiny; the nearly unendurable extremes of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and fatigue; the fear, tedium, and moments of despair; the discoveries of exotic new peoples and strange new lands; and, finally, Magellan’s own dramatic death during a fanatical attempt to convert native Philippine islanders to Christianity.
Capturing the total context of political climate and historical change that made the Age of Discovery one of excitement and drama, Silverberg brings a motley crew of early ocean explorers vividly to life.
The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government’s response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Los Zetas Inc. asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence of the brutal Zetas criminal organization in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. Going beyond previous studies of the group as a drug trafficking organization, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera builds a convincing case that the Zetas and similar organizations effectively constitute transnational corporations with business practices that include the trafficking of crude oil, natural gas, and gasoline; migrant and weapons smuggling; kidnapping for ransom; and video and music piracy.
Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, Los Zetas Inc. proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Correa-Cabrera delineates the Zetas establishment, structure, and forms of operation, along with the reactions to this new model of criminality by the state and other lawbreaking, foreign, and corporate actors. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed “Academi” and now a Constellis company). Asserting that the elevated level of violence between the Zetas and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies the beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.
Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize
“Remarkable and pathbreaking…A radical rethink of colonial historiography and a compelling argument for the reassessment of the historical traditions of Hindustan.”
—Mahmood Mamdani
“The brilliance of Asif’s book rests in the way he makes readers think about the name ‘Hindustan’…Asif’s focus is Indian history but it is, at the same time, a lens to look at questions far bigger.”
—Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books
“Remarkable…Asif’s analysis and conclusions are powerful and poignant.”
—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The Wire
“A tremendous contribution…This is not only a book that you must read, but also one that you must chew over and debate.”
—Audrey Truschke, Current History
Did India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? Manan Ahmed Asif tackles this contentious question by inviting us to reconsider the work and legacy of the influential historian Muhammad Qasim Firishta, a contemporary of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir. Inspired by his reading of Firishta and other historians, Asif seeks to rescue our understanding of the region from colonial narratives that emphasize difference and division.
Asif argues that a European understanding of India as Hindu has replaced an earlier, native understanding of India as Hindustan, a home for all faiths. Turning to the subcontinent’s medieval past, he uncovers a rich network of historians of Hindustan who imagined, studied, and shaped their kings, cities, and societies. The Loss of Hindustan reveals how multicultural Hindustan was deliberately eclipsed in favor of the religiously partitioned world of today. A magisterial work with far reaching implications, it offers a radical reinterpretation of how India came to its contemporary political identity.
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