Acting Inca Kuenzli, E. Gabrielle
07/2013, Letnik:
349
eBook
For most of the postcolonial era, the Aymara Indians of highland Bolivia were a group without representation in national politics. Believing that their cause would finally be recognized, the Aymara ...fought alongside the victorious liberals during the Civil War of 1899. Despite Aymara loyalty, liberals quickly moved to marginalize them after the war. In her groundbreaking study, E. Gabrielle Kuenzli revisits the events of the civil war and its aftermath to dispel popular myths about the Aymara and reveal their forgotten role in the nation-building project of modern Bolivia.Kuenzli examines documents from the famous postwar Peñas Trial to recover Aymara testimony during what essentially became a witch hunt. She reveals that the Aymara served as both dutiful plaintiffs allied with liberals and unwitting defendants charged with wartime atrocities and instigating a race war.To further combat their "Indian problem," Creole liberals developed a public discourse that positioned the Inca as the only Indians worthy of national inclusion. This was justified by the Incas' high civilization and reputation as noble conquerors, along with their current non-threatening nature. The "whitening" of Incans was a thinly veiled attempt to block the Aymara from politics, while also consolidating the power of the Liberal Party.Kuenzli posits that despite their repression, the Aymara did not stagnate as an idle, apolitical body after the civil war. She demonstrates how the Aymara appropriated the liberal's Indian discourse by creating theatrical productions that glorified Incan elements of the Aymara past. In this way, the Aymara were able to carve an acceptable space as "progressive Indians" in society. Kuenzli provides an extensive case study of an "Inca play" created in the Aymara town of Caracollo, which proved highly popular and helped to unify the Aymara.As her study shows, the Amyara engaged liberal Creoles in a variety of ways at the start of the twentieth century, shaping national discourse and identity in a tradition of activism that continues to this day.
The Killer Trail tells the tale of one of the most notorious atrocities to take place during the European ‘scramble for Africa’, a real life story of insane violence in the heart of an exotic ...continent that eerily prefigures fictional accounts such as The Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. The Voulet-Chanoine mission left Dakar in 1898 for the centre of Africa and the region of Lake Chad with the aim of establishing effective borders between the French and British empires while ‘pacifying’ a notoriously belligerent region. Wreaking havoc as it went along, the mission degenerated into an extraordinary display of colonial violence and cruelty, leaving a trail of pillage, murder, and enslavement of the local inhabitants in its wake. When the story of its outrages reached Paris in 1899 there was a public uproar and a second mission was dispatched to investigate. Eventually, on July 14 1899, the two missions met and confronted each other in a dramatic shootout, which led Voulet and Chanoine to declare their independence from France and their desire to establish an African kingdom under their own rule. But their mad dreams of kingship were soon cut short when they fell prey to a mutiny among the African soldiers under their command in which they were both killed. The whole bizarre tale of Voulet and Chanoine’s mission sharply divided opinion back home in France but was eventually explained away as the action of two deranged minds. Yet, as Bertrand Taithe shows, it was not simply a tale of individual insanity. In many ways, the actions of Voulet and Chanoine and their men simply took the violence of European colonialism to a logical extreme, while the way in which the whole affair was soon forgotten is highly revealing of western attitudes to imperial excess in Africa and elsewhere.
When George Carmack struck gold in the Yukon territory on 17 August 1896, he freely shared the details and started what would eventually be three waves of rushes. This reflected a social norm of the ...Klondike, namely that any miner who struck gold would share this information. Miners did not behave this way in other nineteenth-century gold rushes. The article's hypothesis is that the extreme mining conditions and local geography of the Yukon led to very secure property rights over mining claims. Therefore, it took only a small incentive payment to induce miners to act in the social interest.
Master
object description: Field Marshal Sir John French, Earl of Ypres, was born in 1852. After serving briefly with the Royal Navy, he joined the Army in 1874, serving in the Sudan and South Africa ...during the Boer Wars.
During 1912 - 1913, French served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff rising to the rank of Field Marshal in 1913. French was given command of the British Expeditionary Force on the outbreak of the First World War but his erratic performance led to his replacement by Haig in 1915. French was subsequently given command of the British Home Front for the remainder of the First World War, during which time he was required to quell the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland. Sir John French died in 1925
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