Many of N.P. van Wyk Louw’s essays address the role of the intellectual. In the 1930s, Louw struggled to define a place for the intellectual in relation to the Afrikaner volk and its cultural ...movements and political parties. At the end of “Kultuurleiers sonder kultuur” (Cultural Leaders without Culture) (1939), Louw turns to the simile of the cave from book seven of Plato’s Republic. There the cave represents the city and its people, who are trapped in illusion. Plato’s “philosopher” escapes the dark chamber where the prisoners observe only shadows, gains enlightenment, and returns to open the eyes of his fellow inhabitants. Returning is the duty of the philosopher. How did N.P. van Wyk Louw imagine descending back into the “cave,” into the midst of the city, to be among the people of his country? One answer lies in a pair of unpublished fragments dating from the 1940s entitled “In die bus afgeluister” (Overheard on the Bus). In these fragments, Louw eavesdrops, as he takes the bus to and from work, on the conversations of people of Cape Town of various races. We get a slice of city life, and a sense of how Louw tried to embrace that life rather than isolate himself from it. These two urban sketches nevertheless show that the task of enlightening one’s fellow citizens proves more complicated than Louw expects because the intellectual is more deeply implicated in the illusory play of shadows than he imagines.
In 2005, Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Ushering in a new “democratic cultural revolution,” Morales promised to overturn neoliberalism and inaugurate a new ...decolonized society. In this perceptive new book, Nancy Postero examines the successes and failures that have followed in the ten years since Morales’s election. While the Morales government has made many changes that have benefited Bolivia’s majority indigenous population, it has also consolidated power and reinforced extractivist development models. In the process, indigeneity has been transformed from a site of emancipatory politics to a site of liberal nationstate building. By carefully tracing the political origins and practices of decolonization among activists, government administrators, and ordinary citizens, Postero makes an important contribution to our understanding of the meaning and impact of Bolivia’s indigenous state.
This open access book investigates how representation of Native Americans and Mexican-origin im/migrants takes place in high school history textbooks. Manually analyzing text and images in United ...States textbooks from the 1950s to 2022, the book documents stories of White victory and domination over Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups that disproportionately fill educational curricula. While representation and accurate information of non-White perspectives improves over time, the same limited tropes tend to be recycled from one textbook to the next. Textual analysis is augmented by focus groups and interviews with BIPOC students in California high schools. Together, the data show how misrepresentation and absence of BIPOC perspectives in textbooks impact youth identity. This book argues for an innovative rethinking of US history curricula to consider which stories are told, and which perspectives are represented.
This open access book takes a deeper and broader perspective of the Hassaniya-speaking groups of the western region of the Sahara. There has been a surge of interest in this region, often centred ...around sensationalist news reports and policy briefs. But in-depth understanding and analysis remains neglected and little work has been undertaken on the diverse experiences of these groups and the contrasting political regimes under which they live. The contributors here focus on the complex and ambiguous relations between statehood, Islam, nation building and identity formation in hassanophone northwest Africa, ranging from southern Morocco, the Western Sahara and Mauritania to Algeria. The book uses up-to-date fieldwork to provide fresh analysis of and an insiders' perspective on these populations and their regional interactions, with contributions from the fields of law, Islamic studies, history, anthropology, politics, gender and media studies and the research of scholars from both the global North and global South. This interdisciplinary collection shows how urban ways of life are being adopted, with Hassaniya-speaking actors adjusting to state-administered social policies and new modes of settling disputes and legal claims. In doing so, the book sheds new light on the region's shifting social hierarchies, the new gendered power dynamics, and generational changes in the re-interpretation of 'tradition'. As well as displaying that the Hassaniya-speaking groups are pivotal to the development of the region’s political culture, the book also reveals their close association with Islam, both as a religious expression as well as a cultural marker. A much-needed contribution on the intersections of politics, Islam and identity in northwest Africa.
According to republican theory, we are free persons to the extent that we are protected and secured in the same fundamental choices, on the same public basis, as one another. But there is no public ...protection or security without a coercive state. Does this mean that any freedom we enjoy is a superficial good that presupposes a deeper, political form of subjection? Philip Pettit addresses this crucial question in On the People's Terms. He argues that state coercion will not involve individual subjection or domination insofar as we enjoy an equally shared form of control over those in power. This claim may seem utopian but it is supported by a realistic model of the institutions that might establish such democratic control. Beginning with a fresh articulation of republican ideas, Pettit develops a highly original account of the rationale of democracy, breathing new life into democratic theory.
Lateinamerika kennt zahlreiche Protestbewegungen seiner indigenen Bevölkerung. Einer der emblematischsten Fälle ist die soziale Bewegung gegen ein Prestige-Projekt der Morales-Regierung: den Bau ...einer Straße im Indigenen Territorium und Nationalpark Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS) im bolivianischen Amazonasgebiet. Mit Blick auf die Perspektiven der heterogenen Protestakteur*innen rekonstruiert Maximilian Held diesen Widerstand in seinen komplexen Erscheinungsformen. Dabei stellt er heraus, wie Problematiken der geschwächten indigenen Selbstverwaltung, sozioökologische Bedrohungen, Defizite des neoextraktiven Entwicklungsmodells und mangelnde Rechtsumsetzung zusammenhängen.
Reading the Illegible examines the history of alphabetic writing in early colonial Peru, deconstructing the conventional notion of literacy as a weapon of the colonizer. This book develops the ...concept of legibility, which allows for an in-depth analysis of coexisting Andean and non-Native media. The book discusses the stories surrounding the creation of the Huarochirí Manuscript (c. 1598–1608), the only surviving book-length text written by Indigenous people in Quechua in the early colonial period. The manuscript has been deemed “untranslatable in all the usual senses,” but scholar Laura Leon Llerena argues that it offers an important window into the meaning of legibility.
The concept of legibility allows us to reconsider this unique manuscript within the intertwined histories of literacy, knowledge, and colonialism. Reading the Illegible shows that the anonymous author(s) of the Huarochirí Manuscript, along with two contemporaneous Andean-authored texts by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, rewrote the history of writing and the notion of Christianity by deploying the colonizers’ technology of alphabetic writing.
Reading the Illegible weaves together the story of the peoples, places, objects, and media that surrounded the creation of the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript to demonstrate how Andean people endowed the European technology of writing with a new social role in the context of a multimedia society.
Through an ethnographic and comparative study of rituals in a "tribal" region of Odisha, this book, in its core, deals with indigenous conceptualizations of sovereignty. The local proverb that ...connects the ritual of the king with those of his subjects epitomizes the idea of shared sovereignty that hinges sacrificial co-responsibility in navigating the flow of life.
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