The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children’s Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal
This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi-stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re-masculinising the youth. These nation-building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12259
The Charms of Women and Priests: Sex, Magic, Gender and Public Order in Late Medieval Italy
How did judicial authorities in late medieval Italy understand the relationship between gender, sexuality, social status, magic and public order, especially when magic was used to facilitate the crime of adultery? What might this reveal about the intersection of gender, magic and public order in a place and time so fraught with political and social tensions? This study qualitatively compares four love-magic trials from fourteenth-century Lucca and suggests that the anxieties underpinning these trials were both particular to late medieval Italian communes and projected onto two populations, women and priests, whose unchecked sexuality posed the greatest threat to civic order. Historians examining gender in medieval European magic trials have often treated judicial officials’ anxieties as portents of the ‘witch craze’ of early modern Europe. Historians of medieval Lucca have tended to treat the political and gender histories of the city as largely separate. This article suggests that the courts’ increasing regulation of gender and sexuality in late medieval Lucca reflected larger ecclesiastical and communal concerns about the dissolution of civic order. In a world of civic power that increasingly belonged to secular men, the unchecked sexuality of women and clergy represented a dual threat to the stability of the family and, by extension, the city. This article argues that secular and ecclesiastical judicial officials feared not magic itself, but the ability of magic to invert power relations between men and women and between clergy and laity, destroying public order.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12260
Ana Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds: military patients and medical power in the First World War
<span class="paragraphSection">Carden-CoyneAna, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Politics of Wounds: military patients and medical power in the First World War</span>, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 400. £65. ISBN: 978–0–19–969826–4.</span>
Catherine L. Thompson, Patient Expectations: How Economics, Religion and Malpractice Shaped Therapeutics in Early America
<span class="paragraphSection">ThompsonCatherine L., <span style="font-style:italic;">Patient Expectations: How Economics, Religion and Malpractice Shaped Therapeutics in Early America,</span>Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. Pp. 192. $26.95. ISBN 978 1 62534 159 4.</span>
The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth-Century Australia
From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life-worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life-trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al-Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12258
60 Jahre »Blätter«
Aus Sorge um Deutschland“ titelten die „Blätter“ vor 60 Jahren, in ihrer ersten Ausgabe, die am 25. November 1956 erschien. Heute könnte es heißen: „Aus Sorge um die Demokratie“ – und zwar in Europa und darüber hinaus.
Quelle: https://www.blaetter.de/archiv/jahrgaenge/2016/november/60-jahre-%C2%BBblaetter%C2%AB
Die syrische Tragödie und die Ohnmacht der UNO
Am 31. Dezember dieses Jahres endet die Amtszeit des achten Generalsekretärs der Vereinten Nationen. Dann wird der Südkoreaner Ban Ki-moon zehn Jahre lang amtiert haben – und dennoch so blass geblieben sein wie keiner seiner Vorgänger. Und das nicht ohne Grund: Globales Chaos, machtlose UNO – diese Wahrnehmung ist heute weit verbreitet.
Großbritannien: Planlos in den harten Brexit
„Brexit heißt Brexit“, punktum. Mit dieser Ansage reiste die frischgebackene britische Premierministerin Theresa May wochenlang durchs Land. Das Erstaunliche daran: Sie kam damit an und sie kam damit durch. Der Spruch wurde ehrfürchtig nachgebetet. Allerdings wurde nicht klarer, welcher Plan sich hinter diesem Mantra verbirgt.
Quelle: https://www.blaetter.de/archiv/jahrgaenge/2016/november/grossbritannien-planlos-in-den-harten-brexit