Trouble on the Docks: Strikes, Scabs, and the Colonial Question in Marseilles Port Neighborhoods
This essay explores the colonial context in which manly labor—particularly dock work—was performed, experienced and embodied in Marseille from the late 1940s through early 1960s. It takes seriously the spatial milieu in which masculinity was cultivated by paying particular attention to both the workplace and neighborhoods where diverse port workers lived and socialized. While scholarship on gender and labor has underscored how masculinity is constructed and performed in the workplace, recent studies have not fully explored the imperial contexts in which many of these negotiations have taken place. Marseille dockers—whether union member or scab, colonial subject or citizen—had varied understandings of the meaning, goal and consequences of labor. Port work was thus deeply coded by perceptions of gender, political affiliations, and racial differences and these understandings were forged on the docks as well as in the city’s many port district bars and cafés.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/5/900?rss=1
About the Ideal Layout of the City Street in the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries: The Myth of the Renaissance in Town Building
In the historiography of town planning, one still finds the old idea that the straight street is typical for the Renaissance, whereas medieval streets would typically be curved or crooked and irregular. In this article, this idea will be contested with the evidence of the scarce written sources concerning the subject of the layout of the city street from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and of the urban form of the new towns that were built in that period. It will also be shown that traditional interpretations of the famous passage from Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, which describes the advantages of winding streets as compared to straight streets, are largely wrong. Moreover, it will be argued that the general idea of medieval town building as something completely different than Renaissance town building is not correct.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/5/938?rss=1
„My Most Beautiful Ornament Is My House“: National Womanhood and Urban Modernity in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Senegal, 1956-1968
This article examines changing representations of women and the city during the years surrounding Senegal’s 1960 independence from France. By focusing on advertisements, images, and texts of the largest (and later only) political party’s newspaper, this article shows how women and their bodies were politicized by a nation-building process that relied on discourses of the "modern" city and the "traditional" countryside. In the late colonial period and immediately following independence, nationalists perceived a planned city of modern residents as foundational to the emerging nation. Imagery and textual references to women’s consumption and to their labor portrayed them as important participants in the construction of urban spaces and the development of modern citizens. However, as Senegal’s industrialized urban future became increasingly uncertain, text and imagery valorized rural Senegal and traditional bodies, adornment, and female sexuality. Their urbanized inverses were reinscribed as a potential threat to the national project.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/5/881?rss=1
Rape, Race, and Respectability in a South African Port City: East London, 1870-1927
In late 19th century and early 20th century South Africa, public panics about black men who raped white women (the "black peril") provided a potent framework for mobilizing racial nationalism. The experiences of women who attempted to prosecute sexual assaults, however, were more complicated than the black peril panics might suggest. In the port city of East London, the English-speaking elite who dominated the judicial system judged women according to norms of respectability derived from middle-class British culture. Both black women and poorer white women, particularly German and Afrikaans speakers, found it difficult to measure up to these standards and, as a result, were rarely believed when they brought forward complaints of rape. This skepticism of rape complaints persisted even when white women accused black men of rape, since the typical victim in such cases was a white woman whose social life already transgressed the racial boundaries required by respectability.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/5/863?rss=1
Introduction: Sex and the Colonial City
Although cities were not new to Africa and the Americas, slave trading and imperialism produced a particular phenomenon: the modern colonial city. These new sites were supposed to broadcast the power and interests of colonial states and societies. Yet, Africans and people of African descent left indelible marks on modern urban life. Research has demonstrated that cities, even in the metropole, were transformed by enslaved women and men, immigrants, refugees, and laborers. These articles discuss the ways women and men shaped cities as property-owners, litigants, activists, and intellectuals and engaged broader questions of identity, belonging, and citizenship. People circulating through the Atlantic world also inhabited cities as gendered, sexual, and affective beings who actively conceptualized ideas about pleasure, morality, respectability, and desire. These articles on New Orleans, Louisiana; East London, South Africa; Marseille, France; and Dakar, Senegal reveal unique approaches that integrate gender and urban studies in an Atlantic world context that considers connections between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. This introduction discusses the shared themes and contributions to the scholarship the authors make while pointing to potential new directions in research.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/5/831?rss=1
„Refugee from St. Domingue Living in This City“: The Geography of Social Networks in Testaments of Refugee Free Women of Color in New Orleans
Through Cuba and other points, the Haitian Revolution drove thousands of free women of color to New Orleans between 1791 and 1810. This significant influx coincided with the Louisiana Purchase, tripling the city’s Francophone free black population at a transitional moment. Through a close analysis of testaments recorded by refugee women soon after their arrival, this article investigates the gendered strategies they employed to survive their dislocation and rebuild their lives. Wills serve as a valuable source to uncover the social networks utilized by refugees resettling in New Orleans. The relationships captured in wills indicate how the process of migration both reproduced and transformed social relations from Saint-Domingue. Testaments also illuminate the spatial components of the testators’ relationships, enabling a reconstruction of refugee women’s social geography. Mapping these networks exposes where (re)connections occurred in the city and emphasizes the ways in which free women of color refugees shaped the development of New Orleans.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/5/841?rss=1
The Latest Instalment in the Whig Interpretation of Australian Education History: Catherine Byrne’s JORH Article “Free, Compulsory and (not) Secular”
The original meaning of the term “secular” in the “free compulsory and secular” nineteenth-century Australian public education acts is often contested, and has recently become part of a contemporary debate about the presence of confessional religion in state schools. I outline four different interpretations expressed in Australian education history writing, then review the recent Journal of Religious History article “Free, Compulsory and (not) Secular” by Catherine Byrne, arguing that it belongs to the secular liberal or “Whig” interpretation of the meaning of “secular” in the acts. The article is critiqued for forcing sources to conform to an overly rhetorical narrative device: a polarised structure valorising Victorian legislator George Higinbotham, and demonising New South Wales legislator Sir Henry Parkes. The article is also criticised for sub-optimal source-work, lack of awareness of the corpus of Australian education history, and overt contemporary policy agendas. I also suggest that the larger “Whig” interpretation of “secular” as part of a liberal progress narrative, underemphasises a religious hermeneutic and a critical theory hermeneutic: that a Protestant consensus about state schooling and “secular” in the Public Education Acts was also a deeply sectarian device for excluding Catholics from a dominant social settlement, just one part of a systemically divided and prejudicial culture.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1467-9809.12386