16485 results in Anthem Press
4 - Appropriating Black Africa
- P. A. Mullins
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- Book:
- Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 73-98
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Summary
White western art history started before the first century with the Greeks, who carved statues, laid mosaics, and constructed monuments and temples with a high degree of artistic skill. Hellenic art has a character of balance and symmetry, often following the golden ratio and producing realistic portraits of humans. Greek art and ideas about beauty set the standards for what white philosophers and scholars would call the rules of aesthetics. Art for the Greeks celebrated gods and goddesses, public figures, and the good life. However, poor and enslaved people could only interact with public works; the wealthy collected art to decorate their homes and give them status. The Romans copied Greek forms, myths and art, spreading them throughout Europe as they moved their Empire north.
The next movement in white western art is Celtic and Norse art in the early first century. This artwork is highly stylised and figurative, incorporates language elements and does have realistic figures. As with much Greek and Roman art, Celtic art often had ritual significance and reflected the people’s cosmology. Not much changed in white western art until the end of the medieval period. The 1400s began the European Renaissance, Enlightenment, industrialisation, and the formation of ideas about art and aesthetics. This is also the start of the white European Colonisation of Black Africa.
At the start of the European Renaissance, artwork imitated nature as closely as possible. The Renaissance was an era when painting became a popular artistic medium when sculpture and three-dimensional objects held primacy before. The Belgium Jan van Eyck popularised realistic oil painting in Northern Europe, which the southern Italians like Benini picked up. The subject matter of white European art during colonisation consisted of Christian stories and portraits of wealthy nobles who could afford to hire a painter. Art had been used by the Catholic church previous to this to illustrate the bible for the illiterate masses; the church-sponsored various skilled artists to create monuments to god, Jesus and the saints, so artists painted what the Catholic church desired. White western art from this time still relies on Hellenic notions of beauty and proportion but is focused on capturing life in the artwork. We see the first concern for the accuracy of representation, which is influenced by science, during this period, as scientists used illustrations for Enlightenment classification projects before photography existed.
Foreword
- Nivedita Misra
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- Book:
- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp vii-x
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Summary
The idea for this book is an old one. I first read V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas in the third year of my undergraduate course at Delhi University in India. I did not particularly enjoy the book then. Later, when I came to Trinidad and read it again, I found in it a reflection of my interest in Indian writing in English. The book laid emphasis on documenting the everyday lives of Indo-Trinidadians in a joint family set-up. Its use of English and the familiarity of the subject matter helped me re-discover a deep-rooted Indian culture within Trinidad.
I am a recent migrant from India to Trinidad, a non-resident Indian (NRI), who shares strong ties with my motherland through internet access and social media platforms. As such, I am part of a huge NRI population overseas, but Trinidad is not a typical sought-after destination. A majority of the NRI population resides in the Middle East, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. My distance from these ‘diasporic metropolitan centres’ provides me with a unique standpoint from where I can negotiate postcolonial and postmodern discourse away from the typified Indian diaspora critic working in the US or UK academy. However, this book is neither ostensibly about me nor my diasporic point of view.
The book references an older diaspora that came to Trinidad over 178 years ago. That diaspora is no longer a diaspora but a strong community that is deeply enmeshed in the political, economic, social and cultural life of Trinidad. Stories abound about how the Indians were tricked into coming so far from home to Trinidad, or ‘Chini-dad’ as they called it. Vijay Mishra qualifies the differences between the older and the newer diaspora as between those who could not return and for whom India became a land in their imagination, distant and pure, and those who frequently return to the homeland, replenishing their connections to an actual India. My book, in a way, seeks new ways of bridging the gaps between the older and the newer diaspora.
I contend that reading Naipaul in Trinidad has made a difference because location, in spite of recent scholarship on globalisation, has to be lived to be felt.
Chapter Four - Law and Film
- Edited by Daniel Newman, Cardiff University, Russell Sandberg, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- Law and Humanities
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 51-68
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Summary
Sam Bowden:
A lawyer should represent his client.
Max Cady:
Should ZEALOUSLY represent his client within the bounds of the law. I find you guilty, counselor! Guilty of betrayin’ your fellow man! Guilty of betrayin’ your country and abrogatin’ your oath! Guilty of judgin’ me and sellin’ me out! With the power vested in me by the kingdom of God, I sentence you to the Ninth Circle of Hell! Now you will learn about loss! Loss of freedom! Loss of humanity! Now you and I will truly be the same.
(Cape Fear 1991)Introduction
There has always been a mild obsession with lists of ‘best law/lawyer films’ as a starter for any work using film in the study of law which can be found from the turn of the century up until the time of writing. There are also Guides that exist to provide law teachers with material, as well as accounts of how the justice system operates in practice. In addition the role of ideology in film continues to be a theme. Interest comes, too, from slightly unexpected quarters. The impact of film generally as well as certain specific areas like race is also encountered as is writing on strongly related areas. Originally interest in the cinematic portrayal of law and lawyers tended to focus on the traditional American courtroom drama with specific attention on two classic films. First Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film Twelve Angry Men and second Robert Mulligans 1962 offering To Kill a Mockingbird. It also started with American legal academics who had an interest in film as a cultural phenomenon. The two films, noted above, were selected by the American Film Institute as the two finest courtroom dramas, which was defined as ‘a genre of film in which a system of justice plays a critical role in the film’s narrative’; two iconic actors, Henry Fonda and Gregory Peck, standing up against all odds to support the idea of ‘justice’. Both took up an unpopular stance demonstrating the importance of a fair trial against a backdrop of prejudice. The two films are powerful pieces of social drama with life-and-death decisions. However, Henry Fonda, as Davis Juror 8, in Twelve Angry Men, was not a lawyer but a member of the jury charged with determining the guilt or innocence of a young man accused of murder.
3 - Black African Aesthetics
- P. A. Mullins
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- Book:
- Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 49-72
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Summary
If one is not Black African, one must be cautious when thinking about Black African art. Most of the published work about Black African art that has circulated in the west up until the 1990s was all written by white western scholars. Under the influence of white supremacy and Enlightenment ideology, white western scholars believed that they could understand Black African art better than Black Africans. The continued prejudice in the white western world means that Black African scholarship remains ignored when it pertains to Black African art, philosophy, and aesthetics. White westerners with little or no knowledge of Black African cultures they studied had two things that blocked them from understanding what they studied. ‘First, it relates to embedded prejudice, a social inheritance that human beings sometimes display even if involuntarily. The second aspect pertains to ignorance. The modernist cultural hegemony has yet to acknowledge Africa as a legitimate global force in visual arts.’
To understand Black African aesthetics, art, and culture, one needs to look to Black African scholars who are better informed than their white European counterparts. There is a danger in thinking that Black Africa is a place where everyone has the same cosmology, aesthetics, culture, and language. Africa encompasses over thirteen million square miles, four times the size of the contiguous United States. There are hundreds of languages and groups within Black Africa, so one cannot speak of the area as a homogenous whole. If one thinks about the striking differences between different areas of the United States separated by hundreds of miles, one can imagine the differences that occur in Black Africa. To understand how Black African objects in white western scholarship and art are more representative of white western culture and ideas of Black Africa and less representative of Black Africa itself, one must examine Black African ideas, scholarship, and culture. Even though Black Africa does not have a singular language and culture, there are significant similarities that represent Black African cultural threads.
In this chapter, we will explore major themes and ideas found in Black Africa concerning human existence, Truth, and beauty. This work is not a definitive presentation of Black African thought or aesthetics, but a sample of the key themes and positions Black African scholars have held regarding Black African philosophy, aesthetics, and culture.
Chapter Ten - Law and Religion
- Edited by Daniel Newman, Cardiff University, Russell Sandberg, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- Law and Humanities
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 159-174
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Summary
Introduction: An English and Welsh Case Study
The interaction between law and religion differs considerably across time and space. At one extreme, there are theocracies where the religion is law and societies where religious hands shape the laws of the land. There are states where a religion or a particular religious group is afforded a protected position, be it by constitutional recognition of one religion or by the existence of concordats or treaties with them endowing upon the religion equal status to the state. Other societies bestow legal status with resulting benefits and burdens on to those that register or come within particular definitions. Others still provide for freedom of religion and belief, with protections being extended to non-religious world views and often expressed in international agreements. Some states see their role as facilitating and, where needed, regulating the religious marketplace and others see the role of the state as being neutral and/or taking a secular stance (two approaches that are not identical and not completely compatible). These are, of course, ideal types. These models rarely, if ever, exist in their idealised perfect form. In many places in many eras, several of these characteristics exist and interact uneasily. This is often the result of historical religion-state relationships failing to keep up with wider political, social and legal change. The interaction between law and religion is invariably in flux – always contestable, ever changing often in subtle sometimes unseen ways.
This chapter focuses squarely on the study of the interaction between law and religion in England and Wales in the early twenty-first century. Perhaps as a result of a lack of a single document amounting to a written constitution, a wide number and diverse variety of the ideal types described above apply in England and Wales today; often in non-ideal ways. For much of its history, English laws have been shaped by clerical hands and this continues to some extent today with bishops of the Church of England sitting in the House of Lords and representatives of that church having a special protected position on the local bodies that determine how religion is taught in schools and the laws on collective worship in schools. Education is but one example of a social function originally discharged by religions and enforced by church courts where the state has only relatively recently been active and this limits any attempt by the state to monopolise.
8 - Diasporic Nostalgia: The Harlem Renaissance and Black African Objects
- P. A. Mullins
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- Book:
- Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 177-204
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Summary
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Black artists, collectors, and art critics were taught that white western aesthetics, themes, materials, and artworks were the best humans could produce. Thus, as we have seen, many artists and intellectuals shunned or avoided connecting their work with Black Africa. There also existed Black artists, collectors, and critics who embraced Black African visual culture in problematic ways. During and after emerging from the Harlem Renaissance, Black artists incorporated Black African design and colours into their work. Several Black artists also appropriate Egyptian design. The use of Black African objects as subjects of artworks was not revolutionary or new in the art world. Further, these Black Harlem Renaissance artists are not entirely rejecting white western art, as white European artists already worked with Black African design in the latter 1800s. The Black artists’ turn towards Black African objects and designs demonstrates how they were searching for idyllic Black African cultures in the quest for a history that did not start with the horrors of the triangular trade of Black African people.
The artists and scholars of the Harlem Renaissance faced an impossible task as the information about Black Africa was inaccurate at best and often purposefully misleading, painting a picture of lost civilisations crumbled into cannibalistic devil-worshipping cults. There is a disconnect between appreciating Black African objects, which collectors regarded as quasireligious relics or plastic art and understanding Black African people as ignorant savages. The artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance, who claimed Black African objects as their inspiration, had complex and sometimes racist views towards Black Africans and dark-skinned Blacks in the US. Their understanding of Black Africa and its arts was based only on white supremacist aesthetics, mythology, and bad histories.
The white supremacists in the west hold power and control knowledge. In the US after the Civil War, white supremacists were eager to find new ways to control the Black population, so a great deal of education presented white western civilisation as the apex of all humankind and Black African people as the far opposite end of civilisation, i.e., animals. It should not be surprising that Black US artists, critics and collectors who had no memory of enslavement nor knew their familial history beyond their closest relatives would believe what white colonialists said about Black African people and objects.
6 - Redemptive Journeys in the 1990s
- Nivedita Misra
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- Book:
- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 143-160
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Summary
V. S. Naipaul was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. Many centuries ago, Sir Walter Raleigh received his knighthood from Queen Elizabeth I in 1585. Sir V. S. Naipaul was in a long line of those who received the Order of the British Empire from the West Indies, both pre- and post-independence. In 1989, he was also awarded the Trinity Cross by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago. He called the latter the ‘greatest award’ in his life. He was happy that he received this award before the announcement by the British Queen. It made the award special in a personal way. On his way back to London from Trinidad after receiving the Trinity Cross (now the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago), Naipaul spoke to reporters at the Diplomatic Lounge at the Piarco International Airport in Trinidad. Suren Capildeo, the son of Simbhoonath Capildeo and Naipaul’s cousin brother, had recently voiced concerns regarding the continued political alienation of Indians in Trinidad. Naipaul, in response to a question, said: ‘The seeds of that (political alienation) were sown a long, long time ago in the (19)30s and 40s with the extraordinary pettiness of Indian political life and I think we’re paying the price of that pettiness’ (Cuffie 1990, p. 1). He refuted the claims of racial hostility by stating, ‘I don’t see a lot of (racial) tension here. I see a lot more community of interest and culture than most places. We certainly share a language, we share pleasures, we share an economy very much. […] I think a lot of it is in the head’ (Cuffie 1990, p. 1). This was a rare instance of Naipaul speaking benignly rather than nostalgically about Trinidad.
In Trinidad, there is a distinct bonhomie between the different races and religions, and in general, a creolised culture exists. However, this bonhomie is intermittently broken, as it was when a coup was attempted and the Trinidad Parliament was held under siege for six days in July and August of 1990. The political coup was a simultaneous attack on the Trinidad and Tobago parliament, the police headquarters, the National Broadcasting Service, Radio Trinidad and the Trinidad and Tobago Television station.
1 - The Enlightenment and White Supremacy
- P. A. Mullins
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- Book:
- Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century
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- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 1-22
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Summary
This book follows my first, Misrepresenting Black Africa in US Museums (Mullins, 2019), which looked at how Black African objects first came into the US in the late 1800s. Looking at what happened when Black African objects became part of the US art world in the early 1900s. We will explore several dimensions concerning Black African objects and white western aesthetics, and the interpretation and appropriation of these objects by western artists for public consumption after WWI. The chapters trace how western intellectuals understood Black African objects. The objective is to explore how both Black and white collectors and artists regard Black African objects in the US in the early 1900s up to the present day.
To ground the preceding chapters, it is essential to understand what beauty means in a white western context. This requires some understanding of western philosophy, the history of colonialism, and the history of Europe. This book will argue that the theft of Black African objects by white western Europeans has had a lasting effect on white western art, Black artists, and the conception of Black Africa that remains today. Furthermore, the white western understanding of Black Africa that pervades in western discourse, media, and art is a profoundly distorted understanding. Finally, to understand Black African objects or art, one must know the history of the continent that is not white mythology centred around primitivism, the area the objects or art come from, but the history of the people the artists or artesian lives within and the language of the artist or artesian who created the work.
To do this, we will do several things. (1) Explore white western aesthetic ideas and contrast them with Black African aesthetic ideas. (2) Explore the history of the use of Black African objects by white western collectors, and artists, in and around the Harlem Renaissance. (3) Explore the history of the influence of white western aesthetics on Black collectors, artists, and groups in and around the Harlem Renaissance. (4) Explore how Black African aesthetics became a white mythology, which impacts aesthetics beyond the art world through advertising, commercial popularisation with the Black Power movement, and today with films such as Black Panther and videos starring Beyonce.
As noted by Ajume Wingo, western aesthetic thought is concerned with several ideas, forms, content, and meanings which are to be contemplated by the singular, detached observer.
Chapter Thirteen - Law and Theology
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- By Norman Doe
- Edited by Daniel Newman, Cardiff University, Russell Sandberg, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- Law and Humanities
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 201-208
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Summary
Introduction: Towards Legal Theology
In addition to the established field of law and religion whereby scholars study the interaction between religion and the law from a range of disciplinary perspectives, attention should also be afforded to the interaction between the disciplines of law and theology. Theology, the study of God, consists of a network of subdisciplines: in the Christian context, these include biblical theology, moral theology, ecumenical theology and so on. Each branch of theology has its own distinctive object of study, methods and purposes. For example, pneumatology studies the Holy Spirit, practical theology uses the pastoral cycle, and liberation theology seeks to transform unjust societal structures that oppress the marginalised. Each branch of theology has its own distinctive community of scholars. It is a common view (though perhaps a contested one, as between the different church traditions) that the main purpose of Christian theology is to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. The branches of theology, in turn, are vehicles for each of this core purpose.
This chapter explores how legal theology could become a branch of theology with its own distinctive objects of study, methods and purposes. What follows explores these themes, how the subdiscipline of legal theology might be defined and developed in the context of the study of the systems of law, order, and polity, of churches across the Christian traditions that deal with, for example, forms of regulation, ministry (lay or ordained), governance (institutions and functions), discipline, doctrine, worship, rites, property and external relations. It does so as to the following: (1) The object of study: legal theology should at its core be about the relationship between theology and church law – more particularly, the relationship between church law and each of the other branches of theology. (2) The method of study: legal theology may involve the theological study of church law and/or the legal study of theology using standard juristic methods (such as text and context, critical, historical, analytical) as well as methods used in the other branches of theology. (3) The purpose of study: the development of a community of scholars collaborating with a view to its impact on ecclesial practice. In each section, the potential for legal theology will be discussed by reference to three other subdisciplines of theology.
List of Contributors
- Edited by Daniel Newman, Cardiff University, Russell Sandberg, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- Law and Humanities
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp ix-x
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Chapter Nine - Law and Popular Music
- Edited by Daniel Newman, Cardiff University, Russell Sandberg, Cardiff University
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- Law and Humanities
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 143-158
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Summary
Introduction: A Developing Tune
This chapter focuses on law and music, emphasising the engagement by law and humanities scholars with popular music. It is in five parts. The first part identifies a long-standing ‘minor jurisprudence’ concerned with the parallels and cross-fertilisations between legal theorising and musicology, most often depicting judging/lawyering as forms of creative performance. In the second part it is identified that these explorations parallel more doctrinal scholarship on the legal forms – especially copyright – that surround music in the popular space. The third part discerns an area of law and popular music scholarship that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, formed from traces of textual signifiers in Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholarship and the expanding of law and literature to a broader enterprise concerned with law and popular culture. The fourth part identifies law and popular music scholarship where music is seen as a challenge to the legal orthodoxy. In this work, there is the utilisation of popular music, particularly songwriters and their lyrics, as manifesting a cultural zeitgeist: the musician as the voice of a generation in protest against a legally embedded orthodoxy. The fifth part considers a trajectory within law and popular music of construing popular music as articulating a ‘popular jurisprudence’. This focus has a connection with the earlier ‘minor jurisprudence’ of legal theory and musicology. It identifies in the cultural project of popular musicians – their lives, lyrics, videos, album art, political and cultural legacies, and social media presences – an articulation, and critique, of received legal forms. Through singing, dancing and creating in the mainstream, fundamental legalities are presented, questioned and reappropriated.
‘Minor Jurisprudence’ of Law and (Mostly Classical) Music
Law and music have a long-intertwined history. First Nations peoples of Australia describe essential legal relations with Country as ‘songlines’: that the proper relations between land, law and peoples are connected though song. In the mythmaking of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, his world and peoples and the discord they experience are constituted from the singing of ‘Great Music’ by the godhead Eru and angelic-like Ainur. However, the posited and doctrinal focus of the modern Western legal tradition has tended to be deaf to the potential foundational intertwining of law and music. Peter Goodrich has suggested: ‘Just as music has historically paid little attention to writing, law – cold prose, serious social speech – has generally marginalised music.’
5 - Black African Art?
- P. A. Mullins
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- Book:
- Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century
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- Anthem Press
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- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 99-124
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Summary
The earliest artistic products must not have seemed “artistic” to the people of the time. We ourselves, if we were to see them, would scarcely recognize them as works of art. They would certainly be so similar to other products made for other practical purposes that we would not be in a position to draw a clear line between what was “not yet” and what was “already” artistic.
The white western demand for intentional production ties into white western ideas about aesthetics. The evaluation of non-western cultural objects by white westerners at the end of the 1800s included white western ideas about society and culture. Art was not something white westerners could imagine Black Africans producing because they lived in preindustrial conditions and had no history of art. White westerners significantly portrayed Black African objects as dark occult idols or insignificant decorations at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Art is in no sense the “mother tongue of humanity,” either in the sense of a primitive original ability which the romantics thought of as natural and instinctual, or in the sense of an eternal universal means of expression which preserves its essence and its value […] The language of art emerges slowly and with difficulty; neither does it fall into people’s laps from heaven, nor does it come to them naturally. There is nothing natural, necessary, or organic about it; everything is artificial, a cultural product, the results of experiments, changes and corrections.
The lack of knowledge about Black Africa and the hubris white westerners had, presuming they knew more about Black African culture than Black Africans. This led to the loss of critical information about Black African objects in the west. The white western lack of understanding is not only a result of white supremacist ideology but also because of the white western Enlightenment knowledge system of classification and ordering. The classical model of learning in the white western context leads to the specialisation of scholars who work in fragmented silos to study their chosen problem in isolation from other disciplines and methodologies than those of their ‘field’. This fragmentation of knowledge is the opposite of Black African ideas of knowledge and the reality of the world. For Black Africans, it is impossible to separate things, study them in isolation, and reach sound conclusions about the state of the objects of study.
Preface
- Edited by Daniel Newman, Cardiff University, Russell Sandberg, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- Law and Humanities
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 27 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 09 January 2024, pp vii-viii
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Summary
Interdisciplinary approaches to law are now commonplace at least in terms of legal research. Although in the Anglo-American world at least such work has tended to be predominantly social scientific in focus, there has also been an increase in interdisciplinary scholarship on law that draws upon the humanities. This is most notable in the large literature on law and literature as well as the development of a number of further ‘law and’ fields. Some of these (e.g. law and history, law and religion, law and philosophy) have been long-lasting but have been revived in recent years by increased interdisciplinary collaborations while other areas (e.g. law and television, law and comics, law and music) represent new areas of interest that have seen legal scholars interact with academics from other parts of the university and with practitioners, artists and producers. These ‘law and’ fields, however, tend to exist in isolation from one another and this limits their development in that they are not able to draw upon each other’s intellectual and methodological developments and because this means that they exist as small disparate fields at the margins of law as an academic discipline.
There is now a growing number of works that pay attention to ‘law and humanities’ as a field, including a small number of specialist journals, but these typically take a thematic approach and are not particularly accessible to newcomers and to a student readership. This edited work, therefore, fulfils a real and pressing need to provide an accessible, introductory but critical guide to law and humanities as a whole by exploring how various disciplinary ‘law and’ fields have developed. Law and Humanities contributes to further scrutinising the content and role of law, and how it can contribute and be enriched by being understood within the law and humanities tradition as a whole.
This edited collection provides an accessible introduction to law and humanities. It is designed to be the first port of call for students and scholars interested in particular ‘law and’ fields and law and humanities in general. It examines a number of ‘law and’ interactions in turn (ordered alphabetically). Each chapter is written by an expert in the respective field and will explore the nature, development and possible further trajec-tory of that particular disciplinary ‘law and’ field. As editors, we have encouraged each contributor to conceptualise their own discussion of their field.
1 - Early Fiction of the 1950s: The Trinidad Years
- Nivedita Misra
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- Book:
- V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad
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- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 27 March 2024
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- 09 January 2024, pp 25-46
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Summary
I think it was in ‘58 that I ceased to be destitute, really (Naipaul in conversation with Walcott 1965, p. 9).
V. S. Naipaul was the eldest son in a family of five daughters and two sons. Naipaul’s mother, Droapatie Naipaul was one of the nine daughters and two sons of Kapildeo Maharaj and Soogie Rosaline Capildeo. This large household was a well-established family settled in Chaguanas, in central Trinidad, in a house with an impressive facade, with its concrete balustrades, elephants and lions with a shop on the ground floor. It was originally called Anand Bhavan (House of Happiness), but due to the decorative lion heads, it came to be known locally as the Lion House. Droapatie had had a basic education and had been married informally but was not sent away with the man due to the emergence of some last-minute questionable details (Akal 2018, p. 26). Even though she was very young when she was married to Seepersad Naipaul, it was a late marriage according to the customs of the time. She did odd jobs in her family’s establishments and, after the death of her husband, became the breadwinner for her family.
Naipaul’s father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a second generation East Indian whose parents had not thrived in Trinidad. Seepersad’s grandmother had come as an indentured labourer, carrying her little son, who was a free Indian. Seepersad’s father died early, leaving behind two sons and a daughter. Seepersad’s mother married again and had another son from the second husband. At a certain time in the family, it was decided that they would all go back to India. However, Seepersad developed cold feet at the thought and hid in a toilet to avoid the journey back to India. The family stayed on in Trinidad. Since Seepersad’s father died early, the family was left at the mercy of richer relatives. His life, recapitulated in A House for Mr Biswas, typifies the tale of the common man working in a hostile environment. He did odd jobs, learnt English, painted signboards and finally got employed at the Trinidad Guardian newspaper. However, unlike Mohun Biswas, Seepersad began work as a freelance reporter on the Trinidad Guardian in 1929 before his marriage with Droapatie. Seepersad’s marriage had also been fixed early but his bride had run away on the day of the marriage (Akal 2018, p. 27).
Post-script: COVID-19 Disclaimer
- Maria Berta Ecija, King's College London
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- Book:
- The Drivers and Outcomes of Global Health Diplomacy
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 29 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 05 December 2023, pp 227-230
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Summary
I started my research on global health diplomacy in January 2017. My fieldwork in Brazil and Mozambique was undertaken in November 2018. In 2020, I was in my writing-up year in the United Kingdom, working on the analysis chapter, introduction and conclusion, when in March we experienced the COVID-19 outbreak in full force.
Back in 2017, whenever I mentioned to others that I was working on the concept and framework of global health diplomacy and its importance, or even trying to explain the relationship between health and international relations, it was difficult at times because it was not tangible to people. My experience of explaining these factors to a broader audience was challenging because linking one person’s health or a community to a greater web of global political, economic and human rights-oriented frameworks was not feasible.
In an ongoing globalised and interdependent world order, where the physical distances between people and goods are being diminished by technology and more transportation options, society could not grasp the idea of an outbreak. There are many reasons for this incomprehension: advances in science and technology, which boosted our confidence in terms of fighting outbreaks; more access to information; and the backward mindset that outbreaks could be contained in the geographical area in which they originally happened, without considering more significant levels of international interaction.
Therefore, submitting this PhD thesis, or indeed any work related to health in 2021, is challenging because the reader might be expecting an engagement with the COVID-19 crisis and its consequences. Thus, I want to clarify that it was unfeasible timewise to embed any analogy about the current coronavirus pandemic here. Also, the subject matter of this research is the field of global health diplomacy, its drivers and outcomes. However, I write about it in the context of cooperation, horizontality, mutual growth and multilateralism.
Maybe Fidler (2005) was right when he pointed out that certain politicians and societies perceive health as a subject of low politics. Until we had this major global crisis, people were very detached from the importance of global health and the several areas it encompasses. Nevertheless, nowadays, several members of the general public consider themselves avid experts on international health, based on their opinions.
The coronavirus crisis of 2020 has encouraged us to develop a new perspective on health.
List of Abbreviations
- Maria Berta Ecija, King's College London
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- Book:
- The Drivers and Outcomes of Global Health Diplomacy
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 29 February 2024
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- 05 December 2023, pp ix-x
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Contents
- Aneira J. Edmunds
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- Book:
- Human Rights, Security Politics and Embodiment
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- Anthem Press
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- 29 February 2024
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- 05 December 2023, pp ix-x
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6 - Continuity: Weaving Archipelagoes of Resistance
- Sayan Dey, Alliance University, Bangalore
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- Performing Memories and Weaving Archives
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- Anthem Press
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- 29 February 2024
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- 05 December 2023, pp 79-86
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Summary
The Indian Ocean, like the winds and the storms, cannot be restricted within frontiers. From 1500 to 1800, the Indian Ocean rim included all areas between the Red Sea and the Straits of Malacca. In the 20th century, “Australia and Southern Africa were added” to the Indian Ocean space (Khader 2017, p. 85). Gabeba Baderoon in her book Regarding Muslims (2014), argues that “the sea is a metaphor for experiences that transcend conventional categories, the juxtaposition of multiple histories, the transformation of the self, and memories of slavery” (p. 67). On a similar note, this book has reinterpreted the Indian Ocean space through the creolized culinary, spiritual, and musical memories and rituals of the African Indians in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa. The fluidity of the Indian Ocean has generated fluid sociocultural practices amongst the communities residing in and around that space, as can be seen in the cases of the African Indians and the South African Indians. The various sociocultural creolized practices of the African Indians and the South African Indians, as discussed in this book, have pushed these communities into a state of “informed accommodation,” which Khatija Khader defines as a practice by communities to mark a distinct identity “by claiming membership into other larger regional or global groups—to mark similarity” (2020, p. 438). During personal conversations, the African Indians and the South African Indians shared their habitual culinary and spiritual and the musical practices that enable them to remember their “distinctive” ancestral practices, on the one side, and identify “similarities” between the sociocultural practices of the local Indian and African communities, respectively, on the other. The African Indians in Gujarat, while respecting their relationship to the local Indian cultures and traditions, never fail to acknowledge their connections to African ancestry. On a similar note, a lot of South African Indians identify their distinctiveness from the rest of the South Africans by simultaneously acknowledging their Indian and South African roots. These dynamics of informed accommodation can be thoroughly understood through the theoretical and ethnographic narratives of the struggles and resistances of the African Indians and the South African Indians. The multi-rooted sociocultural practices of these communities have led to the formation of several diaspora spaces across the Indian Ocean (Baron and Cara 2011).
Frontmatter
- Maria Berta Ecija, King's College London
-
- Book:
- The Drivers and Outcomes of Global Health Diplomacy
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 29 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 05 December 2023, pp i-iv
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Contents
- Mansour Bonakdarian
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- Book:
- Éirinn and Iran Go Brách
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 29 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 05 December 2023, pp xi-xii
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