This paper means to show how British Colonialism in India was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest. In fact colonialism was itself a cultural project of control. Colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it. Cultural forms in Indian society were reconstructed and transformed by this knowledge. In the conceptual scheme which the British created to understand and to act in India they reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms. An example of colonial way of organizing and representing Indian social identity is offered by the British construction of Indian Gypsies. This communication is meant to explain first the logic of such an identification and then the new authority and vitality currently attained by this product of Orientalism in Romani political organizations and cultural associations.
Historically the Mediterranean has been crossed by civilizations, peoples and goods which interacted, not always peacefully, respecting pluralism and mutual acknowledgment. The colonial expansion was a rupture which introduced the European hegemony all over the basin denying the "other". France and Italy were the most relevant beneficiaries. Italian colonialism started in the Red Sea and founded the Empire in the Horn but landed in the Northern Africa with Libya's conquest in 1911-12. Not even decolonization, with the access to independence of the colonial possessions after the Second World War, entirely filled the gap between North and South opened by colonialism as such because of the asymmetry at the level of power and the economic and commercial dependence. Italy pursued its international alliances in a perspective focussed on the Atlantic Ocean. Despite the Cold War strains Rome tried to save a good neighbouring with the Arab states. Europe has its border -- as a place where the diverse actors meet -- in the Mediterranean. However, the united Europe failed in all the attempts to bring about a real cooperation with the South shore. The Euro-Mediterranean partnership setup in 1995 did not survive the evaluation Conference ten years later. Is the cooperation season over? Italy too has been involved in the coalition that waged a war to accelerate the collapse of Qadhafi's regime under attack from an internal upsurge covering the will of France to reaffirm a post-colonial influence after the liberty wave (Arab Spring) that is going to change the profile of North Africa. Adapted from the source document.
Italian scholars and Arabists have only recently started to pay attention towards Libya and this country's rich and fascinating literary production. Libyan writers are, in fact, still unknown to most people in Italy, where merely a few Italian translations of Libyan works and critical essays on Libyan literature have been published until now. Yet, Libya's contemporary literary scene features outstanding figures, such as the eclectic writer 'Ali Mustafà al-Misrati, whose novels, short stories and essays deal with significant historical, political and social themes. Starting from the analysis of one of author's tales focused on the Libyan opposition against Italian colonialism, this article provides some insights on the importance of satire as a tool of political opposition against the colonial regime, both in the colonized country and in the colonized one.
The chapter on children's literature in Portugal is organised in two parts. The first from 1945 to 1974 and the second from 1975 to 2011. The main reason for this organization is related to the social and cultural changes which have resulted from the policy change, caused by the revolution of April 25th, 1974, putting out the political regime of the "New State". The change from a totalitarian regime, which advocated the isolationism towards Europe, colonialism defender, for a democratic political regime, opening doors to decolonization, to censorship abolition and consequently opened doors to other ideologies and movements of literature from different parts. The children and youth education, the school and the editorial policy, among many other dimensions, reflected these ideological changes.
The South Pacific is a region still unimportant in the world scene, where there are islands which are extremely variable in size and are often gathered in archipelagos. Since it was long neglected by the processes of colonialism, the region has managed to preserve a rich environmental and cultural heritage, abundant and unusual in the European hetero-perception. The region was first considered as a far and wild paradise to tame and exploit in the name of geopolitics and the economy, and is now divided into two linguistic areas, English and French. This situation has not prevented the creation of narratives, representations and stereotypes around this idyllic region and its elements of wilderness, mystery, remoteness, exoticism, isolation.This article focuses on the French islands in the South Pacific: New Caledonia, Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna. Beyond their stereotypes and hetero images (tropical paradises, smiling populations), such islands present some extremely varied forms of spatial organization and land management, depending on physical realities, cultural heritage, social, political and economical processes. While traditional tourism promotes the image of tropical paradise, their self-representations are trying to show a different vision, which increases the differences between the three French archipelagos of the South Pacific.
Imperialism, nationalism and colonies in the work of Friedrich Ratzel Ratzel is often associated with 'fin dè siecle' imperialism, but on the basis of a prejudice that condemns him to "be part of his time" before even having done the appropriate considerations; however, Ratzel is part of his time not because of imperialism, but as a participant in an intellectual debate, far more complex than a foreign policy option. Imperialism, nationalism and colonialism in Ratzel may be included starting by the concept of growth of Government. The problem of growth clarifies the dynamic aspect of the political geography of Ratzel, one of the most crushing innovations introduced by the German scholar into the geographical speech. We tried to show how the political action, within the Ratzel system, is used to obtain a greater advantage from the ground, that is a deep radication and not a necessarily-in-horizontal expansion, which is to the detriment of other countries. According to Ratzel, the end of history is the progressive connection between the human being and the ground; therefore the objective of the policy will be set accordingly, leading to the decline of the possible expansion in favour of growth. A better understanding of Ratzel' way of thinking must begin from a more careful analysis of the "political idea" prevailing in those years in Leipzig. Study circles, conferences, books, and their relationships cultivated by Ratzel, shows a picture closer to the neo-German idealism.
The 'Primitive colony' of Eritrea, overlooking the shores of the Red Sea, or Mar Rosso,(from which comes 'Eritrea' or 'Red Land'), saw successive stages of Italiancolonialism, with a robust increase during the years of Fascism. Asmara, a village that became the capital in 1891, still conserves an almost intact urban structure andarchitectural features from its half century of colonialism. The first expansion of Asmara was regulated by a scheme plan, approved in 1902, which included the area to the East of the original military outpost on the Mai Belà river. The grid pattern was marked by two major arteries, parallel to each other: the King's Way (il Corso del Re) and the Queen's Avenue (il Viale della Regina). After the space of a decade,Cavagnari's plan was the first to separate the European settlement from the indigenouszone. The advent of Fascism did not have an immediate impact in Eritrea; by then thecapital had developed a well-integrated population. One is continuously surprised bytestimonies of the residents in Asmara in the Thirties, which express a state of mindshared by both colonizers and colonized, describing the city as: 'beautiful [.] inhabited by a mixed race, Italians and Africans . a lot of traffic, shops, cinemas andrestaurants.' . It is commonplace to refer to 'good Italian people' (italiani bravagente), which is a most difficult viewpoint to abandon, and is also a most relevant perspective when considering the architectural patrimony of Asmara as a shared heritage. This paper aims to shed light on this mixture of narratives and to reread the modernity of Asmaran architecture as an added value to the contemporary history of the Eritrean nation.
Historically, the people of Mozambique have faced oppression and social spatial segregation and responded in a way that has reinforced rather than dismantled their traditional values. Since pre-colonial times, the population's strategy for escaping from environmental and foreign political disruption has been to reinvent tradition, based on the principles of resilience, resistance and self-reliance. The development of decentralised human settlements, involving the appropriation of land for domestic space and the self-organisation of neighbourhoods, were strategies to protect communities from adversity and secure collective self-reliance. Following Mozambique's conversion to globalization, the post-colonial 'cement city' is now the core of neo-liberalism, as a node of the global economy, where foreign donors and international market economy control national political economy, exacerbating the premise of the negation of self-sufficiency that continues to evolve resiliently at its margins. The adoption of a neo-liberal model of development during the 1990s, completely bypasses the realities of Mozambican society. This paper argues that the strategy of self-production of space regarding the household/Outdoor Domestic Space unit, which existed previously as a resistance strategy, first of all against colonialism and secondly, against the statist definition of socialism, thirdly, has become a successful strategy for survival, as the building block of the decentralised Agrocity, in the face of a global economy which totally neglects both the people and the land. Outdoor Domestic Space is a multifaceted space that refers to the external space surrounding the built house and which, in the case of Mozambique, is where daily life takes place, involving strong social, ecological and productive functions. Under successive periods of political economy oppression and environmental adversity, the Outdoor Domestic Space has been adapted and refined to ensure collective self-reliance. Shaping a green and ruralised urbanisation at the margins of the Mozambican post-colonial dualistic city, which I call the Agrocity, the Outdoor Domestic Space is resilient because it is able to adjust domestic space as a strategy to secure livelihoods, provide urban food, commerce and services, maintain vital kinship relationships and produce a comfortable and clean microclimate across the spontaneous neighbourhoods. This spatial resilience is the feature underlying the self-organisation of neighbourhoods with a new way of overcoming alienation from nature, which suggest the continuance of an innate relationship between society, the human habitat and nature. ; Historically, the people of Mozambique have faced oppression and social spatial segregation and responded in a way that has reinforced rather than dismantled their traditional values. Since pre-colonial times, the population's strategy for escaping from environmental and foreign political disruption has been to reinvent tradition, based on the principles of resilience, resistance and self-reliance. The development of decentralised human settlements, involving the appropriation of land for domestic space and the self-organisation of neighbourhoods, were strategies to protect communities from adversity and secure collective self-reliance. Following Mozambique's conversion to globalization, the post-colonial 'cement city' is now the core of neo-liberalism, as a node of the global economy, where foreign donors and international market economy control national political economy, exacerbating the premise of the negation of self-sufficiency that continues to evolve resiliently at its margins. The adoption of a neo-liberal model of development during the 1990s, completely bypasses the realities of Mozambican society. This paper argues that the strategy of self-production of space regarding the household/Outdoor Domestic Space unit, which existed previously as a resistance strategy, first of all against colonialism and secondly, against the statist definition of socialism, thirdly, has become a successful strategy for survival, as the building block of the decentralised Agrocity, in the face of a global economy which totally neglects both the people and the land. Outdoor Domestic Space is a multifaceted space that refers to the external space surrounding the built house and which, in the case of Mozambique, is where daily life takes place, involving strong social, ecological and productive functions. Under successive periods of political economy oppression and environmental adversity, the Outdoor Domestic Space has been adapted and refined to ensure collective self-reliance. Shaping a green and ruralised urbanisation at the margins of the Mozambican post-colonial dualistic city, which I call the Agrocity, the Outdoor Domestic Space is resilient because it is able to adjust domestic space as a strategy to secure livelihoods, provide urban food, commerce and services, maintain vital kinship relationships and produce a comfortable and clean microclimate across the spontaneous neighbourhoods. This spatial resilience is the feature underlying the self-organisation of neighbourhoods with a new way of overcoming alienation from nature, which suggest the continuance of an innate relationship between society, the human habitat and nature.
Historically, the people of Mozambique have faced oppression and social spatial segregation and responded in a way that has reinforced rather than dismantled their traditional values. Since pre-colonial times, the population's strategy for escaping from environmental and foreign political disruption has been to reinvent tradition, based on the principles of resilience, resistance and self-reliance. The development of decentralised human settlements, involving the appropriation of land for domestic space and the self-organisation of neighbourhoods, were strategies to protect communities from adversity and secure collective self-reliance. Following Mozambique's conversion to globalization, the post-colonial 'cement city' is now the core of neo-liberalism, as a node of the global economy, where foreign donors and international market economy control national political economy, exacerbating the premise of the negation of self-sufficiency that continues to evolve resiliently at its margins. The adoption of a neo-liberal model of development during the 1990s, completely bypasses the realities of Mozambican society. This paper argues that the strategy of self-production of space regarding the household/Outdoor Domestic Space unit, which existed previously as a resistance strategy, first of all against colonialism and secondly, against the statist definition of socialism, thirdly, has become a successful strategy for survival, as the building block of the decentralised Agrocity, in the face of a global economy which totally neglects both the people and the land. Outdoor Domestic Space is a multifaceted space that refers to the external space surrounding the built house and which, in the case of Mozambique, is where daily life takes place, involving strong social, ecological and productive functions. Under successive periods of political economy oppression and environmental adversity, the Outdoor Domestic Space has been adapted and refined to ensure collective self-reliance. Shaping a green and ruralised urbanisation at the margins of the Mozambican post-colonial dualistic city, which I call the Agrocity, the Outdoor Domestic Space is resilient because it is able to adjust domestic space as a strategy to secure livelihoods, provide urban food, commerce and services, maintain vital kinship relationships and produce a comfortable and clean microclimate across the spontaneous neighbourhoods. This spatial resilience is the feature underlying the self-organisation of neighbourhoods with a new way of overcoming alienation from nature, which suggest the continuance of an innate relationship between society, the human habitat and nature. ; Historically, the people of Mozambique have faced oppression and social spatial segregation and responded in a way that has reinforced rather than dismantled their traditional values. Since pre-colonial times, the population's strategy for escaping from environmental and foreign political disruption has been to reinvent tradition, based on the principles of resilience, resistance and self-reliance. The development of decentralised human settlements, involving the appropriation of land for domestic space and the self-organisation of neighbourhoods, were strategies to protect communities from adversity and secure collective self-reliance. Following Mozambique's conversion to globalization, the post-colonial 'cement city' is now the core of neo-liberalism, as a node of the global economy, where foreign donors and international market economy control national political economy, exacerbating the premise of the negation of self-sufficiency that continues to evolve resiliently at its margins. The adoption of a neo-liberal model of development during the 1990s, completely bypasses the realities of Mozambican society. This paper argues that the strategy of self-production of space regarding the household/Outdoor Domestic Space unit, which existed previously as a resistance strategy, first of all against colonialism and secondly, against the statist definition of socialism, thirdly, has become a successful strategy for survival, as the building block of the decentralised Agrocity, in the face of a global economy which totally neglects both the people and the land. Outdoor Domestic Space is a multifaceted space that refers to the external space surrounding the built house and which, in the case of Mozambique, is where daily life takes place, involving strong social, ecological and productive functions. Under successive periods of political economy oppression and environmental adversity, the Outdoor Domestic Space has been adapted and refined to ensure collective self-reliance. Shaping a green and ruralised urbanisation at the margins of the Mozambican post-colonial dualistic city, which I call the Agrocity, the Outdoor Domestic Space is resilient because it is able to adjust domestic space as a strategy to secure livelihoods, provide urban food, commerce and services, maintain vital kinship relationships and produce a comfortable and clean microclimate across the spontaneous neighbourhoods. This spatial resilience is the feature underlying the self-organisation of neighbourhoods with a new way of overcoming alienation from nature, which suggest the continuance of an innate relationship between society, the human habitat and nature.
The so-called "human zoos" represented an incredibly widespread and extremely popular phenomenon in 19th-early 20th century Europe, at the age of the great national, international and universal exhibitions, of which they were a recurrent and a nearly constant element. The "human zoos" were brutish forms of public exhibitions of specimens of "savage" (mostly African) humans purposely imported as exotic animals from overseas by specialised merchants and entrepreneurs and hosted in "indigenous villages" very carefully and minutely reproduced within the exhibition areas. Such public displays - true ethno-anthropological shows in which the exotic actors were supposed to "play" their native daily habits, craftsmanship, arts, dances, songs and religious rites - contributed in an important albeit appalling way to Western Europe self-perception as an advanced, modern and "civilsed" society and culture, to be efficaciously contrasted with primitive or just diverse forms of human ways of living. The expanding, aggressively militarist, imperialist and colonising West could proudly look at itself in the mirror offered by the spectacle of a human alterity exhibited in its most demaning forms; and in that contrast it could find a clear confirmation of the importance of its civilising mission in the world. Several recent books have explored this phenomenon in the social and cultural history of many West-European and American countries: Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, the United States. This book for the first time investigates the great variety of living human public exhibitions in 19th-20th century Italy, between the liberal era and Fascism. It connects these examples of public exhibitions to an ancient tradition of triumphs and freak shows and underlines the close relationships with colonial politics and ideology, with the development of anthropology and the medical sciences as academic disciplines in Italy and with catholic missionary activities in Africa, the Near East and South America. In so doing this book suggests the need to enlarge the very notion of "human zoos", which aptly defines a particularly brutal, even if very common form of living human exhibition, but which cannot be applied to other, themselves very widespread aspects of human shows, such as ethnic theatre, missionary exhibitions and colonial-imperial exhibitions based not so much on the public show of a degraded savagery, but on the apology of the civilising capacity of colonial and imperial institutions. In so doing, this book offers an original insight into Italian public opinion and sensibilities in matters of human varieties, race, civilization, globalization, modernity and the non-European world; and it tries to assess, in comparison with other European cases, the specifities of Italian attitudes toward human ethnic diversities and colonialism. The book is enriched by a very large section of "Illustrations" reproducing original and often previously unpublished images and archive documents; and it is closed by a wide, 50 pages bibliography. ; I cosiddetti "zoo umani" rappresentarono un fenomeno di vastissima diffusione e popolarità nell'Europa delle grandi esposizioni nazionali, internazionali e universali a partire dalla metà dell'800. Forme spesso brutali di pubblica esibizione di esemplari di umanità selvaggia, gli "zoo umani", completi di "villaggi" ricostruiti nel dettaglio e popolati di "indigeni" importati come animali da esposizione, costituirono un ingrediente importante – per quanto raccapricciante – della mentalità e dell'auto-rappresentazione dell'Occidente "progredito", imperialista e colonizzatore. Grazie a questo libro, dopo che numerosi studi hanno indagato il fenomeno in larga parte del mondo occidentale (Germania, Francia, Inghilterra, Stati Uniti, Spagna, Svizzera, Russia, Danimarca) disponiamo ora della prima ricerca sistematica sulle "esposizioni umane" nell'Italia liberale e fascista, viste non solo nella loro funzione politico-ideologica, ma anche in rapporto ai loro antecedenti storici più antichi e nella varietà di declinazioni che, ben oltre la nozione restrittiva di "zoo umani", esse assunsero nel mondo dello spettacolo, in quello delle attività missionarie oltremare e negli ambienti della ricerca medica e antropologica.
This research theorizes an ongoing, global, grand trend of geopolitical disintegration, in the Post-Cold War, and increasingly in post-1989 time. The proposed paradigm may be useful to analyze redistribution of internal power within every state, from developed old Western powers, to new developed powers as China and India, well beyond the dissolved former real-socialist countries and the so-called failing states. The focus is on not empirical description of each local request of more autonomy, self-government, or even independence, but on the reached limits of the centuries-long and planet-wide integration process, from which the modern states and contemporary world have arisen, and that has now left room to a time of disintegration. This insight draws on a wide range of positions and contributions from International Relations theorists, along with other political scientists and scholars of geopolitics, anthropologists and sociologists, political geographers and economists, historians of colonialism and nationalism, experts of secession, critics of globalization and postmodern intellectuals, federalists and anarchists. * The first of the three parts of this study, is dedicated to an historical insight about the geopolitical integration process that had westernized and globalized the entire world. War, the state and expansionism, were not an inevitable destiny. Instead, a very small group of modern states, in competition and imitation amongst themselves, started a particularly steady conquering march on the planet. Their power expanded in intensity and extension for centuries and, with and because of the Industrial Revolution, culminated in totalitarian states and in total wars. * * The second part treats the social and national movements that have led to the end, in 1989, of the bipolar paramountcy of the two industrial superpowers, United States and Soviet Union. Along with the dissolution of blocs and states, a steady decreasing of states wars, crimes and violences, is registered and explained in the study. A slippery use of the word and concept of nationalism, particularly in post-1989 geopolitical crises, is frontally attacked in this part, drawing from early works of Ernest Gellner and Tom Nairn. Under the umbrella term of nationalism, integrationist projects and their victims, colonizers and colonized, oppressors and resistants, are likely to be confused. An early intuition of Karl Deutsch about the social awareness and mobilization of people in post-totalitarian, post-industrial and post-colonial societies, is here crossed with the work about coercion, capital, inclusion and consent of Charles Tilly. Masses, once enslaved in industrialized obedience, have evolved in networks of active citizens – and netizens – able, in a less violent international system, to claim for more personal liberties but also, as communities, for social, economical, and geopolitical change. A theoretical conjecture is also presented in this second part: in the Post-Cold War, no old or new powers will be able to keep enough concentration of power, in order to compete for world domination. We have entered a permissive state of disintegration. Redistribution of power from center to peripheries, empowerment of federal units, multiplication of small states, may occur, from now on, because there is nobody and nothing capable of preventing it. From this geopolitical point of view, the 1989 is at the very beginning. While sharing certain premises of a well-known thoughtful article by Alexander Wendt, on the inevitability of a world state (2003), this work reaches a different conclusion. * * * In the third and last part, the scope and the nature of the break in the sameness of international life is explored, with normative purposes. History is not repeating, and integration prejudices along with integrationist projects should be overcome. Every state may substantially devolve powers to its internal authorities, or even breakup, and many new smaller states, or self-governing units within states, might come out. In this increasing number of polities, an overwhelming number of citizens may go well beyond electoral democracy and have direct access to power. They may coalesce around what Brian Ferguson defined an «identerest» complex: constructed identities and tangible interests, inextricably intertwined. Citizens and netizens demanding power on their own territories and disintegration of their states, are required to take care of citizenry's duties, not only citizenship's rights. A model of responsible, moderate, pragmatic, «princely citizenry», echoing Machiavelli and Gramsci, is here proposed. -|- Acquisitions of this study are bluntly offered as a contribution to political action in a time of geopolitical change, in which it would be important to rely on expertise, but also on compassion, and on a real interest in the historical and geographical, spiritual and material pathways that each local, concrete human community is pursuing. Western-led state-building hubris, for instance, should be put aside in Afghanistan and many other corners of the world, it is recommend by this study. In favor of bottom-up cantonization, for example, an ancient Swiss wisdom which would deserve more consideration in a changing world. While burdened by the contradictions of modernity and menaced by recurrent economical and ecological crises, local princely citizenries, demanding sovereignty in their place of dwelling, are probably the main and the best possible challengers to the status quo. Concentrating on their territory and population, they may change their everyday reality, overcoming political corruption, bureaucratic impotence, economical inequality, ecological destruction. It may reveal be easier to scale down, rather than tear down, the pyramids of oppression. Leopold Kohr, Ivan Illich and don Lorenzo Milani's prophecies of justice and peace in geopolitical smallness, may become inspiring visions, in a time of disintegration.
