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A common thread throughout the essays in this volume is a focus on new loci of power that emerge either in collision with colonial power structures, or in collaboration with or those that emerge in the wake of decolonization. While the authors recognize the presence of a larger structure of colonial hegemony, they also investigate those centers of power that emerge in the interstices of crevices of colonial power. Interdisciplinary and theoretically innovative, this book offers a global perspective on colonial and national landscapes, rewrites the master creator narrative, examines national landscapes as sites of contestation and views the globalization of processes such as archaeology beyond the boundaries of the national.
In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepôt, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite persistent inequality, Hong Kong never ceased to attract different classes of sojourners and immigrants, who strived to advance their social standing by accumulating wealth, especially through land and property speculation. In this engaging and extensively illustrated book, Cecilia L. Chu retells the ‘Hong Kong story’ by tracing the emergence of its ‘speculative landscape’ from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a number of pivotal case studies, she highlights the contradictory logic of colonial urban development: the encouragement of native investment that supported a laissez-faire housing market, versus the imperative to segregate the populations in a hierarchical, colonial spatial order. Crucially, she shows that the production of Hong Kong’s urban landscapes was not a top-down process, but one that evolved through ongoing negotiations between different constituencies with vested interests in property. Further, her study reveals that the built environment was key to generating and attaining individual and collective aspirations in a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, modernizing colonial city.
National history has once again become a battlefield. In internal political conflicts, which are fought on the terrain of popular culture, museums, schoolbooks, and memorial politics, it has taken on a newly important and contested role. Irrespective of national specifics, the narratives of new nationalism are quite similar everywhere. National history is said to stretch back many centuries, expressesing the historical continuity of a homogeneous people and its timeless character. This people struggles for independence, guided by towering leaders and inspired by the sacrifice of martyrs. Unlike earlier forms of nationalism, the main enemies are no longer neighbouring states, but international and supranational institutions. To use national history as an integrative tool, new nationalists claim that the media and school history curricula should not contest or question the nation and its great historical deeds, as doubts threaten to weaken and dishonour the nation. This book offers a broad international overview of the rhetoric, contents, and contexts of the rise of these renewed national historical narratives, and of how professional historians have reacted to these phenomena. The contributions focus on a wide range of representative nations from around all over the globe.
According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island's first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana's central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana's founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order. Paul Niell analyzes how Cubans produced heritage at the site of the symbolic ceiba tree by endowing the collective urban space of the plaza with a cultural authority that used the past to validate various place identities in the present. Niell's close examination of the extant forms of the 1754 and 1828 civic monuments, which include academic history paintings, neoclassical architecture, and idealized sculpture in tandem with period documents and printed texts, reveals a "dissonance of heritage"—in other words, a lack of agreement as to the works' significance and use. He considers the implications of this dissonance with respect to a wide array of interests in late colonial Havana, showing how heritage as a dominant cultural discourse was used to manage and even disinherit certain sectors of the colonial population.
The political context in which historians of India find themselves today, says Sumit Sarkar, is dominated by the advance of the Hindu Right and globalized forms of capitalism, while the historian's intellectual context is dominated by the marginalization of all varieties of Marxism and an academic shift to cultural studies and postmodern critique. In Beyond Nationalist Frames, one of India's foremost contemporary historians offers his view of how the craft of history should be practiced in this complex conjuncture. In studies of colonial time-keeping, Rabindranath Tagore's fiction, and pre-Independence Bengal, Sarkar explores new approaches to the writing of history. Essays on contemporary politics consider the implications of the "Hindu Bomb," the rewriting of national history textbooks by Hindu fundamentalists, and the issue of conversion to Christianity. Scholars in all the fields touched by recent developments in South Asian historiography—anthropology, feminist theory, comparative literature, cultural studies—will find this a stimulating and provocative collection of essays, as will anyone interested in Indian politics.
A place of astonishing contrasts, India is home to some of the world’s most ancient architectures as well as some of its most modern. It was the focus of some of the most important works created by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, among other lesser-known masters, and it is regarded by many as one of the key sites of mid-twentieth century architectural design. As Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava show in this book, however, India’s history of modern architecture began long before the nation’s independence as a modern state in 1947. Going back to the nineteenth century, Scriver and Srivastava look at the beginnings of modernism in colonial India and the ways that public works and patronage fostered new design practices that directly challenged the social order and values invested in the building traditions of the past. They then trace how India’s architecture embodies the dramatic shifts in Indian society and culture during the last century. Making sense of a broad range of sources, from private papers and photographic collections to the extensive records of the Indian Public Works Department, they provide the most rounded account of modern architecture in India that has yet been available.
The Site of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus in Singapore: Entwined Histories of a Colonial Convent and a Nation, 1854–2015 explores key issues and developments in colonial and postcolonial Singapore by examining one particular site in central Singapore: the former Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, established in 1854 and now a food and entertainment complex. The Convent was an early provider of social services and girls’ education—almost a mini-city within walls, including a thriving community of schools, an orphanage, and a women’s refuge. World War II and the Japanese occupation, followed by the creation of the new Republic of Singapore, presented a new set of challenges, but it was the convent’s size and prime location that made it attractive for urban redevelopment in the 1980s and led to government acquisition, demolition of some buildings, and the remainder put out to private tender. The chapel and the former nuns’ residence are classified as National Monuments but, in line with government policy of adaptive re-use of heritage sites, the complex now contains bars and restaurants, and the deconsecrated chapel is used for wedding receptions and events. Tracking the physical and usage changes of the site, this book works to make sense of that eventful journey, a paradoxical journey that moves only in time, not in space, and includes abandoned babies, French nuns, Japanese bombings, and twenty-first century dance parties. In a society that has undergone massive change economically and socially, and, above all, transitioned from a small colonial enterprise to a wealthy independent city-state, those physical changes and differing usages of the Convent site over the years track the changes in the nation. The wider ongoing tensions between heritage conservation and the modern global city are explored by examining what has been chosen for preservation, the quintessentially Singaporean hybridity of the commercial reuse of historic buildings, as well as the nostalgia for what has been lost.
City ascending, city imploding -- The integrated subject -- Ecology in practice : environmental architecture as good design -- Rectifying failure : imagining the new city and the power to create it -- More than human nature and the open space predicament -- Consciousness and Indian-ness : making design "good"--A vocation in waiting : ecology in practice -- Soldiering sustainability
The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History offers a comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge report on recent developments in architectural production and research. Divided into three parts – Practices, Interrogations, and Innovations – this book charts diversity, criticality, and creativity in architectural interventions to meet challenges and enact changes in different parts of the world through featured exemplars and fresh theoretical orientations. The collection features 29 chapters written by leading architectural scholars and highlights the reciprocity between the historical and the contemporary, research and practice, and disciplinary and professional knowledge. Providing an essential map for navigating the complex currents of contemporary architecture, the Companion will interest students, academics, and practitioners who wish to bolster their understanding of built environments.
Heritage and History in the China–Australia Migration Corridor traces the material and social legacy of migration from China to Australia from the 1840s until the present day. The volume offers a multidimensional examination of the material footprint of migration as it exists at either end of the migration corridor stretching between Zhongshan county in south China and Australia. Spanning the fields of heritage studies, migration studies, and Chinese diaspora history, Denis Byrne, Ien Ang, Phillip Mar, and the other contributors foreground a transnational approach to the history and heritage of migration, one that takes account of the flows of people, ideas, objects, and money that circulate through migration corridors, forming intricate ongoing bonds between those who migrated to Australia and their home villages in China. ‘This is an excellent new addition to the growing literature on the history, heritage, and archaeology of the Chinese diaspora and transnational Chinese migration. This book is poised to be a major contribution to the history and heritage of the Chinese diaspora.’ —Barbara L. Voss, Stanford University ‘The quality of the research and writing is very high, and the theoretical framing is sophisticated and original. This book makes a much-needed contribution to overseas Chinese heritage studies, Chinese Australian history, transnational theory, and migration history. It also provides a model for how to work respectfully and successfully with descendants and community.’ —Sophie Loy-Wilson, University of Sydney