Erasure of the Euro-Asian PDF Download

Author: Kumari Jayawardena
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Eurasians
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Author: Kumari Jayawardena
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Eurasians
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Today there is increasing interest in the fusion of cultures and hybridity, especially the interaction between Asia and Europe in the wake of Portuguese, Dutch, French and British imperialism. This book focuses on the vanguard role of the Euro-Asian communities in South Asia, the Burghers, Anglo-Indians and Eurasians, in struggles for democratic rights, long before colonial conditions were ripe for radical social and political change. With their utopian vision of a future democratic society, they agitated for widespread reforms such as worker and peasant rights, early radicalism, proto-nationalism, secularism and gender equality. The author brings the path-breaking efforts of these Euro-Asian pioneers from the footnotes of history in to the main text, asks why their contributions have been 'hidden from history' and suggests that the obsession with 'purity' of race both in South Asia and Europe, led to erasing the importance of this radical intelligentsia of mixed origin.

Author: Liesbeth Rosen Jacobson
Publisher: Uitgeverij Verloren
ISBN: 9087047312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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‘Within the borders of these isles shall remain a race one calls Indo. Neither white, nor brown.’ This ‘Indo’ was part of the Indo-Europeans, a group of mixed indigenous and European ancestry, from the former Dutch East Indies. In almost all other Asian colonies, including British India and French Indochina, which are also covered in this study, such a group of mixed ancestry came into being. The future of these Eurasians after decolonisation was quite insecure. The European rulers, on which their status was based, were gone. The new indigenous rulers perceived them suspiciously as colonial remnants and often even as traitors. In this chaotic situation, they were forced to make a choice, between staying in the former colony or leaving for the European mother country. Did they belong in the country of their European fathers or the former colony, the country of their Asian mothers?

Author: Emma Teng
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520276272
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, global labor migration, trade, and overseas study brought China and the United States into close contact, leading to new cross-cultural encounters that brought mixed-race families into being. Yet the stories of these families remain largely unknown. How did interracial families negotiate their identities within these societies when mixed-race marriage was taboo and “Eurasian” often a derisive term? In Eurasian, Emma Jinhua Teng compares Chinese-Western mixed-race families in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, examining both the range of ideas that shaped the formation of Eurasian identities in these diverse contexts and the claims set forth by individual Eurasians concerning their own identities. Teng argues that Eurasians were not universally marginalized during this era, as is often asserted. Rather, Eurasians often found themselves facing contradictions between exclusionary and inclusive ideologies of race and nationality, and between overt racism and more subtle forms of prejudice that were counterbalanced by partial acceptance and privilege. By tracing the stories of mixed and transnational families during an earlier era of globalization, Eurasian also demonstrates to students, faculty, scholars, and researchers how changes in interracial ideology have allowed the descendants of some of these families to reclaim their dual heritage with pride.

Author: Nira Wickramasinghe
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island in the late eighteenth century and began to gradually abolish slavery. Yet the continued presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century has practically vanished from collective memory in both the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in the wake of abolition. She tells the stories of Wayreven, the slave who traveled in the palanquin of his master; Selestina, accused of killing her child; Rawothan, who sought permission for his son to be circumcised; and others, enslaved or emancipated, who challenged their status. Drawing on legal cases, petitions, and other colonial records to recover individual voices and quotidian moments, Wickramasinghe offers a meditation on the archive of slavery. She examines how color-based racial thinking gave way to more nuanced debates about identity, complicating conceptions of blackness and racialization. A deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance, Slave in a Palanquin offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean.

Author: Susan Visvanathan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9354355188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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The Wisdom of Community is a compilation of essays which documents the key issues that have been pertinent in national debates in India. In some ways it takes a linear and chronological position on how the past informs us as we proceed with making sense of postmodern fluid society. It tries to understand how affected or influenced we are by colonialism, and the debates which brought us our freedom. It uses biography, symbols and narratives to piece together our engagement with literature, history, myth and legend. It presupposes that the past is contextualised through narrative production. Each essay in this collection is tuned to the greater debates, which continue today in problematized global and cosmopolitan contexts to describe the relation between town and country. The consistent preoccupation is with labour and its intended consequences. Here, climate change, law court trials and constructing parallel histories which have influenced us are drawn to tell the reader that learning from history is essential for our survival. Readers will see that the world always appears in the spaces that are produced by travel, by terror, freedom, conquest and adaptation. The coexistence of all these across history, allows for the warp and weft of narrative production to be evident as analysable and comprehensive. The reader enters this frame of interlocking essays in order to understand how significant the production of stories are, and how we may find similarities in our condition across time and space. The book consists of 12 essays which are arranged in a way that the essential problems are made evident as questions of occupation, survival, and translation of world views. It brings the world closer, just as in reality it seems to be receding, because we are afraid of what we see, and know. The method is called Learning from History. The Wisdom of Community brings to the reader the interlacing of archival, fieldwork and literary materials in order to bring to the reader the constants that inform our lives, while recognizing the past as ever-present. The essays in this collection span a period of thirty years, and were earlier published as essays in popular journals and magazines and newspapers, but also include some scholarly articles. They are divided into essays on travel, feminism, as well as activist, literary, and analytical essays. The reader will find in them the insights of three decades spanning the years of teaching and writing while living in Delhi. The link connecting these essays is time and memory, as well as the belief that we can learn from the past. The “circulation of ideas” appears as a dominant theme, in all the essays, along with the emphases on agency, and the celebration of the right to choice and the articulation of human will, since the themes of democracy and freedom are common to all.

Author: Katerina Clark
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674270223
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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A long-awaited corrective to the controversial idea of world literature, from a major voice in the field. Katerina Clark charts interwar efforts by Soviet, European, and Asian leftist writers to create a Eurasian commons: a single cultural space that would overcome national, cultural, and linguistic differences in the name of an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and later antifascist aesthetic. At the heart of this story stands the literary arm of the Communist International, or Comintern, anchored in Moscow but reaching Baku, Beijing, London, and parts in between. Its mission attracted diverse networks of writers who hailed from Turkey, Iran, India, and China, as well as the Soviet Union and Europe. Between 1919 and 1943, they sought to establish a new world literature to rival the capitalist republic of Western letters. Eurasia without Borders revises standard accounts of global twentieth-century literary movements. The Eurocentric discourse of world literature focuses on transatlantic interactions, largely omitting the international left and its Asian members. Meanwhile, postcolonial studies have overlooked the socialist-aligned world in favor of the clash between Western European imperialism and subaltern resistance. Clark provides the missing pieces, illuminating a distinctive literature that sought to fuse European and vernacular Asian traditions in the name of a post-imperialist culture. Socialist literary internationalism was not without serious problems, and at times it succumbed to an orientalist aesthetic that rivaled any coming from Europe. Its history is marked by both promise and tragedy. With clear-eyed honesty, Clark traces the limits, compromises, and achievements of an ambitious cultural collaboration whose resonances in later movements can no longer be ignored.

Author: Anita Sengupta
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739136089
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Heartlands of Eurasia explores how received metageographical knowledge informs the understanding of global processes and is subsequently transformed into geopolitical reasoning with foreign policy implications. It provides a detailed examination of writings, from both within the region and outside, that look into the significance of Halford Mackinder's heritage in the context of a vastly changed world situation. In particular, it attempts to examine how policy makers and strategic thinkers have used these geopolitical concepts as justification for their policy in the region. Finally, it attempts an analysis of the extent to which this policy thinking was translated into practice. While the study looks into how the vision of the 'pivotal' significance of a vast expanse of land finds its echoes in contemporary narratives, it also underlines the very creative ways in which Mackinder's ideas have been reinterpreted in keeping with the changing global dynamics. Making use of the way in which the region has been traditionally defined and the way in which the people defined themselves, the study brings into focus a debate on the usefulness of region or 'area'-based studies that are located in geographical imaginations. Anita Sengupta uses this connection to examine the following issues: geopolitical imaginations and their relevance in identifying 'areas' in the present context; the intersection between how areas are defined from an outsider perspective and how people define themselves; the extent to which these definitions have influenced policy; and the possibility or feasibility of the development of alternative geostrategic discourses. Mackinder himself did not specify the geographical area identified first as the 'pivot' and later the 'heartland,' but his ideas were focused on the 'closed heartland of Euro-Asia,' an area that was unassailable by sea power. This study therefore centers its debates around the Eurasian space in general, though the focus is on the Central Asian region and Uzbekistan in particular. The book is ideal for specialists working on the Eurasian region, graduate students interested in geopolitics as well as Eurasian and Central Asian studies, and undergraduates studying political science and international relations.

Author: Charles W. Hartley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139789384
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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For thousands of years, the geography of Eurasia has facilitated travel, conquest and colonization by various groups, from the Huns in ancient times to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the past century. This book brings together archaeological investigations of Eurasian regimes and revolutions ranging from the Bronze Age to the modern day, from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus in the west to the Mongolian steppe and the Korean Peninsula in the east. The authors examine a wide-ranging series of archaeological studies in order to better understand the role of politics in the history and prehistory of the region. This book re-evaluates the significance of power, authority and ideology in the emergence and transformation of ancient and modern societies in this vast continent.

Author: Leah Feldman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726528
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
On the Threshold of Eurasia explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet "East" as a political, aesthetic, and scientific system of ideas that emerged through a series of intertextual encounters produced by Russians and Turkic Muslims on the imperial periphery amidst the revolutionary transition from 1905 to 1929. Identifying the role of Russian and Soviet Orientalism in shaping the formation of a specifically Eurasian imaginary, Leah Feldman examines connections between avant-garde literary works; Orientalist historical, geographic and linguistic texts; and political essays written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers. Tracing these engagements and interactions between Russia and the Caucasus, Feldman offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity, and anti-imperialism from the vantage point not of the metropole but from the cosmopolitan centers at the edges of the Russian and later Soviet empires. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illustrates the pivotal impact that the Caucasus (and the Soviet periphery more broadly) had—through the founding of an avant-garde poetics animated by Russian and Arabo-Persian precursors, Islamic metaphysics, and Marxist-Leninist theories of language —on the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.