The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World

The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World
Author: Shino Konishi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317322088

This is the first historical study of indigenous Australian masculinity. Using the reactions of eighteenth-century western explorers to Aboriginal men, Konishi argues that these encounters were not as negative as has been thought.

Indigenous Enlightenment

Indigenous Enlightenment
Author: Stuart McKee
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 585
Release: 2023-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496237978

In Indigenous Enlightenment Stuart D. McKee examines the methodologies, tools, and processes that British and American educators developed to inculcate Indigenous cultures of reading. Protestant expatriates who opened schools within British and U.S. colonial territories between 1790 and 1850 shared the conviction that a beneficent government should promote the enlightenment of its colonial subjects. It was the aim of evangelical enlightenment to improve Indigenous peoples’ welfare through the processes of Christianization and civilization and to transform accepting individuals into virtuous citizens of the settler-colonial community. Many educators quickly discovered that their teaching efforts languished without the means to publish books in the Indigenous languages of their subject populations. While they could publish primers in English by shipping manuscripts to printers in London or Boston, books for Indigenous readers gained greater accuracy and influence when they stationed a printer within the colony. With a global perspective traversing Western colonial territories in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the South Pacific, Madagascar, India, and China, Indigenous Enlightenment illuminates the challenges that British and American educators faced while trying to coerce Indigenous children and adults to learn to read. Indigenous laborers commonly supported the tasks of editing, printing, and dissemination and, in fact, dominated the workforce at most colonial presses from the time printing began. Yet even in places where schools and presses were in synchronous operation, missionaries found that Indigenous peoples had their own intellectual systems, and most did not learn best with Western methods.

Enlightenment in the Colony

Enlightenment in the Colony
Author: Aamir R. Mufti
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2009-01-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400827663

Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the "Jewish question" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India. Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls "the exemplary crisis of minority"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the "Jewish question" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance. Mufti examines the literary dimensions of this crisis of identity through close readings of canonical texts of modern Western--mostly British-literature, as well as major works of modern Indian literature in Urdu and English. He argues that the one characteristic shared by all emerging national cultures since the nineteenth century is the minoritization of some social and cultural fragment of the population, and that national belonging and minority separatism go hand in hand with modernization. Enlightenment in the Colony calls for the adoption of secular, minority, and exilic perspectives in criticism and intellectual life as a means to critique the very forms of marginalization that give rise to the uniquely powerful minority voice in world literatures.

Bind Us Apart

Bind Us Apart
Author: Nicholas Guyatt
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2016-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465065619

Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that "all men are created equal"? The usual answer is racism, but the reality is more complex and unsettling. In Bind Us Apart, historian Nicholas Guyatt argues that, from the Revolution through the Civil War, most white liberals believed in the unity of all human beings. But their philosophy faltered when it came to the practical work of forging a color-blind society. Unable to convince others-and themselves-that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of color could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia. Herein lie the origins of "separate but equal." Decades before Reconstruction, America's liberal elite was unable to imagine how people of color could become citizens of the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, Native Americans were pushed farther and farther westward, while four million slaves freed after the Civil War found themselves among a white population that had spent decades imagining that they would live somewhere else. Essential reading for anyone disturbed by America's ongoing failure to achieve true racial integration, Bind Us Apart shows conclusively that "separate but equal" represented far more than a southern backlash against emancipation-it was a founding principle of our nation.

How It Is

How It Is
Author: V. F. Cordova
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2007-12-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780816526482

Viola Cordova was the first Native American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy. Even as she became an expert on canonical works of traditional Western philosophy, she devoted herself to defining a Native American philosophy. Although she passed away before she could complete her life’s work, some of her colleagues have organized her pioneering contributions into this provocative book. In three parts, Cordova sets out a complete Native American philosophy. First she explains her own understanding of the nature of reality itself—the origins of the world, the relation of matter and spirit, the nature of time, and the roles of culture and language in understanding all of these. She then turns to our role as residents of the Earth, arguing that we become human as we deepen our relation to our people and to our places, and as we understand the responsibilities that grow from those relationships. In the final section, she calls for a new reverence in a world where there is no distinction between the sacred and the mundane. Cordova clearly contrasts Native American beliefs with the traditions of the Enlightenment and Christianized Europeans (what she calls “Euroman” philosophy). By doing so, she leads her readers into a deeper understanding of both traditions and encourages us to question any view that claims a singular truth. From these essays—which are lucid, insightful, frequently funny, and occasionally angry—we receive a powerful new vision of how we can live with respect, reciprocity, and joy.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment
Author: John Robertson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2015
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 0199591784

This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.

Enlightened Colonialism

Enlightened Colonialism
Author: Damien Tricoire
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2017-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 331954280X

This book further qualifies the postcolonial thesis and shows its limits. To reach these goals, it links text analysis and political history on a global comparative scale. Focusing on imperial agents, their narratives of progress, and their political aims and strategies, it asks whether Enlightenment gave birth to a new colonialism between 1760 and 1820. Has Enlightenment provided the cultural and intellectual origins of modern colonialism? For decades, historians of political thought, philosophy, and literature have debated this question. On one side, many postcolonial authors believe that enlightened rationalism helped delegitimize non-European cultures. On the other side, some historians of ideas and literature are willing to defend at least some eighteenth-century philosophers whom they consider to have been “anti-colonialists”. Surprisingly enough, both sides have focused on literary and philosophical texts, but have rarely taken political and social practice into account.

Bárbaros

Bárbaros
Author: David J. Weber
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300127677

Two centuries after CortÉs and Pizarro seized the Aztec and Inca empires, Spain's conquest of America remained unfinished. Indians retained control over most of the lands in Spain's American empire. Mounted on horseback, savvy about European ways, and often possessing firearms, independent Indians continued to find new ways to resist subjugation by Spanish soldiers and conversion by Spanish missionaries. In this panoramic study, David J. Weber explains how late eighteenthcentury Spanish administrators tried to fashion a more enlightened policy toward the people they called bÁrbaros, or "savages." Even Spain's most powerful monarchs failed, however, to enforce a consistent, well-reasoned policy toward Indians. At one extreme, powerful independent Indians forced Spaniards to seek peace, acknowledge autonomous tribal governments, and recognize the existence of tribal lands, fulfilling the Crown's oft-stated wish to use "gentle" means in dealing with Indians. At the other extreme the Crown abandoned its principles, authorizing bloody wars on Indians when Spanish officers believed they could defeat them. Power, says Weber, more than the power of ideas, determined how Spaniards treated "savages" in the Age of Enlightenment.

For All of Humanity

For All of Humanity
Author: Martha Few
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2015-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816531870

Smallpox, measles, and typhus. The scourges of lethal disease—as threatening in colonial Mesoamerica as in other parts of the world—called for widespread efforts and enlightened attitudes to battle the centuries-old killers of children and adults. Even before edicts from Spain crossed the Atlantic, colonial elites oftentimes embraced medical experimentation and reform in the name of the public good, believing it was their moral responsibility to apply medical innovations to cure and prevent disease. Their efforts included the first inoculations and vaccinations against smallpox, new strategies to protect families and communities from typhus and measles, and medical interventions into pregnancy and childbirth. For All of Humanity examines the first public health campaigns in Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Central America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Martha Few pays close attention to Indigenous Mesoamerican medical cultures, which not only influenced the shape and scope of those regional campaigns but also affected the broader New World medical cultures. The author reconstructs a rich and complex picture of the ways colonial doctors, surgeons, Indigenous healers, midwives, priests, government officials, and ordinary people engaged in efforts to prevent and control epidemic disease. Few’s analysis weaves medical history and ethnohistory with social, cultural, and intellectual history. She uses prescriptive texts, medical correspondence, and legal documents to provide rich ethnographic descriptions of Mesoamerican medical cultures, their practitioners, and regional pharmacopeia that came into contact with colonial medicine, at times violently, during public health campaigns.