Arabic-Malayalam texts at the British Library:Themes, genres, and production

By the late nineteenth century, when printing press was popular across the world. In South Asia, there was increased production and dissemination of Tamil and Malayalam vernacular materials in Arabic script. This intermarriage of local languages with a cosmopolitan script was part of a larger trend of the time, and in South India those were advanced by Arabic-Malayalam and Arabic-Tamil literatures (also referred as Malabari and Arwī respectively). Hundreds of texts printed annually at the prime centres of Islamic printing on both Malabar and Coromandel coasts were circulated among mobile and immobile communities of the region across the Indian Ocean, Pacific and Atlantic littorals. The reach and impact of such vernacular printings are yet to be explored thoroughly, for these materials have been spread across several formal and informal collections and there has not been any systematic attempt to identify or catalogue them. In this article, I focus on uncatalogued Arabic-Malayalam materials at the British Library London on which I have been working on in the last few years. These materials from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries help us understand the history of the region, religion and printing. After a brief historical overview, I focus on some major features, themes, trends, places, and people in about 150 texts I consulted, and which I discuss in relation to broader histories of Arabic-Malayalam tradition

Montanan, Spring 2017

This is the magazine of the University of Montana with news about the University for UM alumni as well as current faculty, students, staff, and administrators. This is volume 34, number 2.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/montanan/1184/thumbnail.jp

“Woven alike with meaning” : sovereignty and form in Native North American poetry, 1800-1910

The story of American poetry has developed alongside the idea of America itself, becoming almost synonymous with national sovereignty projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time the figure of the Indian was, in poetry, customarily depicted as melancholy and moribund, a noble savage making way for a supposedly superior civilization and race. Yet indigenous North American poets also composed and published poetry and participated in reading communities during this time. Examining this poetry reveals how indigenous writers manipulated poetic genres to contest U.S. hegemony and assert sovereignties from the sexual to the tribal to the national. Indeed, understanding early indigenous poets’ formal choices and poetic communities challenges critical narratives of American poetry’s history as having been linear and progressive, demanding a new way of organizing the study of American poetry. In this dissertation, I argue that early Native North American poets chose to write in specific poetic genres in response to local, national, and international publishing worlds. Each chapter examines how indigenous poets comment on the practice and form of poetry, thus speaking to a diverse community of poets and readers through a variety of verse traditions. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft draws from multiple cultural traditions as she manipulates time and genre through her mourning poems, ballads, and lyrics in the Anishinaabe world of the Great Lakes. In the Chicago area, Simon Pokagon uses insurgent practices of appropriation to criticize and revise colonialist American poetry through cross-racial citations and borrowings in his birchbark pamphlets and novel. As public literary tastes shift from poems to legends at the turn of the twentieth century, E. Pauline Johnson helps invent a different kind of modernist poetry that challenges representations of indigenous peoples as pre-modern. Alex Posey composes skeptical elegies, dialect poems, and political newspaper verse from western and Creek literary forms in Indian Territory to heal a divided Creek Nation, practicing poetic appropriations that offered ways of relating to genre that remain powerful for Native American poets today.Englis

New Mediums, Better Messages?

The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. This wide-ranging collection from a diverse group of academic and non-academic authors engages with the broad field of development through twelve chapters that deal with music, theatre, fiction, photography, festivals, computer games, the arts, blogging, and other media. It explores three broad areas of alternative forms of knowledge about development, organized around the three themes of ‘translation’, ‘advocacy’, and ‘engagement’. The first of these is concerned with how popular representations of development can successfully compete with and complement formal social scientific representations; the second relates to the politics of popular representations of development, and the way that popular productions shape debates; and the third asks whether popular representations of development can generate alternative critiques that allow for the articulation of views that would be unacceptable to more orthodox means

New Mediums, Better Messages?

The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. This wide-ranging collection from a diverse group of academic and non-academic authors engages with the broad field of development through twelve chapters that deal with music, theatre, fiction, photography, festivals, computer games, the arts, blogging, and other media. It explores three broad areas of alternative forms of knowledge about development, organized around the three themes of ‘translation’, ‘advocacy’, and ‘engagement’. The first of these is concerned with how popular representations of development can successfully compete with and complement formal social scientific representations; the second relates to the politics of popular representations of development, and the way that popular productions shape debates; and the third asks whether popular representations of development can generate alternative critiques that allow for the articulation of views that would be unacceptable to more orthodox means

The Pax Cinemana: Film and the Pursuit of Peace, 1914-1939.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

New Mediums, Better Messages?

The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. As international development has become more quantitative and economics-centred, there is an enduring sense that what is measured (and thus 'valued' and prioritized) may have become too narrow, that the powers of prediction claimed by some areas of economics and management may have overreached, and that the human dimension is in danger of being lost. Reflecting this concern, New Mediums, Better Messages? contributes to new conversations between science, social science, and the humanities around the roles of different kinds of knowledge, stories, and data play in relation to global development. It brings together a team of multidisciplinary contributors to explore popular representions of development, including music, blogs, and fiction