Colonialism and Mandates

Daily life in contemporary African countries must be understood as determined by their status as members of an interlocking network of postcolonies, striving to imagine themselves as related through Pan-Africanism but struggling first to realize themselves as fully functioning nations. Even though Ethiopia and Liberia are generally spoken of as the only countries in Africa that were not colonized, this actually suggests the level of subjugation the rest of the continent did experience. After all, if Italy failed in its attempt to take over Ethiopia in the 1880s, Mussolini succeeded in doing so in 1936; Liberia was, in fact, a colony for several decades, created in 1822 by the American Society for Colonization of Free People of Color of the United States as a destination for freed American slaves

Christianity

According to tradition and to the early church historian Eusebius, Christianity was preached in Ethiopia by the apostle Matthew before it reached Europe; Mark the evangelist is said to have established the church in Alexandria in 43 C.E. What is clear is that some of the most important early Christian theologians were from northern Africa: Augustine, from present-day Algeria, and Clement and Origen, from present-day Egypt. The monastic movement in the early church drew its inspiration from these writers. By the 4th century, Christianity was well established in what are today Ethiopia and Eritrea, and was centered in a city called Aksum. From the 6th to 14th centuries, it flourished in what is now Sudan. Coptic Christianity, as it is now known, flourished as the majority faith in this northeastern section of Africa until the end of the 14th century, and is still vibrant in the area. Though considerably diminished by the Arabic conquest of northern Africa, Christianity nonetheless continued in Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Christian Imagination

The role of poets is to get their anchors caught in many such monasteries, to shimmy down the entangling ropes, and then to record the marvelous resistance that caused them to stop in the first place to notice. But those in the monastery, putting in their time, must not too quickly conclude that such accidental tourists, dropped from some ethereal realm, are likely to drown if we do not distance them from the world we consider mundane. In both situations, that of the sailor and that of the abbot, the question of how we envision reality, of what our shaping paradigms may be, dominates our interpretation and response. Imagination shapes our engagement with reality. What remains opaque or simply insignificant to one individual nags someone else, fascinates or haunts, sometimes opens onto an experience of epiphany. Imagination also reshapes logic and offers a new approach to a problem that facts and reason cannot sufficiently describe. Thus, Albert Einstein was once asked to explain the theory of relativity in terms that might make it a bit more accessible to the average human being. Einstein replied: I cannot do what you request, but if you will call on me at Princeton, I will play it for you on my violin (Fischer 15). Einstein implicitly suggested a new paradigm for the reality he had been representing until then by the mathematical paradigm that so confused his listener. This calls to mind, in light of our principal focus during these days, the particular aspect of imagination that theologian David Tracy calls analogical. Analyzing our age as one of porous boundaries between various paradigms for reality, he argues strongly in favor of an ecumenism in our religious imagination, an opening up of our systematic approach to transcendent encounters

Introduction to LGBTQ America Today

l was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and learned from my classmates in seventh grade that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were homos. Because I did both, I knew I was in deep trouble from the start and might have some pretending to do. Such was the atmosphere for LGBTQ folks in the United States throughout the 1950s. Things loosened just a bit in the 1960s, when hippies were shaking society up. Then, in the 1970s, gay folks seemed to be-a lot more visible--disturbingly so, in the minds of many-and lesbian women were suddenly a force to be reckoned with. In the 1980s, gays and lesbians were popping up all over the place: the love that dared not speak its name was shouting from the rooftops. Bisexuals gained a voice; transgendered individuals began the long struggle that is still in its infancy. Queer began to blur the distinctions that had defined the identity politics of these early decades. In short, non-heterosexual America during these decades was as much a part of the civil rights movement as was any ethnicity. Back in 1956, set to Leonard Bernstein\u27s haunting tunes, Stephen Sondheim could write soulful, yearning lyrics that West Side Story put in the mouths of a heterosexual couple ( There\u27s a place for us,/ Somewhere a place for us .... We\u27ll find a new way of living, / We\u27ll find a way of forgiving/ Somewhere ... . ), but by 1990 Queer Nation was stripping away all pretence of quiet compliance, shouting \u22We\u27re here, we\u27re queer, get used to it

The Muscular Christian as Schoolmarm

In 1859 the Saturday Review was one of the first journals to associate Charles Kingsley with a younger generation of writers of fiction who fostered the sentiment that power of character in all its shapes goes with goodness. Who does not know, the reviewer asked, all about the \u27short, crisp, black hair,\u27 the \u27pale but healthy complexion,\u27 the \u27iron muscles,\u27 \u27knotted sinews,\u27 \u27vast chests,\u27 \u27long and sinewy arms,\u27 \u27gigantic frames,\u27 and other stock phrases of the same kind which always announce, in contemporary fiction, the advent of a model Christian hero? 1 After Kingsley\u27s death in 187 5, however, Henry James and others spoke up in his defense and correctly identified the novelist George Lawrence, considered by many to be Kingsley\u27s literary disciple, as the real proponent of the brutes commonly called Muscular Christians. 2 Kingsley himself had something much more human in mind, and it was an ideal he preached not only to men but also to women

Postcolonial Theory

Colonialism and its aftermath prompt a form of cultural studies that seeks to address questions of identity politics and justice that are the ongoing legacy of empires. Postcolonial theory has its origins in resistance movements, principally at the local, and frequently at nonmetropolitan, levels. Among its early thinkers, three seem of special importance: Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, and Frantz Fanon. Antonio Gram sci ( 1891- 193 7) was a founder of the Communist Party in Italy. In his Prison Notebooks (1971 ), he wrote insightfully about the proletariat, designated by him as subalterns; his thoughts regarding the responsibilities of public intellectuals inspired many, and his notion of hegemony and resistance proved influential. Paulo Freire ( 192 1- 97) was a Brazilian with a special interest in education. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed ( 1970) seeks to restore subjectivity to objectified, oppressed classes in society. Frantz Fanon ( 1925- 6 l) was a psychiatrist of Caribbean descent who participated in the Algerian independence movement. His two books, The Wretched of the Earth ( 1963) and Black Skin, White Masks ( 1967) inspired many anticolonial struggles and investigations of racism\u27s many manifestations

Khaled Hosseini, Keigo Higashino, and Zoe Ferraris: Social Concealment, Personal Revelation, and Community Guilt

Detective novels, while generally considered to be pulp fiction and therefore worthy of less academic attention, nonetheless lay bare the reader’s interest in getting to the so-called truth. Even the inclusion of “red herrings” and false leads serves to entice a deeper commitment to proving the existence of what “really” happened. They are, therefore, escapist in the sense that they tease readers to reject the underpinnings of deconstruction and poststructuralism and allow, at least for the limited duration of the reading, a comforting illusion that there are larger truths that an actual “self” can discern and pin down. This need for structural stability and personal agency carries over into more literary works, though the desire there is generally expressed in the dramatic arc of Freytag’s Pyramid: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement

Introduction to Through A Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination

The question that so disturbed Christ\u27s contemporaries resonates even now: Who do you say that I am? (Matt. 16 : 15). Paradoxically, the answers his disciples boldly or clumsily offer seem to define them far more clearly than describe their teacher. The New Testament stands as a record of their subsequent obsession with the question, with what they remember their answers to have been, and with how this radically creative interrogation ordered their remaining years. Throughout the centuries their own disciples, variously aided and obstructed by these confessions, used the question as a litmus test not only in their prayer and in their personal relations, but, eventually, in their global politics, as well

Freya Stark

Freya Madeline Stark lived for a century, and into that one hundred years she packed a life of extraordinary daring and ingenuity. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself, she wrote in Baghdad Sketches ( enlarged edition, 193 7); I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates. Such a motto defines not only her approach to the world but also the character of the woman herself. She had no duplicate. The writings that resulted from her constant travels began as wonder-filled accounts of ancient storybook kingdoms of the Middle East and moved impressively toward a reflective consideration of the differences between a nomadic way of life and the stable urbanity that might have been her lot if she had decided to fit the mold of those around her. In these accounts of her own transformation she brought a growing body of readers not only into exotic locales but also to the brink of metaphysical questions about the meaning of life

Ben Okri’s Spirit Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity

The widespread notion of the abiku in Nigerian culture says volumes about the heartrending deaths of countless newborns throughout the region\u27s history. It also testifies to a belief in the permeability of the membrane separating the spirit world from our world. As the abiku puts it, in his family he is surrounded by people who are seeded in rich lands, who still believe in mysteries (F am 6), people who hold that one world contains glimpses of others (F am 1 0), and people who acknowledge a personal relationship with these spirits in the course of daily life. In western Nigeria, however, a mother who suspects that her newborn is one of these child-spirits must do whatever she can to persuade the baby to stay in this difficult world, rather than have it return to the spirit-world where it will be bathed in the ecstasy of an everlasting love (F am 18). Mothers will give such children names like Malomo-Do Not Go Again ; Banjoko-Sit Down And Stay With Us ; Duro oro ike-Wait And See How You Will Be Petted ; and Please Stay And Bury Me (Maclean 51, 57). Special jewelry and foods are prepared to tempt the baby to choose life, and circumcision for such young boys is frequently postponed (56)