). In his journal John Anderson presents in a stark manner the dilemma, as he saw it, of the post-slavery relationship between civilisation and wilderness in St Vincent. A well-read scholar of his day, Anderson asks bluntly: can civilisation overcome the wilds of St Vincent? It is in his view a dilemma that is highly skewed against St Vincent with its mass of black population. He is in no doubt that St
or any serious philosophical scrutiny. In fact, the more philosophers have applied the gardening metaphor to tame the wilderness and its state of political animality ( Bauman, 1991 ), the more they have reduced humans to the level of wild beasts and have authored genocides in its name. And yet the ontological idea that life needs to be made partially secure by drawing upon a sovereign claim to order remains a constant in all dominant forms of political reasoning. Just walk into any natural history museum and look upon the version of the past presented with sure
The book argues that the frontier, usually associated with the era of colonial conquest, has great, continuing and under explored relevance to the Caribbean region. Identifying the frontier as a moral, ideational and physical boundary between what is imagined as civilization and wilderness, the book seeks to extend frontier analysis by focusing on the Eastern Caribbean multi island state of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The continuing relevance of the concept of frontier, and allied notions of civilization and wilderness, are illuminated through an analysis of the ways in which SVG is perceived and experienced by both outsiders to the society and its insiders. Using literary sources, biographies and autobiography, the book shows how St. Vincent is imagined and made sense of as a modern frontier; a society in the balance between an imposed civilized order and an untameable wild that always encroaches, whether in the form of social dislocation, the urban presence of the ‘Wilderness people’ or illegal marijuana farming in the northern St. Vincent hills. The frontier as examined here has historically been and remains very much a global production. Simultaneously, it is argued that contemporary processes of globalization shape the development of tourism and finance sectors, as well as patterns of migration, they connect to shifting conceptions of the civilized and the wild, and have implications for the role of the state and politics in frontier societies.
continue to be found and new aspects to be identified. To demonstrate this survival and renewal I extend the conventional notion of frontier as physical boundary to suggest that, beyond physical boundary, the frontier holds also moral and ideational tension as the site of balance between what are imagined as ‘civilisation’ and ‘wilderness’. I will suggest also that social movements challenge attempts to
is the increasing acceptability of the ‘Wilderness People’, as they were known in the nineteenth century, as an urban presence. The Spiritual or Shaker Baptists, as they became known, were officially banned altogether for some sixty years for religious practices that alarmed mainstream colonial society (though the ban was enforced for less than half of that time). My second example is the changing
express the disenchantment of a post-war generation and anticipate the comic nihilism of writers such as Beckett. Both Waugh’s tale of the ill-fated English ‘Gothic man’,5 Tony Last, and Barnes’s story of American expatriate Paris, however, have at their heart the characteristically Modernist preoccupation with the city and the wilderness as a binary which deconstructs itself. Yet even within this binary the meaning of the city is not stable. As Deborah Parsons suggests in a comment which seems particularly pertinent to a consideration of these two novels: ‘The
the wilderness years of the 1980s. ‘Selsdon man’ Despite the economic problems of the previous three years, Labour members saw in 1970 with some optimism. In January, Wilson went on the offensive after the Conservative shadow Cabinet held a weekend 217 fielding ch 9.P65 217 10/10/03, 12:37 218 Fielding conference at the Selsdon Park Hotel. This gathering was meant to imbue the Conservative’s post-1966 policy review with some coherence, but the media created the impression that it marked a dramatic departure from post-war policy. Certainly, Edward Heath, the
My perspective on the frontier in this chapter involves an examination of concepts of ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ in relation to St Vincent. While the concerns with ‘civilisation’ and ‘wilderness’ persist, they are inflected with the perspectives of the authors whose work I examine. This chapter, then, applies the malleable concept of the frontier to a study of rhetoric
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
Colonial powers and Ethiopian frontiers 1880–1884 is the fourth volume of Acta Aethiopica, a series that presents original Ethiopian documents of nineteenth-century Ethiopian history with English translations and scholarly notes. The documents have been collected from dozens of archives in Africa and Europe to recover and present the Ethiopian voice in the history of Ethiopia in the nineteenth century. The present book, the first Acta Aethiopica volume to appear from Lund University Press, deals with how Ethiopian rulers related to colonial powers in their attempts to open Ethiopia for trade and technological development while preserving the integrity and independence of their country. In addition to the correspondence and treatises with the rulers and representatives of Italy, Egypt and Great Britain, the volume also presents letters dealing with ecclesiastical issues, including the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem.