22.08.2015
16.08.2015
Modern Inquisitions
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| Afro-Peruvian servants in Lima, early 19th century |
Looking for a precedent that eased the way for "civilized" people to
embrace fascism in the twentieth-century, Hannah Arendt found it in
nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule,
racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. Modern Inquisitions
takes Arendt's insights about the barbaric underside of modern Western
civilization and moves them back in time several hundred years to the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Spanish empire dominated
the globe. Irene Silverblatt argues that the modern bureaucratic state
developed in tandem with colonialism and that its genesis is especially
evident in the machinations of Spanish Inquisition. She illuminates the
intricate "dance of bureaucracy and race" evident in the Inquisition's
persecution of scores of Spanish subjects in colonial Peru. Drawing on
extensive archival research in Lima, Silverblatt highlights what Spanish
trial records, evangelizing sermons, and missionary guides say about
how the emerging modern world was understood, experienced, and
constructed by colonists and Inquisition officials: Early missionaries
preached about world history and the "races" that inhabited the globe;
Inquisitors, able bureaucrats, turned executions into "reasons of
state"; royal authorities spoke of grand conspiracies of Jews,
merchants, Indians, and blacks; "stained" blood--carried by Indians,
blacks, and those of Jewish and Moorish descent--became marks of
deficient character and ability. Engaging with the state formation
theories not only of Arendt but also of others including Max Weber,
Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Mick Taussig, Modern Inquisitions
forces the reader to confront the idea that the modern state, with its
capacity to rationalize extreme violence, is in fact a product of the
Inquisition rather than a progression beyond it.15.08.2015
14.08.2015
Obeah
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| Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage a Surinam . . . cent
dessins pris sur nature par l'auteur (Bruxelles, 1839), plate xvii,
fig.36. (Copy in the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) Using her spiritual powers, a healer is helping to cure a child who is not present. After engaging in certain ritualistic behaviors, she gives the mother, who stands before her, a herbal decoction, made in the pot in front of her; the mother is told to drink the decoction several times and then is given some herbs which she is to give her child. These healers, "who are regarded as oracles by the Negroes," are usually older black women who are called “Mama Snekie, Mother of Serpents, or Water Mama.” The author observed one of these women at work, and describes (p. 26) the scene he witnessed, including the furnishings of her house. Although his description is relatively brief and sparse in ethnographic detail, it nonetheless represents a rather unique first-hand account of an African-type spiritual practitioner (what might have been called an obeah practitioner in the British Caribbean) at an early date. Benoit (1782-1854), a Belgian artist, visited Suriname around 1831 and apparently stayed for several months. The 100 lithographs in his book (hand colored in the John Carter Brown copy), accompanied by textual descriptions of varying detail, are derived from drawings he made during his visit, which included time in Paramaribo, the capital, as well as trips into the interior visiting Maroons and Amerindians. Forty of his lithographs, with our translations from the French text, are shown on this website. |
Obeah (auch Obi) ist eine auf den Westindischen Inseln gebräuchliche Bezeichnung für Praktiken und Lebensvorgängen, die nach naturreligiösen Vorstellungen zugeordnet werden. Die Vokabel "Obeah" entstammt vermutlich dem Igbo (Nigeria) und wird vor allem benutzt in Bezug auf volkstümliche Zauberbräuche und -riten, sowie allgemein zur Beschreibung von in der westindischen Inselwelt üblichen religiösen Praktiken afrikanischer Herkunft.
Die Inhalte und Praktiken des Obeah-Glaubens wurden von den in den Jahrhunderten der Sklaverei in die Kolonien auf den Westindischen Inseln verschleppten Schwarzafrikanern mitgebracht und an ihre Nachkommen tradiert. Die Herkunft und Überlieferungsweise von Obeah ist damit denen anderer Vorstellungen der ostamerikanischen Inselwelt wie Voodoo, Hoodoo oder Palo identisch.
Mithin ist Obeah in nahezu allen karibischen Staaten, sowie in einigen Gebieten Mittel und des nördlichen Südamerikas verbreitet. Anzutreffen ist die Praxis des Obeah unter anderem in Jamaika, den Jungferninseln, Trinidad, Tobago, Guyana, Belize, den Bahamas, St. Vincent und Barbados.
Obeah existiert in diversen Ausprägungen die meist synkretistischer Natur sind: Einige vermengen afrikanisches Brauchtum und schwarzafrikanische Kulthandlungen mit christlichen Glaubenselementen, andere vermischen Obeah mit hinduistischen Elementen.
Als Obeah-Männer werden die religiösen Adepten beziehungsweise Führer des Obeahs bezeichnet.
13.08.2015
Coolitude (Khal Torabully)
Coolitude is a term coined by Mauritian poet Khal Torabully to describe the cultural interaction of the Indian or Chinese "coolie" diaspora, and by extension also similar migrations. It refers to a transcultural process, articulating imaginaries and cultures in non-essentialist ways.
Further reading
Khal Torabully, Cale d'étoiles-Coolitude (Azalées Editions, La Réunion, 1992)
Carter, Marina; Torabully, Khal (2002). Coolitude : an anthology of the Indian labour diaspora. London: Anthem. ISBN 1843310031.
Torabully, Khal, Voices from the Aapravasi Ghat - Indentured imaginaries, poetry collection on the coolie route and the fakir's aesthetics, Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund, AGTF, Mauritius,November 2, 2013.
External links
Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labor Diaspora (2002), page from Anthem Press website
Khaleel Torabully, "The coolies' odyssey",[dead link] UNESCO Courier (October 1996)
Khal Torabully, "Créolité, Coolitude, Créolisation: Les imaginaires de la relation", at Africultures website (2006)
Véronique Bragard, Torabully biography, at the île en île website (CUNY)
Véronique Bragard, "Transoceanic echoes: coolitude and the work of the Mauritian poet Khal Torabully", International Journal of Francophone Studies 8.2 (August 2005)
Véronique Bragard, "Voyages into Coolitude: A Comparative and Textual Analysis of Kala Pani Womens Cross-Cultural Creative Memory", thesis abstract
Paget Henry, Review of Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labor Diaspora, from H-Net
Voices from the Aapravasi Ghat, http://www.potomitan.info/torabully/voices.php
HILL COOLIES OR DHANGARS http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/etext/scoble/
COOLIE - ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA : http://www.britannica.com/topic/coolie-Asian-labourer
CHINESE COOLIES http://www.imperialchina.org/coolie.html
Chinese coolie trade, https://web.archive.org/web/20150701053253/http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B0DE2D61539EF34BC4152DFB1668388669FDE
Slave trade, coolie trade: http://facweb.northseattle.edu/cadler/Global_Dialogues/Readings/Monkey_Hunting_Readings/Slave%20Trade%20Coolie%20Trade.pdf
UK National Archives : http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/indian-indentured-labourers/
Facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/pages/Coolitude/240942269264444
Blackbirding
The blackbirding schooner Daphne was seized by HMS Rosario in 1869, and its passengers freed[1] Blackbirding is the coercion of people through trickery and kidnapping to work as labourers. From the 1860s, blackbirding ships in the Pacific sought workers to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands in Peru.[2] In the 1870s, the blackbirding trade focused on supplying labourers to plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland and Fiji.[3][4] The first documented practice of a major blackbirding industry for sugar cane labourers occurred between 1842 and 1904. Those "blackbirded" were recruited from the indigenous populations of nearby Pacific islands or northern Queensland. In the early days of the pearling industry in Western Australia at Nickol Bay and Broome, local Aborigines were blackbirded from the surrounding areas.
Blackbirding has continued to the present day in developing countries. One example is the kidnapping and coercion at gunpoint of indigenous people in Central America to work as plantation labourers in the region, where they are exposed to heavy pesticide loads and do backbreaking work for very little pay.[5]
Etymology
The term may have been formed directly as a contraction of "blackbird catching"; "blackbird" was a slang term for the local indigenous people. It might also have derived from an earlier phrase, "blackbird shooting", which referred to recreational hunting of Australian Aboriginal people by early European settlers.[6]
Blackbirding in Polynesia in the 1860s
Polynesia is the largest of three major cultural areas in the Pacific Ocean. Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian triangle.
Geographic definition of Polynesia, surrounded by a pink line
For less than a year between 1862–63, Peruvian ships (and a few Chilean ships under the Peruvian flag) combed the smaller islands of Polynesia from Easter Island in the eastern Pacific to the Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu) and the southern atolls of the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati), seeking workers to fill the extreme labour shortage in Peru.[2]
In 1862 J. C. Byrne, an Irish speculator, persuaded countrymen to financially back a scheme to bring "colonists" from the New Hebrides to Peru as indentured agricultural workers. The first ship, Adelante, was fitted and on 15 June 1862 set out across the Pacific. Calling in at Tongareva (Penrhyn) in the northern Cook Islands, Byrne found the one island in the Pacific where the population was willing to leave because of a severe coconut famine. He took 253 recruits; by September, they were working in Peru as plantation workers and domestic household servants.
Coolie
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Coolie (disambiguation).
Coolie labourer in Zhenjiang, China, with bamboo pole to hoist and carry heavy loads.C. 1900
A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.
Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations)[1] and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia,[2] particularly in South Africa.[3]
Etymology
The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி).[4][5] An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul.[4] The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.[6][7]
The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.
Slavery
Contemporary[show]
Historical[show]
By country or region[show]
Religion[show]
Opposition and resistance[show]
Related[show]
History of the Coolie trade
An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower.[8] As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts.[9][10] British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.
The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.[11][12][13]
Penny Siopis
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| William Blake, Nebukadnezar |
PERSONNE ET LES AUTRES VINCENT MEESSEN AND GUESTS
Belgian Pavilion
56th international art exhibition - Biennale di Venezia
9 May - 22 November 2015
Curator: Katerina Gregos
The Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale will present the work of the Belgian artist Vincent Meessen (Baltimore, 1971, lives in Brussels), together with international guest artists. His project Personne et les autres breaks with the tradition of Belgium’s representation in Venice to date, which has mostly featured solo or duo exhibitions of Belgian artists. The artist’s project, selected to represent Belgium at the Biennale, challenges the notion of national representation, by moving away from the traditional format of a solo show and opening up to include multiple positions and voices.
Working in close collaboration, Meessen and Brussels-based curator Katerina Gregos have developed an international, thematic, discursive, contemplative group exhibition of a poetic as well as political nature, which is grounded in research-based practices. The exhibition welcomes ten other artists from four continents and – for the first time in the Pavilion – artists from Africa, all of whose work has probed the question of colonial modernity, and most of who are producing new work for the exhibition.
The title of the exhibition, Personne et les autres, is borrowed from a lost play by André Frankin, a Belgian art critic affiliated with the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals. The exhibition takes the history of the Belgian Pavilion and the international context of the Biennale (both derived from the colonial exhibitions and world expositions) as its points of departure to explore the consequences of political, historical, cultural and artistic entanglements between Europe and Africa during the time of colonial modernity, and in its aftermath. The Belgian Pavilion itself was the first foreign Pavilion to be built in the Giardini in Venice, during the reign of King Leopold II. Meessen’s own work and artistic research have consistently explored and questioned the history and afterlife of colonial modernity.
Vincent Meessen / Thela Tendu
Der Künstler wird zum Kurator
12.2.2015, 15:14 Uhr
Vincent Meessen macht uns in der Kunsthalle Basel mit dem Werk von Thela Tendu bekannt. Das tut der belgische Künstler auf derartig vielschichtige Weise, dass uns fast schwummrig wird – wir am Schluss aber trotzdem überzeugt sind. Von Karen N. Gerig
Philipp Hänger: Ein-, Auf- und Durchblicke: Die Ausstellungsarchitektur von Vincent Meessen in der Kunsthalle Basel.
Ein-, Auf- und Durchblicke: Die Ausstellungsarchitektur von Vincent Meessen in der Kunsthalle Basel. (Bild: Philipp Hänger)
Nehmen wir es vorweg: Wenn man Vincent Meessens Ausstellung in der Kunsthalle Basel wirklich verstehen will, dann kommt man nicht umhin, sich zumindest den Saaltext zu Gemüte zu führen. Denn was der Belgier in den fünf Räumen, die ihm zugewiesen wurden, installiert hat, ist derartig vielschichtig, dass selbst mit Anleitung kaum alles gesehen und gelesen werden kann.
Davon sollte man sich nun aber nicht abschrecken lassen – denn auch wenn man nicht gern lesen mag, so gibt es vielerlei zu sehen und zu entdecken.
Ein Widerspruch? Keineswegs. Es folgt der Versuch einer Erklärung.
Fünf Räume, die fast alle demselben visuellen Muster folgen. Konstruktionen aus Holz und Platten in Silber, Schwarz und Weiss. Bilder mit geometrischen Mustern, die eindeutig von Hand gezeichnet sind. Filmprojektionen, in denen visuelle Tests mit Afrikanern durchgeführt werden. Studien in Buchform, die von solchen Tests berichten. Kleine Objekte aus Holz, die einen rituellen Charakter besitzen. Eine Soundinstallation, die in abstrakter Form Wortfetzen und Klänge miteinander verbindet.
Meessen bedient sich der unterschiedlichsten Medien. Bald wird klar, dass er hier mehr als Kurator denn als Autor der Werke fungiert. Die Zeichnungen an den Wänden sind gezeichnet mit dem Namen Thela Tendu, die Bücher stammen von André Ombredane, der identisch ist mit dem Herrn weisser Hautfarbe, der in den Filmen die Tests durchführt.
Bücher von André Ombredane auf einer Tischarchitektur. (Bild: Philipp Hänger)
12.08.2015
11.08.2015
Cimarrón
Cimarrón (Plural: Cimarrones) bezeichnet im lateinamerikanischen Spanisch ein wildes Tier oder ein entlaufenes Haustier (auch als Adjektiv gebräuchlich). Im Zusammenhang mit der Sklaverei wurde dieser Begriff als Negro Cimarrón auf entlaufene Sklaven (afrikanischer Herkunft) angewendet, die rechtlich den Haustieren gleichgestellt waren. Die englische Bezeichnung Maroon ist aus dem Spanischen abgeleitet.
Um die Cimarrones im Sinne von entlaufene Sklaven ranken sich auf Kuba und in der übrigen Karibik viele Mythen und Legenden, die bis in die heutige Zeit wirksam sind. Der Grund dafür liegt in den wenigen Informationen, die es über sie gibt. Die Flucht von Sklaven wurde mit fürchterlichen Strafen belegt, im Wiederholungsfall in der Regel mit öffentlicher Hinrichtung durch Folter zur Abschreckung für die anderen Sklaven. Eigens ausgebildete Suchtrupps mit dressierten Hunden verfolgten die Cimarrones und erhielten im Erfolgsfall hohe Belohnungen, die den „materiellen Wert“ der Sklaven bei weitem überstiegen. Es ging besonders den Sklaven haltenden Zuckerplantagenbesitzern der Industriellen Revolution darum, die Aussichtslosigkeit jedes Fluchtversuches zu demonstrieren.
Auch das Überleben nach gelungener Flucht war durchaus nicht gesichert. Cimarrones mussten sich von jeder Siedlung fernhalten, da auf ihre Ergreifung hohe Belohnungen ausgesetzt waren. Sie konnten nur in den dichten Urwäldern mehr dahinvegetieren als leben. Trotz des damit verbundenen Risikos mussten sie sich dennoch immer wieder in die Nähe von Siedlungen wagen, um Lebensnotwendiges zu stehlen. Für die weiße Bevölkerung Kubas waren Cimarrones eine „dunkle“ Gefahr, mit der ungehorsame Kinder erschreckt wurden. Für die schwarze Bevölkerung symbolisierten sie die Hoffnung, doch noch dem Los der Sklaverei entfliehen zu können, so dass der Cimarrón auch in der synkretistischen Religion der Santería eine wichtige Rolle spielt.
Der Überlieferung nach flüchtete 1502 ein afrikanischer Sklave, welcher kurz zuvor von dem Menschenhändler Nicolás de Ovando in die Neue Welt verschleppt worden war, ins Landesinnere und wurde so der erste Cimarrón. Bereits siebzig Jahre später gab es nach spanischen Schätzungen 7000 Cimarrones, die in den Wäldern Südamerikas umherstreiften und später sogar eigene Dörfer gründeten. Im ständigen Konflikt mit ihren einstigen Herren stehend, bildeten sie eine eingeschworene Gemeinschaft, die strengen Gesetzen unterlag. In einzelnen Fällen griffen Cimarrones auch spanische Siedlungen an oder ließen sich von Expeditionen anderer europäischer Nationen anwerben, die sich mit Spanien im Kriegszustand befanden, so zum Beispiel bei der Plünderung einer spanischen Silberkarawane durch Francis Drake im Jahre 1573.
10.08.2015
Portret van Thomas Hees (1634-1692) met zijn bediende Thomas
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| Portret van Thomas Hees (1634-1692) met zijn bediende Thomas |
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