Loading...
| Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.8 MB | Adobe PDF |
Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
This collection adopts a broad conception of “conflict” by examining
sites of conflict which include, but are not limited to, historical
battlefields, contemporary areas of political strife and fictional renderings
of imperial conflicts. A re-consideration of imperial conflicts is
particularly pertinent in the case of the British Empire, which established
an extremely varied and complex world in time and space. In its first
phase, the North American colonies performed an important role in
establishing the Empire. It then reached its height between the end of the
nineteenth century and World War I by means of military domination in
India, Southeast Asia and Africa, expanding its influence after 1919 up to
the process of de-colonization, which commenced from the middle of the
twentieth century. With so many diverse cultures involved and the everchanging
legitimate arguments proposed for colonialism, the British
Empire created a vast volume of work of the most varied kind, including
biographies and auto-biographies, travelogues, periodicals, political and
economic essays, anthropological studies, paintings, sculptures, architecture,
photography, poetry, stories and novels, all of which transmitted a
plurality of voices with heterogeneous values and perspectives about the
colonial experience.
To understand the contentious nature of imperialism, in addition to
exploring the concepts of Empire, colony, colonialism and imperialism, it
is important to analyse these individual and collective experiences,
including the arguments for the benign “European civilizing mission,” and
the denunciation of covert economic interests. Another factor to be
examined is the aggressive affirmation of British cultural superiority at the
time, and the gradual consciousness-raising as to the value and legitimacy
of different cultures conducive to dissonance, doubts and questions about
the universality of the dominant culture and its manifestations. A third area
of interest is the way in which the hierarchical social values in force in
England at the time were transplanted to the colonies, and were
subsequently transformed or maintained through political and domestic
authority or were caught up in the collision between the attraction and
repulsion towards other cultures.
Description
Keywords
british empire South Africa Port Elizabeth Elizabeth Donkin
Citation
Rodrigues, P. (2014). Elizabeth Donkin’s unlikely contribution to the making of a South African city.In Reviewing Imperial Conflicts, 94-106. ISBN 978-1443854931