Singing the Civilizing Mission in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms: The Fisk Jubilee Singers in Nineteenth-Century Germany

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kira Thurman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Fisk Jubilee Singers

The Fisk Concert Spiritual

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Jean Graham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
American Missionary Association ◽  
Fisk Jubilee Singers

This chapter explores the process of musically and culturally translating oral folk spirituals into notated arranged spirituals performed on the concert stage. The American Missionary Association hired people’s song composer and church musician Theodore F. Seward to transcribe the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ spirituals as arranged for them by their director, George L. White. Using Seward’s transcriptions as well as those by Jubilee Singers Ella Sheppard and Thomas Rutling, plus reviews and primary sources, as well as early recordings, this chapter recreates as far as possible the performance practice of the concert spirituals sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers on their tours. The reception of the Fisk Jubilee Singers is surveyed through numerous reviews and is interpreted to show how a codified discourse about spirituals was created in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which stressed, for example, primitivism, wildness, nature, and the inherent musicality of the African race.

The “White Man,” Race, and Imperial War during the Long Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
Marilyn Lake
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Constitutive Relations ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Self ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Colonial Settlement

This chapter explores the transnational formation of the gendered and racialized figure of the “white man” in the constitutive relations of colonial conquest and imperial rule across the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The self-styled bearer of a “civilizing mission” to indigenous peoples, the white man became a perpetrator of violence and atrocity as imperial rule and colonial settlement encountered continuing resistance and guerrilla warfare. In the process, the older ideal of moral manliness gave way to a more modern conception of masculinity characterized by toughness, aggression, and a capacity to use firearms to “pacify the natives.” Defined by power, even as he was haunted by his vulnerability, the white man engaged in systematic denial and disavowal, evasion, and euphemism and narratives of nation-building that justified his right to rule.

Millian Liberalism and Colonial Oppression

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 79-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.G. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
First Century ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Central Object ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Colonial Oppression ◽  
Ways Of Life

In nineteenth-century Europe …. [w]ith rare exceptions liberals approved of colonialism and provided it with a legitimizing ideology …. Liberalism became missionary, ethnocentric, and narrow, dismissing non-liberal ways of life and thought as primitive and in need of the liberal civilizing mission.This is the judgement passed by Professor Bhikhu Parekh in his 1994 essay “Decolonizing Liberalism.” His deference to John Stuart Mill is shown in his making Mill not one of the exceptions, but rather the central object of attack. It would seem indeed that if the charges can be made good against Mill they will hold against nineteenth-century liberalism in general, and perhaps in some degree against twenty-first-century liberalism.Simple piety moves me to offer some defence of Mill's own good judgement, particularly in relation to India. But, in dealing with a phenomenon like liberalism, we need always to maintain a distinction which tends to blur. Doctrines and assertions are one thing. Historical movements and trends in a society are another.

The “Moral Effect” of Legalized Lawlessness

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Elkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
British Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
The Creation

From 1930s Palestine to Kenya in the years following World War II, systematized violence shaped and defined much of Britain’s twentieth-century empire. Liberal authoritarianism, and with it the “moral effect” that coercion had upon colonial subjects, gave rise to the systematic use of violence against colonial subjects. The ideological roots of these tactics can be located in the twinned birth of liberalism and imperialism, together with metropolitan responses to imperial events in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite copious amounts of empirical evidence documenting the evolution of liberal authoritarianism, and the creation and deployment of legalized lawlessness throughout the British Empire, Steven Pinker either ignores this evidence, or implicitly denies its validity. In reframing Britain’s civilizing mission, and challenging liberalism’s obfuscating abilities, this article critiques not only the British government’s repeated denials of systematized violence in its empire, but also Pinker’s reinforcement of the myths of British imperial benevolence.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
David Todd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Economic Modernization

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the French imperial empire in the nineteenth century. France after Napoleon did not renounce empire. Instead, it became less interested in formal conquest and experimented with novel techniques of imperial domination. French proponents of informal empire usually looked back on the 1789 Revolution with a mixture of disillusion and dismay, while its collaborators outside France were mostly conservatives bent on reconciling economic modernization with the defence of their privileges. This informal civilizing mission was, in many respects, counter-revolutionary. Counter-revolutionary commitment to capitalism went hand in hand with a collaborative style of imperialism. Ultimately, France's largely informal empire made a significant contribution to nineteenth-century globalization, even if it employed subtler mechanisms of coercion and collaboration than the more formal British Empire ever did.

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