Photography in Sierra Leone, 1850–1918

Africa ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 510-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Viditz-Ward
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Photograph Albums ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Colonial Archives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
The City ◽  
European Technology

Opening ParagraphIn recent years scholars have shown considerable interest in the early use of photography by non-Western peoples. Research on nineteenth-century Indian, Japanese and Chinese photography has revealed a rich synthesis of European and Asian imagery. These early photographs show how non-Western peoples created new forms of artistic expression by adapting European technology and visual idioms for their own purposes. Because of the long history of contact between Sierra Leoneans and Europeans, Freetown seemed a logical starting point for similar photographic research in West Africa. The information presented here is based on ten years of searching for nineteenth-century photographs made by Sierra Leonean photographers. To locate these pictures, I have visited Freetonians and viewed their family portraits and photograph albums, interviewed contemporary photographers throughout Sierra Leone, and researched in the various colonial archives in England to locate photographs preserved from the period of colonial rule. I have discovered that a community of African photographers has worked in the city of Freetown since the very invention of photography. The article reviews the first phase of this unique photographic tradition, 1850–1918, and focuses on several of the African photographers who worked in Freetown during this period.

Women in Freetown politics, 1914–61: a preliminary study

Africa ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 439-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
LaRay Denzer
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Women's Leadership ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Preliminary Study ◽  
National Congress ◽  
Economic Contribution ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
The City

Opening ParagraphThe study of women in Sierra Leone has been well launched. Except for the work of Carol P. MacCormack (formerly Hoffer) on political leadership and socio-economic development among Mende and Sherbro women (1972, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982), most of this scholarship focuses on women in Freetown, mainly the Krio. Filomena Steady (1975, 1976) has analysed Krio women's leadership in church and political organisations. The history of their economic contribution to the evolution of the city has been discussed by E. Frances White (1976, 1978, 1981a, b). Gender relationships in modern marriage have been examined by Barbara Harrell-Bond (1975). In addition, there are a number of biographical studies of prominent leaders: Paramount Chief Madam Yoko (Hoffer, 1974), Adelaide Casely Hayford (Okonkwo, 1985; Cromwell, 1986), Constance A. Cummings-John (Denzer, 1981, forthcoming a, b), Hannah S. Benka Coker (Metzger, 1973: 50–2), and Lottie Hamilton-Hazeley (Metzger, 1973: 52–3). On the basis of this body of work it is possible to study more closely the contribution of women in modern politics in Freetown and the socioeconomic forces behind their participation. This account covers the period from the emergence of the proto-nationalist movement, the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), up to the campaign for independence.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Emotional Cities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Dynamic Transformation ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Habitus, Capital, Agency, and Distinction in Entrepreneurial Field Dynamics: The Case Lafayette

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anderson Sant'Anna
Keyword(s):  
Business Environment ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Institutional Dynamics ◽  
Business Ecosystem ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Individual Variations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Depth Interviews

<p>This paper aims to investigate process of requalification of economic functions in the ongoing transition to the digital economy experienced by the American city of Lafayette, in the state of Louisiana. As a starting point an extensive analysis of the history of the city and its surroundings was carried out, accompanied by semi-structured and in-depth interviews with respondents involved in the current process of reconversion investigated. In this transition it was relevant the Lafayette's historical, demographic, cultural, spatial, and socioeconomic dynamics. According to Bourdieu's theoretical framework, it was sought to identify the main cognitive categories, both in relation to the socio-institutional dynamics and individual variations, emerging from the interviews. As result, the analysis of the habitus and the main economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capitals mobilized by community members it was possible to identify themes and categories used to describe the local business ecosystem and its components. It was also possible to reveal alliances and disputes that forge and characterize Lafayette's business environment, taking into account relationships among its main historical agents: White Americans vs. Indians, White Americans vs. Cajuns, White Americans vs. Blackcreoles.<i></i></p>

Urban Formalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The City

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-195
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Student ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.

scholarly journals Dueling, Conflicting Masculinities, and the Victorian Gentleman

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margery Masterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Multifaceted Approach ◽  
Multiple Modes ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.

THEODORE VACQUER AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MODERNITY IN HAUSSMANN'S PARIS

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 157-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Urban Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
The City ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

AbstractThéodore Vacquer (1824–99) was an archaeologist who excavated, directed excavations in and visited all archaeological sites in Paris between the 1840s and his death. In the latter part of his career, he served as assistant curator at what became the Musée Carnavalet, specialising in the Roman and early medieval history of the city. Taking advantage of the reconstruction of the city in the nineteenth century associated with the work of Paris prefect, Baron Haussmann, he was able to locate far more of Roman Paris than had been known before. His findings remained the basis of what was known about the Roman city until a new wave of archaeological excavations after 1950. Vacquer aimed to highlight his discoveries in a magnum opus on the history of Paris from earliest times to ad 1000, but he died with virtually nothing written. His extensive archive still exists, however, and provides the substance for this essay. The essay seeks to rescue Vacquer from the relative obscurity associated with his name. In addition, by setting his life and work in the context of the Haussmannian construction of Paris as the arch-city of modernity it aims to illuminate the history of archaeology, conservation and urban identity in nineteenth-century Paris.

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