Het Spoorwegmuseum Utrecht, the Netherlands

Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-121
Author(s):  
Rolf-Ulrich Kunze

God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands, albeit with only a limited role for the railway. Any railway museum in this country invented by and dependent on hydraulic engineering must creatively solve the problem of portraying a technology of mobility which was not central to the Waterstaat (hydro-engineering) identity and the nation’s sociotechnological construction, but one which initially was secondary and subsidiary and, above all, delayed. On the face of it, the story to be told here appears to be that of how, in a northwestern part of Europe where thorough industrialization was late to come, railway-based mobility established itself against the omnipresence of shipping and evolved from seaport-catering surface logistics into an integral element of everyday transportation in twentieth-century Netherlands. The Utrecht Spoorwegmuseum (railway museum) impressively shows that this is not even half the truth, behind which might be, at best, the grumbling resentment of an 1890 boatman.

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
Bill Metcalf

Brisbane was wiped off the face of the Earth and Queensland ceased to exist as a political entity under the combined military forces of Victoria and New South Wales during violent conflict at the end of the twentieth century. Brisbane was annihilated because of the un-Christian sins of its people, and the moral corruption of its leaders. The Queensland Defence Force was incapable of defending even itself, let alone defeating the invading troops. The pivotal event in this collapse concerned the alluring performances by a group of ‘lady parachutists’ who entertained the Queensland military forces, thereby distracting them and allowing the opposing forces to easily defeat them at the Battle of Fort Lytton.That, at least, is the key to the plot of Dr Thomas Pennington Lucas's 1894 dystopian novel The Ruins of Brisbane in the Year 2000. The origin of this ‘lady parachutists’ myth, and the connections between this myth and the end of Queensland civilisation, led me to research a fascinating episode in Queensland's cultural history, and in particular Victorian notions of sexual propriety, ‘true manhood’ and the combined — albeit veiled — threats posed by unfettered female sexuality and male masturbation.


Author(s):  
J. Daniel Elam

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Molla Mekonnen Alemu

Every life form is dependent on ecosystem services for food, water, fiber, ecological regulation and societal values. During the past 50 years, human beings interfered in to the wellbeing of these ecosystems and the services they provide, mainly to fulfill the ever increasing demand of humans. Many ecosystems are being degraded by putting their ecological services in jeopardy and causing considerably irremediable losses of biodiversity from the face of the earth. The degradation of these resources is also expected to grow in the years to come by posing a threat to the wellbeing of humanity in various forms. The threat, therefore, needs a collaborated action from grass root to global level entities and bodies. Strong policy, strategy and institutional frameworks and action plans could also play a role in averting the ongoing degradation of the ecosystem services. This paper is therefore, aimed at highlighting the major ecosystem services and some possible measures that will help to mitigate the degradation of their services.


This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.


Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-103
Author(s):  
Lina Aniqoh

This paper seeks to elaborate on the textual interpretation of Q.S Muhammad verse 4 and Q.S at Taubah verse 5. These two verses are often employed by the extremist Muslim groups to legitimize their destructive acts carried out on groups considered as being infidels and as such lawfully killed. The interpretation was conducted using the double movement hermeneutics methodology offered by Fazlur Rahman. After reinterpretation, the two verses contain moral values, namely the war ordered by God must be reactive, fulfill the ethics of "violence" and be the last solution. Broadly speaking, the warfare commanded in the Qur'an aims to establish a benefit for humanity on the face of the earth by eliminating every crime that exists. These two verses in the contemporary socio-historical context in Indonesia can be implemented as a basis for combating the issue of hoaxes and destructive acts of extremist Muslim groups. Because both are crimes and have negative implications for the people good and even able to threaten the unity of mankind.


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