Decolonizing the Map: Cartography From Colony to Nation
Author: James R. Akerman File Type: pdf Almost universally, newly independent states seek to affirm their independence and identity by making the production of new maps and atlases a top priority. For formerly colonized peoples, however, this process neither begins nor ends with independence, and it is rarely straightforward. Mapping their own land is fraught with a fresh set of issues how to define and administer their territories, develop their national identity, establish their role in the community of nations, and more. The contributors to Decolonizing the Map explore this complicated relationship between mapping and decolonization while engaging with recent theoretical debates about the nature of decolonization itself. These essays, originally delivered as the 2010 Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, encompass more than two centuries and three continentsLatin America, Africa, and Asia. Ranging from the late eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth, contributors study topics from mapping and national identity in late colonial Mexico to the enduring complications created by the partition of British India and the racialized organization of space in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. A vital contribution to studies of both colonization and cartography, Decolonizing the Map is the first book to systematically and comprehensively examine the engagement of mapping in the longand clearly unfinishedparallel processes of decolonization and nation building in the modern world. **Review Excellent scholarship permeates every chapter of Decolonizing the Map. The essays collected here by Akerman are subtle, tightly argued, and carefully crafted the standard of analysis and exposition is uniformly high. This fascinating volume will be widely read and enthusiastically received by a readership spanning political history, historical geography, and, of course, the history of cartography. (Michael Heffernan, University of Nottingham) Decolonizing the Map examines how maps were used before and after independence movements to establish new nations that emerged in the lengthy decolonization process. In different contexts, the contributors reveal not only how maps served as a basis for the construction of those nations but also how they were reflections of those recently emerged entities, condensing all the characteristics and contradictions of each process. This book is a pioneering intellectual enterprisea highly recommended and welcome contribution to the field. (Junia Ferreira Furtado, Federal University of Minas Gerais) About the Author James R. Akerman is Curator of Maps at the Newberry Library and director of the librarys Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography. He is editor of Cartographies of Travel and Navigation and The Imperial Map, and coeditor of Maps Finding Our Place in the World, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Author: Jonah Lehrer
File Type: pdf
The profound mysteries of creative thought have long intimidated the worlds finest brains. How do you measure the imagination? How do you quantify an epiphany? These daunting questions led researchers to neglect the subject for hundreds of years. In Jonah Lehrers ambitious and enthralling new book, we go in search of the epiphany. Shattering the myth of creative types, Lehrer shows how new research is deepening our understanding of the human imagination. Creativity is not a gift that only some possess. Its a term for a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively. Some acts of imagination are best done sipping espresso in a crowded cafe, while others require long walks in a quiet park. Lehrer helps us fit our creative strategies to the task at hand. The journey begins with the fluttering of neurons in the prefrontal cortex, before moving out to consider how this new science can also make neighbourhoods more vibrant, companies more productive and schools more effective. Well learn about Bob Dylans writing habits and the drug addiction of poets. Well see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar designed its office space to get the most out of its talent. Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, Imagine reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind and its essential role in our increasingly complex world.
Author: Michael J. Reznicek
File Type: pdf
Alcohol, opiates, cocaine and marijuana, among other drugs, have been used and abused for millennia. Prior to the disease model approach to drug addiction, which posits that addiction is a psychological and biological problem and that sufferers are victims, societies had a workable solution let people consume what they want, and let informal cultural controls reinforce responsible behavior. Legal sanctions were reserved for any use that affected the safety of others. Blowing Smoke proposes an approach to the war on drugs that returns us to the pre-disease-model era. Dr. Reznicek asserts that addiction is not a medical problem to be treated in rehab or by prohibiting substance use. Rather, he debunks the disease model, arguing that it has exacerbated the problem by telling drug abusers that they are not responsible for their behavior, that they are sick, that they are not to blame. He skillfully argues for a new approach to drug use and abuse that requires a shift in the way we fight the war on drugs.Dr. Reznicek provides a new framework for understanding drug abuse the habit model. Habits are practiced as long as they provide comfort, and are abandoned when they cause pain. The habit model is more consistent with current neuroscientific knowledge and it accounts for the widely observed phenomenon that most substance abusers dont change until they hit bottom, the point where the consequences of drug use finally outweigh its benefits. Using the habit model, Dr. Reznicek suggests the solution to the drug problem is to turn back the clock, and to take lessons from societies that use social controls and consequences to deal with addiction and drug abuse. He recommends the legalization of drugs for adults, the implementation of social practices to dissuade abusers, and the end to the use of rehab as a way of handling addiction. Blowing Smoke shows how such an iconoclastic approach can work for us today.
Author: Chris L. de Wet
File Type: pdf
This volume examines the prevalence, function, and socio-political effects of slavery discourse in the major theological formulations of the late third to early fifth centuries AD, arguably the most formative period of early Christian doctrine. The question the book poses is this in what way did the Christian theologians of the third, fourth, and early fifth centuries appropriate the discourse of slavery in their theological formulations, and what could the effect of this appropriation have been for actual physical slaves? This fascinating study is crucial reading for anyone with an interest in early Christianity or Late Antiquity, and slavery more generally. **
Author: Jordan E. Miller
File Type: pdf
This book puts radical theology and political theology into an interdisciplinary conversation with sustained and serious readings of resistance. Using an anthropology of ritual as a common thread, Jordan E. Miller explores the reality of the relationship between political theology, radical theology, and political theory, action, and power without cynicism in a creative, forward-moving way. The first half of the book develops a radical political theology and the second half applies that theory to a series of social movements, including The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Occupy Wall Street, and #BlackLivesMatter, and includes reflections on the events at Standing Rock, ND.
Author: Ōta Gyūichi
File Type: pdf
Shinch-K ki, the work translated here into English under the title The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, is the most important source on the career of one of the best known figures in all of Japanese historyOda Nobunaga (1534-1582), the first of the Three Heroes who unified Japan after a century of fragmentation and internecine bloodshed. The other two of the triad, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), also make frequent appearances in this chronicle, playing prominent although clearly subordinate roles. So the chronicle also is an important source on their early careers, as it is on a constellation of other actors in Japans sixteenth-century drama. The chronicles author, ta Gyichi, was Nobunagas former retainer and an eyewitness of some of the events he describes. He completed his work about the year 1610. **
Author: Karen Solie
File Type: epub
A profound new collection from one of poetrys rising stars hrIntroducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray . . . He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives. . . . And, yes, as we embark on the third millennium of our so-called Common Era, she is indeed the one by whom the language lives. Michael Hofmann, London Review of BooksA sublime singer of existential bewilderment, Karen Solie is one of contemporary poetrys most direct and haunting voices. A poet of the in-between placesthe purgatory of wayside motels and junkyards, the abandoned Calgary ski jump and the eternal noon of Walmarther poems stake out startlingly new territory and are songs for our emerging world, an age of uncertainty and melting icebergs. In Solies new collection, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, she restlessly excavates our civilization, the moments of tough luck, casual violence, naked desire, and inchoate menace, pursuing Beauty and terror in equal measure and fixing on the Intrigue of a boarded-up building. We want to get in there and find out whats the matter with it. Amplifying the elegant recklessness of her Griffin Poetry Prizewinning collection Pigeon, these poems bear an uncanny poetic intelligence and unflinching vision.**
Author: Barbara Cassin
File Type: pdf
Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy. In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. While impressed by the search engines brilliance, Cassin enlists her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition to challenge on the Google myth of a good tech company and its democracy of clicks, laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naivete that underwrites its founding slogans Organize the worlds information, and Dont be evil. For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world. While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Googles playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial flavors folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English. As the Internet continues to intensify the neoliberal effacement of difference and corporate reduction of the common, Cassins refreshing polemic takes technology seriously enough to scrutinize the beliefs upon which it operates. **
Author: Nicholas Shakespeare
File Type: epub
Andy Larkham is late. He is due at the funeral of his favourite school teacher, who once told him Its hard work being anyone. Its especially hard for Andy - stuck in a dead-end job, terminally short of cash and with a fianc e who is about to ditch him. When the funeral leads to unexpected consequences, Andy has to ask himself how far will he go to change his life? From early-twentieth-century Turkey to modern day London, Nicholas Shakespeare takes us on an extraordinary journey that explores the temptations of unexpected wealth, the secrets of damaged families and the price of being true to oneself. At once a love story spanning many decades and a tragedy of betrayal and missed opportunities, it is a romance for our times.