#and one of those european “orientalists” common at the time

[blossoms-and-petrichor]

all im saying is if crowley had been friends with freddie mercury, it only follows that aziraphale was friends with Tchaikovsky.

I'm talking them sipping tea in russia. Indulging in pastries in comfortable silence, writing in their respective diaries. One day Tchaikovsky sticks his head out of his sheet music and gasps "what if we put CANNONS in the OVERTURE" smiling ear to ear and Aziraphale gives this wicked, enabling grin. Aziraphale's favorite piece would be Dumka because it has so much beautiful imagery and because it is really Tchaikovsky trying to put his home to music. Imagine Aziraphale meeting Tchaikovsky's lovers and warning them not to hurt him with a very angelic grin. Imagine Aziraphale sending Tchaikovsky his favorite foods during the latter's depressive episodes. Imagine Aziraphale's fury when after Tchaikovsky's death, his diaries are censored by the soviet union and the later russian government, entire passages blocked out because they discussed his lovers and sexuality. Imagine him trying to preserve the books his friend once loved because if he doesn't, even more of his memory would be erased.

[stirringwinds]

While I feel that hws France is hard to portray I do wonder what headcanons you have for him. Care to tell a few that come to mind?

a lot of my headcanons of francis/françois are from the british imperial + sea/east asian perspective, so with that in mind, these are some thoughts i've had:

a. françois' strengths are that he can be very charming and good at putting people at ease. he is somebody, if you ran into him somewhere, just comes off as a really interesting person. he can talk for ages about his passion for philosophy, art, literature, science and cooking without it getting boring to the listener.

b. he can be a really good lover too and is that sort of person who considers it a point of pride to make his partners enjoy his company. the sort of person who will make dinner and probably also a good breakfast for you. but one of his flaws is that he can also be pretty self-centred at times, and sometimes he uses his charisma to get out of things or simply dodge issues in his personal relationships.

c. françois, much like arthur, is in the Bad Parent club vis a vis matthew in the 17—18th centuries. where they differ however, is i feel that arthur was controlling but more...present, whereas françois was more...dismissive. matthew would get letters from arthur instructing him to do this and that, which for matthew at least acknowledged him, whereas françois might just not even write to him much at all, especially after matthew came under arthur's control.

d. françois really clicked with alfred during the revolutionary war. it helped that alfred was punching arthur in the dick, but i think that françois for all his flaws, genuinely possesses a somewhat more idealistic streak (than say, arthur imo) so that gelled well with alfred spouting all kinds of enlightenment thoughts (especially since he was also reading french writers like Montesquieu).

e. françois and lien (vietnam) have a complicated (to say the least) relationship due to the history of french imperialism over vietnam; i see francis being much younger than her (she and yao are peers in age!), so lien fitted him very much into her prior experience as an older female nation being forced to deal with 'boys playing at being empires'. lien probably shot him in the face at least once during the first indochina war, that tried to re-establish colonial rule over vietnam in the 1950s. however, i do think they can talk more cordially in more recent decades, with normalisation of ties. cooking is perhaps one topic that is a common interest—vietnamese banh mi is a kind of sandwich originating from french baguettes that incorporates local ingredients, and it's a really tasty and popular streetfood. there's also a big french-vietnamese population in paris today.

f. kiku was absolutely not impressed by monet's la japonaise, nor 'madame chrysanthème', the wildly racist and orientalist mess that Madame Butterfly was based on. it was exoticising, not flattering to him—he was however, more amenable to those of françois' artists that incorporated japanese artistic techniques in more genuine ways, or with françois' own view of aesthetics and his knowledge and interest in engineering.

g. yao, much like kiku later, was someone françois was very interested in culturally—as seen from the boom in chinoiserie when trade with china began back in the 17th century. i think french is probably one of the first european languages yao learns (besides portuguese). it's a fairly functional trading relationship—until of course, french imperialist interests began expanding in yao's sphere of influence and the opium wars.

h. i'm a fruk fan so naturally i think his love-hate relationship with arthur is one of his most significant r/ships—arthur has been a neighbour, friend, enemy, lover and everything in between. but! scotfra is another very, very long-term relationship important to him (auld alliance!). also on an EU level well, there's him and ludwig too.

i. naturally, he's also fairly fashionable, and i feel like he'll always eye himself critically even if he's going out casually, compared to way i can see arthur being fairly chill about strolling out in that questionable, ill-fitting acid green christmas sweater alfred sent him as a joke once. i also think françois probably smokes a fair bit, compared to how arthur's gotten a kick in the arse to cut back after WWII. and nowadays, he'll often just be relaxing with a cigarette on the balcony of his apartment with a book, or enjoying a day out in one of his museums.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Do have any thoughts on genies (either the general group or one of the specific kinds)? I don’t know about other editions, but they seem really flat in 5th edition. It would also be nice if a lot of their depictions didn’t use stereotypes associated with the Middle East.

Monsters Reimagined: Djinn

So I'm going to attempt to restrain myself because the popular representation of genies is one of my favorite things to ramble about pedantically, because the versions of them that we get in d&d are so far removed from their mythological roots that to get into why they're done dirty in most fiction we're going to need to get into dissect a game of broken telephone that's been going on for hundreds of years.

Likewise, getting back to those roots requires us to delve into some very heavy topics like orientalism and cultural mores surrounding slavery, which are complex enough that I could easily make whole posts about any of them.

TLDR: Djinn work well enough as powerful elemental spirits, but the classifications the monster manual uses for them are completely arbitrary and actually mush several different types of creature into one category. Just use Djinn as an umbrella, and don't worry about the pokemon elemental alignments. Perhaps most jarringly: Genie wishes do not rewrite reality or do the impossible, and are instead tasks that the djinn is magically compelled to do. This means you can include Djinn in a lot more of your stories without having to worry about including magical cheatcodes into your game. Instead, you get to wrestle with the complication of people keeping powerful (and potentially destructive) magical creatures as slaves, which has much more storytelling potential to play with.

What's wrong: While normally I'd do a breakdown on problematic portrayals of djinn ( and hooboy are there many) I think to get us all on the same page, I'm going to peel back the layers of historical/pop culture representation so we can see how these creatures have changed over time.

Djinn originated in pre-Islamic Arabia and occupy a similar cultural role to "the fey" in Europe, unseen beings that are as numerous as as the stories and cultures that involve them, tricksters, tempters, helpers, monsters, all manner of things.

The 7th century rolls around and there's a hot new religion that's looking to put down roots. Djinn get codified in the Quran as one of the three sapient beings created by Allah ( Angels of Light, Humans of Clay, Djinn of smokeless fire) which defines their theological existence going forward. The idea of powerful/magical people keeping Djinn as servants gets popularized ( which I've heard was part of a loophole regarding the Abrahamic forbiddance on sorcery. A pious individual couldn't possess magical powers, but they could own a being/object who did)

Over the next thousand years Orientalist texts like the 1001 Nights expose European audiences to the concept of "genies" , leading to the common idea of them and the wishes they grant entering the cultural lexicon.

At some point in the 1970s, the folk who make d&d are plundering every mythology they can lay hands on for fantasy creatures to include in their game, and decide on including the djinn. To make this creature fit into their budding cosmology, they're made into air elementals, which paves the way for other elemental genies to follow, with the name of more Arabic spirits being haphazardly stapled on to fill out the roster.

In 1992 Disney happens, and the genie/ bound object/three wishes trope is codified into the cultural consciousness forever.

Putting aside the ham-fisted cramming of djinn into the role of elemental nobles, I think the most interesting thing to address when talking about Djinn is the issue of wishes.  Simply put, rather than a being of “phenomenal cosmic power” that can snap its fingers and make the impossible happen, Djinn in the original stories were magical servants/slaves, bound into service and forced to do tasks that while impossible to a human were menial for it. The idea of a flying carpet? not an inherently magical object, but a piece of textile held aloft by four djinn who carried the thing and their “master” upon it like a palanquin. Aladdin asks the djinn of the ring to make him a palace? The djinn doesn’t just conjure one out of thin air, but assembles it by hand impossibly fast. If you bring bound djinn into your game, you’re going to have to start considering your world’s stance on slavery, which can be a heavy topic in its own right. 

What’s worth Saving:   The ethical quandary of a captive djinn can actually be a thematically rich avenue of storytelling potential provided your campaign is emotionally mature enough to acknowledge that enslaving sapient beings is abhorrent.  

Is it right to keep a djinn captive for personal gain? No? What if its powers are turned to a good end? 

What if the players get their hands on the djinn, get what they need, and free it right after? Is it still moral to exploit something and then let it go? 

What if the djinn was a dangerous and wild thing, a murderous spirit, or the manifestation of a powerful storm or wildfire and if released would go back to causing chaos, is it still right to keep and exploit it then? 

What if the djinn was not originally hostile, but has been deeply abused over its captivity, and has sworn revenge against those that wronged them? As a being of tremendous power its vendettas could prove to be calamitous 

These sort of questions can have a party debating for ages, and can provide the thematic through line for a lot of great adventures, especially when coupled with wonderous possibilities of the djinn’s powers and their elemental nature for added aesthetic flourish.  

How do we Fix it: 5e’s already taken a step in the right direction by removing the ability of most “genie” creatures to grant wishes, saving it for more advanced versions of the creature. Personally I’d eliminate the ability entirely, and have it be a misconception among common people and dabbling arcanists that djinn can do anything when captured. Djinn then stay the FUCK away from most mortals, preferring to dwell in the most inhospitable places and letting nature keep away those who would hunt and enslave them. 

As I mentioned before, I'd also do away with a strict air/water/earth/fire alignment to geniekind, and instead have them manifest as particularly wild aspects of nature. 

Adventure Hooks: 

While trekking through the deep wilderness, the party stumbles into a wonderous castle boasting all manner of enchantments, with a strong elemental theme. Possibly seeking shelter or supplies, they enter the domicile only to discover that it’s the domain of a djinn, who fears that they’re here to capture it and bind it. Perhaps some swift talking can put their host at ease, or perhaps they’ll give into the temptation of making the castle theirs. 

A djinn of falling stars was long ago bound to a lantern by a powerful arcanist, who had him tell her all the secrets of the heavens. Generations later, the Arcanist is dead, but the djinn remains trapped, and now searches for a mage clever enough to break the seal upon the lantern. Greatly disappointed by their prospects, the djinn has become a tutor of the arcane arts, hoping to raise up a student with enough talent to one day free them. 

The spring that fed an oasis settlement has suddenly gone dry, throwing those who relied on it into chaos and despair. Investigation reveals that a shy and kindly djinn was maintaining the font, but was nearly killed after a band of treasure hunters learned of her existence and sought to capture her. With the elemental fading in their arms and the oasis on the verge of drying up, the party will need to decide between defending against further attacks, or venturing out into the desert to find a means of healing her. 

[marryat92]

The Pacha of Many Tales

I’m finally finished with The Pacha of Many Tales, and it was… something, I suppose. It certainly dethrones The Pirate as my least favorite Marryat novel to date. I think The Pirate suffered in my estimation since it was only the second Marryat book I had read, and right after Mr. Midshipman Easy at that. After such a clever and humorous story it felt boring and bombastic, and one of these days I ought to give it another chance. 

Reading The Pacha of Many Tales just once was more than enough, I’m sure of it. It is sometimes described as a “parody” of Arabian Nights, but it only borrows a similar framing device of a bored and fickle ruler (the Pacha) who demands entertainment with stories from his subjects. The Pacha and his vizier will eavesdrop on the common folk, and when they overhear an exceptionally colorful or inscrutable remark they insist on the story behind it. Certain characters return for multiple tales and others make a single appearance.

It is a great deal of orientalist nonsense, needless to say, although Marryat seems to be drawing from sincere translations for a lot of the material. There are at least two academic papers referencing Pacha that I came across in the course of looking up things from the book, and it is possibly of interest to people looking for Western, specifically British depictions of “exotic” cultures in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region. Marryat’s writing in general is heavy on broad stereotypes, often offensive stereotypes, but at least it has the redeeming qualities of being original and authentic in its Age of Sail content, and entertaining. Not so with the 500 pages of dreck I just plowed through.

Another note on the offensive stereotypes: it’s true that Islamic customs and religious officiants appear backward, primitive, and superstitious in Pacha; but Marryat’s treatment of European Catholics is just as patronizing. They are shown as equally regressive and corrupt, and this practically gets lampshaded by an English sailor who observes to the pacha and his vizier, “Jack Soames said that you warn’t Christians, but that if you were, you could only be Catholics.”

Marryat refrains from editorializing or interrupting his story, which was originally serialized in his Metropolitan Magazine between 1831 and 1835. There’s only one brief moment in the opening pages when Marryat speaks in his own voice, seeming to refer to his guilt and trauma stemming from his long military career. It’s a sad, disquieting passage, following a meditation on the “bloody hand” of heraldic symbolism:

And I, whose memory stepping from one legal murder to another, can walk dry-footed over the broad space of five-and-twenty years of time, —but the “damned spots” won’t come out— so I’ll put my hands in my pockets and walk on.

Conscience, fortunately or unfortunately, I can hardly tell which, permits us to form political and religious creeds, most suited to disguise or palliate our sins.

(Just in case you forgot Frederick Marryat had PTSD, owch.) 

The best tales are those of Huckaback, a renegade French sailor of shifting national and religious allegiances. Marryat is in his element with the sea-stories, and we get a more concrete idea of the time period from Huckaback’s references to historical events such as la Terreur of 1793. (The other characters almost exist outside of history.) At one point Huckaback purchases a whaling ship and heads for Baffin’s Bay, and I was very curious to see an 1830s pop culture representation of an arctic voyage. It ends up with the ship beset and trapped in ice, the crew succumbs to scurvy and eventually resorts to cannibalism. (Prescient!)

Despite this negative experience, Huckaback returns for a second adventure in the arctic. This one is more mystical and fantastical, with Huckaback trapped inside an iceberg in a state of suspended animation before he’s rescued by the inhabitants of a floating island. Amidst this weirdness the real-life Captain William Parry makes a cameo, presumably with HMS Hecla and Griper in 1819-1820. As Parry’s men cut through the ice to free their ships the saws narrowly miss Huckaback in his icy prison.

I am beyond mystified that Pacha gets a higher average review on Goodreads (4.08 stars) than the superior Frank Mildmay (3.7 stars) or The King’s Own (3.45 stars). Both of those books have their flaws, but when they’re good they’re really, really good. Pacha might have a more consistent structure and theme, but it never rises to the level of truly great storytelling. It’s creaky and racist by modern standards, and you can skip it without missing much.

[insideanairport]

Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (part II/II)

❍❍❍

Iran between Zoroaster (زرتشت) and Islam

Last Thursday night (June 20th), Trump approved an attack on Iran after a US drone was shot down, yet he suddenly changed his mind and pulled back from the attack. (5) While Trump almost attacked Iran and started a new area of war and misery in the world, Iranians inside Iran and around the world are frightened by this escalation. Today, Iran’s Jewish community is the largest in the Mideast outside Israel – and feels safe and respected. (6) 

Iranians in the diaspora have a variety of ethnicities, languages, religions, and political views but with different intensities, they all share the common Iranian-something else identity. There are many different political oppositions to the current Islamic Republic which in itself is one of the most straight-forward opponents of the United States hegemony and its imperial projects. Politically, Iranian Left has a wide spectrum; from the ultra-radical MEK which is supported by no one else but John Bolton, to Tudeh Party of Iran. Iranian right-wing opposition has also a wide gamut from ultra-right nationalists such as Persian Renaissance, Jason Reza Jorjani who hangs out with American white-supremacists Richard Spencer, to the good old monarchists, and of course the recent infamous Mohamad Tawhidi a fake Muslim cleric educated in Iran who is now a hero for the white-nationalists and Islamophobes. (7) (8)

Iranian nationalists see themselves as Caucasian or white. This might be in part due to the fact that etymologically the word Iran means “land of Aryans”. The Avestan name Airiianəm vaējō "Aryan expanse", is a reference in the Zoroastrian Avesta (Vendidad, Fargard 1) to the Aryans’ mother country and one of Ahura Mazda's "sixteen perfect lands". (9) Before the Islamic Revolution of 1978, Shah of Iran was seeing himself as a descendant of the great ancient Persian kings. In 1971, Shah decided to organize a huge event on the 2500-Year Celebration of Persian Empire (officially known as the 2500th year of Foundation of Imperial State of Iran). Many historians argue that this event resulted in the Iranian Revolution and eventual replacement of the Persian monarchy with the Islamic Republic. If you fancy watching some part of the event, there is good propaganda video narrated by Orsen Welles. 

Before the Shah, for a short period, Iran had a cozy democracy in 1951-1952. Iran democratically elected its 25th prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh (محمد مصدق‎), who was a supporter of secular democracy and resistance to foreign domination. He nationalized the Iranian oil for the first time in 1951. The oil industry had been built by the British on Persian lands since 1913 through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC/AIOC -later British Petroleum and BP). Mosaddegh’s government was overthrown in a coup d'état (28 Mordad 1332) orchestrated by the United States' CIA and the United Kingdom's MI6. (10)

Nietzsche and Postmodernism

Zoroaster [Zarathustra as its older form] was the ancient Persian prophet who lived in Iran at some point between 1500 BCE - 1000 BCE. Nietzsche chose the older version of Zoroaster’s name “Zarathustra”. Before publishing the book, Nietzsche included the first paragraph of Zarathustra’s prologue in his previous book Joyous Science (1882). There are two differences between this paragraph and the opening in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (1) The title Incipit Tragoedia [tragedy begins] and (2) in Joyous Science the lake of Zarathustra’s home is mentioned as “lake Urmi” [today’s lake Urmia] compare to the prologue in Thus Spoke Zarathustra where the name of the lake is left out. We know that the real birthplace of Zoroaster is uncertain. (11)

Nietzsche’s anti-Christian and anti-majoritarian views (it's reversals of Christian morality and values) are picked up by white feminists and queer theorists for obvious reasons. As Michael Hardt wrote in the forward for Deleuze’s "Nietzsche and Philosophy”, postmodernists didn’t just use these concepts to get away from the dominant French Philosophical establishment of ’50s and ’60s but they were also genuinely interested in Nietzsche’s anti-universalities views.

Although very similar in methodology, there are some differences between the Nietzschean concept of solitude (which is very predominant in this work) and postcolonial marginalization and anxiety. Words such as "happiness” and “joy” has a distinctive meaning for Nietzsche which wasn’t unpacked in this book but was the main topic of his previous book Joyous Science (1882). Nietzschean Dionysius is more tonal in this book rather than descriptive and maybe has giving its chair to the bigger umbrella of Eternal Return as the "fundamental conception" of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (-Ecce Homo, 1888)

Importance of writing as an activist

“Of all that is written I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit. It is not easy to understand the blood of another: I hate the reading idler. He who knows the reader does nothing further for the reader. Another century of readers – and spirit itself will stink. That everyone is allowed to learn to read will in the long run ruin not only writing but thinking, too. Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob[populace].”

At the end of chapter 4 in Joyous Science, Nietzsche inserted the opening of the Zarathustra’s prologue. He is making his readers ready for a transformation. For understanding Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it is essential for the reader to read Joyous Science first. Nietzsche wants to prepare his readers for his philosophy, so in a way, he is selective about who is he talking to.

“We not only want to be understood when we write, but also just as surely not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book that someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this was precisely the author’s intention – perhaps he did not want to be understood by ‘just anyone’. Every individual with a distinguished intellect and sense of taste, when he wishes to communicate himself, always selects his listeners; by selecting them, he simultaneously excludes ‘the others’. All the subtler laws of style have their origin here; they simultaneously ward off, create distance and forbid ‘entrance’ (or intelligibility, as I have said) – while allowing the words to be heard by those whose sense of hearing resembles the author’s. And between ourselves, may I say that, in my own case, I do not want my ignorance or the vivacity of my temperament to prevent me from being understandable to you, my friends; certainly not the vivacity, however much it may compel me to come to grips with a thing quickly, in order to come to grips with it at all. (The Joyous Science - Book V, 381 On the Question of Intelligibility”)

Anti-Nietzsche writers

Anti-Nietzsche writers usually refer only to Nietzsche’s text from his early period (before the break with Wenger) without taking his later works into consideration. Taking his works out of context is a sign of dismissal of his philosophy and art. Nietzsche met Wagner at the home of Hermann Brockhaus an Orientalist who was married to Wagner’s sister, Ottilie. Brockhaus was himself a specialist in Sanskrit and Persian whose publications included an edition of the Vendidad Sade—a text of the Zoroastrian religion. (12) It was only after the publication of “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” that he realized who Wagner really was (an anti-Semitic coward). After completion of “Human, All-Too-Human” (1878) and continuation of his friendship with Jewish philosopher Paul Rée, Nietzsche ends his friendship with Wagner, who comes under attack in a thinly-disguised characterization of “the artist”. (12)

“Nietzsche had long hymned the sublime power that Wagner’s music exercised over his senses but now he realised how it robbed him of his free will. The realisation filled him with a growing resentment against the delirious, befogging metaphysical seduction that once had seemed like the highest redemption of life. Now he saw Wagner as a terrible danger, and his own devotion to him as reeking of a nihilist flight from the world. He criticised Wagner for being a romantic histrionic, a spurious tyrant, a sensual manipulator. Wagner’s music had shattered his nerves and ruined his health; Wagner was surely not a composer, but a disease?” 

(Sue Prideaux, “I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche”)

To even start talking about Heidegger and Nietzschean metaphysics, is to miss-read Nietzsche, just as taking "Will To Power” as something that Nietzsche actually published is wrong. Will to Power was never meant to be a book, it was put together by Nietzsche’s Nazi sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Heinrich Köselitz. They have selected, added and subtracted parts to Nietzsche’s notes in order to compile a book that is accessible to their average readers. (See Will to Power introduction by R. Kevin Hill, Penguin Classics 2017). Sue Prideaux described this perfectly in Nietzsche’s biography "I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche”. And Carol Diethe’s wrote a biography on Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche which gives us more insight into her proto-Fascist mentality.

The Will to Power book, did everything that Nazis wanted, hugely swerving from Nietzsche’s philosophy, the book starts with "European nihilism" and ends with the forceful sentence “This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And even you yourselves are this will to power – and nothing besides!”. No other philosophy could do better justice to the Nazi cause than this fabricated assemblage.

Majority of Nietzsche’s work can be hijacked by ultra-right and the new alt-right, expect his fundamental critic of Christianity which is at the heart of his philosophy. Fascist and racist white writers such as Jordan Peterson, Oscar Levy (who wrote the introduction to Untimely mediation in 1909 and according to Walter Kaufmann, forged a fake autobiography of Nietzsche titled “My Sister and I”), Richard Spencer and others have tried to utilize Nietzsche in their hatred of brown and black peoples, religious minorities, Muslims and Jews, Queer people, and liberals. (13)  

Methodologically, Nietzsche doesn’t throw away, archaic classical concepts such as; nobility, civilization, and barbarism, he appropriates and instrumentalizes them for his philosophical end. He didn’t have everything perfect, after all, we are talking about a dude who lived his mature period 140 years ago and was using a “writing ball” to type. (14) He has comical and outdated stuff as well. His rejection of vegetarianism is one of them.

Who is living in Nietzsche’s world

It seems to me the worst thing that we can do when reading Nietzsche is to put his philosophy into a functionalist and majoritarian (national) use. He argues in Joyous Science concerning consciousness (which he perceives as a communal category rather than an individual one):

“the growth of consciousness is dangerous, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease. As one might have guessed, it is not the antithesis of subject and object which concerns me here; I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). Even less is it the antithesis of the ‘thing in itself’ and the phenomenon; for we do not ‘know’ enough to be entitled to make such a distinction. We have absolutely no organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’; we ‘know’ (or believe, or imagine) exactly as much as may be useful to us, exactly as much as promotes the interests of the human herd or species; and even what is called ‘useful’ here is ultimately only what we believe to be useful, what we imagine to be useful, but perhaps is precisely the most fatal stupidity which will some day lead to our destruction.”

Nietzsche’s critique of European Universalism and Western Humanism is still valid and timely, yet if we stay within the hegemonic “white domain“ (White-main) our theoretical understanding of Nietzsche, will be centered somewhere between the Alt-right racism, white phenomenology, European Modernist and localists, Silicon Valley accelerationism and Nick Land (which is equally racist). The only way to get out of this binary is to step out of White-main and find Nietzsche in between the lines of the second-generation non-European Nietzsche intellectuals (Fanon, Derrida, Aimé Césaire, Muhammad Iqbal, Ali Shariati) and the third-generation intellectuals (Spivak, Bhabha). At this time in history, Europeans can’t (and shouldn’t) any longer teach or perpetuate Nietzsche’s philosophy for any end. Not for Germany, not for any other white-majority nation. This is simply because they are already living in Nietzsche’s post-God reality.

Bib.

1. NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH and HOLLINGDALE, R. J. . Ecce Homo. s.l. : PENGUIN BOOKS, 2004. 9780141921730. 2. Sandis, Constantine. Nietzsche’s Dance With Zarathustra . philosophy now. [Online] 2012. https://philosophynow.org/issues/93/Nietzsches_Dance_With_Zarathustra. 3. Ashouri, Daryoush. Nietzsche and Persia. http://www.iranicaonline.org. [Online] July 20, 2003. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/nietzsche-and-persia. 4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. the joyous science . s.l. : Penguin Classics, 2018. 5. Michael D. Shear, Eric Schmitt, Michael Crowley and Maggie Haberman. Strikes on Iran Approved by Trump, Then Abruptly Pulled Back. nytimes.com. [Online] June 20, 2019 . https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/world/middleeast/iran-us-drone.html. 6. Hjelmgaard, Kim. Iran’s Jewish community is the largest in the Mideast outside Israel – and feels safe and respected. msn. [Online] 8 29, 2018. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iran%E2%80%99s-jewish-community-is-the-largest-in-the-mideast-outside-israel-%E2%80%93-and-feels-safe-and-respected/ss-BBMAVgX. 7. Mackey, Robert. How a Fringe Muslim Cleric From Australia Became a Hero to America’s Far Right. theintercept.com. [Online] June 25, 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/06/25/mohamad-tawhidi-far-right/?fbclid=IwAR25hr0TV8w0erffRrGhccVkC5G0KFwjR3y7tM7n2j-4nx4pp_b5PssuFzo. 8. Schaeffer, Carol. ALT FIGHT Jason Jorjani Fancied Himself an Intellectual Leader of a White Supremacist Movement — Then It Came Crashing Down. theintercept.com. [Online] March 18 , 2018. https://theintercept.com/2018/03/18/alt-right-jason-jorjani/. 9. ĒRĀN-WĒZ . Encyclopedia Iranica. [Online] http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/eran-wez. 10. Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror . s.l. : John Wiley & Sons, 2004. 11. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Joyous Science. s.l. : Penguin Calssics, 2018. 12. Wicks, Robert. Nietzsche’s Life and Works. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Online] 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche-life-works/. 13. Illing, Sean. The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis were too. www.vox.com. [Online] Dec 30, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16140846/alt-right-nietzsche-richard-spencer-nazism. 14. Herbst, Felix. Nietzsche’s Writing Ball (Video). felixherbst.de. [Online] https://vimeo.com/43124993.

(Part II/II)

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[lupine-publishers-sjpbs]

Lupine Publishers | The Concept of Science in Islamic Civilization the Case Psychology and Behavior Sciences

Lupine Publishers | Scholarly Journal Of Psychology And Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

Islamic civilization formed in context of behavioral changing and explaining human behavior in many medieval teachings led to emergence of behavioral science and psychology. Present study proved scientific approach of Islamic civilization to human behavioral research that it has illustrated concept of science in Islamic civilization. The capital of this change in behavior of nations is emergence of human phenomena called Prophet’s everyday life. Writing daily life has been common issue of world civilizations since ancient times. This religious phenomenon of Prophetic usage effected on attitude, hygiene which explained in various schools of religious psychology and social psychology, including Gestalt school. The writing of life style of Prophet led to establishment science in Islamic civilization entitled Knowledge of everyday life of Prophet because general phenomenon of character of Mohammad’s daily life is like a symphony that has organized behavior of Islamic societies for centuries. The subject of this science is perfect human behavior, which is intuitively understandable to human societies. And it can be considered starting point of knowledge of Islamic behaviorism in Middle Ages. Because this generality exists alongside any partial behavior of Prophet. Within framework of Aristotle’s book on the soul Philosophers produced theoretical foundations of Islamic psychology and behaviorism. Alpharabius, Avicenna on soul and its belonging to body and neuroscience of these communications and his research on human sensory perceptions and physical connection of soul and essential place of prophecy in its completion. Islamic behavioral sciences refer to initiatives of Islamic societies.

Keywords: Psychology; Avicenna; Alpharabius; Lifestyle; Soul; Prophetic usage

Historical and Theoretical Introduction

The concept of science in civilization from Greek civilization to Islamic civilization Inductive study of the teachings is Aristotle’s initiative in the history of science. The way of thinking in Islamic civilization has been formed with a tendency towards Aristotle. The concept of science in Islamic civilization is the same as the concept of science in Greek civilization. It is on this basis that Aristotle was called the first human teacher in the history of science in ancient times due to his special tendency in the inductive division of sciences and knowledge. And Aristotelian philosophy has remained an active force in the method and concept of science to this day. Alpharabius was named the second teacher of science for sharing Aristotle’s method. His classification of sciences is based on Aristotle’s Book of Soul, which is first classic book on human behavior and it is theoretical basis of behavioral science in history of science.

Psychology and behavioral sciences in Islamic civilization

Behavioral Sciences, which deals with the nature of human individual and social behavior, began with Aristotle’s book of soul and Plato’s teachings about the soul and individual and social behavior of the citizen in the city. The classical form of defining the science of behavior and its place in the history of science is the product of Islamic civilization and was presented by Farabi’s second teacher [1-5]. By combining Aristotle’s and Plato’s views on the soul, he has divided science into five categories. and fifth branch is science of behavior, which Farabi referred to as civil science. Explaining this branch of science, Farabi has spoken about the word soul, behavior, personality, society, the nature of behavior, and the end and purpose of behavior. In beginning of Islamic civilization, Razes and Avicenna wrote book in phycology with title spiritual medicine and Psychosomatics.

Following perfect man in Islam and Christianity in medieval

The most Common denominator of Islam and Christianity in medieval is the need to follow perfect man to achieve happiness. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, St. Augustine wrote a book on the city of God in the context of Plato’s philosophy of soul, criticizing the individual and social behavior of Roman societies towards the behavior of the perfect man. In middle of medieval, Farabi examined perfect and imperfect behavior of man and society. And in late Middle Ages, Averroes criticized the individual and civil behavior of man in the context of Aristotle’s philosophy. He explained science of Islamic behavior on the basis of Aristotelian rationalism. At the same time, Emperor of Germany Frederick II called on Christian, Islamic, and Jewish scholars in the Mediterranean to test the nature of the human soul on the basis of Ibn Sina’s knowledge of the soul, and to ask scientists about the nature of the human soul. What is the reason for this emperor’s scientific actions, which was his apparent behavior in clothing and food and many other customs in accordance with the culture and behavior of Muslims and had several Islamic teachers and counselors, about soul -knowledge?

Anthropology, ethnology in Islamic civilization, behavior people of capitals

One of the most important branches of behavioral science is anthropology, which has been left and produced in classical texts of the Middle Ages. An anthropological leader in the Middle Ages, he traveled to India to learn about behavior and anthropology. According to historians, science is a pioneer in behaviorism of Indian people (Sarton, In medieval literature and history there are texts that are the written legacy of Islamic civilization on the behaviors of individuals and nations. At the forefront is the travelogue of Shiite scholar [6]. He traveled to India in the tenth century to report on the behavior of the India people, An external book on the behavior of the Indian people in 1910 was translated into English by Zakhao with title: Albiruni’s India and Al-Biruni’s encyclopedic work on India [7-10]. Several Islamic travelogues have described the behavior of European peoples and societies in the Middle Ages .as Reporting and Ibn Khaldun, whom European orientalists have called him Montesquieu the Arab. he is the founder of the science of historical sociology. he has examined the socialpolitical behavior of heads of state and communities. His study is a kind of social psychology and is based on understanding human emotions .he has considered the kind of human feeling that can be studied simultaneously in the sciences of behavior, political science, ethics, and history as the driving force behind individual behaviors and community behaviors. he has written articles on sciences of soul and Islamic psychology, his theories on social dilemma and human behavioral education have been compared to those of contemporary psychologists, He has explored human thought and learned from the empirical reason for acquiring knowledge. his views of man are similar to Martin E. P. “Marty” Seligman in Positive Psychology.

Historical value and content accuracy of teachings known as Islamic medicine

Titles as Islamic medicine, health, psychology, means set of teachings that Islamic societies have prepared and attributed to some of the great men of Islam. Including Imam Sadegh’s medicine, Imam Reza’s medicine, the Prophet’s medicine, this attribution may be correct and may be rejected by experts in Islamic history and civilization, This issue is very similar in Islamic civilization and has been disputed for several centuries, and in the history of science and civilization of Christian and Jewish communities, the situation is similar. Is it possible to say that Islamic mathematics and medicine and psychology is opposite to Christian, Jewish and Jewish mathematics? Or that there is only mathematics in Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and Iranian societies.

In the present article, Islamic Health and Islamic Psychology refers to the collection of traditions and teachings and psychology courses that Islamic societies and Muslim people have researched, and the collection of innovative and physical services of Islamic societies to the history of health and behaviors sciences and psychology . And using title of Islamic behavior science and Islamic Psychology is a virtual application. As Ibn Khaldun, an expert on Islamic civilization in ninth century of AH and fourteenth century of AD, has denied existence of Islamic medicine in a critical statement. He said the prophet has no mission as health and medical orders but His mission has been to communicate jurisprudence, sharia, and the laws of religion. Therefore, reader of these studies and similar cases should always realize that he is researching in the context of historical knowledge.

Materials and Methods, Heritage Of Islamic Dating Material in Medieval

It was mentioned in introduction there is great legacy of Oriental and Western writings on behavior and character and lifestyle of Muhammad and his psychological saying , which are in Arabic, Persian, Latin, English , French , Indian , Chinese, and there are big flow of knowledge of Muhammad has become one of sources of science in world and Christian West begun extensive studies of knowledge of Muhammad five hundred years ago in eleventh century of Spain from Toledo but in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it culminated [11], Italian prince wrote a book in forty volumes that examines evidence for forty years of Prophet’s behavior, The Biography of Muhammad: the Issue of the Sources, It is noteworthy that these historical materials related to Muhammad’s lifestyle came at the time were compiled that until the fourth century AH, the world witnessed a great urban movement based on the Prophet’s behavior in the urban development of Medina. Medina is the birthplace of the most civilized people in the Islamic world who have the behavior of an Islamic human being against the behavior of an ignorant human being .And the Prophet rejected ignorant behavior and replaced it with Islamic behavior [12-16].

Result, analyzing prophet’s behavior, observation in Mohammad style life

Behavioral science and psychology in Islamic philosophy One of the sciences that emerged in Islamic civilization is the science of psychology that scientifically examines the behavior, actions, and reactions of the human soul. the volume of Islamic teachings about the human soul and its behavior is modest that the Islamic civilization then became the most productive In Psychology and Ethics and Human Behavior that heretofore have been seen in the world. In this civilization it had been created unique results such as Avicenna an unparalleled man who co-founded the topic of sensory perception, which is a common theme of the behavioral sciences and cognitive sciences , In an empirical experiment, he proved the human soul, and several centuries after that, German Emperor Frederick II posed questions to his contemporary philosophers and sought to replicate and execute Avicenna’s experiment on the soul in Sicily al-Farabi who first examined the behavior of human societies. he separated individual behavior from social behavior and divided the types of behaviors into virtual cities and non-virtual societies. he is indeed a philosopher of societal behavior, he divided societies on the basis of human behavior to Ignorant cities and misguided communities.

One of the behaviors of misguided and ignorant societies is the struggle for survival over water, food, housing, clothing, and material necessities. Farabi has returned the root of society’s behavior to the innate, inherent of human being. This theory on the behavior of societies was repeated by seven centuries later [17]. he has identified the material cause of the struggle for survival with the inherent selfishness of man [18], the historical induction into the minds of philosophers before Farabi and after Hobbes and philosophers between the two, the analysis and explanation of the behavior of societies depends on a psychological theory of human nature, and the behavior of societies is subject to the self and psyche of human individuals. Societal behavior is a function of one’s self and psyche [19].

Monopoly of writing daily life to Muhammad, prophet of Islam by orientalis

The possibility of historiography of Muhammad’s complete lifestyle is a fact in field of orientalism and many orientalist have concluded that it is only possible to trace the Prophet’s daily lifestyle because only his body and grave are known, and there is a rich legacy of teachings on his behavior, interests, and tastes about food. , Clothing, socializingetc. There studied in his book behavior of Arab in two societies with two different life styles. “Muhammad in Mecca, Muhammad in Medina” examined Muhammad’s influence on behavior of two different societies and his change in behavior and attitudes has determined them. After Qur’an, which describes behavior man’s first book that wrote was book of Prophet’s behavior. The Prophet’s behavior writing is still prevalent among Islamic and non-Islamic scholars as in her book ,those are in his book La vie in his book Muhammad, His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, and watt in Mohammad in Meca and medina, F. E. Peters,in his book The Quest for Historical Muhammad, at the top of the teachings of Mohammad is a behavioral doctrine that is the main reason for his being a prophet.

The tradition of writing the Prophet’s behavior in Islamic civilization

In medieval literature and history there are texts that are the written legacy of Islamic civilization on the behaviors of individuals and nations. At the forefront is the travelogue of Shiite scholar. he traveled to India in the tenth century to report on the behavior of the India people, Several Islamic travelogues have described the behavior of European peoples and societies in the Middle Ages. as Reporting of They talked about the difference between the morals and the behavior of the people of the capital and the behavior of the people of the cities (Ibn Jubayr, Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun, whom European orientalists have called him Montesquieu the Arab. he is the founder of the science of historical sociology.

He has examined the social-political behavior of heads of state and communities. His study is a kind of social psychology and is based on understanding human emotions .he has considered the kind of human feeling that can be studied simultaneously in the sciences of behavior, political science, ethics, and history as the driving force behind individual behaviors and community behaviors. he has written articles on sciences of soul and Islamic psychology, his theories on social dilemma and human behavioral education have been compared to those of contemporary psychologists, He has explored human thought and learned from the empirical reason for acquiring knowledge. his views of man are similar to Martin E. P. “Marty” Seligman in Positive Psychology.

Hygiene from prophet to averroes

There are in history of Islamic civilization in medieval The Prophet’s teachings on mental health and body and social behaviors culminated in five centuries by Ibn Rushd in his book in medicine “general in medicine“, (al-Koliyaat fi tab) “that is final version of Islamic medicine in medieval and and it was Ibn Rushd’s medical encyclopedia of medicine that studied in Europe until nineteenth century in Europe, which was called Colgate( Hunkke,….). It is dedicated to the evolution of the teachings of the Prophet. More than a hundred treatises on health and hygiene were written from the time of the Prophet to Ibn Rushd. These works begun with work of Prophet’s close successors such as who compiled in his book Islamic health education in the framework of the science of nutrition and medicine [20-24].

Divisions and Types of Hygiene in Prophet’s Hygiene and Health

The Prophet’s medical heritage shows that he drew the right pattern for a social and individual hygiene and person’s health behavior. The focus of his teachings is cleanliness and hygiene. In his teachings, he has introduced faith as a direct and dependent function of health and cleanliness. The Prophet’s instructions and rites in hygiene have been researched a lot so far. Among them is the book The First University and the Last Prophet in various issue of hygiene , behavior sciences , psychology in Islamic texts of medieval in forty volumes in the twentieth century, [11,25,26] The Prophet’s instructions for the protection of the body and the soul were collected after that, and so far it has been the main subject of research, and some, such as Ibn Khaldun, have looked at it critically and has discussed whether Prophet is obliged and present Shari’a and religion or whether he has issued health orders medical heritage left by the Prophet includes to heritage of body , soul, society , animals, trees, waters, clothes.

Some of these commands are as follows

a. Mental health: that the Prophet has many instructions about choosing the right color for belt shoes and all kinds of clothing. b. Hygiene of the body. c. The Prophet’s instructions on skin hygiene by choosing the right types of cotton yarn and the quality of clothing in terms of volume and materials. d. Prophet’s instructions about dairy products. e. 4-The Prophet’s instructions regarding food - in some cases, for example, he has mentioned sheep members for better quality nutrition. f. 6- The Prophet’s advice on the quality of drinking and eating etiquette. g. 7- Prophet’s instructions on walking etiquette h. 8- Prophet’s instructions about the properties of fruits i. 9- Prophet’s instructions on speaking etiquette. j. 10- Prophet’s instructions on marriage. k. 11-The instructions of the Prophet during the occurrence of diseases and epidemics such as cholera and plague

Discussion in Aristotelian Roots of Islamic Civilization in Behavioral Sciences

Islamic Paradigm of Aristotle’s Book on the Soul Aristotle is Funder of psychology by his book on the soul and many scholars introduced this book as a book on psychology but this book reached Europe through Arabic literature and Islamic and Iranian teachings, and it is an Islamic paradigm. Therefore the most important aspect of this research paper is originality of psychology in Islam civilization [27-30]. Because in appearance, main capital of Islamic civilization in production of Islamic psychology is Aristotle’s book on soul but in historical reality, Aristotle’s book on the soul has been critiqued and analyzed by Muslim scholars for about seven centuries, and new scientific perspectives on soul have been presented. After Aristotle’s book on soul, writing essays in soul based this book is one of the initiatives and achievements of behavioral sciences in Islamic civilization. Aristotle’s Treatise on the Soul was translated into Arabic in second half of the eighth century A D, A later Arabic translation of Aristotle book on soul into Arabic by Ishaq ibn made a translation into Arabic from Syriac. The Arabic versions show a complicated history of mutual influence. Avicenna and al-Farabi wrote independent writings on nature of human soul, study of soul in works of, then Ibn Rushd analyze process of soul and natural and perfect behavior of man in relation to behavior of perfect man. The Aristotelian paradigm of the soul is an Islamic paradigm that was formed by Muslims, led by Ibn Sina in the Middle Ages, and entered the field of Christian philosophy and Christian theology through Islamic theology. Encouragement of Frederick II the study of Islamic sciences including Aristotelian psychology, had been developed. This is one of obvious issues in the history of philosophy and humanity and literature of medieval [30-34].

Perfect man behavior, capital of psychology, attitude, behavior, emotion

Jesus and Muhammad are perfect man in systematic theology of Christian and Islam in medieval. Common denominator of selfstudy analyzed, explained, and accepted and understandable in psychology school of Gestalt and within framework of intuitive theories about social behavior. Our intuitive efforts to make scientific arguments about everyday life are fruitful, if intuitive understanding of behavior was validated by humans, and if intuitive theories about human behavior were not valid, our social interactions would be severely impaired.

Conclusion

The Prophet’s tradition is capital of human and social attitudes, and social psychologists consider attitude to be the symbol of three components: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral function. Attitudes help us to understand our surroundings and to express our values through function (and the function of self-defense. No on e has ever been able to find a better alternative to Muhammad’s lifestyle to determine human behavior, and all efforts have been in vain because one of essential purposes of Prophet’s behaviors and traditions is to provide a solid foundation for good human behavior. For centuries, some philosophers have tried, like, to find new ethics based on biology and other sciences.

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[easyfoodnetwork]

Rajma Masala Might Be the Perfect Cupboard Comfort Dish for Our Times

Getty Images/iStockphoto

The north Indian kidney bean curry is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity

In the first few weeks of sheltering in place, I found a packet of old rajma in my pantry — that is to say, I stumbled upon a small treasure. Strictly speaking, it was an American brand, so the label on the bag read “kidney beans,” but their magic was the same.

I soaked them overnight and they bloomed into large, toothy beans already splitting at the seams. Boiling them turned their surrounding water brown and thick; I cooked them with onions, tomatoes, and whatever spices I had, and simmered it for hours, using the liquid from bean boiling to thicken the mix. In the end I had made the perfect dish of rajma masala — a rich North Indian kidney bean curry — even if it took me two extra hours of simmering, since I didn’t account for the added cook time for old beans.

Like so many of the world’s recipes that rely on hardy pantry staples, rajma masala is an ideal pandemic dish. You can turn to it when grocery runs are limited and time at home abundant. Its base recipe demands largely shelf-stable ingredients, and like the various bean chili riffs of the Americas, is a soothing comfort food for those who grew up with it. (To New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, rajma masala is “her family’s store-cupboard comfort food” and the “indisputable king” of bean dishes.) Also like chili, there’s an acidic tomato base to cut through the bean’s inherent creaminess, and though it’s heavily spiced, it is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity.

“The beauty is that it is not instant gratification,” says Oxford, Mississippi-based chef Vishwesh Bhatt, who makes batches of Louisiana red beans to share with his neighbors. “Beans and rice are universal comfort foods, communal, big pot dishes— they lend themselves to sharing.”

After I posted photos of my own rajma masala efforts to Instagram, friends, both South Asian and otherwise, slid into my DMs to ask for the recipe and tips. Similarly, when food writer Priya Krishna posted a photo of her rajma chawal — rajma masala with rice — 10 people responded immediately, and more the next day, telling her that they too had been making rajma at home. Krishna, who grew up eating rajma, had cooked it with her mother while sheltering in place with her family in Dallas, but notes, “I hesitate to call what millions of people do everyday a trend.” Fair point.

It is true that what seems remarkable in the diaspora is not really so remarkable in the subcontinent. Would anyone in India really care that anecdotally, about 20 people also made rajma masala the same day that Krishna and I did? While I had finished the bulk of this essay before Alison Roman’s comments about two Asian women’s business endeavors kicked up a storm in food media, I am finishing it in the aftermath. It is true that writing about food is a fraught endeavor that skirts appropriation and neocolonialism — that often, food personalities exploit other cultures and their own. Exotification is, after all, an orientalist, capitalist ploy. And in learning more about the rajma bean, I have uncovered another complication in my notion of what is traditional desi, or Indian, cuisine, and — as an Indian immigrant to Turtle Island, another reason to honor the ancestors of this land.

Rajma masala may taste and feel like an ancient Indian dish, but its past is marked by cultural and colonial exchange, its recipe scarcely older than my grandfather. While rajma masala is a modern icon of North Indian food, the bean itself is not indigenous to the subcontinent, and neither is the dish’s base, tomato. “Ingredients that seem to many to be inextricably part of an Indian diet are not always autochthonously Indian,” writes historian Anita Mannur in her 2010 book Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture.

The kidney bean originates in the Americas, with sources pointing to Mexico and Peru. The bean journeyed from the New World to the Old, and then onward through the spice trade routes to Asia, in what is known as the Columbian exchange, where beans and other plants and animals and peoples and information and diseases were passed between continents in the 15th and 16th centuries. “We think we’re globalizing now, but look to the 1500s,” says Mannur, who co-edited Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. “The irony is that in looking for India, Columbus bizarrely transformed the Indian diet.”

The bean’s beneficial properties as a nutrient-dense dried protein source, Mannur tells me, made it a good food for long nautical journeys. Portugal’s ships, filled largely with degredados — convict exiles who often died of dysentery and typhoid along the spice route, and were promised one chest worth of expensive spices to take home if they made the journey — arrived on the western coast of India. Goa, which became Portugal’s capital in India in 1530, was a hub for much internal trade — and was how the tomato and chile pepper took root in Indian cuisine.

It is possible that the bean made it up through the cattle caravan routes to the Mughal Empire in the north — but the recipe for rajma masala doesn’t really crop up until as recently as around 130 years ago, says culinary archaeologist Kurush Dalal. Dalal thinks it’s unlikely the kidney bean was traded by the Portuguese, even if they ate it themselves, because it is not mentioned in medieval Indian texts.

“There is evidence that the French brought the rajma bean from Mexico to Pondicherry,” he tells me, calling the French the “best conduit.” The French, who colonized Pondicherry on the Eastern coast of India, had mounted the Second French Intervention in Mexico in the 1860s, spearheaded by Emperor Napoleon III. (Cinco De Mayo celebrates the day the French were defeated by the Mexicans in 1862.) There is no paper trail of how it ends up in the hills of the North — though logically, it makes sense for the hearty bean to become more popular in cooler climates, where one would burn more calories. In the wetter, hotter south, such a bean would throw off the Ayurvedic energies of vata and pitta, Dalal speculates.

Rajma masala, which made a place for itself in North Indian cuisine, is not as popular in the South. Mannur remembers being told at a restaurant in Mangalore — another erstwhile Portuguese capture — that the North Indian thali was unique because it featured rajma masala.

“Methods of preparing rajma masala are not too different from how Latin Americans made chili,” says Mannur. Like Goan vindaloo, which retained both its Portuguese name and the foreign ingredient of vinegar, rajma masala folded in local ingredients like its spices and the Asian-origin onion, but kept its base of tomatoes and chile peppers, imports from long ago.

Of course, the bean’s entree into the international plate was accompanied by pandemics brought on by Columbus and his ilk, who pillaged the global south, devastating populations and colonizing them along the way.

And this is where a cruel mirror image emerges: A few hundred years ago, millions of Indigenous people died after European contact brought with it an onslaught of new diseases, then departed with native foods, including beans. Now here we are again in the midst of another pandemic, hastened and marked by irresponsible tourism, largely impacting vulnerable populations, especially Native Americans for whom “disease has never been just disease.”

Food exchange has historically been a story of carnage, and the hegemony established continues to benefit from these massacres that unwittingly introduced foods like beans to the world.

Beans that we’re now all staring at in our pantries, wondering how to best cook. Rajma masala came together on the other side of the world — to cook the beans in their “land of origin” feels like a nod to its history. Here, then, are some tips on how best to cook these lovely, storied beans.

How to Make Rajma Masala

Step 1: Procure

Red kidney beans are available at most grocery stories, whether canned or dry. Buy some onions and tomatoes (or tomato paste) while you’re at it. Cilantro leaves will brighten your finished dish. Check your pantry for the usual suspects: chiles, garlic, ginger, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaves. If you’re missing any ingredients, or just want to punch up the flavor, the easiest cheat is to buy garam masala — well, the actual easiest would be to buy some rajma masala powder.

Step 2: Soak

“Not all beans are created equally,” says molecular biologist and food writer Nik Sharma. Rajma is a fatty bean, while the chickpea is both fatty and carby — these properties affect how you cook a bean. And while it’s a beautiful thing that the kidney bean can sit on a shelf for a year and still be delicious, the older the bean, the longer it takes to cook. “The skin contains magnesium and calcium,” which create water barriers. It holds in itself pectin, the same tough ingredient that makes jam gel together, and the calcium makes it insoluble.

If you’re using dry beans, you’ll have to soak them. Mannur cautions that faster processes may reduce some of the nutrients. She soaks beans overnight — “My mother was right, but I’ll never tell her.”

Step 3: Boil

Not all food legends are true. For example, we’re told that we must shave off the foam buildup from boiling beans because that foam contains whatever makes you gassy. Sharma, whose book The Flavor Equation will come out this October, says that this is a common misconception. The foam does not make you gassy; improperly cooked kidney beans do, though, if the complex carbohydrate does not break down. The precipitate is removed during the canning process, he says, so you don’t get it confused with bacteria — “it’s not poisonous itself, it’s just quality assurance.”

And Sharma has a secret that he’s willing to share as a tip, and it’s baking soda. “I did an experiment,” he says. Adding baking soda to boiling water and beans cut down the cook time from 4 hours to a mere 30 minutes.

Step 4: Make the Base

“You cook the masala with tomato and onion until the fat separates,” says Sharma, and know that canned tomato is chemically different from fresh tomato, that its acids and sugars have changed in the canning process — so start with fresh tomato, and judiciously add canned slowly, tasting every time. The rest (the spices, that is) is tweakable. I like to use garlic, ginger, cumin, red chile powder, a bit of garam masala, cardamom, and cinnamon.

Step 5: Combine

Hopefully your beans are cooked, somewhere between al dente and exploded. Throw them into the onion-tomato base and add the leftover bean water. I did this gradually. It renders a much thicker base than if you were to use water. Simmer for 20 minutes, checking for consistency. It should be thick and stew-like, not dry or watery.

Step 6: Eat and share

Serve it to yourself with rice. Squeeze a bit of lemon to cut the richness, and sprinkle on some chopped cilantro for sparkle. Or better yet, take a page out of Vishwesh Bhatt’s book, and make a ton. Separate the servings into jam jars. Leave them on your neighbor’s doorsteps as a contactless embrace and a reminder of the bean, its story, and how far it traveled.

Aditi Natasha Kini writes cultural criticism, essays, and other text objects from her apartment in Ridgewood, Queens.

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Getty Images/iStockphoto

The north Indian kidney bean curry is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity

In the first few weeks of sheltering in place, I found a packet of old rajma in my pantry — that is to say, I stumbled upon a small treasure. Strictly speaking, it was an American brand, so the label on the bag read “kidney beans,” but their magic was the same.

I soaked them overnight and they bloomed into large, toothy beans already splitting at the seams. Boiling them turned their surrounding water brown and thick; I cooked them with onions, tomatoes, and whatever spices I had, and simmered it for hours, using the liquid from bean boiling to thicken the mix. In the end I had made the perfect dish of rajma masala — a rich North Indian kidney bean curry — even if it took me two extra hours of simmering, since I didn’t account for the added cook time for old beans.

Like so many of the world’s recipes that rely on hardy pantry staples, rajma masala is an ideal pandemic dish. You can turn to it when grocery runs are limited and time at home abundant. Its base recipe demands largely shelf-stable ingredients, and like the various bean chili riffs of the Americas, is a soothing comfort food for those who grew up with it. (To New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, rajma masala is “her family’s store-cupboard comfort food” and the “indisputable king” of bean dishes.) Also like chili, there’s an acidic tomato base to cut through the bean’s inherent creaminess, and though it’s heavily spiced, it is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity.

“The beauty is that it is not instant gratification,” says Oxford, Mississippi-based chef Vishwesh Bhatt, who makes batches of Louisiana red beans to share with his neighbors. “Beans and rice are universal comfort foods, communal, big pot dishes— they lend themselves to sharing.”

After I posted photos of my own rajma masala efforts to Instagram, friends, both South Asian and otherwise, slid into my DMs to ask for the recipe and tips. Similarly, when food writer Priya Krishna posted a photo of her rajma chawal — rajma masala with rice — 10 people responded immediately, and more the next day, telling her that they too had been making rajma at home. Krishna, who grew up eating rajma, had cooked it with her mother while sheltering in place with her family in Dallas, but notes, “I hesitate to call what millions of people do everyday a trend.” Fair point.

It is true that what seems remarkable in the diaspora is not really so remarkable in the subcontinent. Would anyone in India really care that anecdotally, about 20 people also made rajma masala the same day that Krishna and I did? While I had finished the bulk of this essay before Alison Roman’s comments about two Asian women’s business endeavors kicked up a storm in food media, I am finishing it in the aftermath. It is true that writing about food is a fraught endeavor that skirts appropriation and neocolonialism — that often, food personalities exploit other cultures and their own. Exotification is, after all, an orientalist, capitalist ploy. And in learning more about the rajma bean, I have uncovered another complication in my notion of what is traditional desi, or Indian, cuisine, and — as an Indian immigrant to Turtle Island, another reason to honor the ancestors of this land.

Rajma masala may taste and feel like an ancient Indian dish, but its past is marked by cultural and colonial exchange, its recipe scarcely older than my grandfather. While rajma masala is a modern icon of North Indian food, the bean itself is not indigenous to the subcontinent, and neither is the dish’s base, tomato. “Ingredients that seem to many to be inextricably part of an Indian diet are not always autochthonously Indian,” writes historian Anita Mannur in her 2010 book Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture.

The kidney bean originates in the Americas, with sources pointing to Mexico and Peru. The bean journeyed from the New World to the Old, and then onward through the spice trade routes to Asia, in what is known as the Columbian exchange, where beans and other plants and animals and peoples and information and diseases were passed between continents in the 15th and 16th centuries. “We think we’re globalizing now, but look to the 1500s,” says Mannur, who co-edited Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. “The irony is that in looking for India, Columbus bizarrely transformed the Indian diet.”

The bean’s beneficial properties as a nutrient-dense dried protein source, Mannur tells me, made it a good food for long nautical journeys. Portugal’s ships, filled largely with degredados — convict exiles who often died of dysentery and typhoid along the spice route, and were promised one chest worth of expensive spices to take home if they made the journey — arrived on the western coast of India. Goa, which became Portugal’s capital in India in 1530, was a hub for much internal trade — and was how the tomato and chile pepper took root in Indian cuisine.

It is possible that the bean made it up through the cattle caravan routes to the Mughal Empire in the north — but the recipe for rajma masala doesn’t really crop up until as recently as around 130 years ago, says culinary archaeologist Kurush Dalal. Dalal thinks it’s unlikely the kidney bean was traded by the Portuguese, even if they ate it themselves, because it is not mentioned in medieval Indian texts.

“There is evidence that the French brought the rajma bean from Mexico to Pondicherry,” he tells me, calling the French the “best conduit.” The French, who colonized Pondicherry on the Eastern coast of India, had mounted the Second French Intervention in Mexico in the 1860s, spearheaded by Emperor Napoleon III. (Cinco De Mayo celebrates the day the French were defeated by the Mexicans in 1862.) There is no paper trail of how it ends up in the hills of the North — though logically, it makes sense for the hearty bean to become more popular in cooler climates, where one would burn more calories. In the wetter, hotter south, such a bean would throw off the Ayurvedic energies of vata and pitta, Dalal speculates.

Rajma masala, which made a place for itself in North Indian cuisine, is not as popular in the South. Mannur remembers being told at a restaurant in Mangalore — another erstwhile Portuguese capture — that the North Indian thali was unique because it featured rajma masala.

“Methods of preparing rajma masala are not too different from how Latin Americans made chili,” says Mannur. Like Goan vindaloo, which retained both its Portuguese name and the foreign ingredient of vinegar, rajma masala folded in local ingredients like its spices and the Asian-origin onion, but kept its base of tomatoes and chile peppers, imports from long ago.

Of course, the bean’s entree into the international plate was accompanied by pandemics brought on by Columbus and his ilk, who pillaged the global south, devastating populations and colonizing them along the way.

And this is where a cruel mirror image emerges: A few hundred years ago, millions of Indigenous people died after European contact brought with it an onslaught of new diseases, then departed with native foods, including beans. Now here we are again in the midst of another pandemic, hastened and marked by irresponsible tourism, largely impacting vulnerable populations, especially Native Americans for whom “disease has never been just disease.”

Food exchange has historically been a story of carnage, and the hegemony established continues to benefit from these massacres that unwittingly introduced foods like beans to the world.

Beans that we’re now all staring at in our pantries, wondering how to best cook. Rajma masala came together on the other side of the world — to cook the beans in their “land of origin” feels like a nod to its history. Here, then, are some tips on how best to cook these lovely, storied beans.

How to Make Rajma Masala

Step 1: Procure

Red kidney beans are available at most grocery stories, whether canned or dry. Buy some onions and tomatoes (or tomato paste) while you’re at it. Cilantro leaves will brighten your finished dish. Check your pantry for the usual suspects: chiles, garlic, ginger, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaves. If you’re missing any ingredients, or just want to punch up the flavor, the easiest cheat is to buy garam masala — well, the actual easiest would be to buy some rajma masala powder.

Step 2: Soak

“Not all beans are created equally,” says molecular biologist and food writer Nik Sharma. Rajma is a fatty bean, while the chickpea is both fatty and carby — these properties affect how you cook a bean. And while it’s a beautiful thing that the kidney bean can sit on a shelf for a year and still be delicious, the older the bean, the longer it takes to cook. “The skin contains magnesium and calcium,” which create water barriers. It holds in itself pectin, the same tough ingredient that makes jam gel together, and the calcium makes it insoluble.

If you’re using dry beans, you’ll have to soak them. Mannur cautions that faster processes may reduce some of the nutrients. She soaks beans overnight — “My mother was right, but I’ll never tell her.”

Step 3: Boil

Not all food legends are true. For example, we’re told that we must shave off the foam buildup from boiling beans because that foam contains whatever makes you gassy. Sharma, whose book The Flavor Equation will come out this October, says that this is a common misconception. The foam does not make you gassy; improperly cooked kidney beans do, though, if the complex carbohydrate does not break down. The precipitate is removed during the canning process, he says, so you don’t get it confused with bacteria — “it’s not poisonous itself, it’s just quality assurance.”

And Sharma has a secret that he’s willing to share as a tip, and it’s baking soda. “I did an experiment,” he says. Adding baking soda to boiling water and beans cut down the cook time from 4 hours to a mere 30 minutes.

Step 4: Make the Base

“You cook the masala with tomato and onion until the fat separates,” says Sharma, and know that canned tomato is chemically different from fresh tomato, that its acids and sugars have changed in the canning process — so start with fresh tomato, and judiciously add canned slowly, tasting every time. The rest (the spices, that is) is tweakable. I like to use garlic, ginger, cumin, red chile powder, a bit of garam masala, cardamom, and cinnamon.

Step 5: Combine

Hopefully your beans are cooked, somewhere between al dente and exploded. Throw them into the onion-tomato base and add the leftover bean water. I did this gradually. It renders a much thicker base than if you were to use water. Simmer for 20 minutes, checking for consistency. It should be thick and stew-like, not dry or watery.

Step 6: Eat and share

Serve it to yourself with rice. Squeeze a bit of lemon to cut the richness, and sprinkle on some chopped cilantro for sparkle. Or better yet, take a page out of Vishwesh Bhatt’s book, and make a ton. Separate the servings into jam jars. Leave them on your neighbor’s doorsteps as a contactless embrace and a reminder of the bean, its story, and how far it traveled.

Aditi Natasha Kini writes cultural criticism, essays, and other text objects from her apartment in Ridgewood, Queens.

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[monosko]

Dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Dr. Alok Ray (March 1937- June 2019)

  Calcutta International Exhibition 1883_84

ঔপনিবেশিক কলিকাতায় সাংস্কৃতিক বিনিময়

PROLOGUE If we believe that acculturation is an interactive process that brings about changes in lifestyles as well as moral and aesthetic values of two or more autonomous cultural systems, then it was a two-sided process of acculturation that happened in nineteenth-century Calcutta merging interests and identities of the two civilizations in encounter between a technologically superior Western society and a non-Western society inclined toward its empirical traditions. Acculturation in colonial India is generally interpreted as a deliberate process initiated by the British Orientalists and the English-educated enlightened Indians notwithstanding the dominating spirit of the 19th century nationalism in Victorian sense. In fact, on either side, players were products of the 18th-century world of rationalism, classicism, and cosmopolitanism. [Koff] Many Orientalists, notably William Jones, H. T. Colebrooke, William Carey, H. H. Wilson, and James Prinsep, made significant contributions to the fields of Indian philology, archeology, and history. On the other hand, Rammohun, Dwarkanath, Radhakanta, Debendranath, Vidyasagar and so many Indian reformists encouraged their fellowmen to get exposure to western science and literature, on top of vernacular sagacity. They effected in remarkably short time a widespread dissemination of western knowledge through institutionalized means like schools and colleges, printing-press and newspapers. By 1821, the Calcutta School-Book Society, sponsored by a number of public spirited individuals like David Hare, Rammohun, Radhakanta, belonging to different religious denominations, without any backing of Government grant, produced and distributed as many as 126446 copies useful works in different languages; no fewer than 14,792 were books in the English language’. Another interesting feature was the decrease in the demand for books in the Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian languages, ‘being the spoken language of no one’. By 1835, the Society had sold 31,864 books in English. Five year before the Medical College in Calcutta started professional courses in English, it was claimed that Calcutta had in 1830 nearly 200 who wrote English as naturally as their mother tongue. As for Bengali language, long before the coming of the English in Bengal, the mother tongue of the majority had been discounted as simplistic and unworthy of official status. ‘The languages of the superior civil and commercial stations were English, Portuguese, and Persian, and ambitious Hindus made certain that of these they knew at least Persian’. It was Halhed who first urged upon British civil officers the necessity of acquiring knowledge of it for the efficient transaction of their duties. He argued for the Bengali language, before anyone else ever did, specifying its inherent qualities: ‘its plainness, its precision and regularity of construction, than the flowery sentences and modulated periods of Persian.’ His Grammar printed and published in Calcutta, gave practical support to his arguments, by providing British officers with a book from which they could learn the language. [Clark, 1956]

The earliest printed book in Bengali

No sooner Bengali becomes a popular medium of communication it started borrowing words from English and the English from Bengali as well. There have been many familiar words, e.g. coolie, cowrie, cot, curry, godown, pagoda, etc., originated from some other languages, commonly used by the English and the Bengalese. There are also some distinctively of Bengali origin, like babu and bungalow. A glimpse through Hobson-Joson may reveal many interesting evidences of liberal linguistic behavior of the Colonial Bengal despite the racial bias of which the world is continuing to suffer till today. As we understand from Sarah Ogilvie the author of ‘Words of the World’ that the former OED editor Robert Burchfield found to be an inward-looking anglocentrics who had erased 17 per cent of the ‘loanwords’ and ‘world English words’,  Indic included, that had been added by earlier editor Charles Onions. [Ogilvie]

While all these conscious efforts of magnificent persona of both the camps created a short-lived glorious age of awakening and also a golden opportunity for a giant leap toward a modern society at par with global standards. Around 1880s that opportunity got lost. Western education reached a tiny proportion of the Indian population largely confined to the major urban centres. A chauvinistic nationalism back lashed the progressive movements. The undercurrent of acculturation, however, continued to flow effortlessly as conscious and unconscious acceptance of new ideas, often with the intention of revitalizing Indian cultural practices and institutions. Slowly steadily new things and ideas percolated through lairs to the bottom level of society undergoing series of changes through interactions. [Peers] What were those ‘new’ things and ideas? Historically speaking, the things and ideas branded ‘colonial’ are supposed to be grown out of Industrial Revolution directly or indirectly, which may be as big as Indian Rail or as small as a gramophone pin – everything targeted to make living in the colonial society convenient and agreeable.

Nipper, the dog is listening to a wind-up gramophone. New Vector Records September 1905 ad. Courtesy: HMV

It was still an industrial age when the Colonial style of living was being shaped through interactions with native environment. Changes incorporating new things and ideas were taking place faster and in an unprecedented large scale than ever happened in history because of the boon of technology. The Industrial Revolution, however, may not be seen as a movement for achieving speed and volume in industrial sphere. Its ultimate gain for the human society proved to be more an attitudinal change toward accepting values associated with new products than productivity itself. Acculturation during the colonial era may be more meaningfully interpreted, essentially in terms of the attitudinal changes.

EUROPEAN HABITATION IN CALCUTTA BEFORE 1830s Captain Williamson provided immaculate descriptions of the living conditions of late 18th century Calcutta that provides us with significant resource for identifying some down-to-earth relationship between the ‘new products’ of the Industrial Age and the formation of the ‘new society’, which yet to be fully surfaced.

The EIC officers adopting some local customs while remaining distinctly British_doyely

To the gentlemen coming to settle in Calcutta on civil, military, or naval service of the Hon. East India Company, Captain Williamson offered in his Vade Mecum many practical advices along with cautionary against belittling the native sagacity unwittingly while finding the most suitable mode of living for them. During Williamson’s time, between 1787 and 1798, a new Calcutta suburb was being born south of Town Calcutta to meet the craving of the settlers for ‘airy’ life close to Nature in the Gangetic Bengal mingled with the comfort and convenience of European way of living. New townships at Chowringhee-Dhurrumtollah locality were then only at their initial stage. In 1793-94, all over the town there were no fewer than 1114 pucca houses; in 1821 it increased to 14,230. [Oneil] The new suburbs grew faster with masonry houses built by Europeans and deshi well-to-dos as nucleus of new urban experience of ‘airy habitation’.

It is worth noting that the English inhabitants were still chiefly to be found ‘where their fathers had lived before them’ in the year 1810, Colonel Sleeman spoke of the residences of the Europeans as lying mainly between Dhurrumtollah and China Bazar; and the Tank Square was in the middle of the posh ‘Belgravia of his day’. [Cotton] This happens to coincide with the timeframe Williamson depicted in his Vade Mecum pinpointing some cultural issues involved in modeling ‘airy’ homes to live in comfy liberal style, which European settlers aspired to attain once they crossed Cossitollah toward further south. And so they did achieve their ‘model home’ through an intricate acculturation, after more than three decades of trials and errors, by coming into terms with indigenous methods and means of house building that the settlers initially tended to neglect. [Williamson 1810]

IN SEARCH OF A EUROPEAN MODE OF LIVING Williamson was one who believed that taking the general outline of indigenous customs should be considered an axiom for the settlers in exploring a new possibility of improving their quality of life. All the European settlers remained anxious to see airy habitations, through which the wind could pass freely in every direction. When the English first visited India, they adopted a mode of building by no means consistent with common sense, and displaying a total ignorance of the most simple of nature’s laws. For instance, they wasted much time to ‘become convinced that the most insupportable heats are derived from the glare of light objects’ and were to be judiciously used in designing habitats. Williamson’s advice to the settlers was ‘to coincide with the habits of the natives, to a certain extent if they mean to retain health or to acquire comfort’. Upon arrival, travelers learnt from local doctors that nine out of ten of the advices prescribed by doctors at London, would infallibly have sent them to ‘kingdom come!’ but readily approve the homie piece of good sense that ‘do as one should find the old inhabitants do’. Travelers, he observed, often suffer extreme inconvenience, and expose themselves to much danger because of the fact that they “bent on the refutation of the most reasonable assertions, and influenced by a ridiculous determination to support some equally ridiculous hypotheses”. Williamson tipped them with a piece of his mind: however absurd many indigenous practices may at first appear, it will ordinarily result that ‘necessity was their parent’.

British Styled Bungalow. Photographer: James Kerr (pumpparkphotos.com) c1880

All the buildings forty to sixty years old were, “like the celebrated Black-Hole, constructed more like ovens, than like the habitations of enlightened beings”. The doors were very small; the windows still less, in proportion, while the roofs were carried up many feet above both. Those roofs were in themselves calculated to retain heat to an extreme, being built of solid tarras, at least a foot thick, lying horizontally upon immense timbers, chiefly of teak, or of saul wood. Until around 1790s, the whole of the family resided in the first floor; leaving the whole of the ground floor as basements for reception of palanquins, gigs, cellars, pantries, and even stables. Since around 1780s their preferences changed in many ways. Living in single-floored thatched houses, styled as bungalows, became the way of European life. The settlers remained engaged indefatigably to improve upon the habitability of bungalow. They closed up all the intervals between the thatch, and the walls, on which it rested; so as to exclude the external air, as well as the dust: a practice religiously observed even to the present date. They improved upon the arrangement by installing a tin ventilator near the summits of the thatches. [Williamson 1810]

The shape and size of bungalows changed further having their apartments surrounded by a veranda, of full fourteen feet in width; with apertures, of a good size, in the exterior wall, corresponding with those of the interior. This arrangement renders the generality of bungalows remarkably pleasant; but, it must be noticed, that there was a very wide difference in the expense incurred in rendering them so, both as relating to the labor, and to the materials.

COLONIAL LIVINGSTYLE INVENTED As we discussed, Europeans modeled their new home and styled a new way of living for themselves through a continuous process of interactions between their own perceptions and desi sagacity. The model was generally found most comfortable and highly adaptable for living in changing Gangetic Bengal climate, and therefore the overall cost of a complete bungalow in tune of Rs 40,000, found quite acceptable by the well-to-do families of different cultural origin. Besides Europeans, there were quite a few desi families moved to Chowringhee-Dhurrumtollah to their newly owned bungalows. The natives of the land, on the other hand, increasingly appreciated whatever the settlers fashioned for their everyday use including bungalows, furniture fixture utensils wearable, as wonderful user-friendly amenities.

Major William Palmer with his second wife, the Mughal princess Bibi Faiz Bakhsh by Johann Zoffany, 1785.

Sketches Illustrating the Manners & Customs of the Indians & Anglo Indians | William Tayler/British Library

Nautch Girl or public female singer of India,” by Mrs. Belnos, London, c.1832. Source: ebay

A male Anglo-Indian being washed, dressed and attended by five Indian servants. Coloured lithograph by J. Bouvier, 1842, after W. Tayler. Iconographic Collections. Source: Welcome Images

The spread of English education might have a partial role in changing people mindset toward western culture – the way of life and the things they use every day. The ‘new products’ we talk about, however, more often than not, were made of old familiar things into new design; like a folding umbrella, for example. The settlers learnt by experience that it should be a madness to use a European umbrella, like a parapluie or a parasol, against a heavy Indian shower or a blazing sun. So they designed a new tough umbrella employing seasoned bamboos and heavy canvas to stand Indian weather best, and then add a collapsible holder inside to turn the old chattah into a surprisingly convenient ‘folding umbrella’. This novelty item was expected to be on high demand in Chandney shops, and the shops were expected to store umbrella and its parts as well to promote use of umbrella to all communities of Calcutta society.

A Fakir with umbrella. Details not known. Source: ebay

Bengalese Babu. Courtesy: Mary Evans.

Like the umbrella, there happen to be a innumerable new products originally designed and developed by the European settlers out of local ingredients generally employing local tools and technology to facilitate their living a decent comfortable life in India as they were used to. Such products of Colonial origin not anymore sensed as foreign to local habits and practice, and the locals feel at ease in using those, hand in hand with things they use traditionally in everyday life. Today, after a lapse of two centuries, Indian populace in general, have converted their mode of living so completely that rarely a dhoti-clad babu can be spotted on road unless he was to attend a special festive occasion. Desi dresses, Desi dishes ending with a bouquet of Benaresi pan will be soon things of forgotten past together with many essential items that remained parts of our heritage so long. The way the tune of Senhai is giving way to the resounding Rock music, every single item of our traditional pieces of life and art will be replaced with newer kinds in course of never-ending societal change.

Colonial-inspired house and interior design Courtesy: @myLusciousLife

HOUSE & FURNITURE Colonial Scenario: In all parts of the country houses are let with bare walls. Rent was expensive; some two hundred rupees a month for small house; which was then equal to three hundred pounds yearly. [Williamson 1813] Terrace-work is substituted for plank; and, being covered with a fine kind of matting, made of very hard reeds, about the thickness of a crow-quill, worked in stripes of perhaps a foot or more in breadth each gives a very remarkable neatness to the apartments; many of which, however, are laid with ‘satringes’ (সতরঞ্চি), or striped carpets, made of wool, or cotton, during the cold season. Carpets, in imitation of those manufactured at Wilton and Brussels, are now made in India; some of which are of incomparable excellence and beauty. The necessity which exists for keeping the doors and many windows open at all times renders it expedient to guard the candles, which are invariably of wax, from the gusts of wind that would speedily blow out every light. Shades, made of glass, are put over such candles as stand on tables.

Present-day Scenario Majority lives in rented accommodation; mostly unfurnished. Few have preference to ethnic furnishing with satringes’ (সতরঞ্চি), or striped carpets, sitalpapties, madoors, chics, ctc., while the generality love showy interiors with sofas, chairs centre table, side tables and so on. Urban folks keep doors closed, widows open all seasons except when gusty wind blows. Even then there is no need to guard candles as there no candle in use normally, but modern homes steel need shades for cutting the glare of electric lamps. As it appears, the mode and style of living in Calcutta now and then in many respects alike outwardly, yet an attitudinal difference remains much to explain why the homes of today so ill-kept in contrast with the spic and span Colonial home. The other notable difference is that the modern families ‘sacrifice comfort to appearance’ contradicting the principle of the Colonial Style as we have already discussed at length. . GARMENTS & OUTFITS Colonial Scenario:

Major-General Charles Stuart (circa 1758 – 1828), wrote  his first article in 1798 about military clothing and there he professed the use of Indian clothing and accessories, as they are convenient and appropriate, attacking European prejudices. Better known as ‘Hindu Stuart’, Charles was not just an admirer of the Indian religions but also an enthusiastic devotee of Indian fashions. In a series of disputed articles in the Calcutta Telegraph he tried to persuade the European women of Calcutta to adopt the sari on the grounds that it was so much more attractive than contemporary European fashions. Because of his Hindu craze, Charles Stuart was certified as ‘gone native’.  [Dalrymple]

The friends of the English young men, who are sent to the East Indies, generally fit them out with a great variety of apparel, and other articles, enumerated in the slop-merchant’s list under the head of “Necessaries” that basically include quantities of the followings: Calico Shirts, Stockings, Trousers, Drawers, Jackets, Waistcoats, Night Caps, Hats, Handkerchiefs, Neck Kerchiefs Or Bandana, etc. “Of these a large portion is entirely useless.” Among the indispensables, according to Williamson, should be a good stock of wearing apparel; generally speaking, white cotton, manufactured into various cloths; such as dimity, calico, if not made of nankeen. The beauty of some fabrics of this description was considered ‘very striking’. Thirty suits will not be found too many for a European in Calcutta society. [Williamson 1813]

  A European, probably Sir David Ochterlony (1758-1825), in Indian dress, smoking a hookah and watching a nautch in his house at Delhi. Artist: unknown. c.1820. Courtesy: BL

Present-day Scenario Inside home, Calcutta men commonly wear pajama kurta (পাঞ্জাবী), and the ladies stuck to sari (শাড়ি) wherever they go, inside or outside, till around 1980s when a wave of Anglo-American fashion maxi midi mini dresses became choices of convenience for the young ladies that ultimately gave way to oriental varities of salwar kamiz. Outside, almost all men folks and children of both sexes appear in western attire – but with no caps on head. The corporate or institutional dress codes in Calcutta do not insist to wear a headdress – a useful accessory for resisting weather bite, but a necktie around the neck to look smarter at the cost of agonizing physical discomfort. There were quite a few things Europeans invented for tropical climate that become obsolete now in spite of their latent advantages. The Sola-topee or topi, may serve a good example of such things. Topi is made of lightweight sholapith covered with khaki or white cloth. The reason for using sola is its lightness and its heat-resistant capacity for protecting head from the scorching tropical sun, cleverly fitted with two tiny holes at both sides for ventilation. Colonial men and women loved to wear it for convenience and comfort, Indians rejected it possibly because of its prosaic appearance on the first place.

KITCHEN & TABLEWARE Colonial Scenario: The favourable oriental dejeuner usually consisted of tea, coffee, eggs, toast, and fish, (either fresh or slightly powdered with salt, rice, &c.). Many gentlemen, especially those from North Britain, add sweetmeats and soogee; the latter corresponding with porridge, oats, which were not cultivated in India. Of all things of European liking Hilsa might be the foremost. The fish tasted ‘remarkably fine’ especially when baked in vinegar, or preserved in tamarinds worcestersauce.

The knives and forks were all of European manufacture, though, within few years, some excellent imitations appeared in market. The greater part of the plate, used throughout the country, was made by native smiths, who, in some instances, might be seen to tread very close on the heels of English jewelers. Table cloths and napkins were manufactured in several parts of the country, where ‘piece goods’ were made, especially at Patna.

Present-day Scenario

Not for breakfast alone, tables for lunch and dinner (or supper as it was called then) resemble by and large what commonly Calcuttans having these days. Although, Bengalese still prefer to use hands in dining at home, cutlery are being used increasingly along with a large number of local variety of tableware like Tea Cups and Plates, Tea Cozy, Pepper Grinder, Salt Shakers, Napkins, and Pickles, Vinegar & Sauce as for instance. The English, as we all know, is basically a highly traditional race who still calls their lamb cutlet a ‘mutton cutlet’ retaining the French legacy of the product they had borrowed. Following the same tradition they call many products of Indian origin with vernacular appellations. On the contrary, in case of the colonial products, which they designed and developed using local ingredients and technology, reference to the source of origin is rarely provided. The story of the world famous Worcestershire Sauce and the theme British Curry may exemplify my view point adequately.

LEA & PERRINS® .The story of Lea & Perrins® famous Worcestershire Sauce begins in the early 1800s, in the county of Worcester. Returning home from his travels in Bengal, Lord Sandys, a nobleman of the area, was eager to duplicate a recipe he’d acquired. On Lord Sandys’ request, two chemists, John Lea and William Perrins, made up the first batch of the sauce but were not impressed with their initial results. They needed few years more to find right kind of aging process to turn the ingredients into a delicious savoury sauce. Without any kind of advertising, in just a few short years, it was known and coveted in kitchens throughout Europe.

Portrait of William Fullerton of Rosemont, Dip Chand, Murshidabad, India, 1760-1763. Opaque watercolour on paper. Company Painting. Courtesy: VAM

In the space of a few years Duncan, a New York entrepreneur, was importing large shipments to keep up with demand. Lea & Perrins was the only commercially bottled condiment in the U.S., and Americans loved it right away. Almost 170 years later, Lea & Perrins sauce remains a favorite in households across the U S.

BRITISH CURRY. “The idea of a curry is, in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture. Indians referred to their different dishes by specific names … But the British lumped all these together under the heading of curry.” [Collingham] In fact, there are many varieties of dishes called ‘curries’. In original traditional cuisines, the precise selection of spices for each dish is a matter of national or regional cultural tradition, religious practice, and, to some extent, family preference. Such dishes are called by specific names that refer to their ingredients, spicing, and cooking methods. Curry, which becomes now Britain’s adapted national dish, is largely viewed as an Anglo-Indian theme. Luke Honey, a columnist, writes “how fond I was of Anglo-Indian curry powders; the sort of thing I chuck into stews and then have the nerve to call ‘curry’”. He made his own version of Dr Kitchener’s curry powder, as described by Mrs Beeton. He slightly adapted it for the modern kitchen and added cardamom and black pepper. [Honey] Wyvern’s recipe for basic powders reveals a large number of similar ingredients, hinting at very similar flavour profiles. They all include turmeric, cumin seed, fenugreek, mustard seed, black peppercorns, coriander seed, poppy seed and dried ginger and chilies.

In 1810, the entrepreneur Sake Dean Mahomed, from the Bengal Presidency, opened the first Indian curry house in England: the Hindoostanee Coffee House in London. The theme of British Curry, as distinguished from Proto-Curry and Anglo-Indian Curry, presumes that Curry is the result of over four hundred years of British interaction with India. As the findings of a recent British academic research suggests, Curry is a way that the British made Indian cuisine understandable in their minds and on their palates. It is more than a mixture of Indian spices, an idea or a symbol of the success of British imperial endeavors in possessing, converting and incorporating an object of other i.e. of India, into their world. [Waldrop]

BRITISH GIFT OF TEA CULTURE TO INDIAN PEOPLE

British Tea Tea Culture of India, Calcutta in particular, tells a fascinating story of social dynamics involving the ways of life of the British and the Indian people. The British gifted Tea Culture to India where they cultivated tea plants of native origin as well as the Camellia sinensis variety that Robert Fortune smuggled from China in 1849 for the East India Company. In Britain initially it was a luxury of the high society under the spell of Braganza the Queen Consort of Charles II during 1662 -1685, who happened to be the primary motivator behind the emerging British tea culture. Because the British East India Company had a monopoly over the tea industry in England, tea became more and more popular; and as its prices slowly fell, the luxury of drinking tea became middle-class habit. At the close of the 18th century tea – a cheaper drink than bear – turned out to be the drink of Britons of every class. There have been, nonetheless, the ways of making tea and taking tea remain distinctive of every class conforming nuances of tea culture. The popularity of tea, its respectability and domestic rituals, supported the rise of the British Empire, and “contributed to the rise of the Industrial Revolution by supplying both the capital for factories and calories for labourers” . Tea became the national drink of Britain. [Mintz]

Colonial India In late 1870s the drinking of tea was in fashion all over India and commonly a part of everyday informal social meets. [Mandelslo] We can see from contemporary writers that ladies and gentlemen had occasions to socialize themselves many a time a day – at breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, supper, dinner, and after-dinner – and never without cups and shimmering teapots to induce sharing of minds. Calcutta was then a city of ceremonials and carnivals.

Tea-parties were enlivened with spirit of sociability where anything could be discussed, less the delicate subjects like tea growing and its politics and economics. Tea and the Britain have a shady history. ‘The British brought tea to England by way of monopolistic trade, smuggling, drug dealing, and thievery’ as modern research admits [Petras]. The Colonial India produced highest bid tea in auction markets by employing bonded labourers from Assam and North Bengal. From Calcutta, troops of hair-dressers and shoe-makers of Chinese origin were also called to join on the presumption that every Chinese a good tea-plucker. The plight of these hapless slaves was first known when Ramkumar Vidyaratna and Dwarkanath Ganguly reported in Sanjibani (সঞ্জিবনী) aroud 1886 [Ganguly] long before Mulk Raj Anand portrayed their misery in his famous Two leaves and a bird appeared in 1937. [Anad]

Recent Scenario The Tea Culture in India virtually started with the Tea Cess Bill of 1903 provided for levying a cess on tea exports – the proceeds of which were to be used for the promotion of Indian tea both within and outside India. Large hoardings and posters for tea recipes were put up in Indian languages, on several railway platforms; at Calcutta tram terminals they distributed free cups of tea, added with milk and sugar to make the drink agreeable to uninitiated tongues, and the like promotional plans put into operation to convert the teetotaler Indian public, especially the Bengalese, into a tea-addict race to whom ‘every time a tea time’. The plans, however, failed to meet their goal so long the aggressive opposition from the Swadeshi camp was in force. Gandhi called tea ‘an intoxicant’, in the same class of avoidable substances as tobacco and cacao. In the early 1920s, Acharya Prafulla Ray, an eminent chemist and a passionate nationalist, published cartoons equating tea with poison [Sanyal], in contrast of the British outlook that drinking tea is good for health of every family member including the dog. “Young dogs are frequently kept in health by a cup of tea being given to them every day.”[Roberts]

Tea Set. Oil on canvas. Artist: Jean-Étienne Liotard. 1781-83. Courtesy:Getty Center

Rabindranath Tagore, to whom the spirit of nationalist was never chauvinistic, welcomed tea cordially not only as a refreshing drink but an engaging Culture as he had experienced in Japan in 1916. He also established at Santiniketan a unique café exclusively for tea, ‘Cha-Chawkro’ (চা চক্র) in around 1929 – an addaa for the চা-স্পৃহ চঞ্চল চাতক দল tea lovers, [Chakraborty 2019]. Cha-Chawkro probably was the third stand-alone Tea Room in India, the first being The Favourite a typical vernacular tea joint set up in1818, and the second, a typical well-groomed Anglican tea-shop that the Swish Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Flury opened in 1927 under the banner “Flurys”.

Today’s Flurys is no more a tea-room – but surely a brazen joint best known for its exquisite breakfast meals. The décor has given away its colonial vibe for a fusion of cultural trends of no character of its own. [Majumdar,2009]

The old Favourite Cabin, however, still continuing with its inimitable tea-culture indigenously developed since 1918. Excepting the tea tables, crockery and the style of tea making, Nutan Barua, and his elder brother Gaur, borrowed nothing from the English to steer this first stand-alone tea room making a history contributed by generations of regular customers, many of them were firebrand writers, political activists, and young intellectuals. The tea-table manners were guided by the unwritten codes the customers formed themselves over the years that surely helped the cafe in continuing with its esprit de corps so long. [Bhaduri]

Other than the three pioneering tea shops we discussed Calcutta had quite a few local bistros famous for their addictive teas, often with some fried specialties. Basanta Cabin, Jnanbau’s tea stall, in North, Radhubabu’s stall, Sangu Valley, Bonoful in South, and Café de Monico at the city centre had been then crowdie hangouts of different social groups who were largely responsible for hauling an independent tea culture of this colonial city. Although the tea industry is still looking optimistically for the prospect of India’s National Drink status, the culture of Tea is seemingly dying a silent death. Already assaulted by coffee and the American soft-drink lobbyists, it may not stand the shock of being robbed its very identity in recent time. The good name of ‘tea’ is now being abused to mean some novelty refreshments that have little or no tea content, but mostly made of heady spices often with large proportion of milk and sugar. Such brands of desi teas sound like new versions of Gandhian tea now being marketed as Tulsi tea, Masala tea, Malai tea, Rhododendron tea, and the like. The Kahwa tea, is however different being the soul-warming drink of the Kashmiris and a part of their culture. All these refreshment drinks, of dissimilar taste and flavour, meant for people of different mind-sets than those who enjoyed tea the way Tagore’s Gora did, or a Nazrul did in Favourite Café, or someone, not necessarily an intellectual like Sydney Smith [Smith], who thanks God for tea, wondering “What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.”

  END NOTE It is highly interesting to note, all these ‘new things’ created by the Europeans for themselves proved in no time to be equally good for Indian homes. Those products actually gave indigenous people an exposure to alternative styles of living and an opportunity to preview their relative merits that instigated necessary attitudinal change to tolerate differences in socio-cultural values and accept what found ‘best’ for them objectively. This attitudinal change we may consider as an indispensable condition for bringing about the ‘Awakening of Bengal’ and its recurrences around 1880s and 1930s.

  REFERENCE

Anand, Mulk Raj. 1937. Two Leaves and a Bud. Bombay: Kutub.

Bhaduri, Arka. 2019. “ফেবারিট কেবিন.” Indian Express, May 9, 2019. https://bengali.indianexpress.com/west-bengal/favourite-cabin-a-century-old-kolkata-cafe-college-street-100180/.

Biswas, Oneil. 1992. Calcutta and Calcuttans From Dihi to Megalopolis. Calcutta: Firma KL. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.149376.

Chakraborty, Sumita. 2016. “শান্তিনিকেতনে চিন ও জাপান.” Parabas, 2016. https://www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/pSumita_china-japan.html.

Chunder, Rajarshi. 2016. “Dishes and Discourses: Culinary Culture at Jorasanko.” Sahapedia. 2016. https://www.sahapedia.org/dishes-and-discourses-culinary-culture-jorasanko.

Collingham, Lizzie. 2006. Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. London: Vintage Books. https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Curry.html? id=Sr3GUyWe3O0C.

Cotton, H E A. 1907. Calcutta: Old and New; a Historical and Descriptive Handbook of the City. Calcutta: Newman.https://archive.org/details/calcuttaoldandn00cottgoog/page/n3

Dalrymple, William  (2002). White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th-century India. London: Harper.

Davies, Pauline. 2013. “East India Company and the Indian Ocean Material World at Osterley, 1700-800,.” Internet: East India Company at Home. 2013. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/osterley-park-middlesex/osterley-case-study-winds-of-trade/.

Gandhi, Arun. 2014. Grandfather Gandhi. NY: Atheneum Books. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=wduwz6-DapAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Honey, Luke. 2008. “Dr Kitchener’s Curry Powder.” The Greasy Spoon. 2008. https://lukehoney.typepad.com/the_greasy_spoon/2008/11/dr- kitcheners-curry-powder.html.

Koff, David. 1969. No TitleBritish Orientalism And The Bengal Renaissance 1773-1835. Calcutta: Firma KL. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.98306/page/n7.

Mahomet, Sake Deen. 1794. The Travels of Dean Mahomet : A Native of Patna in Bengal, through Several Parts of India, While in the Service of the Honourable the East India Company. [Ireland]: Cork. https://archive.org/details/b28742898/page/n5.

Majumdar, Rakhi. 2009. “Into the Future: Apeejay Surrendra Group Post Jit Paul.” ET :Jun 04, 2009, 2009. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/into-the-future-apeejay-surrendra-group-post-jit-paul/articleshow/4617853.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst.

Mandelslo, Johann Albrecht von. 1669. Voyages Celebres & Remarquables, Faits de Perse Aux Indes Orientales. London: John Starkey, and Thomas Basset. https://archive.org/details/voyagescelebresr00mand/page/n8.

Mintz, Sidney W. 1993. “The Changing Roles of Food in the Study of Consumption.” In Consumption and the World of Goods; Ed. by Brewer, John; Porter, Roy. NY: Routledge. https://www.amazon.com/Consumption-World-Goods-Culture-Centuries/dp/0415114780.

Ogilvie, S. (2012). Frontmatter. In Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (pp. I-Vi). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139129046″>https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139129046

Peers, Douglas M. 2006. No TitlIndia under Colonial Rule: 1700-1885. NY: Routledge. https://books.google.co.in/books? id=dyQuAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_book_other_v ersions_r&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false%0A%0A.

Petras, Claire. 2013. “British Tea 17th-19th Century.” Clairepetras.Com. 2013. http://clairepetras.com/history/ . Roberts, Emma. 1837. Scenes and Characteristics Hindostan,with Sketches Of Anglo-Indian Society. Vol. 1 (2). London: Allen. https://archive.org/details/scenesandcharac04robegoog.

Sanyal, Amitava. 2012. “Mahatma Gandhi and His Anti-Tea Campaign.” BBC News Magazine, May 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17905975. Shastri, Shibanath. 1909. রামতনু লাহিড়ি ও তৎ���ালীন বঙ্গসমাজ. The British Journal of Psychiatry. 2nd ed. Calcutta: SK Lahiri. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.111.479.1009-a.

Smith, Sidney. 1855. A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. By His Daughter, Lady Holland. With a Selection from His Letters. NY: Harper. https://archive.org/details/memoirofreverend02smituoft/page/n6.

Waldrop, Darlene Michelle. 2007. “A Curried Gaze: The British Ownership Of Curry.” Univ. Georgia.

Williamson, Thomas. 1810. East India Vade Mecum; or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military,or Naval Service of the Hon. East India Company; Vol. 2 (2). London: Black, Parry. https://www.scribd.com/document/305022589/The-East-India-Vade-Mecum-Volume-2-of-2-by-Thomas-Williamson.

Williamson, Thomas. 1813. Costume and Customs of Modern India from Collection of Drawings by Charles Doyley… Ed. by Thomas Williamson. Oxford University. Vol. XXX. London: Edward Omre. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=VNFbAAAAQAAJ&pg=PP7&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false.

WAYS OF LIFE IN COLONIAL CALCUTTA: CHRONICLE OF ACCULTURATION

Dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Dr. Alok Ray (March 1937- June 2019) ঔপনিবেশিক কলিকাতায় সাংস্কৃতিক বিনিময়

WAYS OF LIFE IN COLONIAL CALCUTTA: CHRONICLE OF ACCULTURATION Dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Dr. Alok Ray (March 1937- June 2019) ঔপনিবেশিক কলিকাতায় সাংস্কৃতিক বিনিময়

[dweemeister]

Lost Horizon (1937)

Asia and Europe were about to plunge into warfare when Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon was released in American theaters. The Chinese, mired in civil war between the Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang, were about to find a common enemy in the Japanese. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany continued its saber-rattling, leaving other European states looking nervously towards the continent’s increasingly militarized center. At this time, Americans, still reeling from the Depression and not yet too concerned about enforcing Wilsonian human rights elsewhere, longed for escape, for being sheltered from the news and conflict and suffering. A utopia, a Shangri-La, must have seemed appealing. The Shangri-La depicted in Lost Horizon – based on James Hilton’s 1933 novel of the same name – might fit the bill, without closer inspection.

It is 1935 and soon-to-be Foreign Secretary Robert Conway (the reliable Ronald Colman, performing solidly in this outing) is a diplomat working to evacuate as many white people as he can from a city under attack from Mao’s Communists. The Chinese heathen can fend for themselves, I guess. Among those climbing aboard the diplomatic plane to Shanghai are Conway’s younger brother George (John Howard), paleontologist Alexander Lovett (Edward Everett Horton), criminal Henry Barnard (Thomas Mitchell), and the terminally ill Gloria Stone (Isabel Jewell). Their plane has been hijacked and crash lands somewhere in the Himalayas. A Shangri-La native, Chang (H.B. Warner; one of many white actors playing an Asian character), rescues the British subjects and leads them to his home, a lush valley where the residents age much slower and are shielded from the brutal Tibetan weather. There, George is enchanted by a lady named Maria (Margo) and Gloria’s ailments have disappeared. Conway also meets the High Lama (Sam Jaffe), who eventually reveals that their arrival in Shangri-La has not been by chance. When the British characters raise questions about contacting the outside world, their questions are left unanswered.

With an original runtime of six hours, then trimmed to three-and-a-half hours, and finally settled for a runtime of just over two hours (today, the film is considered partially lost, but more on that later), Lost Horizon’s screenplay – penned by Capra regular Robert Riskin (1934′s It Happened One Night, 1941′s Meet John Doe) – appears to be an amalgam of ideas, tossed like a salad, that combine into an unfocused end product. The notion of Shangri-La and its inhabitants is proclaimed to be universalist, for the bounty of all those looking to coexist with others. But Riskin’s adaptation of Hilton’s novel adheres to Hilton’s conception that Shangri-La was once inhabited by native Tibetans, and that those Tibetan leaders were replaced by European wanderers who introduced Western knowledge for themselves, not for the Tibetans who could no longer attain an elite status. A “Christian ethic” where, “the meek shall inherit the Earth” is considered superior to other structures of social organization, according to the High Lama (as sociology, that’s just lazy writing). Riskin makes little attempt to either critique the existing organization of Shangri-La nor does he – outside of one lengthy soliloquy by the High Lama – use the shining example of Shangri-La to effectively juxtapose life in the Himalayas with life in places soon to be reduced to charred, damaged battlefields. However, as a fantasy film, Lost Horizon wonderfully constructs the awesome settings described in the Hilton novel.

Though few in 1937 criticized Lost Horizon for its Atlanticist imperialism upon release, those features are more apparent eighty years later. Considered a masterwork from Frank Capra, the film has aged poorly on how it treats the Asian setting and individuals that it depicts. Though the High Lama and Chang mention the diversity of Shangri-La, we only see white actors in yellowface playing the leaders as the actors of Asian descent play the speechless grunts patrolling the settlement. The High Lama’s functions are an embodiment of the perceived religious, cultural, and technological superiority of the West combined with an awkward mysticism that stems from exotic places. The backwardness of any Asian characters reduces them to grinning, violent caricatures.

Yet where Lost Horizon succeeds as a film – though despicable in its racialized writing and portrayals – is in its technical components. Cinematographers Joseph Walker and Elmer Dyer are allowed immense backgrounds to work with, allowing for an incredible scope to the production not often seen after the free-spending epics in the later silent era. Editors Gene Havlick and Gene Milford play with the film’s practical visual effects in groundbreaking fashion for the time. Some of their visual tricks, borrowing heavily from the later silent era, make any miniatures or matte paintings that appear to seem realistic. With a then-astronomical budget of $2 million (~$34 million in 2017′s USD), Capra lavished much of that money from Columbia Pictures – in 1937, Columbia was not quite a major studio on the level of Warner Bros. or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) yet – on the production design by Stephen Goosson. Goosson and his staff built sixty-five sets, constructing the walls and buildings of Shangri-La at Columbia’s ranch in Burbank. Extensive research also produced replications of upwards of 700 props used in Tibetan life. This expansive collaboration of cinematographers, editors, and production designers help Lost Horizon to transcend its Orientalist trappings, its troubled writing, if only to a limited extent.

Lost Horizon presented a breakthrough for composer Dimitri Tiomkin, who would become Frank Capra’s favored composer through You Can’t Take It with You (1938), into Capra’s Why We Fight WWII propaganda series, and until It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Over this next decade, Tiomkin’s concentration on piano and European classical music expanded to grand orchestral works with American influences thanks to his friendship with Capra. But for this first score for a Capra film, the strings dominate the faux Eastern-sounding melodies – there is a long history of European composers trying to imagine Asia through their music. Although in too many places (especially in the opening half of Lost Horizon), Tiomkin’s brass is too harsh where he should be more delicate with his passages. Yet there are gorgeous cues contained within Tiomkin’s composition, most notably during the swimming sequence and the resolving sequences of the film – this includes the funeral procession (perhaps the most memorable cue of the score, thanks to a wordless choir) and an attempted flight from Shangri-La. This is one of Tiomkin’s greatest works, with a curious orchestration and thematic development that would be recalled for his work in Land of the Pharaohs (1955).

Existing prints of Lost Horizon are partially lost. The print that I saw for this write-up was on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and is the most complete edition available. This print is the one recommended for those interested in seeing Lost Horizon – the 1986 restoration by the American Film Institute (AFI) and the UCLA Film and Television Archive which runs 132 minutes and contains 125 minutes of footage. The seven missing minutes are accompanied by the film’s soundtrack (which thankfully exists in its entirety), but includes still images of the missing scenes. Do not watch any other prints other than the AFI/UCLA version – exceptions can be made, of course, if you stumble upon the original six hour print only shown to Columbia executives.

For Columbia’s co-founder and president Harry Cohn, Capra’s indiscretions of shooting excessive takes and ballooning production costs damaged his relationship with Capra. Unhappy with preview footage screened in January 1937, Cohn – believing that audiences would not be patient enough with a lengthy feature film despite the fact that some silent films ran over three hours or longer (1916′s Intolerance is 210 minutes; 1923′s La Roue is 273 minutes) – eventually seized Capra’s film from him and cut Lost Horizon down to the familiar 132 minutes seen in its roadshow format. Decades later, Capra still would not forgive Cohn for how he treated the final cut of Lost Horizon.

Confounded by too much exposition and an outdated portrayal of its Asian characters and cultures, Lost Horizon –  like fellow 1937 release The Good Earth (a better movie with a more sensitive take on Asian characters, despite the rampant yellowface) – has the imagination of its artisans and craftspersons to make it one of the grandest Hollywood productions of the 1930s. The eleventh-highest grossing film at the American box office in 1937, Lost Horizon provided a temporary utopia for Depression-era audiences yearning for such an escape. The Library of Congress’ National Film Registry - a collection of American films regarded as national treasures, and marked for preservation - recognized this, inducting Capra’s film into the Registry just last year. For some characters in Lost Horizon, Shangri-La is paradise found. For others, a prison. Modern audiences might scoff without much thought when considering the elements that constitute Shangri-La. But for a certain people in a different time, whatever troubled Shangri-La probably was more easily forgiven.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

[i-just-like-commenting]

Final Thoughts While Reading “The World of Ice and Fire” (part 6)

"Some of that is, Here there be dragons," Martin cautioned. "It's beyond the world they know."

Once you get beyond Westeros, the tenor of the book starts to change. You get a lot more talk about things being “exotic” or bizarre or mysterious. Martin himself has said that the further you get from Westeros, the less seriously you should take what the book says, because the more Yandel is relying on hearsay and third- or fourth-hand accounts. You wind up with different levels of knowledge:

The six coastal Free Cities, Braavos, Pentos, Lys, Myr, Tyrosh, and Volantis, all of which have extensive trade and interaction with Westeros directly

The three interior Free Cities, Lorath, Navros, and Qohor; the Summer Islands; and Ib, which while they trade with Westeros are much more reclusive and harder to reach

Central Essos and the Basilisk Isles, which Westeros is more likely to trade with via intermediaries

East of the Bones, and Sothoryos, which are mostly rumor and speculation

Also, this section of the book can be hard to follow unless you have a nice big map of the Known World that came with The Lands of Ice and Fire, which a certain someone just so happened to get for Christmas:

…so let’s started.

How many weird-ass societies can you come up with?

There are a ton of orientalist overtones in this section of The World, but that is, I think, intentional. It is imitating the tone of European works on “the East” for the presentation of Essos. Within the books, too, there tends to be a POV-derived sense of things being mysterious/exotic/bizarre. The characters who are just sojourners there, like Tyrion in Volantis and Dany in Qarth very much have these ideas in their minds. In contrast, Braavos (though not the Faceless Men) becomes more and more ordinary the longer that Arya lives there. I’m looking forward to her reverse culture shock when she comes back to Westeros.

What I do find impressive about this description of Essos is how Martin, for the most part, tries to avoid doing direct one-to-one parallels with real-world cultures. Especially with the Free Cities there’s a strong sense of their situatedness within his own universe and history that defies attempt to make them perfect analogs of anywhere in Europe or the Middle East. The Summer Islands, Sarnath, Ib, Hyrkoon, Qarth, the Dothraki…they all take cues from cultures in real life, but are so mish-mashed that they don’t feel like fantasy counterparts of anywhere real. Some are problematically culturally monolithic (especially with the Dothraki), but at least this particular snarl is avoided.

The one major exception is Yi Ti, which is China. Or rather Cathay, the Medieval image of China as it was received passed down and exaggerated by travelers. Setting aside the fabulous extravagances, there are similarities to Chinese history with its periods of long dynastic stability interrupted brutally by civil war. The monosyllabic nature of most names and words hints at a tonal language ala Chinese (though the consonants, with the inclusion of non-nasal final consonants, are very different from modern Chinese). It’s not a particularly offensive fantasy-China, however, so I’ll let this one slide.

The oddest culture is Hyrkoon, dominated by women who supposedly castrate all men but a handful they use for breeding. It would be great to know more about their history and how much of these tales is true, but unfortunately Yandel’s only real source is Addam of Duskendale (the Marco Polo of Westeros), who

instead spends most of its time finding ways to remind readers that the warrior women walk about barebreasted and decorate their cheeks and nipples with ruby studs and iron rings.

In other words, rather than give cultural background and history, he was too obsessed with just talking about the sexy~~~ bits and I think this might be Martin throwing some shade on the show, especially since this was written around the same time that the notorious Dorne arc happened in seasons 5.

Where do dragons (and other creatures) really come from?

The Valyrians say that dragons were born naturally out of fire and that they were the first to tame them. In Asshai it is said that some pre-Valyrian people tamed them in “the Shadow” and later taught the Valyrians. The maesters assert that there were dragons of some kind in Westeros long before they were tamed in Valyria. And Septon Barth says that dragons were created by Valyrians using fire magic out of the monstrous but not particularly supernatural wyverns that live in Sothoryos.

A good rule of thumb is that Septon Barth is probably right, but that means having to figure out how all the other pieces fit together. Some can be dismissed as self-aggrandizement, but there seems to be a common root in several of the stories, namely the importance of fire magic. Asshai is a major source of fire mages; if they had worked with Valyrians to create the first dragons, it could have served as the basis of their respective myths.

But that leaves the question of whether there were really dragons in Westeros before the Valyrians created them. I can come up with three major possibilities:

Septon Barth is wrong and there have always been fully functional dragons all over the place. I think we can dismiss this one out of hand.

The maesters correctly attribute things like knighthood or seven references to anachronism, but don’t with dragons. In reality dragons only appeared in Westeros as strays from Valyria much later in history.

The “dragons” from ancient Westeros were very different from Valyrian dragons – maybe related to the wyverns of Sothoryos, maybe even “feathered” to give rise to the idea of griffins. These extinct creatures took on the attributes of Valyrian dragons by later singers.

I’m partial to the third idea, because it would take care of multiple questions, and the best theories are usually the ones that explain the most data points.

Of course, griffins and wyverns are far from the only mythical creature that one finds in Essos. There are also mentions of centaurs, which are dismissed with the same argument given in our world, namely that people who didn’t know about horse riders got the wrong idea. Whether or not ice dragons in the North are real remains to be seen, but it would be interesting if “cold” became another element in the magical universe – it would certainly fit the Others more than the elements of earth or water. The brindled men of Sothoryos (who are seen in the fighting pits in Meereen so they’re definitely real) seem like another surviving hominid offshoot like the Ibbenese (who are clearly Neanderthals). Shrykes and winged men are probably mythical, given how far east they are. Tiger-men sound like skinchangers. The Jhogwin and Ifequevron may be proof that giants and the children of the forest were native to more places than just Westeros.

Indeed, a lot of what this does is put the local history of Westeros into a global scale, and on that note…

…let’s see if we can catch all the Lovecraft references!

The Deep Ones and the Drowned God’s famous words are really obvious Lovecraft references, so obvious that most people quickly notice them. There are others here in The World – lots of them, in fact, some of them fairly obscure.

BUT GUESS WHO’S GOT TWO THUMBS AND A SERIOUSLY PROBLEMATIC FAVE! I’ve added numbers on them, see if you can figure out why before the end. (cw: racism/anti-semitism/xenophobia on all these links, because it’s Lovecraft and he was a bigot)

Church of Starry Wisdom: originating in Yi Ti (4) but found throughout the world, including in Braavos (1), it originates in Lovecraft’s The Haunter in the Dark

The Black Goat of forested Qohor (2) seems a pretty clear reference to one of the titles of Shub-Niggurath (don’t think too hard about how that name is pronounced), “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young”

“Ib” (2) references “Ib” in The Doom that Came to Sarnath

The idol of “a gigantic toad of malignant aspect” on Toad Isle (3) is a shout-out to Lovecraft’s version of Tsathoggua, an “amorphous toad-like god” dwelling in N’kai

The lizard men of Sothoryos (4) are a possible nod to the inhabitants of The Nameless City, though lizard people have a long history elsewhere

The lost city of Sarnath (3), as in The Doom that Came to, from above

The people of the Thousand Islands (4) worship “squamous, fish-headed gods,” included because nobody uses the word “squamous” unless they are doing Lovecraft pastiche, even though he only used the word once

N’ghai (4) might refer to N’kai, since N’kai is an underground city like Nefer

Carcosa (4) with its yellow emperor is an obvious nod to the pre-Lovecraft stories An Inhabitant of Carcosa and The King in Yellow that is sometimes used in Cthulhu mythos stories (though not by Lovecraft himself)

K’dath (4) is Kadath from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and if you have not read that novella, it is bizarre but one of my favorite Lovecraft tales and reads a lot like an RPG campaign

Leng (4) reference the Plateau of Leng, which is also in The Dream-Quest, but appears in At the Mountains of Madness and The Hound as somewhere in the waking world, in Antarctica or Central Asia. The people of Leng revered the Old Ones in ages past, a very obvious reference to the Great Old Ones, extremely powerful and long-lived aliens that serve the Outer Gods

I may have missed a few in the weirder names, too, since a few of these have messed up spellings. Now, with this many references, man, it might seem that this is straight-up part of the Cthulhu mythos, but there’s a reason I have those numbers. They correspond to the concentric rings of knowledge I started this entry out with, and as you can see, the references get more and more common the further you are away from Westeros and the closer you are to “here there be dragons.”

And on closer look, a lot of these references don’t amount to much more than name-drops. The exact nature of the Black Goat in Lovecraft is unclear, and was probably him ripping off another story called The Great God Pan; Qohor’s religion owes as much to ideas of Baphomet and Satanism as it does to Lovecraft. The Cult of Starry Wisdom didn’t worship a fallen asteroid, as they do in Essos, but rather a device they could use to see between worlds. Tsathoggua didn’t preside over merrow-human hybrids as on Toad Isle. The Neanderthal Ibbenese in no way resemble the green-skinned, bug-eyed, voiceless Ib. Sarnath’s doom is from a very mundane Dothraki invasion rather than being transformed into monsters. Carcosa should be a lost ruin. Leng is a cold barren plateau populated either by people with horns and hooved feet or by “a corpse-eating cult,” not a tropical island with tall beautiful humans. Kadath exists only in the dream lands – and the dream cycle is also where you find Sarnath, Ib, and sometimes Leng, all explicitly imaginary places in a string of Dunsany-esque fantasy stories with minimal connection to the rest of the Cthulhu Mythos.

The only real exception are those Old Ones in Leng, trapped beneath the earth in sealed underground caverns. One of the reasons I doubt the show’s explanation of the origin of the Others is the one from the books is that it’s so local, entirely driven by the children vs First Men conflict, whereas in the books the Long Night was worldwide. I don’t know how the show intends to reconcile this provincialism with the prophecies of Azor Ahai; how could Asshai care about this if it happened on the other side of the world? And it’s far from the only culture with Long Night myths. Yi Ti has a fairly elaborate one, and the book gives many names for Azor Ahai: Hyrkoon the Hero (Hyrkoon), Yin Tar (Yi Ti, and a woman), Neferion (N’ghai?), and Eldric Shadowchaser (Andal? First Men? The name is a Michael Moorcock reference so who knows); we can probably add the last hero of Nan’s tales to that list.

That there might be another sealed evil in a can under Leng doesn’t seem impossible, but the series already indicates what they might be: the Others. It is entirely possible that the Wall is not the only barrier keeping whatever caused the Long Night from once again covering the earth; it may simply be the most vulnerable because Westeros no longer believes in magic and myth as it used to, and everyone is too busy with local politics to care about another hibernal apocalypse. Martin has created his own strange mythos, with giants that are radically different from our own legends, monstrous merfolk, the strange child of the forest that rather than elves, and the unearthly and ethereal white walkers with their armies of undead and giant ice spiders. Frankly it would be a disappointment if he grafted on someone else’s stories.

[uchicagosymphonyorchestra]

Maestra Barbara Schubert leads the USO into the New Year with a concert of orchestral variations, from the perspective of three different composers. The program features Johannes Brahms’ well-known Variations on a Theme by Haydn, French composer Vincent d’Indy’s eclectic Istar Variations, and Paul Hindemith’s masterful Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. Together these three works offer a fascinating view into how diverse composers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries treated this traditional musical form. A reception will follow. Admission is free. Donations are requested at the door: $10 general, $5 students.

RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1266098793469630/

Program Notes:

Johannes Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a (1873)

Johannes Brahms lived and worked at a time when the Austro-German canon of classical music had very recently solidi ed. A new idea of musical historicism (or antiquarianism) was emerging on top of that canon as well: the Bach Society, whose purpose was to edit and publish the complete works of that recently rediscovered Baroque composer, was formed in the year 1850, and a similar Handel Society appeared in 1858. This historicism was fed by the desire for a national pantheon of Classical composers, which grew throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. This desire was  nally ful lled in the 1890s by two gargantuan collected editions: the  rst was called Monuments of German Musical Art, and the second was titled Monuments of Musical Art in Austria. In the late nineteenth century, then, the story of classical music in Germany and Austria was a story of roots:  nding them, creating them, and then using them to propagate a new national culture.

Brahms’ career lined up perfectly with the development of this national historicism: his  rst published opus (his Piano Sonata in C Major) was written in 1853, and his last published opus (the Bach-inspired Eleven Chorale Preludes for Organ) was written in 1896. Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56, emerged against this historicist background. Even in the early nineteenth century, the trio of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven represented a holy trinity of Austro- German compositional practice. One needs only to look to the famous words of the music patron Count Waldstein, when he funded Beethoven’s studies with Haydn: “You shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.” For Brahms to write a set of variations on Haydn, then, was like an act of intercession, intended to connect oneself to the musical divine.

Brahms took the theme for this work from a manuscript shown to him by an early Haydn scholar, Carl Ferdinand Pohl. It was the second movement of a piece for winds, and above it was written “St. Anthony Chorale.” Brahms was enamored with the chorale’s expansiveness, and set out to write a set of variations with the chorale as its theme. Brahms thought of variation form as a balancing act: on one hand, one needed a unique theme (but not odd enough to be distracting); and on the other, one needed inventive variations (which should still be recognizably related to the theme). With the new backdrop of nineteenth-century historicism, there was an additional factor to balance: a set of variations on a classic theme ought to pay its respects to the greats without being overly conservative — and it ought to innovate but it could not leave its theme behind. Brahms had previously written a set of piano variations on a theme by Handel, which demonstrated his ability to write music that blossomed from the hardy seed left behind by a great master. He hoped that this Haydn chorale would be just as fertile for a new composition.

It might be surprising, then, to learn that Haydn actually had nothing to do with the wind version of the “St. Anthony Chorale” that caught Brahms’s imagination. Musical misattributions were common before the twentieth century for two reasons:  first, copyright laws were few and far between; and second, much music was copied by hand and disseminated in manuscript form without careful oversight. Musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon has purported that this “St. Anthony Chorale” was in fact composed by Haydn’s student, Ignaz Joseph Pleyel. (And in any case, the original inspiration for the chorale tune did not come from Haydn: the chorale was based on a hymn sung by pilgrims in Padua, where the tongue of St. Anthony was kept as a relic.) Brahms’s theme, then, lacks the authentic connection to Haydn that Brahms had hoped would tie him to a venerable tradition. 

Of course, none of this changes the sheer joy of listening to Brahms’s Variations. The listener’s curiosity is immediately kindled by the opening statement of the theme: it is organized into five- measure phrases, which thwart our deeply ingrained, foursquare Classical expectations. Brahms preserves this unique detail in every one of his eight successive variations. The melody of the theme also provokes curiosity: it’s an oddly static melody, mostly hovering around the same notes (D and E- at above it).

The  first variation takes us into definitively Brahmsian territory: over a static bass we hear a bustle of triplets in the strings, set against duplets in the other instruments. This sort of melodic three- against-two is one of Brahms’s favorite maneuvers, as many beleaguered pianists know. The second variation gives us the first hint of storm and stress: sharp timpani strokes are followed by quiet flurries of motion in the strings. The third variation soothes the anxiety of the previous one with sinuous lines played by the woodwinds over a placid string accompaniment. The fourth variation grows out of the previous one, with the same hushed lyricism now cast within the less con dent minor mode. The  fifth variation is a lively Poco presto, serving the same function as a scherzo movement within classical sonata form. In the sixth variation the horns take center stage, playing a version of the opening melody that is decorated with skipping sixteenth notes. Here Brahms changes the underlying harmonies of the theme, closing the initial phrases with unexpected cadences in a minor key. The seventh variation has a kind of courtly magnanimity, with slow lilting rhythms recalling the Baroque siciliano dance. The eighth variation, which calls for the strings to play with mutes, casts us into a state of mysterious groundlessness. We regain our footing with a stately passacaglia finale. (A passacaglia is a form in which the bass line repeats the same figure over and over, while the other parts play constantly-changing countermelodies over it.) This passacaglia leads us seamlessly back to the original St. Anthony Chorale, played triumphantly by the whole orchestra to cap the work.

Vincent d’Indy: Istar: Variations Symphoniques, Op. 42 (1896)

Vincent D’Indy’s Istar: Variations Symphoniques, Op. 42, is based on a story from the Epic of Gilgamesh that describes the descent of Ishtar, goddess of love, into the underworld in order to save her imprisoned lover. Ishtar is forced to remove a piece of jewelry or an item of clothing at each of the four gates through which she passes. This slow and methodical disrobement was the inspiration for d’Indy’s reversal of variation form: instead of beginning with the theme, d’Indy begins with his most far-flung variation. Each subsequent variation is pared-down and re ned, and the piece ends with the “naked” theme. A concertgoer who is familiar with Richard Strauss’ opera Salome (with its infamous “Dance of the Seven Veils”) might expect a garishly orientalist Ishtar — but not so. D’Indy’s Istar is much closer in character to the nineteenth-century orchestral genre called the “symphonic poem,” which is best represented by Liszt’s allegorical works of the 1850s. Istar projects this same sort of allegorical abstraction. We do not hear the urgency of a determined goddess here; instead, we hear the story of ornament and simplicity, told in a late- romantic Franco-German voice.

This piece’s unusual form, and the myth that inspired it, is worth examining. Why would the Babylonian Ishtar be a promising subject for a French symphonic piece in the German genre of the “symphonic poem”? What would have made it feasible — or necessary — for such a piece to be penned in fin-de-siècle Paris?

Istar was composed in 1896, during a period of European fascination with ancient cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. As the Ottoman Empire began its slow dissolution over the late nineteenth century, the Europeans swept in — and when they left, they took local artifacts and mythologies with them. The tale of Ishtar (from the Epic of Gilgamesh) is one of those mythologies. The Gilgamesh story was first translated into English by the Assyriologist George Smith, who attracted international attention by comparing the flood myth in the Epic to Noah’s flood in the Bible. Smith further declared that Gilgamesh was the same figure as Nimrod of the Old Testament. These similarities to more familiar European myths were what put early Assyriology into the public eye.

Indeed, the story of Ishtar descending into the underworld is remarkably similar to the myth of Orpheus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Orpheus was a hero who plied his way into Hades with the musical power of his lyre to save his beloved Eurydice. The Orpheus myth appears throughout the history of European music like a leitmotif. Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), for example, was a seminal early opera. Likewise, the musical reformer Christoph Willibald Gluck also turned to Orpheus when he wrote Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), his first opera written in a new, streamlined style. Victorian readers of the Gilgamesh epic were quick to point out the similarity between Ishtar and Orpheus — and d’Indy’s Istar, in turn, appears to triangulate the distance between the Babylonian Ishtar and the Greek Orpheus. While Monteverdi’s Orfeo began with simple pastoral forms that became more formal, more ornate, and more filled with pathos as Orpheus journeyed into the world of the dead, D’Indy does the exact opposite: his most inventive material comes at the beginning, with ravishing orchestration for the initial variations, gradually lessening as Istar’s (literal) divestment proceeds, and resulting in a knowing and elegant simplicity in the final section of the work. D’Indy’s Istar, then, is a reversed Orpheus.

Paul Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Weber (1943)

Paul Hindemith began his work on the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber shortly after leaving Germany for the United States. In Germany, the composer had alternated between resisting the Nazi government and making concessions to them: thus, a man whose music was officially catalogued as “degenerate” could at the very same time receive praise from Josef Goebbels, who praised Hindemith as the foremost composer of his generation. Despite Hindemith’s popular success, though, political tensions mounted. Wilhelm Furtwängler, the legendary conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was even forced to step down from his post temporarily because of his vigorous defense of Hindemith. The composer emigrated to the U.S. in 1940, and joined the music faculty at Yale University.

The Symphonic Metamorphosis began its life as a series of sketches for a ballet. Hindemith had planned to collaborate with Léonide Massine on a ballet based on the music of classical composer Carl Maria von Weber, but Hindemith and Massine’s artistic differences over the staging eventually killed the project. Hindemith refashioned his sketches into the orchestral piece we hear tonight. The themes that Hindemith selected for “metamorphosis” were all fairly obscure Weber tunes: three of the Metamorphosis’ movements were taken from Weber’s Op. 60 collection of piano duets, and the middle scherzo was based on Weber’s music for the Friedrich Schiller play Turandot. One might speculate that Hindemith chose these little-known and little-appreciated themes so he could showcase his compositional skill. (You might recall the balancing act that Brahms was faced with: don’t pick a theme that will steal the show from your variations!)

The Symphonic Metamorphosis ultimately turns Weber’s original pieces into empty molds that are then filled with Hindemith’s inventive fire and flash. The first movement, a raucous Allegro, transforms a Turkish march by Weber into something far more foreboding. The second movement, crafted from music originally for Turandot, is a set of variations on a Chinese melody (drawn by Weber from Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique of 1768). The Chinese tune is repeated over and over, to create a feverish perpetual motion machine whose ceaseless whirring is underscored by the almost never-ending trills in the woodwinds. By the end of the movement, this off-kilter tune completely exhausts itself of significance: it’s as if one had repeated a word so many times that the word is now a string of unfamiliar sounds. The third movement, a soothing Andantino, hews closely to the original structure of Weber’s piano duet but adds two new elements: first, a cushion of harmony in the strings, and second, a final flute solo that is foreign to Weber’s style. The final movement is yet another march, introduced with horn-calls and martial beats of the snare drum. One of the goals of the Metamorphosis was to show the new possibilities that were unlocked by the huge, post-Romantic, twentieth-century orchestra. The piece requires an extensive percussion section: over and above the standard percussion instruments we hear a tambourine, gong, wood blocks, tom-toms, and chimes. Hindemith’s use of percussion gives every movement an edge of danger.

The bizarre exoticism of the “Turkish” first movement and “Chinese” second movement are worth exploring. The Ottomans were a legendary military opponent of the Habsburgs for the entire existence of the Habsburg empire, and it was commonplace for Biedermeier-era composers to mimic the sounds of a Turkish military band (think of Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca”). It’s not surprising, then, to encounter a Turkish march by Weber. But why would Hindemith choose a Turkish march for his Metamorphosis? The Turandot scherzo is even more confusing: Weber wrote his music for Schiller’s play Turandot, which was in turn based on an eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte play by Carlo Gozzi, who in turn was inspired by the Sassanid Persian tale of Princess Turandokht (“daughter of Turan,” Turan being the ancient name for Central Asia). European whimsy gradually transformed Turandokht into the Chinese Turandot, the thwarted empress of Puccini’s eponymous opera.

And what can we make of Hindemith’s putative homage to Weber? Weber was a composer idolized in his own time, but after a few generations he was remembered only as a composer of a few famous operas. It might surprise the reader to learn that the nineteenth-century critic A. B. Marx wrote that Weber’s work was on par with Beethoven’s: it “often surpassed [Beethoven’s work] in grandeur and elaboration.” But Hindemith isn’t bowing to the old master, Carl Maria von Weber. His piece does not seem to highlight the original features of Weber’s music in same the way that Brahms’s Variations paid tribute to the simplicity of “Haydn’s” chorale. Neither does Hindemith scorn Weber: even though Hindemith’s transformed final product is overwhelming in its fire and brilliance, it still seems to depend on the structure of the Weber pieces on which it was based. (The first movement of the Metamorphosis, for example, preserves the exact same phrase structure as Weber’s original.) Finally, Hindemith’s treatment of the Chinese melody from Turandot raises questions: this is not a metamorphosis of Weber, but a metamorphosis of Weber’s original metamorphosis. In sum, Hindemith’s Metamorphosis doesn’t point backwards to its original source material in the way Brahms’ piece does — but it doesn’t call attention to its own structure like d’Indy’s Istar, either.

The intended subject of this Metamorphosis isn’t the beginning of the transformation, or its final product: it’s the process of metamorphosis itself — a process that inadvertently creates a formless but threatening Orientalized “Other.” (A painter might set out to turn the story of Ishtar into a painting, but he would shudder to imagine the real Ishtar who eluded his brushstrokes.) This “Other” emerges as a threat only after it has passed through the ears of Rousseau, of Schiller, of Weber, and finally through Hindemith’s ears to us — like a racializing game of “telephone” (a game that was once called “Chinese whispers”).

Hindemith’s Metamorphosis, then, is an object lesson in how music is inextricably bound up in the political conditions of its creation. Is it possible, as a composer, to connect your music to the past in just one specific way, and to scrub away all other traces of intervening history? Is it possible to write music based on a theme penned by a composer as monolithic as Haydn, without calling attention to a Bloomian “anxiety of influence”? Can the genealogy of a melody, or of a myth, be wiped away to create a clean musical slate to work on? We listen to Variations on a Theme by Haydn, though, whose theme has nothing to do with Haydn, and we suspect the answer is “no.”

— Notes by Andrew Malilay White Ph.D. Student in Music

[khalilhumam]

Through the Orientalist looking-glass: An interview with Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi

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Through the Orientalist looking-glass: An interview with Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi

Lalla Essaydi, Harem #2, 2009. 71 × 88 in 180.4 × 223.5 cm.

Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi, 64, is well known for her dazzling, multidimensional staged photographs, which in spite of their simplicity, masterfully capture and challenge the complexities of social structures, women's identities and cultural traditions.  Essaydi‘s artworks not only reinvent visual traditions; they also “invoke the western fascination with the odalisque, the veil, and, of course, the harem, as expressed in Orientalist painting.” “My work speaks primarily in terms of Moroccan identity, but visual identifiers such as the veil, harem, ornate ornamentation, and sumptuous color also resonate with other regions in the Muslim and Arabic worlds where the place of women has historically been marked by limited expression and constrained individuality,” Essaydi said in an interview with Global Voices.  Raised in Morocco, Essaydi has lived in Saudi Arabia and France and is currently based in Boston. She has exhibited at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fries Museum in the Netherlands, among others. Essaydi is a poet of architecture, the female body, and color. Where letters overwhelm her composition, the bold presence of women and the veiled apprehension in their eyes disrupt all equations of beauty. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Moroccan artist, Lalla Essaydi. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Omid Memarian: Over the past two decades you have been creating striking artworks that conceptually challenge social structures and comment on power and authority. How did you find and develop this visual language?  Laila Essaydi: My approach to art in general, and my relation to Islamic art in particular, is deeply rooted in my personal experience. As a Moroccan-born artist who has lived in New York, Boston, and Marrakesh and who travels frequently to the Arab world, I have become deeply aware of how the cultures of the “Orient” and “Occident” view one another. In particular, I have become increasingly aware of the impact of the Western gaze on Arab culture.  Although Orientalism most often suggests a 19th-century European vision of the East, as a set of assumptions it lives on today: both in the gaze of the West and in the way Arab societies continue to internalize and respond to that gaze. In its early form, Orientalism was a literal “vision,” finding expression in the work of Western painters who traveled to the “exotic” East in search of cultures more colorful than their own, I have used it as a point of departure in much of my own work—in both painting and photography. The imagery I found in Orientalist painting has resonated with me in tricky ways and ultimately helped me situate my own experience in a powerful visual language. In my photography, I explore this space, whether mental or physical, and interrogate its role in gender identity-making, while engaging with centuries of cultural heritage and artistic practices. For instance, my images of women, embedded in Islamic architecture, recognize and represent an alternative to similar spaces, as imagined for women, in painting and photography, from within the Arab and Muslim worlds. My fusion of calligraphy (a sacred art traditionally reserved for men) and henna (an adornment worn and applied only by women) similarly reproduces artistic traditions and practices common in everyday life in Islamic cultures while transgressing gender roles and the boundaries between private and public spaces.

Lalla Essaydi, Harem #1, 2009

OM: You were born and raised in Morocco, spent 19 years in Saudi Arabia, moved to Paris and studied there and finally landed in the U.S., studied, and lived there. How has this geographical path impacted your art, your perception of women, and their presence in your photos?  LE: My work is inspired by personal history. The many territories that converge in my work are not only geographical ones but territories of the imagination, shaped, above all, by childhood and memory—by these invisible influences. My work cannot be reduced to Orientalist discourse. Orientalism has given me a lens through which to focus on the converging territories of my work and through which to see more clearly the influence of Western imagination in the Eastern ways of conceptualizing the self. At a more personal level, my creative practice is a means through which I can reinvent and position myself in different times and cultural contexts. At the same time, I also celebrate the cultural richness of Morocco, the Middle East and North African countries. Although I tend to think of my work as, first and foremost, being about the experience of women, I would say that these elements are also significant. They do not happen incidentally but are part of the inherent qualities that I bring to my vision and my work.

Lalla Essaydi, Bullets Revisited #37, 2014.

OM: How did earning a BFA and MFA from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Art contribute to your career and artistic transformation? Was the education something you expected? LE: I enrolled in the Museum School because I wanted to return to Morocco and be able to pursue my hobby with greater knowledge and skill. Instead, I found my life’s work. I learned that some of the most important things in our lives happen unexpectedly. We take a class in painting and discover an entire new world at our fingertips: waiting to be grasped. We take a class in painting and find art history, and installation, photography and so much more. We look for a glass of water and find an ocean, calling to us. And we answer the call.  I never dreamed I would spend seven years in this environment, immersing myself in everything the School had to offer, and learning more than I had ever imagined was possible.   This was, and is, a school of artists, designed by and for artists: where students are free to choose what they want to learn. It only offers elective modules, and there are no mandatory classes. When we realize the riches that are available, we want to absorb everything. At first I was overwhelmed. I was one of those students who roamed the corridors of the School late at night, peering into the empty rooms, with their silent trappings of whatever medium was taught there.  Eventually, the School taught me a second lesson. With all these opportunities and this great array of artistic riches, with this enormous freedom to choose, comes responsibility. Responsibility first means discipline, and setting priorities, followed by learning new skills and techniques. And then comes self-direction, as we learn and understand new ways of thinking about art, and the ambition to do something important with our lives.   My career offered me something else, something I did not expect. This very public environment offered me a private space, something I had never had at home. It offered me a space where I was free to express my thoughts in private, without the inhibiting knowledge that they were available for all to see. This enabled me to explore and bring to the fore aspects of my own interior life I hadn’t even known were there. While I knew that creating art is an intensely personal experience, I also learned that it happens only with the help of a lot of gifted and dedicated people: people who teach and guide, people who encourage and nurture, people who inspire you to keep reaching to create what is excellent and beautiful and true. You can tell, I loved the School. 

Lalla Essaydi. Les Femmes du Maroc: La Grande Odalisque, 2008

OM: Women and their private space in the Arab world are central to your series “Harem” and other work. Where did this curiosity and focus come from and sow has it changed over time?  LE: My work reaches beyond Islamic culture as it also invokes the Western fascination with the odalisque, the veil, and, of course, the harem as it is expressed in Orientalist painting. Orientalism has long been a source of fascination for me. My background in art is in painting, and it is as a painter that I began my investigation into Orientalism. My study led me to a much deeper understanding of the painting space so beautifully addressed by Orientalist painters in thrall to Arab décor. From its terrific prominence in these paintings, this décor made me keenly aware of the importance of interior space in Arab/Islamic culture. And finally, of course, I became aware of the patterns of cultural domination and predatory sexual fantasy encoded in Orientalist painting.  Memarian: Your artworks incorporate multiple layers, a beautiful and colorful layer on the outside, and inviting mixed layers of calligraphy, henna, ceramic, and also models. The latter rests on the edge of cliché, but it also creates a lively and mystical visual labyrinth. What is it like to navigate this fine line?  Essaydi: It is important for me that my work be beautiful. While it is received very differently in Western and Arab contexts, its aesthetic is appreciated in both. More critical for me, however, is that the photographs achieve a balance between their political, historical and aesthetic content, as well as make a statement on art. But the fact that I have sometimes been critiqued for, on the one hand, perpetuating expectations and stereotypes rather than refuting them and, on the other, for exposing that which should remain private, indicates that responses to my work are highly subjective, context-specific and likely culturally informed. Tempered by the ambiguity of the work’s literal meaning, perhaps defaulting to the most accessible and intuitive reaction: perception of the stereotype. Nevertheless, with deliberate subtlety, my work introduces alternative, challenging perspectives on canonical 19th-century Orientalist paintings. As a female artist from the regions depicted, mine is an historically repressed voice that “complicates any neat framing of the canon.” Drawing on similar visual devices, I try to engage it in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable dialogue, and re-situates the Orientalist genre in the history of art.

Harem Revisited #34, 2012

OM: In a 2012 interview you said that your models “see themselves as part of a small feminist movement.” While “freedom” is one of your main concerns, and many of your works seem to reconstruct traditions, how does this contradictory formula have such a liberating result?  LE: My work may seem to “reconstruct traditions,” but in fact I am trying to create a new understanding. The liberating result comes because in many ways, performance is an intrinsic element of my photographs, evident in the figures’ careful composition, in the physical act of writing and, more importantly, in the intensity of the sitters’ embodied presence that also renders them subjects rather than objects.  Through writing, I lay bare personal thoughts, memory, and experiences that belong to me and the women featured as individuals within a broader narrative. Though my work speaks primarily in terms of Moroccan identity, visual identifiers such as the veil, harem, ornate ornamentation, and sumptuous color also resonate with other regions in the Muslim and Arabic worlds where the place of women has historically been marked by limited expression and constrained individuality.   While my work evokes the region’s traditional aesthetics and social practices, I insert a dimension that complicates them: a personal narrative that takes form in the written word. In volumes upon volumes of text, these women voice critical reflections on and interrogations of memories, all captured within the space of my photographs. At the same time, I write about historical representations of Moroccan, Arabic, Muslim, and African women. To understand my work, then, one must examine long-standing preconceptions held by diverse peoples over time, as well as by myself.

Lalla Essaydi, Bullets, Jackson Fine Art. February 3 – April 15, 2017

Written by Omid Memarian · comments (0) Donate · Share this: twitter facebook reddit

[bluewatsons]

Emmanuel Szurek, To Call a Turk a Turk: Patronymic Nationalism in Turkey in the 1930s, 2 Revue D'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (2013)

By their denotative and even more their connotative charge, large numbers of Turkish patronyms are repositories loaded with symbolism. To understand this, one must examine the discursive context in which the “Surname Law” of June 1934 was adopted. The Kemalist leaders imported into Turkey the European anthroponymic system and had the Anatolian population choose surnames from an onomastic stock selected according to etymological and semantic criteria. In its actual linguistic dimension, the alteration of anthroponyms in Turkey displays a particularly strong case of nationalization of cognition.

I went to primary school in 1952. At school, I bore the number 97. Our teacher was called Hekimhanlı Resul Okur [Resul Hekimhan “Reader”].[2]  For the purposes of demonstration, the meaning of Turkish...[2] After so many years, delving into my memory, some recollections come back to me. Like any pupil, I mistreated my exercise books and went through a great number of pencils. I was in a hurry to learn how to read, and the memory of that ABC, illustrated in color, has never left me. Neither have I forgotten the set phrases:. .. “The crow says caw. Look! Climb on this branch! The crow has brought some hazelnuts. The mouse has eaten seven of them. A cat has caught it. He said meow, and ate it.” And at the end: “My mother is a Turk, my father is a Turk! Son of a Turk, I am a Turk!” At home, I went to the top of the stairs and swung my legs forwards, like in Türkü, and sang “My mother is a Turk, my father is a Turk! Son of a Turk, I am a Turk!”[3]  “Anam Türk, Babam Türk! Türkoğlu Türk’üm ben!:” İlhan...[3]

Through their denotative and even more by their connotative charge, many Turkish patronyms are heavily laden with symbolism. To understand this, one must examine the discursive context in which the “Surname Law” of June 1934 was adopted. The Kemalist leaders imported into Turkey the European anthroponymic system and had the Anatolian population choose a surname from an onomastic stock selected according to etymological and semantic criteria. The sources used in this paper will be the official, normative documents which instituted anthroponymic reform, the public and didactic discourses which accompanied its enactment, and finally the family names available on the Kemalist onomastic market, to the extent that they are a reflection of a linguistic (social) practice[4]  The notion of onomastic market is derived from Pierre...[4].

It can be readily admitted that an internal and static study of a patronymic discourse does not allow any measurement of its social effectiveness, that is the degree of attachment of those being named (Turkish citizens) to the meanings put, in their name, into their names, by those allocating the names (the Kemalist leadership). To be very clear, that is outside the scope of the present contribution.[5]  See the thesis of Meltem Turkoz, who, using oral inquiry,...[5] There remains, however, within the framework of the present dossier, centered on diverse forms of onomastic resistance and resilience, a fundamental need to consider, and to grasp in exactly what way the reform of 1934 was part of an authoritarian program of social and political summoning. In its specifically linguistic dimension, the alteration of anthroponyms in Turkey represents a particularly stark case of symbolic conformity, and of the nationalization of cognition.[6]  My thanks go to Nicolas Camélio, Daniel Fields, Monique...[6]

The Neological Ambition of Surname Reform

The Turkist Paradigm

Turk, Turkish, Turkey – a nation, a language, and a state: what a commonplace trilogy of nationalist common sense. In linguistic terms, this is known as a paradigm: an ethnonym, a glossonym, and a toponym.[7]  French-French-France, Pole-Polish-Poland, Romanian-Romanian-Romania...[7] In the context of the past 150 years, each of these labels is a kind of neologism.[8]  On the understanding that a neologism is not necessarily...[8] It is argued that the nationalist sense of the word Türk gained currency only at the very end of the nineteenth century.[9]  Ahmet Yildiz, “Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebilene.” Türk Ulusal...[9] Until that time, while the term could occasionally be found as an ethnonym, Türk was frequently used in the language of elite city-dwelling Ottomans as a socionym to refer to the rural Turkish-speaking populations of Rumelia and Anatolia with strong connotations of class-based disdain.[10]  On this point, a translation of Türk might be something...[10] As Eric Hobsbawm points out, “[the notion of ethnicity and race] probably more commonly served to separate social strata than entire communities.”[11]  Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780:...[11] Secondly, the glossonym Türkçe, while found for centuries in the form Türkî, did not designate a stabilized entity – that is, it was not a codified, “grammatized” language that was subsequently labeled the official language of the Ottoman state – before the second half of the nineteenth century.[12]  Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic...[12] As for the toponym Türkiyya (later, Türkiye), this too is an invention of the late nineteenth century.[13]  Howard Eissenstat, “Metaphors of Race and Discourse...[13] Whereas Europeans took to calling Asia Minor Turchia during the time of the Third Crusade,[14]  Claude Cahen, The Formation of Turkey. The Seljukid...[14] the Ottomans referred to their country using phrases such as “The Sublime State,” and “The Well-Protected Domains.”[15]  Güneş Işiksel, “La Politique étrangère ottomane dans...[15]

Strictly speaking, it makes sense to add to the trilogy just discussed the name of a fourth accomplice – and to do so by putting forward our own neologism: the word Turkology is indeed an “epistemonym;” the term emerged in various European languages in the last third of the nineteenth century (though its translation in Turkish in the form of Türkiyât scarcely occurred before the twentieth century.) This orientalist “discipline” consists of turning the Turkic peoples and languages – scattered, as is well known, across an immense territory stretching from the Balkans to northern Siberia – into a philological, archaeological, and ethnographic object. Initially, the epistemological elaboration of Turkology preceded the intellectual construction of Turkish nationalism. Later, the two became interdependent.[16]  Emmanuel Szurek, “Les Langues orientales, Jean Deny...[16] Many scholars share the belief that the Turkologists played an important role in the intellectual crystallization of Turkism among the educated Turkish-speaking Muslims of the Ottoman Empire[17]  Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London:...[17]. From the 1870s onwards, the latter “discovered” that the “Turks” were not mere uncouth country folk; they were also the descendants of a glorious civilization which had had its heyday several centuries before the arrival of Islam, and whose stomping ground had been the whole of central Asia.

This hijacking of the scientific discourse by the promoters of nationality is not at all surprising. As with many European national constructs, the gradual discovery of the rustic virtue of the little people in the countryside, their songs and dances, and their language by the bourgeois intellectuals of the big cities is to a large extent an indirect reflection of transnational scientific research.[18]  Anne-Marie Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales....[18] The fact is that by placing the categories Turk, Turkish, Turkey, and Turkology next to each other, a quite classic case of nominalist convergence is created. At the end of this convergence, each of the above terms provides a reference and a justification for the others: “Turkish,” the language of a nation called the “Turks,” is spoken in a country named “Turkey,” and qualifies as intellectual property of a discipline known as “Turcology.” However, it remains the case that in terms of the comparability of nationalist symbolic repertoires, the experience of the reform of personal names carried out in the Turkey of the 1930s goes beyond the textbook examples made familiar in the constructivist literature. This is explained by the strictly linguistic context in which it took place – that of a “revolution of the signifiers,”[19]  In the words of Benoît Fliche, elsewhere in this d...[19] which equally affected common nouns and proper nouns. In other words, we will see that from the rather long list of the Turkist paradigm – an ethnonym, a glossonym, a toponym, and an “epistemonym” – it is possible to construct, both etymologically and semantically, a large number of personal names.

The “Language Revolution”

At the end of the 1920s, Kemalist leaders launched a vast project to nationalize the tools for communicating and to reclassify the world. Initially cosmetic,[20]  In 1927, for instance, the Cadde-i Kebir was classically...[20] the political manipulation of signifiers quickly moved towards real engineering, which made Kemalist language policies a unique case. The “Alphabet Revolution” of 1928-30 represented the first act of Kemalist linguistic interventionism. Within eighteen months, Arabic characters disappeared from public spaces and from publishing; the script used by literate Ottomans was replaced by a transcription derived from the Roman alphabet that the Kemalist intellectuals were quick to name the “Turkish alphabet.”[21]  Birol Caymaz and Emmanuel Szurek, “La Révolution au...[21]

Three years later, in July 1932, a Society for the Study of Turkish Language [Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti] was created. The task of this semipublic organization was to “purify” and “nationalize” the language,[22]  A sociological study of this organization can be found...[22] a process that entailed a huge proscription of words of Arabic or Persian origin, words that were considered “foreign,” “corrupted,” “invasive,” and not a true part of the “genius” of the Turkish “national” language. In fact, throughout the period 1932-1935 a multitude of words in daily use, but of Arab-Persian derivation, were formally excluded from the linguistic norm. To fill the gap, the Society for the Study of Turkish Language conducted a vast survey of dialect words across the whole of Anatolia, with the support of the combined services of the state. Additionally, it examined traditional writings in order to exhume disused Turkic words. These lexicographical campaigns provided the etymological raw materials (roots and affixes) from which the Kemalist linguists selected a replacement lexicon. The results of these efforts began to be published in 1934 in a “journal of the collection “[Tarama Dergisi]. In the following year the first two officially “bilingual” lexicons rolled off the presses of the Government Printing Office, providing translations in both directions between old Turkish (called “Ottoman,” Osmanlıca), and new Turkish (baptized “pure Turkish,” Öz Türkçe).[23]  Türk Dili Araştırma Kurumu, Osmanlıcadan Türkçeye Cep...[23] The operation was a “success.”[24]  Lewis, Turkish Language Reform. From a linguistics...[24] In a few years, the “Language Revolution” led to the fixing in place of a radically different variety of what was still the language of the written press at the end of the 1920s.

The 1934 Reform as Language Policy

Before examining how the 1934 reform of surnames extended Kemalist linguistic purification, it must be pointed out that the quest for onomastic purity was not an invention of the 1930s. Since the time of the second constitutional monarchy, two major representatives of the Turkist movement had taken the initiative by Turkifying their own names: Mehmet Ziya, a Kurd from Diyarbekir (in eastern Anatolia), took the name Ziya Gökalp [“Blue Hero”];[25]  J. Deny, “Ziya Gök Alp,” Revue du Monde Musulman 61...[25] Moïz Kohen, a Jew from Serres (in Macedonia), rebaptized himself Tekinalp [“Unequalled Hero”].[26]  Tekinalp was an ardent supporter of the assimilation...[26] Rıza Nur can also claim to have anticipated the Kemalist government in matters of anthroponymic purification:

In 1919 [in fact 1920], as minister for public instruction in Ankara, I had sent out a list of pure Turkish names, and in a circular sent to schools, required that Persian and Arabic names should be renounced, and true Turkish names from the list adopted. This measure applied to teachers and pupils. Since then, pure Turkish names have become the rule.[27]  Riza Nour, “Noms propres turcs,” Revue de Turcologie...[27]

It is doubtful whether this initiative (if it took place) met with much success – particularly in the context of the Greco-Turkish conflict (1919-1922), during which the confessional register was widely exploited by the government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey to mobilize the Muslim population of Anatolia against the “invader.”

There is a notable difference indeed between the Islamist Turkism of the years of the war of independence, and the secularist Turkism promoted by the Kemalist bureaucrats and theologians of the 1930s. It should be recalled in this regard that in April 1928, the mention of Islam as the state religion was removed from the constitution, and that from May 1931, “secularism” [laiklik] figured among the “six arrows,” or six grand principles intended to inspire the conduct of the Republican People’s Party. Above all, the Turkification of the call to prayer [ezan] in 1932 brought about nothing less than the purging of the most sacred word in Islam: the name of Allah. The measure was extended to the whole of Turkey in February 1933, with the result that for seventeen years, until 1950, the Merciful was no longer invoked from the tops of Anatolia’s minarets by his Arabic name, but by the old Turkic-Mongol word Tanrı[28]  Jean-Paul Roux, “Tängri. Essai sur le ciel-dieu des...[28] – in so far as the measure was obeyed.[29]  Azak, Islam, 57. Despite the proscription of the name...[29] Linguistic purification and the Kemalist domestication of Islamic references, along with the “History Thesis” to be discussed below, provided the political, symbolic, and intellectual backdrop onto which the patronymic reform of 1934 came to be grafted.

The reform was underpinned by two normative texts: the first was the law passed by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey on June 21, 1934; the second was the Regulations on Family Names [Soy Adı Nizamnamesi], which was adopted by the cabinet on December 24, 1934, from which the following is a first extract:

Article 1. Each Turk shall bear a family name [soy adı] in addition to his personal name [öz adı]. Those who do not possess a family name are required to choose one and have it written in the records of the civil registry, as well as on their birth certificate, before July 2, 1936.[30]  Soy Adı Kanunu ve Nizamnamesi (Istanbul: Necmistikbal...[30]

The Ottoman onomastic mosaic was characterized by its heterogeneity. The fundamentally multiethnic, multiconfessional, and, more significantly here, multilingual nature of Ottoman society explains the juxtaposition of very different-sounding names. It also allowed the coexistence of different naming systems, that is, of distinct anthroponymic nomenclatures in the onomastic marketplace. Lastly, Ottoman names were characterized by their volatility: not only could an individual be driven to use different onomastic components according to the context – which in fact is not particularly unusual – but he or she might very often change name several times over the course of a social career.[31]  According to a study of the different categories of...[31] In other words, at a formal level, the adoption of a nomenclature calqued from the Western patronymic model represented simultaneously an exercise in homogenization, and an increase in onomastic rigidity: unlike the subjects of the Ottoman sultan, the citizens of the Republic of Turkey would all use the same kinds of name – and they would theoretically use the same name throughout the whole of their lifetime.[32]  This does not preclude a certain administrative flexibility...[32] This formal dimension of the surname reform is part of what linguists call status planning, in as much as it favors one naming system to the detriment of the others.

But the reform was equally a modification of the onomastic inventory – an exercise in corpus planning.[33]  On these concepts, see Robert Leon Cooper, Language...[33] Evidence of this is provided by three articles from the aforementioned Regulations:

Article 5. New family names will be chosen in the Turkish Language.. ..

Article 7. It is forbidden to bear a name appearing to contain suffixes or words implying the idea of another nationality or borrowed from a language other than Turkish, such as -ian, -ov, -eff, -vich, -ich, -is, -dis, -poulos, -aki, -zade, -mahmoudou, -veled and -bin [Yan, Of, Ef, Viç, İç, İs, Dis, Pulos, Aki, Zade, Mahmudu, Veled ve Bin]. Those who bear such names may not use them. The suffix -oğlu should be substituted in their place.. ..

Article 8. It is forbidden to use and, once again, to bear family names which indicate in a general manner other nationalities, such as The-Son-of-the-Albanian [Arnavut Oğlu] or The-Son-of-the-Kurd [Kürd Oğlu], or which express the idea of another nationality, such as The-Son-of-Hasan-the-Circassian [Çerkes Hasan Oğlu] or The-Son-of-Ibrahim-the-Bosnian [Boşnok (sic) İbrahim Oğlu], or which are borrowed from other languages, such as Zoti or Grandi.[34]  Soy Adı Kanunu, 6.[34]

Article 5, which restricts citizens to choosing their patronym from the Turkish language (that is, from “pure Turkish”) implies, by capillary action, that the purge of the lexical corpus is also a purge of the onomastic inventory. Furthermore, it supposes that, in the Turkey of the 1930s, any common noun was a potential proper noun,[35]  With the proviso that Article 3 of the law of June...[35] and that conversely, proper nouns often bore a clear meaning in official neo-Turkish. In regard to Article 7, interpretation is more complex than it seems: in practice, individuals with prohibited suffixes – at least the Orthodox Rums (“-is, -dis, -poulos, -aki”) and the Armenians (“-ian”) – would not be legally required to change name and would be able to conserve their “foreign”-sounding patronyms.[36]  Detailed analysis of the objective of Article 7, of...[36] Finally, Article 8 stipulates that both foreign names and the names of foreigners (“The Albanian,” “The Bosnian,” “The Kurd”) – in spite of formally being Turkish words – were to be banned under the new patronymic propriety.

In matters of naming, the Kemalist reformers were not just prohibitionist; they were also very interventionist. In other words, they were not content to proscribe names which evoked “otherness”; to a large extent, they defined the onomastic potentialities of nationalist Turkey. It is no surprise to find that the same intellectuals working with the authorities, charged with “purging” Turkish vocabulary of its “foreign” components, were also involved in the establishment of an etymologically orthodox onomastic inventory. This is because the linguistic material exhumed, catalogued, selected, expurgated, indeed purely and simply invented by the Society for the Study of Turkish Language mentioned above, was not simply the thesaurus from which the neo-Turkish lexicon would become officially recognized; it was also an immense onomasticon from which fathers – heads of family – were soon encouraged to come and take a new patronym. Here the originality of the Kemalist linguistic order is revealed: in Turkey, perhaps more than elsewhere, linguistic praxis can be considered a political one, a manipulation of tools – alphabetical, lexical, and onomastic ones – that have their origins (in the etymological as well as the pragmatic sense) in a form of state engineering[37]  Emmanuel Szurek, “Gouverner par les mots.”[37].

The Semantic Ambition of Surname Reform

Onomastic Amnesia

Far from being seen as a new standard borrowed from the West, the adoption of a patronymic system was portrayed as a rehabilitation of ancestral customs and heritage in Kemalist discourse. In this line of argument, the reform was simply a return to origins after a long period of onomastic amnesia, and the Anatolian peasantry once again shouldered its load in the role of repository of eternal Turkishness. The prevailing belief, the argument runs, is that the Turks did not have family names.

But one hastens to say it: it is not the case that we have no family names! Everyone has a family name in the country. It is only the Istanbulites, those who have moved in to Istanbul, all those fine educated types [okumuşlar] who do not know what a family name is. Since the Tanzimat, there has been a fashion [here] of bearing two names, copying the Franks. That fashion reached our intellectuals [entellektüel], and they all invented themselves a false name.[38]  N. H. Sinanoğlu, “Soyadı dolayında bir iki düşünce,”...[38]

We hear the same from Rıza Nur:

It is widely believed that the Turks do not have surnames. That is incorrect. The ancient Turks had them, and in the countryside and cities of Anatolia, they still have them. Only the people who live in Istanbul forgot theirs, and Turkey’s intellectuals, following that example, neglected theirs.[39]  Nour, “Noms propres turcs.”[39]

And again from the journalist Enver Behnan, the author of a little book published in 1935 that proposes a list of names to his fellow citizens, which is preceded by a brief historical account, of which the following is an extract:

Today’s names are, for the most part, Arab, Persian, Jewish, or Assyrian [asurice] names. In the Ottoman period, Turkish names survived in small numbers among our country folk. A Turk [that is a Turkoman, as opposed to a city-dwelling Ottoman] would be known by his family name. To the rest of us, it was lost; once again, it was in the bosom of the people that family names reposed.[40]  Enver Behnan, Türk Soyadı, (n.p.: Tarık, 1935), 4.[40]

In the climate of cultural neo-pan-Turkism which suffused Kemalist nationalism at the beginning of the 1930s,[41]  Yildiz, “Ne Mutlu,” 185.[41] the Turkic peoples of central Asia were likewise able to support the cause of the surname. As Besim Atalay recalls:

The Yakuts have preserved, to the present day, the ancient Turkish traditions in their naming system. Three months after the birth of the child they give him his first name, which is a makeshift name [iğreti]. As for the second name, it is awarded to him when the child can flex his bow and fire an arrow.[42]  Besim Atalay, Türk Büyükleri veya Türk Adları, [Turkish...[42]

Similarly, the epic tradition was called upon for reinforcement:

According to [the Russian Turkologist] Titov, [among the ancient Turks] if a child grew up without demonstrating his bravery he could not be given his name. He would go about nameless. It was only after he had shown heroism in the face of the enemy that the father would organize a ceremony [düğün] and would give a name to his son.

However it remains to be explained why the Turks, who lived peaceably and waged war sometimes in their central Asian dystopia, with their onomastic tradition and heritage, ended up “losing their name:”

Study of the subject reveals that in the past the Turks had purely Turkish names. They began to borrow names and titles from the Chinese; but that did not go on very long. After their Islamization, they removed their ancestral names and adopted Arab and Persian ones. After three or four centuries, with the help of religion, these names were in general usage, and in the modern era, only a very few Turkish names remained among the Anatolian country people.[43]  Nour, “Noms propres turcs.”[43]

Besim Bey gives more or less the same explanation, his message perhaps slightly more tinged with Arabophobia:

Like all nations, the Turkish nation used names that it created a very long time ago and that had been drawn from its own language. But then one day in Turania, Turkdom was shaken. The Arabs thrust into Turkish lands in many places, and where they were unable to enter, it was their culture which came in. The Arabs destroyed the life of the nation in Iran as well as in Turania, they killed the learned, eradicated the thinkers, swept all trace of an earlier existence from the face of the earth. [The Turks began to “Arabize” themselves.] It was at this time that Arab names began to appear among the Turks. First of all it was the religious leaders, the hodjas, who took Arab names; then it was the sovereigns, the chiefs. Little by little, these names spread through the whole nation.[44]  Nour, “Noms propres turcs,” 1.[44]

The Characterology of the Turk in Battle

In 1934, the interior minister Şükrü Kaya [“Rock”] created a depositary of Turkish surnames that were etymologically certified by the authorities, on which officials in the civil registry offices were invited to draw in order to attribute a name to the male citizens and the members of their family.

The thesaurus in question was taken from a work by Besim Atalay [“Attila”], an eminent member of the Society for the Study of Turkish Language. He was a senior civil servant from the education department who made a name for himself as an onomastics specialist. From 1917-1918, he published a series of lists of names in the journal Türk Yurdu, the organ of the Turkish Hearths, the main nationalist association at the end of the Ottoman Empire. These lists were combined in 1923 in a first booklet of 112 pages, produced on the presses of the Ministry of Public Instruction, comprising some six hundred names. This work was republished ten years later, in a considerably enlarged form, on the presses of the National Printing Office [Devlet Basım Evi]. Presented as a “command” from the Ministry of Public Education, it assumed a very different meaning in the context of the surname law.[45]  For the whole of this paragraph, S. Sakaoğlu, Türk...[45]

It had now become a compendium of some 5,500 potential patronyms, an inventory benefitting considerably from the lexicographical surveys that had been carried out under the auspices of the Society for the Study of Turkish Language following the launch of the “Language Revolution” in 1932. The author arranged the names collected in three categories, as follows:

The names in the first part are the names of persons who have lived in history. The meaning of these names will be presented, as well as those who have borne them.

The names in the second part have been drawn from the Tarama Dergisi [Journal of the Collection] published by the Turkish Language Society: these [are words which] may become names.

The names in the third part are a selection drawn from the work published seven years ago by the Ministry of the Interior under the title Köylerimiz [Our Villages]; because numerous village names derive from the names of persons.[46]  Atalay, Türk Büyükleri, 3.[46]

The book was therefore a manual in which citizens could choose their surname according to any association they might care to find with a (supposedly Turkish) “great figure” from history – for this reason the work was entitled Great Turkish Figures, or the Names of the Turks – or with a particular Turkic word, the meaning of which might stir some feeling of affinity in them, or again with one or other Anatolian toponym. Besim Bey himself had set his sights on “Attila” [Atalay], to which a brief paragraph is dedicated in the first of the three lists, under the double entry, “Atilâ-Atalay:”

Great chief of the Hunnic Turks [Hün Türkleri]. Although in 432 he began by sharing power with his brother Beleda-Balta [“Axe”], it was not long before he did away with him. After definitively putting the nation in harness, he set forth on his mount, and bestrode the Caucasus, Upper Persia, and Anatolia, from Konya to Antalya. Finding these lands too small for him, he drove on toward Europe, passing through the country of the Kipchaks, and made the whole of Europe tremble. Princes, kings, and popes from all of Europe threw themselves at the feet of this illustrious Turk.

Then in 453, when he had just married in the town of Tokay, where he lived with a girl called Yıldıku – that is to say, Yıldız [“Star”] – he met his end. He was a person of great bravery, a being of profound integrity, kindly, judicious. He was quick to forgive the man who confessed his wrongs, even if he was his enemy. He showed the greatest compassion for his nation, as for all the nations under his sway. He lived simply, knew no form of immorality; his women themselves took care of knitting and sewing his fighting equipment.[47]  Atalay, Türk Büyükleri, 23. We note in passing that...[47]

This pro Attila case also appears in the work of Reşit Saffet. A graduate of the École libre des sciences politiques in Paris in 1904, and a member of parliament from 1927 to 1934, Reşit Saffet was first and foremost a distinguished diplomat and statesman, close to the center of power, president of the Touring and Automobile Club of Turkey, and a great promoter of his country’s image around the world.[48]  Ahmet Altintaş and Şahin Kurnaz, “Reşit Saffet Atabinen...[48] He too was concerned with rehabilitating the name (and the historical renown) of the national glories for which Europeans showed so little respect. He went to Budapest in the fall of 1934 to deliver a lecture in French entitled “Contribution to a Sincere History of Attila,” explicitly a response to the latest book by Charles Seignobos:[49]  Charles Seignobos, Histoire sincère de la nation française:...[49]

Read the Histoire sincère de la Nation Française [Sincere History of the French Nation], by one of the greatest French historians, Charles Seignobos; you will find in there, for example, on page 93, this astonishing sentence: “The third kind of invader was a yellow-skinned people who came from Asia, the Hungarians; they were horsemen armed with a bow.. .. They had the appearance of ferocious monsters; they left no other trace behind than their name, given to ogres, supernatural beings who eat children.” Such assertions, of which the least one can say is that they are puerile, are to be found in a serious history, one said to be “sincere,” for good measure; what might you not find in those histories which are less so, and which continue to be taught to the current generation of young people?. .. The history of Attila, a history which is fifteen centuries long, has never, until now, been subjected to the kind of critique which is the foundation of all art, and all science.

Through the correction of this history, releasing the truth from the cloak of religious fundamentalism, and the political limitations imposed upon it, I propose to return to our shared truths, to our shared glories, to the original civilization common to the Turks and the Magyars, to address the subject “to several degrees of depth,” to use Gratry’s expression.[50]  This is indeed a reference to the philosopher Joseph...[50]

As his name suggests, Reşit Saffet Atabinen [“He-Who-Rides-A-Horse”] conducted a crusade in defense of national honor. This militaristic, epic, moralizing tone is found in a whole characterological onomastic inventory. Hence we encounter legions of people in Turkey with the surnames Korkmaz [“Fearless”], Yılmaz [“Intrepid”], Eğilmez [“Unbending”], and Kırılmaz [“Unbreakable”]. Then there are the many Yiğits [“Brave”], Kahramans [“Lionhearted”], and others using Alp [“Hero”]. There are innumerable surnames containing the root er [“Man,” in a sense unambiguously alluding to the martial manliness which thrives on the battlefield, with a bow and a horse]; the name of the current (“Islamist”) prime minister, Erdoğan, means “Born Soldier.” The Turkish national temperament takes its various declinations on the marching grounds, or just next to them, in surnames belonging to the many Mr. or Mrs. “Tireless” [Yorulmaz], “Hard Worker” [Çalışkan], “Of Integrity” [Dürüst], “Right” [Doğru], “Trustworthy” [Güvenli], or, simply, “Strong” [Güçlü]. The French expression “fort comme un Turc” would appear to be more than wordplay, for these are clearly the key values persistently attributed to the Turks in Turkist discourse. Consider, for example, this patriotic song from the 1930s:

How happy I am to have been born a Turk! Turk, that means courage, it means rectitude My name has shone throughout History I was born a Turk, I was born free – victory is mine![51]  “Ne mutlu Türk yaratıldım/Türk demek cesaret, doğruluk...[51]

This warrior imaginary is inseparable from the return of the Turkish nation to its original central Asian and pre-Islamic purity, following a template that historians of nationalism have shown to be signally trite,[52]  Thiesse, La Création, 23.[52] but whose anthroponymic updating in the Turkish case still draws the attention of the linguists.[53]  Derya Duman, “A Characterization of Turkish Personal...[53] Many surnames adopted or imposed in Turkey in the 1930s convey a whole shamanistic imaginary, composed from animal, mineral, and cosmic elements. There are countless Turks called Şükrü “Rock” [Kaya], Mevlut “Grey Iron” [Bozdemir], Ali “Steel” [Çelik], Şekip “Bronze” [Tunç], Zeynep “Earth” [Toprak], Ayşe “Sea” [Deniz], Cemil “Sky” [Gök], İbrahim “Morning-Has-Broken” [Gündoğdu], Ceyhan “Cloud” [Bulut], Metin “Star” [Yıldız], Mesut “Lightning” [Yıldırım], Abdullah “Moon” [Ay], and Adnan “Mountain” [Dağ]; not to mention the numerous Turks called Mr. “Universe” [Evren]. Turkish telephone directories are also veritable bestiaries, where Turks called “Tiger” [Kaplan], and other great felines [Arslan], fight it out with people called “Wolf” [Kurt], “Eagle” [Kartal], and “Falcon” [Şahin]. Not many farm animals are to be found, in contrast, apart from some who use the name “Bull” [Boğa] or “Cock” [Horoz]. Unsurprisingly, there is nobody called “Veal,” “Cow,” or “Pig.”[54]  Besim Atalay mocks those “ridiculous” [gülünç] names...[54] However this is not the whole story – in many Turkish surnames there is a darker streak which deals in matters of blood and race.

“The Land of the Turkish Race”

The reform of 1934 was not the first initiative toward imposing change on the nature of surnames in Turkey. In March 1929, the Turkish government had already set up a ministerial commission charged with preparing a first draft bill on the matter. At that time, it was all about “family names” [aile ismi].[55]  Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivi [Archives of the Prime...[55] But the law of 1934 preferred the notion of soy adı, or “soy name.” What is a soy? The (current) dictionary of the Turkish Language Institute gives it as an equivalent to the Arabic (or Ottoman) sülale, or English lineage. Therefore, the soy adı would appear to be a lineage name. There are plenty of examples indeed where the offspring of the Anatolian nobility made their new surnames a blaze of their illustrious genealogy.[56]  That is, of their “lakab [ancestral name] of lineage.”...[56] The case of the writer Yakup Kadri, of the house of Karaosman, is well known – in the civil registry he became Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu [“Son-of-Karaosman”].[57]  We observe that in the same family, some would take...[57] That of the Turkologist Mecdut Mansuroğlu [“The-Son-of-the-Victorious”] is less well known. Born into the Mansurizâde family, he had only to drop the Persian descent suffix, -zâde, and replace it with the Turkish equivalent, -oğlu, for his ancestral lakab [earlier family lineage name] to be recognized by the law and to become a soy adı.[58]  The case is quite similar to that of Köprülüzâde Mehmed...[58] A third example is that of the historian İsmail Hâmi Bey, who took the name Danişmend by virtue of his allegedly “being of the Turkoman family of Danischmend of Anatolia,” a dynasty which reigned over Asia Minor in the middle of the twelfth century.[59]  Les Annales de la Turquie 7-8-9 (August-October 1936):...[59]

But the word soy is equally freighted with a racialist sense, which is found in soydaş (for which a possible translation is “brother-in-race,” alongside “member of the same lineage”); and again, in soykırım [“genocide”]. It is clear that raciological thinking was omnipresent in the intellectual and political context of Kemalist Turkey. From the beginning of the 1930s, the “History Thesis” [Tarih Tezi] was an official state truth. This thesis was elaborated at the highest levels of the state by a range of approved intellectuals and officials, among them Sadri Maksudi, Reşit Galip, Şemseddin Günaltay, and Afet İnan. Spurred on and encouraged by the president of the republic himself, it represented a kind of origin myth, which attributes to the Turks a central role in world history. Summarizing briefly: in the beginning, a time long ago, there was a great body of water in the heartlands of central Asia, called the Great Turkish Sea. This sea was the cradle of brilliant civilizations. When, for climatic reasons, it suddenly dried up, several millennia before our era, the proto-Turks were forced to disperse.[60]  It is worth noting that this origin story is a “photographic...[60] Wherever they went, the representatives of this “brachycephalic alpine race” brought enlightenment to humanity in the form of articulated language, the cultivation of wheat, a mastery of animal husbandry, the invention of the wheel, and many other beneficial discoveries. Everywhere the Turks developed refined civilizations: the civilization of the Nile, and the Sumerian, Chinese, Indian, Hittite, Etruscan, Lydian, and Phrygian civilizations, too.[61]  Büşra Ersanli, İktidar ve Tarih: Türkiye’de “Resmi...[61] The following is an example of what can be found in junior high school textbooks published in the year of the surname reform:

The Turks went to China at least seven thousand years before Christ, and the works they left behind there show that they laid down a civilization greatly superior to that of the Chinese.. .. [Another group of migrants crossed the Himalaya.] There was no indigenous civilization there, it was still prehistory, it was full of groups of men with black skin, resembling troops of monkeys. The Turks pushed on to the south, and founded a brilliant civilization.[62]  Translated and published in Ersanli, İktidar ve Tarih,...[62]

This historiographical narrative, with its linguistic[63]  İlker Aytürk, “Turkish Linguists against the West:...[63] and anthropological[64]  See for example the anthropometric survey of Mustafa...[64] dimensions, was written within a broad movement in 1930s Turkey towards the ethnicization of categories of thought and of political action. On the same day as the vote on the Surname Law, a Settlement Law [İskân Kanunu] was published in the official (state) journal; the aim of this law was to sedentarize the nomad populations of eastern Turkey in the name of “national security” imperatives. In this text, use is made of a formal distinction – involving the use of the word soy – between individuals of “Turkish race” [Türk soylu], and those “linked to Turkish culture” [Türk kültürüne bağlı], in this case meaning, essentially, the Kurds.[65]  “İskân Kanunu,” Resmi Gazete 2733 (June 21 1934): 4008....[65] If, as Ahmet Yıldız believes, Kemalism never took the form of state racism, “it does, nevertheless, have a strong racial or ethnic tinge throughout; and this has been reflected in objective as well as subjective cultural signs.”[66]  Yildiz, “Ne Mutlu,” 156.[66] And behind it is the obsessive desire to sort and separate the pure and the impure, the healthy and the corrupted, which pervades the whole Kemalist national imaginary; it appears not only in the purification of the onomastic corpus, but also in the semantic values of a great number of patronyms.

In the fall of 1934, for example, the parliamentarian Saffet Bey (a name which in Arabic already means “purity”) received the name Arıkan [“Pure Blood”] from Mustafa Kemal in person – a man with no fear of pleonasm. “Purity of Pure-Blood” is perhaps an onomastic hapax, but “Pure Blood” [Özkan] and “Strong Blood” [Pekkan], in contrast, are rather common names in Turkey. This is without mentioning those whose name refers specifically to race [soy], such as that of the personal secretary of the president of the republic, Hasan “Race White” [Soyak]. Many Turks are called Mr. “White Race” [Aksoy], or Mrs. “High Race” [Ulusoy]. Nothing actually prohibits combining the two, which gives us people called “Race Blood” [Soykan] and “Blood Race” [Kansoy]. Eric Hobsbawm remarked that “there is an evident analogy between the insistence of racists on the importance of racial purity and the horrors of miscegenation, and the insistence of so many – one is tempted to say of most – forms of linguistic nationalism on the need to purify the national language from foreign elements.”[67]  Hobsbawm, Nations, 108.[67] The Kemalist bureaucrat-intellectuals certainly provide support for this notion; they just pushed the obsession a little further, taking it to the point – in the real as well as the figurative sense – of inscribing the signature of their fantasies on their fellow citizens’ identity papers.

The Nominal and the National50

On November 24, 1934, five months after the adoption of the Soyadı Kanunu, the Turkish National Assembly unanimously passed a law under the terms of which the family name Ata Türk (subsequently, Atatürk, in a single word) was solemnly conferred upon the president of the Republic of Turkey. Mustafa Kemal became “The Father Turk.” At the beginning of December, the parliamentary member for Kocaeli, İbrahim Süreyya, proposed the prohibition of the use of this patronym par excellence by any other person.[68]  In exchange for which he received from Mustafa Kemal...[68] The creation of a separate and exclusive onomastic status for the head of state shows us that the act of naming was also a celebration, and that the name Atatürk was also an honorific title. Without a doubt, in this denomination we must seek international parallels with the Duce, the Führer, and the Father of the peoples.[69]  Also in use as a semiofficial title, from 1934, was...[69] Nevertheless, in the context of the personality cult surrounding Mustafa Kemal from the middle of the 1920s, the process takes on an original rhetorical character that might well suit the term “creationist.” The leader of the war of independence against the Allies and the Greeks (1919-1922) had already been rewarded, in 1921, with the title Gazî, traditionally given to Muslim leaders who won signal victories over the Infidel. But henceforth, the renown of the founder of “New Turkey” would be written into the race’s new secular future:

He is the greatest Turk. Ata Türk is not his family name, it is he himself. Atatürk will fly like a flag over history. The future of Turkish history is to be found in his shadow.. .. A name was necessary with which to decorate the one who saved his nation from death, a most pure and genuine Turkish name. What better name to give him than that of Ata [ancestor]? Turkish is an inexhaustible spring. The Gazî, by tracing back to the source of the spring, has swept away the rubble heaped for centuries upon it. It is He who is the streaming water of this spring, which revives and energizes, like the summer sun, that which had been destroyed. Blessings upon Him and his name.[70]  “Ata Türk,” İstanbul, November 26, 1934, 1.[70]

It is legitimate here to borrow Mona Ozouf’s notion of the transfer of sacrality;[71]  Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris:...[71] both the blessing and the capitalization (“It is He. ..”) evidently echo the written conventions and the forms of deference used to refer to the Almighty in Old Testament tradition. Atatürk is in effect a theorem of transcendence,[72]  Étienne Copeaux, “La transcendance d’Atatürk,” in Saints...[72] by which he is at once the heir of the “Great Turk” (a caliph to replace the caliph[73]  In the latter years of his life, Mustafa Kemal stayed...[73]) and the Hyper-Turk (“more-Turkish-than-Thou”). But he was also the Arch-Turk, located at the wellspring of the nation. This is how we must read this astonishing passage taken from an article by the official linguist Agop Martaian, the well-(re)named Dilâçar [“Explainer-of-the-Language”], in which Mustafa Kemal’s patronym comes to resonate with echoes of the famous prehistoric Turkish race.

The Sumerian language undoubtedly resembles all languages, for it is the closest heir of the mother language of the alpine race of central Asia and of the Ata-Türks (the palaealpine proto-Turks); in the same way, it is the “dominant language” over all others.[74]  A. Dilaçar, “Les bases bio-psychologiques de la théorie...[74]

It is here, perhaps, that the reform of family names in Turkey reveals itself in all its cognitive violence. “The great Kemal Atatürk, by having the Grand National Assembly of Turkey adopt the law on family names, succeeded in that great undertaking: he gave the Turkish an existence as a nation.” Put another way, the word creates the thing. Enver Behnan, the author of those few lines, further propounds the principle which was, from that point forward, to guide the onomastic choices of his fellow citizens:

After the revolution of family names, each Turk must give his child the name of Turk, by virtue of the principle “He who is a Turk gives the name Turk!” He who does not give a Turkish name is not a Turk. And so, here is my book, where you will find 3,396 Turkish names. Help yourselves![75]  Behnan, Türk Soyadı, 4, 18.[75]

Each word taken from the Turkish language is a metonym of the ethnonym Türk. To bear a Turkish name, or to bear the name Türk: it is one and the same thing. This is an example of the “hold of the national over the nominal” that is characteristic of so many patronymic nationalisms.[76]  Lapierre, Changer de nom, 54 and after.[76] What is not found elsewhere is the use of the national ethnonym as a patronym, modified in numerous ways in the onomastic inventory imposed on the population. As an example there is Fahri Sabit “Protect Turk” [Korutürk], president of the republic from 1973 to 1980, who also received his surname from Mustafa Kemal. This allegedly took place in March 1935 at Karpiç – one of the capital’s smart restaurants – when the young military officer in his thirties crossed the path of the “Father Turk.”[77]  Konukçu, “Yeni harfler,” 300.[77] But when it comes to Turkophoric names – since that is indeed what this is about – the subalterns were not to be outdone. After the Father Turk come his people: great numbers of Mr. “Turk Son” [Türkoğlu], Uncle “Turk Blood” [Türkkan], and Aunt “Pure Turk” [Arıtürk]. Here are the thousands by the name of “Race Turk” [Soytürk] inhabiting the civil registers, and there, the “True Turks” [Öztürk] – often Kurds – who each day bear the name of their “identity.”[78]  By which family names reveal their assimilationist...[78]

The full meaning of surname reform in Turkey cannot be grasped by representing it as an exercise in social control and the bureaucratization of society – which it also is, of course. If we envisage it from the point of view of those who carried it out, that is, from an internal perspective, we can state that the patronyms put into circulation on the Turkish onomastic marketplace in the 1930s crystallized and objectivized a whole political imaginary: the reform of family names was also an exercise in glorification of the national self, and the construction of a metahistorical reputation. To that extent, it supported the notion of patronymic nationalism. We have seen that in the soy adı the whole semantic range of the genus is affected, in as much as it encompassed the generational, the genealogical, and the phylogenetic. Biological engenderment contends here against national regeneration, family relationships fuse with ethnic heredity – and what we are then left with is patronymic racialism.

It could quite justifiably be argued, to be sophisticated and sometimes a little dreary, that the remodeling of the world through the creation of this vast scenario, of these meanings, and these words, was never the idea of more than a small group of leaders and intellectuals of their time, the 1930s – and that consequently, the discourse studied here tells us nothing of the way in which each individual received, interpreted, and gave meaning to the official patronymic discourse. But it remains the case, firstly, that in reaching into the privacy of individual personal names, the anthroponymic norm represented a more effective vehicle for the introduction of the national than the incantation of any kind of discursive political propaganda, or indeed of any social labeling via the transformation of collective nouns. Secondly, it is worth remembering, with Paul Siblot, that linguistic categories are also categories of practice; they are praxemes, the manipulation of which affects our view of the social world as much as that world is refracted through them:

This relationship to the real via praxis is not carried on in one direction only. Praxemes are not restricted to recording the information provided by sense experience or by practical experience, to taking on board the meanings conveyed by the discourse in which they are produced. The dialectical relationship with the real also works in the other direction; words act upon us and in so doing are just as much praxemes. We conceive and perceive the world through the templates they provide; through them we determine our attitude, and we act. Praxemes also exercise a feedback effect on our practices, one that imbues words with their power and their purposive force.

It is therefore to be expected that men of power seek to enact that power through their use. Lacking the ability to exercise the absolute dictatorship of Big Brother, they can hope to dictate the behavior of their subjects through the representations the latter can make of the world and of their situation.[79]  Paul Siblot, “Appeler les choses par leur nom. Problématiques...[79]

Notes

[1]Translator’s note: All quotations from Turkish-language sources contained in this article have been back-translated from the French-language version of this article.

[2]For the purposes of demonstration, the meaning of Turkish patronymic names will be given in brackets throughout this paper. In this instance, Okur [“The Reader”] is a surname common among schoolteachers and imams. A well-known example is Hafız Yaşar [Okur], who was one of those who Turkified the call to prayer in 1932 (which will be discussed below); Umut Azak, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Kemalism, Religion and the Nation State (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 54. It would appear that the theologian (and opponent of the Kemalist regime) Said Nursi was likewise entered in the civil register under this patronym: http://www.sentezhaber.com/risale-i-nur/said-nursinin-resmi-soyadi-h70529.html.

[3]“Anam Türk, Babam Türk! Türkoğlu Türk’üm ben!:” İlhan İlhan, Kızlar Da Okur [Girls Read, Too] (Istanbul: n.p., 2005), 36; Türkü (literally, “Turkery”), is the generic term used to refer to poetry and popular songs in the Turkish language, as well as the dances which accompany them.

[4]The notion of onomastic market is derived from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of “linguistic market,” Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity in association with Basil Blackwell, 1991).

[5]See the thesis of Meltem Turkoz, who, using oral inquiry, has been able to explore indigenous semantic adaptation, the registers of meaning through which individuals explain their own surname: “The Social Life of the State’s Fantasy: Memories and Documents on Turkey’s 1934 Surname Law” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2004). The present contribution will be followed up with two studies based on archive sources. The second part will offer an external (or sociohistorical) perspective focused on the contribution of surname reform to the objectivization of the relations of power, race, and class in Kemalist society. The third part will consist of an analysis of “Kemalist onomaturgy,” that is, the benefits of differentiation, and the (re)naming games indulged in by the elites in the Turkey of the 1930s.

[6]My thanks go to Nicolas Camélio, Daniel Fields, Monique Halpern, and Güneş Işıksel.

[7]French-French-France, Pole-Polish-Poland, Romanian-Romanian-Romania etc. Salih Akin, “Pour une typologie des processus redénominatifs,” in Noms et Re-noms: la dénomination des personnes, des populations, des langues et des territoires, ed. Salih Akin (Rouen: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 1999), 33-60.

[8]On the understanding that a neologism is not necessarily a new word, but a word whose semantic content evolves to the point of referring to a different referent.

[9]Ahmet Yildiz, “Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebilene.” Türk Ulusal Kimliğinin Etno-Seküler Sınırları (1919-1938) [“How Happy is the One Who is Able to Say He is a Turk!” Ethno-Secular Boundaries of the Turkish National Identity (1919-1938)] (Istanbul: İletişim, 2010), 66 and after.

[10]On this point, a translation of Türk might be something like “muddy asses” or “hicks.” For a nuanced (and decentered) analysis of the semantic content of Türk in the Ottoman world, see Benjamin Lellouch, “Qu’est-ce qu’un Turc? (Égypte, Syrie, XVIe siècle),” European Journal of Turkish Studies 16 (2013). On the notion of a socionym, see Jacques Bres, “Praxis, production de sens/d’identité, récit,” Langages 93 (1989): 23-44.

[11]Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 65.

[12]Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12 and after. On the notion of “grammatization,” see Sylvain Auroux, La révolution technologique de la grammatisation (Liège: Mardaga, 1994).

[13]Howard Eissenstat, “Metaphors of Race and Discourse of Nation: Racial Theory and the Beginnings of Nationalism in the Turkish Republic,” in Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World, ed. Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2005), 239-256, 245.

[14]Claude Cahen, The Formation of Turkey. The Seljukid Sultanate of Rum: Eleventh to Fourteenth Century (Harlow: Longman, 2002), 76.

[15]Güneş Işiksel, “La Politique étrangère ottomane dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle: le cas du règne de Selîm II” (PhD diss., École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2012), 71-75.

[16]Emmanuel Szurek, “Les Langues orientales, Jean Deny les Turks et la Turquie nouvelle. Une histoire croisée de la turcologie française (XIXe-XXe siècle),” in Turcs et Français. Une histoire culturelle 1860-1960, ed. Güneş Işiksel and Emmanuel Szurek (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014).

[17]Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 339-342; David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876-1908 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 9 ff.; Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism. From Irredentism to Cooperation, 2nd ed. (London: Hurst & Company, 1995) 30; Étienne Copeaux, Espaces et temps de la nation turque: analyse d’une historiographie nationaliste (1931-1993) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1997), 37‑40; Halil İnalcık, “Hermenötik, Oryantalizm, Türkoloji” [Hermeneutics, Orientalism, Turcology], Doğu Batı 20, 1 (2002), 13‑39; Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), 423. See also my “Gouverner par les mots. Une histoire linguistique de la Turquie nationaliste” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2013), 1, 383-410.

[18]Anne-Marie Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

[19]In the words of Benoît Fliche, elsewhere in this dossier.

[20]In 1927, for instance, the Cadde-i Kebir was classically renamed “Independence Avenue” [İstiklal Caddesi]. The Turkification of Istanbul’s street names took a more systematic turn in 1934, at the same time as that of anthroponyms. İstanbul, December 3, 1934.

[21]Birol Caymaz and Emmanuel Szurek, “La Révolution au pied de la lettre. L’invention de ‘l’alphabet turc,’” European Journal of Turkish Studies 6 (2007).

[22]A sociological study of this organization can be found in Emmanuel Szurek, “Le Linguiste et le politique. La Türk Dil Kurumu et le champ du pouvoir dans la Turquie du parti unique,” in Ordonner et transiger. Modalités de gouvernement et d’administration en Turquie et dans l’Empire ottoman depuis les Tanzimat, ed. Marc Aymes, Benjamin Gourisse, and Élise Massicard (Paris: Karthala, in press).

[23]Türk Dili Araştırma Kurumu, Osmanlıcadan Türkçeye Cep Kilavuzu [Ottoman-Turkish Pocket Guide] (Istanbul: Devlet Basım Evi, 1935); Türk Dili Araştırma Kurumu, Türkçeden Osmanlıcaya Cep Kilavuzu [Turkish-Ottoman Pocket Guide] (Istanbul: Devlet Basım Evi, 1935). Note that the glossonym Osmanlıca is traceable to the end of the nineteenth century, whereas Öz Türkçe makes its appearance on the linguistic market in the second half of the 1920s.

[24]Lewis, Turkish Language Reform. From a linguistics perspective, this work is without a shadow of doubt the best study of the “Language Revolution” in Turkey. However, the article published close to the time by Jean Deny remains useful: “De la réforme actuelle de la langue turque,” En Terre d’Islam 10 (July-August 1935): 223-247.

[25]J. Deny, “Ziya Gök Alp,” Revue du Monde Musulman 61 (1925): 1-41; 6.

[26]Tekinalp was an ardent supporter of the assimilation of non-Muslim minorities in Turkey. In 1928, he began, in his book Türkleştirme [Turkification], to call on the Jews in Turkey to follow his example in taking a Turkish name. Jacob M. Landau, Tekinalp, Turkish Patriot. 1883-1961 (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1984), 22, 308.

[27]Riza Nour, “Noms propres turcs,” Revue de Turcologie 5 (February 1935): 65-72; 65.

[28]Jean-Paul Roux, “Tängri. Essai sur le ciel-dieu des peuples altaïques,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 149 (1956): 49-82, 197-230; 150 (1956): 27-54, 173-212.

[29]Azak, Islam, 57. Despite the proscription of the name of Allah, certain Turkish patronyms attest to the survival of Muslim naming practices in the Kemalists’ onomastic inventory. Thus, Tanrı can at times translate Allah, as in the surname Tanrıkulu [“Slave of God,” that is, Abdallah]. I would like to express my thanks to Timour Muhidine for explaining to me the case of the president of the Turkish Hearths (and later, a diplomat), Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver: Hamdullah is an act of grace [“God be Praised”] – an expression which literally translates the patronym Tanrıöver: “One-Who-Praises-Heaven.” In other words, the surname Tanrıöver is a semantic calque of the theophoric name Hamdullah.

[30]Soy Adı Kanunu ve Nizamnamesi (Istanbul: Necmistikbal Matbaası, 1934), 5.

[31]According to a study of the different categories of names commonly used among the bureaucratic elites of the Ottoman Empire, in Olivier Bouquet, “Onomasticon Ottomanicum: identification administrative et désignation sociale dans l’État ottoman du XIXe siècle,” Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée 127 (2010): 213-235.

[32]This does not preclude a certain administrative flexibility regarding the process of changing surnames, as is demonstrated in the study by Élise Massicard in this dossier.

[33]On these concepts, see Robert Leon Cooper, Language Planning and Social Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 99-121; 122-156.

[34]Soy Adı Kanunu, 6.

[35]With the proviso that Article 3 of the law of June 21, 1934, forbids (quite casually indeed) “names which do not comply with public morality [umumî edeplere uygun olmıyan], as well as those which are disgusting [iğrenç] or ridiculous [gülünç];” Soy Adı Kanunu, 2.

[36]Detailed analysis of the objective of Article 7, of its interpretation on the part of the Kemalist administration, and of its application would require consideration well beyond the scope of the present article. A later version of the regulations does show a modification of Article 7, which was reformulated as follows: “It is forbidden to use the name [isim] of a foreign race or nation as a surname [soy adı],” Soy Adı Nizamnamsi [sic] (Istanbul: Cihan Kitabhanesi, 1935), 3. This important modification – which implied that the Surname Law was not as assimilationist as it would have seemed first, especially in so far as non-Muslims were concerned – has gone utterly unexplored.

[37]Emmanuel Szurek, “Gouverner par les mots.”

[38]N. H. Sinanoğlu, “Soyadı dolayında bir iki düşünce,” Milliyet, January 12, 1933.

[39]Nour, “Noms propres turcs.”

[40]Enver Behnan, Türk Soyadı, (n.p.: Tarık, 1935), 4.

[41]Yildiz, “Ne Mutlu,” 185.

[42]Besim Atalay, Türk Büyükleri veya Türk Adları, [Turkish Glories, or Turkish Names] 2nd ed., (Istanbul: Devlet Basım Evi, 1935), 6 and after.

[43]Nour, “Noms propres turcs.”

[44]Nour, “Noms propres turcs,” 1.

[45]For the whole of this paragraph, S. Sakaoğlu, Türk Ad Bilimi. Giriş [Turkish Onomastics: An Introduction] (Ankara: TDK, 2001), 34-46. While this work by Besim Atalay was the only one carrying a semiofficial status, it must be noted that ten booklets appeared around the time of the June 1934 law, all proposing lists of etymologically correct Turkish names. A list is provided in Sakaoğlu, Türk Ad Bilimi, 51 and after.

[46]Atalay, Türk Büyükleri, 3.

[47]Atalay, Türk Büyükleri, 23. We note in passing that the choice of the name Attila as a surname has evidently not been considered contrary to Article 6 of the law of June 21, which forbids the names of “famous people from history” (see the text of the law in the introduction of the present issue.) In fact, the article was aimed less at prohibiting the reuse of surnames drawn from the ancient “Turkish Glories,” if indeed that is what they were, than at avoiding the pretention to nobility to which some citizens of humble origins might fall prey after the “appropriation” of a “great name” which was not “theirs” – not just anybody can be a Karaosman or a Danişmend. Thus, behind the egalitarianist imaginary of republican onomastic law, mechanisms survived to ensure the protection of the symbolic capital associated with the social authority of the “great families;” examples of these appear below.

[48]Ahmet Altintaş and Şahin Kurnaz, “Reşit Saffet Atabinen (1884-1965) ve Türk turizmine katkıları,” Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Tarih Bölümü Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi 26, no. 42 (2007): 9-36.

[49]Charles Seignobos, Histoire sincère de la nation française: essai d’une histoire de l’évolution du peuple français (Paris: Rieder, 1933).

[50]This is indeed a reference to the philosopher Joseph Gratry. He also quotes Doctor Max Nordau, and the writer André Gide. The text of the speech was published in the French-language daily Stamboul, on October 4, 1934.

[51]“Ne mutlu Türk yaratıldım/Türk demek cesaret, doğruluk demek/Tarihe ün saldı adım/Türk doğdum, hür doğdum zafer bana gerek;” quoted in Yıldız, “Ne Mutlu,” 179.

[52]Thiesse, La Création, 23.

[53]Derya Duman, “A Characterization of Turkish Personal Name Inventory,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 165 (2004): 155-177.

[54]Besim Atalay mocks those “ridiculous” [gülünç] names found “among the French,” such as “Berger [Shepherd], Pierre [Stone], Bouillon [Stew], Bœuf (Monsieur Le Bœuf) [Beef]” [“Fransızlarda, Berger, Pierre, Bouillon, Bœuf (Monsieur Le Bœuf) gibi ki çoban, taş, etsuyu, öküz demektir”]. Atalay, Türk Büyükleri, 8. Nicole Lapierre points out that among the requests for name changes submitted to the French Council of State, those “involving the surname Canard [Duck], Vache [Cow], Veau [Veal]. .. were admitted, but [that] the same was not the case for Bœuf [Beef], Taureau [Bull], Chèvre [Goat], Rossignol [Nightingale], or Léopard [Leopard]:” Nicole Lapierre, Changer de nom (Paris: Stock, 1995), 110.

[55]Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivi [Archives of the Prime Minister] (Ankara), 30..18.1.2/002.018.38.

[56]That is, of their “lakab [ancestral name] of lineage.” Bouquet, “Onomasticon Ottomanicum: identification,” 220.

[57]We observe that in the same family, some would take the unmodified lakab, such as Suat Karaosman, a “close relative” of Yakup Kadri, who mentions him in Politikada 45 Yıl (Ankara: Bilgi Yay, 1968), 179. See also the death notice of Kâni Karaosman, Milliyet, August 8, 1959, 2.

[58]The case is quite similar to that of Köprülüzâde Mehmed Fuad, except it provides a fairly exceptional example of an Arab anthroponym surviving the onomastic purge. On Köprülu, see the article by Olivier Bouquet in this dossier.

[59]Les Annales de la Turquie 7-8-9 (August-October 1936): 43.

[60]It is worth noting that this origin story is a “photographic negative” of the Atlantis myth.

[61]Büşra Ersanli, İktidar ve Tarih: Türkiye’de “Resmi Tarih” Tezinin Oluşumu (1929-1937) [Political Power and History: the Formation of the Official History Thesis in Turkey] (Istanbul: Afa Yay, 1992); Étienne Copeaux, Espaces et temps.

[62]Translated and published in Ersanli, İktidar ve Tarih, 63.

[63]İlker Aytürk, “Turkish Linguists against the West: The Origins of Linguistic Nationalism in Atatürk’s Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 40 (2004): 1-25; Emmanuel Szurek, “Connaissez-vous la théorie de la langue-soleil? Une histoire européenne du fantasme scientifique dans la Turquie des années 1930,” in Les langues de la négociation, ed. Déjanirah Couto and Stéphane Pequignot (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, in press).

[64]See for example the anthropometric survey of Mustafa Kemal’s adoptive daughter: Afet İnan, L’Anatolie, le pays de la “race” turque. Recherches sur les caractères anthropologiques des populations de la Turquie (enquête sur 64000 individus) (Geneva: Georg et Cie, 1941). On Kemalist anthropology, see Nazan Maksudyan, Türklüğü Ölçmek: Bilimkurgusal Antropoloji ve Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Irkçı Cephesi, 1925-1939 [Measuring Turkishness: Anthropological Science Fiction and the Racist Element within Turkish Nationalism] (Istanbul: Metis, 2005); Murat Ergin, “‘Is the Turk a White Man?’“Towards a Theoretical Framework for Race in the Making of Turkishness,” Middle Eastern Studies 44, no. 6 (November 2008): 827-850.

[65]“İskân Kanunu,” Resmi Gazete 2733 (June 21 1934): 4008. A third category refers to individuals with no link to Turkish culture,” which means anarchists, spies, “nomadic Roma,” as well as people expelled from Turkey (art. 4).

[66]Yildiz, “Ne Mutlu,” 156.

[67]Hobsbawm, Nations, 108.

[68]In exchange for which he received from Mustafa Kemal in person the name Yığıt, “The Brave.” Enver Konukçu, “Yeni harfler ve devlet büyüklerinin imzaları” [“The New Characters and the Signatures of Statesmen”], in 80. Yılında Türk Harf İnkılabı Uluslararası Sempozyumu [International Symposium on the Occasion of the 80th Anniversary of the Alphabet Revolution], ed. Tülay Alim Baran (Istanbul: Yeditepe Üniversitesi Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü, 2009), 290-302; 296, 301 and after.

[69]Also in use as a semiofficial title, from 1934, was the expression Büyük Önder [“Great Leader”].

[70]“Ata Türk,” İstanbul, November 26, 1934, 1.

[71]Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

[72]Étienne Copeaux, “La transcendance d’Atatürk,” in Saints et héros du Moyen-Orient contemporain, ed. Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2002), 121-138.

[73]In the latter years of his life, Mustafa Kemal stayed increasingly regularly, and for longer, in the former imperial Ottoman palace of Dolmabahçe, in Istanbul, where he died in November 1938.

[74]A. Dilaçar, “Les bases bio-psychologiques de la théorie Güneş-Dil [Langue-Soleil],” Türk Dili 21-22 (February 1937): 80-92, 83. On this Armenian intellectual, a convert to Kemalist racialism, see Türkay, A. Dilâçar (Ankara: TDK, 1982).

[75]Behnan, Türk Soyadı, 4, 18.

[76]Lapierre, Changer de nom, 54 and after.

[77]Konukçu, “Yeni harfler,” 300.

[78]By which family names reveal their assimilationist aspect – at least for the Muslim ethnic minorities: Eissenstat, “Metaphors of Race.”

[79]Paul Siblot, “Appeler les choses par leur nom. Problématiques du nom, de la nomination et des renominations,” in Akin, Noms et Re-noms, 13-31; 29.

[kw-artsleuth]

Outsiders Looking In: Europe and “The Orient”

What do a Felix Bonfils photograph, an oil painting by Jean Leon Gerome and a lithograph engraved by Ingres have in common? All of these artworks were created in the 19th century by French artists, portray scenes and people from the Middle East and are in the collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Mia). However, if we dig a little deeper we may find some surprising connections. Cultural and political interactions between France and The East during the later half of the 19th century would influence how people and places were depicted by artists who traveled to l’orient (the Orient). In 1830 France captured Algiers, which began the colonization of North Africa and an influx of writers and artists to this “new” colony.  The word “Orient”, which means “East”, was used describe the large regions of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Most Europeans did not make distinctions between the people of these regions and ignored the many cultural, ethnic, social and political variations. Orientalism was/is a system used by the West to maintain imperial and cultural superiority over the East by portraying them as uncultured, unchanging, and uncivilized people. This East stood as a symbol of everything that Europeans perceived to be lesser and this helped to support colonial occupation and oppression. Orientalist ideas are present in the artwork of this period, as we will explore in artworks at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (mia). 

Figure 1

Sans titre, femme voilée 

1870-1879

Félix Bonfils

Albumen print

8 13/16 x 6 5/8 in.

Mia

81.77.47

   The development of Photography was especially important to the spread of images of the Middle East. For the first time, Europeans could see with clarity the “exotic wonders” of the Orient. This not only applied to the monuments and landscapes, but also the people. Felix Bonfil’s 1870’s albumin print, Sans titre, femme voilée (Untitled, Veiled Woman)(Fig. 1), is indicative of the types of photographs being taken at this time. The woman in the photograph is completely obscured by cloth as she stands in front of a plain background. She appears to hold her veil from underneath the garment. Unlike commonly worn hijabs or niqabs, the cloth underneath her veil completely obscures her face; she is simply the veiled woman. The woman makes us ask questions: Who is she? What does she look like? This photograph conforms to the narrative of the exotic and mysterious East. Europeans were less interested in realistic depictions of the people who lived there and there everyday lives. They wanted to see something new, something mysterious, something that conformed to their own fantasies about the Orient.

Felix Bonfils’ photographs were widely shared throughout Europe and his “costume studies” were used by artists as models for their paintings. Although this photograph may have been taken in his studio in Beirut, it most likely was not taken by Bonfils. It would have been considered inappropriate for a Muslim woman to have her picture taken by a man. Therefore, it is more probable that Bonfils wife, Marie-Lydie Cabanis, took this photograph and all other photographs of women in the studio. Orientalist art, and photography especially, gives the illusion of authenticity. What we don’t see is the elaborate staging that went into these photographs. It was a very artificial process; clothing and props were often added and the subjects were perfectly posed. Bonfils’ costume studies were a part of a larger European movement to document The East through art, which allowed them to control the narrative. This photograph assumes that this woman would have commonly worn this garment and that her existence was relegated to obscurity and shadow. We now understand that this was simply not true, women did have power in Middle Eastern and African societies. The Veiled Woman was not defined by her anonymity, as this photograph would suggest.

Figure 2

Odalisque 

1825

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Lithograph

11 x 13 3/4 in.

Mia

P.11,022

In the 1825 lithograph by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Fig. 2), we see a woman depicted with almost no clothing at all. This print is a faithful re-creation of Ingres’ popular 1814 oil painting, Grande Odalisque (Fig. 3). Lithography uses a stone or metal plate that is then drawn on and pressed onto paper, creating a print. This allowed for the mass production and circulation of images. Ingres published this and other original artworks of his in 'Album Lithographique' in 1826. The word “odalisque” is a French word that refers to a female slave or concubine. In Odalisque, we see a female reclined on a bed, her only clothing consists of a headdress. She has fine jewelry on her wrist and a peacock fan in her hand, which she drapes across her body. Although her back is turned to us, she makes eye contact with the viewer. The whole room is filled with drapery and in the bottom left-hand corner we see a hookah and an incense burner.

Figure 3

La Grande Odalisque

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

1814

Oil Painting

H. 0.91 m; W. 1.62 m

Louvre

R.F. 1158

The myth of the female slave in the harem, although completely unfounded, was a common subject of 19th century artists. This myth allowed Europe to maintain a position of moral superiority over the Orient. They could justify their involvement in this region as an ethical necessity and a civilizing force. There was another, far simpler, reason for the proliferation of this type of imagery, which had to do with its primary audience. French culture at this time, was becoming increasingly moralistic, and any attempts at female nudity in art kept to the categories of myth and legend. Depictions of the harem and nudity within it were considered acceptable because of the geographic and cultural difference that France perceived between The West and The East. The exotic stereotypes are all present in Odalisque, available for the consumption of a European audience. The reality of harem life was much more bland than the fantasy. Nudity was rare in the harem because this was the place where wives raised their children, not a brothel. Ingres, as in the case of most artists, would have never seen the inside of a harem. Odalisque presents to us the narrative of the exotic East, which fulfilled Europe’s desire for sexualized material while maintaining a moral and ethical distance.

Figure 4

The Carpet Merchant

c. 1887

Jean-Léon Gérôme

Oil on canvas

33 7/8 x 27 1/16 in.

Mia

70.40

Jean-Leon Gerome’s paintings were, and continue to be, celebrated for their vibrant colors and hyper-realistic scenes. One of Mia’s more famous holdings is The Carpet Merchant (Fig. 4), which Gerome painted in 1887 after one of his many trips to the Middle East. Two years prior, in 1855, he had visited The Court of the Rug Market in Cairo. On the surface this painting may seem like a faithful re-creation of an event that Gerome actually witnessed, but in reality Gerome took liberties when depicting Oriental scenes. He was more concerned with creating locations that evoked the unchanging “otherness” of the Orient, rather than those that were realistic. 

The Carpet Merchant depicts the sale of elaborate carpets in a large interior room. The merchant gestures towards a prospective buyer, as a group of richly clothed men stand around him, admiring his wares. Carpets lay strewn on the floor in the foreground, while the background is completely consumed by a large, ornate red and green carpet. The many different styles of dress and turbans on display seem to come right out of Bonfils’ costume studies. This painting reveals another aspect of Orientalism; consumerism. Europeans were avid consumers of Oriental goods, even going so far as to dress in Oriental clothing. Carpets, fine jewelry, and furniture were just some of the imports that became available in popular marketplaces such as London. It even became popular to furnish your apartment and wardrobe in the style of the Middle East and live your life in the guise of an Oriental. Of course, what we see in Gerome’s painting is a spectacle of imagination.

These surprising connections between artworks from entirely different mediums shows us how common Orientalist thought was during the 19th Century. The legacy of Orientalism continues to have effects on how Westerners perceive Middle Eastern countries and vice-versa. Contemporary Middle Eastern artists are still grappling with the consequences of this ideology in their art. These artists create work that conveys the complex, dynamic, and culturally rich place that the The East is, as a counterpoint to these static depictions by Orientalist artists.    

[jeki2011-blog]

Myths and Truths About Publishable Journal Articles

Wendy Laura Belcher

What are the essential ingredients for a publishable research article? Most academics know that their classroom essay or conference paper is not yet publishable, but they’re not entirely sure why. So let me debunk some common myths about what makes an article publishable and then turn to what, in fact, does make one acceptable to a journal.

Myth No. 1: Only articles that are profoundly theoretical and/or have groundbreaking findings get published. Novice authors have an exaggerated idea of what publishable quality is, because they rarely read the average journal article. Graduate seminar readings tend to concentrate on leading thinkers, plus a few articles the professor considers groundbreaking. As a result, the characteristics of the great majority of scholarship are something with which graduate students seldom acquaint themselves. Most articles are neither earth-shattering nor published by famous scholars. Instead, they’re narrow in claims and context and published by people like you and me.

Myth No. 2: Only articles with lots of interesting ideas get published. Novice authors think that many interesting ideas make an article publishable. Although it is to be hoped that any article has interesting ideas, their sheer accumulation isn’t what gets an article published. As a senior scholar told me, “A graduate student came to talk to me about the article he wanted to publish. Three continents, 50 authors and a dozen theoretical paradigms later, I’m wondering where exactly it is that 30 pages can hold 100,000 words?” Articles get published not for spraying ideas but for articulating one important idea.

Myth No. 3: Only articles that are entirely original get published. Novice authors often don't grasp what makes something original, thinking that only unique work gets published. When they find, upon doing a literature search, that “someone has written my article,” they feel discouraged. Yet almost all published scholarship is not the first on the subject and is openly derivative or imitative.

So if originality is so elusive, why do people in academe always harp on its importance? Because you still must do something “new” to be published. To get a better sense of this point, let’s take a closer look at the difference between original ideas and new ones.

What Gets Published and Why

A publishable journal article is a piece of writing organized around one important new idea that is demonstrably related to the scholarship previously published. In other words, research articles get published because they say something new about something old. If your idea is interesting but not new, your article won’t be published. If your idea is new but not related to the old (previous research), your article won’t be published. If your ideas are multiple but not organized around one new idea, your article won’t be published. As Wayne C. Booth and his colleagues wrote in The Craft of Research, “Tell me something I don’t know so I can understand better our common interest.”

Note that I didn’t use the word “original.” In contrast to original, the strict meaning of new is not “the first” or “previously nonexistent” but something that has been seen, used or known for only a short time. For instance, if you write an article about Vietnamese women’s reproductive strategies, some of which have existed for centuries, your information will not be original, but knowledge of it may be new to the field of medical anthropology. Bringing attention to something can be sufficiently original to get an article published.

Something new can also be a variation. For instance, if you write an article about schizophrenia using statistics collected by others but correlating variables that they didn’t correlate or interpreting the correlation differently, you’ll have written something new. To write a variation on scholarship that already exists can be sufficiently original to get an article published.

So don’t get fixated on the idea of originality when drafting or revising your article. Make your material, whether ancient or invented yesterday, fresh, and you’ll be published. How do you accomplish that? And what’s considered new for the purposes of publication? Three types of newness mark publishable articles.

Publishable article type No. 1: approaches new evidence in an old way. An article that provides new evidence in support of an accepted idea represents the best bet for novice authors. In such an article, you don’t create a new approach; rather, you present new evidence to support an existing approach. (By “existing approach,” I mean accepted theories, common methods, dominant arguments and so on. As long as someone else has proposed a theory, it’s an existing approach for you.) This new evidence can result from your laboratory experiments, field observations, primary source study or archival research. It can also be evidence that someone else recently produced, such as government data or a new film.

Since graduate students are usually more in touch with new cultural trends and practices, they can often make real contributions by writing this kind of article, testing old ideas in new contexts. Those who have grown up in transnational or subcultural contexts also have an advantage in collecting such data.

Unfortunately, simply having new evidence won’t suffice. It’s not enough to introduce a new text, draw attention to a movement little discussed or fill in the details on a little-known cultural practice. While this is important work (and, I think, sadly underappreciated in academe as an end in itself), it’s not the kind of research that tends to get published. You have simply written a report, a paper typical of the classroom but uncommon in journals. To be published, you must relate the new to the old.

As an example, say that you’ve written an article about art initiatives in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, one of the largest refugee settlements in the world. If you simply describe where the poetry readings are, who paints what kind of paintings and how song lyrics relate to current events, you probably won’t get published. This is so even if you’re providing new data that few have collected or presented in scholarly journals. But if you describe this new evidence and employ it to theorize, say, how individuals use the arts to resolve conflicts and recast national identities, then you’re on your way to a publishable article.

That is, since conflict resolution and national identity have been wide-ranging theoretical concerns for some time, you will have provided new evidence for the old theory that human beings use culture to construct identity. If you simply report on cultural production in Zaatari, you didn’t present your evidence in the context of ongoing academic concerns or the scholarly conversation in your field. You didn’t approach the new in an old way.

Your new evidence doesn’t have to support the old theory; you can refine it or even disprove it. Of course, taking this strategy is riskier, since readers tend to accept evidence for things they believe in and to reject evidence against things they believe in. If you decide to contradict existing theories, you must have strong evidence. An example of an article providing new evidence to contradict an old theory would be your finding that low self-esteem is correlated not with shyness but with vitamin D levels. That is, although other researchers on the topic found a strong correlation among low self-esteem, depression and shyness, your test administered to undergraduate students did not find a strong correlation. You would be using new evidence to undermine an existing theory.

Publishable article type No. 2: approaches old evidence in a new way. An article taking a new approach to old evidence is typically not by a novice author. Only an author with a strong grasp of existing theories and methodologies, something the novice is often still trying to attain, can invent a new approach. In such an article, the author develops a new way of approaching old data, such as a new method, research design or theory.

Again, just having a new approach won’t suffice. It’s not enough simply to claim that a new theory has explanatory power or that a new methodology will be more useful than an old one. Rather, you must apply the new approach to something that already exists. If the possible error in writing publishable article type No. 1 (based on new evidence) is that the article is too bound to concrete data, the possible error in writing publishable article type No. 2 (based on a new theory) is that the article is too high in the theoretical stratosphere. The new theory must be related to old evidence.

One example of a successful new approach-old evidence combination is the work of Timothy Morton. Taking advantage of object-oriented ontology, itself a relatively new school of thought, he arrived at the idea of “hyperobjects” -- objects so widely spread and long lasting that they are practically everywhere and always, like global warming or Styrofoam. He brought something new to an old problem, our ecological crisis, and theorized a new approach to existing evidence.

If I may immodestly refer to my own work, I too have theorized in this manner. I invented the term “discursive possession” to talk about how the discourse of a subjugated colonized group could possess the thought of a dominant colonial group. I made this argument using old evidence -- one of the most canonical European texts ever written, Rasselas, Samuel Johnson’s 18th-century novel about Ethiopia -- to show how this problematically orientalist text, by an author who had never been to Africa, was nevertheless animated by Ethiopians’ own self-conceptions.

Of course, newness can take many forms. If an approach exists elsewhere in the scholarship but is very hard to find, has not been written about in a long time, has not been articulated clearly, has been discredited or has not been used in your field, then refurbishing that existing but sidelined idea can constitute a new approach.

Publishable article type No. 3: pairs old evidence with old approaches in a new way. An article that presents a new pairing of old evidence with an old approach represents another good choice for novice authors. It gives neither new evidence nor a new approach; instead, it merely links evidence and an approach that haven’t been linked previously. As Disraeli said, “The originality of a subject is in its treatment.” Those with strengths in several disciplines are most able to make these kinds of links.

Let’s examine an example of an old evidence-old approach-new link article. Say that you have written an article about the problems of racism and sexism in the Hollywood film industry. If you simply note that many Hollywood movies are racist and sexist, you’ll have done nothing new. If, however, you demonstrate how the Federal Communications Commission’s policies during the 1960s and 1970s caused film production to shift away from inclusion, away from positive portrayals of women and people of color, you’re on your way to getting published, because you have paired an old approach (historical analysis of government media policies) with old evidence (sexism and racism in the movies) in a new way. You brought existing data and approaches together to create a new understanding.

To conclude, advice about academic writing often assumes that the most difficult part is arriving at good ideas. But I’ve found that most academics, even graduate students, have good ideas. The real problem is how many of those good ideas languish in unfinished articles. I hope these suggestions will aid you in shaping those good ideas in ways that will make them publishable.

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/07/18/how-write-publishable-journal-article-opinion

[trendteeshop]

The fraught cultural politics of Disney’s new Aladdin remake

The fraught cultural politics of Disney’s new Aladdin remake

Disney’s live-action Aladdin, a remake of its 1992 animated film, has finally arrived in theaters, and on one level, it’s something of an achievement. The production, helmed by Guy Ritchie, had a hefty amount of cultural baggage to overcome, and has been dogged by controversy and skepticism over its premise and execution since before filming even began.

All the backlash isn’t entirely the 2019 film’s fault. Although the original movie was a critically acclaimed masterpiece, it was also dripping in Orientalism and harmful racist depictions of Arabic culture. The new film has, for the most part, managed to shirk much of its inspiration’s exoticism and cultural inaccuracies, but despite Ritchie’s clear efforts to deliver a more respectful version of Aladdin, it may not be enough to satisfy many of its detractors.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a press release earlier this week asking reviewers and critics to acknowledge that the “Aladdin myth is rooted by racism, Orientalism and Islamophobia” and to “address concerns about racial and religious stereotypes perpetuated by the [new] Disney film.”

Most people think that the story of Aladdin comes from the original 1001 Nights tales, which is a collection of traditional Middle Eastern and Asian folklore. But in fact, Aladdin isn’t a traditional folktale; it has a different history, and it’s one that still causing controversy today.

The tale of Aladdin is born from a hodgepodge of cultural influences — each with an Orientalist viewpoint Aladdin had no known source before French writer Antoine Galland stuck it into his 18th-century translation of 1001 Nights. Galland claimed to have heard it firsthand from a Syrian storyteller, but claiming your original story came from an exotic faraway source is a common literary device, and it’s likely this Syrian storyteller never existed. In other words, a French guy with a European colonial view of Asia gave us the original Aladdin.

The story’s exoticism — a xenophobic view of other cultures, or people from those cultures, as being somehow strange, unfathomable, or alien — is entrenched in that framing. A specific flavor of exoticism is Orientalism, an idea famously conceptualized by Edward Said. Said was a leading figure in early postcolonial research, and in his 1978 book Orientalism, he outlined literary and narrative tropes that US and European writers used (and still use) to portray Asia and the Middle East as bizarre, regressive, and innately opaque and impossible to understand. The othering of these cultures often takes the form of romanticized depictions of these regions as mysterious or mystic fantasy lands, framed through a colonial perspective.

What’s fascinating about the origins of this tale is that, even though 1001 Nights has been traditionally translated in English as Arabian Nights, the original story was set not in the Arabic world, but in China. Early 19th and 20th-century versions of the story clearly show Aladdin as culturally Asian.

In this illustration of Aladdin, circa 1930, Aladdin and his setting are clearly Chinese

You could even still find many stage depictions of Aladdin as culturally Chinese well into the 20th century, such as in this yellowface production of a British pantomime from 1935:

Aladdin confronts his captor, who’s styled as an Imperial Chinese official

But the Aladdin myth also was a cultural hodgepodge, with many depictions of the story freely mixing Asian elements with European elements. In an 1880 musical burlesque version, Aladdin appeared to have been played by an actor in yellowface, with a contemporaneous setting that seems culturally European:

A musical score of popular songs, arranged by W. Meyer Lutz, from a production of Aladdin, at the Gaiety Theatre, London. Hulton Archive

This tendency to modernize Aladdin continued into the 20th century. As we can see from this archival photo from a 1925 stage production, the story was often presented as a hybrid tale of the exoticized Orient meeting modern English-language styles and fashions.

Truly, a whole new world of cultural appropriation

Following the rise of Hollywood, however, European and American storytellers gradually began transforming Aladdin into a Middle Eastern tale. Movie studios played up the exotic setting and emphasized cultural stereotypes.

This poster for a 1952 film version of Aladdin gives you the idea the filmmakers weren’t all that interested in authenticity

And no Hollywood production did more to solidify this change than Disney’s animated version of Aladdin.

The 1992 Aladdin codified how we think of the story — and the new film had to grapple with that legacy

Perhaps in response to its alleged roots as a Syrian story, the 1992 animated film transplanted the fictional Chinese city of Agrabah to somewhere along the Jordan River. But Disney also gave the film several architectural and cultural flourishes that seem to hail from India — like basing the Sultan’s Palace on the Taj Mahal.

The 1992 film revels in a lot of Orientalist stereotypes: Its mythos reeks of mystical exoticism, with Agrabah explicitly described as a “city of mystery.” Jasmine is a princess who longs to escape an oppressive and controlling culture; her ultimate aim is to gain enough independence to marry for love rather than political expediency, which made her strikingly evolved for the time but seems hopelessly limiting now. Meanwhile, her father, the sultan, is a babbling, easily manipulated man-child. The citizens of Agrabah are frequently depicted as barbarous sword-wielders and sexualized belly dancers. Worse, the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” originally contained the ridiculously racist line, “They cut off your ear if they don’t like your face / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.”

Perhaps most crucially, the film renders its heroes, Aladdin and the Genie, as culturally American. Their wisecracking street-smarts, sheer cunning, and showy braggadocio are all coded as things that set them apart from the residents of Agrabah, and Robin Williams’s famously improvisational jokes as Genie are anachronistically drawn from contemporary American pop culture. In essence, it’s very easy to unthinkingly read Aladdin and the Genie as two Yankees in a land full of exotic Others.

This take on the story became the definitive one, so to release a new version of Aladdin in 2019 is to grapple with all of this baggage at a time when audiences are less likely to turn a blind eye toward it. Things got off to a rocky start: The choice of Ritchie as director — great when it comes to snappy street action, but less so when it comes to nuanced portrayals of race — didn’t exactly inspire a ton of confidence.

Then came one casting controversy after another. An early report that Ritchie and Disney Studios were having trouble casting the lead role, in part because of alleged difficulties finding Arabic and Asian actors who could sing, drew outrage from fans. Then the production was criticized for casting ethnically Indian British actress Naomi Scott as Jasmine, instead of a Middle Eastern or Arabic actress. And then news that the film had added a new white male character to the cast, played by Into the Woods’ Billy Magnussen, raised more eyebrows. (His role ultimately turned out to be a bit part added for comic contrast to Aladdin.)

To top it all off, reports that Disney had been “browning up” some actors on set sparked flabbergasted reactions and drew a swift response from Disney, noting that “great care was taken to put together one of the largest most diverse casts ever seen on screen” and that “diversity of our cast and background performers was a requirement and only in a handful of instances when it was a matter of specialty skills, safety and control (special effects rigs, stunt performers and handling of animals) were crew made up to blend in.”

Given all of this, skepticism over the film has run rampant. Disney and Ritchie seem to have taken pains to deliver a respectful film: They’ve written more three-dimensionality into most of the main characters, especially Jasmine and the Genie, and they’ve removed much of the exotic stereotypes of the film’s predecessor. Still, there remains a lack of confidence in their final product. The Council on American-Islamic Relations noted before the film’s US debut that “as seen through the trailer, the racist themes of the original animated cartoon seemingly reemerge in the live-action remake, despite efforts by Disney to address the concerns from 25 years ago.”

Then there’s the tense sociocultural context in which this new live-action film is appearing. At any other time, Aladdin might have been little more than a dose of multiculturalism, but it has emerged at a moment when global politics are deeply fraught, progressives have fought hard for ethnically diverse and authentic cinema, and extremists — everyone from actual radicals to media fans engaging in online review bombing — have demonized and attacked the very idea of multicultural representation. The Council on American-Islamic Relations was also wary of this, warning that releasing the film “during the Trump era of rapidly rising anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and racist animus only serves to normalize stereotyping and to marginalize minority communities.”

All of these factors have created a rocky path for the movie, and seem to have hindered its route to finding critical success; currently, reviews are decidedly mixed. But Disney is a global powerhouse whose films can shape cultural perceptions for generations, and Aladdin will doubtless have plenty of pull at the box office. So for better or for worse, Aladdin’s crossed cultural signals and its troubling legacy will probably be with us for a very long time to come.

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