Category: Academic
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Pan-Africanism and Western Domination
Written by Pablo Perez Ruiz. “Toussaint’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness.” – C.L.R James, Black Jacobins. “This is where the African intellectual lives in paradoxical terms: powerful yet powerless.” – Toyin Falola, Nationalism and African Intellectuals. Pan-Africanism, when taken as a broad ‘group of movements’ with ‘no single nucleus’ and stemming from the experiences of the…
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Wicked Women: The Stepmother as a Figure of Evil in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Written by Anahit Behrooz. The recent scholarly resurgence of fairy tales and folklore, and the litany of rewrites, spin offs and adaptations, prompts a reexamination of many of the genre’s characteristics and tropes. The character of the wicked stepmother has gained notoriety as one of the most evil villains to be found in fairy tales, frequently…
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Pharaoh Akhenaten’s Ordained Benevolence
Written by Jenisha Sabaratnam. As Pharaoh of Lower and Upper Egypt, King Akhenaten undoubtedly had immense power over his land and subjects throughout his seventeen year rule of the 18th dynasty of Ancient Egypt. Though it was common for Pharaohs to justify their rule through religion, Akhenaten took it one step further. He changed the…
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The Legend of Classical Greek Theatre
Writtten by Phoebe McKechnie. When reading Euripides’ The Bacchae and Medea, a comparison with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible does not instantly come to mind. Their settings are very different: The Bacchae and Medea are set in ancient Greece, and the Massachusetts town Salem is well known as the setting of Miller’s Puritanical play. However, within these geographical settings, all three plays revolve around male-dominated environments where…
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Between Psychotherapy and Spirituality: Buddhist Interaction with Freudian Psychoanalysis
Written by Christopher Harding. In the West, Sigmund Freud is thought of as one of the greatest critics of religion that has ever lived. In our own times, we are quite familiar with attempts to integrate psychoanalysis and psychotherapy more broadly with religious traditions including Christianity and Buddhism. The rise of a ‘mindfulness’ culture, which…
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Presidential Campaign 2016: Thoughts from Across the Pond…
Some thoughts on the current Presidential Campaign from Professor George H. Gilliam, UVA. The great philosopher Woody Allen once remarked that 80 per cent of life is just showing up. Most Americans have stopped showing up at political events. This year, only about 9 per cent (fewer than one in ten!) of the population actually…
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Africa’s Haven of Peace? Elections, Politics and Violence in Post-colonial East Africa
As I write, it is the 28 October 2015, and three days have passed since Tanzania went to the polls for the fifth time since the return of multi-party elections in 1995. Elections in Africa are always moments of high tension, and this election is no different. Today, the BBC News Africa page leads with…
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From Oral to Written Folklore: The Evolution and Reception of the Icelandic Saga
The Icelandic Sagas are more than stories about a heroic age of kings, of trolls and witches, and magical phenomenon unseen by our modern eyes. They offer a complex resource of what early settlers of the island deemed important to their heritage. Since the thirteenth century, scholars have attempted to understand the departure from the…
Retrospect Journal 