{"title":"Social media and the demotic turn in Africa's media ecology","authors":"Farooq A. Kperogi","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12711","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hic3.12711","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Social media platforms have exploded in the last decade and have emerged as the arenas for discursive democracy, sociality, and digital dissidence across Africa. This article historicizes and genealogizes the exponential, if slightly imperceptible but nonetheless phenomenal, growth, maturation, and spread of social media on a continent that had been described in the scholarly literature as the blackhole of informational capitalism. It argues that the progressive centrality of social media in the quotidian lives of Africans, which has invited consternation and censorship from many African governments and inspired precarity in the traditional media sphere, instantiates the materialization of the demotic turn in communication, which situates the ordinary person as the fulcrum of the communicative process.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"20 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42859137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Genealogies of exception: Writing histories of North-East India","authors":"Anandaroop Sen","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12710","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hic3.12710","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The North-East in India is a shorthand for a territory built on violence, commodity extraction and exceptional laws. For years now, the region has nurtured a stygian discontent. However, instead of succumbing to the despair and disapproval of technocrats and security personnel such crises usually evokes, one can find political and analytical sustenance in such turbulent histories. Often in the histories of ‘failed’ states, ‘disturbed’ frontiers and borderlands, one finds cyphers to modern governance. In this sense, the North-East is quite au courant. In this analytically productive sense, the essay will discuss the recent and older trends of historiographies of the North-East. How is the North-East located within South Asian historiography? How does it speak to academic collectives beyond the Indian/South Asian historiography? How does the political discord and potential of the region shape academic engagements? Answers to these questions will provide insight into the production and nature of academic silos or lumps as the North-East simultaneously poses as a political problematic at the heart of Indian democracy <i>and</i> a component of an emergent field of South-Asian, South-East Asian and global scholarship.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"20 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46412694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mass education and the British Empire","authors":"Stephen Jackson","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12709","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47491244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The languages of Indian Ocean studies: Models, methods and sources","authors":"Nile Green","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12703","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This introductory survey offers a critical reflection on the development of Indian Ocean studies over the past three decades. It pays particular attention to the gaps in our understanding left by adopting foundational paradigms from elsewhere (particularly the Mediterranean) rather than developing “tailor-made” models based on primary sources in the languages of the Indian Ocean itself. Looking back over previous scholarship, the critical part of the essay focuses on the influential model of a holistic, environmentally determined maritime “world” of enduring and persistent interactions, and the longstanding focus on trade as a sufficient enabling mechanism for “cosmopolitan” cultural interactions. Looking forward to future avenues of research, the constructive part of the essay then turns to the importance of written source materials in Indian Ocean languages, and the new methods and insights suggested by this evidentiary corpus.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"20 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"137675962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Food, health, and nutrition in Chinese history","authors":"Hilary A. Smith","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12704","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hic3.12704","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay explores the relationships between food and health in Chinese history, from ancient times to the present. It briefly reviews how historians have written about dietary knowledge in China's past, from a midcentury focus on discoveries that prefigured those of modern nutrition science to a more expansive recent understanding of healthy eating. From there, the piece draws on scholarship from the past 2 decades to highlight the complexity of pre-modern Chinese ideas about food and its connection to ritual, social order, moral rectitude, pleasure, and physical and emotional well-being, all of which factored into dietetic prescriptions and prohibitions. Finally, the last section focuses on the modern period. It suggests that while Western foods and nutrition science acquired great prestige in early twentieth-century China, by the early 21st century both had lost some of their luster, and interest in classical and folk understandings of diet—inflected by the postsocialist political and economic order—was again flourishing.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hic3.12704","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44440213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Teaching and learning guide for: Health for all? Histories of international and global health","authors":"M. Brazelton","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12702","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48108278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Teaching & Learning Guide for: A social history of the Avars: Historical and archaeological perspectives","authors":"Florin Curta","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12699","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hic3.12699","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"19 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48210272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contextualising colonial violence: Causality, continuity and the Holocaust","authors":"Mads Bomholt Nielsen","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12701","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hic3.12701","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article considers the problems that arises in linking colonialism and colonial violence to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Links between colonialism and the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, have again become popular with the increased focus on colonial violence. In German colonial history, a dominant tendency has been the ‘colonial <i>sonderweg</i>’ where continuities are drawn from colonial Africa to the Holocaust. Recently, British colonial violence too has been contextualised with the Holocaust, thus expanding the continuity thesis. Furthermore, Germany's confrontation with the Holocaust after 1945, some argue, serves as a model for how Britain should confront its past as a colonial power. This article argues that the invocation of the Holocaust as a benchmark for violence and a way to gauge colonial violence is generally unproductive and problematic. While intended to promote the historical significance of colonial violence, it does the opposite: it reduces it to a precursor and flattens the historical complexities that explained colonialism and colonial violence. Colonial violence, it is argued, is in itself significant and should therefore be separated from the Holocaust if we are to maintain its colonial context and historical specificity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"19 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44130889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Health for all?: Histories of international and global health","authors":"M. Brazelton","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12700","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45782286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A social history of the Avars: Historical and archaeological perspectives","authors":"Florin Curta","doi":"10.1111/hic3.12697","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hic3.12697","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Avars have been recently been of some interest to historians, but only from a political point of view, given that the written sources cover almost exclusively only the first century of Avar history. Comparatively less attention has so far been paid to the social organization of the Avar qaganate. Archaeologists, on the other hands, are now in a privileged position, as the quantity of material culture evidence has grown exponentially over the last decades or so. However, even the archaeological approach to social history is marred by serious problems deriving from the slavish application of a model of analysis first promoted by Gyula László. That model is based on dubious ethnographic parallels and does not account for the variety of situations within the Avar qaganate either in chronological or in geographical terms. Most archaeologists concerned with the analysis of cemetery sites (which produced the bulk of the evidence under discussion) still maintain that Avar society was divided into lords, middle class and commoners. New excavations, but especially new techniques (such as those associated with bioarchaeology) have slowly, but steadily eroded the simplistic model advanced by László and his students. A review of the most recent archaeological literature reveals a shift towards an intepretation that takes into account the staged representation of status in death, and therefore privileges the symbolism of the artifacts associated with social rank. “Princely burials” are now regarded as a sign of political and social crisis, and weapon burials have by now received a much more sophisticated interpretation largely inspired by gender archaeology.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"19 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45728701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}