|
Showing 1 - 7 of
7 matches in All Departments
This is an offprint of two chapters of a more complete monograph
published by the author under the title of "How America's First
Settlers Invented Chattel Slavery." That book is still available
from the publisher, but the two chapters reproduced here are
because they have particular relevance to contemporary subjects and
discussions, particularly surrounding the recent canonization of
Father Junipero Serra. The subject of the reprinted chapters is the
dehumanization of Native Americans and Africans with Language,
Laws, Guns, and Religion, especially during the colonization of
early settlers in the United States. The two chapters reproduced in
this offprint are from a larger work published in the Series
"Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics" and are reproduced
here, by the author, with the kind permission of Peter Lang
Publishers, Inc., New York.
Really, we don't have to keep worrying about the time, Gordon.
Let's just sit here together. Okay? For a little while. London is
sinking, there's constant rain, and everyone is trying to escape.
Gordon, an American writer, finds himself holed up in the attic
room of a half-way house, awaiting forged papers and safe passage
back to the States. He becomes trapped with Stella, a mysterious
and seductive woman, and a teenage girl called Iris who, between
them, take Gordon on an emotional journey through his past and into
the present, forcing him to face the painful truth as to why he is
there. David K. O'Hara's The Upstairs Room is a modern take on
Sartre's play Huis Clos in which a man and two women find
themselves confined together in a drawing room for eternity. First
produced at the King's Head Theatre from 13 November to 8 December
2012 by Giddy Notion, The Upstairs Room is a compelling and
well-written play.
This book by David K. O'Rourke presents a study of language and
linguistic forms and the roles they played in the initial
imagining, developing, and maintaining of a society based on
coerced labor. It focuses especially on the contexts of coercion
and on the differences in the roles of masters and servants from
society to society. In the interaction between colonial powers and
conquered peoples, O'Rourke also describes how the European
colonial nations imposed their own languages, social metaphors, and
utopian views as a way to disconnect those they conquered from
their historic roots and re-imagine, redefine, rename, and map them
into new lands and places inhabited by inferior peoples needing
control by masters who understand how they should now live.
O'Rourke begins by describing how this rewriting of history is not
new. He calls on well-established classical and biblical language
studies to describe how older and historic oral histories and texts
were rewritten to reshape the past to fit new and more useful
views. He explains how rhetoric, metaphor, and pseudo-sciences were
used to change Europe's earlier contracted and coerced labor in
colonial America into the chattel slavery that became the hallmark
of the new and growing United States. O'Rourke also describes how
the dominant culture's current values, foundational metaphors, and
sacred notions were woven together into linguistic shelters that
served to enshrine the repressive process from questioning and
dissent. These same linguistic elements were then used after
emancipation to maintain and sanitize the remains of the slave
system by presenting it as a benign institution.
Oikos - Domus - Household: The Many Lives of a Common Word
describes historic episodes in the lives of these words, from the
Greek oikos and Roman domus to our current family and home. The
episodes highlight their function as controlling metaphors used
very differently from culture to culture, but often as ways to
control basic issues, like the context in which women become
pregnant and the control of land and its transmission to heirs.
This book also describes how these words and their current
equivalents, home and family, are used as metaphors to illustrate
how people who count are supposed to live and also to justify
disinterest in people who do not count. One of the most important
functions of the household is providing a dependable context in
which pregnancy can be controlled. It describes how another key
interest, continuing the male line, is embodied. Currently family
is a politically useful, normative fiction. Family and home have
little concrete meaning other than as metaphors for how people are
supposed to live. There is no consistent meaning for these words
from one era and one culture to another. Each episode is described
on its own trying to avoid "history by hindsight." There are no
attempts to trace causes from one time or event to another, but
rather an attempt, to the limited extent possible, to describe
episodes seen within their own contexts and mindsets. However, the
fact that women can now have control over their own pregnancy is
seen as a radical change in the role and definition of family and
household.
From New England and Virginia to New Spain and the current
Southwest, North America's founding householders--English and
Spanish alike--took the limited European practice of coerced labor
and, over the course of two hundred years, transformed it into a
depersonalized and brutal chattel slavery unlike anything that had
existed in Europe. What system of language and logic, what visions
of religious and civil society, allowed men who saw themselves both
as Christians and cultured humanists to dehumanize and enslave
people whose cultures and accomplishments were evident to nearly
all? In this book we observe the progressive development of a
mindset that allowed the settlers to see both Native Americans and
Africans as « others who did not merit human status.
|
|