colonialism

At the fraying tail end of French colonialism, at an army base in early 1970s Madagascar, the soldiers and their families cling to an expat lifestyle that will soon be relegated to the past. Cocktails and parties set against the tropical sweep of this bewitching island; churning undercurrents of sexual tension: all of it is observed by the keen eye of eight-year-old Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), a comic-book-obsessed spy on a thorny adult world that he doesn’t fully comprehend.Director Robin Campillo draws on his own…

Film-maker Robin Campillo has surrendered to the flow of memory and given us this wonderful, personal movie, created with tenderness, unsentimental artistry and visual flair, inspired by his own childhood growing up on a French army base in recently independent Madagascar in the early 1970s. It is the story of an imaginative little kid spying and eavesdropping on the private lives of grownups, which are a mystery to him and a mystery to the grownups, too. Red Island elides his own poignant growing pains with Madagascar’s…

In the early 1730s, a new subscription craze transformed Georgian Britain. Every year, for five guineas, “Bartram’s box” would delight plant collectors and gardeners with seeds from among a hundred different North American species. The supply chain had a Pennsylvanian Quaker, John Bartram, at one end and another Quaker, English merchant Peter Collinson, at the other.The overpriced phlox and rudbeckia we now buy from garden centres in seasonal attempts to brighten up our outdoor spaces, the rhododendrons and magnolias that…

Sudden Death, Álvaro Enrigue’s previous novel to appear in English, spun an audacious patchwork of historical reflection around the tale of a tennis match – really a barely disguised duel – between the painter Caravaggio and a Spanish noble in 16th-century Rome.The US-based Mexican writer toys once more with the factual record in You Dreamed of Empires, an imaginative riff on the foundation of Mexico City by the conquistador Hernán Cortés after the sack of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán in 1521, one of the threads of…

For thousands of years, a breed of white, woolly dog played an important and cultural role for Coast Salish people in Western Canada but when colonists moved in the animal quickly became extinct, a new study says.It started with a dog named Mutton that died in 1859. Its pelt had been in a collection at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.DNA analysis on the pelt, coupled with traditional knowledge from the Coast Salish people, provided new insights on the dog once bred for…

It is an interesting fact of history that the concept of civilization emerged in northwestern Europe in the same decades of 1750s and 1760s during which the foundations of the colonial regime were laid in India after the East India Company’s successive victories in the battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) (Febvre, 1998). While initially emerging as a concept to refer to and theorize the emergent modes of civility and urban sociability of the post-feudal bourgeois world in Europe, civilization soon came to be used…

Woman, Eating is about a starving vampire, Lydia, who is unable to find pigs’ blood, which is what she usually subsists on, and cannot bring herself to feed on humans. But it is not a vampire novel — it’s about the loneliness and hunger of a young artist in London. The Guardian called it an “original take on millennial angst.” What made you start writing it? Claire Kohda, author, Woman, Eating. (M Gafarova) It was in lockdown. I’m a musician as well — a violinist — and there had been no music industry for a…

Artificial intelligence continues to be fed racist and sexist training materials and then distributed around the world. Artificial intelligence continues to be fed racist and sexist training materials and then distributed around the world. FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS Read original article here Denial of responsibility! Techno Blender is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials…

In 1857, in the wake of the Indian mutiny, a British officer, Lt George Cracklow, described in a letter home what happened to captured rebels. “The prisoners were marched up to the guns... and lashed to the muzzles,” he wrote. “The guns exploded... I could hardly see for the smoke for about 2 seconds when down came something with a thud about 5 yards from me. This was the head and neck of one of the men... On each side of the guns, about 10 yards, lay the arms torn out at the shoulders.”Nigel Biggar, in his new history of…

Do you believe that our policies are mostly good but are badly implemented? Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S Jaitley don’t agree with this ubiquitous idea. In Missing In Action, they argue that bad implementation results from ill-conceived policies that do not account for ground realities. This is one of many policy “myths” that this timely volume busts. Divided along three thematic lines, Sarkaar (State), Bazaar (Market), and Samaaj (Society), the book provides examples from history, sociology, economics, and political…