The Story-Time of the British Empire: Colonial and by Sadhana Naithani PDF

By Sadhana Naithani

In The Story-Time of the British Empire, writer Sadhana Naithani examines folklore collections compiled via British colonial directors, army males, missionaries, and girls within the British colonies of Africa, Asia, and Australia among 1860 and 1950. a lot of this paintings used to be comprehensive within the context of colonial kinfolk and performed by way of non-folklorists, but those oral narratives and poetic expressions of non-Europeans have been transcribed, translated, released, and mentioned across the world. Naithani analyzes the function of folklore scholarship within the building of colonial cultural politics in addition to within the notion of overseas folklore reviews. given that such a lot folklore scholarship and cultural background focuses completely on particular countries, there's little learn of cross-cultural phenomena approximately empire and/or postcoloniality. Naithani argues that connecting cultural histories, in particular in terms of formerly colonized international locations, is vital to knowing these nations' folklore, as those people traditions end result from either inner and ecu effect. the writer additionally makes transparent the position folklore and its learn performed in shaping intercultural perceptions that survive within the educational and well known nation-states this present day. The Story-Time of the British Empire is a daring argument for a twenty-first-century imaginative and prescient of folklore reports that's foreign in scope and that is aware folklore as a transnational entity.

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Example text

Fletcher “This little book claims to be nothing more than the contents, revised and classified, of a notebook in which between the years 1904 and 1910 Hausa words and phrases hitherto unpublished were noted down wherever heard during my stay in Northern Nigeria. They are published in the hope that students of Hausa may find them useful in the attainment of a more perfect knowledge both of the spoken language and of the native’s mental and physical modes of recreation” (Fletcher 1912, 5). Rev. Edwin Smith and Captain Andrew Dale “Finding ourselves among a people that were almost unknown to the outside world, we threw ourselves into a study of their language and customs, our motive being, not the production of a book of this kind, but simply that we might prosecute our callings as missionary and magistrate to the best advantage.

One other European power, namely Germany, worried England even in the area of anthropological and folkloristic research, especially in Africa. Hartland presents figures: “. . German government, clearer in perception and more prompt in execution than ours, spent in the year 1898 upon anthropological explorations no less a sum than £25,000” (Hartland 1901, 39). The motivations for collecting folklore certainly did not come from individuals alone, but from the states concerned. , 40) of collecting oral lore of the different peoples brought under the British Empire.

Many of the tales are known far and wide, others in lesser areas. But, however often the people hear them, they never seem weary of repetition. They never say, “Oh, that’s an old tale,” . . with no trace of boredom [they] come in with their ejaculations just at the right points, take, it may be, a sentence out of the narrator’s mouth, or even keep up a running echo of his words. (Smith and Dale 1920, 336)4 Recording some of the important aspects of oral cultures, Smith and Dale’s description also candidly portrays the difference in the act of hearing and reading—the latter being the act through which their European audience would receive the narratives.

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