Partition, Literature, and History: a Personal Reflection on ‘Toba Tek Singh’ and ‘If They Come for Us’
Though it’s been some months and even years since I’d first read these works, I have not stopped thinking about them, wanting to talk about them.
Regulating Bodies: Gender Construction in Japan
The implementation of a Euroamerican binary in nineteenth century Japan fuelled an erasure of indigenous gender identities; the subsequent impact of centring biological sex had significant effect on contemporary Japanese society.
SOAS History Blog Podcast, Ep. 4: The Ramayana – History as Storytelling, Storytelling as History
Listen to our two part episode about the Ramayana, the history of story telling, and the place of storytelling in history.
Poetry as History Analysis: Seeking Ancient Egypt’s Urban History in Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias
Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ serves as an analytical lens for both the Europeanisation of contemporary notions of ancient Egypt, and is itself a testament to the legacy of Ramasses II’s legacy.
A Tribute to bell hooks: For a Revolution in Education
hook’s engaged pedagogy is deeply connected to the idea of decolonisation. Although bell hooks comes from a particular imperial background – a “rural southern black experience (…) through the struggle for racial desegregation” in the USA – her ideas speak to a broader audience outside North America.
A Pair of Male Ducks: Traces of Queerness in Jin Dynasty China
This article is chiefly an examination of an ivory-white porcelain from Ding kiln in Quyang produced for mass domestic use during the Jin dynasty (1115-1234 CE).[1] This porcelain shows a pair of male Mandarin ducks which, this article contends, could be read as a trace of queer aesthetics.
Queer Baroque: Nikko Mausoleum
The construction of modern sexuality emphasises the sameness of biological gender between sexual object and sexual subject, which did not operate in Japan as it could not accommodate these existing gender constructions. The intense connection of the Nikkō Tōshōgu to the Tokugawa meant that it was intrinsically connected to a time that was becoming increasingly demonised as deviant.
When Things Go Wrong: Smuggling Artefacts from Baghdad to London in the late 19th Century
Many of the artefacts we see today in the ‘Ancient Near East’ collections of European and American museums were purchased in the late 19th and early 20th century from dealers who specialised in smuggling archaeological artefacts to Europe from Baghdad.
Thinking through Australian Coloniality: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Ancestry, Epistemology and Academia
Though I would not refer to myself as one, being ‘a colonial’ is an uncomfortable place to be when your ancestors were simultaneously the victims of horrific British penal codes, and also the instigators of genocide.
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SOAS History Blog Podcast, Ep. 3: Sudanese History through Music
More about this episode Samples of music in this podcast have been for research and academic discussion only. Podcast transcript This is a SOAS History Blog Podcast. In this installment, we bring you Walter Rodney Prize winner Saffa Khalil discussing her award-winning dissertation with SOAS staff member Henny Ziai. For further information about the music…