Tag: colonialism

Interesting New Book on Assyria (and it’s a free pdf!)

I’ve just finished reading the intro so far, and I’m finding much to like in this new work by Jessie DeGrado on the interplay between the Assyrian empire(s) and ancient Israel, biblical texts, museum reception, and modern receptions. Neat framing in a decolonial context! I’ve been thinking of working on an updated and expanded Asia Has Claims Upon New England since it’s turning 20 (!!) this year as we continue to examine and re-examine our own lenses of history, theology, and cultural assumptions…

University Press of Colorado – Assyria’s Plunder:

Engaging texts from Israel and Judah, DeGrado refuses the usual framings of Biblical resistance to Assyrian despotism and asks instead why subject populations may have capitulated to Assyrian rule. Paired chapters consider specific Assyrian imperial practices and biblical texts that engage them. As the study moves from the awe-filled spectacle of Assyrian throne rooms to the Assyrian policy of deporting divine statues, Assyria’s Plunder centers the embodied experiences of those subjected to Assyrian hegemony. DeGrado also explores how the empire’s violence still holds sway in the popular imagination while Euro-American imperialism goes largely unacknowledged.

Drawing on decolonial studies alongside epigraphic and textual analysis, Assyria’s Plunder shows how critical historiography and theory can enrich historical analysis and provide a fuller portrait of Assyrian interaction with its client state.

Displaced Forms: Assyrian Reliefs, Ecological Intentionality, and the Ethics of Perception

Twenty years ago (2006), my first book, Asia Has Claims Upon New England: Assyrian Reliefs at Yale, was published by Yale University after my time there as a graduate student working at the Yale University Art Gallery. It’s a short study of how carved stones from the palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud came to New Haven and entered the religious, educational, and institutional imagination of nineteenth-century America. That earlier work focused on Assyrian palace reliefs, Protestant missionary culture, biblical archaeology, and the strange afterlives of objects once they are removed from the worlds that formed them. The original publication is available here, with catalog records available through Yale/WorldCat and the Smithsonian Institution.

This new work, “Displaced Forms: Assyrian Reliefs, Ecological Intentionality, and the Ethics of Perception,” returns to that earlier project from the standpoint of my current doctoral work in ecology, spirituality, and religion at CIIS. I ask what happens when a form is separated from its world, whether that form is an Assyrian relief, a sacred tree carved in gypsum, a black walnut in a Spartanburg yard, or a river translated into capacity. The essay brings the Assyrian reliefs into conversation with ecological phenomenology, Edith Stein’s account of form, and my ongoing work on ecological intentionality. Its central claim is simple, I think… displaced forms continue to make claims upon us, and to perceive them rightly requires more than possession, preservation, or admiration. It requires learning to receive the worlds still speaking through them.

Displaced_Forms_Assyrian_Reliefs_Ecological_IntentionalityDownload

Digital Colonialism

“Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have started hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and linking to them on closed Facebook groups, creating a totally free and clandestine file sharing network in a country where mobile internet data is extremely expensive…”

Source: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems With Digital Colonialism | Motherboard

Fascinating article.

If the developing world wants to use our internet, they must play by our rules, the thinking goes.