Sources translated and discussed: Vela Blagoeva, “Klasovo suznanie i feminism” (Class consciousness and feminism), Zhenski trud (Women’s labor) 1, no. 2 (1904–1905): 1–2; [Ana Karima], “Nie” (We), Ravnopravie (Equal rights) 1, no. 1 (November 1908): 1–2; [A. Karima], “Vnasiame li nie raztseplenie” (Do we divide the Union?) Ravnopravie 1, no. 3 (1908): 1–2.
Krassimira Daskalova and Karen Offen
Landscapes and Races in Early Twentieth-Century Peru
The Travels of José Uriel García and Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa
Rupert J.M. Medd
From the 1930s onward, Peru began to acknowledge its own intellectual travel writers who were committed to writing about national geographical and social realities. This can be evidenced by the output during the period of independent travelers and those connected to state-funded institutions such as the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima. The underlying position is that the act of travel and its literature can work against imperialism and, therefore, become expressions of patriotism. Here, the travel narratives of two prominent Peruvian figures are analyzed: José Uriel García from Cusco and Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa from Lima. Together, they provide valuable evidence about two different responses to the modernization of Peru while also representing the nation’s significant sociogeographical divides. The focus is on questions of history, coloniality/modernity, national identity, and natural resources such as water and wood. It is hoped that this will contribute to literary studies on travel and the environment.
Female Agrarian Workers in Early Twentieth-Century Hungary
The Making of Class- and Gender-Based Solidarities
Susan Zimmermann and Piroska Nagy
Source translated and discussed: Letter, sent by Mrs. István Bordás and Mrs. Gábor Magyar to Róza (Rosika) Schwimmer, dated 1 June 1908, National Archives of Hungary— National Archives (Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára, MNLOL), Fond P 999, Feminist Association, 1904–1959, batch 5, no. 40, handwritten.
Leonid M. Goryushkin
Many earlier studies of the economic development of Siberia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presented an oversimplified view of the reality, and did not take account of the multifarious types of economic relationships or modes of production. Two collective works on the history of the Siberian peasantry and working class, published in the 1980s, demonstrate the complex and highly varied nature of the Siberian economy during the period studied. This included both small- and large-scale enterprises, concentration of capital, rapid expansion of the agricultural sector, huge population growth, significant foreign investment, co-operative associations and private artisan workshops, and the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway. Economic relationships comprised not only capitalist, but also small-scale commodity and even feudal structures. These were to some extent inter-active and inter-dependent, but the basic direction of development was towards capitalism, though at a slower pace than in European Russia.
Women's Religious Celibacy and Gender Identities among the Bulgarian Catholics in the Plovdiv Region
A Case Study of the Villages of General Nikolaevo and Sekirovo
Tsvetana Boncheva
The article deals with the institution of ‘village nuns’, a form of religious celibacy among Bulgarian Catholics in the Plovdiv region during the first half of the twentieth century. The primary concern of this article is the structuring and functioning of the institution of village nuns, viewed from the perspective of the fractal dichotomy strategy–tactics, belonging to the paradigm of fractal dichotomies including religious culture–traditional culture, clergy/male celibacy-–nuns/female celibacy, masculinity–femininity. The sources used in the research are of different types: census registers, parochial books, civil registers of births and deaths, household registers, property tax registers, various publications of the Catholic Church in Bulgaria, and ethnographic field material collected by the author. The methodology employed combines various qualitative methods: the gatekeeper and snowball methods, structured and semi-structured interviews, the biographical method and the comparative method. The analysis shows that the nuns’ institution can be treated as a turning point at which female tactics turn into strategies and bring about certain power shifts affecting gender relations.
Dhan Zunino Singh
This article traces a genealogy of sexual harassment in Buenos Aires public transport, analyzing the intersection between gender and mobility through cultural history. It focuses on the first decades of the twentieth century in which the city became a modern metropolis and women became more visible commuters using public transport. It deals with the tensions, interactions, expectations, and representations that emerged from the increasing presence of female passengers within the male imaginary and how women became a sexualized object in order to contextualize sexual harassment and explain how it became a “natural” practice over time. Finally, this article argues that the case study triggers the need to analyze gendered mobilities paying more attention to the relationship between sexuality and transport to understand passengers as sexualized bodies.
Mobility on the Move
Rickshaws in Asia
M. William Steele
The rickshaw initiated an explosion in personal mobility in Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Invented in Japan in 1869, by 1872 there were forty thousand and by 1875 over one hundred thousand of the new two-wheel vehicles on the streets of Tokyo. The number reached a peak in 1896 with 210,000 countrywide. The rickshaw (in Japanese, jinrikisha) quickly spread to Asia, to Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1874, to Singapore and Calcutta in 1880. By 1900, the rickshaw had spread throughout the continent, bringing with it new mobility to an emerging urban middle class. Moreover, for many people in Asia, the rickshaw alongside the locomotive, came to symbolize modernity. This article will explore routes of diffusion, focusing on the role played by Akiha Daisuke and his adopted son, Akiha Daisuke II, Japan's largest exporters of rickshaws, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Rehabilitating Eden
Archetypal Images of Malaya in European Travel Writing
Siti Nuraishah Ahmad, Shanthini Pillai and Noraini Md. Yusof
This article links Jungian literary criticism on archetypes with contemporary postcolonial theories on colonial discourse in travel writing (David Spurr) and the worlding of a colonized land (Gayatri Spivak) in order to understand the pattern of images in European travel writing that created the fiction of Malaya. This fiction is created through a process of worlding by European travelers from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. The practice of Islam and magic among the Malays was represented as contributing to the degeneration of Malaya. The resulting image is that of an Eden that has fallen into ruin and that needs to be transformed back into paradise by the white man.
Picturing Central Siberia
The Digitization and Analysis of Early Twentieth-Century Central Siberian Photographic Collections
David G. Anderson and Craig Campbell
This article documents over five years of exploratory work digitizing glass plate negatives across Siberia dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article explains the technical and cultural challenges governing access to these collections and offers a preliminary analysis of the themes common to this collection of over 4,000 images. The article is accompanied by a photo essay, which provides a sample of the material and the attributions, as well as references to electronic resources for the full collection and guides to further digitization.
The Sephardi Ballad
Past and Present
Hilary Pomeroy
The ballad has played a significant role not only in the literature of Sephardi Jews but also in establishing the distinctive Sephardi culture of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Handed down orally by generation after generation of Sephardi women until the first systemised collecting of ballads took place from the early twentieth century onwards, the Sephardi ballad became part of family and daily life, sung to accompany mundane household tasks; to entertain; to mark out significant stages in life from birth until death; and to celebrate and commemorate the annual religious cycle.
