The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]

Professor Davis’s early article on appropriations of the Indies by Spanish poets who remained in Spain invites us to contemplate a body of poetry that plays the idea of American treasures against the value of true, spiritual riches.

Using the transatlantic relación of Diego Portichuelo de Ribadeneyra (1657) as an example, this essay tracks some of the ways in which several religious passengers narrated their experience crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the Spanish Indies fleets during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Of particular importance here are the ways in…[Read more]

This chapter is the product of a Keynote Address that Dr. Davis offered at the VII Conference of the Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro which took place at Robinson College, Cambridge, 18-22 July, 2005. Here the author examines a variety of kinds of early modern Spanish maritime writing (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).

The article describes two accounts of Poland and the culture of its people. The first of these dates from 1784 and was written by the Marquis de Ségur, a French diplomat travelling to St Petersburg. The second, from 1840, was written by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, at the time working as a professor at the Collège de France in Paris. I try t…[Read more]

इक्कसवीं सदी के दूसरे दशक में भारत में महिषासुर आंदोलन द्विज संस्कृति के लिए चुनौती बनकर उभरा। इसके माध्यम से आदिवासियों, पिछड़ों और दलितों के एक बड़े हिस्से ने अपनी सांस्कृतिक दावेदारी पेश की।

लेकिन यह आंदोलन क्या है, इसकी जड़ें समाज में कहां तक फैली हैं, बहुजनों की सांस्कृतिक परंपरा में इसका क्या स्थान है, मौजूदा लोक-जीवन में महिषासुर क…[Read more]

महिषासुर आंदोलन के इस कदर अचानक फैल जाने का एक बड़ा कारण था कि बहुजन समाज में इन परंपराओं की जड़ें बहुत गहरी रही हैं और इनका प्रसार उसके अवचेतन तक रहा है। इन समुदायों से आने वाले फुले, आंबेडकर, पेरियार समेत सभी चिंतकों ने असुर-संस्कृति की न सिर्फ विस्तृत गवेषणा की है, बल्कि अगर आप ध्यान से देखें तो पाएंगे कि यही उनकी वैचारिकी का प्रस्थान…[Read more]

Bahujan criticism underlines the presence of not only literature of the Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC sections but also Brahmanical and other dwija (upper caste) literature; and it also brings out aspects of their fundamental (social) make-up and their consequences. It interprets entrenched values and aesthetics in various kinds of literature. Thus,…[Read more]