Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India

Colonial governmentality in India reconstituted the public sphere. New political rationalities that constituted modern governmental power and the liberal technologies of government effected a new conception of economy and society. Governmentality's governance of colonial conduct in an improving direction socialized native public opinion to question the legitimacy of the colonial covenant. As native opinion against colonial rule sharpened, colonial liberalism had often to make a volte-face of its liberal principle and was forced to suppress public opinion. Gandhi alone sought to overturn colonial governmentality and in doing so, provided a conception of public opinion that could transcend the limits of liberal reason.     

Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India

Colonial governmentality in India reconstituted the public sphere. New political rationalities that constituted modern governmental power and the liberal technologies of government effected a new conception of economy and society. Governmentality's governance of colonial conduct in an improving direction socialized native public opinion to question the legitimacy of the colonial covenant. As native opinion against colonial rule sharpened, colonial liberalism had often to make a volte-face of its liberal principle and was forced to suppress public opinion. Gandhi alone sought to overturn colonial governmentality and in doing so, provided a conception of public opinion that could transcend the limits of liberal reason.     

“A stone wall out of the earth that thundering cannon cannot destroy"? Bastion and Moat at the Castle,Cape Town

Although the urgency with which the Dutch East India Company administration at the Cape built defensive works was a direct result of their fear of attack from both land and sea, there was an additional imperative, for the Castle at Cape Town stood as a symbol of Dutch colonial aspirations. In this paper, we compare written and material texts of one part of the Castle's architecture to show firstly, how the discordances between such sources can reveal an underside of early colonization and secondly, how the Castle moat, in the seventeenth century a stamp of aspirant power, was by the mid‐nineteenth century a dump and a public nuisance.     

Civility and Humiliation under the French Flag: The Tensions of Colonial Liberalism in Pondicherry, 1871–86

This article explores the extension of political “liberty” and franchise – as well as the eventual extension of citizenship rights – to Indians during the decades of France's Third Republic (1870s–80s) in French colonial India. Not only does this example stand in stark contrast to the civil position of Indians in British India at the time, but it was also something of a unique situation in the French colonial world. How did the French attempt to apply a colonial policy of liberalism to Indian communities in Pondicherry, India, whose social world was constructed upon caste‐based rituals and rules? I argue that liberal policies that could violate caste rules concerning purity and lead to the loss of communal rights cannot be assessed without understanding how they were received and instrumentalized by the Indian population. Overall, the difficulty of transplanting liberalism in Pondicherry was not due just to the opposition of colonial society, but also due to the resistance of local Indians. Rejections of a more emancipatory agenda meant that the republican “civility” of liberty, equality and fraternity was compromised, and this illustrates one of the fundamental tensions in imperial/liberal discourse at the time.     

Cruising,space and surveillance: decolonizing sexuality in Singapore

ABSTRACT

The policing of homosexuality in Singapore through legislation and public policy are imbued with colonial legacies that have enshrined heteronormative values within its public sphere. However, communities within new online spaces in Singapore disrupt the heteronormative surveillance efforts deployed by the state within public, family and political landscapes. Through an analysis of a local online forum dedicated to cruising this article unpacks how local gay men resist, negotiate and deploy surveillance techniques to navigate these heteronormative structures and cruise safely in Singapore. This article demonstrates how online spaces have become part of an everyday resistance that characterize modern-day efforts to decolonize sexuality in Singapore.     

Ní cothram na Féinne é sin: Cricket,Lexicography and Cultural Purity in Ireland1

This article explores the relationship between the game of cricket and the Irish language in Ireland. In our analysis, dictionaries are invoked as indices of formations of cultural purity and political power, documents of defiance, tools of codification, assertions of confidence, representations of linguistic identity. By examining the treatment of the term “cricket” in Irish language dictionaries from the eighteenth-century to the present day, we find an index of cultural values, responding and adapting to ongoing changing cultural power and capital. This demonstrates how the game, and its translated presence in the lexicography of the native language, functions as a form of cultural hybridity in the nineteenth-century, yet is cleansed in the twentieth as part of the process of Irish cultural purity (as it fights for an established postcolonial nationhood). The article offers a new way of understanding social and linguistic conventions, in the context of the colonial/postcolonial, and how such conventions function in the field of sport. Given the dominance (with the exception of India) of English as the lingua franca of sport's colonial and ludic diffusion, the article's ability to access and interrogate the processes of inclusion/exclusion in the linguistic and sporting Irish setting marks it out as an original and innovative way of understanding how cultural transfers occurred and were later annulled.     

Between the state and global civil society: non‐official experts and their network in the Asia‐Pacific, 1925–45

This article stresses the need for a more rigorous scrutiny of the power structure in which an expert network produces its ‘expert knowledge’. It defines a pioneering multinational expert network in the Asia‐Pacific region in the interwar years as a prototype of an epistemic community, and examines how far it challenged the state‐centred and North Atlantic‐centred dominant structure of international politics, and became ‘global’. In this article I argue that this particular network largely reinforced the dominant structure. This meant that it remained inter‐national and colonial, and served the interests of the state/empire, neither becoming global nor advancing a universalist cause for the global civil society. The failure owes a lot to historical circumstances. Yet this case study also demonstrates that the structure in which the expert network produced specific knowledge is still dominant and that a constant scrutiny of the role of an expert network remains critical.     

REPRODUCING REGIMES OF IMPUNITY

In India, the phrase ‘fake encounter’ refers to the extrajudicial killing of a civilian followed by the official claim that the victim was a Pakistani infiltrator killed in a legitimate military encounter with police or army forces. This article explores the widespread pattern of fake encounters in Kashmir Valley in order to shed light on the processes through which violence and terror become fictionalized and fantastic, with Kashmiri bodies gaining a heightened visibility in a falsified form within a cultural imaginary of national security interests and public safety concerns. Identifying Kashmir Valley as a state of exception, I examine how the suspension of the rule of law gives rise to new agents and hierarchies of power and authority and new patterns of criminalization and paramilitarization throughout Kashmiri society. I also consider how the informalized practices of forced disappearance, fictionalized terror, and impunity for violence are produced and reproduced through the strategic manufacturing of public consent for violence against Kashmiris throughout Indian society at large.     

Sexy and sovereign? Aboriginal models hit the ‘multicultural mainstream’

Long argued by post-colonial scholarship, Indigenous sexualities have been variously cast as pathological and abject, or fetishized and exotiziced. In the Australian context, Aboriginal sexualities have never been granted a normalized, agentic visibility in the white Australian imaginary. Since the 1990s, however, there has been an increase of ‘sexy’ Aboriginal ‘stars’ in the Australian media. This newfound visibility invites fresh questions about race, beauty, appropriation and resistance, most particularly in ways that centres Aboriginal narratives: What does it mean to be visible and ‘mainstreamed’ in a media that ‘values diversity’, whilst denying sovereignty for Indigenous people? This question is significant in the Australian context, but also has relevance for rethinking race, sexuality and media representations in colonial contexts internationally. The paper explores this newfound exposure through the voices of two Australian Aboriginal women, Samantha Harris and Magnolia Maymaru. These women have come to national and international fame as celebrated models in a fashion industry priding itself on becoming more inclusive and multicultural. It focuses on their responses to journalists over the course of their careers, as well as how the stories construct beauty and Aboriginality. I draw on Indigenous feminist scholars, particularly the work of Irene Watson, who foreground the subject of sovereignty and remind us that discourses of multiculturalism have a charged meaning for Indigenous people. I also draw on the insights of Elizabeth Povinelli who considers how sexuality intersects with discourses of empire, and how Indigenous people employ ‘creative engagements’ with liberal multiculturalism. Positioning sovereignty and multiculturalism side by side, I reflect on how Samantha and Magnolia enact a sovereign sexuality, and what this might look like. Rather than fix colonial alterity or reproduce multicultural ‘inclusions’, their narratives skirt, sidestep and ‘dance’ with the discourses constructing their lives, attending to race while transcending its colonial limits.     

The Global Transformation: Critical reflections on the historical sociology of the long nineteenth century

George Lawson and Barry Buzan's The Global Transformation advances the claim that International Relations (IR) has mistakenly overlooked the Long Nineteenth Century as a transformative era. They argue this period saw a shift in the mode of power, i.e. how power was utilised and expressed, and not merely a change in how it was distributed amongst competing political entities. The following offers a sympathetic critique of their theoretical claims. Highlighting the role of geopolitics and the societal changes of the public sphere, the article argues that the historical sociological method utilised by these authors is ‘neither realist nor liberal enough’.     

Discursive and institutional intersections: women,health and law in modern India

While important foci of feminist legal jurisprudence have highlighted the patriarchal bias in the areas of legal theory, sexuality, race, and violence, an important area that has received little attention is the interface between health law, gender, and power, particularly in the context of post-colonial societies. This paper explores these concepts in contemporary India, the underlying idea being that health is as much an issue of violence as violence is an issue of health, and both carry critical implications for the gender power configurations in society. This discussion is framed in the interstices between the Indian state and the women's movement that have interfaced in fashioning law as a critical instrument of social change and women's empowerment. Several assumptions foreground this paper: Firstly, culture is the ground upon which gender and power dynamics play out in any society. Secondly, law is also taken to be one of the sites of cultural engagement and is very much embedded in and the product of prevailing values, norms, and practices; it is not outside culture. And lastly, although this paper is India-specific, it raises issues which have cross-national resonance, particularly in the South Asian context.     

Native Dirt/Imperial Ordure: The Cholera of 1832 and the morbid resolutions of Modernity*

Abstract Why is India treated as the standing menace to the public health of the world? Is it something peculiar to Indian tradition which prevents India from enjoying the fruits of universal modernity? Or perhaps, is it the emergence of institutions and of other politically organized subjections in a history of colonialism which endowed India with a brand of colonial modernity? By using the cholera epidemic of 1832 and the efforts to rebuild and restructure everyday life in Europe and in India, this essay attempts to answer such questions. It is in the aftermath of the epidemic that various ideological positions are clarified, with the result that bourgeois culture demonstrates its limit in colonialism.     

Organ Donation and Transplantation in India: An Inquiry in Kerala

Until recently, financial incentive was the prime motivation in transplantation of kidneys from nonrelated living donors in India. Prior to the Human Organ Transplantation Act of 1994, it was legal in all states of India to purchase and merchandise organs, eliminating the opportunity for black markets currently created by the enormous demand for organs. Eight years later, the question remains on how if at all The Act has changed the way organ donation is viewed and conducted in India. This study reveals attitudes and beliefs about organ donation in India from the perspectives of the doctors and the public. Interviewees expressed concerns and fears over the implementation of The Act. Mistrust of the medical profession and concerns about illegal buying and selling of organs were some major issues brought forth by the public. Additional issues were the need for public education, advertisement, and role models to promote organ donation in India. All interviewees had prior knowledge of organ donation and did not require explanation of the concept. No one interviewed was opposed to organ donation. Many participants were aware of organ donation through Ashwaria Roy, a former Miss World who does advertising campaigns promoting cornea donation in India.     

Freighting English law: interpreting maritime spaces,law and the Armenian strategies in the Indian Ocean

In this article, I examine the formation of the English East India Company's legal regime in the Indian Ocean between the mid‐eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I look at how this process affected maritime trade and space from the vantage point of Armenian merchants' interactions with the colonial regime in the courts of law. The productive tensions arising from the colonial regime's new protocols and the merchants' leveraging tactics make for a complex story of Anglo‐Armenian dialogue. I argue that indigenous agency in the colonial courts complicated the binary colonial/indigenous structure. The idea of legal pluralism that emerges from the article suggests that the identity of an imperial subject or the definition of law was neither a given nor simply imposed through colonial coercion but was a complex product of a long‐term dialogue and rationalization.     

Sexual place,spatial change,and the social reorganization of sexual culture

This paper describes how the landscape of a public place in a New York City park embodies larger external structures within which sexual subjects actively organize local sexual culture. Controlling the configuration and utilization of such space is a technique of power used by the state apparatus. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork, we describe how the sexual culture situated within this public space is produced and reproduced in the micro‐social practices of sexual subjects in the face of structural constraints. The social reorganization of sexuality occurs when subjects creatively refashion their local sexual culture through subtle alterations in the way they practice it. Such practical alterations occur in dialogue with larger structures. Ultimately, this analysis of sexual space in San Jose Park provides for an examination of the deployment of power and local sexual culture as the nexus of structure and agency.     

LGBTQ Activist Organizations as ‘Respectably Queer’ in India: Contesting a Western View

This study contests the distinction of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) organizations suggested by earlier scholars as ‘respectable’ — i.e. normalizing, professionalizing and conforming to the dominant cultural and institutional patterns — and ‘queer’, meaning challenging the cultural and institutional forces that ‘normalize and commodify differences’. Using Bernstein's model of identity deployment, it is found problematic to distinguish LGBTQ organizations this way because when the actions of LGBTQ organizations are more complex to describe, it is not warranted to conflate identity goals with identity strategies — whether normalizing (respectable) or differentiating (queer). To examine these concerns, a qualitative inquiry was used to study five LGBTQ organizations in India where the intersections of post‐colonial ethnicity, gender, social class and sexuality offer an intriguing context through which to study queer activism. Based on the findings, it is argued from a post‐colonial perspective that when the socio‐cultural and historical existence of non‐homonormative queer communities and practices is strong, LGBTQ organizations challenge the heteronormative and/or other forms of domination to become ‘queer’. But they may simultaneously become ‘respectable′ by conforming to the diversity politics of non‐profit business, donors, and social movement organizations they seek support from, and turn out as ‘respectably queer’.     

“A Feeling of Absence from Old England:” The Colonial Bungalow

This article explores how the colonial bungalow provided a setting for attempting to bridge perceived distances between English home life and its corollary in colonial India. At the same time, the article suggests that the bungalow gave presence to a kind of “Indian-ness,” a social and material presence that produced anxiety in its European occupants. On the one hand, as the primary realm of English domesticity in India the bungalow provided a setting for the cultivation of habits of self-control thought necessary for comporting the self with authority. On the other hand, the material qualities of the bungalow's construction, along with the social practices it had to accommodate, continually worked against these goals, something discussed in British memoirs, travel accounts, and guides to household management written throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. What tied these two disparate discourses together was the bungalow itself, as a material artifact with distinctive qualities.     

Don Juan: A Universal Theme in Ukrainian Drama

This article uses the University of Calgary Gorbachev Foundation Public Policy Project (UCGF99) as a case study for exploring the challenges of international participation in promoting reform of the content and context of public policy in postcommunist Russia. Drawing on evidence from a series of interviews with Russian and Canadian participants, it focuses on how cultural and power issues played out in UCGF99’s work. Because public policy stands at the juncture between state and society, public policy reform is an ideal rubric for exploring how values accompany aid and the way that the culture of the receiving society shapes the implementation of that aid. The interviews reveal an inherent tension between the ideal of egalitarian co-operation and the reality that the work done by the partnership was dedicated, ultimately, to the “reform” of one side by the other. They also highlight the extent to which reform is a process of translation: as concepts and international models make the transition to another society, their own cultural specificity becomes apparent, as does the challenge of translating them in a manner meaningful to the society undergoing “transition.” This article focuses on two related questions of translation: how issues of language, culture and power played out in the “consultant” structure of UCGF99 partnerships, and the concrete challenges of transforming Russian political culture using Canadian models.