Elephant empire: zoos and colonial encounters in Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

Whereas zoological gardens and animal collections in North America and Western Europe are well researched from historical, philosophical, and cultural perspectives, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the history and legacy of these modernizing institutions in Eastern Europe. To bridge this gap in scholarship, I investigate the traffic in exotic animals to this region with a focus on a particular species. Historically, elephants have been considered prime symbols of the power and triumph of the colonial empire, and were thus often the jewels of colonial animal collections across Europe. In this article, I explore how the colonial origin of elephants as both big game and charismatic megafauna translates into a geopolitical context without direct overseas colonies, in order to trace the material links between species, race, transnational commodity networks, and structures of identity formation. Based on archival and bibliographic research focused on the Poznań Zoo in years 1871–1945, this article offers a critical analysis of the role of elephant performance in zoos, circuses, and travelling shows in mediating and mobilizing imperial longings. From this vantage point I suggest that studying public zoos in Eastern Europe offers a unique insight into a physical presence of colonial imperialism (via traffic in exotic species) in an area without overseas colonies, through a site where modernist models of citizenship, nationhood, and Europeanness are forged at the interface between science, education, and transnational politics. Given that zoos were crucial for the development of the biological perspective in the West, I posit a reconfiguration of zoos as ‘contact zones’ and primary sites for colonial encounter within the empire from a semi-peripheral perspective.     

Moral accounting as field foundation in an early modern empire: the English East India Company in the late eighteenth century

Field analysis and the relational approach to historical social-scientific explanation of which it is an instance – helps illuminate the administrative dynamics of empires. While most studies of imperial dynamics emphasize the ‘high imperialism’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article extends field analysis to a crucial case from the second half of the eighteenth century: the English East India Company's transition from a (largely) merchant trading company to a territorial power. In this disordered space of administration, officials struggling with one another for metropolitan recognition provided moral accounts of themselves which, on the one hand, explained their behaviour in terms drawn from abstract, purportedly universal social spaces, and, on the other hand, claimed credibility through a personal ‘interest in disinterest’. I argue that these moral accounts helped delimit the boundaries of and shape the dynamics within a distinctively imperial administrative field. To analyse this transformation, I suggest a synthesis of three varieties of relational analysis: Bourdieu's field theory, Fligstein and McAdam's analysis of strategic action fields, and Padgett and Powell's work on network folding and robust action.     

The necessity of an attention to Eurocentrism and colonial technologies: an addition to critical mental health literature

Critical perspectives in mental health and the highly influential contributions of those who identify with and/or ally with the psychiatric-survivor, consumer-survivor, ex-patient, or mad movements have provoked an appreciation of the many exposed epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues that (re)produce violence within biomedical psychiatry. What is often left uninterrogated is the reliance on a Eurocentric conceptualization of history within articulations of struggle and when attending to the political and social contexts of critique. The effect of this enduring Eurocentrism is often an inattention to the complicit influences of colonial and imperial projects on the practices and technologies of dehumanization, taxonomization, and the establishment of human hierarchies to rationalize violence through the implementation of racial and eugenic rationale. The imperative of this attention to Eurocentrism is suggested from a synthesis of contributions from critical mental health, postcolonial, and critical race literature.     

Philanthropy in 18th-Century Central Europe: Evangelical Reform and Commerce

This article focuses on the close linkage between domestic philanthropy and commerce at the end of the early modern period, and the sophistication with which well-connected evangelical institutions transcended the confines of established religion and territorial boundaries. Use of a large set of primary and secondary sources that are relatively unknown in the history of the voluntary sector permits the examination and analysis of several notable aspects of the Francke Orphanage Foundations, an 18th-century central European institution of evangelical reform and colonial mission. Particular attention is given to the innovative efforts of their founder, August Hermann Francke, to secure an independent financial base for his institutional goals. These goals, which were supported in large part by members of the German nobility and of merchants in the imperial cities, included but were not limited to reform of charity care and education. From the outset, a close network of personal supporters and evangelical institutions that extended throughout Protestant Europe proved essential for both trade and evangelical mission; this network permitted expansion into Russia and the Baltic provinces, Hungary, the Near East and India, and eventually the British North American colonies.     

Doctors for the empire: The medical school of Goa and its narratives

This paper studies the establishment of medical teaching in Portuguese colonial settings as a means to understand the ways of empire building. The rules and regulations regarding surgeons and doctors in the African and Asian colonies evidence a structure of subalternities within the empire. Goa, in India, emerges as the second to the metropolis within that hierarchy, and the Medical School of Goa becomes the ultimate producer of doctors for the empire. We will bring to the analysis the narratives and representations of Goan doctors about their Medical School and its role in empire building. The analysis raises a number of issues that deserve further discussion: the ideologies of colonialism and the colonial condition, the formation of hierarchies within imperial structures, the tensions between social groups defined by the empire, the interaction between different bodies of knowledge and medical practices in the context of colonization, and the ambiguous position of creóle elites within a colonial system.     

Britain's Colonial Emergencies and the Invisible Nationalists

Abstract From the perspective of imperial propaganda Britain's colonial emergencies of the forties and fifties have straightforward, even self-evident explanations. In the case of Malaya the state of emergency declared in June 1948 was a response to an international communist plot designed to seize power. In Kenya, an underground conspiracy of tribal extremists necessitated the implementation of emergency powers in October 1952 and the intervention of the British military. In British Guiana, the October 1953 state of emergency was essential to prevent a communist-inspired reign of terror and sabotage.¹
More objective researchers and journalists have questioned the familiar justification for Britain's colonial emergencies.² However, controversy persists, not simply about the interpretation of these events but about the basic facts.³ This is not surprising, because a study of the available files in the Public Records Office shows that the relationship between the colonial emergencies and their purported causes is far from straightforward. While imperial propaganda projected a sense of single-minded clarity, behind the scenes the leading experts of the Colonial Office were uncertain and deeply disturbed by events that they did not entirely comprehend. Nevertheless, despite their lack of a clear understanding of the situation in the affected colonies, the Colonial administration fully supported a military response. Indeed a study of the emergencies in Malaya, Kenya and British Guiana reveals a common pattern in the response of the British government and helps to place each of these conflicts in a wider perspective.     

The first two centuries of colonial agriculture in the cape colony: A historiographical review∗

Over the last fifteen years radical historiography has demolished the unstated presumption that South African history began in 1652. However, in emphasising the centrality of the mineral revolution, it encouraged a tendency to see South African history as really beginning in 1870. Many recent liberal works have done the same. This article argues that, no matter how much new was brought into South African society by the great transformation of the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism was able to build on historical processes within pre‐industrial colonial society to a degree that is far greater than is frequently realised. The article develops five main propositions: (i) as a colony, the Cape can only be understood within the context of the Dutch and British empires (ii) a necessary condition for the establishment of colonial agriculture was the generally forcible dispossession of the African population from the land (iii) colonial agriculture relied to a very large degree on forced labour systems, whether the labourers were legally slave or free (iv) almost all colonial farmers were linked to the urban, and so to the world, market, both to sell their produce and to raise credit and (v) the farming community was never homogeneous, but exhibited continual and various degrees of stratification. Focussing on colonial agriculture, the article concludes that capital accumulation by one class to the exclusion of others and with the help of the state had begun long before the mineral revolution, setting the pattern for modern South Africa.     

Nikolai Gogol'’s Self-Fashioning in the 1830s: The Postcolonial Perspective

This study examines Gogol'’s complex self-fashioning during the time of the creation and reception of his Ukrainian tales Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki [Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka] (1831–1832) in light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Gogol'’s self-fashioning is studied through his submission to the symbolic power responsible for branding him as the Other in imperial Russian culture, as well as through his deliberate strategy of mimicry. Not only did Gogol'’s marginal social status and his Ukrainian ethnicity create a social hierarchy responsible for fashioning him as “an outsider within” imperial culture, Gogol' himself engaged in the colonial mimicry, trying to reverse the colonial gaze that imagined him as a “sly” Ukrainian. Challenging the accepted view of Gogol' as one who internalized the colonial stereotype of a “sly” Ukrainian, this study treats Gogol'’s identity as strategic, positional, and ambivalent. The first part of the study focuses on the manipulation of stereotypes of the Other within the Russian nationalist imagination in the early 1830s; the second part examines Gogol'’s ambivalent visual self-representation and social performance that simultaneously mimicked and menaced the colonial authority.     

Screening dirt: public health movies in colonial Nigeria and rural African spectatorship in the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

From the inception of colonial film-making in British West Africa in the early 1930s, dirt and the cinema were closely connected. Numerous educational movies were produced to show Africans the economically, physically and morally degrading consequences of “dirty habits.” By the early 1940s, the Colonial Office had come to realise that, within the cinema spaces created by mobile health units across Africa, intended audiences processed images and messages through their own aesthetic, spiritual, moral, economic and political value systems. These systems exceeded colonial projections and defied assimilation into colonial categories of dirt. This article focuses on the complexity of intended audiences’ responses to the simple ideological formula of colonial health and hygiene films. It argues that the presence of local aesthetic tastes and values in media archives on public health and hygiene in colonial Africa represents a vital space of mediation that must be considered alongside film content and film-makers’ intentions.     

Theorizing fields

Field analysis, inspired largely from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is becoming widely used in sociology today. In A Theory of Fields Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam elaborate selectively on Bourdieu’s thinking to offer a conceptual framework for better understanding the creation, institutionalization, and transformation of “mesolevel social spaces” where actors compete, often through cooperation and coordination, for material and status rewards. In lieu of calling those spaces markets, organizations, networks, systems, or institutions, as is commonly done in the specialized subfields of social movements, political sociology, organizations, and institutional work in political science, FM propose the language of “strategic action field.” They argue that their strategic action field perspective can link agency to structured social spaces and serve as an integrative conceptual umbrella for these fragmented subfields of scholarly specialization. This review presents and evaluates this intellectual field strategy to provide a common and integrative conceptual framework, while calling attention to its key strengths and weaknesses.     

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.     

Framing Greater France Between The Wars

This essay analyzes the relationship between France as an imperial nation-state and the discourse of Greater France that intensified during the interwar period. I am interested in the way that the figure of Greater France sought to stage and reconcile – not justify, rationalize, or mystify – structural contradictions between republican and imperial systems of government. I argue that there is an intrinsic relationship between colonial discourse and its corresponding political form. By posing questions about the status we assign to colonial ideology through the analysis of a series of influential colonial texts, this essay pays special attention to the dissociation of nationality and citizenship that characterized a political form composed of a metropolitan parliamentary government articulated with a colonial administrative regime. I hope to reframe the familiar discussion of the proliferating representations of empire that circulated in metropolitan France after World War One. The figure of la plus grande France that developed then allows us to interrogate the French imperial nation-state at a doubly paradoxical historical conjuncture characterized by the consolidation of both the republic and the empire, on the one hand, and by unprecedented crises of the republic and colonial legitimacy, on the other. Interwar imperialism produced qualitative and evaluative distinctions between different French colonies but I will focus on the more general conceptions of the empire as such that circulated through the discourse of Greater France.     

Recipes for Attention: Policy Reforms,Crises, Organizational Characteristics,and the Newspaper Coverage of the LGBT Movement, 1969–2009

Why do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organizations' characteristics and actions. With this model, we hypothesize two main routes to coverage: one that includes changes in public policy and involves policy‐engaged, well‐resourced, and inclusive organizations and a second that combines social crises and protest organizations. Second, we appraise these arguments with the first analysis of the national coverage of all organizations in a social movement over its career: 84 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and AIDS‐related organizations in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal from 1969 to 2010. These analyses go beyond previous research that provides either snapshots of many organizations at one point in time or overtime analyses of aggregated groups of organizations or individual organizations. The results of both historical and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses support our media and political mediation model.     

“A male feminist walks into a bar,because it was set so low: The pedestal effect and the economy of gratitude in feminist spaces”

Men in feminist spaces often find themselves the recipients of disproportionate gratitude and attention—along with other persistent effects of male privilege that I have elsewhere termed the Pedestal Effect—despite this running counter to both prevailing feminist ideologies and the desires of the men themselves. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild described a similar economy of gratitude wherein low expectations led to heightened valuation of married men's household contributions, smuggling inequities from the wider society into the marriage and inhibiting progressive change even if both parties desired a more egalitarian partnership. By applying Hochschild's framework to interview data from 52 men and 12 women active in the field, I show that the same process explains the troubling continuance of male privilege in feminist spaces: while interviewees of all genders problematize the imbalanced economy of gratitude and many have attempted specific counterstrategies, it nonetheless persists in importing inequalities, undermining men's accountability, and inhibiting desired progressive change. This suggests that the economy of gratitude may be a ubiquitous interactional process that reproduces inequalities across a wide range of social contexts. I emphasize that the economy of gratitude is in fact intersectional, not only gendered, and introduce the idea of a “low bar” to more fully account for the broad range of social influences on expectation-setting.     

The state and the colonial unconscious

In this article, Fanon’s concept of the colonial unconscious – introduced in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 1968 Fanon, F. 1968. Black Skin, White Masks, London: Paladin.  [Google Scholar]) – is used to clarify the post-1994 political conjuncture in South Africa; in particular, unconscious forms of resistance against the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). Fanon’s concept of colonialism is first outlined and developed before his concept of the colonial unconscious is itself refined and put to work in the analysis of Brett Murray’s The Spear in terms of the return of the colonial repressed. It is argued, in conclusion, that the NDR needs to include within its ambit this unconscious dimension of South African politics without, however, giving in to the temptation of attempting to totalise and saturate all processes of subject formation.     

‘Closure’ at Manus Island and carceral expansion in the open air prison

ABSTRACT

Manus prison was officially closed in 2017 following Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Supreme Court decision that the existence of the camp breached the PNG Constitution. The ‘Namah’ decision was significant in signalling and seeking to curb the imperial reach of Australian law but insufficient in resolving the question of refugee imprisonment. Far from ending the imprisonment of refugees, the closure following the judicial ruling has facilitated the expansion of the imperial carcerality that has characterized Australia’s immigration detention policy since 1992. By revealing how refugee incarceration has been extended and offshore processing instantiated following the closure of Woomera camp in 2003, we argue that official closures of refugee camps Woomera and Manus have been constitutive of carceral expansion that is imperial in form and that reiterates patterns of colonial violence. After tracking imperial expansion, we make a call for prison abolition in the refugee incarceration arena as this is a critical decolonizing strategy.     

‘The Great White Chief’: the abolition of slavery in colonial Burma, 1826–1935

This article looks at the history of British anti-slavery thought and public policy in colonial Burma from the 1820s until the abolition of slavery in Burma’s highland regions in the 1920s. It argues that abolition in Burma during the 1920s can only be understood by examining the ways in which British definitions of indigenous slavery and colonial territoriality evolved over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article demonstrates that while anti-slavery thought and imperial expansion were entangled during the modern period, questions about security and territory were also critical to how British officials considered and enacted abolition.     

Roads to American Empire: U.S. Military Public Works and Capitalist Transitions, 1898–1934.

Between 1898 and 1934, in synchronous and successive U.S. military interventions and occupations in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, American soldiers made public works, and especially roads, into a global technology of imperial power. This essay examines infrastructure as a factor in state formation and capitalist transition in these five different imperial spaces as a way to study U.S. empire, and its effects on foreign societies, through a comparative, global, and intra‐imperial approach often precluded by the methodological nationalism of historical and sociological literatures. Despite significant differences between these sites of U.S. war and occupation, both prior to American interventions and during them, U.S. military public works expressed and advanced a common political‐economic logic of state centralization and capital accumulation. Colonial and post‐colonial political institutions and political economies, the strength of central governments, the extent of plantation agriculture and rural proletarianization, world commodity markets, and geography and natural events varied, but determined U.S. imperial infrastructure's outcomes. By the 1930s, the U.S. military had elevated infrastructural improvement to a key repertoire of American imperial power in the world, and one which persisted as the United States turned away from formal colonialism in the era of the Cold War and decolonization.     

Colonizing nature: scientific knowledge, colonial power and the incorporation of India into the modern world-system

In this paper, the role of scientific knowledge, institutions and colonialism in mutually co-producing each other is analysed. Under the overarching rubric of colonial structures and imperatives, amateur scientists sought to deploy scientific expertise to expand the empire while at the same time seeking to take advantage of the opportunities to develop their careers as 'scientists'. The role of a complex interplay of structure and agency in the development of modern science, not just in India but in Britain too is analysed. The role of science and technology in the incorporation of South Asian into the modern world system, as well as the consequences of the emergent structures in understanding the trajectory of modern science in post-colonial India is examined. Overall, colonial rule did not simply diffuse modern science from the core to the periphery. Rather the colonial encounter led to the development of new forms of scientific knowledge and institutions both in the periphery and the core.     

TERROR AND THE COLONIAL IMAGINATION AT WORK IN THE TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATE SPACES OF JAKARTA,INDONESIA

This article examines the role of the imagination in the construction of meaningful places out of economically defined and organized spaces. It seeks to understand the processes through which a colonial imagery is deployed in the negotiation of a complex and continually transforming transnational corporate order. This article is based on research conducted while working as a cross-cultural trainer within a transnational corporate office space in Jakarta, Indonesia. I discuss cross-cultural training as a space within which a colonial discourse based on terror and uncertainty persists, producing an ambivalent understanding of foreign overseas labor. I argue that a colonial approach to the social relations that take place within trans-national spaces persists for both Western-born and Indonesian members of the transnational capitalist class and is central to their perspective on capitalist expansion.