The transnational lives and third space subjectivities of British Nigerian girls

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2012 on British Nigerian young women who have gone to boarding school in Nigeria and returned to attend university in the UK, I use the concept of third space as a heuristic device for understanding their transnational subjectivities and practices. I argue that, for some, this third space is a transgressive one in which they can craft alternative subjectivities and narratives about African culture and political economy. Applying insights from decolonial theory, I seek to build on the transgressive nature of this third space. In positioning themselves variously as Londoners, Nigerians, dual and post‐nationals, they express key features of contemporary transnational European subjectivities. Yet, parental expectations that they marry Nigerians and members of the Nigerian diaspora serve to reproduce the racial distinctions and nationalist rhetoric of colonial modernity that their third space subjectivities contest.     

The Birth of a Noble Tea Country: on The Geography of Colonial Capital and The Origins of Indian Tea

This paper looks at the origins of the British tea industry of India from the standpoint of colonial and semicolonial involvement in, respectively, British India and Qing China. The imposition of the tea industry in Assam was integrally tied to the wars in East Asia fought in order to open markets for the movement of opium and other commodities. British officials championed both policies in the name of modern economic progress, liberalizing trade with the Qing and establishing a productive industry in Assam. The agricultural science of political economy aimed to extract the value of various objects which could then be united in a land hitherto considered a wasteland. Plants, soil and labor were each viewed as isolatable things whose values were objective and calculable. Such static representation, however, was already belied by the dynamic process of gathering and transporting these "things" across the vast and unevenly developed regions of Asia, ultimately valorizing them as a breakfast drink commodity enjoyed worldwide. The origins of the Assam tea plantations, mirroring developments elsewhere, relied upon spatio-economic connections that force us to reevaluate how the specific histories of British India, Qing China and Southeast Asia are inseparably linked.     

Colonial violence and civilising utopias in the French and British empires: the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) and the Insurrection of the South (1870)

Two similar rebellions in British and French Caribbean colonial histories are addressed to highlight the complexities of race and historiography. The Morant Bay Rebellion has been commemorated as a major event at the core of Jamaican nation-building, while the Insurrection of the South remained largely unrecorded in Martinique. Differing narratives of the past reflect the regimes of colonial violence adopted to suppress popular rebellion. Ideas of ‘race’ were explicit terms of reference in the British Empire, whereas the French republican ideal eradicated racial categorisation. ‘Racial thinking’ or ‘colour blindness’ informed respective governments’ ‘civilising’ projects in subsequent decades.     

Visits to the country of origin: how second‐generation British Pakistanis shape transnational identity and maintain power asymmetries

In this article, I identify the need for more nuanced approaches to transnational emotional attachment, especially with regard to the second generation. Interviewing second‐generation British Pakistanis while on their holidays in Pakistan and comparing the findings with data collected in the UK provides a more realistic exploration of the phenomenon than would have been possible with only narratives collected before and after the trips. In contrast to current utopian views of egalitarian transnationalism negotiated at a personal level, known in the literature as transnationalism from below, I argue that the visits of second‐generation British Pakistanis perpetuate global power asymmetries. Furthermore, such visits may help British Pakistanis redefine their identity in relation to Pakistan, the UK and Islam, thus contributing to the formation of a new transnational identity. In the conclusion, I suggest that leisure visits can still carry the potential for important political and economic relations for Pakistan in times of need.     

Extending cultural horizons: Political economy and public relations

In this article, we aim to offer a conceptual bridge between political economy and the practice of public relations, which should be helpful especially for practitioners and scholars interested in public relations at a global level. The combination of social, political, and economic forces is powerful, pervasive, and highly influential on the public relations activities of organizations, and we assert that these factors must be examined in unison. In turn, we discuss the role of political–economic relationships and the constraints they impart on the goal-seeking behavior of organizations. We conclude by offering suggestions as to how public relations practitioners and scholars can begin to think about their efforts and linkages with political economy.     

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.     

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.     

Social fields,subfields and social spaces at the scale of empires: explaining the colonial state and colonial sociology

This article develops a series of arguments about social fields, subfields, and social spaces that can help us understand empires and colonies. First, we have to assume that the scale of fields is not always coextensive with the boundaries of the national state but is often much larger, or smaller. Imperial fields are among the most spatially extensive ones, though they may not be as territorially extensive as truly global fields. Second, we need to make a distinction between imperial fields and imperial social spaces (based on Bourdieu's distinction between social fields and social spaces). The third argument is that colonies in modern empires were characterized by two different kinds of fields: fields that were simply extended into the overseas territories, versus completely separate fields unique to one or more of the colonies. The colonial state is an example of a field that is specific to the colony. By contrast, scientific fields were often simply extended from the metropole into the colonies, encompassing both. The fourth argument concerns subfields. Transported into imperial realms, this distinction suggests that some colonial offshoots of fielded metropolitan practices do not constitute separate fields but are nonetheless differentiated from their main overarching field. These four points are illustrated with examples from British, French and German imperial policy, colonial statecraft and colonial sociology.     

‘When he gets among his Countrymen,they tell him that he is free’: Slave Trade Abolition,Indentured Africans and a Royal Commission

The 1807 Act to abolish the British slave trade determined that those Africans seized by the British navy from illegally operating slave ships would be enlisted into the armed forces or indentured for a maximum of 14 years. In 1821, a Royal Commission was sent to the West Indies to investigate the ‘state’ and ‘condition’ of those Africans who had been indentured under the Act. This article focuses on the work of the Commission – as it became riven by a personal and political dispute – in Tortola. It pays particular attention to the testimonies of the indentured Africans documented in the records. Their dissident narratives further disrupted the inquiry as they refused to answer to either redemptive abolitionism or instrumental political economy – the overlapping discourses framing the ways in which alternatives to enslaved labour were conceptualised during the 1820s.     

Honorary whiteness

‘The fantasy of the exception’ is a seductive trope. More penetrating than any explicit legal codes or political structures, the fantasy is embedded in a constellation of politics and psychology and is linked to both colonial and neocolonial logics. In her book Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, Anne Norton presents the ‘fantasy of the exception’ as luring individuals to repress or magnify parts of their identities in exchange for increased access to political and economic privilege. This study argues that the fantasy of exception is intrinsically intertwined in constructs of ‘honorary whiteness’ as exemplified in the contemporary academy, as well as in colonial and neocolonial constructs of identity. Building on Norton's definition of this fantasy, I examine its colonial roots and contemporary manifestations in the broader neoliberal agenda. In doing so, I will show how the fantasy is exemplified by individuals' aspirations for ‘honorary white’ status, and how their drive to achieve power comes at the expense of the splitting of their selves. By examining the narratives of ‘non-white’ individuals and their struggle for power and identity in the face of colonial and neoliberal orders, the fantasy of exception is revealed as reinforcing inequality and oppression, and ultimately, sustains fabricated differences that fuel the legacy of colonial racism.     

Insurrectional Politics in Colonial Southeast Asia: Colonial Modernity,Islamic ‘Counterplots’, and Translocal (Anti-colonial) Connectivity

Abstract

This article focuses on the idea of ‘colonial modernity’ to pursue a dual theoretical purpose: to interrogate the givenness of ‘modernity’ as an overarching and over-determining epistemological framework; and, secondly, to indicate how movements against colonial modernity were part of a ‘deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity’. By examining a number of Islamic movements in the Dutch Indies and in British Malaya, this article seeks to map out some of the translocal spaces created and occupied by these movements, which linked North Africa to Saudi Arabia and to South East Asia. The focus on translocality speaks also to the existence and enactment of exteriorities to modernity. My deployment of ‘exteriority’ signals here certain historical, political, and cultural lateral relations among colonial spaces, through which the colonized generate and activate what June Nash calls ‘counterplots’ to colonial modernity.     

Making Coolies, (Un)making Workers: “Globalizing” Labour in the Late‐19th and Early‐20th Centuries

This paper explores the social relationships of wage labour formed or stabilized in British merchant shipping in the course of “off‐shoring” employment in the late‐19^th century. It argues that Asian wage‐workers were mobilized for employment on British merchant vessels as “coolies”, i.e. nominally free but mediated labouring subjects who could only be stabilized through legal, penal, social, debt, or other forms of coercion. Once introduced “coolie” relations were not confined to Indian crews. They also affected wage labour relations more generally in British shipping. While occurring against the backdrop of anti‐colonial struggles, the seafaring coolie's transformation into maritime worker was closely mediated by employers and the colonial state and produced hybrid outcomes. The creation of the modern seafaring “coolie” and the nature and context of his transformation into a “worker” thus shed interesting light on wage labour relations in the modern and contemporary global economy.     

Bread and wine: Bourdieu's photography of colonial Algeria

The photography of Bourdieu, whilst documenting aspects of his sociological work in Algeria, problematizes the relationship between its photographic referents and their history. To grasp this relationship, I will decode the historical signification of three photographs taken by Bourdieu in the mid-1950s when Tillion published L'Algérie en 1957 and Sartre 'Le colonialisme est un système' situating Bourdieu's photographic and sociological work in relation to both Tillion and Sartre. Although the influence of Tillion on Bourdieu is discernable, especially in Sociologie de l'Algérie , their political positions are at variance. Bourdieu's snapshots provide us with a perspective on how to interpret the causes of the vagrancy and famine in colonial times. Despite his avowed hostility to Sartre, Bourdieu concurs with the latter's critique of colonialism. His three photographs together project a political affinity with both Sartre and Barthes. The impoverishment of native Algerian society was not due to the fact that it failed to catch the train of progress, as Tillion intimates; rather it resulted from its systematic despoilment by colonial France.     

The rational kernel within Samir Amin’s mythological shell: the idea of a democratic and pluralist world political party

ABSTRACT

Amin’s Leninist-Maoist vision is unlikely to be persuasive to twenty-first century citizens. Nonetheless, there is a rational kernel in Amin’s call for a new worldwide political organization. Some structures, mechanisms and tendencies of the capitalist world economy are relatively enduring and some patterns recurrent, although the world economy is also fluid, constantly changing and evolving. Although waves of globalization have radically transformed human societies and their economic activities during the past 500 years also in many positive ways, the expansion of the international society and world economy has often been characterized by violence, imperial subjection and colonial expropriation and exclusion. There is a rational kernel also within Amin’s analysis of the current world-political situation. Command over space and time by investors and megacorporations is power. Emancipation aims at freedom from domination. The decline of the World Social Forum indicates that progressive politics must move ‘beyond the concept of a discussion forum’. My argument is that emancipation from unnecessary, unneeded and unwanted sources of determination requires global transformative agency and planetary visions about alternatives.     

Migrants,Settlers and Colonists: The Biopolitics of Displaced Bodies

All through the nineteenth century, Madeirans migrated from their Atlantic island to places as remote as Hawaii, California, Guyana and, later, South Africa. Scarcity of land, a rigid social structure, periodic famines and rampant poverty made many embark to uncertain destinies and endure the harsh labour conditions of sugarcane plantations. In the 1880s, a few hundred Madeirans engaged in a different venture: an experience of “engineered migration” sponsored by the Portuguese government to colonize the southern Angola plateau. White settlements, together with military control, scientific surveys and expeditions, contributed to strengthen the claims of European nations over specific territories in Africa. At that time, the long lasting claims of Portugal over African territories were not matched by sponsored colonial settlements or precise geographic knowledge about the claimed lands. There was little else representing Portugal than the leftover structures of the slave trade, the penal colonies and the free‐lance merchants that ventured inland. In fear of losing land to the neighbouring German, Boer and British groups in south‐western Africa, the Portuguese government tried then to promote white settlements by attracting farmers from the mainland into the southern plateau of Angola. As very few responded to the call, the settlement consisted mostly of Madeiran islanders, who were eager to migrate anywhere and took the adventure of Angola as just another destiny out of the island where they could not make a living. Their bodies and actions in the new place became highly surveilled by the medical delegates in charge of assessing their adaptation. The reports document what were then the idealized biopolitics of migration and colonization, interweaving biomedical knowledge and political power over displaced bodies and colonized land. At the same time, those records document the frustrations of the administration about the difficulties of the settlement experience and the ways in which colonial delegates blamed their failure on the very subjects who enacted and suffered through it. The eugenicism and racialism that pervade those writings, a currency during the age of empire, may now be out of taste both in science and in politics; however, they are not fully out of sight, and the subtle entrance of social prejudice into the hard concepts of biomedical science is still with us. Learning from this example may help analysing contemporary processes of medicalizing diversity or pathologizing the mobile populations, or, in other words, the biopolitics of migration in the 21^st century.     

上海建设国际创新中心战略研究

国际创新中心是指科技创新资源密集、科技创新实力雄厚、创新文化发达、创新氛围浓郁、科技辐射带动能力较强,具有良好科技发展潜力和人文自然环境、较强国际竞争力和影响力的城市或区域,是全球新知识、新技术和新产品的创新源地和产生中心之一。上海科技创新实力雄厚,稳居全国各地区前列,具备建设国际创新中心的先天优势。上海要实现创新驱动转型发展,必须在城市总体发展格局中进一步凸显科技创新功能,全面实施科教兴市战略、人才强市战略和文化强市战略,全力以赴抓好张江国家自主创新示范区建设,使科技创新功能成为城市功能的核心和关键,着力增强城市科技创新实力和国际综合竞争力,到2020年基本建设成为具有雄厚竞争力、强大辐射力和广泛影响力的国际创新中心城市,成为全球创新资源配置中枢、国际创新知识生产源地、世界创新经济战略高地和国际科技创新竞合平台。     

A Critical Transnational Public Sphere: Bringing Back Common Good and Social Ontology in Context

The public sphere and public reason have recently become key ideas in global governance, with most scholars expressing related transparency and accountability concerns. This article contends that if transnational public sphere(s) and the use of reason in global policy-making aim to reinforce the common good and justice, they must go beyond the procedural concerns of transparency and accountability, with the proviso being that legitimacy be derived from the people. To this end, the author argues that, we must consider social ontology to unpack or deconstruct at least three hegemonic philosophical presuppositions that now inform global policy-making processes: a positivist approach to scientific knowledge; the Lockean view on the way in which the state, the economy, and society relate; and the putative monolithic perception of the transnational. It is suggested that procedural accounts coupled with positivist ontology may reinforce neoliberal hegemony, opening an empty space between political decisions and interests while obviating the will of the people.     

Brexit and Global Wealth Chains

One vision of a post Brexit Britain is of a political economy sustained by highly flexible labour markets, light touch regulation, and a hyper competitive low-tax regime. This article focuses on the tax element, evaluating the prospects of this vision’s realization on the basis of the attributes of the British political economy, the substance of the Britain’s new found freedoms and the forces at play in the European and international regulatory environment. Britain is seeking a smooth transition via a strategy of upgrading and expanding national position in global wealth chains (GWCs). Occupying space in GWCs requires a series of careful balancing acts between making a tax offer attractive to mobile capital and maintaining revenue, designing a low-tax regime and staying within the boundaries of accepted practice established by multilateral rules and norms, and between multiple, often conflicting, goals that Britain must simultaneously pursue as it leaves the European Union. With hard Brexit, Britain will pursue this vision, but these balances are likely to prove illusive.     

Eating heritage: caste,colonialism, and the contestation of adivasi creativity

ABSTRACT

This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue that coloniality is not a casteless structure of violence. In discursive and planning rhetoric, ‘creativity is in India’s DNA.’ This discourse incites the poor to harness and develop their tangible and intangible cultural heritage in order to feed themselves. Foregrounding anti-caste, Dalit scholarship in conversation with extant formulations of decolonial aesthetics focuses urgent attention on the fact that caste domination and violence structure inter-state political systems of development planning and post/colonial state discourses of heritage that claim to feed the caste-oppressed poor with their own creativity. This article attends to the political histories and critiques of Indigenous Chhara performance artists because their expressive cultures foreground anti-caste struggles against simultaneous state erasure and capture of Indigenous creativity. Against planning’s compensatory solution of eating heritage, anti-caste scholarship and the creative politics of Budhan Theatre refute the apparent castelessness of what counts as creativity and heritage, demonstrating that optimistic global creative economy discourses actually rely upon caste and colonial histories to entrench caste-based definitions of heritage within international and national development regimes. Budhan Theatre’s decolonizing cultural production avoids the mistakes of postcolonial scholarship and its erasure of caste histories. They prompt a multiple colonialisms approach which refuses labels of postcolonial or settler colonial states to privilege instead attention to the actually existing contemporary ways in which caste violence structures inter-state systems of violence, policies, and discourses.