Policing native pleasures: a colonial history

The moral modality of colonial power is still with us when it comes to the recreation of sexual norms of traditional or feudal society. We can examine the emergent properties of colonial knowledge anew by exploring how the colonial regime's strategic attention of regulating brothels in India differed from the analytic of power Foucault described for sexuality in European society. It turns out that amongst other things, public anxieties about the failure of adaptation by South Asians are incapable of leaving sexuality aside as a key interpretive device for their culture. The British preoccupation with reproducing the dynamics of the bourgeois matrimonial market on foreign soil in the mid‐nineteenth century similarly necessitated a sociological pretext for racial purity. However, the kind of knowledge a typical traveller and employee of the East India Company brought to the Victorian public from his own researches in the brothels and streets of colonial India, which revealed how popular prostitution was as a vice amongst the officer class, was also more than a welcome imaginary relief from Christian morality; it was an alternative vision of modernity.     

Tours of Duty, Cross-Identification and Introjection: The Colonial Administrative Mind in Wartime Indochina

Abstract  Some scholars have explained colonial policies as the outgrowth of the need to provide profits and prestige for the motherland. Others have linked policymaking to the use of colonial space as experimental laboratories of modernity; while others assert that the overseas was a terrain for finding solutions to some of the political, social and aesthetic problems which were affecting France at the time. In contrast, this paper traces how colonial policies can be explained at the level of individual colonial administrators. It does so not only by reference to the social backgrounds of officials, but also their inner "psychic processes." This study addresses the colonial tendency to imagine cross-identification between France and the colony. It presents three case studies of colonial officials in Indochina to investigate how administrators' perceptions of France became projected onto the colonies, and how one of them incorporated within himself some of the attributes of the colonized, an example of introjection. It is argued that these processes had an impact on policymaking. My theoretical goal with this piece was to apply a psychoanalytic approach to the study of the empire.     

Muslim women and the politics of (in)visibility in late colonial Bengal

The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo women writers in this process.     

Migration Trends in the Kansas Ogallala Region and the Internal Colonial Dependency Model

Abstract The High Plains of the United States has been portrayed both as a place of despair and a region of renaissance. This study proposes that, within the Ogallala Aquifer portion of the High Plains, landscapes of decline and renaissance co-exist within the context of an internal colonial dependency model. While the notion of internal colonial dependency has been applied primarily to the central Appalachian region, an assessment of population change in the High Plains of western Kansas suggests some striking similarities with the population change expected in a region conforming to the internal colonial dependency metaphor. This study identifies a wide range of colonial dependent characteristics, as they apply to the High Plains, with a focus on migration. Demographic changes supporting a colonial influence include long-term population decline in most counties, high median age, high levels of channelized out-migration, even higher levels of channelized in-migration, in-migration flow origins that are concentrated in just four other Ogallala states, and a continued long-term trend of exporting the region'S most educated inhabitants.     

Changing place names in post-apartheid South Africa: accounting for the unevenness

This paper examines the renaming of South Africa’s public places, following the country’s democratic breakthrough in 1994. The process has unfolded unevenly throughout the country’s nine provinces. The paper explains this unevenness. Fundamentally, it contends that the act of renaming has unfolded largely as a restoration of indigenous memory, which, in turn, is mediated by a number of factors. The lopsided nature of renaming is indicative of the similarly uneven manner in which South Africa’s black population recalls indigenous memory. How black people relate to colonial memory also determines whether or not they would want to change it: some came to identify with colonial memory, while others were offended by it. This contrasting symbolism of colonial memory is a result of the varying ‘native policies’ pursued by the Boer republics, on the one hand, and the British colonial states, on the other. In other instances, indigenous memory simply vanished due to the absence of reminders, while some descendants evolved a new identity that to some extent erased the memory of their ancestry.     

Fornicatie and Hoerendom or the Long Shadow of the Portuguese: Connected Histories,Languages and Gender in the Indian Ocean and Beyond

Abstract

Processes of creolisation, some of which went by the name of ‘miscegenation’ in older colonial studies, have a much broader area of distribution than the colonial and postcolonial spaces wherein they are traditionally studied. In fact, they originate in a very large area of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and are ultimately not colonial in origin. Moreover, these processes involved social technologies that were gendered and deeply affected knowledge networks and movement of people and goods in the Indian Ocean and beyond. Processes of creolisation in the Americas can also be traced back to these ancient Indian Ocean patterns. Those processes have been somewhat overlooked by traditional nation-centred historiographies. They have, however, noticeably inflected colonial and postcolonial imaginaries through a variety of local languages, such as, for instance, from west to east: Brazilian Portuguese, Afrikaans, Netherlands Indies Dutch or Malay-Indonesian. They also find expression in various kinds of narratives, including historiographical works. Only a connected history, linked to a translinguistic approach, will be able to retrieve more fully the complexities and nuances of those ancient networks of people and knowledge transfer.     

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.     

Leonard Barnes and South Africa (1)

The Dutch East and West India Companies established colonies in the Caribbean, Brazil and at the Cape of Good Hope. The resulting townscapes can be read as artefacts of domination ‐ attempts to stamp order on the chaos of newly‐colonized lands. But at the same time, such built forms incorporated knowledge of the “low‐other” ‐ the underclasses in highly hierarchical colonial worlds. As a result, the experience of resistance (rarely directly visible in such public constructions as street grids and building fagades) was incorporated into the symbolic language of dominance, setting up a dialectical relationship between the High and the Low.     

Noise

This essay develops a cultural materialist theory of listening through a historical ethnography of Gibraltarian men's contradictory sensitivity to the ‘noise’ of mass media and desensitization to the industrial soundscape of the state. I argue that this contradiction can be historicized through close attention to the social antagonisms embedded in the history of noise ordinances, and the ways in which British colonial officials structured an idealized form of masculinity premised on the sonic relationships between bodies and technologies. Gibraltarian men reproduce this masculine disposition, and through it colonial hierarchies, in the seemingly banal practice of listening to mass media, and ignoring the soundscape of the neoliberal, colonial state.     

Princely states,peasant protests,and nation building in India: the colonial mode of historiography and subaltern studies

The postcolonial unity of India as a single nation state incorporating the princely states covering two-fifth of the territory and a quarter of the population that remained outside the direct jurisdiction of the colonial state has not been problematized in the colonial and postcolonial historiography of India. This problematization is nonetheless essential in order to understand the internal dynamics of the colonial social formation in India, especially the agency of peasant movements in princely states in the dissolution of tbe colonial state and in preparing the ground for the postcolonial unity of the Indian state. The tendency to ignore the agency of peasant movements in princely India during the colonial rule is what I have characterized as the colonial mode of historiography. Subaltern Studies project which claims to distinguish itself for its role in restoring the agency of peasant insurgency in colonial India is indeed a continuation of the colonial mode of historiography.     

Ritual, Resistance and Social Reproduction: A Cultural Economy of Iron-Smelting in Colonial Tanzania 1890–1975

Abstract The paper examines the historical relationships between ironworkers and peasants of Geita and other districts in colonial Tanzania. It explores their material. cultural and symbolic practices, as well as their interaction with merchants, native authorities and the colonial state. It is argued that these ironworkers and peasants. in providing for their social reproduction, confronted the daily challenges of existence through both material (economic) and ideological (cultural) means - at once resisting and accommodating the terms of domination and incorporation.     

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.     

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.     

Safaris into Subjectivity: White Locals,Black Tourists,and the Politics of Belonging in the Okavango Delta,Botswana

The elite safari lodges in Botswana's Okavango Delta provide an intriguing site through which to explore processes of identity construction, as people from vastly different backgrounds meet and explore ontological possibilities through and against each other. Drawing on a dinner table dispute between an African American tourist and his white Motswana guide, I explore contested notions of what constitutes African identities. The encounter shows that colonial histories and the racialization of space continue to be central to African identity politics, and I describe how white citizens' claims to belonging are challenged on these grounds. In response to such challenges, white Batswana assert a strongly nationalistic identity, distancing themselves from other southern African white populations and their colonial histories. They staunchly defend their claims to belonging through mobilising a partial view of Botswana's history and contemporary sociopolitical conditions, which has made possible a deep sense of emplacement within the social and natural environments of the Okavango.     

Introduction: Cultural production under multiple colonialisms

ABSTRACT

In this introduction to the special journal issue, we elaborate a multiple colonialisms framework that allows us to examine the complex relationalities of multiple and converging colonial relations in historical and contemporary contexts within which cultural production does its work. Through examples of cultural production from the Americas and Asia, Special Issue contributors analyse rarely-recognized sites of colonialism that bear a palimpsestic relationship to other articulations that are more commonly legible as colonialism. Such an approach makes new analytical connections and gives greater depth to conventional theorizations of coloniality and decolonization. We also illustrate the centrality of the scholarship of Indigenous, Black, and Dalit-Bahujan scholars to the framework, especially the ways in which their work challenges our collective and accumulated racialized and colonial unknowings and illuminates what often remains unthinkable in conventional analyses of cultural production and the colonial contexts of their making. Overall, rather than analytically imply pluralism and equivalence among varied colonialisms, we argue that a multiple colonialisms framework enables cultural studies scholarship to dwell on the relationality, contradictions, and incommensurabilities generated within converging structures and multiple articulations of colonial and racialized violence across spaces. Weaving the various contributions into the framework, we invite readers to consider what histories, structures, and relationships help to explain why actually existing colonialities remain illegible as such in the particular context of each paper, and what that implies for solidarity and decolonization struggles. We hope that highlighting the specific creative methodological practices and significant spatial and temporal rethinking that a multiple colonialisms approach can generate incites conversations about how we might enrich theorizations of coloniality and decolonization.     

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.     

Sailing through Suez from the South: The Emergence of an Indies‐Dutch Migration Circuit, 1815–19401

This paper shows the importance of colonial garrisons and colonial migratory circuits in the history of European migration. During the nineteenth century the overwhelming majority of European‐born migrants to the Dutch East Indies were military personnel. Rapidly decreasing mortality rates and a large influx of European military personnel in the decades of colonial wars were responsible for the remarkable growth of the European colonial population throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. As a consequence an extensive colonial‐metropole migration circuit emerged. Contrary to expectations, neither the opening of the Suez Canal nor imperialist expansion resulted in a significant increase of white civilian emigration to colonial Indonesia in the late nineteenth century. Instead, sailings through Suez went north as frequently as south. It was only at a much later stage, following the end of World War I, that the tobacco and rubber plantations as well as the oil industry of the Outer Regions of the Indies archipelago generated an unprecedented demand for expatriate labor.     

The early days of public relations in British Malaya: Winning the hearts and minds of the Empire

This article traces the early form of public information services during the colonial period to provide new insights into the historical development of Malaysia’s public relations. The first formal information agency created in 1910 was based in London to promote the early practices of public relations for British Malaya and its interests in Britain. British consolidation during the years of economic boom and depression, until the achievement of Malaysian Independence, was aided by the early information services. The article makes an alternative argument about the beginnings of Malaysian public relations based on colonial economic and political interest as against other previously held views     

REGARDING IRELAND IN A POST-COLONIAL FRAME

This essay considers the applicability of postcolonial theory to Irish culture and history. It develops the concept of multiple rhythms or temporalities of social struggle for which only that of nationalism is determined punctually by the struggle for the state. The domination of Irish historiography by state-oriented narratives occludes the histories and the formal or organizational aspects of other forms of social movement, such that the postcolonial project is directed simultaneously towards the mapping of such alternative movements and to the critique of statist historiographies, whether imperialist, nationalist or ‘revisionist’. Where postcolonial theory has tended to emphasize the ‘hybrid’ nature of colonial cultures, this essay prefers to focus on the productive interface between the incommensurable social and cultural formations of colonial modernity and colonized non-modernity. At this interface emerge continually both new subaltern social formations and practices, which cannot be understood as ‘traditional’ and new forms of colonial state institution that are summoned into being by anti-colonial practices, for which the model of an advanced state coming to bear on a backward population is clearly inadequate. The essay draws from the history of agrarian movements in Ireland and banditry in the Philippines and from contemporary techniques of state surveillance and resistance to it in Northern Ireland.