India: Keystone of the British Empire

Teaching about diversity and respect for others is a challenging task for today's educators—especially at the middle school level. This article describes successful attempts to do so at the sixth-grade level. These real-life experiences enhanced classroom learning and reached out to the community. The author hopes that other educators will duplicate this endeavor. Although the lessons described focused on the Lakota nation, educators can teach about any tribal culture by using this approach.     

Original and Ongoing Dispossessions: Settler Capitalism and Indigenous Resistance in British Columbia

This paper draws on archival research and theoretical work to articulate the specific histories, processes, and structures of primitive accumulation in British Columbia. Such processes of accumulation appear differently here than in the comparably more well-theorized contexts of imperial colonialisms. As we highlight the agents and infrastructures of dispossession, our research also aims to foreground the importance of agents and infrastructures of resistance. Different dispossessions generate different antagonisms, and we argue that Indigenous subjects are situated antagonistically to capital not only as laborers partially or wholly subsumed into capitalist social relations, but as Indigenous peoples as such, whose Indigeneity has been ‘in the way’ of development from the 1850s onward. Private property requires before all else the deterritorialization of those whose relations with the land do not revolve around its commodification. Violence against Indigenous nations, and especially Indigenous women, is not incidental to capitalist development but is a prerequisite to capitalist subsumption in the settler-colonial context. In requiring the death of either Indigeneity or the person, capital constitutes Indigenous struggle as an antagonist, interrupting both the subsumption of labor and the circulation of capital (even as such struggles may also self-constitute themselves in a variety of ways).     

Rescuing children,reforming the Empire: British child migration to colonial Southern Rhodesia

This article examines a child migration scheme which aimed at permanently resettling British children to Southern Rhodesia during 1946–1962. First, the philanthropic scheme was framed in terms of child welfare; it sought to benefit selected children by removing them from their homes and resettling them at Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College, a boarding school and children’s home. Second, the scheme aimed at advancing Empire building more broadly by increasing the number of white citizens in Africa. The article considers how the Fairbridge scheme distinctively combined physical and social mobility. The children were expected, through first-class education, to rise to privileged positions, thus maintaining the colonial, racially segregated social hierarchy. By focusing on implicit forms of education at the boarding school, analysed as a ‘Goffmanian’ total institution, the article considers the ambiguous intents and outcomes of a very particular project of colonial social engineering.     

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     

Moby-Dick and the American Empire

Abstract

This article explores the parallels between the narrative tropes of Moby-Dick and the conduct of the Mexican War of 1846–48. Drawing on the theories of Austin and Butler, the article develops an account of the performative speech acts deployed by President James K. Polk in order to secure Congressional support for the war, and the rhetorical power exercised by Ahab on the Pequod. It also examines in detail Melville’s use of the Biblical figures of King Ahab and Belshazzar, showing how the novel turns the Biblical-republican typology used in the American Revolution against the British to indict America’s own practice of imperialism. The article concludes by reflecting on both the vision of perpetual war which Melville presents as the consequence of Polk’s assumption of imperial power, and the parallels between Polk’s prosecution of the war with Mexico and the US invasion of Iraq.     

Picturing Empire and Illness

Reflecting on recent debates within cultural studies on non-Western modernities and ‘cultural studies in/of Asia’, this essay explores a cultural history of venereal disease (VD) in Korea under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). The colonial representation of and discourse on VD in Western colonial settings was often built around a missionary medical account of sin and disease and a colonial dialectic of white civilization and non-white backwardness. This essay draws attention to the colonial discourse on VD in the non-Western Japanese Empire and its East Asian context, which compels us to look into the colonial framing of disease and bodies in imperial contexts where ruler and ruled shared close racial, cultural and religious affinities and where colonial medical power did not stem from white hegemony and Christian religious authority. By using methods from cultural studies and feminist history, this essay uncovers and critically reads the Japanese colonial medical and popular cultural archives on VD that range from state documents to laboratory reports to patent medicine advertisements, in order to reconfigure Japan's colonial medical empire and its underlying, gendered assumptions. It clarifies not only the legal, military and institutional bases for the intense governmental control over VD, but also the cultural image, metaphor and knowledge of VD and the biomedical female body promoted by Japan's transnational patent medical industry in close collaboration with the colonial state. By doing so, this essay sheds light on the gendered epistemic violence of Japanese colonialism.     

Settler colonialism and sociological knowledge: insights and directions forward

Theory and Society - What can the analytical framework of settler colonialism contribute to sociological theorizing, research, and overall understanding of the social world? This essay argues that...     

The Politics of Pain and the End of Empire

This article is a discussion of the role of feeling and emotion, and particularly the experience of pain, in contemporary global political events. In placing pain at the center of an analysis of a lived experience of global politics, the aim is to forge strategies to resist neoliberal imperialism and to create emotionally literate political communities. Drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry, Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon, the article situates the concept of emotions in a modern colonial landscape that is both racialized and gendered, complicated by neoliberalism as a subjectivity that contains the scope for emotions. As a case study, the article considers the emotions of viewing the deliberate infliction of pain through the circulation of the ‘Abu Ghraib photos’, particularly in the form of recent museum exhibitions in the USA.     

American Studies in the time of Empire

Abstract

This article argues that in terms of political economy, political/military power, and culturally, the USA is 'worlded' in two important ways. In terms both of power and self-perception, the national space of the USA is no longer contained within the boundaries indicated on political maps, but has come to encompass the globe, projecting the nation onto a global space. At the same time, intensified population flows into the USA – part of the same process – 'worlds' the USA from within, transforming American society. These contemporary developments need not be projected upon the past, but they do enable us to see the past in different ways – with colonialism integral to the US national formation both in North America and elsewhere. The article suggests on these grounds that an American-centered view of the USA, understanding the US as a sui generis formation is insufficient to understand the US past or present; such an understanding requires constant attention to the entanglement of the USA in the world and of the world in the USA.     

Children and the Discourse of Fear

The news media, a dominant source of information about social issues, use entertainment formats to organize reports that audiences will understand. Part of this organized effort is the use of a discourse of fear, or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are central features of everyday life. Reliant on formal agents of social control as news sources about fear, news reports tend to repeat certain words, themes, and perspectives that support more social control. Although associated with crime, the discourse of fear includes other topics and concerns as well. A qualitative content analysis approach, “tracking discourse,” permits a mapping of discourse over time and across various topics. Analysis of the use of fear in three major newspapers during 1987–1996 shows that it has increased; that a large part of the discourse of fear includes children and the spaces they occupy (e.g., schools and neighborhoods); and that it changed from a focus on specific events in the 1980s to a more generalized, pervasive perspective in the 1990s, peaking in about 1994. It is argued that this is important for making claims about “necessary” social action to protect children, as well as protect us from children. Fear is the path to the dark side. —Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace     

The 'New' Sociology of Empire and Colonialism

This study reviews recent sociological scholarship on empire and colonialism. The new 'imperial–colonial studies' in sociology is not a fully fledged subfield but an emerging space of inquiry that examines social forms, processes, and relations associated with imperialism and colonialism. This study sketches the main features of the new scholarship. It also situates the new sociological studies within a larger history of sociological inquiry and interdisciplinary context. Finally, it suggests that the future of sociology's new imperial–colonial studies lies not in 'sociologizing' the study of empire and colonialism but in deploying analyses of empire and colonialism to help critically reorient some of traditional sociology's limiting lenses and assumptions.     

Locating the Wild Man: Rain Forest Enchantments and Settler Colonial Fantasies Amid the Ruins of the Anthropocene

The figure of the Wild Man resides at the hinge where nature meets culture. In the Pacific Northwest, the Wild Man is known locally by different names and is interpreted through a variety of cultural and historical lenses. Settler colonialism in the region, for example, situated the Wild Man within wilderness and anachronistic spaces, aligning him with a bygone and romanticized indigeneity. Conversely, Coast Salish people invigorate new stories of the Wild Man as critique of the ruins of late capitalism. The Wild Man provides them with strength to assert their autonomy and authority in leading the restoration of the natural environment. This article explores monstrous entanglements between settler colonialism, indigeneity and the Wild Man on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.     

Sensational signs,authority and the public sphere: Settler colonial rhetoric in times of change

The article explores the emotional regimes of settler colonialism in post‐apartheid South Africa. The focus is on apocalyptic fears of the imagined eradication of whiteness. These fears are articulated in response to postcolonial/decolonial interpellations of abject whiteness, and are made visible in a range of sensational signs that circulate online and offline. The signs cluster around two themes that are central to the ideologies of settler colonialism: land (and its feared loss), and (white) bodies (and their feared disappearance). Following Sarah Ahmed (2004a,b), emotionally charged signs can be seen as actions (akin to words in speech act theory). In contrast to Jürgen Habermas’ conception of the public sphere as an idealized place of rational debate, the article argues that a combination of affect‐emotion‐feeling and the performance of ‘reason’—what Aristotelian rhetoric refers to as pathos and ethos—are integral for understanding public‐political discourses of whiteness at a time when white privilege has been called out globally (and locally), and white dominance has lost its stronghold.     

Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire

Abstract Peoples that span national borders are ambiguous in that they in some ways partake of both nations and in other ways partake of neither. This paper analyzes how the boundary - the power to impose difference - of the United States and Mexico is being eroded by transnational developments causing the structure of the nation-states to become problematic. To the degree that anthropology is an official discipline predicated on the distinction between Self and the alien Other which it presumes to represent, the deterioration of the borders and boundaries of the nation-state have serious implications for its epistemology and legitimacy and its power of representation of transnational communities and of difference in general. Furthermore, as national distinctions decline ethnicity emerges as a consciousness of difference.     

Settler colonial power and the American Indian sovereignty movement: forms of domination, strategies of transformation

The article extends the multi-institutional model of power and change through an analysis of the American Indian Sovereignty Movement. Drawing upon cultural models of the state, and articulating institutionalist conceptions of political opportunities and resources, the analysis demonstrates that this framework can be applied to challenges addressing the state as well as nonstate fields. The rational-legal diminishment of tribal rights, bureaucratic paternalism, commonsense views of tribes as racial/ethnic minorities, and the binary construction of American and Indian as oppositional identities diminished the appeal of "contentious" political action. Instead, to establish tribes' status as sovereign nations, tribal leaders aggressively enacted infrastructural power, transposed favorable legal rulings across social fields to legitimize sovereignty discourses, and promoted a pragmatic coexistence with state and local governments. Identifying the United States as a settler colonial society, the study suggests that a decolonizing framework is more apt than racial/ethnicity approaches in conceptualizing the struggle of American Indians.