Colonial Legacies and the Struggle for Social Membership in a National Community: The 1946 People's Uprisings in Korea

The historical experience of colonialism exerts a profound influence upon emergent postcolonial societies. Yet colonial legacies are not passed on in precisely the same way; rather, they are contingent on particular historical processes. In the case of Korea, Japanese colonialism gave way to a brief liberation phase that was followed by another foreign occupation (the U.S. in the south and the U.S.S.R. in the north) during which efforts were made to rebuild the political community. Focusing on the 1946 people's uprisings, the largest popular social movement during the U.S. occupation period, as a pivotal historical event, this article examines why the primary target of the uprisings was not the foreign military government but fellow Koreans, especially police officers, bureaucrats, and wealthy landlords, thereby revealing how Japanese colonial rule influenced the movement's choice of targets as well as its eventual failure. Through this historical analysis, I demonstrate that internal conflicts among Koreans, which were created and rearticulated through Japanese colonial rule, became critical sources of social and political struggles under the American occupation, the important consequence of which lies in the creation of a pattern of internal exclusion that characterized South Korea's post‐war political trajectory.     

Decolonial sociology: W.E.B. Du Bois's foundational theoretical and methodological contributions

Decolonial theory offers sociologists, especially critical race scholars, powerful theoretical and methodological tools to understand historical and contemporary injustice and resistance. As a revolutionary epistemology, decolonial theory and methods feature critical insights into knowledges from subaltern voices concerned with how the implementation of modern technologies shape colonial structures, inequalities, the daily lives of the colonized, and resistance strategies. However, decolonial studies have long been the purview of the humanities and remain marginal to the social sciences due, partially, to a dearth of foundational theorizing. Challenging scientific colonialism, historicism, and Eurocentric conceptions of civilization while simultaneously linking these phenomena to racialized exploitation of labor within a modern global capitalist system and resistance to it, W. E. B. Du Bois's sociological theories, methods, and advocacy offer insightful ways to begin decolonizing the discipline, theoretically and in practice, in scholarship and in the world. This article outlines Du Bois's theoretical and empirical contributions by putting him in dialogue with a century of decolonial scholarship before offering suggestions for how to mobilize Du Bois's decolonial theory and methods for a pluriversal decolonial sociology.     

The “Moment of the Boomerang” Never Came: Resistance and Collaboration in Colonial Korea, 1919–1945

The contradiction between the colonial ideology of universalism and the rule of difference may result in discontentment among the ruled, but it does not always lead to sustainable organized resistance. In many Western colonies during the interwar period, growing anti‐colonial resistance replaced collaboration; however, in Korea that was under Japanese colonial rule, resistance during the 1920s was superseded by collaboration in the 1930s. Adopting two accounts of ideology‐resource pair and structural characteristics of Japanese colonialism, this article analyzes the progression of liberal nationalism in Korea from resistance to collaboration. In colonial Korea, a separatist project led by the liberal nationalism started as a promising anti‐colonial movement, but by the end of the 1920s, it became apparent that the resources engendered by the separatism had validated both anti‐colonial nationalism as well as colonialism, thereby undermining its legitimacy. A more serious crisis occurred in the early 1930s: with the “decline of the West” and its associated intensified Japanese assimilationism, liberal nationalism not only lost its ideological ground but also came to overlap with assimilationism. The Korean elite's political conversion during the 1930s took place in a contradictory situation in which their nationalist practices ironically contributed to the empowerment of the colonial rule.     

Schooling a European Identity: ethno‐cultural exclusion and nationalist resonance within the EU policy of “The European dimension of education”

This article aims to explore how the role of education as an aide in the process of “European” identity formation is being articulated in the European Union's (EU) policy of “The European dimension of education”. After having located the EU's views on education in the context of the neo‐liberal discourse on economic globalization, the article goes on to trace EU discussions of the European dimension of education historically. Subsequently, it deliberates on the understanding of European culture and identity which the European dimension of education endeavours to advance. Here a critique is developed of the policy's ethno‐culturalism, thereby excluding delineation of a collective identity in the EU. Basing itself on a notion of cultural identity which, implicitly, includes only those who fit certain versions of European historical “roots” and cultural “heritage”, the policy, it is argued, impedes a discussion of how a trans‐ethnic identity formation could be created in today's EU. Towards the end of the article, a scrutiny of the European dimension's perception of the so‐called “language diversity” in the EU seeks to illustrate this issue further.     

Citizen or Subject? Blurring Boundaries,Claiming Space: Indians in Colonial South Africa

Citizenship and subjecthood are often seen as discrete, bounded categories, temporally disparate and conceptually distinct in law and in the social sciences. This paper challenges this predominant formulation by attesting that these legal categories are in fact, often, breached and blurred in identity struggles over claims to rights. Using the case of colonial Indians in South Africa, this paper argues that under conditions of colonialism, the colonized use the dual category of citizen/subject to claim rights while pledging allegiance to the power‐holders. Using historical sources such as petitions and referenda written by Indians to the colonial rulers and Gandhi's writings during his stay in South Africa, I explore the implications of this slippage between subject and citizen, thus contributing to the existing literature on colonial law and colonial resistance, the politics of citizenship, race relations and the politics of difference and identity.     

The Uses of the Past and European Integration: Austria between Lisbon,Ireland, and EURO 08

This article examines Austrian national identity negotiations through a qualitative analysis of the country's ideologically heterogeneous media, with a focus on Austria's most widely read paper (and its popular readers’ letters pages) between April and August 2008. This turbulent period coincided with widening opposition to the EU's Lisbon reform treaty, Austria's co-hosting of the European football championship, and the collapse of the country's coalition government. This analysis of media coverage and readers’ letters focuses on the rhetorical strategies underpinning various discursive constructions of Austria's place within the EU. The following key findings are discussed: projections of perceived social ills and resulting anxieties onto the EU; the interpretative uses of the past—historical episodes selected from Austrian and other national contexts—to make sense of and politicize the present; constructions of ‘European ideals’ in juxtaposition to perceived ‘European realities’; and competing models of national identity in relation to the European ‘network state.’     

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.     

Cruel Pessimism and Waiting for Belonging: Towards a Global Political Economy of Affect

Recent theorizations of affect have focused largely on Western historical, political and aesthetic contexts to distinguish between affect and emotion. Notably, these interventions offer new imaginaries to reinvigorate analysis of politics in the face of shrinking possibilities. However, much of this literature views affect as autonomous from emotion, while overlooking the political history of development and the differentiated relation to affect under colonial capitalism in other historical contexts. This paper studies subaltern engagement in activist performance in India to address these issues. It thinks through Lauren Berlant's account of the aesthetic genre and affective structure of cruel optimism, and her focus on historical contexts where people have recently lost the vision of a good life. By contrast, focusing on the historical present of those born into a pervasive and intractable sense of marginality and insecurity, I ask: what is the subject's relation to affect and activism in contexts where the loss of vision of a good life is not new under neoliberalism, but rather, reworks long-standing violence and inclusion/exclusion of colonial capitalism and nation-state histories. I argue that it is useful to understand Berlant's ‘materialist context for affect theory’ in light of uneven global histories of colonialism, development and neoliberalism. The affective experience of time is different across different spaces. As such, this paper contributes a global materialist context for affect theory, by focusing on activist theatre by a tribe called Chhara, designated ‘born criminals’ by British colonial law – a status legally denotified in 1952, but that is practically still effective in postcolonial India. Competing affective structures – sentimental optimism, cruel pessimism, betrayal and ordinary regard – shape and are shaped by Chhara negotiations with branded criminality. Ultimately, for the postcolonial subject, surviving in the neoliberal present involves vacillating among competing affective structures, only some of which generate sustained political critique.     

The Caliban Codex: mud,blood and spurious issues

The internationally known and respected Cherokee Indian artist Jimmie Durham created the conceptual mixed-media installation The Caliban Codex in anticipation of the 1992 quincentennial Columbian celebrations that were held throughout the Americas. He used Shakespeare's The Tempest as a vehicle by which to critique colonialism's appropriation of language and its power to assert colonial authority. He also addressed physiognomy as it was employed during the nineteenth century in a pseudo-scientific endeavour to ‘prove’ the biological legitimacy of racism. In each case Durham employed the methods of mimicry and mockery to address the ambivalent relationship between the coloniser and the colonised as it continues to be experienced.     

Pinkwashed

Claims regarding “gay rights” have acquired a prominent role in debates over Israel's occupation of Palestine. This often takes the form of “pinkwashing,” a term denoting the use of gay rights discourse to justify the imposition of colonial rule. This article analyzes the pornographic film Men of Israel to explore how pinkwashing reflects colonialism's depoliticizing and exclusionary logics. Men of Israel shows how pinkwashing is far more than a justificatory practice. It also legitimates, reproduces and appropriates colonial narratives to justify an alliance between supporters of gay rights and the “pro-gay” Israeli state. It simultaneously excludes a racial category of people called “Palestinians,” which includes gay Palestinians, from the rights accorded to gay men in Israel. In an era of “gay rights as human rights,” such deployments of “gay rights” highlight the necessity of directing critical scrutiny to the alliances and exclusions implicated by a particular articulation of rights.     

Through the Looking-glass: Colonial Encounters of the First Kind

Abstract Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault, there remains a tendency, in historical sociology, to explain processes of domination in terms of political and economic forces. In the study of state formation and imperialism, realpolitik is given precedence over ritual, material factors over the moral suasion of the sign. Yet European colonialism was also a cultural project. In Southern Africa, nonconformist missions, the vanguards of empire, conjured up new maps, new systems of relations, new notions of time, production and personhood. From their very first encounters with native communities, it is argued, they sowed the state of colonialism on which the colonial state - and a more enduring condition of dependency - was founded.
About sunset the king, attended by his brothers and a few more persons, came to our tent…I said that I had brought a small present for him, as a token of friendship—while opening it he remained silent, not moving even his head, only his eyes towards the parcel. I then took from it a gilded copper comb and put it into his hair, and tied a silver spangled band and tassel round his head, and a chain about his neck, and last of all presented him with a looking glass…     

EU ideology

The idea of Europe was radically transformed after the accomplishment of the idea of European unification. The European Union (EU) and Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century were defined by a broad common ideology that consists of ideologies such as antinationalism, social democracy, pacificism and environmentalism. These ideologies are presented by pro-EU scholars and politicians as ideologies rooted in European history and parts of European identity and as being mostly absent in the American policies. The emergence of EU ideology is traced in the relaunch of European integration in the mid-1980s and in Delors’ conflict with Thatcher. It is argued that the emergence of EU ideology is the result of two long-term historical developments: the deepening and enlargement of European integration; and the changing relations between the USA and Europe. It is concluded that the emergence of EU ideology resembles the emergence of nationalism and national ideologies.     

Social Spaces beyond Civil Society: European Integration,Globalization and the Sociology of European Society

There has been a renewed interest in the idea of society of late. Sociological studies of globalization have posed the question of how to understand society without the nation-state, and studies of European Union (EU) integration have linked the non-emergence of a European society to the 'democratic deficit'. In both cases what is at issue is how to understand the social dynamics of transnational spaces. This paper advances three main arguments in relation to the idea of European society. First, despite its popularity, the concept of civil society is of limited use for understanding European society. Second, European society should not be seen as a unified and coherent whole but as a series of non-integrated, fragmented and autonomous public spheres. Third, European society cannot be understood in the singular. A plurality of European public and social spaces exist, often beyond the control of, or unrelated to, the EU or its member states. In short, European social spaces are not harmonious and cohesive, nor are they necessarily constituted by European integration.     

Aid and its impact on domestic change: The case of police reforms in Macedonia

This article examines the role that aid from the European Union (EU) has played in leading to change in non‐EU Member States. It particularly explores whether the EU's financial assistance has led to change in Macedonia. The question of police reforms in Macedonia, and of the EU's impact on these, are complex because of the sensitivity of such reforms in terms of the functioning of the country's multi‐ethnic democracy. Using the institutionalism approach, the article argues that the police reforms have indeed been heavily dependent on EU funding and traces the EU's role in the implementation of police reforms in Macedonia.     

Theorizing race and settler colonialism within U.S. sociology

Settler colonialism expands race and racism beyond ideological perspectives and reveals the links between historical and contemporary racialized social relations and practices–the racial structure–of American society. In this article, we define settler colonialism, highlight sociological scholarship that uses settler colonial theoretical frameworks, and explore ways in which this work enriches, intersects with, complicates, and contradicts key assumptions within the sociology of race.     

Beauty in the Community

Metacom's War, also known as King Phillip's War, sets a pattern of national expansion through displacement of native people that echoes throughout American history. Helping students further understand this war through the examination of Mary Rowlandson's primary document provides educators and students with an opportunity to delve deeper into the complexities surrounding the convergence of cultures in colonial America. In this article, I provide an overview of the context that led to the conflict between the native populations and the European settlers. Additionally, I highlight passages from Rowlandson's narrative that are relevant to upper-elementary students. The passages are accompanied by questions to assist students as they examine the primary source for a deeper understanding of the people who strove to survive in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Examining primary sources is one piece of the multifaceted process of historical understanding. In this article, educators learn the historical content of the period and a structured process for their students to examine the primary source.     

Provincializing europe: towards a post-colonial reconstruction: a critique of baconian science as the last stand of imperialism

This article treats Europe's claim to universality as its problematic, and contends that any serious attempt to reorganize the past and/or the future must subvert the European appropriation of the universal. Noting that the justification for Europe's ‘confiscation’ of the universal is often grounded in the argument that only Europe has succeeded in inventing an epistemological tool (namely, Baconian science) that successfully opens the doors to Truth, the article seeks to further its project of provincializing Europe by demonstrating the inadequacy of Euro-science as humanity's chosen vehicle to Truth. This the article does by developing the thesis that violence is encoded in the very fabric of modern science. Following a broadly Gandhian perspective, therefore, the article rejects science's epistemological pretensions. Such rejection of Euro-science, the article points out, leads also to a denial of Europe's presumed universality. Finally, the paper offers some preliminary thoughts on a post-science reorganization of knowledge-creative practices.     

Articulation,national unity and the aesthetics of living against occupation in Elia Suleiman’s Palestine Trilogy

This article interrogates questions of political subjectivity and representation in the context of late modern colonialism, by reading Elia Suleiman’s Palestine trilogy against a wider history of Palestinian political articulation. It suggests that Suleiman’s films detach the Palestinians’ struggle from the national paradigm, and create a political aesthetics that does not reduce the Palestinians to passive victims, nor depends upon their ability to reconstruct national unity and a coherent struggle for liberation. The political importance of this post-nationalism cannot, however, be understood unless it is tied to the specific historical and discursive conjuncture in which the Palestinians exist today. Undoing discourses of Palestinian nationalism, I argue, has become particularly important since the break up of the Oslo accords, not despite, but because of the exigencies of the colonial occupation and the imperative of finding efficient ways of resisting it.     

Applying visual anthropology: Ethnographic video and policy ethnography

This research is part of a larger project that examines the working lives of South African women prisoners. The data gathered represent one of the occupational sectors inside a women's prison in the Western Capearea where lace‐making and embroidery represent key working activity for the day. Lace‐making is a symbolic link between European and colonial heritage and is associated with hegemonic relations. Women who are involved in lace‐making must bring eye, hand and mind into creative dialogue. The sociologist as photographer attempts to draw the observer in, through the eyes of the worker and to indicate the intricacy of physical involvement and sense of necessary patience that must take place with work of this detail. (The wrong placing or direction of fine thread can raise moral, psychological and pedagogical questions to the working whole.) Lace making may be interpreted as an ‘engaging’ pedagogical vehicle and/or as a futile, oppressive vestige of colonialism.