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This chapter looks at veiling during the nineteenth century, a period that saw European imperial powers make incursions into and take control over much of the Middle East. It examines how European views of Muslim-majority societies and of veiled Muslim women of this time have shaped the way Muslim women, especially veiled ones, are perceived in Euro-American societies today. It begins by discussing the portrayal of Middle Eastern women with veils and the imagined interiors of harems in European and American paintings throughout the nineteenth century, in photographs and postcards in the early twentieth century, and in early Hollywood films. It then explores how European colonisers used Muslim women's veiling and the perceived evils of Islam to justify their civilizing missions.

This chapter explores Abdulrazak Gurnah's works. The European colonizer/African colonized discourse is explicitly complicated in Zanzibar, the birth place of Gurnah, by a set of circumstances which do not fit the Black Atlantic model. Two additional discourses in particular need to be factored into the discussion here: the history of the Cold War and how it played out in Africa between World War II and the collapse of communism in 1990, and the history of the Indian Ocean world and the various and complex circulations of people, things, and ideas within it—notably Islam. Furthermore, a reading of Gurnah's works supports the critique of mainstream Western discourse for writing and reading about Africa.

This chapter examines the response of Africans to the criminalization of poaching in the wake of emerging wildlife conservation regimes during the colonial period. More specifically, it considers how Africans subverted the structures through which the European settlers had intended to colonialize them and now used them to engage in a process of self-liberation. The restriction camp at the Gonakudzingwa Detention Center in Zimbabwe became a spiritual site; teachers like Elias Chauke and the students under his custody defied the conformist agenda by leaving the country to go to Mozambique, train, get guns, and cross back into Rhodesia to fight and get rid of the European colonizers whom they accused of being unjust. The colonizers had used Africans to fight against tsetse fly; now the nationalists were using locals to fight against the Rhodesians. This chapter describes the transient workspaces of anticolonial organizing in relation to the metanarrative of nationalism in Zimbabwe.

This chapter examines how European colonizers under siege from the deadly tsetse fly in Africa turned to the professoriate of the hunt in the absence of any remedies of their own. Until the appearance of trypanosomiasis drugs and residual insecticides in the late 1950s, there was no other method besides “game destruction” to starve the tsetse fly and deny it its primary vehicle for mobility: big forest animals. Similarly, in the absence of ready-made technological solutions to tropical pests and pestilence, Rhodesian settlers turned to African hunters and deployed them as a weapon of tsetse control. In this particular case, the state employed the hombarume or maphisa who lived nearest the tsetse-infested areas, arming them with guns and sending them into the forest. The more animals these hunters slaughtered, the more they would be rewarded. In deferring to the vahloti and availing them the space, animals, and guns, the state became magocha, a rich vein of meat supply to the village.

This chapter discusses the agricultural development program to transform Togolese cotton growing from a small economic sector that supported local spinning and weaving into a large monocropping sector for the export of raw cotton to European mills. In relation to this, the development and implementation of capitalist labor systems occupied European colonizers on the ground to a greater extent than interimperialist squabbles about colonial borders or even the dubious treaties of protection concluded with local political elites. Moreover, it shows that the United States played a central role in the development of these colonial labor systems in many European colonies and thus had a vast imperial reach.

This chapter examines how European colonizers under siege from the deadly tsetse fly deferred to African hunters in the absence of any remedies of their own. It considers the disruptive role of European colonial partition, mobilities, and settlements; in particular, it shows how this “ecological imperialism” led to the displacement of Africans from lands they had tamed, with the Europeans settling in areas where Africans had sequestered pestilent insects like tsetse fly. When the pests struck back and there was no ready biomedical or chemical solutions, the colonial state turned to the African hunter to help slaughter forest animals, starve the tsetse fly of its food source (blood), and kill the deadly trypanosome protozoan the insect transmitted from forest animal reservoirs to livestock. The outbreak of trypanosomiasis becomes coproduced “through a conjunction of bodies, technologies, and cultural practices,” demonstrating how an insect subverted and indeed mediated the much-vaunted powers of imperialism and colonialism and held hostage those who are supposed to be the lord of the African.

This introductory chapter briefly explores the transatlantic origins of black consumption, tracing it back to the first contact between European colonizers and coastal Africans. By the early twentieth century, Europeans had admitted to and documented a connection between European global expansion and a sexual/libidinal appetite for African flesh. One such document is a cartoon published in the French journal Le Rire in 1911 which demonstrated the European hunger for conquest sometimes coincided with a homosexual hunger for African flesh. This cartoon depicts the widespread belief of that time in Western and Central Africa that Europeans were cannibals. Groups such as the Igbo, Bakongo, Fanti, and Guinea all thought of European interlopers as cannibals. The chapter also analyses why and how the bodies of black American slaves became so delectable, so erotically appetizing, to a nation and white populace that denied and despised their humanity.

This introductory chapter briefly discusses the history of the Garifuna people. In colonial times the Garifuna were known as Black Caribs, a name that represents their mixed African/Amerindian heritage, and their story—from their traditional origin in a shipwreck, to their battles against the French and British, to their final, cataclysmic struggle to retain their independence at the end of the eighteenth century.

This chapter examines the spatial and material history of the former Ebenezer Mission, near Dimboola, in northwestern Victoria, Australia. More specifically, it highlights the disjunction between Moravian missionaries' attempts to create an idealised didactic landscape that would inculcate order among the residents, and the actual complexity of cultural exchange between Aboriginal people and European colonisers. The chapter first considers the significance of former missions and reserves to the heritage and identity of Aboriginal people before turning to a discussion of the Aboriginal experience of colonialism as well as the role of missions as sites of encounter. It then explores the archaeology of ‘contact’ between white Australian settlers and Aboriginal people, along with the centrality of reformed gender and class order in the missionaries' vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria.

This chapter traces the origins of North America. It presents a geological history of North America; the arrival of humans and the naming of a continent; the arrival of European colonizers; the specific threads that have made the United States, Canada, and Mexico different as well as those that make them similar; and common themes in the history of the continent, beginning with the natural landscape that was shaped long before surveyors marked the boundaries between the three countries.