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Chapter 4 addresses the construction of peasantries and tradition in colonial ethnography. Although the Seereer have been portrayed as timeless farmers, a close reading of ethnographic archives, attentive to convergent and dissonant accounts, shows that images of typical peasants greatly underestimate the dynamism of rural culture. The chapter also examines how static portraits of Seereer farmers speak as much to imperial anxieties and colonial preoccupations as to the social existence of people in Siin. Key to these discursive productions was the crystallization of Seereer farmers as creatures of their natural milieu. Landscape here serves as a visual technology of colonial power, which assisted the primitivization of rural Africans while papering over evidence of Seereer cultural dynamism in the colonial and precolonial pasts. To redress these representations, we must instead view tradition as a labile mode of engagement with outside forces of change. Indeed, a close reading of the written record shows considerable vibrancy and heterogeneity in Seereer social and political organization, kinship structures, agricultural ecology and landholding practices, village layouts, cultural economy, and religious orientations – which, in turn, provides a fluid baseline of cultural information to be compared with documentary, oral and archaeological evidence for earlier periods.

The introduction provides an overview of the scope and aims of the book. It begins by noting that the Moroccan colonial archive was the collective product of a generation of French scholars and amateur ethnologists, who, between 1900 and 1925, invented a new field, “Ethnographic Morocco,” and a new object of study, Moroccan Islam. It claimed to provide a scientific basis for the development of French colonial policy toward Morocco. The Moroccan colonial archive, however, was not just a product of its discursive destiny; it was continually reshaped in response to the multiple historical conjunctures (diplomatic, political, and intellectual) in which it was embedded. In this sense, this book is an extended argument in the importance of historicization. The introduction also forecasts a central argument: that the Moroccan ethnographic state was structured, organized, and institutionalized the way in which both non-Moroccans and Moroccans understood the Moroccan polity. In short, it created modern Morocco. The introduction also contains brief discussions of the chapters.

The main task of the chapter is to address a number of historiographical and methodological issues in connection with the sources used in this study. The first set of questions concerns the challenges of locating documents on or by women of the empire in an archival system that was built on the premise that colonization was an exclusively masculine undertaking. The next group of issues relate to the methods of reading the diverse types of written and oral materials collected. These sources pertain to widely different genres, such as promotional and advice literature, personal narratives, petitions, private and official correspondence, each calling for specific interpretive strategies that have to take into account complex questions about generic conventions, the nature of experiences, the work of memory, and the role of subjectivity.

The introduction of Living Cargo presents the book as a project of unhousing the past; about opening up archives and drawing history out; and about the opening out that occurs when history goes public. It is also about the social, political, and ethical demands such openings make on public and private lives; and about the publics and counterpublics that are produced when history is on the move. When history is unhoused, when it travels narratively, visually, performatively its movements help bind people together, as surely as its institutional enclosure helps keep them apart. In other words, this book is about the black public cultures of postcolonial Britain; the particular historical resonances that join together many disparate communities in the UK under and beyond the banner of the nation; and the transnational circuits of exchange economic, social, political, affective that takes British colonial history for a ride.

The fourth chapter explores the bio-medicalized forms of human bio-cargo to find expression in the sign of “blood” as the particularized biological “matter” of family history, now articulated in enthusiasm for DNA mapping as a way to restore family genealogies lost in the Middle Passage. The chapter looks to creative works by Bernardine Evaristo, Dorothea Smartt, and Inge Blackman, and Isaac Julien, which provide compelling anti-genealogies of intimacy and belonging irreducible to the brute substance of bio-matter.

Chapter 4 explores the massive impact of the orientalist project in Kashmir on its narrative tradition. The orientalist preoccupation with originary texts and singular notions of authorship—evident in the critical editions and translations of the twelfth-century Rajatarangini—sundered the Sanskrit corpus from the Persian historical tradition and thus its Kashmiri context, incorporating it instead into India’s literary tradition. Its contents, meanwhile, were utilized to narrate India’s ancient, defined inevitably as its Hindu, past, thus creating a colonial archive of historical sources from Kashmir. Indian nationalists further appropriated Kashmir’s Sanskrit corpus—and the region—into their own projects of constructing the past of the Indian nation. This new conversation on history marginalized the Persian tradition and literati and brought a new set of interlocutors, the Kashmiri Pandits, to the fore of knowledge production. Nonetheless, these informants infused the orientalist project with tropes and ideas from the indigenous narrative tradition.

The first chapter analyzes David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghost in relation to the way in which recent scholars of the African Atlantic have wrestled with the perennial problem of the “example” as a representational form, in which particular acts of violent atrocity must stand in for extended, systematic, and non-singular event(s) of modernity.

Chapter Four, “Along Enlightenment’s Cast Shadows,” begins with melancholy and the shadow of the object that falls across the ego. I elaborate how technologies of light projection to create shadow pictures form a foundational and persistent part of the history of projection technologies as both colonial regulatory devices for the production of the disembodied subject of reason and as machines haunted by other ways of knowing and becoming. The chapter begins with a reconsideration of the physiognomic silhouette. Taking seriously Lavater’s ambivalent assertion that what he calls the “shade” may assist the promotion of human understanding and love, the chapter turns to the beginnings of photography and William Henry Fox-Talbot’s alternate naming: “skiagraphy,” or shadow writing. The chapter argues that setting the early history of photography back into the dark room of devices for drawing with shadow allows us to bring out photography’s relation not to only to identitarian fixity but also to volatility, desire, and transformation. The final section focuses on the work of contemporary artist Kara Walker’s use of the technology of shadow projection to reconsider the institution of the photographic archive and its regulatory effects on the body. Thinking through shadow projection enables us to see the body in ways that revolatilize the hardened differences of race and sexuality as well as galvanize the transformative instability in the universal pretensions of enlightenment technologies--namely, the fact that we all cast a black shadow.

The third chapter considers the ambivalent role of the law in the geography of colonial biopolitics by examining three of Caryl Phillips’s novels. It addresses the relationship between Phillips’ self-reflexive historiography and the conditions of precarity they depict, underscoring the continuity between the biopolitical institution and instrument of the colonial modernity in the contemporary forms of human bio-cargo that arise in its wake.

This introductory chapter defines ‘news’ and presents the context of colonial Algeria. Using the example of news of the Tunisian invasion of 1881 in Algiers, it shows how news circulated through a variety of media, forming a complex news ecosystem. This ecosystem challenges standard theories of media put forward by scholars from Marshall McLuhan to Benedict Anderson. The introduction then explains the formation of a deeply divided society within colonial Algeria, placing the history of information within the wider historiography on colonial Algeria. The chapter concludes with a consideration of sources for a history of news, explaining how the colonial surveillance archive can form a useful entry point because surveillance was part of the news circulation system.

This chapter will look at the ways in which the colonial archive on piracy was produced and on the challenges of reading this archive. In doing so, it addresses several critical questions about the archives—the archival field in general and the colonial archives in particular. The chapter ponders on the limits of the archive and it’s potential, and focuses on the logic of archiving adopted by the colonial state and how this yielded a particular set of formulations on piracy and predation. It will also consider subsequent representations of piracy and the challenges these offer to the historian attempting to reconstruct a history of the phenomenon.

The fifth chapter begins with a consideration of bespoke tailor, menswear designer, and global fashion icon Ozwald Boateng in order to simultaneously think about the historicity of fashion and the commodified “branding” of the past. The chapter contrasts Boateng’s carefully cultivated public persona with another fashionable icon, Yinka Shonibare MBE, an artist best known for refashioning aristocratic dress of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century in African batik.

The history of indigenous citizenship in California began to be obscured in 1849, when it was revoked in the California constitution. But the process of obscuring this past began in the Spanish documents and politics of conquest. To narrate this history of indigenous politics and colonial communities, native sources proved essential. In each chapter, analyzing native sources made it possible to develop important new interpretations. They gave insight into the missions as sites of indigenous memory, where native authorities had access to rectify conditions. Indian painters produced a visual world replete with indigenous ways of seeing. Chumash histories of the 1824 war suggested forms of power the Chumash community attributed to their leaders. Emancipation documents defined indigenous political visions in the early national era. They show indigenous citizens negotiating their rights under restricted conditions. Some of this is known because indigenous communities preserved their archives. Other written and visual records and objects became alienated from the communities that produced them and part of repositories of world civilization in European capitals. In recovering archives, histories, and forms of knowing, this history is interested in redressing wounds produced by the historical erasures undertaken during these years.

The second chapter offers an extended reading of A Harlot’s Progress that illustrates the novel’s spectacular orchestration of far-flung art-historical citations taken from the social satires of William Hogarth. By depicting the search of an eighteenth-century abolitionist for an authentic, first-person account of the violence of slavery, the novel underscores the condition of human life at the intersection of law and commerce, and the problematic relationship between the reading public and the instances of cruelty on which they are easily transfixed.

This chapter involves a close reading of several dozen notarized acts produced in Ferrand-era Santo Domingo by men and women seeking to document and preserve their freedom from (re)enslavement. This part of the work complements the political history told in the other chapters by offering a fine-grained “on-the-ground” portrait of legal strategies to secure freedom in a context of reenslavement. Here, the author also engages with themes such as the role of gender in slavery and emancipation, the reemergence of race as a system of classification in the legal record, and the creation of an archive of race and slavery during a unique moment in the history of Atlantic slavery.

The sixth and final chapter of Living Cargo concludes with an interrogation of urban regeneration in the city of Bristol, situating the neoliberal city’s alliance with private real estate investors and corporate investors in relation to the concurrent campaigns by black community activists that the city acknowledge its historical involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and that it reorient economic redevelop for the benefit of communities struggling against that historical legacy. The chapter looks at artists Hew Locke and Graham Mortimer Evelyn alongside political protests, street actions, and popular uprisings that raise fundamental questions about state, civic, and institutional responsibility to the past, and laid the groundwork for a transformation of its public cultures.

This chapter examines Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s literary history, which describes the literatures of Latin America as an extension of Spain. Menéndez Pelayo proposed, in the Antología de poetas hispano-americanos, a narrative that was primarily aimed to recover the literary production of the colonial times. This recovery was not only limited to archival research, but also included the symbolic redistribution of the Spanish cultural capital, assigning texts to the new Latin American literatures that had previously been exclusive parts of the Spanish literature. The consequence was a broadening of Latin American literary canons to embrace the colonial tradition as a foundational moment in their cultural production. But what did Latin Americans have to gain by embracing a cultural discourse like Menéndez Pelayo’s, not without colonial anxieties? Alongside Spanish efforts to achieve cultural hegemony over the new national realities of Latin America, we also find a local quest, one that attempted to formulate a foundational discourse for the cultural production of each of the young countries. Through Hispanism the Creole elites renewed their arguments to establish their own national hegemony against the less Hispanicized sectors of the population.

This chapter describes the history of Southern Bhutan as recorded in British colonial accounts. Though these are inevitably coloured by colonial preoccupations, they shed valuable light on the conditions in southern Bhutan before and during the arrival of the first Nepali settlers. A marked change occurs in British portrayals of the Bhutanese after the end of the Duars war. Colonel Francis E. Younghusband needed Bhutanese cooperation, and in the event a threat to withhold the annual subsidy if the Bhutanese sided with the Tibetans was dramatically effective. Ethnic stereotypes of the ‘land hungry,’ ‘mercenary,’ and ‘migratory’ Nepali created in colonial accounts still remain currency in local discourse today. The political and cultural dangers posed by Nepalese immigration are cited regularly by the Bhutanese government even today, and also, ironically, by some refugee activists, who use them for different purposes.