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Introduction

Sara Mills

in Gender and Colonial Space

This introductory chapter discusses the process by which spatial relations are considered classed, raced and gendered within the imperial and colonial contexts. It notes that the focus of the study ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the process by which spatial relations are considered classed, raced and gendered within the imperial and colonial contexts. It notes that the focus of the study is on the period of ‘high’ British colonialism during the last few years of the nineteenth century. It considers the question of spatiality and explains how the book—and the study—developed. It examines post-colonial theory, this book's theoretical position, and the concepts of space and spatial relations. This chapter also identifies the different levels of colonial space and discusses the public and private spheres, the contact zone, the sexualisation of space, and gender and space.Less

Territory and Foreign Policy

Itty Abraham

in How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics

This chapter begins by surveying the literature on territorial conflict in international relations. It argues that the key term territory remains largely unexamined in this literature. This extends ... More

This chapter begins by surveying the literature on territorial conflict in international relations. It argues that the key term territory remains largely unexamined in this literature. This extends into a critique of dominant conceptions of territorial sovereignty. The chapter then explores techniques of producing territory and sovereignty in colonial India, showing how the anticolonial territorial imaginary produces a deeply fissured national body. The next section offers a theoretical reconstruction of foreign policy as a territorializing practice. The final section shows how territorializing gender helped to produce boundaries around the postcolonial Indian nation through the figure of the “abducted woman.”Less

Exile, Colonial Space, and Deterritorialized People in Eastern Indonesian History

Timo Kaartinen

in Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration

Exile served two purposes in the early colonization of Eastern Indonesia. By exiling indigenous leaders to distant lands, the Dutch East India Company limited the expansive potential of their ... More

Exile served two purposes in the early colonization of Eastern Indonesia. By exiling indigenous leaders to distant lands, the Dutch East India Company limited the expansive potential of their domains. At the same time, the company used exile to create colonial subjects in limited areas in which it operated as a quasi-state. This chapter asks what effect exile had on those people whom Europeans failed to control politically, and argues that colonialism in Eastern Indonesia deterritorialised indigenous societies by creating a power assemblage based on maritime mobility. Some indigenous peoples responded to it by deterritorialising their kinship networks and by forming a cosmologically mobile trading community. In the late colonial context, exile emerges as a figure for imagining the territoriality of such communities in Dutch history writing as well as in indigenous narratives and poetry.Less

The Geography of Enslaved Life in New Netherland

Andrea C. Mosterman

in Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York

This chapter reviews how some of the company's enslaved laborers took advantage of the lack of spatial control in the Dutch colony and their close proximity to each other and several important ... More

This chapter reviews how some of the company's enslaved laborers took advantage of the lack of spatial control in the Dutch colony and their close proximity to each other and several important institutions. It explores a variety of reasons why some of New Amsterdam's enslaved men and women had been able to attend the Dutch Reformed Church, use the courts to secure wages or defend property, and obtain a (conditional) freedom. The chapter then analyses the importance of place, space, and geography. Because enslaved people had very little control over their mobility or the environment in which they lived, the physical and social spaces that they inhabited played an especially important role in the ways they were able to partake in society. Ultimately, the chapter looks at the ways in which enslaved people navigated these systems and the colonial spaces.Less

John Galt’s ‘Whole Art of Colonization’: Sound, Voice, Space

Josephine McDonagh

in Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–1876

The Scottish novelist John Galt provides the clearest example of a writer in whose works fiction, literary technique, and settler colonization overlap. Famous for his regional novels about ... More

The Scottish novelist John Galt provides the clearest example of a writer in whose works fiction, literary technique, and settler colonization overlap. Famous for his regional novels about communities on Scotland’s western seaboard, he also had careers as parliamentary lobbyist, entrepreneur, and colonist in Upper Canada. In the 1820s, he spent a period working for the Canada Land Company, a colonization company he helped to establish in London, and through which he travelled to Canada to participate in the development of colonial settlements, including the city of Guelph. This provided copious material for writings in the final years of his life. Although Galt, and subsequently critics and biographers, have tended to represent the two periods of his life separately, they both are part of a single colonial project, connected by the extensive print networks of which he was a part. The connections are evident principally in his preoccupation with voice and dialect, sound and hearing. In the Scottish works he emphasizes phonological aspects of Scottish regional voices, and ways in which literature trains the ear. Sound operates as a mode of organizing and producing space. In the Canadian works, he explores the themes of sound and acoustic management in the context of colonial space. Together his works present an archive of colonial sound management, and an exploration of the auditory elements of his colonial project.Less

Terrains of Settler Nationhood

in Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society

Discrete material-cultural artifacts, ornamentations, and styles of architecture were interpreted as exemplars of Jewish artistic forms and achievements. They were invoked as emblems of continuity, ... More

Discrete material-cultural artifacts, ornamentations, and styles of architecture were interpreted as exemplars of Jewish artistic forms and achievements. They were invoked as emblems of continuity, signifiers of the lasting presence of Jewish communities, after the fall of the Second Temple, the final episode in what was considered to have been ancient Jewish national existence and sovereignty in their homeland. This effort of (arti)fact collecting configured a distinctive form of settler-colonial space. This chapter analyzes this work of Jewish archaeology by considering the relationship between the collection of “discrete particulars”—material-cultural and linguistic facts dispersed across the terrain—and the instantiation of a “spatial biography,” through which a cohesive, historical narrative for the land was given empirical and factual form. Fact collecting was essential to “colonizing the land at the level of meaning,” which prepared the ground for the enactment of colonial practices of a very particular sort.Less