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Introduction: Excess, a History

Durba Mitra

in Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought

This introductory chapter traces the history of the concept of the sexually deviant female in colonial India. It first takes a look at how the figure of the prostitute appears across different ... More

This introductory chapter traces the history of the concept of the sexually deviant female in colonial India. It first takes a look at how the figure of the prostitute appears across different archives from colonial India and within analyses of Indian social life. The chapter then shows how colonial studies on the nature of Indian society were to become the empirical basis for universalist theories of comparative societies. Indeed, the colonial state in India was, at its inception, an experiment in new forms of scientific and social scientific practices that were to influence state practices and the formation of disciplinary knowledge in the colony and metropole. At the heart of these sciences of society was a concern about structuring, tracing, and mapping the social world of colonial India through the assessment of women's sexuality. These histories reveal the way key debates about gender, caste, communal difference, and social hierarchy in India became objects of social scientific analysis through the description and evaluation of female sexuality. And, as the chapter shows, this social scientific imaginary had extraordinary reach.Less

Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda

Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper

in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World

This chapter examines how the colonies and metropole shared in the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, and in what ways the colonial domain was distinct from the metropolitan one. It considers ... More

This chapter examines how the colonies and metropole shared in the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, and in what ways the colonial domain was distinct from the metropolitan one. It considers different approaches to colonial studies and investigates how a grammar of difference was once continuously and vigilantly crafted as people in colonies refashioned and contested European claims to superiority. The chapter argues that scholars need to attend more directly to the tendency of colonial regimes to draw a stark dichotomy of colonizer and colonized without falling into a Manichaean conception.Less

Conclusion: Re-theorizing Colonial Power

Law Wing Sang

in Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese

This section argues that to reject historicism, the binary schema in colonial study as well as the associated location reductionism in colonial and post-colonial analysis involves a dual task: (a) ... More

This section argues that to reject historicism, the binary schema in colonial study as well as the associated location reductionism in colonial and post-colonial analysis involves a dual task: (a) revisiting the nature of colonial power prior to assessing or presuming any structure of colonial domination; (b) refusing the dialectical structure of colonialist and nationalist discourses which treat space merely as a passive particularity that specifies and fragments the universal progression of history. Therefore, a re-theorization of colonial power as a power of space is called for. It further argues that there is no better place to start re-theorizing colonial power than the teachings of Foucault. It explains that this book shows how Chinese collaboration and colonialism mutually intertwined and conditioned each other in and around Hong Kong.Less

Contexts and Concepts

Stephen Howe

in Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture

This chapter identifies views on the contemporary relevance of imperialism and colonialism as categories for understanding contemporary Ireland and its history. Terminology is a contested matter in ... More

This chapter identifies views on the contemporary relevance of imperialism and colonialism as categories for understanding contemporary Ireland and its history. Terminology is a contested matter in colonial and postcolonial studies concerned with Ireland, as it is in global contexts. Explanations for the course of modern Irish history, including its recurrent incidence of violent conflict, are sought in patterns of state-building, of political, economic and religious change. The historians' controversy about medieval and early modern Ireland is summarized by dividing interpretations of the Irish past between ‘colonial’ models and ‘archipelago’ ones. In Ireland, the acceptance of legitimacy was never fully achieved, and such acceptance as there had been was later withdrawn, much of it with astonishing rapidity in 1916–21. Nothing preordained this failure, though a variety of factors including cultural and religious difference may have predisposed towards it.Less

Introduction: India’s ‘Domiciled Community’: The Ambivalence of Whiteness under the British Raj

Satoshi Mizutani

in The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the 'Domiciled Community' in British India 1858-1930

This chapter clarifies the book’s aim, scope, and approach. It first explains why and how the emergence of the ‘domiciled community’ (made of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and ‘Domiciled Europeans’) in ... More

This chapter clarifies the book’s aim, scope, and approach. It first explains why and how the emergence of the ‘domiciled community’ (made of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and ‘Domiciled Europeans’) in colonial India should be seen as inseparably linked to the historical construction of ‘whiteness’ under British rule and to the various socio-cultural measures which were meant to discipline its boundaries. The prime task of the book, the chapter argues, is to reveal the precise ways in which the existence of the community was identified as a problem—or as what was then called the ‘Eurasian Question’—and to ponder the deeper historical meanings of such problematization itself. The chapter then lays out the book’s theoretical frameworks by situating it within current theoretical debates in post/colonial studies. Finally, the chapter discusses the scope and limits of the book in terms of historical span, geographical areas, primary sources.Less

Culture and Excavation

Giovanna Ceserani

in Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology

This chapter traces the study and imagining of Magna Graecia in the twentieth century, from its involvement in Italian Fascism to global developments in its post-war understanding, concluding with ... More

This chapter traces the study and imagining of Magna Graecia in the twentieth century, from its involvement in Italian Fascism to global developments in its post-war understanding, concluding with snapshots from the early twenty-first century. Magna Graecia under Fascism is examined by contrasting the lives and work of Emanuele Ciaceri, Fascist historian of Greek South Italy, and Umberto Zanotti Bianco, anti-Fascist, activist within the Southern Question's debates and for protection of Italian cultural and archaeological heritage, and discover (with Paola Zancani Montuoro) of the major archaic sanctuary of the Sele. Later developments, such as post-colonial studies’ relation to Magna Graecia, are briefly sketched, culminating with a consideration of the region's place in a less Hellenocentric, twenty-first century Humanist world.Less

Richard Jebb, intra-imperial immigration, and the practical problems of imperial citizenship

Daniel Gorman

in Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging

This chapter examines the view of English author Richard Jebb on imperial citizenship. Unlike Lionel Curtis and John Buchan, Jebb remained convinced that Britain must continue to be the centre of the ... More

This chapter examines the view of English author Richard Jebb on imperial citizenship. Unlike Lionel Curtis and John Buchan, Jebb remained convinced that Britain must continue to be the centre of the Empire and he envisioned the Empire less as a federation and more as a confederation. He also lobbied for a greater regard for colonial nationalism as the buttress of imperial unity, particularly through a common imperial naturalisation process, and those of ‘colonial autonomy’. This chapter also comments on Jebb's Studies in Colonial Nationalism and suggests that he was a colonial nationalist.Less

White Women, Black Books: The Negro Anthology and Sylvia Leith-Ross’s African Women¹

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

in Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

Devoted to the making of the Negro Anthology, the chapter reads Cunard’s collection alongside and against white Englishwoman, Sylvia Leith-Ross, and her “official” project African Women, funded by ... More

Devoted to the making of the Negro Anthology, the chapter reads Cunard’s collection alongside and against white Englishwoman, Sylvia Leith-Ross, and her “official” project African Women, funded by two government grants to live and study in Nigeria in the same year as Negro’s publication, 1934. Marcus interrogates Leith-Ross’s treatment in the study of the Women’s War, or the “Aba Riots” as the British were anxious to diffuse the memory of their rebellion against colonial rule and oppression. The chapter focuses on the collective work of Negro and the challenges Cunard faced in bringing to the public a project that was unauthorized, unfunded, and surveilled.Less

Introduction

Johannes Quack

in Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India

The Introduction provides an overview of the structure and arguments of the book. On the basis of a brief description of the Indian rationalist movement and the relevance of the work of Ulrich ... More

The Introduction provides an overview of the structure and arguments of the book. On the basis of a brief description of the Indian rationalist movement and the relevance of the work of Ulrich Berner, Charles Taylor, Max Weber and various post-colonial scholars, the introduction highlights the ways in which Disenchanting India makes an important empirical as well as theoretical contribution to a field of study that has widely been neglected: the spectrum of non-religiosity and unbelief in India, from religious indifferences to outright criticism of religion(s).Less

France And The Sociology Of Islam, 1798–1890

Edmund Burke

in The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan Islam

Chapter 1 surveys the French tradition of the sociology of Islam from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (1798) to the end of the nineteenth century. It provides a necessary background for situating ... More

Chapter 1 surveys the French tradition of the sociology of Islam from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (1798) to the end of the nineteenth century. It provides a necessary background for situating the Moroccan case detailed in this book. French studies of Islam had four main temporalities—Egypt, Algeria, West Africa, and Tunisia—linked to the phases of the expansion of the French empire. French writings on Algerian society were linked to the phases of the conquest and the product of three different groups: military officers, amateur civilians, and academics. The Algerian model provided both a native policy toolbox and a set of binary stereotypes that could explain native society. Although it appeared to be the most influential model for the Moroccan case, as events soon unfolded, this was not universally accepted.Less

Introduction: Scottish Colonial Literature, 1603–1707

Kirsten Sandrock

in Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603–1707

This chapter establishes the book's key claim that Scottish colonial literature in the seventeenth century is poised between narratives of possession and dispossession. It introduces the term ... More

This chapter establishes the book's key claim that Scottish colonial literature in the seventeenth century is poised between narratives of possession and dispossession. It introduces the term colonial utopian literature to frame the intricate relationship between colonialism and utopianism in the seventeenth century. The chapter uses the instances of book burnings in Edinburgh and London in 1700 that revolved around Scotland's colonial venture in Darien as a starting point for the discussion to make a case for the centrality of literary texts in the history of Scottish colonialism. In addition, it introduces the historical context of seventeenth-century Scottish colonialism, especially in relation to the emergent British Empire, inner-British power dynamics, and other European imperial projects. On a theoretical level, the chapter enters debates about Scotland's position in colonial and postcolonial studies through its focus on pre-1707 Atlantic literature. It also makes a fresh argument about Atlantic writing contributing to the transformation of utopian literature from a fictional towards a reformist genre.Less

Introduction: Labour, Empire and Decolonisation: Historiographical Landmarks

Yann Béliard

in Workers of the Empire, Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s-1960s

This introduction outlines how the paths of imperial and labour histories, though they originally developed in separate spheres, have come to converge. It examine how New Imperial History, Global ... More

This introduction outlines how the paths of imperial and labour histories, though they originally developed in separate spheres, have come to converge. It examine how New Imperial History, Global Labour History and Post-Colonial Studies have affected the understanding of British decolonisation per se. Highlighting the achievements and also the lacunae in the relevant historiography, this introduction then sketches what makes this collection an original contribution to the collective efforts of historians so far.Less

Dangerous Parallels: The Holocaust, the Colonial Turn, and the New Antisemitism

Bruno Chaouat

in Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism

In Chapter 3, I probe the theory of multidirectional memory propounded by literary scholars in Europe and the U.S. The multidirectional-memory hypothesis was born from what those scholars call “the ... More

In Chapter 3, I probe the theory of multidirectional memory propounded by literary scholars in Europe and the U.S. The multidirectional-memory hypothesis was born from what those scholars call “the colonial turn” in literary and Holocaust studies. Scholars in postcolonial studies are increasingly turning to the Holocaust to approach the history and memory of colonialism, slavery, and more specifically, the events of the Algerian war. Their stated goal is to use the history and memory of the Holocaust to shed light on colonialism, especially in its French incarnation, or rather, to trigger a dialogue among collective memories. I argue that despite a praiseworthy attempt at rejecting the paradigm of competition among victims, that paradigm returns to haunt multidirectional memory. In order to legitimate its effort at finding consensus by uniting collective memories of suffering and persecution, multidirectional memory tones down the specificity of the Holocaust, and ends up neutralizing complex aspects of the Algerian war (notably, conflicting narratives of victimized groups) and more recent manifestations of Islamic terrorism and Islamic antisemitism. Not only do those blind spots prevent vigorous confrontation with resurgent antisemitism, they utterly obliterate that resurgence.Less