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The vision of Maximus the Confessor, a 7th‐century monk‐theologian, is an unexpected resource, the chapter argues, for reconceiving the very task of theology given its tyrannical performance inside of whiteness. At the heart of Maximus's Christology is an exegetical practice that reads scripture against rather than with the grain of the social order, and an ethical practice that refuses self‐love or the logic of possession and ownership, which is central to the colonialist orientation of modernity's racial imagination of whiteness. This orientation of a theological ethics of dispossession (to speak in Maximian terms) is what makes Israel a nonracial people (to speak in contemporary terms). Understanding the person and work of Jesus as triangulated between Abraham, Moses, and the Prophets, Maximus's Christology roots itself in the covenantal‐nonracial story of Jewish existence. Maximus's Christological argument, which is an anticolonialist argument, therefore fittingly culminates this book's argument.

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of crime became a crucial, perhaps dominant strain in the British representations of India from the mid- to late 18th century onwards. It shows how inconsistent and contested this representation of criminal India was from virtually the moment of colonial paramountcy in India. Setting out to tell the story of British attempts to introduce order into chaos, the narratives seem to argue against each other and often against themselves, bearing out the accounts of ambiguity and discursive disturbances that post-colonialist critics have attributed to colonialist discourses.

This chapter examines the interaction between Anglo-Saxons and Gaels in Scotland and considers how a post-colonialist perspective can contribute to a discussion about interaction between peoples from what are now present-day England and Scotland. It suggests that the picture of Anglo-Saxon/Gaelic interaction in Scotland revealed by archaeology is complex. This is because of the evidence concerning the use of Anglo-Saxon goods on high-status sites in western Britain and the presence of a variety of processes in metalwork.

This chapter examines the formation of ideas and practices of ‘criminality’, ‘justice’, and ‘punishment’ in Britain. It considers how the contests and fractures built within these crucial implements of power at ‘home’ provided the distinctive flavour of ambiguity to colonial authority in India.

The 1860s was a period of complex and crucial changes in British responses to deviance and punishment. This chapter shows that in this context, the post-Mutiny revision of the ‘criminal Indian’ figure may be seen as an example of negotiation between colonialist narratives and the ‘new’ strategies of criminalization emerging during this time.

The British interpretations of Indian history served to denigrate the Indians and their achievements, and justify the colonial rule. A few of these observations appeared to have some validity. Like, in comparison to the Chinese, Indians did not show any strong sense of chronology. However, generalizations made by colonialist historians were by and large either false or grossly exaggerated, but served as good propaganda material for the perpetuation of the despotic British rule. Most historians were guided by the nationalist ideas of Hindu revivalism, but there was no dearth of scholars who adopted a rationalist and objective approach. In the interpretation of history, there was a continuing struggle between colonialism and nationalism. However, the situation has undergone a change. The struggle now is between communalism and irrationalism, on the one hand, and rationalism and professionalism, on the other.

This chapter focuses on a range of English language accounts of India's and Bengal's past composed during the mid-to late eighteenth century. Most of these accounts were written during the decline of the later Mughal political order in Bengal and the transformation of the English East India Company into the sovereign ruler of a large part of eastern India as a prelude to the extension of its empire to other parts of the subcontinent. The narratives present a contrast to the colonialist historiography of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They also embody a phase in the evolution of colonialist discourse about India when the tendency to marginalize and look down upon Indian traditions of writing about the past had either not crystallized, or had not yet acquired the strength and conviction that it did later.

This chapter discusses the example of a slightly different kind of local history from the Bhojpuri region, which represents just one attempt among many in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to bring ‘history’ to the witness-stand and assert a community identity in terms both of temporality and territoriality. The example — Sheikh Muhammad Ali Hasan's Waqeat-o-Hadesat: Qasba Mubarakpur—takes the form of a history or chronicle of events in the qasba prepared in the 1880s by a scion of a local Muslim zamindari family. The importance of the text is illustrated by drawing on alternative reconstructions of the same history as found in other sources.

This chapter examines the concepts of “amok” and arrogation in the writings of Frank Swettenham, a British colonial officer in Malaysia. The significance of Frank Swettenham to the colonialist historiography of Malaya cannot be overemphasized. His career as a colonial administrator and his reputation as an expert on all matters related to British Malaya span a significant period of the British presence in Malaya. This chapter analyzes the unhomely image of Malay subjects who run amok and looks at how amok as a trope is depicted in Swettenham's writings.

This chapter examines representations of Malaya in the writings of Isabella Bird, Emily Innes, and Florence Caddy, British writers who were in Malaya for different periods of time between 1879 and 1888. It provides a reading of their works as discourses of differences that reinforce colonialist attitudes about Malaya and its people. It suggests that the works of these women are a response to the condition of being not-at-home in that there is an attempt to create through their writings an environment that is hospitable to the colonial enterprise, even if the voices are different.

Since the beginnings of Western scholarship in India, the figure of the blood-thirsty, violent, and explicitly sexual goddess Kālī appears to have held an especially central, but also ambivalent and disturbing, place in the colonial imagination. In the eyes of the early British colonial authorities, missionaries, and scholars, Kālī was identified as the most depraved of all forms of modern popular Hinduism, the quintessence of the licentiousness and idolatry that had destroyed the noble, monotheistic spirit of the Vedas and Vedānta. This chapter argues that Kālī was conceived by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialists as the worst example of irrational Indian savagery. Such a reading of Kālī as the quintessential Other and the “extreme Orient” influenced Britons' dealings with the “Thugs” and led to the creation of a genre of Victorian novels centered on the lurid East. The chapter also discusses the strategies of appropriation and subversion used by Indian nationalists, who turned this Orientalist Kālī against her colonial creators in their own literatures and actions.

This chapter recounts how the members of the Arab diaspora attempted legal arbitrage under colonial rule. It analyses the members' expansion and modification of Islamic law, while at other times they policed the boundaries of Islamic law even as mere translators. The chapter tells the story of the surprising involvement of the outsider — the Arab diaspora — in aiding colonialists to accumulate legislative power. The pace of change from the mid-nineteenth century onward was brisk, and the Arab diaspora capitalized on it while attempting to navigate uncertainty and risk. This chapter also investigates how Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia were able to influence the shape of law to a great extent. It takes a look on how concessions to Arabs in the Straits Settlements, in the form of the Mohamedan Marriage Ordinance, and their appointments as members of the Mohamedan Advisory Board after the Sepoy Mutiny subsequently tied them more closely to the British colonial government, along with the rest of the Muslim population in the colony.

This chapter studies Peru, an epic romance written by Helen Maria Williams. It promotes the 1780–2 Peruvian revolt that was led by Túpac Amaru II, and places it against the historical backdrop of Britain's increasing economic and political involvement with Spanish America. This reveals the determination of a problematic slippage between the commercial and colonialist interests of Britain in the Spanish colonies. It then examines the implications of the omission of any celebration of commerce from Williams's poem. This chapter suggests that Williams's commitment with the sentimental and patriotic poetry of the eighteenth century encouraged a mistrust of commerce as a humanizing means of exchange.

This chapter discusses the role of music during the time when colonialism was being introduced in France. It shows how musical fantasies helped increase the desire of French republicans to extend their influence to others and add to their military and economic power. It studies the terms colonialist desire and imperial desire, and explains how music supported the three main assumptions that maintained French imperialism. The chapter ends with a section on the songs that helped inspire resistance.

This chapter examines the ways in which Milton channels the cosmological implications of a world poised between union and fragmentation into a critical commentary on English nationhood and expansionist projects. Experimentation with genre facilitates this political commentary, as Paradise Lost yokes the pastoral and the epic together into unstable coexistence. The chapter begins by putting Milton's account of Eden in dialogue with seventeenth-century country house poetry and with colonialist writings. Through descriptions of Eden as country estate, Near and Far Eastern destination, and New World colony, Milton's narrative works to unsettle both insular myths and expansionist ambitions. The chapter also considers the gender politics that Eden shares with God's kingdom. At this level, too, Milton's poetry rebuts visions of domestic stability and expansionist ambitions.

This chapter explores a number of figures who are central to the articulation of the alterity of the self, including numerous pioneering anthropologists, the African explorer Manuel Iradier, and Ángel Ganivet. It argues that such alterity was experienced by a small number of Spaniards in the late 1800s, before the sequelae of neo-colonialist fervor had distracted the national attention from postcolonial disorientation: when they have discovered in fact that the self is inscribed in the Alter that the self needs to define itself against.

For many decades after the Civil War, the Republican Party claimed the majority of black votes. Its legacy as the party of Abraham Lincoln and its leadership in securing the Reconstruction Amendments outweighed its failure to enforce them, as well as its unwillingness to pass federal anti-lynching legislation. Robert Terrell was appointed a justice of the peace by the Republican President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 and Mollie Terrell, a member of the National League of Republican Colored Women (NLRCW) secured campaign jobs from the RNC beginning in 1920, once women secured the right to vote with the 19th Amendment. Nor could Terrell forgive the Democrats’ role as the party of secession and its continued embrace of segregation and white supremacy. Terrell was a pro-peace member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and an anti-colonialist, advocating the self-determination of nations. Focusing on the status of what she termed the “darker races of the world,” Terrell approached race and equality from a transnational perspective.

This chapter attends to the tensions between universal claims—a broad public defined by rational-critical discourse, theoretically open to all, and materialized in communicative networks of civic engagement and sociability—and de facto exclusions of class and gender in colonial discourse. Colonialists assembled the doubled civil society of private industry and stratified associational life into a late, vestigial form of a bourgeois public sphere in which a particular colonial discourse claimed privileged status: as both a form of knowledge (current, rational, scientific) and a disinterested discussion of the common good. The colonial movement thus incarnated the contradictions inherent in the very concept of the “bourgeois public sphere:” universalist intentions, exclusivist realities, the construction of “the masses” as object, and the attempt to efface multiple voices.

This chapter discusses the intersectionality of Palestinian identity with queer identity. Amal Amireh explains the colonialist context behind the discourse regarding queer issues relating to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Amireh also discusses the difference in universal and local expressions of queerness and Middle Eastern identities.