The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas,Ancestral Osage (Wah‐Zha‐Zhi) Territories,and the Violence of Forgetting

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler “men” in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation‐state building. I then explore how hetero‐patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed.     

Acts of Faith: Muscular Christianity and Masculinity among the Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

This article examines the way Gogodala men in Western Province experienced colonialism and change not simply in terms of alienation or emasculation but as a dynamic process that reinforced many aspects of their work ethic, bodily capacities and lifestyle. Through an analysis of local narratives and colonial reports encompassing the way Sosola, a Gogodala leader, instigated and negotiated European contact, I discuss how, despite colonial changes, he continues to embody the male way of life or dala ela gi. As the only ‘faith’ based mission to enter Papua prior to World War II, I propose that the Unevangelized Fields Mission's muscular approach to evangelism enabled Gogodala men to determine their own response to Christianity. The early evangelical missionary disposition of demonstrating faith through action, through a reliance on the virtues of physical strength, work and tenacity rather than theological knowledge, resonated strongly with a Gogodala masculinity that was epitomised by displays of strength through work. Rather than rendered powerless by colonial authority, I discuss some of the ways men have experienced and interpret the colonial past in ways that assert the continuing dynamics of dala ela gi.     

War Trauma and Alcoholism in the Early Writings of Charlotte and Branwell Brontë

During and after the Napoleonic Wars, there was an outpouring of military-based biographical writing never before seen in British history. Over 200 military memoirs were published either as standalone entities or in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The United Service Journal. As a result, the experiences of ordinary soldiers were brought to the forefront of Britain’s public consciousness. Although many of these memoirs glorified war, a number revealed the psychological damage war inflicted on the British male population and explicitly exposed the horrors of combat to a domestic readership. Furthermore, this explosion of life writing also exposed a connection between suffering and alcoholism, consolidating trauma as a post-war, national problem. The Brontës, typically recognized as canonical, Victorian authors, first participated in this military-based literary movement. This article attempts to reposition and establish two of the siblings – Charlotte and Branwell – as significant post-war commentators. By focussing on their military reading, it will become clear how they vicariously processed and reimagined war trauma and addiction through their Glass Town and Angrian sagas. Not only will this article argue that the introduction of military biography into British society generated wide-scale recognition of war trauma, despite its absence within contemporary medical discourse, but it will also argue that the young Brontës’ literature is an important historical source for understanding and re-evaluating the public response to post-war military masculinity.     

How not to build a world wireless network: German–British rivalry and visions of global communications in the early twentieth century

Abstract

Edward Snowden’s revelations laid bare an unprecedented scale of state influence on communications technology. But government elites have frequently shaped technological development through their beliefs about potentially nefarious uses of communications. This article argues that beliefs about how other states or groups might use a technology can shape innovation. In particular, German visions about the British use of cables spurred German investment in developing wireless telegraphy. Germans imagined that the British were using cable technology to damage Germany’s reputation, spy on Germany and ‘poison’ neutral countries against the Central Powers. The German government and military at first created a colonial wireless network to bypass British cables. In World War I, however, they sought to establish a world wireless network. In the end, innovation was significantly shaped by how Germans imagined their enemies’ uses of communications technology.     

Ornamentalism,Empire and Race: Indigenous Leaders and Honours in Australia and New Zealand

The imperial honours system, David Cannadine has argued, was a means for binding together ‘the British proconsular elite’ and ‘indigenous colonial elites’ throughout the settler colonies and dominions of the British Empire (Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin, 2002). Yet in settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand indigenous populations were marginalised and often disregarded, and it was local white elites who became knights of St Michael and St George, the Bath and the British Empire. Focusing on Australia and New Zealand, this article explores the complex relationships Aboriginal and Māori leaders have had with honours during the twentieth century. Building upon Cannadine's analysis, I examine the ways in which indigenous leaders navigated the political complexities involved in the offer of an honour, and how their acceptance of awards was received by others, shedding light on how honours systems intersected with post-war struggles for indigenous rights in the former dominions.     

British Masculinities on Trial in the Queen Caroline Affair of 1820

This article uses the deluge of pamphlets, public addresses, newspaper articles and sermons addressing the Queen Caroline Affair to construct a case study of the opposing constructions of British masculinity vying for dominance in 1820. The literature surrounding the attempted royal divorce reveals a contest between the libertine example of manhood characterised by George IV and the more sober, chivalrous and respectable image of masculinity increasingly espoused as the British ideal. This episode, therefore, offers an unusually rich insight into contemporary constructions of masculinity and the way in which they were utilised within the public sphere. Moreover, this article argues that such gendered concerns were not only as crucial to motivating opposition to the king's actions as political issues, but that gender concerns and political issues were indivisible, as appropriate manly behaviour in both public and private increasingly came to be seen as a core component of a man's overall reputation and fitness to exercise authority.     

Transmobilities: mobility,harassment, and violence experienced by transgender and gender nonconforming public transit riders in Portland,Oregon

This research endeavours to fill a conceptual gap in the social science literature on gender, public space, and urban mobilities by exploring how transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience public transit. Although previous research has surveyed gender minorities about harassment and discrimination in a range of environments, little is known about the quality or content of these experiences. Drawing from 25 interviews with transgender and gender nonconforming individuals in Portland, Oregon, this article finds that gender minorities experience frequent harassment while engaging with the public transit system. We articulate the concept of transmobilites to describe the ways that transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience a form of mobility that is altered, shaped, and informed by a broader cultural system that normalizes violence and harassment towards gender minorities. We conclude that gender minorities have unequal access to safe and accessible public transportation when harassment is widespread, normalized, and when policies prohibiting discrimination remain unenforced on urban public transit.     

Empire and Domestic Space in the Fiction of Jamaica Kincaid

Three novels by Jamaica Kincaid are critically investigated for their representation of colonial and domestic space. Aspiring middle-class Afro-Caribbean families in the patriarchal-colonial society of 1950s and 1960s British Antigua occupied social spaces gendered largely according to western design. In Kincaid’s fiction, the house and yard are designated as feminine and reproductive spaces, while outside the home lies the public world of employment, administration, formal education and migration opportunity, all of which are governed by the norms and expectations of a white Eurocentric culture. Kincaid’s female characters display strategies of subversion and resistance which disrupt the homogeneity of territorial and cultural colonisation.     

‘It was entirely his fault’: constructing white masculinities and the Haga Man assaults in Umeå, Sweden 1998–2006

Several cases of single repeat offenders in urban space have raised public concern in Sweden during recent decades. Few studies have been conducted on the consequences of the ‘hostage situations’ that emerge when one individual offender causes fear and affects a large group of people in a specific place. The concern of this article is to examine consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon: the case of a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006 in Umeå, a medium-sized Swedish city. The article focuses on the construction of white masculinities among male respondents in Umeå during the time of the attacks. I examine how men positioned themselves in relation to the public image of the offender as a ‘normal Swede’ and how they related to women's increasing fear of violence in urban space. Three prominent constructions of masculinity emerged from the research data: the dangerous stranger, the suspect and the protector. These three constructions of masculinity were not clear-cut and did not ‘belong’ to specific men – several of the interviewees articulated various forms of masculinities but stressed them in different ways depending on, for instance, age and/or ethnicity/race. I conclude that men largely positioned themselves as protectors as a strategy to distance themselves from the perpetrator (the image of the ‘normal Swedish man’ performing the rapes) and to ensure that they would not be perceived as suspects. However, men largely perceived that women's increased fear of crime was ‘one man's fault’ and broader issues about gendered power relations in space were not raised.     

A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia,Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18

This article argues that the most severe crisis of masculinity among British and Dominion soldiers in the First World War did not take place on the Western Front. Instead, British and Dominion soldiers serving on the war's sideshows in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine believed most acutely that their manliness was in question. Unlike soldiers on the Western Front, they were not battling the main German Army, they were not fighting to liberate occupied France and Belgium, and their war was not to preserve the rights of small nations and the inviolability of international law. This article explores how military masculinity played out much differently on the war's peripheral fronts in two ways. First, it suggests that where a soldier fought mattered more to military masculinity than a soldier's method of enlistment or any other variable. British and Dominion soldiers were fully aware that the home front only considered France and Flanders as the real war, and they actively argued against this misconception to loved ones and in their memoirs. Second, this article demonstrates an additional crisis of masculinity on the war's peripheral fronts: the lack, or more often effacement, of non‐white colonial (Eastern Mediterranean and Arab) women. Not only was British and Dominion military masculinity under assault on the war's peripheral fronts, heteronormative sexual relations were also being transformed in a world where few, if any, racially acceptable women were available.     

Enclosures from Below: The Mushaa’ in Contemporary Palestine

This article traces the declining fortunes of the mushaa’, a once‐prominent Levantine culture of common land. Palestinians managed to resist attempts by the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate to break up the mushaa’. Under Israeli colonization, the remaining commons are now subject to another type of appropriation: individual Palestinian contractors seize hold of mushaa’ land and build on it. This article introduces the concept of “enclosures from below”, whilst looking at the dynamics of seizure of the commons by Palestinian refugees, who once were peasants practising mushaa’ on their lands and are now landless, some having become expert contractors. I show that the contractors consider their actions to be a form of resistance against the settler colonial project, manifested in the advancing of the Wall and settlement expansion. This is described through a case study of the Shu'faat area in Jerusalem. Changing uses of mushaa’ land reflect wider tendencies in the Palestinian national project that has become increasingly individualized.     

Spaces of Intemperance & the British Raj 1860–1920

ABSTRACT

The history of the British Empire in India is one awash with alcohol. Drinking was a common practice throughout colonial society, acting as social necessity and source of a public anxiety. However, rather than only acknowledging what and why individuals in colonial India drank, it is of equal importance to consider where they did so. Despite its ubiquity, alcohol consumption in India was responsive to the dynamics of space and place, and both the habits of drinkers and the social, military or governmental response to their actions altered greatly depending on locations individuals were able to access, and in which they consumed alcohol. This article draws focus on the spatiality of colonial drinking through an examination of key environs that characterise the British experience of India, and in which colonial Britons drank regularly. Examining published sources alongside archival material, the article argues that drinking in colonial India is rendered simultaneously private and public, personal and socially performative, as a result of the hybrid spaces in which individuals access alcohol. The culture of drinking in colonial context, and the manner through which the drinker is constantly under scrutiny makes the act of drinking as much to do with social performance as it is to do with personal taste, with space in each instance a governing influence on choice of beverage, intent, behaviour, and the perceived identity of the drinker themselves.     

From Kings to Kids: Refashioning Akan Adinkra Symbols as ‘African’ Motifs in a Nineteenth-Century British Cloth Design

In the nineteenth century, British textile companies began making factory-printed cloth with adinkra motifs for African consumers. These symbolic designs were previously reserved for hand-stamped cloths among Akans of present-day Ghana. Such textiles illustrate the complexities of re-presenting history and shaping cultural knowledge through cloth and colonial exchanges. This article focuses on the design and circulation of one specific British textile design with adinkra symbols made during the 1890s to 1930s, the earliest recorded evidence I have found of adinkra in factory-printed cloths. This textile pattern reveals how merchants, designers and printers historically transformed adinkra symbols from Akan society to become global markers of Africa.     

Young lesbians negotiating public space: an intersectional approach through places

In this paper I analyze how different aspects of identity combine to shape the experiences of seven young lesbians in public space in Manresa, a non-metropolitan city in Catalonia. I argue that their experiences need to be understood intersectionally and spatially, as complex processes that involve the mutually constituted identities that shift in space. I focus on interviews and Relief Maps to show how these dynamics work and how they are related to larger social processes such as the heteronormalization and adultification of public space.     

Geography,political economy and the ‘personality of Britain’

SUMMARY: This paper engages with the historical archaeology of the British Isles (With one or two exceptions, I follow the usage of Kearney 2006 in preferring the term ‘British Isles’ to ‘Atlantic archipelago’, preferring the more ideologically loaded, but familiar, term over the arguably more neutral but obscure term.) as a whole. It advocates an approach that foregrounds geography and political economy, via quite simple and traditional ways of mapping variation, for example the work of Cyril Fox. It seeks to play to archaeology’s strengths: rather than seeking abstract origins, it examines how practices later labelled as ‘colonial’ emerged from an intersection of concrete material practices.     

Making Headlines in a State of Emergency: The Case of the Times of Cyprus, 1955–1960

The final years of British rule in Cyprus were marked by the colonial government’s use of authoritarian measures to impose control over the local press. The most problematic publication during the 1955–60 period was the Times of Cyprus, an English-language newspaper edited and owned by experienced British journalist Charles Foley. This article examines the fraught relationship between Foley’s newspaper and the colonial government against a backdrop of social instability and political violence. In particular, it focuses on the role the newspaper played as a conduit of information between Cyprus and Britain, conveying the experience of colonial rule to influential readers in London and reporting British support for self-determination to a Cypriot reading public. This ability to undermine official control over the flow of intelligence between the colonial periphery and its metropolitan centre unsettled the British administration, leading to repeated but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to proscribe the newspaper.     

From Batticaloa via Basel to Berlin. Transimperial Science in Ceylon and Beyond around 1900

ABSTRACT

Recent historiographies of ‘Science and Empire’ have successfully critiqued older euro-centric narratives. They highlighted how science was ‘co-produced’ through interactions between knowledgeable European and non-European actors in colonial ‘contact zones’, and how this ‘pidginised knowledge’ circulated through networks across various sites within the British Empire. This article shares and expands this approach. By focussing on continental European scholars in Ceylon around 1900, it argues that scientific networks were never confined to a particular empire. Science among Europeans was, rather, multi-lingual, mostly cross-disciplinary and always transimperial. Applying such an approach to the history of science in late colonial Ceylon allows us to uncover entanglements between historical processes that have for too long remained subject matters of disconnected historiographies: the emergence of Buddhist revivalism, evolutionary theories about human origins, the transformation from ‘liberal race science’ to Nazi eugenics in Germany, and the surfacing of British cultural anthropology.     

Origins of Missionary Periodicals: Form and Function of Three Moravian Publications

The nineteenth century was a boom time for the genre of missionary periodicals. Missionary periodicals were established by religious organizations, societies, and churches for their members, for the general public, for theologians, for women, for children, and for converted non‐Europeans, and their growth reflected the expansion of missionary societies into the non‐European colonial world. Despite the abundance and wide range of these publications, research on the origins, form, and function of missionary periodicals remains limited. This article examines the rationale behind the establishment of three Moravian Church missionary periodicals: the British Periodical Accounts (1790–1970); the German Missions‐Blatt (1837–1941); and the North American The Little Missionary (1870–1920). The article elucidates both broader similarities and differences in missionary periodicals, as well as distinguishing how intentions behind the establishment of missionary periodicals differed from the practice of how religious organizations, societies, and churches utilized these periodicals in presenting themselves to the outside world.     

Masculinity and the mic: confronting the uneven geography of hip-hop

This article explores the uneven gendered geographies of rap music. It argues that Black men's blocked access to culturally dominant masculinity, vis-à-vis access to public space – and the resulting containment of Black men within Black communities – has produced an overly compensatory form of masculinity, for which access to and control of the public domain within Black communities is essential for access to hegemonic masculinity. Rapidly declining economic opportunity has meant that young Black men thrown out of work put their talents, time, and energy into an emerging youth culture brewing in parks, on street corners, train stations, and viaducts in places such as the South Bronx. The early innovators of the hip-hop movement used this new art form to remake the public space of the abandoned, segregated, and spatially disempowered Black neighborhoods they lived in. It was in this context that the link between masculinity and rap music was established. I conclude by providing an example of how Black women have found ways to break the link between masculinity and the mic by creating spaces where they can confront and remake the uneven geography of hip-hop, restoring hip-hop's radical spatial potential.