Nationalism and Sexuality,What are the Issues?

Abstract. This article attempts to clarify in a systematic fashion the relationship between nationalism and sexuality. Whilst a relationship is now generally recognised between the two phenomena, it has been neglected relative to other issues. There are genuine reasons for this, the relationship being fraught with conceptual and empirical problems. Such problems are evident in the writings to date directly on nationalism and sexuality. This discussion attempts to initially disentangle racism and gender from nationalism and sexuality, respectively, before outlining what I consider to be the three major intersections: national sexual stereotypes, sexuality in national conflict and sexuality in nation-building. Each of the intersections are indicated by an assessment of their conceptual relationship, and illustrated by various historical instances.     

Class,Caste, Gender,and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have experienced a rapid transformation from mud to cement houses, which has been promoted by governments and cement companies for its positive impacts on household socioeconomic status and gender inequalities. But we know little else about how different communities are participating in house transformation. In this paper, I study the embodied and affective dimensions of house transformation in Himachal Pradesh, India. I argue that house transformation is also the transformation of traditional gender and caste identities into new middle-class identities which benefits some social groups, like upper-caste women and Dalit men, but not others like Dalit women along intersectional lines. My work extends literature in infrastructure studies and urban political ecology by highlighting how the materiality of infrastructures interacts with everyday dimensions of difference to reproduce the marginalisation of historically oppressed groups along intersectional lines of class, caste, and gender.     

Nature,space and distances in an imperial boundary network: The delimitation of the Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau boundary

This article discusses an episode of boundary delimitation/demarcation conducted between British and German imperial powers on the central African Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau in the late 1890s. I situate vignettes on the boundary's delimitation in 1897-98 within broader processes of imperial territorialisation to note that the boundary eventually produced on the plateau represented a fabrication resolving tensions between its ‘natural’ and textual sources. Specifically, I argue the boundary was produced to mediate between a diplomatic nature, written in metropolitan worlds by diplomats and cartographers, and a colonial nature, a zone of phenomenal experiences, inhuman encounters and ‘sensation’ (Wark, 2016). I emphasise the experience of technical practice to suggest that this itself represented a form of imperial power, capable of challenging or ‘deferring’ (Bhabha, 2012) metropolitan circuits of governance and knowledge production, not least by revealing the liveliness of the material world undergoing imperial territorialisation. Sensation produced the form of the writings and archives of survey-exploration: often confounded by problems of their data and surroundings, commissioners made the epistemological and subjective manoeuvrings through which they appeared to rise above their inert surroundings to master them. But this does not characterise the experience of fieldwork on the plateau, which was constituted by a panoply of technical situations wherein delineations between objects, observers and their material settings were indeterminable.     

Affection and Assimilation: Concubinage and the Ideal of Conjugal Love in Colonial Korea, 1922–38

This article explores how selective application of Japanese divorce laws between 1922 and 1938, which obstructed Korean women from obtaining divorce on the grounds of concubinage, affected the meaning of conjugal relationships in colonial Korea. I argue that in this period affection and companionship emerged as critical components of a legitimate conjugal relationship among Koreans. This legal process, which I call the affectivisation of the female‐spouse, coincided with a popular penchant for romantic love shown in public media and popular novels. Challenging previous scholarship that treated the phenomenon of romantic love as contained in literary discourses, this article shows how literary and legal discourses mutually influenced one another. I further argue that this new ideal of conjugal love had an intricate relationship with overall colonial legal policy: it worked in conjunction (not antithetical) to the family state ideology of the Japanese empire and the family system that the colonial state was trying to implement in Korea. The qualitative transformation of the conjugal relationship contributed to firmer implementation of the family system in Korea and prepared Korean society for the full assimilation of the Korean civil laws in 1940.     

Local Intermediaries? The Missionising and Governing of Colonial Subjects in South Dutch New Guinea, 1920–42

This paper will show that the colonial project in south Dutch New Guinea was a joint project in which evangelisation, education, ‘civilisation’ and ‘pacification’ were taken up by the Dutch Catholic mission in close collusion with the colonial government. This was also a project in which a few Dutch missionaries deployed many goeroes (teachers) from elsewhere in the Dutch East Indies. These goeroes had an important position assigned to them by the Catholic mission and colonial government in the development of the Papuans and the area. This colonial structure utilised by both Dutch colonial administrators and missionaries has been labelled in the literature as a system of ‘dual colonialism’. Drawing on records held in missionary and colonial archives, the paper explores this dual colonial structure by analysing the roles of Catholic goeroes from the Kei and Tanimbar islands. This is done by taking Felix Driver’s concept of local intermediaries as the point of departure. While this concept makes visible the key role of goeroes, it is not without its issues, which will also be explored.     

'Tout cela,je ne voulais pas le laisser perdre': Colonial lieux de me´moire in the comic books of Jacques Ferrandez

A comic-book series by French artist Jacques Ferrandez serves as a case study of how Pied-noir memories of Algeria are given expression in popular culture. Ferrandez recreated French Algeria as a virtual place of memory in his five-volume Carnets d'Orient , by borrowing images from colonial postcards and orientalist paintings, as well as stories from sources including his own family history and French travel writings about the 'Orient'. Although he provides a useful critical perspective on the colonial period, he is limited in this effort by his identification with the Pied-noir community, and his desire to memorialise French Algeria.     

Description,appropriation, transformation: Fascist rhetoric and colonial nature

During the period of Fascism, a variety of discourses and representations were attached to colonial landscapes and to their uses. African nature was the subject of diverse rhetorical strategies, which ranged from the persistence of visions of wilderness as the locus of adventure to the domesticating manipulations of an incipient tourist industry aiming to familiarise the Italian public with relatively tame forms of the exotic. Contrasting images of bareness and productivity, primitivism and modernisation, resistance to change and dramatic transformation found their way into accounts of colonial territories ranging from scientific and pseudo-scientific reports to children's literature, from guidebooks to travel accounts, all of which were sustained not just by written texts but also by iconographic representations. This article will look at the specific example of accounts of Italian Somalia in order to explore Fascist discourses regarding colonial nature and its appropriation. Documents examined will include early guidebooks to the colonies, a small selection of travel accounts aimed at the general public, as well as the works of a number of geographers and geologists who were among the most active polygraphs of the period, and whose writings addressed a wide range of Italian readers.     

Interning the Serpent: Witchcraft,Religion and the Law on Montserrat in the 20th Century

This article is an examination of the uneasy relationship between religion and witchcraft (the worship of the serpent/obeah) on the British colony of Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean. It looks at obeah in the 20th century as practised by colonial British subjects and prohibited by British law imposed by British expatriates. Colonial governance is examined first through correspondence at the start of the 20th century, and then through newspaper archives and fieldwork reports and experiences throughout the century. The continued use of anti‐obeah laws by the British is shown to be an irrational but effective colonial technology of control.     

THE FRONTIER REMIX

In The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts, Premesh Lalu claims to offer a critique of apartheid's colonial past. Emblematic of this colonial past is the 1835 killing and mutilation of the Xhosa king Hintsa. Lalu uses this violent event to argue against the evidence provided by the colonial archives. He argues that the killing of Hintsa was not an empirical fact but a product of the colonial imagination. The review argues that although the critique of apartheid's colonial past is timely, the book is not about Hintsa and does not therefore offer an alternative narrative of the death of the Xhosa king.     

“An auxiliary,not an usurper”: John Saunders,Temperance, and Secularisation

In his influential account of the political history of early colonial Australia, Michael Roe identified the temperance movement of the 1830s–1840s as a pivotal factor in the secularisation of Australian culture and institutions. The belief system that drove the movement, he argued, was not traditional Christian doctrine but a “new faith” of “moral enlightenment.” In this article I test the validity of Roe's claim, drawing on the work of a more recent generation of historians and sociologists who have argued for more “porous” and “reciprocal” accounts of concepts such as reason, religion, the Enlightenment, and the secular. Its focus is on the writings and activities of John Saunders, whose endeavours on behalf of the temperance cause were such that he was described by his contemporaries as the “life and soul” of the society, the “father” of the movement, and the “apostle of temperance.” It examines the role played by key Enlightenment motifs such as improvement, optimism, reason and cooperation within the rhetoric of Saunders's writings and the reasoning that informed his actions, exploring the various and complicated ways in which he articulated the relationship between evangelical religious conviction and the quest for the common good.     

Spain violated: foreign men in Spain's heartland

The process of colonial expansion in the sixteenth century fundamentally changed Spanish culture. Along with race, religion, ethnicity, status and honour, definitions of proper gendered and sexual behaviour changed as well. This article argues that Spanish communities and institutions came to define foreign men as examples of a subordinate and dangerous masculinity. The threat that foreign male sexuality posed to Spanish women and thus Spanish patriarchy – not only in the colonies, but within Spain itself – led institutions to prosecute foreign men. This essay draws on the language used in Inquisition and ecclesiastical court cases against foreign men as well as in Spanish literature of the period.     

Popular geographies and scholarly geographies in provincial France: the Société Normande de Géographie, 1879–1937

Geographical societies were established in many provincial cities of France during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Through lectures and publications, these organizations promoted popular geographies at a time when academic geography was in its infancy. The Geographical Society of Normandy was founded at Rouen in 1879 and survived for six decades. Unlike some of its counterparts, it did not provide commercial information after its early years nor did it receive funding from the local chamber of commerce. Its annual Bulletins presented aspects of popular geography at the time and elucidated views held by explorers, colonial administrators and other contributors. Tales of expeditions to distant lands were reported enthusiastically, but assessments of opportunities for European settlement were not always optimistic. European affairs rose to prominence in the life of the Society in the years surrounding World War I. Its popular geographies conveyed in public lectures continued to enjoy success but contacts with academic geographers were intermittent. Largely forgotten geographical societies, such as that in Normandy, played a significant role in raising knowledge of the world before geography became firmly established as a university discipline.     

Decolonization in the Heart of Empire: Some Fanonian Echoes in France Today

Abstract: This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post‐colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re‐articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post‐colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of “autonomy” and “mixity”. “Autonomy” (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio‐politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter‐colonial than post‐colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique “live” in France today.     

Cross-cultural sexual narratives and gendered reception in Republican China

ABSTRACT

This article examines nonfiction sexual narratives inspired by foreign thought in Republican China. It highlights female viewpoints to recover their hidden voices in history and shows the socio-cultural significance of the gendered reception of cross-cultural theories. I focus on three foreign female thinkers – Ellen Key, Emma Goldman, and Alexandra Kollontai – whose works stood for different schools of free love and drew numerous adherents in China. My study shows a nuanced but telling difference in the focuses of sexual narratives along gender lines. Whereas male writers sought to modernize marriage and liberate sexuality from socio-eugenic perspectives, female writers pursued sexual autonomy from relatively more personal stances. The rhetorical feature of Chinese female essayists, I argue, was essentially iconoclastic towards sexual conventions and yet reticent about free sexuality, as opposed to the progressive eloquence often shown in male writings about sexual matters. In sum, this article illustrates how Chinese female essayists retained gender propriety when openly addressing intimate matters, while male writers glamorized free sexuality and free love as a panacea for nation-strengthening and social/racial progress in a cross-cultural context.     

Remembering the 1960s: popular music and memory in Europe

Following the increasing attention paid to popular music in heritage discourses, this article explores how the popular music culture from the 1960s is remembered in Europe. I discuss the role of heritage organizations, media and the cultural policy of the EU in the construction of a popular music heritage of this period. Furthermore, I examine the ways in which attachments to local, national and European identities are negotiated. To this end, I draw upon interviews with representatives of museums, websites and archives. The article reveals a recurring tension between transnational and local experiences of the 1960s. It is found that media and heritage institutions like museums and archives predominantly have a national and local orientation, although narratives with a European vantage point are now emerging on the internet.     

Civilized Colonizers and Barbaric Colonized: Reclaiming Naga Identity by Demythologizing Colonial Portraits

In this paper, I address a prominent colonial representation known as “headhunting”, because this term has been in use almost synonymously with Nagas and continues to exert negative psychological ramifications on contemporary Nagas. Due to a lack of work revising the exaggerated representation, the colonial portrayal is being sustained by the frequent and continued use of terms such as “former headhunters” and “once headhunters”. Therefore, this work is in part to represent the Nagas not as “barbaric headhunters” but as “normal” human beings both in the past as well as in the present. To do so, first, I will outline traditional Naga warfare, the context in which decapitation occurred. Second, I will examine the subject as it is being presented in the literature of Euro-Americans. Finally, the paper will end with the argument that the term “headhunting” was simply an invention of the colonizers and briefly note the ramifications of colonial stereotypes on contemporary Nagas.     

Pain,Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives

Dalit life narratives have gained prominence in the last two decades in line with the increasing visibility of Dalits in the Indian public sphere and their vociferous demands for a more just political and social order. This can be productively situated not just in the contemporary global context of the proliferation of narratives and testimonios of human rights violations in other parts of the world, but also in the context of an emerging conversation on the nature of “Dalit personhood” in the Indian public sphere, a category infinitely more complex than legal subjectivity and abstract citizenship. The Dalit narratives analysed here are rich illustrations of this double movement: they witness on behalf of a suffering community and keep alive the singular, non-universal nature of Dalit pain through an aesthetic that is not wholly translatable into the lexicon of rights and justice. By invoking the historical and rhetorical force of two prose fictional genres, the Bildungsroman and the picaresque, the analysis has sought to recast the testimonio less as a proxy for the legal witnessing and amelioration of Dalit pain than as a rich and expressive medium of Dalit personhood. This way of reading Dalit lives accords India's ex-untouchables a stature beyond that of victims at the mercy of the capricious sentimentality of upper-caste solidarity.     

A bloodied bond: Fly River heads and body image in Beatrice Grimshaw's colonial landscapes

In a paper published previously in the Irish Studies Review I discuss the anthropomorphic features of Beatrice Grimshaw's landscapes in relation to colonial fears of the unknown. Following on from this I argue in the present work that this trope, ubiquitous in colonial literature, is exacerbated in Grimshaw's oeuvre by a body image or body image tendencies associated with penetrability, the foundations of which would have been laid long before she first saw the delphinium skies of the south. Grimshaw's body image, her realisation of her own physicality, is the primary focus of this essay. Drawing on the research of psychologists Seymour Fisher and Sidney E. Cleveland, I explore Grimshaw's conception of body boundaries, the boundaries of the touristic self and the indigenous Other. Such an analysis requires an examination not only of the body, and its extension dress, but also of physical terrain, the spaces and places, landscapes of the past and the present, home and the away, within which these cartographies of flesh and bone move.     

‘Demonstrating the Machine Guns’: Rebellion,Violence and State Formation in Early Colonial Darfur

Recent literature on British colonial rule in Africa has increasingly emphasised the ways in which relatively cautious colonial states were formed in processes of engagement and accommodation with local societies. This article uses the example of a major rebellion against colonial authority in southern Darfur in 1921 to demonstrate the ways in which these processes of local engagement might themselves feed into rebellion against state authority, rather than secure colonial rule. The rebellion was inspired by Mahdist millenarian belief, but the involvement of local societies in both the rebellion and its repression was also shaped by patterns of local rivalries into which the colonial state had entered as an additional actor. The article also reminds us, more broadly, that spectacular violence and local accommodation were not distinct modes of colonial governance but rather continually intertwined in processes of colonial state formation.     

EPISTEMIC WOUNDED ATTACHMENTS: RECOVERING DEFINITIONAL SUBJECTIVITY THROUGH COLONIAL LIBRARIES

Postcolonial theorizing on empires and subjects focuses on governance and infrastructure as relevant geographies of relation. However, when governance-driven knowledge production migrates from colony to metropole, what postcolonial subjectivity formations are recovered from colonial archives, particularly if these archives are structured by epistemic difference? We theorize a wounded attachment to a colonial library, or the construction of subjectivity through colonial archival recovery, as a means of transforming a colonial library of governance into an academic discipline. Through the case study of Sikh studies, a discipline originating out of colonial governance of Sikhs, we argue that epistemic difference is transformed into epistemic distancing as a tool by which scholars pursue legibility to the Euro-American academy. We contextualize the ongoing investment in measures of academic legibility (for example, objectivity, distance, and validity) as how area and region are tied to the production of universal knowledge; these measures result in the elision of embodied knowledge as a valid framework for intellectual pursuit.