The red line over European colonialism: comparison of the Macao museum and Hong Kong museum of history after their return to China

Hong Kong and Macao were once European colonies. A unique, hybrid culture of East and West now flourishes in these two Special Administrative Regions (SARs) of China. Both cities opened new history museums in 1998, but they adopted remarkably different approaches in their representation of their complicated and politically sensitive history. The Hong Kong Museum of History (HKMH) represents history by closely following the orientation of traditional Chinese nationalism. The postcolonial characteristics adopted by the Macao Museum to reproduce history, in contrast, are likely amongst the richest of all history museums in China. What are the reasons behind the different historical representations by Hong Kong and Macao, which were both promised a ‘One country, Two systems’ policy by the Chinese central authority? This paper argues that both museums reveal two faces of a rising China; the one in Hong Kong emphasises national dignity, and the people’s identification with and loyalty to the nation when it is engaged in state building. The one in Macao emphasises the multiple roles in finding a balanced position to coexist with superpowers, forging friendships with developing countries and building an idealised image of a (re-)rising nation through historical construction. The difference between these two museums indicates the exceptional flexibility of China’s postcommunist regime in engaging in soft power diplomacy.     

Modernization,colonialism, and the new anthropology of sport

Abstract

Anthropologists Niko Besnier, Susan Brownell, and Thomas Carter have recently contributed a theoretically- and empirically-updated account of sport anthropology, the burgeoning, heterogenous, productive field dedicated to the myriad forms of sport and physical activity in human societies. This essay dialogically relates their contribution with previous conceptions of sport anthropology to better understand the interconnections between global and local contexts of physical culture and the relations between anthropological inquiry and important issues like social power, biopolitics, and colonialism. The essay specifically highlights the authors’ contextualization of assumptions of modernization and categorizations of “primitive” and “pre-modern” sport, arguing that a postcolonial approach to sport anthropology results in a more inclusive, nuanced framework for studying the anthropological dimensions of physical culture.     

Capitalism,internal colonialism,and patterns of dominance

William Barclay, Krishna Kumar, and Ruth P. Simms, eds. Racial Conflict, Discrimination, and Power: Historical and Contemporary Studies. New York: AMS Press, 1976. 437 pp. Tables, figures, chapter notes, and bibliography. $15 cloth, $5.95 paper.     

The Un-European Idea: Vichy and Eurafrica in the Historiography of Europeanism

Imperialist and collaborationist conceptions of Europeanisms have generally been excluded from mainstream historiography with reference to their alleged un-Europeanness. However, by discussing the ideas and writings of two French Europeanists—Louis Le Fur’s and René Viard’s—in the years 1940–41, I argue that it is precisely their Vichyite and imperialist conceptions of Europeanness that underpin their political ideas of a united Europe. Their works therefore call into question a prevailing historiographical narrative of Europeanism as a benign counterpoint to a dark European past. Since, as demonstrated in this article, French Europeanist visions have often been bound up with both collaborationist and imperialist interests, I argue for the need to develop a more inclusive and critical historiographical perspective on the history of Europeanism.     

French geography, cartography and colonialism: introduction

This paper provides an introduction to a special feature of the Journal of Historical Geography devoted to recent research, by French scholars, on the relations between French geography, colonialism and the mapping of colonial boundaries, with particular reference to Africa between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.     

Identity and European integration: diversity as a source of integration1

ABSTRACT. This article explores the concept of European Union identity and its significance for European integration by drawing upon insights from theories of nationalism and national identity. European Union identity is viewed as an ongoing process which is banal, contingent and contextual. The central hypothesis is that: European integration facilitates the flourishing of diverse national identities rather than convergence around a single homogeneous European Union identity. The role of the EU as facilitator for diverse understandings of collective identities encourages the enhabitation of the EU at an everyday level and the reinforcement of a sense of banal Europeanism which is a crucial aspect of the European integration process. Facilitating diversity may thus provide a vital source of dynamism for the integration process.     

Artisan dynamics in the age of colonialism: the social history of Moroccan Jewish goldsmiths in the inter-war period

The article highlights the social history of Jewish goldsmiths in French Morocco between the two World Wars, a period in which the global capitalist system challenged their historical monopoly over production and commerce. Continued external intervention (Moroccan commercial treaties with European capitalist markets), direct competition (the import of cheap industrial products and an influx of entrepreneurs), the mechanisation of local manufacturing, the encouragement of individualism resulting in the breakdown of Jewish social cohesion and the taking over of political institutions by France (the Makhzen) and its local agent (the Muhtaseb) had all eroded the Jewish monopoly of the precious-metals industry and created an unexpected atmosphere of strong economic, political and judicial pressures on Jewish goldsmiths. In order to explore the struggle and survival of Jewish goldsmiths in the new economic order, the article addresses the following key questions: (1) What was the influence of various forces, both external and internal, on the Jewish goldsmiths' industry?; (2) How did the artisans respond to and cope with these new economic conditions?; and (3) Why did the Protectorate revert back from liberal economic policy to that of local producers' protection?     

Adowa and the historiography of Italian colonialism

Report on the Convegno internazionale di studi nel centenario della battaglia di Adua, Piacenza, 10–12 April 1996, now published as, Angeld Del Boca (ed.), Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, Laterza, Rome ‐ Bari, 1997, 468 pp., ISBN 88–420–5196–9, 45,000 Lire.     

The European miracle. Environment,economies and geopolitics in the history of Europe and Asia

This article analyses the 1936 “Wotan” essay by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in light of one of its reigning motifs, Ergriffenheit. First, this term is examined within the works of Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto and Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who used it to describe what they claimed to be the original religious experience, a state of being deeply stirred or even seized by the “the holy” or by “the ultimate reality.” The article then examines antecedents in Jung's theory of states of psychic seizure, in which two halves of the psyche come into conflict, the resolution of which leads to an increased capacity to create the arts of culture. The analysis then moves to the “Wotan” essay itself, where Jung brings together his own theory of psychic seizure with the theory of the original religious experience as proposed by the above-named scholars of religion in order to suggest that, under National Socialism, the Germans were in the midst of a collective confrontation with their own inner divinity, which should lead to a national spiritual rebirth. The article then investigates the works of several of the men Jung mentions in the essay, as well as his use of ancient Germanic mythology, to support his claim. Through his portrait of the Germanic archetype Wotan, Jung psychologizes and thereby essentializes the Romantic image of the Germans as “a people of poets and philosophers” as well as that of a Nietzschean “master-race.” In conclusion, the article argues that, at least in 1936, Jung's attitude towards Hitler and National Socialism was much more favorable than has previously been recognized.