The ‘Wicked Machinery of Government':1 Malta and the Problems of Continuity under the New Model Administration

This is a study focused on the early years of British rule in Malta (1800–13). It explores the application to the island of the ‘new model’ of colonial government, one based on direct rule from London mediated by the continuation of existing laws and institutions. Systemic deficiencies are identified. These tended to undermine the effectiveness of direct British rule. This study also reveals, in the context of legal and constitutional continuity, unresolved tensions between modernity and tradition. The political stability of the island was damaged and the possibility of continued British possession was threatened.     

Photography and Latin American Ruins

Ever since the nineteenth century photographers have regularly turned to Latin American ruins to express a diverse range of scientific, colonial, aesthetic and spiritual desires. This article looks at photographs of Latin American ruins from the nineteenth century through several archaeological expeditions in Central and South America over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing in particular on photographs of ruins that include human subjects, I argue that the human-material interactions evident in these images undermine the traditional view of a split between the archaeological subject and the material object, serving as a reminder of the political actuality of ‘classical’ ruins, sites that have sometimes been left out of the West’s contemporary fascination with the dark underbelly of modernity. Acknowledging that such politics is by no means always innocent, sometimes reflecting as it does the embedded power relations of neo-colonial desires, I argue nonetheless that ancient ruins in Latin America continue to be spaces around which social relations can be formed, not least through humour and pleasure.     

A Collision of Masculinities: Men,Modernity and Urban Transportation in American-Colonial Manila

Abstract:

Early twentieth-century Manila saw the motorisation of its urban transport system. This was a significant transformation not only because of the technological changes it brought about but more importantly because of its role in shaping the highly gendered discourse of colonial modernity. Motorised vehicles, like the streetcar and the automobile, were trumpeted as masculine and modern machines by America’s civilising mission. This colonial discourse was continuously shaped and subverted by a collision of masculinities coming from different directions. This essay will focus on four different male groups in an effort to understand how transport motorisation influenced their sense of masculinity. White American colonisers imagined themselves as modern men destined to bring civilisation to the colony through technology. The native elites used the coloniser as their model by appropriating the symbols of masculine modernity. While the male workers of the modern transport sector gained knowledge of and access to the domains of those in power, those in the traditional sector became targets of vilification by the native and colonial elites. Instead of a duel between two sets of masculinity (coloniser vs. colonised) what emerged was a complex set of relationships influenced by the socioeconomic differences that separated these four groups.     

Colonial exhibitions,hybrid architecture,and the interpretation of modernity in the Dutch East Indies

To gain more economic profit and strengthen its colonial power, the Dutch brought Western technologies and products to their colonies and organized colonial exhibitions, modeled on the successful international exhibitions in Europe. This article analyzes colonial exhibitions in the Dutch East Indies and the ways that Dutch architects used various local architectural forms for those ephemeral events to attract visitors and to modernize the colony. The empirical case study discusses hybrid architecture in the Dutch East Indies at three events: Pasar Gambir of Batavia, Jaarmarkt of Surabaya, and the 1914 Semarang Colonial Exhibition. Through analysis of archival and historical documents, I argue that the use of local architectural forms in colonial exhibitions helped the colonies to adapt to modernity and created places where local people could practice a Dutch lifestyle and create their own idea of modernity.     

Mountains and Black Races

This paper explores the pivotal status of mountain spaces in the 19th-century imaginary of wild peoples and black races in island Oceania. It adopts the notion of ‘heterotopia’ in order to examine how arrangements of human difference and spatial alterity were productively brought together in racial anthropology and in colonial praxis. Taking the example of the Portuguese former colony of East Timor, the author argues that anthropological theories of ‘mountain Negroes’, local categories of ‘mountain enemies’ and experiences of colonial hostility were mutually reinforcing.     

Australia’s Detention Centre and the Erosion of Democracy in Nauru

Since 2013, the Nauru government has undermined democracy by reducing the independence of the judiciary, treating opposition MPs as potential traitors, curbing freedom of speech and restricting visits by variously defined groups of people who include journalists, Australians and New Zealanders. New Zealand responded by suspending its aid to Nauru’s justice and border control department. Australia, by contrast, has said little. The Nauru government would not have acted so boldly in curbing civil freedoms and weakening the rule of law if Australia had been less dependent on its goodwill to act as host for Australia’s Regional Processing Centre, which houses asylum seekers who have attempted to reach Australia by boat. Australia’s reliance on Nauru – driven by urgent domestic political considerations – has fostered an atmosphere where the principles of good governance can be flouted with little fear of significant criticism from Canberra.     

Tropes of fear and the crisis of the west: Trumpism as a discourse of post-territorial coloniality*

We examine ‘Trumpism’ as a contemporary form of colonial domination, showing how this discourse represents both a crisis of coloniality and a stimulus for a movement of ‘decoloniality’. A critical discourse analysis is applied to seven speeches delivered by Donald Trump between his announcement of his presidential candidacy in June 2015 and his inauguration in January 2017. In assessing Trump's arguments, we focus mainly on those concerning national security, illegal immigration, and the threats posed by various foreign countries. Although these arguments sit within a long colonial tradition, they also indicate a crisis of modernity, as witnessed in the growing challenges to colonial masculinity, nationalism, and rationality. We conclude that Trumpism articulates a reaction to these challenges, and that Trump's rise to power is a symptom of the crisis of post-territorial coloniality in contemporary global society.     

Postcolonial positioning and Japanese imperial affect in interwar Dada prose poems

Between the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Mukden Incident (1931), Japan’s mounting colonial presence manifested itself in the activities of the South Manchuria Railway Company as well as in the Japanese forces’ skirmishes for control of the region. The poet Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–1990) would draw on his memories of Manchuria, where he lived until attending college in Kyoto, to situate hyperobjects and colonial minutiae in counter-hegemonic anticolonial and antiwar prose poems. His subtractive poetic configurations – not Surrealist but certainly building on Dada precedents – isolate incongruous elements (evental traces) in Alain Badiou’s sense of being faithful to a critique of the ethics of a colonial apparatus. Having grown up within the colonial enterprise himself, and subject to high-minded Japanese media representations and instilled imperial affects, Kitagawa positions himself against the machinic drive for colonial profits and the abuse of labour and prostitutes. This article thus situates aesthetic strategies for displacing imperial affect as projected onto spaces of Japanese expansion so as to document radically anticolonial subject possibilities among Japanese nationals themselves. As postcolonial artefacts, these prose poems suggest the contradictions of European modernity writ in the Japanese rhetoric of cosmopolitan East Asian development and liberation as cultural production that aestheticises colonial extraction of labour and raw materials.     

1919 in dynamic East Asia: March First and May Fourth as a starting point for revolution

Abstract

The March First Movement and the May Fourth Movement are like mirrors reflecting each other’s relationship. This article uses the concept of “simultaneity” in global history to reevaluate the significance of both events in world history. It also examines the differences exhibited by the simultaneity of the two events from the perspective of an “interconnected East Asia.” After entering the world-system, imperial Japan, semi-colonial China, and colonial Korea occupied different positions within its hierarchical structure. Here we need to pay attention to the status-diverse but mutually influential conditions in East Asia. To see through the complexity of (semi)colonial modernity and find the inherent opportunities to overcome modernity, it is useful to analyze the “double project” of adapting to modernity and overcoming modernity. Since the 1920s, the two events have been continually reinterpreted in the vein of socio-historical changes. The question of how to remember the two is not only a historical question but also a practical question for the present. Now is truly the methodological turning point in exploring and reinterpreting the two events. The author will use the terms “March First Revolution” and “May Fourth Revolution” in an attempt to tackle this issue. The mass gatherings that took place during March First and May Fourth provide sufficient evidence to support the use of “revolution” to describe them. Although March First and May Fourth are part of two respective histories of Korea and China, at the same time they are part of East Asia’s and the world’s interconnected history.     

Australia’s Detention Centres on Manus Island and Nauru: An End of Constructive Pacific Engagement?

The ‘Pacific Solution’ of transporting asylum seekers who arrive by boat in Australian waters to detention centres on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has attracted considerable international attention. Most of this has focused on the treatment of those detained and the morality, practicality and sustainability of Australian refugee policy. In this issue of ‘Pacific Currents’, we focus on the consequences for the Island nations. This article sets the scene for articles on Nauru and Manus Island by: 1. outlining the policy debates that led to the two phases of the ‘Pacific Solution’; 2. assembling data covering the numbers and costs involved; and 3. exploring the policy options in the wake of the PNG Supreme Court’s April 2016 ruling that the Manus Island centre was in violation of the constitution. All three papers are particularly concerned to explore the domestic political and legal ramifications of the centres for Nauru and PNG, and to examine the impact on Australia’s reputation in the Pacific region.     

Quarantine Matters: Colonial Quarantine at North Head,Sydney and Its Material and Ideological Ruins

Australia’s quarantine regulations have their roots in colonial practice. This paper is concerned with the “matter” of quarantine—its location, spatialization, and materialization—and the ways in which it contributed to the colonial agenda. Through an exploration of Sydney’s North Head Quarantine Station, quarantine is shown to be a technology through which the colony and the continent were framed as simultaneously pure and vulnerable. These colonial roots of quarantine practice are then brought back to the present, drawing on Stoler’s (2008) concept of “imperial debris” to contemplate the contemporary ruins, both material and ideological, of colonial quarantine practice.     

“Let Me Come to Tell You”: Loide Shikongo,the King,and Poetic License in Colonial Ovamboland

In this paper, I explore cultural discourse, gender and the subjectivities of local people on the frontier of empire in mid‐20th century southern Africa. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial “Ovamboland”), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated. The narrative of a remarkable woman’s life and her poetry is told to understand how gender in relation to other forms of identity was constructed in different cultural discourses. I argue that both the Christian mission’s cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration’s efforts to masculinise the “native” political authority gendered Owambo elite women whose identities had previously included “gender” only as a rather contingent component. The example of Loide Shikongo, however, also shows that many Owambo continued to pursue heterogeneous, and sometimes ambiguous, strategies in their claims to Christian models of modernity.     

A Colonial Shipwreck in Saipan,Northern Mariana Islands

Previous underwater cultural heritage investigations conducted in the western Pacific's Northern Mariana Islands largely focused on the submerged World War Two remains, despite the islands’ rich colonial history. The island chain was the setting of numerous historical occupations including indigenous Chamorro populations, Spain, Germany, Japan and the United States, all of which created a lasting maritime heritage legacy on land and under water. This paper presents the first colonial shipwreck investigation to be undertaken by archaeologists and fills a gap in our history and knowledge of the Mariana Islands’ pre‐World War Two era.     

Valkeapää's Use of Photographs in Beaivi áhčážan: Indigenous Counter-History versus Documentation in the Age of Photography

This article examines the photographic material of the Sámi cultural mobilizer Nils-Aslak Valkeapää's Beaivi áh?á?an (The Sun, My Father), published in 1988, with theoretical perspectives from anti- and postcolonial studies. The analysis focuses on how Valkeapää's use of photographs involves that the colonial past is examined from the vantage point of the anti-colonial present of the 1980s. Valkeapää's re-contextualization of photographs from ethnographic collections assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a book he called a family album of the Sámi is discussed as an example of Sámi counter-history that is part of the decolonization process. When analysed with perspectives from anti- and postcolonial studies, the documentation of the way of life of the Sámi people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exemplifies a practice which has constructed the Sámi as the others of modern society. The article discusses how the construction of the Sámi as the others of modernity is deconstructed and challenged in present-day indigenous identity politics.     

The Imaging of Samoa in Illustrated Magazines and Serial Encyclopaedias in the Early 20th-Century

Drawing on English language sources and material relating to the colonial administrations of Western Samoa (now Samoa) and American Samoa, this examination of photographically illustrated serial encyclopaedias and magazines proposes an alternative historical analysis of the colonial imaging of Samoa, the most extensively covered field in Oceanic photographic studies. Though photographs published between 1890s and World War II were often ‘recycled’, without acknowledging the fact that they were taken much earlier, and despite claims in the text of illustrated publications of an unchanged, enduring, archaic tradition in Samoa, the amazing variety of photographic content often offered contradictory evidence, depicting a modern, adaptive and progressive Samoa. Contrary to orthodox historical analysis, the images of Samoa in illustrated magazines and encyclopaedias were not limited to a small repetitive gallery of partially clothed women and costumed chiefs; and the ways in which readers understood Samoa from photographs and text raises questions still to be explored.     

Fixity and fluidity: chiefly authority and settlement movement in colonial Botswana

This article proposes that anthropologists and historians of colonialism, landscape and the colonial construction of chieftaincy in Africa should examine particular case studies in more detail to elicit the complex social and material processes implicit in such notions. In particular it focuses upon the colonial conflation of the notions of settlement nucleation and sedentism in the period of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in Botswana (1885–1966), processes of material change, and the position of Tswana chiefs with regard to settlement and authority. The perceived “failure” of the Tawana chiefs in Ngamiland District to exert settlement control over the dispersed population is analyzed through detailed colonial records of conflict to argue that what failed was the colonial construction of chieftaincy itself, as well as the colonial imagination of landscape in Africa. The article’s emphasis upon the materiality of dwelling in the landscape also seeks to convince historians and anthropologists alike of the vast research potential of material culture in the analysis of colonial histories, social and cultural change, and indigenous notions of modernity.     

Religious Colonialism in Early Modern Malta: Inquisitorial Imprisonment and Inmate Graffiti

Early modern Malta was governed by three competing Roman Catholic institutions—Order of St. John, Bishopric, and Roman Inquisition—all of which ultimately answered to the Pope. By focusing on the inquisition, the institution most directly controlled by the Vatican, this paper explores the role of imprisonment in furthering the Vatican’s cultural and political control on the island. In doing so, this paper offers an archaeological perspective on an early modern prison context. Through analyses of the prison cells and the inmates’ graffiti, I argue that the inquisition’s ability to imprison was crucial to the Vatican’s colonial position in Malta.     

Reproducing the indigenous: John Møller’s studio portraits of Greenlanders in context

Between 1889 and 1922, John Møller (1867–1935), the first professional Greenlandic photographer, produced more than 3000 glass plate negatives documenting life in Western Greenland around the turn of the twentieth century. Rooted in an internal understanding of self, Møller’s photographs played an important part in the formation of a contemporary image of Greenlandic indigenous identity. At the same time, Møller’s photographic practice was arguably entangled in and delimited by a historical reality that was structured by colonial relations of power. This paper examines the social and art-historical contexts of Møller’s work, focusing in particular on a selection of his formal studio portraits. My reading of these portraits suggests a case in which conflicting impulses coincide. On the one hand, Møller produced images that played out the “ethnographic convention”, a European form of representation dating back to the sixteenth century used for the documentation of non-Western indigenous peoples as specimens. However, in acting out that convention, Møller’s photographs hint at a subtle, progressive building-up of identity that reclaimed images of Greenlanders for themselves, and turned an originally negative, external image of indigeneity into a positive sense of self.     

Why Does the Cook Islands Still Need Overseas Aid?

The Cook Islands Government spends more than 40 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Its tax revenue is capped at 25 per cent of GDP under a 1998 austerity package agreed with its creditors New Zealand, Nauru and the Asian Development Bank. Non-tax revenue is 5 per cent of GDP, and external aid fills the resulting gap. This recently renewed reliance on aid contrasts sharply with the strong performance of the economy’s private sector, driven by a booming tourism industry, which has pushed the balance of payments into a huge surplus and raises important questions about the allocation of the gains from growth.     

Regionmaking and conceptual development in South China: Perceiving islands,the Pearl River Delta,and the Greater Bay Area

The Pearl River Delta in South China is today associated with one of the world's largest megaregions. Even though scholarship often treats the Pearl River Delta as a natural region and unit for analysis, this area has only recently been regionalised. This paper undertakes a critical rewriting and remapping of the Pearl River Delta's history, starting in precolonial times in which the Chinese population saw the area as composed of islands and waterways, moving through the period when colonial powers saw the area as a pathway up from the colonial island enclaves of Hong Kong and Macao and into China's interior, and ending in the Reform and Opening Up era when the modern Chinese state has implemented a succession of planning-oriented conceptions of the region. As the area has moved conceptually from a world of islands to a delta and now to the Greater Bay Area, perceptions about what the area means have changed as well. From a position in urban island studies and critical reflexivity, this paper troubles taken-for-granted colonial, technocratic, and governmental visions and regionalisations, focusing on how physical and cultural geographies develop in tandem. The notion of the interstitial island is used to help understand how the Pearl River Delta's island geography has influenced the area's conceptual development.