Postcolonial polar cities? New indigenous and cosmopolitan urbanness in the Arctic

ABSTRACT

The arrival into geography, and especially urban geography, of a frame of questioning coming from postcolonial studies has contributed to a fascinating debate about what a “postcolonial” city is and how the urban duality between ethnically, socially, and spatially segregated “European” towns and “native” settlements is being reformulated and transformed. Obviously, Arctic cities are not postcolonial in the political sense of being independent from the former colonial centre – although this process may be under way in Greenland – but they have seen a progressive move from a Eurocentric culture toward greater hybridization. This article looks into two new trends that contribute to making Arctic cities postcolonial: first, the arrival of indigenous peoples in cities and the concomitant diminution of the division between Europeans/urbanites and natives/rurals; and second, the arrival of labour migrants from abroad, which has given birth to a more plural and cosmopolitan citizenry. It advances the idea that Arctic cities are now in a position to play a “decolonizing” role, in the sense of progressively erasing the purely European aspect of the city and making it both more local and rooted (through indigenous communities) and more global and multicultural (through foreign labour migrants).     

European Postcolonial Studies and Ireland: Towards a Conversation amongst the Colonized of Europe

In the 1980s, key Irish Studies scholars proposed that Irish culture, politics and economics – both past and present – are most usefully viewed in the context of imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. The result of this intervention is an Irish postcolonial studies which, over the past 35 years, has produced an influential body of scholarship premised on the idea that Ireland is a colony/former colony of the British Empire. Notwithstanding its considerable impact, Irish postcolonial studies has not been without its detractors, with the country's location within Europe forming the basis for one of most persistent objections to the application of a postcolonial framework to Ireland. Given the key role assigned to geography in the postcolonial debate in Ireland, this article explores the implications for Ireland of an emerging postcolonial critique centred on Europe. In addition to discussing the concept of internal colonisation as applied to such Western European countries as Italy and Britain, the article makes reference to postcolonial analyses of the region of Eastern and Central Europe and its relationship with both Russia and Western Europe. The article acknowledges that the branch of European postcolonial studies that focuses on uneven power relationships within and between European countries offers a useful challenge to the argument that Ireland should either be examined within a European framework or a postcolonial one, but argues that the categorisation of a greater number of European societies as colonies or former colonies raises important questions that require further debate.     

Fighting the red peril in the Congo. Paradoxes and perspectives on an equivocal challenge to Belgium and the West (1947–1960)

A study of the Belgian fight against communism in the Congo can uncover the deeper workings of Belgian colonial ‘foreign’ policy. The principles guiding Belgium and its Western partners in their war against the ‘red threat’ give us vital clues to understanding how Belgian governance worked, and shed new light on the Congolese crisis of 1960–61. This article also gives examples of strategies and influences at play during the Cold War, and significant both for the countries developing them and for those which suffered the consequences.     

Settler nationalism: Ulster unionism and postcolonial theory

Despite the capacity of postcolonial theory to accommodate a wide variety of situations, one area of postcolonial experience still has not received much attention – the experience of non-hegemonic settler colonies, that is settler colonies that did not in the end succeed in dominating native populations politically or culturally. Analysis of the unionist community in Northern Ireland offers a number of refinements to postcolonial theory at the same time that it demonstrates how postcolonial theory can enrich our understanding of non-hegemonic settler populations. While every postcolonial culture, native or settler, is uniquely structured by specific historical circumstances, there are features that many of these cultures share, such as hybridity, estrangement, incommensurability, contradiction, mimicry, miscognition, ambivalence, resistance, and the construction of mythical/historical narratives. The structure of these features, however, differs between native and settler cultures, and it differs in a way that makes one culture the mirror image of the other. This should not be surprising since the same colonial situation produces both native nationalism and settler nationalism, and they are both subject to similar colonial contradictions. Recognising settler nationalism as a legitimate part of postcolonial studies opens up the possibility of exploiting the in-betweenness of settler cultures. Emphasising this in-betweenness, and thus its affinities with native nationalism, suggests that settlers, particularly non-hegemonic settlers, are likely to find more in common with the natives they see themselves in opposition to rather than with the colonisers they identify with.     

Preservation between empire,nation and nationalisms: the problem of history and heritage in India

This article looks at the problematic questions of heritage and history in a postcolonial nation‐state such as India. It looks at the colonial past of the preservation of historical buildings and relates this to the postcolonial history of the use of heritage and history for both nation‐building and also to assert the claims and counterclaims of postcolonial identity politics. The article shows how the state and its bureaucracy historically acquired the right to be the custodian of culture, history and heritage, and it also argues that the state nevertheless was and remains circumscribed by subnational and communitarian claims to heritage and the past.     

3. THE NOSTALGIAS FOR EMPIRE

The aim of this article is to explore the theoretical and practical differences between colonial and imperial nostalgia. It opens with a substantial theoretical discussion of the relevant scholarship followed by an analysis of the nostalgias of empire. Nostalgia, in relation to empire, is usually analyzed as a longing for a period of former imperial and colonial glory, thus blurring the various hegemonic practices associated with empire. This elision arises out of the fact colonialism was integral to European imperialism. Yet there is a significant distinction between imperial and colonial nostalgia. With its main focus on postcolonial society in France and Britain, the article will theorize the differences between them, arguing that one is connected to the loss of global power and the other to the loss of a socioeconomic lifestyle. It will explore the way in which these two types of nostalgia are constructed and historicized, examining their differences from historical memory through the responses of both former colonizing and colonized individuals or groups. It will demonstrate that collective nostalgia is not merely a “feel‐good” sentiment about an idealized political or socioeconomic past, but can be readily connected to coming to terms with past trauma(s) thus being a mechanism to elide violence experienced and violence perpetrated by highlighting one to the detriment of the other.     

Postcolonial Denmark: Beyond the Rot of Colonialism?

This article begins by providing a brief overview of Danish colonial and imperial history in the tropics, the Arctic and the sub-Arctic. It then discusses how Danish colonialism relates to a broader regional (Scandinavian/Nordic) and pan-European colonial history. From there it moves on to consider Denmark's postcolonial condition, that is, it identifies issues in contemporary Denmark deriving from Danish (and European) colonialism's aftermath. This unfinished business includes contemporary historiography of the migrant other in Danish society, refugee discourse in the public domain, the early stages of a reconciliation process with former colonies – reconciliation has been placed on the public agenda in both Greenland and the US Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies) - and the still unfolding process of Greenlandic and Faroese independence. The article maps out how the emerging dis-connections between Denmark and its former colonies are paradoxically juxtaposed with processes of new reinforcement: The U.S. Virgin Islands has emerged as an important tourist destination for Danes (more than 10,000 visitors each year). Ghana is one of the major recipients of Danish development aid. Major restoration programs are and have been conducted in all former Danish tropical colonies. In Greenland, Denmark is using its sovereignty to boost its international status as part of the Arctic council, as a scientific power centre on Polar/Arctic research – not least in relation to climate change. The article concludes by looking at critical approaches to Danish colonial history and its legacy in contemporary Danophone literature.     

Cultural policy in France’s overseas: permanence of colonial logics and the potential for creole resistance

France's overseas territories have received greater political autonomy these past three decades. In the Arts sector, the centralised government as well as local governments have developed many cultural policies. Yet, a close examination, through postcolonial lenses, reveals that these policies are imbued with a colonial logic and that colonial patterns are being maintained. These policies hide and deny processes of creolisation that represent a potential for resistance and emancipation.     

States,Money and the Persistence of Colonial Financial Hierarchies in British West Africa

This article contributes to debates about the persistence of colonial hierarchies in global finance by examining the reproduction of key features of colonial monetary and financial systems through the end of formal colonialism in West Africa, with a focus on Ghana. The article draws together engagements with Marxian theories of money and of the colonial state, and an examination of a key period which has often not received sufficient direct attention in debates about colonialism and financial subordination: the breakdown and end of formal colonial rule, roughly between 1930 and 1960. The central puzzle addressed in this article is how, despite the explicit desire on the part of nationalist political leaders to overturn colonial financial systems, these wound up being reproduced through the negotiation of political independence. The article shows how the entanglements of colonial monetary and financial systems with processes of state formation posed severe limits on efforts to articulate a ‘developmental’ colonialism after World War II. Efforts to work around these limits ultimately reinforced the reliance of the colonial and postcolonial state on extractive and hierarchical structures of global finance. In short, the article shows how the contradictory position of the state in colonial capitalism is vital to understanding the persistence of colonial monetary and financial structures.     

Women,Gender and Migration along a Mediterranean Frontier: Pre‐Colonial Tunisia,c.1815–1870

This paper investigates gendered mechanisms for regulating migrants and migration in a pre‐colonial Muslim state, Tunisia, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the eve of colonialism. Trans‐Mediterranean migration to, and permanent settlement in, nineteenth‐century Tunis, the capital city, constituted a major stimulus for political, cultural and social transformations that endured into the colonial period. Employing diverse documentation, the case study analyses this Mediterranean migratory current of ordinary women and men to test the theoretical literature based primarily on trans‐Atlantic movements, which has emphasised the ‘diversity of social positioning’ for women migrants. The paper argues that for pre‐colonial Tunisia, a state that was both an Ottoman province and a part of the larger Mediterranean world, the system of diplomatic protection represented a critical form of positioning. Moreover, Mediterranean states, both European and Muslim, had a long tradition of controlling the movements of women in port cities. Two distinct historical moments in the settlement of women from the Mediterranean islands in pre‐colonial Tunisia are compared. This approach not only enables an assessment of whether women's movements across international borders can attenuate, if only momentarily, patriarchal authority, but also encourages reflection on how gender explains historical variations in global migratory displacements as well as to what extent colonialism serves as an satisfactory explanatory framework for the gendering of communal boundaries.     

Arcangelo Ghisleri and the “Right to Barbarity”: Geography and Anti‐colonialism in Italy in the Age of Empire (1875–1914)

This paper addresses the work of early critics of colonialism and Eurocentrism within Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At that time, a minority but rather influential group of Italian scholars, influenced by the international debates promoted by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Me?nikov, fumed publicly at Italy's colonial ambitions in Africa. Their positions assumed, at least in the case of Arcangelo Ghisleri, the character of a radical critique of both political and cultural European hegemony. These approaches were linked to a similar critique of “internal colonialism”, both Austrian in the Italian‐speaking regions of Trento and Trieste, and Piedmontese in southern Italy. Based on primary sources, and drawing on the international literature on imperial geography and colonial and postcolonial sciences, this paper conjures up the Italian example to discuss how some European geographers of the Age of Empire were also early critics of racism, colonialism and chauvinism, and how these historical experiences can serve current debates on critical, radical and anarchist geographies.     

Writing sex and sexuality: archives of colonial North India

This article focuses on disparate sites and subjects to reflect on and problematize the relationship between sexuality and the archives in colonial north India. I dwell on how ‘recalcitrant’ and hidden histories of sexuality can be gleaned by not only expanding our arenas of archives, but also by decentering and recasting colonial archives. I do so by specifically investigating some of the “indigenous” writings in Hindi, through texts concerning homosexuality, sex manuals, the writings of a woman ayurvedic practitioner, didactic literature and its relationship to Dalit (outcaste) sexuality, and current popular Dalit literature and its representations of the past. The debate for me here is not about the flaws of archival uses but rather of playing one archive against another, of appropriating many parallel, alternative, official, and popular archives simultaneously to shape a more nuanced and layered understanding of sexuality.     

Transatlantic unity on display: the “white legend” and the “pact of silence” in Madrid’s Museum of the Americas

This article examines the history and recent pro-immigrant installations of the postcolonial Museum of the Americas in Madrid. It critically relates the Hispanist “White Legend” regarding the benevolence of Spanish colonialism to both the “pact of silence” following Spain’s Civil War and the current Spanish orientation towards immigrants from Latin America. Despite significant recent reconceptualization, the museum continues to put forward a narrative in which Spain is represented as a benevolent and civilizing contributor to Latin America. The museum’s more recent inclusionist turn to welcoming and serving Latin American immigrant communities in Spain does not complicate the pro-colonialism stance but rather, through a strategically neutral curatorial style, further serves to insist on a positive framing of the past. The exhibit analysed in this article highlights the innocence of Latin American children in order to frame immigration as positive while simultaneously supporting the “White Legend”. Contemporary Spanish tendencies towards forgetting or silencing the past have a deeper history than is usually recognized, and in this case study, these tendencies work to occlude not just the violence of the colonial period but also the inequities of today’s immigration.     

MEGA‐IRRIGATION AND NEOLIBERALISM IN POSTCOLONIAL STATES: EVOLUTION AND CRISIS IN THE GHARB PLAIN,MOROCCO

This article explores the development, evolution and impacts of large‐scale irrigation schemes in the formation of the postcolonial state of Morocco and in more recent neoliberal decades. In particular, the article focuses on the Gharb Plain in the Sebou River basin, which was targeted by huge investments to become the core region for national development. In this area, three stages of development – colonial, early independent, and the aggressive politique des grandes barrages post‐1970 – have created two clearly different and successive landscapes. The traditional landscape has been overlain, and largely obliterated, by colonial and postcolonial governmental landscapes, reflected through different spatial, economic, cultural, and political patterns over time. In the present, a fourth stage of neoliberal development is occurring in the landscape, in which diffused poverty and ecosystem collapse coincide with greater concentrated wealth and the building of technological infrastructures. The article aims to complement critical studies on neoliberal environments, by focusing in particular on the manipulation, dispossession and commodification of water and land resources in irrigated agriculture in Morocco. These emerging rationalities are closely related to the changing policies of the contemporary Moroccan state.     

Community-based legislative representation and postcolonial ethnic civil warfare in former British and French colonies

Recent research argued that the colonial policy of community-based representation in the legislative assembly strongly increases the risk of postcolonial ethnic warfare in former British and French colonies. This paper delves deeper into the relationship by using an updated dataset that codes the receipt or non-receipt of communal representation for nearly all ethnic groups in former British and French colonies. The results confirm the war-inducing effect of this communalising colonial policy and additionally find that such an effect applies relatively uniformly to groups that benefited from this policy as well as those that were excluded from it. In addition, based on sociological theory and previous research, it was hypothesised that a combination of precolonial receipt of communal legislative representation and postcolonial political exclusion would make an ethnic group particularly prone to postcolonial ethnic warfare. This hypothesis, however, was not supported by the data. This null result has theoretical implications for our understanding of the conditions that give rise to conflict-inducing psychological strain in the field of colonialism and ethnic warfare.     

Locality,Mobility and Governmentality in Colonial/Postcolonial New Caledonia: The case of the Kouare tribe (xûâ Xârâgwii), Thio (Cöö)

The colonial history of New Caledonia has been one of dispossession, alienation, and racial segregation. Indigenous people did not experience a life of all‐embracing confinement and immobility. Instead, Kanak localities were historically shaped by the interplay of colonial projects, ideas, tensions, power relations, practices, representations, values, norms, and emotions. Based on the example of Thio, located on the south‐east coast of New Caledonia, this article explores these transformations, focusing on processes of localization and mobility in the colonial and postcolonial eras. The first section focuses on the encounter with and the interplay between different organisations in Thio: the missionary, mining, pastoral, and administrative frontiers. The second section explores the multilayered history of the landscape and settlement patterns in Xârâgwii/Kouare (a tribe located in the mountainous part of Thio), and the third section analyses the interplay of locality and mobility since World War II. The final section examines the ‘invention’ of the tribe as part of colonial governmental projects. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the meaning of this evolving dialectic in the current context of decolonization.     

MacLiammóir's minstrel and Johnston's morality: cultural memories of the Easter Rising at the Dublin Gate Theatre

This article explores how Micheál MacLiammóir and Denis Johnston attempted to perform cultural memories of the Easter Rising at the Dublin Gate Theatre and thereby articulated their respective views on a colonial past that had to be reassessed anew, on the one hand, and a postcolonial future that still had to be made possible, on the other. By analysing how these two prominent Gate Theatre playwrights sought to commemorate the Rising through mediated performances, this article argues that the Gate Theatre did not simply serve as a playground for disinterested aestheticists but also created a stylised forum where the perceived strain between Ireland's traumatic history and its uncertain future could be addressed and reconfigured into a meaningful teleology. In doing so, this article attempts to demonstrate that the Gate Theatre served as a cultural counterweight to the Abbey's ostensible hegemony as a theatrical force in Irish identity formation.     

The Value of Culture: Congolese Art and the Promotion of Belgian Colonialism (1945–1959)

Based on the scholarship of Frans M. Olbrechts and the changes implemented in the Museum of the Belgian Congo during his directorship (from 1947 until 1958), this article argues that the institutionalization of African artefacts as art served the late Belgian colonial regime in promoting its renewed postwar commitment to the Congolese colony. In their reinvention as art and subsequent re-installation in modernist displays, the objects acquired not only a cultural, but also an economic and political value as resources, which led to their co-option in the mise-en-valeur, or valorization, of the colony and fuelled a colonial rhetoric that replaced an earlier emphasis on the civilizing mission with a construction of cultural guardianship based on the universal value of the objects as art.     

SOS Racisme and the Legacies of Colonialism 2005–2009: An Ambivalent Relationship

The relationship of French anti-racist organisations with the country's colonial past forms a substantial division within the movement. Whilst some organisations—the Mouvement des Indigènes de la République, for example—place colonial commemoration at the heart of their ideology and draw parallels between the colonial past and post-colonial present, others are far more sceptical. One such group is SOS Racisme, which, despite the intense debate around the legacies of colonialism during the article's timeframe (typified by the law of 23 February 2005 on the ‘positive role’ of colonisation, and Nicolas Sarkozy's discourse on ‘repentance’), has been consistently reluctant to acknowledge the impact of such legacies on contemporary French society, to the extent of seeing too much emphasis on the colonial past as actively harmful to both the anti-racist movement and populations of immigrant origin. In this article, the author considers why this is, noting that although SOS sees France's colonial past as a legitimate area of historical study, it rejects the idea that it should affect the way in which post-colonial populations are seen and treated in contemporary France; the idea that it should form the backbone of these populations' identities; and the idea that immigrants and their descendants have the right to see themselves as victims solely because of their colonial heritage. This rejection, the author argues, can be linked with both SOS's emphasis on universalist republicanism and its prioritisation of practical action against racism over analysis of its causes.     

Colonial Dreams and Nightmares: British and French Perceptions of Republican Policies in Spanish Morocco (1931–1936)

Historians’ continuing interest in the origins of the Spanish Civil War has recently extended to the colonial policies of the Spanish Second Republic in Morocco, a relatively unexplored issue in previous decades, which has informed new approaches to the military uprising of July 1936. Foreign sources and archives, however, have been generally overlooked in this context. This article claims that British and French delegates in Morocco made critical observations about republican reforms in Spanish Morocco, which have much to add to this debate. They raised questions regarding the continuity of republican policies in Morocco and the anti-republican attitudes within the Army of Africa. They also challenged conventional knowledge concerning the difficulties encountered by alternative colonial projects in Morocco. In the end, their reports not only questioned metropolitan options but also anticipated the attitudes of the British and French governments, vis-à-vis the military rebellion.