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.     

Translation as techné: female sexuality and the science of social progress in colonial India

Abstract

In this article, I analyze processes of translation that shaped the science of sex in eastern India between the 1880s and the 1930s. I trace the impact of translation – the rendering of words between the language of English and Bengali as well as the travel and transformation of concepts – through close textual analysis of influential Bengali-language medical and scientific textbooks on nymphomania, female sexual excesses, and the evolution of Indian society. The translation of sexual categories was a techné by which Bengali intellectuals produced categories of social behavior and identity as equivalent and homogenous. Through claims of equivalence in translation, Bengali scientists argued for the commensurability of Indian social practices with universalist schemes of social evolution and civilizational progress. This process of exchange pivoted on the figure of the sexually deviant woman, who became a key site of translation and categorical equivalence. In thinking translation through techné, I foreground how a semiotics of female sexuality produced ‘the social’ as an object of inquiry in colonial India.     

Challenging the grammar of difference: Benoy Kumar Sarkar,global mobility and anti-imperialism around the First World War

The new imperial history has advanced our understanding of empires in many ways: it enhanced a networked interpretation of empires, brought space back into the discussion, and suggested a fresh reading of imperial careers to comprehend early forms of global inter-dependencies. This article discusses selected aspects of the life and work of Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949), a Bengali social scientist and political activist, to illustrate that anti-imperial biographies were simultaneously rooted in local as well as transnational spaces. They thus connected national struggles with globe-spanning processes. Biographies like this are underacknowledged in their meaning for how empires functioned and failed, and in their potential for understanding transnational actors. Sarkar’s efforts to challenge the legitimacy of the British Empire were the result of his life in a transnational social field, which was equally shaped by his extensive experience abroad and his continuous rootedness in local Bengali affairs. Sarkar’s anti-imperialism was enhanced by the mobility structures of the British Empire and resulted in new constellations of imperial, cosmopolitan, local and regional orientations and attachments. In this view, anti-imperialism was less the result of local struggles but of life practices reaching beyond the borders of the empire and a high awareness of acting in a global context that located its protagonists in numerous social and spatial contexts.     

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.     

农民何以支持与参加中共革命？

内容提要 农民的支持与参加是中共革命胜利的主要保证,问题是如何解释农民的这一行为。学术界的解释与争论主要涉及四个方面：一是土地集中、家庭贫困与农民革命的关系,二是社会经济改革与农民革命的关系,三是民族主义与农民革命的关系,四是中共动员与农民革命的关系。以上说法都揭示了问题的一个主要方面,而且多是从自上而下的视角进行分析,缺乏农民自身的声音,尤其是缺乏对农民个体或群体感受的关怀。事实上,农民支持与参加革命的动机十分复杂,很难能用一条或几条理论概括。在农民支持或参加中共革命的行动中,土地分配、家庭贫困、社会经济改革以及民族主义在动员农民中究竟起了什么作用,仍需要做大量的农民个体与群体的实证研究。只有在此基础上,方可还原农民的革命动机,也才有利于中共革命胜利原因的解释。     

Remote Sensing,Land Quotas and Mass Relocation: China's Governance of Farmland

There is increasing interest in understanding China's environmental governance through the lens of governmentality. This article contributes to that discussion by using the Foucauldian analytical apparatuses of discipline and security to understand China's governance of farmland. It argues that the Chinese state applies these two apparatuses simultaneously: on the one hand, it disciplines and deters local states from illegal land grabs by utilizing surveillance tools such as remote sensing and national land surveys; on the other hand, it relies on indirect governance through the land quota market to achieve grain security, transforming both local states and peasants into autonomous market players, and reconstructing China's rural landscape by launching mass peasant relocation programmes. The study also reveals the contingent effects of those power tactics: the state's governance is compromised by the local states’ counter‐conduct, such as data fabrication and concealment, and by the peasants’ denial of their new subjectivity as market players. When the tactics are effective, as in the case of local states actively assuming roles of land quota producers and traders, the villages and peasant households suffer from deprivation of land rights.     

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.     

Education for Tomorrow: The Vision of Rabindranath Tagore

This article investigates Rabindranath Tagore’s educational vision, which underpinned the three institutions he set up in India – Santiniketan (1901), Visva-Bharati (1921) and Sriniketan (1922). It argues that this vision is still relevant for the world of today and tomorrow, and that it should be taken into account in designing any educational model for the future. Tagore rejected the modern mechanical learning that focuses merely on cultivation of the individual’s mind, in favour of learning that encourages the creativity, imagination and moral awareness of students. He believed that education should be not for mere “success” or “progress” but for “illumination of heart” and for inculcation of a spirit of sympathy, service and self-sacrifice in the individual, so that s/he could rise above egocentrism and ethnocentrism to a state of global consciousness or worldcentrism. In pursuing this argument, I refer to Tagore’s letters, lectures, interviews and essays, both in Bengali and in English, a body of his short stories, his novel The Home and the World and his allegorical poem “Two Birds”. I also explain his awareness of the educational movements of his time in the West, and draw brief parallels with selected Western luminaries in the field, such as Plato, Montaigne, Rousseau and John Dewey. My contention is that although some may dismiss Tagore’s educational principles as “rickety sentimentalism” in a world that is palpable and real, his ideas of human fellowship, unity and creativity, and kinship for nature seem irrefutable with the rise of multiculturalism and the looming ecological crisis threatening world peace.     

Riding the Rhino: Conservation,Conflicts, and Militarisation of Kaziranga National Park in Assam

Since 2004, media and public opinion in Assam (India) have focused on increasing instances of poaching of rhinoceros for their horns and presence of Bengali‐speaking Muslim peasants, especially in and around the iconic Kaziranga National Park. From hastily made digital films, to anti‐poaching motifs at Durga Puja pandals, the plight of the rhinoceros has occupied an important position in an acrimonious political discourse on Assamese culture. The innocence and dignity attributed to the animal stands in marked contrast to the lack of discussion on the large numbers of young men who have been killed in anti‐poaching campaigns by the state. This article looks at the interstices of class, culture and commerce in an attempt to understand the popular deification of the rhinoceros and implications of the developmental discourse that seeks to put people and rhino in their “rightful” place.     

The interaction of methodology with an impegno del dopo in Nuto Revelli's collections of oral testimonies

Among his varied publications, Nuto Revelli (1919–2004) produced three collections of oral testimonies gathered from the contadini (peasants) of Piedmont: La strada del davai, Il mondo dei vinti and L’anello forte. This article argues that these collections were the product of the same specific impegno del dopo (‘obligation of afterwards’) as his initial autobiographical writings, which had arisen from his experiences as an officer on the Russian Front during the Second World War. From this premise, the article then examines the interaction of Revelli's sense of impegno del dopo with the methodology he developed. The article concludes with an assessment of Revelli's stated aims and his actual achievements.     

Popular Italian cinema,the media,and the economic miracle: rethinking commedia all’italiana

This article seeks to reposition the popular cinematic genre commedia all’italiana within the context of the rapid expansion of the media industries which accompanied Italy's postwar economic miracle. The article looks at three distinct aspects of the relationship between commedia all’italiana and other media. First, it outlines the important role played by the media during the boom in disseminating images of consumer lifestyles, and highlights the way in which commedia all’italiana participated in this process. Second, through a discussion of media appearances by Vittorio Gassman and Nino Manfredi, the article emphasises the extent to which their commedia all’italiana star personas were constructed and circulated in a multimedia context. Finally, it examines how the genre represented other media, focusing in particular on the representation of gender in advertising scenes. Through close readings of commedia all’italiana advertising scenes, the article notes points of continuity with and difference from advertising imagery that was circulating at the time. The article argues that in order to further our understanding of commedia all’italiana and its relationship to Italian society, it is essential to understand the genre's relationship to other media production of the period, which both influenced the comedies’ representations and was influenced by them in turn.     

The Stolypin Agrarian Reform in Contemporary Historiography

Through a combination of radical and moderate ideas, rejection of rigid schemas, and allowances made for the peasants’ understanding of the law and capacity for change, Stolypin’s agrarian reform produced real results even though it remained unfinished.     

John Stuart Mill and voluntary slavery contracts

Mill's unwillingness to support the enforcement of voluntary slavery agreements is problematically related to his strong anti‐paternalism. Working on the assumption that it is too simple to charge him with inconsistency, this paper examines several interpretations of his remarks, and explores some of the deeper motivations that may have influenced his position. Several features of his argument are emphasized: the fact that his opposition is to slavery contracts and not self‐enslavement as such; the weight he allows to ‘the necessities of life’ in determining what freedom‐limiting contracts to enforce; the way in which enforceable slavery agreements would undermine the presumption in favour of liberty; the problematic character of carte blanche consent, and the possibility this raises that enforcement could make the law a party to criminable harm. Although Mill's argument is too cryptic to be persuasive, it is too suggestive to be given the off‐handed treatment often meted out by his commentators.     

‘Affirmative Signalling’: Dickens’s Railway Journalism and Victorian Risk Society

This essay explores Charles Dickens’s railway journalism of the 1850s and 1860s and its differences from his more well-known fictional accounts of the British railway network. While fictional works such as Dombey and Son and ‘The Signalman’ emphasize the catastrophic aspects of railway accidents, Dickens’s journalism in Household Words and All the Year Round examines the modern systematicity of the railway network, which by its nature as system, necessitated accidents on the lines. The essay incorporates theoretical readings of risk by Ulrich Beck and Paul Virilio into its critical assessment of Dickens’s railway journalism. Fundamentally, it aims to demonstrate that Dickens’s railway journalism illuminates the complexity of Victorian narratives of technological and bureaucratic industrial and transport systems by prioritizing the global dimensions of systematic accidents over the period’s tendencies to focus merely on local accidental events.     

新型城镇化过程中农民集中居住研究进展

通过引导农民集中居住,建设小城镇和农村新社区是实现新型城镇化的重要路径之一。因此,农民集中居住成为各地政府重要的政策工具,并逐渐成为理论研究的焦点。在归纳中国农民集中居住研究文献成果分布基础上,从基本概念出发,从农民集中居住发生机制、运行机制、过程中出现的问题、效应评价四方面对研究进展述评。从研究成果、内容和方法三个角度指出目前研究的不足。总结出后续研究的三个迫切方向是农民集中居住需求研究、政府角色定位和社区治理机制创新问题研究、农民集中居住综合效应评价研究。并提出了相应的概念性研究框架。     

Conservation,extraction and social contracts at a violent frontier: Evidence from eastern DRC’s Itombwe Nature Reserve

Conservation efforts must develop strategies to perform at violent frontiers where environmental values, mineral extraction and conflict intersect. Using war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Itombwe Nature Reserve as an illustrative example, this article explores how community conservation is implemented and received at a violent frontier. Taking inspiration from an emerging body of literature which portrays conservation as a form of ‘social contract’ in regions where the nation state is weak or absent, it explores some of the expectations and obligations that surround community conservation initiatives. It draws the conclusion that conservation social contracts are likely to produce unintended consequences when left unfulfilled or broken. Conservation actors perceived to be breaking the terms of (implicit) social contracts can inadvertently encourage local communities to embrace alternative contracts with other actors seeking to extract value from the resources located in frontiers, such as industrial mining companies.     

Global social justice at the WTO? The role of NGOs in constructing global social contracts

Over the past decade, international non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) have been contesting the neo‐liberal economic order in international politics by campaigning for normative conditions to bring about what Richard Falk calls ‘humane governance’. However, the degree to which NGOs have contributed to the formation of global social contracts remains controversial. While NGO activists and various scholars advocate the establishment of such contracts, empirical testing of this normative argument is underdeveloped. Drawing upon this lack of empirical support, critics dismiss the global social contract concept and question the roles played by NGOs in international politics. This article addresses the controversy through a review, refinement and application of global social contract theory and an empirical study of two prominent international NGO campaigns directed at the World Trade Organization (WTO), an institution that represents a ‘hard test case’. It explores the ways in which NGOs and their networks are challenging the neo‐liberal basis of WTO agreements and contributing to the emergence of global social contracts. The article concludes that in some circumstances, NGOs have the capacity to inject social justice into international economic contracts and there is some basis for optimism regarding the formation of global social contracts involving NGOs, nation‐states and international organizations.     

Conversion,Autobiography and Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696)

This article juxtaposes two of Richard Baxter’s autobiographical accounts written 5 years apart but along very different lines. In the final chapter of A Holy Commonwealth (1659), Baxter confidently asserted the rightness of Parliament’s cause in the civil wars; for Baxter, it is a strikingly optimistic, triumphalist and providentialist account. In the Reliquiae Baxterianae, which he began to write in 1664, he explicitly distanced himself from any such claims about the wars and he wrote in a more chastened fashion. The former account, and the kind of autobiography it intimates, brings Baxter’s purposes in writing the Reliquiae more clearly into focus. The article advances on recent scholarship by Kathleen Lynch while investigating the nature of autobiography. The iterations of Baxter’s autobiography demonstrate that such accounts are first a story that the author tells himself or herself. If events negate that story, it is never told.     

Dreaming of a Golden Bengal: Discontinuities of Place and Identity in South Asia

This article analyses five different representations of the homeland category “Bengal”. The region of Bengal was partitioned twice in the twentieth century and imagined in a multitude of forms at different historical moments. The article describes the conditions that allowed different territories and peoples to crystallise as “Bengal” and “the Bengalis”, and investigates why some versions of the Bengali homeland proved durable as others faded away. Rather than asking who is the real Bengali and where is the real Bengal, it investigates how particular identity categories become popularly practised and why particular images of the homeland come to be perceived as true, legitimate and authentic. It concludes that homeland categories are never fixed and finalised, but are rather always in a process of becoming, and are contested, reimagined and redefined as socio-political contexts change.     

中国历史上的“契约”

很早以来,中国人就通过订立契约来处理各种社会经济关系,契约在人们的日常生活中扮演着重要的角色。文章分析了中国古代契约形制与语言的变化,说明了这种变化的社会背景;讨论了契约的发现与契约的研究史,提出利用古文书学的方法,对于契约展开长时段、跨地域的比较研究,将会是今后中国古代契约研究的方向。