‘Britishness’, Colonial Governance and Education: St Helenian Children in Colonial Natal in the 1870s

This article considers understandings of ‘Britishness’ in the Natal colony in the 1870s. Focusing on St Helenian children’s expulsion from ‘government’ schools that were ostensibly open to all racial groups, the article shows how competing definitions of race and ‘Britishness’ shaped the responses of colonial officials, settlers and the St Helenian community to the expulsion. The white settler population in Natal was concerned about St Helenian economic migrants’ inclusion in white, English society. In particular, the ambiguous racial status of St Helenians was seen as potentially harmful to white children. The focus on a group of recent incomers to the colony uncovers a process of racialisation unfolding in the context of migrations within the British Empire. The case highlights how movement and migration within the empire could bring these definitions of race and Britishness into conversation and conflict with each other.     

‘Martial Races’ and ‘Imperial Subjects’: Violence and Governance in Colonial India, 1857–1914

This essay explores the specificity of colonial violence in India. Although imperial and military historians are familiar with several instances of such violence—notably the rebellion in 1857 and the 1919 massacre at the Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar—there is a broader, and arguably more significant, history that has largely escaped attention. In contrast to metropolitan European states, where sovereignty derived, at least in principle, from a covenant between subjects and government, the sovereign power of the colonial state was always predicated on the violent subjugation of ‘the natives’. However, while violence was integral to colonialism, such violence was never a purely metropolitan agency: most of those recruited to serve in the colonial military were, themselves, Indian. Exploring the history of the imperial military in South Asia after 1857, the paper outlines the complex and rather ambiguous relationship between the colonial state and its ‘native armies’.

résumé ?Cet article se penche sur la spécificité de la violence coloniale. Malgré des exemples familiers—comme la grande révolte de 1857 en Inde ou le massacre de Jallianwalla Bagh à Amritsar en 1919—il y a une histoire plus large et plus importante qui a échappée à l'attention des historiens. Contrairement aux états européens ou la souveraineté dérivait en principe du moins d'un contrat social entre les acteurs sociaux, le pouvoir souverain de l'état colonial restait fondé sur la subjugation violente des indigènes.     

‘Symbolic reservoirs’ and inter-group relations: West African examples

A number of archaeologists have recently considered the possible functioning of shared systems of symbols and beliefs — sometimes called symbolic reservoirs — within and between more or less closely related West African societies. Elements from these systems are expressed in behaviour and in material culture to support and articulate group social strategies; they are therefore capable of structuring artefact variation on a large scale. This concept has obvious implications for our understanding of regional variation in archaeological assemblages. In this paper, I offer a critique of the concept of the symbolic reservoir; I believe that the metaphorical implications of the term reservoir are not useful, and that present conceptions are of an entity too bounded and too stable usefully to reflect the dynamics of social interaction within and (especially) between African societies. I then offer an alternative view of the spread of symbolic and stylistic elements between groups.

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Résumé Un certain nombre d'archéologues ont récemment envisagé la possibilité de systèmes communs de symboles et de croyances — parfois désignés par le terme réservoirs symboliques — au sein de sociétés d'Afrique occidentale entretenant entre elles des rapports plus ou moins étroits. Des éléments de ces systèmes s'expriment en termes de comportement et de culture matérielle et permettent de soutenir et d'articuler des stratégies sociales de groupes; ils peuvent donc structurer sur une grande échelle variation des objets façonnés. Ce concept a des conséquences évidentes par rapport à notre compréhension des variations régionales entre collections archéologiques. Dans cet article, je présente une critique du concept de réservoir symbolique; j'estime peu pertinentes les implications métaphoriques du terme réservoir et je pense que les conceptions actuelles représentent une entité trop bornée et trop stable pour pouvoir bien refléter la dynamique de l'interaction sociale au sein des sociétés africaines et (surtout) entre elles. Je présente ensuite un point de vue différent sur la propagation d'éléments symboliques et stylistiques parmi des groupes.

     

Feminist geographies in Greece: a personal trajectory between ‘local’ and ‘international’

Abstract

Feminist debates in the context of an active women's/feminist movement found their way into the Greek academy in the second half of the 1970s, initially in history. Urban studies and geography were ‘late-comers’ in these debates which took place in different disciplinary environments where geography courses were taught. The article presents a personal account in and through the development of feminist approaches in urban geography, drawing from my teaching and research experience since 1982 in a department of urban and regional planning. This experience has been accumulated as a hard exercise in navigating through the denial and reluctant consent of various levels of administration, students’ changing acceptance, some women’s valuable active support, in the university and beyond, and other colleagues’ opposition or indifference. In this process, recent and longer-term developments have contributed to form a (continuously negotiated and contested) space for feminism, for tolerance, diversity and difference, in which a ‘we’ has been tortuously formed which speaks across worlds, participates in a plurality of communities, communicates in more than one languages and in a plurality of voices between ‘local’ and ‘international’.     

‘Uncircumcised boys’ and ‘girl Spartans’: Youth,Gender and Generation in Colonial Insurgencies and Counterinsurgency,c. 1954–59

Both male and female youth were significant actors in anti-colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies due to the marginalisation of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses in two British colonies, Kenya and Cyprus, in 1954-59, providing a gendered and relational study of youth as cohort, as liberation generation, as life stage and as kinship position. It argues that a ‘gen[d]erational’ lens is necessary to properly understand how age and gender intersected to shape boys' and girls’ experiences of youth insurgency, and how colonial states punished and tried to ‘rehabilitate’ such rebellious youths. This article argues that colonial responses to youth in insurgency were implicitly shaped by colonial understandings of gender and generation as well as by race and ethnicity, but that counterinsurgency policies failed to effectively integrate gendered and generational perspectives sufficiently into either their security, peno-legal or welfare and developmental responses. The only successful ‘rehabilitation’ programmes focused on male youth, and combined colonial and local understandings of age and gender to provided pathways towards the forms of adulthood desired by youth, rather than just treating them as unthinking, impressionable or irrecoverable children.     

‘A book is a book,all the world over’: New Zealand and the Colonial Writing World 1890–1945

The idea that literary expatriation was a prevalent and often necessary phenomenon for early twentieth-century Antipodean writers is well established, as it is widely believed that New Zealand and Australia were places not conducive to the nurturing of literary talent. In order to succeed, writers were forced to leave for places with developed publishing infrastructure and sympathetic communities of like-minded people like London, choosing expatriation over failure or mediocrity at home. This study, which is based on an empirical investigation into the lives and publication records of New Zealand authors, questions this long-held assumption by emphasising the transnational elements involved in literary production. New Zealand writers were able to remain in New Zealand and still be successful because of the existence of the ‘colonial writing world'—a system of cultural diffusion, literary networks and personal interactions that gave writers access to all the cultural capital of Britain (and other hubs of empire) through the lines of communication established by colonial expansion. The opportunities provided by international connections have been largely overlooked or dismissed until very recently because of the persistent nationalist framework within which New Zealand literary history has been written.     

Buried in a Head: African and Asian Parallels to Aesop’s Fable

There is a strange story among the fables ascribed to Aesop. It was preserved by Aristophanes and tells about the lark, who was born before the creation of the earth and had to bury her dead father in her own head. This article investigates Indian, Arabic, and North and West African parallels to this story. The analysed texts share several specific details, and the motif ‘buried in a head’ lying at the base of them is found worldwide only in a few areas of Eurasia and Africa; so there is most likely a historical connection between the examples.     

‘Operation Legacy’: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide

The end of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century was accompanied by a large-scale rearrangement of sensitive colonial records worldwide. A great number of these records were destroyed and a sizeable portion sent to Britain to be kept secret. This article advances studies of this policy, eventually code-named ‘Operation Legacy’, by reading the ‘migrated archives’ that have been newly discovered and declassified in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 141 series. It asks where the policy was decided, for what reason and how it was carried out. Sources suggest that the policy was not planned in the Colonial Office in London and delivered to the colonies in a hierarchical fashion, but, rather, significant elements of the policy were developed in the colonial governments overseas in response to each local context. The general idea was to save Britain’s honour and to protect its collaborators. However, the limitations in terms of time and manpower often prevented the officers from putting sufficient thought into the actual screening of the documents. At the same time, some officers demonstrated a level of historical awareness regarding their actions. The episode reminds us that the official mind as it relates to decolonisation is to be understood not only by reference to the highest levels of strategic planning but also in terms of how it worked at the lower levels, in the colonial administrations on the ground.     

Salutary Lessons: Native Police and the ‘Civilising’ Role of Legalised Violence in Colonial Australia

Over much of the nineteenth century, recurring problems of covert and opportunistic conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples produced considerable debate across the British settler world about how frontier violence could be legally curbed. At the same time, the difficulty of imposing a rule of law on new frontiers was often seen by colonial states as justification for the imposition of order through force. Examining all the mainland Australian colonies from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, this paper asks how this contradictory dilemma played out through deployment of ‘native police’ and the ‘civilising’ role of legalised violence as a strategy for managing the settler frontier. In light of wider debate about a humanely administered empire, Australia’s first native police force established in New South Wales in 1837 was conceived as a measure that would assist in the conciliation and ‘amelioration’ of Aboriginal people. In the coming decades, other Australian colonies employed native police either as dedicated forces or as individual assistants attached to mounted police detachments. Over time, the capacity they held to impose extreme violence on Aboriginal populations in the service of protecting pastoral investments came to reflect an implicit acceptance that punitive measures were required to bring order to disorderly frontiers.

By tracing a gradual shift in the perceived role of native police from one of ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people to one of ‘civilising’ the settler state itself, this paper draws out some of the conditions under which state-sanctioned force became naturalised and legitimated. It concludes that, as an instrument of frontier management, native policing reflected an enduring problem for Australia’s colonial governments in reconciling a legal obligation to treat Aboriginal people as subjects of the crown with a perceived requirement to bring them under colonial authority through the ‘salutary lessons’ of legalised violence.     

‘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.     

Feminicide as ‘act’ and ‘process’: a geography of gendered violence in Oaxaca

Feminicide in Mexico is most notoriously associated with the serial deaths of women in and around Ciudad Juárez. A 2005 congressional investigation expanded, nonetheless, the geographical scope of feminicide, arguing that the phenomenon was present throughout the country. One location that was identified early on as also experiencing a high rate of feminicide was the state of Oaxaca, in the southern part of Mexico. Inscribed within this shifting geopolitical terrain, this article draws on an understanding of feminicide as both act and process in order to offer a critical portrayal of feminicide in Oaxaca. Beginning with a discussion of the profiles of feminicide in Oaxaca, the analysis moves out to explore the multifaceted processes that enable feminicide to occur. In so doing, we also explore how feminicide intertwines with other forms of social and political violence in Oaxaca. From an ethical-moral terrain, this article joins a broader movement in certain corners of feminist geography that is concerned with ‘making bodies count’ and the politics of witnessing acts of violence.     

Spatialising performance: masculinities and femininities in a ‘fragmented’ field

While there are many self-reflexive accounts of ‘field’ experience, few researchers have explicitly examined how different places within the field shape gender performances and subsequently the research process. This paper spatialises the notion of ‘performance’ by examining how male and female bodies in particular places of the field are perceived both by researchers and participants as markers of gender identity. The analysis is based on fieldwork in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi where the author and her research assistant conducted semi-structured interviews with the residents. The fieldwork highlighted how the embedded power structures in different places of the field created encounters between different gendered bodies and, in turn, how different relationships between researchers and participants shaped the field ‘experience’. I suggest that the ‘field’ should not be understood as a homogeneous terrain, but as a fragmented collection of places, each constructing multiple gender identities in research, and each telling its own research story.     

Modernisation without ‘banalisation’: Towards a new era in French African aid relations?

This article considers recent changes in France's assistance programme to black Africa. It looks at the historic logic underpinning France's aid policies and structures; examines the latest reforms; and attributes these to the election of a reformist socialist government, a favourable political climate, globalisation and the constraints of EMU. The main obstacle to reform is said to be President Chirac who remains attached to the old logic of French African relations. Ultimately, however, it is not the struggle between modernisers and traditionalists but pressures from France's African and European partners which will determine the future of French aid policy.     

‘Innovation is a dirty word’: contesting innovation in the creative industries

Innovation is a term that is used and defined in many different ways. This holds for innovation in general, but particularly for innovation in the creative industries. In cultural policy and in academic literature, the creative industries are often addressed in the relation to their innovative capacities, yet a shared conceptualisation of innovation in this sector is lacking. This paper seeks to develop a conceptualisation of innovation in the creative industries based on 43 interviews with creative workers about their views and practices. Results indicate that creative workers articulate numerous views on innovation, with three main approaches: innovation as something completely new, innovation as a contribution to society and innovation as a continuous recombination of new and existing elements, with the latter being most prevalent in the creative industries and considered a central (by-product of the) process of creative production that is highly contextual to specific localities and fields.     

‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain

This paper considers Oscar Wilde's ongoing interest in the image of a single brain cell as a souvenir of human autonomy in a world of matter. Taking a long view of Wilde's career that demonstrates the relevance to his literary work of his college interests in physiology and philosophy, this paper shows how Wilde's socialism can be explained by his uniquely aesthetic take on the brain. For many late Victorians brain science threatened both the autonomy of human action and the legitimacy of beauty because it had the potential to invalidate conscious experience, but writers whose work Wilde knew, like Ernst Haeckel, W.K. Clifford and John Tyndall, apply aesthetic vocabularies to their own discussions of cells. Their theories illuminate Wilde's representation of the cell as an aesthetic object. Wilde's art collaborates with science to reject action, as action is conventionally understood, without relinquishing beauty as his ultimate value. His discovery of beauty in matter that is beyond the pale of human experience, yet intimately and strangely constitutive of our experience, directs the senses to a new field of experience that values the molecular life the species holds in common, in which individuals and their actions matter less to the possibility of social change than does the necessity of pleasure.