Dystopian space in colonial representations and interventions: Sierra Leone as 'the white man's grave'

This paper explores the power of dystopian imaginations. It does so by examining the form and function of dystopias in colonial contexts, both in general and through one particularly salient and significant colonial dystopia, which was known widely in imperial England as 'the white man's grave'. A detailed analysis of the form and function of dystopian accounts of Sierra Leone, with particular attention to Richard Burton's negative appraisal of the colony, illuminates a particular form of geographical colonial discourse, and clarifies some of the power relations more generally associated with dystopian representations and interventions.     

Negotiating Colonial Violence: Spaces of Precarisation in Palestine

This paper examines the ways in which colonial violence is transformed and spatialised into negotiated precarities at the occupied Palestine. The notion of “negotiated precarity” is developed herein, to refer to two aspects in particular. First, to spatial compartmentalisation, which shows how the settler colonial power operates by creating precarious administrative zones, where the life of the colonised becomes prone to several flexible, negotiated uses of power. Second, negotiated precarity is used to refer to the conduct of the colonised that counters, transforms, redirects, cancels or hampers the colonial spatialisations of power. By focusing on the “negotiated precarities” in a singular West Bank village, I exemplify how the colonial governing is entwined with spatial compartments that enable several informal, indirect and ad hoc techniques of colonial violence, but also how the colonial governing is constantly mobilised, negotiated, countered and redirected in/through the everyday Palestinian spaces.     

Land reform in South Africa and the colonial present

This paper develops Derek Gregory's concept of the ‘colonial present’ by demonstrating how the colonial present in rural South Africa in general and around land reform in particular has conditioned land reform outcomes. My development of the concept departs from Gregory's in two key respects. I argue first that, by viewing it in relation to the geopolitics of capitalism, it can be applied to places beyond the immediate influence of US military power; and, second, that social forces which might begin to undermine the colonial present should be examined. My empirical materials draw upon primary research on the emergence of government-sponsored partnerships between restitution beneficiaries and agribusinesses in northern Limpopo. I use the materials to argue that partnerships have emerged given white farmers’ near-monopoly on skills and the persistent power of traditional leaders, two features of South Africa's colonial past whose importance today is suggestive of a colonial present.     

Incarceration,classification and control: Administrative detention in settler colonial Australia

Administrative detention, a form of non-judicial incarceration, was a powerful tool of settler colonialism. Administrative detention enables governments to incarcerate whole categories of people, often indefinitely and under unregulated conditions, to manage perceived threats to national identity, integrity, or security. In Australia, various forms of administrative detention have been implemented almost continuously since British settlement. By treating different forms of administrative detention as variations of the same category of governmental power, this article depicts this form of incarceration as fundamental to the creation and character of settler colonial societies. The article develops a history of Australian administrative detention by identifying the striking similarities between three historical forms – Aboriginal reserves, quarantine stations, and enemy alien internment camps – and immigration detention in the present day. Administrative detention has been used to establish order and hierarchy in the settler colonial state by classifying populations into subgroups, and has contributed to the character of its culture: in particular, the precarious sense of belonging afforded to some categories of non-citizen, and the primacy of executive power in controlling these categories. The article offers an endogenous explanation for the entrenchment of immigration detention policy, despite its flaws and harms.     

Distorted Narratives: Morocco,Spain, and the Colonial Stratigraphy of Cultural Heritage

International cultural development projects entail a neoliberal agenda that frequently echoes colonial ideologies and discourses. Using the case study of Chaouen, a northern city in Morocco, I argue in this paper that former colonies and aid-receiving countries usually overlap, and serve the former metropolises to continue controlling the former colony’s human and economic resources. I discuss how the former colonial power, in this case Spain, regulates and promotes a particular heritage discourse that has conveniently been depoliticised. I further contend that in line with previous colonial narratives, Spain has silenced the painful history of struggle and resilience of the inhabitants of Chaouen.     

A landscape of powers in Highland Papua,C. 1899-1918

The article proposes that anthropologists and historians attend to a 'landscape of powers' to understand the ways colonial and mission projects become actualised in on-going social relations. An expanding body of scholarship for the Melanesian region has focused on the way missionaries and colonial agents, as much as the diverse Melanesian peoples, attain power through rendering persons and places in specific forms. This is documented here for Fuyuge-speakers relations with colonial and mission projects during their early phase. Although the forms and consequences of power among each--Fuyuge, colonial, mission--is different, attention is devoted to the resultant and emerging patterns of these long-standing interactions and interventions. In particular, the article maintains that when such projects become locally actualised a landscape of powers is established. A landscape of powers is the multiply constituted arrangement of persons and places in an historical and ethnographically delineated context.     

Village and community in early colonial New England

The long-standing correlation between community function and nucleated settlement form in early colonial New England is mistaken. Puritan communities were established, but new communities—often called villages in colonial records—were developed and survived quite well regardless of settlement form. As in England at the time, village meant community and community was a social web. Village status in New England provided a community with land and thus enabled the community to undertake settlement. But the social web that comprised community did not require nucleated settlement, and the dispersed settlement form that many colonists had known in England dominated the village landscape of early colonial New England.     

Introduction: Biographies Between Spheres of Empire

ABSTRACT

Biographical research offers a promising approach to the study of empire, imperialism and colonialism. The careers and life stories of individuals and generations show particularly clearly the disruptions and constraints, but also the new possibilities and mobilities, that were created by colonial rule. This special issue focuses on practices and experiences of boundary crossing in imperial and colonial history. It explores how ‘ordinary’ individuals and groups navigated between the different imperial spaces and spheres into which they were categorised according to the ideologies and regulations of the well-ordered colonial world. Africa offers particularly interesting cases for studying these issues because, first, it was a field of particularly rigid colonial distinctions and, second, different colonial empires overlapped and competed there with particular intensity. This introduction outlines briefly the relevance of biographical research for new approaches in imperial, colonial and African history, and highlights the major themes of the five articles comprising this special issue. It is argued that these new biographical approaches tell us much not only about life in Africa on the eve of and under colonial rule, but also more generally about both the power and the permeability of imperial domination and of colonial categories.     

“Refusing to be a victim,refusing to be an enemy”. Form-of-life as resistance in the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism

This paper focuses on practices of non-violent resistance as they are played out in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the Israeli settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank. By looking at the resistance of expanding settlements, demolition and land confiscation orders, and livelihood destruction in two Palestinian sites, the paper shows how Israeli settler colonial apparatuses, and the variety of techniques and practices of erasure they mobilize, can be fruitfully studied through site-specific ways of Palestinian resistance. In order to do so, the paper turns to discuss a peculiar form of non-violent resistance grounded in what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘destituent power’. It shows how the acts of destituent resistance in the two sites under study function by playing with the apparatuses of control in creative but non-violent ways; namely, by using the potentialities of that form-of-life that the settler colonial apparatuses try to cancel, overrule, control, weaken, criminalize, and erase. The idea of ‘destituent play’ is hence elaborated, and special attention paid to its ability to slow down and hamper the repressive functions of the settler colonial apparatuses through the creative use of the potentialities of Palestinian everyday life.     

The construction and destruction of a colonial landscape: monuments to British monarchs in Dublin before and after independence

Where cities evolve in contentious political circumstances and make the transition from a colonial to a post-colonial state, aspects of the urban landscape such as public monuments, street nomenclature, buildings, city plans and urban design initiatives take on particular significance. Collectively they demonstrate the fact that the city is the product of a struggle among conflicting interest groups in search of dominion over an environment. As one group seeks dominance over the other the urban landscape often becomes the canvas upon which this power struggle finds expression. Public statues in particular serve as an important source for unravelling the geographies of broader political and cultural shifts. These issues are explored here with reference to Dublin City and the monuments erected to royal monarchs before the achievement of political independence in 1922, namely Kings William I (1701), George I (1722), George II (1758) and Queen Victoria (1908). The fate of such monuments in post-colonial Dublin and the ways in which the fledgling state and particular groups within it sought to express their new found power through both the official and oftentimes wilful destruction of these royal statues is then examined. The paper illuminates the power of public monuments as symbolic sites of meaning and explores their role in the construction of a landscape of colonial power. It also demonstrates how monuments become sites of protest, as symbolic in their removal as in their erection.     

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.     

Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies

Taking into account that ethnic cleansing not only undoes the legal and spatial formations within a given territory but also is a productive force aimed at securing and normalizing a new political order within a contested territory, we examine its impact on settler colonial geographies. We show that the relative completeness or incompleteness of ethnic cleansing helps shape the specific configuration of two intricately tied sites of social management – spatial reproduction and legal governance – within settler colonial regimes. We claim that complete ethnic cleansing produces a ‘refined’ form of settler colonialism resembling the colonial geographies of North America and Australia and is more readily normalized, while incomplete ethnic cleansing produces an ‘intermediate’ form of settler colonialism similar to the colonial regime in Rhodesia before the settlers lost power and is impossible to normalize due to a series of contradictions stemming from the presence of the ‘indigenous other’. To uncover this less acknowledged feature of ethnic cleansing we compare two territories that were colonized by Israel during the 1967 War: the Syrian Golan Heights and the Palestinian West Bank.     

Colonial Institutions: Uses,Subversions, and Material Afterlives

Archaeologically based explorations of colonialism or institutions are common case-studies in global historical archaeology, but the “colonial institution”—the role of institutions as operatives of colonialism—has often been neglected. In this thematic edition we argue that in order to fully understand the interconnected, global world one must explicitly dissect the colonial institution as an entwined, dual manifestation that is central to understanding both power and power relations in the modern world. Following Ann Laura Stoler, we have selected case studies from the Australia, Europe, UK and the USA which reveal that the study of colonial institutions should not be limited to the functional life of these institutions—or solely those that take the form of monumental architecture—but should include the long shadow of “imperial debris” (Stoler 2008) and immaterial institutions.     

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

Kopytoff's model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre‐colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouessè). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre‐colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post‐colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out‐ and in‐migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non‐state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post‐colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state‐led forms of ‘villagization’.     

This is Not an Answer to the Question “Who is Indigenous?”

‘Indigenous’ is a colonial category, and it is always related to particular colonial configurations of diversity and in relationship to particular colonial/national states. In this paper, the many historical configurations in which the terms ‘Indian’ and ‘Indigenous’ have figured are traced, including the Spanish colonial state and the Argentine state. The ways in which these successive systems of categorization are juxtaposed is described. Finally, post-Western understandings of what it could mean ‘to be Indigenous’ are explored.     

The Influence of ‘Benthamite’ Philosophies on British Colonial Policy on New Zealand in the Era of the Treaty of Waitangi

Most of the recent historiography on the British presence in the South Pacific in the first half of the nineteenth century rightly reflects the dichotomy of private commercial enthusiasm for imperial expansion set against a backdrop of official hesitance and vacillation over any possible enlargement of the empire—a stance manifested in Britain's stance on New Zealand prior to 1840. However, such analyses, which emphasise the reactive, unplanned and incremental extension of British interests and involvement in New Zealand, tend to bypass consideration of the particular philosophical influences that helped to shape British colonial policy during this time. This article surveys those social philosophies formulated by Jeremy Bentham—and advanced by his followers—which prescribed a distinct form of colonial intervention and government. It focuses specifically on Bentham's utilitarianism, and his notions of colonial trusteeship, and explores how these ideas insinuated their way into British colonial policy relating to New Zealand in the 1830s, culminating in the Treaty of Waitangi (1840).     

Making Territory Visible: The Revenue Surveys of Colonial South Asia

Once the British became a colonial power in south Asia in the eighteenth century, they had to struggle to determine the internal divisions and boundaries of the territories under their control. In north India, these units had been organized around various pre‐colonial administrative divisions, such as parganas, which had never been mapped. With the introduction of detailed revenue (cadastral) surveys in the early nineteenth century, the British were able to map the parganas and other administrative units, thereby creating a durable record of property holdings. In the nineteenth century, they also allowed the colonial administrators to reorganize the old divisions into a well‐defined and more coherent pattern that endured to form the geographical template of the modern state.     

Proceeding through Colonial Past-Presents in Fieldwork: Methodological Lessons on Accountability,Refusal, and Autonomy

This article examines how the colonial past manifests within the present through an analysis of ethnographic and archival fieldwork. Drawing on feminist geographic scholarship for decolonising knowledge production, I argue that geographers have a responsibility to the people they work with and the places where they conduct research to know what came before. Through an analysis of how the colonial past surfaced in everyday and ongoing experiences of negotiating consent during fieldwork, I show how reflecting on the colonial past-present offers insights into the colonial power geometries of knowledge production. Proceeding through the colonial past-present offers useful lessons on being accountable to people and lands, recognising refusal, and making autonomy. While this article is focused on my experiences as a white settler scholar from the USA who did research in a Mixe community in Oaxaca, Mexico, proceeding through colonial past-presents offers lessons to any and all geographers who struggle to unsettle the persistent colonial power geometries of knowledge production.     

The Ultimate "Other": Post-Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt's Ecological Relationship with Nature

This article is a meditation on the overlaps between environmentalism, post‐colonial theory, and the practice of history. It takes as a case study the writings of the explorer‐scientist‐abolitionist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the founder of a humane, socially conscious ecology. The post‐colonial critique has provided a necessary corrective to the global environmental movement, by focusing it on enduring colonialist power dynamics, but at the same time it has crippled the field of environmental history, by dooming us to a model of the past in which all Euro‐American elites, devoid of personal agency, are always already in an exploitative relationship with the people and natural resources of the developing world. A close reading of Humboldt's work, however, suggests that it could provide the basis for a healthy post‐colonial environmentalism, if only post‐colonial critics were willing to see beyond Humboldt's complicity in colonial structures. In particular, this article attempts to rehabilitate Humboldt's reputation in the face of Mary Louise Pratt's canonical post‐colonial study, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Humboldt's efforts to inspire communion with Nature while simultaneously recognizing Nature's “otherness” can be seen as radical both in his day and in ours. In addition his analysis of the link between the exploitation of natural resources and the exploitation of certain social groups anticipates the global environmental justice movement.     

Colonialism,Dining, and Changing Strategies of Power: the Example of Iron Age and Roman Mediterranean France at Lattara (ca 150 bc–ad 50)

The establishment of colonial rule by one society over another, both in ancient and modern examples, often has dramatic consequences for the establishment and maintenance of political relationships within the context of everyday life in colonial society. In this article, I examine the ways in which the performative acts of dining can play an integral role in this reconstruction of political relationships that is so often implicit in colonial encounters and state expansion. In particular, I suggest that an analysis of the ceramic evidence of vessels used in dining and the frequency of specific forms in the overall assemblages can help to reveal the ways in which the politics of commensality play an active role in transforming political relationships and strategies of power in colonial societies. This article uses the example of ancient Mediterranean France after the Roman conquest in the late second century bc at the Celtic-speaking settlement of Lattara (modern Lattes). I argue that by the end of the first century bc, coinciding with a time period when the political structure of the region was being significantly reorganized, there was a notable change in dining practices, with a move away from a more communal ethos in dining to one emphasizing the individual. These new practices served the strategic interests of individuals in local society at Lattara seeking to break with earlier political systems and integrate themselves into larger colonial society.