Heritage in Palestine: Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Discourse

This essay addresses the need to look into ‘postcolonial’/‘post-Oslo’ Palestine heritage discourses and practices to uncover commonalities and divergences. These practices and discourses, I claim, tell a story about hidden codes of subjectivity while revealing the setbacks of postcolonial heritage discourses in a ‘postcolonial era’. I show that the Palestinian ‘postcolonial’ heritage polices and preservation practices echo colonial discourses in terms of approach, legal framework and end results. My premise is built on a long engagement with governmental and non-governmental heritage organisations as well as the literature on the topic that shows heritage discourses and practices implicated within the specific narrative that they are destined to (re) produce. I claim that postcolonial approaches to the material culture, consciously and unconsciously, reproduce the colonial situation and while the impetus towards preservation itself is a symptom of postmodernity, it is still carried out in a modernist spirit. Throughout my analysis, I show that what spills out from the heritage discourses, as well as the unintended consequences of heritage practices are worth considering in any analytical approach of heritage discourses.     

Colonial Streets and Statues: Postcolonial Belgium in the Public Space

Belgium has a very one-sided way of dealing with its colonial past in its public space. The country has hundreds of street names and memorials for white colonials, but not a single tribute to a Congolese. There are at least fifteen monuments for King Leopold II, some of which are occasionally vandalized, but only one presents a plaque with background information. Only one other monument, for a missionary in Antwerp, has been contextualized with an interpretive panel. The demand of Congolese migrants to name a square in the Brussels borough Ixelles/Elsene after Lumumba, has yet to be satisfied after more than ten years.

This situation contrasts that of other former colonial metropoles and can be explained by several factors. Belgium has far fewer postcolonial migrants, who in other countries often have the loudest and most critical voice in the postcolonial debate. Moreover, the postcolonial fight in Belgium is waged with sensitive symbols: a king (Leopold II) and an assassinated prime minister (Lumumba). This makes the debate much more emotionally charged. Last but not least, Belgium has gone through a great identity crisis over the past ten years. Left-wing pundits, who are traditionally more critical of the colonial past, and mainstream opinion-makers have avoided sparking the postcolonial debate so as to not fuel Flemish nationalism.     

Imperial Identity in Colonial Minds: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931-50

This article examines how the League of Coloured Peoples, foundedin London in 1931 by the Jamaican Harold Moody, used its versionof a British identity to seek equal rights for Britons of colour.I argue that by invoking an imperial British identity that drewon widely accepted elements of Britishness, namely respectabilityand imperial pride, the League gained support from black colonialsand white English people in its fight for equality. This wastrue despite the fact that a major element of the League's conceptionof British identity, racial equality, challenged the dominantidea that ‘true’ Britons were, by definition, white.The article focuses on the workings of the organization's ideologyin the context of two news-making issues: the campaign to restoreBritish citizenship to ‘coloured’ seamen in Cardiffin 1936, and the parliamentary and judicial reaction to discriminationby London's Imperial Hotel against League member Learie Constantinein 1943. The story it tells indicates that British identitieswere claimed and manipulated not only by natives of the BritishIsles, but also by colonial peoples. It further suggests thatunder the conditions of empire colonial peoples could simultaneouslyidentify with the imperial power and their (potentially national)home colony.     

Spatializing Technoscience: The Anthropology of Science and Technology and the Making of National,Colonial, and Postcolonial Space and Place

Joseph G. Jorgensen and Marcello Truzzi, eds. Anthropology and American Life. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974. xi + 522 pp. Tables and bibliography. $6.95 (paper).     

Colonial Australia,the 1887 Colonial Conference,and the Struggle for Imperial Unity

ABSTRACT

For historians interested in the settler colonial world, one of Professor John Darwin’s most important interventions has been to argue for the reintegration of the dominions into the wider history of the British empire. In re-engaging with the history of Britain’s white settler colonies in North America, Australasia, and South Africa, Darwin’s work has sought to emphasize the place of the dominions in relation to the rise and fall of the British world system, as well as their value as vantage points from which to consider imperial and global history more generally. In this regard, Darwin’s systemic approach has encouraged a more dynamic conception of ‘British world’ history – one deeply embedded in a series of overlapping imperial, regional, and international contexts. This article focuses on a particular moment in imperial history where some of the internal dynamics of the late-Victorian British world system, and the changing place of the settler colonies within it, were brought into sharp relief: the 1887 Colonial Conference. It argues that we might look to the conference as a valuable window onto the impact of Anglo-Australian relations upon the wider struggle for imperial unity in the 1880s.     

Postcolonial border crossing

Through a postcolonial lens and based on in-depth interviews with British expatriates who moved to Hong Kong in the first decade after its handover, this paper highlights the contested role of borders in the everyday making and remaking of skilled migration. It draws on Paasi's (2003 Paasi, A. (2003). Boundaries in a globalizing world. In K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile, & N. Thrift (Eds.), Handbook of cultural geography. London: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781848608252.n33[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) definition of boundaries to denote that borders are not merely geographical lines but zones of mixing, blending and reconfiguring historically formed material connections, identities and power relations through which contemporary skilled mobility is constituted. The border crossing of skills in Hong Kong and elsewhere is a historically contingent phenomenon whose meaning derives not only from economic forces and social networking but also the accumulated history of the borders they cross. The notion of ‘postcolonial border crossing’ highlights the dis/continuity in skilled migration and integrates social, cultural and economic spheres into the same framework in interpreting skilled mobility.     

The Dutch Colonial House And the Colonial Revival

The Colonial Revival was a major movement in twentieth-century American domestic architecture. The Dutch Colonial house, one of many Revival styles, provides a useful index of Colonial Revival popularity, which was greatest between 1905 and 1940. This popularity was based upon a nostalgic idealization of the nation's colonial past, and was apparently tied to white Protestant dissatisfaction with urbanizing, industrializing America. The persistence of Colonial Revival styles in the landscape throughout this century and a recent resurgence in their popularity suggest that the idealization of colonial America continues to be an important feature of American popular culture and cultural geography.