A Postcolonial Critique of Community Energy: Searching for Community as Solidarity in India and Scotland

Community renewable energy (CRE) represents a growing empirical and academic turn towards community‐based sustainability and climate change interventions. This paper brings together postcolonial theory and CRE for the first time to outline fundamental tensions in the conceptualisation and application of the idea of community. The understanding of community within the CRE discourse is largely: (1) location‐based; and/or (2) a community of choice that is consciously opted into. Driven by postcolonial theory, this paper counterpoises both as a form of community as contract against an idea of community as solidarity. Its central thesis is that actually existing community, contrary to how the bulk of CRE literature commonly understands it, is a combination of bonds of solidarity and emergent purposes. The paper conceptualises community as fluid bonds of solidarity that align and realign differently around different purposes.     

Where the violence happened matters. Geopolitical framing and assessments of collective responsibility for historical violence.

Mass violence always takes place in a particular geopolitical context, and how that context is understood influences perceptions of collective responsibility. As international borders shift, often in the wake of war, events that occurred within one geopolitical entity can be understood has having taken place in another. The influence of such geopolitical framing on judgments of collective responsibility remains understudied. Two studies examine how geopolitical frames lead to shifting assessments of collective responsibility for historical mass violence. By depicting historical violence within a particular geopolitical entity (e.g., a country), that entity was perceived as being more responsible for the violence. The studies are set within the contexts of German-occupied Poland and the British occupation of the Indian subcontinent. The ramifications of these findings are discussed for the teaching of history, the commemoration of historical victimhood, and for our understanding of assessments of collective responsibility and geopolitical framing more broadly.     

The Making of an ‘All Weather Friendship’ Pakistan,China and the History of a Border Agreement: 1949–1963

China and Pakistan share what is widely known as an ‘all weather friendship’. The historical roots of this friendship can be traced to 1963, when the two countries entered into a border agreement that divided territory in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Since then, China has provided missile and nuclear technology to Pakistan. It has limited the potential for escalation in the time of war between India and Pakistan and is the largest economic investor in Pakistan. The benefits of this friendship for Pakistan are clear. Yet, there is little detail on what led to the making of the ‘all weather friendship’. This article provides a detailed account of Sino–Pakistani relations between 1949 and 1963. It argues that whilst the 1963 agreement led to a turning point, the Pakistani establishment – military and civilian – sought to engage China since 1949. They did so to create strategic options for themselves in the event that the US and the UK – Pakistan's main allies following independence – limited or worse, ended their support for Pakistan in its troubled relations with India. This article is based on primary sources available in the US, Britain, as well as recently declassified and hitherto unused papers in India.     

A postcolonial framing of Indian commercial surrogacy: issues,representations, and orientalisms

Although only legalised in 2002, Indian commercial gestational surrogacy (CGS) is an industry worth an estimated 2.3 billion USD to India at its height. Not only has this contentious topic been researched extensively from a spectrum of academic angles, representations of Indian CGS abound in both the Indian and Western popular media (novels, documentaries, films, etc.), and increasingly online, particularly in CGS websites, advertisements, and (personal) blogs. Popular media representations as well as commercial ones can often be inclined towards the sentimental and even sanctimonious, but are immensely influential in shaping public perception. This article seeks to position the discourse and representation of transnational Indian CGS more explicitly within the postcolonial framework. Thus, it addresses a theoretical gap in explicitly connecting the problematic issues of power and ethics in CGS within the paradigms of postcolonial studies, drawing also on gender and feminist frameworks. The neo-colonisation of the body has been already considered to some extent – mostly in neo-liberalist contexts – but the industry’s systemically orientalistic set up and structure has been surprisingly little mentioned, particularly where transnational surrogacy is involved, with little framing of the imperialistic hangovers and undertones dogging these particular sets of international contracts. This article maps the orientalisms (and sometimes re-orientalisms) at play in this already fraught and contentious context, positioning transnational surrogacy as another instance of imperialism, as yet another form of cultural colonisation, othering, subalternising, and peripheralising working-class Indian surrogate women in the twenty-first century.     

A New View of the ‘Edesö Wreck’: identifying the Swedish naval vessel Bodekull,built 1659–1661 and sunk 1678 from written sources

This article complements the archaeological account of the so‐called ‘Edesö Wreck’ with archival research that has led to its identification. In 1659 the Swedish King Karl X Gustav ordered a number of vessels for transport of horses and soldiers while at war with Denmark. The king died just a few months later, the war with Denmark was aborted, and the unfinished vessels were rebuilt to serve other purposes. One of these was Bodekull, built under English master shipwright Thomas Day between 1659 and 1661. In October 1678 Bodekull sank in the Stockholm archipelago. Alterations made during construction mentioned in written sources have been noted on the wreck and strengthen the argument for the identification.     

The Emergence of a Story Space

For centuries, the Club War, a popular uprising on Finnish territory in the 1590s, constituted a minor side story in Swedish royal historiography. After the Napoleonic Wars, it was quickly appropriated as one of the most canonical historical events in the emerging Finnish national history. This article argues that, in order to understand the role of the Club War in early 19th-century Finnish historical culture, it is necessary to trace its interpretive tradition backwards in time, across established borders of national historiographies, in a thematic, transtemporal, and comparative framework. The paper will discuss eight pieces of Swedish and Finnish history writing from 1620 to 1860, focusing on the storylines, attributes attached to the protagonists, and historical agency allocated to different social groups against a backdrop of sources available within each context of writing, in order to pinpoint and analyse moments when the story space of the event altered. The article will demonstrate that textual traditions of regions that formerly belonged to multi-ethnic or conglomerate states provide particularly interesting material for transtemporal historiography. Through this case study, the article also argues that Swedish and Finnish historiography of the early 19th century should be studied as one, entangled, textual culture.     

An Archaeological Study of a Streetcar Suburb: The East Main Streetcar Barns and Hayward-Hobbie Subdivisions,City of Rochester,New York

ABSTRACT

In order to appreciate the social dimensions of the industrial past, any research examining how working people both laboured and lived must recognise that sites of production and distribution may share a close relationship with the household, a relationship that will influence consumption and settlement patterns. Using artefactual and documentary evidence, this paper examines the initiation and growth of the Beechwood neighbourhood, a former streetcar suburb, located in the eastern section of the City of Rochester in western New York State. Streetcar suburbs in cities throughout the United States have received attention from geographers and urban historians for some time. This paper builds on previous studies by considering how transportation infrastructure — here, a maintenance facility and railyard for repairing inter-urban and intra-urban trolley cars — influenced the demographic and material patterns in one section of the neighbourhood in the first decades of the 20th century.     

北大藏秦水陆里程简“阳”县考辨

北京大学入藏的秦代水陆里程简册中记载秦代有"阳"县存在,关于这一新出现的秦县,前辈学者认为可能是位于今河南省方城县的秦汉"阳城"。然而,从简册中记载的"阳"县下属各乡到其他地区的距离来看,"阳县"不太可能在今方城附近,而更有可能是位于先秦"唐"国故地的"唐"县。其他出土材料所见的"唐"县一般写作"阳",清华简《系年》中还有楚国曾灭"唐(阳)"置县的明确记载。秦代的阳县应该就是继承了楚灭唐国之后所设的阳县。     

Atomic structures: the architecture of nuclear nationalism in India and Pakistan

Abstract

A half-century after their completion, India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) stand out as unchallenged architectural advertisements for ‘nuclear nationalism’. Elsewhere, Atoms for Peace reactors made no pretence to architectural refinement. In the right hands, however, ‘Cold War Modern’ could express the hard power of the nuclear age. For India and Pakistan, these nuclear laboratory complexes became the public faces of the peaceful atom that held out the promise, and masked the peril, of the atomic age at home and abroad, and deliberately deflected attention away from clandestine nuclear weapons programmes. BARC and PINSTECH, envisioned as cornerstones for self-confident and self-reliant programmes of nuclear physics, embodied the paradox of postcolonial science, necessarily borrowing from the West but determined to break the cycle of dependency, in defiance of Western expectations.     

Technospatial imaginaries: Masud Rana and the vernacularization of popular Cold War geopolitics in East Pakistan, 1966–1971

Abstract

The cold war in East Pakistan was intimately connected with nationalism and nation-building. One of the central aspects of such nation-building was the articulation of a new sense of national territoriality. Technology was central to these attempts to radically reimagine space. This is what I call technospatiality. Material, political and symbolic resources of the cold war were mobilized in the production of these new technospatialities. Popular cold war geopolitics engendered in cultural productions such as the James Bond films were creatively vernacularized to produce new, nationally useful technospatial imaginaries. In this article I look at how Kazi Anwar Hussain’s hugely successful spy-thrillers articulated this new technospatial imaginaries by drawing upon and reworking contemporary technopolitical objects, projects and anxieties.