Colonial Apparatus Research Articles

Deconstructive pedagogy and ideological demystification in post-colonial Pakistan

ABSTRACTWith post-colonial Pakistan inheriting the British colonial ideological and governmental apparatus, the English literature curriculum implemented at the university level in Pakistan carried the interpellatory baggage of its colonial past. Our interdisciplinary exploration focuses on using deconstructive pedagogy to demystify and subvert the ideological conditioning of Pakistani students that is done through the English literary syllabi taught at the Masters level in Pakistani universities. These pedagogical practices involve genealogical and deconstructive readings of selected English literary texts taught to students pursuing a Master of English degree at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. These practices involve an activation of deconstructive readings through class discussions to unveil the different hegemonic processes involved in the constitution of docile political subjects. They challenge any authoritative interpretation of canonical texts, creating new meanings by activating the play of trace and differénce in the re-readings of these texts within post-colonial Pakistan. The class discussions have been transcribed to show how the English literary texts introduced in the colonial era have been extracted out of a Western epistemological closure. In addition, their role in the constitution of colonial and post-colonial subjectivities has been discussed. These discussions raise questions regarding the opaque processes of self-constitution, yet do not aim at re-interpellating the students. They simply revisit the closure within which the students’ thoughts and subjectivities are confined, and open up the progression of thought processes so that the functionality of different viewpoints within different communities may be constantly re-visited to defy ideological colonization.

Beyond Edward Said: An Outlook on Postcolonialism and Middle Eastern Studies

At the forefront of critically examining the effects of colonization on the Middle East is Edward Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism (1978). In the broadest theoretical sense, Said’s work through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge, presented an epistemologico-methodological equation expressed most lucidly by Aimé Césaire, colonization=thingification. Said, arguing against that archaic historicized discourse, Orientalism, was simply postulating that colonialism and its systems of knowledges signified the colonized, in Anouar Abdel-Malek’s words, as customary, passive, non-participating and non-autonomous. Nearly four decades later, Said’s contribution has become tamed and domesticated to an extent that most heterodoxic critical endeavours in the field have become clichéd premeditated anti-Orientalist tirades. At best, these critiques are stuck at analysing the impact of power at the macro-level, polemically regurgitating jargons like “hegemony”, “misrepresentation” and “Otherness”. At worst, they have become dogmatic or ethnocentric, closing space for scholarly debate through insipid cultural relativism, pathological religiosity or pernicious Occidentalism. I argue there is a need to go beyond that old postcolonial epistemological equation through examining the follow on effects of thingification on the thingified subject’s Weltanschauung, cultural practices and more importantly, subjectivity. I aim to undertake this critical endeavour through theorizing what I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse (CRD). This discourse is an historicized, Eurocentric-Orientalist implicit programme of action and an analytical tool, which functions as a cognitive schema and a grammar of action that assists the colonial apparatus in surveillance, gauging, ranking and subjectifying Middle Eastern subjectivity and resistance according to imperial exigencies. Through tracking the matrix of Western statements, ideas and practices, I demonstrate that imperial enthusiasts in encountering Middle Eastern revolutions, from the Mahdi, Urabi, Zaghloul, Mossadegh, the PLO and the PKK to the ‘Arab Spring’, draw on a number of Counter-Revolutionary Discourse systems of thoughts, which I argue are responsible for re-interpellating Oriental subjectivity and resistance. In the process, I put forward a new post-Saidian equation that not only transcends that tried and tested scholarly narrative, but a formula much better suited for tracing the infinite and insidious effects of neocolonial power that aims to negate the negating act: Colonization=thingification + re-interpellation of subjectivity.

Otto Koenigsberger and Modernist Historiography

Otto Koenigsberger’s (1908–1999) work in India (1939–1951) complicates the idea that tropical architecture was a strain of European modernism that was dispersed to the colonial tropics along the imperial networks of the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s. Koenigsberger, a German émigré architect, arrived in India in 1939 in princely Mysore – a state under indirect British rule. As the state architect in Mysore (1939–1948), he designed numerous buildings – schools, hospitals, offices, police stations, palace extensions, pavilions, colleges, factories, and bus shelters. In 1951, he emigrated from India to London and, in 1954, established the department of tropical architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. His treatise on tropical architecture, Manual of Tropical Housing and Building (1974) offers a critique of modernisation, which originated in Koenigsberger’s failed and successful projects in India. Yet, until recently the majority of his architectural work in India was unknown. This paper discusses the absence of Koenigsberger’s architectural oeuvre in South Asian architectural histories and argues that uncovering his work in India offers a missing link between colonial and post-colonial architectural cultures, and global networks of tropical architecture. His career illuminates how multiple actors outside the colonial state apparatus – such as the Maharajah’s regime with their sovereign ideals and independent entrepreneurial clients – shaped his ideas of modernism.

Analytical perspectives on indigenous homosexualities: Considerations from a comparative study

This research is about Native homosexual activism in a comparative perspective between Brazil and the United States. The idea is to work as starting points with the queer theory, the coloniality of gender and two-spirit critiques in order to understand homosexuality as a Native critique of colonial apparatus (bureaucratic and missionary) normalizer, heterosexual, male, white and European. Several writings of two-spirit in the United States reflect a critique of queer studies in the sense that queer theorists share a Western, white and modern perspective. Thus, they could not fully understand the native sexualities as an attitude of opposition to the colonization process.

The Thingified Subject's Resistance in the Middle East

Colonization, I postulate, has a far more profound effect on the colonized than conceptualized in Aimé Césaire's postcolonial equation, colonization = thingification. Rather, here I put forward a new postcolonial equation for tracing the infinite and insidious effects of colonialism: Colonization = thingification + re-appropriation of subjectivity. I argue that Western imperial narratives and what Edward Said calls its ‘evaluative judgment’ and ‘implicit program of action’ also subjectify the thingified subject's Weltanschauung, cultural practices and more importantly, subjectivity. I present this equation through theorizing what I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse (CRD). This discourse is an historicized, Eurocentric-Orientalist implicit program of action and an analytical tool, which functions as a manual that assists the colonial apparatus in surveillance, gauging, ranking and subjectifying Middle Eastern subjectivity and resistance according to imperial exigencies. Through tracking the matrix of Western statements, ideas and practices, this genealogical exploration demonstrates that imperial enthusiasts, from Napoleon, Renan, Le Bon and Stoddard to Winston Churchill and David Petraeus, in encountering Middle Eastern revolutions—from the Mahdi, Urabi, Zaghloul, Mossadegh, the PLO and the PKK to the ‘Arab Spring’—draw on four Counter-Revolutionary Discourse systems of thought, which, I argue, are responsible for interpellating Oriental subjectivity and resistance, and which I denominate as: Recrudescence of Fanaticism, Progress Fetishism, Outsourcing of Agency, and the bipolar cognitive device Revolutionary Narcissism-Red Peril.

The scramble for the Waste Lands: Tracking colonial legacies, counterinsurgency and international investment through the lens of land laws in Burma/Myanmar

This article traces the revenue category and legal concept of the Waste Land in Burma/Myanmar from its original application by the British colonial apparatus in the nineteenth century, to its later use in tandem with Burma Army counterinsurgent tactics starting in the 1960s, and finally to the 2012 land laws and current issues in international investment. This adaptation of colonial ideas about territorialization in the context of an ongoing civil war offers a new angle for understanding the relationship between military tactics and the political economy of conflict and counterinsurgent strategies which crucially depended on giving local militias—both government and nongovernment—high degrees of autonomy. The recent government changes, including the more civilian representation in parliament and its shift to engage with Western economies, raise questions regarding the future of the military, as well as local autonomy and the rural peasantry's access to land. As increasing numbers of international investors are poised to enter the Myanmar market, this article will revisit notions of land use and appropriation, and finally the role of the army and its changing relationship with Waste Lands.

Contriving ‘laissez-faire’: Conceptualising the British colonial rule of Hong Kong

Hong Kong was under British colonial rule for half a century in the post-WW2 era of decolonisation. The question remains how this ‘success’ in colonial governance is related to the colony’s alleged laissez-faireism, which the neo-liberal economist Friedman highly praised. Contrary to what neo-liberals make us believe using the myth of small government, colonial political apparatus played an essential role in leading the Hong Kong Chinese into cutthroat competition by manipulating policy variables at their disposal. Scarcity was artificially created and competitions among Chinese themselves were intentionally yet subtly encouraged. The Chinese were thus diverted from direct ethnic confrontation with the British, which also succeeded in co-opting some of their wealthier groups into the colonial apparatus. The laissez-faire policy was thus contrived by the British colonial government in order to sustain its colonial rule. Using the example of space (land), this paper shows how the policy variables at disposal of the colonial government were manipulated to generate the system that might be called ‘contrived laissez-faireism’. Evidences that substantiate this hypothesis include the Kwng Tong industrial site development project and general regression analysis of Crown land disposal. The greater political autonomy of the Hong Kong British from London based on surplus budgets, as well as ethnic integration of the British ruling minority and subjugated Chinese majority, was achieved through this contrived laissez-faireism, which lead to a ‘stable’ colonial society until 1997.

Her Majesty’s Servants

Through an analysis of colonial and orientalist literature, this article will show how South Asian fauna, through the lenses of Colonial enterprise, came to epitomize a whole system of social relations which can be easily tri-partite: the ruler, the ruled and the unruly. The complex colonial apparatus of dominance and repression clearly surfaces in many of the texts produced by the literates working, living or simply travelling through the British Indian Empire. Fascination for the wildest creatures of the jungle or the domesticated flocks reflected and re-shaped discourses about Western dominance. Eventually it entered European culture and modified our perception of South Asia. As long as the boundaries between the human and the non-human remain thin and blurred, non-human animals were rapidly equated to the human subjects of the Empire. The imperialist discourse, a mythology in the making, was made up of a series of performative utterances used to conveniently describe and to shape the new world. A world to be subjugated, tamed and ruled upon by a self-appointed superior authority. The living landscape of South Asia cannot escape the literary cage of the Empire. Human and nonhuman indigenous animals, or even the hybrid system they form, are discussed like a vast, uncharted and uncanny new territory to conquest with sword and pen alike. The article eventually argues that the colonialism of the mind exerted by the British Empire did not spare non-human animals and such perdurable effects still linger and affect uncritical policies of exploitation.

"Moral Influence" in Asia: Political Practice and Electoral Corruption in the Spanish Philippines

Proceeding from a microhistory of local elections at the end of the nineteenth century in one municipality, this article traces the mechanisms of representation and exercise of local power in the Spanish Philippines. Within the colonial apparatus the municipal sphere was one of the few areas of tangible power for the principalia (indigenous elites). The local elites, who were selected by colonial authorities based on political, economic, and religious criteria, played an important role in the fealties and resistances in the colony. This article examines the significance of the Maura Law, or the electoral reforms of 1893, and the obstacles encountered in the eradication of electoral abuse—“moral influence”—that colonial authorities, through action or inaction, had promoted over the years. Keywords: municipal elections • reformS • local power • native elite • Spanish colonialism

Ambivalent Islam: the identity construction of Muslims under Portuguese colonial rule

This article wishes to contribute to the study of the historical processes that have been spotting Muslim populations as favourite targets for political analysis and governance. Focusing on the Portuguese archives, civil as well as military, the article tries to uncover the most conspicuous identity representations (mainly negative or ambivalent) that members of Portuguese colonial apparatus built around Muslim communities living in African colonies, particularly in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The paper shows how these culturally and politically constructed images were related to the more general strategies by which Portuguese imagined their own national identity, both as ‘European’ and as ‘coloniser’ or ‘imperial people’. The basic assumption of this article is that policies enforced in a context of inter-ethnic and religious competition are better understood when linked to the identity strategies inherent to them. These are conceived as strategic constructions aimed at the preservation, protection and imaginary expansion of the subject, who looks for groups to be included in and out-groups to reject, exclude, aggress or eliminate. The author argues that most of the inter-ethnic relationships and conflicts, as well as the very experience of ethnicity, are born from this identity matrix.

Global Indian Diasporas: Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Global Indian Diasporas: Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory Shefali Chandra Global Indian Diasporas: Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory. Edited by Gijsbert Oonk. International Institute for Asian Studies Publications Series. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. 296 pp. $59.95 (paper). The past few years have seen an explosion in Indian diaspora studies. Often extending the colonial history of British India into wider, transregional arenas, historical and sociological works on the Indian diaspora have successfully tracked the administrative and military reach of the colonial apparatus, the reproduction of "culture" amid difference, and the emergence of new circuits of economic and cultural production.1 Tracing the histories of the twenty million people of [End Page 177] South Asian origin living outside the subcontinent, these works have invariably stressed the search for a common identity, the reproduction of culture, and the production of an attachment to "India," all of which are considered essential for naming the "Indian diaspora." Undoubtedly contributing much needed evidence on a wider world of social interaction, dislodging binaries of metropole /periphery, and tracking the continuity between colonial and postcolonial India and South Asia in the global twentieth century, the field of India diaspora studies has largely reflected, and deepened, an affirmative identification with Indian cultural and economic power. The need for critical approaches to the Indian diaspora is definitely upon us. In this wide ranging and expansive study, edited by Gijsbert Oonk, eleven authors set out to examine the very portability of the diaspora concept for India. Simultaneously providing an insight into methodological and institutional differences, and very importantly naming the diverging realities between "India" and "South Asia," the book takes a deep look at the "quite a few overseas Indians who were not interested in re-connecting with the homeland" (p. 1). Very seriously probing the "limits of the diaspora concept, rather than its possibilities and range" this collection of essays highlights new historical material and new historical actors, and in the process opens the door on new methods for world history (p. 4). The authors provide complex accounts of a range of meaningful counter-identifications with "India," whether as a reaction against the Indian government's exclusion of Muslim Indians, the immigration patterns of Indian Africans after expulsion from Uganda, or the cultural identifications of twice migrants such as Hindustanis in the Netherlands. The range of trajectories followed in this collection builds on four broad patterns of movement: first, traders in search of trade and business (these were often temporary or circular migrations); second, Indian indentured labor, a forced migration; and third, the movement from the subcontinent after the Second World War (these were the cross-border forced migrations of Partition, or after 1970, the movement of highly educated Indian professionals who left for the "dollar and pound" economies or to the Middle East). Within this lies the fourth pattern: the twice migrants such as those from East Africa [End Page 178] expelled by one regime and who, instead of being drawn "back" to the subcontinent, settled instead in the United Kingdom and Canada. That these trajectories provide fresh and original alternatives to the usual arcs of "homeland to diaspora" is evident. What is even more commendable is the rich comparative work performed by each article, comparative work that is essential to materializing the power of divergent trajectories. Part 1, "Critical Historical Perspectives," discusses the applicability of the term "diaspora" during a period when the concept was not recognized. Here Scott Levi provides his signature deep research into the Indian trading world of the seventeenth century. The dispersal of Multanis and Shikarpuris across from (what is today) Afghanistan and beyond into Iran, the Caucasus, and Russia illuminates the reliance of prosperous trading links on the transitory and masculine kin networks oriented toward Central Asia. Gijsbert Oonk turns to the issue of language in East Africa. Rather than favor a literal reading of the dominance of English as signaling the triumph of globalization, he illuminates instead how and why Lohanas in British East Africa "lost" their ability to read, write, and speak in Gujarati. Subsequently, they learned English instead of Swahili; they did so because it enabled them to enter into a local cultural and...

Bilingual inequality: Linguistic rights and disenfranchisement in late Belgian colonization

Language policy in the Belgian Congo (±1880–1960) ran on two tracks. In addition to the question which languages were to be used in the ‘education’ and Christianization of the colonized masses, the authorities had to respond to linguistic tensions between Dutch-speaking and French-speaking Belgians in the colony. Regarding the first question, preference was generally given to the use of African rather than European languages in primary education. As for the second, the 1950s witnessed attempts gradually to ‘bilingualize’ the colonial apparatus, dominated, until then, by the use of French. Stressing the role of subaltern agency in language policies, the study discusses reactions by Congolese to these two options. Sources include articles published by Congolese in popular magazines, minutes of Provincial and Government Councils, and archival records and publications documenting language attitudes. Results indicate that the two policies were negatively received: the former was felt to deny Africans access to socio-economic advancement, the latter was said to preclude Congolese from obtaining appointments in public services, where Dutch-speaking Belgians would have the right to enforce the use of their language. The rights of one group to live and work in a bilingual environment thus entailed increasing inequality and disenfranchisement for another.

Partisanship, Power Contenders, and Colonial Politics in Puerto Rico, 1920s

Cet article explore les conditions politiques et la réorganisation du paysage politique à Porto Rico durant la décennie de 1920. Il examine comment, vers la fin des années 1910, la montée d’un puissant bloc politique de base ouvrière a bouleversé les partis politiques de l’époque ( Unión, Republicano, Socialista ). L’article montre ensuite comment ces trois partis politiques ont remis en question leur rôle en tant que témoins de l’appareil colonial sans remettre en cause la présence américaine pour autant, et comment ils concevaient l’aboutissement de la situation entre l’île et les Etats-Unis. Afin d’expliquer les nuances de la politique portoricaine pendant cette période, nous étudierons les causes de la recrudescence de la violence politique, et nous verrons comment cette violence ressemble à d’autres épisodes de violence qui ont eu lieu au début du siècle. De même, nous présenterons les transformations politiques et économiques qui ont promu la réorganisation politique des partis établis à cette époque-là. Enfin, pour mieux comprendre comment se sont manifestées la dynamique de la partisanerie politique et la violence à Porto Rico, nous nous limiterons à analyser le parcours politique de la municipalité de Caguas, considérée comme l’un des bastions de la politique Unionista , ainsi que les changements politiques qui ont eu lieu dans cette municipalité au cours des années 1920.

White and Dark Stranger Kings: Kupang in the Early Colonial Era

The article explores the common Southeast Asian epistemological theme of a “stranger king” as an ordering principle in a polity, a principle that was also relevant in a colonial context. The case studied here is the Dutch colonial post in Kupang, West Timor, in the VOC period, 1653-1800. The Dutch fort was surrounded by five princedoms, which stood in the relation of subordinate allies to the VOC. Four of the five groups had migrated to Kupang due to pressure from the Portuguese and their clients, which dominated the rest of Timor. Arenas of interaction were developed, whereby the elites of the five princedoms deliberated with the Dutch authorities on a regular basis. Their attachment to the Dutch colonial apparatus was actually never broken until the twentieth century, in spite of several reasons for discontent. The article argues that the peculiar situation on Timor, where the five allies were under siege from the clients of the Portuguese, underpinned a system in which the colonial masters were seen as legitimate “princes”, ultimate referents of authority whose very strange-ness enabled them to hold the system in place.

Quando os outros somos nós: o lugar da crítica Pós-Colonial na universidade brasileira - DOI: 10.4025/actascihumansoc.v29i2.725

The examination of identity issues, in their respective forms of cultural representation, becomes productive in the light of Post-Colonial Studies – an interdisciplinary academic area of increasing relevance today, and of special interest for comparative literature and theory. A critical counter-discourse vis-a-vis hegemonic interpretative trends and models, Post-Colonialism re-reads the cultural production ideologically committed to the colonial apparatus in its various aspects and facades, and investigates, above all, alternative voices and deviant ways derived from the populations subjugated in the imperialistic process of European colonization. The present article emphasizes the importance of Post-Colonial Studies in the Brazilian university as it undertakes a contrastive analysis of British colonialism and the Portuguese (the latter, historically subaltern in relation to the former). Contemporary post-colonial reflection of different sources is here problematized, together with inherent questions of ambiguity and hybridity, alterity and otherness, representation and identity.

Ethnography, borders and violence: reading between the lines in Satō Haruo's Demon Bird

Satō Haruo traveled to Taiwan in 1920 and published the short story ‘Demon Bird’ (Machō) in the October 1923 issue of Chūō Kōron. The narrator of ‘Demon Bird’ imitates the style of an ethnographic report to tell his civilized audience about a custom of scapegoating in an unnamed ‘barbaric’ society. He offers an interpretation of this custom and recounts a recent episode of persecution. By his literary indiscretions, he also discloses his own position within a colonial apparatus and underscores the connection between ‘barbarism’ at home and violence in the colonies. In the end, this narrative about a violent, ‘barbaric’ other is not what it appears to be. While the narrator of ‘Demon Bird’ sets the episode of persecution in a distant land, he also hints at an unspeakable atrocity fresh in the minds of his readers: the massacre of thousands of Korean residents of the Japanese capital during the Great Kanto Earthquake. This short story thus straddles the border of two genres (ethnography and fiction) and links two separate spaces (colony and metropolis) and times (narrative time and the time of writing). This hybrid text appeared at a time when criticism of Japan's colonial policies by liberal and reformist intellectuals was at its peak and epitomizes both the strength and the limitations of the liberalist critique of colonialism.

Rebellions or factionalism? Timorese forms of resistance in an early colonial context, 1650-1769

The history of Timor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is interspersed with conflicts where indigenous groups opposed polities with a partly European background. In Western historiography such conflicts are usually portrayed as rebellions against a given European colonial apparatus (Morais 1934; Leitão 1952; Boxer 1968). A closer look, however, reveals these events to be quite complex affairs, which raises questions about the nature of acts of rebellion and colonial rule. Are we dealing with a one-sided anticolonial resistance, or is there more to the picture?

Njama's Supper: The Consumption and Use of Literary Potency by Mau Mau Insurgents in Colonial Kenya

In this essay I hope to come closer to an understanding of how Mau Mau insurgents created a world in the Aberdares forest composed of individuals and groups who contested the means for which positive social value could be attained.' The world they created was replete with power, and this power was congealed in certain objects and the ability to use them. Many of these objects were literally stolen from the institutions which made up the colonial regime (schools and offices, for example). They circulated within and among groups of insurgents (itungati) in the forest and in some way represented and embodied the enchanted power of the colonial state apparatus.2 Yet the circulation of these objects into new social space (Mau Mau camps), whose constitution they contributed to, both changed the meaning of these objects and clarified and accelerated divisions within the movement. The circulation of literary-bureau-

Chiefs, Boundaries, and Sacred Woodlands: Early Nationalism and the Defeat of Colonial Conservationism in the Gold Coast and Nigeria, 1870-1916

he main aim of this essay is to make a tentative assessment of some of the attempts made by the British colonial authorities to introduce forest conservation programs into Anglophone West Africa, and to sketch out the nature of some of the more elitist indigenous responses to those attempts. In the course of the essay we also aim to characterize the changing emphases and fashions of conservationism in West Africa and make some brief comparative remarks about contemporary developments in other parts of the British Empire. The story of colonial conservation in West Africa was inextricably bound up with the developing tension between two entirely different agendas of power, one indigenous and the other governmental, within which the state attempted to assert its own notions of environmental control and land-use planning, reflecting both international changes in conservation thinking as well as an empirical and institutional learning process on the part of the local colonial apparatus. Simultaneously the indigenous populations, or at least their leaders, learnt increasingly to adjust to the weaknesses of the colonial state as specifically manifested in an environmental policy, seeking eventually to manipulate the agendas and mechanisms of colonial conservation to their advantage, often with some success. This essay, then, sets out quite deliberately to question the assumption engendered in some quarters that colonial conservation was, throughout the imperial context, a vigorous and militarized instrument of colonial oppression.2 Certainly, in British West Africa this was far from the case. On the contrary, the evidence indicates that, in the context of Western economic penetration, the general pattern of land use change and forest survival was dictated far less by the colonial state than by indigenous political interest groups in close alliance with the interests of metropolitan capital. This analysis actually corresponds with existing and highly insightful research by economic anthropologists.3 To a greater extent than in other parts of the colonial world, conservation in West Africa was affected by the distinctive conditions of indirect rule and local autonomy. Far from succeeding in establishing an environmental hegemony, the conservation propagandists of the colonial state found themselves, from the out-

Decolonization as Disintegration

Decolonization in Francophone Africa today entails a double disengagement: 1) state disengagement from the classic colonial power (i.e. France) and 2) societal disengagement from the inheritor of the colonial apparatus (i.e. the sovereign African state). Under these conditions, decolonization, otherwise welcomed as a positive development for the African polity, is accompanied by negative consequences for the people so affected. The principal drawback is the disintegration of key sectors of the state apparatus and the consequent wholesale withdrawal of significant elements of the population from state-sponsored activities. This thesis is advanced in the context of Chad, which has been undergoing a painful transition from mono-militaristic to multi-party competitive politics.