Colonial Frame Research Articles

Half-Brothers

Faced with a declining number of brothers arriving from France, the Frères des écoles Chrétiennes (FEC) in Vietnam actively recruited and trained Vietnamese members to sustain and expand their school network. French brothers practiced de facto associationism through their unwillingness and inability to concede responsibility to Vietnamese confreres. The expectations of the latter, however, had grown in an ecclesiastical background of indigenization, and this led to severe internal tensions. The hybrid life the FEC were committed to by virtue of their religious profession was a casualty. The failure of hybridity underlines the polarization engendered by the colonial frame.

Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers by Amar Acheraïou (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers by Amar Acheraïou Christopher Gogwilt (bio) Amar Acheraïou . Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 264 pp, ISBN: 13: 9780230552050 Amar Acheraïou joins an already crowded field of scholars intent on rethinking postcolonialism, an enterprise usefully outlined and illustrated by the volume of essays Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005). Acheraïou's book is all at once a critique and a symptom of this recent development within literary and cultural studies. Although it may not offer an easily accessible guide to postcolonial theory, it does provide two important interventions of special interest to readers and critics of Conrad. It seeks to challenge the colonial frame of reference within which literary modernism is now being reconceived; and it places Conrad's work at the center of that endeavor. If this hardly sounds original (the same thing might have been said about Edward Said's work in the 1960s and 1970s), Acheraïou's argument nonetheless offers unique and important contributions that deserve critical attention. Acheraïou's book is divided into two parts. In the first part, he seeks to broaden historical accounts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European "colonial discourse" by arguing for the continuity between ancient Greek and Roman models of colonialism and racism (or "proto-racism") and modern French and British ideologies of imperialism. This first, more theoretical part argues against the dominant model of postcolonial theory, premised on Homi Bhabha's concepts of "hybridity" and the "third space of enunciation." This "middle ground theory," as Acheraïou calls it (2, 47), creates a model of analysis whose valorizing of "dialogism"—or "contest and negotiation, resistance and complicity" (47)—underestimates the enduring violence and deep-seated inequalities of a long history of colonialism preceding modern times. Acheraïou does not discount this model entirely, but the "trans-epochal dialogue" (4) he proposes between classical and modernist formations seeks to correct for the tendency to "study colonialism as a synchronic phenomenon and mere product of modernity" (3). The "horizontal" (or synchronic) axis of colonial contest and negotiation needs to analyzed, according to Acheraïou, in relation [End Page 161] to the "vertical axis" (or transhistorical continuum) of imperial discourse since classical antiquity, which shapes the "ideological and rhetorical palimpsest" of modern colonialist discourse: "Part of the insufficiency of the postcolonial theoretical models derives . . . from a scholarly habit of seeing colonialism as a purely horizontal manifestation and mere product of modernity. We lose sight of the fact that colonialism is a continuum that also obeys, at least on the level of discourse and representation, a vertical axis" (53). In many ways this effort to balance macro- and micro-historical perspectives has been, from the start, the challenge postcolonial theory has brought to the work of "rethinking" colonial history. Linking this problem of historical balance to the contending models of the old "core-periphery dichotomy" and newer "circulatory" models of colonial contest and negotiation, Acheraïou usefully identifies a key feature of many ongoing efforts to rethink postcolonialism. Acheraïou cites two recent studies that provide revealing points of comparison for his own Rethinking Postcolonialism: Elleke Boehmer's Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (2002) and David Adams's Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (2003). Boehmer aims to "swivel the conventional axis" of postcolonial theories away from the core-periphery, colonizer-colonized dichotomy, in order to re-envision the "imperial framework" as "a network . . . of interrelating margins" (Boehmer, 1; 6). An important example of works designed, in Acheraïou's words, to "uncover the neglected colonial narrative of exchange and negotiation" (53)—and a work to which Acheraïou repeatedly refers—its cross-national and cross-nationalist perspective remains focused entirely on the moment of literary modernism (1890-1920) that Acheraïou seeks to set in "trans-epochal dialogue" with classical antiquity. David Adams's Colonial Odysseys, on the other hand, provides a study of just such a "trans-epochal dialogue" between classical models and literary modernism, but without probing, as Acheraïou aims to do...

The Human Recycled: Insecurity in the Transnational Moment

This article reads Stephen Frears's film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) to consider the questions of subjectivation and commodification motivating postcolonial critiques of power. The authors suggest that in the film, the assertion of sovereignty is articulated through the politicization of death and a reckoning of the dying body, through what Achille Mbembe refers to as “necropolitics.” Drawing on the work of Mbembe, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others, the authors contend that the limit of the human posed by the articulation of colonial frames within transnational ones conjoins modes of cultural subjection to an absolute devaluation of life itself. This reading of the film foregrounds the arena of the mass commodification of material bodies, resituating the foundations of capitalism within the slave trade, in contexts ranging from the sale of human organs to prostitution to trafficking in migrant laborers. The article posits a model of salability, based on disposable life and recycled humanity, where entry into the market as either subject or object is the condition of survival in the modern security regime. Against a terrain of precariously asserted and suspended subjectivity within the realm of state sanctions, readers are invited to consider the possibility the film presents of realizing a collective politics that subverts and seizes the management of life on the verge of death.

Refracting an Orientalist Lens

In her 1994 directorial debut, The silences of the palace (Samt al-qusur), Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli invokes various modes of representation—traditional oral performance, Western theatrical conventions, filmic modes—in telling a multilayered, retrospective story of cultural and gender oppression/expression. The contemporary moment of the film, circa 1962, demonstrates the complicated nature of gender politics in post-independence Tunisia. The flashbacks record a moment in the early 1950s when the country was on the verge of independence, ridding itself of both the rule of the decadent beys who had become disconnected from the people, and of the French colonial ‘protectorate’ which confiscated land, conscripted men, and marginalized women. The reverberations of likeness and difference that Tlatli sets up between upstairs and downstairs, rich and poor, male and female, conservative and revolutionary, past and present, individual and communal, private and public, local and global are largely accomplished through visual mirroring, musical echoing, and narrative repetitions that block binary interpretations and create analogical sympathies across the divides. While many critics have viewed the film through an Orientalist lens, The silences of the palace resists stereotypical readings: no myth of colonial progress, no escape or rescue from the harem, no pre-colonial nostalgia, no miraculous revolutionary change. Tlatli has created a space visualized largely through female performances and perceptions, and this alteration in perspective calls patriarchal, colonial, masculinist and Western frames of reference into question as the traditionally male, Western ‘task of the translator’ has been shifted to women, and especially to a young girl who struggles to interpret the performance of daily life she witnesses.

Between Objectivity and Illusion: Architectural Photography in the Colonial Frame

In this paper, I compare the use of photography by Sawai Ram Singh, the maharaja of the Princely State of Jaipur in colonial India, and by James Fergusson, the earliest historiographer of Indian architecture. Contrasting the “objective” use of photography by the colonist, with the maharaja's hybridized and illusionistic images, I argue that photography, on the one hand, helped fix “India” into stereotypical brackets, but on the other enabled the colonized to re-invent himself in more contemporary and potentially threatening ways. Foreshadowing the contadictory nature of postcolonial modernity, photography, in other words, enabled the maharaja to simultaneously resist the hegemonic interests of the colonizer while coveting and appropriating the instruments and signs of the West to his own ends.

The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency: Colonial Texts and Modes of Evidence

This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as ‘alternative history.’ The aim in effecting this interruption is to call attention to the enabling possibilities of critical history. This is achieved not by way of declaration but rather through a practice whereby the foundational category of evidence is problematized. The paper alludes to the limits of alternative history and its approaches to evidence on the one hand, and the conditions of complicity within which evidence is produced on the other. Whereas alternative history identifies its task as one of rewriting South African history, critical history, it issuggested, offers the opportunity to reconstitute the field of history by addressing the sites of its production and also its practices. In exploring the production of the colonial record on the killing of Hintsa, the paper seeks to complicate alternative history's slippage in and out of the evidentiary rules established by colonial domination even as it constitutes the category ofevidence as an object for a politics of history of the present.

Des "Indes" en Méditerranée ? L'utopie tropicale d'un jardinier des Lumières et la maîtrise agricole du territoire

The evolution of the Gardener Nectoux, from 1787 to 1814, illustrates the tropicalist utopia of mercantilism that the French Revolution and Empire transferred from West Indies to Meditaranean world, in Egypt then in Roma. It underscores the operations of sponsoring networks and lobbies in the field of colonial botany. The inventory of nature is coupled with a policy of systematic research of utilitarian plants (einchona, senna) and of projects for developing agriculture with scientific methods. The attention of the gardener, a fasmer- botanist, is different from the attention of the traveller (botanist or statistician) because the gardener takes into consideration long lasting period and necessary harmony between agriculture and environment. The will to master the territory led bim to view it as gardens fitted into each other. Finally, the colonial frame is second as the project of Nectoux was a part of the continental expansionnism of Napoleonian empire as well as of modernisation of AEgypt under Muhammad Ali.