Colonial History Research Articles

Removing a colonial anachronism - The decolonization of heritage in the 1970s Hong Kong

Abstract This article explores the decolonization of heritage politics in 1970s Hong Kong. It firstly revisits recent scholars’ work on Hong Kong heritage politics and the transformation of Hong Kong’s cultural identity. It shows how people’s perceptions of their colonial heritage and history in Hong Kong have changed since the 1970s. Secondly, it outlines the city’s cultural heritage policy framework after the 1967 Riots, inspired by the Cultural Revolution. It analyses how the colonial government intentionally rebranded the city’s colonial heritage as an anachronism to justify its new narrative of Hong Kong and its cultural identity in the 1970s. It also employs the demolition of the former Kowloon Railway Station building in the 1970s as a case study to discuss how the colonial government decolonized local colonial structures through its new cultural heritage policy approach after the Riots. Finally, by employing the case study of the demolished Central Star Ferry Pier in the 2000s, this article argues there was a change in people’s perceptions of the city’s colonial history in the early postcolonial period of Hong Kong. A more active notion of Hong Kong’s cultural identity is also being articulated in the uncertain future due to the city’s recent rapid political and social changes influenced by the mainland authority.

‘We have a right to flourish in our own land’: using pedagogies of healing to support Indigenous students to thrive in university classrooms

ABSTRACT This article responds to a pressing question, posed by Māori university students in Aotearoa, New Zealand: How do teachers transform universities into places where Indigenous students can thrive and heal? To address this question, we engage with pedagogies of healing, a radical critique of wellbeing within the classroom. We utilized the Māori practice of wānanga to facilitate collective reflection and action. We propose three principles for enabling Māori and Indigenous healing within classrooms: engage colonial histories, foreground Indigenous forms of knowledge, and uplift students through Indigenous research on/as healing. Within these, we offer seven teaching strategies to enact a pedagogy of healing and create classroom ‘healing zones’, strategies that challenge the individualized and depoliticized approaches to wellbeing dominant within contemporary universities.

Materials Necessary for the Formation of a Correct Knowledge of the History of Colonialism in South Africa? Reassessing the Historical Productions of Donald Moodie and Their Implications

ABSTRACT The contribution of the Rev. Dr John Philip and Donald Moodie to South African historiography has received some attention from historians, but the extent and duration of Moodie’s attempts to challenge Philip’s version of South African history have not been quite so fully explored. Nor have Moodie’s subsequent publications. This article examines Moodie’s dispute with Philip and their conflicting conceptions of history, and what Moodie’s less well-known publications reveal about his notions of the history of South Africa. In the process, it rediscovers Moodie’s mysteriously lost only full-length historical narrative and examines what the contestations around the colonial archive in the first half of the nineteenth century reveal about the challenges of the colonial archive and South African historiography today. It suggests that Moodie’s works can be located against a backdrop of conservative British intellectual thought in South Africa and that understanding the influence of Moodie’s publications is important in historicising the development of colonial knowledge systems in South Africa.

Colonial erasures in gender and climate change solutions

AbstractDespite deliberate moves to integrate gender with climate change solutions, efforts do not go far enough to account for coloniality, thus falling short of achieving feminist, just and transformative ends. Coloniality is a political blind spot and a systematic amnesia in climate policies and actions, despite being a key driver of climate change manifested through various forms of extractivism, economic growth, and hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge production. As a corrective and a pathway toward realizing a post/decolonial feminist climate praxis, I will disclose the colonial underpinnings in (i) a persistent gender binary and women‐centered approaches; (ii) white feminist epistemic privileging; and (iii) acquiescing to masculine Enlightenment‐inspired techno‐managerialism. Furthermore, disclosures of colonial erasures entail a foundational re‐evaluation of the climate change narrative from an isolated form of natural crisis to a phenomenon embedded in complex histories of colonialism, extractivism, and capitalist exploitation that threatens the intrinsic interdependence of nature and society and planetary survival. As a result, a post/decolonial feminist climate praxis then asks that we foster and restore this interdependence by institutionalizing an ethics of socioecological care, acknowledging epistemic diversity through embodied knowledge, and carrying out intersectional justice.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice Climate and Development > Sustainability and Human Well‐Being Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development

Taiwan inside‐out: Rescaling colonial constructions of Taiwan through a Tayal‐focused lens

AbstractThis research deals with issues of Indigeneity and autonomy in Taiwan by notionally turning things inside‐out. We aim to contextualise international geopolitics and local polity by considering the Tayal people, one of 16 nationally recognised Indigenous groups living in northern Taiwan. We reject the conventional geopolitical lens of Great Power claims as the only and best way to understand contemporary Taiwan and chooses to refocus and rescale the geopolitical lens. We seek to reconsider Taiwan’s history, geography, and territory by reference to the conceptual lenses that apply to Tayal peoples’ experiences. The research methods employed include geographical fieldwork, literature reviews, and archival studies. The research acknowledges Tayal people’s custodianship over their territory and provides an in‐depth discussion on the colonial history and geography of Taiwan. In the process, we unsettle what is taken‐for‐granted and rescale erasure, violence, and resistance in Indigenous Taiwan. In building a Tayal‐centred positionality, we reframe geopolitical dynamics as connections within territories and across boundaries rather than as disputes over deeply contested boundaries. Neither Tayal people nor other Indigenous peoples in Taiwan ever ceded their sovereignty. Regardless of any broader geopolitics shifts, Tayal territory remains just the way it always has—Tayal territory.

Elite schools and slavery in the UK – capital, violence and extractivism

ABSTRACT Elite schools in the UK are bound to the history of British colonialism. This paper examines the material ties between these schools and the transatlantic slave trade. We combine multiple sources to examine which schools and their alumni accrued substantial economic capital derived from the enslavement of Black people. We find two principal connections: first, in donations and foundations of schools from those who made their fortune in the slave trade; and second, through income of boys attending these schools. Drawing on the Legacies of British Slavery dataset, we show that schools with alumni benefitting from the slave trade include the most prestigious British private schools. Moreover, this paper traces the histories of several secondary schools founded by, or in receipt of, substantial donations from slave-owning families. We argue that extractive, violent forms of colonial capital accumulation have been central to, the formation and maintenance of these elite educational institutions.

Maye Ma Leka – Reframing Congolese-Swedish Colonial Entaglements

This article will discuss an artistic research project exploring a repressed part of Swedish colonial history by unboxing and unfolding a hidden trove of photographs and films amassed by Swedish Missionaries in Congo. The transdisciplinary and transnational research project explores how material traces of Swedish colonial history can support contemporary discourses, processes, and practices of recovery from the colonial period's devaluation of indigenous knowledge systems. By developing a participatory practice based on artistic research methods, the project contributes new perspectives on critical re-examinations and future knowledge in artistic research.

I Will Live for Both of Us: A History of Colonialism, Uranium Mining, and Inuit Resistance

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Records of Relinquishment

This article focuses on the archive of the Washington Female Orphan Asylum, founded in 1815, and places the study of philanthropy in conversation with scholarship on the archive in histories of slavery, colonization, and trauma. It argues, first, that philanthropic and reform institutions such as the asylum were domestic sites of empire and that their archives reveal the reach of statecraft into the intimate lives of women and families. The article explores, second, the role of emotion in archival research, which can highlight an archive’s construction and its silences. The relinquishments within the asylum’s records provoke emotion; as fragmentary evidence, they testify to trauma and demand the historian’s care.

Revisiting Traditional Chinese Medicine in Hong Kong during the Influenza Epidemics in the 1950s and 1960s.

This paper examines the supply and utilization of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in Hong Kong during the influenza epidemics of the 1950s and 1960s. Existing narratives of TCM in Hong Kong have predominantly framed with within the dichotomy of Western medicine "Xiyi" and Chinese medicine "Zhongyi," portraying TCM as marginalized and nearly wiped out by colonial power. Departing from this binary opposition, this study views TCM as an autonomous space that had never been subjugated by the colonial power which opted for minimal interventionist approach toward TCM. By adopting diachronic and synchronic perspectives on Hong Kong's unique environment shaped by its colonial history and the geopolitics of the Cold War in East Asia, particularly its relationships with "China," this research seeks to reassess the role and status of TCM in post-World War II Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, along with other countries in East Asia, traditional medicine has ceded its position as mainstream medicine to Western medicine. Faced with the crisis of "extinction," Chinese medical professionals, including medical practitioners and merchant groups, persistently sought solidarity and "self-renewal." In the 1950s and 1960s, the colonial authorities heavily relied on private entities, including charity hospitals and clinics; furthermore, there was a lack of provision of public healthcare and official prevention measures against the epidemic influenza. As such, it is not surprising that the Chinese utilized TCM, along with Western medicine, to contain the epidemics which brought about an explosive surge in the number of patients from novel influenza viruses. TCM was significantly consumed during these explosive outbreaks of influenza in 1957 and 1968. In making this argument, this paper firstly provides an overview of the associations of Chinese medical practitioners and merchants who were crucial to the development of TCM in Hong Kong. Secondly, it analyzes one level of active provision and consumption of Chinese medicine during the two flu epidemics, focusing on the medical practices of TCM practitioners in the 1957 epidemic. While recognizing the etiologic agent or agents of the disease as influenza viruses, the group of Chinese medical practitioners of the Chinese Medical Society in Hong Kong adopted the basic principles of traditional medicine regarding influenza, such as Shanghanlun and Wenbingxue, to distinguish the disease status among patients and prescribe medicine according to correct diagnoses, which were effective. Thirdly, this paper examines the level of folk culture among the people, who utilized famous prescriptions of Chinese herbal medicine and alimentotherapy, in addition to Chinese patent medicines imported from mainland China. In the context of regional commercial network, this section also demonstrates how Hong Kong served as a sole exporting port of medicinal materials (e.g., Chinese herbs) and Chinese patent medicines from the People's Republic of China to capitalist markets, including Hong Kong, under the socialist planned or controlled economy in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not only the efficacy of TCM in restoring immunity and alleviating symptoms of the human body, but also the voluntary efforts of these Chinese medical practitioners who sought to defend national medicine "Guoyi," positioning it as complementary and alternative medicine to scientific medicine. Additionally, merchants who imported and distributed Chinese medicinal materials and national "Guochan" Chinese patent medicine played a crucial role, as did the people who utilized Chinese medicine, all of which contributed to making TCM thrive in colonial Hong Kong.

Afro-Ecuadorian Women, Territory and Natural Resource Extraction in Esmeraldas, Ecuador

Afro-descendant women in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, are amongst the most marginalized groups in the country. Living in a region severely affected by environmental degradation due to multiple and overlapping forms of resource extraction, they also face the impacts of drug-trafficking conflicts crossing the Colombian border, as well as institutional and everyday racism. Many of these conditions are rooted in a long history of colonialism. In this article, we highlight the relative absence of Afro-Ecuadorian women’s voices, histories and experiences from research on resource extraction and argue that Black feminist theoretical approaches provide an essential tool for understanding intersections of gender, race and activism, as well as (alternatives to) development, and the impacts of natural resource extraction in Ecuador. In so doing, the article proposes a theoretical framework to open up spaces that situate Afro-Ecuadorian women’s knowledge at the centre of efforts to resist marginalization and extractivism.

Pediatric anesthesia in Australia and New Zealand and health inequity among First Nations and Māori children.

Australia and New Zealand are two countries in the Southern Pacific region. They share many pediatric anesthesia similarities in terms of medical organizational systems, education, training, and research, however there are important differences between the two nations in relation to geography, the First Nations populations and the history of colonization. While the standards for pediatric anesthesia and the specialty training requirements are set by the Australian and New Zealand College of Anesthetists and the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia in New Zealand and Australia, colonization has created distinct challenges that each nation now faces in order to improve the anesthetic care of its pediatric population. Australia generally has a high standard of living and good access to health care; disparities exist for First Nations People and for those living in rural or remote areas. Two influences have shaped training within New Zealand over the past 40 years; establishment of a national children's hospital in 1990 and, more importantly, acknowledgement that the First Nations people of New Zealand (Māori) have suffered because of failure to recognize their rights consequent to establishing a partnership treaty between Māori and the British Crown in 1840. Health inequities among Māori in New Zealand and First Nations People in Australia have implications for the health system, culturally appropriate approaches to treatment, and the importance of having an appreciation of First Nations people's history and culture, language, family structure, and cultural safety. Trainees in both countries need to be adequately supported in these areas in order for the sub-specialty of pediatric anesthesia to develop further and improve the anesthetic and surgical outcomes of our children.

Inhuman Kinship at Insensible Depths

The Afrofuturist mythology of Drexciya rewrites violent colonial histories of dispossession, imagining submarine utopias in which the descendants of enslaved Africans live outside colonial orders. With this submersion, the Drexciyan mythos offers creative visions of oceanic futures—the result of climate change. I therefore ask; what might be learned from Drexciyan relations to the Earth? I first probe Drexciyan–Earth relations through Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019), in which Drexciyans espouse a mode of stewardship over the Earth. Taking up a critical problematization of the possibility of relating to an inhuman Earth vastly greater than ourselves, I explore how The Deep navigates the incommensurability between inhuman nature and human/Drexciyan being. I argue that The Deep ’s Drexciyans are constituted across orders of in/non/human matter, an insight I carry over to Ellen Gallagher’s painting Bird in Hand (2006). There, I find a kinship relation with inhuman matter that accommodates the radical incommensurability of the Earth: I articulate this kinship as a transcorporeal mutuality of be(com)ing with the Earth. Whilst recognizing the asymmetry between their own existence and the Earth’s, Drexciyans insist on a difficult kinship with it. Such kinship relations critique Western practices of extractivism, and probe other praxes of inhabiting the Earth.

Bushranger Re-Enactments: Legend And Landscape

The re-enactment of events from Australia’s history as popular entertainment has dropped away in the twenty-first century. Whilst Old Sydney Town attracted crowds from 1973 through to 2003 with its daily parades of British red coats who marched down to an artificially constructed ‘Old Sydney Cove’, Australians today often have a more conflicted view of Australia’s colonial history. If national identity is maintained through acts of ‘remembering’, as suggested by Ian McBride (2001), the past can be a contested issue that impacts on what is accepted as popular representation. Yet the persistence of bushranger escapade re-enactments, though set in colonial times, suggests that issues beyond Australian national identity are at work in maintaining the popularity of such events. Bushrangers in Australia have fuelled imaginative representations in theatre and then later cinema since the early 1800s, with Andrew James Couzens (2019) stating that the Australian “bushranger legend … responds to the historic and mythic characteristics of outlawry” with “the outlaw as heroes”. This paper investigates three specific bushranger re-enactments. In Braidwood, south-eastern New South Wales, from 1865-1867 the Clark Gang, Tom and John Clark terrorized citizens and were known as ‘the bloodiest of bushrangers’. In 2017, the 150-year anniversary re-enactment of the Clark Gangs’ shooting up of the small country town of Braidwood attracted crowds keen to witness, as well as take part in the drama. The second re-enactment occurs regularly through performances by the Gympie Historical Re-enactment Society. Opting to entertain tourists, the group have staged a ‘Bushranger Show’ at numerous sites throughout inland regional Queensland. The third re-enactment occurred annually, until Covid struck, at Canowindra in northern New South Wales. In 1863 the notorious bushrangers, Ben Hall and Johnny Gilbert locked a group of villagers in the Canowindra pub, the re-enactment takes place at the site of these events, the now named Royal Hotel in the main street of Canowindra. These re-enactments are investigated through multiple lenses of performance, place, and politics. The site-specific nature of these performances positions them as specifically different than performances depicting Australian bushrangers in the cinema or theatre.

Semiotic whitening: Whiteness without white people

AbstractIn the borderlands of south Texas, the Mexican and Mexican American social practice of naming includes the use of English‐language names and nicknames, anglicized pronunciations, and English‐language spellings and “misspellings,” all of which potentially index at least two historically informed perspectives: (1) the hegemonic “white gaze”; and (2) a localized, interrogating gaze. In this article, I focus on local naming practices to advance an approach to what I call semiotic whitening—the indexical linking of any phenomenon to the idealized norms of whiteness—to better understand how whiteness works from the perspective of Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in a geographic region (informed by colonial and white supremacist histories) where few white folks reside.

The Fossil Record and Diversity of Pycnodontiform Fishes in Non-Marine Environments

Pycnodont fishes were a successful clade of neopterygian fishes that are predominantly found in shallow marine deposits. However, throughout their long 180 million year reign (Late Triassic–end Eocene), they made multiple incursions into both brackish and freshwater environments. This fossil record mostly consists of fragmentary dental material, but articulated specimens are known from Early Cretaceous lacustrine localities in Spain. This review article aims to document all non-marine occurrences of Pycnodontiformes throughout most of the Mesozoic and early Paleogene. This review highlights two interesting trends in the history of non-marine habitat colonization by pycnodonts: (1) a huge spike in non-marine occurrences during the Cretaceous; and (2) that most occurrences in non-marine localities occurred at the latest Cretaceous period, the Maastrichtian. The high number of colonization events within the Cretaceous lines up with extreme climatic events, such as high temperatures resulting in high sea levels which regularly flooded continental masses, allowing pycnodonts easier access to non-marine habitats. The increased presence of pycnodonts in brackish and freshwater habitats during the Maastrichtian might have played a role in their survival through the K/Pg extinction event. Freshwater habitats are not as vulnerable as marine ecosystems to environmental disturbance as the base of their food chain relies on detritus. Pycnodonts might have used such environments as a refuge and began to occupy marine waters after the K/Pg extinction event.

Settler memory and Indigenous counter-memories: narrative struggles over the history of colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT As with other settler colonies, Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a long-running conflict between a Euro-centric ‘master narrative’ of the historical past and Indigenous counter-narratives. Previous research on these narrative struggles adopts the ‘top-down’ perspective on collective remembering, focusing primarily on how memory entrepreneurs deploy cultural texts and practices to construct particular representations of history. To broaden the methodological scope, the analysis developed in this paper follows the ‘bottom-up’ approach, which makes it possible to map the distribution of collective memories across individuals and investigate their attitudinal effects. By means of a rigorous survey study (N = 1,066), the paper reveals three key findings about collective remembering in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, individuals in the ‘critical years’ of adolescence are more open to weaving Indigenous Māori perspectives into their understandings of history than older generations. Second, when compared to the monocultural master narrative, historical reconstructions that reflect Māori experiences promote a more inclusive understanding of national identity and generate public support for redressing historical injustices against Māori. Third, the empirical analysis finds no evidence for claims made by conservative political actors that creating space for the articulation of Māori histories perpetuates social division and weakens popular identification with the nation.

Not a Monolith: Understanding of Racism and Racialization among Korean, Pacific Islander, South Asian, and Vietnamese Women

The people within the Asian and Pacific Islander racial/ethnic category used in the United States are often misrepresented as a monolithic group when, in reality, the group includes people from over 48 different countries with diverse cultures, languages, and customs. Asian and Pacific Islander people experience racism and racialization in nuanced ways that are influenced by immigrant generations, histories of colonization, and origin countries’ relationship with the US. This study examines the racialized experiences of Asian and Pacific Islander women in the United States. Focus groups were held with 21 Korean, Pacific Islander, South Asian, and Vietnamese women in the United States to explore their experiences of racism and racialization. Data were analyzed using an iterative coding and theme-generation process. Findings indicate that among these groups, there is a heightened awareness of racism both toward their own racial/ethnic group as well as toward other minoritized populations, a recognition of the importance of solidarity among people of color to combat racism and the difficulties in sustaining solidarity, and nuanced ways in which different Asian and Pacific Islander people navigate their own racialization.

The Terminator in the goldfields: speculative affects in an extractive frontier in Colombia

AbstractThis article analyses the relationships among speculative rumour, everyday storytelling, and financial speculation that impact small‐scale gold mining towns in Colombia. By following the stories surrounding the visit of Arnold Schwarzenegger to Marmato, a mining town in central Colombia, and its consequences, I explore how people speculate about such ‘speculative’ visits so as to reframe the events as part of wider colonial histories. I aim to comprehend the affective constellation of lives criss‐crossed by financial speculation and the political openings created by rumour, storytelling, and fabulation. I argue that people locate the Schwarzenegger visit as part of a crisis‐ridden history that counters the narratives of modern and responsible mining. The argument contributes to the conceptualization of speculation in anthropology, as well as to questions of history, temporality, and politics of extractive frontiers. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2019 in the central Andes of Colombia and with governmental and corporate representatives.

How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History

&#x0D; This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.&#x0D;