Colonial Intellectuals Research Articles

The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

<i>The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures</i> by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

The Fluctuations in Self-Narration in 1930s Colonial Taiwan：On Zhang Wen-huan’s “Father’s Demand” and Conversion Literature

This paper re-appraises the Taiwanese colonial writer Zhang Wen-huan’s Japanese novel, “Father’s Demand” (Chichi No Yōkyū), published in 1935, as a form of “conversion literature” in terms of its narrative style and in relation to the nexus of ideas in the literary field of its time. First, I examine the difference between the contemporary autobiography and the literary portrayal of popular life on the basis of the prevailing literary discourses in 1930s Taiwan, and I then show the threshold or hybrid status of Zhang Wen-huan’s texts, positioned between the two genres. Next, I examine the discourse of “conversion literature” and of the “I-novel” in 1930s Japan and clarify how Zhang’s “Father’s Demand” reflected the perspective of the literary elite but also differentiated itself from their work. Furthermore, by paying attention to the representation of prisoners in the work, I clarify the difference between the depiction of intellectual subjectivity in “Father’s Demand” and in other Japanese works of conversion literature. By analyzing the letters in the final section of the novel, I present the contradictions in the subject formation of colonial intellectuals and identify their prior state. Through these analyses, I reconsider the so-called “conversion” in “Father’s Demand,” viewing it not as a return to a specific identity, but as a focus on the body and other pre-subjective entities.

At a Slight Angle to the Empire: Cavafy among the British

C. P. Cavafy's position as a British-cultured Greek who lived and wrote in colonial Alexandria has perplexed critics, who often address the poet's commitments either as Anglophile or as anti-imperialist and pro-Arab. Seeking a subtler approach to Cavafy's complex colonial circumstances, this essay looks at the poet as a diaspora Greek who wrote of Eastern Hellenism through concepts, facilities, and resources made available by the British Empire. Among the issues explored in this venture are: the widespread use of the Hellenistic East as code for the British Empire in Cavafy's time and the keen interest of colonial intellectuals on some of the poet's favorite topics, such as Hellenistic racial and cultural hybridity; Cavafy's encounters with major colonial figures, including Evelyn Baring (1st Earl of Cromer), T. E. Lawrence, and Ronald Storrs; and the interpretative complexities and ambiguities that arise once we recognize the colonial substratum of Cavafy's historical poems.

Racializing Chōsenjin: Science and Biological Speculations in Colonial Korea

Recent literature on the history of medicine in colonial Korea has revealed that Japanese medical scientists studied Korean bodies to expose racial differences between the Japanese and Koreans and justify Japanese colonial rule. Previous scholars, however, have focused mainly on finding a connection between colonial medical research and eugenics. This article attempts to consider things as yet underinvestigated, in particular, the way in which medical research on Koreans emerged and was intertwined with Japanese colonialism in other ways, separate from contemporary eugenics projects. The article examines the emergence and development of what we now considered as “racial sciences”—physical anthropology, serological anthropology, and human genetics—with regard to the biological characteristics of Koreans. In doing so, it argues that biological speculations on Koreans originated as a subdiscipline of Japanese origin studies and resonated with a newly emerging type of colonial racism in colonial Korea—inclusionary racism. The article also presents the colonial scientific enterprise’s conclusion that Koreans were biologically heterogeneous, contradicting colonial Korean intellectuals’ assertion about Korean ethnic homogeneity. The use of Korean ethnic homogeneity as an ideological basis for nation building by two Korean governments meant that postcolonial Korean scientists had to seek a way to reconcile the colonial era’s “scientific conclusion” (biological heterogeneity) with the postcolonial era’s “politically approved” conceptualization (biological homogeneity). Therefore, regardless of whether it was trying to refute, appropriate, or revitalize the colonial legacy, biological research on Koreans in the postcolonial period was carried out under the framework that had been constructed by colonial racial sciences.

Confessions and Dialogues of Colonial Intellectuals from Feminist Perspectives: Im Sun-deuk’s Short Stories during the Late Period of Japanese Colonial Rule

Confessions and Dialogues of Colonial Intellectuals from Feminist Perspectives: Im Sun-deuk’s Short Stories during the Late Period of Japanese Colonial Rule

Construction of an Indian Literary Historiography through H.H. Wilson’s “Hindu Fiction”

Postcolonial scholars are largely in consensus that the modern Indian literary historiography is a gift of our colonial legacy. Most of these scholars have looked at the classical Sanskrit texts and their treatment by the Orientalists. One genre that is often ignored, however, by them, is that of fables. Fables formed a significant section of the Indian literature that was studied by the orientalists. The colonial intellectuals’s interest in selected Indian fables is reflected in H.H. Wilson’s essay entitled “Hindu Fiction”. The essay not only helps in deconstruting the motive behind British pre-occupation in the genre but also is significant in deconstructing the colonial prejudices which plagued the minds of the nineteenth century European scholars in general and colonial scholars in particular regarding the Asian and African communities and their literature.

Imperial Endnotes: The First Filipino and Boricua Historians

The Philippines and Puerto Rico, often overlooked in studies of Latin American literature and history, are endnotes to Spain’s colonial saga. These island regions continued under imperial rule long after nearly all other former Spanish territories had achieved independence. Two late 19th-century intellectuals, José Julián Acosta of Puerto Rico and José Rizal of the Philippines, dust off 17th- and 18th-century tomes of official Spanish colonial history furnished by European archives. Acosta and Rizal publish critical editions of these histories, and through the annotations, they sneak their voices into discussions over the history and future of their colonies. While scholarship about 19th-century Latin America traditionally affirms that the work of literature is to facilitate the forgetting of differences in the service of community consolidation, I argue that these works constitute a contentious and continual revisiting of difference at the root of the authors’ assertion of their own authority. This article probes the problem of authority at the heart of these notes, examining three processes of authorization: appropriation, racialization, and historiography. The resonances and dissonances between the projects of annotation expose the racialized nature of the colonial intellectuals’ ambivalence toward authority on both ends of Spain’s late empire. Acosta’s and Rizal’s republications show why we have to pay attention to the notes; they destabilize certainties and dare to pursue contentious and divergent truths.

Decolonizing love: ambivalent love in contemporary (anti)sexual movements of Taiwan and South Korea

ABSTRACTThis article problematizes the modern construction of “love” in colonial and contemporary Taiwan and South Korea through historicizing the concept from the nineteenth century to the present. The conception of modern love in East Asia emerged during the late nineteenth century that coincided with the beginnings of civilization and nation-building discourses advocating as a strong mediator for the reconfiguration of social and intimate relationships. In the case of colonial Taiwan and Korea, the colonial governments and intellectuals constantly pivoted on “exceptions” – obscene sex, indecent behavior or illegitimate subjects – to justify their political legitimacy/hegemony to love that prescribed a normative social relationship. Fully embraced by colonial Taiwan and Korea, this mechanism was extended to their postwar regimes; that is, love is celebrated and worshiped without the recognition of its underlying ideology of discrimination and exclusion. I coin the term “love unconscious” to characterize the colonial legacies of love in the contemporary social movements in Taiwan and South Korea. Furthermore I examine how both religious groups and LGBTQ activism were stuck in the “love unconscious” with two cases of contested love: the definition of love in the dictionary, and the rhetoric of love in (anti-)same-sex marriage movements. This article argues that Taiwan and South Korea's LGBTQ and marriage movements are based neither on Western discourses nor inspiration, but are instead driven by the reality and legacy of colonial history. To envisage the decolonization of love is to deconstruct the love unconscious and reconsider the history of colonial love.

Colonial Intellectuals' Fantasies of Sex, Love, and Women: Centering on Modern Koreans' Travel Notes about Shanghai

Colonial Intellectuals' Fantasies of Sex, Love, and Women: Centering on Modern Koreans' Travel Notes about Shanghai

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and the Mexican Archive

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and the Mexican Archive Jason Dyck Idea of a New General History of North America: An account of colonial Native Mexico By Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci. Translated and edited by Stafford Poole. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial MexicoBy Amber Brian. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and His Legacy Edited by Galen Brokaw and Jongsoo Lee. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2016. Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800 By Peter B. Villella. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Portraits of colonial scholars in New Spain often depict Spanish and Creole men surrounded by books and manuscripts.1 With quill in hand they are poised to pen the history of America on European paper by candle light. Generations of historians have closely followed this image by imagining colonial intellectuals—normally cloaked in religious habits—as bookish men and antiquarians ensconced in their convent and college libraries. But do the printed and unedited materials surrounding these men offer an alternative vision of scholarly activity in New Spain? The four books under review complicate traditional views of colonial scholars by recognizing the collaborative process of intellectual production and the formation of personal archives. They provide the context in which some of these collections were compiled and their link to the development of both Creole patriotism and Mexican nationalism. They convincingly demonstrate that Creole discourses were not entirely their own but that they were shared narratives with the multiethnic populace. A central figure in the development of colonial archives was Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650), a local governor, interpreter in the Real Audiencia (High Court) and colonial historian of mixed racial background from San Juan Teotihuacan with links to the Tetzcocan nobility. He plays a key role in all four books under review and is the primary focus of Amber Brian's Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. According to Brian, so-called Native and Mestizo historians have been unjustly marginalized in the "lettered city,"2 both supposedly developing a "vision of the vanquished"3 that was entirely distinct from the cultural patriotism of creoles and other Spanish émigrés. Her goal is to diversify the scholarly community of New Spain by focusing on what she calls the "colonial economy of letters" (10), by which she means the social networks, exchanges and dialogues taking place between intellectuals of all socioracial backgrounds. To understand the collaborative endeavours of viceregal times, she centres on a key event in the development of creole patriotism: the transition of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's "native archive" to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's (1645–1700) "creole archive." What is in this archive and how was it compiled? Brian defines the "native archive" as "knowledge native communities collected in an effort to preserve their connection to the pre-Hispanic past in the context of European domination" (14). Alva Ixtlilxochitl, then, was a "material keeper of the historical record" (24) who acquired alphabetic and pictographic texts. His archive of manuscripts was inherited by his son Juan de Alva Cortés (b. 1624) who, in turn, gave it as a gift to Sigüenza y Góngora, a Creole savant deeply interested in the pre-Hispanic past. Upon his death, Sigüenza y Góngora entrusted Alva Ixtlilxochitl's collection to the Jesuit college of San Pablo y San Pedro, which the Jesuits eventually transferred to their other Mexico City college of San Ildefonso. By the early nineteenth century Alva Ixtlilxochitl's writings and collected documents had been dispersed to various parts of the world, forcing Creoles to work with transcriptions the Milanese scholar Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci (1698–1755) had made at San Pablo y San Pedro in the eighteenth century. This "native archive" was used by Creole patriots to write the history of New Spain and is among the most important collections for scholars of central Mexico today. It is impossible to know the extent of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's "native archive," but the original documents Boturini worked with were discovered in three vellum-bound volumes in the library...

A Union Reframed: Sovinformbiuro, Postwar Soviet Photography, and Visual Orders in Soviet Central Asia

A Union ReframedSovinformbiuro, Postwar Soviet Photography, and Visual Orders in Soviet Central Asia Timothy Nunan (bio) When Soviet photographer Evgenii Khaldei photographed Red Army soldiers raising the USSR’s flag over the Reichstag on 2 May 1945, he captured not only the arrival of Moscow as a global superpower but also the importance that photojournalism would assume in fashioning the image of the Soviet Union in the world. No longer a pariah but rather the liberator of Europe and a superpower, Moscow faced new challenges in how to present itself. Fashioning the image of a Soviet homeland demanded choices at once aesthetic and political. Presenting an image of the Soviet Union that accented its anti-capitalism and opposition to European imperialism was crucial. Yet other countries were busily remaking their institutions and visual self-presentation too. Journalistic outlets in the United States presented an “American century,” while European empires busily reinvented themselves as commonwealths or federations.1 As the terms of comparison with the West were shifting, Moscow needed to reinvent its own visual brand. It had to remind the world what relevance its own policies of ethnofederal republics and citizenship for all—rather than a distinction between metropolitan citizens and colonial subjects—held for the rest of the world. Nor was this merely a repackaging race for its own sake. With communist parties in Eastern Europe struggling for power, communist parties in Western Europe on the upswing, and all of Europe mired in economic depression, Moscow faced both challenges and opportunities. Soviet photographers and journalists had to supply audiences [End Page 553] with visual documents not only of socialist prosperity but also of the Soviet alternative to racial democracy and colonial empire. As Soviet embassies around the world dispatched negatives to communist, socialist, and trade-union papers, the Soviet Union seized on Central Asia to show the enlightened side of Soviet policy. Here former tsarist colonies and protectorates had been transformed into nominally autonomous ethnofederal republics. Already during the interwar period, the five republics carved out of Central Asia had attracted sympathy from European or American socialists, who contrasted them, naïvely, to American cotton plantations and to British or French aerial bombardments in Mandate Iraq or Syria. Soviet Central Asia, it would seem, gave the lie to Western imperialists’ claims to represent “civilization.”2 And during a brief postwar moment, the Soviet federal model gained admirers among not just the anti-imperialist Left but also European imperial administrators as well as colonial intellectuals seeking a nonimperial formula for federative polities.3 The Soviet vision of politics was, in short, attractive in the postwar years. It needed only photographers to shoot it, state outlets and Soviet embassies to package it, and newspapers to print and sell it to European and colonial observers. While the study of imperial visual culture has long occupied the attention of scholars of the British and French empires, studies of the visual ordering of the Soviet periphery remain limited.4 Scholarship on Soviet photography focuses primarily on Russia and the prewar period.5 Some studies of tsarist colonial photography have shifted the focus toward Eurasia, but the Soviet period in [End Page 554] general, and the postwar period in particular, remains poorly understood.6 Studying the visual culture of the Soviet peripheries would not only contribute to an emerging “visual turn” in the study of the late Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, but also—at least as specifically concerns Central Asia—offer a new entry point to debates about the relationship of the Soviet experience to empire.7 As Adeeb Khalid has urged, we need to move beyond comparisons of the Soviet experience to an ideal type of what empire—or its visual culture—looks like.8 As noted above, any use of empire as an analytical concept must be grounded in the postwar reality of empires seeking to reform themselves through federative solutions—indeed, often with the Soviet Union as a reference point in mind. But what if, in addition to thinking about the Soviet relationship to empire less through juridical or political categories of subject or citizen, or through economics, we did so by thinking about how Soviet media depicted the...

An Awareness of Tradition by the Colonial Intellectuals under Japanese Imperalist Rule : Focusing on ‘Shin Nam Chol’ and ‘Park Jong Hong’

1930년대 전통론의 특징은 전통이 더 이상 후진적인 것이 아니라 민족정체성을 확립하거나 서구근대의 한계를 극복할 수 있는 유력한 사상적 원천으로 여겨졌다는 점에 있다. 이 글은 1930년대 초반부터 중일전쟁 발발까지 전개된 전통론과 중일전쟁 이후의 전통론을 구분한 뒤, 철학 전공자인 신남철과 박종홍이 각 시기에 어떠한 전통인식을 드러내고 있는지를 살펴보는데 있다.BR 1930년대 전반 식민지 지식인들의 전통인식의 공통된 전제는 ‘서구적 보편 대 조선적 특수’였으며, 다만 이들 간의 논쟁점은 조선적 특수성을 어떻게 이해하는가에 있었다. 반면, 1930년대 후반 식민지 지식인들의 전통인식은 ‘서구=보편, 비서구=특수’라는 이항대립을 넘어서려는 일본 발 아시아주의에 의해 영향을 받았다. 1930년대 전반과 후반, 식민지 지식인들의 전통인식에서 드러난 두 경향은 오늘날에도 여전히 현재성을 지니고 있다. 여기서 새삼 환기하게 되는 것은 서구든 동아시아든 특정 지역 전통의 보편성과 우월성을 선험적으로 전제하는 것이 아니라, 자신의 전통에서 인류가 공감하는 설득력 있는 보편의 지평을 길러내는 지적 분투가 중요하다는 점이다.

Yi Kwangsu and the Post–World War I Reconstruction Debate

In this article, I trace the circulation of kaejo (reconstruction; J. kaizō ; C. gaizao ) thought in East Asia after World War I, starting with its introduction by libertarian Bertrand Russell ( The Principles of Social Reconstruction , 1916) to Japan and China. This study hopes to shed new light on an old debate through a rereading of Yi Kwangsu’s “On National Reconstruction” against interwar intellectual issues, beginning with Le Bonianism, liberalism (John Dewey and Bertrand Russell), Marxism, and colonial collaboration and ending with Indian colonialism. Yi Kwangsu appropriated the term “reconstruction” to describe both the visions of youth vanguardist An Ch’angho and crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), despite the concept’s initial liberal inspiration. I conclude that given the choice among liberalism, social interventionism, and Marxism, Yi chose interventionism (the way of the colonizer) instead of liberalism, even though the latter was rhetorically more appealing to the colonized. This was because liberalism, a political ideal from late capitalist nations, was deemed inapplicable to 20s-colonial “catch up” realities. The article also explores the problem of culture in colonial nationalism and questions whether collaboration can be regarded comparatively with the Gandhian case and re-narrated as another historical (albeit controversial) route to modernization. The dialectical polarities of universalism (Japan/West) versus particularism (Korea) speak to the fundamental condition of alterity within modernity itself, especially when evaluating the most problematic yet important colonial intellectuals.

Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era ed. by Christopher P. Hanscom

Reviewed by: Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era ed. by Christopher P. Hanscom Eunhee Park Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era edited by Christopher P. Hanscom , Walter K. Lew , and Youngju Ryu . Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press , 2013 . 230 pp. Imperatives of Culture is a great collection of twelve selected essays by colonial Korean intellectuals of the left and right, such as the “cultural gradualist” Yi Kwangsu (Chapter 1) and the Marxist Sin Paegu (Chapter 2). This book also touches on various themes, such as women’s issues (Chapter 3, on Mun Ilp’yŏng), diaspora in Manchuria (Chapter 7, on Kang Kyŏngae), modernism and “fragmentary notions” in the poetry of Kim Kirim (Chapter 8), and the so-called “literature of self-indictment” (kobal munhak, Chapter 10, on Kim Namch’ŏn). Judging from the great endeavors that the participating scholars made in each translation, the many tribulations this work underwent on the road to publication (as the Foreword implies) have been vindicated by the end result. Each chapter begins with an insightful commentary that effectively unfolds the complex colonial intellectual world in a novel, interdisciplinary way. The commentary section contains each intellectual’s biography, works and contributions. The commentators were responsible for selecting the texts and making the commentaries and translations, which help readers to better comprehend these intellectuals and their selected works. Within the translated texts, relevant commentary is added depending on the situation and at the [End Page 142] commentator’s discretion. For instance, in order to reduce a lengthy text and better convey its meaning, in Chapter 5 Seung-ah Lee omits several parts of the original and replaces them with summaries (pp. 91–97). As the title implies, throughout the book culture plays a crucial role in challenging the nation-state paradigm of colonial Korea, but the authors also attempt to position this culture within the global context (xii). Instead of attempting to define “culture” directly, this book attempts to show colonial Korea through the eyes of the twelve colonial intellectuals and to clarify their ideals about the nation-state, national spirit, people, and history. This book gives a new meaning to the 1930s, suggesting that it laid the foundations for the ideological schisms of the post-liberation era. To do so, language took on multiple, crucial roles in deepening the rifts. By comparing the two post-colonial intellectual essays—regarding the role of national literature (Kim Tongni, Chapter 11) and new nationalism (Son Chint’ae, Chapter 12)—with the essays from the colonial period, readers can get a sense of how colonial intellectuals sketched out a framework for nation-building. To show ideological diversity, this book dedicates a considerable amount of space to the works of Marxist and socialists groups, including the writings of Marxists Sin Paegu (Chapter 2) and Paek Namun (Chapter 6), and the socialists Kang Kyŏngae (Chapter 7), Kim Kirim (Chapter 8) and Kim Namch’ŏn (Chapter 10). To those less familiar with colonial Korean literature, this book provides a good overview of socialist and Marxist intellectuals during the colonial period. I believe it is rare to find books that collect such diverse works by different ideological groups, so this book can serve as a good reference for those interested in colonial literature and history. That colonial Korea was connected to the global context can be seen in the diverse worldviews of the authors. Yi Kwangsu was influenced by mass psychology through the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon (p. 12). Sin advocated the “serious passionate socialist” movement (p. 39) and Paek understood mid-1930s Korea as a “semi-feudal” society riven by the “dual conflicts” of class and national struggle (p. 106–107). Likewise, each intellectual explored the uniqueness in “Korean-ness.” The lack of similarities or agreement among the twelve authors may confuse some readers, but this may be intended, because “culture is a concept that reveals the complexity of both imperial and national identities and the political projects that undergirded them [these collected essays]” (xi). However, the density of this book may act as both a strength...

Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity by Mahmood Mamdani (review)

Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.168 pp.In an intellectual climate where scholars are increasingly wary of catego- ries like tribal, and traditional, Mahmood Mamdani's lat- est work offers a satisfying unmasking of colonial constructions, and an antidote to their legal and political legacies. As a scholar whose work fre- quently straddles border between law, politics, and culture, Mamdani has a reputation for revealing rational bases for otherwise unconscio- nable histories. From his examination of Rwandan genocide in When Victims Become Killers (2001), to more recent works examining politics, identity, and terrorism such as Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, Cold War and Roots of Terror (2004) and Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and War on Terror (2009), Mamdani convincingly traces philosophical foundations of community, citizenship, and policy to evi- dence influence of colonial categories. His latest work stems squarely from this tradition, offering added value of comparative analysis, and demonstrating holding power of as a political identity in post-colonial world.Indeed, while decades of anthropological literature on technolo- gies, philosophies, and legacies of imperialism have located origins of racism in practices of colonial rule, Mamdani asserts that racism is only half story. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Mamdani ar- gues that colonial from British India to Dutch East Indies was specifically based on two different axes of discrimination-race and tribe-through which natives and settlers were legally distinguished, differently ruled, and confined to separate social and political destinies. Mamdani further argues that shift from direct to indirect colonial rule, rather than lax control over colonized populations (which promises of non-interference might suggest), masked colonizers' vast ambitions to renegotiate native's subjectivity. Binding movement to indirect rule with parallel shifts-from civilizing missions to projects of protection, from assimilationism to a preoccupation with defining and managing dif- ference, and towards a new form of govern mentality dependent upon an emerging settler/native binary-Mamdani powerfully asserts that the native was creation of theorists of an empire-in-crisis (6). No longer under clear control of crown rule, colonial subjects became objects in need of stricter rule and, therefore, necessarily more subversive forms of subjugation.1Mamdani places colonial crisis point at 1857 Sepoy Mutiny in India: In reflection that followed crisis, Mamdani explains, the colonial mission was redefined-from civilization to conservation and from progress to (8). The movement culminated in 1858 with Queen Victoria's proclaimed doctrine of noninterference in India (8). While this doctrine superficially diluted colonial control of region by abandon- ing assimilationist projects in favor of protecting customary practices, Mamdani suggests that indirect rule achieved opposite, for the pre- rogative to define boundary, substance and of 'customary,' gave vast scope to powers of occupying authority (27). Combining political necessity of social order with an interest in conserving custom, administrators capitalized upon bureaucratic im- plications of indirect rule to emphasize differences that would keep masses divided among themselves.With great attention to colonial political history, Mamdani traces this movement from Indian subcontinent through reforms in British Malaya, Dutch East Indies, and several African colonies, arguing that colonial intellectuals undertook process of defining, and by extension trans- forming, race and tribe as academic and administrative shortcuts to gain- ing control of subject populations. …

The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America ed. by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (review)

The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America. Edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 401, Hardcover, $45.00.)Reviewed by J. Kime LawsonThe First Prejudice is a collection of twelve essays by leading historians that reexamine role of religious and persecution in shaping legal and cultural practices of early American colonies. Religion is called the first prejudice in early America because before legal imposition of racially based forms of intolerance, municipal authorities mandated practice of religious customs and often punished nonconformists with violence. Studying history of and in America has typically been domain of legal or church historians focused on court records or sermons, but this volume demonstrates that closer scholarly attention to sources illustrating lived religion, local legal norms, or everyday practices can complicate longstanding assumptions about early American religious history. While most religious histories of early America have stressed big events like English Toleration Act or American Revolution to describe continuity, change, or progress during period, each selection in this volume challenges usefulness of those categories to explain more complex and ambiguous cultural exchanges hiding underneath grander narratives of American religious history.Christopher S. Grenda's and John Corrigan's essays on tolerance and intolerance begin volume proper. Grenda points out that over seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, faith and reason often had a complex and multidimensional relationship in public discourse of American colonial intellectuals, who relied on forms of reasoning rooted in their understanding of Bible rather than Enlightenment secularity to argue their desires for a more tolerant society. Corrigan shows more gruesome side of reasoning, explaining how a variety of early American Christians deployed Hebrew Biblical story recounting Israel's extermination at divine behest of ancient Amalekites as a justification for and violence toward Native Americans. Both essays demonstrate that religious ideology was central to people's choices and behaviors in regard to justifying both and intolerance, even if that ideology was diverse, adaptable, and situational. They disagree about continuity and change in regard to religious influence from Europe, however, insofar as Grenda suggests a formal continuity of religious ideology coming from Continent, while Corrigan notes break between British and more violent American usage of Amalekite rhetoric.Part two has four selections. Ned Landsman addresses lingering question of why Anglican Church never became a powerful religious force in American colonies. Rather than following more traditional explanation that Anglican Church resisted appointing a bishop in American colonies out of fear of igniting anti-imperial sentiments, Landsman shows that factors such as internal Anglican Church restructuring as a result of union with Church of Scotland, anxieties about preserving apostolic succession and other sacred practices without direct oversight, and stubbornness to compete within American denominational style all contributed to Anglican Church's lack of institution-building in American colonies. Landsman also claims that lack of Anglican institutional strength in American colonies led to an informal separation of church and state in practice. Joyce D. Goodfriend compares legal treatment of religious outsiders in New Netherlands with their treatment in Holland, as Dutch are usually cited for pioneering European religious toleration. Peter Stuyvesant's handling of religious outsiders such as Lutherans, Jews, and Quakers was just short of brutal, and religious toleration in Dutch colonies was at best tepid with an uncooperative colonial state authority. …

Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again (review)

Reviewed by: Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again Sang Yee Cheon (bio) Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again, by Kelly Y. Jeong. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011. 156 pages. $55 cloth. Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again is a study of South Korea’s unprecedented experience of modernization, with a focus on the literature (and also in the films in the [End Page 157] 1960s) that portrayed the historical traumas of colonialism in the 1930s, decolonization in the 1940s, the Korean War in the 1950s, and uneven economic development in the 1960s. The book includes the introduction of modernity’s paradox, trauma, and multiplicity into Korean life; gender issues and nationalism or modernity depicted in the literature of the period from the 1920s to the 1960s; and nation rebuilding, masculinity, and decolonization depicted in the postwar South Korean cinema of the 1960s in films like The Coachman and The Stray Bullet. The author starts with the umbrella topic of modernity, asking “What is modernity?” The author claims that the content and context of modernity in Korea changes depending on the different historical period in question. Also, modernity is like a double-edged sword in Korea, promising freedom, as well as gender or social equality, but creating destabilization and confusion of existing hierarchies and truths. Korea’s modernity started with colonization, arriving slowly and filtered through Japan even before Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. By the 1930s, the Korean experience of modernity via colonialism was filled with novelties, the greatest of which resulted from higher educational levels. For example, colonial modernity provided Korean young women with a modernized or Western-style education, but Korea’s ancient patriarchal Confucian worldview conflicted with the ideals that newly educated young women pursued—a contradiction illustrated perfectly in the life of the “New Woman” Na Hye-sŏk. The New Women were an anachronism in the colonial Korean context, where chastity was still widely considered a woman’s foremost virtue, and Korea was thus not ready for the new ideals that New Women signified (for example, marriage based on romantic love). The primary role of intellectuals as leaders of the nation in the colonial era was to be exemplars of the “modern.” Many colonial intellectuals had to submit to the Japanese or showed an ambivalent attitude toward colonial power because they were not courageous enough to endure oppression; they later typically regretted their role as titular leaders of a colonized country. In the late 1940s, Korean modernity was characterized by decolonization and its aftermath, which resulted in confessional writings by intellectuals. By the 1950s, Korea’s modernity was synonymous with Americanization. Postwar Korean literature from 1955 to 1960 was influenced by the militaristic culture that pervaded the sociocultural atmosphere that followed the Korean War and the subsequent stationing of American forces in South Korea. This included ideals of masculinity and ideological conflict, and thus it manifested itself as a nihilistic, existentialist modernism. (For example, the word yanggongju, literally, “Yankee princess,” refers to [End Page 158] Korean women who engaged in prostitution around American military camps and was popularized via Korean literature of this period.) Postcolonial South Korea was chaotic, with a government still unstable due to inadequate infrastructure. South Korea’s most influential and best-organized institution was the military, and the state ideology was the military ideology: anticommunism. However, during the Rhee regime, the nation simultaneously militarized and Americanized, and this led to social conflict. In the 1960s, exposure to Western culture—specifically, American culture via the presence of American troops and the system of Americanization that the Rhee regime followed—resulted in divergence from traditional hierarchical and gender roles and even challenged the patriarchal social order. However, although the American quasi-colonial presence in this period undermined tradition, it failed to introduce the redeeming qualities and ideals of American life such as openness and democracy; this is illustrated in the film The Stray Bullet. The author asks which other forms of modernity have become established in South Korea since the 1960s and how new forms of modernity...

The Stranger's Work

The Stranger's Work reads Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood into a critical tradition that considers the awkwardness and “outsider” status of Western intellectuals, particularly those who take up the subjects of diaspora and colonization. With special emphasis on C.L.R. James' Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, Albert Camus' The Stranger, and James Baldwin's “Stranger in the Village” Reid-Pharr argues that Carby's particular genius is her sensitivity to the ways that the works of colonial and diasporic intellectuals must by necessity grapple with their own outsider status. In particular, he suggests that these intellectuals have little choice but to operate within routes established by the very forms of oppression that they attempt to disrupt.

Seductive Landscapes: Gender, Race and European Representations of Nature in the Dutch East Indies during the Late Colonial Period

A common assumption in current scholarship on imperialism is that representations of colonised landscapes were gendered female and that European expansion was a male‐gendered enterprise. In the Dutch East Indies (colonial Indonesia), a Dutch possession in south‐east Asia, this association was by no means consistent in artistic and literary representations of nature and landscape. The gendering of Indies landscapes as feminine and their association with erotic conquest in colonial representations was most strongly evident in paintings. However, in photographs and literature, race figured more prominently in the designation of colonised landscapes as tropical and other. This was particularly true from the late nineteenth century onwards, when an ideological shift towards increased racial segregation occurred among colonial intellectuals and officials. In literature particularly, Indies landscapes and nature appeared as gender‐neutral, but were clearly raced native. In such instances, colonial representations were more likely to convey a fear of seduction and engulfment by Indies nature than titillation at the prospect of erotic opportunity or colonial conquest.

New Woman, Romance, and Railroads: The Paradox of Colonial Modernity

This article sees Korea’s colonial modernity as a set of paradoxes and provides a reading of it through the most symptomatic aspects of such modernity—the New Woman, ideals of romance, hypermasculinity of the colonial subject, and railroads. I examine texts by and about colonial intellectuals who were at the forefront of cultural and literary experience and production. My discussion shows that this literature reveals colonial Korea as an arena in which the old and the new intermingle and coexist, leading to new conceptions and practices of family and marriage. The New Woman and her male counterpart become recognizable cultural personae and compete against each other for the limited access to modernity especially through education and travel, the two major modes of gaining exposure to the changing world and its values. The New Woman becomes the human fallout of such competition, as Korea’s anti-colonial nationalism, a very much male-identified thought, provides an excuse to ignore women’s causes, even though they are intertwined with the causes of national sovereignty. Ultimately, what results is a split loyalty and double-identification among Korea’s colonial intellectuals, who fail to create a viable alternative to the Old that is dead and the New that is yet unborn.