Colonial Nostalgia Research Articles

Remembering Colonial Algeria’s Desert in the “Grand Sud”

While the majority of French colonists in Algeria lived on the Mediterranean coast in cities such as Algiers and Oran, or in not-too-distant inland towns like Constantine, those who settled further afield in communities bordering or in the Sahara Desert, like Aflou, Batna, Biskra, or Khenchela, had a vastly different experience of colonial life. These settlers were often isolated outsiders, subdued by the remote terrain. In French Algerian memorial books destined to fulfill French colonial nostalgia, repeated iconic images of recognizable destinations and events overlap and solidify in the memory of Algeria’s former French inhabitants, the Pieds-Noirs. Within these same memorial texts, the desert, which occupies 80% of Africa’s largest country, has always been present. Photographs from the 1850s onward, attempting to capture the country for its French occupiers, depict the desert as a peaceful and quiet landscape with exotic indigenous figures, traditional houses, and little evidence of Europeans in the frame. Locations are hard to pinpoint, outside of the occasional oasis, and the sand dune landscapes would have been shifting. This article examines how colonial photographs and sparsely written textual souvenirs of the desert provide a contrapuntal image of colonial Algeria as a place of the unknown. Using Dylan Trigg’s work on place and memory, I explore the juxtaposition of the predominant nostalgic vision of European settlement and images of the desert that highlight what the French Empire never possessed.

Re-Orientalism and Colonial Nostalgia in Pakistani Austen Rewritings: A Case Study of Austenistan

Our paper aims to explore the recent Austen rewritings in Pakistani Anglophone fiction such as Austenistan as an example of professional fan fiction and postcolonial literature. These rewritings, we argue, possess such qualities that not only appeal to Janeites but also adhere to Re-Orientalism. The primary premise of our work focuses on the strategic use of ‘Austenmania’ by Pakistani Anglophone female writers in their fiction and its tendencies to project an oriental gaze on Pakistan, while also aligning it with the ‘benevolent modernity’ of former colonial masters. In our paper, we have critically analysed seven stories from the anthology Austenistan by mainly drawing upon the theoretical lens of Re-Orientalism propounded by Lisa Lau along with other relevant theories of Robert Dryden, Sarah Brouillette, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, and William Bissell, etc. Our research explores that Pakistani Janeites employ the practices of “possession” and “selfothering” in Austenistan through compromised and pejorative representations of Pakistan which is a manifestation of their nostalgia for the colonial past.Keywords: Janeites, Regency era, South Asian writers, Pakistani Anglophone fiction, Self-othering, Re-Orientalism, Colonial Nostalgia.

New Zealand Nurses: Caring for Our People 1880 – 1950

Pamela Wood’s New Zealand Nurses: Caring for our People 1880-1950 reveals nursing through the eyes of fierce pioneers of New Zealand nursing. It provides a valuable window on the foundations of professional nursing and is likely to be of interest to nursing scholars and other curious readers. At the same time, however, it is missing the voice of Māori, the tangata whenua of Aotearoa New Zealand. By failing to consider the nursing practices before colonisation, or the impact of colonisation, Wood falls into the trap of colonial nostalgia, focussing on imported systems, rather than on their contextualisation in Aotearoa.

A heterotopic reading of heritage: The Village of Our Lady in Ka Ho, Macau

Postcolonial Macau is keen to celebrate its colonial legacy to preserve its cultural distinctiveness. This study explores the reordering of a Portuguese colonial site, the Village of Our Lady in Ka Ho, into an architectural heritage in the broader postcolonial context. Employing the Foucauldian concept of ‘other spaces’, specifically ‘utopia’ and ‘heterotopia’, the study argues for the heterotopic nature of heritage. It identifies the discourses and material representations of heritage, their construction and their mirroring of mainstream social ideals. Heritage as heterotopia is a conceptual entity that informs and is realised with material objects. The discourse takes heritage spaces as mediums for performances through symbolic loading on material objects to demonstrate the space's otherness. In addition, colonial nostalgia emerges as a dominant narrative in shaping urban identity. The primary proposition of this research is that heritage is made through othering, and the otherness of heritage is presented through performing. Heritage‐making transforms the site from a ‘heterotopia of deviation’ to a ‘heterotopia of performance’, which reveals the societal transition from early modernity that advocates for scientific knowledge to postmodernity that embraces neoliberalism, and then to the arriving era of post‐postmodernity based on performatism.

КОЛОНІАЛЬНИЙ ТУРИЗМ: РОЗВИТОК, ВИДИ, ХАРАКТЕРНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ

The article is devoted to the study of the history of the development of colonial tourism in the second half of the 19th – at the beginning of the 20th century in the countries of the East. The relationship between the formation of the colonial system, the new needs of the capitalist development of European countries in the 19th century, and the emergence of tourism as an important tool for the study of colonized territories and peoples is revealed. It is emphasized that gradually the market of impressions and recreation became an important factor in the economic and cultural exploitation of the colonies. It is proposed to define colonial tourism as a type of travel organization that involved visiting colonially dependent territories to get to know the history, culture, historical and cultural heritage, everyday life of local residents, as well as for the purpose of health and recreation. Colonial tourism is characterized as internal (trips by representatives of the colonial community to the country of their stay) and as external (visiting by residents of metropolises and colonial dependent territories for tourist purposes). This type of tourism is characterized by a special elite social and ethnic composition of tourists. The connection between tourist trips and the formation of transport infrastructure, in particular rail and sea transport, which significantly increased the possibilities for the mass movement of people and goods, is analysed. Such forms of colonial tourism are characterized as trips with sightseeing and educational purposes, colonial cruises, colonial hunting, and organization of rest places in the form of “stations on the hills”. Attention is focused on the distribution of such popular types of information about colonial territories as postal (colonial) postcards during the researched period. It is emphasized that the relevance of this topic is because in the modern tourism of many countries there is a historical injustice, which is manifested in exploitation, abuse of images of the past, fascination with colonial nostalgia, the illegal transformation into a commodity of the cultural and ethnic heritage of once colonial dependent peoples.

Peripheral Orientalism and the Creation of Arab Literary Precursors in Quinteto de Mogador by Alberto Ruy Sánchez

This essay explores the intentio operis in the use of transatlantic bridges that are sometimes real, other times rhetorical, and others imaginary that Alberto Ruy Sánchez draws between his country and Morocco. It also looks at the representation of Moroccan space and women, arguing that Ruy Sánchez falls into exoticizing Orientalism with tints of colonial nostalgia, particularly when portraying Moroccan women. Finally, it explores how the author creates his own precursors through the quotes and literary references in his five novels. Presenting himself as a reader of Arab erotic literature and Sufi sacred texts, Ruy Sánchez suggests that he is rewriting classic literary texts, thus creating his own literary lineage and diachronically situating his work within a literary tradition that remains on the margins of Mexican national coordinates to approach, instead, the canon of Arabic literature. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Public monuments, palliative solutions? Political geographies of memory in Goa, India

ABSTRACT This article examines some of the compromises that emerge in the process of converting colonial-era material culture into ‘heritage’ claiming to foreground a critical postcolonial consciousness. Prompted by recent controversies about statuary celebrating figures who engaged in colonial exploitation and slavery, I look at how frictions inherited from the colonial period are projected onto colonialism’s physical remains. This article, however, enquires into ways in which disputes over the proper function of postcolonial heritage projects may be framed not in a militant, but in a conciliatory register, that aims to accommodate diverse representational imperatives, instead of elevating one as supreme. In postcolonial settings such as the one discussed, these imperatives awkwardly include the tourism industry's promotion of ‘colonial nostalgia’ via the restoration of ‘colonial ambiences’. Focusing on a Portuguese-era fort that served as a prison for Goa’s 'freedom-fighters', I investigate the unexplained, and subsequently contentious, display of pictures authored by the nationally-renowned artist Mario Miranda in one section of the fort. The article then recounts the contours of a public challenge to this exhibition’s legitimacy, and examines the introduction in an adjacent space at the fort of a Freedom Fighters’ Gallery. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I analyse tensions within and between each of these exhibitions, connecting them to deeper fissures in colonial experience and postcolonial memory. I argue that these fissures are best understood in their relationship to recriminations both about colonial experience and about inequalities traceable to its ‘aftermaths’, which are now consolidated in uneven political geographies.

Tensions of Modernity: Privilege, Precarity, and Colonial Nostalgia among European Security Contractors in East Africa

AbstractPrivate security work can be a brutal world of short-term contracts, exploitation, and under-regulation, where the imperative of profit is expected to trump collective notions of military brotherhood. Why then do so many demobilized soldiers turn to it as a vocation? While a rich body of work has revealed the vulnerabilities of demobilized military life, ethnographic investigations into how contractors experience and make sense of precarity are less common. Drawing on fieldwork with military veterans of European descent working and living in East Africa, this article argues that a central, yet underexplored, feature of contemporary security work is colonial nostalgia. Some contractors read the travelogues of colonial adventurers, while others trace their family genealogy to ancestral colonial frontier soldiers. A few even write their own memoirs in similar fashion. Writing, reading, and living the colonial past through this contractor canon serves several present-day functions. First, the parallels between risk-taking colonial adventurers and the kind of rugged individualism associated with homo economicus masks the tensions and fissures that emerge from soldiers’ discharge from the military and subsequent remobilization as privatized contractors. Secondly, colonial nostalgia forms part of a larger political critique of Western military interventions, of which many of these contractors experienced first-hand. Here, private security work is imagined as replicating an older, more effective tradition of frontier soldiering that is rooted in a logic of settler-colonialism. Finally, fantasies of a colonial past feed into contractors’ attempts to market themselves to clients and to organize their everyday work.

Countering colonial nostalgia and heroic masculinity in the age of accelerated climate change: The Arctic artworks of Katja Aglert and Isaac Julien

This article explores two screen-based artworks: Katja Aglert’s Winter Event – Antifreeze (2009–18) and Isaac Julien’s True North (2004) respectively, that exemplify diverse viewpoints contesting the essentialized identities of the Arctic past. These artworks recover the histories of women, the Inuit and African American men’s involvement in polar exploration, reimagining heroic narratives from historically excluded or ignored perspectives. By employing irony and humour, these artworks expand our understanding of how media-based art can respond to the ironies of a warming planet and challenge colonial nostalgia for White male heroism. The artworks traverse not just the human imperialism of the colonial era but also the newer imperialism in the age of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, decentring the mythic and exotic qualities of expedition narratives. Ultimately, the irreverent artwork encourages us to rethink an aesthetics of the distanced sublime from Romantic aesthetics and its roots in European Universalism, promoting a more inclusive and intersectional approach to the Arctic and its representation.

Nostalgia for Japanese colonialism: Historical memory and postcolonialism in contemporary Taiwan

AbstractTaiwan is unique among postcolonial societies today for a widespread social nostalgia for Japanese colonial rule. Contrasted with anti‐Japanese sentiment in neighboring East Asian societies like South Korea and China, Taiwan seems to present a puzzling instance of “pro‐colonial” nostalgia. This article discusses this phenomenon through reviewing recent scholarship of Japanese and Guomindang rule of Taiwan and Taiwanese postcolonialism. Nostalgia for Japanese colonialism in Taiwan emerged after the traumatic experiences of later Guomindang authoritarian rule and the politics of democratization and decolonization that followed the end of Guomindang martial law. While some of this social memory is shaped by a generation who lived through Japanese rule, much of the reshaping of Taiwan's historical memory is more complex than merely “pro‐colonialism.” Colonial nostalgia reflects a historical memory shaped by contemporary social experiences of trauma, counterhegemony, and postcolonial agency.

‘Out through the door and in through the window?’: Positioning colonial nostalgia for French India in Puducherry

The former French India has held a distinctive place in metropolitan French discourses and sentiments of colonial nostalgia which have been subject to sustained analysis. French India is thus part of a larger body of research exploring colonial nostalgia both as a general phenomenon and in a specific regional context. However, the corresponding imaginaries in what after its decolonization became the Indian Union Territory of Puducherry have remained marginalized in research. Yet regardless of the frequently naturalized expectation that the colonial metropoles should be its natural habitat, colonial nostalgia is not something that only occurs among the former colonial powers, and colonial nostalgia is in fact expressed in many ways in present-day Puducherry. This ethnographic study shows that if we are to understand the production and roles of colonial nostalgia we need to analyse it not merely from the perspective of the former colonial powers, but also as it occurs in the former colonies. Indeed, we should question how separate such discourses, imaginaries and sentiments of colonial nostalgia are, and redirect our attention to interrogating how they interact and may be coproduced in a broader, often ambiguous post/colonial field where postcolonial interests in the former colony are equally at stake.

Consuming colonial nostalgia in Kolkata, India

Imperialist nostalgia has been well documented by tourism scholars; however colonial nostalgia has been ignored as this is, arguably, considered embarrassing. This ethnography, utilizing Homi Bhabha's (1994) concepts of hybridity and mimicry, was conducted with young Indian domestic tourists visiting postcolonial Kolkata, India. Findings revealed that despite the current Indian government's efforts to wipe away the colonial legacy, many young Indians have no qualms about carrying on the legacy of the British Raj. Nostalgia for these young Indian tourists is rooted in an imagined sense of the past and born out of frustration with the present and the uncertainty of the future. The private sector in the tourism industry in India, capitalizing on this trend, increasingly lures domestic tourists.

Virtual Returns: Colonial postcards online and digital \u2018nostalg\xe9rie\u2019 among the former European settlers of Algeria

This article analyses how certain former European settlers of Algeria (pieds-noirs) have created a digital space of remembrance online using scans of colonial-era postcards. Tracing the role of colonial-era postcards in pied-noir memory narratives, from the phototexts of the 1980s to websites from the mid-2000s onwards, I suggest these digital sites of memory attempt to maintain a connection to an imagined Algerian homeland during the so-called ‘memory wars’. By collecting, scanning, and reproducing postcards and photographs of colonial landscapes, pieds-noirs websites aim to reconstruct a lost topography of houses, shops, streets, and towns that have been renamed and rebuilt since independence. These ‘virtual returns’ to Algerian urban topographies rely predominantly on affective responses to ‘nostalgérie’ or nostalgia for Algeria. However, in relying on colonial-era postcards they ultimately recreate the ‘visual economy’ (Welch and McGonagle) of French Algeria in the early 20th century. I argue that, despite the radical ‘connectivity’ presented by the internet, these websites remain primarily focused on creating a homogenous collective memory for an imagined audience of pieds-noirs online. Nonetheless, I conclude by suggesting that this online model of colonial nostalgia has permeated, in limited but influential ways, how other groups interpret visual ‘nostalgérie’.

White hallucinations

ABSTRACT In this paper, the concept of white hallucination is developed through the prism of a recent debate about the permissibility of defending colonialism. The latter is, unsurprisingly, steeped in colonial nostalgia and a defence of free speech. These arguments, however, have to be related to the operation of whiteness itself. White hallucinations concern the psychopathological tendency of whiteness to incessantly reinscribe its mastery of the world. Cases for defending colonialism expose whiteness as a delusion that is reasserted by demanding ‘proof’ against its normativity while simultaneously discarding alternative knowledge claims made by testimonial epistemologies of colonial subjugation and dehumanization. The argument further unravels whiteness as a position-without-positionality that seeks to maintain its normativity and supremacy by aligning itself with rationality, objectivity and humanity as such and subjugating non-white perspectives, experiences and knowledges to the spectre of nonexistence.

BREXIT and empire: the role of colonial nostalgia in the argument for “Global Britain”

To what extent has the argument for ‘Global Britain’ benefited from elements of colonial nostalgia that may have permeated British collective memory until the present day? In other words, can a genealogy be established between Britannia (Thomas Arne composed Rule Britannia in 1740) and Brexit? Whilst the concept of Empire 2.0 has often been used to engage with the range of reasons put forward by Brexiteers to support the principle of a breakaway from the EU, commentators have often neglected the long-term ramifications of the feelings that may have played a role in the choice of 52% of the British population in the summer of 2016. Yet, a longue duree approach reveals compelling continuities over several centuries. Historiographical developments since the 1980s have pointed towards the persisting influence of the imperial experience on the DNA of British culture and politics. This was reflected in a range of cultural manifestations reaching large constituencies of the population of the British Isles – what John MacKenzie has termed ‘Popular Imperialism’. This paper explores the hypothesis that this deeply rooted attachment to the Empire has been running consistently (although at varying degrees) at least since the eighteenth century, and has found a new lease of life among supporters of the Brexit process, who have celebrated often implicitly the strength of the imperial legacy as a suitable alternative to the EU project. Key words: ‘Global Britain’, colonial nostalgia, Brexit, European Union.

Une identité réinterprétée : Notes sur un vieux documentaire et recherche autour de l’identité macanaise

The present paper, originating from its author’s innocent search for his identity in his twenties as a postcolonial yearning for an emotion-driven, if not unconsciously voluntary, cultural self-colonization, appears ten years later as a self-reflexive and self-critical essay. It can be read as a piece of postcolonial literature apart, or as a commentary to his documentary Ou Mun Ian, Macaenses (2009) and its textual research (2010). This quest, if not construction or invention of identity, resonated with a cross-epochal public discourse which transcended Macau’s last colonial years and its first postcolonial decade, that Macau was never a colony but a unique result from a China-West exchange. Originally to mark the tenth anniversary of the postcolonial Macau, between 2008 and 2009, the author, who was a great yet naïve admirer of the domestic exoticism and the colonial nostalgia of the mix-blood Portuguese Macanese, travelled across Portugal, Canada, US and Brazil to create a project from filmed interviews in the diaspora, in a government-sponsored adventure which let to the author’s self-discovery. This very amateur thirty-three-minute documentary largely shaped the author’s earlier belief in his undecolonizability and his later extended search and creation of his multiplying beliefs inside an Eurocentric expansion of an European universe.

Tricks to Inherit: Re-centering a Transnational Translation Onstage

Tricks to Inherit: Re-centering a Transnational Translation Onstage Olga Sanchez Saltveit (bio) Astucias por heredar un sobrino a un tio, identified as the “first drama staged in California” (1) by Hispanic theatre historian Nicolás Kanellos, had been buried in the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library archives for over 200 years when Pedro García-Caro unearthed and transcribed the play for publication in 2018. When I first met García-Caro at the University of Oregon (UO) in 2015, he invited me to join the translation team so that it could be produced by UO’s Theatre Arts Department, where I would propose to direct it. Script unseen, I accepted. The opportunity to interpret the play written by Fermín de Reygadas in 1789, unproduced for over two centuries, was an adventure I could not resist. This essay chronicles the response to the problematic historical script through the crafting of a production for contemporary audiences (fig. 1). Brazilian director, teacher, and statesman Augusto Boal argued that theatre can correct the flaws of the state through empathy and catharsis (9). The emotional impact of performance, as well as its consciousness raising, has the potential to move audiences to identify or align with the struggles presented and join in activism to remove the associated challenges. It stands to reason, then, that if performance can support positive societal transformation, it can also reinforce the status quo or, worse, promote a regressive social direction. Theatrical scripts reveal the attitudes of their day, and incognizant revivals of old chestnuts can perpetuate prejudice, ignorance, and oppressions that a progressive society strives to eradicate. Harmful or offensive events can also be encountered in production elements such as casting, design, and dramaturgy. As I proposed Tricks to Inherit: A Nephew and His Uncle (the translated title) for the University Theatre’s 2017–18 season, I contemplated how the play’s politics and social commentary, grounded in the racialized and gendered social stratification of late colonial New Spain, might prove troubling. What harms or offenses occur by mounting the play as written? Should such transgressions be edited, excised, or ignored? How would I negotiate my twin responsibilities to the playwright’s words as the play’s translator and to the audience’s experience and conclusions? The historic significance of García-Caro’s transcription and illumination of this script cannot be underestimated. Astucias por heredar, inspired by an eighty-year-old French play,1 was written by a peninsular living in Mexico City, suppressed by the Viceregal Censor of New Spain, performed once in a remote colonial outpost of Alta California while that territory was still part of New Spain, and was eventually buried in California, US’s historical archives. It can be considered a European play for its French roots, Spanish setting, and peninsular authorship, but its crafting and first production occurred in New Spain. The text’s survival through the Mexican War of Independence and the Mexican-American War complicates its identification, for like the famous adage of the 1960s Chicano movement, the play did not cross the border, the border crossed it. A product of colonial nostalgia and shifting national allegiances, the transnational script reflects the cultural influences of France, Spain, and Mexico as well as a material journey through Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Furthermore, as with so much early Hispanic history of the southwestern United States (including that of the oppression of Native nations through colonization), its existence was overlooked. While the play is an important example of the rich legacy of Hispanic culture in the United States, the script’s [End Page 233] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Manuscript cover, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. (Photo: Pedro García-Caro.) [End Page 234] burial in the Bancroft archives in the late eighteenth century contributed to an inadequate historical characterization of Spanish settlers and by inference their descendants (García-Caro, “From the Stacks to the Stage”). Producing the play and acknowledging its history in the process would be an act of reclamation for the presence and cultural contributions of New Spanish ancestors in Alta California. Yet, despite the historical importance of the text...

Reports, silences and repercussion: wondering about the ballistic biography of the Leichhardt gunplate

ABSTRACT One of the most mythologised Australian explorers is the Prussian-born Ludwig Leichhardt, who famously ‘disappeared’ in 1848. The only seemingly authenticated relic from his final journey is a gunplate, purchased by the National Museum of Australia in 2006. In a context conditioned by the Australian History Wars, the Museum presents the plate in singularising, largely heroicising fashion and occludes the uses to which the gun was once put. However, an expanded object biography – a ‘ballistic biography’ that wonders about trajectories, interactions with the media through which an object travels, and terminal impacts as well as subsequent repercussions – can contemplate the significance of guns and their parts in Indigenous lifeworlds, and their after-effects. Plumbing these hidden histories and effects can add nuance and complexity to the simpler story of colonial nostalgia accreting around objects like this gunplate in its current institutional setting. By encouraging speculation it can prompt museum visitors into a more activated state.

Diasporic visions: colonialism, nostalgia and the empire in Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House

ABSTRACT Released on the 70th anniversary of Partition, Gurinder Chadha’s film Viceroy’s House, which is narratively and stylistically constructed in the fashion of heritage cinema, chronicles the last days of the empire in India and is said to provide a ‘British Asian perspective’ on Partition. This article addresses the debate that followed the release of the film and, in particular, the analysis focuses on the interplay between Partition, diaspora, and representations of the imperial past. Through the analysis of the film’s structure and narrative, the article discusses its representation of British India and argues that, notwithstanding its potential to unsettle traditional representations of the empire of period dramas, the film’s glamorous depiction of the British rulers ultimately feeds into the contemporary wave of colonial nostalgia.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites: shared shrines or contested sanctuaries? The case of the Buddhist temples of Luang Prabang, Laos

ABSTRACT This article, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Luang Prabang, Laos, since 2006, expands the analysis of the conflicts and divergent interpretations regarding non-Western UNESCO World Heritage Sites. We suggest that the Buddhist temples of Luang Prabang, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1995, may best be understood as ‘shared shrines’ or ‘contested sanctuaries.’ Here, three cosmological perceptions intersect: the local Laotian Buddhist cosmology, the statist cosmology of the contemporary Laotian regime, and the Western cosmological perception of heritage, comprising modernity and (colonial) nostalgia. We show how the relevant parties – local town dwellers, Laotian state officials, and Western foreign experts and tourists – are involved in a cosmological debate over the ways in which rituals operate, time evolves, and material objects are created, maintained, destroyed and rebuilt. We conclude by arguing that these differing perceptions of the universe make world heritage sites such as the Buddhist temples of Luang Prabang into ambiguous and contested spaces, where a temporary, apparently harmonious balance exists between conflicting cosmologies.