Colonial Past Research Articles

Broken View. Congo and the magic lantern

As an early projection device, the magic lantern was often used for colonial propaganda. For instance, to showcase and legitimize the ‘good works’ of the church in the colony. But lanterns were also used by missionaries in Africa to evangelize the local people and create a colonized mindset. This text is a reflection on the work process of Broken View, an essay film on colonial images from the Belgian Congo and the magic lantern. Through montage, collage, and assemblage the film examines and recontextualizes these images of the Belgian colonial past.

After the Colonial Past: Ambivalences of Assimilation in French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s

Focusing on the case of French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s, this article aims to contribute to reflection on the controversial notion of assimilation. The author therefore pays attention to the trajectories of the préfet, i.e. from 1947 the highest civil representative of the state and Creole teachers, the latter providing the largest contingent of indigenous colonial officials. The article argues that, while assimilation is often perceived as a policy that aims to impose an order designed for the mainland through a universalist ideal that erases differences, in reality it did not produce uniformity and its ideal could be – and often was – negotiated under the constraints of a post-slavery society in which the elites were indeed Black.

Mi casa de los Espíritus (My house of spirits): Challenging patriarchy with magical feminism

AbstractThis paper draws on magical feminism, a writing that engages in a critic of patriarchy through inexplicable events that address gender inequality and the power of the oppressed. This magic has always been in me but always dormant in my academic writing. To let this magic out has required to let myself go into a form of magical embodiment in my methods: I engage in a spiritual excavation to let emerge three Latin American feminist myths and legends that are in me to recover from vicarious violence and come back to the world. This experience opens the gates to engage with a colonial past and to celebrate other systems of belief. This paper is an invitation for those who will join to mobilize our magical forces for the recognition of knowledge production in moments of magic as legitimate.

An evolving migration-development nexus: DfID and British politics of race and belonging

The last three decades have witnessed increasing interest in the connections between migration and development. Within this body of work less attention has been paid to the ways in which ideas of race and racialised histories and geographies shape the migration-development nexus. Focusing on diasporic communities as key actors within this nexus and using empirical material from Great Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID), this paper explores the shifting constructions of ‘the diaspora’ within the global development context from DfID’s inception in 1997 to its demise in 2020. Constructions of the diaspora-development nexus can be framed as a (shifting) assemblage, bringing together contemporary post-colonial politics of belonging, the racialised histories and geographies of development and the changing (neoliberal) architectures and cultures of development. The paper concludes that in this context, diasporic-centred development can be considered a racialised socio-political mechanism, shaped by the shifting politics of race and belonging, which are themselves bound to colonial pasts and contemporary colonialities. This attends to processes of inclusion (and exclusion) in the global development sphere in contemporary Britain and speaks to the need to think more widely about how race intersects with the migration-development nexus.

The narrative practices of hostile environments: the story of the nation-as-family and the story of security

This article contributes to research into the importance of storytelling in asylum practice by examining the narratives used to promote and justify Hostile Environment policies. The two narrative practices identified are the “story of the nation-as-family”, which defines national belonging predominantly by markers of race and ethnicity, and the “story of security”, whereby racialized refugees are framed as potential threats to the nation's socio-economic stability. The former propagates a notion of consanguinity that works to exclude and silence people seeking asylum from non-European nations. The latter sees the rhetoric of a “clash of civilisations” so central to the “War on Terror” taken up in policy debates about climate-induced migration. An analysis of the way in which these stories are staged and critiqued in the writing of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Stephen Collis reveals how they elide the relationship between forced migration and the history of European colonialism. In exploring this elision, this article insists on the significance of literary texts as spaces where monocultural conceptions of belonging can be confronted, and where understanding Europe's colonial past is established as an integral part of hearing the stories of refugees in the present.

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.

Introduction

Introduction

Us and them: Privileged emotions of Cape Town’s urban water crisis

Political ecology has already engaged with emotions in order to reveal the intimate, unconscious and unexplored power dynamics which characterise patterns of water use and control. Similar explorations have mostly focused on the emotional struggles of structurally disadvantaged people rather than on the emotions of those with privilege: the elite. This oversight becomes problematic when it conceals disproportionate shares of power and the implications that such power has on the sustainable use and just distribution of water resources. The 2018 water crisis which affected Cape Town’s metropolitan area constitutes the empirical context of this paper, which sets out to address the aforementioned research gap. Focusing on the elite’s emotional responses to Cape Town’s drought and subsequent water crisis, this paper seeks to advance political ecology’s understanding of urban water crises by retracing the emotional geography of Cape Town’s most privileged urban dwellers. In particular, this work leverages the concept of subjectivity to explain the way emotions are constructed and come to materially and discursively reproduce historical power dynamics. These findings reveal that fear, anger, and a sense of pride felt by wealthier Capetonians results from and perpetuates the privileged conditions of those elite. Rooted in colonial and apartheid past, Capetonians’ privileged emotions end up perpetuating the main causes of the water crisis and eventually excluding the most disadvantaged inhabitants from future use and control of water resources. Ultimately, by connecting with privileged emotions, it is possible to challenge certain subjectivities and create space for more just and sustainable urban-water imaginaries.

Of Calimero and other stories

In my article, I explore the common roots of the different expressions, manifestations, politics, and embodiments of anti-black racism by examining the similarities and differences of anti-black imaginaries in Italy and the way they resonate with anti-black racism in the African diaspora contexts, including the Latin American one. While this comparative perspective reaffirms the global dimension of different forms of racism and anti-racist struggles, it also places the case of Italy, with its colonial past and postcolonial present, in direct conversation with the larger global context of racist narratives and practices.

EMERGING SECESSIONIST THREATS IN NIGERIA: A FOCUS ON THE ACTIVITIES OF IPOB AND UNKNOWN GUNMEN IN EASTERN NIGERIA

This study examines the reemergence of separatist movements in Nigeria, particularly in the Eastern region, and their impact on the security situation in the country. It reveals that the separatist groups, such as IPOB and Unknown Gunmen, have been able to mobilize support from the Igbo people by highlighting their historical, economic, and political grievances against the Nigerian state. The failure of the Nigerian state to address the legitimate grievances of ethnic minorities has contributed to the emergence of separatist movements. The analysis of reports and data sources shows that the activities of IPOB and Unknown Gunmen have had a significant impact on the security situation in the Eastern region of Nigeria. The findings of this study have important implications for the security and stability of Nigeria. The study concludes that secessionism in Nigeria has a complex and multi-layered history that is rooted in the country's colonial past and perpetuated by the failure of the Nigerian state to address the legitimate grievances of ethnic minorities. The recommendations include addressing the root causes of secessionism, promoting inclusive governance, and engaging in meaningful dialogue with separatist groups. These steps can help to find a peaceful solution to the issue of secessionism and ensure the security and stability of Nigeria.

Decolonising Teaching and Learning in Anthropology, A Holistic Approach.

The task of decolonising anthropology is not yet complete. Rather, it is an ongoing process, and recent times have reminded us that evidence of the colonial past can still be found in anthropology departments (and are potentially reproduced through our teaching). In this article, I argue for a holistic approach to the decolonising of teaching and learning. This is in contrast to more isolated attempts to decolonise anthropology, for example, in the inclusion of previously suppressed voices. I explore a repertoire that includes student-centred methods, links between fieldwork practices, teaching practices and ethics, and a practice of encouraging students to place their interlocutors aims and objectives at the centre of anthropological practice. Moreover, I argue for the importance of assignments, fieldwork exercises, and performative teaching techniques that assist students to experience, rather than merely discuss, anthropology. I also go on to encourage the teaching of an actively engaged and relevant anthropology, which is open to student engagement with contemporary issues and which is directly relatable and relevant to them. Finally, I provide examples of collaborative research methods as a medium for decolonising anthropology. I argue that these methods allow students to fathom more deeply the ways in which contemporary anthropological knowledge is produced.

An Atomic Age Unleashed

Abstract While tens of thousands of Koreans were subject to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, early peninsular analysis of the bombings rarely grappled with the existence of these individuals. The general exclusion of colonial subjects from the story of the atomic bombings has long been identified as part of a nationalization of the wartime years, a move that situates the history of the attacks as a specifically Japanese experience. Less understood is how postcolonial intellectuals in Korea encouraged this historiographical trend. Across the peninsula, a common commitment to the idea of science as emancipatory enabled postcolonial Korean writers to conflate political liberation with advancements in the field of atomic science. This fusion of postcolonial developmentalism and atomic scientism, common in both the North and the South between 1945 and 1950, drowned out the critical temporalities introduced by peninsular survivors of the atomic attacks. This article outlines the historiographical obstacles Korean bomb victims posed to emancipatory accounts of the attacks. Postcolonial bomb victims were interpolated into a postwar community that was physiologically unable to leave the fact of the bombings in a colonial past.

Unfixing timelines: connecting colonial pasts and contemporary constructs

Unfixing timelines: connecting colonial pasts and contemporary constructs

Men. Male-biased sex ratios and masculinity norms: evidence from Australia's colonial past.

We document the historical roots and contemporary consequences of masculinity norms-beliefs about the proper conduct of men. We exploit a natural experiment in which convict transportation in the and centuries created a variegated spatial pattern of sex ratios across Australia. We show that in areas with heavily male-biased convict populations, relatively more men volunteered for World War I about a century later. Even at present these areas remain characterized by more violence, higher rates of male suicide and other forms of preventable male mortality, and more male-stereotypical occupational segregation. Moreover, in these historically male-biased areas, more Australians recently voted against same-sex marriage and boys-but not girls-are more likely to be bullied in school. We interpret these results as manifestations of masculinity norms that emerged due to intense local male-male competition. Once established, masculinity norms persisted over time through family socialization as well as peer socialization in schools. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10887-023-09223-x.

The Nightmare Island: Representations of St. Barthélemy in Swedish Novels

The Nightmare Island: Representations of St. Barthélemy in Swedish Novels

Violent Histories of Indigeneity and International Relations: Tales from the Indian State

The discipline of International Relations (IR) has been complicit in its representation of indigenous populations, often producing teleological narratives underpinning the superiority of the West and legitimizing colonial domination. The historical lived experiences of the indigenous peoples and their knowledge have been silenced and sidelined enabling the anchoring of discussions on political subjectivity and development from the vantage point of western modernity. The crisis of understanding modern statist practices of development plays out in the domain of ‘onto politics’—the politics of being whereby current governing practices are merely reflective of the colonial past. The practice of finance and the use of capital during the colonial era contributed to the embedding and actualization of colonial enlightenment thought on the inferiority of non-Europeans, while corollaries of money (property, trade) helped to produce implement hierarchies even amongst the indigenous colonized communities. The article is exploring a double relationship between knowledge production and practice: the first is how enlightenment scholars provided the rubric for racial hierarchies, and the second is the way money reified and reproduced those racist classifications through practice by looking at the colonial and post-colonial Indian state. In doing so, it advances the case to examine the relationship between indigeneity and knowledge production as constitutive to the modern Indian state.

Editorial EAJPC 9.1

This editorial is an overview of this edition of the Journal of East Asian Popular Culture. It features a theme that has assumed prominence in East Asia’s cultural conversations during the latter half of 2022, namely the role of religion in public life. Five articles examine the engagement of religion with various examples of popular global culture. Two articles deal with popular portrayals of the recent colonial past in postwar Japan and Taiwan. The Book Reviews section features commentary on recently published works that relate to themes discussed in the research articles.

Photographic Power

In Raw Histories, her 2001 compendium of essays on photography, anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards writes of the layers of historical significance and meaning that colonial photographs bear. She elaborates: During the hours, days and months spent in many places, working with photographs … I have talked to people looking for ‘history’. This history has been both the actuality of evidential inscription, and their own particular ‘realities’. They are looking for their own history or someone else’s history, for the history of their discipline, or confronting the nature of their colonial past, both the colonised and the colonisers; people looking for their ancestors, people making, re-making or even imagining histories.1 Edwards succinctly gestures towards the many stakeholders of the colonial photographs: museum professionals, historians and anthropologists, but equally the descendants of the subjects of these images who find traces of themselves in imperial archives. The passage refers to efforts to prize alternative histories away from dominant narratives of colonial vision and its encyclopedic logic. It also refers to ongoing efforts to bestow personhood, lineage, and afterlife to the sitters of imperial images, the majority of whom were photographed in the context of great asymmetries of power. These alternative practices of reading photographs against the grain as a way of resuscitating Indigenous-centred narratives do not as often make it to the page. In the immense wealth of scholarship that colonial photography has generated, from studies that centre the performance of savagery to the development of exoticist codes, to the efforts of colonial officers to produce encyclopedic albums, literature concerning Indigenous revisions and interventions in the material as a means of challenging colonial epistemologies is less prominent.2 This begs the question: has the dominant literature in this area facilitated enough of a shift in methodologies to prioritise the non-colonial, entangled histories of these photographs? How can archival and art historical method be transformed to accommodate narratives of the photographed?

When images hurt hyper-reality and symbolic violence in Indonesian men’s lifestyle magazines

In Western culture, the practice of looking has traditionally been perceived as an act of dominance. Enacted by the male gaze, looking implies an active position, whilst to be looked at implies a passive position. However, in the case of Indonesian men’s lifestyle magazines, these practices of looking fuel the internalisation of inferiority on the part of Indonesian subjects. Emerging from its colonial past, contemporary Indonesia continues to be confronted with a persistent colonial order of things—an imaginary structure that is highly hierarchical and rooted in the colonial legacy. Notably, this colonial discourse also impacts men and masculinity. By analysing seven different men’s lifestyle magazines spanning the period from the earliest magazines published in the mid-1970s until 2015 and providing analyses of other sociocultural practices in Indonesian society, in this article I interrogate the internalisation of this colonial discourse and the symbolic violence that Indonesians enact upon themselves in the process. In order to untangle the deep-rooted and complex inlander mentality marked by colonialism, I demonstrate how doxa, in the form of hyper-reality, produce symbolic violence between spectators and spectacles.

DECOLONIZING NEWSMAKING ON YOUTUBE: THE CASE OF CLIMATE JOURNALISM DURING THE COP26 SUMMIT

This paper examines the role of newsmaking on the digital platform YouTube during the 2021 Climate Change Summit. Drawing on data collected with the software NodeXL Pro, we assess the connected communities, authorities, and popularity within a YouTube comment network. The data set of the investigation was assembled by the query ’COP26’. Drawing on the measures of influence in-degree, out-degree and PageRank, were ranked the YouTube channels of the researched network. In addition, the layout algorithm Force Atlas 2 was employed to detect network clusters in the software program Gephi. Finally, the study drew on Natural Language Processing to analyze the comment corpus. Our key findings suggest that YouTube channels of well-established, professional news corporations, such as BBC News, DWNews, and Sky News, reached high scores for the PageRank analysis. Based on the evidence collected, we argue that professional news corporations acted as influencers during the coverage of the 2021 Climate Summit on YouTube. This investigation contributes to understanding the role of digital platforms in the science communication on climate change and the negotiations of (post)colonial pasts. Its findings imply that claims for climate justice are increasingly played out within a diverse, global transmedia ecology. Climate justice is increasingly intertwined with decolonial voices.