Colonial Periphery Research Articles

Whose heartland and which periphery? christian women crossing south africa's racial divide in the twentieth century

Abstract This article focuses on black and white Christian women's groups in the Anglican and Methodist churches in twentieth-century South Africa. While the Mothers' Union was exported from the metropolitan heartland to the colonial Anglican periphery as a nominally multiracial organisation, Methodist women set up racially divided women's groups, which, nevertheless, intersected in various ways. By the 1960s, Africans dominated the Mothers' Union, and white and mixed-race Anglican women turned to a more liberal alternative, while Methodist women faced growing pressure to form one united organisation. Democratic transition in South Africa found female church groups still wrestling with historic divisions which were not simply racially based, but the black ‘periphery’ was now clearly numerically, if not always organisationally, dominant while its spiritual style constituted the heartland of South African ‘mission’ Christianity.

Whose heartland and which periphery? christian women crossing South Africa's racial divide in the Twentieth Century

This article focuses on black and white Christian women's groups in the Anglican and Methodist churches in twentieth-century South Africa. While the Mothers' Union was exported from the metropolitan heartland to the colonial Anglican periphery as a nominally multiracial organisation, Methodist women set up racially divided women's groups, which, nevertheless, intersected in various ways. By the 1960s, Africans dominated the Mothers' Union, and white and mixed-race Anglican women turned to a more liberal alternative, while Methodist women faced growing pressure to form one united organisation. Democratic transition in South Africa found female church groups still wrestling with historic divisions which were not simply racially based, but the black ‘periphery’ was now clearly numerically, if not always organisationally, dominant while its spiritual style constituted the heartland of South African ‘mission’ Christianity.

Amnesia in the Fields: Late Modernism, Late Imperialism, and the English Pageant-Play

In the decade since the appearance of James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture, the study of Euro-American modernism has been enlivened and expanded by attention to the intersections between anthropological knowledge and modernist artwork. Most new readings in this vein are underpinned by a model of epistemological privilege in the metropolis, according to which cultural materials from the colonial periphery were collected, circulated, absorbed, and imitated by Western arts and sciences. The model of "metropolitan perception"--developed most influentially in the work of Edward Said and Raymond Williams--has helped reveal new ethnographic and primitivist layers in a range of British modernist works from the period 1880-1930. 1

Biographical Passages: Essays in Victorian and Modernist Biography: Honoring Mary M. Lago (review)

In their closing essay to Biographical Passages, dedicated to Mary M. Lago, Joe Law and Linda K. Hughes honour her "traditional yet forward-looking" (191) scholarly and cultural interests. These embrace music, the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and E. M. Forster, as well as the art of Edward Burne-Jones and Christiana Herringham. Lago's expertise traverses the borders between the tonal and the representational arts, the Victorian and post-Victorian worlds, and (anticipating postcolonial concerns) the imperial centre and the colonial periphery. It has enabled her to produce critical biographies of diverse subjects, as well as editions of their letters and conversations. Thus, Lago's own biography, and her commitment to the practice of biography, are the principles linking the various essays in this collection.

Troubled Homecomings

This paper has many beginnings. My interest in Rosa Praed's involvements with spiritualism and theosophy has taken me into the nineteenth century literatures and practices of spiritualism, to debates about the specification of human nature and human origins and to the recent literature on the administration and regulation of populations in the cities at the centre of Empire and the colonial periphery. But my thinking about Lemuria had been caught up with the ‘nowhere’ of Utopian discourse.

Prostitution and Racialised Sexuality: The Regulation of Prostitution in Britain and the British Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts

In this paper I examine the interplay of race and sexuality in 19th-century British colonial legislation concerning prostitution. I demonstrate that British systems of regulation of prostitution predated the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, and that rather than spreading from Britain to its colonies regulationist measures developed from the interplay of metropolitan-colonial relations. The example of Hong Kong serves to illustrate both the priority of colonial systems for the regulation of prostitution and the explicitly racialised nature of this legislation. I argue that colonial practice served as more than a merely legislative precedent for domestic measures, however, as racial discourse and practice can be seen to mark all attempts at the regulation of prostitution, at home and abroad; and the conception of ‘racialised sexuality’ is useful for understanding both colonial and domestic measures for the regulation of prostitution. Understanding the historical geography of regulation therefore undermines conventional analyses of relations between imperial metropole and colonial periphery, and directs our attention to the articulated categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender in the complex colonial spaces of the British imperium.

“To See is to Know”: the Pedagogy of the Colonial Exhibition, Semarang, 19141

In this paper, which focuses on a western discourse of race within the pedagogical context, I want to draw some parallels between the “object” and the image in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century classroom and the exhibit of the contemporary museum and exhibition. I suggest that the classroom, museum and exhibition were fundamentally similar pedagogical sites in which the object and the image illustrated similar pedagogical subtexts and were located in architectural environments which were similarly complicit in delimiting the range of meaning which spectators/readers were being encouraged to extract. I emphasise this parallel by focusing on visual representations of “the Other” in the school text and exhibition in both the meteropolian and colonial context. The paper concludes that a discourse of race and cultural contestation pervaded European educational institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in both the metropole and the colonial periphery. 1 Revisions of the original conference paper, including references to Dutch colonial texts, were undertaken while I was Affiliated Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden, The Netherlands. I wish to acknowledge the support of this Institute in providing the opportunity to develop the original concept on which this paper was based.

Criminological Science and the Criminal Law on the Colonial Periphery: Perception, Fantasy, and Realities in South Africa, 1900-1930

This article, by framing criminology and criminal law together, suggests that in the early years of the South African state both bodies of discourse served to evade reality and to construct a sense of self and other as a part of the development of the administration of South African criminal law. It considers the derivation of South African criminology from contemporary metropolitan formulations. South African legal doctrine and practice likewise depended on extra-South African sources. These imported discourses provided lenses through which a descriptive confrontation with the realities of the processes of criminalization, and the administration of criminal justice could be avoided precisely by hose “expert” in these fields. Instead, science and law, far from being pragmatic disciplines, provided the means by which to fantasize about the nature of white justice and black criminality.

Criminological Science and the Criminal Law on the Colonial Periphery: Perception, Fantasy, and Realities in South Africa, 1900-1930

This article, by framing criminology and criminal law together, suggests that in the early years of the South African state both bodies of discourse served to evade reality and to construct a sense of self and other as a part of the development of the administration of South African criminal law. It considers the derivation of South African criminology from contemporary metropolitan formulations. South African legal doctrine and practice likewise depended on extra-South African sources. These imported discourses provided lenses through which a descriptive confrontation with the realities of the processes of criminalization, and the administration of criminal justice could be avoided precisely by hose “expert” in these fields. Instead, science and law, far from being pragmatic disciplines, provided the means by which to fantasize about the nature of white justice and black criminality.

The Soviet Union

It has become commonplace to call the Soviet Union an "empire," usually with clear negative connotations. But, if the USSR was an empire, then what kind of an empire was it? How similar was it to the great European empires that ended their existence in the first three post-war decades—the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish empires? In the European empires, the metropolis was always clearly contrasted to the colonial periphery. The metropolis always had its own system of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Only citizens of a metropolis had the right to elect national legislatures, and in presidential republics (for example, in Portugal, in accordance with the constitution of March 13, 1933) the head of state as well. The population of the colonies and other dependent territories (protectorates, associated states) was never included among the electorate of the governments of the metropolis. However, these legislative authorities of the metropolis, and of presidents where they ...

Race and Migration in Imperial Japan.

A high degree of cultural and racial homogeneity has long been associated with Japan, with its political discourse and with the lexicon of post-war Japanese scholarship. This book examines underlying assumptions. The author provides an analysis of racial discourse in Japan, its articulation and re-articulation over the past century, against the background of labour migration from the colonial periphery. He deconstructs the myth of a Japanese race'. Michael Weiner pursues a second major theme of colonial migration; its causes and consequences. Rather than merely identifying the push factors', the analysis focuses on the more dynamic pull factors' that determined immigrant destinations. Similarly, rather than focusing upon the immigrant, the author examines the structural need for low-cost temporary labour that was filled by Korean immigrants.

The Soviet Union: From an Empire into Nothing?

It has become commonplace to call the Soviet Union an usually with clear negative connotations. But, if the USSR was an empire, then what kind of an empire was it? How similar was it to the great European empires that ended their existence in the first three post-war decades—the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish empires? In the European empires, the metropolis was always clearly contrasted to the colonial periphery. The metropolis always had its own system of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Only citizens of a metropolis had the right to elect national legislatures, and in presidential republics (for example, in Portugal, in accordance with the constitution of March 13, 1933) the head of state as well. The population of the colonies and other dependent territories (protectorates, associated states) was never included among the electorate of the governments of the metropolis. However, these legislative authorities of the metropolis, and of presidents where they ...

The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Colonization and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition

Adistinctive feature in the new directions I have selected for this presentation is what I call the “darker side” of the European Renaissance, which could be condensed in “the discontinuity of the classical tradition.” Such discontinuity becomes apparent in the fractured cultural products which do not conform to the aesthetic norms of the early modern period, and they are, consequently, marginalized from histories of ideas, art or literature. I have also used elsewhere the expression “colonial semiosis” to distinguish the fractured semiotic practices in the colonial periphery resulting from the clash between hegemonic norms and values guiding semiotic practices in metropolitan centers, their extension to the colonial periphery, and the resistance and adaptation to them from the perspective of the native population to whose historical legacy the European Renaissance was quite meaningless. I have selected, therefore, those scholarly works which have in the past fifteen years introduced a new perspective by looking at the European Renaissance from the New World colonial periphery.

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AbstractWhen Imperial Germany entered the group of European colonial powers in 1884, among her enthusiastic physicians the question arose how the white man, as a representative of a vulnerable race, could be able to exist permanently in tropical regions. It is not surprising that German colonial circles especially the representatives of the organized German colonial movement were taking a keen interest in the same question. The Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society) inaugurated and financed international questionaire‐activities in the field of tropical medicine with the intention of supporting the institutionalization of this new medical discipline. In fact, the foundation of the Hamburg Institut für Schiffs‐ und Tropenkrankheiten in 1901 was not only a consequence of the specialisation of bacteriology but also an expression of the grasp of colonial politics for tropical medicine as an instrument of colonization. Ever since up to the loss of the imperial Schutzgebiete (protectorates) German tropical medicine has been in a very close connection with colonial politics. Its tasks ranged from the organization of medical infra‐structures at the colonial periphery to the delivery of instruments for the imperial process of acculturation or the supply with pseudo‐scientific arguments for racial discrimination. The spectrum of these tasks will be outlined in this paper, and the interdependency of German colonial politics and German colonial medicine will be discussed.

Shamanism and politics in late‐colonial Ecuador

Study of 18th‐century “witchcraft” trials from the Audiencia de Quito indicates that many acts of magical aggression and defense belonged to the South American tradition of shamanic combat but that the conflicts provoking them derived from specifically colonial stresses. Due in part to the poor fit between jurally mandated institutions of colonial governance and the dynamics of native communities, shamanic achievement continued to be a route to indigenous power. The failure of Spanish administrators to interpret such facts politically had the paradoxical effect of accrediting shamans' magical potency in European eyes and strengthening the conviction that peoples of the colonial periphery were ungovernable and dangerous. [shamanism, Andes, Ecuador, ethnohistory]

Commerce and Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man

B q ETWEEN them, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville have provided us with a detailed, fully realized portrait of the new man of commerce. Their psychological analysis both of the universal type and of its American democratic exemplar is by now familiar and persuasive. We not longer startle at the strange blend of limitless aspiration, quasi-heroic effort, and sensible calculation that characterizes their model man of the future. And, of course, we rarely wonder at how much domestic tranquillity owes to the influence of commerce upon men's tastes, thoughts, and manners. In the eighteenth century, however, when this model of civil behavior was being formulated, all this stood in need of explication and argument. A case had to be made, and then won. The advocates men as diverse as Montesquieu and John Adams, Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Benjamin Rush were united at least in this: they saw in commercial republicanism a more sensible and realizable alternative to earlier notions of civic virtue and a more just alternative to the theological-political regime that had so long ruled Europe and its colonial periphery. However much these advocates differed in their philosophic insight, in their perception of the implications of their proposal for the organization of economic life, even in the degree of their acceptance of the very commercial republic they were promoting for all this, they may be considered a band of brethren in arms.1