Colonial Public Sphere Research Articles

A Class of Their Own: Newspaper Obituaries and the Colonial Public Sphere in Lagos, 1880–1920

AbstractFrom the 1880s, obituaries of Africans and European colonial officials became a frequent genre in Lagos newspapers. This article examines obituary notices in seven Lagos newspapers to understand how print publications and the next of kin who commissioned obituaries used commemorative practices to frame colonial relations and reflect on imperial expansion. Revisiting Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, I argue that colonial newspapers introduced gossipy anecdotes and sensationalism in obituary notices to define the colonial “public sphere” as one that is characterized by insinuations of social and economic class, Christian rhetoric, racial divides and anti-colonial sentiments as well as civic responsibilities around public health concerns.

The making of Islamic reform (iṣlāḥ) in Colonial Algeria (1882–1938): Ibadi scholars, French officials and the conceptual foundations of modern Islamic studies

Abstract Among the conceptual foundations on which scholars of modern Islam have built their narratives for decades, ideas such as “reform” and “reformism” have been singled out for charges of Eurocentricism and Orientalism. At the same time, research on early modern Islam leads us to question the specificities of these nineteenth and twentieth-century concepts. Building on this scholarship, this article examines the case of Algerian Ibadi reform (iṣlāḥ) in order to reassert the specificity of the early twentieth century as a moment when Islamic concepts acquired new meanings, but also as a moment of deep entanglements between Islamic and colonial knowledge production. It shows that a systematic understanding of iṣlāḥ as social and religious reform linked to the idea of progress developed only during the interwar period. It also demonstrates that the emic and etic uses of iṣlāḥ and “reform” developed together, a result of the confluence between modern Islamic scholarship and scholarship about Islam in the early twentieth-century Algerian colonial public sphere. Thus, the conceptual history of iṣlāḥ warns us against approaches that consider emic and etic categories bounded entities and invites us instead to unravel their complexities.

Zoïle’s pilgrimage: Abbé Ouvière’s Journal du Port-au-Prince (1791) and the struggle for free colored rights in revolutionary Saint-Domingue

ABSTRACT The Journal du Port-au-Prince was first published in Saint-Domingue on 1 September 1791, days after an insurrection of the gens de couleur libres (free people of color) was launched in the colony’s West Province. This hitherto unexamined newspaper was edited by Félix Pascalis Ouvière, a recently arrived native of Aix-en-Provence who, by the time it ceased publication on 20 November, had earned a reputation as among the most prominent white advocates for free colored rights. After supplying some biographical context for Ouvière’s Journal, this article provides a detailed account of how his (constitutional royalist) “politics of moderation” shaped the paper’s changing attitudes toward the gens de couleur, and then proceeds to highlight the distinctive role that literary forms of expression play in the Journal, concluding with methodological reflections on the double reading, historical and literary-critical, that Ouvière’s innovative contribution to the colonial public sphere solicits.

Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics, and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century

Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics, and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century

Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond

This article aims at exploring the role played by Freemasonry in displaying, promoting and celebrating the British Empire. It argues that Masonic lodges held centre stage in the Indian colonial public sphere. They organized processions, cornerstone laying ceremonies, and banquets on an unequalled scale, which all became an integral part of imperial display. Masonic ritual, therefore, held centre stage in the dramaturgy of colonial power in India, and also played a leading role in fostering the cult of Empire, which emerged in the last decades of the 19th century. In that respect, Freemasonry offers a stimulating venue for articulating the local and the global, the material and the cultural, formal and informal Empire. It also offers an interesting insight into imperial circulations.

Introduction: Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print

AbstractA growing literature explores the varying role of print media in the colonial world and the new types of publics such newspapers and periodicals produced. However, this literature has tended to focus on specific regions, and has often sidestepped the larger question of how to conceptualise the relationship between print media and colonial rule. While some have used the term ‘colonial public sphere’ or ‘colonial publics,’ others have preferred to avoid these terms and instead thought in terms of multiple and overlapping publics. What this literature has shown is that a single analytic model for analysing public spaces of discourse is not usable. In this Introduction to our Special Issue we propose a new framework for studying the publics created through print media in the colonial world. We outline a set of four factors – addressivity, performativity, materiality and periodicity – that can be applied to specific historical case studies. We then explain how the issue as a whole models this methodology as a means to analyse how print media (as one medium within the public sphere) functioned in specific colonial and semi-colonial spaces around the world.

Public Sphere without a Printing Press: Texts, Reading Networks, and Public Opinion in Venezuela during the Age of Revolutions

AbstractAt the end of the eighteenth century, members of the colonial elite of the Captaincy General of Venezuela addressed a letter to the king of Spain in which they sought permission to have a printing press in the city of Caracas. In the letter, they argued that the establishment of such a press was fundamental for the economic and commercial development of the Captaincy. Months later, they learned that the permission for a printing press had been denied without further explanations. Venezuela became one of the last capital cities in colonial Spanish America to possess this technology. The lack of a printing press during this politically dynamic period moved by the Atlantic revolutions did not necessarily affect public access to reading, sharing of information, and political debate in Venezuela. Venezuela's unique geographical location, and its open and frequent connections with the Caribbean region during the Age of Revolutions allowed for the effective entrance and transit of people and written materials that spread revolutionary ideas and impressions, creating a dynamic and contested political environment. Here I argue that during the late-colonial period, semiliterate forms of knowledge transmission, partially promoted by Spanish reformism, mobilised a socially diverse public that openly debated the monarchical regime, the system of slavery, and the hierarchical socio-racial order of colonial society. The colonial public sphere in Venezuela was shaped, then, within a context of emerging socio-racial tensions and became a space of contestation and struggle, animated by the overlapping of contradictory political discourses.This study contributes to recent debates about the character, nature, and relevance of the public sphere in the colonial world. It explores the circulation of manuscripts and ephemeral written materials, the different modes of production and reception of texts that developed in the colonial context, and an analysis of the character of the urban spaces that facilitated the performativity of texts. It thus offers a new framework for understanding the emergence of a public sphere in Venezuela, a colonial peripheral province with no printing press.

Weeping Qingdao Tears Abroad: Locating Chinese Publics in Colonial Malaya, circa 1919

AbstractThis article suggests that conditions of coloniality produce a sui generis public sphere, one which contains multiple, plurilingual collective audiences, rather than a single “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas), or a single “imagined community” (Anderson). By way of illustration, it locates diasporic Chinese publics in the colonial public sphere of British Malaya, and argues for a more analytically differentiated understanding of their constituent collectivities, or what it refers to as “we” publics. It analyses a Chinese-language newspaper, theYik Khuan Poh, elaborating the different “we” publics convened within its pages, and emphasising the regional and translocal geographies of collective belonging that exist within the “transnational we,” which models of diaspora tend to overdetermine. In situating theYik Khuan Pohin its temporal and spatial contexts in the early twentieth century, this article also raises questions about the character of colonial public spheres in an era of significant globality.

Censorship as Negotiation: The State and Non-European Newspapers in Kenya, 1930–54

AbstractThis article is concerned with the colonial state as a producer, consumer, and regulator of print. Propaganda and censorship may represent two extremes in the management of a colonial public sphere. Censorship was an interactive and negotiated process—one whose successful management was in the interest of both the censoring agents and those censored. One might think that censorship is a measure taken in order for communication to break down. If we imagine colonial print communication as a continuum suspended between partners that at one end desire full freedom of expression and at the other full control, absolute censorship does constitute silence, like that represented by the dramatic closure of the African press in Kenya with the Emergency of 1952. In a politicised colonial environment, like that in postwar Kenya, censorship may be understood as negotiation between colonisers and colonised on the limits of free speech. The article examines what changed in Kenya's late-colonial period in relation to the production, broadcasting, censoring, and suppression of non-European newspapers, and how the change affected the institutions and groupings that produced and received texts. More narrowly, it seeks to trace the dynamics of textual interfaces between the European print frameworks and those of the consolidated or emerging non-European publicists and publics. An examination that situates censorship in a broader context of management of discourse, of negotiation and dialogue, one that tests and goes beyond the dualism of suppression and resistance, may make it clearer why and to what extent a number of critical, anti-colonial publications were allowed to exist, and some were encouraged; and what the limits were, when opposition became unacceptable, and communication broke down.

British Visions, African Voices: The “Imperial” and the “Colonial” in World War II

AbstractThis article is focused on a magazine calledJambo, which was published by the British East Africa Command for troops in its employ between 1942 and 1945.Jambowas an agglomeration of political articles, general interest stories, propaganda, cartoons, crosswords, and more, with many of its contributions authored (or drawn) by men serving in the Allied forces. Here, I useJamboto consider notions of the “colonial” and “imperial” during the Second World War, exploring how the realities of racial segregation in the colonies fit awkwardly with imperial service.Jamboalso permits us a window into the views of some hundreds of British servicemen, who wrote extensively about the Africans with whom they served, revealing the complexities and shifts in British perceptions of African peoples during the conflict.Jambois unique in another respect: it also provided a forum for African troops. In few other publications—and even fewer with such wide circulation—could educated (but nonelite) African peoples reach thousands of British readers. Though their published letters and articles were few compared to those written byJambo's British authors, African writers used the venue to critique the conditions of their military service, argue about the sort of social ordering they desired in their home communities, and create an alternate narrative of the war. Like most colonial publications,Jambohad intended audiences, but also voracious, additional, alternate publics that mediated the articles which appeared in its pages. All this suggests that we might think of the colonial public sphere as both local and global, inward and outward looking, personal and communal, and situated along a continuum between colonial and imperial contexts.

Piety in Print: The Vaishnava Periodicals of Colonial Bengal

Abstract The voluminous corpus of Bengali Vaishnava periodical literature remains largely untapped in scholarship on Bengali Vaishnavism and colonial Hinduism more broadly. This article explores a range of Bengali Vaishnava periodicals from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to understand the complex ways in which educated Vaishnavas sought to forge points of convergence for Vaishnava culture within the colonial Bengali public sphere. The ensuing investigation will, it is hoped, demonstrate both the centrality and versatility of the role of the periodical in the broad and multiplex program of Vaishnava retrieval in colonial Bengal.

Gandhi's Newspaperman: T. G. Narayanan and the quest for an independent India, 1938–46

AbstractThe expansion of the colonial public sphere in India during the 1930s and 1940s saw the nation's English-language press increasingly serve as a key site in the struggle for freedom despite British censorship. This article examines the journalistic career of T. G. Narayanan, the first Indian war correspondent and investigative reporter, to understand the role of English-language newspapers in India's quest for independence. Narayanan reported on two major events leading to independence: the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Second World War. Drawing on Michael Walzer's concept of the ‘connected critic’, this research demonstrates that Narayanan's journalism fuelled the Indian nationalist movement by manoeuvring around British censors to publicize and expand Mahatma Gandhi's criticism of British rule, especially in light of the famine and war. His one departure from the pacifist leader, however, was his support of Indian soldiers serving in the Indian National Army and British Army.

Social histories of exclusion and moments of resistance: The case of Muslim Julaha weavers in colonial United Provinces

Locating the theorisation and practices of caste hierarchies within South Asian Islam with reference to high-caste Muslims (Ashrafs) versus Julaha weavers (Ajlafs), this article argues that class exploitation and class hegemony over the marginalised sections of Muslim society in North India were practised through caste stratifications, social hierarchies and land relations. The horizontal equality of ‘textual Islam’ was transformed into vertical social hierarchies in South Asia. While explaining the conditions of the disadvantageous socio-economic status that ensured their subordination, this article narrates instances of resistance and quests for equality undertaken by the Julaha weavers. The dialectics of these negotiations produced factors such as the stigma of status mandated by their caste, on the one hand, and the weavers’ integration within the capitalist colonial economy and politics, on the other. The article explores this history of hierarchies and the complex resistances offered to it, closely mediated by social and economic structures, prevailing ideologies and notions of colonial legality and mobility. The processes of the weavers challenging their social marginalisation, predicated on their economic status and their quest for new identities may look familiar to other communities which similarly used religion, caste and colonial law to resist and subvert hierarchies. Hence, the politicisation of the colonial public sphere affected the relations among the Indian Muslims in a new milieu. These arguments are significant in terms of rewriting the existing historiography that reinforces the binaries of nationalist–communalist or Hindu–Muslim politics.

Colonies in the Countryside: Doing Mission in Imperial Germany

This article adds the rural area of Wilhelmine Germany to the rich field of studies on the colonial public sphere in order to reassess the role mission associations played. The main argument is that so called mission friends developed a specific agenda that overlapped with the official politics of the mission societies but emphasized different elements while downplaying perspectives crucial to official missionary propaganda. By constructing a heterotopia that spoke to rural populations experiencing the dislocations of modernization, the discourse of the mission friends offered these populations what Arjun Appadurai calls “imaginative resources of lived experience.”

‘The Coming Clash of East and West’: syncretism, cosmopolitanism, and disaffection in the colonial public sphere

ABSTRACTThis essay analyses the modernist Indian journal ‘East and West’, published in Bombay from 1901 to 1921, as a significant instance of how and why syncretic ideals circulated in the colonial public sphere in India. The idea of East–West union, I argue, was a form of modernist cosmopolitanism that mediated between Enlightenment public sphere ideals and an emergent, ‘spiritual cosmopolitanism’, critical of Western values. It was also a way to conform to the government’s criminalisation of the Indian press for expressions of ‘disaffection’; by professing its allegianceto East–West friendship, but demonstrating the fallacy of this idea in practice through its juxtaposition of articles by British and Indian writers, the journal gives us insight into the changing valences of cosmopolitanism over the period of its circulation; the way syncretism mediated between these valences; and how these discourses were shaped by the regulation of the press.

Life Writing in the Colonial Archives: The Case of Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996) of Nigeria

ABSTRACTCommentators on Europe’s colonial archives often highlight the lack of coherence to be found in official and national repositories. Even within a single file, the archives do not simply, or only, yield evidence about imperial intentions and colonial subjects in Europe’s diverse territories. Focusing on secret files compiled in the 1930s and 1940s around the activities of the prominent Nigerian newspaper editor and later first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996), this article argues that Colonial Office archives reveal the tensions between imperialism as a hegemonic ideology and the diverse practices of individuals, including colonial governors, civil servants in London, and their critics in the colonial public sphere. The article shows how Azikiwe’s biography was produced by spies and informants in Nigeria, and by civil servants at the Colonial Office, but that Azikiwe himself cleverly exploited the meticulous record-keeping procedures in Whitehall to insert his political autobiography into the files for posterity.

ENTERTAINING THE EMPIRE: THEATRICAL TOURING COMPANIES AND AMATEUR DRAMATICS IN COLONIAL INDIA

ABSTRACTThis article argues that theatre in colonial India – both in the form of touring companies and amateur dramatics – offered much more than mere entertainment: first, it was an important social space where the British diaspora constituted itself as a community. Secondly, it served as a lifeline to the home country. By watching theatrical performances either brought to them straight from London or which they performed themselves, colonial Britons felt in touch with their homeland. Finally, theatre not only allowed colonial audiences to participate in the metropolitan culture; it inadvertently helped to unify the British empire. Whether living in London, the provinces, or a colonial city, all British subjects consumed the same popular culture, forming in effect one big taste community. Theatre, therefore, lends itself to a discussion of central issues of imperial history, as, for example, the relationship between the metropolitan centre and the imperial periphery, the colonial public sphere, social and racial hierarchies, the perception of the ‘Other’, and processes of cross-cultural exchange and appropriation.

DEFINING THE RELIGIOUS AND THE POLITICAL

This essay explores the ways the colonial public sphere was configured as secular vs. religious through the debate over the administration of religious sites in colonial India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the British Crown had attempted to limit its involvement with religious sites that, according to the various regulations passed in the presidencies in the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was obligated to manage. After the passage of a pivotal Act in 1863, the Government was obligated to define administrative mechanisms for religious sites that would allow it to divest itself of direct control, and at the same time provide for (and indeed, enforce) machinery that accorded with prevailing distinctions between religious and secular public institutions. The overall debate over the management of religious sites thus allows entry into the formative definitions of the colonial public sphere, and how South Asians, and specifically Sikhs, were able to gain entry into this sphere in religious and political terms. This case is considered in relation to all-India debates and legislation, to excavate how Sikh mobilization was formed within the broader colonial logic of the religious sphere, as well as in relation to a broader discourse on the role of religion in the public sphere in the West.

Culture and agency in a colonial public sphere: religion and the anti-colonial imagination in 1940s Eritrea

Ever since the late eighteenth century, empires and nations have represented two of the most common forms through which people have imagined their relationship to each other and to the constitution...

The Construction of a ‘Population Problem’ in Colonial India 1919–1947

This article examines the construction of a ‘population problem’ among public health officials in India during the inter-war period. British colonial officials came to focus on India's population through their concern with high Indian infant and maternal mortality rates. They raised the problem of population as one way in which to highlight the importance of dealing with public health at an all-India basis, in a context of constitutional devolution of power to Indians where they feared such matters would be relegated to relative local unimportance. While they failed to significantly shape government policy, their arguments in support of India's ‘population problem’ nevertheless found a receptive audience in the colonial public sphere among Indian intellectuals, economists, eugenicists, women social reformers and birth controllers. The article contributes to the history of population control by situating its pre-history in British colonial public health and development policy and outside the logic of USA's Cold War strategic planning for Asia.