Colonial Space Research Articles

Water in the Wilderness: The Group of Seven and the Coastal Identity of Lake Superior

This paper challenges the wilderness ideology with which the Group of Seven’s coastal landscapes of the north shore of Lake Superior are often associated. Focusing my analysis around key works by Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, I offer an alternative perspective on commonly-adopted national and wilderness narratives, and instead consider these works in line with an emergent ecocritical consciousness. While a conversation about wilderness in relation to the Group of Seven often ignores the colonial history and Indigenous communities that previously inhabited coastal Lake Superior, this paper identifies these within a discussion of the environmental history of the region. That the environment of the north shore of Lake Superior was a primordial space waiting to be discovered and conquered only seeks to ratify the landscape as a colonial space. Instead, by engaging with the ecological complexities and environmental aesthetics of Lake Superior and its surrounding shoreline, I challenge this colonial and ideological construct of the wilderness, accounting for the prevailing fur trade, fishing, and lumber industries that dominated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A discussion of environmental history and landscape painting further allows for a consideration of both the exploitation and the preservation of nature over the course of the twentieth century, and looks beyond the theosophical and mystical in relation to the Group’s Lake Superior works. As such, the timeliness of an ecocritical perspective on the Group of Seven’s landscapes represents an opportunity to consider how we might recontextualize these paintings in a time of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change, while recognizing the people and history to whom this land traditionally belongs.

Fatal blow: Urbicidal geographies, pax colonial and black sovereignty in the Colombian city

This article gives ethnographic form to Fanon’s warning that in the colonial world, “zombies are more terrifying than settlers,” by analyzing how racial mythologies produce spatial classifications of Black urban communities as unruly places and how Black individuals challenge their wretched condition by embracing a “program of complete disorder.” To do so, the article analyzes the short(ened) life of Paco, a young Black man under house arrest whose retaliatory violence against, and territorial dispute with, the police is an entry point for exploring resistance to urban coloniality in Santiago de Cali/Colombia. The article engages with the field of Black geography to propose a Fanonian reading of contemporary cityscapes as colonial spaces. Such colonial spatialities, it is argued, are not defined merely by subjugation to death but also, as Paco’s refusal to be killed may reveal, by an insurgent spatial praxis that might reposition the Black subject in relation to the city and the regime of Law.

Review: Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, by Dylan Robinson

Review: <i>Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies</i>, by Dylan Robinson

From a Mughal Bagh to a Colonial Archaeological Garden to a UNESCO World Heritage Property and everything else in between: the many lives of Badshah Shahjahan’s Hayat Baksh Bagh

ABSTRACT The article explores the transformation of the Indian subcontinent’s historic gardens as power changed hands from the Mughals to the British, first as the East India Company (henceforth EIC) and subsequently as the Crown, thus altering not only the political scenario but also the subcontinent’s cultural landscape. In the aftermath of the 1857 Indian uprising against colonial rule, the victorious colonial state undertook an urban remodelling programme across the subcontinent’s cities in a bid to stamp its authority. This resulted in the introduction of metropole-inspired forms of urbanity that included leisure. As a cultural import, leisure was spatialised in the subcontinent, like its British counterpart, via the public park. Colonial institutions notably the municipality and Archaeological Survey of India (henceforth ASI) laid out public parks that were referred to as municipal gardens and archaeological gardens respectively. These were either laid out as new ventures or by remodelling Mughal gardens based on metropolitan, notably English garden design ideas. The article argues that colonial interventions transformed Mughal gardens to produce a multi-layered landscape that evoked several but fragmented meanings. Further, it urges an unravelling of the layers of Mughal gardens to appreciate their complexity for charting a holistic approach for their conservation and management. One such venture is examined in detail i.e. the transformation of the seventeenth-century imperial Mughal leisure garden, Hayat Baksh Bagh, in Delhi’s Red Fort, first as a Mughal leisure garden, then as a colonial military space and archaeological garden and finally as a contemporary tourist site. The need to unravel the garden’s many culturally diverse layers is underscored for a more nuanced site interpretation to facilitate its conservation in keeping with contemporary global and national conservation discourses. 1

Doris Lessing’s Farm Writing and Capitalist Colonial Space Production

Doris Lessing’s Farm Writing and Capitalist Colonial Space Production

Dressed in Sheep’s Clothing: Pastoral and Reform in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland

Abstract This study investigates the presence of pastoral themes in Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596). Tracing the traditional pastoral themes of generational conflict, degeneration, and regeneration in Spenser’s late pastorals, this study considers how Spenser’s inclusion of these pastoral themes shape paradigms of reform in the View. It argues that generational conflict is exacerbated in the colonial space where degeneration is pervasive threatening both the self and the social structure of the English colonial project in Ireland. These connections to pastoral themes suggest that Spenser and his colonial peers, such as Lodowick Bryskett, conceive of their lives in pastoral terms intersected with imperial politics.

Resisting racial militarism: War, policing and the Black Panther Party

The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton’s concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.

Where are all the Girls and Indigenous People at IGSA@ND?

We adopt an autoethnographic approach to share critical reflections from the Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia girls’ group about our experiences attending the 2019 International Girlhood Studies Association conference at the University of Notre Dame (IGSA@ND). Moments of inspiration included sharing our work and connecting with local Indigenous youth. Challenging moments included feeling isolated and excluded since the only girls present at the conference were Indigenous people in colonial spaces. We conclude with reflection questions and recommendations to help future conference organizers and participants think through the politics and possibilities of meaningful expanded stakeholder inclusion at academic meetings.

Beyond ‘causes of causes’: Health, stigma and the settler colonial urban territory in the Negev/Naqab

This article critically analyses and theoretically conceptualises the links between settler colonialism, planning and health. Based on the case of the Bedouin community in the Negev/Naqab, we argue that the production of settler colonial space has a profound impact on health, and should therefore be referred to as a specific category for analysing health disparities, simultaneously entangling territorial control and biopolitics towards indigenous communities. Furthermore, we suggest that this relationship between space and health constructs stigma that justifies and facilitates – in turn – the ongoing territorial control over the indigenous Bedouin population in Israel. By reviewing existing data on health and planning, especially in relation to infrastructure and access to services, we contribute to the growing literature on the nexus of settler-colonialism/health with urban and regional planning. Importantly, throughout this paper we refer to the Bedouin localities as part of the production of urban territory, illuminating the urban as a multidimensional process of political struggle, including the metropolin informal fringes.

“State of Intoxication:” Governing Alcohol and Disease in the Forests of British North Borneo

This article focuses on issues of alcohol consumption, disease and public health in British North Borneo in the 1920s and 1930s, a colonial territory along the periphery of empire. Drawing upon a range of sources – from reportage and memoranda, to local folk tales and oral tradition – it examines how the North Borneo Chartered Company administration responded to spiralling population decline and ill health amongst indigenous Murut communities. Amidst widespread economic stagnation, the company shunned vital public health infrastructure and medical aid, opting instead to govern behaviour and condemn alcohol consumption. This article shows how the company perpetuated racist assumptions concerning ostensible alcohol addiction amongst indigenous communities. It further suggests that the effects of Northern European and American temperance and prohibition movements impacted the Bornean tropics. While scholarly attention has been paid to issues of alcohol, disease and empire in the tropics, historiography has overlooked the role of lax colonial governance in semi-autonomous, atypical colonial spaces such as British North Borneo. This article ultimately serves as a vital corrective by showing how the legacies of commercial-colonial governance remain perceptible in Sabah today, a region still facing major socio-economic and public health pressures amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Colonial capitalism, boundary demarcation and imperial placemaking in South Arabia

This study analyses the means through which indigenous stakeholders and British imperialists competed for influence in the shaping of Aden’s built environment, thus complementing a robust body of literature highlighting the importance of the port city within the framework of the world capitalist system. Yet in much of the historiography highlighting the colonial port city as an object of historical analysis, the coast of South Arabia – and the city of Aden in particular – remains overshadowed by the wealthy port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. Crucially, the imperial politics of demarcation and development found in Aden grounds for experimental placemaking, a process consisting of military and civilian infrastructure projects and the securitisation of territory both within and beyond Aden’s walls. Attempts to territorialise space through the imposition of hard borders and infrastructure exemplify the colonial embrace of geo-spatial abstractions, a process that occurred alongside the consolidation of direct rule within Aden and the concurrent projection of capitalist market forces into the hinterland. British incapacity created room for local agents of change to contest the construction of colonial space; attempts to integrate Aden and neighbouring polities into the imperial orbit entailed negotiation, compromise and occasionally the use of violence.

Spatial Attractions: The Literary Aesthetics of Female Erotic Experience in the Colony

This article examines the aesthetics of representing female sexuality within colonial narratives of the West–East encounter. I consider two literary works whose female characters challenge the gendered metaphors of empire that predominated in a tradition of colonial literature and its postcolonial rewriting: the short story “La femme adultère” by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, and the novelWāḥat al-ghurūbby Egyptian writer Bahāʾ Ṭāhir. In each text, the standard heterosexual troping of imperial conquest as a male activity directed at or against a feminized other is inverted to place a European woman’s sexually aroused body at the center of the drama of colonial contact. Reading these two texts against the grain of the aesthetic formulas that they employ to contemplate the political stakes of cross-cultural intimacies in a colonial setting, I argue that the phenomenological immediacy of how the female protagonist in each is shown to experience the eroticism of colonial space introduces a break in these formulas. The loss of narrative plausibility in each text that follows from these erotic interludes, I propose, ultimately testifies to the irreducibility of the body to either enforcing or disputing the epistemologies of the colonial project.

‘Good Things […] from Bristol and Ireland’

According to the historical sources, the members of the Creoles elite were ambiguous in their dietary choices: if they mainly had British food when they shared their meals with British colonists, in their private sphere, the dishes served were mainly and with strong traces of slaves cuisine. We hypothesise that their incongruous behaviour was connected with a white planters’ supposed feeling of inferiority for which British ingredients, along with British people, were believed of superior quality and more appropriate to be eaten when they believed British observed them. However, because food tastes and distastes were and are connected with familiar habits, the local élite chose to have their local dishes in their private daily lives. This attitude was connected with the construction of the identities in the colonial space in which food played a significant role, too.

Research of Beauveria bassianao the field control of Locusta migratoria manilensis Meyen

In this experiment, through testing the B.bassiana colony space persistent change on the lawn by isolate medium, explore the application time of field climate and other factors on the inoculum effect. Results: The control effect of lawn locust, Suspension emulsion mortality rate was 74.2%, Bt bacterium mortality rate was72.2%, B.bassiana bacteria mortality rate was70.1%. Test the population dynamics of B.bassiana surviving in lawn during 30 days by PPDA medium, we found that different strains of time has a great influence to the spore viability. Each cell showed obvious changes, the overall downward trend evident. After application the lawn every part of colony persistent distribution for soil> leaf > air; the best application time is 6:00 p.m.

Hubris of absenteeism

Harnessing Walter Benjamin’s [2009. One way street and other writing. London: Penguin Classics] Eingedenken and Jetztzeit along with the co-author’s notion of the Absent (a term in impossible redemption) into insurgent allegorical devices, are useful in reassembling reflections of ‘Time Flies’: a treasure hunt led performance project co-created by the co-authors between 2008 and 2018. The reflective essay is made in three parts (or theatrical acts) and prescribes to three themes: (i) absence, (ii) foolishness and (iii) remembrance. These three parts occur through an embodiment of absent authorship, made as a point of considering how the project and ideas collate into allegorical absence in reconsidering colonial space in the post-colonial city.

At the Edge of Empire? Women’s Ceramic Collections in Seventeenth-Century Newfoundland

ABSTRACT The sisters Sara Kirke and Frances Hopkins were successful plantation owners in the colony of Ferryland, Newfoundland. This article examines artefacts found in situ at Ferryland, alongside archival documents, to illuminate how Kirke and Hopkins positioned themselves as important actors in the English Atlantic empire. They were involved in debates on the future of the colony, and in their homes they also conveyed their feminine taste and imperial ambition through the display of exotic ceramics. The article focuses attention on the role of women in Newfoundland colonisation and also offers a new perspective on elite women’s collecting in colonial spaces.

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography by Pamila Gupta

Portuguese Studies vol. 37 no. 2 (2021), 256–68© Modern Humanities Research Association 2021 Reviews Pamila Gupta, Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 225 pages. Print and ebook. Reviewed by Paul Melo e Castro (University of Glasgow) A recent growth area in postcolonial studies has involved what one might loosely describe as ‘oceanic perspectives’. The attractions are obvious, in that such perspectives effectively provincialize Europe as one point in a network of exchanges and allow for a renovation of existing topics by recovering interconnections between former colonial spaces that a more national(ist) focus might occlude. Given that the bulk of Portuguese speakers are located around the South Atlantic and that a significant number, if not the majority, are of at least partial African descent, it is no surprise that Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic paradigm of a ‘counterculture of modernity’ emerging in the wake of the middle passage has provided the main inspiration within Lusophone Studies. Lately however, as attested by such works as Fernando Rosa’s The Portuguese in the Creole Indian Ocean (2015), among various articles and research projects, interest has also grown in how Isabel Hofmeyr’s countervailing Indian Ocean paradigm — in which processes of exchange long predate colonial modernity, even if increased and then informed by it — might bring about studies of the peripheral, less integrated, even residual eastern territories of the former Portuguese empire, stretching from Mozambique to India and onwards to Timor Leste. It to this emergent debate that Pamela Gupta’s Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World contributes, asking some searching questions of an original variety of ethnographic materials and historical junctures yet equally showing the risks that working across such a broad scope may entail. GuptahasdoneasignificantamounttointroducetheIndianOceanparadigm, being inter alia one of the editors of Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (2010). The present work collects a series of articles written subsequently and linking Angola, South Africa, Mozambique and Goa through the lens of decolonization, which the author pegs to two dates: 1961, when Goa was annexed by India, and 1975, when Angola and Mozambique achieved independence after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. While 1975 is uncontroversial, whether 1961 represented decolonialization or recolonialization is a tricky subject, as the various debates put forward by Goa’s Al-Zulaij Collective show. One of this book’s main points of interest is the wide variety of subjects it traverses, taking in references to the work of Ryszard Kapuściński, Mia Couto and Ricardo Rangel alongside the life stories of the Goan fishing community of Catembe and White Portuguese Africans who left Angola and Mozambique Reviews 257 for South Africa. Decolonization becomes a way of discussing the messiness of lives that continued through traumatic breaks in the historical timeline. The section on ‘retornados’ (if I can bend the meaning of this word so much, though many of the ‘retornados’ to Portugal were hardly returning there either) in South Africa is fascinating, the most interesting in the book for me. We see how this exodus, which has been given less attention than the high-profile flux of Whites to Portugal, was driven by a complex mix of self-identification as white Africans and the desire to preserve the prestige that colonial status brought. The fine-grained discussion of these lives is neatly complemented by the inclusion of photographs by Ricardo Rangel detailing the 1975 settler exodus from Lourenço Marques, adding a contrasting viewpoint to the memories of the interviewees. The section on Goans in Mozambique is equally interesting, the interviewees’ recollection of their ambivalent entanglements with whiteness and blackness exemplifying what Cristiana Bastos, quoted, calls their ‘floating position’. When problems arise, it is often in point of detail and partly through the cursory treatment given some issues. Here for brevity I focus on two subjects I know something of. Can we simply discuss Ricardo Rangel’s photographs as ‘visual metaphors’? Does the analysis of such documentary photography not have to engage with its claims on reality as trace or metonymy? What proof is there that many of Rangel’s colonial-era photographs were destroyed by the Portuguese colonial state, rather than their publication simply...

Axis of succession and axis of intention of time: Unpacking temporal dynamics of colonial space in Jerusalem

Axis of succession and axis of intention of time: Unpacking temporal dynamics of colonial space in Jerusalem

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang

Reviewed by: The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang Klara Loc-Ling Boger (bio) The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form, by Caroline H. Yang. Stanford University Press, 2020. Ix + 280 pp. $28.00 paper. ISBN 9781503612051. Explicitly evoking Saidiya Hartman's articulation of "the afterlives of slavery," Caroline H. Yang's The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form compellingly argues that one such afterlife, the minstrel form, informed representations of Chinese "coolie" labor in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. Yang emphasizes minstrelsy's origins in American chattel slavery and its antiblack logics that resulted in jovial depictions of enslaved Black people as "naturally" subservient to whites. Minstrelsy's specifically proslavery antiblackness affirmed whiteness as the only legitimate claim to personhood and citizenship even after Emancipation, and as the nation expanded westward, this sense of white national identity had to contend with other subordinated racialized labors. Coolie labor, at once seen as a replacement for slave labor and as a challenge to the standard of "free" American labor, perpetuated white anxieties about who can claim "legitimate" labor and citizenship. Using Robin Bernstein's definition of repertoire as a set of practices and gestures that inform everyday life, Yang asserts that blackface minstrelsy was one such repertoire that formed a "state of vision, of feeling, and of consciousness" in nineteenth century America (37). Yang's turn to the minstrel form's manifestation in literature after Emancipation is significant as she demonstrates the ways pervasive and quotidian antiblackness set the terms of representation for the Chinese "coolie" laborer. Literary minstrelsy during Reconstruction was a venue for the forging of a national cultural identity that upheld white supremacist definitions of personhood and political enfranchisement, "recalibrating" antiblack racism through the coolie figure (19). "Coolie" minstrelsy continued proslavery logics through representations of nonwhite figures as subhuman as it attended to anxieties about racialized labor that was nonwhite yet also not enslaved. In "Part I: 'Earliest Pioneers' of White Literature of the West During Reconstruction," Yang explores work by white writers, namely Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce, who, in spite of their "progressive" politics, still perpetuated racist depictions of Chinese laborers by deploying popular minstrel tropes and gestures. Thus, these writers intertwined the antiblack logics of slavery with US imperialism. These writers began their literary careers in California and were central in crafting or "pioneering" the space of the West as an American national space. For example, Yang argues that Harte's best-selling 1870 poem "Plain Language from Truthful James," later renamed "Heathen Chinee," refigures Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, a character that employs minstrel gestures, into the language and gestures of the Chinese laborer Ah Sin. Twain's early [End Page 510] representations of the Chinese, such as in the play Ah Sin (1877) co-written with Harte, demonstrates his appreciation for minstrel shows; in many of his early writings that feature Chinese people, Twain directly borrows from minstrelsy and employs a mixture of the stock characters the "interlocutor," a straight man character, and "end men," two joke-telling characters nicknamed Tambo and Bones. Bierce's representation of the Chinese in his early short story "The Haunted Valley" (1871) at first glance seems to be most critical of minstrelsy, yet ultimately fails to point to the form's origins in slavery. The westward extension of a minstrelsy cognizant of Chinese labor was a crucial mechanism that made the "external" space of the frontier internal to the nation. Yang's readings of these texts importantly underscore slavery, colonization, and imperialism's intertwined relationship. In "Part II: 'Pioneers' of Asian American and African American Literatures at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Yang examines how "Eurasian" writer Sui Sin Far and African American writer Charles Chesnutt offer critiques of minstrelsy. Whereas the aforementioned white writers were "pioneers" of the colonial space of the West during Reconstruction, Far and Chesnutt wrote after Reconstruction and can be seen as "pioneers" of their respective minority American literary traditions. Still, Yang argues, Far fails in her critique to acknowledge minstrelsy's roots in slavery, such...

“A Thing Apart”: Sonnet Poetics and Radical Politics in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows

In this paper, I read Claude McKay’s partaking in the English sonnet tradition in Harlem Shadows as being a fundamental part of—and not, as many commentators have suggested, counter to—the poet’s and book’s radical politics. Upon contextualizing my readings alongside critics including Houston A. Baker, Jr., Kamau Brathwaite, and Winston James, I perform close readings of McKay’s poems “Subway Wind” and “Outcast.” I specifically analyze how these poems imagine climatic ‘currents’ through images and metaphors of racially marked colonial spaces, which the poems, I suggest, also poetically perform through the actualization of the sonnet form as discursive currents redirected toward liberatory politics.