Colonial Texts Research Articles

Indigenous Kinship, Colonial Texts, and the Contested Space of Early New England by Marie Balsley Taylor (review)

Indigenous Kinship, Colonial Texts, and the Contested Space of Early New England by Marie Balsley Taylor (review)

Screaming bloody murder in the Andes: making race and white noise in a colonial text

ABSTRACT Colonial control is studied through a narrative sound designed to entomb a black woman’s voice under noise. Interpreting Charles Marie de La Condamine’s 1746 letter, recounting the murder of a colleague during his scientific travels through Cuenca, involves mapping the effort to quell the scandalous scream of an enslaved woman who spoke up against the traveller and went unpunished. The text is read for the concatenation of sounds that follow her scream and the way these accrue into white, order-restoring noise at the hands of the author. However, simultaneously tracking how this defiant sound travels and is inscribed through layers of noise underscores the limits of such attempts to erase a racialised voice. Examining this tangential episode in an Andean town within La Condamine’s larger Geodesic Mission (1735–45) introduces narrative silencing to the study of noise-making, wherein race thwarts the act of writing to regulate sounds during colonial encounters.

Marie Balsley Taylor, Indigenous Kinship, Colonial Texts, and the Contested Space of Early New England

Marie Balsley Taylor, <i>Indigenous Kinship, Colonial Texts, and the Contested Space of Early New England</i>

Magical Realism in Indian Literature

Magic realism or magical realism is a genre where magical or unreal elements play a natural part in an otherwise realistic environment. Although it is most commonly used as a literary genre, magic realism also applies to film and the visual arts. An example of magic realism occurs when a character in the story continuous to be alive beyond the normal length of life and this is subtly depicted by the character being present throughout many generations. On the surface the story has no clear magical attributes and everything is conveyed in a real setting and breaks the rules of our real world. Magic realism is term used to describe the everyday reality with supernatural events. The two terms ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ have become to intertwined that strange, unearthly happenings become almost an accepted, even normal part of daily life. Magic realism considers being a postcolonial phenomenon. Magic realism is to be found only in the post colonial texts. The writers of colonized countries incorporate magic realism in their writings as a mode of resistance to western rationalism. There is no place for logic in magic realism. In countries like India, People believe in myths and ghosts as they believe in history. Magical things do not constitute the Indian culture. There is realism also. Diaspora writers’ characters make use of magic realism to escape to a world of fantasy for it provides them pleasure, relief, and an escape from the excruciating pain they experience in an alien land. The term magical realism was introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic in 1952. When Roh coined the term the mean it to create an art category the strayed from the strict guidelines of realism, but the term did not name an artistic movement until the 1940s in Latin America and the Caribbean. Magic realism or Magical realism is a genre of 20th century English literature. This paper deals Magical Realism in Indian literature and its authors.

Water Conflicts in Chile: Have We Learned Anything from Colonial Times?

The number of disputes related to water that reach courts in Chile has increased in the last decades, the topics of these disputes have become more complex, and the current conflict resolution system has not been able to adjust to this situation. This study analyzes colonial texts from water-related conflicts that were addressed at the Royal Hearings in Santiago (1691–1800) and from the Cabildo gatherings (1541–1802), using an adaptation of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework. The research shows a strong institutional system surrounding conflict resolution during colonial times, with nested schemes and empowered figures appointed in leading roles. However, a lack of equity and inclusion of all actors is also visible, reducing its legitimacy. At present, the increasing value of water and a sense of distrust in the institutional system have led to longer and more complex conflict resolution processes. Here, learning from past times about the empowerment of the institutional system for solving water disputes could be useful. An increased support towards initial conflict resolution mechanisms, giving space for local knowledge and generating stronger participation in these initial steps, is a lesson for the future.

Rewriting the Indian other

Abstract This article reexamines the colonial representation of Indians in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Story of Muhammad Din” through a postcolonial resistant translation from English to Arabic. Set in India, Kipling’s short story depicts the buried Anglo-Indian conflict between the world perspectives of an adult Englishman and an Indian child. To this Indian child, Muhammad Din, existence is situated at the crossroads of an intense personal and national struggle for power, freedom, and independence. The dominant presence of the colonial law, which is embodied in the English doctor’s presumed authority and strict medical discourse in Kipling’s narrative, fashions a negative and inferior representation of Muhammad Din and his father Imam. Moreover, the impersonal style of narration, which is noted in the final scene of Muhammad’s death, enhances a colonial desire of the English to accentuate a rigorous sense of Englishness and national superiority that cannot be compromised. By offering a postcolonial translation of Kipling’s story in Arabic, however, Arab readers re-conceptualize or re-imagine othered Indians – here Muhammad Din – as central post-colonial agents who also function as vital sources of artistic or creative power that is necessary to deflate colonial authoritative agency in Kipling’s colonial text.

Mobilizing Great War Literature: Rereading the English Canon through Mulk Raj Anand's Across the Black Waters

Abstract: While Great War scholars have recently recovered colonial texts, they seldom use those texts to reassess the English Great War canon. Mulk Raj Anand's depiction of Indian experience in Across the Black Waters highlights the imperial dimensions of English texts from the Great War. The novel depicts Indian soldiers first as travelers through Europe before narrating their experiences of displacement in the horrors of the trenches. This shift calls attention to the English canon's depictions of soldiers' mobility, which similarly shift from travel in initial military mobilization to displacement in the violence of warfare. Across the Black Waters rewrites this characteristic shift to reveal its imperial significance, ultimately transforming the English Great War canon's typical disillusionment with Britain into a critique of empire. Anand's novel invites us to recenter the imperial position in Great War literature: all English narratives are narratives of empire, and Britain at war is always imperial.

Objects of mestizo memory

This visual essay explores the relationship of racialization and family archives based on an inquiry into my Guatemalan father’s collection of media artifacts. The media objects include VHS tapes, photographic prints, and legal documents. All of the images presented are from my father’s media archive, and they are presented in relation to a series of textual reflections. These reflections are drawn from my own experiences producing oral histories with my tía Marta in Guatemala, my father’s reflections on his archive of media objects, and a review of colonial texts that elaborated the descriptions of ethnoracial categories related to “mestizaje” in Central America. Taken together, this image-based and textual exploration presents the reader with an opportunity to reflect on the contingent, fraught, and open-ended process of racialization, as well as on moments of foreclosure where boundaries of ethnoracial identity are demarcated and reified. The essay meditates on ways that utterances and dialogue about family archives constitute sites of racialization. There is a corresponding video essay featuring my father’s narration along with his interaction with his archive at the link below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwPmMwBJc-k .

Colonial texts on Aboriginal land: the dominance of the canon in Australian English classrooms

From its conception in Australia, subject ‘English’ has been considered central to the curriculum. The English literature strand in the curriculum does not stipulate specific texts but is more explicit regarding what should be considered as an appropriate ‘literary text’. Curriculum documents emphasise the need for texts to have cultural and aesthetic value whilst suggesting that English teachers include texts that are chosen by students, texts from Asia, and texts by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors. Despite this, the influences of British colonisation manifests in Australian English teachers’ text selection as they continue to choose texts from the 'canon’. This paper is framed by Rigney’s principles of Indigenism and Indigenous Standpoint Theory (1999; 2017) and will draw on my own lived experience—as an Aboriginal student, English teacher, and now researcher—to examine the presence of colonialism in English and the consequent subordination of Indigenous perspectives. This paper will suggest some of the ramifications of prioritising colonial texts while teaching and learning on Aboriginal land and investigate how the construction of subject English could feel assimilative to Indigenous people. I will explore this by using my own experience of learning William Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ as a student and of teaching Doris Pilkington’s ‘Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence’ as a teacher as examples.

Context in Discourse Analysis of Indonesian Colonial Texts

Discourses are defined as ideas conveyed by humans through language using a series of sentences in a co-text and context. Co-text is the cohesive and coherent relationship between a series of written words, phrases, sentences, in a paragraph. Generally, the contexts are understood more broadly even beyond the boundaries of language, therefore, it is considered non- linguistic. It is also the circumstances behind an idea used as a reference for understanding language expression. In colonial discourse, ideas are conveyed through narrative texts which express the real situation and time of the existing reality. Similarly, the use of discourse markers in the form of words, phrases, or sentences also represents the condition of the real context that is socio- historical and socio-cultural. This article, therefore, discusses the concept of context in texts with the application of colonial discourse projected from Indies Literary.

Context in Discourse Analysis of Indonesian Colonial Texts

Context in Discourse Analysis of Indonesian Colonial Texts

Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya

In Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos identifies the central narratives of ancient Maya mythology and explores their various permutations across centuries. Extrapolating outward from the Classic Maya ceramic vessel record, Chinchilla connects Maya mythic traditions to parallel myths throughout Mesoamerica. With careful attention also paid to local variants and points of divergence, he bridges the boundaries between cultural groups and their distinct worldviews. Chinchilla advocates for Maya myths to be analyzed not in isolation but rather as part of wider Mesoamerican mythic traditions, which share similar roots in deep antiquity (4–5, 48).The scope of the monograph spans centuries, connecting later Maya myths back to their ancient origins. To demonstrate the complexity and multiplicity of the extant Maya mythological record, Chinchilla weaves together disparate bases of evidence. In addition to reading the ancient Maya visual record iconographically, he compares various textual sources, ranging from deciphered hieroglyphic inscriptions (notably, the Cross Group Tablets from Palenque that feature prominently in chapter 3) to works composed (or at least transcribed) at a historical remove. Few mythical scenes in the ancient Maya art corpus are accompanied by lengthy descriptive text, but other evidentiary bodies provide useful comparison points between mythical narratives that are recorded centuries apart. Thus, Chinchilla’s discussion primarily revolves around the Popol Vuh, a K’iche’ Maya narrative from sixteenth-century highland Guatemala. The singularity of this document, as Chinchilla notes, is in its historical situating: it is one of few surviving manuscripts that detail Maya worldviews, but it is from a specific time and place. At times, scholarship has treated the Popol Vuh as an absolute, seamlessly applying the document to illuminate practices of the ancient past. However, Chinchilla analyzes the Popol Vuh not as a “static, authoritative source on Maya myths” but as one of many tools with which to identify and relate similar narratives from the Mesoamerican visual, material, and textual record (4). In so doing, the core mythological characters and chronicles that define the backbone of Maya cosmologies comes further into focus. Ultimately, Chinchilla advocates for a persisting relationship between mythological scenes in the ancient Maya art corpus that relate to the text of the Popol Vuh, but he is rightfully careful to not suggest a one-to-one correlation, considering the centuries of separation between the sources and limitations of its application.The book is divided into nine chapters. The first three outline the methodological stakes of the project, ranging from historiographic discussions on the application of colonial texts to ancient images, to a consideration of the ways Maya sources structure the concept of Mesoamerican creation. Throughout, Chinchilla pays careful attention to how these various sources craft cross-temporal notions of Mesoamerica cosmogony. The remaining six chapters are each devoted to one of what Chinchilla identifies as “nodal subjects” within Maya mythology: the Maiden, the Grandmother, the Sun’s Opponents, the Sun, the Perfect Youth, and the Father. The identifications of these “nodal subjects”—tropes that structure variations of the same mythic narrative—are derived from Alfredo López Austin’s late twentieth-century scholarship on Mesoamerican mythology (4, 24, 26). In brief, Chinchilla identifies the nodal subjects of Maya (and Mesoamerican) myths by analyzing different versions of similar mythic scenes and texts. Despite the diversity of myths, the repetitiveness of mythic structure as well as similar protagonists across time and space reveal the basic tenets of Mesoamerican myth history.Lavishly illustrated and full of novel insights, Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya presents fresh ways to understand how core principles of ancient Maya myths persevered and evolved over time, from painted vessel scenes to sixteenth-century texts to modern oral narratives.

"Oracles of Woods": Ecologies of Abandonment

Taking up two Romantic-era colonial texts about Jamaica—Benjamin Moseley's Treatise on Sugar and the anonymous novel Marly—this essay considers the forest in relation to racial ecologies of the Caribbean. Beginning with the entwined history of deforestation and the sugar plantation in the fifteenth century, it reads the forest as a non-place aiding forms of resistance and escape from slavery, sheltering different modes of earthly inhabitation, and gesturing toward alternative conceptions of form and matter. The essay concludes with the forest as a conceptual and material site from which to constellate subsistence movements and ecological resistance across time and space.

Koloniale Fremdheitserfahrung und bikulturelle Eheschliessungen: zur kolonialen Ambivalenz bei Jesco Von Puttkamer und Pierre Loti

"Colonial Experience of Strangeness and Bicultural Marriages: On Colonial Ambivalence in Jesco von Puttkamer and Pierre Loti. The following article goes into the literary analysis of colonial strangeness and bicultural marriages through two colonial texts. Jesco von Puttkamer and Pierre Loti exemplify the subject of colonial strangeness from a travel experience. In their texts, colonial experience of foreignness focuses on excerpt of the colonists from their familiar surroundings with travel. The journey in the sign of colonization goes hand in hand with the perception of the foreign space and its inhabitants. Puttkamer's and Loti's main characters do not however abide by the colonial rule of radical distancing from the natives because they have romantic relationships with black women. In both cases, it is an ambivalent attitude of the colonial masters towards the non-European foreign region, which oscillates between positive and negative stereotypes. The depictions of mixed marriages are also characterized by ambivalence, because the black woman acts both as an object of fascination or desire and as a subject of racial power differences. These statements justify the thesis of colonial ambivalence, which is the subject of discussion here. The authors thus confirm the following results, which the article concludes with; namely, that the line between exotic strangeness and colonial stereotyping is difficult to draw. The analyzed narrative sequences also provide information that colonial intermarriage leads to mutual transformations. As an exchange of bodies, colonial marriages illustrate the interweaving of the colonial periphery and the European metropolis. To achieve the above goals, Whiteness and (post)colonial Studies provide theoretical foundations that make my investigation more plausible. Keywords: colonial travel, foreignness, ambivalence, intercultural marriages, reciprocity "

Discursive Resistance to the Western Imperialism in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1969)

Post-colonial literature has always been aiming to refuting the orientalists' distortion of the East. The binary division of the West/East, Self/Other, and Centre/Margin has been heavily stereotyped and debated in colonial texts, but of course, has been attacked by post-colonial critiques and authors. However, this paper tries to shed light on an iconic way of writing back to the Western hegemony on the Orient and its peoples. Feminizing the East in colonial texts is represented and perpetuated in many colonial texts. Yet, the case study of this paper uses the same colonial discourses against the colonizer and deprives the West of the position of the Subject that is celebrated in all colonial texts.

Historia de las Indias (1552)

In 1552, Francisco López de Gómara published Historia de las Indias y conquista de México, which was quickly followed by immediate success, numerous editions, and censorship. Drawing on Marcel Bataillon's lectures in the Collège de France, French scholars from four different universities have put together a new comprehensive critical edition of the first part of Gómara's work, known as Historia de las Indias. The collaborative work of these scholars, as Monique Mustapha writes, provides a “panorama de las viscitudes y censura sufridas por la Historia” based on a systematic comparison of the different editions of Gómara's work (p. 14).This new edition of Gómara's Historia is divided into two parts. The first one comprises two informative preliminary essays, the criteria for editing and transcribing Gómara's work, the content of the Historia, a list of variants among the imprints, and endnotes. In one of the preliminary essays, Mustapha writes that unlike most editions, which rely on the text of Guillermo de Millis published in Medina del Campo in 1553 (titled Hispania Victrix), the editors of this new imprint chose to follow the 1552 princeps edition and include reproductions of its original covers, mappemonde, and engraving of the bison. Historia de las Indias (1552) is particularly distinguished by its exhaustive editorial work. The editors carefully underscore the modifications that took place between the 1552 princeps edition and other editions, including its second imprint, the versions published in Medina del Campo and Antwerp, the corrected versions published in Zaragoza, and Andrés González de Barcia's edition of 1749. Such editorial work provides indeed “una visión global del conjunto de las variantes” of several imprints of Gómara's Historia (p. 48).The second part of Historia de las Indias (1552) consists of six illuminating essays, six appendixes, and two bibliographies. Based on strong archival documentation, the essays address Gómara's biography, sources, and the trajectory of the Historia and its morphosyntactic phenomena. The recently found documents on Gómara's life as well as an iconographic study stand out among the appendixes. Regarding the latter, it is worth noting that the authors demonstrate that the engraving of the bison included in the princeps edition is the only image that appears in all the sixteenth-century editions of Gómara's text and was the first representation of the bison to circulate in Europe. Throughout Historia de las Indias (1552), there is keen attention to the iconographic elements that appear in multiple editions, which stresses the editors' goal of bringing to light modifications among these texts.These French scholars' comparative analysis of the diverse versions of the Historia contributes to our understanding of the material history of Gómara's work. Experts on Gómara's Historia will find particularly useful the arduous editorial work, in which differences among various editions are presented in a clear, expositive manner. By the same token, historians and graduate students can benefit from the informative essays as well as from new archival information included in the appendixes. Scholars interested in iconographic elements of colonial texts will also find this new edition useful. Overall, the editors of Historia de las Indias (1552) make a significant contribution to the study of Gómara and his works by putting together an edition that presents Gómara's first imprint while underscoring the differences between it and its following publications.

Nicole Legnani. The Business of Conquest. Empire, Love and Law in the Atlantic World

Nicole Legnani. <i>The Business of Conquest. Empire, Love and Law in the Atlantic World</i>

The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962 by Kyle J. Gardner

Reviewed by: The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962 by Kyle J. Gardner Benjamin Holt The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962. By Kyle J. Gardner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xxi + 280 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-84059-0. $99.00 (hardcover). A central aim of Kyle Gardner's The Frontier Complex is to demonstrate how colonial border-making shaped ideas about territory that created legacies still felt in contemporary Asia (p. xvi). Supplementary ambitions are to bring Ladakh into greater focus within histories of South Asia (p. 20) and amalgamate top-down narratives of border-making with ground-level experiences. The book delivers on these aims. To do so, Gardner traces the history of the frontier to reveal how colonial concerns with geography and security created the foundation for the postcolonial borderland. Thus, the book rejects the stasis of borders in favor of an in-depth temporal analysis of developments in the northwest Himalaya, with primary focus on Ladakh. A core argument made by Gardner is that the creation of a borderland is not merely a routine exercise in map-making. Rather, the process is critical for understanding ways that "geography, politics, and power" are understood (p. 2). When this historical process is recognized, notable insights follow. For instance, Gardner is particularly keen to stress the ramifications of the "new, geopolitical way of seeing space" that dominated British thinking from the late nineteenth century (p. 184). The focus on security was propelled by colonial anxieties and this—alongside the inability to properly demarcate a clear boundary—produced lasting effects. This conundrum proved to be a key factor behind the Sino-Indian war of 1962, the temporal endpoint of the book. [End Page 532] The notion of the "frontier complex"—that is the various practices used by colonial officials, from surveys and mapping, to construction, information, and regulation (p. 21)—provides the framework for analysis. The first chapter covers the diverse ways the region was "seen" before the British arrival, suggesting that "Ladakh" was—in a sense—a colonial construct. The second then suggests the colonial state developed both natural and political understandings of the region but failed to construct a "scientific frontier" regardless.1 This desire to politicize geography is a continuing theme in chapters three and four as roadbuilding and colonial texts take centre stage. The former was a conduit of imperial security; the latter reflected the colonial vision of territory. Chapters five and six then delve into the rise of geopolitical thought from the 1880s, as colonial anxieties clashed with previous ideas about exploration and commercialization. The final chapter then confronts the postcolonial legacies of the frontier complex. A key strength of The Frontier Complex is its advancement beyond top-down narratives of border-making to continually examine groundlevel interactions with colonial visions of space. For instance, chapter four provides a compelling overview about how lopchak and chaba—essentially tributes paid between Ladakh and Lhasa—proved problematic for colonial governance and prestige (pp. 158–165). This approach is made possible by a rich and diverse source base. The only issue this reviewer would highlight relates to the 1962 war. Considering how heavily it weighs upon the book, the immediate prelude to war is mostly overlooked (pp. 248–250). A more concerted explanation for the midand short- term dynamics could be provided, narrated alongside the longer-term structural factors that Gardner's book reveals. This would help to recalibrate traditional narratives of the conflict, providing more convincing context for the diplomatic failures leading to 1962, of which Gardner is critical (p. 61). Despite this relatively minor area of contention, The Frontier Complex is a richly researched work that provides significant insight for several fields. This is clearest for borderlands studies and adds to a growing repertoire of historically focused analyses in recent years.2 [End Page 533] Viewing borders as something more than "hard territorial lines" is a clear point of departure for the subfield, but Gardner's book reinforces the benefits of understanding the temporal development of the borderland to reveal how spaces are conditioned by the changing interests of associated polities...

Contributors

Contributors

Almost Like the Amazons

The duality concept was central to ancient Andean gender structures. However, testimonies show that these structures included more than two categories, several of which are of a male body engaged in feminine performance. This article suggests another angle from which to explore this gender complexity. Through analysis of visual culture, together with lexical, archaeological, and ethnohistoric sources, I uncover an Andean gender category of the masculine woman warrior. Textual accounts describe this category as involving a female body that is engaged with performance and qualities that were considered masculine. In artistic expressions, the category is also portrayed as a female body with masculine attributes, such as hairstyle and jewelry used typically by men. Another characteristic of the masculine woman category is limited reproductive potential. This study focuses on three masculine woman warriors: Mama Huaco and Chañan Cori Coca from the Inca tradition, documented in colonial texts and artworks, and a Wari masculine woman, woven and painted on textiles and ceramics. My research reveals that some masculine woman warriors were mythologized and worshipped for their prowess in defending their territories, while others may have been mythologized as military leaders.