Colonial Writers Research Articles

Representations of Colonial Writers in Land and Clues for Postcolonial Literary Theory －Focusing on the Descriptions of Lee In-jik and Lee Gwang-su

Representations of Colonial Writers in Land and Clues for Postcolonial Literary Theory －Focusing on the Descriptions of Lee In-jik and Lee Gwang-su

German colonial geography as a racial-Völkish reordering project beyond the East: National Socialism and the colonial writings of geographer Oskar Schmieder

There is very little research on German colonial geography in general, and the boom in this subdiscipline during the National Socialist period has not received any scholarly attention so far. Against that backdrop, this paper aims to contribute: a) to a finer-grained picture of colonial, racial-Völkish thinking – and its application – in German geography during the National Socialist period and b) to our understanding of the continuities and ruptures in German geographical scholarship after WWII. To that end, I focus on the biography of Oskar Schmieder (1891–1980). Two interrelated aspects of Schmieder's writings will guide the analysis: first, his conceptualization of race, Volk, and soil regarding (Germans in) South America and, secondly, the political colonial project that he pursued for Nazi Germany. Studying Oskar Schmieder shows that German geographers not only stood up for the re-establishment of a German colonial empire during the National Socialist period, but also fought for its Fascist orientation – which, at least for Schmieder, was to differ from the German colonial pre-1914 empire. Being primarily known as a representative of Länderkunde, Schmieder's institutionally and conceptually influential career after 1945 can be seen as a prime example of the continuities within the discipline in Germany.

Representation of the Moroccan Ruler, Tribe and Resistance in Travel Writing: A Postcolonial Study of Morocco That Was and In Morocco

Colonial travel writing performed ideological functions in North Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The images, stories, and narratives composing its representation- created a distorted reality of the colonized lands to normalize and legitimize colonialism. This study contributes to offering a more literary account of how colonial writings about Morocco targeted social and political institutions or organizations as part of its imperial project in the region. To this end, this study examines two travel accounts (Morocco That Was and In Morocco) to identify how they represent the Moroccan ruler, tribe, and resistance during the colonial period. Based on postcolonial and critical discourse analysis perspectives, the findings of this research showed that representation of these aspects of Moroccan life during that period endorsed the colonial and imperial project in Morocco. In the meantime, the study recommended the integration of this colonial discourse earlier in Moroccan textbooks.

Discovering ‘Religion’: Nineteenth Century Colonial Attitudes Towards Religious Identity and Difference in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to show how the example of colonial writings in Southeast Asia display, but also complicate, some already identified patterns in how religion, and the world religions paradigm (WRP), alongside such discursive terms as ‘superstition’, were applied to the religious practices and worldviews of indigenous Southeast Asians through the nineteenth century. Such figures as Sir Stamford Raffles and John Crawfurd, amongst others, from both the British and American colonial enterprise, are examined in terms of how both Islam and other forms of religiosity are framed in their writings. The paper focuses upon merchants, adventurers, and officials rather than scholars in terms of how they framed these traditions in their writings, and developed influential ways of representing this region and its peoples, which was also created in the process of so-called ‘discovery’. The imbrication of race, religion, and civilisation is critically discussed, alongside how mercantile pragmatics also played into the formation of categories.

Post-colonial Counter-memory in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi: (Re)membering the Demonized Hero and Subverting the Colonial Discourse

This paper examines how Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Zimbabwean playwright Micere Githae-Mugo have embarked on a dramatic counter-discursive project through their play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976). The researchers argue that the play was intended to subvert the many colonial historical accounts about the figure of Kimathi and the Mau Mau revolutionary anticolonial movement. Drawing upon post-colonial criticism, this paper demonstrates how the playwrights use the heroic fictional character of Kimathi to counteract several historical and fictional colonial and contemporary postcolonial accounts about this controversial freedom fighter. Then, the paper goes on to examine the role of Ian Henderson (the British colonial police officer who participated in the manhunt for Kimathi and succeeded in capturing him in 1957) as a fictional character in the play. While many studies have demonstrated that The Trial of Dedan Kimathi re-writes the colonial history about Kimathi and the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, which was maintained by Ian Henderson and many other colonial writers, to the best of the researchers’ knowledge; previous studies have not presented a comparative examination of both figures of Henderson, i.e., the historical figure and the fictional one. Here, the researchers explain how through the inclusion of the character of Henderson as the antagonist of the play, the dramatists subvert Henderson’s actual written accounts about Kimathi and the Kenyan national movement.

Linguistic (Im)mobility and the Transformation of Korean Language in Ch’ae Mansik’s Late Colonial Literature

Abstract This article examines translingual literary circulations through close readings of Ch’ae Mansik’s Korean-language writings from the early 1940s. While a growing number of recent publications have approached late colonial literature through the lens of transnational movement, the primary focus of this emerging body of scholarship has been the Japanese-language writings of Korean writers. Instead of relegating the Korean language of this time to a position of self-evident immobility, this article shows how colonial writings that were never translated into, nor written in, the imperial language reveal indelible marks of border crossings across distances and languages. Ch’ae’s Korean-language texts resist the linguistic hegemony of the Japanese empire not by refusing change or insisting on linguistic purity but by providing testimony of the various ways the Korean language itself was transformed under the demands of the wartime Japanese empire. Countering the idea that automatically equates translation and other forms of transcultural travel to increased heterogeneity, Ch’ae’s writings also show how the wartime instrumentalization of literature as carriers of meaning across greater geographical and cultural distances led to a stripping down of the existing plurality and materiality of sound within the Korean language.

Observing Adam’s children: Missionary ethnographers and the discovery of a new world of childhood

ABSTRACT One of the striking elements in proto-ethnographic literature is the attention given by colonial writers to child-rearing practices around the world. This article revisits the early modern “discovery of childhood” by analyzing case studies in which religious writers documented the experience of growing up in non-European societies. Taking examples from Spanish America and North Africa, I argue that missionaries of various confessions raised awareness about the diversity of childhood experiences and lifestyles, and in so doing, exposed the multiple ways by which children were expected to integrate into their societies as they grew. I further claim that documenting the different ways of nurturing children opened new paths to conceptualize childhood and education, and helped to expose the socially constructed nature of human values and practices.

LAZY MALAYS? THE RIDICULE OF DERISIVE STEREOTYPE FROM THE POST-COLONIAL COLONISTS

Malays have long been stereotyped with certain negative characters and this has been prompting for decades. They had been blamed for their inability to compete against other races in many aspects. The main objective of this study is an exploration of how British writers stereotyped the images of the native Malays through texts. A thematic content analysis involving articles published by Singapore Free Press were analysed for this purpose. The findings showed that some of the contents of the articles were misleading and far from being accurate. The British managed to portray Malays as lazy and apathy through the publications. These accusations were not explained in an intellectual manner, a result of civilizational and cultural discrepancies between the British colonial writers and their Malay subjects. Such stereotype was actually being planned ahead to legalized the colonization in the Malay land.

Writing Back to the Imperial Canon : Hybridity and Resistance in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest

Négritude, as the social movement initiated by Francophone colonial writers and intellectuals in the 1930s, sought to debunk the longstanding myth of ‘blackness’ that had been invented and propagated in order to justify the histories of slave trade and colonial rule. Though Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, the co-founders of Négritude, shared the agenda of decolonizing the mind and rebuilding black consciousness, their means to achieve it were not identical. While one had nostalgia for a ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ African culture of the pre-colonial past, the other accepted the given condition of colonial hybridity as a point of departure for anticolonial resistance. This essay examines how Césaire put his political theory of Négritude into literary practice in A Tempest, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s colonial romance The Tempest. For Césaire, Shakespeare was not simply the Bard of English literature but also an icon of Western cultural hegemony that served to rationalize the unequal power relations between colonizer and colonized. Césaire’s writing back to the representative Western canon from an Afro-Caribbean perspective had both aesthetic and ideological purpose. By making ‘the imperial canon’ a site of intercultural dialogue, by using the English text and the French language in the non-European context, Césaire suggested that appropriation as well as rejection can be a means of cultural resistance. Further, Césaire’s challenging experiment in A Tempest provided a viable model of cultural hybridity for his succeeding postcolonial critics like Frants Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha.

Folk Performances and the European Gaze in Bengal in the Nineteenth Century

Cultural anthropologists acknowledge the primacy of the spectator’s gaze in assigning hierarchical space to performances within the public sphere. Equations of power and transactions between agents of performance and the consumer or between the language of the entitled spectator and subject performers determine the category assigned to a given performance: folk or elite, classic or popular, high or subaltern. The late eighteenth – early nineteenth century in Bengal was a period of political and social transition and of realignment along religious, spatial and intellectual lines. The birth and growth of the metropolitan urban centre (Calcutta), an increasing presence of European residents of both genders in Calcutta and Bengal and the shift of power and influence from Muslim military aristocracy to an European merchant company (The British East India Company), meant that traditional indigenous performances were often thrown open for commentary and judgment to an audience who were largely outsiders and to whom the nuances of language, caste, class, region, ritual signification were matters of academic interest only occasioning descriptive commentaries on the practices in an alien country. In the travelogues and memoirs of Maria Nugent or Fanny Parkes, for instance, rituals, customs or performances were viewed as exemplifying the picturesque ‘otherness’ of an alien race. This paper will focus on evidences within British colonial writings of the early nineteenth century describing what appeared to observers as performances, with which they attempt to conceptualize the native ‘other’ as a cultural trope.

Manoj Das: A postcolonial writer

Manoj Das’s writings take the readers to the horizon where both the fantasy and fact are mingled, fables and parables are interconnected and folk tales and stories are mixed to a type of creation to hype the imagination as if wandering in the Disneyland. His short stories and novels portray the ruins and debris left behind the departure of the colonial rulings in India. Like a colonial writer, Das focuses on the fertile culture of his native land that is severely affected by the colonial ruling. His short stories based on the folk lore of his localities that he heard during his childhood. The folk tales he rewrites adding characters and incidents take a shape that is unique and marvelous. The present paper focuses on the post-colonial context of his writings.

A Postcolonial Study: Abolition of Native Language by Invaders in Munshi Premchand’s My Elder Brother

Munshi Premchand was one of the prominent Indian Writers in Hindi and Urdu. His works were mainly focused on important social issues of his period. This study analyses his work “My Elder Brother” where he depicts the relationship of two brothers. He explains the divergence between them. This attitude indicates that he also had a different opinion than other writers. Because, other writers preferred to write in English language. But, he used to write in his native language. This study examines how Indians are easily adopted to English language. Through the character of Elder brother, it was understood that Younger generation don’t know about their native language but they knew about British and their language. It had happened because of the British Education system. Premchand believed that this system eradicated the native language and it made people learn English. So, he focused on the displacement of Native Language by the invaders. Similarly, Post- Colonial Writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o was against the abolition of Native Languages in Africa. Premchand scrutinized the people who learned English in India. This paper explores how British infused their language to India and abolished native language.

The Modern Malay: A Comparative Study of Katherine Sim’s Malacca Boy (1957) and Mahathir Mohamad’s The Malay Dilemma (1970)

This article examines the representations of the modern Malay in Katherine Sim’s Malacca Boy (1957), which is set against the backdrop of historical events in British Malaya, including the Japanese Occupation. An important historical commentary on Malay life and modernising Malaya, the novel invites us to revisit the ingrained scholarly views about colonial writers as well as the contemporary racial discourse about the Malay. Using a new historicist approach, this article has a two-fold aim: first, to analyse how Malacca Boy engages the critical issues of race and modernity in its portrayal of Malay identity through the protagonist, Hassan; and second, to examine the relevance of Sim’s portrayal in relation to the contemporary political narrative of the Malay in Mahathir Mohamad’s The Malay Dilemma (1970). Indeed, very little research has been done to consider how the trajectories of fiction and non-fiction intersect in the discussion of race and modernity, and therein lies the novelty and strength of our study. Although it is uncommon to compare literary fiction and non-fiction writing, we contend that such an unconventional approach to literary analysis will yield important insights to the narration of Malaysian history, both in the colonial past and postcolonial present, and the place of the modern Malay in it.

Repositorios de poder: la poesía visual en México colonial:Repositories of Power: Visual Poetry in Colonial Mexico

Abstract This work reviews the interventions of visual poetry in the colonies’ lettered world. From the visual exercises with educational and practical value to the visual poems that appeared in poetry contests, these poetic practices reorganize the categories of masculine/feminine readership and authorship as well as the circulation of poetry. Through a contextualized analysis of the uses of visual poetry, this article shows some of the ways in which colonial writers conquered and generated new forms of “authorized word” in the colonies and how these disputes would create a much more diverse and complex reality for the lettered world.

French colonial publications and their situated re-presentations of native Algerian leadership (late 1840s–1860s)

ABSTRACT This article explores new ways to fruitfully investigate French colonial expedition diaries and memoirs, and help deconstruct what their authors framed as ‘historically accurate’ accounts of ‘pacification’ during the violent French military colonization of Algeria. How can we use such problematic sources in the absence of subaltern voices to counter the master narratives of these mid-nineteenth-century publications? As a way of reading them against the grain, this article proposes to shift the focus from their discursive representations of the colonized Other to the authors’ situated re-presentations of native Algerian chiefs and the embodied performance of their leadership. Such a performance-oriented approach with attention to acoustics is presented here as a perspective that may help differentiate between the colonial writers’ socio-cultural habitus and their political strategy when it comes to their misinterpretations of native Algerian expressions of loyalty and resistance. As (former) high-ranking officers and officials attached to the French army’s administrative sister institution (the bureaux arabes), or as novelists and interpreters joining the military campaigns, these authors claimed to rely on their own ear- and eyewitness accounts when describing what (a)political Arab or Berber leadership looked and sounded like. By exploring their representations of speech, silence, and performance during these encounters, we can trace the mechanisms by which they artificially separated spiritual and political authority, and ultimately failed to grasp how power worked in the colony.

Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift as a Postcolonial Text: A Semiotic, Linguistic and Onomastic Analysis

This essay analyses Namwali Serpell’s seminal novel The Old Drift from a postcolonial perspective. In pursuing this goal, the essay utilises some aspects of postcolonial theory, semiotics, onomastics and linguistics. In particular, it looks at how Serpell reinterprets the history of colonial Zambia as projected and interpreted by colonial writers. The findings suggest that the novel epitomises a new drift in Zambian literature. The novel problematises the views of the imperial centre as exemplified in colonial literature and suggests that the colonisers used the gun, fraud, deception, language and names as some of the means of subjugating the local people and dispossessing them of their land. Therefore, the whole colonial enterprise was pursued for the benefit of the white settlers at the expense of the local people and was motivated by greed, selfishness and self-aggrandisement.

New Dalit Assertion and the Rejection of Buffalo Sacrifice in South India

Taking a cue from the recent prevention of a buffalo sacrifice to a powerful local goddess in Karnataka and the writings of Dalit activist-turned-spiritual-guru M. C. Raj, this article traces a history of how buffalo sacrifice has been witnessed, described and analyzed from the mid nineteenth to the twentieth century. This endeavor reveals how structural-functionalist understandings of the ritual obscured the voice of Dalit dissent while stressing the organic unity of the village as a whole. This was despite the fact that colonial accounts, relied upon in later studies, clearly documented the reluctance of Dalits to participate. This article also finds within colonial writings an unexpected description of Dalits as original inhabitants of the land, an idea that has been revived in contemporary movements of Dalit assertion.

The Fluctuations in Self-Narration in 1930s Colonial Taiwan：On Zhang Wen-huan’s “Father’s Demand” and Conversion Literature

This paper re-appraises the Taiwanese colonial writer Zhang Wen-huan’s Japanese novel, “Father’s Demand” (Chichi No Yōkyū), published in 1935, as a form of “conversion literature” in terms of its narrative style and in relation to the nexus of ideas in the literary field of its time. First, I examine the difference between the contemporary autobiography and the literary portrayal of popular life on the basis of the prevailing literary discourses in 1930s Taiwan, and I then show the threshold or hybrid status of Zhang Wen-huan’s texts, positioned between the two genres. Next, I examine the discourse of “conversion literature” and of the “I-novel” in 1930s Japan and clarify how Zhang’s “Father’s Demand” reflected the perspective of the literary elite but also differentiated itself from their work. Furthermore, by paying attention to the representation of prisoners in the work, I clarify the difference between the depiction of intellectual subjectivity in “Father’s Demand” and in other Japanese works of conversion literature. By analyzing the letters in the final section of the novel, I present the contradictions in the subject formation of colonial intellectuals and identify their prior state. Through these analyses, I reconsider the so-called “conversion” in “Father’s Demand,” viewing it not as a return to a specific identity, but as a focus on the body and other pre-subjective entities.

Rethinking Ao Naga traditional religion

Understanding the Ao Naga traditional religion detached from its colonial and Christian theological imprints is still in a very nascent stage. Literature review reveals that there are copious writings on Ao traditional religion, seemingly indicating that it is one of the most studied aspects of Ao society. Even though Ao traditional religion is the most studied aspect of Ao society, it is also one of the most misunderstood aspects of the society. Such misunderstanding stems from the bubble of references among the academic writers concentrated on colonial and Ao theologians’ writings with negligible scrutiny. This paper is an attempt to break the bubble and challenge the mindscape by giving an alternative proposal. The first section critiques the colonial writings of J. P. Mills and W. C. Smith. The second section critiques work by Ao Christian theologians. In the last section, I propose a way of understanding Ao traditional religion gleaning from the work of contemporary animism.

The Italian immigrants and the American Dream in Pascal D’Angelo’s “Son of Italy”

After the Italian Unification in 1861, farmers, masons, artisans – mostly from southern Italy – decided to leave their villages and their families to emigrate to America. At the time, America was a country that was the subject of travelers’ legends that recounted how people there could achieve economic stability and settle the foundations to support their families. Pascal D’Angelo and his father were migrants from Abruzzi who decided to pursue the American dream: his autobiography, “Son of Italy,” tells of the magic of Abruzzi and the dream, which then became a nightmare, that he found himself living once he arrived in America. According to his autobiography, daily life in America was a nightmare based on survival and strenuous work on the construction sites where Italian immigrants earned little more than a dollar an hour. On those construction sites, Pascal D’Angelo discovered that his talents were not building houses, working with concrete and shovel, but in poetry and writing. However, before being able to show these qualities, he recounted in his autobiography the illusion of the American dream and the misery that Italians in America, known at the time by the derogatory names such as wop and dago, were forced to endure. Pascal D’Angelo, after quitting his job on the construction sites, had to accept many rejections from editors before being allowed to publish his poems and, in this article, it will be investigated how he managed to fulfill his dream and how he experienced the Italian migration in the U.S.A. The methodology of this text is based on comparative literature within the field of Italian American critical studies: Pascal D’Angelo’s autobiography is analyzed in relation to the studies of Durante, Fontanella and Luconi. Moreover, Pascal D’Angelo’s autobiography is compared with the novels’ content of John Fante and Pietro Di Donato, who were two writers still representing the pillars of Italian American literature. The objective of this study is to focus on Pascal D’Angelo peculiar immigrant experience because the literary criticism on him is scarce, despite the fact that he is a unique example of a “colonial writer” and deserves to be studied for his innovative content: it is shown how, through his writing, he was able to become the voice of the Italian immigrants by narrating his daily life without filters and letting the reader experience the tragedy of the daily work of Italian immigrants in America.