Colonial Context Research Articles

‘One of the sights of the colony’: Australia’s nineteenth-century arcades

ABSTRACT The arcade is a nineteenth-century architectural and social form long associated with industrial modernity and consumer culture. Better known in the British and European urban landscape, they were also significant in the Australian colonial context from 1853 onwards, in numbers rivalling those in the so-called ‘metropole’. Australian entrepreneurs, architects and shop owners utilized what was seen as a very European form to represent the progress and civilization of the Australian colonies and their urban spaces, both in capital cities and smaller regional centres. The arcades, including their presence in the landscape, their architecture, and the commodities and leisure activities found within, were regularly invoked by boosters in order to demonstrate the sophistication of these colonial urban spaces. This article briefly discusses the history of the nineteenth-century Australian arcades, the boosterish discourse that promoted them, and how their representation was a way to express the place of the Australian colonies within a transnational milieu.

The Image of the Slave in Cicero's Catilinarians

Abstract: "Are we not condemned to live in our exposure to one another, sometimes in the same space? Owing to this structural proximity, there is no longer any 'outside' that might be opposed to an 'inside,' no 'elsewhere' that might be opposed to a 'here,' no 'closeness' that might be opposed to a 'remoteness.'" Taking inspiration from Achille Mbembe's (2019), 40, "necropolitical" analysis of slavery in colonial contexts as a "structural proximity," this article explores Cicero's use of the image of a slave (idealized as "ideal" as well as vilified as violent) in the Catilinarians .

Decolonizing US Comparative Literature: The 2022 ACLA Presidential Address

Abstract This essay examines how comparative literature as a discipline has never confronted its interlocking contexts of settler colonialism, imperialism, and racialization as its conditions of possibility in the United States. Inspired by recent efforts at decolonization in other disciplines, this essay calls for decolonizing comparative literature via a critique of the discipline from the nineteenth century to the present. From evolutionary scientism at its origin, overarching and continuing Eurocentrism, the disavowal of area studies, the rise of literary theory, and the primacy of non-US-focused postcolonial studies to problematic conceptions of multiculturalism, the discipline has scrupulously dissociated itself from the US reality. This dissociation, in the final analysis, replicates and supports the settler-colonial structure that evacuates the Indigenous peoples from their land and replaces Indigenous knowledge with settler knowledge, showing comparative literature to be a settler-colonial discipline. Hence, the necessary settler-colonial critique of comparative literature ought to be superseded by Indigeneity-centered practices in our work for decolonization to be possible.

John Locke, Ecological Imperialism, and the Narration of the Land in Robinson Crusoe —A Tale of the Anthropocene

Abstract: The influence of John Locke's political thought on Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has often been discussed. Most studies have focused on how the novel speaks to political crises in England, especially those surrounding the Glorious Revolution, which have traditionally been seen as forming the key context for understanding Locke's Two Treatises of Government . But recent scholarship has shown that the Two Treatises also addressed the colonial context in America and provided the intellectual platform that justified British expansion in the New World. Though studies of Robinson Crusoe have for some time analyzed the novel in the context of colonialism, Locke has not figured much in such analyses. This essay argues, however, that Locke's key connection to Robinson Crusoe is his view of America and empire and that Defoe's story of survival in the wild builds on and powerfully reinforces Locke's colonial ideology, which is grounded in a vision of how human beings should (and should not relate) to the earth. This vision is deeply anthropocentric and matches what the environmental historian Donald Worster calls "the 'imperial' view of nature." The vision of empire shared by Locke and Defoe is thus based on and inseparable from a quest for ecological dominion that is global in scope. In the latter part of the essay, I discuss the astounding popularity of the Crusoe story and its status as myth and argue that it constitutes a version of what Carolyn Merchant terms the "Recovery Narrative," which forms "perhaps the most important mythology that humans have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth." Given its influence and enduring popularity, I suggest that we see Robinson Crusoe as a key text and driver of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch in which human activities have altered the planet's land surfaces, oceans, and biosphere and produced the environmental crises that we face today.

Decolonising Australia's International Relations? A Critical Introduction

Australia's international relations (IR) discipline has a deep colonial history, but has never been through a conscious process of decolonisation. Although discussions of decolonising IR have taken place elsewhere, the discussion in Australia is in its infancy. This collection examines the possibilities for decolonising Australia's IR in the present moment, looking at its teaching practice, its research, its styles of analysis, and its relationship with Australian foreign policy. We consider what is particular to Australia's settler colonial context, what is achievable, and what is not. The collection also seeks to develop a new style of anti‐colonial foreign policy analysis in Australia, looking at the relationship between colonisation, settlement, and foreign policy. In this introduction, we first look over debates on decolonisation elsewhere in the field. We then examine the historical background of Australia's IR discipline, and look at Australian Indigenous diplomacy, to consider what is specific to Australia's context. We conclude by looking over the contributions of the papers in this collection, and consider what a decolonised Australian IR might look like. Ultimately, we argue that any process of decolonisation will be extremely difficult, and that decolonisation in Australian IR should be perceived as an ongoing struggle, rather than an endpoint in itself.

Decolonising Politics and International Relations Classrooms: Reflections from the “Field”

International Relations (IR) is a discipline founded upon and shaped by colonialism and Eurocentrism. Its Eurocentric tropes and myths distort the discipline's historiography and its perceptions of why and how it was founded, and for what purpose, such that race and colonialism are eliminated from mainstream discussions of disciplinary history and IR's main themes, concepts, and theories. This is reproduced in both the teaching and research of IR. Focusing on the former, this paper reflects on my experiences as the convenor of a course on colonialism. This is a second year, core course in the Politics and IR program at UNSW Sydney. The explicit purpose of the course is to contribute to decolonising UNSW's Politics and IR curriculum by centring Indigenous perspectives of colonialism and IR, critically interrogating the racism and Eurocentricity of Politics and IR, and exploring how colonialism shaped the world we live in and continues to inform our world and our lived, everyday experiences. This paper explores the concepts and theory informing the pedagogical praxis employed in the course, this praxis itself, and critically reflects on the achievements, challenges, and pitfalls of actively attempting to contribute to decolonising the IR classroom within Australia's settler colonial context.

The importance of a complementary approach when working with historical documents

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to show that the neo-documentary – or complimentary – approach in Library and Information Science by no means is conservative, but highly necessary also in today's digitized media landscape. An example from a digitized photo archive is chosen to demonstrate the importance of a complimentary analysis that considers both material aspects as well as social and mental ones.Design/methodology/approachBy taking Jenna Hartel's description of the neo-documentary turn as point of departure, the paper focuses on one case, the portrait of Johannes Abrahamsen Motka taken by Sophus Tromholt in 1883 and discusses different versions of the photograph from glass plate negatives to digitized versions in different contexts and media.FindingsMany of the same paratextual elements can be found in different versions, also the digitized ones, to help the viewer to establish a historical context, but the images exhibited today are nevertheless no longer the same ones taken by Tromholt at the end of the 19th century. Not only have the material properties changed, but also – and probably even more important in most cases – the social and mental aspects. More re-contextualization is needed for today's audiences to recognize and understand a historical photograph taken in a colonial context. Focusing on document's material elements is not novel within the LIS-field, but the so-called neo-documentary turn was also a reaction on political and technological developments during the 1980s and 1990s. The increased focus on understanding a document in a complimentary way has demonstrated its impact during the last decades and is, at the same time, still work in progress.Research limitations/implicationsAs a scholar in the humanities the author can only relate to and therefore analyze what the author can experience and observe on screen level.Originality/valueIn providing a case study, this article illustrates the necessity of employing a complimentary approach when analyzing documents. This also implicates the claim that the neo-documentary turn – or complimentary as it rather should be called – by no means is a conservative one, but a highly necessary one in today's digitized media landscape.

Racialization, colonialism, and imperialism: a critical autoethnography on the intersection of forced displacement and race in a settler colonial context.

Migration has been identified as a priority area for policy responses by both the federal and provincial/territorial governments yet, much of our knowledge about migration is not premised on addressing current xenophobic and racist narratives about migrants. The purpose of this research is an interrogation of Canada's colonialism, imperialism, and racialization, which produce specific oppressive policies and practices that have impacted my family. This research is premised on the understanding that in the space between what is known about migration in Canada and what is not, a great deal of narrative and interpretive work is done that makes assumptions about migrants, specifically forcibly displaced people from the Global South. Through a critical autoethnography focused on my lived experiences as a descendant of forcibly displaced Chinese-Vietnamese people living in a settler colonial nation state, this study critiques to what extent these assumptions are founded, and to what extent they represent a socio-political climate in which migration is set out as particular problems requiring a legal and policing solution. In particular, my analysis centers anti-colonialism and anti-racism, shifting to resistance to systemic violence and liberation, while considering the discursive and on-the-ground effects of racist, colonial, and imperial policies and practice. Set against the backdrop of the rise of white nationalism, xenophobia, and racism across all levels of government and academia, and the general public, the results of this study produce a counter-narrative focused on the intersection of forced displacement and race in a settler colonial context, which is both timely and urgent.

Liminal Landscapes of Otherness: Postcolonial Interpretations of The Self and the Other in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

This paper presents a textual analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians within the framework of postcolonial theory with special emphasis on the dichotomy between the Self and the Other, which is embedded within the text. Frantz Fanon is credited with introducing the concept of Other in postcolonial studies. Fanon perceives the dualistic construct of Self and Other as an outcome of what he terms a ‘Manichean Delirium.’ This phenomenon engenders a profound schism in the entirety of human existence, delineating it into interconnected yet opposing dichotomies such as virtue-vice, dominator-subjugated, and Caucasian-African, wherein the presence of blackness serves to validate the identity of the white Self, simultaneously relegating the black subject to objectification. In a colonial context, the coloniser saw the colonised merely as his binary opposite. The coloniser saw himself as the subjective, conscious Self while refusing to see the Other even as human. The Other was divested of his/her humanity, was objectified, and rendered a beast by the Self. Waiting for the Barbarians engages in a profound exploration of themes surrounding power dynamics, the perpetuation of torture, and the construction of the Other, which is achieved by superimposing an arbitrary identity upon individuals who deviate from the framework of the subjective imperial Self. However, the relationship between the Self and the Other is not simply that of dominance and meek obedience, rather the relationship is always fraught with tension, resistance and even defiance. This paper seeks to discursively interpret the mutual tension between the Self and the Other, as well as the resistance mounted by the Other against the Self’s dominance that has been poignantly captured by Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians.

Austria’s post-colonial present: Missing memorialization of colonial violence

ABSTRACT This article situates Austria in wider discussions around the repercussions of colonial violence on a global scale. It focusses on the ways in which anthropological disciplines fashioned specific ideas of racial and ethnographic belonging both within and outside the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Understanding how Austrian knowledge production relied on and participated in colonial expropriation sheds light on the significance of the post-colonial for a nation that did not establish formal colonial rule overseas. The unearthing of the mortal remains of people and other forms of colonial exploitation such as geological extraction were deeply intertwined; they were often conducted within the very same expedition. These processes of colonial dispossession continue to be operative today. Anthropological and other ‘collections’ from colonial contexts that are housed in European institutions speak to the currency of these issues. This paper argues that different conceptions of time – of the relation between past and present – complicate ongoing negotiations of the meaning of Austria’s colonial history.

Heredity of Schizophrenia in India: A 1928 debate

Shaw, a British psychiatrist working in India, observed that the incidence of Schizophrenia was higher among a community of Parsis as compared to other ethnic groups. He published his findings in two British journals. The paper drew responses from two other psychiatrists. The debate is examined in colonial context during which occurred and some implications for contemporary research.

Land, labour, and sovereignty in school: the Strelley mob and zones of contest in Indigenous education

ABSTRACT Schooling has been a site of harm for Indigenous people in settler colonial contexts, as a tool of dispossession, assimilation and separation from country and kin. However, schools have simultaneously been sites to work against this and build alternatives to settler colonial systems that nourish Indigenous futures. This article centers the connections between Indigenous labour, land, sovereignty and schooling. It focuses on the Strelley mob’s innovative remodelling of schooling during the first phase of national Australian government policies of Indigenous self-determination and self-management between 1972 and 1983. Working with Indigenous-authored texts and oral histories, I explain how the Strelley mob and supporters worked to exploit and reshape schooling to bring together and sustain their communities on their land, developing a practice of local control over repossessed country with an Indigenised schooling system at the heart. I show how the tensions centred on five ‘zones of contest’ where the Strelley mob clashed with norms of settler state governance in schools. I suggest these zones – political economy; school sovereignty; knowledges, technologies and temporalities; language and linguistic power; and spaces and lands – may provide an analytical tool for situating contests over Indigenous schooling within wider contests over land, labour and sovereignty.

The footprints of Three Latvian Female Missionaries in Colonial Contexts

During the era of colonial domination of much of Africa and Asia, many female missionaries from Europe served in these parts of the world. They served as teachers, medical practitioners, and evangelists but were also often seen as supporters of colonial culture. This paper examines the previously unresearched work of three female missionaries from Latvia who were sent by German mission societies to China, India, and Indonesia, respectively. The study uses historical-comparative, content analysis, and hermeneutical methods to interpret the missionaries’ own texts and those written about them. It finds that the missionaries felt compelled to cooperate with colonial forces in order to carry out their ministry, even though colonial policies sometimes restricted what the missionaries could do. They also exhibited effective application of cultural frameworks and use of language skills in serving and collaborating with local populations.

Classifying Colonial Objects in Museum Collections with Machine Learning and Historical Knowledge

Many natural history collections and museums in Europe were established in the late 18th and early 19th century. Their development is inseparably linked to colonial expansion and significant parts of their collections are of colonial origin. The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) preserves a large natural history collection comprising zoological, paleontological, mineralogical, geological, and botanical objects as well as an institutional archive and a library. Especially in the period from 1884 to 1919, when the German Reich had colonies in Africa, the Pacific and China, the Zoological Museum of today's MfN played a prominent role in imperial politics. By a decision of the Federal Council in 1889 (Bundesratsbeschluss) and an addendum to this resolution in 1891, the museum received all zoological objects from expeditions financed by the state as well as the materials collected by colonial officials (Anonymous 1890,Kaiser 2023). The disclosure and digital transformation of museum collections worldwide will significantly improve digital access for all stakeholders. Opening up the (digital) collections is also considered crucial for the role of museums in mobilising participation and societal change. However, the mere size of the MfN collection, estimated to comprise approximately 30 million objects, poses additional challenges. How can we identify the objects from colonial contexts among these millions and how do we tag them? A recent project, "Colonial Provences of Nature",*1 led by historians at MfN, designed a decision tree to identify collection objects from the colonial past in which relevant categories of information and critical metadata were determined to confirm a colonial acquisition context (Kaiser et al. 2023). In this talk we will present our approach and preliminary results towards automatisation of the decision-making process in the mammals collection at MfN. This subcollection offers a suitable case study for testing how machine learning algorithms and historical knowledge can be used to classify colonial items based on their geographical provenance and acquisition time. Several specimens were indeed acquired during German colonial rule in Africa, Asia and Oceania between the 1880s and the end of World War I. The metadata associated with these objects are available in the institutional collection management system and they can be extracted and cleaned to generate a dataset for training and testing decision trees (Alpaydin 2020). The research of suitable classifying algorithms has a dual scope. The first is to compare the algorithmic decision boundaries with the rule-based decision tree drawn by the MfN historians interested in identifying and tagging collection objects from colonial contexts. The second aim is to develop automated procedures for labelling objects in the museum collections as colonial/non-colonial and add this information to the standard taxonomic metadata raising awareness on the complex political history of the specimens available at MfN.

Persistent, pragmatic and prolific: Urban master planning in Accra, Dar es Salaam and Lilongwe

This paper interrogates the persistence of urban master planning in African cities. Critiques of master planning in Africa label it as a stifling product of colonial legacies, an inappropriate imposition of external ideas, or a device to achieve the goals of global actors, all seen as being at odds with the rapidly changing settlement patterns and needs of many African urban contexts. This paper instead focuses on the role of local planning actors in the demand for and the production of master plans and proposes a different analytical perspective on the role of master planning in African urban contexts. Notably, we point to the weak presence of master planning in colonial contexts, in contrast with the strong activation of master plans to shape the ambitions of newly independent governments. We observe also the nuanced interactions between local actors and transnational circuits and influences in devising and implementing plans. The paper presents three case studies which demonstrate the persistence of master planning practices through the post-independence period and their proliferation in contemporary moments. We document the diverse range of local actors who have chosen to retain or revise colonial planning legacies, initiate new city-wide master planning, or solicit, shape and assume responsibility for master planning promoted by transnational circuits of development and planning. We find that actors embedded in local or national institutions, and a wide variety of transnational actors, are driven by a range of, at times conflicting, interests and ideas about what planning is and is meant to do. Historical surveys and in-depth interviews with current actors, as well as those from the recent past in Accra (Ghana), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Lilongwe (Malawi), help us to identify three aspects of urban master planning which challenge existing interpretations. We observe that master planning has been a persistent presence, although often taking a more ephemeral form in extended “silent” periods when outdated but valued plans remained operative. We note that complex political tensions and institutional landscapes shape enthusiasm for, and control over the nature, preparation, adoption and implementation of master plans, including their being side-lined or resisted – local-national dynamics are crucial here. This leads to a pragmatic engagement with transnational actors to bring forward different kinds of plans. The prolific production of master plans supported by multiple transnational actors in poorly resourced contexts constitutes a dynamic, although at times counterproductive, terrain of visioning and practical planning initiatives seeking to grapple with the pace and unpredictability of urbanisation. Our analysis provides an opening for considering the politics of urban planning from an African-centric perspective and as an active part of African urbanization.

Community Awareness and Restitution of Isanzu Ancestors’ Human Remains from the University of Göttingen Collections to Mkalama District, Tanzania

This paper investigates the restitution of Tanzanian human remains from colonial contexts in the Anthropological Collection at the University of Göttingen, Germany. This collection contains 66 human remains from Tanzania whereby 22 of them are from the Isanzu ethnic group. This paper focuses on the Isanzu human remains from Mkalama District in Singida Region and examines the circumstances of acquisition and their historical background. This interdisciplinary research combines methodological approaches from critical historical provenance research and cultural anthropology to study the Isanzu remains. We include investigation of the Isanzu ethnic group's awareness, emotions, opinions, and concerns over the restitution of their Ancestors’ remains back to the community. This paper proposes a plan for best practices in restitution and urges that wisdom, agreement, and negotiation results of Isanzu stakeholders should be taken into account to bring the restitution process of Isanzu's Ancestors to fruition.

Adaptation at whose expense? Explicating the maladaptive potential of water storage and climate-resilient growth for Māori women in northern Aotearoa

Drawing on ethnographic research with Indigenous Māori women in northern Aotearoa (New Zealand) we challenge the presumed benefits of neoliberal, infrastructural-focussed climate adaptation, and advocate for far greater engagement with multiple subjectivities and intersecting inequalities in the design of climate adaptation in Global North, settler colonial contexts. Focussing on a government-led water storage project that aims to enhance local communities’ economic wellbeing through climate-adapted horticulture, we demonstrate how interlinked forms of marginalisation and privilege mediate the distribution of benefits from climate adaptation and decrease rather than increase wellbeing for multiply marginalised subjectivities. Combining the concept of racial capitalism with intersectionality we advance a novel theoretical framework to advance insights about more equitable and nuanced adaptation in an under-researched, settler colonial context. Using this framework, we explore the maladaptive potential of the water project which grows regional economic resilience through violent climate-related alterations to low-income, single and/or older Māori women’s bodies. We demonstrate how settler colonial legacies, structures, and intergenerational traumas are lived through and collide with intersecting racial, class, gender, and age-based disadvantages, that together mediate local labour relations and decision-making processes that ultimately exacerbate climate vulnerability for particular groups of Māori women in the region.

Seeking utopia: Psychologies'waves toward decoloniality.

This paper provides a review of empirical studies published with a decolonial epistemic approach in psychology. Our goal was to better understand how decolonial approaches are being practiced empirically in psychology, with an emphasis on community-social psychology. We first discuss the context of colonization and coloniality in the research process as orienting information. We identified 17 peer-reviewed empirical articles with a decolonial approach to psychology scholarship and discerned four waves that characterize the articles: relationally-based research to transgress fixed hierarchies and unsettle power, research from the heart, sociohistorical intersectional consciousness, and desire-based future-oriented research to rehumanize and seek utopia. Community-social psychology research with a decolonial approach has the potential to remember grassroots efforts, decolonizing our world.

Introduction to the Special Issue

One of Britian's colonial legacies is the common law defence available to adults who corporally punish children. Canada inherited this defence, which became codified in 1892 as Section 43 of the Criminal Code. The aim of this Special Issue is to examine Canada's law alongside those of other former members of the British Empire that have abolished their defences - Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
 The first three papers in this issue will place Canada's law within its global, historical and colonial contexts. The next three papers tell the stories of how Ireland, Scotland and Wales overcame the same challenges faced in Canada to ultimately provide equal protection for children.

Between Empires: Al-Amīra Nazlı Fazıl Hanım, a Middlewoman in the “Question d’Orient” around 1900

Abstract Late nineteenth-century Tunisian history has primarily been studied from a European perspective, in the colonial context of the French Protectorate. Yet, the North-African beylik was still inscribed within the realm of the Ottoman Empire long after 1881. The strength of the Mediterranean network was epitomized by Ḫayr al-Dīn’s political figure and by his going back and forth between Tunis and Istanbul. Later on, the princess Nazlı Fazıl Hanım (d. 1913) created another layer of relationships, extending the zone of contacts to Paris and Cairo, putting Tunisia at the heart of Mediterranean intellectual exchanges. In her tow, the famous Egyptian scholar Muḥammad ʿ⁠Abduh had a notable influence over Tunisian ʿulamāʾ, and Bachir Sfar (al-Bašīr Ṣfar), forerunner of the Young Tunisians, paralleling the Young Turks, created his own path through a complex geo-political space. This article documents these personal links and the circulation of ideas within this cultural space: Maghreb in Mediterranean context, at the meeting point of provincial and imperial logics, and at the crossroads of traditionalist and reformist agendas.