Critique Of Imperialism Research Articles

Rethinking the History of Criticism of Organized Sport

Rigorous academic work in the field of the history of sport is increasingly correcting academics' previous unwarranted contemptuous neglect of the subject. As a consequence of this prior neglect and of structural and theoretical influences on the field, however, historians of sport still have some difficulty in dealing with the history of critical responses to sport, a problem which may exacerbate the residual condescension of the academic mainstream. This paper offers a modest contribution to correcting the errors of both sets of scholars, by tracing and interpreting one small but historically significant and resilient strain within such critical responses to sport in Britain, and linking its initial appearance to politically progressive critiques of imperialism and nationalism from the early twentieth century.

Popular National Sovereignty and the U.S. Empire

In the 1960s, the left branded US imperialism the major enemy of social justice in the world. Such talk faded after the war against Vietnam and almost disappeared after communism fell in Eastern Europe. It’s not that the American brand of informal empire disappeared. It continued through US influences on other states’ policies, the sway of US corporations abroad on host governments, US military power, and the power of the Washington-based financial institutions. But, the discourse changed and raged around the softer term globalization. In the past few years, imperialism talk has roared back, led this time by the political right, who gave it a positive sheen. Some on the left have joined in too, in an exciting new literature, revising Marxist and Leninist critiques of imperialism. But, much of the political left and centre are still mired in aspirations for cosmopolitanism, which inadvertently obscure struggles for popular and national sovereignty. This paper examines the limits of cosmopolitanism for democracy, critiques the nature of US power, and discusses how a reasserted US empire has sparked the revival of nationalisms by looking at the cases of nationalism in the six top oil-exporting countries to the US. The paper concludes with inquiries into people-to-people internationalism and whether citizen-based democracy is possible without sovereignty.

"We Who Are Not the Same" in Times that Are/Not the Same

"We Who Are Not the Same" in Times that Are/Not the Same Donna Palmateer Pennee (bio) It is now some two decades since Adrienne Rich delivered "Notes toward a Politics of Location" (1984), to a Conference on Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the 1980s, at the First Summer School of Critical Semiotics (Utrech). Her "Notes" remain, for me, an eloquent, moving, and useful confession of the limits of white liberal feminism as well as an honest and astute call to continued and differentiated action for a global good. I take seriously her admonishment, to herself at the time but with continued relevance for her readers today, that "[t]his is the end of these notes, but it is not an ending" (231). It cannot be an "ending" insofar as the interlocking systems of opportunity for some, oppression for others—interlocking systems that go by the name of modernity—continue to be foundational to identity- and subject-formation, for both "the individual" and "the institution" in all their mutual constitutiveness. It should come as no surprise, then, that not only has a dominant form of feminism failed to change the terms of "progress," it could never be expected to change those terms on its own nor when it spoke for only one constituency, and only a part of that constituency, too. The "simultaneity of oppressions" (218) from which Rich is partially freed by her white, middle-class location, a "simultaneity of oppressions" about which she was learning from [End Page 44] feminists of colour and from international environmental, anti-nuclear, and anti-imperialist activists, is also a "simultaneity of oppressions" that in its variedness, tenacity, and resilience requires a flexible and vigilant ensemble of tools for analysis and action. To Rich's still invaluable essay, I would add Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (1991) as key documents in identifying how feminist work still needs to be done. Learning more recently from Dionne Brand to be wary of stories about (white middle-class) women's and Canadian literary and colonial "survival" when my own class mobility has been made possible by my ready access to the "grant" of "whiteness" (Brand 175) and by my concomitant inheritances from and participation in "cognitive imperialism" against First Nations peoples, as indigenous students Carole Leclair and Christine Lenze first taught me and as Marie Battiste reminds me (193), I try to teach Canadian literary studies rather like (I hope) Rich taught herself to extend, refine, rethink, and reconfigure her projects as a feminist; that is, from "the geography closest in" (212). By this phrase, Rich meant most immediately her "body," but she also knowingly and explicitly spoke from a place of geopolitical power, too, behind "that raised boot" of the U.S.A. (220). So located, she found herself unable to say, after an earlier feminist, "as a woman I have no country" (Virginia Woolf, quoted in Rich 211). The Famous Five who won the vote for white propertied women in Canada knew a different sense of the geography closest in, and they knew it very differently from women (and men) whose racial and economic circumstances were not their own. Himani Bannerji, Linda Carty, Hiromi Goto, Sherene Razack, and many others know this geography differently yet again, at the intersection of their bodies, racist pasts and presents, and the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the Canadian nation-state. The simultaneity of oppressions for feminists to unpack includes, then, in/accessibility to citizenship, to national, civic, and legal identities as much as to gendered freedoms. These take particular forms and have particular histories in Canada as an invader-settler colony, fueled by and fueling nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century imperialisms, but they also have particularities in more recent histories and practices of globalization for the sake of the unfettered movement of capital into fewer and fewer hands. "Canada," given that it is a creation of modernity, is no more immune to neo-imperialist pressures and practices than to any other of modernity's manifestations of "progress." As a result, the discourse of...

Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel by David Adams Rebecca L. Walkowitz Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel. By David Adams. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Colonial Odysseys seeks to historicize two characteristics of modernist writing: its use of classical models and its articulation or critique of imperialism. David Adams attributes both of these characteristics to “the tortured working through of… the failure of the modern subject to replace God as a subject of history” (222). He argues that modernist writers (his principal examples are Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf; his secondary examples are E. M. Forster and James Joyce) set their narratives in colonial territories because these spaces allowed them to stage, sometimes reproduce, and sometimes reject a feeling of nostalgia for omnipotence and lost self-certainty. Adams’s title, therefore, refers to the metaphysical “odysseys” for which physical journeys serve as occasion and consequence: occasion, because physical journeys allow fictional characters to experiment with new ideas of authority apart from the godless center; and consequence, because the desire to regain a sense of authority often leads European characters to impose their will on other peoples. The journey or odyssey is not only a metaphor in Adams’s study, since he attributes the historical project of colonization to the historical problem of epistemological homelessness. (It is difficult to speak unmetaphorically of Adams’s argument since, as he shows, home may have a literal geography, but the meanings of geography are ideological and metaphorical.) Adams suggests that secularization led to colonization because Europeans needed to replace one idea of totality with another: if “home is a place where… the totality of the world is fully accessible to the subject,” then secular subjects can retain the metaphorical experience of knowing only by making their hold on the world more literal (47). Adams’s book offers an articulate response to the accusation, leveled by Georg Lukács and later by Fredric Jameson, that modernist narratives are indifferent to or hopelessly ignorant of “the geopolitical phenomena that they seem to represent” in novels such as A Passage to India and A Voyage Out (2), which Adams examines in his study, and from the geopolitical phenomena that they do not seem to represent in novels such as Howards End and Mrs Dalloway. The first group of modernist narratives are said to be “distracted,” Adams explains, because they are too much concerned with the Odyssey of Homer, as it were, and not enough with the odysseys of present-day Europeans. Adams’s response to this accusation is interesting because it is not a refutation: he argues that modernists were indeed more interested in the self than in the world, but he argues also that problems of the self mobilized not only fantasies of travel but also the economic and social realities of colonialism. Adams thus suggests that modernists who projected interior voyage onto world voyage were not disengaged from history. Rather, they were representing the consequence of European secularization and modernity: filling or struggling not to fill “a god-shaped hole” (11 and passim). Adams borrows the theory of “reoccupation” that is central to his account of the modernist novel from the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg. As Adams presents it, “reoccupation” refers to the process of answering “theological questions with secular ideas” (4). Adams uses Blumenberg’s theory to argue that modern thinkers used an idea of geographical totality to replace an idea of totality based on a Christian view of God’s omniscience. For the most part, the book offers a historically specific account of “reoccupation,” focusing on the intellectual and social developments of early-twentieth-century Britain. Colonial Odysseys is shaped not only by Blumenberg’s work but also by the tradition of Marxist literary criticism, especially the work of Lukács and Jameson. This is evident in Adams’s assumption that representing the world must involve offering an account of its “totality.” Moreover, Adams suggests that wholeness is a necessary aspect of social life as well of representation. He contends, for example, that Edward Said’s desire for a community based on affiliation rather than filiation “underestimates the human need for integration...

The Indo-Mediterranean

We return to Derrida's 1974 Glas. It has probably never occurred to readers of Glas that it could have relevance for any kind of critique of empire - let alone a critique of empire via the Mediterranean. But Braudel's investigation of the difficult question of the `historical Mediterranean' is precisely the lens through which Glas's nascent critique of imperialism comes into focus. In this strange work, a `thinking' of passages emerges - disruptive passages moving from west to east, ceaselessly criss-crossing the vectors of the western empire's seemingly `continuous' move westward. As a rigorous critique of origins and borders, Derridean deconstruction can provide a useful perspective on ongoing efforts to pinpoint the borders of a `historical Mediterranean' and on the ways in which medieval mercantile histories of the Mediterranean themselves serve as a critique of empire.

A Postmodernist Challenge to Imperialism

Eunjung Park's Study on Thomas Pynchon: Empire and the Postmodern, the first critical book on Pynchon published in Korean, is remarkable for its systematic and comprehensive approach to Pynchon's postmodernist critique of imperialism. According to the author, Pynchon's concern with imperialism consistently pervades his novels. A Study on Thomas Pynchon begins with the paradoxical premise that America both denies and inherits European imperialism. With her keen criticism, Park explores how Pynchon's novels suggest that America reproduces and reinforces an ideology of imperialism in various forms rather than continuing to carry out what the founding fathers and their nineteenth-century heirs proclaimed against the evil force of British empire. What Pynchon points out through this paradox is relatively self-conscious: America itself has become an empire that increases entropy more and more.

(Re)Staging Colonial Encounters: Chesnutt's Critique of Imperialism in The Conjure Woman

Charles Chesnutt's Conjure Woman has long been treated as regionalist work, set as it is during Reconstruction the fictional town of Patesville, North Carolina, which Chesnutt modeled on native Fayetteville. But Conjure Woman also taps issues that resonate beyond North Carolina. Broader issues imbue the encounters between the former slave, Uncle Julius, and employer, John, who during Reconstruction has moved to the South, bought ruined plantation, and invested vineyard whose fruit he ships to the North for profit. Even as Chesnutt roots plots particular relations of race and class that characterize exploitation North Carolina after the Civil War, he also responds to extensions of exploitation that accompanied emergent American imperialism during the 1880s and 1890s, the decades which he wrote the stories for Conjure Woman. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the United States was displacing Spain and vying with England to become the major power the Western Hemisphere. Chesnutt, who published Conjure Woman as volume 1898 shortly after the Spanish-American war, wrote into the tensions betwen Uncle Julius and John veiled critique of Western imperialism.(1) Many of the scenes that depict John as the Yankee capitalist exploiting Uncle Julius and the ruined Reconstruction South carry undercurrents that cast John as the emergent imperialist--the new Westerner, who has much common with European predecessors. Chesnutt, who countered white audience's racism through strategies of indirection,(2) placed critique of imperialism (geographically most far-reaching, and historically most contemporary, critique) the parts of the stories that 1898 seemed least important: the tales' frames.(3) By inserting descriptions that resonate beyond the immediate setting within the local color scenes of Patesville, Chesnutt avoided accusations that he had stepped out of his place, even as he condemned emergent American power and undermined the Western imperial subject. Conjure Woman repeatedly undercuts John's claims to stable, abstract, and rational identity, which he constructs against the conditions of own capitalist venture and against Uncle Julius, the subaltern, to whom John's project allocates an unstable and situated position. Chesnutt's interest imperialism dates back at least to 1881, when he outlined diary course of reading he had set for himself on Western empires, ancient and modern. He noted that he was reading Goldsmith's Roman History from the Foundation of the City of to the Destruction of the Western Empire and Merivale's General History of Rome, as well as Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Macaulay's Life and Letters includes correspondence and minutes from years of service to the British empire India, where he presided over the committee that established English as India's national language.(4) While Chesnutt immersed himself Western historical texts, he read them with critical eye. Two stories Chesnutt published 1889 Puck magazine set the Reconstruction United States and emergent American nationalism within long of Western imperialism. In A Roman Antique, the narrator, visiting New York City, meets an old black man Washington Square Park who tells him that he had been Mars Julius Caesar's `fav'rite body-sarven', and that he is `bout nineteen years Because he had rushed into battle on Caesar's behalf, the old man explains, Caesar gave him quarter and lef' directions will fer [him] ter be gradually 'mancipated, so [he]'ud be free w'en [he] wuz hund'ed years old. In this satire on the outcome of American Reconstruction, a vision of imperial Rome rises up before the narrator in all its glory and magnificence and power. Chesnutt's second Puck allegory of 1889, The Origin of the Hatchet Story, satirizes American nationalism, setting the legend of George Washington and the cherry tree in the stream of tradition that extends back to the ancient Egyptian empire. …

No Accident: From Black Power to Black Box Office

It's no accident that people like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were destroyed at those moments of their political careers when [ldots] they replaced with a critique of imperialism. (hooks 37) The years between Malcolm X as the scariest thing mainstream white America could imagine and Malcolm X as pitchman for movies, baseball caps, and t-shirts have bleak ones for African American progressive politics. The various movements that held so much promise in the 1950s and '60s have, in the words of Cornel West, been crushed and/or absorbed (Keeping 246). Manning Marable has divided politics into three strategic visions, which can be termed 'inclusion,' [ldots] 'black nationalism,' and transformation' (History 73). Generally speaking, inclusion and black nationalism have defanged and absorbed, while those ideas represented by Malcolm X's last year have silenced and crushed. Marable notes the way that the silence has institutionalized when he points out that historians [have] characterized the central divisions within political culture as the 150-year struggle between 'integration' and 'separation' (History 72), with the poles represe nted in such easy binaries as Du Bois versus Garvey, Martin versus Malcolm, or Henry Louis Gates versus Molefi Asante. The yin and yang between the inclusionist and nationalist visions has led to the African American political gains of the last fifty years: the end of legal segregation, the increase in the dissemination and study of African American culture, and the growth of the middle class. But, at the same time, this political dynamic has also created conditions in which life for the majority of African Americans has become steadily worse. While the African American middle class has moving to the suburbs, enrollments in U.S. colleges have declined, real incomes for workers have dropped through the floor, life expectancy has gone down, and a staggering percentage of young African American males have warehoused in prisons. The connections between the African American middle class and lower classes have broken to the point that the increasing number of high-profile leaders and elected officials rarely represent the interests of the African American underclass. [1] Inclusionist an d even nationalist political strategies have served the African American middle class with varying degrees of success, but they have done virtually nothing for those left behind in U.S. inner cities. The strategy with the most potential to change the plight of the African American underclass is transformation, which begins with the fundamental insight that black economic empowerment is impossible in the long run without a complete shift in the pattern of ownership, the expansion of the rights of labor, and the democratization of the relations of production within U.S. society (History 85). Marable's formulation leans heavily on the Marxist tradition, but we should be careful not simply to equate transformationism with Marxism. The relationship between liberation movements and Marxist/socialist movements has and still is complex, and often antagonistic. [2] African American transformationist thinkers such as Cornel West, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde often emphasize questions of ethics, culture, and gender that tend to fall into the background of many Marxist analyses. But rather than get bogged down in the distinctions between transformationism and various Marxisms, let us focus on the underlying dynamic that unites these traditions and clearly separates them from more mainstream liberal strategies. The most important element that transformationism takes from Marxism is an emphasis on sweeping and fundamental change. Unlike integrationist strategies, which seek to expand participation in current arrangements, or nationalist strategies, which seek to replicate current arrangement s, transformationist strategies look to create new and different institutions, traditions, and practices. …

'A Choice of Nightmares': Narration and desire in Heart of Darkness

This paper considers the gendered organisation of narration in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is argued that the text fictionalises its audience as an exclusively masculine community of readers, bounded together by shared interests and commitments. The discursive construction of preferred reading positions is critically examined with reference to the mobilisation of discourses of cannibalism and representations of femininity in the text. It is argued that positive evaluations of the text, as a critique of imperialism or a commentary on the human condition, are problematised by consideration of the gender values inscribed in the texture of the narrative.

The rhetoric of science and the critique of imperialism in British social anthropology, c. 1870–1940

(1995). The rhetoric of science and the critique of imperialism in British social anthropology, c. 1870–1940. History and Anthropology: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 93-119.

Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India

Kingsley Martin's critique of imperialism was born out of socialist rationalism and long overseas lecture tours. But in Leonard Woolf, his friend and periodic replacement at the offices of the New Statesman, we have a confidant who had, for several years before 1914, abandoned the rarefied circles of Bloomsbury, to become a civil administrator in Ceylon. Woolf's experience of colonial government had soured him from the beginning. He came to feel that the British were eternally shut out from knowledge of the lives of the Ceylonese subjects by an almost palpable curtain of ignorance and racial prejudice. Those temples of accumulated colonial knowledge, the district offices where he worked, were ‘great monuments of official incompetence, bottlenecks of delay’. When he tried to galvanize into action these places of sacred lore, the squeals of rage, from Briton and Ceylonese alike, were louder than if he had trespassed into the holiest Buddhist shrine. Yet, for all that, Woolf remained a devout believer in the individualist myth that sustained colonial rule: the ideal of the lone colonial officer and sage, standing at the centre of a web of untainted knowledge, the man who ‘knows the country’.British rule might be saved from damnation if liberal judgement were based on pure information. The problem was that, at some level, information hadto come from a ‘native informant’, an agent, a spy, an ‘approver’ who turned King's Evidence, and, by their very nature, such agencies could not be trusted.

Joseph Conrad: narrative technique and ideological commitment

Part 1 Seeing and believing: represented speech and thought in Conrad's fiction. Part 2 Narrative and ideology: class and society in Nigger of the Narcissus, Secret Agent and Rescue race and class in Nigger of the Narcissus Chance Conrad's anti-feminine feminist novel. Part 3 The critique of imperialism: An Outpost of Progress Heart of Darkness Nostromo adventurers and fairy tales. Part 4 The uses of the imagination: Typhoon Under Western Eyes and the expressive body Tale Conrad's unreadable work.

The Lenin-Hobson Theory of Imperialism: A Didactic Drama in Five Acts

My undergraduate lecture course in economy and society includes a section on the capitalist world system in the twentieth century. The Lenin-Hobson theory of imperialism provides the central issues under discussion in this section. The Lenin-Hobson theory represents Lenin's (1939) Marxist interpretation of Hobson's (1902) liberal critique of imperialism. Now a fundamental of communist theory everywhere, the Lenin-Hobson theory explains imperialism, world wars, and regional conflicts as long-term, international consequences of imbalanced divisions of income in the devel-

The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives

Two years ago, when a conference with title and Its Others was proposed by Sociology of Literature Group at Essex, I made some pious remarks about an alternative title, namely, as an Other. It has since then seemed to me that proposed revision was ill-considered in at least two ways. First, it ignored fact that history and theory that such a conference would want to expose are precisely those of how Europe had consolidated itself as sovereign subject by defining its colonies as Others, even as it constituted them, for purposes of administration and expansion of markets, into programmed near-images of that very sovereign self. Second, proposed revision nostalgically assumed that a critique of imperialism would restore a sovereignty for lost self of colonies so that Europe could, once and for all, be put in place of other that it always was. It now seems to me that it is this kind of revisionary impulse that is allowing emergence of as a convenient signifier. If instead we concentrated on documenting and theorizing itinerary of consolidation of Europe as sovereign subject, indeed sovereign and subject, then we would produce an alternative historical narrative of worlding of what is today called the Third World. To think of Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation helps emergence of the Third as a signifier that allows us to forget that worlding, even as it expands empire of discipline.'

Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism

The contemporary writer like Jean Rhys reveals the limitations of Western feminism in the way that the dissenting voice of the colonized woman is silenced through Christophine's 'expulsion' from Wide Sargasso Sea. The very relationship between sexual reproduction and social subject-production, the dynamic nineteenth-century topos of feminism-in-imperialism, remains problematic within the limits of Shelley's text and, paradoxically, constitutes its strength. Frankenstein is not a battleground of male and female individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction and social subject-production. A basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high feminist norm. The battle for female individualism plays itself out within the larger theatre of the establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the aesthetic field by the ideology of the creative imagination. In a reading such as mine, in contrast, the effort is to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the 'subject-constitution' of the female individualist.