Early Post-colonial Period Research Articles

Myths of Zimbabwean urban nationalism: Narratives of modernity and exceptionalism in the economic crisis

AbstractZimbabwe has distinct urban nationalist myths stemming from the colonial period—urban modernity and economic exceptionalism. The modernity myth has been constructed from the colonial period and came to be associated with urban order, lifestyle and social mobility. The economic exceptionalism myth refers to Zimbabwe's past exceptional economic performance during the colonial and early postcolonial periods. However, the economic crisis and informalisation from the late 1990s have challenged these myths as neither previous practices of urban modernity nor the feeling of exceptional economic performance is attainable any more. In this context, people in the informal sector reimagine what these nationalist myths mean to them. In particular, they engage in debates about which economic practices are modern enough to be implemented in urban areas, especially in the city centre, and how to identify themselves make a claim to urban modernity. The memory of economic exceptionalism in the meantime acts as a reference point in discussions about future national development. All these translate into the question of legitimacy—of the informal economy and its practices and the government that failed to uphold the modernity and exceptionalism myths.

Removing a colonial anachronism - The decolonization of heritage in the 1970s Hong Kong

Abstract This article explores the decolonization of heritage politics in 1970s Hong Kong. It firstly revisits recent scholars’ work on Hong Kong heritage politics and the transformation of Hong Kong’s cultural identity. It shows how people’s perceptions of their colonial heritage and history in Hong Kong have changed since the 1970s. Secondly, it outlines the city’s cultural heritage policy framework after the 1967 Riots, inspired by the Cultural Revolution. It analyses how the colonial government intentionally rebranded the city’s colonial heritage as an anachronism to justify its new narrative of Hong Kong and its cultural identity in the 1970s. It also employs the demolition of the former Kowloon Railway Station building in the 1970s as a case study to discuss how the colonial government decolonized local colonial structures through its new cultural heritage policy approach after the Riots. Finally, by employing the case study of the demolished Central Star Ferry Pier in the 2000s, this article argues there was a change in people’s perceptions of the city’s colonial history in the early postcolonial period of Hong Kong. A more active notion of Hong Kong’s cultural identity is also being articulated in the uncertain future due to the city’s recent rapid political and social changes influenced by the mainland authority.

What Makes a Natural Harbor?

The Mundra Port on the Gulf of Kutch in western India is one of India's largest port projects today. This article takes the port-circulated narrative of the coast being a natural harbor as its starting point, to show how fresh water was central to official maritime projects until the early postcolonial period. Conserving mangroves and freshwater creeks was not antithetical to maritime ports but part of the same administrative project. Political and infrastructural shifts from the river to the tide naturalized the erasure of coastal fresh water and transformed the coast into a singularly tidal space, creating the conditions for the development of a large-scale, high-technology shipping port.

Press charges: renegotiating free speech and citizenship in post-partition Delhi

ABSTRACT This article examines the conflict between press censorship and free speech in post-partition Delhi, focusing on the Urdu press. It demonstrates how conflicts over free speech became a focal point for the intersection of two fundamental tensions underlying postcolonial state formation—between civil liberties and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule, and between a secular democracy and a religion-based partition. The article explores the Urdu refugee dailies that relocated from Lahore to Delhi amid the partition upheaval and emerged as significant media voicing refugees’ interests, often at the expense of Muslim residents. Their provocative writings simultaneously challenged the boundaries of free speech and advanced an exclusionary notion of citizenship based on blood-based descent (jus sanguinis). This narrow conception of citizenship, underlying the partition migrations themselves, challenged the secularist vision of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In response, the Delhi administration took actions against the refugee papers, making them central to contemporary struggles over press censorship. By taking the state to court, refugee editors promoted citizens’ right to free speech, but simultaneously advanced a circumscribed notion of ethno-religious citizenship. Navigating this dual role, the article unveils the exclusions and contradictions that marked citizenship formation in the early postcolonial period.

Un-suturing Westphalian IR via non-Western literature: A Grey Man (1963)

Abstract This paper aims to un-suture common-sense assumptions based on Westphalian International Relations (IR) from South Korea’s non-essentialist and situated perspective, in the context of decolonising IR. Towards this end, the paper methodologically investigates a South Korean novel, A Grey Man, published in 1963 during South Korea’s early post-colonial period at the height of the Cold War. Using a non-Western novel to conduct a contrapuntal reading of Westphalian IR, this paper constructs a different type of worlding, conceptualising ‘the international’ through ‘the cultural’. It explores the following questions: How do ‘yellow negroes’ (the subject race) make sense of themselves and their roles and life-modes in a world defined for them by the white West (the master race)? How do yellow negroes understand and respond to the white West, which is hegemonic in world politics and history? In what ways does the protagonist of A Grey Man resist, engage with, and relate to the hegemonic West, which he has already internalised? In addressing these questions, the paper attempts to access different IR words to think with, such as race, white supremacy, intimacy without equality, sarcastic empathy, and disengagement. These provide an arena in which we can think otherwise, while un-suturing dominant Westphalian IR thinking.

The university in modern South Asia: Historiographical framings between the local and the global

AbstractThis essay traces different historiographical framings of the modern university in South Asia. Although the trajectories of this institution are manifold and complex, the university's deep imbrications with colonial expansion and developmentalist ambitions lend it to both national and global perspectives. Focusing on the late colonial to early postcolonial period, I examine how recent scholarship has positioned the university across multiple scales. In particular, I consider how the turn toward global, networked, and “entangled” perspectives — with examples drawn from global intellectual history and the history of international development — suggest fresh approaches, clearing the way for new questions as well as encountering unique limits. Ultimately, these frameworks help reorient the university toward its translocal dimensions: as a site of national imagining, internationalist claim‐making, development meaning‐making, global connectivity, and the transnational circulation of knowledge.

The origins of Moroccan narrative film: Mohamed Osfour’s films of the early post-colonial period

ABSTRACT New Film historians purport that the historical progression of world cinema has fundamentally been shaped by the transition from the ‘cinema of attractions’ to the ‘cinema of narrative integration.’ From a historical perspective, these two concepts reflected not only two visions of the cinema’s functions, but they also related to two crucial moments of the development of worldwide filmmaking. This development has often been associated with the shift from ‘non-narrativity’ (incorporated in films of early cinema) to narrativity (exemplified in the rise of Hollywood). From an aesthetic-based standpoint, the two definitions indicated two opposing modes of visualization and two stylistic choices: Showing and telling. In a similar way to the evolution of world cinema, Mohamed Osfour’s film practice developed alongside its transition from ‘attraction’ to ‘narration.’ This shift reflected Osfour’s intellectual commitment and his understanding of the cinematic apparatus’ social functions. The present article argues that Osfour’s films of the early postcolonial period – Al-Ibn Al-a’k (The Damned Child, 1956), Al-Yatim (The Orphan Boy, 1957), and Al-Harib (Fugitive, 1962) – represented the rise of Moroccan narrative film and instigated the move to a film practice that capitalized on the narrator system. It seemed that the liberating context of post-colonial Morocco implicitly played a part in this shift, allowing Osfour to look for narrative spaces where he could manipulate the pro-filmic to tell and write (his)story. Based on the concept of ‘cinema of narrative integration’ – as theorized by Tom Gunning (1994) – this article demonstrates how these cinematic works developed film stylistics that aligned with the dominant features of narrative cinema.

A Country in Abeyance

Amid an economic meltdown in 2022, a nonviolent citizens movement in Sri Lanka ousted Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, brothers from a family that had dominated national politics since 2005. But Parliament filled the presidential vacancy with Ranil Wickremesinghe, a six-time former prime minister seen as a proxy for his predecessors. After a draconian crackdown on protesters, the streets have quieted. But the country’s underlying economic and political crisis, which has roots in the early postcolonial period and the civil war, and was worsened by the Rajapaksas’ autocratic misrule, persists. The new administration has avoided the systemic change demanded by protesters.

Consuming Students: Advertisements and the Indian Youth Market, 1935–65

Advertisements for commodities offer a unique keyhole into the shifting consumption practices and media constructions of the youthful consumer. An analysis of five student and youth magazines foregrounds the gendered and materialistic idealisations of leisure invoked to promote branded goods in the Indian youth market. Analysing advertisements in these magazines allows us to trace the increasingly sophisticated way in which capitalist actors stratified the domain of advertising by life stages during the late colonial and early post-colonial periods in India. This finding runs contrary to the grain of historiography that contends that the Indian ‘market’ failed to respond to the interests of consumers prior to the media liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s.

Cultivating Cotton in the Red Earth of Kampong Cham: Self-Sufficiency, Alternative Modernities and Wartime Refugees in Cold War Cambodia, 1955–1970

ABSTRACT This article argues that Cambodia’s postcolonial cotton ‘push’ was integral to its ultra nationalist vision of modernity and how Cambodia sought to survive within an increasingly acerbic Cold War landscape. In turn, Cambodia’s attention to its cotton and textile industry transformed its foreign policy, student study abroad destinations, state labour apparatuses and humanitarian aid programmes. Norodom Sihanouk’s Sangkum Party used the cotton industry to increase its national legitimacy and visibility, which was intended to help Cambodia gain traction in the Cold War ‘living standards race’. This history sounds innocuous enough except that the Party sustained its cotton push by drawing its labour pool in part from refugees and other marginalised communities. That these refugees were forced to work in Kampong Cham and Battambang cotton fields contradicts the rhetoric of the Buddhist–Socialist politics promulgated by the Sangkum Party. Consequently, the history of Sangkum cotton is at once a history of Cambodia’s early postcolonial period, the American War in Vietnam, and the internationalisation of the Cold War during the ‘Decade of Development’ in the 1960s.

Imperialism, internationalism, and education in Africa: connected histories

ABSTRACT This text introduces the themed issue “Imperialism, Internationalism and Education in Africa: Connected Histories”. It provides an overview of the history of education in twentieth-century Africa, highlighting its major problems, themes, and actors. Arguing for a transnational and connected approach to this field of research, it also explains how the four papers included in the issue allow to address the multiple entanglements between educational internationalism and imperialism in the late colonial and early postcolonial period.

Tanzania’s Authoritarian Turn

For a time, Tanzania enjoyed a reputation for mostly free elections and public debate. But after President John Magufuli was elected in 2015, he introduced measures to stifle the media and tilt the electoral playing field in favor of the longtime ruling party. The turn toward authoritarianism is not due to any one personality or stereotypical “mad dictator,” however (notwithstanding Magufuli’s pandemic denialism, which may have cost him his life). It is part of the legacy of the early postcolonial period and the revered founding president, Julius Nyerere, who set the foundations of one-party rule and wielded the rhetoric of economic nationalism.

Do Institutional Transplants Succeed? Regulating Raiffeisen Cooperatives in South India, 1930–1960

The government in British-ruled India established cooperative banks to compete with private moneylenders in the rural credit market. State officials expected greater competition to increase the supply of low-cost credit, thereby expanding investment potential for the rural poor. Cooperatives did increase credit supply but captured a small share of the credit market and reported net losses throughout the late colonial and early postcolonial period. The article asks why this experiment did not succeed and offers two explanations. First, low savings restricted the role of social capital and mutual supervision as methods of financial regulation in the cooperative sector. Second, a political-economic ideology that privileged equity over efficiency made for weak administrative regulation.

Reconfiguring the Audiovisual Heritage: Lessons from Nigeria

Taking the recent rediscovery and restoration of Adamu Halilu’s 1976 Hausa-language film Shehu Umar as its point of departure, this article addresses the blind spot in the current debates about restitution: the question of Africa’s film heritage. The article offers a critical discussion of the conceptual framework of the heritage concept and highlights the challenges related to the three layers of African and specifically Nigerian film heritage: films from the colonial period, celluloid films from the early postcolonial period up to the 1990s, and the video- and digital-native films of the so-called Nollywood film industry produced after 1992.

El Comité Mudaliar (1962): evaluación de los comienzos

El Comité Mudaliar fue integrado en los primeros años del periodo poscolonial en India para hacer una evaluación de la salud de la población y hacer recomendaciones. El Comité buscó producir conocimiento que diera legitimidad al Estado y que sirviera de guía en la definición de la salud pública. Mudaliar manifestó tener una postura crítica, pero el Reporte que produjo junto con el resto del Comité estuvo marcado por limitantes contradicciones. Al estudiar este proceso, busco contribuir a una mejor comprensión de los primeros años del periodo poscolonial y mostrar que el paso de un periodo a otro no se reduce a rupturas absolutas ni a continuidades sencillas.

To rely or not to rely on common sense? Introducing critical Realism's insights to social network analysis

AbstractIn this article, I aim to critically evaluate the epistemological position of social network analysis. My main point is that while the two main schools of social network analysis – formalism and relationalism – claim to be different because of their respective comprehensions of the ontology of social networks, epistemologically they both rely on network actors' commonsensical comprehension of social ties to conduct social network analysis. Following critical realists' insights into the depth ontology of the social world, I argue that social network analysts must break from their and network actors' commonsensical comprehension of social ties in order to illustrate the objective principles of social networks. I suggest that one strategy for doing so is to treat the current networks of social actors under investigation as a product of historically shaped and state‐mediated contests among social actors to define hierarchical features of their social relations. I present my study of the history of social networks in Indian politics during the early postcolonial period (1947–64) in support of my points.

The Impact of the African Inland Mission (AIM) On Social Change between 1895 and 1971 in Machakos District, Kenya

This study aimed at analysing the African Inland Mission and social transformation in Machakos District of Eastern Kenya from 1895 to 1971. It sought to establish how the elements of the Akamba social life underwent a social change as a result of the mission's presence in the district. The study was guided by the question: How effective was the mission in influencing social change in the district? The structural- functionalism theory formulated by Herbert Spencer and developed further by Emile Durkheim was used to analyse the role of the African Inland Mission in influencing social change in Machakos District. The qualitative research design involving the use of in-depth interviews with key informants was used. A target population consisting of local residents, former administrators and African Inland Mission/church leaders was interviewed. The study used the purposive method of sampling. Primary data was collected using in-depth oral interviews as well as from archival records, while secondary data was obtained through a thematic review of literature related to the topic of study. This study has provided sufficient knowledge on the African Inland Mission and the social transformation in Machakos District in the colonial and the early post-colonial periods of Kenyan history. In addition, the findings have constituted part of the historiography of the African Inland Mission in Kenya.

Национально-функциональная парадигма: увеличение языкового капитала как цель языковой политики

The article discusses changes in linguistic ideology in the postmodern and globalization period, which led to a change in the linguistic paradigm from ethnocultural to national-functional, which arose on the basis of the developmental ideology. Language policies always have a “hidden agenda” aimed at creating language hierarchies and marginalizing language communities. In the new paradigm, the question turned out to be not only the concepts of language and languages, but also many related concepts derived from the concept of the discrete nature of a language, such as language rights, mother language, bilingualism, multilingualism, code switching, etc. The resource-oriented approach to language radically changes attitudes towards languages and language groups. Language management is viewed as an analogy of natural resource management, and language policy makers control the learning and use of languages in the same way as is done in business resource allocation models. Earlier, the spread of English was studied within the framework of the theory of language imperialism. Since the last third of the ХХ century, instead of the concept of linguistic imperialism, which had a heuristic value in the early post-colonial period, the concept of linguistic capital is used. The historical chance of the Russian Federation is the use by the absolute majority of the population of the endogenous world language. Proficiency in Russian constitutes the main share of the linguistic capital of its speakers.

The Blessings of Medicine? Patient Characteristics and Health Outcomes in a Ugandan Mission Hospital, 1908–19701

Summary This article sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa. We use patient registers from Western Uganda’s earliest mission hospital to explore whether and how Christian conversion and mission education affected African health behaviour. A data set of 18,600 admissions permits analysis of patients’ age, sex, residence, religion, diagnoses, duration of hospitalisation and treatment outcomes. We document Toro Hospital’s substantial geographic reach, trace evolving treatment practices and highlight significant variation in hospital-based disease incidence between the early colonial and early postcolonial periods. We observe no relationship between numeracy and health outcomes, nor religion-specific effects concerning hygiene-related infections. Christian conversion was associated with superior cure rates and shorter length of stay and with lower incidence of skin diseases and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). However, our findings indicate that STI incidence was linked to morality campaigns and that clinicians’ diagnoses were influenced by assumptions around religious groups’ sexual behaviour.

Education, Industrialization and the End of Empire in Singapore

Singapore under the ruling People’s Action Party government has been categorized as a developmental state which has utilized education as an instrument of its economic policies and nation-building agenda. However, contrary to accepted assumptions, the use of education by the state to promote economic growth did not begin with the coming to power of the People’s Action Party in 1959. In Singapore, the colonial state had been using education to meet the demands of its colonial economy well before the rise of the post-independence developmental state. Education, Industrialization and the End of Empire in Singapore examines how the state’s use of education as an instrument of economic policy had its origins in the colonial economy and intensified during the process of decolonization. By covering this process the history of vocational and technical education and its relationship with the economy is traced from the colonial era through to decolonization and into the early postcolonial period.