Imperial Encounters Research Articles

Visualizing imperial encounters: PLACA and US-Central American solidarity murals in San Francisco’s Mission District

This article examines two 1984 murals—Keeping the Peace in Central America and Culture Contains the Seed of Resistance, Which Blossoms into the Flower of Liberation—painted in San Francisco’s Mission District by members of PLACA, a multi-ethnic collective of thirty-six mural activists. I discuss how the artists depicted imperial encounters in their murals dedicated to US-Central American solidarity as a strategy for building transnational support for Central American liberation movements in the 1980s. PLACA transformed Balmy Alley by creating twenty-seven murals protesting US intervention in Central America and celebrating Central American culture. The collective played a pivotal role in transforming Balmy Alley and manifested the larger Central American solidarity movement taking place across the United States.

VISUAL CULTURAL PRACTICES OF POSTCOLONIAL ELITE SCHOOLS IN GLOBALIZING CIRCUMSTANCES

In this article the author reports on the matter of the contemporary management and conservation of histories in the visual domains of three postcolonial elite school sites: Old Cloisters in Barbados, Rippon College in India, and Straits School in Singapore. These schools form part of a 5-year, 9-country study of postcolonial elite schools in globalizing circumstances—a flash point of articulation between these schools and profound change. The article turns on this fundamental fact: that these schools, which are the products of societies marked historically by British colonial and imperial encounters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the first half of the twentieth, are now driven forward by new energies associated with marketization, neoliberalism and globalization as these countries lurch forward unevenly towards a postdevelopmental era. This turn towards neoliberal globalization has precipitated radically new needs, interests, desires, capacities and competitive logics among the middle class and upwardly mobile young and their parents in each of these societies that then press powerfully onto these elite schools, and their cultivated pasts as they reside in school anthems, flags, emblems, banners and rituals of assembly, formal dress and decorum. All of this is taking place in the glow of digitalization as these schools increasingly move online locating themselves in photo and video-sharing websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Flicker as well as websites that each individual school is creating to consecrate school heritage. In what follows, then, the author calls attention to the theoretical significance and practical dimensions of the work that these select schools are doing on their rich heritages and historical archives in response to the new demands of globalization and transforming educational markets.

Book review essay: Colonialism and modern social theory

As the discipline of the social sciences finds itself at a crossroads hedged in by the remnants of empire, with the ‘decolonisation’ of its conceptual and methodological foundations being the only productive path forward, the question is no longer whether to take this route, but how. In their recent book, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, Gurminder K Bhambra and John Holmwood offer a stimulating and resourceful guide to this objective, setting forth a provocative approach in disrupting and radically reinterpreting dominant sociological understandings of modern world society. The following book review essay discusses the authors’ interventions by highlighting their interrogations of the canonical figures who would shape the problematic trajectory of the discipline for generations. I assess the book’s core argument of advocating for a need to recentre imperial encounters and relations at an explanatory level in the shaping of capitalist modernity, concluding with considerations for a reflexive and epistemic reconstruction of the sociological canon.

Figuring Black Lives

Figuring Black Lives Justin L. Mann (bio) It is sadly difficult to imagine myself going back in time to June 2020. The temporal dilation and spatial stasis wrought by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has stretched the last few years into some indeterminate meter. And so, it is also hard to resituate myself in relation to the triple murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd that marked the spring of that year and set the stage for the global uprising that dominated the summer of 2020. What I do have is a strong sense of how I felt that spring: already exhausted with online teaching, frustrated with reductive discourses about what anti-Black violence meant / didn't mean / couldn't mean, enraged that again, state and state-adjacent men with guns could kill Black people with impunity, and scared for my life. I was teaching an advanced undergraduate course called, dubiously, Black Insecurity, which sought to understand, according to the course description, the "interdependence" of anti-Black violence at home with what Erica R. Edwards and others call "the long War on Terror," geopolitical and imperial encounters throughout the global South, in the Middle East, and in the virtual world online. Predictably, much of our conversation turned to the relationship between overpolicing, the process of global securitization, and the effects of both on racial regimes, specifically although not exclusively white supremacy and anti-Blackness, in the US in the contemporary moment. Working our way through Black memoir—Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped—and situating these stories of Black life in an intellectual milieu that tracks how narratives of heartbreaking sadness, grief, and violence enliven, rather than obliterate, Blackness, Black people, and Black life, my students exhibited a unique and overwhelming heroism, soldiering (if you'll excuse the metaphor) through what are often bleak stories to arrive on the narrative other side. At around the same time, protests at Northwestern, my current institution, crescendoed; student-activists, including Northwestern Community Not Cops (NUCNC), urged university officials to defund campus policing while administrators defended police as a necessary and often benevolent force, protecting the property of stakeholders including parents, [End Page 635] professors, and trustees. At the fulcrum of this confrontation was the implicit misrecognition of the history and logic of policing, the denial of the relationship between race and surveillance, and the disavowal of the university's possessive investment, to crib George Lipsitz's oft-repeated phrase, in preserving its accounts receivable ledger. This is likely a familiar story and one I recount not to set out my experience as exceptional or unique but to mark my own expectation of the banality of this story, of its points of comparison with the experiences of so many others, especially those of my scholarly generation (indeed, I thought about dropping the autocratical outright, but here we are): old enough to remember LA burning, engaged in graduate study when the killer George Zimmerman was acquitted, weary at the litany of names we feel compelled to mention when writing about police murder, like the final tableau of Ava DuVernay's The 13th. A wall of text. A visual tomb. It is our job to make sense of senselessness, to define, analyze, assess, and contextualize brutality, to render thinkable the mindlessness of racism: a Sisyphean task to be sure. Racism is racism. The logics of anti-Black policing from the "Broken Windows" to "stop-and-frisk," to mandatory minimums, announce themselves in their appeal to common sense. As techniques of power, they draw into them racial and gendered logics that hail precisely whom they are meant to hail.1 They are, at base, ideological, stripped to the bones of discursive nuance and instead proclaiming their objectifying violence outright. What more sense is there to be made? No demystification necessary. This is not to indict the herculean efforts of scholars and critics, including Mariame Kaba, Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Simone Browne, Stuart Schrader, and so many others, who detail oppressive regimes in the service of the project of abolition, not just of the prison, or the carceral, but of Empire, and its institutions: the military...

Epistemic demarcations as social erasures: taste and the politics of distinction from the ‘revolutions of wisdom’ to the ‘Green Revolution’

AbstractThe epistemic and aesthetic dimensions of taste are always inscribed in conceptions of the social order that the discourse on taste simultaneously enacts and rationalizes, while veiling the logics of difference and power it thereby affirms and reproduces. This article illustrates the entanglement of social and intellectual hierarchies that anchors the resolution of the problem of taste in the mechanisms of social distinction and erasure. It does so by examining four socio-epistemic configurations in the history of Western knowledge. The first vignette contextualizes the original devaluation of taste in the competition between the Socratic philosophers and epistemic labourers whose elevation of taste disrupted the Athenian aristocratic order. The second vignette explores the entanglement of humoural theory with the racial and religious orders of the premodern age, as imperial encounters threatened European identity brought into contact with the tastes of others. The third vignette examines how the epistemic status of gustatory taste became anchored in the hierarchy of cultural taste within British empirical philosophy. Finally, the paper tracks new forms of social distinction in the resistance to the globalization of food systems and to the democratization of culinary tastes, as manifested in the constitution of an exclusivist ‘standard of taste’ for wine appreciation.

Imperial Encounters and Material Culture

Imperial Encounters and Material Culture

Afroperipheral indigeneity in Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour

Black Canadian writer Wayde Compton’s short story collection The Outer Harbour (2015) is located in the Afroperiphery of British Columbia which stands as a ‘contact zone’ that enables the alliances between Black and Indigenous peoples and also establishes a fecund ground of possibilities to emphasize the way in which cross-ethnic coalitions and representations reconsider imperial encounters previously ignored. The stories participate in the recent turn in Indigenous studies towards kinship and cross-ethnicity to map out the connected and shared itineraries of Black and Indigenous peoples and re-read Indigeneity in interaction. At the same time, the stories offer a fresh way to revisit Indigeneity in Canada through the collaborative lens and perspective of the Afroperipheral reality. In doing so, they contribute to calling attention to current cross-ethnic struggles for Indigenous rights and sovereignty in Canada that rely on kinship and ethnic alliances to keep on interrogating the shortcomings of the nation’s multiculturalism.

From James Legge to Evangeline Edwards: The Role of Scottish and Other Missionaries in the Formation of Sinology in Britain

Over the last half-century, the foreign missionary movement from the West has attracted much academic scrutiny from historians of imperial encounters with indigenous peoples. More recently, scholars have also begun to draw attention to the significance of missionaries, former missionaries or their progeny, as repositories of specialist linguistic and cultural knowledge of Asia and Africa who were indispensable to Western governments and universities and whose influence was sometimes formative in shaping conceptions of the non-European world.1This article addresses one aspect of this broader theme, namely the leading role played by missionaries or former missionaries in the development of the academic discipline of sinology in Britain. Particular emphasis is placed on the contributions of two missionaries with strong connections to Scotland. One of these, James Legge, is well known. The other, Evangeline (‘Eve’) Dora Edwards, has been almost entirely forgotten.

Family matters in racial logics: Tracing intimacies, inequalities, and ideologies

AbstractThis article seeks to advance our understanding of how intimate relations and racial logics are co-constituted and matter – subjectively, culturally, materially, and politically – in our colonial present of economic inequalities, nationalist populisms, anti-migrant discourses and xenophobic hostilities. Addressing these crisis conditions is urgent, yet critical interventions indicate that prevailing accounts inadequately address the scale, complexity, and fluidity of racisms operating today. This article proposes to think racial logics ‘otherwise’ by drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and intersectional analytics to produce a genealogy of state/nation formation processes, imperial encounters, and legitimating ideologies that illuminates how ‘intimacy builds worlds’.1A deep history of political centralisation reveals that regulation of intimate, familial relations is a constitutive feature of successful state-making and crucial for understanding how modernity's ‘race difference’ is produced and how the racialisation of ‘Other’ (‘non-European’, undesirable) sexual/familial practices figures in contemporary crises. Locating intimate relations – ‘family’ – in (birthright) citizenship, immigration regimes, and political-economic frames helps clarify the amplification of global inequalities and the power of stigmatisations to fuel nationalist attachments and anti-migrant hostilities. Foregrounding intimacy and integrating typically disparate lines of inquiry advances our analyses of today's often opaque yet intense racisms and their globally problematic effects.

Babylonian Encounters in the Upper Diyala River Valley: Contextualizing the Results of Regional Survey and the 2016–2017 Excavations at Khani Masi

Kassite Babylonia counts among the great powers of the Late Bronze Age Near East. Its kings exchanged diplomatic letters with the pharaohs of Egypt and held their own against their Assyrian and Elamite neighbors. Babylonia's internal workings, however, remain understood in their outlines only, as do its elite's expansionary ambitions, the degrees to which they may have been realized, and the nature of ensuing imperial encounters. This is especially the case for the region to the northeast, where the Mesopotamian lowlands meet the Zagros piedmonts in the Diyala River valley and where a series of corridors of movement intersect to form a strategic highland-lowland borderland. In this paper, we present critical new results of regional survey in the Upper Diyala plains of northeast Iraq and excavations at the Late Bronze Age site of Khani Masi. Not only do our data and analyses expand considerably the known extent of Babylonia's cultural sphere, but also the monumental character of Khani Masi and its wider settlement context prompt a fundamental rethinking of the nature and chronology of Babylonian presence in this transitional landscape. As such, this paper contributes an important new case study to the field of archaeological empire and borderland studies.

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World

Sympathetic collaboration and the made-for-US Philippine films of the 1950s to 1970s

Between the 1950s and 1970s, the Philippines became a prolific producer of low-budget films that were made almost exclusively for American audiences, as an array of subgenres such as war films, jungle horror, blaxploitation and women-in-captivity films found their way to drive-ins and grindhouses. Conscious of the tastes of exploitation film aficionados, these films pandered to their viewers by adopting the familiar conventions of stereotyping villains and heroes, exploiting storylines and genres popularized by mainstream cinema, and featuring the usual gore, hyped-up sex scenes and ‘schlock’ factors found in their American counterparts. They notably also appeared to narrate from the perspective of the white cinematic gaze, often participating in the self-orientalization of Southeast Asian wilderness and tribal life. Considering the highly international nature of Philippine cinema and the historical circumstances that shaped its postcoloniality and reactions to previous imperial encounters, the existence of these export films should not be entirely surprising. Notwithstanding Andrew Leavold’s observation that most Filipino pictures were produced for domestic consumption,1 the Philippine film industry, at least up to the 1980s, was arguably the most internationally oriented within Southeast Asia, with the country serving as the location for big-budget Hollywood productions, and with Filipino filmmakers making films featuring content conscious of international and intercultural contact. The export films2 can therefore be understood as a logical outcome to these industrial developments. By going into partnership with American producers and distributors, Filipino filmmakers seized on competitive advantages, such as lower production costs, the existence of skilled cinematic labour and, more importantly, the ability to shoot on location with sizeable numbers of locally hired extras. In this way these export films boasted higher production values than their American counterparts, especially when there was a requirement for exoticized settings and visual aesthetics.

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World by Kelly L. Watson

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World by Kelly L. Watson

Sex, Race Mixing, and Empire

Sex, Race Mixing, and Empire Micheline Lessard (bio) Christina Firpo, The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016. 260 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8248-4757-9 (cl); 978-0-8248-7515-2 (pb). Emma Jinhua Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 331 pp.; ISBN 978-0-5202-7627-7 (pb); 978-0-5209-5700-8 (epub). Carina E. Ray, Crossing the Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Policies of Colonialism in Ghana. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2015. 364 pp,; ISBN 978-0-8214-2179-6 (cl); 978-0-8214-2180-2 (pb); 978-0-8214-4539-6 (epub). Judith A. Bennett and Angela Wanhalla, eds. Mothers' Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen, World War II. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016. 424 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8248-5152-1 (cl). These four monographs represent necessary and sophisticated analyses of the ways in which mixed-race children born of colonial and quasi-colonial encounters contended with and challenged racial representations and hierarchies. We also find in their pages insight into the mechanisms employed by occupational forces, be they imperial or otherwise, to impose or reinforce notions of race, class, and gender. Each of these studies situate hybridity within specific political, geographic, and cultural environments and circumstances while also allowing us to find common threads pertaining to the exercise of power and the definition of identity and culture. Rich in historiographical and historical context and in analysis of theories of empire, race, gender, and culture, the arguments and the hypotheses set forth in all four books are enhanced by case studies and personal narratives that clearly illustrate the impact of such processes as racialization, rationalization, and exclusion upon métis children, their mothers, fathers, and families. Although the children born of relations between men and women of China, French Indochina, the Pacific, and Ghana with those of European or American descent may be perceived as the embodiment and the complexity of colonial and imperial encounters, these studies illustrate [End Page 159] that they also often defied such notions through their own diverse ways of navigating through difficult social, cultural, and political waters. Christina Firpo's The Uprooted provides a masterful study examining the French colonial policies in Vietnam of "uprooting" or removing métis children from social settings perceived as threats to the welfare of these children but, significantly, also as potential dangers to the colonial enterprise. The removal of métis children, by both French colonial authorities and "protection" societies, argues Firpo, was consistent with nineteenth-century imperial notions of statecraft. Equally clear in this study is the reality that definitions of mixed-race children either as "indigenous" or as "French" shifted over time and according to place, interest, and circumstance. The defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1871 weighed heavily on France as it attempted to consolidate the Third Republic. French leaders bemoaned the loss of prestige and the defeat of a once grande nation and attributed this to the notion of dégénerescence (degeneration), a concept that became a leitmotif for national uplift (the relèvement de la nation). Renewed imperial ambitions became synonymous with national strength. In Vietnam, French colonial authorities attempted to uphold a fiction of imperial prestige and French supremacy. Notions of French vigor and power were embedded in racialized and gendered hierarchies. Firpo reveals in her study that when we scratch away the veneer of colonial rule, persistent fears of rebellion over even the most minor contestations of French supremacy emerge. There was, alongside the often-violent exercise of power, a recognized, if seldom stated, understanding of the fragile ground upon which stood the occupation and the exploitation of the Vietnamese kingdom in France's colonial rule. Métis children were considered not only problematic in terms of racial and cultural classification, but those who were not recognized by their fathers and who were not deemed and treated as French were considered a potential threat to French colonial rule. Their liminal status—the very result of colonial policies intended to buttress...

Transatlantic - Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World. By Kelly L. Watson . New York: New York University, 2015. Pp. 239. $40.00 cloth.

Transatlantic - Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World. By Kelly L. Watson . New York: New York University, 2015. Pp. 239. $40.00 cloth.

“The Wonders of India so Near our Front Doors”: Consuming India, Imagining America

This article examines the period diaries or narratives of bourgeois white women from Salem, Massachusetts, to explore Salem as a contact zone or port through which goods and stories about India entered the early national spaces of the United States. Focusing on a range of social and symbolic meanings surrounding the consumption of “India goods,” this article illuminates the global connections of the early republic and sheds light on it as a society animated by, and entangled in, global and imperial encounters of maritime trade, a culture enmeshed in an international economy.

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World by Kelly L. Watson

<i>Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World</i> by Kelly L. Watson

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World, written by Kelly L. Watson

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World, written by Kelly L. Watson

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World, written by Kelly L. Watson

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World, written by Kelly L. Watson

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World