Imperial Identity Research Articles

Claiming Identities in Palestine: Migration and Nationality under the Mandate

In the decades just prior to the end of World War I, residents of the Ottoman Empire's provinces alternated with ease between a variety of personal identities and affiliations. Overlapping imperial, supranational, and localized identities could all be claimed with flexibility by Arab travelers and migrants in the region and in the wider diaspora. Arab, and later Jewish, inhabitants of Palestine conceived of nationality as a choice based on personal understandings of identity that were not necessarily tied to domicile in a particular territory. This article traces the demise of such a notion of nationality, and its practical repercussions after 1918, showing how Palestine's emigrants and immigrants did not immediately understand or reimagine themselves as part of the more rigid nationality system imposed by the British Mandate. Analyzing regional migration into and out of Palestine during the interwar period, the study seeks to explain the ways in which a system of flexible national affiliation transformed into a rigid system of nationality based on domicile.

Brexit, boundaries and imperial identities: A comparative view

The year 2016 will be marked as a year in which identity politics reached new levels of significance. Among numerous dramatic events, the UK referendum on membership of the European Union has brought many issues of interest to archaeologists to the fore. These range from entirely contemporary concerns, such as the future of research funding in Britain, to topics of more longitudinal significance, including the interactions between different identity groups in particular economic and political circumstances. In this paper, I wish to explore aspects of the distinctive position of Britain as an illustration of identity dynamics in the long term, focussing on the relationship between imperialism and identities and viewed through the lens of recent work in Border Studies. Brexit can be seen as the culmination of the collapse of the British empire, and transformation of British identity, in the post-Second World War era and the particular dynamics of this process invite comparison with Britain’s earlier position as one of the frontier provinces of the Roman empire, especially in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. This comparison reveals two paradoxical dimensions of imperial identities, the first being that so-called ‘peripheries’ can be more important than ‘cores’ in the creation of imperial identities and the second that such identities can be simultaneously ideologically powerful yet practically fragile in the circumstances which follow imperial collapse. Such insights are important because, at a time of apparently resurgent nationalism in many countries, archaeologists need to work harder than ever to understand identity dynamics with the benefit of time depth.

An Effigy of Empire: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Canadian Imperial Nationalism During the Second Boer War

On October 31, 1899, as a part of undergraduate University of Toronto Halloween celebrations, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Princess of Wales Theatre on King Street West was interrupted by shouts from the gallery calling for the death of “Oom” Paul Kruger, the leader of the South African Republic, who had recently declared war on the British Empire. The student demonstration was not, in itself, seen as objectionable or surprising—a similar interruption by Trinity students at convocation on October 25 was lauded in The Globe as “Patriotic.” What was unusual to the Toronto newspapers that spent the next week decrying the demonstration was the students’ lack of decorum at a Shakespeare performance. In this contribution, Andrew Bretz looks at the tension between how paratextual signifiers such as costuming choices, lighting, and the theatre space itself constructed the Halloween 1899 performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an imperial text, and how Shakespeare as “high culture” moderated the ways in which individuals could express imperial allegiances. This alignment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Canadian and British imperial projects may serve to explain why the students chose a performance of that particular play to enact their patriotic violence, yet the condemnation of the event by the daily newspapers troubles the relationship between imperial identity, partially predicated on a sanitized vision of Shakespeare, and the enacting of violence against the colonized other. For the newspapers, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a representation of paternalistic British culture and identity, ultimately could not be reconciled with the bald violence of a jingoistic imperialism.

Four Traumatizations That Created Ukrainian Identity

Four Traumatizations That Created Ukrainian Identity Frank Golczewski George O. Liber, Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954. xxxiv + 453 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-1442627086. $39.95. Are there not already too many books on the history of Ukraine? And has Timothy Snyder not described in sufficient detail the mass killings that occurred in the area between Central Europe and the Ural Mountains?1 Both questions have to be answered in the negative after reading George Liber's book that describes one specific result of the murderous cataclysms that shook the vast lands of Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Liber sets the ambitious goal of providing a new answer to the old question of how nation-states emerged. But rather than entering the dispute between primordialist, perennialist, and modernist theoreticians, he describes on a practical level what happened in and around the area of present-day Ukraine and how this resulted in the formation of a modern nation-state called Ukraine.2 According to Liber, the "total wars" of the first half of the 20th century brought about a "social realignment" in Ukrainian society (279) and made possible the formation of this nation-state. These wars reshaped the multicultural area into one with a Ukrainian identity. But at the same time, they loaded the existence of the Ukrainian state with unsolved burdens of the past—causing phantom pains over disputed territories that had been incorporated into its neighbor states. [End Page 839] The modernist discourse (and Liber is more modernist than anything else) is based on, among other things, Miroslav Hroch's assumption that nations—especially those emerging from "incomplete" nonstate peoples in Eastern Europe—are the creations of intellectuals and activists. The national intellectual elites convince the inhabitants of these lands of their particular cultural quality and forge a political program based on a cultural agenda.3 Although Liber does not refute Hroch's scheme, he advances a different interpretation of the nature of state formation. Instead of the nation building taking place in peaceful times, he concentrates on clashes, mass murder, deportations, and the "social chaos" (279) in deadly times of war and persecution. His bold thesis is that there was no "linear road" to the Ukrainian nation state. Rather, the emerging Ukrainian nationalism was an "interactive response" to wars and violence that in essence created present-day Ukraine (11). Quite in line with Ukrainian integral nationalists of the interwar period,4 but in contrast to most ideologues of modern-day Ukraine, Liber identifies the Ukrainian-speaking population of the pre-1914 period as "an ethnographic mass" (34), lacking most accessories of modern nationhood. After establishing this ground zero, he proceeds to describe in length how—according to his count—four traumatizations (all part of the "total wars") changed the mental and demographic situation in the Ukrainian lands. For Liber, the first traumatization comes not in 1932 (as for Timothy Snyder), but in 1914 (11). Although the military confrontations of World War I were accompanied by mass murder, Liber's focus is rather on the wartime encounters between different groups of Ukrainians as well as between Ukrainians and other peoples. It was in the context of the war that Galician Russophiles were disappointed by the Russians, less nationally conscious Eastern Ukrainians met nationalist Western Ukrainians, and numerous evacuees mixed with locals in whom they suddenly recognized their co-nationals. For Liber, these wartime encounters constituted the first step in the process of replacing loyalty to non-Ukrainian ruling dynasties and imperial identities with a common Ukrainian national identity. Liber's description of what happened after the war differs sharply from the narrative of nationalist writers: he considers Soviet Ukraine, notwithstanding its shortcomings, to have played an important part in shaping Ukrainian national identity. Like [End Page 840] Richard Pipes, he calls Soviet Ukraine a "subversive institution" (78), because it implanted Ukrainian nationhood into the Soviet system, whose declared goal was to overcome nationality.5 In this sense, it was quite similar to Sergei Uvarov's doctrine of "official nationality," which unintentionally introduced a nationalist discourse to the Russian Empire in 1833.6 The second...

Legittimare l'impero britannico: nazionalismo, cosmopolitismo e missione civilizzatrice

The essay addresses the peculiar meanings conferred on the idea of nation within the context of the various attempts at redefining in statal national terms the imperial identity of Britain which characterized the tradition of liberal imperialism. The analysis focuses upon the evolution of a specific form of pan-Britannicism which emerged since the 1880s and strove both to emphasize the political potentialities of an assumed ethnolinguistic and cultural homogeneity between the white colonies and the motherland and to credit the British global state with a providential vocation to the unification of mankind. India's later inclusion in the pan-Britannicist rhetorics, which went so far as to invest the Raj with the mission of encouraging the birth of a pan-Indian nation state based on the cross-fertilization of European and Asian civilizations inside the British Commonwealth of Nations, not only showed the final adoption by colonial authorities of a variant of Orientalism aiming to distinguish itself from the most blatant kinds of cultural differentialism, but was premised also on a profound revision in a pluralist sense of the categories according to which late Victorian imperialists had interpreted nationality with reference to the composite metropolitan core of the Empire and its neo-European overseas peripheries.

El Magreb, pluralidad y memoria: Cervantes y las crónicas de Berbería en "La historia del cautivo."

Cervantes's information about Algerian society and the diversity of the Islamic world concurs with the content of the historiographic works on North Africa, affirming the importance of this knowledge for the formation of a collective memory, for which the contributions of Andalusies to the social and economic progress of the Maghreb are recognized. The role of Muslim women, such as Zoraida, in the process of recovering the historical past helps to underline the cultural continuum between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, problematizing imperial ideals of cultural homogeneity, while simultaneously anticipating the definitive division caused by the Moriscos who are about to leave.

Book Review: Lisa Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity in the Mughal Empire: Memory and Dynastic Politics in Early Modern South and Central Asia

Lisa Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity in the Mughal Empire: Memory and Dynastic Politics in Early Modern South and Central Asia, Indian edition (New Delhi: Viva Books), 2013, xix + 216 pp., ₹1,895 (hardback).

Lisa Balabanlilar. Imperial Identity in the Mughal Empire. Memory and Dynastic Politics in Early Modern South and Central Asia

Cette etude, fondee sur un grand nombre de sources en persan, turc chaghatai et arabe (p. 192-198), montre comment les heritages turko-mongols ont fini par devenir des marqueurs d’identite. L’ouvrage est compose d’un prologue, suivi de quatre chapitres et d’une conclusion. Dans le prologue (« Timurid Political Charisma and the Ideology of Rule », p. 7-17), l’A. decrit les cadres ideologiques timourides, ancres dans l’heritage de Gengis Khan. Tamerlan apporta a l’ideologie de la conquete gengi...

RUSIŠKASIS KONSERVATIZMAS: NACIONALINĖS IDEOLOGIJOS PAIEŠKA IR SANTYKIS SU RUSIJOS UŽSIENIO POLITIKA

The article analyses the impact of present-day Russian internal structural factors, searching national ideology and shaping “Russian conservatism” line formation marked the links between this ideology and Russian foreign policy. The main focus is designated to Russia’s politics after the Russia-Georgia conflict in 2008, highlighting the response of Vladimir Putin’s regime to several domestic policy tensions related with: 1) the structure of the Russian regime and the domination of siloviki group in the power structures; 2) the etno-federalist structure of Russia and the growing nationalism; and 3) the competition of several ideologies, which increasingly turns to the support of Eurasianist ideology line and its transformation into “Russian conservatism”. Theoretically, this analysis is based on the internal and external factors that have an impact on the state’s policies (e.g. Walter Carlsnaes concepts), as well as on the theories analysing Russian etno-federalism and informal networks/relations. This article argues that Russian internal structural factors strongly support the Russian Eurasianist direction as the dominant policy doctrine, and this doctrine defines the Russian foreign policy, limits its balancing and influences the dynamics of foreign policy. It shows how, during the recent years, Russia’s assertive foreign policy has become influenced by neo-imperialist vision of a strong, conservative, and alternative Russia, which actively uses the “Russian conservatism” as an ideological justification, supports active protection of Russia’s interest in the post-Soviet region (e.g., war with Ukraine) increasing the use of foreign policy in the post-Soviet region (e.g., war with Ukraine) or raising the question about the multipolar world order. Other competing ideological lines (pro-Western liberalism and Slavic nationalisms) are still included in the balancing if there is demand, however, it remains non-typical forms of current Russia’s ideological framework. Since the Russia-Georgia war in 2008, the aggressive Russian foreign policy depends not only on the external factors, but it also increasingly reacts to internal factors, especially to Putin’s interest to maintain the vertical power and ensure further legitimacy of the regime. Russia’s “electoral authoritarianism”, which actively used the concept of “sovereign democracy” last decade, faced serious challenges in 2011– 2012. After public protests for electoral fraud, Putin’s circles have perceived that Russia’s ruling elites need to initiate a new turn for the country, either to a wider democracy development or to find other resources to mobilise society. By reacting to the interest of siloviki group and seeing the confrontation between Russian ethnic and minorities’ nationalism manifestations, Putin’s regime strengthened its orientation towards the new Eurasianism, which emphasized the special path of Russia’s civilization: being alternative to the Western world, adjusting only “appropriate for Russia” democracy standards, opposing human rights development, and seeing it as a harmful foreign influence. State patriotism was framed under the new “Russian conservatism” line, which emphasized strong authority of central power, Russian imperial identity, Russia’s interest in Eurasian regions, support for multipolar world, and the spread of conservative values as opposition to Western cosmopolitism. It helped to mobilise Russian society, integrate the great old and the new military victories of Russia’s state and received a new support and greater legitimacy for Putin’s regime. This ideology leaves room for integration of separate narratives from various ideological lines (from the Soviet nostalgia and technocratic modernisation to “old Russia” traditionalism). Military actions in Ukraine in 2014–2015 have illustrated that imperial approach effectively mobilises not only the Russian society but a certain part of the other post- Soviet societies (e.g., the idea of the Russian world). This “Russian conservatism” also attempts to respond to other internal tensions, such as ethnic conflicts, by promoting a more intensive Russian state identity instead of an ethnic identity. The situation, when various ethnic minorities and their leaders (e.g., R. Kadyrov) actively supported Russia’s actions in Ukraine and the new Putin’s activism, revealed that under this ideological umbrella, such local actors as in Putin’s circle, leaders of ethnic regions, Orthodox church, and media authorities find themselves in the state’s ongoing narratives. Under this situation, Putin’s regime effectively marginalises their opponents. Non-systemic liberal-democrats are presented as acting against Russia’s interests. The discourse for keeping the relationship with Western partners, which emphasizes the modernisation or stresses the importance of economic developments, is still valid, and it is still used for balancing, but current ideological trend has clearly prioritised the imperial identity over democracy development.

Civic Nationalism, Imperial Identities and Punjabi Migration: Sundar Singh's Political Activism in the Dominion of Canada

ABSTRACTThis article explores the three themes of civic nationalism, imperial identities and Punjabi migration by focusing on the life of Sundar Singh, a migrant to Canada who came to prominence in the early 1900s, through his speeches. Sundar Singh employed the idea of equal status of all British subjects in the British Empire to argue for the migration of Sikhs to Canada and other British settler societies and their being treated with respect and fairness on their arrival in their new homes. Although Singh's claim to Britishness was rejected in many sections of Canadian society, it was supported by some white Canadians. The article suggests that British identity of the Empire's Dominions could, in some circumstances, be a force for the inclusion of South Asians. The article also illustrates the way in which developments in India impacted upon those of the diaspora across the British Empire. This idea is developed by demonstrating the importance of the triangular relationship between India, the United Kingdom and Canada as highlighted by the issue of Punjabi migration within the British Empire.

A Forgotten Legacy: The Romanov Patronage of Finland’s Early Art Collections

The earliest art collections of Finland’s National Gallery came into being when, as the Grand Duchy of Finland, it was an autonomous part of imperial Russia (1809–1917). The prevailing view of Finnish museum studies, however, sees the Finnish Art Society, the precursor of the Finnish National Gallery, as being modelled on exclusively European cultural institutions. The history of the Society and its collections have thus been seen as resistant to any alien eastern influences, and as an attempt to differentiate Finnish culture from Russian art collecting practices. Drawing on the theoretical shift in cultural studies from the conception of stable, clearly demarcated cultural identities of nation states toward less rigidly defined identities, the aim of this essay is to reconstruct the hidden Russian presence in Finnish museum historiography. Based on original unpublished sources, my study shows that the earliest support of Finland’s cultural infrastructure was given by the Romanov patrons Nicholas I, Alexander II, and Alexander III. By exposing the absence and physical erasure of “imperial identity” in the official Finnish museum narrative, I reveal how museums can at once elevate particular discourses and practices while marginalizing other historical processes in a nation’s cultural past.

Jade, Imperial Identity, and Sumptuary Reform in Jia Yi’s Xin Shu

The founding of the Han 漢 dynasty by a man of common birth, Liu Bang 劉邦, precipitated a new awareness that class boundaries had become more fluid than in prior generations. New fashions threatened the established social order as wealthy individuals pretended to status that they had not yet achieved. To respond to these concerns, Jia Yi 賈誼 (200–168 BCE) proposed a new sumptuary code regulating a range of luxury goods from apparel to accessories to ritual wares. This sumptuary system was designed to bolster the authority of the imperial throne and to distinguish members of the Han government and the imperial family from other elites. This essay will present an overview of Jia Yi’s sumptuary code and consider its relationship to earlier theories of ritual reform. It will argue that his system combined Lord Shang’s 商 theory of circumstantial advantage (shi 勢) with a new scheme of imperial publicity. The final section of this study assesses the implementation of Jia Yi’s recommendations by using jade as a case study. Based on recent archaeological evidence, I argue that Jia Yi’s ideas about jade in the context of his sumptuary guidelines have a contemporaneity with the revitalization of jade craft in the early Western Han.

Imperial localism, cosmopolitan localism and the Cameroon Anglophone decolonial option in John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo

ABSTRACTThis article discusses three related issues – imperial localism, cosmopolitan localism, and the Anglophone decolonial option in Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo. It shows that Nkengasong argues that, if Cameroonians foster local cosmopolitan ideals, there would be no need for Anglophones/Francophones to adopt/adapt imperial cosmopolitan ideals as their blueprint. Francophone/Anglophone cosmopolitanisms should be taken as group/local ideals of a cosmopolitan Cameroonian world. Since imperial versions of Francophone and Anglophone cosmopolitanisms are untenable in postcolonial Cameroonian society, it is necessary to recognize that there are many other local histories in and from which cosmopolitan projects could, and do, emerge. Nkengasong proposes reducing Francophone and Anglophone legacies to shards of Cameroon’s decolonial culture by arguing that Anglophone and Francophone concepts of cosmopolitanism have the right to exist but have no right to expect to be Cameroonian universals. Across the Mongolo therefore suggests a dialogical cosmopolitanism that involves the multiplication of nodes, the active intervention of local cosmopolitan projects from all over the Cameroonian world and the reduction of Francophone/Anglophone cosmopolitanisms to local histories with national/global designs.

The Victorian "Cameo Craze": Cameos, Femininity, and the Fashioning of Britain's Imperial Identity

The Victorian "Cameo Craze": Cameos, Femininity, and the Fashioning of Britain's Imperial Identity

Tolochko, Aleksei Kievskaia Rus′ i Malorossiia v XIX veke (review)

SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 176 light. In his conclusion Eddie stresses that the definition of ‘feudal’ remains contested.Manyofthereformsbetween1806and1821werenotpurely‘capitalist’ but retained variations of dependency, which underlines that ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’ were not mutually exclusive. The reforms did not directly lead to a modern and industrialized Prussia, but remained ‘stubbornly interventionist and mercantilist’. The stability of the post-reform peasant economy prevented a faster pace of urbanization. Demography eventually changed this. This insight is not as new as claimed, but it is presented with a wealth of useful evidence. School of Divinity, History and Philosophy K. Friedrich University of Aberdeen Tolochko, Aleksei. Kievskaia Rus´ i Malorossiia v XIX veke. Laurus, Kyiv, 2012. 253 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Price unknown. In this book the leading Ukrainian medievalist Oleksii (Aleksei) Tolochko turns his attention to the nineteenth century as the period when both Russian and Ukrainian intellectuals rediscovered the legacy of Rus´ in what they knew as ‘Little Russia’ (Malorossiia) and what we now know as central Ukraine. Tolochko had good reasons to publish his study in Russian because it analyses the formation of the Russian imperial myth of Little Russia, as well as the making of a modern Ukrainian national identity — two topics that are as controversial today as they were back then. This is not a traditional academic monograph, however. The six essays comprising the book are based on the author’s previously-published articles. Tolochko’s style is engaging and somewhat conversational, closer to transcribed public lectures than to academic writing. There is neither an introduction nor a conclusion. The book does not have a single unifyng theoretical argument, but two major themes emerge from Tolochko’s narrative. One is that, for most of the nineteenth century, the medieval state of Kyivan Rus´ was not part of the developing modern Ukrainian historical imagination. Whether they were Little Russian elites claiming noble status in the Russian Empire or Ukrainian patriots seeking to subvert Russian rule, patriotic writers emphasized the Cossack past as a legacy that determined their separate identity. It was only at the turn of the century that the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky created for modern Ukraine what Tolochko calls a ‘long history’, by claiming Kyivan Rus´ as part of the national past. The second theme is that of Russian travellers trying to reconcile their image of the glorious Rus´ past with the reality of contemporary Little Russia. Until the mid nineteenth century, Russian travel accounts stressed Little Russia’s cultural difference from Russia proper, while claiming the region’s past as part of their own Russian identity. It was only later that the centrality of the ‘people’ for modern concepts of nationhood resulted REVIEWS 177 in the official position: that the Little Russians were part of the greater Russian nation. The essays do not follow each other in either chronological or thematic succession. Chapter four picks up the discussion of Russian travel accounts from chapter two, while chapter three deals with Ukrainian historical concepts in the eighteenth century. The latter is thus separated from the discussion of later Ukrainian historiography in chapters one, five and six. Unfortunately, there is no analysis of travel accounts by self-identified Ukrainian patriots of the 1840s, even though the book cover features Taras Shevchenko’s 1846 drawing of Askold’s Tomb in Kyiv. Nevertheless, Tolochko’s essays fit together in many ways, first of all in the author’s questioning of historiographical certainties and his search for fresh methodological lenses. Some of these new approaches stem from his familiarity with Western theories. The author begins his discussion of Russian travel accounts by talking about English visitors to Greece, who admired the ancient ruins but refused to believe that the population on the ground descended from that of classical Greece. The parallel with Russian views of Ukraine is only too clear here. Russian writers soon began constructing the image of ‘the Little Russian tribe’ as naive and childish ‘children of nature’ (p. 103), a recognizable trope much analysed in post-colonial studies. Tolochko also connects the beginnings of modern archeology in Kyiv with the first attempts to define the imperial identity in relation to national identities. In discussing Ukrainian history writing, the author...

Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria

Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria

‘What is my country to me?’ Identity construction by Russian-speakers in the Baltic countries

Contributing to the research on interdependence between perceived ethnolinguistic vitality and identity construction patterns, the article takes a close look at the identities of Russian-speakers living in the Baltic countries. Combining quantitative and qualitative research, the purpose is to analyse ethnic, national, linguistic and imperial identity construction by respondents with different ethnolinguistic vitality profiles. The results show that linguistic environment and official language competence are very strong determinants of perceived ethnolinguistic vitality, which, in turn, affects identity construction. It is possible to distinguish up to five vitality clusters within each Russian-speaking community in the Baltic countries. The Russian-speaking groups are quite diverse in respect to the beliefs and ideologies connected with the host and heritage countries, languages, cultures and ethnic self-categorisations.

The Australian Dream of an Island Empire: Race, Reputation and Resistance

The Commonwealth of Australia was founded in dreams of a Pacific empire. One of the first acts of the new nation in 1901 was to request the transfer of British New Guinea to Australian control. Aware of their poor reputation with regard to the treatment of Aborigines, Australian political leaders determined to redeem their reputation in the new colony. At the same time, however, they wanted to encourage white settlement and overcome Papuan resistance to the white take-over of their land. Alfred Deakin recruited professed ‘Australianist' Hubert Murray, the foremost critic of the old regime of Captain Barton, to effect this goal. Papuans were anxious about the transition from British to Australian authority, apprehensive that ‘white men' were coming to steal native land ‘like they had stolen the lands of the Queensland natives'. From the Papuan perspective, the Australian take-over of British New Guinea and Murray's ascendancy represented continuity in colonial practice, rather than the advent of modern imperial ideals.

The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century

The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century

Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World ed. by Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente (review)

Reviewed by: Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World ed. by Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente Michael Householder Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World. Edited by Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente. [Hispanic Issues, Vol. 40.] (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. 2014. Pp. xxiv, 280. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8265-1957-3.) In collecting these essays, editors Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente seek to broaden and deepen our understanding of the roles played by the Catholic Church and various legal/political institutions in the production of coloniality. Looking beyond the formal codifications of the racial, social, and political orders imposed by Spain, the authors of these fourteen essays investigate a range of texts to reveal the complex discursive networks from which these hierarchies were constructed. In doing so, they make a significant contribution to the growing scholarship of the Iberian empire, in particular to our understanding of the formation of colonial identities and modes of thought within it. [End Page 928] The editors group the essays into the three categories of politics, religion, and law. Through careful explication of written and visual texts, the essays articulate the strategies used by colonizer and colonized to adapt existing modes of thought to changing circumstances. Some of the essays focus on texts by recognizably influential writers in the history of colonization such as José de Acosta and Bartolomé de las Casas; others examine lesser known artifacts and figures. Ezekial Stear, for example, closely reads selected episodes from the Anales de Juan Bautista to reveal the tangled responses of indigenous Nahua elites to Christianization and Spanish colonial policy in sixteenth-century New Spain. Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez uses the Historia de Mindanao y Joló to examine how its author, the Jesuit Francisco de Combés, negotiated the jarring encounter between Spanish imperial identity and its Muslim Other during the conquest of the Philippines. Both essays indicate the range of figures, contexts, positions, motivations, texts, and contexts surveyed in the book. The precision, richness, and collective range of these analyses impress and inspire. Careful attention to narrative and rhetorical devices reveals the linguistic traces of coloniality’s conceptual construction, both as it was experienced on the ground by a variety of actors across the Spanish empire and as it was theorized in the centers of imperial power. Especially welcome are those essays focusing on indigenous political agency and the means used to resist, or at least negotiate, the imposition of Western structures. The resulting mosaic suggests the value of such analyses, as well as the directions and forms future work could take. At the same time, the combination of such depth and scope can be frustrating. Readers may be intrigued, for example, by the analysis of the iconography of Marian shrines in the Philippines but will have to look elsewhere to understand how they compare to shrines in other areas of the empire. Readers who are interested in the role of the Catholic Church in colonization may be vexed to find that only a handful of chapters attempt a sustained analysis of the intersection of church doctrine and colonial administrative law. Of course, no collection of essays would be expected to coalesce into a cohesive narrative about something as heterogeneous and complex as the formation of Iberian coloniality. What readers will find instead in these essays is a range of models for analyzing colonial writing and representation, as well as an array of examples that suggest new directions for further investigation. Michael Householder Case Western Reserve University Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press