Imperial Modernity Research Articles

The politics of friendship and cosmopolitan thought zones at the end of empire: Indian women’s study tours to Europe 1934–38

This article considers one of the first series of study tour groups for young Indian women in the mid-1930s, organised under the auspices of the Geneva-based International Student Service. Led by Mrs Alexandrena Datta, wife of the Indian Christian nationalist leader S.K. Datta, the tours took groups of 20 women students and young professionals from diverse faith, caste and ethnic backgrounds on four-month study tours across Europe, visiting progressive social and educational programmes and reform-minded people. Combining albums of the tours assembled by Mrs Datta and the published accounts of the 1935 tour by a participant, Mrs Kuttan Nair, images and text are deconstructed to identify how a politics of friendship within a global imperial social formation emerges. The article argues that the politics of friendship discernible in the remnant archive of the tours was part of a cosmopolitan thought zone that linked a nationalist and structuralist critique of imperial modernity to a vision of Indian women as agentic anti-colonial subjects.

Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Modernization

Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Modernization

Empire’s Trail of Bodies: A Review Essay

Empire’s Trail of BodiesA Review Essay Dinah T. Roma (bio) nerissa balce Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. 223 pages. victor roman mendoza Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913 Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2015. 286 pages. e. san juan jr. Racism and the Filipino Diaspora: Essays in Cultural Politics Naga City: Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2017. 79 pages. [End Page 517] “History has moving, inexhaustible frontiers,” writes historian and cultural critic Resil Mojares (1981, 178). His remark refers to an earlier body of works on Philippine historiography that witnessed the rise of new methodologies in the study of local and national history. Yet Mojares’s words may aptly echo an urgency among contemporary Filipino American scholars whose efforts at demythicizing the US empire have led to groundbreaking works. Three recently published books—Nerissa Balce’s Body Parts of Empire, Victor Roman Mendoza’s Metroimperial Intimacies, and Epifanio San Juan Jr.’s Racism and the Filipino Diaspora—locate history’s “inexhaustible frontiers” in the archives that have largely been the source of so-called official historical narratives. For these authors, to read the US colonial archives anew is to illumine the violence of empire if Philippine history were to retrieve bodies that had been ravaged and whose stories had been silenced on account of imperial modernity. The works are the outcome of the authors’ long engagement in the academe and advocacy to disclose the US empire’s machinations as it ceaselessly impacts on the Filipino global diaspora. Nerissa Balce is an associate professor of Asian and American studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; Victor Roman Mendoza holds an appointment as associate professor of women’s studies and English at the University of Michigan; while Epifanio San Juan Jr. is a multi-awarded academic and staunch public intellectual on Philippine–American relations and the Filipino diaspora, who carved his career teaching at key American universities. The three books rupture the munificent veneer of the US empire. They expose the “cracks in the façade” (Fast and Francisco 1974, 350) through methodologies that are cognizant of the self-serving knowledge produced by colonial functionaries and orthodox historians. The books’ arsenal of interdisciplinary critical tools is wide-ranging—postcolonialism, literary studies, cultural studies, area studies, historical materialism, feminism, ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies. The concomitant use of these critical tools highlights how complex the undertaking is to categorically unmask the American colonial legacy for what it really was—brute force and rhetoric. To do so is vital in putting into perspective the invasion of the Philippines not as a discrete historical occurrence in the name of a noble mission but one in the same expansionist spirit as the conquest of the Native [End Page 518] Americans, Africans, and Mexicans (San Juan 2017, 5). The three books thus foreground the genocidal nature of these imperial subjugations to assert that the Philippine conquest is a major period in US imperial history and one that is unique in the Asia-Pacific, whose aftermath is still evident in the phenomenon of Filipino migration and diaspora to the US. Body Parts of Empire, which won the 2018 Best Book award in Cultural Studies from the Filipino Section of the Association for Asian American Studies, unravels the “complicity of culture in historical violence” (Balce 2017, 15). It consists of five chapters that stand for an inventory of the colonial cultural products teeming with literary and cultural tropes through which the Filipino native body has been vilified. Each chapter analyzes the particular rhetoric that produced the tropes of abjection of body parts which Balce (ibid., 17) catalogues in the following pairings: face (colonial photographs), skin (newspapers), bile (women travel writings), and blood and bones (race romances and ethnographic images). Metroimperial Intimacies, Mendoza’s landmark work, shares Balce’s stance of delving into culture but this time “to look for the queer in the colonial” (Claudio 2016). Mendoza reexamines the colonial archives to dissect the menace of same-sex intimacies between the Filipino male native...

Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction

Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (bio) Frances Ferguson has memorably described “the sharp, sudden consciousness” of climate change as one that “comes upon us like the ominous tones of an intruder bent on murder when the babysitter picks up the telephone receiver in a horror film: ‘I’m in the house’” (33). There is no refuge from this stranger within, nor from the feelings of panic his phone call incites. As I write these words, in the summer of 2018, the phone is ringing off the hook: above the Arctic Circle, record highs of 33°C/92°F were measured in Finland; a new record was set in Oman when the temperature did not drop below 42°C/108°F for twenty-four hours.1 Closer to home, outside my window, California is on fire. Extreme heat and dryness brought an early, vicious start to fire season, and in the Carr Fire near Redding, more than a thousand homes have burned down and seven people have died.2 The sky outside my office is thick and gray, and the air quality is poor—a reminder of these nearby conflagrations and the fiery future they portend. Our climate is changing, but must Victorian studies change too? The real question is, how could it not? For scholarship depends on scholars, and no matter how hard we try to inhabit a detached critical perspective, none of us are writing from Mars. Heatwaves, smoky skies, an incessant phone ringing in the background: these are the conditions in which we work. Sometimes these conditions take on an aspect of cosmic irony; in September 2017, members of the Vcologies working group met at the University of Houston to exchange work-in-progress on Victorian ecologies and ecological thought, and as it turned out, our meeting would take place in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a record-breaking storm that drew its strength from record-high ocean temperatures. Institutional and economic advantages mean, of course, that [End Page 537] many academics have been relatively well protected from the ravages of climate change so far—my office window keeps the smoke outside, the University of Houston did not flood—but five miles north of the university, in a historically Black neighborhood with a high flood risk, house after house was turned inside out: the sodden, wrecked contents of homes were piled in the street, pianos next to baby dolls next to lampshades (fig. 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Kashmere Gardens, Houston, September 16, 2017. Photograph by Nathan K. Hensley. If these circumstances dictate—and I think they do—that climate change must move into every field of academic debate and every part of the university curriculum, it is equally the case that unique aspects of nineteenth-century Britain and its Empire make our field particularly connected to the topic of climate change. For one thing, the geographies of climate change, including urban flood plain maps, bear a historical relation to European and American imperialism, and in a devastating turn of imperial modernity’s screw, the impacts of climate change are now being borne disproportionately by those least responsible for them and least able to weather them. Thus Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee begins Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire with a discussion of Hurricane Katrina, arguing that ideas about natural disaster today “grew out, in important ways, of the British imperial experience in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia” (2). Similarly, while it would be too simplistic to say [End Page 538] that Victorian England is answerable for the climate crisis, it would also be an error to discount its unique historical role in cultivating the fossil fuel economy and the resulting surge in greenhouse gas emissions.3 The “workshop of the world,” as Benjamin Disraeli famously referred to industrial England, relied on coal combustion to accelerate production and speed transportation, forever transforming the scope of consumption habits, global trade, and imperial market-making (Disraeli n. p.). Just as the climate has changed, then, our understanding of the past must transform along with it, and indeed, conventional notions of past, present, and future are troubled in any account of anthropogenic climate change...

Cashmere Shawl as Metaphor and Matterfold

While Mrs. Ramsay's cashmere shawl has been commonly recognized as an organizing trope in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, this essay calls attention to the “materialities” of the shawl by drawing on a thing‐centered metonymic reading and discourses of new materialism. The first metonymic reading – or what I call a “molar‐form” reading – delves into the historical archive of the cashmere shawl to disclose its role as a material nexus of imperial modernity. But if the shawl is encoded within the molar structure of British Empire in this material archaeology, the second new materialist, “molecular‐force” reading transforms the shawl from a tangible object into an affective body, from a metaphor of imperialism into a “matterfold” of affectivity, to foreground its entangled, vibrant materiality in a dynamic field of forces. Shifting the emphasis from molar aggregates to molecular affects, this essay argues that Lily's “vision” at the end invokes a new aesthetics that replaces the substantialist distinction of subject and object with an affective differentiation of bodies.

Happiness Unattained: Colonial Modernity Under Japanese Imperialism in Writings by Ōsako Rinko and Yang Qianhe

ABSTRACTMuch scholarship on gender ideologies under Japanese imperialism remains demarcated by temporal and spatial lines. This article instead conceives the Japanese empire as a continuum, examining writings by women who published in and outside of East Asia, during the imperialist period and after decolonization. Specifically, it examines the femininities constructed in works by Japanese writer Ōsako Rinko (1915–2003) and Taiwanese writer Yang Qianhe (1921–2011), whose lives traversed geopolitical borders and ideological shifts from imperial modernization through decolonization. Showing how colonial modernity influenced gender constructions in different ways depending on the writers’ positionalities, this article illustrates how the writers negotiated happiness and spaces of belonging (whether geospatial locations in which to situate themselves, or daily practices and roles to perform) through their works. Furthermore, the article argues that freedom and happiness described by the two were consistently unattainable and postponed to a geopolitical temporality of dominance – the Japanese metropole, the United States, the imaginary West. The article thus examines gender and power among East Asian nations and the United States throughout the twentieth century.

Empire in three keys

Germany was famously a latecomer to colonialism, but it was a hybrid empire, centrally involved in all forms of imperial activity. Germans dominated the early Holy Roman Empire; Germany after 1870 was a Reich, or empire, not a state in the conventional sense; and Germany had a colonial empire between 1884 and 1918. Prussia played the role of continental imperialist in its geopolitics vis-à-vis Poland and the other states to its east. Finally, in its Weltpolitik – its global policies centered on the navy – Germany was an informal global imperialist. Although these diverse scales and practices of empire usually occupied distinct regions in the imaginations of contemporaries, there was one representational space in which the nation-state was woven together with empire in all its different registers: the Berlin trade exhibition of 1896. Because this exhibition started as a local event focused on German industry, it has not attracted much attention among historians of colonial and world fairs. Over the course of its planning, however, the 1896 exhibition emerged as an encompassing display of the multifarious German empire in all its geopolitical aspects. The exhibition attracted the attention of contemporaries as diverse as Georg Simmel and Kaiser Wilhelm. In contrast to Simmel and later theorists, I argue that it represented the empire and the nation-state, and not simply the fragmenting and commodifying force of capitalism. In contrast to Timothy Mitchell, I argue that the exhibit did not communicate a generic imperial modernity, but made visible the unique multi-scaled political formation that was the German empire-state.

Фронтирная модернизация в имперской России

The article is dedicated to the core issues of three waves — Urals, Siberian and Far Eastern — of frontier imperial modernization of Asiatic Russia. Their preconditions, essence, character and significance are analyzed. The author comes to the conclusion that they were a response to the geopolitical and technological challenges of the epoch. They marked the transition of the country and the region from the traditional to industrial society, but did not complete it, and set the stage for the subsequent crucial socio-economic and cultural changes

Haile Selassie's Imperial Modernity: Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa

In the 1960s, Addis Ababa experienced a construction boom, spurred by its new international stature as the seat of both the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Organization of African Unity. Working closely with Emperor Haile Selassie, expatriate architects played a major role in shaping the Ethiopian capital as a symbol of an African modernity in continuity with tradition. Haile Selassie's Imperial Modernity: Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa examines how a distinct Ethiopian modernity was negotiated through various borrowings from the past, including Italian colonial planning, both at the scale of the individual building and at the scale of the city. Focusing on public buildings designed by Italian Eritrean Arturo Mezzedimi, French Henri Chomette, and the partnership of Israeli Zalman Enav and Ethiopian Michael Tedros, Ayala Levin critically explores how international architects confronted the challenges of mediating Haile Selassie's vision of an imperial modernity.

Imagining an Imperial Modernity: Universities and the West African Roots of Colonial Development

ABSTRACTThis article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived.

The indiano’s marriage and the crisis of imperial modernity in Galdós’ El Amigo Manso

This study examines the significance of the portrait of the indiano and his marriage in Pérez Galdós’ El amigo Manso (1882). By taking into consideration Spanish colonial politics with respect to Cuba in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the present study foregrounds the ways in which the indiano’s interactions with his family reflect the author’s criticism of the peninsular parties’ inflexibility in their treatment of Cuba and his preoccupation with Spain’s future in the era of imperial modernity.

Socio-cultural dynamics of multiple modernities in Brazil and Russia

The article is devoted to comparative-historical analysis of transformation processes in Brazil and Russia from the viewpoint of the multiple modernities theory. Shmuel Eisenstadt’s study of the Latin American version of modernity and interpretations of his ideas in the works of contemporary sociologists are characterized. The peculiarities of modernization in Brazil are singled out including the impact of orientation to external centers of liberal modernity. The article considers the spread of modern ideologies and institutions in Brazilian society and the role of socio-cultural factors in its transition to democracy. The modernizing dynamics of Russian society is discussed on the basis of Johann Arnason’s sociological theory. It is emphasized that Arnason’s analysis of intercivilizational encounters and “imperial modernization” is essential for understanding social transformations in Russian society. The study of the Soviet model of modernity in Arnason’s works is also discussed in the article. It is argued that a comparative analysis of Brazil and Russia should take into consideration the impact of religious traditions and institutions on socio-political changes, the differences between modernizing trajectories of the two countries, the unequal length and intensity of imperial experience, the degree of openness towards western liberal modernity. The main difference of contemporary Russia from Latin American societies is the legacy of the Soviet period.

What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and invention of the Canon by Ankhi Mukherjee (review)

Reviewed by: What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and invention of the Canon by Ankhi Mukherjee Urmila Seshagiri What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and invention of the Canon. Ankhi Mukherjee. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $24.95 (paper). What is a classic? Taking her lead from Augustin Sainte-Beuve, T. S. Eliot, and J. M. Coetzee, Ankhi Mukherjee offers an eloquent case for the question’s continuing relevance to literature, literary criticism, and, above all, to the language arts of the postcolony. What Is a Classic? Post-colonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon brings fresh energy to the longstanding study of imperial cultural authority, attending to both the ideological imposition of that authority and the split literary consciousness of postcolonial writing produced in its wake. The canon, Mukherjee argues, is “an achieved anxiety, an imagined unity, an inclusive stance on the diverse literary genres produced within the tradition of literature in English” (216). Rising above the twinned optics of skepticism and condescension towards the concept of a Western canon, this study casts an unwavering gaze on the canon-bred aspirations of postcolonial writers such as Orhan Pamuk, V. S. Naipaul, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Across the British Empire’s spatiotemporal conjunctions and disjunctions, Mukherjee declares, the canonized literary classic emerges as “a thing of splendid and defensive isolation as well as a textuality mutilated by time over iteration and critical intervention” (214). Mutilation, iteration, and intervention are the historical acts and forces through which Mukherjee’s study establishes that “the invention of modern classics is sustained by a dynamic and variable conversation between the past and present of English studies” (8). What Is a Classic? locates such conversations in the works of a truly impressive range of artists, including the nineteenth-century “Eurasian” poet Henry Derozio, the Nobel laureates Naipaul and Derek Walcott, the contemporary filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj, and the Hamara Shakespeare project in India. These and numerous other artists are bound together by a struggle over whether, as Salman Rushdie once put it, “It is perhaps one of the more pleasant freedoms of the literary migrant to be able to choose his parents” (20–21). Pleasant freedom or torturous exile? History has not exhausted this question, and Mukherjee reminds us that twentieth-century postcolonial literature’s filiative crises continue to exert definitive power over the “formation of an alternative canon for a postcolonial, global age” in the twenty-first century. Mukherjee’s rigorously researched and passionately argued study is a welcome corrective to misguidedly democratic visions of imperial modernity’s cultural transactions. The move to globalize postcolonial literature can dilute national literary traditions born of violent centuries of colonization, but Mukherjee, attentive to the canon reformations inaugurated by Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, and Wai Chee Dimock, upholds vital, nuanced distinctions between the postcolonial and the global. World literature, she summarizes crisply, “is not so much a canon of texts as it is a mode of circulation” (31), and the term postcolonial “does not … amount to [End Page 255] rooted and antagonistic reprisals of colonial power/knowledge” (220). Her standard-bearers for her keywords—“classic” and “canon”—are, surprisingly and daringly, Harold Bloom and John Guillory. Testing a dazzling array of primary postcolonial texts against Bloom’s oft-derided valuation of difficulty and Guillory’s vision of the canon as an aristocracy, Mukherjee illuminates a historical-ideological reality that critics engaged in the act of “worlding” twentieth-century literature often resist: the unrelenting psychological grip of the Western literary canon in the British Empire’s former colonies. To illustrate how the albatross weight of Western literature—Ovid, Virgil, Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens, the Brontës, Conrad—hangs around the necks of non-Western writers, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon returns to postcolonial methodologies that have been occluded by a decade dominated by theories of cosmopolitan, global, and planetary literature. Relying on the now decades-old work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Abdul JanMohamed, and Frantz Fanon (as well as Patrick Brantlinger, Henry Louis Gates, Mary Louise Pratt, Benita Parry, Jahan Ramazani, and Terry Eagleton), Mukherjee reminds us why center-periphery models of nationhood, culture, and...

Review: Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Imperial Legacies, Architecture, and Modernity, by Mrinalini Rajagopalan and Madhuri Desai, eds.

Review: <i>Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Imperial Legacies, Architecture, and Modernity</i>, by Mrinalini Rajagopalan and Madhuri Desai, eds.

Imagining Imperial Modernity in British Colonial West Africa: Gerald Spencer Pryse's Work for the Empire Marketing Board

This essay focuses upon images made by Gerald Spencer Pryse in 1927/28 that were the outcome of a commission from the British government's Empire Marketing Board for him to convey positively colonial West Africa as an integral element of a modern, economic empire. As this essay argues, though, his watercolours and lithographic posters fail to celebrate the region's imperially driven economic activity. Instead, they highlight West Africa's natural aesthetic appeal, and, what Spencer Pryse believed to be, the heightened aesthetic perception of its indigenous population, to suppress, or negatively position, industrialized process that had been introduced there. In valorizing West Africa's exoticism, Spencer Pryse, however, ignored imperial modernities then being independently forged by some West Africans and consequently, as this essay maintains, his images offer only a limited account of West Africa's imperial identity in the late 1920s.

Affect and Logistics: Trollope’s Postal Work

226 Victorians Journal l5/f(2ct and Isogistic*: Trollope's Postal Work by Susan Sieger Toward the end of Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne, the plucky but illegitimate heroine writes her genteel beau a letter in which she heroically offers to give him up. The scene is one of intensive affect, as “Mary was forced to put her hand to her eyes, to save her paper from her falling tears” (DT 416-17). Crying over a letter: the apparent cliche indicates not merely emotion but the less charted realm of affect, because Trollope maps its physical aspects. Rooted in the body, affect has been defined as visceral forces beyond cognition and emotion that can propel and extend people into relation to the world and to others, or equally, to suspend those relations (Gregg and Seigworth 1). Theorists often seek affect in the routine moments ofeveryday life; for middle-class Victorians, these include writing and especially mailing letters. Mary copies and recopies the letter so that she may perfect it and reread it after having posted it, her “somewhat bold handwriting” recording her affective traces. She walks forthrightly to the village post-office and with “unembarrassed” countenance affixes a penny stamp to her missive. Then certain logistics overtake the narrative: the baker’s wife, who acts as postmistress, sends the letter to Silverbridge “so that all due formalities, as ordered by the Queen’s Government, might there be perfected” (DT 418). Since the post-boy had already picked up the mail, it does not reach Frank’s house until three agonizing days later. In this playing out of affect, Trollope’s heroine tests her emotional mettle against the impersonal bureaucracy of the postal system. Bernhard Siegert has argued that, with the modernization ofpostage, the letter-writer as private citizen registered his or her affairs with the state; this new activity produced the deep subjectivity associated with bourgeois privacy (8). Throughout his fiction, Trollope’s scenes of writing, mailing, and reading contribute to this distinctively modem situation, in which affect interfaces with the postal system’s massive movement ofmaterial information throughout Britain and the world. Victorians Journal 227 Interpreting such moments as affect illustrates how “a historical moment appears as a visceral moment” (Berlant 16). Histories of the post office treat it as a unique institution, but it is also a primary, foundational example of logistics. Logistics is the management, of the flow of goods, information, and other material from their points oforigin to their points ofconsumption, aiming for optimal efficiency. In the early twenty-first century, such scholars as Ned Rossiter see logistics as the essence of globalization and the expression of its animating neoliberal ideology (55). Attention to its earlier history reveals relations between the importation and exportation of commodities, including the middle passage; the deployment of military material; and communication technologies such as telegraphy, telephony, and of course, the post. In 1839, Rowland Hill introduced the wildly successful penny post, and Britons responded by writing and reading more letters than ever before. Expanding and modernizing the post involved logistical feats and, in his postal career, Trollope proved himself a masterful logistician. As R.H. Super recounts, he rooted out mail theft in Ireland; negotiated faster transportation timelines between Alexandria and Suez; suggested improvements in efficiency in Malta; recommended Jamaica over St. Thomas as a Caribbean distribution point; and—most famously—invented the red pillar box for the collection of letters (16-44). Helping to consolidate state and capital efficiency, reach, and profit, Trollope worked at the edge of British imperial modernity. His fictional scenes of letter writing, posting, and reading represent the local points or nodes at which individual people and communities interfaced with this globalizing system. In his fiction, more so than in that of such earlier epistolary novelists as Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen, the private letter archives intimacy and generates affective intensity in opposition to the impersonality of its share in a massive logistical flow through time and space. Sara Ahmed has shown that “affective economies are social and material, as well as psychic” (46). Whereas affect is openended , even vague in its contours, duration, and effects, logistics requires precision in measurement, counting, placing, and timing...

I Dreamed I Was Wanted: Flower Drum Song and Specters of Modernity

This essay explicates how Mei Li (Miyoshi Umeki) and Linda Low (Nancy Kwan), the Asian migrant and Asian American female leading characters in the film Flower Drum Song (dir. Henry Koster, US, 1961), oscillate between embodying the fantasies of American modernity and exposing the obscenities of US empire during the early Cold War period. While Linda embodies and enacts the pleasures of feminine spectacle, Mei Li offers an alternative, premodern method of looking that brings into relief the traumatic elements of national modernity. This study first provides an account of how technologies of feminine modernity act as technologies of empire, creating pleasurable affects by incorporating the world into the nation and self. It then demonstrates how the limits of the technological approach to fantasy and spectacle are epitomized by the breakdown of Linda's daydream sequence, an attempt to stage the satisfactions of marital bliss. Linda's fantasy of domestic modernity pointedly and spectacularly fails to cover over national histories of colonial violence and trauma. Meanwhile, Mei Li's premodern framework of animism enlivens these abject spirits otherwise buried by national and imperial modernity. The essay concludes with a consideration of how the film seems to screen such fantasies of racial modernity with its scenes of dancing, fashionable Asian Americans. But, the author asks, why does the exuberance generated by these set pieces feel so uncanny? How do these screen fantasies of racial incorporation also channel specters of empire? And how do these filmic apparitions render their audience also uncanny?

Michel Foucault as a Researcher of “Police State": A Program, Heuristic Problems, and Prospects of Study

The article offers an extended analysis of a research program outlined by Michel Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France during the close of the 1970s. This program was focused on the society that was influenced by the practices of the absolutist state within the framework of a specific “governmentality” discourse. The introduction puts forward the basic problem of insufficient interest displayed by sociology towards particular historical forms in which the state monopoly on violence was realized. The first part of the article considers the “immanent” theory of power introduced by Foucault. The core of this theory relies on his thesis that relations between domination and subjugation pervade the entire social fabric, and results in the microphysical dimension of power coming out on top in social and political analysis. The central part of the article proposes a reconstruction of Michel Foucault’s views on such discursive phenomena of Modernity as the police, the science of policing and the police state (Polizeistaat). The article concludes with the declaration of the huge heuristic potential of concepts elaborated by Foucault in his analysis of power techniques in early Modern times for the general theory of Modernity and for the historical and sociological reconstruction of Russian imperial modernization in 18th to the 20th centuries as well, including the efforts taken by Peter I and Catherine the Great to use the police as a tool to govern Russia’s lagging westernization.

Translating Empire. José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities by Laura Lomas (review)

Reviewed by: Translating Empire. José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities by Laura Lomas Leonora Simonovis Laura Lomas. 2008. Translating Empire. José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 379 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4325-7. The debate on immigration reform has recently come to the forefront in political debates, academic classrooms, conferences, seminars, and discussions. The Latino population has exponentially [End Page 283] grown in the past decade and within the next ten to twenty years it will become a majority in several states. However, the history of immigration, the politics of the revolving door, and the color lines that have divided the United States since the nineteenth century, have been masked by discourses that promote assimilation and that have falsely appropriated the contributions of the diverse immigrant groups that made their homes in these lands. In Translating Empire, Laura Lomas proposes to reevaluate American literature and modernity through the lens of Latino writing. For that purpose, she studies the works of Cuban José Martí during the Gilded Age (1880-1895). In keeping with the book’s title, Lomas focuses on Martí’s translations of American political and cultural phenomena and invites the reader to acknowledge him as one of the first writers who founded an intellectual Latino tradition and who critically reflected on U.S. expansionism towards Latin America. For Lomas, Martí’s work bears witness to the struggle not just of Latino migrant workers, but also that of Asian Americans and African Americans. Martí’s contribution to the field of American studies relies on his undermining of class and racial hierarchies. His focus on labor exploitation, among other topics, aimed to prove how U.S. economy grew by relying on migrant workers who were underpaid and worked under harsh conditions. Unlike other studies of Martí that have mainly focused on his writing as representative of modernism, as well as on his role in the fight for Cuban Independence from Spain, Lomas explores this author’s writings from the point of view of “the deportee, the migrant and the prisoner as they cultivate the rage of the sea beneath the writer’s quill and below the ship’s keel” (53). What lies underneath Martí’s poems, stories, and essays are seeds for a revolutionary movement in the Americas that trusts in the power of minorities working together as one. In spite of his light skin and educational level, Martí disengages from an individualistic bourgeois perspective and does not identify with white, educated elite. He reflects on the collective Latino and immigrant struggles that he has witnessed and experienced while traveling and living abroad. Two of the most poignant reflections in the book have to do with: a) translation as a way to engage and connect the Americas and b) Martí’s double consciousness as a postcolonial subject. Lomas uses the term “imperial modernity” to refer to the political and economic expansion of the US as a form of colonialism. Martí translates the political, economic and cultural implications of this expansion in order to educate possible readers. Translation in this sense becomes a form of resistance that undermines “imperial modernity” and proposes other modernities that break the homogeneity of the empire. In addressing Martí’s double consciousness, Lomas departs from [End Page 284] W.E.B. Dubois’s well-known essay “The Souls of Black Folk”, to explain how Martí’s writing constitutes a process in which the author realizes the dangers of seeing oneself through the eyes of the colonizer. Martí’s imagery speaks about the duality, violence, and destruction that affect Latino subjectivity and create tension and distance between the Americas. This idea questions whether leaving one’s homeland in the name of liberty is thwarted when subjected to the colonizer’s gaze in the country of adoption. In this sense, Martí anticipates discourses that promote assimilation but simultaneously exclude the foreign other by limiting his/her choices, exploiting them as cheap labor, and defining them by their race (and ethnicity although this term is not used in the book). Martí chronicles his experiences and serves as a bridge between the two Americas. His translations give the texts new...

Kahgegagahbowh's (George Copway's) Transatlantic Performance

ABSTRACTOjibwa Methodist minister, author and Indigenous advocate, Kahgegagahbowh/George Copway (1818–69) has been the subject of a number of scholarly studies, particularly within the context of Indigenous studies, literary studies and Indigenous history in Canada and the United States. Born in the British colony of Upper Canada, Copway is known to scholars for his writings, particularly his The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, and his friendships with a number of prominent American writers and public figures. He also has been seen as a figure whose troubled marriage and complicated relationship to the Methodist church illustrates the difficulties Indigenous people faced in mid-century North America. To no small extent, then, Copway often figures in narratives of North American Indigenous history as a tragic figure, as he was displaced from Ojibwa society and simultaneously faced increased racism within settler society. However, Copway can be seen in a different manner. By focusing on his 1850 travels through Britain and Germany, where he attended the Frankfurt World Peace Congress, and exploring Copway's account of this trip, Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland, we can see Copway's narrative as part of a long-standing history of Indigenous peoples' encounters and movements within imperial modernity in metropolitan settings.