Imperial Moment Research Articles

Uncolonialism/Bāb Art

How can we see beyond colonialism? And how might we be able to apprehend the work of those who saw themselves as living and creating the strictures of imperial control? This article argues for an uncolonial approach to knowledge creation, rejecting imperial history’s endless desire to uncover new bodies of evidence, which largely replicate our existing understanding of the ways in which Europeans subjugated Others. Instead, it argues for the ethical imperative of locating lost, forgotten, or erased scripts of Indigenous being and agency that lie largely unexcavated in our archives of the imperial moment. Using a case study of so-called “Bāb Art” from 1920s CE Algeria, the essay explores the manner in which unloved, rough, and ephemeral modes of art possess the potential to serve as touchstones through which we might see unconquered forms of thinking, imagination, and belief that presently lie outside the bounds of our human story. In considering the spiritual and aesthetic significance of these works, it is argued that we are able to open up new vistas, which allow for glimpses of futures that begin again from threads long thought lost to the past.

Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History

Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History

The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in The English Quest for Japan, 1600–1625 by Timon Screech

The Shogun’s Silver Telescope centers Japan within the British East India Company’s history by picking apart layers of archival obscurity and imperial amnesia. Using unlikely gift objects—a silver telescope and cargoes of paintings presented by the English to bewildered shoguns—Screech weaves a riveting history of art with the methods of transnational history. The book argues that the quest for Japanese silver was highly important to the British East India Company in the era of peaceful Euro-commercial rivalry (4). To secure bullion, the English used art to present themselves as trusted trade partners compared to their European rivals, the Iberians, Jesuits, and Dutch.Japanese–British relations before the hostilities of World War II is insignificant to histories of international relations and empire. After the shoguns expelled Iberians and Jesuits when they banned foreigners in 1635, they permitted only the Dutch East India Company (the voc) to operate in Nagasaki. The ban remained in place until Commodore Mathew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy forced Japan to trade with the Americans in 1854. At this point, scholars acknowledge the anti-commercial isolation associated with the Edo ban to be a Euro-centered misnomer. But Britain remains marginal to scholars of the Edo period, nonetheless. After all, evidence of mutual interaction is meager. The dozen or so Company voyages to the “East Indies,” to which Japan was an added destination, ended when the English withdrew from Hirado in 1623. But when a lively historian of art grapples with the dull archives of English cargo, things can, literally, look different.Screech meticulously mines the records of Company voyages usually ignored by all but the connoisseurs of marine trivia for the production, selection, circulation, and reception of art objects. He then elaborates this dense life of art with an impressively close reading of the role of gifts in establishing commercial markets. The English were eager to mark their differences from the “Popish” Iberians and their Jesuit “proxy-agents,” as well as the republican Dutch. They deployed the silver telescope to drive a heliocentric wedge between Iberians and Jesuits and the Japanese elite. Classical nudes and landscapes were intended to distinguish the secularizing inclusivity of the English Church from the proseletyzing Jesuits (104). Furthermore, pictures and rituals concerning the English sovereign intended to reassure the shoguns that, unlike the Dutch, the English were royalists. Indeed, gifts were part of a broader strategy to persuade the shoguns that Jesuits posed an existential threat to their state and that the Dutch were too republican. The British alone traded in peace.The book’s arguments, however, are a little ambivalent. For example, Screech emphasizes that the English branded themselves as peaceable traders, in contrast to their depiction of Jesuits as conspirators, thereby fomenting the Jesuits’ banishment from Edo Japan. But the book also hints that the Company trade in arms may have been decisive in the crucial war between the Tokugawa and the Toyotomi clan (183–184). He finds that many Edo objects and Japan-related discussions are incorrectly identified as “Indian.” That is, the lost archive of Japan is hidden in plain sight. But the mis-filings also imply that early Company voyages to Japan were part of a long history of orientalism barely covered in the book. The research design foregrounds how mistranslated objects can illustrate mimetic relations. Japanese and English codes of art could cohabit and stimulate one another. But the book also suggests that English strategies in Japan were similar to those pursued in the Mughal court. Had Screech acknowledged the wealth of scholarship about art and European courtly encounters in Mughal India, would this stimulating comparison have created a different account of the imperialism of British commerce?The book betrays a mysterious elision. The English withdrawal from Hirado in 1623 coincided with an incident in Ambon, Indonesia, when the Dutch tried several Englishmen and hanged one for conspiracy. Subsequent British mythmaking about the “English massacre” in Ambon anchored British imperialism in narratives of peaceful commerce and accidental conquest. The Dutch “treachery” at Ambon was used to explain the breakdown of Anglo–Dutch relations and the shift in Company interest to India.1 Screech misses the drama of this key imperial moment when he writes that in 1623 “the Dutch saw no further benefit in the English and dissolved the Treaty of Defence” (238).Bilateral accounts of British–Japanese relations tend to emphasize peaceable relations to counter the history of World War II’s hostilities. Screech’s interdisciplinary method offers the potential to subvert that narrative and that of British imperialism as well. That the book does not realize this potential fully, however, should not stop it from being read and studied closely. The Shogun’s Silver Telescope opens up new avenues of research because it leaves readers wanting more.

Drone Form: Mediation at the End of Empire

All aesthetic forms presuppose and in turn ratify a regime of perception by which subjects apprehend their world. This essay surveys key areas of the contemporary cultural field—prestige television, gallery art, mass-market best sellers, and the literary novel—to describe the material and formal processes that mediate our moment of fading geopolitical hegemony: the way of seeing proper to our drone era. The essay reads artworks about surveillance by multimedia artist Trevor Paglen; bestselling thrillers about drone war by Mike Maden and others; and technofetishistic novels about mediation by Tom McCarthy including Satin Island, C, and Remainder. After establishing the role of mediation in wartime activities across periods of imperial rule, the essay underscores these texts’ varied obsessions with physical channels, technological apparatuses, and built infrastructures—and suggests that these processes of mediation themselves become apprehensible at the level of style as drone content becomes drone form. The essay then identifies in these instances of drone form an abiding problem of nonreciprocal action. Often allegorized as dysfunctional masculinity or failed copulation, drone war's constitutive dissymmetry between subject and object—its problem with action—becomes an aesthetic and thematic preoccupation of aesthetic form in the drone era. It is the hyberbolic obsession of Maden's aspirationally masculinist novels and the special focus of McCarthy's sexless and technofetishistic ones. Using these novels as test cases, the essay unpacks the relation between the means of distributing death in our late imperial moment and the regime of perception proper to our dying empire.

Aesthetic Regime Change: The Burnham Plans and US Landscape Imperialism in the Philippines

Taking Daniel Burnham's 1904–1905 visit to the Philippines as a starting point, this article examines the unrealized dream of US colonial officials to extend American empire through the production of space, particularly the aesthetic dimensions or what might be called a landscape vision of US empire. It offers a brief but intimate history of the making of the Burnham plans for Manila and Baguio so as to better understand how the ideological contradictions of the imperial moment were built into American colonial spaces, sometimes brutally but sometimes through aesthetic means in the formation of setting and landscape.

The Imperial Moment in Fascist Cinema

The Imperial Moment in Fascist Cinema This essay looks at how Italian feature and non-fiction cinema on imperial themes engaged with themes of temporality as it asserted Fascism's right to occupy Ethiopia (1936) and, during World War II, Greece as well. For the Fascists, cinema was a means of displaying the colonies as theatres of Italian modernity, rebuking rhetorics of Italian «backwardness». As I argue, the movies made between 1936 and 1943 reflect the belief of many film professionals and Fascist officials that the scale of the Ethiopian invasion, and the stories it generated, could not be adequately communicated by traditional means of representation; only the movie camera could adequately capture the dense and mobile Fascist present. I analyse Roberto Rossellini's 1942 aviation drama, Un pilota ritorna / A Pilot Returns, as the apex of this form of temporal and cinematographic thinking, but also as a film that presaged the undoing of Fascism's empire and its cult of Italian modernity.

Sir George Grey’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell: Protectorate Politics in a Colonial Collection

Sir George Grey’s gift to Auckland Public Library in 1887 included a collection of original documents from the English Protectorate of 1653–59. Central to the collection is a manuscript treaty signed by English and Dutch commissioners. The Cromwell papers have received scant attention since Grey’s death but the ‘secret treaty’, as it was called, rewards investigation for the light it sheds both on the Cromwellian ‘imperial moment’ identified by recent scholarship and on the ‘cult of Cromwell’ in the most distant part of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Unlocking its secret, moreover, involves showing that the manuscript has been misdated and mistakenly described for at least 140 years.

Beginnings & Endings: 146 BCE as an Imperial Moment, from Polybius to Sallust

The year 146 BCE marked an endpoint for the cities of Carthage and Corinth – two otherwise unrelated poleis that were destroyed by Rome within the space of a few months. In many ways, modern tradition has taken it for granted that these two calamities should be considered a single point in time, and that this moment (“146”) should be deemed a juncture in Roman, if not broader, history. This paper explores the earliest evolution of the “146” event horizon, from the work of Polybius to Sallust. It argues that Sallust’s well-known “theorem” – that an eliminated « fear of the enemy » inaugurated a calamitous process of internal decline – is to be understood as a multi-layered response to earlier interpretations, as pioneered by Polybius. The paper begins by reconstructing the “destructions” within their contemporary intellectual and historiographical contexts. It then explores Polybius’ views, as he considered the “synchronic” fall of Carthage and Corinth to be of unprecedented significance. For in his History , Polybius writes with an urgency, insisting that the political, pragmatic lessons to be gleaned from history were ever more pressing in his lifetime, since Fate was rapidly pulling together the myriad lifespans of all the Mediterranean states, converging upon a single polis : Rome. The events of 146 BCE, featured in the finale of the History , thus marked, in Polybius’ eyes, the full triumph of Rome as a newly minted « world-city » ( kosmopolis ). As such, they provided the ultimate Polybian lesson in statesmanship, for both ruler and ruled, while leaving an ominous possibility: that the convergence upon one polis would subject all to its individual lifecycle ( anacyclosis ), which was not immune from the corrosions of time and Fortune. And it is here, this paper asserts, that subsequent authors – Posidonius, followed by Sallust in particular – crafted their responses to the questions left unanswered by Polybius. Sallust’s unique contribution – one that was to have a lasting impact – was to explore a world in which all of the looming portents in Polybius’ History had indeed come to pass. The elimination of Carthage in particular (as a « rival for empire » ), had, for Sallust, undeniably tipped the moral-political scales, bringing about despotism abroad and deterioration at home. And even worse, the very lines between Roman and foreign, public and private, and virtue and vice had themselves become irreparably blurred, and with them, the baseline notion that history itself, as a genre, was capable of fulfilling its core promises. Sallust thus viewed his own era as locked within two timescales, now inextricably confused: that of a cyclical world history, and that of Rome as an individual state. Together, in Sallust’s presentation, the two had sunk through a distorted lens into utter disarray, with the ideals and simple lessons of the past being truly beyond the grasp of the immediate, crushing present and the gaze of the historian.

Transversal Alliances: White Fantasies of Indigeneity in Suzanne Desrochers’s Bride of New France

Suzanne Desrochers' novel Bride of New France (2011) constructs interesting historical transnationalities linking the French biopolitics of population implemented by Louis XIV, with the story of filles du roi and encounters with indegeneity in colonial New France. Although her narrative explores the possibility of illicit transversal alliances between the oppressed, in this case involving a poor white French woman and an indigenous man, I argue that its potential to reconfigure gendered and racialized spaces of the Empire is thwarted by its generic indebtedness to the genre of the colonial gothic, preoccupied with the "hauntings" of colonialism and imperialism. Moreover, Desrochers' hybrid text, a product of "miscegenation" between history and literature, relies on Eurocentric stereotypes of the Noble Savage and the bad Indian, which suggests that perhaps even her ostensibly feminist attempt to re-read the imperial moment through the stock repertoire of gothic images, no matter how well intentioned, cannot be free from the risk of re-enacting the discursive violence that was constitutive of colonial representation of the Natives and assertions of cultural hegemony. Ultimately, despite its focus on the subjugation of the reproductive female body as a reluctant site of the production of the nation-state, the effect of Bride may well be considered as reterritorializing the nation albeit from a minoritized French perspective.

Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transitional Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas

Exceptional Violence. Embodied Citizenship in Transitional Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2012. xiv, 298 pp. $84.95 US (cloth). Post-independence discussions about Jamaica's violence range from esoteric examinations, domestic- and international-research reports and statistical rankings, to more sophisticated theorizing that attribute violence to a number of economic, social, and political factors. Using an anthropological lens, Deborah Thomas acknowledges traditional sociological and criminological explanations, but also challenges, expands, and locates the problem within the historical context of slavery with its practice of social exclusion, alienation, and inequalities. Thomas uses the discussion of violence to rethink the post-colony from the perspective of an earlier imperial moment, and by so doing, she interrogates particular forms of violence, that for her, foundational to the development and deployment of ideologies regarding (p. 3). For Thomas, two related themes are repeated: one examines and its relationship to history, violence, and practices of citizenship; the other explores culture and its relationship to representation, debates about the appropriateness and availability of representations, notions of who has the power to create representations, and the relationships between representation and economic development (p. 4). She situates violence within the colonial epoch. This systematic interrogation sets the context for understanding possession and perception of citizenship, its meaning, impact, representations, and power relations in the experience of violence. Current manifestations of violence in Jamaica have been observed in other post-colonial societies. Indeed, the discussion underscores how historic injustices are overlaid on contemporary Jamaican cultural and political practices and institutions, thereby replicating, in different forms, that which the colonial made dominant. The chapters are treated topically. The introduction, entitled Moving Bodies and subtitled Reluctant Witnessing articulates how violence pervades the psyche of government and citizens. Consequently, levels of interpersonal violence are symptomatic of historical trajectories of structural violence. The explication of Dead Bodies in Chapter one lays the groundwork for the understanding that patterns of authority in the political sphere are extensions of practices from colonial period (p. 7). Chapter two invokes the notion of Deviant Bodies to contextualize the effects of slavery on family formation, as well as provide the scaffolding for understanding culturalist notions of poverty and violence. The discussion of Spectacular Bodies in Chapter three dismisses the attribution of violence in Jamaica to the influence of American media, suggesting instead that such interpretation obscures earlier histories of imperialista and slavery, and specifically the transnational organization of violence. Instead, spectacular forms of punishment and discipline during slavery better account for the more performative dimensions of current killings. Public Bodies, in Chapter Four, juxtaposed narratives and counter-narratives about the emancipation statute--Redemption Song--to explore the crisis. This discussion deconstructs the superimpositions of norms related to gender, sexuality, and family, and thereby underscores how these control mechanisms serve as a foundation for respectability. The most poignant articulation of interrupted citizenship is outlined in Chapter five. …

Dialogue and Leisure at the Fin de Siècle

Through both their arguments and their form, Oscar Wilde's quasi-Socratic dialogues, The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist, articulate a conscious anti-work ethic, an ideology of leisure. The historical roots of this discourse extend through the nineteenth century in complicated ways, connecting with the institutional history of Oxford, the poetics of dialogue form itself, the cultural implications of Victorian homosexuality, and the contradictions of British capitalism in its imperial moment. These fastidiously playful texts therefore enable us to explore the importance of being idle, amateurish and unproductive.

The Imperial Moment ed. by Kimberly Kagan (review)

Reviewed by: The Imperial Moment ed. by Kimberly Kagan Ion Marandici (bio) Kimberly Kagan (Ed.), The Imperial Moment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). xii+250 pp. Index, Bibliographical references. ISBN: 978-0-674-03587-4. Is America an empire? After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, critics of American foreign policy have often pointed out that the unilateral use of American military force on the world stage resembles the behavior of past empires. While the term is not part of the American mainstream narrative, this inconvenient question still awaits an answer. The very fact that the question on the imperial analogy is raised points to the transformation processes that marked the end of the Cold War, and namely, the expansion of American international influence. Whether the current world is a unipolar one or not, matters less, since scholars still struggle to grasp the nature of the hegemon. Internationally, the United States is still the dominant military power, outspending the next ten countries combined, but, domestically, political actors constantly refer to America's economic decline, and some of them ask for military spending cuts. This declinist theme is a recurrent one in American politics mirrored even in the 2012 presidential debates. Is the United States at the peak of its power on the global stage or is the unipolar moment gone? [End Page 441] The ambitious volume edited by Kimberly Kagan attempts a herculean feat; it raises, explores, and answers a host of intriguing questions related to this by now very popular imperial analogy. Kagan, however, suggests that the United States should be compared to emergent empires. It is the transition to an empire that is of interest here. The term imperial moment refers to this transition. It should be noted that from the very beginning the inquiry focuses on the political and military aspects of imperialism leaving aside the economic and some of the cultural dimensions of empires. This might come as a disappointment for Marxist historians studying economic imperialism, or for historians studying imperial institutions from a cultural perspective, but it is a methodological decision that aims at setting clear boundaries for the volume. Another methodological decision refers to the definition of empire. Given the diversity of meanings ascribed to the term, Kagan states in the introduction that "this book does not offer a single definition or typology of empires" (P. 7). The term empire had different meanings and purposes in various historical and regional contexts; Kagan rightly emphasizes that many historians are tempted to adopt a teleological view and regard the emergence of empires as the culmination of an inevitable path toward empire. Hence, even though a single definition of empire is not provided, the volume highlights and focuses on two necessary dimensions of empire, and thus of the imperial moment. The first one is related to the projection of power abroad, namely, the situation when a state begins to issue orders to other autonomous states with the certainty that those orders will be obeyed without the constant use of force (P. 173). That is how the powerful state eliminates the ambiguity of informal domination. The second dimension stems from the first one and refers to the domestic narrative. It is at this point that culture enters the picture. The authors try to pinpoint the various cultural and linguistic forms that suggest that the elites in a specific context embraced an imperial identity. More specifically, the authors look at the moment when state elites begin self-identifying with an empire, and the official title of the ruler includes the term "emperor" in one of its regional or historical forms. Both are required elements of imperialism, but the second one is grounded in the first. This definitional choice seems to give preference to the relational understanding of empires, even though it tries to mitigate the tension between the two divergent traditions in the study of empires by including the second element. Here are just a few of the pertinent questions singled out by Kagan in the introduction and the conclusion [End Page 442] of the book: "Do powerful states inevitably become empires? Do particular decisions or events, either alone or in series, cause that transition? [...] Do policy makers have a...

The Imperial Moment (review)

Reviewed by: The Imperial Moment Alexander Mirkovic The Imperial Moment. Edited by Kimberly Kagan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. 268 pp. $ 49.95 (cloth). This collection of essays focuses on six imperial moments, particularc events in history when a powerful state becomes an empire. The imperial moments included in the collection are as follows: (a) classical Athens, (b) the Roman republic, (c) Great Britain (before American independence), (d) China of the Qing dynasty, (e) Russia, mostly before the Romanovs, and finally (f) the United States. In this last [End Page 816] case the focus is on the new American empire created after 9/11, in the wake of the so-called Bush doctrine, the foreign policy principle that allows the United States to act "preemptively" when it concludes that its security interests are at stake. With great precision, the editor made it clear that the scope of this collection was narrow. The editor's choice of imperial moments might strike many readers as a missed opportunity to include more, but it is the author's or editor's prerogative to limit the scope of his or her book. Therefore, economic or cultural aspects of empires were not discussed here. There is no mention of Immanuel Wallerstein and his world-system theory. Ethical and racial aspects of empires were also not considered. Noam Chomsky and Edward Said are never mentioned in the book. Most surprisingly, there is no mention of the age of empires, the nineteenth century. The editor explains this exclusion by saying, "it is not possible to define empire or develop a general theory of empires exclusively on the basis of the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century examples" (p. 8). The book is about power politics and interstate relations, pure realism in international relations, as pure as it was conceived by Machiavelli. However, as one delves into the book, it becomes clear that, although the scope of this book is extremely narrow, the editor's ambitions are colossal. On the narrow basis of the six examples listed, Kimberly Kagan would like to create a general theory of empires and cover the whole world and all of history. How can this be done? Historians seldom write narratives such as this one that span from antiquity to modern times. These grand narratives leave normally careful and cautious historians overexposed to attacks from all sides, from specialists who cover a single period or region, to experts who have theoretical and methodological complaints. Kagan attempted exactly that: to compile a history of imperialism in six easy examples. With much nerve, Kagan constructed a grand narrative of imperialism from ancient Athens to George W. Bush trying to explain how powerful states become empires. She tried and, in my opinion, failed. Let me try to explain this with a story. Winston Churchill also had no qualms about writing grand narratives. When he wrote A History of the English Speaking Peoples he said, "I write about the things in our past that appear significant to me and I do so as one not without some experience of historical and violent events in our own time." His archrival Clement Attlee mocked Churchill's historical work and his selectivity by saying Churchill wrote a book about "things in history that interested me."1 [End Page 817] Like Winston Churchill, Kagan is a conservative activist. Educated as a military historian and a graduate of classical studies at Yale University, Kagan has taught at various institutions, such as the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. However, she left her academic career and became a founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., an influential political think-tank. In recent years Kagan conducted many military missions as a part of civilian advisory teams. As a result of these military engagements, she produced the book The Surge: A Military History, published in 2009. Kagan praised military generals who enacted the surges in Iraq with the following words: "Great commanders often come in pairs: Eisenhower and Patton, Grant and Sherman, Napoleon and Davout, Marlborough and Eugene, Caesar and Labienus. Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno can now be added to the list."2 Therefore...

The Imperial Moment, edited by Kimberley Kagan.

<i>The Imperial Moment</i>, edited by Kimberley Kagan.

X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895 (review)

Reviewed by: X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895 Ellen Boucher X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895 By Megan Norcia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. Since the 1990s, feminist geographers have highlighted the role women played in defining and mapping imperial spaces for European audiences. The most influential of these works, like Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose’s edited collection, Writing Women and Space, and Cheryl McEwan’s Gender, Geography, and Empire, have focused on those few women travelers who ventured into the empire to encounter the colonized world first-hand.1 But what of those who stayed at home, the “armchair geographers” (10) who produced imaginative accounts of Britain’s overseas realms for children? In X Marks the Spot, Megan Norcia offers a thought-provoking, critical reading of nineteenth-century geography primers authored by women. Strongly informed by postcolonial theory, her aim is both to illuminate the ways in which primer writers produced and transmitted imperial systems of knowledge, and to recapture the agency, resistance, and “subterranean instabilities” buried within these texts. (110) If Norcia overreaches in her claims about the impact of geography primers on the British cultural consciousness, her study is nevertheless valuable for the light it sheds on middle-class women’s fraught intellectual relationship to the empire in the decades leading up to the late Victorian high imperial moment. At heart, Norcia is engaged in a recovery mission. Too often, she argues, primers have been dismissed as inconsequential children’s literature. The result has been to misconstrue imperial geography as a wholly masculinist discipline, the realm of the “geography militant” who triumphantly mapped the globe.2 By according the primers sustained and careful consideration, Norcia is able to uncover an alternative imperial language that depended less on the masculine tropes of conquest and penetration than on domestic metaphors of hearth and home. As she demonstrates, women primer writers used their “particular knowledge base and gendered skills in the household” to craft a vision of the empire as an interdependent “family of man,” one directed not by an austere patriarch but by a firm yet loving mother Britain. (21) While Norcia makes much of the novelty of this familial model, it will be familiar to historians of British missionary culture, especially if they have read Catherine Hall’s Civilizing Subjects.3 Yet she is certainly right to call attention to how this gendered imagery of the imperial terrain allowed women writers to assert the importance of maternal authority at a time when women’s cultural influence was closely circumscribed. Those restrictions on women’s status also turned the primers into sites of resistance. As Norcia stresses, although penning these texts gave women an opportunity to showcase their talents and to make some money, it equally pointed out their position as “limited subjects.” (137) She is sensitive to the frustrations of women who spent their days sifting through tales of derring-do from an empire that was mostly off limits to them, and she teases out instances when their disappointments bubble up in the texts: when mother figures get testy with their children, for instance, or appear jealous of their sons’ mobility. In line with trends in postcolonial scholarship, she also argues that primer writers’ own dissatisfaction with the constraints of imperialism made them able, consciously or not, to pinpoint and preserve the resistance of indigenous peoples. She thus highlights instances of Africans appearing amused, rather than awed, by missionary teachings, or of colonizers coming across as “bestial.” (160) Of course, as Norcia acknowledges, it is impossible to tell if any of these anecdotes had any basis in fact, and given her stress on the women’s authorial agency and interpretative license, it seems rather doubtful. They do, however, provide evidence for her contention that these women “endorsed imperialism yet resisted its restrictive closures.” (27) Given this close scrutiny to the authors’ mental and emotional engagement with the “empire,” it is surprising that Norcia never clearly defines what she means by the term. At times, it seems to imply any land that lay beyond Britain’s shores. Primers on places as varied...

DECOLONIZING GLOBAL THEORIES TODAY

Since the 1990s there has been an impetus to develop paradigms of theory that are global and energize us with possibilities for resistance. This essay argues that such theories confront us with a postcolonial unease because they are, like the tradition of colonial knowledge production, universalizing. The essay begins by briefly analysing the West-centered basis of the idea of inevitability in Hardt and Negri's concept of empire and moves on to critiquing two universalizing concepts: Giorgio Agamben's ‘bare life’ and Judith Butler's ‘vulnerability’. Turning from theory to practice, the essay points out the problems of Eurocentrism in even so ostensibly radical and global an organization as the World Social Forum. The essay demonstrates the need, particularly in the imperial moment today, for a vigilance against the global theoretical projects being generated at present.

Exceptional Sovereignty? Guantánamo Bay and the Re‐Colonial Present

Abstract: The US government has presented Guantánamo Bay to the world through the lens of “exceptional sovereignty”. This argument holds that international law does not apply at Guantanamo because while America has “complete authority” over the base “ultimate sovereignty” rests with Cuba. Many accounts rightly critical of the abuses of power taking place at Guantanamo similarly understand it as something wholly abnormal—a literal “non‐place”. But in falling back on this argument both the American position and many of its critics have tended to “black box” what is taking place within the camp. In this paper I suggest that we ditch any sort of critique that says Guantanamo is somehow outside of the law and instead replace this line of argument with a critical history of the deployment of a particular sort of Executive power there. From this perspective, Guantanamo is better understood as a rather more normal part of the current imperial moment and connected up in various ways to American imaginations and materialisations of power. As a way of exploring some of these connections in greater detail, I examine the construction of Guantanamo as a particular sort of social space by drawing upon the accounts of those who have been there: former guards, detainees and their defence lawyers.

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Englishness and The Victorians

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Englishness and The Victorians

BLACKNESS ACROSS BORDERS: JAMAICAN DIASPORAS AND NEW POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP

“Blackness across borders” outlines the effects of the currently weakened hegemony of the creole multiracial nationalism that had been consolidated by political and intellectual elites at the time of independence. The essay examines how intensified transnational migration and the proliferation of media technologies have contributed to a situation in which urban popular expressions of blackness have become paramount within contemporary invocations of Jamaican particularity. Arguing that these factors have facilitated the amplification of a diasporic consciousness, this essay explores how working-class Jamaicans negotiate American (and in particular, African American) hegemony through this consciousness. It seeks to illuminate the ways newly powerful notions of national belonging and transnational racial mapping affect the development of nationalist discourses and strategies “at home,” arguing that Jamaicans use “America” in part to mitigate the effects of a global political economy that has reinstated the national-racial hierarchies of an earlier imperial moment.

The imperial moment: A European view This article is based on developments up through June 9, 2003, the date it was submitted for publication

This article will first review the essential characteristics of the old exceptionalism in US foreign policy, then compare it with the specific features of the new strategy of the Bush administration and finally address the challenges and risks that this enterprise entails. The article provides an analysis of realist and liberal critiques of the Bush administration's foreign policy in terms of both objectives and results. It concludes that the war in Iraq constituted a truly imperial moment in US history. Preventive war is a flawed strategy, which runs against US principles in world affairs and against its security interests in the current international environment. For this reason, Bush's imperial policy will not last. The author writes here in a personal capacity, and not in the name of the European Union Institute for Security Studies.