Imperial Narratives Research Articles

Imperial narratives: reading US soldiers' photo albums of the Philippine–American War

This paper explores the visual narratives of US soldiers' photo albums of the Philippine–American War. It focuses on the materiality, imagery, and narrative structure of these ego-documents and asks for their individual and social functions and usages. As I show, most albums of US soldiers framed the experience of war in the Philippines as a triumphant story of imperial conquest that dwelled on notions of masculinity, racial superiority, and exoticism. However, by analyzing the album of Lt. Koontz, who died during his military service in the Philippines, my paper also points to the unsettling potential of these albums and their shifting meaning once they reach the realm of the historical archive.

Creole Frontiers: Imperial Ambiguities in John Richardson’s and James Fenimore Cooper’s Fiction

In his 2010 article Settler Postcolonialism as a Reading Strategy, Edward Watts argues that by using settler theory to study early literature, scholars in field can move away from binary of empire and resistance, toward a better understanding of multiple experimental and alternative nationalisms of early Republic. This timely decentering of nationalist narrative builds on shift toward postcolonial studies in literature, while reflecting more general transatlantic and hemispheric turn in studies in recent years. (1) In Watts's reading, then, settler theory has potential to transcend what Ralph Bauer describes as the limitations of critical and theoretical concepts, as well as markers of identity current in US studies ... across cultural and disciplinary borders (Early American 225). On one hand, postcolonial theory has created useful comparative frameworks for discussing local colonialisms; on other, dominant Anglo-American emphasis on colonizer-colonized conceptual binary fails to prove consistently useful in a hemispheric context. Furthermore, traditional periodizations of literary studies that separate colonial and national artificially normalize experience of decolonization, since US model was exception rather than norm in hemisphere until at least 1820 (Bauer, American 225). Thus, settler theory has unique potential to address both disciplinary shortcomings by positing early Americans as just one group of Euro-Creoles in Americas, simultaneously agents and subjects of imperial power, whose identities and relationship to land were triangulated across multiple political formations. This article examines relationship between such political formations and competing narratives of indigeneity and authenticity that underpinned frontier fiction in United States and Canada in 1820s and 1830s. (2) James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) and his contemporary and admirer, Canadian novelist John Richardson (1796-1852), have been traditionally read through lens of national canon as early representatives of Canadian and literatures, respectively. (3) The works of both have long drawn comparisons, which I do not intend to revisit here. (4) Rather, my goal is to illuminate commonalities of these two Euro-American Creoles via an examination of role that land, empire, and whiteness play in their literary invention of competing national and prenational pasts. In doing so, my use of settler postcolonialism dissociates term Creole from its racial connotations, dominant in studies scholarship, and uses it as a marker of difference in relationship between metropolis and its colonial outposts. At same time, rather than positing Richardson as a British colonial epigone of Cooper, I view him as translator of a literary model into a cultural paradigm shaped by different historical circumstances, and informed by different transatlantic and hemispheric power relations. Central to my argument is fact that, although both authors engage same empires and same geography, they wrote from within two concurrent political regimes, one colonial, one national, whose structures and conventions informed their respective frontiers. In early decades of nineteenth century, northern borderlands of Republic were underpinned by real, albeit contested, ideological fault lines. Early settlerhood evolved in dialogue with colonial settlerhood of British North America. British literature was widely read in colonies, but so were authors. Early Canadian fiction engaged not only with British imperial narratives and tropes of belonging but also with nationalism, defining itself in relation to both. Similarly, throughout nineteenth century culture remained involved in a series of complex political, cultural, and literary negotiations with Canada. …

Violence against Women

Protesters in Kolkata, India, decry violence against women following the death of a twenty-three-year-old woman who was gang-raped and beaten on a bus in New Delhi. Activists in India later criticized U.S. feminists for reproducing colonial discourse in their responses to the attack. When gender-based violence occurs in the Global South, how should feminists in the Global North respond? Sometimes feminists in Europe and the United States say nothing, fearful that their attempts to speak out about gender violence in South Asia, Africa, Latin America, or other formerly colonized regions will reproduce colonial dynamics. At other times they do speak, and their language echoes imperial narratives about needing to "rescue" downtrodden women from "backward" cultural traditions. To move to a more constructive place, we need to foster a transnational analytic of care: one that is not defensive, reactionary, or silencing. We need an analytic of care that is cognizant of the local and global processes that create conditions of vulnerability for women and form the asymmetrical planes in which cross-cultural alliances and solidarity practices must happen. The urgency of our need for more constructive forms of transnational feminist solidarity became particularly apparent in December 2012, when feminists across the globe took to the pen and the streets in response to the gruesome gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi, the capital of India. The twenty-three-year-old woman was returning home after watching the film The Life of Pi with a male friend in a shopping mall in South Delhi. She and her companion that night tried to hail public buses and auto-rickshaws to no avail. Eventually, a private chartered bus stopped to picked them up. There were six men on the bus, including the driver, his younger brother (who posed as the conductor), and four others who worked in various low-skilled jobs in the city and were economic migrants from neighboring states. The bus did not have a permit to be on the roads after-hours; investigations later revealed that the traffic police had been bribed in order for it to pass through security checkpoints. The men on the bus, apparently on a "joyride," beat the young woman and her friend. When the woman and her friend resisted, they dragged her to the back of the bus and took turns raping her. The assault lasted several hours as the bus plowed through the city streets, and involved the insertion of a metal rod into the woman's body, which caused her intestines to spill out. Afterward, the couple was stripped naked and thrown off the bus. The driver tried to run over the woman, but her friend managed to pull her out of the way. Click for larger view A narrow focus on sexual assault can obscure how the structural violence of the global economy is also a central source of women's suffering in the Global South. This photo, Death of Thousand Dreams by Taslima Akhter, captures the final embrace of two workers killed by the April 2013 factory collapse in Bangladesh. The young woman's ordeal did not stop there: for nearly half an hour, passersby ignored the pair's cries for help. When the police finally arrived, instead of transporting the woman and her friend immediately to the nearest hospital, they argued over jurisdiction. The woman fought for her life for two weeks and finally succumbed to her injuries in a hospital in Singapore. Even though the government ostensibly flew her to Singapore for better care, many in India were critical of the move as her condition was too fragile--they saw the move as a gesture by the government to dampen the public outrage and massive protests in Delhi and all over India. The men accused of this brutal crime are currently standing trial in a fast-track court. In the face of mounting civil protests, the government set up a committee that brought representatives from diverse constituencies in India to put forth a set of legal and social recommendations to deal with violence and discrimination against women. Even though feminist groups found these recommendations inadequate, indeed a "mockery... Language: en

Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics by Pratik Chakrabarti

122 BOOK REVIEWS Pratik Chakrabarti, Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2012). ISBN 978-1-58046-408-6 (HC). x + 304 pp. This detailed critical study exemplifies contemporary historical writing about medical practice. Its scope and sources are broad, its engagement with technical material is rigorous, and its arguments are consistent and largely convincing. Although focused on intersections between British India and bacteriology—primarily in its post-1890 iterations—scholars of Australasian medicine will find many points of contrast and connection with Pratik Chakrabarti’s fine text. The author’s central tenet is that the universalist claims of Pasteurian and Kochian bacteriology were patently contradicted when imported into post-1857 India. The study of microbes in the tropics was never a discrete technological and epistemological revolution. Rather, it intersected with prevailing prejudices to animate dialectic between germs and climate. In imperial thought, cultures—in both bacteriological and anthropological senses—‘behaved differently in hot climates’ (p. 10). The unifying position driving Chakrabarti’s analysis is the moral stance enabled by bacteriological research and praxis under the Raj. Germs, he insists, ‘were inescapably entwined in a moral imperial narrative of disease, filth, and putrefaction’ (p. 3). They therefore justified a paternalistic rationale for controlling India, and Indians, to render the tropical environment safer and more humane—at least in British eyes. Successive chapters overlap and occasionally leapfrog each other, addressing the promises and failings of the Pasteurian paradigm in India; implications for the geographical location of laboratories; colonial appropriation and experimentation upon local animals; wild beasts, snake venoms, and antidotes; rabies and vaccine research; and the construct of India as the natural ‘home’ for cholera. The possibility that a panacea might emerge from bacteriology— especially via vaccination and serum therapies—appealed to many Britons and Indians alike. This potential engendered an almost evangelical zeal in some officers within the predominantly white Indian Medical Service (IMS). Their conviction of doing ‘right’, both in scientific and societal terms, excused the suppression of competing claims for moral consideration among indigenous denizens of India— human or otherwise. If such imperatives helped to keep Indians Health & History ● 16/1 ● 2014 123 out of responsible medical roles until the 1930s, in the context of vivisection, ‘the notion of care for animals was concomitant with the idiom of rule’ (p. 96). Despite Chakrabarti’s frequent invocation of ‘morality’, however, I often found his usage a little vague. Nowhere in the text was his own moral frame of reference located within a wider historical, philosophical, or bioethical context (as has been done for French colonial medicine in Algeria, for instance). Readers will acknowledge that side-lining research undertaken by Indians was an undesirable feature of IMS hegemony. Yet Chakrabarti himself is ambivalent about Ram Nath Chopra’s 1930s efforts to integrate biomedical and traditional approaches to snakebite. Likewise, it is implicit in Chakrabarti’s rendering that climate does not affect the biological or pathological characteristics of microorganisms. Surely, therefore, his position should be stated explicitly when contending that ‘the close link created by the British between cholera and the tropics … internalized a fatalism in colonial medical thinking about the possibilities of the eradication of cholera from India’ (p. 198). In light of my own studies on snakes in colonial Australia, I noted that the one chapter in which ‘morality’is conspicuously absent is the one focused on serpents. Indeed, I take issue with the author’s claim that Indian snakebite research ‘reflected the characteristics of colonial science defined by the metropolis and the periphery’(p. 124). From 1865 to 1910, medical references to snakes and their venoms—and to antidotes and their innovators—provoked a rich intercolonial dialogue between India and Australia, with nary a nod to British ‘expertise’. At a conceptual level the author sets up Bacteriology in British India to challenge the agency afforded to non-human actors by Bruno Latour’s oeuvre. Much, however, is in the telling. One could readily reassemble the historical elements arrayed by Chakrabarti to fashion a tale in which germs, landscape, devices and animals—especially flies, which barely rate a mention—could prove just as active in constructing ‘tropical’ diseases as did...

Women, Gender, Intimacy, and Empire

This article presents a genealogy of historical studies of women, gender, intimacy, and empire from the late 1970s to the present day, with specific reference to modern European imperial formations. It begins with the problem of “additive histories,” in which empire is merely affixed to a nation-based story and white women are inserted into historical accounts of empire. The article argues that work on intersectionality and colonial intimacy have complicated the additive history paradigm; in the first case, by complicating the rigid binaries of colonizer and colonized to include gender and sexuality, and in the second, by highlighting how corporality, desire, hybridity, and exchange function in imperial narratives. In turn, this historiographic trajectory questions the categories of (colonial) modernity and problematizes the (colonial) archive.

The Construction of the Other in Postcolonial Discourse: C. P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” as an Example

This paper argues the construction of the other in literary discourses by analyzing C. P. Cavafy’s poem "Waiting for the Barbarians." Using textual analysis and postcolonial rhetoric, it shows that the other is a convenient myth created and maintained to justify the privileged existence of the self. Since one of the essential functions of postcolonial literature is to offer a counter discourse that undermines colonial and imperial master narratives, Cavafy’s poem, I argue, is itself a discursive means of resistance that exposes the falsity of the exclusive, binary foundations of western imperialism and, in the process, the mechanism through which colonialist ideologies function. Hence, the response to the negative construction/representation of the other in literature, which is itself a discourse, is another deconstructive discourse.

Microregionalism and intercolonial relations: the case of the Danish West Indies, 1730–1830

AbstractThis article proposes a new framework of analysis for studying inter-imperial spaces in global history. The analytical construct developed here – that of the inter-imperial microregion – highlights the density of networks and interactions found in certain areas with multiple competing polities. It provides a relational approach to the study of transnational and inter-polity exchanges that challenges traditional imperial narratives and suggests a more direct engagement between global, regional, and local histories. After discussing the theoretical and historiographical implications of this model, the article goes on to look at empirical evidence from the case of the Danish West Indies. It analyses the role that these Caribbean colonies played within the inter-imperial microregion of the Leeward Islands during the century from 1730 to 1830. The case study is structured around three central elements of colonial life – geography, security, and commerce – showing how these created the conditions for a high level of interdependence between colonies of multiple empires in the region.

(Re)circulating Foreign Bodies

This paper situates Richard Fung's auto-ethnographic video Sea in the Blood within the context of the personal illness narrative as a mode of political resistance which emerged alongside the movements of feminist health activism and global HIV/AIDS activism. I argue that as a critical illness narrative, which reads the experiences of transnational travel and migration in and through a narrative of illness, race, and sexuality, Sea in the Blood disrupts the genres of both the personal illness narrative and the imperial travel narrative while resisting the assimilative pull of what Charles L. Briggs calls the “political economy of communicability.” Specifically, I argue that Fung resists cultural and political absorption using three primary strategies: the symbolics of blood, the juxtaposition of illness and travel narratives, and the tactics of misalignment, or the self-conscious use of contradictory narratives and competing modes of representation. Through these strategies, Sea in the Blood is installed as a form of revolutionary activism which comments on the historical pathologization of foreign bodies, and exposes the ways in which the medicalization of race underwrites the medicalized history of sexuality. Accordingly, Sea in the Blood inaugurates what might be thought of as a politics of incommunicability through the sensuous and metaphorical re/circulation of foreign bodies.

Empire films and the dissemination of Americanism in colonial India

In the 1930s, as literature and films representing the British empire were disseminated in Britain, the United States and colonial India, the narratives were transformed through reception and adaptation. The genre of pro-imperial or ‘empire films’ produced by British studios celebrated the continued international relevance of the British empire at a time of contestation by nationalist movements. American film adaptations of imperial narratives from the same period promoted an image of the United States as a global economic power even as Hollywood was confronted internationally with accusations of cultural imperialism and restrictive quotas to limit the number of American film imports. In colonial India, the empire films became a lightning rod for criticism about the misrepresentation of South Asia and a force against which filmmakers, journalists and industry representatives sought to articulate the values of a burgeoning national industry. Studying imperial narratives as they were created and circulated illuminates the transnational construction of cultural identity in the age of early sound cinema, whose technologies heightened awareness of linguistic and national divisions.

Tracing slavery and abolition's routes and viewing inside the invisible: The monumental landscape and the African Atlantic

This essay analyses Lubaina Himid's satirical performance piece “What Are Monuments for? Art of the Black Diaspora: Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map” (2009) and juxtaposes it with other memorial pieces. She uses collaged additions to manipulate a glossy guidebook to the world cities of London and Paris to imagine what might have been if the contributions of African diasporan peoples to the capitals had been fully taken on board in the memorial landscape over the last three centuries. Her commentary in the same self-satisfied style of the touristic voyeur populates London and Paris's history in radical new ways. Through image and text, she subverts the imperial national narrative and makes the landscape speak its hidden and diverse history. The city's amnesia and her act of remembrance are counterpoints that create new multiple possibilities in the often monological cityscape. This essay argues that Himid is working against the apolitical notion that a city gives up its meaning without any work on the part of its citizens. The essay shows how her work is related to that of Yinka Shonibare, whose dramatic Nelson's Ship in a Bottle (2010) is the latest work to be introduced on the Trafalgar Square fourth plinth. Like Himid's work, Shonibare introduces ideas of the absence of black historical memorialisation in London. The essay discusses Himid's work in the light of recent London, Paris and Amsterdam memorials for victims of the slave trade by Michael Visocchi and Lemn Sissay, Fabrice Hyber and Erwin de Vries. These works exemplify how national memorials can be stymied by conservatism and how municipal memorials can be undermined by apathy when there is an absence of community involvement. The essay uses the author's theory of “guerrilla memorialisation” developed from theoretical paradigms around memory and memorials by Pierre Nora, Édouard Glissant, James Young, Stuart Hall and Paul Ricoeur to show that the right kind of political response to amnesia can make art that is effective and dynamic, enabling nation states, cities and localities to create memorial landscapes that are affecting, truly radical and worthy of a transatlantic abolitionist legacy.

Imperial narratives displaced by Indian subaltern identities in early amateur films

This article analyses how representations of Indian people in colonial amateur films from the 1920s challenged and displaced imperial narratives. It explores how conventional visual colonial rhetoric allowed typological (mis)representations of Indian people, and how these can often voice a suppressed collective history outside the films' customary early twentieth century imperial narrative on race and indigenous traditions. It discusses how British and Indian amateur filmmakers employed visual tropes of colonial discourse on race and identity when constructing, controlling and (mis)representing Indian identities as ‘criminal’ tribes, ‘savage’ colonial subjects, members of esoteric groups, and as members of the imperial elite. Most British amateur filmmakers modelled their records after colonial picture postcards of India or ethnographic and travelogue films, and supported Britain's ‘civilizing’ imperialism by portraying Indian people within a ‘primitive’ romanticised colonial locus. Some Indian amateur filmmakers often employed the journalistic style of British actualities (newsreels) across their entire collections and especially when recording state visits and durbars. Drawing on theoretical perspectives borrowed from the subaltern studies framework, this paper investigates issues of Indian racial and gender agency in four colonial amateur films, and argues that the visual (mis)representation of several Indian subaltern identities ultimately cancels conventional imperial narratives. The research corpus includes missionary films, ethnographic travelogues and home movies made by Anglican missionaries, British ethnographers and freemasons and Maharajahs in the late 1920s. These examples belong to film collections held by the British Film Institute, the Centre of South Asian Studies (University of Cambridge) and the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum.

Embodying the Colonial Encounter: Explaining New Zealand's ‘Grace Darling’, Huria Matenga

Focusing on the heroine of an 1863 New Zealand sea rescue, this article is concerned with gender, race and the colonial encounter. The rescue became an example of harmonious race relations, advocating Maori service as part of settler society governance. The article analyses Huria Matenga's place in the rescue as white settlers endorsed, rewarded and constructed her in relation to the imperial reference point of British heroine Grace Darling. It is argued that the gendered imperial narrative of Grace Darling combined with transcultural representations of women and the sea to accord Huria Matenga a central place in the rescue. While in the early twentieth century Grace Darling's memory was more entrenched in mainstream New Zealand society than Huria Matenga's, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Grace Darling as imperial signifier had disappeared, and the legend of Huria Matenga existed alone in a state of postcolonial irony. The article demonstrates that mythologies of and commemoration for heroines are constantly recast and operate across a complex network of local, national and transnational levels.

Rewriting agency: Samuel Baker, Bunyoro-Kitara and the Egyptian slave trade

This article combines colonial history/discourse analysis and postcolonial theory to explore how non-Western forces and agents can predetermine and even derail the discursive production of the narrative of the West. Drawing on the work of the Victorian explorer Samuel White Baker, I pursue two lines of analysis. First, I develop a genealogy of the key intercultural encounters documented by Baker during his 1863–5 travels in southern Sudan and Bunyoro. Second, by reading Baker's unpublished diary alongside his published narratives, I trace the discursive impact of these encounters on Baker's texts. Ultimately, by using the example of Baker, I suggest that the influence of non-Western populations, cultures and political circumstances on Western discourse production can be considerable and that by reading the ‘raw’ records of exploration alongside both published accounts and African cultural history, critics can construct a more multilayered model of imperial narrative production than has previously been developed by scholars working just in colonial or postcolonial studies.

Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History , and: Sibir´ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii [Siberia as Part of the Russian Empire] (review)

Reviewed by: Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, and: Sibir´ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii [Siberia as Part of the Russian Empire] Andrew A. Gentes Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland , eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History. xvi + 288 pp., illus. New York: Routledge, 2007. ISBN-13 978-0415418805 (cloth); 978-0203933763 (e-book). $180.00. L. M. Dameshek and A. V. Remnev , Sibir´ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii [Siberia as Part of the Russian Empire]. 362 pp., maps. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007. ISBN 5867935108. In the aftermath of the USSR's collapse, scholarship on Siberia and the Russian/Soviet periphery has increased, driven by post-colonial paradigms and greater access to former Soviet archives. Traditional scholarship is being subjected to revision, and new questions are being asked. Siberia's indigenes have received greater attention;1 the journal Ab Imperio as well as recent collections by Jane Burbank and others have reconceptualized empire and imperial space;2 and the resurrected interdisciplinary journal Sibirica provides a forum for discussion of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Sibirskii khronograf is publishing an excellent series of primary document collections,3 and every week sees new studies by Russian historians.4 Altogether, this scholarship variously addresses relations between center and periphery and between hegemons and regional ethnicities, the exploitation of resources, imperial aggrandizement, and conflicts between competing value systems and belief structures. Both books under review reflect this exciting period for scholars who are reconceptualizing Siberia and the Russian periphery. [End Page 963] L. M. Dameshek and A. V. Remnev's study of Siberia during the imperial period is most welcome, and it deserves translation into English and other languages. This volume from the Borderlands of the Russian Empire series of Historica Rossica partially updates the magisterial five-volume Istoriia Sibiri [History of Siberia] edited by Aleksei Pavlovich Okladnikov and others during the late 1960s.5 Though constructed within a Marxist-Leninist framework, Okladnikov's collection has yet to be entirely superseded. But in contrast to it, as well as to the several volumes of important essays later edited by Leonid Mikhailovich Goriushkin of Novosibirsk University,6 Dameshek and Remnev interrogate Siberia's functionality so as to subvert the very notion of it as an integral part of a supposed imperium. Post-Soviet surveys on Siberian history have tended to be secondary- or tertiary-level textbooks.7 Dameshek and Remnev's volume also targets university students, yet, despite several passages that dwell too much on facts, figures, names, and dates, their analysis and thematic conceptualization render it engaging for specialists as well. They introduce two major themes for considering Siberia's history: its role in Russia's "imperial narrative" (5); and the disjunctures, both administrative and social, that arose between center and periphery. With regard to the first of these, the authors note that Siberia is a "mental construct" (13), not least because it is difficult even to define the region geographically. Some geologists disregard the Urals as a legitimate boundary between Asia and the putatively discrete continent of Europe; and present-day dal´nevostochniki (Far Easterners) will sometimes bristle at being called "Siberians." Under Peter I, the province of Siberia (Sibirskaia guberniia) included regions west of the Urals. Culturally, the relative ease with which Russians traversed the subcontinent to reach Kamchatka by 1700 indicated to some their "natural" right to it. Nikolai Ivanovich Nadezhdin even wrote that there were portions of Asia and North America where the "geography has a purely Russian physiognomy"; and he suggested that these areas could [End Page 964] somehow be united with the "native Russian land" (korennaia Russkaia zemlia), the supposed "fundamental core" of the empire (17). So the question is posed from the beginning: Was Siberia a colony or not? Was it part of a general Drang nach Osten, as G. Patrick March has argued,8 or did it constitute a "fundamental" part of the Russian state, like the erstwhile Riazan´ principality? Indeed, the question itself introduces the Andersonian notion of Russia as an "imagined community."9 Dameshek and Remnev do not explicitly argue in favor of seeing the Russian state this way, but it is telling that they...

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America , and: Doctor Franklin’s Medicine , and: Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (review)

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. By James Delbourgo. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 367. Cloth, $29.95.)Doctor Franklin's Medicine. By Stanley Finger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 379. Cloth, $39.95.)Science and Empire in Atlantic World. Edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew. (New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. xiv, 365. Cloth, $95.00; Paper, $31.95.)Reviewed by Carla MulfordIn recent decades, scholarship on scientific revolution and Enlightenment studies more generally has taken turn away from intellectual history (largely story of training and writings of elite groups) toward cultural studies, social history, and history of technology and its circulation. Rather than focusing primarily on findings of Royal Society, scholars have excavated stories of numerous lesser-known scientists, engineers, and quacks involved in experimental, technological, and human sciences, and they have articulated range of stories that have usefully called into question imperial narratives of Enlightenment. Rather than speaking of one Enlightenment that moved from center to peripheries, these scholars have shown extent to which so-called enlightened sciences were embraced everywhere by everyday people for everyday ends. Examining interplay between technology and human behavior and between culture and state formation, scholars such as Roy Porter, Margaret Jacob, Stephen Shapin, Simon Schaffer, and Michael Brian Schiffer have shown that while ideology of enlightenment was in part province of well-to-do intellectuals who pontificated on matters of natural philosophy, epistemology, teleology, and ontology, it was also integrally evidenced in responses of everyday people to wonders being elucidated by experimental science practiced and reported on in their midst.The three books under review participate in this newer conversation about impact of experimental science for general population, revealing how local forms of scientific and technological knowhow assisted in creating public cultures of scientific enlightenment that eventually found (or challenged) marketplace of knowledge-sharing and disciplinary boundary-making among intelligentsia in England and Europe. In metropolitan centers during seventeenth century, debates continued between experimental scientists and traditional philosophers like Cambridge divine and philosopher Henry More (1614-1687), who disliked challenge to then-current epistemes being launched by experimental scientists and their slibber sauce experiments. To charges More laid against experimental science, William Petty (whose tracts garnered him admiration of young Benjamin Franklin) responded that the sweetness of experimental knowledge was far preferable to Vaporous garlick 8c onions of phantasmaticall seeming philosophy.1The debates about importance of experimental method continued through seventeenth century, but empirical method eventually held sway for large swath of population interested in improving on existing practices, whether in agriculture, astronomy, navigation, physiology, or iatrochemistry. At time that Franklin praised Sir Francis Bacon as a prodigious genius, one justly esteem'd father of modern experimental philosophy (quoted in Finger, Doctor Franklin's Medicine, 10), Bacon's methods had been embraced - and challenged, even as they were embraced - by collectors and natural philosophers in different hemispheres. Indeed, as Neil Saner points out in his essay, Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu's South American Odyssey (in Delbourgo and Dew's collection Science and Empire), Bacon's wellknown maxims were being turned on their head: Whereas Bacon had proposed that m situ description was to be followed by metropolitan ordering and interpretation of natural data, Joseph de Jussieu insisted that only those with lived experience in field ought to be credited as scientists. …

Livia the Princeps : Gender and Ideology in the Consolatio ad Liviam

Livia the PrincepsGender and Ideology in the Consolatio ad Liviam Thomas E. Jenkins (bio) I. Introduction The pseudo-Ovidian Consolatio ad Liviam refracts a single politically charged event—the funeral of Drusus the Elder—through an astounding range of viewpoints (mortal and supernatural, female and male, noble and plebeian) and set pieces (consolatory rhetoric, mythological exempla, eyewitness narrative, and internal monologue).1 One constant in this kaleidoscope, however, is the quintessentially Augustan discourse that surrounds the characterization of the empress herself, up to and including the apparently novel application of the term princeps. The appellation princeps thus continues its Augustus-propelled trajectory from a moniker of "the leading statesmen of the Republic" (so Syme 1939),2 to a nebulous and therefore powerful epithet of Augustus and his possible male heirs (so Rowe 2002),3 to a title that, when applied to Livia in the Consolatio, attempts, like much of the poem, to reconcile some of the inherent contradictions in Augustan constructions of imperial womanhood.4 Other imperial narratives of Drusus's death, such as Livy, Seneca, and Tacitus, recognize the importance of the funeral as an icon of Augustus's dynastic ambitions: a curious amalgam of private mourning and public performance played upon the Roman stage. None, however, approach the Consolatio's elaborate structure or its persistent focus on the ever increasing political authority of the women of the Domus Augusta. Indeed, though the poem putatively focuses on Livia's private mourning, it returns time and again to her extraordinary public actions and powers, whether as intensifications of traditional female prerogatives, or as revolutionary steps in imperial patronage and influence. The poem's concluding endorsement of Livia thus attempts, however imperfectly, to balance Livia's gender with her (perhaps troubling) powers of auctoritas. Though the dramatic date of the poem is 9 B.C.E., the year of Drusus's death, the poem was likely to have been crafted under Tiberius, and thus created precisely at a time of renewed attention to (and anxiety [End Page 1] about) the discourses of gender and power surrounding the imperial household.5 As (Kristina Milnor 2004, 4) has outlined in her recent examination of the ideology of domesticity in the early empire, "The family (especially the emperor's own) and domestic life constituted the central space around which the rest of civic life might be built. It is, of course, a fundamentally paradoxical position…." In Augustus's case, the paradox is particularly acute: the greater the emperor's emphasis on domesticity "as a kind of moralized privacy" (Milnor 2004, 7), the greater the tension with the increasing prominence of imperially connected women, and of their involvement in civic affairs. As an example, Milnor points to the portico dedicated to Livia on the Palatine Hill as emblematic of this paradox; the portico replaced the extravagant private villa of the eques Vedius with a public edifice in honor of Livia (thereby reversing the more traditional associations of the female with the private, and the male with the public).6 Beth Severy (2003, 234) has argued that the principate of Tiberius actually accelerated such innovation in imperial discourse. Representations, particularly literary representations, of Livia were relatively infrequent under Augustus; after Augustus's death, Livia exerted a far greater presence in a number of public forms, including literary references (principally in Ovid), portraiture, coins, and honorific titles.7 This expansion may be linked to Tiberius's own agenda in forging, publicly at least, a unified front with his mother, but it also represents the efflorescence of discursive seeds planted in the previous principate. So while the exact date of the Consolatio is unknown, its primary ideological tensions are thoroughly 'Augustan' in that the poem juggles multiple, and often mutually conflicting, representations of proper female imperial behavior.8 Scholars' comparative neglect of the Consolatio may be attributed not just to its uncertain provenance, but also to its fluid—some may argue chaotic—structure (a structure that presents unique challenges to a modern reader searching for either its narrative unity or its ideological underpinnings). As related by Dio Cassius (55.2.1–3), the facts of Drusus's death are clear enough. While on campaign in Germany in...

Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class by John Kucich (review)

255 Reviews ers with numerous illustrations and quotations from the original literature. In brief, Bursting the Limits ofTime will constitute, for a long time, a basic reference book and a rich source of inspiration. Works Cited Voltaire. Des singularités de la nature. Basel, 1768. Cuvier, Georges. Recherche sur les ossements fossiles. Paris: Deterville, 1812. Pasca l R ichet Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris • Imperial Masochism: British Fiction,Fantasy,and Social Class by John Kucich; pp. 270. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. $35.00 cloth. With the publication of this (his fourth) book, John Kucich confirms his reputation as one of the most original voices in the study of Victorian literature . In a recent keynote address, he spoke of “shadow-discourses,” discourses that have gone (or been allowed to go) “dormant” in the cultural imagination.The chief virtue of Imperial Masochism is that it succeeds in coaxing out of intellectual hibernation not one but two shadow-discourses—those of masochism and of social class—that have largely dropped out of recent studies of nineteenth-century British imperial fiction. He analyzes acutely the interweaving of these two discourses in the work of four nineteenth-century Anglophone writers—Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad—arguing that in the colonial fiction of all four, masochism “focused one particular conjunction more than any other: the relationship between imperial politics and social class” (1). Many postcolonial scholars have written about imperialism and its discontents—the anxieties, confusions, and ambivalences of the colonial subject—but Kucich’s approach is rare in linking the suffering of this subject to the category of class.The concepts of race, gender, and sexuality have served as lenses through which scholars have examined colonial literature, but class has largely been ignored as an analytical rubric. Lately, historians have tried to remedy the neglect of class in the study of imperial history—the best example being David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British SawTheir Empire—but, until Kucich, literary critics have been slow to explore this theme in the analysis of imperial literature. His book is thus a fresh and welcome development. Kucich has chosen to focus not on the predominant image of masochism— the Freudian model of sexual submission associated with the Oedipal stage—but on a“shadowy,” alternative masochism: the model, put forward by relational psychologists, of a narcissism linked to the pre-Oedipal stage of psychological victorian review • Volume 34 Number 2 256 development. According to the latter model, disruptions in the parent-child bond open a narcissistic wound in the child that finds its compensation in omnipotent fantasies of control over oneself and others. Kucich examines the metaphors generated by such masochistic fantasies, metaphors that, in latenineteenth -century Britain, often insinuated themselves into imperial narratives that glorified pain, victimization, and sacrifice.According to Kucich, the metaphoricity of masochistic fantasy received a class (usually middle-class) inflection within two discourses in particular—those of evangelicalism and professionalism—that often underwrote lateVictorian imperial narratives. He does not dismiss the heuristic usefulness of the concept of Oedipal masochism; indeed, he finds that in works of colonial fiction, fantasies of eroticized and non-eroticized masochism sometimes work together both to energize characters ’ relationships with one another and to galvanize the ideological configurations those relations embody. However, he asserts that pre-Oedipal masochism’s emphasis upon the relational (suffering as an imagined path to love and sympathy ) offers more diverse and nuanced interpretive possibilities than does the narrow emphasis on sexualized submission in Oedipal masochism that often dominates current psychoanalytical approaches to literature. Kucich argues that in the Scottish novels of the late 1870s and 1880s, Stevenson used bourgeois and anti-bourgeois doubles to disrupt the psychological economy of a pre-Oedipal masochism, thereby exposing the social incoherence of the Scottish middle class. In his South Pacific writings of the 1890s, however, Stevenson showed that through the self-martyrdom of a self-styled, evangelical anti-imperialism, he might overcome the psychosocial schisms that plagued the middle-class milieu of his earlier works. The chapter on Schreiner is the most controversial.There, Kucich contends that in both The Story of an African Farm and her later non-fiction, Schreiner...

Размышления о “Центральной Азии в составе Российской империи”

SUMMARY: In his essay, Sergei Abashin shares reflections on the volume Central Asia within the Russian Empire . He compares this volume with other volumes published in the series Borderlands of the Russian Empire . Abashin observes that the task of writing histories of different regions of the Russian Empire according to a single plan has failed. The author contends that attempts made in the series to overcome the influence of national narratives were unsuccessful. Proof that national narratives have crept into a new analytical framework is found in the fact that the volume was eventually titled Central Asia , despite the fact that the region had never constituted geographic or administrative unit prior to the twentieth century. Moreover, Abashin contends that putting all the borderlands of the Russian Empire into a single analytical framework conceals imperial diversity and inequitable relations between different borderlands and the imperial center. Though Central Asia briefly fascinated Dostoevsky and other champions of mission civilisatrice , it never occupied a place in governance and symbolic geography of imperial mindscape similar to that of the Caucasus. At the same time, the efforts undertaken in the series to overcome the inertia of past imperial narratives, with their concomitant focus on the imperial center, led to a paradoxical situation in which the center did not merit a separate volume. Still, study of the history of diverse borderlands evokes the image of the center and judging by the various volumes of the series, the imperial center was perceived differently in different borderlands. Reflecting on the volume dedicated to Central Asia, Abashin observes that the period of entry (conquest and incorporation) of new territories into the Empire receives more scholarly attention than periods of ruling routine. This creates an imbalance in the historical analysis of colonialism and pushes historians to rely on the visionary designs of a short heroic period, thus missing the importance of the dissipation of these visions during the longer period of imperial routine. Abashin also describes other imbalances apparent in historical reconstructions of the steppe region and Turkestan, both of which (contrary to historical evidence) are usually taken together and thought of as homogenous colonial peripheries. In conclusion, Abashin defends the view of the steppe region and Turkestan as a peculiar borderland in the Russian Empire, based on a number of historical factors. More to the point, Abashin reminds the reader that the region of Central Asia appears to be a peculiar part of the Russian Empire because its study is contested between two hardly compatible traditions: historiography (or studies of Russian history) and Oriental Studies.

Going to Find Stanley: Imperial Narratives, Shilling Shockers, and Three Men in a Boat

Going to Find Stanley: Imperial Narratives, Shilling Shockers, and Three Men in a Boat

A Provocative Blind Spot: Orientalism and Charlotte Tonna's Judah's Lion

With the publication of Orientalism (1978) Edward W. Said initiated a profound shift in the relations between critical approaches to literary culture and the study of European imperialism. Central to Said's argument and his subsequent analysis is his identification of a clear, precise division between East and West or Orient and Occident. I question the extent to which this geographical paradigm works for the study of representations of Jewish people and history in Charlotte Tonna's Judah's Lion (1843). Drawing from both Zionist and imperial narratives, Tonna's Evangelical novel depicts the journey of an English Jew, Alick Cohen, to the Holy Land where he is so thoroughly moved by the powerful presence of British imperial interests there that he converts to Christianity. In order to understand this novel's depictions of Jewish history and culture imagined in relation to the British imperial arena, I suggest that we must think within and beyond Said's East/West divide, reading the relations between Semitic and Orientalist discourses as another grid through which European identity emerges. Unlike Said's argument in Orientalism, I maintain that Judah's Lion functions as a Western Christian discourse that draws from rather than against an Orientalized Jewish narrative of the return to a land that was wrongly taken. It is a discourse that is relevant to Orientalism, but not wholly explained by it.