Imperial Project Research Articles

「바라죠프 백작부인」 속 올컷이 재건한 미국 재건시대

Louisa May Alcott’s literary life is one very exciting and thrilling suspense of its own. Her initial reputation as ‘the children’s friend’ came from one of the all-time favorites in English literature, Little Women. That reputation underwent a surprisingly shocking turn when her anonymous and pseudonymous publication of blood-and-thunder stories were discovered by Leona Rostenberg. The discovery soon paved the ground for rediscovering Alcott as one of the leading feminist writers of 19th-century America. Though a huge contribution to enriching Alcott studies as well as women’s studies, her rediscovery as such has seriously thwarted many other non-feminist approaches to her stories. This essay intends to widen the ground in Alcott scholarship by proposing to read her stories in a historicized way and tracing her unconventional view of the most influential event that happened in her life and career: the Civil War followed by Reconstruction. As much as critical were gender issues at the time, mid- and late-19th-century America was literally and figuratively overwhelmed by the conflict and reunion of the North and the South over slavery. So far, the history of the war and reconciliation has been recorded in favor of the North, who were to abolish racial discrimination in opposition of anachronistic Southern planters. Yet a recent generation of historians launched on rewriting it with equal consideration of the Southern causes while decentralizing racial issues from the position of the primary reason of the war as the North used to insist. This essay places Alcott’s much-overlooked story, “Countess Varazoff,” in relation with that rewriting and shows how Alcott the Northerner tries to look at the American policies of Reconstruction as a set of the North-directing imperialist projects of colonizing the South in that story. Alcott’s representation of the Polish countess’s persisting resistance to the despotic possessiveness of the Russian prince in “Countess Varazoff” turns out to be a call for unbiased and objective acceptance of differences within one nation of ‘democratic’ America.

What’s Wrong with the Global? The Interconnected Roles of Inequality, Migrancy, Criminality, Religion, Class, and Caste in India

Abstract Postcolonial discourses often view globality as marking the continuation of the imperialist project. However, discourses entailing a genetic assessment of globality have identified that the workings of the neoliberal economy are largely responsible for its undoing. This mutually destructive relationship between globality and neoliberalism makes it even more necessary to strike a rupture between them. This article illustrates the strands of global and neoliberal discontent, positioning both globality and neoliberalism as arriving at cul-de sac despite vigorous effort to pretend otherwise. In particular, it dwells on the ontological status of the migrants in India by discussing the current strategy to criminalize them and uses Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir to show how criminalized migrants may be turned, by de-globing, into natural inhabitants of the Earth.

Alongside gratitude and anguish

In this piece, I respond to Sarah Cervenak and Molly Farneth’s generous readings of Hope Draped in Black. Regarding Cervenak’s moving piece, “High Under The Pew,” I focus on the apposition of apparent oppositions—such as elevation and being underneath, or social life and black death. I also draw attention to the relationship between style of writing and ethics that Cervenak enacts in her comments. I then engage Farneth’s reflections on the ritualization of melancholy. While melancholy is expressed and performed in aesthetic and political practices (song, dance, vigil), we must be alert to the ways that civic rituals convert loss and anguish into opportunities to affirm and bolster imperial projects.

Accepting Dominion Status as a Way of Reconciliation of British-Irish Disputes?

The article is focused on an analysis of British-Irish relations in 1921. From the British point of view, the best solution to the conflict seemed to be the granting of Dominion status. It was based on the assumption that the British Empire represented the largest community of free sister nations in the world. On the contrary, Irish officials did not have the confidence to participate in various colonial or imperial projects because they considered themselves a victim of British colonialism. The question of the accepting of the Dominion status divided the Irish political scene into supporters and opponents of the Anglo-Irish treaty. Supporters of the agreement calmed their own sympathizers by claiming that freedom and equality derive directly from Dominion status. However, the lack of precise determination of the rights and duties of the Dominions was a complication of the situation. The question arises as to whether negotiations on reconciliation between Britain and Ireland led from the British and Irish perspectives, in the context of the then unclear situation of what precisely it means to be a Dominion, to a fair solution to the British-Irish Disputes.

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner (review)

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Matthew VanWinkle Winter Jade Werner. Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Ohio State UP, 2020. 210p. A substantial strand of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century literature and culture contests the secularization hypothesis, the claim that religiously oriented worldviews are becoming less pervasive and influential as more rationalistic perspectives increasingly drive cultural priorities and decisions. This hypothesis depends on, and often merely assumes, a simplistic binary opposition between these two organizing visions of reality. Werner’s study counters this hypothesis by focusing on texts from the first half of the nineteenth century that find an emergent religious impulse not only compatible with but also contributing to a more inclusive view of intercultural encounters. An 1837 introduction to John Williams’s A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Seas confidently proclaims that “the Christian is the only true cosmopolite” (1). Few in Britain would have aspired so explicitly to such an appellation at the close of the eighteenth century. To call oneself a citizen of the world in the immediate wake of the French Revolution was to risk being suspected of an incendiary disregard for nation and family. Werner’s first chapter traces how the rhetoric and practice of the early nineteenth century missionary movement contributed to the rehabilitation of cosmopolitanism as a concept. In describing their aims as cosmopolitan, missionary societies returned [End Page 140] to an earlier Enlightenment conception of universally shared values “born of Christian belief rather than from an explicit political agenda” (49). By focusing on saving individual souls and largely abstaining from the local politics of the places they visited, missionary efforts plausibly advanced the possibility that one could be cosmopolitan and at the same time reassuringly British. While emphatic critique of missionary priorities persisted—Werner’s first chapter concludes with a discussion of Bleak House as an example—for the most part these priorities and their fundamental view of the world became more acceptable over the first half of the nineteenth century. Because missionary societies frequently described their efforts in terms of revived and rehabilitated Enlightenment ideals, their work frequently proved especially appealing to those seeking “reasonableness” in religion. Werner’s second chapter examines how one such admirer, Robert Southey (Britain’s poet laureate from 1813 until 1843), both popularized and crucially misrepresented this aspect of the missionary perspective. Although their travels frequently coincided with British colonial expansion, missionaries were often opposed to the more overtly coercive features of the imperial project: “the political and cultural benefits of Christianity would only be realized by changing individual hearts […] Social good followed individual spiritual salvation” (91). Southey’s literary representations of missionary work, in contrast, “tries to appropriate missionary cosmopolitanism to suit his own nationalist ends” (93). Werner shrewdly emphasizes this contrast through a reading of A Tale of Paraguay (1825), a long poem that construes the logic of posthumous salvation as an exculpation of imperial brutality: “colonial disease and native deaths work ultimately work for the greater good” (99). What might be seen as common ground in a rhetorical tendency toward pragmatism overlooks deeper theological and ideological divides in practice. The first two chapters of Missionary Cosmopolitanism, then, highlight the ways in which early nineteenth-century missionary work entered a mainstream that it sometimes subtly strove to redirect. The final two chapters illuminate the fissures that opened up in the movement in the 1840s and 1850s. The third chapter reads St. John Rivers’s proposal to Jane Eyre in connection with the increasingly vexed debate over missionaries and interracial marriage. Because the missionary movement was predicated on the idea of universal [End Page 141] human kinship, interracial marriages were accepted and even to some degree encouraged well into the 1820s. Yet precisely because these marriages proceeded from this assumption of equality, they also disrupted other assumptions about cultural superiority that tacitly informed missionary work. St. John’s insistence that he marry someone like Jane, someone as much like himself as possible, betrays an anxiety about a disruptive desire for the other by pre-empting it as emphatically as possible. Werner’s final chapter explores a turning point in the way that missionaries...

Racial Passing and the Eurasian Question in Kipling'sKim

The hero of Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim is an orphaned European boy who ‘goes native’, blending in among Europeans and Indian natives alike. Although Kim is said to be the son of an Irish sergeant, it is far likelier that a child of Kim's class origins would have been mixed-race. In addition to the economic constraints and lack of social status that afflicted poor whites in India, this article also examines the novel against the backdrop of the colonial authorities’ efforts in British India to resolve the ‘Eurasian Question’. It argues that, though Kipling's depiction of the European orphan who can pass for a native is problematic, it nevertheless betrays deep-rooted anxieties about the racial and cultural hierarchies that legitimated the colonial project. Indeed, the ambiguities of the novel lead Kipling to open the door to such ideas as that the ‘Oriental’ traits of his hero are superior to those of his characteristics that could be regarded as Western. Kipling's selective view of his novel's economic and cultural context cannot avoid giving rise to readings that contradict and undermine the determination to justify the imperial project.

‘The Heat of a Feaver’: Francis Bacon on civil war, sedition, and rebellion

ABSTRACT This article contrasts Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) understanding of civil war, sedition, and rebellion with that of his near contemporaries and predecessors, especially Montaigne, Bodin, Machiavelli, Alberico Gentili and Edward Forset. The article contends that for Bacon, civil war, sedition, and rebellion are the antitheses of good government and that which prudent policy aims to avoid. The article further argues that for Bacon as sedition and its extremities (rebellion and civil war) are caused by poverty and discontentment, and these, in Bacon’s view, are the result of overpopulation or ‘surcharge of people’, Bacon’s view for the avoidance of civil war aims at policies of outward expansion in the form of colonies and wars of aggression, both of which aim to reduce the metropole’s own population and therewith its propensity to civil war. The article argues that a consideration of Bacon on civil war in particular will shed considerable light on the ideological origins of the British Empire which have often been ignored – where some contemporary political theorists and historians are keen to link ideologies of empire to corresponding positions in political anthropology. A consideration of Bacon’s thought on civil war will show, instead, the article contends, that for key ideological originators of imperial justifications, imperial projects have their origin in domestic politics and the avoidance of civil war.

Narrating Colonial Silences: Racialized Social Work Educators Unsettling our Settlerhood

In this paper, three racialized social work educators unsettle our settled colonial silences as acts of self-decolonization and as a way of responding to the call to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Hailing from the uneven manifestations of global capitalism and coloniality in Morocco, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, we draw on various critical theories to interrogate our unique entanglements with the imperial project of entwined settler colonialism and white supremacy. We narrate our embodied coloniality and how the virulent materiality of global processes of displacement and dispossession plays out in each of our personal stories, everyday encounters, and practices as educators.
 With the aim of teaching for social justice by modeling, we share the processes of unsettling our colonial settlerhood and puncturing our racialized innocence. Each story addresses three themes: contact and colonial relations with Indigenous peoples of Canada, complicity in global coloniality, and responsibility in responding to the TRC call to action. The first story provides a broad outline of our struggles with the Indigenous/Settler binary created to perpetuate the various forms of displacement and dispossession in settler colonialism. The second story probes the complexities in the Settler category by engaging difference-making as a central technology of dispossession. The third story probes the complexities in the Indigenous category through interrogating the perils and promises of recognition and reconciliation in the context of global hierarchies of nation-states and global Indigenous resistance. We conclude bymoving beyond our divergent trajectories and offering shared critical remarks on the human rights framework, the nation-state framework, and the coloniality of social work.

The original plan for Hadrian’s Wall: a new purpose for Pons Aelius?

ABSTRACT Several major issues remain around the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall, due partly to the dense urban fabric of Tyneside. These concern the spacing of the interval structures in the first seven Wall miles, the course of the mural barrier in Newcastle, the purpose of the Roman bridge over the river Tyne (Pons Aelius) and the original eastern terminus of the Wall. This paper retraces the anchor points of our knowledge before zooming in to examine the Wall’s northern approach of the Tyne bridge and considering a possible new departure. Seeing the crucial role of river crossings in determining not just the line of the Wall but also the successive work sectors, the question is raised how far the Wall on Tyneside may originally have been planned to mirror the situation in the west. Before long, however, the project was overhauled, and effectively redesigned, in consequence of the so-called ‘fort decision’ and all the related changes, one of them concerning the Wall’s eastern terminus. Understanding the infancy of Roman Britain’s mural barrier requires exploring the eventful context in which this imperial prestige project took shape, got mixed up conceptually and was set right again around AD 122.

What Were Women Writers?

Abstract: Asking what were women writers—to themselves, to those they denigrated or dominated, and to "us"—is another way of asking who "we" were and are as feminist critics. White feminist critics—writing in a moment when violence against Black, brown, immigrant, queer, and trans women has become more visible than ever—have a responsibility to our nonwhite, non-Christian, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming students and colleagues who may find it impossible to identify with early modern women implicated in discourses that we now recognize as anti-Black, anti-Semitic, or homo- and transphobic. Accordingly, this essay argues that we must historicize early modern English women writers' own self-identification as such in the context of the racial, colonial, and imperial projects from which many materially benefitted and whose hierarchies many instrumentalized. This history complicates assumptions that women's writing is necessarily politically radical—or even necessarily feminist in the fullest sense of that term. English women writers in all their guilt and complexity must be studied more closely than ever if early modern scholars are to better understand the past that has helped produce our current discriminatory norms and systemic injustices, both within and beyond feminist criticism.

Empire In-the-Round: The Tiered Stages of Naqsh-i Jahan Square in Isfahan

Naqsh-i Jahan Square lies at the heart of the Safavid Empire's capital city of Isfahan, and it is a remarkable unified artistic statement that renders legible Shah 'Abbas' imperial ideology in the urban landscape. It is also a complex made up of many different buildings with theater iconography: the caravanserai, coffeehouse, maydan, and palace. Though there is much existing scholarship analyzing these buildings separately, this paper proposes a new holistic conception of these stage spaces as linked and hierarchal. The stages embody the Shah's goal of centralization by facilitating ease of movement to promote urban consolidation and they invite the Safavid subject to become an actor in the imperial project through their in-the-round design, while containing dissent through the visual supremacy and exclusivity of the palace stage. Taken as a whole, the square's translated name, 'Image of the World' holds true, and this paper demonstrates how Shah 'Abbas' tiered theater spaces cast Naqsh-i Jahan Square as both a microcosm and a macrocosm of the Safavid Empire.

The Pleasures of Virtue and the Virtues of Pleasure: The Classicizing Garden in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century China and Byzantium

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Byzantium and China, the garden as a site of pleasure was an important literary theme among literati. Although pleasure had long been associated with gardens prior to this period, its simultaneous resurgence in both cultures was specifically linked to new ways of engaging with the classical tradition. This paper explores the nature and significance of the discourse of pleasure in the imagination of gardens in these two culturally distinct, but historically resonant, imperial societies. Noting important parallels and divergences in the literature surrounding pleasurable gardens in the two traditions, it argues that the garden as a site of pleasure was more than a document of the carefree pleasures of communing with nature. Instead, it was a declaration among literati – constrained by their place in a vast imperial bureaucratic system – of their agency, their integrity and, above all, their virtue. Far from being just a psychological or affective state, the pleasures they documented were a testimony of their freedom and moral authority in the face of a vast political order upon which they depended, but that also required their participation and validation as the bearers of the authoritative classical tradition that sustained the very imperial project. As a site charged with references and allusions to the ancient past and its authoritative voices, the garden provided an optimal arena in which those literati retreating from the front lines of official duty could fashion the conditions of their own pleasure, and thereby display their virtue, assert their autonomy and bring to fulfillment their human potentiality.

Conquering Ida: An Ecofeminist Reading of Catullus’ Poem 63

AbstractMany have recognised poem 63 as a study in contrasts – light versus darkness, masculine versus feminine, rationality versus madness, animal versus human, culture versus nature. Caught between these polarities is the figure of Attis, removed from everything bright, male, sane, human, and civilised by one impassioned act. The poem suggests that it is partly the nature of the place, its quasi-Hippocratic airs, waters, and places, that emasculates Attis, making him like anotha mulier, iuvenca, andfamula.This article will use ecofeminist theory – in particular, Val Plumwood'sFeminism and the Mastery of Nature– to investigate the logic of domination running between the poem's polarities and to show how a foreign ‘Eastern’ wilderness effeminises Greek Attis. Moreover, it will be shown that the characterisation of Attis and thegallias aduxand hiscomitesassociates the story with the Roman imperial endeavour, suggesting that we can read the poem alongside others that portray conquest (11, 29) and the experience of young men abroad on provincial cohorts (10, 28, 47). In this way, Catullus implies that the imperial project is also made weak and feminine by its very contact with foreign places.

Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties by Laurence Talairach

Reviewed by: Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties by Laurence Talairach Clayton Tarr (bio) Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties. By Laurence Talairach. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Laurence Talairach's Curious Beasties is a welcome addition to children's literature studies, especially to the continuing work on the intersections of natural science and children's literature during the long nineteenth century. Talairach traces the influx of [End Page 437] animals, both zoological and paleontological, brought to England from around the world and displayed in museums and menageries. These living, skeletal, and taxidermy specimens not only "illustrated the expansion of knowledge," but also "embodied British power and hegemony" (2). Children became a crucial part of this dual impact of exotic animal collection and display, being encouraged to participate in natural history "in the hope of moulding young minds into future British and imperial citizens" (3). The way that museums "offered visitors an experience of the natural world under control" also inculcates proper and productive children (4). The wonderous animals displayed for eager audiences "could simultaneously transport and instruct" (7), Talairach argues, while also "captur[ing] the elusive reality of imperial Britain" (8). Children's books similarly "conjured up the British empire and its booming capitalist economy through adventures where characters could both feel and see the urge to possess and subjugate these 'curious beasties'" (274). At the same time, however, children's literature sometimes provided "the opportunity to question the ideologies of imperialism" (274). Regardless of the ideological stance, children's literature of the long nineteenth century imaginatively represented "the sense of wonderment produced by museum culture" (10). Structurally, Curious Beasties moves both chronology through the long nineteenth century and from broad movements to discrete readings of nineteenth-century children's authors, including Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Edith Nesbit. I find the latter half of the book more compelling, though the first half is just as engaging and readable. Chapter 2 explores how children's literature of Georgian England uses "curious beasties" to "disseminate knowledge about the natural world" (32). Moving ahead to the Victorian period, chapter 3 further probes the "appropriation of animals" to examine how live animals "actively participated in the development of children's literature" (12, 73). Chapter 4 investigates how children's periodicals encouraged "children's interest in natural history collecting" (126). Talairach also studies the rise of taxidermy, which "represented a period when naturalists willingly explored and promoted the relationship between science and myth, or knowledge and narrative" (173). Chapter 5 examines nonsense literature by Lear and Carroll, which "foregrounded and questioned the issue of species classification" (176). Carroll's "curious beasties," in particular, "probe the era's taxonomic practices" (19). Talairach concludes with a chapter on representations of fossil discoveries in Victorian and Edwardian children's literature, particularly focusing on Nesbit, whose "curious beasties" "convey her stance on imperialism and consumerism and challenge the master narrative of British control over the natural world" (20). The main concern I have with Talairach's book is that I consistently found myself wanting a more expansive vision. Science fiction, in particular, which experienced a concurrent "golden age," seems relevant to the study, especially in regard to the [End Page 438] "human/animal divide" that Talairach frequently mentions. Certainly, H. G. Wells imagined grotesque and subversive menageries, challenging practices such as vivisection, which Talairach chooses not to pursue. Are not many of Carroll's monstrosities in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World examples of particularly disturbing cross-species (if not also subject/object melding) surgical experiments? And what about J. M. Barrie's own island, the Neverland where "beasts" occupy a crucial position in the circle of life and death? I am also left wondering about other forms of children's or adolescent writing in the Victorian period, particularly boys' adventure stories. H. Rider Haggard's novels, for example, often hinge on the role animals play in Britain's imperial project. I am also left a little disappointed that Curious Beasties does not spend more time with Christina Rossetti. A short discussion of "Goblin Market" (1862) appears in chapter one, but it is mostly to...

Hispano-Filipina Church Music in Intramuros, Manila in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Philippine Modernity (1858-1898)

Because conversion was Spain’s imperial project in all its colonies, the church, as an institution, became a major player in the colonial enterprise. Christianization became a constitutive force in the country’s colonial affairs as friars were sent to the archipelago to realize Spain’s mission of conversion. From early accounts, it can be surmised that it was the work of religious missionaries that became the most influential factor in the transformation of the cultural behavior of the people in acquiring a Westernized consciousness. The article looks at the conditions that underpinned the transformation of church music in nineteenth-century modernity in the colony, approached through the prism of published music scores. It brings to light both friars and non-religious church musicians who had an active role in transforming the musical life of the colonial capital, being prime movers in the musical scene of the city and contributing to the formation of the city’s sacred music culture. It is interesting to explore this construction within the musical milieu of Intramuros when the church got preoccupied with significant developments of modernity particularly that of lithographic music printing.

A “splendid flying field” in Indianapolis: Aviation and Speedway Spectacles in the Great War Era

A “splendid flying field” in IndianapolisAviation and Speedway Spectacles in the Great War Era Brian M. Ingrassia (bio) In 1917, Carl Graham Fisher offered the facilities of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to the United States federal government for the training of military aviators and the building of aircraft. He asserted that the Speedway, constructed nearly a decade earlier in 1909, was the best place in America to carry out such work. The government partly took Fisher up on his offer, and the 328-acre facility became a focal point for World War I aviation. By autumn of that year, Fisher was mapping and marking cross-country flying routes throughout the lower Great Lakes region; he even began imagining aerial routes along the transcontinental highways he had spearheaded earlier in the decade, especially the east-west Lincoln Highway. In so doing, Fisher seemed to lay the foundation for an aviation network centered on Indianapolis. The war’s aftermath, however, saw the Speedway turn in a different direction. In May 1919, racing returned to Indianapolis in a form made more dangerous than ever before by wartime technological developments. And although there was serious discussion of turning the raceway into an airport in the mid-1920s, the track’s owners chose spectacle over commercial or military utility, cementing the facility’s identity as a site for thrilling motor sports. The story of Great War aviation at Indianapolis, which remains obscured in standard narratives, has a threefold significance.1 First, as historian Mark Foster implies in his brief treatment of the subject, the Speedway’s wartime service was part of Carl Fisher’s project of developing transportation infrastructures connecting early-1900s people and cities.2 Second, it shows that the Midwest, as historian Kristin Hoganson has perceptively argued, was not disconnected from global currents; rather, the region contributed to larger projects of nationalism and imperialism.3 Third, the story hints [End Page 109] at how Midwesterners adopted and adapted transportation technologies for innovative purposes not limited to utilitarian movement of people or goods. Scholar Jason Weems contends that aircraft helped Midwesterners comprehend their region, a former frontier based on a seemingly “infinite notion of the future.” By the twentieth century, though, the “very grid that had once led settlers to a manifest destiny now appeared to lock them in place.”4 Settled in the middle, they turned to modern technologies and cultural spectacles. After World War I, Fisher and his fellow racing moguls had an opportunity to transform the Hoosier track into a regional aviation hub, but instead they doubled down on popular culture, maintaining the IMS grounds as a place for racing before then selling the facility to famed Great War aviator Eddie Rickenbacker right as the postwar economy peaked in 1927. Airplanes may have offered early-1900s Americans a near-utopian “instrument of reform, regeneration, and salvation,” yet motor sport impresarios ultimately chose the racing spectacle.5 The Speedway became a place where Midwesterners fashioned a modernity based on culture as much as upon commerce. The central figure in this story, Carl Fisher, was the guiding spirit behind Indianapolis’s speedway, which itself was modeled on the Brooklands automotive and aerial facility built in Surrey, England, in 1907. Fisher, who made a fortune through a headlamp company called Prest-O-Lite, used his wealth to promote automotive travel, pop-culture spectacles, and real-estate ventures in Miami Beach, Florida, and Montauk Point, Long Island. Fisher was like a playful version of Henry Ford, shaping American landscapes and mobility in his own distinctive way. He and three other Hoosier industrialists—James Allison, Arthur Newby, and Frank Wheeler—built Indianapolis’s famous speedway as a tar-and-gravel track in early 1909 and then, after a series of deadly crashes that summer, repaved it with three million vitrified bricks later that year. In its early years, Indianapolis’s speedway held both auto races and aviation contests, making the regional metropolis a focal point for transportation-based spectacle. By 1911, the 2.5-mile oval held its first 500-mile race, which marked its claim to global fame. When the U.S. entered the Great War, aviation was still an important part of the...

Urbanism, Environment and the Buildings of the Anglo-Egyptian Nile Valley, 1880s-1920s

“Urbanism, environment and the building of the Anglo-Egyptian Nile valley, 1880s-1920s” examines the ways in which imperial officials and others attempted to transform the built environment in Egypt and Sudan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This history is used as a way to read the broader project of Nile valley imperialism. This shows that architecture and urbanism were elements of a broad project of environmental management, encompassing attempts to restructure the lan...

Religion as Resistance: Negotiating authority in Italian Libya by Eileen Ryan

Reviewed by: Religion as Resistance: Negotiating authority in Italian Libya by Eileen Ryan Patrick Bernhard Religion as Resistance: Negotiating authority in Italian Libya By Eileen Ryan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Eileen Ryan has written a clever book on the Italian presence in Libya. What is new is that the analytical prism of the work is religion and the broader political significance it had for imperialism all'Italiana; in previous scholarship, Islam on the one hand and Catholicism on the other played a rather subordinate role; the focus was on more traditional questions of securing military and political dominance. As Ryan shows, the linkage of religion and politics in the Libyan case makes particular sense because when Italy conquered the country in 1911, it was dominated by a religious order, the Sanusi or Sanusiyya, which ultimately functioned as a state. The military and education, for instance, were in the hands of this Sufi religious movement. Against this background, it is not surprising that in Italy Libya was seen primarily through the prism of religion. Ryan focuses on the perception of Islam and how this influenced larger processes in Italy such as nation building. In that sense, her book should be understood as a contribution to the new intellectual history. On the one hand, she argues that the interpretation of Islam was strongly dependent on the behavior of the Arabs living there. Thus, the perception was very situational and contingent and also not exclusively predetermined by a longer intellectual engagement with the "Orient," which of course can also be observed in Italy. Thus, Rome initially believed that the Sanusi were a suitable intermediary force for gaining complete control of the country. Accordingly, strong parallels were drawn between an Islamic Libya and an equally religiously determined Catholic Italy. However, the hopes initially placed in the Sanusi for collaboration soon gave way to bitter disappointment and mistrust, finally culminating in downright hostility. Religion was increasingly equated with resistance, as the title of the book says. It is also this reading that would eventually legitimize the genocidal actions taken against the Indigenous population. Between 1922 and 1931, the fascist regime deported thousands to concentration camps in the desert. In total, up to 100,000 people may have died by the time the region was "pacified." On the other hand, Ryan examines the extent to which religion and imperialism intertwined in the Italian mainland. She asks, for example, how the changing ideas of Islam shaped the identity of a nation that had only existed for 50 years by then. But the topic could also be used in very concrete ways. For the Catholic Church, imperialism opened the possibility of gaining influence over a state with which it had been at cross-purposes until the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Conversely, the ruling liberal elite recognized the benefit that Catholic support offered to the national project of imperialism, as Ryan convincingly demonstrates. However, the book also has some weaknesses. First, Ryan touches only briefly on the period between the late 1930s and 1943, when Italy effectively lost its colony. This is a pity, since during World War II we see once again a major armed liberation movement in Libya, partly directed by Sanusi in exile in Egypt. To all appearances, this cemented previously ingrained narratives such as that of Arab betrayal. This means that this period ultimately also determined the way Italians looked at Libya and its people after 1945. Second, it is regrettable that Ryan did not pay much attention to the third major religion that played a role in Libya: Judaism. After all, 30,000 Jewish people lived in the country at the time. Researchers such as Ethan B. Katz have argued for the Algerian case that since the late nineteenth century, anti-Semitism developed in a complex interplay with Islamophobia. One wonders if the same occurred in Libya as well. After all, the fascist regime became ever more anti-Semitic over the course of the 1930s, culminating during the Second World War in the persecution of Jews who were also accused of having resisted and made common cause with the British colonial power. Thus it would have been better to analyze the phenomenon...

Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton (review).

Reviewed by: Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton Jethro Hernández Berrones (bio) Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico By David S. Dalton. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018. Pp. 248. In Mestizo Modernity, David S. Dalton examines the role of technology in the construction of the national Mexican identity after the Mexican Revolution and throughout the twentieth century. Analyzing theater plays, murals, films, and novels, the author exposes the contradictions of the project of post-revolutionary governments to create a mix-raced, mestizo, population that adopted and adapted technology in order to become part of a modern nation and a modern world. Theoretically sophisticated yet with deeply engaging examples, the analysis explains that writers, painters, and filmmakers viewed the incorporation of Western science and technology as a tool that redeemed Mexicans through mestizaje. The author uses the concept of technological hybridity to expand the work on the intersections of science and culture in Latin America that other culture studies scholars such as Pilar Blanco, Joanna Page, Ruben Gallo, and Andrew Brown have developed in the last two decades. Technological hybridity equates the entities and characters represented in Mexican literary and visual productions with Donna Haraway's cyborgs—entities defined by human-machine interactions, and the resulting mestizo modernity with a post-human society. Through this lens, the author shows that post-revolutionary discourses on mestizaje embraced ideas about human-machine identities half a century before scholars theorized about them. If Haraway's cyborg promised to denaturalize—and therefore escape from—the issues of human identity, Mestizo Modernity shows the limits and complexities of this liberatory promise. Cyborgs and post-humanist perspectives in the post-revolutionary culture represented an internal imperialistic project to colonize the indigenous at the same time that the resulting mestizos resisted external imperialistic forces. The key element of this analysis is that mestizo cyborgs and post-humanism reframed indigenous Mexicans in oppressive ways that still offered spaces for resistance through the technologically-mediated selective preservation of traditional indigenous values against some colonial forms of oppression centered around class, race, and gender. The four chapters trace instances of technological hybridity chronologically, from the elitist cultural space of literate government officials to more popular, visual forms of art that could reach illiterate, Spanish-speaking Mexicans. José Vasconcelos' theater play Prometeo Vencedor describes the transformation of an indigenous proto-humanity into a celestial/cosmic [End Page 1268] post-human race through technological and racial hybridity. José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera embraced Vasconcelos' view in contrasting ways. While Orozco's Cortés y la malinche and La conquista de México aligned technology with the Catholic Church, European influences, and male domination to transform and subjugate the indigenous population, Rivera's Panamerican Unity and Mecanización de la tierra emphasized the role of indigenous spirituality and women to balance technologies' potential harms. Emilio Fernández's films María Candelaria, Río Escondido, and The Torch centered social progress on a technologically hybrid body. In them, immunized cyborg and mestizo virgins mediated between traditional racial, gender, socioeconomic structures and modern ones. These women, for instance, raise their voices publicly to challenge local strongmen while still performing the domestic roles of housewives and teachers. El Santo films epitomize the official government discourse of mestizo modernity. Carlos Olvera's novel Perdidos en el espacio criticized nationalist state discourses of the 1950s and 60s. Displacing colonizing efforts from the Earth to other planets allows Perdidos to equate global with national imperialistic efforts. Controlling Martians with devices that speak multiple languages, Central mexicans become one, post-human society with the Martians, where Martians can only talk to themselves, and the state can only listen to them when mediated by technology. Dalton's elegant analysis demonstrates the power of cyborg and post-humanism theories to explain the key role technology had in framing the bodies of twentieth-century Mexico's national identity. This analysis will fascinate scholars and graduate students. Undergrads interested in Mexican culture will enjoy the interpretation of visual art and performances through this lens. The book's theoretical framework will help historians, sociologists, and visual and literary...

Paradoxical Imperialism: A New Reading of Informal Empire

Paradoxical Imperialism:A New Reading of Informal Empire Dennis M. Hogan Jessie Reeder. The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2020. 277 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-3807-8 Jessie Reeder. The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2020. 277 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-3807-8 The story of the Latin American nineteenth century is, in many ways, a British one, just as the story of British capitalism is in many ways a Latin American one. After the wars of independence, the commercial links between Great Britain and the former Spanish colonies, long pursued clandestinely, grew deeper and more formalized. Though Britain had offered only unofficial support for Latin American independence, going forward, Britain would enthusiastically supply experts, investors, eager buyers for Latin American raw materials, and protection for Latin American shipping. While the opening of vast new markets alongside new governments in need of British capital presented an obvious opportunity for British capitalists, the dream of a partnership with Britain was equally seductive to creole elites. These leaders saw in Britain a source of capital, a key trading partner offering to replace Spain, and a beacon of liberalism, parliamentary government, and the rule of law; in short, a bearer of a tradition of rationalism and economic success. Beyond engaging in commercial trading, British investors financed large projects like mining concerns and railroads (some successful, others almost entirely fictitious, to the dismay of their disappointed investors), and sent a steady stream of adventurers, diplomats, and scientists to Latin America. Such links left their mark on every aspect of culture and society, and this was especially true of literature. What is surprising about Jessie Reeder's book, The Forms of Informal Empire, then, is not that exists, but that it joins so few other comparative, systematic explorations of the literary links between Britain and Latin America undertaken in the discipline of English studies. Reeder takes the idea of informal empire as her main organizing principle, arguing that while this unique practice governed Britain's relations with Latin America throughout the nineteenth century, it was essentially formulated as a paradox: in order to effectively practice informal empire, Britons had to relate to Latin Americans both as citizens of free and sovereign nations whose independence brought them into the international community as equals, and also as subject peoples whose proper place was under the yoke of British commercial domination. Mapping the operations of these contradictory beliefs and [End Page 195] grappling with their implications is the main work of Reeder's book, which offers a valuable contribution to scholarship on informal empire as a political and economic phenomenon and to cultural histories of British-Latin American relations more generally. Reeder divides her book into two sections examining two master narratives of nineteenth century culture: the first, progress, the diachronic and linear view of history that became hegemonic in the wake of the enlightenment, and the second, family, both the actual and metaphorical structures of relation and filiation that governed nineteenthcentury social and political relations. Reeder's aim, as she explains in her coda to the book, is to demonstrate that while accounts of informal empire from both British and Latin American studies have tended to naturalize the eventual success of the informal imperialist project, this move depends on an unexamined presentism that reads the British commercial hegemony and the subsequent neocolonialism of the second half of the twentieth century, as inevitable. Critics of informal empire have tended to ascribe to the project a totalizing power. For Reeder, the antidote to this presentism is a return to critiques of informal empire written not by its historical inheritors but by its contemporaries: viewed in this way, the concept takes on a new contingency, appearing less inevitable and shot through with inconsistencies ripe for unsettling and strategically exploiting. Reeder's approach owes a great deal to New Formalist methods, and is particularly indebted to the work of Caroline Levine, whose 2015 book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network posited not only literary form but also social form as available to narrativizing and discursive methods of literary critique. Echoing Levine, Reeder...