Imperial Project Research Articles

The Baku Crisis in the History of the Batum Subsystem: the Culmination of the Failed Imperial Projects, August–September 1918

The rapidly developing Batum sub-system entered the phase of an open clash of imperial con-tenders for hegemony in the macro-region in August–September 1918. The scale and significance of the military operations took on a new dimension, with the issue of control over the largest oil-producing area at stake, and with broad prospects for further expansion by the Central Powers in the Middle East and Central Asia. Not only the supply of fuel to several great powers, but also the balance of power on the Ottoman fronts of the Great War as well as the fate of a number of state projects underpinning the reorganisation of the southern periphery of the former Russian Empire depended on the outcome of the struggle for Baku. The military and political capabilities of Germany, Soviet Russia, the British and Ottoman Empires were greatly hampered by a number of conflicts between forces operating in the region, as well as by a number of infrastructural and technical difficulties. This delayed the realisation of the imperial projects and was a catalyst for an acute crisis on other fronts in the Great War and the Russian Civil War. The gradual process of shaping German hegemony and incorporating the Batum sub-system into the wider structure of the Brest System was halted before the World War I had entered the stage of collapse of the Central Powers. The battle for Baku marked not only the potential for, but also the limits of possible inter-imperial compromises. The complexity of the diplomatic confrontation around the transformation of the Transcaucasus is often underestimated when viewed at a local level, but reference to archival sources and memoirs, including unpublished ones, enables many regional conflicts to be embedded in a global imperial context and reveals patterns in the military and political situation far beyond the macro-region in question.

The Provinces in Russian Fiction

The Provinces in Russian Fiction John Randolph Anne Lounsbery, Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917. 360 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-1501747922. $33.95. At the beginning of the 18th century, Peter I and his advisers sought to transform the governance of the Russian Empire. They turned to examples drawn from other states and imported terminology for the new administration they planned. Some of this new vocabulary never made it far beyond the project stage (for example, the Swedish inspiration of calling a local military commander the landsgevding). The loanword guberniia, meanwhile, was a great success, used to describe the Russian Empire's largest units of administration (its territorial "governments") right through 1917. A middling fate awaited the kindred calque provintsiia. Employed in the Petrine era to create smaller, more manageable divisions (or provinces) within the gubernii, provintsiia was ultimately discarded by Catherine II. Catherine right-sized her territorial governments not by subdividing them but by shrinking them and increasing their number, thereby superannuating the original Russian "province."1 That might have been it for provintsiia, which could have shared the fate of many other imperial projects: to be given to the archive to be forgotten forever. Instead, as Anne Lounsbery shows in this wondrous and incisive study, a much grander destiny awaited "the provinces" in modern Russian culture. Life Is Elsewhere explores "the process by which nineteenth-century Russian writers imagined the provinces into being" (243), taking an abandoned administrative term of art and making it into one of the central tropes [End Page 167] of "Russian narrative art" (165). Though the cultural space occupied by the provintsiia inside Russian literature would come to be enormous—at times standing for all of Russia itself, and beyond that the still bigger global task of "figuring alienation in geographical terms" (243)—Lounsbery is admirably clear about the limits of her own project. She is quite aware that the province, though capacious, does not include everything. It does not represent (and, indeed, often serves to obscure) the diversity of the Russian Empire, as we might attempt today to reconstruct it through other sources. It draws around some territories and social groups, rather than including them. For good or ill, Lounsbery contends, peasants "are never provincials" in narrative fiction (playing instead the role of "the folk"). While fiction frequently visits the provincial "Town of N," made most famous by Nikolai Gogol´, it contains no memorable invocations of a "Village of N" (all villages have names, it seems, even the humblest ones). Imagined borderlands such as "the Caucasus" receive distinct exoticizing treatments, even as the empire's really existing gubernii are folded up into a common province trope (14–15, 21–22). Within literature, Lounsbery argues, the making of the province was also confined by generic boundaries. Poetry and drama, she contends, needed it less. Focused on internal worlds and intimate stages, these genres were happy to avoid or even mask their relationship to larger networks and hierarchies (of politics, of economy, of culture). Narrative prose—which depended more obviously on these structures for its print production and circulation—did "not have the option of pretending these systems do not exist" (20). Instead, taking up the province as a central device, Russian fiction writers set about conjuring a vast middling world defined by its spatial and temporal relationship to some other center. As a result, as Lounsbery shows, the province with its capital in the proverbial "Town of N" became a sort of irreducible, universal variable (the constant pi) within Russian narrative prose, a magic number that authors could always use to solve all manner of chronotopographical equations. "Provintsiia takes on significance," Lounsbery writes, "because it meets a larger need": it "allows Russians to think about the consequences of centrality and peripherality more generally, and thus (eventually) about modernity and nonmodernity—all crucial issues at a time when educated elites are increasingly worried about their relationship to European ways of measuring both time and space" (56). How, then, did this trope come into being, and how did it develop across the 19th century? Lounsbery's book is organized chronologically. It starts "before the provinces...

“To guard this Paradise from any second violation”: Ysabinda and the Eastern female body as contested territory in Dryden’s Amboyna (1673)

This article focuses on John Dryden’s 1673 play Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, and more particularly on the figure of Ysabinda, and the island she represents, as contested territory. This article demonstrates that Ysabinda’s relationship with her English fiancé Towerson comes to politically stand for the fantasized absorption of the Spice Islands into Britain’s imperial project. Through a rhetoric of trade and ownership, Dryden stages Ysabinda’s commodification and ultimate rape as a way to fuel anti-Dutch sentiment while at the same time justifying Britain’s colonial practices. However, this literary endeavor is only sustainable through the erasure of the ruling power around the Indian Ocean at the time, the Mughal Empire, as well as through the distortion of the real-life figure behind Ysabinda’s character: the Armenian Indian Mariam Khan.

Silencio de reyes negros: La Comedia Trofea de Torres Naharro y la cartografía de la colonización africana

Abstract: This article considers how Bartolomé de Torres Naharro's Comedia Trofea (1517) represents the process of global colonization of the African and Southeast Asian coasts initiated with the Portuguese imperial expansion of the mid- to late fifteenth century. This drama, in essence, maps an emerging empire, highlighting key protagonists and places. Analysis here concentrates on the drama's parade of African kings (Monicongo, Mandinga, Capa, Milindo, Aden), considering how the representation of these rulers on stage proffers a cartography that supersedes the longstanding European conception of Africa that had remained entrenched from the influential world map of Claudius Ptolemy dating from Antiquity to the mid-fifteenth century. New place names and ethnicities evoked within the Comedia Trofea align with European imperialist projects and colonization, both justified in the drama with reference to evangelization and a Eurocentric notion of a civilizing process . This study also ponders the implications of this play's composition and performance in the context of ostentatious courtly festivities, where the aim was to elicit orientalist wonder through the representation of African kings.

British Imperialism in Colonial Africa and the World

At first, my intention in this article was to write about imperialism and agency in sub-Saharan Africa with a focus on British Imperialism. However, as the article evolved over the months, it became gradually clearer that the idea of the agency was not only outdated, based on various reviews, but also unwarranted. This is because of the wide range of possibilities and prospects for agents in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. Therefore, the concept of agency was removed from the title, but it does not make the importance of agency as a recourse for resisting oppression, authoritarianism, and tyranny any less important. One might think that the narratives of imperial colonial Africa have become over-mined since the fin de siècle but the reality is that the consequences of those narratives continue to wreak havoc in the modern African worldview regardless of how many millions have died fighting against its largesse. This is sufficient motivation to continue our struggle in the search for authenticity and agency in postcolonial Africa and modern Africa itself. This article is about the cultural logic of African society and how the social construction of village identity is contingent on tribal elders and gate-keepers, shamanism, colonial authoritarianism, and oral traditions. The logic of the African village during the postcolonial era is defined as the skewed colonial rationale for the cartographization and control of the colonial subject as part of a larger western imperialist project and the imposition of alien White rule on Africa.

Translatio imperii. Воспроизводство институционального наследия Рима

The article discusses various options for the institutional construction of imperial structures, one way or another identified with the classical empire of Rome. The review covers the Roman tradition proper and the formation of successive versions of the imperial-republican complex. There are two ways of using institutional: direct and direct inheritance with predominantly vertical transfer of properties and indirect perception with predominantly horizontal transfer. The continuation of its modified existence of the Roman tradition in the form of the theocratic symphony of the Kingdom of the Romans (Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων) in the eastern Mediterranean and Chrysalis (theocracy with a feudalized horizontal and hierarchical vertical) of the Christian Republic (Respublica Christiana) in Western Europe is considered. There are three attempts to restore the completeness of the imperial structure even within the framework of the Western European chrysalis: the successful Charlemagne, not quite successful in the form of the Holy Roman Empire, and the completely unsuccessful efforts of the Plantagenets to establish an empire in the west of the Christian Republic during the Hundred Years' War. Further variants of the already mediated reproduction of the classical Roman orders in the United Kingdom, and then in the United States, as well as in the First French Empire, are being analyzed. Other imperial projects focused on the Roman heritage are also touched upon. The experience of European integration and the EU's use of republican and imperial aspects of the Roman complex, the use of institutional models of the Christian Republic and the Carolingian Empire are discussed. Special attention is paid to the imperial component of the national political tradition. It is shown that in all the cases under consideration, the imperial component is combined with other orders from patrimonial and monarchical to modern (corporate, consociative, federal, etc.). The use of the Roman heritage is carried out in the form of direct reproduction, indirect restoration, partial copying, imitation and even simulation.

Rus’ Lands in the Fiscal Policy of Möngke Khan

The imperial project of the Mongols was based not only on conquering technologies, the most effective for their time, but also on new technologies for mobilizing, centralizing and managing the resources necessary for further conquests. The most important tool for mobilizing resources, both human and material, was the population census, which had a general imperial character and covered a significant part of the inhabited world – from China to the Rus’ principalities. Each newly conquered people or state, recognizing the power of the great khan, had to put at his disposal all the resources of their country, which was the main condition for the implementation of the imperial project of the Mongols, which had the goal of conquering the whole world and creating a global empire. Throughout the territory controlled by the Mongols, a unified tax and financial system was established, centralization and monetization of tax revenues were carried out, a centralized system was created for using labor resources and replenishing the armed forces through regular recruitment sets. By providing a higher level of integration and interaction between many peoples and creating a new multicultural imperial elite, the Mongols promoted an intensive exchange of knowledge and new technologies, including managerial ones, assimilating and developing them in the interests of the empire. As a result, accounting and resource mobilization tools borrowed from China found a new application at the other end of the empire – in the Caucasus and in the Rus’ lands.

Music, Theatre, and Diplomacy: The Paris Opéra during the Second Empire

Abstract One of the first accomplishments of the Second Empire (1852–70) was to bring the Opéra under the control of a committee of the most highly placed politicians in the land. While this had far-reaching consequences for the development of repertory in the capital and beyond, it also opened up the possibility of using the Opéra as a locus of diplomatic activity, and major works and productions were made to work for diplomatic purposes. The Opéra emerged as a site of four types of diplomatic activities: the spectacle of state visits, the celebration and monumentalizing of military victories, the restoration and maintenance of good relations, and the promotion of Napoléon’s imperial project. Occasionally, as at the end of the “Crimean war,” the Opéra served as one of the sites for a series of prolonged negotiations that would lead to formal treaties.

A Post-Colonial Re-Reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

The imperial project started to influence English national identity as early as the mid-seventeenth century, and the English began to relate their national prominence to their colonial activities, whether in trade or in the acquisition of foreign territories, throughout the eighteenth century. However, England experienced its share of anxieties on the road to imperial "greatness" in its dealings with both other European powers and its native subjects. The British people's tendency to examine themselves and their international achievements with intense pride helped to neutralize those anxieties, much like Crusoe's imagined responses to possible dangers alleviate his fictional forebodings. The English ameliorated their concerns about their international position by becoming an ever more self-referential society, thinking more highly of themselves on account of their contact with colonized peoples, as is epitomized in the personality of Crusoe. To the fictional Crusoe, the experience of his relationship with Friday validates his self-worth and his native culture more than anything else. Robinson Crusoe's affirmation of colonial power through the assertion of his authority over a particular (othered) individual corresponds with, and epitomizes, England's trading and territorial empire during the eighteenth century and the consequent effects on British subjectivity, at a time when the British were struggling to set up a trading empire and challenging other European powers for territory and markets abroad. Robinson Crusoe successfully resolves the insecurities relating to Britain's colonial activities by asserting, through Crusoe's character, the superior nature of the English subject.

Educated Girls, Clothes and Christianity: Subverting Mabel Shaw’s Sartorial Agenda on the Colonial Zambian Copperbelt, 1925–1964

Mabel Shaw, a missionary educator who founded a boarding school for African girls at Mbereshi in modern Zambia’s Luapula province at the inception of the 20th century, perceived her former schoolgirls who jettisoned mission-inspired clothes and took to wearing modern apparel in the mine compounds of the Copperbelt as relapsed Christians who had reverted to worldliness. The missionary held that this situation was a consequence of the girls’ urbanisation on the Copperbelt, an area she dismissed as a profane space that induced individualism, materialism and secularism in Africans. This article, based chiefly on Mabel Shaw’s own writings, oral interviews and short life histories of ex-Mbereshi pupils, questions her perceptions. Informed by academic scholarship that explores the myriad ways in which colonial subjects subverted imperial and missionary cultural projects and highlights connections between religion and material consumption, I suggest that Shaw’s former schoolgirls in the Copperbelt embraced stylish apparel to express Christian modernity and to lay claim to social respectability and church leadership.

Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms

Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms

Reconstructing cinematic activities in the early twentieth century: Gold Coast (Ghana)

In the history of African cinema, there is a nexus between films and the colonial imperial project. That is, products of cinema and cinematic practices shaped the process of colonialism in the specific case of Africa. Predicated largely on archival documents, this study explores how cinema was regulated in the major towns and cities in the Gold Coast during the colonial era. Ghanaian cinema has a considerably long historical narrative, however, much of what is known about the history of cinema in Ghana, particularly, on film screening, censorship and exhibition practices, is rather little. Thus, it is with this gap that this study attempts to fill and make a useful contribution to Ghanaian film history. The colonial experience set the basis for cinematic houses, film production, censorship, distribution and ideological concerns in African cinema. This study is framed within the relationship between cinema and history, with a specific focus on Ghana. This article concludes that while film exhibition, censorship and licensing stimulated the growth of art, particularly cinema, they further inflated the colonial imperial agenda in the Gold Coast.

“Ameliorating the Situation” of Empire: Slavery and Abolition in The Woman of Colour

In this essay, I examine how The Woman of Colour (1808) extends from the ameliorative context of the British slavery debates that were about reforming imperial rule overseas in the wake of the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade. By thinking alongside the work of Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents, I argue that The Woman of Colour abstracts plantation slavery while positioning the protagonist Olivia Fairfield, a mixed-race heiress of a Jamaican plantation, as a figure of British imperial tutelage. The abstraction manifests through Dido, a secondary character whose relationship to Olivia is ambiguously presented to readers. Although the representation of Dido is akin to the grateful slave trope, the novel represents her as a dedicated servant to Olivia, implying that their relationship is benign and harmonious. By turning to Dido’s characterization and the pedagogical objectives of the novel, I identify a liberal imperial project in The Woman of Colour: the novel envisions a paternalistic notion of emancipation in Jamaica while remaining heavily invested in colonial governance of Black people.

Berry, Helen. Orphans of Empire: The Fate of London’s Foundlings.

Berry, Helen. <i>Orphans of Empire: The Fate of London’s Foundlings</i>.

Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital by Zach Sell

Reviewed by: Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital by Zach Sell Peter A. Coclanis (bio) Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital. By Zach Sell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 340. $95.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; $22.99 ebook) The topics of slavery, empire, and capital all command a great deal of attention in scholarly circles, and Zach Sell hits the trifecta, connecting all three in his ambitious, smart, provocative, sometimes frustrating first book. Sell's principal goal in Trouble of the World is to embed U.S. slavery in the context of the expansion and elaboration of Western-led global capitalism in the nineteenth century. In pursuit of this goal, the author perforce takes readers all over the world, albeit often via curious, circuitous routes. Drawing heavily upon Marx and a variety of Marxist and marxisant theorists ranging from Du Bois to Ranajit Guha and from Eric Williams to principals affiliated with the "New History of American Capitalism" movement, Sell argues that enslaved African American laborers and expropriated Native American land were crucial not only to the economic development of the United States but also to early industrialization in Great Britain. More specifically, ill-begotten profits associated with the production for export of slave-grown agricultural staples—cotton, rice, indigo, sugar, etc.—helped establish and sustain British industry and "inspired new hallucinatory imperial visions of colonial domination that took root from the Atlantic world to Asia and the Pacific" (p. 1). In Trouble of the World, Sell splits his time between the generation of said profits and the "hallucinatory" visions they encouraged. In nineteenth-century southern agriculture, cotton, of course, served as primus inter pares, accounting for the largest share of U.S. exports and serving as the key raw material in textiles manufacturing, Britain's leading industry. Indeed, the economic importance of cotton to Britain was sufficiently great, according to Sell, as to motivate various and sundry imperial projects to develop and secure supply sources other than the U.S. South, which projects, not surprisingly, gained momentum with the supply disruptions occasioned by the [End Page 79] American Civil War. The author devotes considerable attention in Trouble of the World to such projects, most of them evanescent and inconsequential. He notes similarly conceived colonial projects intended to secure Asian supply sources for other important slave-produced agricultural exports from the U.S. South, most notably indigo and rice. Besides their impracticality and disappointing results, these colonial projects—in India, Australia, and British Honduras (Belize) among other places—shared characteristics the author believes were intrinsic to global capitalism during its nineteenth century rise to power: land expropriation, labor coercion and exploitation, racial domination, gross inequality, and violent depredation. Trouble of the World marks the debut of a talented historian, a scholar of uncommon breadth and an impressive command of both theoretical work and historical studies critical of capitalism. This said, for several reasons Sell's book is less successful than it could—and perhaps should—have been. First, it fails to engage or even reflect familiarity with alternative views on the southern economy, the rise of industry in Great Britain, the global expansion of capitalism in the nineteenth century, etc. Secondly, the author makes his case against capitalism with rhetorical flourish but without much analytical rigor, and almost no measurement or quantification. Thirdly, Trouble of the World is rather thin empirically, particularly the author's chapters on indigo and rice. In the case of indigo, Sell misdates and misinterprets the reasons for the collapse of the U.S. industry and neglects important American exporters in the period between his coverage of South Carolina/Georgia and India, most notably, Guatemala, but also, for a time, Brazil. Regarding rice, the author misunderstands the nature of the European market for rice, which was essentially a commodity market by the mid-nineteenth century, privileging low price rather than perceived quality, and does not seem cognizant of the fact that total U.S. rice exports (as well as exports to Europe in particular) were lower in the 1850s than they were in the 1790s and that cheap Asian...

Imperialism and Indexing: The Case of Julius O. Kaiser's Systematic Indexing

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time when a number of pioneering knowledge organization systems (KOSs) originated. They were also a time when various forms of imperialism influenced social, political, and economic life in the countries where these KOSs were developed. Adopting a case study approach, this paper examines the influence of imperialism on one pioneering KOS of this period – Julius Otto Kaiser’s method of Systematic Indexing (SI). The study describes the institutional milieux in which Kaiser originated SI and gave it its canonical form – the Philadelphia Commercial Museum (PCM) and the Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Commission (TC). Evidence is presented to show that both institutions were involved in projects of economic imperialism and that these projects affected their knowledge organization (KO) practices. Then follows an examination of the semantic content and syntactic structure of SI for traces of imperialist influence. Analysis reveals that most traces of imperialist thought in the semantic content of SI occur in its treatment of countries as subjects and that this treatment does not differ significantly from that found in other contemporary KOSs. Evidence is presented that the syntactic structure of complex subject headings in SI was influenced by KO practices at the PCM, which were animated by the economic imperialist assumptions, but that similar structures can be found in another contemporary KOS with no manifest ties to imperialism. It is concluded that the motivations for certain semantic elements of SI reflect by imperialist presuppositions but that its syntactic features are not uniquely or inherently associated with imperialist ideology. Depending upon the analytical perspective that one adopts, then, SI both is and – paradoxically – is not an imperialist KOS.

No “Little Saigon” in L.A.

Starting in 1975, Los Angeles attracted what would become, within a decade, the largest concentration of resettled Vietnamese refugees in the United States. A combination of legacies led to the concentration of Vietnamese in Los Angeles: decades of U.S. involvement in Vietnam; Cold War foreign policy; domestic urban planning; and public housing policies born of the city’s history of racial segregation. These structural forces also drew many other immigrant groups to Los Angeles during the same period, as Koreans, Thais, Mexicans, and Central Americans likewise concentrated in L.A., each developing their own distinctive enclaves in the same districts and neighborhoods as the Vietnamese refugees. Refugee resettlement in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s meant that the Vietnamese benefited from services and institutions established earlier for prior immigrant and refugee groups who had made their way to L.A., but also competition and conflict over space, markets, services, and resources, as well as cross-cultural cooperation and convergence. However, unlike some other newcomer groups, Vietnamese refugees had access to specific government-funded resources and opportunities, in addition to personal, professional, and military-related connections, that stemmed from the United States’ decades-long imperialist project in Vietnam. This article examines the settlement and placemaking experiences of Vietnamese refugees among other immigrant groups—overlap, similarities, and differences—in Los Angeles in this era.

Media Post-coloniality and the Ethereal Persian ‘Empress’: How Hollywood Weaponized the Nostalgia of Exile

The osmosis between Iranian exile, Oriental repertoires, and the commodification of nostalgia in film and contemporary1 culture alludes to the Disney reproduction of the East that is capitalized by Hollywood’s invisible hand. The commodification of Orientalist logic via nostalgia of old civilization and Achaemenid grandeur is conveyed by Hamid Naficy’s (1991) reference to Edward Said’s (1978) ‘imaginary2 geography’—the inventive tool of narration that augments tales and anecdotes of exilic narratives, while heightening essentialism of the East. The European modeling of coronation, bejeweled scepters of royalty under the Pahlavi period (1941-1979), and cinematic repertoires of Iranians in film are perpetuated for viewers via fetishization, lust, and enchantment. The televised 1967 coronation of Queen Farah (b. 1938) solidified the trope of the Persian ‘Empress’ through picturesque markers of Achaemenid rulership (550-330 BCE). Media3 propagations of nostalgia in the paradisiacal Pahlavi coronation can be paralleled to current illusions of the Orient presented in the film Paterson (Jarmusch, 2016), starring exiled Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani. I refer to the Pahlavi coronation to expand on the spectacle of ‘nostalgia’, and the desire for a distant homeland. Naficy’s (1991) interpretation of ‘nostalgia’—a factor of exile, expounds how relics and objects induce a longing for the distant and ahistorical. Objects of nostalgia are inexplicably weaponized in Hollywood inventions of Near Eastern characters and serve as palpable symbols of the East via skewed representations of women, sexuality, and the exotic4 (Ahmed, 2006). Poetry, nostalgia, and fictional tales of the Orient in Paterson (Jarmusch, 2016) allude to Said’s (1978) vision of the imperialist project in Orientalism. The inventive and imaginary power of color media in the televised Pahlavi coronation and the fashioning of a politically permanent subject of interest—Iranians and the East, augured a pertinent era of media post-coloniality5 via the preservation of orientalism, rather than the Orient.

Empire remembered: the intimate economy of tea in Assam and the making of ‘Chameli Memsaab’

ABSTRACT This essay examines the complex intertwining of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities in the making of memories about the colonial past. The essay uses literature and cinema as archive and intersubjectivity as the lens to argue that memories of the Empire are culled in the complex intersection of the subjective experiences of the individual and a community's collective perceptions of the past and the present. Accordingly, the essay calls for due diligence to the immediate postcolonial context in which the colonial memory project is ordained. At a more elementary level, the essay argues that the reduction of colonial experiences to a conflictual negation of the imperialist project impairs our understanding of the myriad factors mediating the colonial encounter. The polysemy of colonial memories reflects the multiplicity of intersubjective exchanges within a community. In this case, the Assamese short story, ‘Chameli Memsaab', written by Nirode Choudhury, and describing the affection of a benign planter sahib for Chameli, a coolie woman, becomes our focal point for entry into the neglected domain of Assamese literary representations of the European planter, that put a gloss on the dark side of Plantation abuses in Assam, to project the plantation economy as a desirable addendum to the Raj. Our survey of short stories written in Assamese, in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, reveal a profoundly ambivalent attitude towards the unequal sexual exchange between the European sahib and the coolie woman, which we call ‘the intimate economy of tea’ in Assam, and which, as the coercive underside of the economy, denuded the production relations on the plantations of their putatively capitalist character.

World Literature in the World?

Abstract Criticized for being too Euro- and Americentric, world literature scholarship tends to center on the American implications of this shortcoming, with little discussion of world literature beyond these centers. This paper thus addresses the function of world literature beyond these centers, particularly in the lingua franca of global business: English. Drawing from my experience in the United Arab Emirates, I argue that because students in the region come from places with fraught colonial histories, migrant, Anglophone literature is critical in the world literature classroom because it allows them to see their own experiences articulated in the global literary vernacular. Using Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf as an example, I show how its transnational scope addresses both the hegemonic, Euro-American gaze, but also the students’. Thus, Anglophone literature is not necessarily the extension of an imperialist project or a flattening of differences; rather, it becomes an articulation of them.