Pre-colonial Past Research Articles

The beast that never forgot? Baboon conservation and the role of multispecies history

History and culture were long seen as definitionally human. As other distinctive traits that once defined our species as unique disappeared, at least we still had those two. But are we really the only species shaped by our pasts and who have cultures that change over time? This article explores animal cultures, the significance of history (and individual and group memory) in the survival of social animals and the role the discipline of History can play in conserving them. Haraway contends that people are “becoming with” other species and that these shared histories matter ethically. I argue that it is not only a matter of ethics but one of coexisting better with each other. By considering animals’ culture with a historical lens, we understand them better and adjust interactions with them. Human-wildlife connections can be fundamental to ecological assemblages rather than ancillary. Second, I show how human-animal history can push back into Deep History, also challenging static representations of human-animal relations in indigenous cultures or the pre-colonial past. Most importantly, I argue that other animals (especially social ones) have cultures themselves (neither static nor uniform) and that these can be reconstructed and used in conservation.

Changing the Frame: New Epistemic Frameworks and Social Transformation in African Feminist Theory

Abstract This article discusses African feminist approaches to decolonization and social transformation. In recent years, there has been a significant shift in African feminist scholarship towards African concerns and Africa-centered solutions. Today’s turn to Indigenous knowledge, social structures, and gender relations is no longer just about shedding light on the precolonial past, but about fundamentally changing the epistemic framework in the sense of developing alternative epistemologies beyond the dominant ‘Western’ framework. But what is meant by ‘alternative epistemologies’? How do African feminist thinkers conceptualize social change today? And how do they relate epistemic and social change in their thinking? These questions are explored in this article, focusing on work by Sylvia Tamale (Uganda), Wangari Maathai (Kenya), and Anthonia Kalu (Nigeria) and drawing on the discourse of ecofeminism and Ubuntu as two models of alternative epistemologies.

Decolonising archaeology in South Africa: two decades after the National Heritage Resources Act of 1999

Twenty-four years ago, the National Heritage Resources Act, No. 25 of 1999 (NHRA) was enacted in South Africa. This was a moment of change, when the heritage of those marginalised during the colonial and Apartheid eras would finally be given its rightful place on the national heritage list. There was a sense of optimism amongst politicians that the African past was finally to be recognised in an inclusive and representative future. This was echoed in archaeology, given its central role in uncovering and telling the story of precolonial South Africa. The discipline slowly opened its doors to academics of all ethnic groups and new perspectives were identified. But an examination of the practical consequences and impact of this progressive legislation for transforming officially declared heritage in the past 24 years shows surprisingly little change in the overall body of recognized, listed heritage. Recent studies of transformation in South African archaeology have focussed on institutional transformation; possible transformation of the types and frequency of sites declared as national and provincial heritage sites has not yet been examined. It is this issue which our paper addresses. The paper presents analysis that relies on the South African Heritage Resources Information System (SAHRIS) database covering the period 1936 to mid-2022. Whilst sites associated with European colonialism still predominate, there has been a change in the frequency of types of heritage declared since 1999, with an increase in sites associated with the Black liberation struggle. Yet the list remains very unbalanced, with only a single heritage site connected to the precolonial past of Black South Africans having been declared as a national heritage site since 1999. We discuss and classify the types of heritage declared since 1999 and suggest reasons for the distortion.

“Qayṣar-i Hindūstān Vīktūriyā”: Negotiating Loyalty in Late Nineteenth-Century Parsi Laudatory Verse

To mark Queen Victoria's jubilee celebrations, many Indian authors composed laudatory literature and music in their vernacular languages. Although these works were often dismissed as “enthusiastic effusions” from poets of dubious ability, they offer intricate examples of the varied meanings the queen's presence had for Indian writers. They illustrate the subtle manipulation of laudatory verse for purposes other than praise; and they frequently offer instances of sophisticated, multilingual intertextuality and reuses of literary traditions of praise (and subversion) in India's precolonial past. This article examines examples of Persianate laudatory writing produced by three Parsi writers in colonial India and demonstrates how these works performed “loyalty” in contested, ambivalent ways.

Decolonizing the Discourse of Coloniability from the Algerian Intellectual Mind: Coping with Algeria Pre-colonial Past

Decolonizing the Discourse of Coloniability from the Algerian Intellectual Mind: Coping with Algeria Pre-colonial Past

An Essay on Historiography: Some Recent Writings on Assimilation and Antagonism in Pre-Modern India

Scholars of the subcontinent have abided by colonial paradigms too long. We have accepted the incredibly racist stereotype that the pre colonial past was a static country and was interrupted only by a succession of essentially similar empires – all we had were wars and gods until the British taught us to be liberal individuals in a modern world. Therefore, we need to write histories not only of the present, but histories that investigate the silences and distortions that make our present possible. All the writings discussed herein seek to restore a protean past, filled with possibilities for different futures and multiple modes of being Indian; as several centuries of empire have failed to quell our irrepressible diversity.

Salt and the National Imaginary: The Photojournalism of the Dandi Satyagraha

This article looks at how Gandhi used the Dandi Salt Satyagraha as a site for imagining anti-colonial nationalism. We focus on the visual dimensions of the Salt March and the divergent ways in which it was reported in the illustrated press in 1930. Developing Sumathi Ramaswamy’s idea of the ‘ambulatory aesthetic’ (2020), we highlight how Gandhi created a personified protest. Moreover, he chose salt as a talismanic object, ubiquitous both temporally, back through India’s colonial and pre-colonial past, and laterally, bridging religious identities but also illuminating class distinctions. We also describe how Gandhi’s curated defiance was deliberately mutated and muted by the British, initially by way of censorship, but mostly through using biased visual newspaper and magazine reportage of their own in order to marginalise Gandhi and the salt marchers.

The Legacy of Vaiṣṇavism in Colonial Bengal. Edited by Ferdinando Sardella and Lucian Wong

A Bengali proverb says that there cannot be any song, without Kṛṣṇa (Kānu bine gān nāi). In a historical and cultural region that is so relevant for the study of Tantric Yogic traditions, Goddess cults, and South Asian Islam, even devotion to Śakti and the life of Prophet Muhammad are impregnated by Vaiṣṇava tropes and aesthetic sensibilities. The literary history of, and intellectual debates on the love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa in Bengal are not only indispensable to understand Kṛṣṇa bhakti in its transnational and global declensions, but also to appreciate their pervasive aesthetic and affective influence across regions and religions. For these and many other reasons, The Legacy of Vaiṣṇavism in Colonial Bengal, based on a 2015 workshop held at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, is a welcome contribution. It comprises eleven chapters discussing not only the complicated trajectories of Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal, but also the legacy of colonialism in the taste and ethical regime of new Vaiṣṇava agents, communities, and institutions. The so-called revival of Vaiṣṇava devotionalism initiated by Caitanya (1486–1534) and his followers gave way to multiple religious orientations and contrasting interpretations. This edited volume does not give readers the illusion of a standardised phenomenon that might be unequivocally called Bengali Vaiṣṇavism. Rather, it takes into account a variety of textual traditions and life stories to include various Vaiṣṇavism-s, differently transmitted, practiced, and embodied by diverse communities. The introduction by Ferdinando Sardella and Lucian Wong suggests that much research in this area assumed that modern manifestations constitute a rupture from the precolonial past, induced by the influence of Western education and Christian ideas. They argue instead that pre-existing Hindu sampradayic currents continued to play significant roles throughout the colonial period. Therefore, providing us with a fruitful path for future research, they suggest that explorations of the legacy of sampradayic Hindu streams in colonial South Asia can offer a richer picture of religious life than that afforded by analyses that rely on the ‘Renaissance paradigm’ (pp. 5–6).

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

«БРЕМЯ НЕБЕЛОГО ЧЕЛОВЕКА»: КОЛОНИАЛЬНОЕ ПРОШЛОЕ И ПОИСК НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЙ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ В МНОГОПОЛЯРНОМ МИРЕ

The colonial past continues to play a significant role in the national consciousness of Indian politicians as well as leaders of Western countries who seek to maintain the status quo in bilateral relations with India. By critically reflecting on the remnants of the period of colonialism the Indian political elite develops its own sense of national identity rather than fall for the one ‘invented’ by the Europeans. Instead of ‘mimicking’ Western categories of democracy and freedom, the Modi government defends its vision of the spiritual and cultural development of society in the subcontinent based on traditions and values from the pre-colonial past. It is for these reasons that US attempts to return India to its orbit through global “summits of democracies” and calls for joint defense of the ideals of freedom and human rights were unsuccessful, since they are perceived as alien in the subcontinent

Writing Back to the Imperial Canon : Hybridity and Resistance in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest

Négritude, as the social movement initiated by Francophone colonial writers and intellectuals in the 1930s, sought to debunk the longstanding myth of ‘blackness’ that had been invented and propagated in order to justify the histories of slave trade and colonial rule. Though Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, the co-founders of Négritude, shared the agenda of decolonizing the mind and rebuilding black consciousness, their means to achieve it were not identical. While one had nostalgia for a ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ African culture of the pre-colonial past, the other accepted the given condition of colonial hybridity as a point of departure for anticolonial resistance. This essay examines how Césaire put his political theory of Négritude into literary practice in A Tempest, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s colonial romance The Tempest. For Césaire, Shakespeare was not simply the Bard of English literature but also an icon of Western cultural hegemony that served to rationalize the unequal power relations between colonizer and colonized. Césaire’s writing back to the representative Western canon from an Afro-Caribbean perspective had both aesthetic and ideological purpose. By making ‘the imperial canon’ a site of intercultural dialogue, by using the English text and the French language in the non-European context, Césaire suggested that appropriation as well as rejection can be a means of cultural resistance. Further, Césaire’s challenging experiment in A Tempest provided a viable model of cultural hybridity for his succeeding postcolonial critics like Frants Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha.

READING CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART AS A POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL

Postcolonial Literature is a body of literary writings that react to the discourse of colonization. It is written by natives of formerly colonized countries. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is an African novel set in the precolonial past. It was written in the 1950s when the colonial rule in many African countries began to collapse. Through this novel Achebe intends to prepare the natives of colonized countries for self-rule by making them realize that Africans did not learn to be civilized from their colonizers, they had their way of life before everything was snatched away from them. This paper attempts to highlight the indigenous culture of the Igbo community before colonization as depicted in the novel and the effects of colonization on the people. This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, we will look at the cultural aspects of the precolonial Igbo community, and in the second part, we will look at the beginning of colonization in Igboland and its adverse impacts on people.

‘The word’s challenging opposite’: the visual language of Lorcan Walshe’s The Artefacts Project and Museum Pieces

The work of Dublin-based painter Lorcan Walshe is particularly concerned with the relationship between inscription in its broadest sense and the visual image. His two related series, The Artefacts Project (2007) and Museum Pieces (2008), engage with Ireland’s precolonial past in search of personal artistic, as well as broader cultural, roots during a period when national narratives were being challenged and reconfigured as a result of an increasingly diverse Irish society. The Artefacts Project and Museum Pieces reflect on whether the art of the precolonial past can still be read in a meaningful way in a postcolonial present in which Ireland finds itself part of a globalized world. Reaching across the chasm of history, Walshe’s works emphasize that our reading of the past must always involve an act of translation in order to retain significance in the present: the meaning of the artefact is created anew as it is translated not only from one historical moment into another, but also from one artistic medium into another. This article argues that Walshe’s The Artefacts Project and Museum Pieces question the hierarchical division between writing and the visual image by reading the artefacts of Ireland’s past as visual texts. In this context, drawing and painting themselves emerge as forms of inscription that are part of the process of reading and acts of translation. As a result, the artefact becomes a palimpsest of translations and inscriptions.

DECOLONISATION IN AFRICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT

In essence, African political thought evolved as a result of colonialism and the anti-colonial reactions of first-order African elites. The debate among the episodic and the epochal school of thought over the place of colonialism in African political thought suggests that it took colonialism to inform the people of the continent that they were Africans. Also that Africa had a glorious pre-colonial past. It offered the diverse peoples of the continent a rallying point for unity. This unity was the basis of the anti-colonial reactions especially in the decade before political independence in Africa. This work attempts to examine the origin of African political thought, and the decolonization process in selected regions of the continent namely North-West Africa (Tunisia and Morocco) and British West-Africa. The main source of data collection depends on secondary materials

Decolonizing African history: Authenticité, cosmopolitanism and knowledge production in Zaire, 1971–1975

ABSTRACT This article analyses the social and intellectual dynamisms of the Lubumbashi campus of the Université Nationale du Zaïre in the 1970s. It first highlights how Lubumbashi scholars participated in an early post-colonial attempt to radically transform the university’s teaching, research and operations, at the crossroads of intellectual decolonization and cosmopolitanism. These efforts both overlapped and clashed with the official Zairian policy of Authenticité, a politically tinged reappraisal of the country’s precolonial past. The article contributes to our limited knowledge of everyday life under Mobutu and of vernacular experiences of Authenticité, while highlighting Lubumbashi as an important node in the post-independence intellectual networks.

Indigenizing Philosophy on Stolen Lands: A Worry about Settler Philosophical Guardianship

Indigenizing Philosophy on Stolen Lands: A Worry about Settler Philosophical Guardianship

To an Alien Mecca: Durban Port and its Waterfronts before 1914


 Between 1860 and 1914, three to four million people passed along Durban’s waterfronts, most travelling to or from an industrialising hinterland that a colonial gatekeeper called a ‘Mecca for aliens.’ This article explores mass migration through Durban and the changes the phenomenon brought to the social world and built environments around the lagoon that forms today’s large container port. Using Immigration, Harbour Department and Water Police archives, it shows how the lagoon, until the mid-nineteenth century an obscure outlier in the Indian Ocean World, became deeply integrated with processes simultaneously underway across much of maritime Asia. After an introduction that places colonial Durban alongside the wider changes common to many Indian-Ocean ports, we set the scene with an overview of the lagoon’s deep precolonial past. The core argument then moves through several phases. First, economic and technological developments from the 1850s, designed to inflate cargo capacity, also intensified transoceanic migrant traffic. This generated a rich cultural heterogeneity on the lagoon’s fringes. Second, mass migration fueled a backlash among colonial authorities, who built an elaborate architecture of detention and surveillance around the inner shore. Third, some migrants subverted the new order by ‘jumping ship’ in creative ways, ensuring the waterfronts remained, for a time, unruly heterotopia. In these ways, Durban became a characteristic Indian Ocean port city. But Durban authorities introduced an unusual element: to the north they created a recreational beachfront for settler elites. This ultimately reorientated the city’s waterfront away from the lagoon to the open ocean, casting the former’s social history into the shadows.

ORAL DISTILLATES AND POSTCOLONIAL TEMPER IN ADEMOLA DASYLVA’S SONGS OF ODAMOLUGBE

This paper engages the self-validating domain of orality as a valuable and potent field in the depiction of postcolonial Africa, in particular Nigeria. The paper accounts for orality as the authentic core of the mode of self-assertion, continued self-existence and the consistent (re)validation of how traditional societies structured their worldviews and cultural aesthetics. It argues that African writers still utilise the aesthetic provisions that their oral backcloth and oral past provide in the identification, (re)appraisal and the representation of the postcolonial situation in Africa. Engaging Ademola Dasylva’s Songs of Odamolugbe as primary text and data, the paper examines and explores features of Yoruba oral poetry and allied aggregates that the Yoruba traditional culture offers. This is clearly realized and apprehended in the crafting of the collection of poems and the overarching thematic foci and direction. These representations are captured within two extremes. Employing insights from postcolonial literary theory in its critique of the primary text, the paper situates the enervating frustrations, collapse of industry, economic inanities, atmosphere of fear, tensions, widespread underdevelopment, neocolonial excesses, prevalent hunger, deep-seated corruption and a general apathy to life and living as daily experienced in postcolonial Africa and Nigeria. As part of its finding, the paper attests that Dasylva’s Songs of Odamolugbe relishes a completed precolonial past where African communities maintained a communal cultural ownership of their existence and presided over their own affairs. It concludes that the poetry collection decries and rejects the morbid realities that characterize the postcolonial African experience.

Is Transsexualism Chronic?

Is Transsexualism Chronic? Cassius Adair (bio) Chronic: 1. Of or relating to time; chronological. Obsolete. 2. a. Of diseases, etc.: Lasting a long time, long-continued, lingering, inveterate; opposed to acute. b. So with invalid, and the like. 3. transf. Continuous, constant. Used colloquially as a vague expression of disapproval: bad, intense, severe, objectionable; also something chronic adverbial phrase, severely, badly. —Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition1 Problem List: Noted–Resolved Transsexualism Female to male (Chronic) 11/28/2011–Present —Author’s medical diagnosis, University of Michigan Health System in 2011, i was diagnosed with chronic transsexualism. The doctor did not actually term it ”chronic transsexualism.” It was a diagnosis of ”transsexualism” with a duration marked as ”chronic.” Such a diagnosis sounded dated even at that time. The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (dsm-iv), which was current then, used ”gender identity disorder” as the recommended phrasing for the psychological diagnosis.2 But I, an angry and recalcitrant transsexual, had [End Page 475] demanded to go directly to a hormone-prescribing physician rather than follow the therapeutic steps recommended by the university’s ”comprehensive” gender clinic. So, instead, a doctor gave me a medical diagnosis.3 As such, the language in my chart is not from the dsm but from the doctor’s handbook, the tenth edition of the International Classification of Diseases (icd-10), in which ”transsexualism” was then, and was until 2022, classified as a disease.4 My case of ”chronic” transsexualism eventually cleared up. In 2015, the mention of ”transsexualism, chronic” was dropped from my electronic medical records and replaced by the updated dsm-v diagnosis ”gender dysphoria in adult.”5 Yet, I still take pleasure in identifying as a chronic transsexual. I like the colloquial use of ”chronic” to imply intensity as well as duration, a usage that dates back to the nineteenth century but was later popularized by stoners and surfers like those who populated my teenage landscape. As in, ”this case of transsexualism is chronic, man.” And, like many trans people, I have adopted the term transsexual as a source of perverse pleasure, a disruptive label to use among friends.6 In this essay, therefore, I sometimes use transsexual as a synonym for trans. This pokes fun at those who wrongly see transsexual as some definitive and superior form of gender variance; it also acknowledges the extent to which transsexual, as a hegemonic framing of transness, undergirds the rhetoric of trans life in the United States. The word transsexual shocks cis people, who are just coming around to the language of transgender and may worry about saying the wrong thing. Finally, the phrase ”chronic transsexualism” feels comical, indexing the fantasy of a transness that stretches cleanly across one’s lifespan like a single, straightened thread. [End Page 476] What, then, do we do with the fact that many trans people, myself included, experience transness as having multiple temporalities, more like a tangle of knots than a continuous line? My own diagnostic history is simply one instance in a long history of trouble with trans genders and their temporality. Both in critical theory and in popular culture, the evocation of before-and-after, of abrupt somatic change, lashes trans subjects to the fate of representing something essential about time. Jack Halberstam, for instance, points out that the transgender body has been invoked to represent ”futurity itself,” positioned as an object of postmodern fascination and consumer transgression.7 Yet, to assert that transness is a form of futurity assumes a fundamentally Western conception of modernity, one indistinguishable from colonial temporality. For example, writer b. binaohan asserts a bakla identity that is neither located in a static precolonial past nor mappable onto a Western notion of ”trans” womanhood. ”What bakla are now and what we once were,” binaohan writes, ”are so wildly divergent that even though I know my own heritage, it still requires considerable effort to access the actual history of my gender, rather than the white lies.”8 White trans discourse’s attempts to write bakla into a hypothetical ”trans” temporality — either as the ”past” of modern transness or as one expression of its contemporary transnationality — ignores the extent to which bakla...

Coloniality and its Future

Decoloniality emerged in the last two decades as a new mode of critique against colonialism and coloniality. While its insights are inspired by dependency and postcolonial theories, decoloniality challenges them both, particularly their inability to depart with modern Western epistemology. Written in response to Arjun Appadurai's recent critique of On Decoloniality by Catherine E. Walsh and Walter D. Mignolo, this article attempts to articulate decoloniality's approach to epistemology and discourse analysis. Whereas Appadurai describes Walsh and Mignolo's position as an anachronistic attempt to "return to the precolonial past," this article underlines his inability to transcend the modern linear order of time.