Colonial Question Research Articles

The Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question in Spanish America.

The idea that Spanish American countries experienced colonialism was well accepted for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The independence movements in the early nineteenth century were viewed as the result of struggles by oppressed nations against the metropole's tyranny. Recent historiography views the collapse of the monarchy as the result of the political and legal crisis brought about by the Napoleonic invasion and the illegal abdications in Bayonne in March 1808. Colonial and post-colonial theories and categories have been brought under scrutiny. The following pages sketch the historiographical and theoretical grounds and consequences of this paradigm shift.

AlterNotes on the Politics of Women's Studies Graduate Certificates

298 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Priti Ramamurthy AlterNotes on the Politics of Women’s Studies Graduate Certificates Jennifer Nash’s “Feminist Credentials: Notes on the Politics of Women ’s Studies Graduate Certificates,” published in this same issue of Feminist Studies, provokes a crucial, if difficult, conversation about graduate certificates in women’s studies.1 Nash asks us to question the value of graduate certificates in two registers: first, if the certificate is valuable to those doing PhDs in the disciplines—as professional certification in feminist theory and interdisciplinarity—is women’s studies reproducing its own discounting by continuing to privilege disciplinary formations? And, second, in the highly constrained job market for academic jobs in women’s studies, do those with graduate certificates in women’s studies and PhDs in the disciplines compete with women’s studies PhDs, thereby undercutting the latter’s distinction and chances of getting academic jobs in the very field in which they have been trained? Nash makes it clear that she is not suggesting the graduate certificate be eliminated, nor that only women’s studies PhDs be hired for women’s studies jobs, but rather that this predicament is an effect of the corporatization of the university. To elaborate on the nuance in Nash’s argument and not reproduce the logic of supply and demand that the neoliberal university is producing, I’d like to raise other aporias in the relationship between graduate certificates and PhD education and point to alternate possibilities. 1. In keeping with Nash’s essay, I am using the term “women’s studies” throughout this alternote as well. Priti Ramamurthy 299 The fiscal realities in favor of the graduate certificate in women’s studies highlighted by Nash are all too real. An additional reality is that graduate certificate students subtend women’s studies PhD programs in vital ways. In terms of course offerings, graduate students in certificate programs take a mix of core and elective classes. Given the very small size of most incoming women’s studies PhD student cohorts, without graduate certificate students in women’s studies, departments would be hard pressed to justify offering core and elective courses. For women’s studies faculty, the opportunity to teach not just core but elective courses that draw on their areas or sub-fields of expertise is enabled by graduate certificate students taking their courses. For women’s studies PhD students, this provides a larger range of elective courses to choose from. Many graduate certificate students shape their doctoral projects deeply with the knowledges they get from the certificate courses. Beyond the courses they are required to take, graduate certificate students often continue to work with women’s studies faculty and invite them to serve on their PhD committees. On the one hand, we may posit, as Nash does, that women’s studies faculty thereby service students in other disciplines, but on the other hand, the feminist knowledge produced in the process is exciting and valuable for not just their disciplines but for women’s studies. Departments such as history, geography, and anthropology may have a large cohort of feminist scholars, but graduate certificate students still seek out feminist scholars in women’s studies for their sub-discipline or area studies, and for methodological and/ or theoretical expertise. Unfortunately, many disciplinary and interdisciplinary departments still lack feminist scholars, and in these departments graduate certificate students make important feminist interventions through their doctoral research. To take a recent example, Karin Eriksson, a doctoral student in Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington, was transformed by her GWSS graduate certificate coursework in women of color, indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms , queer studies, and feminist epistemologies. She is questioning why her department does not offer a single course on settler colonialism and Sámi ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies. Her doctoral work, in close collaboration with Sámi indigenous and feminist activists and communities in Sweden, will address questions of settler colonialism . Not only does Scandinavian studies get transformed in the process, but so does women’s studies, especially our own doctoral program and 300 Priti Ramamurthy the students in it who had not engaged with the unique feminist issues raised...

AlterNotes on the Politics of Women's Studies Graduate Certificates

298 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Priti Ramamurthy AlterNotes on the Politics of Women’s Studies Graduate Certificates Jennifer Nash’s “Feminist Credentials: Notes on the Politics of Women ’s Studies Graduate Certificates,” published in this same issue of Feminist Studies, provokes a crucial, if difficult, conversation about graduate certificates in women’s studies.1 Nash asks us to question the value of graduate certificates in two registers: first, if the certificate is valuable to those doing PhDs in the disciplines—as professional certification in feminist theory and interdisciplinarity—is women’s studies reproducing its own discounting by continuing to privilege disciplinary formations? And, second, in the highly constrained job market for academic jobs in women’s studies, do those with graduate certificates in women’s studies and PhDs in the disciplines compete with women’s studies PhDs, thereby undercutting the latter’s distinction and chances of getting academic jobs in the very field in which they have been trained? Nash makes it clear that she is not suggesting the graduate certificate be eliminated, nor that only women’s studies PhDs be hired for women’s studies jobs, but rather that this predicament is an effect of the corporatization of the university. To elaborate on the nuance in Nash’s argument and not reproduce the logic of supply and demand that the neoliberal university is producing, I’d like to raise other aporias in the relationship between graduate certificates and PhD education and point to alternate possibilities. 1. In keeping with Nash’s essay, I am using the term “women’s studies” throughout this alternote as well. Priti Ramamurthy 299 The fiscal realities in favor of the graduate certificate in women’s studies highlighted by Nash are all too real. An additional reality is that graduate certificate students subtend women’s studies PhD programs in vital ways. In terms of course offerings, graduate students in certificate programs take a mix of core and elective classes. Given the very small size of most incoming women’s studies PhD student cohorts, without graduate certificate students in women’s studies, departments would be hard pressed to justify offering core and elective courses. For women’s studies faculty, the opportunity to teach not just core but elective courses that draw on their areas or sub-fields of expertise is enabled by graduate certificate students taking their courses. For women’s studies PhD students, this provides a larger range of elective courses to choose from. Many graduate certificate students shape their doctoral projects deeply with the knowledges they get from the certificate courses. Beyond the courses they are required to take, graduate certificate students often continue to work with women’s studies faculty and invite them to serve on their PhD committees. On the one hand, we may posit, as Nash does, that women’s studies faculty thereby service students in other disciplines, but on the other hand, the feminist knowledge produced in the process is exciting and valuable for not just their disciplines but for women’s studies. Departments such as history, geography, and anthropology may have a large cohort of feminist scholars, but graduate certificate students still seek out feminist scholars in women’s studies for their sub-discipline or area studies, and for methodological and/ or theoretical expertise. Unfortunately, many disciplinary and interdisciplinary departments still lack feminist scholars, and in these departments graduate certificate students make important feminist interventions through their doctoral research. To take a recent example, Karin Eriksson, a doctoral student in Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington, was transformed by her GWSS graduate certificate coursework in women of color, indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms , queer studies, and feminist epistemologies. She is questioning why her department does not offer a single course on settler colonialism and Sámi ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies. Her doctoral work, in close collaboration with Sámi indigenous and feminist activists and communities in Sweden, will address questions of settler colonialism . Not only does Scandinavian studies get transformed in the process, but so does women’s studies, especially our own doctoral program and 300 Priti Ramamurthy the students in it who had not engaged with the unique feminist issues raised...

Religion and Violence in Early America

Religion and Violence in Early America Rebecca Anne Goetz (bio) Susan Juster. Sacred Violence in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. xiii + 267 pp. Notes and index. Cloth: $59.95 Thomas S. Kidd. American Colonial History: Clashing Cultures and Faiths. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. xiii + 329 pp. Figures, documents, notes, and index. Paper: $20.00 In my office I keep a curious material artifact of American religious history—a Jim Beam whiskey bottle from 1973 in the shape of Hannah Duston. The bottle's dress slips off her shoulders and her hair flows down her back (very unpuritan attributes). In one hand she holds a hatchet; in the other, a fistful of bloody blots representing the scalps of three Abenaki women, one Abenaki man, and six Abenaki children she murdered in 1697. The bottle's base conveniently contains a brief history lesson: "First woman honored by a statue in the United States—1874 Led Massacre & scalping of ten Indians at Boscawen, New Hampshire, & escaped back to her Haverhill, Mass. family." A war party captured the recently postpartum Duston and her midwife Mary Neff, killing her newborn infant and marching them towards French territory to the north. Once most of the men had departed, Duston, Neff, and another English captive named Samuel Lennardson murdered most of their captors, scalped them, and headed back to Massachusetts Bay to collect a £50 bounty on Native body parts. Cotton Mather honored her with a sermon in which he praised Duston's murderous rampage as "the action of Jael upon Sisera." The Biblical Jael murdered her enemy Sisera by driving a tent peg through his cranium, a tale related in the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges. Mather further reflected that "[i]f we did now Humble ourselves throughout the Land, who can say whether the Revenges on the Enemy, thus Exemplified [by Duston's acts] would not proceed much rather into the Quick Extirpation, of those Bloody and Crafty men."1 Mather did not expound upon how the killing of children in any way related to the killing of Sisera, although most historians believe that the Abenaki children, like Sisera, were asleep when Duston killed them. In the late seventeenth century, Mather and his congregation understood [End Page 1] Hannah Duston's exploits were the slaughter of a puritan holy war, one that envisioned the wholesale annihilation of Native people. Later representations of Duston's actions emphasized her act as that of a mother. The poet and folklorist John Greenleaf Whittier wrote about Duston in 1831: "Blow followed blow, until ten out of twelve, the whole number of the savages, were stiffening in blood. One escaped with a dreadful wound. The last—a small boy—still slept amidst the scene of carnage. Mrs. Duston lifted her dripping hatchet above his head, but hesitated to strike the blow. 'It is a poor boy,' she said, mentally, 'a poor child, and perhaps he has a mother!' The thought of her own children rushed upon her mind, and she spared him."2 It took some imagination to see Duston's murder of ten people as an act of motherly mercy, but Whittier managed it. In the early twenty-first century, we are perhaps slightly less sanguine about her. While Duston has had no shortage of commemorations, ranging from the 1874 statue to elementary schools and health centers, the Hannah Duston bobblehead introduced for sale at the New Hampshire Historical Society in 2008 was roundly criticized and eventually withdrawn. I read my whiskey bottle curio's celebratory optics as an expression of settler colonial heroism—one made in exceptionally poor taste. One acquaintance recently pronounced it "completely bonkers." Bonkers it might be, but it is a reflection of the long American love affair with religious violence. I use my whiskey bottle to introduce students to questions of settler colonialism, of religious belief, and of violence between Native people and settler populations. Yet Hannah Duston's murderous actions are not usually seen as a part of American religious history, despite Mather's direction connection of Duston's acts with those of the biblical heroine Jael. Even among specialists, our cherished exceptionalist narrative...

Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature

In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography,Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel,Siraaj: An Arab Tale,which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.

Negotiating Identity: Israel, Apartheid, and the United Nations, 1949–1952

Abstract Orthodox historiographies on Israel’s early policies in ‘black’ Africa and its relations with ‘white’ South Africa commonly, if disjointedly, assert that the state’s Jewish identity had played, in the early 1960s, a key role in Israel’s participation in the international ‘struggle against apartheid’. Revisiting this assertion, I examine Israel’s involvement in early United Nations debates on South Africa’s race policies. I trace the making of Israel’s position on South Africa’s treatment of persons of Indian origins in preparation for the 1950 General Assembly; present Israel’s voting praxis in that session; and demonstrate the persistence of both position and praxis in the 1952 Assembly session where apartheid first appeared on the UN agenda. Against the grain of existing accounts, I argue first that, on Africa, Israel’s multilateral diplomacy preceded its bilateral diplomacy; Israel’s encounter with Africa began not in the early 1960s but with its 1949 UN admission, compelling its envoys to vote and reflect on African and colonial questions, including apartheid. Secondly, I demonstrate that Israel approached apartheid with equivocation; at the UN, its diplomats devised and acted on a formula allowing them, in their words, ‘to have our cake and eat it’—even if, on the whole, Israel’s diplomatic praxis was far more progressive than that of Western states. Thirdly, I demonstrate how Jewish identity, constructed through the prism of Israel’s foundational ideology, affected such equivocation: it defined Israel’s dilemma on apartheid but, at the same time, also offered a route out of that conundrum. Finally, I illustrate that the elasticity of Jewish identity displayed by Israel’s envoys drew on sensibilities that were often formed in South Africa itself by their own previous encounters with racially-managed society and, later, with apartheid.

Inventing Postcolonial Elites: Race, Language, Mix, Excess

This article illustrates how semiotic processes that form and circulate ideologies about race, language, and the elite are central to questions of coloniality. Considering the historical and contemporary context of the Philippines, I examine how notions of linguistic and racial “mix” and “excess” get linked to elite social figures and how one elite figure in particular—the “conyo elite”—is reportedly heard and seen by a private school–educated listening subject that is constituted, in contrast, as “middle‐class elite.” I consider how iconizations of mixedness and excessiveness invent distinctions among Philippine elite types, producing an “elite bifurcation” that recursively constitutes colonial hierarchies: positioning conyo elites as acting as colonists whose supposedly mixed and excessive qualities are regarded as immoral, overly modern, and a national betrayal.

¿Negar o reescribir la Hispanidad? Los nacionalismos subestatales ibéricos y América Latina, 1898-1936

Buena parte de la discusión historiográfica acerca del proceso de construcción nacional en la España del siglo XIX ha girado alrededor de la cuestión de la débil nacionalización. Sin embargo, el hecho de que España haya sido un imperio ultramarino hasta 1898, y aun después de esta fecha siempre ha jugado un papel secundario en el debate. En este artículo, y desde una perspectiva que resalta el carácter transnacional de todo nacionalismo, se aborda un aspecto concreto de la interacción entre imperio y construcción nacional en la España de la primera mitad del siglo XX. ¿Hasta qué punto la evolución de la cuestión colonial en el Caribe y Filipinas influyó en el desarrollo del debate territorial entre centralización y descentralización en la España metropolitana?¿Hasta qué punto los emergentes regionalismos y nacionalismos subestatales ibéricos miraron hacia las colonias o las antiguas colonias españolas, qué aprendieron de sus experiencias, y qué relación aspiraban a mantener con esos territorios?

Material Connections: German Schools, Things, and Soft Power in Argentina and Chile from the 1880s through the Interwar Period

AbstractFrom the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the production and consumption of German things played critical roles in delineating and connecting a wide variety of German places in Latin America. Such places became ubiquitous in Chile and Argentina. They flourished because there was ample room in the German imagination for the multiplicity of German places and the cultural hybridity that accompanied them to extend beyond Imperial Germany's national boundaries and colonial possessions. They also flourished because host societies found virtue in having those German places in their states. This essay uses German schools in Argentina and Chile as a window into the emergence of such German places and the soft power that accompanied them. Scholars often overlook that power when they focus on colonial questions or formal and informal imperialism in Latin America. More than any other institution, German schools became sites where the production and consumption of German things were concentrated and multilayered, and where the consistencies and great varieties of Germanness that arrived and evolved in Latin America gained their clearest articulation. Because those schools were both centers of communities and nodes in a global pedagogical network that thrived during the interwar period, they provide us with great insight into a nexus of motivations that created German places in Latin America. Life around these schools also underscores the importance of studying immigrants and their things together.

The Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations and Portuguese overseas policy (1910–26)

Abstract The main goal of this article is to present the challenges for Portuguese colonial policy during the First Republic (1910–26), focusing on the international pressures against the survival of the Portuguese Empire. The article is divided into three parts: in the first we outline the state of the art regarding the questions to be raised. This is followed by an analysis of Portuguese colonial policy in the post-Versailles international context, particularly Afonso Costa’s negotiations for war reparations. In the third part, we examine particular aspects of the relationship between Portugal and the League of Nations in relation to colonial questions: namely, forced labour and the illicit trafficking of opium.

“Where does the Indian begin and where does it end?”: Legal-Criminal Categories in Peru, 1920s-1940s, and two Bolivian Cases from the 1940s*

Como tratar os Índios? Durante a primeira metade do Século 20, com a ascensão do indigenismo e sob a influência das ideias positivistas, esta antiga questão colonial reapareceu na América Latina no campo da legislação criminal. Uma grande parte do debate sobre o status legal dos criminosos indígenas girava em torno de quem exatamente seria o Índio que mereceria ou precisaria de um tratamento penal especial. Esta questão será examinada aqui, principalmente no contexto do Peru, onde o Código Penal de 1924 introduziu novas categorias legais de criminosos Indígenas, e também em duas propostas legislativas Bolivianas que procuraram adaptar a legislação criminal à “realidade Indígena” do seu país. As maneiras como estas categorias criminais foram interpretadas pelas cortes Peruanas, e reformuladas por diversas propostas legislativas Peruanas e Bolivianas, redesenharam as fronteiras interiores destas nações, e implicitamente redefiniram o termo “índio” em si mesmo. No contexto Peruano, elas também refletiram as mudanças do Indigenismo durante os anos 1920/1940.

Thinking ‘differently’ about a feminist critical geography of development

AbstractThis paper makes a case for grounding the global in feminist, anti‐racist, and post‐colonial scholarship in order to foreground questions of race, colonialism, and history in critical geographies of development. I argue that the process of ‘doing development’ involves the imposition of power; hence, geographers' critical engagements with development need to consider the intersectionality of gender, race, and ethnicity that comprises identities of the subjects of development and of those who ‘do development’. This consideration would entail questioning the homogeneity of ‘Third World women’ as a singular category in need of development and recognising the normativity of women from the global North who, so far, have been the ‘doers’ or the key actors in global interventions.

Decolonizing the ‘Global’: The Coloniality of Method and the Problem of the Unit of Analysis

What should ‘global’ stand for in order to qualify ‘historical sociology’ when it aspires to move beyond its Eurocentric foundations? The answer to this question lies in the ability to investigate the limits that Eurocentrism imposes on the possibility of reformulating the world as a unit of analysis, and simultaneously in tackling the centrality of the colonial question in methodological and epistemological terms, rather than exclusively in historical terms.

La condition (post)coloniale entre marxisme et psychanalyse : de l’entre-deux-guerres à 1950

Having emerged in Mitteleuropa, only at a later phase would psychoanalysis encounter the colonial question. Indeed it is in the texts of applied psychoanalysis written by Ernest Jones that we can locate the first applications of Freudian theory, in an analysis of the Irish question. This particular analysis would, by extension, come to operate as a more general point of view regarding the civilizing function of British imperialism, influencing a figure such as Owen Berkeley-Hill, co-founder of the Indian Society of Psychoanalysis. It was slightly later, between the 20s and the 40s of the last century, that a convergence between psychoanalysis and Marxism would emerge within the French surrealist movement, subsequently acquiring a new momentum during the 40s, when Andre Breton, Michel Leiris and other representative figures of the surrealist movement moved to Central America and to Antilles, and with the emergence of « negritude » around Aime and Suzanne Cesaire. The article aims to describe the main features of the geo-history of the meeting between psychoanalysis and Marxism, in the years preceding the publication of what can be considered as the really seminal works to emerge from such a connection, Psychology of the colonization by Octave Mannoni (1950) and the writings of Frantz Fanon.

“Misunderstanding is Universally Rampant”: Misinterpretation, Mistranslation, and Colonial Authority in G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr

While critics have begun to consider G.V. Desani’s Anglo-Indian novel All About H. Hatterr, few have considered the novel’s paratextual structure—composed of a series of fictional prefaces, a primary narrative, and an appendix—in any considerable depth. More often, critics view the novel in terms of its supposed apoliticism and ahistoricism. My essay argues that an investigation of its form can re-invigorate discussions of historical critique in Desani’s text. I read the novel’s experimental structure as a means to critique Western complicity toward colonial oppression in India, in that the paratexts repeatedly urge the reader to ignore and belittle questions of politics and history that pervade the primary narrative. As such, I reveal how the paratexts that frame the narrative engender misreading and misinterpretation. I thus link the novel’s form with questions of colonialism, and I examine how Desani’s text, in encouraging readers to misinterpret it, provides a critical investigation into questions of colonial authority.

프랑스혁명과 식민주의-총재정부시기 식민지 문제를 중심으로-

프랑스혁명과 식민주의-총재정부시기 식민지 문제를 중심으로-

The Rough and Tumble of International Courts and Tribunals

The PCA, a college of arbitrators, originated as an alternative to wars and arms race in Europe at the high noon of colonialism. Subsequently, in 1922, the PCIJ was established to address the ad hoc-ism of pre-World War I hybrid tribunals. Both permanent courts and ad hoc tribunals however failed to acknowledge colonialism as international law’s Achilles heel. The interwar bourgeoisie funded the ghostwriting of apathetic legal methods and capitalist norms in transnational tongues for the protection of alien investors. Post-1945, the continuity of the structure of colonial legal arguments stood in the way of interrogating its essentialist ontology and capitalist teleology. As such, initially, the ICJ stood indifferent to the colonial question. During the ensuing Cold War, the erstwhile colonial powers refused to accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction with the United States doubting the integrity of individual judges. In disputes arising due to the breach of colonial concession contracts, investor-state tribunals billed the costs of producing legal norms to the new sovereigns. Prescriptive writings in favour of judicial lawmaking and the proposed interweaving of investor protection with human rights continue to nourish international law’s Eurocentrism. A hyper-normative theory of lawmaking by international courts and tribunals remains decidedly indifferent to both rational choice approach and third world scholarship. This paper puts ontology and teleology of international judicial lawmaking to test.

The rough and tumble of international courts and tribunals

The PCA, a college of arbitrators, originated as an alternative to wars and arms race in Europe at the high noon of colonialism. Subsequently, in 1922, the PCIJ was established to address the ad hoc-ism of pre-World War I hybrid tribunals. Both permanent courts and ad hoc tribunals however failed to acknowledge colonialism as international law’s Achilles heel. The interwar bourgeoisie funded the ghostwriting of apathetic legal methods and capitalist norms in transnational tongues for the protection of alien investors. Post-1945, the continuity of the structure of colonial legal arguments stood in the way of interrogating its essentialist ontology and capitalist teleology. As such, initially, the ICJ stood indifferent to the colonial question. During the ensuing Cold War, the erstwhile colonial powers refused to accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction with the United States doubting the integrity of individual judges. In disputes arising due to the breach of colonial concession contracts, invertor-state tribunals billed the costs of producing legal norms to the new sovereigns. Prescriptive writings in favour of judicial lawmaking and the proposed interweaving of investor protection with human rights continue to nourish international law’s Eurocentrism. A hyper-normative theory of lawmaking by international courts and tribunals remains decidedly indifferent to both rational choice approach and third world scholarship. This paper puts ontology and teleology of international judicial lawmaking to test.

A Politics Not Yet Known: Imagining Relationality within Solidarity

A Politics Not Yet Known: Imagining Relationality within Solidarity Scott L. Morgensen (bio) Recalling ASA’s momentous support for the Palestinian call for an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, Lisa Duggan queerly articulates this moment with the sudden loss of our colleague José Esteban Muñoz. In so doing she centers the furious fun that Muñoz read within queer creative and utopian practices when she addresses the arrival of queer studies in American studies. Duggan argues that, like many interventions before it, queer studies has become “integral rather than marginal” to American studies because its “refusal of identitarian logics” offers a “deep critical challenge . . . [to] conventional presumptions about who needs to know what, who should read whom, and where a given critical lens is relevant.” Duggan here frames queer studies as a crucial diagnostic of power as such, as well as of the specific forms of power addressed in American studies. In other words, having disturbed identitarianism, queer studies puts in question any presumption that “queer” refers first, or only, to sexuality or gender, which then forces us to ask, what is the power that queer studies calls us to confront? Perhaps a queer way to address this question would be to leave it entirely open—a point to which I return below. But first I want to think about José Muñoz in relation to a movement of scholars, artists, and activists who exhorted queer studies to interrogate racialized sexuality and the violences of colonial modernity. In 1997 Muñoz wrote, with Philip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, and Trish Rosen, that “‘queer critique,’ conceived as a means of traversing and creatively transforming conceptual boundaries . . . illuminates how various dimensions of social experience—race, sexuality, ethnicity, diaspora, gender—can cut across or transect one another.”1 And in 2005 he joined David Eng and Judith Halberstam in calling for “a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor with no fixed referent.”2 Today, our thickly stacked bookshelves of queer of color, queer diaspora, and queer Indigenous critiques model the interrogation of modernity and its coloniality as conditions of queer possibility. Both the [End Page 309] power we perceive as queer and our queer interrogations of it arise not externally to racial and colonial violence but in intimate articulation with them. Cathy Cohen in 1997 explained the whiteness of queer politics by highlighting the underlying queering of blackness by white supremacy: a sexualized antiblackness through and against which black queer life and challenges to violence emanate.3 Today, emergent Indigenous feminist and queer works collected by Joanne Barker are recentering Indigenous theories of colonialism and empire to illuminate our responsibilities (to land, all beings, and one another) as well as the relationships among decolonial struggles. With such works in mind, I want to sustain Duggan’s invocation of queer studies’ arrival by asking how the meaning of “queer” in American studies might hinge on questions of coloniality and decoloniality: questions made all the more imperative by calls for solidarity with Palestine. In this moment of engaging solidarity, thinking queerly can highlight how our acts articulate many forms of coloniality—those named, and those left unnamed—even as questioning identitarianism can return our critical attention to the relationships across differences that solidarity demands. The politics of Palestine within the ASA thus compels me to seek deeply connective theories of power and methods that can ground such theories within praxes of ethical interrelationship. When I look for queer accounts of relational lives that deepen my knowledge of and commitment to struggle, I am provoked by queer ethnographers who interrogate the violences of modernity from within deeply reflexive accounts of interrelationship. In her rendering of gendered and racialized national culture in Venezuela, Marcia Ochoa presents “queer diasporic ethnography” as a method that can address how “the process of modernity extinguishes humanity but creates other possibilities for existence.”4 For Ochoa, “queer diasporic ethnography is not necessarily about queer diasporic subjects” because it “questions the boundedness of the ‘native informant’ as a point of entry.”5 Writing from her own...

THE CONGO OF EUROPE: THE BALKANS AND EMPIRE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH POLITICAL CULTURE

AbstractThis article explores early twentieth-century British political and humanitarian engagement with the Balkans. It focuses on the Balkan Committee, a liberal pressure group that served as the main hub for British interest in the region in the decade before the First World War. Whilst drawing attention to the specific challenges presented by the Balkans to the British liberal mind, it is argued that the Balkan Committee was part of a wider movement of humanitarianism and political activism that encompassed both continental and colonial questions. The issues around which the committee campaigned are related to humanitarian protests against the use of forced labour in Africa, in particular the Congo Reform Association, as well as to the Persia Committee, formed in protest against the 1907 Anglo-Russian agreement. This approach highlights how ‘Europe’ and empire were interconnected agendas within an overarching liberal-internationalist worldview and reformist conscience, despite the different cultural lenses through which humanitarian questions in different parts of the globe were viewed. It is suggested that research into British interaction with the Balkans offers a fruitful means by which to integrate historical analysis of the continental and imperial aspects of Britain's external relations in the ‘age of empire’.