The Dynamics of British Colonial Violence

2017 ◽  
pp. 153-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Gordon
Keyword(s):  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence

scholarly journals Legacies of British Colonial Violence: Viewing Kenyan Detention Camps through the Hanslope Disclosure

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aoife Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Violent Incident ◽  
The Public ◽  
British Colony ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Detention Camps ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Colonial Histories

A number of works have recently been published that seek to re-narrate colonial histories, with a particular emphasis on the role of law in at once creating and marginalizing colonial subjects.1Focusing on mid-twentieth century detention camps in the British colony of Kenya, this article illuminates a colonial history that was deeply buried in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) building for many years. As such, the analysis supports the revelatory work of David Anderson and Caroline Elkins, who highlighted the violence that underpinned British detention and interrogation practises in Kenya.2In particular, the article explores recently declassified colonial files, and pieces together a picture of administrative subterfuge, suppression of facts, and whitewashing atrocities, threaded through with official denial, which long outlived its colonial genesis. Against the hypothesis that detention laws created an architecture of destruction and concomitant custodial violence in Kenya, the article establishes that an accountability deficit is the legacy of detention without trial as it was practiced in colonial Kenya. By untangling a complex web of colonial records and government papers relating to Kenya, this article reveals the often insurmountable pressure that was exerted to conceal evidence of detainee violence, and the role of a highly sophisticated propaganda machine that controlled the public narrative of a violent incident when outright denial was impossible.

Introduction: Torture, Empire, and the Exception

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
High Court ◽  
Virtual Absence ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Exposed Facets

Colonial Terror begins with an examination of a historic case before the High Court of England and Wales in 2011 regarding torture in colonial Kenya that exposed facets of the brutal violence that sustained Britain’s empire, and argues that the case and its aftermath offer a number of insights into the role of extraordinary violence in the operation of colonial states, and with it to the maintenance of imperial and colonial sovereignties, in addition to the discourses and practices of denial regarding British culpability for torture and other forms of colonial violence. After elucidating the book’s key arguments regarding the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of British colonial rule in India the introduction then considers both the virtual absence of colonial violence from British historical memory and recent scholarship on such violence in former British colonial contexts that seeks to redress such an absence. Proposing that scholars of colonial violence need to broaden their understanding of, and approaches to, violence, as well as the impact of violence on both bodies and minds, the introduction goes on to examine the scholarly literatures on, and lacunae in, colonial policing, colonial law, the colonial state, colonial sovereignties, and the use of torture and terror to construct and maintain such sovereignties, and suggests ways in which Colonial Terror will address such omissions.

Colonial monuments, postcolonial selves: History, trauma and silence in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942093393
Author(s):  
Thando Njovane
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mau Mau ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Social Coherence

Yvonne Adhiambo Owour’s remarkable debut novel Dust (2014) made its entrance in the literary scene at a time when cultural discourse on the purpose and meaning of monuments to brutality had increasingly become contentious. As a novel which concerns itself with British colonial heritage in Kenya, the Mau Mau War, and the private losses suffered by the Oganda family, Dust is centrally placed as an intervening voice in any thinking about how colonial monuments trauma affect subjective and social coherence in the postcolonial imagination. The colonial mansion, Wouth Ogik, stands at the center of the novel as a symbol of colonial violence, war, death, and, finally, potential. This article explores the rhetorical significance of the house which, together with the disillusionment which accompanied Kenya’s nationalist project following its independence, suggests possible ways of transcending an otherwise bleak postcolonial present.

SELF-MADE MAIDS: BRITISH EMIGRATION TO THE PACIFIC RIM AND SELF-HELP NARRATIVES

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-304
Author(s):  
Melissa Walker
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Collective Psyche

The victorian discourse of self-help, popularized by Samuel Smiles in the mid-nineteenth century, was integral to the success of mid-Victorian British emigration and colonialism. As Robert Hogg notes in his study of British colonial violence in British Columbia and Queensland, Samuel Smiles's notion of character, which embraced the virtues of hard work, perseverance, self-reliance, and energetic action, helped sanction masculine colonial violence and governance in these regions (23–24). According to Robert Grant in his examination of mid-Victorian emigration to Canada and Australia, one's desire “to better him or herself” was closely entwined with Smiles's self-help philosophy and the rhetoric of colonial promotion permeating British self-help texts “in the projection of the laborer's progress from tenant to smallholder to successful landowner through hard work” (178–79). Francine Tolron similarly observes the pervasiveness of the success narrative in emigrant accounts of New Zealand, noting that this story often constitutes “yet another tale of the British march of Progress” (169) with the yeoman, John Bull, as the hero at its centre, who adopts the imperialist impetus to subdue the wilderness and recreate an ideal England in which a man can earn gentility through hard work and uprightness of character (169–70). She extends accounts by male emigrants to New Zealand to the “collective psyche” of all New Zealanders “whose stuff is made up of earth, so to speak, the inheritors of the old archetypal Englishman who worked on the land before the dawn of the industrial era” (173). These studies contribute significantly to a growing body of scholarship that considers the connections between self-help literature and British emigration and colonialism. Yet, occasionally such analyses apply the meaning of self-help rhetoric universally across British male and female emigrant groups when the rise from tenant to landowner was typically a male, not a female, prerogative. Building on this important body of work, this paper considers how domestic concerns, rather than a sole focus on controlling foreign lands and people, informed versions of success penned by a particular group of mid-Victorian middle-class female emigrants and these women's understanding of their positioning within the colonies.

Policing the British Empire on the Bund: The Origin of the Sikh Police Unit in Shanghai

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Cao Yin
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Modern Shanghai

Red-turbaned Sikh policemen have long been viewed as symbols of the cosmopolitan feature of modern Shanghai. However, the origin of the Sikh police unit in the Shanghai Municipal Police has not been seriously investigated. This article argues that the circulation of police officers, policing knowledge, and information in the British colonial network and the circulation of the idea of taking Hong Kong as the reference point amongst Shanghailanders from the 1850s to the 1880s played important role in the establishment of the Sikh police force in the International Settlement of Shanghai. Furthermore, by highlighting the translocal connections and interactions amongst British colonies and settlements, this study tries to break the metropole-colony binary in imperial history studies.

Pablo Neruda's Transnational Modernist Networks: Colombo-Madrid-London-Buenos Aires (1927–1933)

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-225
Author(s):  
Patricia Novillo-Corvalán
Keyword(s):  
Chamber Music ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Complex Composition ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The One ◽  
Composition Process ◽  
In Transit ◽  
Standing Question

This article positions Pablo Neruda's poetry collection Residence on Earth I (written between 1925–1931 and published in 1933) as a ‘text in transit’ that allows us to trace the development of transnational modernist networks through the text's protracted physical journey from British colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to Madrid, and from José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente (The Western Review) to T. S. Eliot's The Criterion. By mapping the text's diasporic movement, I seek to reinterpret its complex composition process as part of an anti-imperialist commitment that proposes a form of aesthetic solidarity with artistic modernism in Ceylon, on the one hand, and as a vehicle through which to interrogate the reception and categorisation of Latin American writers and their cultural institutions in a British periodical such as The Criterion, on the other. I conclude with an examination of Neruda's idiosyncratic Spanish translation of Joyce's Chamber Music, which was published in the Buenos Aires little magazine Poesía in 1933, positing that this translation exercise takes to further lengths his decolonising views by giving new momentum to the long-standing question of Hiberno-Latin American relations.

Bacurau as Science-Fiction Revenge Fantasy

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-86
Author(s):  
Jocimar Dias
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Colonial Violence

When Bacurau (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) was released in Brazil, it was mainly received as a left-wing critique of the rise of the far right in the country’s political landscape. But some critics argued that the feature’s insistence on graphic violence was actually a celebration of barbarism, equating the oppressed villagers to their genocidal oppressors. This article refutes this view, borrowing from the analysis of science-fiction revenge fantasies and also following Foucault’s genealogical perspective. It argues that Bacurau actually reenacts Brazil’s foundational colonial violence through its complex temporality, in order to rediscover the forgotten past of real struggles that remain surreptitiously inserted in all levels of society, perhaps in the hope that new ways of resistance may flourish from its spectatorial experience.

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