Tragedy, Romance, Satire

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-140
Author(s):  
Greg Forter
Keyword(s):  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Mutiny ◽  
Full Humanity

This chapter challenges David Scott’s contention that we should shift from Romance to tragedy in recounting the history of colonialism’s overcoming. This shift in genre means, for Scott, moving from a pre-Foucauldian understanding of power to a Foucauldian view in which the institutions of colonial modernity produce the colonized subject—and hence, cannot be meaningfully overthrown. J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women subvert Scott’s oppositions and reveal the limits of his prescriptions. Farrell’s text develops a satirical form that, in its depiction of the Indian Mutiny, exposes British power-knowledge as an ideological mystification for which there is indeed an “outside”—namely, the Indians’ insurrectionary agency. James’s text shows how power on the colonial plantation relied on the spectacle of the scaffold rather than the insidious tentacles of disciplinary power. The scaffold functioned to prohibit both full humanity and interracial “love,” Enlightenment promises that only the violence of slave rebellion could hope to fulfil.

scholarly journals Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in eastern India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
SANGHAMITRA MISRA
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Northeastern India ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

scholarly journals "I's Natural Homicidal": Violence and Silence in Execution Poems

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eshe Mercer-James
Keyword(s):  
Western Society ◽  
Taxi Driver ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
State Punishment ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Black Equality

The inescapable presence of violence throughout George Elliott Clarke's oeuvre proposes that the silence imposed on the black community is only overcome through violence. The inevitability of violence is particularly evident in his collection Execution Poems. This collection recounts the “Tragedy of George and Rue,” cousins of his mother who killed and robbed a white taxi driver and were then the last people hanged as state punishment in New Brunswick. Through protagonists’ rationalizations for the crime and with their familial connection to him, Clarke collapses time and justice to place the black man outside of history and within violence. Silence then becomes a visceral experience for black males. Clarke suggests that Western society enacts its silencing of the black male through violence, thus combating this enforced voicelessness becomes a matter of violent vengeance: the only expression impossible to ignore. In a reflection of a peculiar position of blackness in Canada, the inescapability of violence for the black man who wishes to express his subjective being is grounded in a Western history of violence as retribution, which culminates in the diasporic struggle for black equality as enacted by black Americans. Clarke uses intertextual references to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and the iconic slave rebellion leader Nat Turner to locate his characters in a greater mythology of the battle for self-actualization, for a voice. Clarke himself is implicated in this violence, despite his recuperative ability to write poetry. The violence which drives the aptly titled Execution Poems reflects his belief that black literature still functions as a transgression for the wider community. Clarke posits the escape from this silence as an inherent act of violence.

History, Narrative, and the War on Terror

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Keyword(s):  
War On Terror ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of

The assumption that September 11, 2001 constituted a historical rupture enabled the advent of the War on Terror and disabled its critical apprehension. Beginning to counter the trope of rupture, this Introduction locates the paradigms of security and terror—the core conceptual tropes of contemporary and American and global culture—within the long history of a specifically colonial modernity. After outlining this history—its rationalities of accumulation and governance—this Introduction poses the problem of representation, the question of how the colonial present is historicized and theorized in works of contemporary fiction and theory.

“All the World Was America”

2018 ◽  
pp. 20-43
Author(s):  
Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Process And Outcome ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic

Though ubiquitous in contemporary political discourse, the trope of “security” is under-historicized. Countering ahistorical accounts of “post-9/11” political-economic order, this chapter situates the contemporary manifestation and twentieth-century evolution of security rhetoric and practice within the long history of colonial modernity at large. It proceeds through an examination of three elemental relations: security and property, security and race, and security and emergency. The security state emerges to guarantee the process and outcome of capitalist accumulation, in the colony as in the metropole. The securing of private property is enabled by and in turn reinforces race thinking and practice. And the enactment of emergency or exception legitimates the preemptive and punitive violence of the security state.

Nat Turner’s Orientation beyond the Doctrine of Man

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-133
Keyword(s):  
Religious Commitment ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Slave Rebellion

Nat Turner, as a leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, described a religious commitment that shaped his worldview and daily practices, and which ultimately manifested in his leading a slave rebellion. The task of interpreting the meaning of Nat Turner and the Southampton slave rebellion—highlighted by William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and the debate that ensued after its publication—discloses the persistence of Sylvia Wynter’s category of “Man” as a descriptive statement of the human within colonial modernity. This chapter opens up the need to re-visit Nat Turner, and to see how his life and worldview reveal possibilities beyond Man. It argues that religious practices and theological epistemologies can present an alternative to Man and that Nat Turner’s life and thought show one way such practices and epistemologies have been actualized beyond the doctrine of Man.

Colonial Modernity and Methodological Nationalism: The Structuring of Sociological Traditions of India

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujata Patel
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Main Role ◽  
Characteristic Mode ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
Professional Orientation ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Four Levels ◽  
The Way

This article traces traditions of sociological thinking in India and suggests that in order to write the disciplines’ history, it is important to identify the episteme that governs these traditions. It suggests that there are two broad epistemes that have defined sociology as a discipline in India—colonial modernity and methodological nationalism—and it argues that they organise theories, perspectives, methodologies and methods, teaching and research practices of the discipline. The history of the imprint of these epistemes is investigated at four levels: first, in the way one or both defined the discipline’s identity and, thus, organised its characteristic mode of thinking methodologically; second, in the way this identity defined its theoretical direction and the theories that it borrowed, adapted to and reframed; third, in the way the first two organised its professional orientation and made it choose its identity as an academic discipline whose main role is restricted to teaching and research within academic institutions at an expense of a public orientation; and fourth, the way the aforementioned three defined its geographical compass, limiting its queries to national concerns wherein the macro became reduced to the micro abjuring discussions on global debates. This article suggests that today there is a crisis in the received epistemes, and in this context, it becomes imperative to take command to define a new episteme which intersects the local, regional, national and global concerns, is theoretical and methodologically eclectic and is comparative in nature.

scholarly journals POWER AND PUNISHMENT IN M. FOUCAULT’S GENEALOGICAL PROJECT

2019 ◽  
pp. 158-168
Author(s):  
Ivan V. Ryazanov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Subject Field ◽  
Object Description ◽  
Visual Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Analytical Reconstruction

The article proposes analytical reconstruction of the French philosopher and historian M. Foucault’s interpretation strategy related to the genealogical project The History of Punishment. The object of cognition marginalization is content moment of this reconstruction, as contributing to both the transformation of the research subject field and the genealogical identification of the object. There are defined the rules of reconstruction, contributing to the diffusion of the methodological approach to power in the genealogy of M. Foucault. The article substantiates the position that the use of some individual rules of reconstruction cannot lead to methodological unity in the genealogical project due to the marginal-positive identification of the object and the structure of The History of Punishment. Comparison of J. Deleuze’s functional analysis and M. Foucault’s genealogical approach to the problem of power points to the diffusion of the method, which is unable to localize its object in the social space. In many ways, this will be facilitated by the use of the visual model as an epistemological one, which is traditional for Foucault’s research. All the dynamic and structural characteristics that are used in Foucault’s genealogy to analyze the concept of Microphysics of power will be reduced to marginal anthropology. In the genealogical period of the French thinker’s work, marginal anthropology is regarded as a way of constructing genealogical reality. Genealogical description as a method of a marginal object description is viewed as a consequence of methodological diffusion. The phenomenon of disciplinary power is considered as a marginal construction, deriving the concept of normal-abnormal from the totality of disciplinary practices, structuring the European society. M. Foucault’s focus on marginal anthropology will serves as a basis for the transition to The History of Sexuality project.

“A Christy Minstrel, a Harlequin, or an Ancient Persian”?: Opera, Hindustani Classical Music, and the Origins of the Popular South Asian “Musical”

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-350
Author(s):  
Rashna Darius Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
Marching Bands ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindustani Music ◽  
Musical Genres

The story of South Asian colonial modernity and music offers up a multidirectional and polymorphous conceptual terrain featuring, among many agents, Hindustani royalty, touring minstrel and burlesque troupes, Jesuit missionaries and orientalists, and not least, social reformists. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of Hindustani music consistently traces its development through classicization against the rise of Hindu nationalism while overlooking other palpable clues in the colonial past. This article argues for a substantial reevaluation of colonial South Asian music by positing an alternative and hitherto invisible auditory stimulus in colonial Asia's aural landscape: opera. Janaki Bakhle contends that “as a musical form, opera put down even fewer roots than did orchestral, instrumental Western classical music,” even though she subsequently states that “Western orchestration did become part of modern ceremonial activities, and it moved into film music even as it was played by ersatz marching bands.” Bakhle further argues that Hindustani music underwent processes of sanitization and systematization within a Hindu nation-making project, a view that has been complicated by historians such as Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana describes how scholarship that focuses exclusively on the codification or nationalization of Hindustani music through the interpellation of a Hindu public neglects “sedimented forms of musical persistence.” Not dissimilarly, Richard David Williams highlights how the singular emphasis on the movement of Hindustani music reform risks reducing the heterogeneous and complex musicological traditions in the colonial period to the output of a single, monolithic, middle-class “new elite.” Previous scholarship, he argues, concentrates on “one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.” Following these calls for more textured perspectives on South Asian musical cultures, I suggest a somewhat heretical thesis: that opera functioned as a common mediating stimulus for both the colonial reinscription of Hindustani music as classical as well as the emergence of popular pan-Asian musical genres such as “Bollywood” music.

The Colonial Genealogies of Political Decay and Legitimation Crises: An Enquiry into the Predicament of State-construction in Post-colonial South Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-293
Author(s):  
Sanjeev Kumar H. M.
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
After Effects ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Legitimation Crisis ◽  
State Construction ◽  
History Of

This article is an attempt to conceptualise and theoretically explain the colonial genealogies of the processes of state-making and state-construction in post-colonial South Asia. In pursuit of this, the article seeks to theorise the colonial ways of providing a sense of fixity of political territoriality, held together by colonially crafted institutions of metropolitan governance, as an independent variable in determining the nature of the processes of state-making and state-construction in the region. On this count, an enquiry into the complex trajectory of these post-colonial political processes, which are the dependent variables for this article, is the fundamental problematic of analysis. This problematic would be decoded with the help of a dual conceptual framework, involving what Samuel Huntington designates as political decay and the legitimation crisis given by Jurgen Habermas. In the context of South Asia, the predicaments of political decay and legitimation crisis, according to this article, manifest as after-effects of engagement on the part of the region’s post-colonial polities with the imported values of colonial modernity and neoliberal economic reforms. By drawing instances from two countries of the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the article tries to show how these after-effects have played out in the form of a tumultuous political history of the processes of state-making and state-construction. The article, in this way, is an attempt to theorise the inter-sectionalities between the colonial and post-colonial periods of South Asia. This has been done here by problematising such a historical inter-sectionality from the perspective of the two intervening variables—the received values of colonial metropolis and the morals of modernity—mediated through neoliberal economic reforms.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document