5. Colonial Governmentality

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-197
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Governmentality

The limits of literature as liberation: Colonialism, governmentality, and the humanist subject

2020 ◽  
pp. 135050762097897
Author(s):  
M Greedharry
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge ◽  
Colonial Governmentality

Scholars in both the humanities and management remain attached to the idea that literature will set us free. Whether this is because literary text seems unconstrained by our epistemes or reading literature offers a practice through which we will be able to shape ourselves into the people we want to be, many of us understand literature as something that offers us a chance to emancipate ourselves from the regime of knowledge we have now. Nevertheless, as the history of literature as colonial governmentality suggests, literature and literary study have been crucial forms of knowledge-power for creating and maintaining organizational structures as well as producing the willing subjects that make those structures work. This being so, how is it that are we still interested in using literature to make “better” people, whether the people in question are ”better” managers or their subordinates, rather than reorganizing literary study in the contemporary university?

Reporting Security: Postcolonial Governmentality in the United Nations’ Trusteeship System

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thorsten Bonacker
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Reporting System ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Political Rationality ◽  
Central Elements ◽  
Governance Practices ◽  
Colonial Governmentality

Abstract This article examines the political rationality and governance practices that emerged in the course of the international politics of decolonization. It focuses primarily on the UN trusteeship system, within which the former League of Nations mandates were continued by the trusteeship powers. In this process, the trustees' policies were placed under international scrutiny. The article ties in with International Political Sociology's increased interest in historical perspectives. In particular, it asks how the political rationality of the trusteeship system differs from colonial governmentality. Two arguments are put forward: first, international governing, as can be seen from the trusteeship system, is characterized by a postcolonial governmentality that continues central elements of colonial governmentality, but transfers them to the international level. Second, following Latour, it is argued that trusteeship governance is constituted by forms of knowledge production and the bureaucratic circulation of information that continue to shape the governance of international organizations today. To this end, the article takes up in particular the reporting system of the trusteeship system as well as its central instruments of knowledge production: the visiting missions, the petition system, and the collection of data through questionnaires.

Mountstuart Elphinstone, Colonial Knowledge and ‘Frontier Governmentality’ in Northwest India, 1849–1878

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-274
Author(s):  
Martin J. Bayly
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Adequate Knowledge ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Peripheral Areas ◽  
Northwest India ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Colonial Governmentality

With the British annexation of the Punjab in 1849 following the disasters of the First Anglo-Afghan War, Mountstuart Elphinstone's "An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul", and those of his intellectual successors, became "useful knowledge", and found a fertile administrative environment in the management of India's northwest frontier. According to this logic of government, frontier spaces could be tamed through adequate knowledge and understanding of their indigenous populations, part of a wider assemblage of power that has been referred to in Foucauldian terms as "frontier governmentality". Taking this concept as its starting point, this chapter turns its attention to the procurement, evolution, and use of colonial knowledge as part of this wider project of frontier governance. If "frontier governmentality" differed from "colonial governmentality", then what made it distinct? By studying the trajectories of the body of colonial knowledge initiated by Mountstuart Elphinstone and his intellectual successors, new understandings of colonial power in frontier spaces start to emerge through the lens of "governmentality", offering key insights into the modalities of colonial government in so-called "peripheral" areas, and the role played by "colonial knowledge" as part of this assemblage of power.

Colonial governmentality and the ‘economy’

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 418-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
U. Kalpagam
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Governmentality

scholarly journals Developing Terra Nullius: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Indigeneity in the Andaman Islands

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 944-973 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uditi Sen
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Andaman Islands ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Policy Documents ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
Colonial Governmentality

AbstractThis article explores the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular “backward” region of India, the Andaman Islands. I trace the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the islands in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history of planned development there. I demonstrate how intersecting discourses of indigenous savagery/primitivism and the geographical emptiness were repeatedly mobilized in colonial-era surveys and postcolonial policy documents. Postcolonial visions of developing the Andaman Islands ushered in a settler-colonial governmentality, infused with genocidal fantasies of the “dying savage.” Laws professing to protect aboriginal Jarawas actually worked to unilaterally extend Indian sovereignty over the lands and bodies of a community clearly hostile to such incorporation. I question the current exclusion of India from the global geographies of settler-colonialism and argue that the violent and continuing history of indigenous marginalization in the Andaman Islands represents a de facto operation of a logic of terra nullius.

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