scholarly journals 1. Setting the Stage: The Javanization of Colonial Authority in the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-47
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Authority

Writing Sovereignty in Invisible Ink? Autochthonous Sovereignty and Territorial Appropriations in Nineteenth-Century Franco-African Treaties

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (02) ◽  
pp. 187-221
Author(s):  
Isabelle Surun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Legal Frameworks

Abstract This article focuses on the modes of territorial appropriation that characterized the transition from the old to the new colonial regime, when Europeans built their empires in Africa. It analyzes the juridical construction of colonial territorialities based on a corpus of treaties concluded between agents of the French colonial authority and African chiefs, an instrument of legal appropriation that has to date been little explored by historians of international law. Studying the terminology used in these treaties reveals the instability of these categories and the uncertainty of European negotiators regarding the meaning of the legal frameworks they sought to impose on African chiefs. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the protectorate emerged as the most common legal arrangement for regulating the sharing or transfer of sovereignty, based on a distinction between its external and internal dimensions. The consent of African chiefs to such arrangements therefore hung on whether they considered their territorial sovereignty to be divisible or indivisible.

scholarly journals THE ‘INTERIOR WORLD’ OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MALOTI-DRAKENSBERG MOUNTAINS

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
RACHEL KING ◽  
SAM CHALLIS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Cattle Raiding ◽  
Social Logics ◽  
Over Time

AbstractOver the last four decades researchers have cast the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains as a marginal refuge for ‘Bushmen’ amidst constricting nineteenth-century frontiers. Rock art scholarship has expanded on this characterisation of mountains as refugia, focusing on heterogeneous raiding bands forging new cultural identities. Here, we propose another view of the Maloti-Drakensberg: a dynamic political theatre in which polities that engaged in illicit or ‘heterodox’ activities like cattle raiding and hunter-gatherer lifeways set the terms of colonial encounters. We employ the concept of the ‘interior world’ to refigure the region as one fostering subsistence and political behaviours that did not conform to the expectations of colonial authority. Paradoxically, such heterodoxies over time constituted widespread social logics within the Maloti-Drakensberg, and thus became commonplace and meaningful. We synthesise historical and archaeological evidence (new and existing) to illustrate the significance of the nineteenth-century Maloti-Drakensberg, offering a revised southeast-African colonial landscape and directions for future research.

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

2021 ◽  
Vol 155 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
SJ Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Martin Delany ◽  
Military Uniform ◽  
The Military

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

scholarly journals Constructing Native Homosexuality in British India

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Ruhnke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Moral Superiority ◽  
Previous Scholarship

In this paper I will examine how British constructions and criminalization of Indian homosexuality that evolved within the discourse of the imperial project. I will situate my discussion in the late nineteenth century, during which British colonists introduced anti-sodomy statutes to the Indian colony and homosexuality was socially and legally reconsidered in ways without precedent in pre-colonial India. By considering how Indian homosexuality was constructed in this colonial moment, we will be able to better understand the methods by which Britain asserted their colonial authority in nineteenth century India. In order to prove my claim, I will consider previous scholarship that has analyzed British Orientalist representations of Indian homosexuality, trials and testimonies under the anti-sodomy statute, Section 377 of the Indian Penal code, and the political and historical context of the late nineteenth century colonial moment in British India. Drawing upon this scholarship, I argue that British constructions and criminalization of Indian homosexuality served to emphasize the difference between native subjects and British rulers. I demonstrate that by associating “perverse” and “criminal” homosexual identity with native subjects, British rulers accentuated the divide between the ruler and the ruled, thus reinforcing their racial and moral superiority and, in turn, their colonial authority. 

African Marriage Regulation and the Remaking of Gendered Authority in Colonial Natal, 1843–1875

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nafisa Essop Sheik
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Younger Men ◽  
Political Intervention ◽  
Native Policy

Abstract:This article examines the gendered relationships of authority that are at the heart of the processes of customary marriage in South Africa, as well as the ways in which colonial political intervention worked to effect social change in nineteenth-century colonial Natal. This analysis reinforces the established historiographical understanding that instigating generational shifts in authority was important to Natal Native Policy, unlike customary regulation elsewhere in colonial Africa in which colonial law worked to shore up the authority of senior men. However, it seeks to underline that while negotiations of colonial power began to shift authority from older to younger men by manipulating Native marriage, and in particular the practice of lobola, the effects of such policies produced profound shifts in the experience and articulation of gendered relationships of marriage and colonial authority. The imbrication of changes in gender and generational norms ultimately reveals the contradictions in both colonial claims of liberal gender reform and African claims that colonial policy provoked the usurpation of male traditional authority.

Archaeology and Cultural Policy in Ottoman Tunisia Part II: Muhammad Khaznadar (1871–99)

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-252
Author(s):  
Ridha Moumni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial

Abstract This article is the second part of a study focusing on Muhammad Khaznadar’s role in the history of archaeology in nineteenth-century Tunisia. Whereas part I traced the meteoric rise of Muhammad Khaznadar as a Tunisian cultural figure, the second part of this inquiry examines Khaznadar’s fall from power and the end of his monopoly over the country’s antiquities. Following the dismissal of his father, Mustafa Khaznadar, as grand vizier in 1873, Muhammad’s artifacts were seized by the bey. The Khaznadar collection then attracted the attention of the new grand vizier, Khayr al-Din (1873–78). Influenced by the activities of Muhammad Khaznadar, Khayr al-Din sought to create a national museum of antiquities. However, this project came to an end with Khayr al-Din’s dismissal and the subsequent arrival of French colonizers, who established the Bardo Museum (then called the Alaoui Museum) in 1888. The historical narrative written by the French colonial authority erased the memory of prominent Tunisian archaeologists and collectors who had been active in the preceding decades. This article seeks to highlight the important contributions of local Tunisians to the development of archaeological research and policies surrounding Tunisian cultural heritage in the nineteenth century.

“Abroad and at Home”: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth's Belinda

PMLA ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan C. Greenfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Sexual Ambiguity ◽  
Female Homoeroticism ◽  
At Home

A number of critics suggest that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature femininity is portrayed as both similar to and different from colonial otherness in ways that destabilize the English woman's relation to empire. Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) presents an opportunity to enrich this discussion because of the novel's synchronization of domestic and colonial authority, sustained attention to the sexual, national, and racial ambiguities posed by transvestites and Creoles, and chaotic variety of events that prohibits political fixity. Following the multiple allusions to “home” and “abroad” in Belinda, I argue that female homoeroticism and miscegenation become analogous dangers and reflect eighteenth-century concerns about the mutability of bodily and colonial boundaries.

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