“Vanishing Points”

2018 ◽  
pp. 105-139
Author(s):  
Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Keyword(s):  
Vanishing Points ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Histories

This chapter engages works of fiction that counter both the ahistorical affirmation and ahistorical critique of U.S. Empire with historicist renderings of the current conjuncture. In particular, this chapter is guided by a discussion of three postcolonial novels—three works that locate the present within the long history of colonial modernity: Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Resisting the exceptionalism of the “post-9/11” frame, these novels reveal the colonial histories that haunt the present. But they also self-reflexively betray, in their form as well as their content, the persistent and pervasive force of the trope of rupture and related modes of erasure.

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.

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.

Complicating Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion: Jewish radicalism, Asian indenture, and multi-ethnic histories of 1865

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 200-223
Author(s):  
Mimi Sheller
Keyword(s):  
Global Economy ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Ethnic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Archival Record ◽  
Morant Bay Rebellion ◽  
Colonial Histories

The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica has generally been interpreted as a struggle between the post-emancipation Black peasantry and the white colonial government, which led to a violent confrontation, military suppression, and the demise of the Jamaican House of Assembly in favor of direct Crown Colony rule. Yet, the archival record shows other more complex currents that were also at play, including multi-racial, cross-class alliances, and strong conflicts over local politics, corruption, and labor rights. This article focuses on a little noted aspect of the events of 1865: the arrest for sedition of Sidney Lindo Levien, a Jewish newspaper publisher of The County Union. Levien advocated for the poor, foreigners, and women; joined the Underhill Meetings supporting the political rights of the vast majority of people emancipated from slavery; and was arrested under martial law during the rebellion and later found guilty of sedition, serving nearly 7 months in prison of a 1 year sentence before being pardoned. Drawing on his own writings, photographs, family genealogy, and Levien’s hitherto unknown “Chronicle of 1865,” I argue that his story opens new questions about the relation between Jews and Baptists, Black and “Coloured,” Asian and Maroon, and varied elite and non-elite “White” populations in Jamaica, taking us beyond the typical Black-vs-white framing of the Morant Bay Rebellion toward a more multi-sided emphasis on cross-racial protest and multi-denominational resistance within the imperial global economy. Both dominant “White” colonial histories and subsequent Jamaican “Black” national histories have erased the more diverse actors and cross-cutting interests that shaped the events of 1865, which only come into view through a multi-ethnic history of global mobilities and shifting identities, which I refer to as a critical cosmopolitan perspective.

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.

Israel's Settler-Colonial Water Regime: The Second Contradiction of Zionism

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seif Da'Na
Keyword(s):  
Life Style ◽  
Water Regime ◽  
Agricultural Practices ◽  
Ecological Sustainability ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Histories ◽  
Size Limits ◽  
Interpretive Mode

This paper questions the ecological sustainability of the Zionist colonial scheme in Palestine. It outlines an ecologically-based narrative of the Arab-Israeli struggle by juxtaposing colonial Zionism and ecological Zionism to re-narrate the Arab-Israeli conflict using a recent interpretive mode that assumes as a principle concomitant environmental and colonial histories. Examining both the role of water in the history of the Zionist colonial scheme and Zionist agricultural practices, it argues that, similar to previous colonial European ventures, the sustainability of colonial Zionism is challenged by both Palestine's scarce hydrological resources and their mounting exploitation, spawning what I call the ‘inner tension of Zionism’. Given this dialectic of Zionism – that considering, among other things, the nature of Zionist colonial agriculture and settlers’ Western life style, the necessary increasing exploitation of Palestine's scarce resources challenges the sustainability of the colonial venture – the hydrological challenge, entwining with nationalist conflict, constitutes Zionism's second contradiction.11 Due to size limits and nature of this paper, I deal only with the first stage, 1882–1967. I deal with the next stage, 1967 and thereafter, elsewhere, although the typology employed for the distinction between stages is outlined below.

“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.

“This Is Our Threnody”

2018 ◽  
pp. 140-162
Author(s):  
Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Keyword(s):  
Global History ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Roberto Bolano ◽  
Global Reach

Using moments of putative rupture as a lens onto the past and the world, the fiction of Roberto Bolaño articulates two genealogies—the hemispheric (and global) history of neoliberal counterrevolution and the planetary history of capitalist, colonial modernity. Revealing the histories cast in shadow by the global reach of capital and empire, Bolaño’s work, this chapter demonstrates, simultaneously meditates on literature’s ambivalent relationship to cultures of historical erasure. Literature, Bolaño’s fiction insists, is both one mechanism through which the blank spots in our vision are formed and normalized, and one urgent site of resistance to the apparatuses of fetishism and reification.

The Contours of Agency

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey Banivanua Mar
Keyword(s):  
Physical World ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Western Pacific ◽  
Pacific Island ◽  
Women's Labor ◽  
The Past ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Histories ◽  
The Western Pacific

This chapter examines photographs of Pacific Island women laboring in fields in Queensland in the late 1890s, arguing that colonial photography can be a critical means of filling archival silences. It reflects on how we may read this photography in layers, both as a candid snapshot of the physical world of the past, as well as a more subtle register of that world's ideological composition. This is significant in the context of colonial histories in the western Pacific and Australia where indigenous and colonized women's labor, and their contribution to colonial and colonized societies, has been subjected to the violence of a structural amnesia. Photography offers not only visual evidence of a barely told history of Pacific Islander women's labor as told through the agency of their physical presentation. In addition, the medium itself, the photograph and its visual language, points in interesting ways to the discursive contours that shaped indigenous and colonized women's agency.

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