scholarly journals Morocco in Colonial Photography

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (12) ◽  
pp. 01-08
Author(s):  
Soufiane Laachiri Laachiri
Keyword(s):  
Military Officers ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Photographic Documentation ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Travel Writers

This article represents an attempt to approach the notion of colonial discourse and photography more closely with the exigencies that put Morocco under the zoom of the colonial lens. This photographic documentation shows that nations, Morocco, in this case, were annexed to imperial powers through the utilization of various means of representation. This annexation was carried out not only by military officers, missionaries and spies but also by cartographers, travel writers and photographers who never ceased to polish the lens of their cameras so as to be able to represent indigenous identities, as well as their social lifestyles, and cultures. Therefore, the purpose of the present work is to sketch the colonial experience that links the imperializers with the imperialized through chronological documentation of colonial power and domination. Therefore, the main interest centres around the question of rereading this colonial history by analyzing and questioning colonial photography and its role in colonial expansion over Morocco. Besides, it is to unmask the alleged objective embedded in this country's 'civilizing mission'.

“Colonized Body,” “Oriental Machine”: Debating Race, Railroads, and the Politics of Reconstruction in Germany and East Africa, 1906–1910

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley D. Naranch
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
German Society ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
German State ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Colonial Empire

The years 1906–1910 were a period of crisis and unstable consensus in German colonial history. In contrast to the debates of the previous two decades following Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's 1884 decision to establish overseas protectorates, colonial discourse in Germany after 1905 shifted decisively away from abstract considerations of the desirability of colonies for economic and imperialist expansion to focus on the more practical matters of colonial policy and long-term developmental reform. Indeed, given the fact that by 1905 the German colonial empire covered a sprawling expanse of land six times the size of the German state, including territories in Africa, the South Pacific, and a naval base (Tsingtao) on the coast of China, the enormous challenges of managing its far-flung and costly possessions were becoming increasingly difficult to meet. For better or for worse, the Kaiserreich had become a de facto colonial power, and German society was increasingly and uncomfortably being forced to recognize the hazards and burdens of its fledgling global empire.

scholarly journals The Scramble for Africa Reloaded? Portugal, European Colonial Claims and the Distribution of Colonies in the 1930s

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Márcia Gonçalves
Keyword(s):  
Great Powers ◽  
European History ◽  
Small States ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
International Context ◽  
Territorial Integrity ◽  
International History ◽  
Portuguese Empire

Abstract Situating itself at the crossroads of colonial history, international history and European history, this article examines the movement for colonial appeasement and the redistribution of African colonies in the 1930s from a frequently overlooked viewpoint: Portugal and its empire. Even though Portugal was not a principal actor in the discussion of colonial redistribution, the Portuguese empire was placed at the centre of these debates as a subject to be discussed. The article demonstrates that the great powers’ perception of Portugal as an inadequate colonial power was central to their strategy of colonial redistribution in an international context that espoused guarantees of territorial integrity to great and small states alike. In addition, it shows how Portugal entered the debate on colonial appeasement to promote a rhetoric of victimisation and bolster support for the dictatorship.

Colonial History and Historiography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Albane de Suremain
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Military History ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Cultural Hybridization ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Control ◽  
Second World

The colonial condition in Africa has been revisited by all of the main historiographic currents of thought, from a heroizing, highly political and military history of colonization primarily considered from the colonists’ standpoint, to a much more complex and rich history integrating the colonized perspective. This history has been enhanced by contributions from Postcolonial Studies and Subaltern Studies as well as from New Imperial History and perspectives opened by its global interconnected history. At the intersection of these issues and methods, colonial studies offers an innovative reinterpretation of various facets of colonial Africa, such as the factors and justifications for colonial expansion; conquests and colonial wars; processes of territorial appropriation and border demarcation; and the organization and control of the colonies. In these fundamentally inegalitarian societies, accommodation and social and cultural hybridization processes were also at work, as well as multiple forms of resistance or subversion that paved the way for African states to win their independence. In addition to the role played by the First and Second World Wars, the emergence of nationalist and separatist movements helps to clarify the multifaceted nature of these independences, when approached from a political as well as a cultural and social perspective, while questioning the durability of the legacy of the colonial phase in African history.

Majimaji and the Millennium: Abrahamic Sources and the Creation of a Tanzanian Resistance Tradition

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 365-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Sunseri
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
German Colonialism ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Resistance Movement

Writing thirty years ago the historian of the Majimaji rebellion, Gilbert Gwassa, emphasized the purely Tanzanian nature of the uprising, as seen in the ideology which he believed was the inspiration for the widespread war against German colonialism. To Gwassa, southern Tanzanians created an innovative, secular ideology after the turn of the twentieth century which enabled Africans to resist German colonialism supra-ethnically rather than locally. Gwassa was adamant that the Majimaji ideology owed nothing to outside influences.Gwassa's contention has been largely unchallenged despite obvious paradoxes. Majimaji emerged in a region widely permeated with Islamic influences by 1905, the time of the rebellion. Moreover, the Christian colonial power structure had been present in the outbreak region for some twenty years by 1905, while Christian missionaries had been active in Tanzania for almost forty years. By the time the Majimaji historical tradition was being written in Tanzania in the 1960s, the nation included many Muslims and Christians, including many of Gwassa's research informants, who helped shape his interpretation of Majimaji. Aside from these circumstantial suggestions of the possibility of an externally-influenced Majimaji tradition, a close reading of archival sources from the German period, including several documents which have not been considered in the historiographical tradition, suggest that Christian and Islamic influences helped to shape the writing of Majimaji, if not the resistance movement itself. This paper will examine some of these “Abrahamic” sources of the Majimaji tradition, and consider how they might have been used to formulate a Majimaji epic which has become a standard icon of early African colonial history.

scholarly journals Educating Children, Civilizing Society: Missionary Schools and Non-European Teachers in South Dutch New Guinea, 1902–1942

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-70
Author(s):  
Maaike Derksen
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Colonial Education ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Indigenous Youth ◽  
Education Practice ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Power Central

AbstractThis article addresses the colonial project of “civilizing” and educating indigenous people in the farthest corners of the Dutch empire – South Dutch New Guinea (1902–1942), exploring the entanglement between colonial education practice and the civilizing mission, unravelling the variety of actors in colonial education in South Dutch New Guinea. Focusing on practice, I highlight that colonial education invested heavily in disciplining the bodies, minds, and beliefs of indigenous peoples to align them with Western Catholic standards. This observation links projects to educating and disciplining indigenous youth to the consolidation of colonial power. Central to these intense colonial interventions in the lives of Papuans were institutions of colonial education, managed by the Catholic mission but run by non-European teachers recruited from elsewhere in the Dutch colony. Their importance as proponents of the “civilizing mission” is largely unappreciated in the historiography of missionary work on Papua.

Hybridity in the Vernacular: Nineteenth-Century Muslim Reform and Resistance

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-178
Author(s):  
Maryam Wasif Khan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
The Past ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Theoretical Conception ◽  
Dark Space ◽  
Colonial Text

[W]hat attracted Nussooh's immediate attention was a cabinet of books. There was a large collection of volumes; but whether Persian or Urdu, all were of the same kind, equally indecent and irreligious. Looking to the beauty of the binding, the excellence of the lithography, the fineness of the paper, the elegance of the style, and the propriety of the diction, Kulleem's books made a valuable library, but their contents were mischievous and degrading; and after Nussooh had examined them one by one, he resolved to commit them also to the flames.—Nazir Ahmad, The Repentance of NussoohIn the past twenty-five years, no theoretical conception has summed up the complexity of the colonial experience, and the possibilities of its interpretation, as well as Homi K. Bhabha's “hybridity.” “he sign of the productivity of colonial power,” but also the “name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal,” hybridity exposes the uncomfortable state in which colonial culture settled and expanded and, today, continues to beleaguer the state of being “postcolonial” (Bhabha 112). Signiied by the “discovery of the book,” hegemony was marked by the miracle of an object that was at once authoritative and unknowable, one that the supposedly unlettered native could hold in reverent hands (102). In the dark space of the native's hands and narrated within a native register, however, the “colonial text emerges uncertainly” (107). he intent to civilize and anglicize a body of social, religious, and aesthetic practices in the colony, then, is adulterated, perhaps even unconsciously resisted, once it is disseminated by way of the seemingly irrefutable book.

scholarly journals Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: Towards a periodization of cultural discourse about colonial legacies

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Göttsche
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
Postcolonial Discourse ◽  
Political Understanding

Taking German history and culture as a starting point, this essay suggests a historical approach to reconceptualizing different forms of literary engagement with colonial discourse, colonial legacies and (post)colonial memory in the context of Comparative Postcolonial Studies. The deliberate blending of a historical, a conceptual and a political understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ in postcolonial scholarship raises problems of periodization and historical terminology when, for example, anti-colonial discourse from the colonial period or colonialist discourse in Weimar Germany are labelled ‘postcolonial’. The colonial revisionism of Germany’s interwar period is more usefully classed as post-imperial, as are particular strands of retrospective engagement with colonial history and legacy in British, French and other European literatures and cultures after 1945. At the same time, some recent developments in Francophone, Anglophone and German literature, e.g. Afropolitan writing, move beyond defining features of postcolonial discourse and raise the question of the post-postcolonial.

scholarly journals The Embodiment of the Indigenous People by European Travel Writers at the Cape Colony, Southern Africa

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Seroto
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Body ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
The West ◽  
Power Matrix ◽  
Travel Writers ◽  
Travel Accounts

This article analyses how European travellers depicted the bodies of indigenous people in their travel narrations. Three travel writers, Peter Kolb, Anders Sparrman and Sir John Barrow, were selected to investigate how the bodies of indigenous people were perceived at the Cape Colony. Grosfoguel’s theoretical framework of the coloniality of power, the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being was used to ground and investigate the coloniality of the body in the Colony. The findings suggest that the portrayal of indigenous people’s bodies by Europeans in their travel accounts has connotations of racial stereotypes, which are characterised by a colonial power matrix of subjugation, hierarchisation, Eurocentrism, dehumanisation and objectification of indigenous people. European travellers used the notion of Eurocentric power, the epistemology of the West and the degradation of “being” to depict the bodies of the indigenous people.

Situating the Andean Colonial Experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Islamic Law ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Local History ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Local Responses ◽  
Colonial And Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Andean Pact

Re-situating Andean colonial history from the perspective of the local historians of ayllu Qaqachaka, in highland Bolivia, this book draws on regional oral history combined with local and public written archives. Rejecting the binary models in vogue in colonial and postcolonial studies (indigenous/non-indigenous, Andean/Western, conquered/conquering), it explores the complex intercalation of legal pluralism and local history in the negotiations around Spanish demands, resulting in the so-called "Andean pact." The Qaqachaka's point of reference is the preceding Inka occupation, so in fulfilling Spanish demands they seek cultural continuity with this recent past. Spanish colonial administration, applies its roots in Roman-Germanic and Islamic law to many practices in the newly-conquered territories. Two major cycles of ayllu tales trace local responses to these colonial demands, in the practices for establishing settlements, and the feeding and dressing of the Catholic saints inside the new church, with their forebears in the Inka mummies.

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