Postcolonial Governance

This chapter demonstrates the manner in which Hamas's postcolonial governance persists in a colonial nonstate context. Despite the “real” Palestinian state being nonexistent, it is necessary to take the materiality of the imagined state seriously. However, in doing so, the aspiration is not to determine “how much” or “how little” Hamas acts like a state, but rather to illustrate the way in which its state-like conduct is socialized into a liberation context. Subsequently, the chapter specifies two perspectives on Hamas's government. The first perspective is that of Hamas. Drawing on interviews with Hamas officials, the chapter outlines the organization's perception of itself as an anticolonial faction that has now infused the postcolonial state with the ethos of the anticolonial struggle and, in doing so, reconceptualized its role as a government as a means of protecting the anticolonial armed resistance. The second perspective is that of the recipients of Hamas's governance, namely the Gazans. Based on interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, the chapter argues that, while the colonized are socialized into the reality of their own statelessness, their encounter with Hamas's governance also emerges as a canvas on which Palestine is displayed as a state.

The persistent instructor: 45 years of Kofi the Good Farmer in Ghana

In 1950, the Gold Coast colonial government published the 52-page pamphlet titled Kofi the Good Farmer. In 1953, it was adapted into a thirteen-minute instructional film of the same name. The film, like the booklet, follows a farmer named Kofi as he demonstrates proper cocoa-farming methods. Depicted as a remote, rural farmer who becomes successful because of his implementation of foreign farming techniques and his acceptance of the colonial government’s authority to determine and control the cocoa grading scale, Kofi provides evidence of paternalism and racialist colonial rhetoric in British colonial filmmaking. However, 34 years after the making of Kofi, it was re-shown to rural audiences. Why was a dutiful colonial subject like Kofi instructing cocoa farmers over 30 years after Ghana’s independence? And what can his use by the postcolonial state tell us about national governance? This article argues that the persistent use of Kofi by Ghana reveals the entangled relationship between colonialism and nationalism in postcolonial governance. Following the subtle changes that Kofi has undergone in his 45 years of government service, I highlight how government-sponsored films construct their audiences as remote in order to reinforce the power of the state in moments of political uncertainty.

History, Politics, and Culture in Central Tanzania

Central Tanzania is a heterogenous region in the interior of East Africa. Its history, politics, and cultures have been affected by numerous outside influences. These outside influences have primarily come in the form of migrants from elsewhere in the East African interior and the Western Indian Ocean world, and in the form of “proto-colonial,” colonial, and postcolonial governance structures, whose centers since the mid-19th century have been located in Tanzania’s coastal or island regions. Despite the apparent “newness” that each migrant group or governor instituted, Central Tanzania’s politics and cultures have shown a remarkable adaptability to new influences, whether that be to ivory traders arriving in the region during the 19th century or to colonial rulers attempting to govern it during the 20th. Additionally, Islam and Christianity have taken a variety of forms within Central Tanzania, none of which exactly correspond to the ideals of those who originally brought them to the region. The peoples of Central Tanzania have acculturated to outside influences and reconciled them with their preexisting and developing political and cultural structures.

Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

This article examines how the UK’s Troubled Families Programme works as a strategy of domestication which produces and delimits certain forms of ‘family life’. Drawing upon critical geographies of home and empire, the article explores how the Troubled Families Programme works to manage the troubled family as part of a longer history of regulating unruly households in the name of national health and civilisation. Viewing the Troubled Families Programme as part of the production of heteronormative order highlights how the policy remobilises and reconfigures older forms of colonial rule which work to demarcate between civility/savagery, the developable/undevelopable. In examining the postcolonial dimension of neoliberal social policy, the article stresses how the Troubled Families Programme relies on racialising and sexualised logics of socio-biological control borrowed from imperial eugenics. Reading the Troubled Families Programme in this way contributes to our understanding of neoliberal rule. That the troubled family can be either domesticated or destroyed (through benefit sanctions and eviction) equally reveals the extent to which domesticity works as a key site for the production of both ‘worthy’ and ‘surplus’ life.