Criticism of “Colonial Modernity” through Kurdish Decolonial Approaches

Western modernity with its colonial application has created an identity trauma and patriarchal domination of the memory of colonized and oppressed peoples. Critiques from colonized territories encourage us to reread the colonial epistemes of modernity, whether or not centered on the West. The Kurdish political movement thus defines a new interpretation of modernity based on the critique of colonialism and global capitalism: “democratic modernity.” This chapter problematizes the relations between modernity, the nation state, the destruction of ecology, social confinement, the relationship of the forces of these relations, but above all the modalities by which it becomes possible to act on them to break the “stalemate” of the modernity of thought in the twenty-first century.

Colonial Modernity and Diffusion of Power: Identity and Community Formation among Mappilas of Malabar

This paper explores colonial modernity and the knowledge system’s role in constituting community formation among the Mappilas of Malabar. Colonial modernity, such as the introduction of printing, made this transformation more advanced and communitarian in structure. It also discusses colonialism as a force to reshape and bring socio-cultural changes in Malabar during the time. It argues that the existence of a clearly defined community is not a predetermined social fact; it looks at how the Mappilas were represented in an analytical category. In Malabar, the press and literature have played an essential role in framing community consciousness among Mappila society. Print media has brought a revolution in the transmission of knowledge. This paper will encompass the coming of the printing press and the moulding of community consciousness among the Mappilas of Malabar. It discusses the discursive and non-discursive practices of the colonial state for constructing various identities in Malabar.

Law and Order, the Rule of Law, and the Legitimation of the Colonial Presence in Late British Burma

In Britain's empire across Asia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century, two political-legal principles were central to colonial modernity, law and order, and the rule of law. These two principles secured the legitimation of colonial rule, in the eyes of those who ruled. It is striking then to see that in late colonial Burma, in the 1920s and 1930s, the colonial government struggled to maintain law and order and to embed the rule of law. Violent crime soared while the criminal justice system failed hopelessly for serious offences. This article seeks to explore the ways in which senior British officials in Burma navigated the disjuncture between the imperial principles that were central to colonial justification and Burma's reality. Perhaps most notably, they did so by putting blame for the soaring crime rates and the failures of the criminal justice system firmly on the Burmese. In the early 1940s, however, with the end of colonial rule clearly imminent, the legitimation of the colonial presence became of less pressing importance, and the failure of colonial practice to live up to its ideological rhetoric could now be more openly faced.

Shopgirls as Consumers: Selling Popular Music in 1920s Australia

The mid-1920s were boom years for the Australian gramophone trade. The most prominent multinational record companies had established local branches, and a handful of new factories produced millions of records for sale on the local market. Department stores joined an established network of music traders in retailing these cultural products. This article explores the labour of women involved in the retail sale of gramophone records in Melbourne. Selling recorded sound animated a charged rhetoric of musical meliorism, class and taste, according to which the value of the product was determined by the supposed musical quality thereof. Australian saleswomen or “shopgirls” were required to perform evidence of their modernity in the commercial encounter. I propose that conceiving of record saleswomen as simultaneously sellers and consumers provides valuable insight into the entangled nature of capitalism and culture in the realm of Australian music. This exploration of the process of commercialisation of recorded music illuminates the connection between labour and culture, leisure and society in colonial modernity.

Movement, space and the logic of the gift: Reflections on Milbank and the African religious archive

This article reflects on how the contemporary relationship between movement and space can be reversed so that movement regains priority over space in the experience of life. Its key argument is that movement has potential to take priority over space but only via the logic of the gift. The logic of the gift has potential to undermine the privilege colonial modernity accords to space over movement because its conception of exchange challenges exchange as a construct of economic logic central to the experience of modernity. The article focuses on the gift as is found in the work of John Milbank and the African religious archive. It tries to show that along with Milbank’s imagination of the gift, the gift as a construct of the African religious archive stands to contribute in the fight against the continuing alienation brought about by the project of modernity. This is because it imagines the sacred dimension primarily via the terrain of the family.Contribution: This article contributes to a reading of capitalism via the logic of the gift as a construct of the African religious archive and does so by borrowing from the work of theologians. In doing so, it tries to present a different way of thinking about gift giving in relation to the African religious expression, which has until the recent past been dominated by anthropologists.

Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature: Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines

Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force.

殖民的規訓營造──廈門租界的個案（1840s~1940s）

<p>本文旨在重新檢視19世紀中葉後，廈門租界在通商口岸的建構下，如何以殖民工程科學論述的移植，進行租界的空間營造。文中將指出這樣的殖民行動目的在於確保殖民者在殖民地的衛生與安全，以確保殖民行動的遂行，方式上是經由科學觀察、調查、測量和統計的殖民現代性營造，一種帶有非正式帝國（informal empire）領土延伸的具體空間部署。這種非正式的殖民營造，是一種主體被遮蔽的建構過程。作者認為，19世紀萌芽的科學且正當的社會進化理論，提供了像英國這樣的殖民帝國在晚清中國租界擴張的一個自然化邏輯的依據；同時，藉由知識掌控，進而利用殖民地資源，以增進各種帝國殖民行動的經濟利益。這種來自於殖民主義擴張所確立的空間部署，使得想像中的地理願望在這一部署行動中被化為確立的政治連結、經濟依賴與地景改造的物質空間性。諸如廈門租界也在這種全景敞視論（panopticism）的機制下，而被予以殖民規訓營造。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p> This article would like to rediscover the spatial planning and management of the treaty area in Xiamen（廈門）during the 1840s~1930s. It argues that the Xiamen concession shaped the treaty port by transplanting the modern engineering-science. The author thought that British Empire used the neutralization logic for science and legitimated the social evolution to encroach concessions of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century, and enhanced various interests of colonial acts by controlling knowledge simultaneously. This spatial disposition made geographical desire of colonial imagination be a physical space of political connection and economical dependency and remodeled. The informal colonization was a constructional process of a hidden subject. The Xiamen concession built the colonial discipline based on the method of panopticism. This article will point out the purpose of colonial act aimed on ensuring the hygiene and health of Colonizers in Xiamen concession. In practice, it concerned building colonial modernity by observing, surveying, measuring the statistics of science that was a spatial disposition referring to extended territory of informal empire.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>