Rum Histories: Drinking in Atlantic Literature and Culture

The book examines rum in anglophone Atlantic literature between 1945 and 1973, the period of decolonization, and explains the adaptation of these images for the era of globalization. Rum’s alcoholic nature links it to stereotypes (e.g., piracy, demon rum, Caribbean tourism) that have constrained serious analysis in the field of colonial commodities. Insights from anthropology, history, and commodity theory yield new understandings of rum’s role in containing the paradox of a postcolonial world still riddled with the legacies of colonialism. The association of rum with slavery causes slippage between its specific role in economic exploitation and moral attitudes about the consequences of drinking. These attitudes mask history that enables continued sexual, environmental, and political exploitation of Caribbean people and spaces. Gendered and racialized drinking taboos transfer blame to individuals and cultures rather than international structures, as seen in examinations of works by V. S. Naipaul, Hunter S. Thompson, Jean Rhys, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. More broadly, these stereotypes and taboos threaten understanding West Indian nationalism in works by Earl Lovelace, George Lamming, and Sylvia Wynter. The conclusion articulates the popular force of rum’s image by addressing the relationship between a meme from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films and rhetoric during the 2016 election year.

Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India

This essay explores repressed hostility and punitive fantasies in the discourse of international health, using Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Multiple tendencies in interwar thinking converge in Mayo’s book, making it a veritable archive of major, minor and emergent forces, including those shaping the phenomenon of ‘international health’ post-Versailles. Mother India provides a unique opportunity to explore how progressive principles of international public health tend to obscure a ‘minor’ and forgettable yet disturbing truth: the discourse on life and health can ‘safely’ harbour an alternative politics and poetics of enmity. Spotlighting the way international health interventions, centrally shaped by USA, operated across multiple levels of governance, the essay locates the significant detail of Mayo’s representation of India as ‘world-menace’. Propelled by the logic of enmity, her shaming portrait of a dysgenic Hindu India justifying emergency international intervention resonates with a strand of interwar conservatism given theoretical expression in the writings of Mayo’s contemporary, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s animosity towards political liberalism helps identify Mother India’s vision of imperial sovereignty as a curious antiliberal, American iteration of the logic of enmity in extra-European space and in the ‘humane’ domain of health. Biologising the discourse of juridical-political maturity at a time when Indian nationalism’s organised challenge to Empire could not be gainsaid, Mother India urges a re-imagination of the political field as a battlefield where ‘the enemy’, construed as a problem of health, will kill. Building a case for continued imperial domination in the name of global health and immunity, the book’s humiliating representation of colonial bodily habits, habitations and contagions aimed to undermine liberal imperialism, internationalism and Indian nationalism, all increasingly vocal after World War I.

Book review: Paul Wallace (Ed.), India’s 2019 Elections: The Hindutva Wave and Indian Nationalism

Paul Wallace (Ed.), India’s 2019 Elections: The Hindutva Wave and Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2020), 428 pp. ₹1,395 (Hardback). ISBN: 978-93-5388-244-0.

Gandhi, Indian Nationalism, and Temperance Resistance against the Raj

Chapter 7 follows Mahatma Gandhi’s embrace of prohibitionism as resistance against Britain’s “narco-military empire,” first in South Africa and then in India. Gandhi understood that the British system of imperial dominance was built upon trafficking addictive opium and alcohol, the revenues from which paid for military occupation. Nationalists Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari adopted temperance tactics such as picketing liquor stores as part of their noncooperation activism. Their Prohibition League of India—a “social” rather than “political” organization—provided organizational safe haven for nationalists of the Indian National Congress when the British clamped down on Gandhi’s nationalist efforts. Making common cause with transnational temperance norm entrepreneurs such as “Pussyfoot” Johnson added greater legitimacy to both Indian nationalism and prohibitionism, which became utterly synonymous in Gandhi’s quest for independence.

Editorial Introduction

The Editors are proud to present the first issue of the fifth volume of the JIOWS. This issue represents a number of innovations in IOW studies and for our journal.Firstly, we present a special feature on port-towns in the IOW, organized and guest edited by Vidhya Raveendranathan and Duane Corpis. This special feature stems from an interdisciplinary conference held at NYU Shanghai in 2019 and adds perspectives focusing on labour and infrastructure to our understanding of the IOW’s port-towns, past and present. Raveendranathan has written a historiographical primer and has introduced the four articles contained within the feature in the Guest Editors’ Introduction. We are also thrilled to announce that she has agreed to join the permanent editorial team as a Managing Editor following the publication of this issue. We look forward to continuing our work together moving forwards.Secondly, we present two articles dealing with separate issues in IOW studies. Nancy Wright engages the work of Lindsey Collen, a Mauritian novelist, to challenge the thematic paradigms of ‘centre’ and ‘margins’ in the literature of the IOW. She argues that, through using the English language and folklore in her writing, Collen brings the margins to the centre, thereby obliviating an assumed analytical dichotomy. Collen’s work transforms this and other dichotomies by narrating the human condition across gender, class, and nation. Meanwhile, Heena Mistry re-visits the repatriation debate in India following the abolition of indenture in 1917. By drawing on the work of an ‘ocean-crossing activist’ and a journalist with significant links to South Africa, she sheds new light on Indian diasporic perspectives of late colonial India and the IOW. Here, the IOW perspective challenges better-known histories of Indian Nationalism and anticolonialism that focus largely on developments occurring within India itself.Finally, we are proud to launch the Book Reviews section of the JIOWS with Zozan Pehlivan as Book Reviews’ Editor. As Pehlivan is a former postdoctoral fellow at the IOWC, we are especially excited to renew our formal collaboration with her in this new role. In this issue, we present reviews of two exciting publications in IOW studies: Wilson Chacko Jacob’s For God or Empire and Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade. We hope to build on and expand our book reviews section moving forwards, making the JIOWS the prime location in which scholarship pertaining to the IOW is discussed and analysed.

China and India will clash over border again

Significance Under an agreement struck last month, the two sides dismantled forward-deployed encampments and returned to their positions prior to the onset of the crisis, according to a statement from India’s defence ministry. However, troops continue to face off elsewhere along the border. Impacts China is a hot-button issue for Indian nationalism, but the reverse is not the case, so Beijing may have more room for flexibility. Delhi's efforts to reduce India's economic interactions with China will continue. Quadrilateral security cooperation between India, the United States, Japan and Australia will gather momentum.