THE MANILA WATERWORKS SYSTEM

Primarily considered a nineteenth-century feat, the Manila waterworks system which was formally inaugurated in 1882 is regarded as one if not the most important sanitary infrastructure achievements of the Spanish colonial government. A centerpiece public works project of the Inspección General de Obras Públicas (IGOP), it intended to provide solutions to the problems of health and sanitation in a rapidly urbanizing Manila. Used as a testament of modern engineering in the colony, the infrastructure was central in cleansing, domesticating, and transforming the urban body of the city. This paper tackles the techno-scientific innovations that characterized the Manila waterworks project to sanitize and domesticatethe murky, dirty, sickly and unruly body of the modern city. The paper traces how this sanitary infrastructure project was conceptualized and concretized, how water was located, pumped, stored, and distributed to the colonial capital. Furthermore, it interrogates how water was used both as a tool and symbol to cleanse and modernize the colonial body and colonial city. It discusses how water access, exclusion, and control led to an ideological and spatial transformation of Manila in the last decades of the nineteenth century

Colonial Trauma, Utopian Carnality, Modernist Form

Understandings of trauma in the colonial context fall largely into two strands. A therapeutic strand endorses the potential for “healing” from colonial trauma in the present, postcolonial era but fails to grasp how much this era reprises the toxins of colonialism itself. This view implicitly encourages the once-colonized to align themselves with the purported “health” of postcolonial modernity. An anti-therapeutic strand grants the need for a critique of the postcolonial but generalizes the historically specific toxins of that era to any and all social orders—hence making it difficult to imagine social change. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things provide more historically astute and dialectical accounts than the theoretical models offer. These examples of postcolonial historical fiction are modernist in form; they explore distinct yet homologous types of domination (slavery and the slave trade on one hand, exploitation colonialism in India on the other) through a similar set of representational techniques. These techniques are crucial to the novels’ political astuteness. The books’ temporally disordered forms at once record the fragmentations and devastations visited on the colonial body and provide intimations of an alternative, erotic futurity in which those bodies will have been made whole.

A Comparative Study of Pecola and Gyanoda: Sex, Violence and Beauty in the Bluest Eye and Arakshaniya

Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (1876-1938) in Arakshaniya (1916) has pictured Gyanoda, a socially abandoned and oppressed Bengali Hindu girl of 12/13 expected to be married off. Unable to endure the sexual violence and cruelties thrown upon her, Pecola in The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison (b. 1931) looses her sanity. The colonial- society-constructed idea of beauty, the hurling insults of her schoolmates and neighbors, the perverted assurance of achieving beauty from the pedophile Soaphead Church and above all the sexual violence that she receives from her father leaves her in a dark world. Apart from her friends, she receives sympathy only from socially unaccepted ‘ruined’ women. Unlike Pecola, Gyanoda was restored to the world of love and affection primarily by her mother, younger aunt and then by Atul, her assumed love. Gyanoda, though rejected and humiliated by the family and the society, was not a total rejection as Pecola was. She managed to live on though not in a respected manner. This paper looks into Pecola’s psychic procedural patterns to show how she becomes an object of perversion and violence, which along with the established idea of beauty takes her to the verge of insanity. A comparative study has been done between Pecola and Gyanoda, two characters from two entirely different ethnicities and cultures. However, surprisingly both the characters encounter social hostility for their common characteristic “ugliness.” The very presumption of beauty, violence, and sex lead these young girls to the different worlds of their own. Black and female identities occupy very real political spaces of diaspora, dispossession and resistance. What is complicated is the simultaneity of suffering and power, marginalization and threat, submission and narcissism, which accre to Black and women’s bodies and their representation in racist cultures.--from “Feminism and the Colonial Body” by Kadiatu Kanneth.

The Brazilian woman: from the colonial photography to contemporary Portuguese photography

This study aims to carry out an initial analysis of how the Brazilian woman image is shaped by a discourse that is historically constructed and reinforced by colonial photography. This visuality has endured through the ages and represents a form of contemporary colonialism, as it is characterized by an identity reductionism disguised as a global ideology. The possibility of paradox prevalence in these speeches is analyzed through a critical view of the work of André Cepeda and Miguel Valle de Figueiredo, Portuguese photographers who has produced photography artwork about the Brazilian woman. In these images, the construction of a visual concept of Brazilian women revealed underlying statements supported by their perceptions and experiences, as well as in generalized beliefs. Thus, it was concluded that the understanding of the image of Brazilian women as portrayed by those photographers shows itself covered of brand new colonizing processes in which the Brazilian woman’s image is linked with a sense of an available and sensual body, imbued with the concept of a colonial body that still persists in contemporary imagery.