Svirsky and Bignall assemble leading figures to explore the rich philosophical linkages and the political concerns shared by Agamben and postcolonial theory. Agamben’s theories of the ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’ are situated in critical relation to the existence of these phenomena in the colonial/postcolonial world.
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Agamben and Colonialism, Simone Bignall and Marcelo Svirsky; I. Colonial States of Exception; Imperialism, Exceptionalism and the Contemporary World, Yehouda Shenhav; 1. The Management of Anomie: The State of Exception in Post-communist Russia, Sergei Prozorov; 2. The Cultural Politics of Exception, Marcelo Svirsky; II. Colonial Sovereignty; 4. Indigenising Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples, Mark Rifkin; 5. Reading Kenya’s Colonial State of Emergency after Agamben, Stephen Morton; 6. Colonial Sovereignty, Forms of Life and Liminal Beings in South Africa, Stewart Motha; III. Bare Life and Bio-Politics; 7. Encountering Bare Life in Italian Libya and Colonial Amnesia in Agamben, David Atkinson; 8. Abandoning Gaza, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir; 9. Colonial Histories: Biopolitics and Shantytowns in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, Silvia Grinberg; IV. Method, History and Potentiality; 10. Metropolis and Colonisation, Leland de la Durantaye; 11. ‘The Work of Men is Not Durable’: History, Haiti and the Rights of Man, Jessica Whyte; 12. Potential Postcoloniality: Sacred Life, Profanation and the Coming Community, Simone Bignall; Notes on Contributors; Index.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
lea et al. on walkers
It is in the contemporary period of Indigenous cultural recognition that the biopolitical system of policing Aboriginal walkers in Australia’s frontier towns has become so normalized that it takes place without public notice, using universally accepted mechanisms for shedding metropolitan areas of the unsightly and unwanted. Ironically, the hypermarginalized hunter-gatherer population can be identified by their perambulation — they walk — a form of urban nomadism that is both desired and reviled. Aboriginal pedestrians who are temporarily not in motion are forced to keep moving but are not expelled altogether, for their presence is essential to the region’s wider economic interests. Since Aboriginal pedestrians are “moved on” when entrepreneurial imperatives cannot be met, and since moving is also a means of remaining invisible in the most heavily policed commercial zones, walking is thus overdetermined, a coproduced effect of racial excision and resistance in the ambivalent political economies of the Australian liberal-settler frontier.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Ian McLean, ‘Reinventing the Savage’, Third Text 26, 5 (2012).
The noble aims of ‘Exhibitions: L’Invention du Sauvage’ (‘Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage’) at the Musée du quai Branly were not enough to counter the museum’s primitivist postmodern architecture or the exhibition’s curatorial strategy. Presenting a large number of archival images, as if documents of a barbaric age, along with declamatory wall texts that outline the sins of colonialism might satisfy the guilty conscience of the postcolonial European imagination, but it does nothing to speak for the agency of those mainly indigenous performers whom the exhibition showcases. Lost in the exhibition are the ways in which these Indigenous performers in Europe’s capitals shaped the modern imaginary and sought to articulate their own modernity.
Filed under: art, Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
There is a wonderful self-assurance about the zero-sum game when you are always on the winning side. The winnings may not amount to much materially or objectively. That is not the point. The feeling of winning is itself the most important of the winnings.
Joseph lee on settler Unionists, native Catholics and the zero-sum contest in Ireland.
Filed under: Éire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The basic colonial encounter involved a colonizing power and colonized locals. Some colonial situations were more complex, involving a third element: settlers of nonlocal stock originating in an ethnos, or nation, different than that with which the colonizer was identified. Two prominent examples from the annals of the British Empire are the French inhabitants of Nouvelle France after France ceded it to the British in 1763, and the Dutch inhabitants of the Cape Colony after the British conquest of 1806. The British typically permitted such settler populations to retain at least parts of the laws to which they were accustomed, which laws were often based on the laws of the settlers’ jurisdiction of origin. As regards settler use of English law, the English sometimes provided for the application of parts of it to non-British settlers, while blocking such settlers’ attempts to use other parts. The part of English law most commonly applied to non-British colonial subjects, both settlers and natives, was commercial law, in order to facilitate commerce between different parts of the Empire. The parts least commonly applied to such inhabitants were family law, land law, and the law of inheritance.
Filed under: Empire, Israel/Palestine, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This article raises the recurrent question whether non-indigenous researchers should attempt to research with/in Indigenous communities. If research is indeed a metaphor of colonization, then we have two choices: we have to learn to conduct research in ways that meet the needs of Indigenous communities and are non-exploitative, culturally appropriate and inclusive, or we need to relinquish our roles as researchers within Indigenous contexts and make way for Indigenous researchers. Both of these alternatives are complex. Hence in this article I trace my learning journey; a journey that has culminated in the realization that it is not my place to conduct research within Indigenous contexts, but that I can use ‘what I know’ – rather than imagining that I know about Indigenous epistemologies or Indigenous experiences under colonialism – to work as an ally with Indigenous researchers. Coming as I do, from a position of relative power, I can also contribute in some small way to the project of decolonizing methodologies by speaking ‘to my own mob’.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
This is a major new study of the cultural foundations of the Tudor plantations in Ireland and of early English imperialism more generally. John Patrick Montaño traces the roots of colonialism in the key relationship of cultivation and civility in Tudor England and shows the central role this played in Tudor strategies for settling, civilising and colonising Ireland. The book ranges from the role of cartography, surveying and material culture – houses, fences, fields, roads and bridges – in manifesting the new order to the place of diet, leisure, language and hairstyles in establishing cultural differences as a site of conflict between the Irish and the imperialising state and as a justification for the civilising process. It shows that the ideologies and strategies of colonisation which would later be applied in the New World were already apparent in the practices, material culture and hardening attitude towards barbarous customs of the Tudor regime.
Filed under: Éire, Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
extract in lieu of abstract:
The editors of Ab Imperio invited authors and readers to discuss varieties of colonialism in this issue of the journal. Seemingly, “colonialism” is an obvious category in studies of empire. It is exactly the ability to expand and incorporate new territories and peoples that is commonly held to be a characteristic of empire. Moreover, the modern interpretation of colonialism has brought together the political power of the West European nation-state and the production of knowledge about human diversity. And yet, are all aspects of colonialism so obvious?
The textbook definition of “colony” usually starts (in chronological order) with mentioning settlements on foreign shores by natives of Greek poleis and Roman Italy, then focusing on the modern understanding of colony as an element of geopolitical expansion of the “West” (the developed countries). It is tacitly implied that Greeks spreading to Asia Minor and the Black Sea littoral cannot be discussed in terms of modern Western colonialism: colonies are present, while colonialism is not, inasmuch as there are no conventional characteristics of it. There is no attempt to impose political domination upon overseas territories by Corinth or even Sparta, no economic exploitation of the colonized lands. The word “Metropole” exists, but the relations of “the core and periphery” do not. Hence, no colonialism.
The history of antiquity is sufficiently far from the themes explored by Ab Imperio (“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba …?”). However, in an issue dedicated to the role of colonialism in the production of structures and cultures of imperial and postimperial diversity, it is impossible to ignore the obvious “West-centrism” of today’s understanding of colonialism. Is it just modern capitalist overseas empires that conducted colonial policies, and are these policies the only, and exemplary, form of colonialism?
The first part of this question is answered negatively in the article that opens the issue: the Russian translation of the Introduction to Pekka Hämäläinen’s pioneering study The Comanche Empire, characteristically titled “Reversed Colonialism.” Hämäläinen shows how, over a hundred years (from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries), the Comanche tribal confederation took control over enormous swathes of territory in the southern part of today’s United States. In fact, the Comanche empire established colonial relations of domination and exploitation with the outposts of Euro-American colonists. The formal colonial empires of Spain, France, and Britain turned out to be, in effect, in tributary relations with “savages.” The example of the Comanches clearly illustrates that imperialism and colonialism was not a privilege of modern European societies and of the political forms they created.
In Hämäläinen’s work, we see how giving agency to historical actors who had so far been viewed solely as victims and objects of European colonization fundamentally changes the picture of the peopling of North America by Europeans. This is not to say that this colonization was not accompanied by the extermination of native Americans. Rather, the history that we access by changing perspective and giving agency to historical actors is much more rich and complex, with a multidimensional moral and ideological subtext.
This also answers the second part of the question about the exclusively Western forms and meanings of colonialism. Getting back to the ancient Greeks and their colonization of Ionian islands, Italy, and the Black Sea Coast, we can recall that historians usually employ the categories of cultural transfer and economic exchanges, although without forgetting about violence and military engagements. Taking the logic of dictionary definitions seriously, we presume that colonialism can play an important role in population migrations, in the circulation of ideas and technology, and in the transformation of social structures and political cultures of the societies of the metropole and the colonies (as was the case in antiquity).
Filed under: Empire, Europe, Russia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
extract in lieu of abstract:
When Seeley set himself the task of examining ‘historically the tendency to expansion which England has so long displayed’, he divided his lectures in two along a ‘natural’ division between those people ready for self-government and those not yet ready. The first were what he called ‘Greater Britain’, including the United Kingdom and the settler colonies of Canada (and Newfoundland), the Australian and New Zealand colonies, Cape and Natal, as well as the West Indies. The second group included India and all other dependencies. Mantena agrees with Seeley’s distinction between self-governing and dependent colonies.
[…]
Mantena is hardly alone in accepting Seeley’s distinction as the key to explain the evolution of the imperial constitution. In the aftermath of decolonisation, Pocock called for a ‘British history’ that would encompass the settler colonies of the British empire. James Belich and Duncan Bell, among others, have shown that Seeley’s ‘Greater Britain’ arose in the 1880s and ‘was big and powerful in its day, a virtual United States, which historians of the period can no longer ignore, nor dismiss as a failed idea.’ Legal historians have also answered Pocock’s call with detailed comparative studies of discrete legal subjects like property and marriage. Recent scholarship has also examined ‘aboriginal’ or ‘indigenous’ rights in the settler colonies. All these studies reinforce the constitutional unity of the settler colonies ‘emerging’ as distinct Dominions, in contrast to India and the African colonies ‘winning’ or ‘being granted’ independence. ‘Indirect rule, the rule through native institutions,’ Mantena reminds us, ‘would be hailed as the unique and defining principle of British imperial rule in Asia and Africa’. She cites approvingly Low’s argument in Lion Rampant that the new forms of rules developed in India at the end of the century were then transplanted in south-east Asia and Africa.
Filed under: Empire, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
robert goodin on settling
Robert E. Goodin, On Settling (Princeton University Press, 2012).
In a culture that worships ceaseless striving, “settling” seems like giving up. But is it? On Settling defends the positive value of settling, explaining why this disdained practice is not only more realistic but more useful than an excessive ideal of striving. In fact, the book makes the case that we’d all be lost without settling–and that even to strive, one must first settle.
We may admire strivers and love the ideal of striving, but who of us could get through a day without settling? Real people, confronted with a complex problem, simply make do, settling for some resolution that, while almost certainly not the best that one could find by devoting limitless time and attention to the problem, is nonetheless good enough. Robert Goodin explores the dynamics of this process. These involve taking as fixed, for now, things that we reserve the right to reopen later (nothing is fixed for good, although events might always overtake us). We settle on some things in order to concentrate better on others. At the same time we realize we may need to come back later and reconsider those decisions. From settling on and settling for, to settling down and settling in, On Settling explains why settling is useful for planning, creating trust, and strengthening the social fabric–and why settling is different from compromise and resignation.
So, the next time you’re faced with a thorny problem, just settle. It’s no failure.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
