Colonial Figures: Memories of Street Traders in the Colonial and Early Post-colonial Periods

This article explores post-colonial memories about street traders among individuals who lived in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies. It argues that these narratives romanticize the relationship between Europeans and indigenous peoples. Street vendors are also used to differentiate between periods within colonial and post-colonial history. The nostalgic representation of interracial contact between Europeans and traders is contrasted with representations of other figures such as the Japanese and the nationalist. A recurring feature of these representations is the ability of Europeans to speak with street traders and imagine what they wanted and needed. The traders are remembered as a social type that transgressed politics and represented the neutrality of the economic sphere as a place for shared communication. The article concludes that the figure of the street vendor contributes to the nostalgic reinvention of the colony but is also used in narratives to differentiate between and mark changes across the colonial and post-colonial periods

White ants, empire and entomo-politics in South Asia

By focussing on the history of white ants in colonial South Asia, this article shows how insects were ubiquitous and fundamental to the shaping of British colonial power. British rule in India was vulnerable to white ants because these insects consumed paper and wood, the key material foundations of the colonial state. The white ant problem also made the colonial state more resilient and intrusive. The sphere of strict governmental intervention was extended to include both animate and inanimate nonhumans, while these insects were invoked as symbols to characterise colonised landscapes, peoples and cultures. Nonetheless, encounters with white ants were not entirely within the control of the colonial state. Despite effective state intervention, white ants didn’t vanish altogether, and remained objects of everyday control till the final decade of colonial rule and after. Meanwhile, colonised and post-colonial South Asians used white ants to articulate their own distinct political agendas. Over time, white ants featured variously as metaphors for Islamic decadence, British colonial exploitation, communism, democratic socialism and more recently, the Indian National Congress. This article argues that co-constitutive encounters between the worlds of insects and politics have been an intrinsic feature of British colonialism and its legacies in South Asia

"Plays thus at being Prosper" : Caliban and the colonised savage in mid-nineteenth-century Britain : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University

Representations of Caliban in Victorian Britain took the form of plays, performances, reviews, poems, paintings, cartoons, sketches, and commentaries. These representations predominantly involved an ambivalence between portrayals of Caliban as human, and as non-human. A similar ambivalence is apparent in Victorian representations of the savage. Taking Robert Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" as an initial example, this thesis applies Homi Bhabha's model of colonial mimicry to these representations of Caliban in order to show that the ambivalence in them is continuous with the ambivalent aim of the colonial mission, which is both to suppress and to enlighten. This ambivalent colonial mission leads Caliban to be constructed within Victorian colonial discourse in an ambivalent fashion, and he is hence both contained within and subversive against that discourse. Caliban acts as a conceptual site at which colonial ideology can be both defended, by those interpretations of Caliban which are continuous with stereotypical Victorian representations of the savage, and challenged, by those representations which are subversive to the colonial ideology which is the basis of this stereotype. The challenges to colonial ideology come from interpretations of Caliban as an evolutionary figure and as a satirical figure. It is in the process of defending the colonial interpretation that the ambivalence inherent in the colonial model is made clear. Thus Caliban can be seen to be, in these interpretations, a representation of this stereotype of the colonial savage, functioning to justify the ambivalent colonial mission

Pre-colonial institutions and socioeconomic development: The case of Latin America

We study the effects of pre-colonial institutions on present-day socioeconomic outcomes for Latin America. Our thesis is that more advanced pre-colonial institutions relate to better socioeconomic outcomes today. We advance that pre-colonial institutions survived to our days thanks to the existence of largely self-governed Amerindian communities in rural Latin America. Amerindians groups with more advanced institutional capacity would have been able to organize and defend their interests in front of national governments; leading to better development outcomes for themselves and for the population at large. We test our thesis with a dataset of 324 sub-national administrative units covering all mainland Latin American countries. Our extensive range of controls covers factors such as climate, location, natural resources, colonial activities and pre-colonial characteristics – plus country fixed effects. Results strongly support our thesis

Settler colonialism, multiculturalism and the politics of postcolonial identity

The twentieth century saw the development of nationalism and the construction of postcolonial identities in many newly independent nations. Formerly colonised peoples have struggled to restore and adapt their customs and to construct postcolonial national identities. Settler colonial nations face a distinctive challenge in the construction of postcolonial national identities. These nations are founded on the dispossession and assimilation of indigenous peoples and the impulse to build an autonomous settler nation. They are, therefore, caught in a limbo between an ambivalent relationship to the ‘mother-country’ and an unwillingness to acknowledge brutal and colonial aspects of their nation’s foundations. The Australian situation is a powerful example of the difficulty of constructing postcolonial national identities in settler colonial nations. In Australia, multicultural discourses have sought to distance Australian identity from its settler colonial foundations. These discourses have the potential to contribute to a more postcolonial form of national identity. Many Australians, however, have seemed indifferent to multicultural descriptions of Australian identity. Multiculturalism’s failure to capture the Australian imagination can be attributed to the difficulty of overcoming settler colonial forms of identity. The settler colonial ambivalence regarding Australia’s British and colonial heritage has resulted in the adoption of liberal democratic ‘universalist’ values as a form of surrogate cultural and national identity. The culture of Australians of British heritage is normalised and these Australians frequently regard themselves to be without a true cultural heritage. This has serious implications for multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is interpreted as applicable only to Australians of ‘ethnic’ background, irrelevant to Australians with British heritage and unable to provide a sense of belonging to all Australians. Settler colonial discourses of Australian identity continue to be influential. However, multicultural discourses have broadened Australian public debate to include a search for innovative identities in a postcolonial world

Report for the year ...

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Facade Identification of colonial buildings in the city of Bandung

Colonial architecture was present in Indonesia through the work of Dutch architects and was intended for the Dutch who lived in Indonesia around the beginning of the 17th century until 1942. At first, Europeans came to Indonesia to trade, then they built houses and settlements in several cities close to ports in Indonesia. Their houses generally have walls made of boards and wood with roof coverings made of palm fiber, but conflicts often occur, so the fortress begins. Inside, several buildings were built from brick materials imported from European countries. After that, they built many houses, churches, and public buildings with urban planning and architecture similar to their home countries. The story of colonial houses in Bandung began around 200 years after the Dutch East Indies government built a connecting road between Bandung and Batavia, Bandung was nominated as the capital of the Dutch East Indies, by moving Batavia to Bandung. The preparatory steps include building government buildings and settlements with a good spatial plan. So that at that time, the city of Bandung experienced intensive development. Gemeente-werken Bandung with the command of Ir. F.J.L. Ghijsels built 750 modern buildings for the current size, as part of the preparation for the capital\u27s move. The development also made Bandung save a lot of Indo-European-style architectural works. This made Bandung at that time nicknamed The Most European City in the East Indies. The method used in this study is qualitative with more emphasis on the analysis of several colonial buildings in the city of Bandung, especially the front facade consisting of the shape of the facade, doors, windows, roofs and ornaments. analysis by taking several examples of colonial buildings in the city of Bandung then in the analysis of the front view of the building. Keywords Architecture, Colonial, Conservatio

Fighting Zoonotic, Rabies and Public Health in Colonial India

Rabies is the oldest Zoonotic diseases in the world and one of the most important Zoonotic diseases in India. It was one of the most difficult problems confronted both by the medical and veterinary authorities in colonial India. The disease is transmitted from animal to animal and from animal to man through saliva. More than 90 per cent of cases of human rabies are transmitted by dogs which was a major concern of public health. A few British officials and soldiers were bitten by dogs during the colonial period. As a result, they suffered from rabies. As ownerless dogs were infested all through the country, the disease prevailed largely at that time. Gradually, rabies became a problem to the colonial Government. Louis Pasteur obtained his first success against rabies through vaccination in 1885. At that time, Dr. Lingard, Bacteriologist, had proposed to introduce a system of anti-rabies vaccination in the Bacteriological laboratory at Poona. A similar proposal was also submitted by J.H.B. Hallen, a civil Surgeon in 1890. Later, five institutes were established in India for anti-rabies treatment. Gradually rabies patients were treated at pasture institute. Thus, this paper examines impact of rabies, treatment and veterinary public health policy in colonial India. The great Zoonotic waves of rabies that suffered public health in colonial India are also focus of this paper

Diaspora: (post)colonial visions

The exhibition 'Diaspora: (Post)colonial Visions’ is part of the project ‘Memory Matters’, a partnership between the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (University of Kent) and CORECOG, a Congolese community group based in East London. The exhibition documents the ways in which project participants, mostly British Congolese young people, engaged discursively and visually with the urban and socio-historical spaces of (post)colonial memories. Through a series of heritage workshops organised in London and a 3-day visit to Brussels, several aspects of (post)colonial material representations and legacies were explored. In Brussels, the young people participated in an urban tour of the city’s colonial monuments and a visit to the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) a ‘Little Versailles’, dreamt by the Belgian king Leopold II to stage the grandeur of its colonial rule. Between 1885 and 1908 Leopold II was the sole owner of the ‘Congo Free State’, almost 80 times the size of Belgium. He implemented a harsh forced labour regime in the Congo to extract principally rubber as well as other natural riches. Coined the ‘only colonial museum left in the world’, and still bearing the ubiquitous mark of Leopold II, the RCMA is now undergoing major refurbishment and renovation. The museum exhibits unique ethnographic collections but also showcases a whole universe of colonial fantasies. Civilising desires and animalised aesthetics of a ‘primitive Other’ are conveyed through decontextualized and a-temporal visions of an imagined ‘Africa’ - a ‘Heart of Darkness’ turned ‘art of darkness’. ‘Diaspora: (Post)colonial Visions’ is also a witness to the struggle of Congolese activists in London, engaged in long-distance transnational politics and opposing the current Congolese government. Organising flashmobs, protests and demonstrations some of these activists denounce the exploitation of peoples and the plunder of mineral resources by a host of national and international actors, including multinational companies. Their public presence in the centre of London, at the heart of the ‘global city’ and former imperial capital, suggests the extent to which appropriating urban spaces and reclaiming visibility also serves to reconnect colonial past(s) and postcolonial present(s)

Book Review Essay: The Mature Phase: Four Generations of Scholarship on Colonial Mesoamerica and New Spain

This essay reviews the following works: Native Wills from the Colonial Americas: Dead Giveaways in a New World. Edited by Mark Christensen and Jonathan Truitt. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 276. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781607814160. Strange Lands and Different Peoples: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala. By W. George Lovell, Christopher H. Lutz, with Wendy Kramer and William R. Swezey. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 339.$34.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780806143903. Indians and the Political Economy of Colonial Central America, 1670–1810. By Robert W. Patch. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 284. $36.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780806144009. The Mixtecs of Oaxaca: Ancient Times to the Present. By Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. xvi + 328.$45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780806143811. Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico. Edited by Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 257. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780826354624