Browsing by Subject "Colonialism"

After the First World War, Germany lost its overseas territories, becoming Europe's first post-colonial nation. After 1919, and especially between 1933 and 1945, however, German colonialists advocated for the return of these colonies and for their central importance to Germany. This dissertation tells the paradoxical story of these colonialists' construction of a German national character driven by overseas imperialism despite the absence of a colonial reality to support this identity. In contrast to views of colonialism as marginal in Germany after the First World War or the colonialist organizations as completely subsumed under the Nazi regime, this dissertation uncovers both the colonialist organizations' continuing public presence and their assertive promotion of their overseas goals in the Third Reich. It also reveals the space available for debates over the contours of national identity in the public sphere of the Third Reich.

Using organizational records of colonialist groups and Nazi propaganda offices, the colonialist press and other publications, photography, graphics, films, and public opinion reports, this dissertation examines the vibrant two-million-strong colonial revisionist movement that flourished in the Third Reich. German colonialists, straddling between anachronistic fantasy and the National Socialist world-view, reintegrated overseas imperialism into Nazi Germany and thereby reinterpreted the meaning of Germanness. They proclaimed a new vision of German national identity that drew on the imagined glories of the past but also held out the promise of a revitalized future for Germany through Africa. They did so however in conflict with the Nazi regime's expansionist goals in Eastern Europe. Colonialists, however, elided disagreements in favor of projecting a public image that emphasized the deep interconnectedness of overseas colonialism and Nazi goals. Through their public agitation and cultural products, colonialists affirmed the continuing relevance of overseas colonialism to Germans in the Third Reich.

“Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel,” reanimates and repoliticizes the idea of “cruel aesthetics” within contemporary literature by placing cruelty at the crux of global capitalism’s operational antihumanist logic. Historicizing this logic, the project uses a more nuanced definition of the field of Global Anglophone literature as a space to contend with the economic, racial, and emotional legacies of empire. In turn, affective and aesthetic readings of the diverse novels of Jamaica Kincaid, W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Rachel Cusk as Global Anglophone, rather than British, allows for a criticism of global capitalism that is grounded within legacies of empire. The project shows how Jamaica Kincaid’s and W.G. Sebald’s focus on everyday cruelties and historical anachronisms reestablish narrative connections between the networks of violence between colony and empire. It also illustrates how Kazuo Ishiguro’s characters connect the mental and physical servitude within imperial power dynamics to current conditions of work. Finally, locating Rachel Cusk’s novels within a financialized world shows the ubiquitous anxiety of neoliberal present. While the project embraces the universalism of capitalist realities and their imperial foundations, it is only through the concrete expressions and everyday realities of life that the universal architecture of global capitalism can be assessed. Ultimately, linking colonialism with contemporary capitalism formally carves out new “ways beyond” the erasure, paralysis, and the anxiety of the crushing force of dominating world-systems by embracing a politics of refusal, allyship, solidarity, and the bolstering of a “collective intelligence” that comes from the systematic appraisal of cruel aesthetics.

My dissertation interrogates the figure of the priestly charlatan in colonial India. It begins in a theoretical register by arguing that the unmasking of charlatans serves as a metonym for the secularizing procedures of modernity. Tales of charlatans' exposure by secularist skeptics promise a disenchanted world freed from the ill-gotten influence of sham divines; such tales evacuate the immanent frame of charismatic god-men, thereby allowing the extension and consolidation of secular power. I trace the trope of charlatanic exposure, beginning with Enlightenment anxieties about "priestcraft," continuing on to nineteenth century criticisms of religion, and then making a lateral move to colonial India. I suggest that by the 1830s it had become difficult for many English critics to extricate the problem of priestly imposture from the broader problematic of empire and, more specifically, from the specter of the "crafty brahmin." I track the cultural crosscurrents that conjoined English and Indian anticlericalisms, not only to insist on the centrality of colonial thinkers to the constitution of modernity, but also to reconsider modernity's putative secularity. The "anticlerical modernity" that I identify brings religious and secular skeptics together in a shared war on sacerdotal charisma, best observed at the interstices of empire.

The dissertation disperses the intellectual lineage of the "imposture theory of religion" by rerouting it through colonial India. The imposture theory, or the notion that religion is but a ruse concocted by crafty priests to dupe gullible masses, was central to the emergence of secular modernity and its mistrust of religion. Closely associated with the English and French Enlightenments, it was also pervasive in British polemics against Indian religions. My dissertation demonstrates how in its colonial redeployment the imposture theory came to abut Indic imaginaries of religious illusion, ranging from folkloric spoofs of gurus' authority to philosophical debates about the ontological status of "maya." Starting from religious controversies of the colonial era, my interrogation of Indic illusion extends from the ninth century philosopher Shankaracharya to the sixteenth century saint Vallabhacharya to the twentieth century guru Osho. Its focus, however, is on three nineteenth century religious reformers: Karsandas Mulji, Dayanand Saraswati, and H.P Blavatsky. Through archival research, textual analysis (in Hindi, Gujarati, and English), and theoretical inquiry, I insinuate these three colonial thinkers into the history of the imposture theory of religion. In doing so, my aim is to contribute to scholarship on the genealogy of religion, particularly in colonial contexts.

Sea urchins are relegated as background or non-playable characters in Western Science and Western culture on a daily basis. This dissertation shines a spotlight on my non-human relatives and gives readers a chance to learn about the sciences and cultures that sea urchin species play a role in. Along with offering research within the realms of development biology and immunology, there are pieces relevant to Science & Society and general audience blended throughout the chapters. I address two major problems in this work. The first problem is determining how the complex immune system of the Lytechinus variegatus larva develops and reacts to injury. The second, is uncovering what colonial practices have led to the sea urchin research climate today.The first chapter of this dissertation offers a broad Introduction to sea urchins. Moving away from a “cold” or impersonal description, you’ll learn about the diversity of sea urchins that move about the world’s oceans every day. Topics include what urchin’s eat, their etymological origin, their influence on historical and contemporary cultures, what some taste like, and other ranging topics. Parallel to these topics, this chapter contains basic biology on the adult and larval sea urchin, and the development of the embryo’s mesenchyme cell populations, which will be the foci of multiple chapters. Moving into wet lab research, chapter 2 provides the methods used in molecular, cellular, and embryological experiments. The major novel research method is an injury assay where we are able crush or “squish” L. variegatus larvae, causing a reproducible and quick immune cell response. Chapter 3 involves a review and recommendations on how Western Science developmental biology researchers think about and approach studying the larva’s mesenchyme. Using these new practices, we were able to uncover tissue specific candidate markers in silico, by cloning, and through expression data. Chapter 4 is the characterization of the immune-related cytokine family, the macrophage migration inhibitory factors (MIFs) in sea urchins. Utilizing newly published genomes, we were able to provide a fuller description of MIF gene duplications, and confidently clone select MIFs and perturb candidate regulators. The following chapter addresses the conundrum of wound healing and the immune system’s role in the process. By crushing L. variegatus larvae, we have been able to describe and characterize roles of pigment and blastocoelar cells in epithelial and skeletal wound repair. Our conclusions for the respective chapters are, the MIF family has gone through a major gene duplication, and are now able to perform tissue specific and potentially redundant roles in immune cell function; and pigment cells and blastocoelar cell networks are activated quickly in injuries and can remodel tissues in the larvae. The Science & Society, and penultimate chapter of this dissertation takes a deeper look into why Western Scientists study sea urchin, doing so through the lens of colonialism. In outlining personal kinship, obligations, and an interdisciplinary lens, I am able to name the colonial intentions of marine stations and their use of invertebrate species as research materials. For a contemporary example, I name general instances of colonial research methods and propose select ways to promote anti- and decolonial practices in sea urchin science that move beyond metaphors. This project, and the questions it answers and generates moves away from myths of Western Science such as neutrality, and away from a spiritless resource for academic consumption. Along with learning about the immune system, cytokines, and injury response from my non-human, sea urchin relatives, we can also begin to address broad and systemic problems that are faced in sea urchin science and culture. My goal, and what should be thought about early in reading this work, is to learn from, appreciate, reciprocate, respect, and co-create knowledge with sea urchins in a way that doesn’t harm the Land.

This dissertation is a critical exploration of certain authoritative discursive traditions on the limits of Islam in 19th century North India. It investigates specific moments when prominent Indian Muslim scholars articulated and contested the boundaries of what should and should not count as Islam. This study does not provide a chronological history of Islam in colonial India or that of Indian Muslim reform. Rather, it examines minute conjunctures of native debates and polemics in which the question of what knowledges, beliefs, and practices should constitute Islam was authoritatively contested. Taking 19th century Indian Muslim identity as its object of inquiry, it interrogates how the limits of identity and difference, the normative and the heretical, were battled out in centrally visible ways.

The set of illustrations that form the focus of this dissertation come from an ongoing polemic that erupted among some members of the Muslim intellectual elite in colonial India. At the heart of this polemic was the question of how one should understand the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the limits of normative practice in everyday life. The rival protagonists of this polemic responded to this question in dramatically contrasting ways. One the one hand was a group of scholars whose conception of tradition pivoted on establishing the exceptionality of divine sovereignty. In order to achieve this task, they articulated an imaginary of Prophet Muhammad that emphasized his humanity and his subservience to the sovereign divine.

They also assailed ritual practices and everyday habits that in their view undermined divine sovereignty or that elevated the Prophet in a way that shed doubts on his humanity. One of the chief architects of this reform project was the early 19th century Indian Muslim thinker, Shâh Muhammad Ismâ`îl (d.1831). His reformist agenda was carried forward in the latter half of the century by the pioneers of the Deoband School, an Islamic seminary cum ideological formation established in the North Indian town of Deoband in 1867. Another group of influential North Indian Muslim scholars sharply challenged this movement of reform.

They argued that divine sovereignty was inseparable from the authority of the Prophet as the most charismatic and authorial being. In their view, divine and prophetic exceptionality mutually reinforced each other. Moreover, undermining the distinguished status of the Prophet by projecting him as a mere human who also happened to be a recipient of divine revelation represented anathema. As a corollary, these scholars vigorously defended rituals and everyday practices that served as a means to honor the Prophet's memory and charisma. This counter reformist movement was spearheaded by the influential Indian Muslim thinker Ahmad Razâ Khân (d.1921). He was the founder of the Barelvî School, another ideological group that flourished in late 19th century North India.

This dissertation describes these rival narratives of tradition and reform in South Asian Islam by focusing on three pivotal questions of doctrinal disagreement: 1) the limits of prophetic intercession (shafâ`at), 2) the limits of heretical innovation (bid`a), and 3) the limits of the Prophet's knowledge of the unknown (`ilm al-ghayb). It argues that these intra-Muslim contestations were animated by competing political theologies each of which generated discrete and competing imaginaries of law and boundaries of ritual practice.

This dissertation argues that the emergence of the idea of Eastern Europe in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment West could be attributed not only to geopolitical causes but also to the way that the region was figured religiously. Considered against the backdrop of the rise of global racial order, the idea of Eastern Europe is shown to have its origins in Western theological imaginaries which were transmuted into gendered raciality. Through an analysis of the travelogues by Western travelers to the Russian Empire and its European peripheries, this project traces the rise of Euro-Orientalism, which gets inflected as “Asiatic” in Russia, and “Jewish” in the rest of Eastern Europe. Seen through this Euro-Orientalist lens, Russia is figured as the intra-European antithesis to the West, and the remainder of Eastern Europe, as liminal territories.

How can we explain the significant variation in the organization and performance of public bureaucracies across countries, across regions, and between the levels of the administrative hierarchy? Considering the high level of path dependence in bureaucratic organization, this dissertation explains divergence in the institutions of public administrations through a set of historical analyses focused on the 19th and early 20th centuries–a time period crucial for the establishment of modern bureaucracies. The second chapter deals with the influence of socio-economic groups in countries that enjoyed domestic political autonomy. Three social classes had fundamentally different interests in the organization of the state apparatus, and their relative political influence was a key factor determining its organizational characteristics. The third and fourth chapters deal with the impact of foreign rule on the bureaucratic organization of countries that did not enjoy domestic political autonomy. Specifically, the third chapter focuses on within-country regional variation in bureaucratic organization and provides an in-depth study of Poland, which was historically ruled by three empires with vastly different bureaucracies. I develop an account of path dependence and suggest that persisting differences in culture and perceptions of public administration are key drivers of regional divergence. Finally, the fourth chapter focuses on variation in bureaucratic organization between levels of the administrative hierarchy and provides an in-depth study of Romania, which was historically partially ruled by the Habsburg Empire and partially autonomous. I develop a theoretical framework of imperial pervasiveness that explains differential effectiveness of external rule along the administrative hierarchy.

This project focuses on the visual culture that emerged from Japan's relationship with Manchuria during the Manchukuo period (1932-1945). It was during this time that Japanese official and popular interest in the region reached its peak. Fueling the Japanese attraction and investment in this region were numerous romanticized images of Manchuria's bounty and space, issued to bolster enthusiasm for Japanese occupation and development of the region. I examine the Japanese visual production of a utopian Manchuria during the 1930s and early 1940s through a variety of interrelated media and spatial constructions: graphic magazines, photography, exhibition spaces, and urban planning. Through this analysis, I address how Japanese political, military, and economic state institutions cultivated the image of Manchukuo as an ideal, multiethnic state and a "paradise" (rakudo) for settlement in order to generate domestic support and to legitimize occupation on the world stage. As there were many different colonial offices with different goals, there was no homogenous vision of the Manchurian ideal. In fact, tensions often emerged between offices as each attempted to garner support for its own respective mission on the continent. I examine these tensions and critique the strategic intersection of propaganda campaigns, artistic goals and personal fantasies of a distant, exotic frontier. In the process, this project explores how the idea of Manchuria became a panacea for a variety of economic and social problems plaguing Japan at both a national and individual level.

In 1808, Charles Fourier published Theory of the Four Movements, a utopian socialist manifesto describing the emergence of a fundamental rupture between man and nature, the consequence of a metabolic disruption of material, natural, and social flows. As a remedy, he prescribed the construction of phalansteries, self-contained and economically autarkic communal structures seamlessly uniting spaces of both production and consumption, overcoming the division between town and country. The term phalanstère was a neologism of Fourier’s, a combination of “phalanx” and “monastery” intended to conjure up images of both the hivelike coordination of the Greco-Roman military machine and the spiritual purity of the isolated monastery. By the advent of the twentieth century, Fourier’s ideas had spread; the explosive growth of industrial capitalism in hitherto ‘undeveloped’ corners of the world spurred a generation of imitators, critics, and revolutionaries who, influenced by this legacy of agrarian utopianism, sought to actualize plans of their own. This thesis considers the reception and reinterpretation of utopian socialist communal movements by Chinese reformers and revolutionaries during the first three decades of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on how these figures understood the construction of experimental communities like communes and model villages as a potential solution to the geopolitical crisis of China’s subordination to Euro-American-Japanese imperialist powers. Beginning with an initial survey of Euro-American utopian movements, this thesis then turns to Atarashiki-mura, a Japanese utopian village community founded by Saneatsu Mushanokōji, an aristocratic left-wing intellectual. Through an analysis of essays and accounts published by Zhou Zuoren, a leading Chinese intellectual who visited Atarashiki-mura, this thesis then considers debates over the “New Village Movement” (xincun yundong 新村運動), Zhou Zuoren’s attempt to establish similar model communities in China. Following these debates through the following years, this project then turns to the Work Study Mutual Aid Corps (gongdu huzhu tuan工讀互助團), an experimental mutual aid society established by a Beijing-based student named Wang Guangqi during the height of May Fourth Movement-era activism. Through an analysis of the collapse of the Work Study Mutual Aid Corps, I reconsider why many left-wing socialists turned away from utopian communalism towards revolutionary mass politics. In their stead, a number of less overtly ideological rural reform programs, such as Yan Yangchu’s Mass Education Movement (MEM) (quan guo shi zi yundong 全國識字運動), were established; the architects of these projects sought to dramatically transform rural society yet avoid a revolution. Following links between these organizations and leading military figures of the 1920s and 1930s, I move a decade forward to consider the history of Xingan Land Reclamation Zone (Xingan tunken qu 興安屯墾區), a combination model village, military installation, and autarkic factory-farm that was the pet project of the warlord Zhang Xueliang (張學良). I argue that, despite the radically different political visions of their architects and the circumstances of their conceptualization, these commune projects shared a similar logic of reform: the creation of experimental, spatially-bound living facilities would make possible the emergence of a new sort of Chinese citizen-subject, an individual capable of universalizing the commune model and bringing about a new national community. But, as I attempt to demonstrate, in shifts from Zhou Zouren’s fantasies of a pacifistic and agrarian socialist movement to the weaponization of the model village ideal in pursuit of settler colonial frontier expansion, each element within this reform equation was transformed. The ideal subject at the heart of the commune space moved from urban intellectuals and students to destitute peasantry and finally conscripted soldiers, while the physical location of these experimental communities shifted from the countryside to urban metropolises like Beijing and ultimately the frontiers of Manchuria. These projects, initially socialistic in conception—seeking to produce a space outside of capitalism—would instead be bent towards the exigencies of capital’s ceaseless expansion. Fourier’s neologism is thus illustrative of the opposing social forms these communities tended to take in twentieth-century China: monastic millenarianism on the one hand and a fascistic embrace of military mobilization on the other. Zhou Zuoren had intended the communal New Village to be a space beyond the sphere of capitalist production, an alternative path to modernity, but when the dream of rural reform was seized upon by warlords and reform bureaucrats, this space “outside” of capitalism would instead become the tip of its spear, penetrating into the frontier countryside. In the hands of the Kuomintang (KMT), Fourier’s phalanstère was far more phalanx than monastery. Despite the practical failures of these projects, this thesis concludes by arguing that utopian communalism possessed an enduring legacy: though many of these rural reform schemes fell short of their goals, they were central nodes through which new narratives of nationality and modernity were disseminated.

How did our world’s wealth become so unevenly distributed? How did a small group of Europeans and Americans manage to acquire and retain so much wealth while so many others struggled to acquire enough to sustain their basic life functions? Why did some individuals desire to accumulate massive amounts of wealth? In answering those questions, this dissertation first examines the physical, emotional, intellectual, and social forces that inhibited wealth acquisition and the technologies that overcame those forces. The primary technologies under consideration are not of the mechanical type, like guns and steel. This dissertation primarily examines social technologies that relate to practical human action: patterns of buying and selling, rhythms of speaking, and structured systems of ideas about truth, goodness, and beauty. I call these action and idea patterns “technologies” because they were, like all technologies, intentionally constructed over an extended period of time, and they served a critical function. They executed valuable work and facilitated wealth accumulation. After examining the essential forces working against and the technologies working for wealth accumulation, this dissertation uses slave narratives and the theology of Thomas Aquinas to explore how distorted human passion, in the form of greed, served as a principal motive force in unjust wealth accumulation. Finally, this dissertation attempts to construct a Christian anthropology that redefines human life and purpose in order to heal greed distorted passions.

This dissertation examines ethnographic writing in the Jesuit Relations, a set of annual reports from missionaries in New France to Society of Jesus authorities in France that were published and widely read from 1632 to 1673. Drawing on currents in cultural anthropological thought about the complex relationship between anthropologists, their subjects, and the texts they produce, I analyze how the Relations allowed Jesuit missionaries to define for French readers Amerindian cultures, European-Amerindian interactions, and the health and success of the colony and the mission for forty years, almost without competition, giving them extraordinary influence over perceptions of the Amerindian Other at the very moment that France's interest therein was being piqued by an increasing awareness of the world outside of Europe. The texts now are lauded as the première source of information on the Algonquian and Iroquoian groups with which the Jesuits were in contact in seventeenth century New France. In this dissertation, I examine the ways Jesuits conveyed information about Amerindian groups, focusing on the rhetorical aspects of their accounts that have been largely ignored by social scientists who have mined the texts for data. Instead of considering the Relations as a collection of facts recorded by diligent field workers, I seek to understand them as texts that reflect multiple points of view and the political, religious, and intellectual pressures acting on their French Catholic authors. Were Amerindians human? If so, were they created in Eden along with the ancestors of Europeans? How could one explain their presence in America, with little apparent knowledge of their origins? And if they were human and of the same stock as European Christians, how could one explain the fact that their beliefs and behavior were so different from those of their French Christian interlocutors? These questions, I argue, left an enduring mark on the Jesuits' descriptions of Amerindian cultures, making their texts less the work of proto-anthropologists than a form of intellectual colonization.