Violence and ordering of the Third World: an introduction

Abstract

The decisive role violence has played in the ordering of the Third World cannot be ignored or consigned to the past. Accordingly, we argue for a more systematic and determined attention to the connections between the devastation unleashed by colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of large-scale violence in the post-independence periods. In contradistinction to situating violence in and against the Third World as a backdrop of incomplete modernization, we recognize that its proper location is in the larger dynamics of racialized and colonial international relations. The articles in this volume address these dynamics of violence.     

Colonial legacies,armed revolts and state violence: the Maoist movement in India

Abstract

This article examines the connected histories of armed tribal and peasant revolts in colonial and postcolonial India with reference to the ongoing Maoist conflict in rural and tribal areas of central and eastern India. The article makes two interrelated arguments about the violent continuities that endure from colonial to postcolonial contexts: (1) the nation-state system, in its efforts to establish control and influence, creates a hierarchy of citizenship engaging in the hostile policing of marginalised subjects, thereby engendering armed revolts and political violence; (2) the postcolonial state’s response to these armed revolts by marginalised subjects who challenge its sovereignty and monopoly over violence, is equally violent and repressive. Most significantly, the state’s response is legitimised in the same colonial idioms and justifications that mark epistemic and physical violence against the third world.     

Beyond the ‘Auschwitz syndrome’: Holocaust historiography after the Cold War

ABSTRACT

The end of the Cold war has seen an explosion in Holocaust history, and some significant changes in the main historiographical explanations. The ‘return of ideology’ that began displacing the ‘functionalist’ or ‘structuralist’ dominance of the 1980s remains strong. But it is being supplemented by very detailed regional and local studies, by analyses of different experiences of ghettoization in different places, and by a focus on the widespread plunder and corruption that accompanied the killing process. This enormous attention to detail reveals that the Holocaust unfolded differently in different places; but it also demonstrates the existence of an overall framework in which all the operations took place, what we might call an ‘antisemitic consensus’. Simultaneously, historians have broadened the discussion of the Holocaust, situating it into a transnational or world-historical context of imperialism and colonialism. Stone outlines in broad brush some of these themes, and asks what effects they have had and will continue to have on Europeans' self-understanding in an age in which the post-war anti-fascist consensus has been dismantled while Holocaust-consciousness is officially enshrined into European identity.     

Negro labor in the western cattle industry, 1866–1900

The trade union movement in sub-Saharan Africa during the struggle against colonial rule in the 1950s has long commanded the attention of historians. Numerous books and articles have detailed the growing strength and critical role of trade unions in France's vast West African colonial federation, l'Afrique occidentale française (AOF). Far less is known about the fate of these trade unions in the nine newly independent countries that emerged from the demise of AOF. In the 15 years following independence, most autonomous trade unions in French-speaking West Africa were either marginalised or integrated into the political structures of ruling parties. With the exception of Burkina Faso, single national trade union federations controlled by ruling political parties existed everywhere in francophone West Africa by 1975. Whether capitalist, military or socialist, all political elites sought to create a trade unionism that would serve as a transmission belt for party control over the workforce, a type of unionism that was referred to as ‘participation responsable’. This article details the experience of Dahomey (now Benin), where independent trade unions struggled against responsible participation and continued to play a pivotal political role until 1975, when the state socialist regime of Mathieu Kérékou finally succeeded in imposing state-controlled trade unionism.     

El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism: A Multivalent Signifier as Site of Memory

In this article I explore the production and reception of El Templete, a nineteenth‐century memorial erected to commemorate the founding of Havana. This symbolically rich monument participates in the aesthetic traditions of architecture, sculpture and painting, and is a paradigmatic example of the multivalence of public, monumental art in the late colonial classicism of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather than representing strictly an aesthetic discourse of Spanish colonial power, El Templete underwent a process of local assimilation, whereby classical forms and academic aesthetics were adapted to the self‐representation of a heterogeneous colonial city.     

Indianisation or indigenisation? Greater India and the politics of cultural diffusionism

The paper focuses on the notion of Greater India that celebrated the diffusion of Indian cultural practices in Asia. Although prominent in the early twentieth century, it continued to fascinate Indian statesmen in the post-independence period. Juxtaposing its cultural frame with alternative conceptions of India’s self-identity, the paper argues that Greater India at once engaged with, and was in defiance of, both colonial and nationalist discourses. To what extent was the diffusionist logic calibrated to acknowledge mutual learning in the region? The paper critically engages with the dynamics between the circulation of ideas and their systematisation in India’s intellectual history.     

From the Port of Ventspils to Great Courland Bay: The Couronian Colony on Tobago in Past and Present

In the seventeenth century, Duke Jakob Kettler of Courland embraced the mercantile theories of his age and engaged in overseas colonialism. After several aborted attempts, the Courlanders managed to establish a settlement on Tobago in 1654 only to lose it to the Dutch five years later. European competitors and indigenous resistance frustrated the Duke’s attempts to regain control over the colony. Despite its limited scope and success, the Couronian colonization of Tobago left a strong impact on the historical imagination. This paper aims to document the traces and remembrances of Duke Jakob’s Caribbean endeavor on Tobago as well as in Latvia.     

Latin America as a White Settler Society

Latin America’s nineteenth century history of Europeanisation, immigration and extermination suggests that the continent should fit neatly into the category of ‘settler colonialism’, a notion usually employed to describe the white settler colonies of European empires other than those of Spain and Portugal. While the last years of empire and the early days of the republics saw efforts to include the indigenous population as citizens, the racist white elites in the century after independence sought to import European migrants to prevent the non‐white population from participating in power. The desired ‘whitening’ of the population was rarely successful, but the weight of white immigration helped create a twentieth century society that ignored the indigenous peoples – until the popular explosions of recent years.     

The Dreyfus affair in the British press

Stone argues that, although German anthropologists were relatively liberal thinkers before 1900, they nevertheless advocated an understanding of race that encouraged hierarchical thinking. Such thinking saw colonized peoples as primitive and culturally inferior. When, around 1900, anthropologists became increasingly reactionary and drawn to social Darwinist and racist ideas, their work served as a scientific legitimation for colonial atrocity, as the case of the Herero genocide in German South West Africa (1904-5) demonstrates. At this point anthropologists, along with the colonial military, were more sanguine about the disappearance of 'backward races'.     

美国文化软战争的实质、运用及其防范

文化软战争是美国攻掠全球地缘战略枢纽的重要手段,本质是一种文化操纵,即通过改变人们的文化观念来实现美国的战略目标。文化软战争的实施一般要经过三个阶段:一是文化渗透,侵蚀目标国家的文化核心,改变民众的文化观念,最终接受美国所设定的文化观念。二是利用蜂拥战术发动街头政治,颠覆现政权。三是扶植亲美政权上台。防范文化软战争的关键是让美国从幕后"现身",揭露其文化操纵的真实目标、手法和具体过程。