Pub Date : 2024-02-13DOI: 10.1177/00219894241228715
Andrew van der Vlies
In May 1917, two South African feminist friends and critics of empire then in London sent a telegram to Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Union of South Africa’s Defence Minister and delegate to the Imperial War Cabinet, in response to his early proposal for a Commonwealth of Nations. It read simply: “Your speech was fine”. Whether intended sincerely (as in “very fine”) or as faint praise (“fine as far as it goes, but”) is not known, but the ambiguity is fitting for an association and description with such contested associations – and one that, by some accounts, originated in the colonies (from an idea proposed by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and South Africa’s then-Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog). It is fitting, too, that one of the cable’s authors was Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), leading novelist of the “New Woman”, advocate of sex equality, and clear-sighted critic of empire’s presumptions, rapacious designs, and gendered and ethnic biases, as well as of the race politics taking shape in South Africa at the start of the twentieth century. Even as we read Schreiner’s work today with an eye to its own prejudices and contradictions, this essay contends that it is worth considering the value of the proleptic critique it embodies for an understanding of the ongoing limitations — but also use-value — of the term “Commonwealth”, as well as of any term that might replace it. The outlines of Schreiner’s critique suggest that the term might yet encode a counter-ideal that points to an ongoing latent potential for the common to be reactivated as promise of a more equal and just division of empire’s spoils.
1917 年 5 月，当时在伦敦的两位南非女权主义朋友和帝国批评家给南非联邦国防部长兼帝国战争内阁代表扬-斯穆特元帅发了一封电报，对他早先提出的建立英联邦的建议做出回应。电报的内容很简单："你的演讲很好"。是真心实意（如 "非常好"）还是微弱的赞美（如 "就其本身而言很好，但"）不得而知，但这种模棱两可的措辞很适合与这种有争议的联系和描述--根据一些说法，这种联系和描述起源于殖民地（来自加拿大总理威廉-里昂-麦肯齐-金和南非时任首相 J. B. M. 赫佐格提出的一个想法）。同样恰当的是，电报的作者之一是奥利弗-施赖纳（Olive Schreiner，1855-1920 年），她是 "新女性 "小说的领军人物、性别平等的倡导者，对帝国的假定、掠夺性设计、性别和种族偏见以及 20 世纪初在南非形成的种族政治有着清醒的批判。尽管我们今天在阅读施赖纳的作品时会注意到其自身的偏见和矛盾，但这篇文章认为，值得考虑的是其所体现的前瞻性批判对于理解 "英联邦 "一词以及任何可能取代该词的词语的持续局限性--但也有使用价值--的价值。施赖纳批判的大纲表明，该术语可能还包含着一种反理想，它指向一种持续的潜在可能性，即重新激活 "共同体"，以保证更平等、更公正地分配帝国的战利品。
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Pub Date : 2024-02-13DOI: 10.1177/00219894241228715
Andrew van der Vlies
In May 1917, two South African feminist friends and critics of empire then in London sent a telegram to Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Union of South Africa’s Defence Minister and delegate to the Imperial War Cabinet, in response to his early proposal for a Commonwealth of Nations. It read simply: “Your speech was fine”. Whether intended sincerely (as in “very fine”) or as faint praise (“fine as far as it goes, but”) is not known, but the ambiguity is fitting for an association and description with such contested associations – and one that, by some accounts, originated in the colonies (from an idea proposed by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and South Africa’s then-Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog). It is fitting, too, that one of the cable’s authors was Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), leading novelist of the “New Woman”, advocate of sex equality, and clear-sighted critic of empire’s presumptions, rapacious designs, and gendered and ethnic biases, as well as of the race politics taking shape in South Africa at the start of the twentieth century. Even as we read Schreiner’s work today with an eye to its own prejudices and contradictions, this essay contends that it is worth considering the value of the proleptic critique it embodies for an understanding of the ongoing limitations — but also use-value — of the term “Commonwealth”, as well as of any term that might replace it. The outlines of Schreiner’s critique suggest that the term might yet encode a counter-ideal that points to an ongoing latent potential for the common to be reactivated as promise of a more equal and just division of empire’s spoils.
1917 年 5 月，当时在伦敦的两位南非女权主义朋友和帝国批评家给南非联邦国防部长兼帝国战争内阁代表扬-斯穆特元帅发了一封电报，对他早先提出的建立英联邦的建议做出回应。电报的内容很简单："你的演讲很好"。是真心实意（如 "非常好"）还是微弱的赞美（如 "就其本身而言很好，但"）不得而知，但这种模棱两可的措辞很适合与这种有争议的联系和描述--根据一些说法，这种联系和描述起源于殖民地（来自加拿大总理威廉-里昂-麦肯齐-金和南非时任首相 J. B. M. 赫佐格提出的一个想法）。同样恰当的是，电报的作者之一是奥利弗-施赖纳（Olive Schreiner，1855-1920 年），她是 "新女性 "小说的领军人物、性别平等的倡导者，对帝国的假定、掠夺性设计、性别和种族偏见以及 20 世纪初在南非形成的种族政治有着清醒的批判。尽管我们今天在阅读施赖纳的作品时会注意到其自身的偏见和矛盾，但这篇文章认为，值得考虑的是其所体现的前瞻性批判对于理解 "英联邦 "一词以及任何可能取代该词的词语的持续局限性--但也有使用价值--的价值。施赖纳批判的大纲表明，该术语可能还包含着一种反理想，它指向一种持续的潜在可能性，即重新激活 "共同体"，以保证更平等、更公正地分配帝国的战利品。
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Pub Date : 2023-12-30DOI: 10.1177/00219894231219111
Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas
Contrary to an apolitical, pessimistic, and non-feminist perception of Witi Ihimaera’s work, this article contends that his early novel The Matriarch (1986) and its sequel The Dream Swimmer (1997) frame Māori communities as an ancient, patriarchal space in need of revision to accommodate women. Reconsidering the role of tribalism and Māori utopian and cyclical land narratives, this study argues that the confessional male narrator of both novels, Tamatea Mahana, learns to embrace a matrilineal genealogy not only of powerful Māori women leaders of chiefly status, but also of charismatic women in the shadow, like his mother Tiana. Beyond Pākehā imperial democracy and Māori “male utopias of domination”, Tamatea and the exceptional gallery of warrior-matriarchs implement a peculiar and controversial retrotopia — a return to the prematurely buried grand ideas of the past — which, even when dangerously resonating with nostalgia, aims at an open-ended model of democracy through spiral temporality. 1 A predominantly decolonizing theory and methodology is used, drawing on Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wāhine theories.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-23DOI: 10.1177/00219894231207479
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez
This essay discusses the language strategies deployed in twenty-first century works by three Black Canadian poets that engage with the archive of slavery (Sylvia D. Hamilton, charles c. smith and M. NourbeSe Philip) and reads them as performing a counter-pedagogy of cruelty against African-descended peoples. The analysis focuses on the politics of identification pursued by these poets in order to bring back the memory of enslaved Black subjects into the realm of the ‘human’, and particularly the recurrent device of naming or renaming as a way to counter one of the most pervasive dehumanizing practices of slavery, the erasure of one’s past and the imposition of anonymity. By means of this linguistic resource they achieve common aims: restoring dignity to the enslaved, constructing an alternative site of memorialization, and dismantling hegemonic narratives of Blackness in the nation.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-23DOI: 10.1177/00219894231211571
Sana R. Chaudhry
In Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh”, readers are introduced to Sikh inmate Bishan Singh living in an asylum in pre-Partition India.1 The disfigured, swollen, babbling body of Bishan Singh is redolent of Giorgio Agamben’s representation of the “ Muselmann”, the abject camp prisoners of Auschwitz, in his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Drawing on Agamben’s insights, this article reads the figure of Bishan Singh as the Agambenian “ Muselmann” and Partition witness, caught in the space of the camp under the guise of an asylum for the mentally ill. This article also traces this space or holding centre for the mentally ill as a site of production of an ab-humanity marked not so much by a lack of speech, but by its provocative disorder. The figure of Bishan Singh as “ Muselmann” emerges as marked out by his garbled, traumatized language that signals both his ab-humanity and his exposure to the violence that attends the making of the human subject. This study argues that Bishan Singh’s wounded body and speech constitute traces of the unsayable, and that what is perceptible emerges from what is not.
在萨阿达特-哈桑-曼托（Sa'adat Hasan Manto）的短篇小说《托巴-特克-辛格》中，读者看到了锡克教囚犯比山-辛格（Bishan Singh）生活在分裂前印度的一家精神病院里。1 比山-辛格被毁容、肿胀、咿呀学语的身体让人想起乔治-阿甘本（Giorgio Agamben）在他的《奥斯维辛残余》（Remnants of Auschwitz）中对奥斯维辛集中营囚犯 "穆塞尔曼"（Muselmann）的描述：见证与档案》中对奥斯威辛集中营囚犯 "穆塞尔曼"（Muselmann）的描述。本文借鉴阿甘本的见解，将比山-辛格的形象解读为阿甘本笔下的 "穆塞尔曼 "和隔离见证人，他以精神病人收容所为幌子，被困在集中营的空间中。本文还追溯了这一精神病人空间或收容中心，它是一种非人性的产生场所，其特点不是缺乏言语，而是具有挑衅性的混乱。作为 "穆塞尔曼 "的比山-辛格的形象因其杂乱无章、饱受创伤的语言而显现出来，这种语言既表明了他的非人性，也表明了他在制造人类主体时所遭受的暴力。本研究认为，比山-辛格受伤的身体和语言构成了不可言说的痕迹，可感知的东西来自不可感知的东西。
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Pub Date : 2023-12-11DOI: 10.1177/00219894231192075
Keyvan Allahyari
This article attends to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea as a critique of the normative understanding of the border as having a singular, prohibitive function for the refugee, and reads it as a call to register the border as a moving and permeable formation. What I call oceanic border thinking conveys Gurnah’s insight into the imbrication of littoral and land zones, and the effect of the proliferation of biopolitical technologies associated with various iterations of colonial and postcolonial bordering, including partitioning, arbitrary detention, deportation, and expulsion. The border’s liquidity — the elemental property of water — captures the valence of By the Sea’s oceanic border imaginary, which, in turn, challenges overdetermined readings of the border as attached primarily to land, and the reduction of the refugee to a presentist conception of race or nationality. The liquidity of borders, here, is not meant to suggest a state of extremity, crisis, or morbidity of Indian Ocean polities; rather, it suggests an approach to Gurnah’s oceanic writing as a process of world-making across waters in tandem with the biopolitical technologies that reoriented lives in shifting geopolitical territories. Oceanic border thinking enables one’s sense of the world not only in water but onwards into the land, whether in Africa, England, or continental Europe. Transferrable and dissident, this method helps with the exploration of how cartographic, literary, and imaginative conceptions of the border, as observed from water, bear the potential to trouble easy categorizations of borders and the histories associated with them.
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