Resistance and Colonialism. Insurgent Peoples in World History (Palgrave, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, 2019), 2019
This volume offers a critical re-examination of colonial and anti-colonial resistance imageries a... more This volume offers a critical re-examination of colonial and anti-colonial resistance imageries and practices in imperial history. It offers a fresh critique of both pejorative and celebratory readings of ‘insurgent peoples’, and it seeks to revitalize the study of ‘resistance’ as an analytical field in the comparative history of Western colonialisms. It explores how to read and (de)code these issues in archival documents – and how to conjugate documental approaches with oral history, indigenous memories, and international histories of empire. The topics explored include runaway slaves and slave rebellions, mutiny and banditry, memories and practices of guerrilla and liberation, diplomatic negotiations and cross-border confrontations, theft, collaboration, and even the subversive effects of nature in colonial projects of labor exploitation.
‘This splendid collection leaps well ahead of cruder, binary understandings of resistance in the colonial context. By dint of its attention to oral, archival, and local sources it understands that resistance is always multi-faceted, complex, and multi-purposed; that the metropolitan conceit that all the colonized can possibly think about is their colonizer, is wishful thinking. Do read this collection for its geographical breadth, its historical depth, and its sophistication.’
—James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University, USA
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Papers by Ricardo Roque
on a skull mentioned in the private papers of a notorious nineteenth-century race scholar and skull collector, Joseph Barnard Davis. The analysis of this skull inscription and its associated documents also stimulate a reflection on how historiographical work may help us reveal and counter the legacies of these past processes today.
on a skull mentioned in the private papers of a notorious nineteenth-century race scholar and skull collector, Joseph Barnard Davis. The analysis of this skull inscription and its associated documents also stimulate a reflection on how historiographical work may help us reveal and counter the legacies of these past processes today.
the entanglement between colonial power and indigenous cultures, the emergence and development of a scientific discipline, the practices of knowledge-building both in anthropology and colonial history and the role of scientific controversies in illustrating the intertwining ties between science and society. [...] Finally, this book reads almost like a detective story. Though it is not revealed until the final chapter (and this review runs the risk of providing a spoiler), the author succeeded where the 1930s anthropologist failed, by managing to trace the real origin of the skulls, uncovering documentary evidence that eluded the polemists. Now, 150 years later, the mystery is solved
and the skulls are reunited with their ‘histories’. Therefore, this research does contribute to the advancement of knowledge in more ways than one."
take over time and across spaces? How to address the plural manifestations of resistance comparatively, across different empires, different colonial situations, and different historical periods?
The conference Resistance and Empire: New Approaches and Comparisons aims at addressing these questions and rediscovering the vitality of resistance both as a concept and as an empirical phenomenon in the study of European empires, colonialisms, and their legacies. As such, it will invite students of French, British, Portuguese, German, and other European colonialisms to analytically address the multiple expressions of “resistance” in colonial history by engaging with empirical material and theoretical explorations. The conference has two main purposes. On the one hand, it will seek to cross-fertilize the study of anti-colonial resistance(s) as a multiple historical phenomenon across the different geographies and temporalities of the European overseas expansion in Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania since the sixteenth century. On the other hand, it will reassess the potential and limitations of “resistance” as an analytical concept in imperial history, anthropology, and post- colonial studies, relating it to other notions in these domains, such as “order”, “rule”, “protest”, “rebellion”, “subaltern”, “agency”, or “domination”. The conference will adopt a broad conceptual, geographical and chronological framework, encouraging a comparative examination of “resistance” in relation to diverse places and historical periods. We particularly welcome students working on all Western forms of colonialisms and imperial formations, in any historical situation and spatial location, from the sixteenth to the twentieth-first century. We invite paper proposals from senior scholars, early career researchers, and post-graduate students that draw on concrete and specific empirical materials whilst reflecting conceptually and analytically on one, or more than one, of the following topics:
• Nationalist ideologies and liberation movements
• Resistances to decolonization
• Religious movements
• International and transnational engagements
• Armed rebellions and revolts
• Indigenous agency
• Cultural dimensions of resistance
• Forms of everyday resistance
• Archival and methodological aspects of resistance studies
and the state in anthropology and history, this introduction argues for
an approach to mimesis and imitation as constitutive of the state and
its forms of rule and governmentality in the context of late European
colonialism. It explores how the colonial state attempted to administer,
control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic policies
of governance, while examining how indigenous polities adopted imitative
practices in order to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the
presence of, the colonial state. In introducing this special issue, three
main themes will be addressed: mimesis as a strategic policy of colonial
government, as an object of colonial regulation, and, finally, as a creative
indigenous appropriation of external forms of state power.
‘This splendid collection leaps well ahead of cruder, binary understandings of resistance in the colonial context. By dint of its attention to oral, archival, and local sources it understands that resistance is always multi-faceted, complex, and multi-purposed; that the metropolitan conceit that all the colonized can possibly think about is their colonizer, is wishful thinking. Do read this collection for its geographical breadth, its historical depth, and its sophistication.’
—James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University, USA
Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series