Whose Colonialism? Which Empire?

How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire

The emphasis on culture in studies of colonialism tends to obscure other forms of colonial power while making it impossible to contextualize the cultural argument and assess its salience. Rather than focusing on texts, systems of signification, and procedures of knowledge generation, as the colonial discourse literature is wont to do, a fuller understanding of colonial powers is achieved by exp...

Which "Aeneid" in Whose Nineties?

I suppose that I ought to feel well-prepared to speak about the future of studies on the Aeneid, having just read and reviewed two new books dealing with the theme of prophecy in that poem. In reality, though, I feel utterly unable to make comfortable predictions about where our epic voyages will take us-particularly as one of the books I alluded to, Professor O'Hara's, sees prophecy in the Aen...

A child of the empire: British sociology and colonialism, 1940s-1960s.

British sociology was established as an academic discipline between 1945 and 1965, just as the British Empire was gearing up for a new phase of developmental colonialism backed by the social and other sciences. Many parts of the emerging sociological discipline became entangled with colonialism. Key themes and methods in sociology and the staff of sociology departments emerged from this colonia...

The uncontrollable afterlives of ethnography Lessons from ‘salvage colonialism’ in the German overseas empire

policies they did not anticipate, policies they may even abhor? This article explores the ways 19th-century Europeans who would never have considered themselves as policymakers or even policy wonks – writers, artists, missionaries, and ethnographers – influenced colonial ‘native policy’. The article focuses on the case of precolonial European representations of Polynesia (Samoa in particular), ...

Response to Belot’s “Whose Devil? Which Details?”