Abstract
In the long history of European overseas expansion, an immense and diverse collection of texts, images, drawings, and maps has been produced and accumulated, part of which survives today in archives and libraries around the world. As a legacy of colonization and empirebuilding, the ‘knowledge’ embodied in this diverse material has been identified with projects of imperialist or colonialist domination, and as such simply labelled as ‘colonial’. This designation, however, hides considerable complexity. As we enter these archives, we enter a heterogeneous documental world, spanning distinct languages, literary and artistic genres or conventions, historical moments, geographical settings, varied human purposes and agendas. Along the way a proliferation of subjects, objects, categories, stories, events, personal and collective dramas, either experienced or imagined, is brought into being. This is not a neat and orderly world infused with transparent and unambiguous meaning. It constitutes a tensional, discontinuous, and uncertain formation of documents, categories, stories, and images. In their very dispersion and unevenness, these may be seen, as Michel Foucault observed, as productive political ‘fields of force’ that selectively make
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Notes
Jean-Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Bad Blood’, A Season in Hell (1873), trans. A. S. Kline, published online http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Rimbaud3.htm#_Toc202003791, date accessed 15 August 2010.
Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; trans. A. M. S. Smith London: Tavistock, 1972).
See Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
For an inspiring analysis of the force of stories in the creation of a culture of terror in colonial practice, see Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Compare with another (yet rather distinct) classical exploration of the political force of colonial medicine in the creation of Indian bodies: David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
See Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 295.
See also Lynda D. McNeil, ‘Rimbaud: The Dialectical Play of Presence and Absence’, Boundary 2, 12, 1 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 187–211.
See for example: Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”‘, Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977), pp. 782–94;
Charles Nicholl, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880–91 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Foreword’ to Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. xi.
Also: Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Introduction’, in Nicholas B. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 1–26.
The impact of this argument has been especially strong in South Asian Studies. For evaluations and reviews of colonial knowledge-power in Asia see Saloni Mathur, ‘History and Anthropology in South Asia: Rethinking the Archive’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 29 (2000), pp. 89–106;
Tony Ballantyne, ‘Archive, State, Discipline: Power and Knowledge in South Asian Historiography’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 3, 1 (2001), pp. 87–105;
Tony Ballantyne, ‘Knowledge and European Empire-Building in Asia’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 6, 2 (2004), pp. 5–11.
See Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971);
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1975);
Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980);
Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994);
Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978);
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–315;
Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV. Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 330–363.
But for another critical evaluation of Subaltern Studies, and the impact of colonial discourse on its developments, see Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, American Historical Review, 99, 5 (1994), pp. 1475–90.
Said, Orientalism, p. 5. An important development of Said’s argument may be found in Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
The work of Said, including his argument that Orientalism is a self-contained knowledge-power system, has been exhaustively criticized by a number of scholars, see for instance James Clifford, ‘On Orientalism’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 255–76;
Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990);
John Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995);
D. A. Washbrook, ‘Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire’, in Wm. Roger Louis and Robin W. Winks (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume 5: Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 596–610;
C. A. Bayly, ‘The Orient: British Historical Writing about Asia since 1890’, in Peter Burke (ed.), History and Historians in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 88–119.
See for instance Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 7.
An influential and sophisticated discussion of this theme is Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37, 1 (1995), pp. 173–93.
Ibid., p. 178.
For a case study that develops this point in relation to a Portuguese Orientalist text, see Ricardo Roque, Antropologia e Império: Fonseca Cardoso e a expedição à Índia em 1895 (Lisboa: ICS, 2001).
On the importance of including affect and anxiety in colonial studies see, for example, Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
‘British assessments of crime, religion and native lethargy’, Bayly wrote, ‘were more often reflections of the weakness and ignorance of the colonisers than a gauge of hegemony.’ C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 143.
See also D. K. Lahiri Choudhury, ‘Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c. 1880–1912’, Modern Asian Studies, 38 (2004), pp. 965–1002;
Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang Oxford, 2010).
See Taussig, Shamanism.
Important criticisms of textualist reductionism and disavowals of material issues in postcolonial studies include Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, ‘After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXXIV, 1 (1992), pp. 141–67;
Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004).
See also Thomas’s criticism of the homogenizing and monolithic image of colonialism entailed in colonial discourse analysis: Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
Such Foucauldian colonial discourse analysis, as Young argues, is still largely to be undertaken, and would indeed look very different from current approaches. Chance (hazard., discontinuity, and materiality, Foucault exemplarily suggested in one of his writings, are critical elements in the analysis of discourses. See Robert J. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (London: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 408–10.
Foucault, L’ordre du discours, p. 61.
See also (with regard to comparable misuses of discourse analysis): Derek Hook, ‘Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality, History: Foucault and Discourse Analysis’, Theory and Psychology, 11, 4 (2001), pp. 521–47.
Key works calling attention to the significance of ‘scientific knowledge’ in relation to the materialities of practice and the activity of objects and technologies include Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn 1986);
Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Eckhout created life-size paintings of Amerindians, Africans, and Brazilians of mixed race in support of the Dutch governor’s project to document the people and natural history of the colony, see Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise. Albert Eckout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil, 1637– 1644 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p. 11.
Influential in this direction has been the anthropological and historical exploration of missionary accounts. Nicholas Thomas’s and Bronwen Douglas’s work on the Pacific; or John Monteiro’s work on indigenous cultures in colonial Brazil are examples of how history and anthropology can meet productively and insightfully with colonial knowledge. See Nicholas Thomas, Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2nd edn, 1996), chapter 6;
Bronwen Douglas, ‘Encounters with the Enemy? Academic Readings of Missionary Narratives on Melanesians’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43 (2001), pp. 37–64;
John M. Monteiro, ‘Tupis, Tapuias e Historiadores: Estudos de História Indígena e do Indigenismo’ (Tese de Livre-Docência, Dept. of Anthropology, IFCH-Unicamp, 2001), published online http://www.ifch. unicamp.br/ihb/estudos.htm.
Bronwen Douglas, Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), p. 124.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘O Mármore e a Murta: Sobre a Inconstância da Alma Selvagem’, in A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem e Outros Ensaios de Antropologia (Rio de Janeiro: Cosaic & Naify, 2002), pp. 181–264.
See Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1985);
Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992);
Marshall Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
For developments of the debate see Robert Borofsky, ‘Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins’, Current Anthropology, 38, 2 (1997), pp. 255–282;
Scott Ashley, ‘How Navigators Think: The Death of Captain Cook Revisited’, Past & Present, 194, 1 (2007), pp. 107–137.
See Ann Laura Stoler, ‘“In Cold Blood”: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’ (this volume); Louise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 1, 5.
Taussig, Shamanism, p. 75 see also pp. 121–23.
Seminal works that have called attention to the necessity of historicizing the colonial categories have been Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (1989), pp. 134–161;
Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in A. L. Stoler and F. Cooper (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Culture in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1–56.
See Nicholas Dirks, ‘Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History’, in B. K. Axel (ed.), From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 47–65;
Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005);
Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; Ricardo Roque, Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
An example of a critical revisionist argument about ‘colonial studies’ from the perspective of historians of Europe is Jean-Frédéric Schaub, ‘La catégorie “études coloniales” est-elle indispensable?’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 3 (2008), pp. 625–47.
Reading practices, as much as field practices and cabinet writing practices, are thus an important dimension of the colonial identity of knowledge. See Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, ‘Introduction: Five Theses on Ethnography as Colonial Practice’, History of Anthropology, 8, 1–4 (1994), pp. 1–34;
Ricardo Roque, ‘Equivocal Connections: Fonseca Cardoso and the Origins of Portuguese Colonial Anthropology’, Portuguese Studies, 19 (2003), pp. 80–109.
John and Jean Comaroff have already called attention to the close affinities between postcolonial studies, micro-history, and cultural history (namely the work of Ginzburg) as regards the problem of recovering subaltern agency through ethnographic description. John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 16–18.
See also Bruce Holsinger, ‘Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique’, Speculum, 77, 4 (2002), pp. 1195–227.
See for instance Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980);
Peter Burke Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978);
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984);
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1983).
More recent examples are John Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001);
Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
On subaltern whites in colonial contexts, see for example Stoler, Along the Archival Grain;
Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘Low and Licentious Europeans’: Race, Class and White Subalternity in Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2009).
For two insightful works that innovatively discuss the global and transnational nature of colonial knowledge, compare Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002);
Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
See also Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’.
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
This argument may be originally found in Max Weber’s theories of modernity and the development of bureaucracy. But Michel Foucault’s work has taken these linkages between government and knowledge to new theoretical heights. Compare, for example, Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, reed. 1991);
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (vol. II, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the Collège de France) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
For a discussion of ancient forms of recordkeeping see Ernst Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).
The literature is extensive but see H. A. Innis, Empire and Communications (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972);
Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan and Peter C. Perdue (eds), Imperial Formations (Oxford: James Currey, 2007);
John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (London: Allen Lane, 2007);
Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010);
Peter Fibiger Band and C.A. Bayly (eds), Tributary Empires in Global History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
For the Ottoman Empire see: Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996);
Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali, 1541–1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004).
For the Mughal Empire see: Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Bayly, Empire and Information, pp. 10–55.
For Imperial China (Qing) see: Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990);
Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990).
Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
See Shepard Krech III, ‘The State of Ethnohistory’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 20 (1991), 345–75.
See Jennifer S. H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert (eds), Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1996).
See also Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (ed.), História dos Índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992).
See Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1980);
Sahlins, Islands of History; Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991);
Douglas, Across the Great Divide. See also note 23 in this chapter. But for a volume that generally reassesses the state of historical anthropology, see Axel (ed.), From the Margins.
Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, p. 51.
See for instance Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information; Peter B. Wagoner, ‘Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45, 4 (2003), pp. 783–814;
Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
For a recent study that argues for the indigenous origins of colonial knowledge of Hinduism, see Raf Gelders, ‘Genealogy of Colonial Discourse: Hindu Traditions and the Limits of European Representation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51, 3 (2009), pp. 563–89.
See Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2009).
For an example of the importance of indigenous agency and intellectual traditions in the constitution of colonial knowledge in an African colonial setting, in the twentieth century, see Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, ‘ “Colonial” Experts, Local Interlocutors, Informants and the Making of an Archive on the “Transvaal Ndebele”, 1930–1989’, Journal of African History, 50 (2009), pp. 61–80.
See Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (London: Routledge, 2002).
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Roque, R., Wagner, K.A. (2012). Introduction: Engaging Colonial Knowledge. In: Roque, R., Wagner, K.A. (eds) Engaging Colonial Knowledge. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230360075_1
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