Así, por ejemplo, cuando José Vasconcelos enuncia el lema del escudo de la UNAM, "Por mi raza hablará el espíritu", proyecta, por un lado, un programa de fusión de la nacionalidad mexicana con "las ...necesidades del espíritu, cuyo predominio es cada día mayor en la vida humana" (Vasconcelos, Discursos 15); y, por otro lado, dialoga y polemiza ideológicamente con el discurso racial norteamericano, el cual proclamó, durante el siglo XIX, "la superioridad de la raza anglosajona" (Merk 125-26) frente a los mestizos mexicanos. La razón representa un avance respecto al primer estadio de caos y violencia; no obstante, también implica un alto costo a la libertad individual, pues instala la coerción opresora y la razón utilitaria: "en nombre de la política se restringen libertades interiores y exteriores; en nombre de la religión, que debiera ser inspiración sublime, se imponen dogmas y tiranías; pero cada caso se justifica con el dictado de la razón, reconocido como supremo de los asuntos humanos" (23-4). Esto, en el dominio político-cultural, se traduce en este proyecto de supuesta integración universalista mediante el mestizaje de lo mejor de las distintas razas: "By combining miscegenation with the ethnocultural mixing of ideas of beauty, Vasconcelos provides a truly cosmopolitan, global vision of a movement toward a universalist sense of beauty produced not by abstract reason, as in Kant, but by real, biological, historical, and social processes in the progress of 'miscegenation'" (133). Parece que Dios mismo conduce los pasos del sajonismo, en tanto que nosotros nos matamos por el dogma o nos proclamamos ateos. iCómo deben reír de nuestros desplantes y vanidades latinas estos fuertes constructores de imperios! (Vasconcelos, La raza 13, el énfasis es mío).
Born out of the decline of the Ottoman Empire brought on by Western imperialism, Iraq, a composite country, has seen regimes succeed one another without creating the psychological and political ...foundations of a nation-state. The events of the last two decades have only, with heavy western responsibility, widened the gap between communities and affiliations. Has Iraq ever truly existed for its people, and will regional conflicts allow it to survive?
Race for Empire offers a profound and challenging reinterpretation of nationalism, racism, and wartime mobilization during the Asia-Pacific war. In parallel case studies—of Japanese Americans ...mobilized to serve in the United States Army and of Koreans recruited or drafted into the Japanese military—T. Fujitani examines the U.S. and Japanese empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations while waging total war. Fujitani probes governmental policies and analyzes representations of these soldiers—on film, in literature, and in archival documents—to reveal how characteristics of racism, nationalism, capitalism, gender politics, and the family changed on both sides. He demonstrates that the United States and Japan became increasingly alike over the course of the war, perhaps most tellingly in their common attempts to disavow racism even as they reproduced it in new ways and forms.
Enoch Powell's explosive rhetoric against black immigration and anti-discrimination law transformed the terrain of British race politics and cast a long shadow over British society. Using extensive ...archival research, Camilla Schofield offers a radical reappraisal of Powell's political career and insists that his historical significance is inseparable from the political generation he sought to represent. Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain follows Powell's trajectory from an officer in the British Raj to the centre of British politics and, finally, to his turn to Ulster Unionism. She argues that Powell and the mass movement against 'New Commonwealth' immigration that he inspired shed light on Britain's war generation, popular understandings of the welfare state and the significance of memories of war and empire in the making of postcolonial Britain. Through Powell, Schofield illuminates the complex relationship between British social democracy, racism and the politics of imperial decline in Britain.
In the last two decades, the Mediterranean has received significant attention in the media and scholarship due to the so-called 'migration crisis', and this has prompted several critical debates ...about the ethics and impacts of image-making and knowledge production. This thesis contributes to this discussion by providing a thematic, material and historically grounded analysis of eight contemporary artworks about the Mediterranean by women artists. Seen together and in relation to each other for the first time, these projects propose modes of thinking about and with the sea that focus on process, tentativeness, empathy and responsibility. To do this, I establish an interdependent methodology of unlearning and imagining based on the philosophical work of Édouard Glissant and the ontological studies by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Looking at how they explore conceptual notions such as radical difference, worldmaking, borders, place, movement, history, memory and resistance, I develop a way of engaging with material and mental images that simultaneously acknowledges structural absences and invisible potentialities. I demonstrate the importance of problematising the ways in which the violent categories of imperialism and universalism were built and applied, but also of reactivating spaces where hopeful resistances and systematic dismantling have happened and can happen. Examining the conceptual and formal strategies employed by the selected artists, and in particular their interdisciplinary, transcultural and multimediatic creative approaches, this thesis navigates between critically evaluating the past and projecting utopias forward. In doing so, it highlights imperialism's failure to complete its project of destruction and demonstrates the importance of conceiving knowledge production as an always unfinished, ever-evolving practice. It also heavily emphasises that art is a key arena in the (de)construction of collective imaginaires, and that it should be approached not only as a representation of thought but as a modality of thinking.
This volume explores how imperial powers established and expanded their empires through decisions that were often based on exaggerated expectations and wishful thinking, rather than on reasoned and ...scientific policies. It explores these exaggerations through the concepts of El Dorado, utopias and dystopias – undertakings based on irrational perceived values – in case studies from across the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and incorporates imperial traditions including Scottish, British, French, German, Italian and American. Various colonial spaces are considered, from the Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas, and in doing so, the contributors offer new insights into the nature of imperialism and colonial settlement.
For a long time, Europe’s colonizing powers justified their urge for expansion with the conviction that they were ‘bringing civilization to territories where civilization was lacking.’ This doctrine ...of white superiority and indigenous inferiority was accompanied by a boundless exploitation of local labor. Under colonial rule, the ideology that later became known as neoliberalism was free to subject labor to a capitalism tainted by racialized policies. This political economy has now become dominant in the Western world, too, and has reversed the trend towards equality. In Colonialism, Capitalism and Racism, Jan Breman shows how racial favoritism is no longer contained to ‘faraway, indigenous peoples,’ but has become a source of polarization within Western societies as well.
In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and ...humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "West." Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism—including citizenship and equality—were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.
After Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1834, Victorians adopted a creed of "anti-slavery" as a vital part of their national identity and sense of moral superiority to other ...civilizations. The British government used diplomacy, pressure, and violence to suppress the slave trade, while the Royal Navy enforced abolition worldwide and an anxious public debated the true responsibilities of an anti-slavery nation. This crusade was far from altruistic or compassionate, but Richard Huzzey argues that it forged national debates and political culture long after the famous abolitionist campaigns of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson had faded into memory. These anti-slavery passions shaped racist and imperialist prejudices, new forms of coerced labor, and the expansion of colonial possessions.
In a sweeping narrative that spans the globe,Freedom Burningexplores the intersection of philanthropic, imperial, and economic interests that underlay Britain's anti-slavery zeal- from London to Liberia, the Sudan to South Africa, Canada to the Caribbean, and the British East India Company to the Confederate States of America. Through careful attention to popular culture, official records, and private papers, Huzzey rewrites the history of the British Empire and a century-long effort to end the global trade in human lives.
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