LONDON DEBATES
2010 How does Europe in the 21st century address the legacy of colonialism?
London Debates 2010 How does Europe in the 21st century address the legacy of colonialism? Contents Introduction to the London Debates 2010 Philip Murphy Keynote Lecture Postcolonial studies: a political invention of tradition? – excerpt Jean-François Bayart
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Postcolonialism and Islam/ism: theory, academy and the 7 contours of public debate Rosa Vasilaki Palestine and postcolonial studies Anna Bernard
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The New Orientalist debate in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner Lucienne Loh
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The legacy of European colonialism on television Neil Fleming
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The past in the present: London and Paris as post-imperial 11 cinematic cities Malini Guha Europe’s internal ‘other’: postcommunist reconsiderations 12 of the postcolonial Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru Colonialism and the ‘other’ Europe: a neglected web of relations Eva Ulrike Pirker
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Still conceiving the ‘heart of darkness’ in the EU Paul R Sarazin
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Commonwealth histories and geographies Ruth Craggs
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Accountability and the Westminster legacy of executive power Harshan Kumarasingham
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An enduring global Imperial imagination: civilizing mission, lusotropicalism, lusophonia and the third Portuguese Empire Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
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A consideration of transatlantic slavery’s legacy of racism in Britain David Wilkins
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Gazing at the poor: favela tours and the colonial legacy Bianca Freire-Medeiros
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Picture credits Page 8–9: Shutterstock images Page 15: Commonwealth Secretariat
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Introduction to the London Debates 2010 Philip Murphy, Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies
The theme of the London Debates 2010 proved particularly timely. Barely had the workshop concluded than an impassioned debate broke out in the press about the teaching of history in British schools, with some accusing the new coalition government in the UK of seeking to ‘rehabilitate’ the memory of Britain’s Imperial past. For policy-makers in the UK, as elsewhere in Europe, the issue of the enduring legacy of colonialism remains a highly relevant and sensitive one. In exploring this theme we were lucky enough to have as our keynote speaker Professor Jean-François Bayart, the director of research at CNRS in Paris. Three other distinguished commentators also participated in the workshop: Richard Drayton (Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College, London), Stephen Howe (Professor in the History and Cultures of Colonialism at the University of Bristol), and Professor Nicholas Harrison (head of the Department of French at King’s). All four enlivened the two-day workshop with their questions and observations. Professor Bayart’s keynote lecture, an excerpt of which is reproduced below, offered a challenging critique of the field of postcolonial studies. He argued that postcolonial studies has imposed an almost Calvinist sense of predestination on global history, in the process de-historicizing both colonialism itself and the links between the colonial moment and the post-colonial era. The papers of our 13 early-career speakers, drawn from across Europe and the Americas, demonstrate the wide variety of ways in which the legacy of colonialism continues to be felt today, and help to explain its continuing sensitivity. The summaries below give some flavour of their arguments. They include examinations of whether the ideas of the pioneers of postcolonial studies provide a help or a hindrance in explaining current conflicts in Israel/Palestine and Afghanistan or even offer insights into the collapse of the Soviet Empire. They also consider the representation of Europe’s colonial past in the media, and the more concrete political legacies of the British and Portuguese Empires. In discussing these papers, the workshop raised fundamental questions about the nature of Imperialism, the evocation and suppression of memory, and the limitations of our existing conceptual tools. It provided a concrete example of the important role the School of Advanced Study can perform in fostering genuinely interdisciplinary debate about subjects of major contemporary relevance.
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Keynote Lecture Postcolonial studies: a political invention of tradition? – excerpt Jean-François Bayart, Director of research at CNRS, Paris
Professor Jean-François Bayart, the director of research at CNRS in Paris.
The main failing that can be laid at the door of postcolonial studies is their adherence to the extreme forms of the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s. They do not so much address practices (which would be documented by fieldwork and archival research), as discourses and representations on the basis of which they wax eloquent or make often exaggerated over-generalizations. Thus, they get trapped in the catastrophic concept of ‘identity’ and reify a postcolonial condition onto which they confer a quasi-ontological status, in accordance with a kind of tropical or diasporic Calvinism: colonialism and slavery are the predestined fate of the native (and his master). In so doing, postcolonial studies depart from the field of scientific scholarship in the strict sense but still remain in thrall to their initial premises. In France, they contribute, for instance, towards ethnicizing the social and political issue of the suburbs and posing exclusively in terms of racism a problem that also involves ‘class struggle’ and forms of ‘classism’ (to quote the provocative term used by the mediaevalist Alessandro Stella), at the risk of setting themselves up as a selffulfilling prophecy. And in Africa, they do not help the problem of slavery to free itself from the level of nationalist discourse, which obscures the servile social relations internal to sub-Saharan societies, and reduces the legacy of the slave trade to an unambiguous denunciation of the West. The origin of this shift lies in two methodological errors: firstly, the de-historicizing of colonialism,
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which is reified;secondly,the de-historicizing of continuities and discontinuities, or more precisely, of the links, the concatenation, between the colonial moment and the postcolonial moment. When it comes to the analysis of colonialism, postcolonial studies exaggerate its specificity in relation to other imperial forms, and thus fail to understand its historicity by over-simplifying the way in which it is singularised. It is now demonstrated that colonial empires were partly empires just like any others, and so should be read also in terms of the classic investigations that have led to the decoding of the latter. Moreover, colonial situations have evolved in very different ways that postcolonial studies mix up. The latter generally do not distinguish between colonies that are settlements or those of another nature such as slave colonies, even though these realities are at the heart of their concerns. People are not colonized, and therefore ‘postcolonised’, in the same way in the Caribbean as they are in India – not to mention the historical contingencies which soon explode these big classificatory categories, possession by possession, or the canonical contrast between a ‘State of conquest’, violent by nature and necessity, and a ‘colonial State’ in the strict sense, in which the ‘ethical’ imperatives of bureaucratic rationalisation and economic intensification constitutive of a ‘second occupation’ are present. Colonisation was a moment of ‘connection’, violent, iniquitous and traumatic. Nonetheless, it did not annul the moral and political economy of the societies subjected to it, nor did it totally absorb it. So we should not argue by the yardstick of the systematic nature of the colonial system, nor even that of the ‘void’ which its ‘plenum’ never managed to control, insisting on the practices of resistance, flight, hijacking and subversion to which decidedly un-submissive natives have resorted. Instead, we need to set out from the positivity of historic societies and thus show how they came through the colonial moment and brought about the autonomy of the colonial state and its potential hegemony with regard to the colonial situation. In other words, the colonial state owes its epithet (anecdotal and in any case contingent) only to the period which saw it emerge, and not to its essence. In fact, it is
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London Debates participants. Left to right: Harsham Kumarasingham, David Wilkins and Richard Drayton.
defined largely by dimensions other than that of the interaction between the colonized and the colonizer. Once the colonial moment has become historical, it inhabits the consciousness of those who have survived it or were born after it had faded away, but the relation that both the former and the latter have with it is a relation of enunciation and not of determination. We remain the prisoners of the ‘historicism’ we denounce if we affirm that ‘postcolonials’ belong to the colony, instead of seeing the representation of the colony as the effect of its polemical appropriation by postcolonials. In France, the Natives of the Republic (Indigènes de la République) invented the colony out of their nightmares, and also out of their dreams – in other words from their struggle against exclusion, social injustice, and ordinary racism. This myth of postcolonial nationhood, which has its equivalents in India and Latin America, is politically legitimate. But it tells us nothing about what the colonial moment really was. Translated by Andrew Brown 6
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Postcolonialism and Islam/ism: theory, academy and the contours of public debate Rosa Vasilaki, University of Bristol
The first session of the London Debates considered the continuing relevance of postcolonial studies from three distinct perspectives, focusing on Islam, Israel/Palestine and Afghanistan.
In the ongoing academic and public debates about the politicization of religion and the nature of secular political cultures, Islam/ism has held a central role, as illustrated, for example, by the affairs of the veil, the Danish cartoons, the minaret vote, or by the ‘Satanic Verses’ controversy. In these debates Muslim political activism has been increasingly presented under the banner of ‘postcolonialism’ and the two terms, Islam/ism and postcolonialism, often appear in tandem in publications, conferences and postgraduate curricula. What this postcolonial framework seems to imply is that the recent Muslim political activism, whether in its violent, militarist forms or in its softer culturalist versions needs to be understood as a manifestation of the legacy of colonialism, as an arguably understandable reaction to the political and epistemic violence inflicted by the ‘West’ on the ‘Rest’. However, a closer examination of the analytical categories and political imaginary of postcolonial theory points to its antinomy rather than convergence with the ethical and political universe represented by Islam/ism. If this explanatory relationship is not sustainable on theoretical grounds, as the paper demonstrates, then why has Islamic revivalism been increasingly theorised as ‘postcolonial’? What must be understood as typically ‘postcolonial’ is not so much the various manifestations of Muslim political activism but rather the recent intellectual developments within Western academia undergirding approaches such as ‘postcolonial Islam’. The realization of the inextricable relationship between Western scientific knowledge and colonial power, the subsequent erosion of the belief in the possibility of disinterested knowledge about the colonised ‘Other’ and the rise of ‘reflexive’ fields of studies such as postcolonialism, also need to be understood as part of the legacy of colonialism and as part of the broader process of deconstruction of the ‘West’.
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Palestine and postcolonial studies Anna Bernard, University of York
Because postcolonial studies is a well-established academic field, it might seem that universities in the UK and the rest of Europe have done their part to address the legacy of colonialism in the 21st century. However, in literature departments, where postcolonial studies has been most influential, the scope of this address has in fact been very limited. Students tend to read a narrow range of authors – Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott – in safe and predictable ways, downplaying the history of anticolonial independence struggles in favour of a depoliticized celebration of global multiculturalism.The question that those of us who teach postcolonial studies must face, then, is how can we avoid perpetuating a situation in which our teaching simply confirms what our students already know? One solution is to pay more attention to postcolonial studies’ blind spots, of which the most obvious (and surprising) is Israel/Palestine. Palestine’s position in the View From the Mount of Olives on the Dome of the Rock Through the Barbed Wire
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Israeli Border Police soldiers stop a Palestinian pedestrian and inspect his identity documents near the Damascus Gate on Jan. 7, 2011 in the Old City of Jerusalem.
institutionalized form of postcolonial literary studies is akin to the infamous Israeli legal category of the ‘present absentee’: the figure of ‘the Palestinian’ is commonly invoked as the quintessential victim of our present moment, but Palestinian and Israeli literature and culture are almost completely unknown and unstudied. The exclusion of this and other contemporary colonial contexts allows the postcolonial studies curriculum to continue to privilege notions of cultural ‘difference,’ hybridity, migration, and transnationalism over political antagonism and contest, and to problematize national identities at the expense of national liberation movements. The study of Israel/Palestine can begin to dislodge such paradigms by underlining the existence of forms of colonialism and imperialism in the present, and by helping our students to recognize the continuity of the imperial world order and the enduring political and cultural legacy of European colonialism. 9
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The New Orientalist debate in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner Lucienne Loh, Royal Holloway, University of London
Since September 2001, the global ‘War on Terror’ has not only dominated geopolitical concerns, but has been waged in the name of political ideologies such as ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom.’ The political rhetoric adopted to justify the necessity for beleaguered Middle Eastern states to adopt these ideologies has resurrected older discourses which present Middle Eastern cultures as definitively non-European. While literature and politics have traditionally been viewed as separate spheres, Edward Said argued in his seminal publication, Orientalism (1978), that European culture of the 18th and 19th centuries implicitly participated in constructing the Middle East as Europe’s ‘other,’ andfuelled justifications for European imperial conquest. Orientalism, as Said presented it then, was an ambivalent discourse circulated and consolidated within the conscious and unconscious production of culture itself. Orientalism, as a process, exoticised the Middle East as a space of beauty and sensuality, but at the same time, presented Muslim cultures as ignorant, despotic, cruel, repressive and sexually exploitative of women and boys. A number of recent international best-sellers, including Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) have prompted criticism of the rise of a more contemporary form of orientalism which has been labelled ‘new orientalism.’ My focus is on a specific aspect of orientalism implicit in the formal structure of The Kite Runner, which is set predominantly in Afghanistan. While many readers respond to the book’s appeal to common human themes, I argue that the novel implicitly participates in justifying the military invasion of Afghanistan by exploiting Western paranoia about sexually abusive Middle Eastern cultures. The narrative is framed around the rape of a young boy by an older boy who, later in the novel, is revealed to be a core member of the Taliban and a persistent abuser of children.The rape thus haunts the narrative and drives its momentum and plot.The novel, I suggest, represents the Taliban as the absolute political other to Europe by highlighting the Talibe as sexually deviant.
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LONDON DEBATES 2010 The second session of the workshop examined the legacy of colonialism in relation to the depiction of Europe’s Imperial past in cinema and on television, and to the phenomenon of favela/township tourism.
The legacy of European colonialism on television Neil Fleming, John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, University College Dublin With its ability to reach millions of viewers, television has proven the medium most likely to generate high-profile controversy about the legacy of European colonialism. Widening access to television broadcasts in the 1960s accompanied the decline and dissolution of Europe’s overseas empires. The economic liberalisation of broadcasting thirty years later, in a like manner, coincided with greater efforts at fostering multiculturalism. As a consequence, the depiction of colonialism on television has undergone significant changes in the last half century. This has seen a shift from the hegemonic values of the colonial power toward a greater appreciation of the negative consequences of colonialism on its subject peoples. The rate and depth of this shift depends on which country is examined, a reflection of divergent experiences of decolonisation and contrasting approaches to television broadcasting. This is demonstrated in a comparison of broadcasting in the United Kingdom and France, Europe’s two most powerful empires in the 19th and 20th-centuries. Up until the period of decolonisation in the 1960s, relatively rare television output on empire in both counties tended to support an almost exclusively metropolitan view of empire. The 1970s heralded a divergence, with British broadcasters demonstrating a new willingness to screen programmes and films that challenged the hitherto dominant narrative on empire. It took French broadcasters another twenty years to follow this course. The last decade, however, has seen these developments stall or even go into reverse. In France, a belated willingness to address its former empire on television has not developed into a sustained engagement with its consequences for subject peoples. In Britain, critics have been alarmed by the willingness of a recent spate of television programmes to weigh up the costs and benefits of colonialism, especially when some give greater prominence to the latter.
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The past in the present: London and Paris as post-imperial cinematic cities Malini Guha, Carelton University
Vincent Cassel as Vinz in Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995).
One of the ways in which the legacies of colonialism can be ascertained within contemporary European culture is by turning one’s gaze towards the cinema. My paper develops a narrative of the intimate connection between the cinema and the city that takes as its point of departure the story of the flâneur, the great stroller of the 19th-century city whose mobility and gaze is aligned with the experiences of modern urban life and visuality in Europe’s cities, including the birth of the cinema. My work investigates traces of imperial histories, narratives and figures located in recent British and French cinema, set in the cities of London and Paris. If the flâneur can be conceptualized as an iconic figure linked to the rise of modern urban visuality, then the post-imperial migrant or settler is another such urban figure associated with the dawn of post-imperial London and Paris.
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The presence of migrants hailing from former colonies has altered both cityscapes in a way that attests to the imperial history of these cities and these transformations can be charted, in part, through cinematic representation. Examples include the representation of racialized streetbased trauma in a series of films that chronicle the experiences of Caribbean migration and settlement in London including Horace Ove’s Pressure (1975) and Franco Russo’s Babylon (1980). Many of these films are set in areas of black settlement, such as Brixton and Notting Hill. In the French context, the recurring representation of the Parisian suburbs known as the banlieue in films like Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) and more recently, Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), function as markers of the post-imperial history of Paris, where the banlieue became home to migrant populations stemming mainly from Algeria. It is a space that has accumulated its own history of racialized forms of oppression, violence and strife. Still from Caché by Michael Haneke (2005).
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LONDON DEBATES 2010 The third session of the workshop considered European politics and external relations in the second half of the twentieth century from a postcolonial perspective.
Europe’s internal ‘other’: postcommunist reconsiderations of the postcolonial Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, University of Bucharest The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new nations on the map of Europe coincided, according to Christian Moraru, with a paradigm shift in postcolonial studies in the early 1990s. As postcolonialism was being institutionalised, reaching the speaking platform of the academy and thus losing some of its former subversive poignancy, its emancipatory mission was partly taken over by postcommunism. This new discipline, was then in need of conceptual working tools to theorise the historical experience of communism and the transition to a new capitalist economy in Eastern Europe. Initially, it borrowed established concepts from disciplines such as postcolonialism and cultural studies. A decade later, the gradual EU accession of former communist countries, still recovering from difficult processes of economic and political transition, brought the postcolonialism/postcommunism dialogue back on the agenda, with renewed urgency. Despite the similarities that can be found between these two parallel discourses, which share an interest in theorising marginalisation and othering, ideological and historical differences between postcolonialism and postcommunism have also made themselves noticeable. One important distinction, noticed by Adrian Otoiu and Bogdan Stefanescu, comes from the function played by Marxism in postcolonialism, where it was the major source of progressive strategies, as opposed to postcommunism, where Marxism is rejected as the dominant ideology of the communist regime. Also, local conditions and the history of relating to empire sometimes differ widely in Eastern Europe as compared to former colonial countries. Recent theories on imperialism and globalisation show significant potential to shed light on some of the issues in the postcommunism-postcolonialism debate and should be further explored. This paper examines the current state of the art and argues in favour of the benefits of the dialogue between the two discourses, but also for caution against the generalising tendencies inherent in this theoretical enterprise. 14
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Colonialism and the ‘other’ Europe: a neglected web of relations Eva Ulrike Pirker, University of Freiburg
Starting from the premise that the understanding of the history of European colonialism and the postcolonial situation is dominated by Western frameworks of thinking, my paper takes a neglected aspect of this history into consideration: the shifting relation between communist Eastern Europe and intellectuals, students and workers from the colonial and postcolonial sphere. It offers glimpses into prominent examples from the first half of the 20th century (such as poet Claude McKay and activist George Padmore) to the 1980s. In addition, it also draws attention to the less accessible experience of African students at Eastern European institutions of learning, such as the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Ultimately, it suggests that in light of a (still largely) missing historiography, works of fiction might offer a first access to this experience, and presents Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novel By the Sea as an example. Its East African protagonists’ experience of Eastern Europe, as well as their experience of attempts to transplant the Eastern European model of socialism in practice to their postcolonial homeland, has been formative for them as well as for many other ‘real’ individuals and groups in diverse geographical territories.Their stories, the paper argues, deserve to be heard and must be taken into account in efforts to achieve a fuller understanding of colonialism and its legacy in a postcolonial world.
1961 – in the year in which the ‘Friendship University’ was renamed Lumumba University, a Soviet stamp was launched to remember the murdered Congolese Prime Minister who had – unsuccessfully – sought Soviet assistance in his attempts to put down a plot.
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Still conceiving the ‘heart of darkness’ in the EU Paul R Sarazin, Lancaster University
If more trade, then more development, and if more development, then the problems of poverty in the Third World are solved! The solution seems as easy as drawing lines through Africa. Trade liberalisation between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (all excolonies) proposed in ‘Economic Partnership Agreements’ (EPAs) is paradigmatic of larger debates about trade between European nations and former European colonies. My paper considers the underlying assumptions behind speeches made in 2007 by the EU Commissioner for Trade and for Humanitarian Aid and Development.Analysis of the speeches reveals the power imbalance behind the EPAs, based on the ex-colonies’ economically weaker position, and questions claims that there is no alternative to EPAs, and that they are needed to meet the demands of ‘globalisation’. The Commissioner claimed that trade liberalisation is beneficial because more trade would lead to more economic development. But others say that this relationship is based on unrealised assumptions, e.g. ‘perfect competition, full employment, perfect factor mobility within countries’. Yet others deny a correlation between trade and development and maintain that ‘reductions of transactions costs, rapid accumulation of human and physical capital and maintenance of macro-economic stability’ demonstrate a positive relationship to development.
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Commonwealth histories and geographies Ruth Craggs, St Mary’s University College
The Commonwealth is one of the most obvious legacies of Britain’s imperial project, and an important site in which we can think critically, but also productively about the legacy of colonialism in Europe. First, the Commonwealth provides an alternative historical genealogy for thinking about contemporary debates around hospitality and cosmopolitanism. Secondly, taking the Commonwealth seriously offers possibilities for creating more informed understandings of Britain’s post-colonial identity and its contemporary global connections. Thirdly, a postcolonial perspective could provide the institution of the Commonwealth with better tools through which to carry out its work today. A new understanding of the Commonwealth, both by scholars and by the association itself, is therefore needed. Animated through distant places, people and events and challenging simple temporality and spatiality, the Commonwealth could produce critical intimacy and familiarity, rather than the superficial familiarity which is discussed in much contemporary Commonwealth discourse. A Commonwealth acknowledging past relations and highlighting present day connections, would bring spaces, people and ideas into closer proximity and might, on these terms, be better able to make a difference in the future. The Commonwealth provides a useful tool for scholars and policy makers alike in understanding the post-colonial world.
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Accountability and the Westminster legacy of executive power Harshan Kumarasingham,Victoria University of Wellington
In July 2009 members of the British Academy wrote to the Queen outlining an attempt to answer their Sovereign’s question on how the financial crisis was able to happen. This was an interesting dialogue between the Head of State and a range of experts from academia, business and government. Was such an interest shown to or by the Queen of New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica or her analogous republican progeny in India or Singapore? The Westminster system places great power upon the Executive with minimal accountabilities. This is a critical legacy of colonialism. Despite independence coming to the Commonwealth so many countries maintained the Westminster system whether it was transplanted or implanted to their soil. The Westminster model provides various political actors with a great potential of increasing power autonomy over the others due to high levels of flexibility and manoeuvrability. The ‘regime-settings’ available in New Westminsters in their early independence eras displayed a high potential to allow political actors to settle on the power continuum generally unencumbered by fixed and formal institutional expectations. This allowed the countries and their executive, particularly the Prime Minister, the ability to mould and establish constitutional traditions, which in turn shaped the nascent polity that surrounded the real and constitutional independence. The new executive political actors legitimately became the midwife to their newly christened and adopted Westminsters once delivered from the mother of Parliaments. The legacy of Westminster and political colonialism lives on.
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An enduring global Imperial imagination: civilizing mission, lusotropicalism, lusophonia and the third Portuguese empire Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo , Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon Part of a larger research project focused on the historical formation and transformation of a global imperial imagination in Portugal since the beginning of the 19th century, my paper aims to identify and analyze the processes of imperialization of the nation, that is, the variety of socio-political, ideological and cultural instruments, forms and processes that legitimized the country’s imperial and colonial venture after the disintegration of the Luso-brazilian empire in the 1820s. Taking the doctrines of civilizing mission, lusotropicalism and lusophonia as the most important historical examples and observatories of the Portuguese global imperial and nationalist imagination, the paper addresses the role played by the major historical actors, institutions and ideologies that contributed to their formulation. Aiming to highlight the continuities and the differences between these modalities of global imperial imagination and these tools of imperial and colonial legitimation, this article provides an historical overview of Portuguese foreign, metropolitan and colonial policies, from the colonial to the postcolonial contexts. It also confronts the programmatic precepts of the mentioned doctrines with the historical realities of imperial and colonial citizenship, with the production of socio-economic and cultural differentiation in the colonial world via processes of racialization and with overall dynamics of imperial political and moral economies characteristic of the third Portuguese empire.
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A consideration of transatlantic slavery’s legacy of racism in Britain David Wilkins, University of Hull
When thinking about how Europe in the 21st century can address its colonial legacy it is worth considering how Britain might address its problem of racism that can be seen as a legacy of transatlantic slavery. I suggest that one way might be to envisage museums and schools as places where education and commemoration can facilitate a truth-telling process whereby the history of transatlantic slavery and its legacy can be confronted, explored and thereby overcome. The 2007 Bicentenary Commemorations of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade gives insight into this idea. In 2007 some felt that the historical focus on slavery and its contribution to British economic development ignored the parallel historical exploitation of people in Britain and how class and wealth, as well as race, are responsible for inequality in modern Britain. Indeed a few became wealthy from the hard and poorly rewarded labour of many people on both sides of the Atlantic. Many African elites became wealthy through the transatlantic slave trade too. In 2007 there was a hostile reaction to suggestions of apologising and making financial reparation for this history and its legacies.This reaction resulted in part from a lack of historical understanding. The imperative for wider historical context when confronting this history is clear. To bring together the narratives of the exploitation of poor people in Britain with that of the exploitation of Africans in the British Caribbean would help to overcome the legacies of both. Considering the history of transatlantic slavery as part of wider history is a more inclusive approach that also prompts us to question the wider power relations in our society as well as racial prejudice. It is from here that an inclusive universal historical truth may be produced which will enable the legacy of this history to be addressed.
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Gazing at the poor: favela tours and the colonial legacy Bianca Freire-Medeiros, CPDOC/Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil
Favela touism.
Favela is the generic name given to densely populated agglomerations of substandard housing, which emerged in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the early 20th century. Feared and systematically avoided by local elites, the favela nevertheless offers international visitors an interesting package: controlled risk combined with adventure, the opportunity to act as a concerned citizen (by supposedly contributing to the economic development of the area) and a beautiful view of the city captured from above. How do tourism activities in impoverished and stigmatized areas such as the favela relate to the legacy of colonialism and its fantasies about a fearful but seductive ‘other’? To what extent do the first-hand encounters with such territories reinforce or challenge long-lasting stereotypes?
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LONDON DEBATES 2010 Coming from media-saturated societies and broadly stimulated by the tourism market, favela tourists are eager for non-mediated experiences to provide an authenticity lost in the ‘civilized West’. They imagine themselves rescuing the favelados from life-threatening violence, not realizing that the violence imposed on the favela population is not only the result of the arbitrariness of the narco-traffickers and the egotism of the Brazilian elites, but is equally an outcome of unjust economic arrangements of which the tourists themselves are an intrinsic part. To accusations of voyeurism and (post)colonial exploitation, interviewees respond that the first-hand contact with adversity was a ‘fascinating’ and ‘enlightening’, ‘eye-opening’ and ‘self-transforming’ experience. The emergence of the favela as a tourist destination is intertwined with the inheritance of European colonialism, similar to other practices of poverty tourism around the world – such as the townships of South Africa, Kibera or Dharavi – where tourists are promised authentic encounters with exotic cultures presumably alien to modern temporality.
Contributors to London Debates 2010. Thank you to Dee Burn, Rosemary Lambeth and Jim Manor for organising and running the event.
Work is currently under way to publish a selection of the papers from the 2010 London Debates in an edited book. Publication is expected in 2011.
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The London Debates is a series of international discussion workshops organized by the University of London’s School of Advanced Study that bring together outstanding early-career researchers and invited senior researchers to consider a subject of broad concern in the humanities and social sciences. The Debates include lectures, plenary seminars and smallgroup discussions. London Debates was launched in 2009 and the first in this series of international debates was held on 14-16 May 2009 on the subject: ‘What role do museums play in the globalisation of culture?’ The second London Debates workshop was held on 13-15 May 2010 on the subject of ‘How does Europe in the 21st century address the legacy of colonialism?’
LONDON DEBATES c/o Rosemary Lambeth School of Advanced Study University of London Senate House Malet Street London WC1E 7HU UNITED KINGDOM rosemary.lambeth@sas.ac.uk +44 (0)20 7862 8695 www.sas.ac.uk