Browsing by Subject "Colonialism"

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Assimilating Hawai‘i:racial science in a colonial “Laboratory,” 1919-1939
(2012-07) Manganaro, Christine Leah
This dissertation demonstrates how American physical anthropologists and sociologists working in Hawai‘i framed the biological and cultural assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into Americanness as natural rather than ideological, thus naturalizing the islands' incorporation into the United States as a story about integration rather than colonization. Scientists argued that mixing in this "racial laboratory" improved the quality of the majority non-white population, that migration and colonization were features of a natural historical trajectory of Americanization, and that race relations in the islands were the product of a human ecology that went hand in hand with capitalist development. All of these ideas became the racial common sense that traveled to the continental U.S. and perpetuated American amnesia about empire. This project revisits the historiography of the supposed retreat of scientific racism and, by closely examining the methods, actual data, and conclusions of scientists whose work shaped their disciplines, demonstrates how racialist thinking persisted in work that has been characterized as either questioning the race concept, as politically progressive, or both. Taking cues from studies of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i and recent debate about the actuality of a retreat of scientific racism in the United States, this dissertation demonstrates how treating assimilation as a natural process that needed to be better understood, rather than a discursive project of colonial governance, legitimated American power in the islands. During a period when scientists and politicians alike were interested in fitness, degeneracy, and the consequences of immigration and miscegenation as part of debates about national progress, scientists viewed Hawai‘i as a laboratory where they could conduct research on heredity and cultural change that was difficult or impossible to do in the continental United States. American social scientists working in Hawai‘i framed the processes they studied, particularly the assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into American culture and identity, as natural rather than ideological. American scientists with sometimes opposing political orientations such as Louis R. Sullivan and L.C. Dunn concluded that, unlike mixed race people generally and especially "mulattoes," Chinese-Hawaiian "hybrids" were actually improvements on their supposedly pure parents (chapter 1). Physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro, in his study of racial plasticity among migrants in a changed environment, developed few concrete findings, but helped establish Hawai‘i as a long-term human research site. Sociologist Romanzo Adams, who was trained at the University of Chicago, produced the history of Hawai‘i as a history of admixture that exaggerated the degree of interracial reproduction and suggested that the territorial population was well on its way to complete biological amalgamation (chapter 3). Through a series of interviews with couples in interracial marriages and the collection of student papers about identity and racial prejudice, many of which contradicted Adams' findings and predictions, graduate researcher Margaret M. Lam recorded the testimony of residents who both resisted certain types of racialization as they also participated in the construction and maintenance of racial boundaries and meanings (chapter 4). Finally, sociologist Andrew Lind, framed social inequality and tense race relations in the territory as a product of competition for jobs and housing, a "natural" feature of "human ecology," rather than a product of intentional labor control and government decisions (chapter 5). This advanced the idea that social conditions in Hawai‘i were a natural product of modernization rather colonization.
Communities on the Move: Practice and Mobility in the late Eighteenth-Century Western Great Lakes Fur Trade
(2016-08) Allard, Amélie
This dissertation elaborates a framework for interpreting the archaeological site of Réaume’s Leaf River Post, a late eighteenth-century fur trading post in Central Minnesota. It examines the construction of social relationships and community in relation to place both within the site and across the broader fur trade landscape of the Western Great Lakes. I consider the ways in which Euro-Canadian fur traders made sense of an unfamiliar landscape by producing a familiar social space (or places) while on the move. Firstly, they did so through daily practices that are recoverable archaeologically, such as foodways and architecture. Together, such activities served to produce a particular lived space, which also created a stage for the enactment of shared practices. I argue that the transmission of practical knowledge from old timers to newcomers, or sometimes from Native people to traders, worked to create a unique community of practice that revolved around fur trading. Given the mobility associated with this lifestyle, I further argue that mobility not only impacted the materiality of the posts in a particular way, but was in fact part of those shared practices that helped foster a sense of ‘groupness’. This community formation process involves operations of both differentiation and inclusion, which often worked simultaneously and along different layers of identity (social status, ethnicity, experience, etc.). Secondly, place-making and community formation processes also work at the power-laden level of the imagination, representation and discourse, which produce the ‘conceived space’. Here I use for evidence a number of journals and memoirs written by fur traders who operated in our region of interest in the late eighteenth century or the turn of the nineteenth century. These narratives offer valuable insight into the ways in which traders created a particular geographic imaginary through their movement across, and engagement with, the landscape and the people inhabiting it. They turned the unfamiliar landscape into familiar places through stories, food procurement strategies, place-names, mapmaking and references to ‘home.’ The overall objective is to demonstrate how tensions emerged between colonial ideals of sedentary life and the need and desire for mobility, and that the practices and imaginaries of the fur traders in fact embodied these tensions. When considering these issues, Réaume’s Leaf River Post reflects this ambivalence.
Cultural Colonialism in the Twin Cities Jazz Scene
(2023) Garmoe, Ryan
This paper explores the relationship between jazz, white supremacy, and colonialism, and how that relationship manifests in the Twin Cities jazz community. Jazz' s interaction with complex sociological concepts is well documented throughout the music's history. However, the discussion of jazz's racialized and exploited past rarely informs decision-making in everyday jazz happenings. How are current jazz systems the result of colonial history? The data to answer such questions, in the context of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, was gathered through musician-to-musician interviews and a survey created and distributed in conjunction with a local jazz non-profit, Jazz Central Studios. While drawing exact parallels to colonial action is difficult, preliminary findings suggest the Twin Cities jazz community continues to struggle with race and gender dynamics, despite the area's pride as a progressive bastion. Furthermore, the presence of robust state arts funding provides important context on why certain genres thrive and others are left grasping for straws. The Twin Cities jazz scene is well positioned for growth. Strong local musicians and the area's positive disposition towards the arts suggest there is space for jazz to flourish in the coming years, despite generally agreed-upon challenges. This paper aims to spark productive dialogue between key stakeholders and create more equitable, fair, and vibrant jazz systems in the Twin Cities.
Heathens, 'Hottentots', and Heimat: Colonial Encounters and German Identity in Southwest Africa, 1842-1915
(2017-04) Blackler, Adam
At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of colonized African peoples were prevalent in the German metropole. Tobacconists catered to the erotic fantasies of colonial enthusiasts with images of Hereromädchen (Herero girls) in their advertisements. Coffee companies used portraits of black African women to affirm the quality of their beans. Youth magazines allowed children to escape into “exotic” domains where their imaginations could wander unhindered by “civilized” social expectations. Anthropologists shifted the paradigms of scientific analysis by studying Naturvölker (“natural peoples”) as faceless objects. Novelists published romanticized accounts of faraway conflicts, a practice that over time made the realities of colonial bloodshed palpable for a continental audience. Though characterizations like these typified the contemporary discourse on Africa and epitomized Europe’s dominance over the continent, they belie the significant degree to which Africans in turn influenced German colonial policy. These portrayals also tell us little about how events in German Southwest Africa (DSWA) altered collective perceptions of the imperial project in Germany. "Heathens, 'Hottentots', and Heimat: Colonial Encounters and German Identity in Southwest Africa, 1842-1915" reorients our understanding of the relationship between Imperial Germany and its overseas empire in southern Africa. The principal objective of this study is to expose the other side of imperial domination, specifically how African peoples manipulated German rule and the degree to which colonial encounters overseas altered German national identity in the metropole. My focus on colonial encounters in DSWA shows that peoples in Windhoek, Swakopmund, and Otjimbingwe were as integral to Germany’s national development as the merchants, soldiers, and settlers who first ventured abroad in 1884. I emphasize encounters in DSWA as a means to illuminate the multifaceted composition of Germany’s imperial project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study contends that colonialism strengthened visions of identity that saw cultural difference and national belonging not just as competing phenomena, but also as forces that together fortified Germany’s presence abroad. By focusing on colonial encounters in DSWA, I show that African, German, and indigenous people in Southwest Africa were just as integral to Germany’s national development as the merchants, soldiers, and settlers who first ventured abroad in 1884. The dramatic increase in scholarship on German colonialism has been a welcomed development in the historiography. Much of this recent work has concentrated on colonial-era violence and the emergence of segregationist politics before and after the First World War. These inquires have raised important questions about the inherent role of violence in European colonial systems and have placed Germany’s overseas empire at the center of notable debates about the origins of mass murder in Europe and Nazi genocide. Apart from an emphasis on colonial genocide, historians have also started to investigate the transnational orientation of the German colonial project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation builds on this research by examining how colonial interactions in DSWA affected collective impressions of the Heimat ideal in Europe. Though an inherently abstract idea, the concept Heimat denoted a local or national sense of place that was grounded in emotional attachments to local surroundings. I argue that after 1884, colonial conquest provided Heimat greater rhetorical and social mobility. In particular, it enabled missionaries, settler-colonialists, and politicians to appropriate Africa as a natural extension of German culture, memory, and tradition. An emphasis on colonial encounters in DSWA provides a means to illuminate the multifaceted composition of Germany’s imperial project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Living like a wolf: predation and production in the Montana-Alberta borderlands.
(2012-02) Wise, Michael D.
This dissertation argues that economic and environmental transformations in the Montana-Alberta borderlands hinged on changes in the ways that people understood the nature of predator-prey relationships. The author's research demonstrates how interactions between wolves, Anglo-American settlers, and Blackfoot Indians resulted in new understandings of what it meant to be a predator that guided debates over labor and land use in the borderland regions of the Northern Plains and the Northern Rockies. By revealing predation as an historical idea, rather than a biological category, the dissertation offers a new perspective on the environmental, cultural, and political histories of the North American West and global processes of colonialism more broadly.
Re-Imagined Communities: Racial, National, and Colonial Visions in National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, 1933-1943
(2014-12) Roubinek, Eric
The rise of National Socialism in 1933 offered a new opportunity to the German colonial movement whose demands for a restored overseas empire had remained at the margins of nationalist politics throughout the Weimar Republic. Profiting from the broader political revisionism of National Socialism, colonial revisionists sought to meld their ambitions overseas with the racial, national, and expansionist politics of Nazism, while the regime sought to benefit from the popular support for colonialism. Using a biographical approach, I move beyond a strictly diplomatic history of National Socialist overseas empire to explore the experiences of members of the German colonial movement - from mid-level, Party functionaries, to women journalists, and even opponents of the regime - to demonstrate the contentiousness of ideas of race, space, and nation under the Third Reich. Viewing race and nation through the lens of overseas empire, I argue that not only were these ideas highly variable and mobile within a national context, but also that contestations over these terms allowed for the creation of new racial and national communities that transcended the borders of the nation-state. When it became apparent to the German colonial movement that the National Socialist leadership was more interested in expansion on the continent than overseas, the movement looked increasingly to Fascist Italian colonialism for inspiration and collaboration. This transnational cooperation provided an alternative to the formal political and military alliances between the two states and posited a German and Italian fascism as the defender of a "new Europe." My research draws on a broad variety of secondary sources and primary and archival source collections of the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Politsches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and the Archivio Centrale dello Stato.
Rethinking the politics of immigration: colonial modes of immigration management and the ambivalent resilience of the Empire State
(2013-07) Hoffman, Mark N.
A postcolonial-historical reconsideration of migration discourse - including practices of recruitment, exploitation, and exclusion - in the contemporary "security environment."
Society, state, and infant welfare: negotiating medical interventions in colonial Tanzania, 1920--1950
(2010-07) Masebo, Oswald
This dissertation is a historical analysis of colonial state infant welfare initiatives from preventive programs of the 1920s and early 1930s to policies that integrated preventive and curative medicine in the late 1930s and 1940s in colonial Tanzania. It argues that the development of these medical interventions was a negotiated process between colonial government officials, peasants, local chiefs, welfare workers, African dressers, and medical missions. In the 1920s the British colonial government initiated the welfare programs to reduce high infant mortality rates. Government officials explained poor infant survival in terms of maternal ignorance and focused on advising mothers on proper infant care, feeding, and hygiene. The government trained African welfare workers who performed the actual work of advising mothers in the communities. Peasants, however, challenged the early preventive programs as narrowly conceived both because they ignored local medical knowledge and indigenous practices and because they excluded western curative medicine that would help them tackle infant diseases such as malaria. Using their local chiefs, peasants demanded that the colonial government incorporate curative medicine in its welfare policies. Their bargaining strategies to achieve these demands included boycotting government-run welfare centers and refusing to pay taxes. The government eventually incorporated curative medicine in its welfare programs in the late 1930s, and it trained African dressers in preventive and curative medicine. The evidence for this dissertation comes from oral interviews, written archival documents, ethnographic accounts, and missionary and explorers' writings. This evidence has allowed me to explore the complex problem of infant welfare, a topic that has not received adequate attention from historians writing about Africa.
“This is how we show up for our relatives”: Understanding how Indigenous relative caregivers embody traditional kinship to resist the colonial child welfare system
(2021-06) Waubanascum, Cary
This study responds to the gravity of the ongoing removal of Indigenous children, the intractability of colonization in the child welfare system, the glaring absence of Indigenous voices and their distinct experiences in the professional, empirical child welfare literature, and dearth of studies that implement Indigenous methodologies. Grounded in Indigenous Storywork and Aknulha (Mother/Aunty in Oneida) methodologies, this qualitative study sought to understand (10) Indigenous relative caregivers’ experiences with the colonial child welfare system, how they live their traditional kinship beliefs and practices amidst ongoing colonialism and their desires for Indigenous child welfare. Findings identified specific forms of colonialism still inflicted upon Indigenous children and families in the modern child welfare system. The child welfare system perpetrates ongoing removal and separation, a form of colonial violence as a vehicle for implementing assimilative practices. Relative caregivers also exposed how the child welfare system continues to impose the modern colonial gender system, continuing a legacy of government sponsored civilizing educations programs to assimilate through racializing and genderizing Indigenous families. Second, this study revealed, what Lugones (2007) called “sites of resistance”, the knowledge of Indigenous relative caregivers who are actively living our traditional intergenerationally transmitted kinship knowledge and practices to resist the child welfare systems and protect our children from ongoing colonialism, removal and separation. Implications for tribes, social work and child welfare are presented.
Transgressing the boundaries of the nation: decolonization, migration, and identity in France/India, 1910-1972
(2013-04) Namakkal, Jessica Louise
Transgressing the Boundaries of the Nation: Decolonization, Migration, and Identity in France/India, 1910-1972_ argues that the state-based discourse of decolonization, which is widely circulated in most histories of decolonization, does not reflect the lived experience of the colonial subjects who negotiated multiple identities and moving borders throughout what I call the "long history" of decolonization. Examining the five French colonies in India, which remained French until 1962, destabilizes the dominant narrative of decolonization in India, of an anti-colonial nationalist liberation struggle successfully completed with the liberation of India in 1947. Beginning in the 18th-century, when British and French imperial forces were fighting for control of South Asia, the two European powers projected competing ideologies of empire, and over time, national belonging. By the late 19th-century, the French-Indian colonies were physically divided from British India by fences, and passport controls and custom borders were erected to patrol the imperial borders. After 1947, as independent India worked to bring French India into the Indian Union, the same borders were used to distinguish foreigner from citizen, French-Indian from Indian, a colonial-juridical designation that had turned many neighbors into strangers, and lead to the migration of over 7,000 French-Indians to France after 1962. Based on archival research conducted in India, France, and England, I show that while decolonization ruptured the geography and political structure of the imperial world, the institutional structures of colonialism and capitalism, intertwined with the imperial mission of modernity and progress, have continued on into the post-colonial world, re-establishing hierarchies of race, caste, class, and gender in the metropole as well as in anti-colonial nation-states.
“What was best for a white child need not be the same for a dark child”: Producing the ‘educated African child’ in colonial Uganda’s schools, 1877-1963
(2016-06) Lefebvre, Elisabeth
Childhood is generally understood to denote a universal stage of development between infancy and adulthood. However, recent scholarship calls for a reinterpretation of childhood as a historically- and culturally-bounded concept. This dissertation takes up a neglected chapter in the history of childhood, namely, colonial constructions of childhood that simultaneously identified childhood as a developmental stage experienced by all children and a particularly precarious period for African children. Focusing on colonial Uganda, this research illuminates how notions of race, gender, religion, and 'development' shaped educational policy for African children and how these categories continue to inform education in post-colonial contexts.

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