Colonial Resistance

9 Key excerpts on "Colonial Resistance"

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  Resistance and Colonialism

  Insurgent Peoples in World History

  • Nuno Domingos, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Ricardo Roque, Nuno Domingos, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Ricardo Roque(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The notion of “colonialism”, in other words, this volume argues, requires reflection about its companion notion of “resistance”. Resistance and colonialism, then, is the nexus that we propose to investigate. Since the early twentieth century, the notion of “resistance” became common currency in colonial idioms and anti-colonial ideologies to refer to military, political, and other forms of countering the authority of the colonizing institutions and agents. Since the 1960s–1970s, “resistance” became a current term in the critical and conceptual analysis of colonialism as a power relationship. In anti-colonial and post-colonial studies, the centrality of “resistance” has been expressed in various guises

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  Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures

  • Annalisa Oboe, Shaul Bassi(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part One

  Resisting History and Colonialism

  Passage contains an image

  2   The Right to Resist

  Robert J. C. Young

  Do we have a right to resist? While the question of rights and human rights has been extensively discussed and theorized in the human rights field in recent years, within postcolonial theory, resistance as a category and as a practice has been less frequently theorized and interrogated.1 This has often surprised me in so far as resistance is a concept that is especially prized within postcolonial theory. Indeed, postcolonial theory assumes the right to resist as a sine qua non of its political perspective—perhaps its being a right that is so universally assumed explains the lack of interrogation. Looking for and highlighting moments of resistance within colonial discourse could be said to have been one of the major tasks of colonial discourse analysis. You often feel in an analysis of a literary text from the past, or a historical incident, that there is an assumption that you have only to retrieve resistance for your job to be done. Your task: to read a text and find evidence of resistance that goes against the triumphal narrative of imperialism. Having found its expression or, at the very least, evidence of some form of agency, your task is complete. The subaltern has spoken, the subaltern has resisted. I’m not sure if anyone actually practices colonial discourse analysis any more, but we could think of Barbara Harlow’s book Resistance Literature (1987) as an important example of this mode.

  What, though, does resistance literature actually resist? The fact that literature is transtemporal makes its form of resistance very different from the habitual practices of political and military resistance which are responses to immediate formations of power. This means that resistance literature will necessarily tend to be ideological or counter-hegemonic rather than a form of everyday political intervention, though there are some novels—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Matigari

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  An Introduction To Post-Colonial Theory

  • Peter Childs, Patrick Williams(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  At the tactical level, forms of resistance from other countries have been studied and copied, adapted or rejected according to need. (It is worth noting in passing that if resistance has been something of a forgotten subject, then it, too, has its forgotten areas: for instance, it is only relatively recently that attention has been paid to the mundane, non-heroic forms of resistance, as opposed to the more visible or glorious rebellions. 2) At the ideological or theoretical level, resistance has drawn upon the works of writers from other times and places, and it is on this area that the present chapter will concentrate. While history as detailed narrative may be excluded from the chapter, history as precedent, as problem, as provocation, is very much present in the work of the different individuals and groups. History is present also in that while detailed events may be lacking, the chapter aims to indicate something of the continuities and breaks from the colonial to the post-colonial period: the fact that Fanon or Gandhi may continue to inspire; the possibility that the post-colonial period requires different modes of resistance or categories of analysis. One of the things which the chapter makes clear is that there is no single phenomenon which one could identify as ‘resistance theory’

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  Captive Revolution

  Palestinian Women's Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System

  • Nahla Abdo(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  3

  Colonialism, Imperialism andthe Culture of Resistance

  The contradictions between the indigenous culture of the colonized and occupied, which encourages and fosters resistance, and that of the imperialist culture, which, among other things, criminalizes anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles and resistance and transforms the latter into terrorism, is best exemplified by the Palestinian case. The long history of Palestinian national and anti-Colonial Resistance, beginning in the early 1920s has produced a remarkable culture of resistance, manifested in among others, in adab al-muqawama (resistance literature), in shea’r al-muqawama (poetry of resistance) and thus shua’ra al-muqawama (resistance poets), as well as in adab al-sujoun (prison literature). This culture formed the larger body of revolutionary literature at both the regional and international levels. It also played a vital role in Palestinian women coming to be involved in the national and anti-colonial struggle as well as in their commitment and determination to partake in the armed struggle. Throughout our conversations, women of both generations emphasized the impact of adab al-muqawama on their activism: they saw themselves as an integral part of this culture.

  The experience of colonialism and imperialism has produced a history of anti-Colonial Resistance expressed in different forms, including the social, cultural and physical. Anti-Colonial Resistance literature has emerged throughout the world, in Latin America, the Caribbean, South East Asia and the Arab world, including among Palestinians. Revolutionary artists have also emerged, from Chile’s Pablo Neruda to the Caribbean’s Aimé Césaire and Edward Kamau Brathwaite and to Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén and Palestine’s Mahmoud Darwish; the themes and ideologies of these artists have been transmitted to and became very influential on many other committed political resistance writers and poets throughout the world. While differing in context, the majority of these authors have been concerned with documenting the devastating effects of colonialism, imperialism and fascism, expressing their resistance to all forms of oppression and their hope for a better future based on justice and human dignity. The names and sometimes images of revolutionary national leaders such as Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung and General Giap have become international icons and role models, particularly during the 1960s through to the 1980s. The Palestinian resistance movement and women’s involvement in the armed struggle was heavily influenced by local, national and international struggles and the cultures of resistance which accompanied such struggles.

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  British Imperialism

  • Rob Johnson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Each party was essentially a confederation of neotraditional local ethnic, religious and sta-tus interests, managed by a small modern elite.’ 44 Unfortunately, many of these coalitions fell apart as soon as the imperial author-ity passed away. Yet the irony remains. Many of the nationalists were educated through collaboration with a Western system, and some even studied in Britain. The adoption of Western forms of protest and opposition provided them with the means to rid themselves of colonial rule. Collaboration and resistance: conclusions Overall, many non-European peoples chose to resist imperialism, despite the odds against them. Time and again challenges to traditional ways of life characterised their motives. However, resistance to the British was frequently made more difficult by divisions within pre-colonial societies. In addition, as Jeremy Black points out, since the British defined resistance in European terms, their struggle was regarded as ‘rebellion’ and was ‘sup-pressed’ rather than following the patterns of conventional war-fare, where terms might be offered to the defeated side. 45 Resistance was offered at various points of European contact, sometimes initially as the British took over, and sometimes when the enormity of British influence began to make itself apparent. This would account for the lull between, for example, the Chinese Wars (1839–42, 1858–60) which were directed by the 90 BRITISH IMPERIALISM Chinese governments, and the so-called Boxer Rebellion (1900) which enjoyed much more support from the lower classes. However, resistance, in all its forms, was only part of the response to British imperialism. Consumerism, the co-operation of political elites, the enlistment of soldiers and policemen, and the acceptance of wage labour, all contributed to the survival, indeed the flourishing, of the British Empire. This collaboration created winners and losers, but the beneficiaries were not exclu-sively British.

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  An Everyday Geography of the Global South

  • Jonathan Rigg(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Table 8.1 ). In the context of this discussion, we can highlight four key fault lines. First, scholars differ in how they view the relationship between power and resistance; second, in terms of whether we can regard resistance as ‘informal’, while power/domination is formalised; third, with respect to the historical underpinning of resistance; and finally, with regard to the relationship between resistance and globalisation. These differences in emphasis and view should not be regarded as competing – so that one is ‘right’ or ‘correct’, and the others are not. Rather they represent the different ways in which scholars, often from different disciplines, have chosen to deploy the term resistance.

  Resistance is increasingly used in the context of ‘anti-globalisation’ (Mittelman 2001:214, and see below). Resistance becomes, almost by default, a reaction and a response to the manner in which people across the world are being drawn into global relations. The danger here is that such an approach tends to reify and celebrate the local as – almost by definition – progressive, authentic and in conflict with globalisation, and the global as reactionary and, by association, destructive or corrosive of local cultures, structures and livelihoods. As this book has attempted to show, everyday lives in the Global South are far more mixed and diverse than such a crude polarisation proposes. The reality is that much activity at the level of the everyday is not resistance to globalisation but resistance for globalisation. It is people’s exclusion from the perceived benefits of globalisation as well as their struggle against the inequities of globalisation that inform resistance. We see therefore in ordinary people’s resistance practices an often uncomfortable combination of actions and activities which set out – seemingly at one and the same time – to challenge, support, undermine, reinforce, stabilise and corrode existing power structures, hierarchies and processes. Resistance and domination are inherently ambiguous and ambivalent, and perhaps it is not least for this reason that scholars find the distinction problematic. That said, it does provide a valuable starting point for the discussion that follows (Table 8.2

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  Anthropology and Social Theory

  Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject

  • Sherry B. Ortner(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Setting aside, for the most part, the category of resistance, they insist on the thickness of the cultural process in play in colonial ‘‘zones of transcourse’’ (129), where ‘‘multiple grammars operate through contingently categorized people’’ (127). The result is a complex but illuminat-ing picture of shifting loyalties, shifting alliances, and above all shifting catego-ries, as British, native Fijians, and Fiji Indians contended for power, resources, and legitimacy (see also Kaplan 1990; Kelly and Kaplan 1992; Orlove 1991; Turner 1991 and n.d.). Indeed a strong alternative tradition of resistance studies shows clearly that cultural richness does not undermine the possibility of seeing and under-standing resistance. Quite the contrary: This tradition allows us to understand better both resistance and its limits. Many of the great classics of social history —for example, E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1966) and Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1976)—are great precisely because they are culturally rich, providing deep insight not only into the fact of resistance but into its forms, moments, and absences. Other outstanding examples of the genre include Clendinnen’s Ambivalent Conquest (despite its weakness on Maya politics discussed above), William H. Sewell Jr.’s Work and Revolution in France (1980), and Jean Comaro√ ’s Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (1985). Dissolving Subjects The question of the relationship of the individual person or subject to domi-nation carries the resistance problematic to the level of consciousness, subjec-tivity, intentionality, and identity. This question has taken a particular form in debates surrounding, once again, the Subaltern Studies school of historians.

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  When the Other is Me

  Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990

  • Emma LaRocque(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Manitoba Press

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Representation and Resistance Racism...permeates the cultural life of the dominant society both by its exclusive narrative of dominant experience and mythology, and by its stereotypical rendering of the “Other” as peripheral and unidimensional. —Joyce Green 1 Gerald McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin introduced the lovely resistance book Indigena by stating, “To be an Aboriginal person, to identify with an indigenous heritage in these late colonial times, requires a life of reflection, critique, persistence and struggle.” 2 The struggle is about colonization and, for Native intellectuals, about the necessity of revisiting colonial records, records that have largely negated and distorted Aboriginal history and hu-manity. This book is, in part, my revisitation of selected historical and literary texts that have especially served to dehumanize Aboriginal peoples; however, in larger part, this book is about the inevitable Aboriginal contrapuntal reply to Canada’s colonial constructs. What will emerge is a resistance born from the contested ground upon which we, the Canadian colonizer-colonialist and Native colonized, have built our troubled discourse. It is taken here that Native-White relationships in Canada are rooted in the colonizer/colonized complex, much as profiled in Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized. In this now classic work, Memmi, writing from the context of Tunisia, focuses on the distance (both real and symbolic) the colonizer employs to rationalize and to maintain his power over the colonized. Memmi explains, “The distance which colonization places be-tween him and the colonized must be accounted for and, to justify himself, he increases this distance still further by placing the two figures irretrievably in

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  Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination

  Notes on Fleeing the Plantation

  • Patricia Marie Northover, Michaeline Crichlow(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  ≤Ω In addition to bolstering an analysis of resistance by considering the rela-tions of power itself, one might also examine in detail the resistors’ lives. A careful analysis of resistant cultural expressions must ask, furthermore, resistance in relation to what and whom? To which aspects of power and with what liminal e√ects on the smallholders’ identity vis-à-vis ‘‘others,’’ each other, other groups, other places, spaces, given the specific configura-tions of symbolic, structural, and institutional resources, at play in these relations? Though these economic and culturally resistant expressions are weighted with political intent, to borrow Bhabha’s words, they are ‘‘an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they articulate the signs of cultural di√erence and reimplicate them within the deferential relations of colonial power-hierarchy, normalization, marginal-ization, and so forth.’’ ≥≠ As an example of this phenomenon, Bhabha re-counts how the Bible is selectively incorporated into the Indians’ world. As did slaves, Homi Bhabha’s Indians sift, select, and reject on the basis of their own cultural proscriptions, thus destabilizing the ‘‘God-Englishman equiv-alence.’’ ≥∞ However negating the colonial project was, Indians (like the slaves) become, wittingly or unwittingly, partial to the missionaries’ point of view. They must accept the Bible before they can select what they want 84 T H R E E out of it, and because the Bible does not entirely conflict with the Indians’ own particularities, they are free to absorb it. In a very di√erent anecdote, Mintz points out similarly how monolithic notions of resistance are chal-lenged: ‘‘The cook of the master’s family, that faithful lady who prepared the meals three times a day, sometimes put ground glass in the food of her diners. But she had to become the cook before this option became available.

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