Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance (original) (raw)
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There is now a burgeoning scholarship at the intersection of new imperialism and the history of humanitarianism. Scholars have not only pointed to the continuing need to historicise humanitarian developments, but, importantly, argued for more consideration of humanitarian developments outside of Europe and the “Third World.” As Alan Lester and Fae Dussart have recently argued, we must reassess entrenched understandings of the development of humanitarianism as originating from an “anti-slavery mother” and “European battlefield father,” especially in the “light of trans-imperial governmental experiments in violently colonised settler colonial spaces.” The diverse forms of imperial humanitarian history, and their entanglements with violence in colonised regions such as Australia, New Zealand, North America, India and the Pacific, demand attention. http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.utas.edu.au/article/613279
Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2016
There is now a burgeoning scholarship at the intersection of new imperialism and the history of humanitarianism. Scholars have not only pointed to the continuing need to historicise humanitarian developments, but, importantly, argued for more consideration of humanitarian developments
Education and empire: children, race and humanitarianism in the British settler colonies, 1833–1880
History of Education, 2020
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Echoes of the Past: Colonial Legacy and Eurocentric Humanitarianism
The Rest Writes Back: Discourse and Decolonization, 2019
The main goal of this chapter is to interrogate current material and epistemological practices aimed at governance of the most vulnerable layers of humanity. By reflecting on the struggles of forcefully displaced people and the challenges of Western humanitarianism (and contemporary humanitarian agency of Western (privileged) spectators in general), I hope to show that we are confronted with social processes and subjectivity which foster inadequate goals in regard to solidarity with distant others. In order to achieve this, my analysis is divided into three main parts. The first identifies some of the weaknesses of humanitarian discourse and practices, and it has an analytical dimension in that it attempts to tease out the epistemic forces, cultural habits, forms of knowledge, skills and expertise that were folded into the ontological organization and form of subjectivity that is at the center of humanitarian attention and “solidarity.” The second part focuses on material and epistemological legacy of colonialism manifested in practices and ideological tendencies of Eurocentric humanitarianism. Taking into account that encounters between Western humanitarian agent and Non-Western other takes place amidst values and receptivity of hegemonic culture, humanitarian narratives - based on discriminatory racial, gender, cultural, and economic geographies - exemplify the distorted perspectives on humanitarian victims’ structural and symbolic disadvantages. Finally, I conclude by hinting at an alternative way of thinking about responsibility and solidarity. I hope that by bringing inconsistencies of humanitarianism into the spotlight I show how humanitarianism has become an echo of colonial mechanisms that inextricably serve both to define and to justify certain discourses and practices that ultimately govern human beings. By disclosing pathologies internal to humanitarianism, my work at the same time calls attention to practices that an alternative, counter-hegemonic humanitarianism needs to avoid.
Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao (ed.) , Discipline and the other body, Correction, Corporality, Colonialism, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006 Reviewed by Radhika Singha, in Studies in History, 24,1 ( February 2008):159-169. A reviewer has to simplify drastically sometimes to pick out the binding theme in a set of essays. Most of the contributors to this important publication focus on `corporal technologies', especially those by which colonial regimes demarcated their subjects as the `other', as beings `not susceptible to reason'. However the reader of this collection will also encounter the figure of this `other' in the `inadequate' citizen of empire, nation, or modern Islamic society. Nineteenth century agendas of liberalism, Pierce and Rao argue, were predicated on new ideas of personhood, which found their most significant manifestation in the campaign to abolish slavery. Searching for modernizing credentials, the old colonial empires re-structured their regulatory regimes and legal orders.
Settler colonialism, George Grey and the politics of ethnography
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2015
This article suggests that the spaces of British settler colonialism and metropolitan science were interconnected, underexamined, grounds upon which both ethnography and colonial governance developed. Focusing on the governmental and ethnographic activities of Sir George Grey during the mid-19th century it argues that the origins of ethnography and the specifically humanitarian governance of spaces invaded by settlers were co-constituted. Although anthropologists have long recognised the complicity of ethnography in modern colonialism, the relationship runs far deeper and extends far more broadly, than has been appreciated in even the most incisive critiques. That relationship was also located in violent settler colonial spaces that have been relatively neglected in the anthropological historiography. The article concludes that Grey's governmental practices, and his representations of them, established the terms upon which cultural genocide, with its logic of elimination, could ...