Suchergebnisse

The discovery of an official report, so far unpublished, about coolie scandals on the plantations on Sumatra's East Coast around the year 1900, motivated me to produce a full-length book on this theme. My original intention had been merely to write a short introduction to the publication of a shocking historical document. However, I changed my mind when it became obvious that proper understanding of the source required more background information on the social and policy framework within which the plantation system operated. This applied both to conditions on the estates themselves and to the evaluation of those affairs by official and non-official outsiders. The main aim of my study is to contribute to the historiography of industrial labour in Southeast Asia. However, it also analyses die linkage that came about between capitalist industry and colonial policy in a region that formed part of the so-called Outer Provinces of die Netherlands Indies.

In the last issue of Itinerario (vol. XVI, 1992/2), Jan Breman of the University of Amsterdam, has published an English translation of his introduction to the third edition of his book Koelies, Planters en Koloniale Politiek. In this article, titled 'Controversial Views on Writing Colonial History', Breman tries to deal with some of the 'more sceptical and sometimes even hostile' reactions to his book on plantation labour in East Coast Sumatra during the last decades of the nineteenth century. However, his contribution has a more important purport, as he suggests a specific way in which the history of the colonial past should be written, dismissing at the same time the approach to the colonial past undertaken by what he calls the 'Leiden Revisionist School'.

THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE MATTERS. IT STRETCHED SOME THREE CENTURIES IN LATIN AMERICA, MORE THAN HALF THE PERIOD SINCE THE INITIAL CONFRONTATION OF AMERINDIAN PEOPLES AND EUROPEAN COLONIZERS IN 1492. IN SOMEWHAT TRANSMUTED FORM, THE LEGACIES OF COLONIAL RULE CONDITIONED THE CONTOURS OF SOCIAL RELATIONS, ECONOMIC LIFE, CULTURE, AND POLITICAL STRUGGLE IN THE NINETEENTH AND, IN SOME REGIONS, THE TWENTIETH CENTURIES. IT IS THIS RESILIENT GRIP ON THE PAST THAT HAS MADE TERMS SUCH AS "NEOCOLONIAL" SO APPEALING IN DISCUSSION OF POST COLONIAL HISTORY (SEE HALPERIN DONGHI, 1969; STEIN AND STEIN, 1970). THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE HAS ALSO PROVED CRITICAL IN POLITICAL AND THEORETICAL DEBATE ABOUT LATIN AMERICA'S CONTEMPORARY AND FUTURE CONDITION. CONTROVERSIAL THEORISTS OF DEPENDENCY AND WORLD SYSTEMS SUCH AS ANDRE GUNDER FRANK (1969) AND IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN (1976) HAVE USED THE COLONIAL PERIOD AS FUNDAMENTAL POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR THE ARGUMENT THAT LATIN AMERICA HAS LONG BEEN "CAPITALIST" RATHER THAN "FEUDAL." CRITICS OF THESE THEORISTS HAVE, IN TURN, USED THE COLONIAL PERIOD AS A "FEUDAL" BENCHMARK (LACLAU, 1971). EVERY VISION OF THE PRESENT AND FUTURE INCLUDES A VISION OF THE PAST; IN THE LATIN AMERICAN CASE, THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE AND ITS "NEOCOLONIAL" REPERCUSSIONS ARE AT THE CORE OF THIS CHARGED AND STILL UNRESOLVED PAST. ON ANY OF THE GROUNDS JUST MENTIONED-SHEER PROPORTIONAL WEIGHT IN POSTCONQUEST HISTORY, IMPORTANCE AS A SOURCE OF LEGACIES CONDITIONING POSTCOLONIAL TRAJECTORIEPY: 1985

Introduction : Thinking About Forgotten Libyan Genocide -- Where are the Survivors : The Politics of Missing Archives and Fieldwork -- Eurocentrism, Silence and Memory of Genocide -- We Died Because of Shar, Evil My Son: Survivors' Stories of Death and Trauma in the Camps -- After the Genocide : Hidden, and State Histories -- Postscript: Rethinking Postcolonial State Formation, Crisis and Collapse in Libya -- Conclusion : Toward a Paradigm Shift.

I first came across Harlan Lane's work towards the end of my PhD, which I was undertaking at University College London, UK. My dissertation was on the construction of "difference" in the British Empire, particularly the differences ascribed to race and gender. Using nineteenth-century medical missionaries as a way in, I had started to think about differences evoked by health, disability, and the body. In particular, I noted the way in which missionaries used the language of disability as a discourse of racialisation. The African and Indian colonial subjects they encountered were described throughout missionary literature as "deaf to the Word", "blind to the light" and "too lame" to walk alone. I have two d/Deaf cousins, one of whom is the sign language sociolinguist Nick Palfreyman, and around about this time Nick had started to familiarise me with some of the issues surrounding Deaf politics. Becoming interested and wanting to know more, I began to learn British Sign Language (BSL) and contemplate the connections between the historical work I was doing and contemporary struggles of Deaf politics and disability politics (I was particularly interested in DPAC - Disabled People Against Cuts - given the contemporary climate of austerity in the UK). As I did so I became acquainted with the work of Harlan Lane. Here, although acutely aware of my own positionality as a white, British, hearing woman, I have taken up the challenge set by the editors of this special issue to re-read his work twelve years on from my initial encounter with it, using the insights into postcolonial study I have gained through my historical work.