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As Long as the System Prevails: Archives and Temporalities of Indenture 1830-1920
No full textThis thesis is concerned with the construction and staging of productive labour in colonial discourses surrounding Indian indentured labour from 1830-1920. It explores the shifting and tangled relationship between the law and the economy, and sketches what the role of the archive in this relationship can tell us about colonialism and history-making. The central argument of this thesis is that colonial officials viewed and structured indenture as a process through which the productive labourer would emerge. The construction of legalities around indenture were designed to bring new economic sureties in the empire after abolition and were both built upon and created gendered and racialised assumptions about Indian people. These legalisms spoke to a temporality that continually placed the telos of indenture in some distant future which would never arrive. Through the processes of indenture, the labourer was staged as productive through ever closer contact with systems of colonial governmentality and global market forces, which is through financial rather than political subjecthood. In this way, this thesis contributes to emerging research on the modes and mechanisms of racial capitalism both in and beyond the Atlantic while also bringing it into conversation with scholars exploring the intimacies of empire.I draw on feminist and queer scholars, both in the emergent subfield of indenture studies and within wider discussions on history and the nature of knowledge production to argue that in attempting to resolve the tensions of the archive, historians have been guilty of naturalising the temporalities that the archive proposes. This thesis seeks to broaden historical discussions on indenture through problematising what made indenture possible as a system, what sustained it and how its systematisation was ultimately never achievable. One of my central concerns is the patriarchal and racist nature of colonial capitalism and, in unpicking the new modalities of sovereignty which were established to govern indenture, I attempt to collapse the lineages of historical progress. This thesis makes significant interventions in the temporalities of the archive and the complicity of historians in collapsing the speculative and dreamlike futures contained within the archive
Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China
No full textWith Embedded Generations, Liu Jieyu offers a comprehensive examination of Chinese family life since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Grounding her account in the analysis of 260 life history narratives and rich ethnographic data, Liu traces the changing ways families have navigated such experiential milestones as childhood, courtship and marriage, sex and intimacy, and aging over the past seven decades. Using generation, the urban-rural divide, and gender as her analytical lenses, she provides an alternative narrative of Chinese family life, countering the dominant Eurocentric accounts of modernization and family change.Liu proposes the concept of “embedded generations” to capture the ongoing relational and socioeconomic shaping of family life, taking account of variation within and across generations, and of both intergenerational transmission and individual adaptations to changing conditions of everyday life. Resisting the notion that social and family changes are linear historical progressions, Liu reveals a family portrait of complex change, continuity, and diversity. Rather than a straightforward transition from the traditional to the modern and postmodern, she argues, changes in Chinese family life have entailed the adaptation and “re-serving” of traditional ideas and practices to produce a bricolage of modern and traditional elements
Resistance to Slavery in Africa: Past and Present
Get PDFThis introduction to the special issue “Resistance to Slavery in Africa: Past and Present” offers a pan-African perspective on the diverse forms of resistance to slavery across time and space. In addition to the pioneer scholarship on Atlantic transformations in African societies, it examines resistance in West, Central, West Central, East and Southern Africa, including responses to the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades, local slavery systems and their post-abolition legacies. A central contribution is its integration of Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, Arabic and Ottoman scholarships, bridging historiographical divides. Furthermore, the issue foregrounds the role of resistance within customary, Islamic and colonial legal frameworks, showing how enslaved people asserted rights, claimed freedoms or mitigated exploitation. Gendered resistance is also a key focus, highlighting how women fled sexual violence, defended kinship ties and built new communities. Methodologically, the collection employs an interdisciplinary approach, from oral history, microhistory, social history to digital humanities, to recover subaltern voices and reinterpret archival silences. It challenges linear narratives of abolition by revealing resistance as a struggle not only for formal emancipation but also for reshaping social relations and asserting relative autonomy within oppressive systems. Finally, a distinctive feature is the inclusion of contemporary resistance, such as grassroots anti-slavery activism using digital platforms like WhatsApp mobilize marginalized communities. Overall, by linking historical and present-day struggles, the volume underscores that resistance to slavery is a continuous and evolving process. Together the contributions reframe African resistance as locally grounded, historically sustained and globally relevant
Losing Unequally: Financialisation, Productivity and the Finance Wage Premium
Get PDFThis paper provides an expanded analytical framework on the effects of financialisation on the finance wage premium. Current analyses focus on how financial deregulation has increased employee compensation in the financial sectors via rent‐sharing. We argue that rising financial payments—the source of financial rents—also induce wage suppression in the rest of the economy. First, nonfinancial corporations pass increases in their financial payments to workers through wage reductions. Second, simultaneously, indebted workers lower their wage demands to avoid unemployment and personal default. Thus, understanding the growth of the finance wage premium requires scrutinising the impact of business and household indebtedness. To evaluate this argument, we use quarterly data from Eurostat for Greece over the period 1999Q1–2021Q3, and we show that increases in all components of private debt are strongly associated with positive changes in the finance wage premium
Triangulation: Race, Law and Literature
No full textIt is not enough to teach a legal course on race, in my view. One must take seriously the lessons that a racialised point of view has to offer the modality with which one tells a particular story, including a story with intersectional legal dimensions. This notion is one that Black feminist scholars have pioneered – which is standpoint epistemology, or writing and theorising from one’s point of view based on experience and political location (Collins Citation1990). Studying the discursive practices of negotiating racialised power imbalance constitutes a type of posture, a way of reading and interpreting that informs one’s theoretical approach. A corollary point has been made of literature as a discipline – that it serves as a critical cousin to law’s technical regard, offering a more layered, nuanced, alternative approach to text that more closely considers the human condition. But literature cannot simply be a corrective to law; there are techniques and modes of reading that both literature and race bring to bear on how we engage with legal issues. These three frames of textual reference – race, law, and literature – work in concert rather than in sequence
Findings from a Theology-Informed Training for Ethiopian Orthodox Clergy
Get PDFDomestic violence interventions that engage religious leaders and clergy have increased significantly in recent years, spanning social work, psychology, public health, and international development. The international evidence indicates the need for culturally appropriate and theologically informed interventions that may combine religious and secular knowledge and approaches. The current paper presents such an intervention that was implemented with Ethiopian Orthodox clergy employing ethnographic, theological, safeguarding, and legal training content. Qualitative evaluation of the pilot showed that the theological component gave the training credibility from the perspective of the participants and helped them to become more confident in teaching against domestic violence in their communities. The paper proposes the need for developing robust evaluation strategies to better quantify the impact of theologically informed training materials and the influence of the trainers’ approach and identity as a way of designing more appropriate and effective domestic violence interventions in diverse cultural and religious contexts
Why are you not doing research in your home country? dissecting expectations of southern researchers
Get PDFWhy are you not researching your home country, and why did you choose “elsewhere”? Would research in another country in the South be familiar to you? Assumptions and prompts are often posed to southern researchers when they select their fieldwork and case studies. This article dissects the rationale behind southern researchers based in Western academia choosing countries other than their home, the fieldwork experience, and the creation of post-fieldwork knowledge. Through a reflexive approach, we discuss pre-fieldwork training, moving positionalities, gender and religious identities during fieldwork encounters and the imposition of Western perspectives in knowledge creation. To do so, we interrogate the entrenched inequalities in global power dynamics within the architecture of knowledge creation, emphasising the need to decolonise knowledge and (re)evaluate research ethics and training. This article advocates for re-considering knowledge creation and power shifting as a process rather than the outcome, and fieldwork as an essential knowledge creation component enabling post-knowledge production and doing research differently
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