From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?

Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest

Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City

In this article the focus is on various embodied and embedded narratives shaping Tibetan identity today, especially among the diasporic Tibetans living in South Asia. It is argued that it is not only Westerners who have exoticised Tibet and the Tibetans; the Tibetan diaspora too have invested heavily in such (neo)orientalist representation strategies for their own tactical purposes. The first part of the article is devoted to the conceptual issues involved, including the question of identity, nationalism and diaspora. The second part deals with various dynamics and factors shaping the discourse of 'Tibetanness' in the diaspora community. The third part concludes with observations that challenge assumptions about a single discourse of Tibetanness.

(Re)imagining nationalism: identity and representation in the Tibetan diaspora of South Asia

An ethnographic research among activists subscribing to majoritarian Hindu nationalism in India reveals that anxiety, masculinity and sexuality are crucial ingredients in their identity politics. The inimical figure used to mobilise the Hindu nationalist identity is a stereotyped Muslim masculinity which in turn is imagined as dangerous owing to a mix of negative images of Islam, history, physicality and culture. The specificities of anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, and especially the pervasiveness of sexual violence there, can be understood as an assertion of the new Hindu identity which conflates nationalism with masculinity and violence. And yet it was the complicity of the institutions of the state that accounted for the lethality of violence in Gujarat. The article argues that masculinised nationalism and embedded statehood are crucial features of contemporary (inter)national politics.

Anxious Sexualities: Masculinity, Nationalism and Violence

China as a victim rather than a proponent of modern colonialism is an essential myth that animates Chinese nationalism. The Chinese statist project of occupying, minoritizing and securitizing diffe...

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Colonization with Chinese Characteristics: Politics of (In)Security in Xinjiang and Tibet

The recent debates within and beyond Marxism around empire and imperialism focus on deterritorialization, but fail to see non-Western states as anything other than collaborators or victims. Highlighting the importance of center-periphery relations within the territorially bounded political space of the nation-state, this paper puts forward a new concept of the Postcolonial Informal Empire (PIE) to characterize the emerging powers of China and India. The greatest paradox of PIEs is that a postcolonial impulse—to critically appropriate Western ideas and technologies such as sovereignty, nationalism, and the free market to build the multinational state and combine it with an affirmation of stories of historical greatness and long existing, pre-Westernized, civilizational-national cultures—enables the political entities to consolidate and discipline their borderlands and reduce diverse inhabiting peoples to culturally different but politically subservient subjects. It is predominantly a nationalist politics, and not economic calculability or financial interests, that shapes PIEs’ center-borderlands relations.

China and India: Postcolonial Informal Empires in the Emerging Global Order

This paper conceptualizes security as a discourse of violence that masks violence in the name of counter-violence, killing in the name of protection. As the case of Hindutva in India illustrates, violence against minorities is normalized in the name of personal, communal, national and even international security. The will to secure the Self has as its corollary the will to make insecure the Other, the desire to control and use violence. Using the example of anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, the paper examines some of the ways in which a stereotypical image of Muslim men (the figure of 'the Muslim') is seen as constituting the danger against which the Hindu body politic needs to be secured. The violence against minority Muslims is facilitated and justified in the name of achieving security for the Hindu Self at individual, community, national as well as international levels.

Dibyesh Anand

Papers

(Re)imagining nationalism: identity and representation in the Tibetan diaspora of South Asia

Anxious Sexualities: Masculinity, Nationalism and Violence

Colonization with Chinese Characteristics: Politics of (In)Security in Xinjiang and Tibet

China and India: Postcolonial Informal Empires in the Emerging Global Order

The Violence of Security: Hindu Nationalism and the Politics of Representing ‘the Muslim’ as a Danger