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Journal ArticleDOI

Engaging Colonial Nostalgia

01 May 2005-Cultural Anthropology (Blackwell Publishing Ltd)-Vol. 20, Iss: 2, pp 215-248
TL;DR: The authors argue that colonial nostalgia has emerged in a post-revolutionary context and is best understood as a diverse set of responses to neoliberal policies of urban restructuring, and explore nostalgia as a crucial source for anthropology and a constitutive feature of Western modernity.
Abstract: When contemporary Africans express nostalgia for the colonial past, how are we to make sense of such sentiments? Anthropologists have tended to ignore colonial nostalgia, reacting with dismissal or distaste. This article seeks to account for this avoidance, exploring nostalgia as a crucial source for anthropology and a constitutive feature of Western modernity. Nostalgic sentiments of loss and longing are shaped by specific cultural concerns and struggles; like other forms of memory practice, these desires must be engaged with in ethnographic terms and located within the changing contours of a contested social landscape. In urban Zanzibar, I argue that colonial nostalgia has emerged in a postrevolutionary context and is best understood as a diverse set of responses to neoliberal policies of urban restructuring.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Ann Laura Stoler1
TL;DR: In this article, the emphasis shifts from fixed forms of sovereignty and its denials to gradated forms of sovereignity and what has long marked the technologies of imperial rule: sliding and contested scales of differential rights.
Abstract: In this article, I look at “imperial formations” rather than at empire per se to register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation. Imperial formations are relations of force, harboring political forms that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights. Working with the concept of imperial formation, rather than empire per se, the emphasis shifts from fixed forms of sovereignty and its denials to gradated forms of sovereignty and what has long marked the technologies of imperial rule—sliding and contested scales of differential rights. Imperial formations are defined by racialized relations of allocations and appropriations. Unlike empires, they are processes of becoming, not fixed things. Not least they are states of deferral that mete out promissory notes that are not exceptions to their operation but constitutive of them: imperial guardianship, trusteeships, delayed autonomy, temporary intervention, conditional tutelage, military takeover in the name of humanitarian works, violent intervention in the name of human rights, and security measures in the name of peace.

626 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a conceptual framework for the study of tourism imaginaries and their diffusion, and illustrate how the critical analysis of imaginaries offers a powerful deconstruction device of ideological, political, and sociocultural stereotypes and cliche´s.
Abstract: It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive as well as restrictive imaginaries about peoples and places. This article presents a conceptual framework for the study of tourism imaginaries and their diffusion. Where do such imaginaries originate, how and why are they circulated across the globe, and what kind of impact do they have on people’s lives? I discuss the multiple links between tourism and imagination, illustrating the overlapping but conflicting ways in which imaginings and fantasies drive tourists and tourism service providers alike. By applying this conceptual approach to international tourism in developing countries, I illustrate how the critical analysis of imaginaries offers a powerful deconstruction device of ideological, political, and sociocultural stereotypes and cliche´s.

249 citations


Cites background from "Engaging Colonial Nostalgia"

  • ...The imagery used in tourism to developing countries is about fantasies, and often about an ambivalent nostalgia for the past—ambivalent because returning to the past is not what people actually desire (Bissell, 2005)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a conceptual framework for the study of tourism imaginaries and their diffusion is presented, where do such imaginaries originate, how and why are they circulated across the globe, and what kind of impact do they have on people's lives?

237 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors address the tensions that exist between the lives of city dwellers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and those official attempts currently being launched by the Congolese government to create a new, albeit exclusionist, urban environment.
Abstract: This article addresses the tensions that exist between the lives of city dwellers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and those official attempts currently being launched by the Congolese government to create a new, albeit exclusionist, urban environment. During the campaign leading up to the 2006 presidential elections, President Kabila launched his “Cinq Chantiers” program, arguably the most ambitious project since the end of colonization in 1960 to overhaul the country and respond to its most pressing and urgent needs—or at least that of its elites—with regard to its urbanization. The article first situates the main phases of Kinshasa's expansion from the colonial era to the present day. It then turns to an analysis of the impact of the “Cinq Chantiers” program by examining two concrete cases: the expansion of fields in the Malebo Pool (looking at current modes of “informal” expansion of the urban space) and the development of a new urban project, the Cite du Fleuve (whose progressive uplift leaves out a large swath of the population). Are these examples of an African futurity, and for whom do they envision a new kind of urban life?

189 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture results in some significant problems. as mentioned in this paper argues that differences between cultures come about not from their isolation from each other, but because of their connections with each other.
Abstract: This assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture results in some significant problems. First, there is the issue of those who inhabit the border, what Gloria Anzaldua calls the “narrow strip along steep edges” of national boundaries. The fiction ofconclusion that a focus on people who live in the borders between dominant societies or nations (and here borders is also a metaphor for people who identify, culturally, with more than one group) makes clear the fact that differences between cultures come about not because of their isolation from each other, but because of their connections with each other. Such a conclusion also suggests that along with difference comes the hierarchies of power. Culture is not only a concept that expresses difference between peoples, but also a concept that masks the uneven power relations between peoples, and these uneven power relations can only exist through connection, rather than isolation.

2,870 citations

Book
01 Jan 2001
TL;DR: Boym as discussed by the authors explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century, and guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities-St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky.
Abstract: Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Svetlana Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities-St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

1,843 citations


"Engaging Colonial Nostalgia" refers background in this paper

  • ...“Reconstruction” in Eastern Europe, as Svetlana Boym (2001) has argued, has provided a fertile ground for nostalgia to flourish....

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  • ...Boym, Svetlana 2001 The Future of Nostalgia....

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BookDOI
TL;DR: Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the copperbelt's recent history as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. "Expectations of Modernity" explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an 'ethnography of decline'. Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic 'advance' and 'decline'. Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives - the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies. Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, "Expectations of Modernity" will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.

1,550 citations


"Engaging Colonial Nostalgia" refers background in this paper

  • ...From Angola to Zanzibar, people are confronting the restructurings of global capital in terms of an economics of impossibility that renders daily life ever more precarious (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Ferguson 1999; Hansen 2000; Weiss 2002)....

    [...]

Book
20 Sep 2010
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the extensive and complex trading system maintained by the Trobriand Islanders and examined the power of magic, mythology and folklore in their daily lives.
Abstract: First published in 1922, this classic text examines the extensive and complex trading system maintained by the Trobriand Islanders. While the main theme is economics and social organization, the power of magic, mythology and folklore are also examined.

1,163 citations