Organizer: Anand A. Yang, University of Utah
Chair and Discussant: Douglas Peers, University of Calgary
This panel is aimed at rethinking the scholarship on colonialism by looking at the British Empire as a transnational enterprise in which the project of the larger empire continually and consistently contended with issues defined by the local and regional complex of cultures, ethnicities, and gender. Rather than examine the workings of this Empire in a single country or focus only on the connections between metropole and colony, this set of papers will consider the empire in a wider global context by dwelling on the tensions inherent in extending colonial ideas and practices developed in specific settings and time periods to the entire range of societies and states that constituted the British Empire in Asia.
One trajectory will involve tracking colonial efforts at social engineering, specifically attempts to order Indian society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by transporting Indian criminals and political prisoners to various locales in Southeast Asia where they were integrated into the complexities of the local multicultural and multiethnic society. A second emphasis will be on exploring disciplinary ideas and practices aimed at regulating and managing colonial subjects through the new technology of photography. Equally significant in this respect—as well as in all the other attempts to exercise colonial power and expand colonial knowledge—is the importance of considering the ways in which colonial subjects resisted the disciplinary gaze of the colonial regime. A third line of inquiry takes up the attempts by the British Empire to regulate sexual practices and arrangements, particularly the different approaches developed to policing prostitution in different colonies. Thus, this panel will highlight the dynamics and tensions of empire as they pertained to Britain’s colonies across Asia.
Slave/Convict/Laborer, Indian/Malay/Chinese
Anand A. Yang, University of Utah
This paper will examine the complex society and community Indian convicts who were banished to Southeast Asia developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because of the conflicting interests of Indian and Southeast Asian colonial authorities, transportation never developed as the severe punishment it was intended to be for heinous crimes committed against the ‘law and order’ regimen of the emerging colonial state in India. For the local authorities in Southeast Asia, Indian convicts were a source of labor, men and women who were recruited to form the workforce needed to build the infrastructure of rule in the settlements of Bengkulen, Penang, and Singapore. Colonial labor imperatives defined and shaped convict experiences as did convict initiatives in fashioning their own community within the larger local society made up of different occupational and ethnic groups.
Voir/Savoir: Convicts, Photography, and Identification in Colonial Southeast Asia
Clare Anderson, University of Leicester
This paper is an exploration of colonial attempts to use photography for the identification of convicts transported to penal settlements in Singapore and the Andaman Islands during the second half of the nineteenth century. Soon after the introduction of photography into India, its potential for facilitating criminal investigations was recognized. From the late 1850s, various categories of offenders were photographed, including thug approvers, habitual offenders and ‘professional’ criminals. After 1860, photography was extended to convicts transported to Singapore and, from the mid-1870s, to those destined for the Andaman Islands. Photography was an individualizing measure, designed to facilitate the recognition of reoffenders or the arrest of escapees. I will theorize convict photography as an attempt to establish and extend a ‘disciplinary gaze’ within and beyond the penal settlements. However, I will show that it was largely unsuccessful. The reasons for its failure, within the context of an India ‘imagined’ only in terms of ethnographically styled collectivities, will be explored. The disjuncture in the carceral web which resulted provided a space through which the subaltern convict voice could emerge. Photographs, as visual narratives of identity, reveal much about the complexities of power relations in the penal settlements.
How to Rule a Colony: British Imperialism and the Asian Sexualized Subject
Philippa Levine, University of Southern California
Sexual ‘deviance’ was a point of entry for colonial rule throughout the period of high imperialism so closely associated with the nineteenth century. Throughout the colonies they ruled, the British imposed their own ethnographic understandings and their own moralities as a means of rule, arguing that their more civilized and delicate sensibilities in these arenas were proof of their superior leadership qualities. This paper will look particularly at the regulation of prostitution as an example of the ways in which sexuality and power operated in colonial arenas in the nineteenth century. Though nominally the same in all colonies, these laws were startlingly dissimilar, differing largely on the basis of how the colonial authorities viewed what they saw as indigenous sexualities in a given environment. This combination of early anthropology and sociology alongside the rule of law was a potent mix in which race and gender divisions figured prominently. Looking at Britain’s Asian colonies, primarily at Hong Kong, the Straits Settlements, and India, this presentation argues that sexuality was a central feature of colonial rule, a significant prop of colonial masculinity and imperial power.