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Abstract
As a young, but ambitious state that aspired to acquire a respected position in the nineteenth-century European concert, one of the institutions Belgium relied on was its diplomatic corps. Whereas the capitals of Europe quickly became the new home of career diplomats, Belgium gradually developed a consular apparatus that was staffed by locally recruited agents in more faraway areas. In the Eastern Mediterranean, the position of dragoman, who served as translator to the diplomatic representatives, was especially relevant in a setting where language barriers hindered the expansion of Belgium’s diplomatic and commercial interests. This essay unravels the history of the Belgian dragomanate in Egypt and focusses on one dragoman in particular: Jean Eïd. Addressing his term in Belgian service from the perspective of subalternity, I will demonstrate how the social, professional and legal status of these actors who roamed the increasingly entangled Levantine sphere in this period, is particularly challenging to grasp, while also recognizing the potential his position had for the next generations that succeeded him.
Abstract
This article analyzes the use of quoted speech in nineteenth-century European travel writing from around the Indian Ocean. A careful analysis of when speech was quoted directly, and how its phonetic characteristics were transcribed into printed form, elucidates the power dynamics embedded in the spoken word in colonial contexts while also opening up new perspectives on the rhetorical strategies of imperialism. Of particular interest here is the notion of erroneous speech: colonial travelogues regularly employed direct quotes to highlight what were construed as ‘mispronunciations’ or ‘grammar mistakes’ by indigenous and/or non-European-coded speakers of the language of the colonizer. Such a framing of differing language habits served to inscribe a cultural hierarchy and power differential into moments of interpersonal encounter. Moreover, in the firmly middle-class genre of travel writing, the speech of working-class Europeans was subjected to similar treatment, pointing to the diversity of different ‘subaltern’ positions within the colonial hierarchy.
Abstract
This paper examines the alternative articulations of the nineteenth-century Eurasian ‘other’ along the vocal axis of a ‘creole Bengali subalternity’. It predicates its contextual premise upon the transcultural encounters of Bengal’s mofussil enclaves by the Hooghly River. These enclaves developed rapidly into Portuguese, Dutch, French and Danish settlements between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, before being overtaken by the metropolitan colonial modernity of British Calcutta. My analysis of the creole Bengali space-times constituting such entangled histories and their interstitial legacies, revolves around the Eurasian life-world of Antony Firingi (c. 1786–1836), a Portuguese-Bengali kobi singer, viz. kobiyal, from the French comptoir, Chandernagore. Mobilizing the sonic scope of the rasa modality in Indic aesthetics, I close-read a key passage from Firingi’s kobigaan, or ‘musical verse’, duel with his rival, Bhola Moira, to decode the subaltern agency of the ‘creole Bengali rasa’ inflecting the vocal poetics of his liminal identity-narrative as a Eurasian kobiyal.
Abstract
This article lays out a framework for conceptualizing how religious differences and hierarchical, hereditary inequality consolidate in contemporary Sindh. I argue that the terms Hindu, Dalit, and hari are often conflated due to their entangled trajectories. Addressing this conflation sheds light on how structural inequality and discrimination function in Sindh. The article begins by focusing on a government document that limits potential applicants for a sanitation job to “non-Muslims.” Next, it explores how the religious category of Hindu has become, over time, susceptible to ritual stigmas, social marginalization, caste oppression, and hierarchization. Last, it addresses a legal judgment that hinges on recognizing caste inequality but cannot say so. Analysis of the decision reveals how the entanglement of Hindu, Dalit, and hari legal categories produces certain citizen-subjects as perpetual legal minors requiring the state’s paternalistic protection. Throughout, the article illustrates how the production of multiple hierarchies in the social fabric of Sindh and Pakistan broadly operates through the deployment of caste stigma as a public secret.
Abstract
The first part of this essay addresses what a microhistory of petitions has to offer to subaltern studies. The second part illustrates this with a late nineteenth-century case-study revolving around a Kabyle man formerly belonging to the intermediate sphere between French-colonial and local Algerian society. Concretely, the focus lies on Ahmed ben Ali ben Aouadi and the political knowledge to which his 1888-petition to the French Chamber of Deputies and its chairman testified. This written interaction must be seen as an attempt to challenge the institutional framing of his family’s subaltern identity and to reclaim their property, confiscated by the French state. The third section of this essay reveals an interactive exchange between this colonial subject’s subaltern resistance and the institutional counter-resistance of the French colonizer’s legislative and executive authorities, which extended far beyond Aouadi’s second petition in 1892, and thus challenges our notions of political agency and success.
Abstract
In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men was meticulously recorded and preserved, down to the inclusion of dialogue, of turns of speech, of metaphors, sometimes even passages in Creole. Interrogated in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses, they moved beyond the questions posed and answered instead with stories about themselves, their words creating riveting narratives that constitute a precious repository of voices of enslaved individuals in colonial America. Though this archive is problematic, their testimony was anchored in the deponents’ own experiences and ways of knowing, prompting the question of whether we can use this material, and most importantly: if and when they did speak in court, should we listen?
Abstract
The history of communist crimes in the USSR has been well elucidated. Nonetheless, a still under-investigated group of archival materials are files of the Soviet counterintelligence. One of its tasks was the surveillance of the foreign diplomats and consular representatives operating on the territory of the USRR. Even after the fall of the USSR and the opening of the archives, access to the materials of the communist special services was and is very difficult. The situation changed not very long ago. Open access to materials of the former GPU/NKVD/KGB was possible in Ukraine. In the Branch State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine in Kyiv is a file continuing materials from the surveillance by the Soviet counterintelligence of the Polish diplomat Jan Karszo-Siedlewski, who was among others the head of the Polish consulates general in Kharkiv and Kyiv in 1932–1937. In this way, material that had been entirely inaccessible for researchers will be discussed in the present article.