Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: States fielded early censuses primarily for the purposes of resource extraction. However in the 19th century, the emphasis of census redaction shifted from taxation to enumerating national populations, in keeping with the rise of new political ideology that equated populaceness with state power. Colonial censuses developed within this particular political context. Scholars recognize that the colonial census categories developed by states embodied politically and ideologically motivated choices about what to count. Much of the literature on colonial censuses, however, assumes a markedly state-centered or 'top-down' approach to census enumeration. This piece presents an alternative view by showing how existing lay categories such as caste and lay institutions such as popular numeracy initially facilitated the colonial powers' efforts to conduct censuses in their colonies. In doing thus, we draw upon three empirical examples: census-taking in the colonial United States, British India and Italian East Africa. Our findings indicate that the existence of popular categories such as race (in the colonial U.S.) or religious affiliation (in India) and widespread lay numeracy (in both milieux) aided British efforts to enumerate their colonial subjects in these two territories. Italy, however, was hampered in its efforts to field censuses in East Africa owing to a lack of analogous lay categories and institutions in its colonies there.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Republic of Cyprus and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago are considered relatively successful examples of post-colonial development as measured by macro-economic indicators such as high growth rate levels and GDP per capita. However at the ground level, income inequality, rates of poverty and unemployment are distinctly low in the Republic of Cyprus when compared to Cyprus (and even when compared to many advanced capitalist nations). In 1974, approximately fourteen years after their independence, major shifts occurred in both these nations’ economies. The Republic of Cyprus lost its most productive tourist and industrial zones. The Republic of Trinidad, having primarily an oil exporting economy, experienced a financial windfall due to the hike in international petroleum prices. Focusing on the last thirty years of national economic development, this paper uses semi-structured interviews conducted with past and present government officials, state policy documents, and government archives to consider the unforeseen outcome of each nations postcolonial development history. What lead to the unusual economic progress in Cyprus and relatively favorable socio-circumstances for the majority of the Cypriot population? Why, despite increased government revenue, do many Trinidadian struggle to meet basic needs? Certainly many factors contribute to explaining the difference in socio-economic status of the population in these two island-nations. This paper focuses on how colonialism patterns ethnic relations and shaped the development strategies each government enacted in response to the events of 1974. Theoretically, this paper contributes to postcolonial analyses by demonstrating ways that racial/ethnic ideologies influence social and economic policies and contributes to economic success or failure.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Since Greco-Roman antiquity, paternalistic thought has been used to describe and vindicate the relationship between masters and the enslaved, the colonizer and the colonized and now the neo-colonizer and the neo-colonized. The masters, colonizers and neo-colonizers were/are the paternalists, while the enslaved, colonized and neo-colonized were/are the paternalized. Through analyzing how they described the role, function and standing of the paternalists visa vie the paternalized, this paper will ultimately show that there is a clear genealogy of thought that links the theorizers of the natural slave theory in antiquity to those who theorized on slavery during the Middle Ages in Europe and colonial and antebellum America and those who added to the racial discourse in justifying colonialism and neo-colonialism in post-Civil War America. Some of the theorists who will be analyzed include Aristotle, Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Bacon and George Fitzhugh. This paper will further argue that any form of nationalism of the paternalized has always been dismissed by these theorists as it is still being firmly rejected by post-modern (nation-state) paternalists like the United States.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper, I draw from Edward Said’s Orientalism to interrogate how colonial sites and their historical modes of representational practices in colonial India have influenced the constructions of nationalist, communalist, and gendered identities in post-colonial India. I argue that, although colonization is over, a discursive replay of Orientalism (evidenced through the British colonial legacies) is not completely defunct in Indian politics. Rather, through the representations of a modern /secular or a communal India, Orientalism continues in post-colonial Indian politics with its gendered, patriarchal, and communal implications. Additionally, such implications of representational politics in post-colonial India are more complex given that they draw from colonial constructs of communal, patriarchal, and modernist identity politics to interweave gender with religious or secular statist ideologies to securitize the imagined boundaries of post-colonial India. The question then is to explore how India’s post-colonial politics (as a replay of colonialist/ Orientalist legacies) uses women’s inviolate bodies to securitize the nation’s boundaries.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In Algeria on May 16, 1958, French generals staged a ceremony of the mass unveiling of Algerian women by French women, intending to demonstrate new freedom under French Rule. In 2004, French schools began expelling young Islamic women wearing hijab in defiance of the law. Both of these moves, in a colonial and post-colonial setting, mark women's bodies under the name of personal and religious freedom. A close reading of Beauvoir, in tandem with post-colonial and Islamic feminism, challenges this claim and offers one example of the intersection of Western hegemony, patriarchal power and the demands of identity.