Mining the Colonial Archive: The Global Microhistory of a Peruvian Coya

2021 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-76
Author(s):  
Sara Vicuña Guengerich
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Archive

scholarly journals Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in eastern India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
SANGHAMITRA MISRA
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Northeastern India ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

The Colonial Archive on Trial

2005 ◽  
pp. 325-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adele Perry
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Archive

scholarly journals A Queering-to-Come

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-376
Author(s):  
Kirk Fiereck ◽  
Neville Hoad ◽  
Danai S. Mupotsa
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
Global North ◽  
To Come ◽  
Academic Study

This introduction outlines the idea of the queer customary and how various African articulations of it engage, contest, and nuance central concerns of queer theory produced in the global North, particularly around ideas of normativity—hetero and homo. It speculates on the customary’s reworking of temporality and what that reworking does to historical time and the problems and possibilities in reading the colonial archive in the search for a useable past for both lived African sexual and gendered experience and the academic study of it. The customary is seen as an iterative containment of ancestral time, a powerful form of self-fashioning in the present, and as an invitation to futurity. Brief framings of how the various essays in the special issue elaborate what we are calling the queer customary follow.

The sovereignty of political economy: The Garos in a pre-conquest and early conquest era

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-387
Author(s):  
Sanghamitra Misra
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Natural Habitats ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
The Hill

The article is an inquiry into the elision of an image—that of the cotton-producing Garo—in the colonial archive. It situates this inquiry within the pre- and early colonial era where it is still possible to uncover elements of the irrefutable sovereign presence of Garos in eastern India as well as of the regional economic and political system through which the Garo social being makes itself historically visible. Parsing together a narrative of the Garo political order in this period, the article will discuss the ways in which the sovereignty of a people was pivoted around the production and trade in cotton. Rescuing the image of the cotton-producing Garo from the colonial archive is also a retracing of the seamless becoming of the Garo peasant, as adept at working with the hoe as with the plough, into a cotton trader who embarked on long journeys on foot and on boats every cotton season to the lowlands. The article will also probe into the germaneness of the concept of the ‘hill/forest tribe’ with the sedentary plainsman as its oppositional image and the embedding of ethnicity in circumscribed ‘natural’ habitats in eastern India by the colonial state.

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