Barbara Bush

Taxation in West Africa: transforming the colonial subject into the ¿governable person¿

Little attention has hitherto been paid to the role of accounting and taxation in colonial/imperial contexts. The objective of this paper is to explore taxation in British West Africa from the late nineteenth to the mid-20th centuries. Taxation represents the use of accounting to regulate behaviour, and as such offers a new perspective on the claims made for accounting as a successful mode of making individuals governable. We examine the taxation system initiated by Lord Lugard and followed elsewhere in British West Africa and consider what its imposition has to tell us about the relationship between colonialists and Africans, and about its potential for moulding the behaviour of colonial subjects. The vigorous resistance of West Africans to colonial taxation casts doubts on some of the claims made for accounting controls as a means of “forming subjectivity” [Acc. Organ. Society 23 (7) (1998) 685].

‘Daughters of injur’d Africk’: 1 African women and the transatlantic slave trade

There is now a substantial literature on slavery yet few studies directly address the gendered nature of the slave trade. In this article, the author demonstrates how women’s experiences of the trade were contingent on conflicting European stereotypes of African women, their fertility and sexual vulnerability but, also, their gendered roles in African cultures. These gender differences influenced women’s resistance and survival strategies. The middle passage represented irreversible changes in slave women’s lives but important threads of continuity also existed across the Atlantic world. On the slave ship the ‘Daughters of injur’d Africk’ forged new bonds with fellow slaves and their cultural knowledge travelled with them. Women were seminal in reworking African culture on the slave plantation and actively resisted enslavement from the moment of capture to their harsh new lives in the Americas.

Feminising Empire? British Women's Activist Networks in Defending and Challenging Empire from 1918 to Decolonisation

ABSTRACT This article addresses female activism spanning the Empire and creating interconnected networks linking the local and global dimensions of Britains imperial mission in an era of increasing uncertainty. The transition from empire to commonwealth and, ultimately, independence was marked by anti-colonial challenges from within Britain and in the colonies and threats to empire from international developments post-1918. This era also witnessed a more proactive role for women as both defenders and critics of empire who had an influence on shaping a new discourse of welfare and development, purportedly a ‘feminisation’ of empire. Continuities existed between female activism pre- and post-1918 but also significant differences as the late imperial era witnessed more nuanced and diverse interventions into empire affairs than the ‘maternalist imperial feminism’ of the era before the First World War.

Connecting Women's Histories: the local and the global

ABSTRACT The articles in this Special Issue are drawn from some of the contributions to a conference held at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, from 29 August to 1 September 2013 titled ‘Womens Histories: the local and the global’. The articles reflect on diverse aspects of the entangled histories of women across the world, mainly, but not exclusively, during the twentieth century. They explore the range of ways in which womens history, international history, transnational history and imperial and global histories are interwoven.

Gendering the settler state: White women, race, liberalism and empire in Rhodesia, 1950–1980, by Kate Law

uals count for ‘emblematic’ case studies of a new consciousness. Equally problematic is the complete lack of interest on the part of the author in explaining why her case studies are limited to primarily the US and Australia, while her claims imply that feminism everywhere is under siege by men who wish to transition to a female identity. Furthermore the cases she describes in these two countries are also never complicated from the perspectives of race and class, which frankly seem quite important for understanding who is defining gender thusly and for whose benefit (as well as loss, in Jeffreys’ zero-sum definition of gender identity). This is particularly baffling and shortsighted, especially given the author’s interest in defining sexual reassignment among children as a eugenicist form of social engineering. The overall effect of this book is to further confuse the reader about the causes and effects of various forms of trans-activism within the larger context of gender regimes in the US and Australia. In that sense, it is a rich example of the diagnosis I offered at the beginning of this review about the fragmentation and tension growing in the field of gender studies and feminist scholarship today. Therefore, its usefulness rests primarily in giving us the unalloyed, passionate perspective of this author. But for anyone looking for a scholarly analysis that paves the way towards a different, less contentious identity politics, we will have to wait for another book.

African Echoes, Modern Fusions: Caribbean Music, Identity and Resistance in the African Diaspora

ABSTRACT Music and dance have always been a central facet of African and African diaspora culture, simultaneously a site of creative fusions, of cultural forms from different parts of West and Central Africa, and between African and European traditions, and also an arena of contestation and conflict within racialized power structures. This dynamic cultural fusion and conflict began during the enforced transportation from Africa and continued in the slave community where dance and music were fundamental to slave resistance and the reconstruction of community within the constraints of chattel slavery. For Europeans, music, dance, and related cultural forms were not only a threatening reminder of the unknowable “otherness” of African slaves (and their refusal to become dehumanized chattels), but also the potential threat slaves posed to white security through obeah practices and rebellion. Within this wider historical context, my focus here is in the continuities and changes associated with the transmigration of Caribbean cultural forms to Britain. I will explore three main areas: Caribbean music and dance as resistance, cultural expression and community in a racialized society; the influence of Jamaican reggae, raga, and African-American rap on evolving black British music; and, the wider diasporic context, the global rhythms of resistance inspired by African diaspora music.