Esme Cleall

Orientalising deafness: race and disability in imperial Britain

This article explores the conflations and connections that postcolonial and disability scholars have drawn between ‘race’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘disability’ from a historical perspective. By looking at the connections drawn between ‘race’ and ‘disability’ in the context of nineteenth-century imperial Britain, I hope to probe beyond them to examine the origins and implications of their interplay. I do so by focusing on ideas about deafness, an impairment radically reconfigured in the colonial period, and inflected with concerns about degeneration, belonging, heredity and difference. Disability, I argue, not only operated as an additional ‘category of difference’ alongside ‘race’ as a way of categorising and subjugating the various ‘others’ of Empire, but intersected with it. The ‘colonisation’ of disabled people in Britain and the ‘racial other’ by the British were not simply simultaneous processes or even analogous ones, but were part and parcel of the same cultural and discursive system. The colonising context of the nineteenth century, a period when British political, economic and cultural expansion over areas of South Asia, Australasia and Africa increased markedly, structured the way in which all forms of difference were recognised and expressed, including the difference of deafness. So too did the shifts in the raced and gendered thinking that accompanied it, as new forms of knowledge were developed to justify, explain and contest Britains global position and new languages were developed through which to articulate otherness. Such developments reconfigured the meaning of disability. Disability was, in effect, ‘orientalised’. ‘Race’ I argue was formative in shaping what we have come to understand as ‘disability’ and vice versa; they were related fantasies of difference.

Europe After Empire: Decolonisation, Society and Culture

European history. As Elizabeth Buettner outlines in her introduction, there are three historio graphical imperatives for such a work. First, there has been a tendency for much of the ‘new imperial history’ to focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rather than the twentieth. Whilst there are notable exceptions that do tackle the more recent past, Buettner argues this has meant that many of the insights of the ‘new imperial history’ have yet to be fully fleshed out in this period. Secondly, and perhaps most crucially, even in colonial history where the primacy of the nation state has been called into question, many existing histories of decolonisation (and colonialism) tend to focus exclusively on one European empire. In discussing the British, Dutch, French, Belgian and Portuguese empires, Buettner admirably manages the formidable feat of tackling multiple empires at home and abroad. Thirdly, Anglophone historians (who have most commonly then focused on the British Empire) have been particularly slow to incorporate the theoretical and empirical insights of other European empires into their scholarship, including literature on Portuguese, say, colonialism, but written in English. The first part of the book, ‘Decolonization for the Colonizers’, is an excellent account of decolonisation that focuses in turn on Britain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Portugal. From the Indian Congress to the Carnation Revolution, these opening first chapters bring home both the complexity of decolonisation and its global reach. Another thing that stands out is the violence of decolonisation from the use of torture in Algeria to the widespread hangings in colonial Kenya. The varying impact of the Second World War is also demonstrated to be formative, with the occupation of the Netherlands, France and Belgium by the Nazis and the occupation of various colonial territories by the Japanese, shaping the course of decolonisation. The heart of Europe after Empire, ‘Migration and Multiculturalisms in Postcolonial Europe’ is an engaging analysis of how French, British, Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese identities have been reconfigured by some of the repercussions of decolonisation and migration. Her first chapter of this section, ‘Ending Empires, Coming Home’, explores groups of migrants whose arrivals, inconspicuous in some cases though unwanted in others, have often been overlooked historically: colonial repatriates. Often white but sometimes descended from both colonisers and colonised, these groups were largely unfamiliar with Europe, despite, in some cases, having known it as ‘home’. From ‘Indisch Dutch’, ‘imperial Britons’ and Portuguese ‘retonados’ to ‘Pieds-noirs’ and Belgian ‘refugees’, their journeys to Europe occurred in different waves and under different levels of compulsion. With their tastes of food influenced by their lives in the colonies, values that were held with suspicion by metropolitan critics and, sometimes, with little in common with those whose heritage they were said to share, integration often proved difficult. The two other chapters in this section explore what Buettner terms ‘ethnic minority immigration’ from the former colonies. Again this is a careful analysis of the arrivals from various parts of the globe, the reactions and racism that greeted the migrants and the way in which national identities and ideas about belonging shifted as a result. Multiculturalism, assimilationism and integration are examined as state responses as well as the responses of political parties, individuals and other groups. Coalescing around debates about the hijab and halal meat, questions about Islam and about Muslim arrivals are shown to reoccur particularly potently across many of the European Europe after Empire is a useful intervention into the fields of decolonisation and postcolonial Europe After Empire: Decolonisation, Society and Culture, by Elizabeth Buettner, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 551 pp., £69.99 (hardcover), ISBN 9780521113861, £21.47 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-521-13188-9 290 B OOK REVIEWS

From Divine Judgement to Colonial Courts: Missionary ‘Justice’ in British India, c. 1840–1914

Abstract ‘Justice’ is a word scattered through missionary writings. Throughout the nineteenth century, missionaries connected themselves with like-minded communities of opinion with labels such as ‘friends of justice and humanity’, the protectors of ‘kindness and justice’, or ‘friends of justice, humanity and religion’. In their published writings, missionaries wrote of the ‘justice [and] beneficence’ of British rule in India and of missionary work as effecting the inculcation of ‘justice, mercy and charity’. As such, missionaries locked themselves in battle with numerous forces of real and perceived injustice in British India. They railed against the ‘injustice’ inflicted upon Hindu widows, child brides and would-be converts by ‘traditional’ indigenous practices. But they also wrote of ‘the imperfect administration of justice’ conducted by the colonial state. At the same time, missionaries interpreted the famines, floods, plagues and rebellions they encountered in India through a theological framework that also hinged on particular readings of justice, punishment and retribution. At a more mundane level, the everyday practice of missionary stations (including the arbitration of disputes between colleagues) also required a working understanding of what was ‘fair’. This article explores the ways in which missionaries used concepts of ‘justice’ to signify a social identity; a moral need; a legal ideal; a theological explanation; and an administrative tool.

‘In Defiance of the Highest Principles of Justice, Principles of Righteousness’: The Indenturing of the Bechuana Rebels and the Ideals of Empire, 1897–1900

This article explores the controversy around the suppression of the Langeberg Rebellion and subsequent punitive indenture of the ‘Bechuana rebels’, a serious episode of colonial violence which, like many others, has been forgotten. In recovering this episode, I argue that such controversies were crisis points in wider attitudes towards empire and colonial relationships. The article focuses on what the debate reveals about the articulation of four imperial ‘principles’ that those challenging the punishment argued had been undermined: ‘freedom’, ‘protection’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘justice’. By comparing reactions in Britain and southern Africa, I demonstrate that these values, evoked as if universally understood, were configured in ways that spoke to the specificities of different colonial sites and that their meanings differed, even within what may be described as ‘humanitarian’ networks, across places of Empire. I argue that violent episodes, such as the Bechuanaland controversy, created ruptures that exposed these discrepancies and contradictions.

Conclusion: Thinking with Missionaries, Thinking about Difference

Writing in the Chronicle in July 1886, the Reverend W. Pierce reflected on a letter he had received from someone he described as ‘a dusty-skinned man, born in the midst of heathenism, but now addressing us in the terms of Christian fellowship’. The letter had renewed Pierce’s confidence in the ‘universality of the kingdom of Christ’, a vision with which many in the 1880s were becoming disillusioned. And it was not surprising, Pierce felt, that faith in the civilising project ‘grows weak’. The extent of ‘heathen’ degradation, encountered here in India, signified a sense of otherness that could undermine the very foundations of the missionary enterprise. ‘Can we, without entering the kingdom of moonshine’, Pierce wondered, ‘carry our theory of “a man and a brother” right the way through the human race?’ The question was a topical one in the second half of the nineteenth century, when challenges to the universality of mankind were emerging from new discourses of race and when the language of cross-racial kinship, which Pierce was referencing, was becoming unpopular. Doubts concerning the limits of humanity, or in some formulations the relationship between race and species, pulled at the roots of the missionary project with growing strength from several directions. Defying these trends, Pierce responded firmly that the theory of a man and a brother could indeed be ‘carried right through the human race’ and that ‘the missionary steps in’ to debates about race ‘with his profoundly significant facts’.

Introduction: Difference and Discourse in the British Empire

When Richard Lovett came to write a history of the London Missionary Society (LMS) on its centenary in the 1890s, he prefaced his two-volume work with three quotations. The first was taken from the Book of Mark (Mark, iv, 30-32): ‘How shall we liken the Kingdom of God?’ ‘Like a mustard seed’, came the scriptural reply, from which, despite its small appearance, great branches could flourish.1 It was the LMS itself, of course, that Lovett saw as the proverbial seed so potent that its branches stretched out from its roots in London across many continents. Over the course of the nineteenth century, these branches had matured into channels of communication through which people, information and images passed. Some had broken, or died, in stunted missionary activity, others had blossomed into burgeoning Christian communities, each, so the missionary imaginary would have it, growing organically from the metropolitan trunk. Established during the late eighteenth-century religious revival, the LMS was nourished with evangelical religiosity, each new shoot reaching upwards towards the ‘Kingdom of God’.2 Realising this Kingdom was not limited to theological conversion, but meant a widespread programme of cultural change. Dress, education, sexuality, the organisation of time and the demarcation of space were all sources of missionary concern.

Re-Making Homes: Ambiguous Encounters and Domestic Transgressions

There is no doubt that families exercise strong social, economic and psychic binds, pulling their members together and suggesting shared identity and belonging. By presenting families as set types, missionaries exaggerated, almost reified, this commonality in their writing. But families are fluid constructs, whatever the illusion of fixity. Family members come and go, not least in missionary families where birth rates and death rates were high. Besides rooting identity and belonging, families are also characterised by instability, dislocation and conflict. Family members may have different race, national or religious identities, for example, as well as being of different genders and generations.

Colonial Violence: Whiteness, Violence and Civilisation

Sometimes ‘civilized’ Christians, like those African Dutchmen, hungry for land, are capable of tying a dozen Bechwana Christian men together by ropes, and then firing a broadside into them.1 In a long and eccentric speech given at the LMS’s annual meeting in 1883 Reverend Edward White described the ‘world of unreasoning heathens’ in which he saw himself living. This world was violent and cruel, and missionaries were engaged in ‘warfare’ to spread the story, as White put it, of ‘the shame of the gibbet, the pain of the race, the disgrace of the pillory … said to have been inflicted, nearly 2,000 years ago, on a Carpenter of Nazareth in Galilee’. The war was a difficult one to win, ‘the conversion of the heathen almost everywhere’, he wrote, ‘is followed by trouble, persecution, family or tribal disunion, often by loss, depression and death itself’. Furthermore, battles had to be fought on many fronts. Sandwiched between diatribes against the ‘Asiatic races’, White reflected on the ‘Christians’, whose actions, he claimed, were to the missionary movement like ‘being attacked in the rear by your own reserve while you are fighting on the front’. From Pope Leo XIII’s recent condemnation of Robert Moffat as ‘no properly authorised missionary of the Gospel’, to antagonistic relations with ‘Boers’, White’s account outlined a world where Christians as well as ‘heathens’ could be cruel.2

Representing Homes: Gender and Sexuality in Missionary Writing

Missionary projects were theologically and rhetorically embedded in concepts of kinship: the language of family and universal brotherhood permeated their writing. The habitual addressing of fellow missionaries as ‘sisters’ and ‘brethren’ reinforced the identification of colleagues in familial terms and the conceptualisation of the LMS itself as a missionary ‘family’. At least rhetorically, this was extended to both the missionary-supporting public in Britain and to the peoples missionaries encountered overseas. The LMS believed the Gospel of Christ was ’calculated to put an end to the strifes and contentions which distract the human family’ and to ‘re-unite’ it ‘in the bonds of a holy and happy brotherhood.’1 But what did this language mean for their construction of difference? And to what extent was difference mixed with contrary ideas about cross-cultural sameness and human universality?

Illness on the Mission Station: Sickness and the Presentation of the ‘Self’

In the previous chapter, I explored how missionaries responded to sickness overseas and how they developed a framework that powerfully linked sickness, ‘heathenism’ and ‘otherness’. In claiming a healing role for missionaries, they indirectly aligned themselves with ‘healthiness’. In this chapter, I ask how, given this framework, missionaries responded to their own illnesses and those of their friends and colleagues in the ’foreign field’. In doing so, I use sickness to explore discourses of difference (principally those of gender, age, health and location) internal to the missionary ‘self’ and think about how the experience of sickness overseas could both potentially threaten the lines around which missionaries constructed colonial difference and re-encrust them. Sickness provides a useful way into these ‘internal’ differences not only because of the anxiety it generates, but because it is a subject that utterly pervades missionary correspondence.