Steven Pierce

Discipline and the other body : correction, corporeality, colonialism

Discipline and the Other Body reveals the intimate relationship between violence and difference underlying modern governmental power and the human rights discourses that critique it. The comparative essays brought together in this collection show how, in using physical violence to discipline and control colonial subjects, governments repeatedly found themselves enmeshed in a fundamental paradox: Colonialism was about the management of difference—the “civilized” ruling the “uncivilized”—but colonial violence seemed to many the antithesis of civility, threatening to undermine the very distinction that validated its use. Violation of the bodies of colonial subjects regularly generated scandals, and eventually led to humanitarian initiatives, ultimately changing conceptions of “the human” and helping to constitute modern forms of human rights discourse. Colonial violence and discipline also played a crucial role in hardening modern categories of difference—race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. The contributors, who include both historians and anthropologists, address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century and from Asia to Africa to North America. They consider diverse topics, from the interactions of race, law, and violence in colonial Louisiana to British attempts to regulate sex and marriage in the Indian army in the early nineteenth century. They examine the political dilemmas raised by the extensive use of torture in colonial India and the ways that British colonizers flogged Nigerians based on beliefs that different ethnic and religious affiliations corresponded to different degrees of social evolution and levels of susceptibility to physical pain. An essay on how contemporary Sufi healers deploy bodily violence to maintain sexual and religious hierarchies in postcolonial northern Nigeria makes it clear that the state is not the only enforcer of disciplinary regimes based on ideas of difference. Contributors . Laura Bear, Yvette Christianse, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Dorothy Ko, Isaac Land, Susan O’Brien, Douglas M. Peers, Steven Pierce, Anupama Rao, Kerry Ward

Looking Like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria

In the international press Nigeria is represented almost exclusively as a state in crisis. Recurrent military coups, ethnic and religious sectionalism, a civil war, a series of bloody riots and local unrest (of which the Niger delta situation is the best-known example), economic turmoil, and the re-imposition of the Islamic criminal code in many northern states have all been used to paint a picture of chaos and collapse. Journalists and government officials alike tend to find the roots of Nigeria’s problems in intractable ethnic conflict, the collapse of oil prices in 1983, structural adjustment mandated by the International Monetary Fund in 1986, and hatred between Muslims and Christians. The trouble with Nigeria is also understood to illustrate the trouble with Africa. With 25 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria appears as representative of Africa. Potentially wealthy from its oil revenue, it symbolizes Africa’s promise denied. 1

Africa and 1968: Derepression, Libidinal Politics, and the Problem of Global Interpretation

What was the role of Africa in the movements of 1968? At the time it conjured up many images, more perhaps than anytime before or since. Independence continued to come to former European colonies— Equatorial Guinea and Swaziland in that year alone. The “new nations of Africa” was a phrase both trite and exciting. Meanwhile the guerilla leaders of Portuguese Africa, Amilcar Cabrai of Guinea-Bissau most notably, were influential theorists of revolution, as well as inspirational figures of struggle against the colonizer.1 African novels were gaining international audiences and acted both to valorize indigenous cultures and to convince outsiders that Africans had achieved “universal” culture. Excellent universities (Dakar in Senegal, Ibadan and Ahmadu Bello in Nigeria, Legon in Ghana, Makerere in Uganda, Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania) were becoming important centers of learning. However, in Nigeria a brutal civil war raged, which would make the term “Biafra baby” synonymous with starvation. Military governments ruled much of the continent, and the coups continued—Sierra Leone, Congo-Brazzaville, and Mali as the year progressed. In this grab-bag of images one can discern two dominant tendencies, a continuation of the hopeful postwar narratives of emerging countries and modernization, and an even older story about Africa’s violence and brutality.