COLONIALISM AND EUROPEAN ARCHAEOLOGY

COLONIALISM AND EUROPEAN ARCHAEOLOGY

González-Ruiba, Alfredo, Colonialsim and European Archeology in: Jane Lydon and Uzma Rizvi (eds.): Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology.Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2010, pp. 37-47. Available throug the author's website here: https://www.academia.edu/366003/Colonialism_and_European_archaeology

Future Directions

Colonialism and European archaeology have been close allies for a long time. Even today,the colonial sin is far from being washed away. Postcolonial archaeology has to be lessself-in-dulgent and more critical in order to deconstruct the ongoing relationship withneocolonialism. Here are a few suggestions for producing a more radical archaeology. First,it is necessary to get rid of the condescending language of cooperation and progress, whichsimply transforms the savage of colonialism into the undeveloped native of the postcolony(González-Ruibal 2009). Second, we must take equality seriously (Rancière 1995) and stopdreaming of impossible, idealized partnerships. As Alberto Memmi (2004: 163) reminds us,“Partnership does not make sense except when both partners have a reasonably equal force.”It is still Western archaeologists who study Africa’s past, not the other way around. Third, itis important to embrace politics beyond identity issues, and recognize that politics is all aboutconflict (iek 2007). We have to be able to accept conflict in postcolonial situations. Fromhere, we have to consider ruling out concepts that have been deeply tainted by colonial valuesand Eurocentricity, such as “prehistory” (McNiven and Russell 2005), which situatescontemporary Indigenous communities in another time (Fabian 1983), or “historicalarchaeology,” which only considers Western World History as “historical” (Guha 2002).Then, archaeological traditions in Europe must properly address their colonial pasts andneocolonial presents. And finally, a dichotomy has to be broken between consciouspostcolonial scholars who focus on deconstructing their discipline and researchers who,without caring much about the history of the discipline, Indigenous communities, orcolonialism, tell us how the past truly was (Langebaek 2006: 118).

The Algerian Iliad by Cheikh Zakaria (1908-1977)

The Algerian Iliad by Cheikh Zakaria (1908-1977)

The Algerian Iliad is an epic poem of 1001 verse lines composed by Cheikh Zakaria (1908-1977), the poet of the Algerian revolution, to celebrate the long history of the Algerian people's resistance against foreign occupations from "the most ancient times to the present day", as  Mouloud Kacem (1927-1992), the famous  Algerian politician, philosopher, historian, and writer, stated in the preface of the printed poem. Mouloud Kacem was the one who commissioned Cheikh Zakaria to compose this poem. With its 1001 verse lines, it is not only an Iliad, but a clear parody to One Thousand and One Nights of the famous folk tales know as Arabian Nights.

A first short version of this poem of only 610 verse lines was recited by Cheikh Zakaria himself in the inauguration of the sixth conference of the Islamic thought on July 24, 1972 in Club of Pines in Algeria where Houari Boumédiène (1932-1978), Chairman of the Revolutionary Council, was one of the participants. There is a recording on You Tube where one can listen to the very sensational recitation by the author himself. Here it is:

Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, by Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie, 2007

ABSTRACT [ from Oxford Scholarship Online]

Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism, and then a rich field for creating cultural identities which blend the old and the new. Nobel prize winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms, while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs in order to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by scholars who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome, and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296101.001.0001/acprof-9780199296101

Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, UCP 2011

Disarming Words

Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt
Shaden M. Tageldin 

Univesity of California Press 2011

[Thanks to Mohammed Lafi for the reference]

In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt—by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882—in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim. Tageldin finds that the encounter with European Orientalism often invited colonized Egyptians to imagine themselves “equal” to or even “masters” of their colonizers, and thus, paradoxically, to translate themselves toward—virtually into—the European. Moving beyond the domination/resistance binary that continues to govern understandings of colonial history, Tageldin redefines cultural imperialism as a politics of translational seduction, a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, thereby repressing its inherent inequalities. She considers, among others, the interplays of Napoleon and Hasan al-'Attar; Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Silvestre de Sacy, and Joseph Agoub; Cromer, 'Ali Mubarak, Muhammad al-Siba'i, and Thomas Carlyle; Ibrahim 'Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, and Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat; and Salama Musa, G. Elliot Smith, Naguib Mahfouz, and Lawrence Durrell. In conversation with new work on translation, comparative literature, imperialism, and nationalism, Tageldin engages postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak to Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Emile Benveniste, and Jacques Derrida.

Contents 

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration

Overture | Cultural Imperialism Revisited: Translation, Seduction, Power
1. The Irresistible Lure of Recognition
2. The Dismantling I: Al-'Attar's Antihistory of the French in Egypt, 1798–1799
3. Suspect Kinships: Al-Tahtawi and the Theory of French-Arabic "Equivalence," 1827–1834
4. Surrogate Seed, World-Tree: Mubarak, al-Siba'i, and the Translations of "Islam" in British Egypt, 1882–1912
5. Order, Origin, and the Elusive Sovereign: Post-1919 Nation Formation and the Imperial Urge toward Translatability
6. English Lessons: The Illicit Copulations of Egypt at Empire's End
Coda | History, Affect, and the Problem of the Universal

Notes
Index

More about the book from the publisher's website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520265523 .