Ann Laura Stoler (ed) Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History Chapter 2 (Stoler) 18 (C. Hall).
Adele Perry, “Reading Haunted by Empire in Winnipeg: The Politics of Transnational Histories” left history 13 No 2 2008
Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender. Race and the Making of British Columbia 1849-1871 Intro, chapters 2, 4 and 6
Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada Chapters 1, 2, 3
1. One of Adele Perry's main criticisms of 'Haunted by Empire' is that "the term North American seems to function largely as a cognate for the present-day United States projected backwards in time...Mexico and Canada...quietly slide out of focus." (165) Does this imply that the United States sits as a 'special case' nation, in which its intimacies and links can be (or have been) analyzed and extrapolated elsewhere? Why or why not?
ReplyDelete2. In "The Importance of Being Monogamous," Sarah Carter articulates that monogamous, Christian, British marriages were used as a harbinger of civilization. but Western Canada was especially difficult to 'monogamize.' Perry, in "On the Edge of Empire," cites a lack of white women as one obstacle to widespread monogamy, but what other factors about Canada's west specifically made it tricky to impose a European view of marriage?
3. I was especially interested in the reception of the four ships carrying white women to British Columbia - the Marcella, Tynemouth, Robert Lowe, and Alpha - especially in the popular press. How do the various reactions speak to the relationships between gender and governance in 19th-century western Canada? (From "On the Edge of Empire," chapter 6)
1. On the concept of a "surplus of women", Perry recounts that British Columbia was languishing for lack of "proper" colonial women, but suggests that then-contemporary sources believed upwards of half a million heavily strained Britain. Curiously, less than a few handfuls of these women actually emigrated to the colony, and only with great promise and prodding. What does this narrative say about the actual power structures of empire, if it was unable to redirect even a handful of what were largely considered a necessary stabilizing commodity first, and a citizen second?
ReplyDelete2. Both Carter and Perry's readings deal with frontiers people in British Columbia who were leaps and bounds from "civilized empire." These include the numerous workmen rowdies, ranchers living within "mixed" marriages, and even a few independent white women, such as the fiery Irish woman, or the successful widowed homesteader. Do you think that colonial authorities considered that these people may have chafed under the yoke of the era's overly delicate "Victorian sensibilities", and intentionally left the empire for a less restrained existence? Was the "Empire" even aware that it may have had its detractors, for that matter?
3. Carter's text indicates that if anything, an Anglo-centric, Christian, and monogamous marriage was one of many competing methods against a panoply of beliefs, faiths, cultures and people. In your opinion could the empire have been as successful as it was without demanding a singularly strict and hegemonic interpretation of marriage - considering that, by and large, settlers were still marrying (in a manner), largely British subjects and, sectarianism aside, were still mainly Christian.
1. Both Canada and the United States faced the issue of Western settlement and land allocation for settlers during the period under review in Carter's book. How do the differences in land allocation regulations for women in Canada and the United States reflect prevailing attitudes towards the position of women in society and the importance of marriage as a force of social cohesion? Given the geographic proximity of the two regions, why was there so much greater an interest in monogamous, state-sanctioned in Canada when compared to the United States, and what were the implications for the sort of settler society created in each place?
ReplyDelete2. Perry's critique of Haunted by Empire observes that the text was meant to "question the politics of nation and empire and how they shape the writing of history, but in critical ways it ends up reinforcing the hegemony of the United States as a subject of history and Americans as authors of it." (165-166) Later, she asks: "Do we rejoice that some of the issues that have been so central to our scholarship are being taken seriously by historians of the United States, or despair that this work has been ignored, glossed, or selectively used?" (166) Her arguments bring us back to previous discussions from this seminar about the place of national histories in the broader scope of transnational histories currently being produced. Is reference to the United States a prerequisite for scholarship on colonial North America? How would Carter's work on monogamy be strengthened or weakened if the United States were written out of it?
3. Carter makes the point that while Mormon polygamy was one of the most concerted challenges to the Canadian monogamous ideal, but that there was also extreme support for their immigration to Canada, provided they were willing to abandon their polygamous ways; above all else, Mormons were still "white people, industrious, thrifty and honest," and that there were no "half-breed" children to be found in all of Utah. Was race the most important social category in determining what made an appropriate settler on the Canadian frontier? How does official preference for the establishment of self-sufficient farming communities play into racialized immigration policies that privileged hardy Northern Europeans and "white" Mormons show the impact of time/place/space on what constitutes a "good immigrant"?
(Amendment/Edit: Apparently I was really taken with Sarah Carter's work this week?)
1. Both Carter and Perry look at marriage in Western Canada, but two different contexts on either side of the Rocky Mountains. While both articulate the importance of marriage 'laws' and policies in both situations, their conclusions are quite different. How much does the physical location influence the marriage and intimate relationships in both BC and Western Canada (as outlined by Perry and Carter)? Are these differences more attributed to the time period (Perry deals with a much earlier period than Carter) or simply colonial circumstance?
ReplyDelete2. In her introduction, Carter connects her book on marriage to contemporary debates surrounding the nature, purpose and make up of marriage. How does her book serve in the contemporary context where definitions of "traditional" marriage are constantly argued for being upheld? As a broader question, how can studies of intimate relations be used within the contemporary context, on either side of the 'debates'? Is there value in employing historical questions in this way?
3. Stoler attempts to draw connections between intimate relations within empires in order to demonstrate the need for a "history of comparison". She is aided by Hall's commentary and insertion of the British 'perspective'. What do these 'histories of comparison' demonstrate? Are they a valuable tool, as Stoler argues, or are the connections strained (which she also acknowledges)? Moving beyond the intimate realm specifically, are such comparison valuable for other topics within history?
Perry writes "The limited resources available to nineteenth-century historians relying primarily on written sources necessarily impose restrictions on the extent to which any scholar, particularly a non-Aboriginal one like me, can deduce (let alone ‘speak for’) First Nations experiences." (p.49) How do we see this in a book like Carter's, which relies almost entirely on state/settler sources? Are there any ways around this?
ReplyDeleteTo what extent does Perry's (or Carter's) identity matter? How might a non-settler scholar be able to tell this story differently? Or a non-scholar?
Sarah Carter’s book is quite explicitly written in relation to two prominent political issues of its time – the institution of marriage as monogamous and heterosexual, and recognition of Aboriginal governance and law. What do we think of Carter's defense of her use of the term 'marriage' to describe customs and unions that would not have been called 'marriage' in their own context? (p. 103) How does this relate to Carter's stated goal of unsettling ideas of what is 'normal' when it comes to marriage and monogamy today? How does this goal fit with (or not) a goal that relates to self-rule?
Adele Perry notes the tendency of American scholars to define North American history too narrowly within the area encompassed by the modern boundaries of the United States. Does Perry's On the Edge of Empire suffer a similar criticism in focusing too narrowly on British Columbia? She hints at the significant transnational flows along the Pacific West Coast from British Columbia to Mexico, but doesn't expand upon their contribution to the colony.
ReplyDeleteUsing Foucault's “biopolitics” to help understand the intimate gives it, to some degree, an ahistorical nature. As if, throughout time, rulers and moral reformers alike have known the intimate to be an especially important area to control. Catherine Hall reminds us, to the contrary, that family, home, and marriage were given immense importance by Christian missionaries. Something, in the case of the British empire, which happened slowly through the ninetenth century. In order to avoid making the intimate ahistorical, should the influence of missionaries be considered in greater detail, or is it possible to consider the intimate as an ahistorical phenomenon.
Carter places a lot of emphasis on the legal and religious power given to the concept of heterosexual monogamous marriage that was at one point a civil contract. She emphasizes the role of authorities using the concept of marriage to control a group of people. This unidirectional analysis does not acknowledge the political nature of marriage from the bottom up. In which ways was marriage used as a political tool (by men and women) as a means of accessing and changing the empire?
ReplyDeleteStoler claims that, "colonies were not hegemonic but uneven, imperfect and indifferent knowledge acquiring machines" (pp55). To what extent does Stoler portray colonies as such through her writing? If colonies do not see themselves as hegemonic, does this alter their influences on individual bodies?
The institution of marriage was shown in this weeks readins to be the nations mascot for morality. The lack of women in certain colonies and expecially in the west was a point of concern for the entire nation. If maintaining the nation was linked to maintaining marriage and women were at the core of that, what were women representing? What did women in marriages contribute to the discourse of the nation?
1. Do the analyses by Perry and Carter meet the call for transnational histories? How?
ReplyDelete2. If British Columbia is considered a periphery difficult to colonize (Stoler), and central Canada (Carter) can fall into that similar bounded categories, can we not argue that multiple regions, areas, locales, peoples might fall into these same core/periphery dualisms (consider Northern Ontario, the far north)?
3. In Stoler and Perry, analyses of the intimate provide important 'counter' histories. What is clear from both analyses, is that a dearth of direct voice from women (immigrant, and most-noticeably aboriginal) is largely absent. Documents of this sort are generally unavailable and point to the dominance of the male body (voice). How, in writing histories, do we write around/through this gap? How, for instance can we know if there were advantages, attractions, desires for mixed marriage by aboriginal women? There was a period prior to mass immigration when aboriginal men outnumbered non-aboriginal men, yet there were mixed 'marriages'. Were these intimacies all due to coersion, or to facilitate economic advantages? It is interesting to note that discussions (formal, informal, political) in our contemporary context about mixed aboriginal non-aboriginal marriages are dominantly about blood-lines, status and band membership (access, power, land, property).
1.Stoler argues on page 35 that white men “imposed- and women actively participated in- protective models of womanhood and motherhood and prescriptions for domestic relations that constrained both the women and men in servitude and those who ostensibly ruled”. How does this compare to the protective models of womanhood and motherhood asserted in other cultures around the world? Does Stoler miss an important opportunity to point out yet another moment of comparison of intimacies across national boundaries by discussing this issue as simply a practice of white men? How does Perry’s discussion of mixed-race relationships in British Columbia also complicate the image of the white man as protector of white women?
ReplyDelete2.Stoler argues for a more transnational approach to colonial history in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the racial and gendered aspects of “compounded colonialisms”. It is interesting to consider how the Bandung conference in 1955 plays into this discussion in that it also implies connections and similarities across national borders about the racialized experience of colonialism. Though some of the nations who joined the conference were recently independent and would argue for the unique circumstances of their independence, there was obviously some kind of concensus that this kind of international conference would be useful in order to avoid the re-invigoration of the colonial enterprise. Does the Bandung conference support or complicate Stoler’s argument?
Perry notes that the "end of coexistence" between colonizer and colonized is never fully acheived in British Columbia due to "a number of profound and vexing contradictions that lay at the heart of the settler colony's project." Is the end of total coexistence achieved then in a colony that does not share the specific and "vexing" contradictions of BC? Does Perry blunt her argument when she refers only to BC?
ReplyDeleteAs Hall notes - moments of religious exchange were very important in the intimate encounters between colonizer and colonized. Do Perry and Stoler need to give more attention to these sites? (Especially considering that Perry's sources are religious in nature.)
Stoler labels colonial regimes as knowledge-acquiring machines. Their test tubes, the colonies. Colonies were locations where gendered and racialized intimacies could be experimented with and understood. What prevented this 'knowledge collecting' and experimentation from occurring in the epicentres of Europe?
ReplyDeleteCarter discusses the concept of legal pluralism in regards to the governments decision to recognize native marriage. Has marriage continued to be an increasingly plural institution, or have contemporary debates about marriage caused us to view marriage as an increasingly singular and defined institution?
On page 14, Carter mentions the fact that intimate relationships in the colonies were extremely difficult to police. How do you think this fact impacted the historical evolution of marriage? Would the situation have been different if the imperial policies on the issue were rejected outright, or followed to the letter? Are there parts of our contemporary view of marriage that can be traced back to it's status as an area of sustained conflict during the colonial period?
ReplyDeleteIn a similar vein to Rachel's question, how would the use of aboriginal sources potentially change the way early colonial gender history is understood? Are there identifiable areas that are lacking because these sources have been excluded? Is it right for Perry to believe that, as a non-aboriginal Canadian, that she is somehow incapable of properly interacting with aboriginal sources, or that she should not?
Carter's "Importance of Being Monogamous" emphasizes the portrayal of women in the West as political objects. They are blamed for the breakdown of a marriage, if they are single they threaten other marriages, or if they within the context of Christian conjugality, they need to be saved from their heathen union. To what extent should this be considered politicking versus the social norms of the time?
ReplyDeleteThe concept of 'romantic racism' that Perry describes in "On the Edge of Empire" is illustrated in the many poems she highlights in the chapter. How does this concept problematize the certainty of the historiography and to what extent does if reflect a colonialist mentality? And how does it compare to the other forms of objectification of women as demonstrated by Carter?