Anjali Arondekar considers the relationship between sexuality and the colonial archive by posing the following questions: Why does sexuality (still) seek its truth in the historical archive? What are the spatial and temporal logics that compel such a return? And conversely, what kind of “archive” does such a recuperative hermeneutics produce? Rather than render sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive through the preferred lens of historical invisibility (which would presume that there is something about sexuality that is lost or silent and needs to “come out”), Arondekar engages sexuality’s recursive traces within the colonial archive against and through our very desire for access. The logic and the interpretive resources of For the Record arise out of two entangled and minoritized historiographies: one in South Asian studies and the other in queer/sexuality studies. Focusing on late colonial India, Arondekar examines the spectacularization of sexuality in anthropology, law, literature, and pornography from 1843 until 1920. By turning to materials and/or locations that are familiar to most scholars of queer and subaltern studies, Arondekar considers sexuality at the center of the colonial archive rather than at its margins. Each chapter addresses a form of archival loss, troped either in a language of disappearance or paucity, simulacrum or detritus: from Richard Burton’s missing report on male brothels in Karáchi (1845) to a failed sodomy prosecution in Northern India, Queen Empress v. Khairati (1884), and from the ubiquitous India-rubber dildos found in colonial pornography of the mid-to-late nineteenth century to the archival detritus of Kipling’s stories about the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

Focuses on the period leading up to the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

This book tackles the historical relationship between colonial violence and monuments in Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, North America, and Australia. In this volume, the authors ask similar questions about monuments in each location and answer them following a parallel structure that encourages comparison, highlighting common themes. The chapters track the contested histories of monuments, scrutinizing their narrative power and examining the violent events behind them. It is both about the history of monuments and the histories the monuments are meant to commemorate. It is interested in this nuanced relationship between violence, monuments, memory, and colonial legacies; the ways different facets of colonial violence—conquest, resistance, massacres, genocides, internments, and injustices—have been commemorated (or haven’t been), how they live in the present, and how pertinent they are in the present to different peoples. Legacies of colonial violence, and continued reinterpretations of the past and its meanings remain very much ongoing. They are still very much unsettled questions in large parts of the world. Colonial Violence and Monuments in Global History will be essential reading for students, scholars, and researchers of political science, history, sociology and colonial studies. The book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

This is an interdisciplinary volume exploring a range of historical, anthropological and literary ideas and issues in South Asian Borderlands. Going beyond the territorial and geo-political imaginaries of contemporary borderlands in South Asia, chapters in this book engage with the questions of sovereignty, control, policing as well as continuing affections across politically divided borderlands. Modern conceptions of nationhood have created categories of legality and illegality among historically, socially, economically and emotionally connected residents of South Asian borderlands. This volume provides unique insights into the interconnected lives and histories of these borderland spaces and communities.

During the First World War, Etaples, a coastal fishing port situated on the North-East French coast, 15 miles south of Boulogne, was a base camp for the British Army, as well as a major medical facility for wounded and sick troops, including both British and Canadian hospitals. The Etaples camp also included a military cemetery, which by the end of the war contained the graves of more than 11,000 British and British Imperial soldiers. Soldiers crossing the Channel on their way to the battlefields of the Western Front found themselves at the Etaples camp, where they would stay an average of two weeks undergoing further training and drills. The training staff who oversaw them had a bad reputation for either their training methods or their lack of genuine military experience at the Front. The Etaples camp was also part of the route taken by men on their way back to the UK. Opportunities for leisure and recreation activities for soldiers away from the camp could be found in Etaples town. Officers, meanwhile, headed to the slightly more up-market beach resort of nearby Le Touquet, which was separated from the Etaples area by the river Canche, and accessible by a bridge. To ensure it remained ‘just for officers,’ pickets, usually members of the Military Police, were placed on the bridge to enforce its exclusiveness. The men's overall treatment, conditions in the camp and the poor relationship between them and members of the Military Police, was a cocktail for disaster, culminating in a number of incidents in September 1917, which have collectively become known as the Etaples Mutiny, the full story of which can be found in this book.

Includes section "Reviews and notices of books".