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Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Decolonization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2018

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick
Matthew P. Fitzpatrick*
Affiliation:
Flinders University
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Extract

In the past two decades, colonial studies, the postcolonial turn, the new imperial history, as well as world and global history have made serious strides toward revising key elements of German history. Instead of insisting that German modernity was a fundamentally unique, insular affair that incubated authoritarian social tendencies, scholars working in these fields have done much to reinsert Germany into the broader logic of nineteenth-century global history, in which the thalassocratic empires of Europe pursued the project of globalizing their economies, populations, and politics. During this period, settler colonies, including German South West Africa, were established and consolidated by European states at the expense of displaced, helotized, or murdered indigenous populations. Complementing these settler colonies were mercantile entrepôts and plantation colonies, which sprouted up as part of a systematic, global attempt to reorient non-European economies, work patterns, and epistemological frameworks along European lines. Although more modestly than some of its European collaborators and competitors, Germany joined Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States in a largely liberal project of global maritime imperialism.

Type
Part II: Reflections, Reckonings, Revelations
Information
Central European History , Volume 51 , Special Issue 1: Special Commemorative Issue: Central European History at Fifty (1968–2018) , March 2018 , pp. 83 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2018 

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References

1 For a sample of the work on German colonialism, see Berman, Nina, Mühlhahn, Klaus, and Nganang, Alain Patrice, eds., German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kundrus, Birthe, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2003)Google Scholar; Steinmetz, George, The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lindner, Ulrike, Koloniale Begegnungen: Deutschland und Großbritannien als Imperialmächte in Afrika, 1880–1914 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2011)Google Scholar; Naranch, Bradley and Eley, Geoff, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ames, Eric, Klotz, Marcia, and Wildenthal, Lora, Germany's Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Walther, Daniel J., Creating Germans Abroad: Cultural Policies and National Identity in Namibia (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Wildenthal, Lora, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For its intersection with transnational and global history, see Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Conrad, Sebastian and Osterhammel, Jürgen, eds., Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006)Google Scholar; Conrad, Sebastian, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; idem, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 4 (2013): 545Google Scholar.

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7 Influential in sparking this wave were Zantop, Susanne, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, Lennox, Sara, and Zantop, Susanne, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

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11 Following in the footsteps of Lora Wildenthal's German Women for Empire, see Loosen, Livia, Deutsche Frauen in den Südsee-Kolonien des Kaiserreichs. Alltag und Beziehungen zur indigenen Bevölkerung, 1884–1919, (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014)Google Scholar; Birthe Kundrus, “Weiblicher Kulturimperialismus. Die imperialistischen Frauenverbände des Kaiserreichs,”  in Conrad and Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational, 213–35; Dietrich, Anette, Weiße Weiblichkeiten: Konstruktionen von “Rasse” und Geschlecht im deutschen Kolonialismus (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 There is nevertheless a burgeoning literature here as well. See, e.g., Habermas, Rebekka, Skandal in Togo. Ein Kapitel deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2016)Google Scholar; Moyd, Michelle, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Pesek, Michael, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika. Expedition, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2005)Google Scholar; Giblin, James Leonard and Monson, Jamie, eds., Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War (Leiden: Brill, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yigbe, Dotsé, “Is Togo a Permanent Model Colony?,” in The Cultural Legacy of German Colonial Rule, ed. Mühlhahn, Klaus (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2017), 97–112Google Scholar; Gottschalk, Sebastian, Kolonialismus und Islam: Deutsche und britische Herrschaft in Westafrika, 1900–1914 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2016)Google Scholar; Nyada, Germain, “The Germans Cannot Master Our Language!,” in German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences, ed. Berman, Nina, Mühlhahn, Klaus, and Nganang, Patrice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 50–70Google Scholar.

15 Kopp, Kristin, Germany's Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelson, Robert L., ed., Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East, 1850 Through the Present (New York: Palgrave, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See Förderer, Gabriele, Koloniale Grüße aus Samoa: Eine Diskursanalyse von deutschen, englischen und US-amerikanischen Reisebeschreibungen aus Samoa von 1860–1916 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steinmetz, Devil's Handwriting; Loosen, Deutsche Frauen; Morlang, Thomas, Rebellion in der Südsee: Der Aufstand auf Ponape gegen die deutschen Kolonialherren 1910/11 (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2010)Google Scholar. These studies join works by earlier specialists on the Pacific, including Hiery, Hermann J., The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Hempenstall, Peter J., Pacific Islanders under German Rule: A Study in the Meaning of Colonial Resistance (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Firth, Stewart, New Guinea under the Germans (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

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21 Mühlhahn, Cultural Legacy; Sean Wempe, “Lost at Locarno? Colonial Germans and the Redefinition of ‘Imperial’ Germany, 1919–1933” (PhD thesis, Emory University, 2015)—a revised version will appear as Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, the League of Nations, and the Redefinition of Imperialism, 1919–1933 (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

22 Along these lines, see the special edition of Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 1 (2006): “Decolonizing German Theory,” edited by George Steinmetz. More generally, see Ciccariello-Maher, George, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Beyond German history, researchers around the world are beginning to ask what a truly decolonizing research praxis might actually look like. See, e.g., the special issue on decolonizing research practices, edited by Debbie Hohaia, Lisa Hall, and Nia Emmanouil, in Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts 22 (2017).

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25 Deutsches Historisches Museum, German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present (Berlin: Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2016)Google Scholar. For a criticism of the lack of African involvement in the planning and opening of the exhibition, see Peter Schraeder, “Wie eine neue Ausstellung den Kolonialismus aufarbeiten will,” Vorwärts, Oct. 14, 2016  (https:// www.vorwaerts.de/artikel/neue-ausstellung-kolonialismus-aufarbeiten-will).

26 Jürgen Zimmerer, “Der Kolonialismus ist kein Spiel,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Aug. 9, 2017 (http://plus.faz.net/feuilleton/2017-08-09/der-kolonialismus-ist-kein-spiel/40725.html).

27 Lars Eckstein, “Recollecting Bones: The Remains of German-Australian Colonial Entanglements,” Postcolonial Studies (forthcoming, 2018); Le Gall, Yann, “The Return of Human Remains to the Pacific: The Resurgence of Ancestors and the Emergence of Postcolonial Memory Practices,” in Postcolonial Justice: Reassessing the Fair Go, ed. Adair, Gigi and Schwarz, Anja (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2016), 45–60Google Scholar; Ahrndt, Wiebke, “Zum Umgang mit menschlichen Überresten in deutschen Museen und Sammlungen—Die Empfehlung des Deutschen Museumsbundes,” in Sammeln, Erforschen, Zurückgeben?, ed. Stoecker, Holger, Schnalke, Thomas, and Winkelmann, Andreas (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2013), 314–22Google Scholar. Also see “Forum: Human Remains in Museums and Collections: A Critical Engagement with the ‘Recommendations’ of the German Museums Association (2013)” (https:// www.hsozkult.de/text/id/texte-4037).

28 “SPK erforscht Herkunft von menschlichen Überresten aus Ost-Afrika—Gerda Henkel Stiftung fördert das Projekt” (https://www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de/pressemitteilung/news/2017/08/02/spk-erforscht-herkunft-von-menschlichen-ueberresten-aus-ost-afrika-gerda-henkel-stiftung-foerdert-da.html).

29 Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40Google Scholar.

30 Ibid., 11, 19.

31 Ibid., 35.

32 Evelyn Araluen, “Resisting the Institution,” Overland 227 (https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-227/feature-evelyn-araluen/).