A basic fear of colonial agents since at least the late eighteenth century was the possibility that the “the natives” would suddenly break their chains of subservience, and rise fiercely against their colonial masters. Imageries of native rebels, deceptive informants, treacherous kings, unreliable servants, seditious slaves, and so forth are inherent to the colonial endeavours of Europeans, and to the related forms of imagining and justifying their options. Colonial officials thus often perceived those they ruled, or imagined or intended to rule, as peoples on the verge of insurgency, as resistors in, at least, a latent form. To assign “resistance” as the single-minded purpose of the actions of the colonized peoples was consequently a pervasive feature of the othering practices and the anxieties of colonial power. From ennui to fear, panic, or nervous breakdown, a world of emotions and feelings of vulnerability shaped the experience of colonial situations and constrained political options, on many circles, at many levels.1 This image—at odds with the idea of colonialism as an exhilarating experience shaped by encounters with the new and the exotic—is evocative of the need to understand resistance and colonialism in connection with colonial imaginaries and practices grounded upon negative “emotional states of exception”.2
Thus in such contexts, colonizers often negatively perceived and eventually dealt with “resistance” and “resistors”. Anti-colonial and nationalist imageries reversed, but also reinforced, this same trope, especially in the twentieth century. They inverted the pejorative sign, celebrating “resistance” as the basic, hidden, or manifest driving force of the agency of colonized populations across history. In this view “resistance” became the primary (when not the only) morally and politically valid orientation or justification of the actions of the colonized, to the benefit of an emancipatory narrative of “decolonization” and national “liberation”. If anxious colonial administrators kept “waiting for the barbarians”, the anti-colonial heralds of insurgency perhaps kept longing for an imagined resistant subjectivity to become real, and intentionally active.
These introductory observations make clear that the historical phenomena of European colonialisms as well as of African, American, and Asian anti-colonialisms need to be considered in connection with resistance as a topic and as a practice. The notion of “colonialism”, in other words, this volume argues, requires reflection about its companion notion of “resistance”. Resistance and colonialism, then, is the nexus that we propose to investigate. Since the early twentieth century, the notion of “resistance” became common currency in colonial idioms and anti-colonial ideologies to refer to military, political, and other forms of countering the authority of the colonizing institutions and agents. Since the 1960s–1970s, “resistance” became a current term in the critical and conceptual analysis of colonialism as a power relationship. In anti-colonial and post-colonial studies, the centrality of “resistance” has been expressed in various guises. From Frantz Fanon’s calls for “decolonization” as a violent process of subjective opposition; to Amílcar Cabral’s elaborations on “cultural resistance” as “an alternative to the direct and structural violence of colonialism”; to Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry and ambivalence as subversion of colonial authority; to Ranajit Guha’s valuable critique of the colonial prose of rebellions as a means to recover the actual “consciousness” of peasant insurgency; or to the Subaltern Studies project to recuperate subaltern agency, “resistance” has persisted as an “amorphous concept”, as David Jefferess observes, trapped in oppositional language and in emancipatory politics under different names.3
In the 1990s, however, the validity of resistance as a concept and empirical topic was criticized for either merely reiterating the colonial representations, reducing colonialism to a simplistic binary, or limiting the possible plethora of the colonized subjects’ motivations to a political straightjacket.4 For, if colonial counter-insurgency commonly operated through the abstract othering of “insurgents” as an object and target of colonial violence, anti-colonialist movements and scholarship often functioned through generalizing an essence for the acting insurgent subjects, as if driven by the single purpose to counter “colonial oppression” and attain a so-called liberation.
If unable to evade such colonial and anti-colonial dualisms, the notion of “resistance” arguably loses much of its early attraction and analytical vitality. Yet even contained in this force field it did not, in fact, disappear from scholarly concerns, let alone from current political discourse about coloniality. Today, in post-colonial nations (former European colonies), ideas of “liberation”, “freedom fighting”, and “anti-colonial resistance” retain powerful significance as mobilizing slogans for nation-building, and often appear as historical concepts in retrospective nationalist readings of the birth of nation-states. In some academic circles, a cross-disciplinary field of “resistance studies” is coalescing with new forms of political activism.5 In the world we live in, moreover, the theme “resistance and colonialism” demands analytical attention. Resisting colonial processes is not simply associated with a bygone past. “Resistance” is invoked as a meaningful interpretive notion, and as a political practice in the context of contemporary re-configurations of colonial or imperialist oppression.6
In a parallel vein, resistance has been treated as a subsidiary to, or as a veiled theme within, the emphasis on knowledge and power that has characterized much critical historical and anthropological scholarship on colonialism in the last decades of the twentieth century.7 Inspired by Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Bernard S. Cohn, among others, historians dissected the cultural and epistemological apparatus of colonialism as a form of hegemony and/or domination. Students of colonialism have thus revealed the political nature of colonial knowledge. They have also consistently critiqued the monolithic understanding of colonial “domination”, offering alternative accounts and solutions.8 Thus we now have a wealth of studies that expose the fractured, ambivalent, uncertain, and anxious workings of the colonizers’ actions and the apparatuses of imperial powers and colonial states. Yet the conceptual sophistication invested in showing the internal complexities of colonial power–knowledge has not been accompanied, in our view, by a symmetrical scrutiny of “resistance” as an apparatus and as a practice that has to be historicized and theorized in its own right. Power and domination cannot be conceivable without some form or degree of resistance, as Foucault’s famous motto implied. “Where there is power, there is resistance”, he asserted in his defence of the relational nature of power, “and, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. […] [Power relationships] depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations”.9 In many cases, however, Foucault’s call for addressing resistance as constitutive of colonial power has been neglected or simply left out of the analysis of power relations themselves.
Therefore, as just this summary overview indicates, the term “resistance” has for long populated imperial and colonial historiography as a key descriptive of subaltern insurgency and rebellion, and it has been central to referential literature in post-colonial studies. Yet, we believe, it is still necessary to formulate novel questions, and carry on new researches, about an old, but still vital, topic. The texts in this volume reveal the achievements of theoretical and methodological debates on the concept of resistance, which also result in a broader, and richer, thematic diversity. One of their main objectives is precisely to perceive the forms of resistance against the grain of historical consecrated narratives, those that still proceed within a framework of a traditional imperial history or those trapped into the politics of grand nationalist anti-colonial narratives. “Monolithic portrayals of resistors” (as well as of the “dominants”, those other barbarians in reverse), as Ortner observed in 1995, have pervaded post-colonial studies. But, just like colonial students have done with the “dominants”, such monolithic portrayals still need to be made more complex, without, nonetheless, denying the value of “resistance” both as a concept and as a historical phenomenon.10
This volume undertakes this challenge, bringing forward an innovative set of studies that seek to revitalize the study of “resistance” as an analytical field in the comparative history of Western colonialisms, including their engagements with other polities. The essays collected herein cover a diversity of chronologies and geographies of the European overseas expansion in Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania, from the eighteenth century to the age of decolonization in the twentieth century. Certainly, in order to appreciate the varied configurations of resistance and colonialism, it is important to be sensitive to each specific and distinct chronology and geography under analysis. Yet, rather than embarking on typological divides into places, empires, or periods, we believe it is here more fruitful to provoke reflection about resistance in colonial histories, from historiographical and conceptual angles that cut across these divides. We aim to contribute to the ongoing re-evaluation of concepts and practices of resistance in both colonial and anti-colonial thought, adding to the questioning of both negative and celebratory readings of forms of “insurgency” (and related counteractions). The plurality of forms of imagining and enacting resistance within the power relations of colonialism is addressed through distinct topics and approaches. The authors examine runaway slaves and slave rebellions in the Caribbean; mutiny and revolt in colonial India; memories and narratives of banditry and liberation in post-war Africa; diplomatic negotiations and cross-border confrontations; theft, escape, and even the subversive effects of nature in colonial projects of labour exploitation, farming, and mining. Each essay adopts its own singular analytical and historiographical approach to the nexus between resistance and colonialism in a broad range of historical circumstances across the British, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish empires, and with one incursion into imperial China. Together, however, they allow for a methodological reflection on how to read and (de)code resistance in archival documents—and how to conjugate documental approaches with oral history, indigenous memories, and international histories of empire. Together, they stand for a fruitful approach to historicizing resistance, both as a concept and as a practice, across different imperial and colonial histories. This approach, this volume argues, is fertilized by methodological triangulation between the archive and the field; by in-depth studies of the local meanings and historical circumstances; and by the contributions of international history. The three parts that compose this volume, each organized respectively around these approaches, express our threefold contribution. In what follows, we frame the essays, first, in relation to the scope of our critique of resistance in anti-colonial master narratives; and then in connection with a proposal to approach resistance practices as repertoires.
Resistance and the Anti-colonial Narrative
This book benefits from an accumulated wealth of debates on the concept of resistance and, more broadly, on discussions about the conceptual use of colonial categories. We think that these theoretical and methodological debates and critiques, rather than rendering the concept of resistance obsolete and useless, guarantee this notion, at the same time, greater rigor and fruitful plasticity. Assuming the critical relevance of these debates, we consider that the po...