Mapping a Colonial Borderland: Objectifying the Geo-Body of India's Northeast

India’s Northeast frontier is at the margins of three study areas: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. This paper attempts a history of “mapping” in its broader sense as a cultural universal over a relatively long period. It is not a history of cartography, but focuses on the interface between cartography and cosmography, which were, in turn, shaped by imperial power and geographical knowledge. This approach offers a high-altitude view of this Asian borderland as the imperial frontier of both the Mughals and the British, and the national fringe of Republican India. The authors argue that imperial geographical discourses invested the colonial Northeast (British Assam) with a new kind of territorial identity. Surveyors and mapmakers objectified the “geo-body” of this borderland in a spatial fix and visualized it as a Northeast-on-the-map. Cartographic territoriality naturalized traditional frontiers into colonial borderlands, which, in turn, forged national boundaries.

Outposts of Empire: Scientific Discovery and Colonial Displacement in Gaskell's Wives and Daughters

This article offers a fresh consideration of Elizabeth Gaskell's unfinished Wives and Daughters (1864–6), in terms of what this metropolitan novelist knew about contemporary scientific debates and imperial exploration of Africa, and how her familiarity with these discourses was incorporated into her imaginative work. Her focus for these two related themes is the naturalist Roger Hamley, whose character and exploits are meant to parallel those of the young Charles Darwin. Roger's direct involvement in the historical Geoffroy–Cuvier debate allows Gaskell to offer a sophisticated examination of how discussions about evolutionary biology (about which she learned from personal acquaintances and printed sources) contributed to political and social change in the era of the first Reform Bill. Roger's subsequent journey to Abyssinia to gather specimens allows Gaskell to form a link between science and imperial exploration, which demonstrates how, when carried to its conclusion, the development of classificatory knowledge systems was never innocent; rather, it facilitated colonial exploitation and intervention, which allowed for the ‘opening up of Africa’. Gaskell's pronouncements about science in the novel are far more explicit than her brief references to empire; the article ponders why this should be so, and offers some suggestions about how her reliance on imaginative and discursive constructs concerning the ‘Dark Continent’ may be interpreted as tacit complicity with the imperial project, or at least an interest in its more imaginative aspects.

The Violent Maintenance of the Portuguese Colonial Identity and the Search for a Postcolonial one: literary images of Portugal as a colonial and postcolonial nation

Through the examination of Camões's Os Lusíadas , Sena's Os Grão-Capitães and Saramago's A Jangada de Pedra , this article explores violence as a means of shaping Portuguese identity in different historical contexts, and how these works portray the continued recourse to violence as Portugal moves from colonizing to postcolonial nation.