Culture and History: Student Research Papers

https://tidsskrift.dk/culturehistoryku/issue/feed Culture and History: Student Research Papers 2024-12-13T13:43:21+01:00 Peter Edelberg edelberg@hum.ku.dk Open Journal Systems Culture and History er et online tidsskrift, der publicerer artikler forfattet af studerende og ansatte ved Saxo-Instituttet, Københavns Universitet. Tidsskriftet udkommer både som temanumre og blandede numre og redigeres af en fast redaktion, evt. i samarbejde med gæsteredaktører, som i fællesskab tager stilling til indkomne forslag og sørger for evt. fagfællebedømmelse. https://tidsskrift.dk/culturehistoryku/article/view/151772 Indholdsfortegnelse 2024-12-02T15:54:02+01:00 Redaktionen edelberg@hum.ku.dk 2024-12-13T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Redaktionen https://tidsskrift.dk/culturehistoryku/article/view/151773 Forord 2024-12-02T15:55:09+01:00 Redaktionen edelberg@hum.ku.dk 2024-12-13T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 https://tidsskrift.dk/culturehistoryku/article/view/152196 Introduction 2024-12-13T13:24:23+01:00 Daniel Steinbach edelberg@hum.ku.dk

The 19th and 20th centuries were transformative periods of expansion, consolidation, and eventual unravelling of colonial empires across the globe. These centuries saw the proliferation of imperial ideologies, practices, and cultural codes that permeated everyday life, while also shaping and reshaping social systems and structures. Colonial cultures emerged as dynamic spaces where differences were encountered, power asserted, identities constructed, and resistance negotiated. This special issue explores the multifaceted nature of colonial cultures from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, drawing attention to their manifestation in diverse regions and contexts, from the settler colonies of Australia and Kenya to the imperial ‘peripheries’ of Greenland and Indochina. The breadth of geographical scope across the ten articles contained in the special issue reflects the extensive reach of high imperialism. Across contexts, the articles examine complex intersections among material culture, ideology, and social hierarchy. By analysing distinct practices – from dining to photography, hunting, conservation, and governance – the articles illuminate how colonial cultures functioned as instruments of control as well as sites of conflict, and in so doing reveal the enduring legacies of imperialism.

In the intersection of food history and colonisation, historical cookbooks are often more prescriptive than representative of actual culinary habitants of individuals. In the colonial setting, cookbooks act as a marker for the subordination of indigenous cuisine in place of cuisines rooted in the heart of the empire—food becomes representative of culture, identity, and civilisation. In the Australian context, the earliest published cookbooks date back to the 1860’s, a period in which Australia saw extensive cultivation, pasteurisation, and settlement. Thus, as we trace Australian cookbooks through the late 19th and early 20th century, the inclusion and exclusion of exogenous foodstuffs becomes indicative of both colonial identity markers and performative campaigns to associate the colony with specific and particular notions of what cuisine should consist of. By analysing the recipes and discourse of historical cookbooks and emigrants’ guides in Australia, the performative nature of food asserts the tenets of culinary colonialism by maintaining spaces of control and occupation through the association of cuisine, identity, and civilisation.

When photography arrived in the Dutch East Indies in the middle of the 19th century, European colonists embraced the medium to immortalise impressions of colonial life. By studying photographs produced by European colonists in the Dutch East Indies, this article examines dining culture as an arena of colonist regulation, construction and maintenance of colonist identity through visual and material performances and practices from approximately 1880 to 1920. The article argues that colonists upheld clear cultural and social separation from the colonised through dining practices which highlighted the European material culture around the dining table and gentile sensibilities modeled after the ideals of Victorian gentility in the colonial metropole. The complete social segregation and rejection of cultural assimilation that is evident in the examined photographs, served to maintain colonists’ European identity and exclusive positions of power in colonial society. The medium of photography enabled colonists to perpetuate, reinforce, and preserve the captured messages of colonist idealized life and superiority, as the photographs were continually shared in both private and public European spheres.

The first Greenlandic photographer, John Møller, produced over 3000 images in the period 1889-1922. This article seeks to analyse and contextualise selected images from Møller’s practice. In doing so, the article explores the photographer’s agency on composition choices, power dynamics and colonial hierarchies. Furthermore, the article suggests that Møller, through counternarratives in his visual representations, unveils nuanced reflections of power dynamics and a subtle critique and resistance that served to undermine the Danish colonial authority in Greenland.

From the establishment of the first Australian colony until the mid-1900’s, Aboriginal people were routinely forcibly restrained using chains by white settlers. Using two lenses, this article analyses a selection of photographs published in colonial newspapers, depicting this practice. It firstly examines how colonial photography constructed the Aboriginal body as an object of fear to be controlled by the frightened settler. This article also interrogates how these photographs appealed to humanitarian sympathies, which themselves were highly conditional, with comparisons to slavery embodying a ‘safe’ method of critique, one which did not challenge the settler colonial state.

2024-12-13T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 https://tidsskrift.dk/culturehistoryku/article/view/151777 Atrocities in the 'Heart of Darkness' 2024-12-02T16:01:58+01:00 Daniel Fabricius edelberg@hum.ku.dk

This article will provide an in-depth analysis on the colonial usage of sexual violence as a weapon of superiority during the Congo Free State during 1885-1908. The evaluation aims to uncover how white settlers systematically and intentionally utilised sexual violence as tool of colonial warfare. Literature shows that rape was a common occurrence which caused psychological, economic and physical hardship towards the Congolese. Crimes relating to sexual violence transpired through atrocities like rape, abduction, blackmail, forced incest and kidnapping. It will be illustrated that sexual violence was fuelled by motives like economics, sexual lust, psychological dominance and military tactics. Sexualised atrocities proved effective as they inflicted unprecedented injuries while also manifesting social hierarchies. Sexual violence served as reliable weapon of colonial warfare which remained unbound by controversy and objections. Rape and sexual violence were effective tools in causing psychological and physical injuries while simultaneously displaying its perpetrator as the superior force.

European settlers in colonial Kenya in the beginning of the 20th century embodied a significant contradiction: While advocating vividly for the preservation of a ‘pristine nature’, the settlers hunting and agrobusiness activities are the single most important factor for a rapid decline of wildlife population in the area. This article investigates the meaning of hunting and conservation practices for the establishment and consolidation of a White settler elite in Laikipia, Kenya. The argumentation is based on episodic evidence from the biography of Lord Delamere, an influential first settler, hunter and conservationist, written by Elsbeth Huxley in 1935. It investigates the practices around ‘managing’ wildlife from an ideological and economical dimension. I argue that the transplantation of European aristocratic traditions of ‘The Hunt’ and the understanding of nature and society as separate spheres delegitimized pre-colonial modes of nature-use and reinforced a racist hierarchy of societies. The systematic dispossession of precolonial landholders, their forceful but selective inclusion in the settler economy and the eradication of wildlife for profitable agrobusiness irreversibly degraded the various forms of precolonial economies and consolidated the settler’s presence in Laikipia until today.

This article examines the hunting practices in the British colonies, the significance of hunting and what the specific hunting style used, revealed about the imperial and colonial mindset of that time. Furthermore, this article examines the gendered and racial aspects of colonial life and hunting, as well as the personal hunting experiences of the Danish author Karen Blixen. This article argues that hunting in the British colonies was a significant part of colonial life and imperial control, as well as a great influence on the gender ideals and roles of this time. The personal experiences of Karen Blixen as settler, white, woman and hunter functions as an embodiment of the colonial and imperial views of this time and place.

In this article, I aim to illustrate the process of transforming Greenlandic society from one centered around a subsistence economy to one integrated into the external Danish market, drawing particularly on Karl Polanyi’s characterization of market patterns. My focus will be on the means by which the colonial administration acquired a socio-economic dominant position in Greenland, the colonial reforms implemented during the nineteenth century, and the establishment of forstanderskaberne, local councils of representatives, as a pivotal milestone in the transformation of the Indigenous society.

2024-12-13T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 https://tidsskrift.dk/culturehistoryku/article/view/151781 'Métis' Child Removal in French Indochina 2024-12-02T16:18:03+01:00 Ida Kaae Antonisen edelberg@hum.ku.dk

In this article, the practice of removing mixed-race, or métis, children from their indigenous mothers in French Indochina is examined. While the changed circumstances of the Second World War and the ensuing process towards decolonisation forced colonial authorities to rethink their priorities, the practice of child removal remained constant. Against the backdrop of this persistent and relatively unchanging practice, changes and continuities in rhetoric about and justifications for child removal reveal underlying colonial interests and anxieties around race, memory, and maintaining French influence, even beyond the official end of French colonial rule.

2024-12-13T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 https://tidsskrift.dk/culturehistoryku/article/view/151782 Portuguese Africa through Danish Eyes and Ears 2024-12-02T16:22:55+01:00 Alex Alexandre edelberg@hum.ku.dk

This article examines Danmarks Radio’s portrayal of the Portuguese colonial state, specifically during the Portuguese colonial war. From the collected archive material, it has been possible to identify three main phases of the reporting. The first phase, from 1961, was uncritical of the conflicts that were erupting the in Portuguese African colonies. From the mid-1960’s a second phase started to emerge, where analysis and criticism in the reports appeared. By 1970, the coverage of the different wars evolved into a third phase, which was committed anti-colonial.