This dissertation examines how Indian Muslim thinkers participated in and contributed to regional and global debates about the concept of minority as a category of governance and identity constituted through law, politics, and daily life. Focusing on the period from the end of the Crimean War in 1856 to the 1947 partition of India, it follows the writings of Islamic modernists, a transregional group of thinkers who championed an egalitarian view of Islam as an alternative vision for universal rights and ethics. Using periodicals, letters, memoirs, pamphlets, treatises, official documents, and other sources (mainly in Urdu, Arabic, Russian, and, English, and, to a lesser extent, in Persian, Hebrew, and French) mostly from archives and libraries across India, Britain, and Israel/Palestine, this dissertation traces how Britain’s classification of Indian Muslims as a minority put them at the center of global conversations about rights, citizenship, and emancipation. It also shows how South Asian Islamic modernists, in dialogue with one another and political and intellectual projects across the British Empire, Khedival Egypt, Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East, Tsarist Empire, and Soviet Russia and Central Asia, formulated novel modes of belonging that challenged both colonial rule and national territorial partitions. The concept of a Muslim minority emerged in the context of the trans-imperial “Muslim Question”—i.e., how European powers sought to “manage” Muslim subjects, and how Muslims responded to such politics and sought to transform them. After the Crimean War (1853-56), Britain began to link its governance over Muslims in the Indian subcontinent to its diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire and Khedival Egypt. On the one hand, British officials now invoked their status as rulers over the largest Muslim population in the world to increase their influence in Ottoman and Egyptian politics. On the other hand, these officials pointed to their military and diplomatic support of Ottoman sovereignty in the Crimean War in an attempt to win over “Indian Muslim public opinion.” At the same time, by creating the categories of “Muslim minority” and “Hindu majority” through technologies of enumeration and identification, most notably the All-India Census of 1871-1872, Britain quantified and politicized religious difference among Indians. Amidst these upheavals, Islamic scholars and activists in North India joined hands and articulated new visions of rights, identity, and unity across difference. However, this was not only a subcontinental story. Rather than historicizing the minority question only via European imperial or local lenses, this dissertation breaks new ground by showing how Islamic modernists interpreted, applied and produced models of mutilingualism, multiconfessionalism, and federalism from and across the British, Ottoman, and Tsarist empires and Khedival Egypt, and, after 1917, Soviet Russia and Central Asia to challenge both imperial and national “solutions” to the minority question. Taking an interdisciplinary view of “minority” as a complex interplay between demography, bureaucracy, discourse, practice, and experience, “Recasting Minority” argues that the concept of minority structured core debates about and in modern South Asia and the Middle East and their transregional linkages, from the conception of halal meat, to questions of Arabic as a language of belonging for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to the creation of anticolonial solidarities. In so doing, this dissertation questions the dominant historiography that binds minority within European genealogies of nation-state formation and politicization of religious difference. Rather than regarding minority solely as a persecuted group or a predicament produced by “secular governance,” this dissertation shows that the emergence of this concept in trans-imperial geopolitics, and the precarious position of Muslims working within and beyond them, enabled Islamic modernists to produce alternative visions of sovereignty, religious difference, and worldmaking. In so doing, my dissertation synthesizes the global intellectual history of the concept of minority with the socio-political and cultural history of South and West Asia and Eurasia, helping explain the enduring potency of this concept in these regions today.

Sudanese Political Movements and the Struggle for the State: 1964-1985 examines Sudanese opposition movements focusing on the early independence period. It begins in the period immediately following the 1964 October Revolution in which a civil uprising led by students, unions, and civil society at large ousted President Ibrahim Abboud. This event defined understandings of citizenship and political opposition for decades to come. Following 1964, a host of political movements led by Communists, Islamists, sectarian parties, and regional rebel groups all acted with the knowledge that change to the political system—even the removal of the President—was possible and could be done again. These movements engaged in different forms of confrontation with an evolving regime, not only altering the policies of the state but defining what forms of politics were seen as reasonable and worthy of recognition. These confrontations functioned as an iterative process that both altered the state as well as the larger political system in which the government was a dominant, yet not all-powerful actor. This is a history of state building told through the state’s relationships to non-state actors. It builds upon historically engaged studies of Africa and the Middle East that delve into the nature of state power both in an imperial and colonial context of the 19th and early 20th century as well as in post-independence settings. By discussing politics beyond the state, it shows how the state changed over time in dialogue with those that opposed it. Discussions of state formation (and reformation) in relation to political opposition in post-independence Africa and Middle East are rare due to the political sensitivity of the subject and consequent challenges in accessing source materials. Sudanese Political Movements and the Struggle for the State draws on state produced documents located in the Sudanese National Records Office and the South Sudan National Archives, as well as British diplomatic reporting to describe these contestations directly, providing an understanding of a type of politics rarely discussed in historical works. Divided into five chapters, Sudanese Political Movements and the Struggle for the State periodizes the relationship between political movements and the state based on which groups controlled the government. It begins with an examination of the parliamentary period of 1964-69, when political elites from northern Sudan determined and policed the realm of what was deemed reasonable politics even as the security apparatus retained control over large swathes of the country. Following chapters delve into President Ja’afar Nimeiri’s regime, delineating between the alliances it maintained with Sudanese political movements—first with the Communist party (1969-71), Southerners and “technocrats” (1972-76), Sectarian movements of the center right (1977-1983) and finally the Islamic Movement (1983-85). These alliances did not always obviate those of the past, at least entirely, nor did they remove all opposition. Yet the alliances guided the state in its pursuit of policy, as well as in how to respond to dissent from different segments of Sudanese society and what forms of dissent and lines of political argumentation were legible and which were threatening to state legitimacy.

This dissertation focuses on fiction and pictorials (huabao, 畫報) in the early twentieth century and its relation with the new visual technologies of the time, mainly photolithography, but also lantern slides and photography. It explores how these visual mediums were self-reflected in fiction and pictorials and how they connected these two literary expressions, as well as their constant transformation. It concludes that this type of intermediality and self-reflexivity came as a response to China’s modernization during the late Qing Empire (1868-1911). Most scholars agreed that photolithography was the catalyst for reproducing visual images in large quantities, which facilitated the hybrid publishing space of pictorials and, in tandem with the other visual mediums, allowed them to act as a multimedia platform. My dissertation demonstrates how fiction also participated in this new visual media ecology created by photolithography and thus contributes to the exploration of an aesthetic, social, and political moment in the late Qing Empire. Major texts discussed in this dissertation include Sequel to Dreams of Shanghai Splendor 續海上繁華夢, The Flower of the Sea of Sin 孽海花, The Tales of the Moon Colony 月球殖民地小說, and The Current News Pictorial 時事畫報, as well as other critical works that also reflect modernization, propaganda, anti-imperialism, and cosmopolitanism. It is widely assumed that this intermedial experimentation was introduced to China with the global trend of modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. However, my dissertation demonstrates an earlier experiment in the 1900s in the literati’s first attempt to directly respond to modern visual and printing technologies. I argue this early experiment should be understood as one of the last attempts to revitalize the traditional Chinese chapter novels (Zhanghuixiaoshuo, 章回小說) during a time when they were gradually being displaced by Westernized modern fiction. I further demonstrate that by depicting the material production of the pictorials, the artists made them not merely a static medium that captured the development of the cities, but rather a transformative medium that developed alongside these cities. My approach will challenge the current methodology that views pictorials as the transparent publishing medium that passively recorded the sociopolitical changes, thus redefining the dynamics of the pictorial images, its production and modernization. These discoveries and analyses will illuminate the transformations of both Chinese pictorials and fiction, and the brave experimental spirit of their writers and artists during the technological transition at the turn of the twentieth century.

This dissertation examines the links and lasting impact of reformist Muslim scholars, or ‘ula-ma, and the organizations they established in Algeria, Senegal, and Mali in the mid-twentieth century. The dissertation focuses on the Union Culturelle Musulmane (UCM), established in 1953 by a young Senegalese Muslim named Cheikh Touré along with several companions who had all studied together in Algeria with the Algerian Association of Muslim ‘Ulama (AUMA in French). The UCM became an important advocate for reformist Islam in the period before independence; it established branches in several countries (including Mali) and advocated across colonial and postcolonial borders not just for changes to “traditional” Muslim practices while also challenging the leadership and structure of Sufi brotherhoods. The UCM, inspired by the AUMA but also its diverse local and regional contexts, pushed French officials – and later officials in Senegal, Mali, and elsewhere – for a place for Islam in public life while also advocating for moral reform and more modernist Muslim education as an inte-gral and protected part of educational systems before and after independence. This dissertation makes several main arguments about the UCM and reformist Islam more broadly in the mid-twentieth century. Firstly, it argues that an enduring connection existed between reformist Muslims on both sides of the Sahara, one shaped by mutual exchange and discussion and which continued even after independence from France. Secondly, it argues that the UCM and its off-shoots represented an early example of Islamic advocacy that was both political and moral in its focus, stretching the confines of how “Islamism” is often defined while still using politics to obtain religious and social goals. And finally, this dissertation argues that reformist and salafi Muslims had a significant impact on social order as well as other Muslim groups, reshaping politics as well as Islam even beyond the reformists’ adherents.

Why does constitutionalism sustain itself as the primary language of politics in a postcolonial democracy like India? This dissertation answers this question by arguing that constitutionalism sustains itself as the primary language of politics for Indian democracy because of enduring anticolonial justifications for it that emerge from epistemically diverse worldviews in Indian society. In particular, this dissertation explores Islamic and anti-caste justifications for an anticolonial pluralist political conception of constitutionalism in India. In studying constitutionalism as an outcome of diverse anticolonial justifications for it, this dissertation demonstrates that the political conception of constitutionalism in India is not merely a continuation of liberal-imperial ideas of constitutionalism. Instead, popular justifications of constitutionalism in India, even in its current moment of crisis, have a genealogy that emerges from epistemically diverse anticolonial justifications of constitutionalism that took shape during constitutionalism's moment of creation in India. It makes this argument in three steps. First, by interrogating how liberal imperialism constructed the political domain in colonial India. Second, by exploring how anticolonialism critiqued this liberal imperial construction of the political domain and used these criticisms to justify a pluralist political conception for postcolonial constitutionalism. Third, by analyzing how these anticolonial justifications of constitutionalism are employed in postcolonial Indian democracy to maintain constitutionalism as the language of politics even when it faces a severe threat from Hindu majoritarianism. This dissertation demonstrates that anticolonial justifications of constitutionalism in India, which emerged from Islamic and anti-caste worldviews, remain relevant to the democratic discourse around constitutionalism and the political conception that it shapes for India by examining four significant justifications for constitutionalism in India. The first justification is captured by anticolonial worldmaking adopted by constitutionalism in India to acknowledge, forefront, and make legible to political life the background conditions for common life in India. This justification of worldmaking, which anticolonial thought regularly reflected on and brought to the fore of public life in India, includes (a) deeply ingrained dispositions about mutual coexistence that subconsciously shaped its participants for a millennium through the unfolding of overlapping geographical, linguistic, ethical and social worlds of diverse worldviews in India, and (b) agentic forms of participation, shaped by diverse groups in India coming into public spaces and employing constitutionally guaranteed political freedoms, to discursively construct the world that is India as one that is plural, progressive and enables self-respect despite being shaped by non-secular ideas. The second form of justification for constitutionalism in India lies in the use of non-secular conceptions of progress, where progress is not simply captured by a developmental conception but by the ethical modes of learning and knowledge-building through which constitutionalism enables diverse people to learn about others in the political community and develop a conception of fraternity. This dissertation shows how conceptions of fraternity that justify constitutionalism in India enable a non-secular conception of progress, pluralism, and self-respect in democracy in India. However, it also examines how a majoritarian conception of constitutional democracy threatens this conception of fraternity in India's postcolonial democracy. The third justification of constitutionalism emerges from endorsements for it that emerge from its capacity to enable self-respect, where diverse individuals who are shaped by the institutions and normative order established by constitutionalism demand that this order enable recognition, communication, association, and self-consciousness across the diverse groups that shape Indian society. Such a conception of self-respect, which derives its ideas from anticolonial conceptions of self-respect, is more expansive than conceptions of self-respect that emerge from Transatlantic liberalism because it reflects how colonialism shaped counter-concepts to self-respect across whole societies and worldviews, and not just as conditions that impact individuals alone. When this pluralist and emancipatory political conception of constitutionalism is threatened by other interpretations of constitutionalism by those in power, as it is by religious majoritarianism in its current moment of crisis, it is reaffirmed in sites of civil disobedience across India's postcolonial democracy where epistemically diverse interpretations of constitutionalism are not only respected but esteemed as justifications for constitutionalism in India. Such a form of participation in democratic politics through civil disobedience has led to a justificatory discourse around constitutionalism that draws on a pluralist conception of participation as the fourth justification of constitutionalism in India. These four interlinked justifications of constitutionalism in India have enabled a plural political conception of constitutionalism that survives in India, despite the threat to it from Hindu majoritarian politics. In exploring why justificatory discourse around constitutionalism enables democracy in India, this dissertation also develops an anticolonial u conception of justification as a form of making political principles legible to diverse peoples who were formerly colonized, as opposed to a strictly rational discourse of separating right from wrong in public reason that shapes democratic societies.

My dissertation studies gender and politics in printed imagetexts in colonial Bengal. It covers the period from the publication of the Bengali Punch Magazine, Basantak, in 1874 to the circulation of anti-imperial newspaper gags during WWII. At the core of this project are colonial illustrated periodicals—the quintessential mediums of colonial modernity and pedagogy, and the bearer of anticolonial imagetexts. The dissertation analyzes printed imagetexts like comics, cartoons, caricatures, newspaper gags, posters, and advertisements in periodicals and their effects on anti-imperial thought and the politicization of colonial popular culture. Imagetexts are synthetic mediums where ‘image’ and ‘text’ compositely create meaning. I argue that the printed imagetexts understood nationalist politics and gender through the stereotypes of English-educated babu, native politician, and the urban clerk. Imagetextual satire, for anticolonial and nationalist politics, framed these three stereotypes as both the oppressor and the oppressed in relationship to which other genders were conceived in colonial Bengal. These imagetextual stereotypes provided the bases for imagining the self and the other and a set of sensibilities, practices, and modes of sociability that defined late colonial South Asia. The circulation, co-existence, and deployment of these satirical discursive models for decolonial projects in English and vernacular illustrated periodicals stemmed from the nineteenth-century phenomenon of print erotophobia—the national and imperial fear of Indian erotic literature. I examine the imagetextual satire born in the wake of this print erotophobia at the intersections of class, gender, and nationalist politics. This cultural history of imagetexts also draws attention to the fictional properties of the colonial archival documents, which served as mediums of political exclusion and representation, history-recording, storytelling, and articulating nationalist sentiments.

Colonial intellectual is a good point of entry for making sense of anti-colonial movement because in many cases they constituted the pioneer of the movement. Moreover, in some cases, they became the founding father of new nations. However, such an important social category received inadequate attentions. / The main concern of this research is: how to make sense of the fact that in some colonies, anti-colonial movement were stronger while in others, the subjects were silent. The present writer would use colonial intellectuals from three areas (Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) as cases to illustrate the development of anti-colonial movements in above three areas in late nineteenth Century and Early Twenty Century. / Using the theory of institutionalization as theoretical framework, the present writer argued that the level of institutionalized of the society is the prime mover of the event. To view colonial society as a social group, it is argued that only in those societies reaching a high level of institutionalization, then members of the society would develop a kind of locally oriented vision of the society. That kind of vision is the necessary condition of anti-colonial movement. In the following thesis, the present writer would discuss in what way colonial governance, migration, and the conditions of pre-colonial society shaped the level of institutionalization of the discussed cases. / 劉紹麟. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-10, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Liu Shaolin.

Through Judith Butler’s concept of ‘cultural translation’, this dissertation seeks to provide a less imperialistic law-making mechanism as it relates to the lesbian, gay and bisexual rights concept (hereinafter ‘the LGB rights concept’) in Turkey, which currently relies heavily on legal transplantation. In search of a new law-making method, this thesis first deconstructs ‘legal transplantation’ as that which creates various asymmetrical relations that amount to consolidating Western imperialism. Critical legal scholars have shown great interest in revealing the imperialistic consequences of the law-maker West and the law-taker non-West. This thesis aims to add another dimension to these discussions by placing ‘imitation’, as advanced by Judith Butler, at the heart of its analyses. It scrutinises legal transplantation through the various imitations/repetitions it embodies and explores the role of imitation in law-making as law-taking. It does so by evaluating legal change by means of legal transplantation through the example of the Turkish experience with the LGB rights concept, and uses Judith Butler’s understanding of imitation/repetition, as advanced in her gender performativity concept, to achieve this evaluation This thesis attempts to expand our understanding of law-making as law-taking by unveiling their performative force, which humanises the subject in a way that is similar to the processes of gendering it. In doing so, this thesis aims to transfer the analyses that postulate the gendered body as performative to the rubric of human rights law, and argues that humanisation of the body through granting rights is performative as well. Though the occasion arises for subversion from these various imitations, it introduces a new law-making method, cultural translation, transforming the realm of limited possibilities for human rights into the realm of the possible.

This dissertation studies conflict in a hierarchical international system, the British Empire. How did the British Empire respond to violent and nonviolent resistance within its colonies? I develop a theory explaining how and why an imperial metropole becomes involved in and grant concessions to its colonies. Unlike federal nation-states and looser relationship like in an international organization, modern European empires were characterized by selective engagement of the metropole with its peripheral colonies. This has important implications for understanding metropolitan response to peripheral resistance. In contrast to more recent work, I find that violence was more effective at coercing metropolitan concessions to the colonies in the British Empire than nonviolence. I argue that this occurred because violence overwhelmed the capabilities of local colonial governments, and violence commanded metropolitan attention and involvement. This theory is supported with a wide range of data, including yearly measures of anticolonial resistance, every colonial concession made by the British Empire after 1918, daily measures of metropolitan discussions of colonial issues from cabinet archives, and web-scraped casualty data from British death records. In addition, I present in-depth case studies of British responses to resistance in Cyprus and the Gold Coast, along with a conceptual schema of different types of resistance to understand strikes, riots, terrorism, and civil disobedience in a number of other British colonies. My findings show that the effectiveness of resistance is conditional on the political structure that it is embedded in and that hierarchy matters for understanding state responses to resistance.

The creation of universidades interculturales (intercultural universities, UIs) in Mexico at the start of the 21st century was not only a policy response to the need for more accessible higher education for historically underrepresented students, but also to the call for more culturally and linguistically relevant education and development made by the Indigenous rights movement. However, because of the history of colonialism in Latin America and the use of state schooling to assimilate citizens into a homogenous Mexican nation, the goal of supporting cultural and linguistic diversity through public education presents tensions and contradictions. For some, UIs promise the possibility of revalorizing subaltern knowledges, promoting Indigenous activism, and protecting the human and cultural rights enshrined in international and national law. For others, they represent a continuation of top-down polices dominated by policymakers who are not intimately familiar with Indigenous experiences and goals. More research is needed at the level of implementation, where teachers and students make meaning out of policy, to clarify whether and how intercultural higher education models can accomplish the various possibilities they are ascribed in theory. Research on programs to support Indigenous linguistic and cultural maintenance must attend to the colonial histories undergirding the material and social realities of the communities they are meant serve. As such, this case study used a decolonial lens and ethnographic methods, including interviews, classroom observations, and accompaniment of participants in their daily lives, to investigate how professors, students, and local community members were enacting an intercultural higher education at the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural-Huasteca (La UVI-H), an intercultural university campus created in 2005 as part of an intercultural subsystem of the larger and autonomous state University of Veracruz. The purpose of this study was to critically examine the teaching and learning taking place in and through La UVI-H to find out whether and how participation in intercultural higher education was influencing youths’ beliefs and perspectives about local languages, knowledges, and their views of the meaning(s) and purpose(s) of the bachelor’s degree it enabled them to pursue. Findings showed that most students initially enrolled at La UVI-H because it was their only accessible higher education option. Yet over time, they found ways to appropriate aspects of their intercultural education, often coming to revalue the cultural and linguistic practices of their local communities, even if they did not plan to or end up staying in them upon graduation, as the UI model expects. A central role of professors at La UVI-H beyond formal language teaching was creating space for students to question the colonial logics of education and development that surrounded them in larger society, including those they had internalized before arriving at university. Community leaders and members in the nearby towns were key to this pedagogical process, sharing their ways of life with UVI-H students through participation in their action research projects, thereby reengaging the cross-generational transmission of knowledge. Finally, students benefited not only from local community-linked interactions but also from interactions with regional and international networks and actors that being a part of the larger UV system afforded them. Together UVI-H professors, students, and local and international community members were enacting intercultural education in decolonial ways that recognized Indigenous languages and ways of living as resources that can and should be used to inform knowledge production and the creation of more desirable and self-determined futures.