At the beginning of the 20th century, in the midst of fears of anti-colonial Muslim uprisings fomented by the Ottoman Sultan, a network of French colonialists, diplomats, and scholars argued that France should colonize North Africa through Islam and not against it. They contended that, since expanding its dominion over large populations of Muslims, France had become “a Muslim Empire” and should govern as such. This dissertation studies what it meant for France to attempt to rule as a Muslim power through colonial expansions and crises from the 1900s to the 1920s. It reads this colonial rhetoric and practice against the grain of a wide array of North Africans’ writings, ranging from Islamic jurisprudence manuscripts, newspapers, memoirs, and private letters that reflected the multiple dimensions of anti-colonial struggles: from dreams to re-unify North Africa under the Ottoman Empire to trans-colonial Muslim solidarities from Morocco to India. By so doing, it attempts to place marginalized North African voices at the center of discourses on colonial subjecthood, race, and Islamic belonging.

by Kwan Shui-man. / "March 1999." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-283). / 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 Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

This dissertation reconstructs a theoretical framework for the Indian Constitution. It does so immanently, by focusing on the making of the Indian Constitution, taking into account both the demands of its specific historical conditions, and the formal constraints of drafting a constitution. The dissertation shows that in its historical context the task of the Indian constitution makers should be understood as creating a constitutional system that can mediate a transformation of the social condition. Performing this task required reinterpreting the established tenets of constitutionalism. The reinterpretation produces a distinct variation of constitutionalism that is termed transformational constitutionalism. Part I of the dissertation focuses on some of the central tenets of constitutional theory by examining the writings in which they first assumed their paradigmatic form. The concepts are situated in the historical context in which they were formulated to highlight the specific challenges they were a response to, and hence distinguishing them from the conceptual terrain in which the Indian Constitution was formulated. Part I also shows the essentially preservative nature of the main tenets of constitutional thought, and that the fully developed versions of its central concepts seek to preclude any possibility for major changes in social conditions. Part II sets out the historical developments that led to the material and ideational terrain on which the Indian Constitution was conceived. It first outlines the institutional and discursive structures of colonial rule to tease out the development of concepts that would serve as the point of reference for the constitution-makers. Part II then turns to the resistance to colonial rule by focusing on the ideas and politics of M.K. Gandhi to delineate the strengths and weaknesses of Congress's claim to represent the Indian nation at the moment of independence, and outline the two different visions of what it meant to free oneself from colonial subjugation, and the different challenges for bringing those visions to fruition. Finally, Part II outlines the way in which the Indian constitutional vision was caught in an interdependent dynamic of break and continuity with its colonial past. After Part I and II have traced the conceptual coordinates of a modern constitution, and the specific historical condition in which the Indian constitution was conceived respectively, Part III focuses on the Indian Constituent Assembly Debates to show how the framers sought to respond to the concrete challenges facing them by creatively reinterpreting the precepts of modern constitutionalism itself. The dissertation shows that the Indian Constitution has to be understood as a totality containing three related strata - that of constitutional imagination, promises, and text - which exist in tension with each other. This tension constitutes the contradiction at the heart of the Indian Constitutional form. The dissertation concludes by following one such contradiction, between the strata of imagination and text as it developed during the most important constitutional conflict of the initial years on the question of compensation for acquisition of property. It also demonstrates how that conflict fundamentally shaped the nature of Indian constitutional practice.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of History, August 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 425-447). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

This dissertation investigates the protest cultures of social revolutionary groups during and after the events of 1968 in France and West Germany before inquiring into how political officials and police responded to the difficulties of maintaining public order. The events of 1968 led revolutionaries in both France and West Germany to adopt new justifications for militant action based in heterodox Marxism and anti-colonial theory, and to attempt to institutionalize new, confrontational modes of public protest that borrowed ways of knowing urban space, tactics, and materials from both the working class and armed guerrilla movements. Self-identifying revolutionaries and left intellectuals also institutionalized forums for the investigation of police interventions in protests on the basis of testimonies, photography, and art. These investigative committees regularly aimed to exploit the resonance of police violence to promote further cycles of politicization. In response, political officials and police sought after 1968 to introduce and to reinforce less ostentatious, allegedly less harmful means of crowd control and dispersion that could inflict suffering without reproducing the spectacle of mass baton assaults and direct physical confrontations—means of physical constraint less susceptible to unveiling as violence. Second, police reinforced surveillance and arrest units. The new tactics of the police borrowed their principles from the struggle against subversion, criminality, and terrorism in order to neutralize the small-group tactics of militant demonstrators. Thus, 1968 served as the point of emergence of a confrontational protest culture within the New Left that in turn provoked the re-articulation of practices of the state. It was a revolution in the counter-revolution.

This dissertation presents an original reconstruction of Kintwadi kia Bangunza, the movement of Simon Kimbangu in Belgian Congo, from the period 1921 to 1942. It interprets the movement ancestrally, arguing that Kimbangu and his initiates were spiritualists who worked to heal the dead and reverse the European occultism of the First World War. When the prophetic healers (bangunza) received the sick, they became mediators between the living and dead, performing rituals using Holy Spirit medicine to retrieve, reconcile with, ascend and avenge their ancestors. This dissertation brings together a wide variety of sources in five languages, gathered from over a year of archival research as well as several months of anthropological fieldwork. It presents a feminist, interdisciplinary analysis of the transformation of Kintwadi from its beginning as an ancestral healing movement, into a revolt movement led by the ancestors and finally, to its institutionalization as various churches. This dissertation argues that how we read Kintwadi, provides a useful prism through which to consider the politics of decolonization in Africa today.

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.