#225 in the Moʻolelo series, this is a little more academic set of musings than the usual fare of late
Nicholas Thomas (1994, 4) re-contextualizes the concepts of colonialism and governmentality in the field of cultural studies:
In cultural theory since Foucault, the idea of government is central to the critique of language, knowledge and narrative, because it presupposes their constitution in and through power relations … For Foucault, the ‘governmentality’ that these knowledges and programmes amount to is not a transhistorical feature of all polities, but a distinctively modern development that displaced other modes of political power and state dominance.
Thomas (1994, 2) notes that the term ‘colonialism’
is not best understood as primarily as an economic and political relationship that is legitimized or justified through ideologies of racism or progress. Rather, colonialism has always, equally importantly and deeply, been a cultural process; its discoveries and trespasses are imagined and energized through signs, metaphors and narratives; even what would seem its purest moments of profit and violence have been mediated and enframed by structures of meaning.
While Thomas argues that too narrow a definition has been used for colonialsm, and that this should be broadened, others posit the reverse – that the broad, cultural dimensions of the term ‘colonialism’ have obscured the political history in Hawai’i case (see Sai, 2008). Likewise, governmentality is intimately bound up with notions of law and property in Hawai’i, because of the contested governmental regimes after 1893. The authority, legality and legitimacy of those governments’ actions depends on the premises one accepts in evaluating them.
the umiverse 