|
Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan | 
 enlarge | Author: Heather J. Sharkey
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy Used: $9.89
You Save: $16.06 (62%)
New (14) Used (13) from $9.89
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1257778
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 245
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5
ISBN: 0520235592
Dewey Decimal Number: 962.404
EAN: 9780520235595
ASIN: 0520235592
Publication Date: March 18, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Histories written in the aftermath of empire have often featured conquerors and peasant rebels but have said little about the vast staffs of locally recruited clerks, technicians, teachers, and medics who made colonialism work day-to-day. Even as these workers maintained the colonial state, they dreamed of displacing imperial power. This book examines the history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898-1956) and the Republic of Sudan that followed in order to understand how colonialism worked on the ground, affected local cultures, influenced the rise of nationalism, and shaped the postcolonial nation-state.
Relying on a rich cache of Sudanese Arabic literary sources, including poetry, essays, and memoirs, as well as on colonial documents and photographs, this perceptive study examines colonialism from the viewpoint of those who lived and worked in its midst. By integrating the case of Sudan with material on other countries, particularly India, Sharkey gives her book broad comparative appeal. She shows that colonial legacies--such as inflexible borders, atomized multi-ethnic populations, and autocratic governing structures--have persisted, hobbling postcolonial nation-states. Thus countries like Sudan are still living with colonialism, struggling to achieve consensus and stability within borders that a fallen empire has left behind.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Powerful insights into an elites failure of imagination April 25, 2005
Loay Abdelkarim (Boston, MA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
An eye opening book. Details how the British ruled the colonial Sudan by helping create and educated, at the Gordon Memorial College (present day University of Khartoum), a technocratic class of lower level clerks and minor civil servants. This literate class collaborated with the Empire in ways that allowed a handful of British bureaucrats to rule the vast area of Sudan. But in many ways there was ambivalence and suspicion of each others motives, and feelings of frustrated ambition on the side of the Sudanese. The British used their own racial and imperial prejudices in selecting Arabic speaking groups and families to draw into this class and excluded Southerners and others they termed "detribalized blacks". In doing so they influencing the class's ideas of itself and their environment, and shaped their very narrow vision of the future post colonial nation. A national vision that proved to be as elitist, statist and unable to incorporate the reality of a diverse and complex Sudan. It is this central lack of vision that lies at the heart of the Sudan's failure to build an inclusive nation. It is a sad commentary that the same elite still sees itself as a conduit for propagating western civilization, in the form of such alien ideologies as "secularism", to an essentially savage nation.
As a product of this class I am amazed to realize just how narrow this class has remained. Again and again I recognized the actors in this book as being the grandparents of my colleges and friends. In the mid-eighties my educated parents convinced me to withdraw from an English university and return to matriculate at The University of Khartoum. It has been one of the most profound decisions I have ever made.
|
|
|
|
| |
