The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire

摘要

In the preface to his The Writing of History (1988), Michel de Certeau describes the encounter between Amerigo Vespucci and Indian America as one between conqueror and 'an unnamed presence of difference' (p. xxv). The visual allegory behind this description is a seventeenth-century etching by Jan van der Straet, through which de Certeau predicts 'the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history' (p. xxv). This, de Certeau reminds us, 'is writing that conquers' (p. xxvi). Giordano Nanni's book examines a more recent encounter, which, nevertheless, contributes to the very same story: nineteenth-century British settlers and missionaries writing the body of the other, their practices, their beliefs, their worldviews, and their land, in Victoria, Australia and Cape Colony, South Africa.