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The Postcolonial Subject Claiming Politics Governing
Others In Late Modernity 1st Edition Vivienne Jabri
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Vivienne Jabri
ISBN(s): 9781136281501, 1136281495
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.01 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECT

This book places the lens on postcolonial agency and resistance in a social and
geopolitical context that has witnessed great transformations in international
politics. What does postcolonial politics mean in a late modern context of
interventions that seek to govern postcolonial populations? Drawing on historic
and contemporary articulations of agency and resistance and highlighting voices
from the postcolonial world, the book explores the transition from colonial
modernity to the late modern postcolonial era. It shows that at each moment
wherein the claim to politics is made, the postcolonial subject comes face to face
with global operations of power that seek to control and govern. As seen in the
Middle East and elsewhere, these operations have variously drawn on war, policing,
as well as pedagogical practices geared at governing the political aspirations of
target societies. The book provides a conceptualisation of postcolonial political
subjectivity, discusses moments of its emergence, and exposes the security agendas
that seek to govern it.
Engaging with political thought, from Hannah Arendt, to Frantz Fanon, Michel
Foucault, and Edward Said, among other critical and postcolonial theorists, and
drawing on art, literature, and film from the postcolonial world, this work will be
of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations,
postcolonial theory, and political theory.

Vivienne Jabri is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War

Studies, King’s College London.
 Interventions
Edited by:
Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and
Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick

‘As Michel Foucault has famously stated, “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is
made for cutting”. In this spirit The Edkins–Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits
cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international
relations. It is the best place to contribute post-disciplinary works that think rather than
merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.’
Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa, USA

The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working
within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions have chosen to
make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics.
Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics
and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies
in international politics.

Critical Theorists and International Relations

Edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams

Ethics as Foreign Policy

Britain, the EU and the other
Dan Bulley

Universality, Ethics and International Relations

A grammatical reading
Véronique Pin-Fat

The Time of the City

Politics, philosophy, and genre
Michael J. Shapiro

Governing Sustainable Development

Partnership, protest and power at the world summit
Carl Death

Insuring Security
Biopolitics, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Foucault and International Relations
New critical engagements
Edited by Nicholas J. Kiersey and Doug Stokes

International Relations and Non-Western Thought

Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity
Edited by Robbie Shilliam

Autobiographical International Relations

I, IR
Edited by Naeem Inayatullah

War and Rape

Law, memory and justice
Nicola Henry

Madness in International Relations

Psychology, security and the global governance of mental health
Alison Howell

Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt

Geographies of the nomos
Edited by Stephen Legg

Politics of Urbanism
Seeing like a city
Warren Magnusson

Beyond Biopolitics
Theory, violence and horror in world politics
François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder

The Politics of Speed

Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world
Simon Glezos

Politics and the Art of Commemoration

Memorials to struggle in Latin America and Spain
Katherine Hite

Indian Foreign Policy

The politics of postcolonial identity
Priya Chacko
Politics of the Event
Time, movement, becoming
Tom Lundborg

Theorising Post-Conflict Reconciliation

Agonism, restitution and repair
Edited by Alexander Keller Hirsch

Europe’s Encounter with Islam

The secular and the postsecular
Luca Mavelli

Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Deconstruction

Badredine Arfi

The New Violent Cartography

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Edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro

Insuring War
Sovereignty, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero

International Relations, Meaning and Mimesis

Necati Polat

The Postcolonial Subject

Claiming politics/governing others in late modernity
Vivienne Jabri

Foucault and the Politics of Hearing

Lauri Siisiäinen
THE POSTCOLONIAL
SUBJECT
Claiming politics/governing others
in late modernity

Vivienne Jabri
First published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 Vivienne Jabri
The right of Vivienne Jabri to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Jabri, Vivienne, 1958-
The postcolonial subject : claiming politics/governing others in late modernity / Vivienne Jabri.
p. cm. -- (Interventions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. International relations. 2. Postcolonialism. I. Title.
JZ1251.J33 2012
325⬘.32--dc23
2011052217
ISBN: 978-0-415-68210-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-68211-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-11225-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby
CONTENTS

Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: the past in the present 1

1 Tracing the postcolonial subject 8

An epistemological quest for the postcolonial subject 13
On temporal trajectories 19
The spatial and the postcolonial 26

2 Policing access to the modern: power, fear, resistance 31

Narratives of resistance 34
Culture and the politics of control 45
Counter-insurgency: violence, fear, anxiety 49

3 Resistance as the claim to politics 57

Claiming the right to politics 61
Locating the subject of politics 68
Fanon’s negativity 71
Claiming the international 73
Tracing the postcolonial subject into late modernity 80
viii Contents

4 Reclaiming the international: resistance in

cosmopolitan space 82
Declaring independence, claiming the right to (international)
politics 85
Political community and the postcolonial state 94
The postcolonial state, resistance, and the international 100

5 Governing others: war and operations of power in

late modernity 108
When power is rendered cosmopolitan 111
Liberal cosmopolitanism and the government of populations 115
Violence and the government of populations 126

6 Creative politics and postcolonial agency 131

The question of postcolonial agency 132
The late modern postcolonial 134
Claiming the political in late modernity: the Arab Spring 135
A cosmopolitanism of politics 147

Notes 152
Bibliography 165
Index 175
PREFACE

Two events frame the writing of this book. The first, the invasion of Iraq, made a
lasting imprint, and indeed took me back to the spaces and locations that seemed
to be in the distant past. Hatred of a tyrannical regime now went hand in hand
with anger at the unleashing of violence and abuse by the world’s strongest and
largest military machine against an already abused population. This first event was
the driver behind my last book, dedicated to exploring the subject of war and war’s
place in the transformation of the modern international, the terrain that had made
the ‘post’ in the postcolonial meaningful. This first event remains with me now in
the writing of this book, dedicated as it is to the postcolonial subject, she or he who
remains the target of such war, seemingly vulnerable to global legislating practices
authored elsewhere.
However, there emerged another ‘event’ during the writing of this book, once
more in the Middle East, and one that again propelled me and others back to the
region and the streets that were now being claimed by its populations. The
resounding call was for a democratic future, one where the state could be reclaimed
in the service of populations and not the oligarchical regimes that had been in place
throughout the postcolonial era. The so-called Arab Spring was suggestive of a
‘new’ phenomenon and yet there had been other attempts at rebellion, other
efforts at dissent, other calls for the right to politics. What seemed beyond dispute,
and indeed continues to be so as I write this, is that, regardless of its outcomes, this
was a significant, distinctly political moment, one that somehow, at least for this
author, placed the lens on the postcolonial condition and the postcolonial subject.
The two events seem to represent two poles: on the one hand global power,
and on the other the articulation of resistance. However, what is of greater interest
is that the two events, or moments, could not be related in a uniform, linear causal
relationship. That resistance against occupation had emerged and took many forms
in the context of a fragmented, divided Iraq was not in doubt. However, what was
x Preface

of profound interest in relation to the uprisings of the Arab world was that resistance
was being articulated against the local regimes, long sustained and reinforced by
external powers. Populations that had long been subjected to an orientalist
discursive framing, complicit in their depoliticiation, had now risen to claim
politics, to assert a presence in political space and time.
Where the first event, the invasion of Iraq, represented the articulation of
power, now globally rendered, and whose edict was and continues to be the
government of others, the second brought forth the postcolonial subject’s claim to
politics. Where the first sought to depoliticise, and through such, to discipline and
govern, the second sought to assert political agency. Where the first reacted with
fear and trepidation against the potential of democracy in the Middle East, the
second seemed to suggest a different imaginary, one that sought the conditions of
possibility for politics and hence political contestation without fragmentation.
The two dynamics continue to be at play, generating tension within this moment
of transformation. The imperatives of a global apparatus of security are all too
present amidst calls for freedom, as are forces that seek to shape the future to come.
The tensions are not just apparent in the dynamic between ‘government’ and
‘politics’, the imperative to govern the revolutionary moment and this moment’s
imaginary of a moment to come, but also in the local frames of meaning through
which this latter moment is constituted. When placed in the context of late
modernity, we might say that these tensions negotiate the lines of a cosmopolitan
socio-political terrain that produces at one and the same time a cosmopolitanism of
government that targets its machinery at the shaping of societies in accordance with
a script authored elsewhere, and a cosmopolitanism of politics that seeks solidarity
in a distinctly late-modern articulation of self-determination, and hence of politics.
The question that animates this project revolves around what it means to be a
postcolonial subject in late modernity, how this subject is formed and shaped in an
era wherein the colonial legacy is not just borne as an imprint, but seems to be
resurgent, and how, despite the odds, this subject comes to articulate political
agency. These are all interrelated questions and their complexity is multiplied by
the sheer diversity that defines the postcolonial world, the experiences of its
populations, and the socio-economic and political trajectories that position different
parts of this world in relation to the international and its structural continuities. At
the same time, to refer to a postcolonial subject immediately implies a focus on the
‘post’ in the postcolonial, so that the space and time of such a designation come to
have profound significance. To ask the question ‘what does it mean to be a
postcolonial subject in late modernity?’ is also to ask what does the modern
international mean for this subject, how are the two constituted, and what role
does the postcolonial subject have in relation to the international as a distinct
location of politics? As will become apparent, there is no way in which these
questions can be investigated without the acknowledgement of history and the
constitutive role that the colonial legacy and its place in modernity play in the
formation of the subject of politics in postcoloniality.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Any author can only do her work with a network of support. I am, as ever, grateful
to my network of colleagues, friends, and family.
This book could not have been written without the generous sabbatical leave
provided by King’s College London. I am grateful to King’s and to Professor
Mervyn Frost and Professor Denise Lievesly for their support.
I have benefitted enormously from invaluable discussions I have had with a
number of colleagues. The foothills of this project saw their first outing at the
International Studies Association Convention in 2009 in San Francisco. I am
grateful to Rosemary Shinko and Beate Jahn for their panel on the subject of
cosmopolitanism, where my work on the cosmopolitan and the postcolonial was
presented. I am especially grateful to Rose Shinko for a panel she organised devoted
to my book project at the ISA North East Convention held in Baltimore in 2010.
All on this panel, Rose herself, Christine Sylvester, Anna Agathangelou, Andreas
Behnke, and Hilbourne Watson placed the first chapter of the book through a
rigorous testing ground, focusing especially on the challenge of talking about ‘the’
postcolonial subject. I am also grateful to the audience present at that panel,
including Ann Tickner and Himadeep Muppidi, again both contributing points
that I have taken on board. I am grateful too to Mustapha Pasha, Ritu Vij, and
Charlotte Epstein for their friendship and for always asking the difficult questions.
Parts of this project were also presented as contributions to the Leverhulme
Network project ‘Cosmopolitanism or Empire’, coordinated by Costas Douzinas,
and I am grateful to Costas for providing an intellectually invaluable forum for
discussions of the global implications of a cosmopolitan late modernity. At King’s,
Claudia Aradau, Peter Busch, and Didier Bigo are, as ever, a constant source of
support and intellectual engagement. I am also grateful to the editors of the
Routledge series Interventions, Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams, for
including this book in this wonderful, critical series in international relations
xii Acknowledgements

scholarship. I am grateful to them for their patience, as I am to Nicola Parkin at

Routledge and the reviewers of the original proposal.
I could not have written this book without the unconditional love and support
provided by Mary Nankivell especially, and by Dorian Jabri and Chris Smith. All,
as ever, are always there for me.
INTRODUCTION
The past in the present

We have to discard the past.

Pablo Neruda, ‘Past’

Recent events in the Middle East place into sharp relief questions relating to
change and political transformation in the postcolonial world. The primary call of
the ‘Arab Spring’ is for a renewed notion of political community being made at a
historical juncture that is of the postcolonial on the one hand and of late modern
modes of colonisation on the other. That these events are taking place in a region
that has witnessed its share of war in Western military intervention and practices
deemed to service the so-called ‘war against terrorism’ reflects the intersection
between globally articulated modes of power and local political contestations. It is
as if the promise of independence, though long recognised as remaining largely
unfulfilled, is being reclaimed afresh, political community reclaimed afresh, and the
right to politics itself being reclaimed in the face of external and internal violence
and dispossession. The prevalent tendency is to see these events as rebellions against
tyrannical and dictatorial regimes. Indeed they are reflections of a seemingly
widespread expression that fear itself is transcended, so that confrontations between
civilians and the security apparatus of the state are the overwhelming feature.
However, the reclaiming of the political must be conceived in terms of both local
as well as global structures of domination and control and their complex and
contingent intersections.
It is not too difficult to see interventions such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan,
not to mention the continued incursions into Pakistan and yet other more subtle
forms of interventions elsewhere, as reflective of continuities with the colonial
past. These are, at the same time, distinctly late modern forms of intervention;
from the high technology military machines unleashed upon populations, to their
interpellation as ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘statebuilding’, to the seemingly paradoxical
combination of technologies of control and regulation, from the direct use of
warfare to the rebuilding of schools and hospitals, to the pedagogical aspects that
come in the form of ‘training’, gender-awareness, human rights, all function at a
2 Introduction

limit point wherein distinctions seem to disappear – between war and security,
violence and care, public and private, inside and outside, the military and civilian.
The terrain that confers meaning to the postcolonial, namely the ‘international’
conceived as a distinct location of politics, seems itself challenged in the face of a
global juridical-political trajectory that is transnationally defined, that seeks the
trumping of the international by the cosmopolitan terrain of the human.
While Kwame Nkrumah (1965) foresaw the continued implications of what he
referred to as ‘neocolonialism’, the workings of capital across, and despite of, the
limits of the sovereign state continuing to dispossess the formerly colonised, late
modern transformations, those that confer positive force to that other transnational
terrain, humanity at large, are equally monumental in their implications for the
postcolonial world. My interest in writing this book is exactly the trajectory of the
postcolonial subject,1 but as will be seen, this is by no means a linear trajectory, a
historical narrative that has a beginning and an end. Rather, this is a trajectory that
sees the intersection of past and present, a past lived in the present as well as a
present that was always there in the past. This is a trajectory that sees movement,
not just in time, but also in space, so that the spatial articulation of the postcolonial
subject is not simply confined to the postcolonial state but shifts and moves on a
landscape of streets and neighbourhoods, gallery spaces and film archives, on the
pages of literary productions, and in the virtual space of mass communications. The
reclaiming of the political that I want to identify here is bound up with this
temporal and spatial trajectory, in complex ways that not only defy easy cause and
effect relationships, but also elude easy capture. That the attempt is made exactly
to capture the postcolonial subject as this subject negotiates and seeks to reclaim the
terrain of the political should not be taken to mean a total capture in a theoretical
and conceptual frame, for the postcolonial subject escapes, and it is a recognition
of this excess to the subject that renders this work critical.
The theme of the book emerged from a number of sources and motivations.
My last book, War and the Transformation of Global Politics ( Jabri, 2007a) explores
the implications of liberal cosmopolitanism, focusing on violence as its constitutive
moment. Conceiving of war as a technology in the government of populations, the
book focused on the implications of interventionist wars and security practices on
relationships of power and emergent subjectivities. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s
analytics of war,2 the book argued that the permeation of war into the social sphere
is suggestive of what I refer to as a ‘matrix of war’, the practices of which have
implications not only for the structure of the international, but for subjectivity –
the liberal self conceived as possessing global reach on the one hand, and the other
of the liberal self, located largely in the postcolonial world, target of practices that
range from direct violence, to incarceration, to surveillance, and pedagogic
practices aimed at the redesign of societies. Two inter-related issues that emerged
from the book included on the one hand the question of the implications of racially
defined hierarchical inscription of the subjects of liberal cosmopolitan projections
of power, and on the other, the question of how resistance might be conceived in
the face of such projections. This then is the intellectual background that informs
 Introduction 3

the present book, a background that is brought into sharp relief by recent events in
international politics, namely the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the war in
Afghanistan, practices constitutive of the so-called ‘war against terrorism’, Gaza,
Lebanon, Iran, to name but a few locations where the ‘government’ of populations,3
variously using technologies from the violent to the pedagogic, comes face to face
with the postcolonial subject.
Conventionally in International Relations, reference to the ‘cosmopolitan’ is
suggestive of Kantian-inspired liberal discourses informing conceptions of
transformation towards peace and justice. Seeing realist conceptions of the
international system as a hindrance to such transformation, liberal cosmopolitans
have long projected a self-image that proclaims a critical and an emancipatory
agenda in social and political theory and in the realm of practice.4 Theory and
practice meet in advocacies around international law and its transnational
reformulations, human rights, interventions in the name of rescue, global
governance, and measures aimed at what is referred to as ‘human security’.5 The
agents of such transformation are assumed to be the liberal democracies of the
West, seen as holding the ‘moral resources’, to oversee its actualisation.6
When viewed from a Marxist, a poststructural, or a postcolonial perspective,7
the cosmopolitan ceases to be a benign aspiration, but acquires a material and a
discursive presence that is imbricated with relations of power globally rendered.
Conceived in this way, liberal cosmopolitanism comes to be understood as the
projection of power through practices of discipline and government aimed at other
societies. The ‘apparatus of security’ that, according to Michel Foucault, identifies
liberal government,8 is what I argue constitutes the transformation of the
international into cosmopolitan space. This apparatus is realised through practices
that range from violence to pedagogic practices geared at ‘training’ target societies
towards liberal modes of self-articulation. The structural transformation of the
international is hence also accompanied by operations of power and knowledge
that seek the transformation of subjectivity itself, so that the now postcolonial
others come to have a self-understanding that somehow reflects the frame through
which the liberal cosmopolitan might view them, just as, to borrow from Parama
Roy (1998), the colonial subject reflected colonial inscriptions.
The cosmopolitan terrain I am highlighting here is also a terrain of contestation
and resistance. The subject of late modern operations of power might be seen as
traversing transnational spaces, somehow defiant of the re-formulated limits defined
and inscribed by those in possession of legislative authority in this transformed
space. Where the liberal self is constituted as being in possession of global reach,
engaged in the government of others, the other of the liberal self, located largely
but not exclusively in the postcolonial world, is somehow reinscribed in terms of
the dichotomy of modernity and tradition, civilisation and barbarism, freedom and
unfreedom; dichotomies that are reproduced through a powerful racialised,
culturalist, as well as gendered discourse. My claim here is that the apparatus that
seeks to constitute the global in security terms, that extends its machinery, indeed
its technologies, both military and civilian, across the terrain of the global is also
4 Introduction

one that is enabled through discourses of legitimisation that draw upon a racialisation
of populations, a hierarchical rendering of societies despite the universalising claims
of the human as a category and target of action. The legacy that enables this
projection of power and one that is drawn upon in contemporary practices is
colonialism, but its present articulation is distinctly late modern in its construction.
What do I mean when I claim that the articulation of the colonial legacy is
distinctly late modern in its construction? I mean that it is imbued with the features
of our time; the intensification of the institutions of modernity, to borrow from
Giddens, the modern state as a cluster of institutions that permeate all aspects of
lived experience, and a capitalist international political economy that incorporates
most exchange within its remit, that stands in tension with the regulative aspect of
the territorial state, and that overwhelmingly determines life chances through
inequalities of access to resources. Ultimately, the most significant feature of late
modernity, what Bauman refers to as ‘liquid modernity’, is the fragmentation,
indeterminacy, and uncertainty associated with these institutions of modernity,
elements that are recursively related to the globalisation of the economic and the
socio-political. In times of ‘liquid modernity’, to use Bauman,

power has become truly exterritorial, no longer bound, not even slowed
down, by the resistance of space … It does not matter any more where the
giver of the command is – the difference between ‘close by’ and ‘far away’,
or for that matter between the wilderness and the civilized, orderly space, has
been all but cancelled. This gives the power-holders a truly unprecedented
opportunity: the awkward and irritating aspects of the panoptical technique
of power may be disposed of. Whatever else the present stage of the history
of modernity is, it is also, perhaps above all, post-panoptical.

(Bauman, 2000: 11)

What does this shift from the panoptical to the post-panoptical mean for the
postcolonial world? How is this global terrain of the late modern viewed when the
lens is held by the postcolonial subject? There are, of course, no easy generalisations
that can be made, though the broad-brush stroke approach that Bauman uses is all
too tempting. Nevertheless, we might say that the ‘postcolony’, to use Achille
Mbembe (1992), is increasingly incorporated, some would say co-opted, into the
time and space of the post-panoptic articulation of power, so that the wielders of
power locally are but easily bought off local managers of a globally instantiated
de-regulative imperative authored elsewhere, in financial institutions that have
always functioned transnationally, but always with the assistance of the military and
security apparatus of the state. We might say that where the colony in modernity
was subjected to conquest, the postcolony is subjected to the post-panoptic
governmentalising manifestation of power, where populations, and not simply
individuals, are shaped and regulated into governable, manageable entities. When
viewed from the postcolony, the postpanoptic is not necessarily about the end of
 Introduction 5

confinement; indeed it might mean the use of incarceration to an ever increasing

extent, not just of errant individuals, but of populations through the control of
their movements. The postpanoptic might also make use of a military machine no
longer simply engaged at state boundaries, but a global military machine the
function of which is the governing of errant populations and their movements.
Colonialism has always been viscerally felt, in modernity and in its late modern
versions. This is not just about the racialised inscriptions of the colonised, the
degradations, humiliations, and violence, both epistemic and physical, to which
the colonised is subjected, but it is also profoundly about the traces that such
inscriptions leave behind, only to re-emerge in the subject’s consciousness, at
times articulated in discourse, but more often remaining un-articulated, forming a
backdrop of knowledge that is constitutive of the subject’s past and present, even
as this past is often inherited, learnt in narrations of a past told and retold. It is in
this sense that we might think of Fanon’s colonised subject and the ‘insurgent’
fighting American troops in Fallujah, both viscerally related to the condition of
colonisation: ‘At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the
native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes
him fearless and restores his self-respect’ (Fanon, 1967: 74). The visceral is all too
apparent in the confrontation that the coloniser seeks to subdue and, importantly,
this visceral aspect of the colonial encounter is not confined to the individual:
‘The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force
against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with
security makes him remind the native out loud that there he alone is master’
(Fanon, 1967: 42). Over and above the immediacy of the encounter and its
constitutive violence, the postcolonial condition too is, for Fanon, also visceral in
its manifestation: ‘The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up
with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow
races’ (1967: 77). The structure of the colonial relationship is rightly conceived in
terms of this constitutive inequality; however, this is an inequality that is carried
in and upon the body of the colonised, past and present.9
There is then a materiality to the colonial relationship and this materiality might
be conceived in a number of ways that can potentially reflect the nexus of power
and resistance as this negotiates the time and space of modernity. This materiality
might first be conceived as relating to bodies as these come to be inscribed in and
through the colonial encounter. When bodies are placed at the nexus of power and
resistance, they come to have a presence in all presence’s sheer physicality of form,
so that just as power seeks to variously obstruct, kill, harm, confine and incarcerate,
so too resistance seeks to interject the body into the spaces of power, so that such
interjection seeks to variously disrupt, and harm in Manichean return, as Fanon
shows, or it might create alternative spaces for movement and circulation defiant
of the carceral remit of power. As we know from Michel Foucault’s analytics,
power operates upon bodies and populations, disciplining the former and governing
the latter, and we know too that such disciplining and government take place in an
architecture of space that exactly serves to produce disciplined and governable
6 Introduction

individuals and populations. This architecture of space is then a material force that
has effects, in the shaping of subjects and in their potential to resist. Reflecting
continuities of past and present, this architecture of space might come in the form
of so called ‘green zones’ – high security enclaves and walled compounds – and it
might come in the form of road blocks, prison buildings, and other locations of
confinement aimed at the control of movement, both temporally and spatially.
The postcolonial subject bears the imprints of the colonial legacy, not just in
relation to a colonised past, but in the constitutive role of the past in shaping the
present. This is an imprint that sits closely, if somewhat uncomfortably, with the
imprint of the postcolonial state and what I will refer to as the promise of
‘independence’. It is these imprints together and in all their complexity and
diversity that then come to the fore in a late modern cosmopolitan terrain wherein
the very idea of ‘independence’ as a political construct comes face to face with a
governmentalising remit that can be authored elsewhere. The profound implications
for the political cannot be overstressed. While the machinery of government is not
confined to Western agencies and institutions, that much of the postcolonial world
has witnessed and continues to witness a separation, or a disjuncture, between
government and politics – between the machinery of provision and the institutions
of state – raises fundamental questions relating to the meaning of political
community and its relationship to the state. As we will see, where the postcolonial
state relied for its legitimacy on the anti-colonial, nationalist struggle, the late
modern postcolonial state comes up against the question of political community in
a context wherein the limits and boundaries of such community can no longer be
conceived in terms of the state. As will be seen as the argument of the book
develops, the core concepts I use in rethinking postcolonial political community
are the ‘declaration of independence’ and the ‘moment of founding’. I borrow
these terms from Hannah Arendt’s engagement with the American Revolution,
but find them of immense significance in thinking of the postcolonial subject and
this subject’s claiming the political, the right to politics. Of core interest here is
how the declaration and the moment of founding are articulated, in modernity and
now in late modernity. The conception of resistance I seek to develop in this book
is constitutively related to the ‘declaration’ and the moment of ‘founding’ and the
forms that both take, in relation to political community, to the ‘international’, and
to the ‘cosmopolitan’.
The book is structured around and through a number of interrelated themes
aimed at uncovering the postcolonial subject’s claiming the political. The idea of
‘claiming the political’ suggests the articulation of a ‘right to politics’ in the context
of the postcolonial state, the postcolonial international, and the late modern
cosmopolitan. To suggest a subject engaged in claiming, or an ‘articulation’ is at
once to suggest the emergence of political agency. While much in the constructivist
turn in International Relations seeks to resolve the agency-structure dynamic, the
more challenging question, and one that is preferred intellectually in this context,
relates to the subject and how we can conceptualise this subject’s constitution as a
subject of politics. The first chapter, therefore, explores the ontological and
 Introduction 7

epistemological challenges in tracing the postcolonial subject. The second locates

the postcolonial subject and articulations of resistance in the temporal and spatial
contingencies of modernity, focusing in particular on what I refer to as ‘policing
access to the political’ as a colonial rationality. The first two chapters must be read
as servicing Chapter 3, which is devoted to providing a theorisation of the subject
of politics in postcoloniality. The concepts I elaborate in this chapter run through
the book, providing its conceptual schema, and driving its curiosities. These
include ‘the subject of politics’, the ‘right to politics’, and the ‘declaration of
independence’ as core concepts in understanding the constitution of the subject of
politics in postcoloniality, drawing in particular on Hannah Arendt and Etienne
Balibar, and then focusing on the ‘negativity’ of the subject of politics, focusing on
Fanon’s negativity. The aim throughout is to rethink resistance in terms of the
subject’s claim to politics, locating this claim in a constitutive relationship with
political community, the international, and the cosmopolitan. The last three
chapters of the book are therefore devoted to the postcolonial struggle over the
political, starting with Chapter 4, which focuses on the claim to politics and what
I refer to as the ‘heteronomy of the international’. The chapter focuses in particular
on the constitutive role of ‘independence’ in relation to the constitution of political
community and the struggle of access to the ‘international’. The aporetic
relationship between the postcolonial and the international comes into sharp relief
here, but is seen in all its resonance in Chapter 5 where the ‘international’ as such
is challenged through what I have suggested are cosmopolitan operations of power,
what I refer to as the cosmopolitanism of government. The ultimate aim of this
chapter is to reveal how the subject of politics emerges in these spaces of
cosmopolitan government. Chapter 6 retrieves the subject of politics in late
modernity, culminating in what we have come to know as the ‘Arab Spring’,
suggesting that this perhaps signs in a moment that we might come to know
temporally as the ‘beyond the postcolonial’. The regional reference point is
primarily, though not exclusively, the Middle East.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 88 STRADIVARI'S VIOLINS that the whole was put together
at the same time ; nevertheless, upon scrutinising the label, we
invariably find that it is a forged Stradivari, thus proving that it was
originally labelled otherwise, probably " sotto la disciplina," etc. It is
fortunate, then, that the impress of Stradivari's work is as marked in
his old age as in his younger days, and notwithstanding the
confusion brought about by this nefarious exchanging of labels, the
few connoisseurs who have had the opportunity of studying the
instruments dated year after year throughout the master's life, are
able to distinguish, in most cases clearly, Stradivari's work from that
of his pupils or assistants. We are now entering on the last period of
Stradivari's life. In 1730 he attained his eighty-sixth year, but was
still hale and able to continue his daily occupation. That he thought
man's allotted time upon this earth had, in his own case, well-nigh
expired is evidenced by his having in 1729 chosen and prepared a
resting-place for his remains. No record exists of any other member
of his calling having been able to use his tools at such an advanced
age. The second Carlo Bergonzi, the grandson of Stradivari's pupil,
who died in Cremona in 1838, is stated to have attained the age of
eighty, but we know of no instrument of his dated later than 1833.
Of Nicolo Amati, who died aged eighty-eight, we have already stated
our belief that he ceased working several years previous to his
death. In France, the elder Derazey and George Chanot, senior, both
worked up to eighty years of age. Cuypers, the Dutch maker, seems
also to have worked to an advanced age, which fact he frequently
recorded on his labels. We have had a violin made by him, dated
1808, on the label of which he says, " setatis suae 84." As far as
England is concerned, we know of no makers whose
 THE WORK OF HIS LAST YEARS 89 longevity equals that of
Stradivari. The Kennedys and Craske were probably those whose
lives approached nearest to it in length. The instruments dating
between 1730 and 1737 are of diverse type and character. It is
impossible to suppose otherwise than that Stradivari's collaboration
in the construction of instruments must have decreased from year to
year as he drew nearer to his end ; yet in the greater number of the
specimens of this period we can invariably trace some part wrought
by his hand. Others he apparently made entirely by himself, for we
cannot admit that either of the sons or Bergonzi — who proved
themselves, as witnessed by their signed works, to be, if not
technically of the first rank, at least good average workmen — would
have cut those palsied sound-holes, in which we discern not only the
trembling hand, but also the failing sight — for instance, those of the
" Habeneck " Stradivari, dated 1736, where the right-hand one is set
quite TV of an inch higher than the other. Then there is the " Muntz
" violin, on which sandpaper marks show plainly all over the sides
(and the same is the case in some of the later-dated J. B.
Guadagninis). The irregular purfling we meet with tells the same tale
: the grand old man's hand trembled so much in cutting the grooves
for its insertion that his knife played sad havoc in all directions, — so
much so that to have filled up the trenches it would, in places, have
been necessary to use purfling of violoncello thickness. Our
illustration (fig. 33) of the sound-hole and section of the edge and
purfling of the "Muntz" violin, 1736, pathetically portrays the
veteran's work. The formation of the corners and edges is
ponderous, blunt, irregular, and of square appearance. This is but
natural when we consider the difficulty experienced by the old and
en 
 9Q STRADIVARI'S VIOLINS feebled, though practised,
hand', of bending the sides of the centre bouts with well-rounded
curves; and it must be remembered that the curves of the outline
follow those of the sides. The modelling is heavy, full, and abrupt ;
we notice the absence of that graceful blending with the fluting
around the edge. The heads, while distinctly exhibiting the work of
less skilful hands, are not so much like the work of an old man as
the bodies, and we cannot but believe that Stradivari made a certain
number in former years which he now utilised ; we are also of
opinion that his sons materially* assisted him in this direction*
hence the superiority of the finish of the cue. pajtover that of the
other. The varnish generally shows, though not without exception,
considerable deterioration. More often it is heavily laid on, wanting in
softness of texture, and in perfect transparency and richness of
colour. At times it is even of a muddy an.d Kig. 33. — Edge, Purfling,
and Sound-hole of the Example known as the "Muntz," MADE IN
1736.
 REPRESENTATIVE SPECIMENS 91 streaky appearance,
which but too plainly demonstrates that the old man's sight failed
him both in the mixing of the ingredients composing the varnish and
in the use of his brush when applying it to the instrument. Some of
the most representative specimens known to us of these last years
are : — The " Kiesewetter," dated 1731, owned by the late Mr.
Havemeyer. The Violin 11 1732, )i „ Mrs. Tom Taylor. 5) »J 11 1732,
» „ the late Mr. Wiener. )) » J) 1733, » ,, M. Roussy. » i* 5) 1734, si „
the late Lord Amherst of Hackney. J' J) 11 1734, » „ Mr. Phipps, ex
Ames. 11 )» 11 1735, >> „ M. Lamoureux (the late). )) 11 11 1735,
>> „ M. Samazeuilh. The"Muntz" 11 1736, )j „ Mr. Higgins. The
Violin 11 1736, >> „ Mrs. Sassoon. )> » 11 1736, )i „ M. Roussy. » »
11 1737, 1) „ M. White. We are also acquainted with other equally
characteristic examples of this period, but are unable to give their
exact dates, as the labels have either been changed or their figures
tampered with. The excellent instrument of that distinguished
artiste, M. Heermann, of Frankfort-on-the Main, is of one or other of
these years — most probably 1731 ; also the '' Habeneck " violin,
that of Mr. Tangye, and the violin of M. Ysaye ; likewise the "
Kreutzer," owned by M. Doyen — this latter an admirable example in
every respect. But only when we take one of these 1730-36
examples, and place it side by side with another of the 1710-15
period, and a third of the 1720-25 epoch, do we fully realise the
gradual change which has taken place. The veteran has in nothing
forsaken his principles of form and construction ; he steadfastly
adheres to them as long as life leaves him the use of hand and sight
: in fact, model, form, curves, edges, sound-holes, purfling, and
 g2 STRADIVARI'S VIOLINS head lack nought but the power
of execution and the firmness of hand of former years. It is generally
known that we rely for the date of the year of Stradivari's birth upon
information gained through the master having recorded his age on
several labels inserted in instruments made during the last ten years
of his life. Fetis was the first to publish this information, and he
based his proof upon Stradivari's statement, " d'anni 92" written on
a label dated 1736, found in a violin only a short time before in the
possession of Count Cozio di Salabue.* The Count, before his death,
had sold this instrument to Tarisio, who took it to Paris, and disposed
of it to the elder Gand in 1831. In the course of time it found its way
to our shores having been purchased in Paris from the firm of Gand
& Bernardel Freres, by the late Mr. H. M. Muntz, of Birmingham ; at
that amateur's decease it came into our hinds, and subsequently
became the property of Mr. Higgins. The year of Stradivari's birth, as
thus recorded by Fetis, remained uncontested until a few years ago,
when Mr. E. J. Payne, in the article on Stradivari contributed to
Grove's Dictionary, cited a violin dated 1732, then in the possession
of the late Mr. Wiener, upon the label of which was written, in
Stradivari's handwriting, " d'anni 82." The label, the handwriting, and
the figures are undoubtedly original, and equally so are those in the
above-mentioned violin referred to by F6tis ; yet if the one version
were correct the other could not be. Hence, at the time when Mr.
Payne's article was written (1882), the matter was even to ourselves
an unsolved conundrum, although one circumstance somewhat
influenced us in favour of the * Count Cozio makes mention in the
notes left by him of the purchase of this violin, with others, in 1775
from Paolo Stradivari. (See " The Salabue Stradivari.")
 SOLUTION OF A PUZZLE 93 statement apparently recorded
in the Wiener violin. The figures 92 of the "d'anni 92 " on the Cozio
violin label are inscribed on a small piece of paper separate from the
ticket itself; and why this should be so was at the time inexplicable,
and very naturally gave rise in our minds to a suspicion that they
had been written by other hands than Stradivari's, and probably
covered the master's true figures. As time passed on, and the
instrument came into our possession, we, in order to elucidate the
matter, decided to detach this piece of paper from the label, and, on
doing so, found underneath, to our astonishment, similar figures,
only the " 9" was less distinctly made. We were therefore still further
perplexed as to the reason for covering them. The explanation came
a few years later, when we were fortunate enough to purchase in
Italy a small violin by Stradivari made in 1736, and which also bore
his inscription "d'anni 92," but this time entirely written on a
separate piece of paper glued along the bottom of the label On
taking it to pieces for repairs we availed ourselves of the opportunity
to remove the inscription, and the key to the mystery was then
found. The old man, proud of the fact, of making an instrument in
his ninety-third year, strove to record it in his handwriting at the
bottom of the label, but his eyes being dim and his hand lacking
guidance, the inscription ran downhill so much that he had to cut it
through in order not to leave an excessively wide margin on the
ticket. Unwilling to waste it, he again wrote down his age, this time
on a separate piece of paper, cut it out, and glued it on the label
over his first effort. The same explanation applies to the inscription
in the Cozio violin : Stradivari, fearing his figure " 9 " of the " 92 "
was indistinct, re-wrote both, and placed them similarly on the label
over the others. Armed now with increased knowledge and
strengthened
 94 STRADIVARI'S VIOLINS convictions, we once more
scrutinised the ticket of the Wiener violin, and the explanation of it
dawned upon us. Both Mr. Payne and ourselves tad wrongly
deciphered Stradivari's faulty figure " 9 " as " 2." Read it " d'anni
89," and it tallies with all other inscriptions, as the master, though
eighty-eight years of age in 1732, obviously celebrated his eighty-
ninth birthday during the year, and this instrument was made after
that event. The label dated 1737 is of quite pathetic interest
Apparently the master could no longer trust himself to add either
figures or inscription, so this was done for him by his son Omobono
(see the written label of Omobono for comparison). The facsimiles of
these interesting tickets are given in our reproductions.* Several
other instruments have been seen by us on the labels of which
Stradivari recorded his age. These are : first, a violin dated 1732, "
de anni 89 " ; second, a violin dated 1735, " d'anni 91 " ; third, a
violoncello dated 1736, "d'anni 92"; fourth, a violin dated 1737,
"d'anni 93." This last is probably the instrument mentioned by Count
Cozio as belonging in 1822 to Professor Bertuzzi, of Milan. Later the
property of M. de St. Senoch, of Paris, it is now owned by a
distinguished Cuban violinist, M. White. The " Habeneck " violin,
referred to by HarJ:, we do not cite, as, though unquestionably of
the latest period, neither label nor inscription is original. We thus
have eight records, all of which are in agreement, and we may
therefore conclude that, with the clearing up of the one hitherto
presumed contradictory statement, the matter may be considered as
finally placed beyond controversy. A few words as to Stradivari's
precise age at death. Paolo, the son, in con^pondence with Count
Cozio di Salabue, states that his father died at the age of ninety*
See Chapter IX.
 STRADIVARI'S AGE 95 four years, in 1738 ; but in this
latter date he was in error, as will be seen on referring to the
extracts from the Registers of the churches of S. Matteo and S.
Domenico in Cremona, showing that Antonio Stradivari was interred
in the vault of Signor Francesco Villani in the Chapel of the Rosary,
on December 19th, 1737 (see Chapter I.). Hart apparently assumes
from this that the age given was also incorrect. We, however, believe
not, as it is very possible that Stradivari had actually passed his
ninety-fourth birthday before death called him away — perhaps only
by a few days : he would therefore be in his ninety-fifth and not in
'his ninety-fourth year. The following is an extract from the
registration of Stradivari's burial in the church of S. Domenico in
Cremona. It will be noted that his age is there described as about
"'95 " : — "Anno Dili mill"10 septing™ trig"10 septimo, die decima
nona mis icbris. Dnus Antonius Stradivari viduus, aetatis annorum
nonaginta quinque circiter, heri mortuus,praemunitus, SS.
Sacramentis Ecplesije, ac adjutus commendatione animae usque ad
ejus obitum, hodie ejus cadaver associatum fuit cum exequiis a me
Dominico Antonio Stancari hujus Eccl" S. Matthei Praeposito ad
Ecclesiam M. R. R. P. P. S. Dominici Cremona: in qua sepultum fuit."
 CHAPTER III. Stradivari's Violas. TRADIVARI made few
violas. We are acquainted with only ten examples. In an old note-
book in our possession there is a reference to one, dated 1695, but
we have failed to find its present owner. Arisi tells us that in
September 1685 Bartolomeo Grandi, called " II Fassini," ordered
from Stradivari a whole set of instruments for the Court orchestra of
the Duke of Savoy : this set would have included at least two violas.
Again, in 1707 the Marquis Desiderio Cleri wrote from Barcelona to
Stradivari by order of King Charles III. of Spain, ordering six violins,
two violas, and one violoncello. Not one of these violas is now
known to exist, whilst of the two made for the Grand Duke of
Tuscany in 1690 only one remains ; and similarly, of the pair which
formed part of the set of inlaid instruments that passed into the
hands of the Spanish Court in 1772, one example only can be now
accounted for. At the commencement of the master's career the
accepted design and dimensions for a viola were those defined and
carried out by Gasparo da Salo and the Amati during upwards of a
century (see Appendix), the general proportions of which varied but
little. The attention of those accustomed to these dimensions, and
96
 ORIGIN OF THE SMALLER TYPE 97 occasionally to even
larger ones, is at once arrested by the considerably smaller form of
the earliest known Stradivari viola, made in 1672, and some
explanation of this departure from the previously accepted design is
naturally sought for. We cannot accept Stradivari as the originator of
the smaller type of viola, for, in addition to other evidence, we know
of a fine A. and H. Amati made in 1615, a Stainer made in 1660, and
several notable examples by Andrea Guarneri — contemporary
productions — which are of similar size. The A. and H. Amati viola,
being earlier and the work of famed craftsmen, served in all
probability as a model for later makers. Stradivari in particular seems
to have profited by the study of it, for we observe great similarity of
form and dimensions in his viola of 1672, though the Amati, with a
small and delicately proportioned head of violin pattern, is by far the
more gracefully designed instrument of the two. Was the smaller
form of viola initiated by the brothers Amati? We think it was ; but
can make no positive statement, owing to the ruthless manner in
which many of their violas have been reduced in size — some of the
old violas being even converted into violins.* We can only conjecture
what were their original proportions. The viola of 1672 shows in the
arching, long corners, form of edge, sound-holes, design of head,
and the pale golden varnish, just what we should expect from its
date — a following of the Amati tradition; though the whole
instrument, with its unsymmetrical outline (too wide for the length),
ungainly head, and general stiff robustness, is without the grace
inherent in the productions of the Amati. The wood of the back and
sides is of poplar ; that of the belly in width and straightness of grain
is admirable, the * See Chapter X., p. 250. 7
 98 STRADIVARI'S VIOLAS whole selection being acoustically
faultless. The dimensions agree with those of Stradivari's later
examples, with the exception of the widths ; the sound-holes are
also placed higher up on the belly. The condition of this viola is
practically perfect ; the neck is the original one, and it is interesting
to remark that the label is signed " Antonins " * — the " u " inverted.
The gradual introduction about this period, 1660-^90, of the smaller
type of viola, which offers greater technical facility to the performer,
is difficult to account for. The printed music of the time provides no
clue, for the earliest important viola part, that of Corelli's "XII
Concerti Grossi," published in 171 2, could be quite easily played on
a Gasparo or Amati, and in a performance the balance of sound
would be incomparably better preserved by the tone of the larger
viola. Even later, in the time of Handel,t the compass of viola parts,
seldom, if ever, necessitated the shifting of the hand above the first
position ; therefore no difficulty was presented' by the use of a large
viola. It is astonishing, too, to observe how small is the quantity of
chamber music, which included a part for the viola, written from
1683, the date of Corelli's earliest composition (" XII Trios for Two
Violins and Bass "), until nearly a century later, when Boccherini and
Haydn J were ensuring permanency for the string quartet. 1 Corelli's
celebrated " Forty-eight Trios for Two Violins and Bass " met with
such universal approval that this combination became the favourite
one, and later composers of all degrees of merit adopted it, to the
exclusion of nearly * See Chapter IX., p. 229. t See interesting
analysis of the orchestral parts of the " Messiah " used by Handel,
and now preserved at the Foundling Hospital, by Dr. E. Prout
{Monthly Musical Record, April 1894). X Boccherini's " First Set of
Quartets," Paris, 1768. Haydn's first quartet was composed in 1755.
The text on this page is estimated to be only 20.33%
accurate

The Inlaid Viola made by Stradivari, dated 1696. 99

 THE VIOLA IN CHAMBER MUSIC all other forms of chamber
music. The finer form of string trio, that for violin, viola, and
violoncello, seems only to have come into existence with the string
quartet ; and of Boccherini's * published collection of fifty-two string
trios only twelve are for this combination of instruments. Seeing,
then, that the music of the epoch can scarcelyhave led to the
introduction of the smaller violai what other cause can be assigned
for the change? It was an experimental age in instrumentmaking,
and the small viola may have been an experiment at first, su
bsequently securing a permanent position because it proved more
convenient to the ordinary viola player, who would in nine cases out
of ten be a violinist, and therefore find playing on a large viola
fatiguing and disturbing to * Boccherini's " First Set of Six Trios for
Violin, Viola, and Violoncello,'' Op. 14, Paris, 1768. Fig. 34. — Bridge
made by Stradivari for the "Tenore" of the "Tuscan" Quintet.
 io2 STRADIVARI'S VIOLAS his technique. The violin had
been evolved from and superseded the smaller types of viols, and
the violoncello of reduced proportions was on its trial ; therefore
makers may have reasoned that a smaller type of viola might equally
supply a want. The' next viola known to us is dated 1690 —
eighteen years later — the year which gives the first of the '' Long
Strad " violins as well as the " Tuscan " set — and the creative
capacity displayed in these instruments is equally traceable in the
viola. The distinctive features at once apparent between this and the
former viola are the narrower outline, the lower and more slanting
position of the sound-holes, flatter arching, broader edge, and
shorter corners. The diminution of the outline in width at top and
bottom (see Appendix), and the lower position of the sound-holes,
clearly improve the proportions. The wood of the back, sides, and
head is of attractive appearance ; and though the varnish is not
sufficiently definite in colour, the fine style and preservation afford
ample compensation. The principles and details of the work are
those embodied in the violins of this period. We know not which to
admire most — the determination Stradivari evinces to form a style
of his own, or the intuition which enables him at this stage to design
the form which was to serve for all his subsequent violas, with the
exception of the two large ones. The "Tuscan" viola, preserved in the
Musical Institute of Florence, is of extremely large dimensions,
exceeding those Of Gasparo and Amati. It is worthy in every respect
of its surviving companions of the quintet — the violin and the
violoncello ; wood and varnish are identical with those used for
them, though the viola seems a shade lighter in colour than the
violin. Stradivari's very graceful monogram * is stamped in the * See
reproduction, Chapter II., p. 46.
 "TENORE" AND "CONTRALTO" 103 mortise of the neck,
which is original, as are also the finger-board, tail-piece, tail-pin, tail-
nut, and even the bridge (fig. 34). Indeed, except for somewhat
serious beetle "ravages, set up probably through the instrument
being locked up in a museum rather than remaining in the hands of
a loving appreciator, it is as it left the maker, and is a truly grand
example. We know of only one other similarly proportioned viola
having been made by the master — namely, the corresponding
instrument of the inlaid quintet. The moulds and other necessary
patterns used in making the Violas of the " Tuscan " set are
preserved in the Dalla Valle Collection, and we note with interest
that Stradivari calls the larger one " tenore," the smaller
"contralto";* the moulds are also lettered T. PC and C.V.\ (fig. 35).
The distinctive titles favour the supposition that these two distinct
.types of violas were then generally recognised and known
respectively by the names cited. These pairs of violas by Stradivari
were doubtless intended to be played in compositions of the
character of the " Sonata a cinque,' by G. LegrenziJ (1625-90), and
the "Sonata Varie," by J. B. Vitali § (1644-92). A brief reference to
the course which viola-making followed may prove instructive.
Before 1660 we find the makers — Zanetto, Gasparo, Maggini, the
Amati, and others — frequently constructing the large viola, but very
rarely the small one. From 1660 to 1700 the small viola was
superseding the large one, though fewer violas of any kind were
then made. Between 1700 and 1750 there was almost a cessation of
viola-making in all countries ; this coincides with the dearth of
chamber * See reproduction of Stradivari's writing to this effect, t
Tenore viola and Contralto viola. J Wasielewski, "Die Violine im XVII.
Jatirhundert." § Grove's " Dictionary of Music," art. 'Tenor Violin.1
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