Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Cultures by Marouf Hasian Jr. (review)

The cover of Marouf Hasian’s Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Culturesbears an arresting image: a photograph of a skull on a pristine white surface in a clear protective case. This skull is a surviving trace of the colonial empire of German South-West Africa, today’s Namibia. A numbered tag is attached to the skull’s upper jaw. The lower jaw is secured to the skull by a narrow spring and screws. A surgically precise cut transects the cranium, evidence that the skull cap was removed to weigh the brain’s mass as one measurement in its comprehensive cataloguing in the larger project of “racial science” at the turn of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inscribed on the cranium are two notations, “Herero” and “Bartels,” each followed by cataloguing codes. The former notation is the tribal identifıcation of the skull; the latter is a common Germanic surname, in all likelihood the name of the laboratory worker who measured and catalogued the skull.

The contrast of inscribing the tribal identifıcation of the colonized against the specifıc surname of the colonizer offers a glimpse into the racial hierarchies of the era. What the photograph cannot reveal, however, is the camp culture that produced the deaths of 60,000–80,000 Herero and tens of thousands of Nama in the “annihilation camps” of colonial German SouthWest Africa. Nor can it suggest “the utilitarian use of their bodies by European[s]…who treated African body parts as iconic forms of arguments that would be deployed in the rhetorical construction of [numerous] anti-humanitarian discourses” (114). This contemporary image, as well as others from the colonial camp era, have become potent visual arguments among those national communities that are entangled by the horrors of the colonial era; these visual artifacts participate in contemporary efforts to induce, cajole, or exact from former colonizer nations acknowledgments, or apologies, or fınancial restitution.

In the pages of this detailed and superbly documented book, Marouf Hasian gives human depth to the colonizers and colonized in four case studies of Western imperial conquest, indigenous resistance, counterinsurgency suppression, and biopolitical and thanatopolitical (i.e., the politics of death) terror. Moreover, through his detailed articulation of “actual historical and contemporary arguments” of both “defenders and critics of…colonial camps” (4), Professor Hasian gives readers a rich understanding of “the arguments that have been deployed by both defenders and critics of these colonial camp cultures” (4) and “of the uncanny discursive and visual resemblances that exist between the historical claims that circulated during the fın de sièclecamp years and today’s wartime representations of civilian casualty loss” (17).

Investigations throughout this volume are grounded in argumentative and critical genealogical analysis. Hasian identifıes and analyzes the rhetorical topoi through which privileged “claims and conclusions about the camps becamethe taken-for-granted epistemesthat fıll our libraries, archives, and pictorial collections” (8). He cautions readers to be wary of assertions about “what really happened,” as well as rhetors’ claims about their own motives. “We need to be circumspect when we hear that any particular historical account, from either the colonized or the colonizer, is providing us with some preferred… rendition of ‘what happened’ in the camps” (6). Consequently, Hasian focuses upon the uses of argumentative claims of both colonizers and colonized to justify their positions and actions during these periods. Additionally, his four case studies track the persistence and transformation of those original premises and claims that have reemerged on the contemporary scene, as descendants of camp victims and their communities seek recognition, apology, and restitution, part of a “growing transglobal phenomenon” (2). In this manner, Hasian articulates the elements of a rhetorical genre that structure contemporary justifıcations for, and attacks upon, counterinsurgency movements and their suppression.

Through critical genealogy, Hasian enables us to frame “colonial archives and historical records...