Dr. Rohan Price

In this unique, provocative and wide-ranging work, author Rohan Price explores the colonial experience of Western Australia, Tasmania and Singapore with reference to four concepts: Being, Legality, Convenience, and Fate. At its heart are case studies of violence between white settlers and Indigenous populations in Western Australia and Tasmania, and the Japanese invasion of Singapore during the Second World War. Within each of these case studies, Price focuses on acts of violence to determine the extent of Being, Legality, Convenience, and Fate. Across these experiences, Price finds that resistance offered by many inhabitants to their colonial overlords creates disturbing challenges for both philosophy and history. Being in the Colonies adopts an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, encompassing philosophy, history and law, and making extensive use of oral testimony. It applies a revealing ontological claim that competitive struggle, violence and resistance yield a form of Being that is temporary, relative and always hard-won.

Are there ethics justifying anti-colonial violence? How and why did the violence and visions of nationalist movements become incorporated by colonial and neo-colonial rule? Using the insurrection by the Malayan Communist Party (1948–1960) as an example, this book argues that resorting to violence sped up the decolonisation of British Malaya by forcing its colonial administration to invent Malay nationalism and pursue ameliorative social policy among the Chinese diaspora community in a manner clearly derived from the Party’s platform. Yet this was not the same as giving the country economic emancipation from the expectations of neo-colonial rule. Violence and Emancipation in Colonial Ideology entertains no warm colonial memories of the cold war years. Confirming Price’s reputation as a plain speaking critic of Empire apologia, this book asks how colonial ideology was considered to be beneath Europe yet desperately needed by it. He faces down nostalgic communities defending an outdated view that “might was right” in South East Asia and that communism failed to contribute to the world that came to be. Using an Althusserian assumption, the book begs the question: if a late colonial state was subjective, then how did it claim a sufficiently objective mantle to rule and how did ideological techniques enable this?

Provocative and disconcerting, The False Past confronts what many generations hold near and dear about their memorials. What if everything we know about colonial history is wrong? What if history is driven by vanity and unexamined moral claims? What if fabrication and corruption are so integral to history that it must be written anew? These questions, posed by Nietzsche, are answered in this exciting new work. The False Past takes a disturbing escapade through Australia’s colonial past. Using a Nietzschean evaluation of how the eternal recurrence of suffering worked in practice, it announces a fresh vision for frontier history. And in the finest Nietzschean tradition, Price reveals the uncaring absurdity and inconsistency of settlers in the pioneer past as their supreme failing because it produces contemporary trauma. The False Past evaluates claims to colonial nobility, too. Who were the souls aiming beyond humanity who rose up Down Under? Was its Übermensch a dark and moody genius with a taste for conquest, a supreme talent in pastoral profiteering, an Indigenous exemplar, or a cunning bushranger out on a mission? Awkward and confronting, bold and experimental, this book often says the unsayable. The False Past lays siege to nostalgia, piety, vanity and nihilism to explain how unfounded exceptionalism has come to rule our lives. A revisionist assault on settled history, The False Past promises to spark debate among readers for many years to come.

This text argues that Nietzsche's idea of invalid policy that is believed to be valid and Heidegger's concept of doubt as the reason for a representation are essentially the same idea. Using this insight, the text investigates vignettes from colonial occupation in southeast Asia and its protest occupations to contend that untruth, covered in camouflages of constancy and morality, has been a powerful force in Asian history. The Nietzschean inflections applied here include Superhumanity, the eternal return of trauma, the critiques of morality, and the moralization of guilt. Many ideas familiar to the Heideggerian repertoire are used including the struggle for individual validity amidst the debasement and imbalance of Dasein. Thrownness, and the remnant cultural power of Christianity, are also deployed in a searching expos of colonial practices. The book gives detailed treatment to post-colonial Malaya, Japanese occupied Hong Kong, the tussle with communism in Cold War Singapore and Malaya and the question of Kuomintang KMT validity in Hong Kong and British Malaya. The book explains the old struggles for freedom and identity in the Hong Kong protest movement by showing how economic distortion caused by landlordism has been covered by aspirations for freedom.