Description
Scholarship on war experience has emphasised the centrality of technology in shaping the relation between war and the body. This paper historicises these dynamics by looking at the introduction of breechloading rifles and machine guns in late-19th-century British imperial warfare - especially the Anglo-Zulu War (1879). Looking at the role of these weapons in ‘automating’ the colonial battlefield, this paper calls for an understanding of war experience beyond the human body-subject. On the one hand, the agency of rifles and machine guns disturbed the gendered construction of the civilised nation as premised upon the relation between individual masculine warriors and collective experiences of war. While these innovations were praised for glorifying individual responsibility on the battlefield - an idea that was proved wrong in colonial settings - they also ignited anxieties about the emasculation of soldiering bodies. On the other, the natives’ perception of weapons challenged Western racial and civilisational hierarchies. Exemplarily, the Zulus saw modern rifles as a morally inferior weapon linked to hunting rather than war, rather than the embodiment of racial dominance. Underpinned by hierarchies that cut across the categories of humanity and animality in new ways, these experiences challenged the subjection of the Black animalised body to the Western technological one.
