ABSTRACT
The notion of an all-embracing colonial governmentality that, in Homi Bhabha’s famous phrase, ‘appropriates, directs, and dominates its various spheres of activity’ (1986: 154) has for the most part been discarded by scholars of colonialism. Yet, governmentality continues to appear in scholarship as a set of technologies that are effi caciously applied to a variety of subjects in different contexts and time periods. Is it perhaps the case that this form of modern power was not mapped as easily onto colonial contexts as the literature on colonial governmentality implies?1
