Whose settler-colonial definition? Discussing recent contestations about Elizabeth Warren’s claims to indigeneity

17Oct18

See what the BBC makes of it.


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Liberia as a settler-colonial project: Carmel Lambert, Inventing Liberia: imagining and representing colony and nation in American, Liberian and European writing 1820-1940, PhD Dissertation, NUI Galway, 2018

16Oct18

Abstract: Liberia, the West African nation, whose name connotes freedom, was the creation of the American Colonisation Society (ACS) whose initial aim was to rid the United States of a growing population of ‘free people of colour.’ Yet it became a unique imaginative space on to which were projected the hopes, dreams and fears of various groups in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study examines the various ways that the country (established as a colony in 1820 and declared a republic in 1847) was imagined, constructed and represented in a wide variety of American, Liberian and English texts from 1820-1940. Ultimately, Liberia came to be widely regarded as not merely the reversal of the Middle Passage but a path whereby the descendants of slavery, figured as socially and spiritually unmoored in the New World, might be anchored and regenerated in Africa. For the pioneering members of the free black community and newly emancipated slaves who colonised it, Liberia came to be represented as a recovered homeland, a space in which the experience of New World slavery could be rendered meaningful in the secular and sacred arenas through nation-building and the Christianisation of the African continent. White Americans promoted colonisation as the Manifest Destiny of the free black community, giving them the opportunity to carry the ideals of revolutionary America to their ancestral home. Late nineteenth-century American and Caribbean black commentators figured Liberia as a base for a Pan-African nation that presented a historic opportunity to define the ultimate destiny of the African Diaspora. These different representations positioned the Black Republic as a supposed utopia where black masculinity and femininity, so deeply undermined by the institution of slavery, could be restored and revitalised. For contemporary English and European visitors, the nation was a troubling anomaly in a continent ruled by European imperial powers. The accounts of these travellers to Liberia represented it as a state in crisis, whose failure they attributed largely to the incapacity of African people for self-government. Liberia represents a re-figuring of the very concept of settler colonialism. Its distinctive and contested nature offers a singular paradigm that transforms and destabilises understandings of discourses regarding race and colonial relationships, complicates ideas of liberty and agency, and widens the scope of abolitionism, black nationalism and American imperialism. It adds a new dimension to our conceptualisation of the Black Atlantic and extends the developing genre of black American literature beyond the borders of the United States.


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Indigenous sport and settler sport: Andrew Narraway, Settler Colonial Power and Indigenous Survival: Hockey Programs at Three Indian Residential Schools in Northwestern Ontario and Manitoba, 1929-1969, MA Dissertation, Carleton University, 2018

16Oct18

Abstract: Despite the growing national interest and body of literature concerning the Indian Residential School System, there has been little acknowledgement of the history of hockey within these schools. This thesis is an examination of hockey programs at three Protestant-run Indian residential schools in northwestern Ontario and western Manitoba during the middle of the twentieth century. By using church and government documents, this study highlights the complex relationship between settler colonialism, sport, and Indigenous survival. It reveals that while hockey was implemented into residential school curriculum as a means of assimilation, public relations, and eventually integration, it was also a space of negotiation, entertainment, identity, and even survival for Indigenous children within these schools. Microlevel decisions and effects greatly influenced the advancement of hockey from a local-level disciplinary technique to a federally mandated aspect of Indian education.


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The settler ‘white’ legend (is a legend, and needs a ‘black’ legend too): Ralph Bauer, ‘The White Legend: Edmundo O’Gorman, Hemispheric Studies, and the Paradigm of New World Exceptionalism’, English Language Notes, 56, 2, 2018, pp. 51-54

14Oct18

Abstract: This position paper offers a reflection on Edmundo O’Gorman’s seminal La invención de América as a critique of the New World exceptionalism underwriting much of twentieth-century hemispheric American studies. It suggests that the paradigm of New World exceptionalism emerges, as a state of exception, from the modern Western (Protestant) idea that America was discovered by Europeans in the fifteenth century, or that America was ever “discovered” by anyone at all. This exceptionalist paradigm of discovery can be understood in terms of a “White Legend” that structurally depends on the idea of the “Black Legend” of the Spanish conquest, for, contrary to conventional wisdom, it was the conquest of America (not its “discovery”) that legitimated the modern idea of discovery in international law and science.


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Settler colonial violence’s ghosts: Fiona Murphy, ‘The whisperings of ghosts: Loss, longing, and the return in Stolen Generations stories’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2018

14Oct18

Abstract: This article examines the telling of ghost stories of Indigenous Australians who were removed from their families during Australia’s assimilation era. Known as the Stolen Generations, this group of people were subjected to institutionalisation, adoption, and forced removals from their families, communities and Aboriginal country. In many of my ethnographic encounters with Stolen Generations, I was steadily drawn into their world of ghosts and hauntings. This article reflects on the challenge for the ethnographer in thinking with and through such encounters with the uncanny. It asks how we should approach the ghost as a real entity as well as a metaphorical, interpretative lens through which to understand the transgenerational trauma and suffering inflicted by settler colonial violence.


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Voting settler women: Ana Stevenson, ‘Imagining Women’s Suffrage Frontier Landscapes and the Transnational Print Culture of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States’, Pacific Historical Review, 87, 4, 2018, pp. 638-666

14Oct18

Abstract: During the late nineteenth century, the print culture associated with women’s suffrage exhibited increasingly transnational connections. Between the 1870s and 1890s, suffragists in the United States, and then Australia and New Zealand, celebrated the early enfranchisement of women in the U.S. West. After the enfranchisement of antipodean women at the turn of the twentieth century, American suffragists in turn gained inspiration from New Zealand and Australia. In the process, suffrage print culture focused on the political and social possibilities associated with the frontier landscapes that defined these regions. However, by envisioning such landscapes as engendering white women’s freedom, suffrage print culture conceptually excluded Indigenous peoples from its visions of enfranchisement. The imaginative connections fostered in transnational suffrage print culture further encouraged actual transpacific connections between the suffragists themselves.


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Southern settler colonialism: Gina Caison, Red States Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies, University of Georgia Press, 2018

12Oct18

Abstract: Red States uses a regional focus in order to examine the tenets of white southern nativism and Indigenous resistance to colonialism in the U.S. South. Gina Caison argues that popular misconceptions of Native American identity in the U.S. South can be understood by tracing how non-Native audiences in the region came to imagine indigeneity through the presentation of specious histories presented in regional literary texts, and she examines how Indigenous people work against these narratives to maintain sovereign land claims in their home spaces through their own literary and cultural productions. As Caison demonstrates, these conversations in the U.S. South have consequences for how present-day conservative political discourses resonate across the United States.

Assembling a newly constituted archive that includes regional theatrical and musical performances, pre–Civil War literatures, and contemporary novels, Gina Caison illuminates the U.S. South’s continued investment in settler colonialism and the continued Indigenous resistance to this paradigm. Ultimately, she concludes that the region is indeed made up of red states, but perhaps not in the way readers initially imagine.

 


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Dance as indigenous response-ability: Jacqueline Shea Murphy, ‘Mitimiti Reciprocities of indigenized dance’, in Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, Holger Hartung (eds), Movements of Interweaving Dance and Corporeality in Times of Travel and Migration, Routledge, 2018

10Oct18

Abstract: This chapter discusses Mitimiti by Māori (Ngati Porou/Ngati Kahungunu and Te Rarawa/Nga Puhi) choreographer Jack Gray, as presented in October, 2015 by Atamira Dance Company in Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand). It engages with the activations of reciprocity this dance work embodies, focusing on how it enacts connective, respectful, response-able—as well as playful and loving—relationality, activated in Indigenous-to-Indigenous contexts and open to all. The chapter describes (with description unfolding in layers, much like the dance itself) ways this work counters familiar absorptive (or distanced or exotified) settler-colonial practices of (attempted) incorporation of Indigenous peoples and knowledges; Mitimiti, it suggests, is not a celebration of the interweaving of Western and Indigenous movement structures, and the possibilities in these interwoven patterns for moving beyond an ongoing settler colonialism that is hardly “post.” Rather, it looks at how Mitimiti refuses the interwoven fabric of various “Western” structures, worldviews, and practices (even as this activation happens, necessarily, in adaptive relation to the weight of its mantel) to assert, through loving, embodied practices—where love is defined through reverberating calls for Indigenous-to-Indigenous self-recognition and self-love—the interwoven fabric of its own multiple and complex continuums of past, present, and future.


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Settler colonialism is transcolonial as well as transnational: Briony Neilson, ‘Settling Scores in New Caledonia and Australia: French Convictism and Settler Legitimacy’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2018

10Oct18

Abstract: This article explores the entanglements of Australia and New Caledonia as settler colonies with convict histories. Existing historiography focuses on the importance of the Australian model in inspiring the French to transport convicts to settler colonies, and has explored the moral panic that erupted over the menace of escaped French convicts invading the Australian colonies after the abolition of British convict transportation. My analysis shifts the focus onto the construction of settler colonial authority, analysing the ways in which comparisons drawn by contemporary observers of New Caledonia and Australia served primarily to solidify the legitimacy of settler rule in Australia and increase its regional hegemony into the first few decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on original French and English‐language sources, including the writing of the obscure French convict poet Julien de Sanary, this article makes the case for understanding New Caledonia and its bagne not as unwanted reminders of Australia’s penal origins, but rather as useful sites of projection for settlers in Australia. Constant arguments about the archaic and authoritarian nature of French penal policy and colonialism helped erase the memory of convictism and strengthen settler authority and legitimacy in Australia and internationally. By considering the trans‐imperial entanglements of Australia and New Caledonia, we can further reveal the dynamics of settler colonialism and the processes of disavowal and disassociation that sustain it.


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Feeding settler colonialism: Sarah Rotz, Lauren Wood Kepkiewicz, ‘Settler colonialism and the (im)possibilities of a national food policy’, Canadian Food Studies, 5, 3, 2018, pp. 248–258

07Oct18

Abstract: In this perspectives piece we ask: is it possible for a national food policy to form the foundation for sustainable and equitable food systems in Canada? First, we argue that under the current settler government, such a policy does not provide this foundation. Second, we consider what might be possible within the scope of a national food policy, examining our responsibilities as settlers to hold our government accountable so policies do not further exacerbate food system inequities. To mitigate some of the harmful effects of current food-related policy, we offer several suggestions regarding how settlers might begin to rethink our investments in the Canadian state and settler food systems: 1) repatriate land and transform private property structures; 2) support Indigenous food provisioners; and 3) build knowledge and support for non-extractive relationships. These suggestions will not decolonize a national food policy; rather, they present short-term actions that we urge settlers to advocate for in order to address some of the ways the Canadian government attempts to restrict Indigenous food systems.


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