Comparative Wests: Transnational Perspectives on Rapid Cultural, Economic, and Environmental Transformations in the 19th Century Settler Colonies of Western Australia, Western Canada, the Western United States, and the Pacific Islands

Wednesday, September 29, 2010 | 3:00pm
Stanford Humanities Center

This Mellon-Sawyer seminar will focus especially on how indigenous communities interacted with, resisted, and adapted to the the spread of settler colonialism, and on the connections among environmental and cultural changes prompted by the simultaneous expansion of these Anglophone settler colonies. One premise of the seminar is that we can better understand how nation states have incorporated lands that they claimed but did not fully control by looking at the construction of space — how movements of people, things, other animals, and ideas are expedited and constrained over historical time – in comparative and transnational context. Another starting point for discussion will be to ask how the 19th-century mix of settler colonialism and industrial capitalism produced political and scientific narratives of race, labor, property, polity, and environment, and how these discourses were both written and contested in law and on land.

We hope the seminar will be useful for scholars across several disciplines interested in these different Wests, in borderlands, environmental and indigenous issues, and in comparative colonialisms. The seminar will meet at least three times per quarter in 2010-2011, and will hold additional events in conjunction with the visits to Stanford of scholars and artists from Australia in the spring and summer of 2011. Discussion will be largely based on precirculated readings.

Hat-tip to Aaron B for sending word of this event.