The Times (SA) (5/8/2013).

Our right to the land is entrenched in history. It is undisputed.We have ancestral rights to the land because it was not granted or sold to anybody. The land belonged to aborigines who were there long before Europeans settled. […] But colonialists took the aborigines and classified them as coloured. Then these “coloureds” had to […]

James L. Flexner, ‘Historical Archaeology, Contact, and Colonialism in Oceania’, Journal of Archaeological Research (August 2013). The archaeology of colonialism can destabilize orthodox historical narratives because of its critical engagement with multiple lines of evidence, revealing ways that different perspectives can complement or contradict what was assumed to be known about the past. In Oceania, archaeology […]

Karen Hughes, ‘”I’d grown up as a child amongst natives”: Ruth Heathcock (1901-1995) – disrupting settler-colonial orthodoxy through friendship and cross-cultural literacy in creolised spaces of the Australian contact zone’, Outskirts online journal 28 (2013). Growing up in the small River Murray town of Wellington, South Australia as the twentieth century turned, Henrietta (Ruth) Sabina […]

Poetic Craft and White-Settler Colonialism: A workshop on Australian and South African poetics. 13-14 September 2013, University of Western Sydney Bankstown campus (Bullecourt Ave, Milperra). This workshop will bring together eminent Australian and South African poets and critics to con-sider how poets in societies with a white settler history think about their world through their […]

Ben Emmerson, the UN’s special rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, said a long-running dispute over land rights could boil over into serious violence at any moment. […] Mr Emmerson said the state had repeatedly discriminated against the Mapuche and used anti-terrorism legislation against them “in a confused and arbitrary fashion that has resulted in […]

James Lehning, European Colonialism since 1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). This masterful synthesis provides a much-needed, complete survey of European colonialism from 1700 to decolonization in the twentieth century. Written by an award-winning author, this advanced undergraduate and graduate level textbook bridges, for the first time, the early modern Atlantic empires and the later Asian and African […]

It would be more logical to recognize only settler colonies as colonies per se and refer to all other results of expansion as dependencies. The loss of colonies is incomparably more dangerous for empires than the loss of dependencies. Trying to hold on to dependencies is meaningless, but to neglect the colonies is reckless. ‘Colonies […]

G.N. Barrie, ‘Accepting state responsibility by means of an ‘apology’ : the Australian and South African experience’,Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa 46, 1 (2013). The International Law Commission’s 2001 Draft Articles on State Responsibility declares that, besides restitution and compensation as a means of accountability for an international wrong, satisfaction may also […]

Lorena Rizzo, Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa’, Visual Anthropology 26, 4 (2013). This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized […]