Lorraine Weir, ‘“Time Immemorial” and Indigenous Rights: A Genealogy and Three Case Studies (Calder, Van der Peet, Tsilhqot’in) from British Columbia’, Journal of Historical Sociology (advanced edition 2013). “Time immemorial” has operated as a legal fiction in the discourse of colonization, performing a genealogical function in the construction of “antiquity” and “legal memory” in English […]

Michelle R. Sizemore, ‘When are the People?: Temporality, Popular Sovereignty, and the U.S. Settler State’, South Central Review 30, 1, (2013). This essay examines the subject of anti-imperialism through the lens of settler postcolonial studies, an approach that immediately confounds sure distinctions between pro- and anti- imperialism. In the mid-1790s, during the Whiskey Rebellion, farmers in western […]

Alex Trimble Young, ‘Settler Sovereignty and the Rhizomatic West, or, The Significance of the Frontier in Postwestern Studies’, Western American Literature 48, 1 & 2 (2013). Contemporary “postwestern” literary scholarship has largely turned away from frontier historiography toward a “critical regionalist” approach in its efforts to move western literary studies away from familiar national paradigms. […]

Edward Cavanagh, ‘The History of Dispossession at Orania and the Politics of Land Restitution in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39, 2 (2013). This article takes for its subject a small piece of land on the southern banks of the middle Orange River, which has been known in the last few decades as […]

Alabama high school graduate Chelsey Ramer was fined $1,ooo and denied her diploma and transcripts after wearing an eagle feather attached to her mortarboard as a symbol of her Native American heritage. Katie McDonough for Salon.

Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien (eds), Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013). This engaging collection surveys and clarifies the complex issue of federal and state recognition for Native American tribal nations in the United States. Den Ouden and O’Brien gather focused […]

Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch, ‘Empire and After: Toward a Framework for Comparing Empires and Their Consequences in the Post-Imperial Middle East and Central Asia’, Journal of Historical Sociology (early edition, 29 MAY 2013). This article compares and contrasts the variations in paths from empire to sovereignty in the Middle East and Central Asia. We […]

An amendment and announcement by Patrick Wolfe: Settler Colonialism and Native Alternatives in Global Context is a collection of essays that will make up special editions, guest-edited by myself, of two international journals. Part 1, ‘The Settler Complex’, is due to appear this week as volume 37, no. 2 of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. […]

A Response to A. B. Yehoshua, by Lorenzo Veracini: Yehoshua wants to define Zionism ‘realistically’ (‘Defining Zionism: The Belief that Israel Belongs to the Entire Jewish People’, Haaretz, 21/05/13). ‘Realistically’, which appears in the subtitle and in the text, is key: different positions – all other opinions in a multifarious debate in fact, those located to […]

American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, 2 (2013). The Settler Complex. Guest editor: Patrick Wolfe. The Settler Complex: An Introduction. Patrick Wolfe. What Is Settler Colonialism? (for Leo Delano Ames Jr.). Maya Mikdashi. “Aloha ‘Oe”: Settler-Colonial Nostalgia and the Genealogy of a Love Song. Adria L. Imada. All the Eagles and the Ravens in […]