Contributions are sought for the following seminar, to be held during the 2015 Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA, March 26-29, Seattle, U.S.A). CULTURES OF SETTLEMENT AND UNSETTLEMENT Organizer: Bruno Cornellier, University of Winnipeg Our seminar wishes to return to some of cultural studies’ earlier, formative insights about culture and hegemony, but this […]

The lawsuit, filed last week at Vancouver Federal Court, alleges that Chief Giesbrecht breached his duty to “obtain the free, prior and informed consent” of his people before extinguishing a claim to aboriginal title.   More at the National Post.

Paul Moon, ‘The Influence of ‘Benthamite’ Philosophies on British Colonial Policy on New Zealand in the Era of the Treaty of Waitangi, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Published online: 03 Sep 2014). Most of the recent historiography on the British presence in the South Pacific in the first half of the nineteenth century rightly reflects […]

Simone Bignall, Daryl Rigney & Robert Hattam, ‘The Postcolonial Time That Remains’, Interventions (Published online: 27 Aug 2014). Sovereign authority to establish the colony of South Australia was given by Letters Patent (1836), signed by King William IV. The Letters Patent made explicit provision for the recognition and protection of Indigenous rights and interests in traditional lands […]

Alexander Morrison, ‘Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Published online: 03 Sep 2014). This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth […]

P. G. McHugh, ‘Time Whereof–Memory, History and Law in the Jurisprudence of Aboriginal Rights’, Saskatchewan Law Review 77 (2014). We each have a personal relationship with the past, one that is utterly our own. This lecture is not a law-as-biography, but it draws upon my personal experience of the past and the impact of my LL.M. year at […]

Lindsey Kingston, ‘The Destruction of Identity: Cultural Genocide and Indigenous Peoples’, Journal of Human Rights (posted online: 10 Sep 2014). International law defines genocide in terms of violence committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” yet this approach fails to acknowledge the full impacts of cultural destruction. […]

Daniel Rueck, ‘Commons, Enclosure, and Resistance in Kahnawá:ke Mohawk Territory, 1850–1900’, Canadian Historical Review 95, 3 (2014). Historical communities that have held lands in common have, without exception, had strict regulations for using those lands. This was true also in Kahnawá:ke, a Mohawk community near Montreal, where community leaders articulated and enforced customary land laws until the last […]

Noel Pearson, ‘A Rightful Place: Race, recognition and a more complete commonwealth’, Quarterly Essay 55 (2014). The nation has unfinished business. After more than two centuries, can a rightful place be found for Australia’s original peoples? Soon we will all decide if and how indigenous Australians will be recognised in the constitution. In the words of […]

Jodi A. Byrd, ‘A Return to the South’, American Quarterly  66, 3 (2014). Written as a meditation, this essay considers how indigeneity challenges the geopolitical formations of “souths” within and beyond the US nation-state. In particular, Southeastern American Indians provide an important analytic through which to reconceptualize hemispheric understandings of race, place, and temporality that are […]