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As the settlers have displaced, one has to visit them: Chris Holdridge, ‘Ceremony, Conquest, and Conciliation: An Afterword’, Royal Studies Journal, 5, 1, 2018, pp. 168–174

12Aug18

Abstract: British royal tours to the empire’s settler dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand reached their zenith in the early- to mid-twentieth century during a period of wilful amnesia and lack of engagement with the legacies of violence and dispossession brought about by colonial rule. This afterword considers royal tours in the light of the systemic racial inequality inherent within settler colonialism and its narrative of nationhood and British loyalism. The discussion draws on the articles in this special issue, but also on new examples: Mark Twain, the American author and anti-imperialist, demonstrates a different type of touring celebrity to visiting royals and their role as defenders of empire, with Twain critical of empire in his literary works and travels; Sol Plaatje, the black South African journalist, politician and one-time translator to the Duke of Connaught, reveals the ineffectiveness––and reticence to intervene––of touring royals as mediators between settlers and colonial subjects robbed of their land and liberties. The article concludes by noting improvements in the speed of travel and telecommunications as crucial for the increase in royal tours to settler dominions, an increase that proved critical in facilitating the affective power of royal performance for the solidifying of settler nationalisms reliant upon loyalism to the Crown.


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The public history of settler colonialism: Michael Belgrave, ‘Colonialism Revisited Public History and New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal’, in David Dean (ed.), A Companion to Public History, Wiley, 2018, pp. 215-230

10Aug18

Abstract: Over the last three decades New Zealand has undertaken a comprehensive state‐sponsored review of the impact of colonisation on Māori, its indigenous population. This has been the country’s leaders exercise in public history, one where historians have worked both to provide evidence for the Waitangi Tribunal, a commission of enquiry which investigates claims against the crown, based on alleged breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty of Waitangi gave legitimacy to British claims of sovereignty over New Zealand, but also made substantial promises to Māori tribes. Māori were guaranteed the right to retain their lands on other properties, as well as the right to retain their own tribal laws. Some Māori have even argued that the treaty did not transfer of sovereignty from tribes to the British Crown. As well as providing evidence and sitting on the Tribunal, historians have assisted in negotiating Treaty settlements, sometimes following a tribunal enquiry, on behalf of both Māori and the Crown. Waitangi history has become a highly specialised form of public history, prepared for quasi‐judicial judicial inquiries and as part of political negotiations. This chapter explores both the strengths and limitations of this form of history, where the historians inevitably support tribunal reports and negotiated settlements that are at times extremely can controversial.


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Settler revitalisation through artifacts: Peter Anderson, ‘Grasses tame and wild: Imperial entanglements in settler colonial cereal breeding and botany’, Environment and Planning E, 2018

08Aug18

Abstract: This article argues that imperial and local state-supported science played a key role in the discursive and material changes – including political, economic, and ecological – in Canadian settler colonialism. I advance this argument through two case studies from Canada’s Experimental Farm Service: the breeding of Marquis wheat and attempts to domesticate wild rice as ornamental feed for game birds. Marquis wheat has been celebrated for its role in expanding the wheat growing regions of Canada’s Prairies, whereas wild rice’s role was transferred from food to ornamental. The movements of these plants through the scientific milieu of the Experimental Farm Service demonstrate how the state used science to lift up settler communities while holding down Indigenous communities.


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Indigenous revitalisation through artifacts: ann-elise lewallen, The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan, University of New Mexico Press, 2016

08Aug18

Description: In present-day Japan Ainu women create spaces of cultural vitalization in which they can move between “being Ainu” through their natal and affinal relationships and actively “becoming Ainu” through their craftwork. They craft these spaces despite the specter of loss that haunts the efforts of former colonial subjects, like Ainu, to reconnect with their pasts. The author synthesizes ethnographic field research, museum and archival research, and participation in cultural-revival and rights-based organizing to show how women craft Ainu and indigenous identities through clothwork and how they also fashion lived connections to ancestral values and lifestyles. She examines the connections between the transnational dialogue on global indigeneity and multiculturalism, material culture, and the social construction of gender and ethnicity in Japanese society, and she proposes new directions for the study of settler colonialism and indigenous mobilization in other Asian and Pacific nations.


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Countering settler exclusion at the counter: Nadia Rhook, ‘Affective Counter Networks: Healing, Trade, and Indian Strategies of In/dependence in Early “White Melbourne”‘, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 19, 2, 2018

08Aug18

Abstract: This article maps the in-situ affective strategies employed by Indian leaders to counter the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, the legal cornerstone of the White Australia Policy. It explores how a masseur, Teepoo Hall, and a merchant, Khooda Bux, mobilised Indian trade networks at a time when British imperial networks were in complex tension with growing settler Australian and Indian projects of national independence. It does so by paying attention to the urban position of shop counters and massage benches: objects that brought strangers and acquaintances into relations economic and intimate, from where affect was produced and circulated. New imperial histories have privileged a wide-lens transnational frame. I argue that a determined focus on counters and benches—sites of bodily density that I term “clustering objects”—affords a closer view of the processes of networking and their spatial-affective dynamics. In fin-de-siècle Melbourne, counters were privileged sites where Indians and White settlers forged bonds that linked individuals to larger, transoceanic and anti-imperial networks.


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The spatial politics of indigenous activism: Katherine Ellinghaus, Leonie Stevens, ‘Mind the Gap: Micro-mobility, counter networks and everyday resistance in the Northern Territory in 1951’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 19, 2, 2018

08Aug18

Abstract: This article begins with a single, seemingly isolated moment of activism by the Indigenous residents of the Gap community in Alice Springs. We use this protest to make two arguments. First, we highlight the significance of local mobility to Indigenous people in the twentieth century; and second, we trace a hidden counter network of Indigenous civil rights activism in the Northern Territory. We argue that “micro-mobility” should receive greater attention from historians and show how the 1951 protest was one part of a broader counter network of Indigenous activism, stretching across the vast distances of the Territory.


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The spatial politics of settler assimilation: Katherine Ellinghaus, Sianan Healy, ‘Micromobility, Space, and Indigenous Housing Schemes in Australia after World War II’, Transfers, 8, 3, 2018, pp. 44-66

08Aug18

Abstract: This article examines state efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples through the spatial politics of housing design and the regulation of access to and use of houses, streets, and towns. Using two Australian case studies in the 1950s, Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve in Victoria and the Gap housing development in the Northern Territory, and inspired by recent scholarship on imperial networks and Indigenous mobilities, it explores Aboriginal people’s negotiation of those efforts through practices of both moving and staying put. We demonstrate the importance of micromobility—which we define as smallscale movements across short distances, in and out of buildings, along roads, and across townships—and argue that in order to fully appreciate the regulation of Indigenous mobility and Indigenous resistance to it, scholars must concentrate on the small, local, and seemingly insignificant as well as more drastic and permanent movement.


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Indigenous political economies: David K. Johnson, Theorizing Indigenous economic formations, MA Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2018

04Aug18

Abstract: The paper sets out to develop a methodological framework for researching Indigenous political economies. This endeavor has been marked historically by more or less racist and ahistorical culturalisms. Building on recent interventions in Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies, I argue that such research must account for the ongoing history of settler-colonization and Indigenous resistance. Recent work in political theory has taken up this imperative, but the theorization of settler-colonial dispossession comes with problems of its own. The emphasis now laid upon theorizing dispossession, I argue, has produced an amorphous conception of Indigenous political alterities, conceiving them negatively as an absence of European-style institutions. We continue to lack therefore an adequate theory of Indigenous social systems that can account for both historical change and socioeconomic difference. Accordingly, I advocate a Marxian reading of Indigenous and settler economic formations that can better account for social difference by offering a more expansive and comparatist theorization of the categories of production, property, and the metabolic relation to nature. Such a theory offers a powerful resource for understanding the complexity of contemporary settler-colonial relations and for understanding the overlapping interests of socialist and decolonial struggles in North America.


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Interwar settler modernism: Melinda Cooper, ‘”Adjusted” Vision: Interwar Settler Modernism in Eleanor Dark’s Return to Coolami’, Australian Literary Studies, 33, 2, 2018

04Aug18

Abstract: This essay uses the interwar writing of Eleanor Dark to destabilise the binary between nationalist-realism and experimental modernism in accounts of Australian literature. Dark’s novels mix modernist and experimental styles with middlebrow and vernacular forms, while also legitimating settler nationalist desires. This constellation was not unique to Dark but was part of a broader phenomenon which I call interwar settler modernism: the modernism produced by settler artists and writers between the wars, often through a promiscuous engagement with elite, middlebrow and vernacular forms of culture. Dark’s novel Return to Coolami (1936) exemplifies interwar settler modernism, combining recognisably modernist techniques with middlebrow romance, elements of vernacular culture such as photography, cinema and motor travel, and cultural-nationalist ideas. This study traces some of the contours of interwar settler modernism through examining Dark’s ideas about visual perception, time, memory and interior psychological states. It will explore the implications of settler modernism for studies of Australian literature and, more broadly, for global modernism studies.


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Settler belonging facing other-than-human-actors: Margaret Boyce, ‘Taking Cereals Seriously in Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese’, Canadian Literature, 234, 2017

02Aug18

Abstract: This articles proposes a fresh reading of the classic Canadian novel, Wild Geese, by Martha Ostenso. By way of Anna Tsing’s discussion of the cross-species influence of crops on the development of Western agricultural societies, I reconceive of the novel’s surly antagonist Caleb as beholden to the fruits of his labour. I thereby develop a reading of Ostenso’s frontier narrative that takes seriously the role of other-than-human actors in the novel, which counters scholarship that ascribes solely symbolic status to the novel’s plantlife, while also revealing the novel’s instrinsic anxiety regarding the limitations of settler belonging.


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