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The ruins of settlerism? Antonia Malan, ‘Archaeology of Colonial Settlement at the Cape’, Oxford Research Encyclopedias (African History), 2019

27Nov19

Abstract: Colonial settlement at the southern tip of Africa was pre-dated by 150 years of occasional encounters with European mariners. They touched on the coast to refresh water barrels, barter for meat with the local pastoralists, and repair their crafts, or in some cases found themselves wrecked and desperate on the shores of the “Cape of Storms.” It became the “Cape of Good Hope” after fleets of European ships profiteered from the sea route to the resources of India and Asia, among them the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British.

The formal date for permanent foreign occupation of the Cape is 1652, when a Dutch East India Company (VOC, the Company) force anchored in Table Bay and, with some basic tools, materials, and supplies, set up camp.

After the decline and bankruptcy of the VOC in the late 18th century, a brief military occupation by the British (1795–1802), and an interim Dutch (“Batavian”) administration (1803–1806), the Cape became a British colony. By 1820 the Cape Colony stretched northward as far as the Orange River, and eastward to the Fish and Tugela rivers. Colonial settlement expanded with the arrival of traders, pastoralists, missionaries, and emigrants and created volatile zones in which settlers and African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and farmers contested with one another over land and resources. The colonial project continued into the later 19th century, spurred by the discovery of gold and diamonds far inland where independent Boer republics and Griqua states had been established. British imperialism and the lure of mineral wealth led to wars of annexation. Following the Second South African (“Anglo-Boer”) War (1899–1902) and subsequent attempts to reunify the country, in 1910 the “Union of South Africa” became a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, gaining formal independence in 1934.

Thus, colonial settlement at the Cape covers a 250-year period and a vast area (roughly equivalent to the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape Provinces, and parts of North West Province). From an archaeological perspective, studies encompass the city of Cape Town and sites fanning out from there chronologically and spatially, such as grazing grounds, military outposts, the towns and villages of the coast and hinterland, arable and pastoral farms, sites of conflict and interaction, missions, and mines.


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What is to be done? Irene Bellier, Jennifer Hays (eds), Scales of Governance and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, Routledge, 2019

27Nov19

Description: This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the complicated power relations surrounding the recognition and implementation of Indigenous Peoples’ rights at multiple scales.

The adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 was heralded as the beginning of a new era for Indigenous Peoples’ participation in global governance bodies, as well as for the realization of their rights – in particular, the right to self-determination. These rights are defined and agreed upon internationally, but must be enacted at regional, national, and local scales. Can the global movement to promote Indigenous Peoples’ rights change the experience of communities at the local level? Or are the concepts that it mobilizes, around rights and political tools, essentially a discourse circulating internationally, relatively disconnected from practical situations? Are the categories and processes associated with Indigenous Peoples simply an extension of colonial categories and processes, or do they challenge existing norms and structures? This collection draws together the works of anthropologists, political scientists, and legal scholars to address such questions. Examining the legal, historical, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of the Indigenous Peoples’ rights movement, at global, regional, national, and local levels, the chapters present a series of case studies that reveal the complex power relations that inform the ongoing struggles of Indigenous Peoples to secure their human rights.


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Settlers are good, anxious, racist people: Lisa Slater, ‘Good White People: Settler Colonial Anxiety and the Endurance of Racism’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 3, 2, 2019, pp. 266–281

24Nov19

Abstract: The focus of this essay is the racialised political emotions of ‘good white people’. I examine what Berlant names ‘public feelings’, focusing on the way emotional states are part of communal experiences. My interest is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ repeated calls for mainstream Australia to genuinely engage with political and cultural difference, and listen. Such claims often make ‘good white people’ anxious. They protest, insist they are trying but don’t know what to do. Good white people’s anxiety is much more telling than the stories that are told about bad racists. Thus, it is a productive site to analyse the cultural dynamics of settler–Indigenous relations, and to understand how race structures Australian culture and the endurance of racism.


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Settlers need expanses (they manufacture them): Kristen Simmons, ‘Expanse’, Journal for the Anthropology of North America, 22, 2, 2019, pp. 103-105

24Nov19

Abstract: The federal government owns more land in Nevada than any other state. While the acquisition of land as territory is central to the project of settler colonialism, this essay expands the frame by considering the atmospherics of rural America through an indigenous analytic. Reflecting on aboveground atomic testing, the growth of Air Force bases, and conservation imaginaries, the essay examines the work that goes into producing emptiness and what the dream of the expanse allows.


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The settler home is mobile: Nicholas Shapiro, ‘Manufacturing Home’, Journal for the Anthropology of North America, 22, 2, 2019, pp. 121-124

24Nov19

Abstract: Making the colonist’s home mobile, disregarding local ecologies and building practices, is foundational to the settler‐colonial project. This article tracks the mobile home from its role as a key architecture of occupation and settlement by the British Empire to being a superlative embodiment of hydrocarbon‐infused commodities and homes after World War II. As the violences of mobile home ownership are coterminous with the violences of settler colonialism, an equitable vision of affordable housing cannot stop at achieving racial parity for toxic/classist loans (for often toxic homes) or greater protections for colonial land tenure.


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Indigenous women rights are the end of settler colonialism: Talia Yousef, Settler-Colonialism and Indigenous Women’s Rights: A Comparative Analysis of the Socioeconomic Impact endured by Indigenous women within ‘Canada’, and Indigenous Palestinian women within ‘Israel’, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2019

24Nov19

Abstract: This research compares the socioeconomic realities of Indigenous women resisting settler colonialism, such as Palestinian women resisting Israel, and women of varying Indigenous nations resisting Canada. The purpose of the research aims to address the socio-economic impact of settler-colonialism on Indigenous women as a causal relationship. In doing so, the research addresses factors such as Indigenous relationships to land, genocide (which will be defined and situated within the context shortly), and continued mechanisms of systemic oppression and discrimination. This comparative analysis uses lenses of anti-colonial feminism and marxism, while relying on the academic work of Indigenous authors as well as statistical data indicating various measures of socio-economic welfare. The observed outcomes situate the rights of Indigenous women at the heart of liberation from settler colonialism, and inversely address settler-colonialism as a key mechanism oppressing the rights of Indigenous women.


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Why forgive? Sam Grey, ‘Returning to the Source: Revisiting Arendtian Forgiveness in the Politics of Reconciliation’, Theoria, 66, 161, 2019, pp. 37-65

24Nov19

Abstract: The idea of forgiveness is omnipresent in the transitional justice literature, yet this body of work, taken as a whole, is marked by conceptual, terminological and argumentative imprecision. Equivocation is common, glossing moral, theological, therapeutic and legal considerations, while arguments proceed from political, apolitical and even antipolitical premises. With forgiveness as a praxis linked to reconciliation processes in at least ten countries, concerns have grown over its negative implications for the relationship between the state and victims of state-authored injustices. Many of these debates reference Hannah Arendt. Drawing from a range of Arendt’s published and unpublished work, this article challenges the academic claim that forgiveness has no place in the politics of reconciliation. Through this ‘returning to the source’, it presents a promising mode of thinking about political forgiveness in contemporary Settler-colonial states.

 


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Settlers tell even more stories: Edward Guimont, From King Solomon to Ian Smith: Rhodesian Alternate Histories of Zimbabwe, PhD dissertation, University of Connecticut, 2019

22Nov19

Abstract: In the eleventh century CE, the Shona people of Central Africa built the city of Great Zimbabwe, an administrative center and royal home. Connected to the Indian Ocean gold trade, it would become the largest pre-colonial city in sub-Saharan Africa. However, it entered into decline and was ultimately abandoned by the sixteenth century – when the first Portuguese expeditions came in contact with the region. The fact that this city entered into decline just as Europeans encountered it set it up to become the center of a number of fantastical legends about its origins, typically linking it with the Biblical King Solomon and his gold mine of Ophir.

Most prior studies of the “foreign builder hypothesis” have focused on the fact that white supremacist ideologies of explorers and settlers tended to reject the idea that Africans could have built a city like Great Zimbabwe. This study instead focuses on how successive regimes in Central Africa approached the legend of Great Zimbabwe for their own political ends. In doing so, this study reveals how settler colonialism not only builds off of, but facilitates the construction of “mythic histories” to justify rights not only to the land, but its history. Further, this project illuminates how those approaches to mythic history formed in the nineteenth century persisted after the end of formal colonialism, and have helped feed not only mainstream white supremacist discourse in former imperial metropoles, but served as the origin of modern anti-intellectual and anti-government political movements in the United States.


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Settlers tell stories: John R. Legg, ‘White Lies, Native Revisions: The Legacy of Violence in the American West’, Great Plains Quarterly, 39, 4, 2019, pp. 331-340

22Nov19

Abstract: This essay examines particular episodes of violence between Native peoples and white settlers in the American West and the competing narratives created by the two groups. The contested memory of the US-Dakota War, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Modoc War, the Northern Cheyenne Exodus, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the legacy at Fort Smith, Arkansas, all provide a lens through which to view the formation of white victimhood and the idea of American innocence. Key works about the historical memory of these episodes of violence are explored for the issues surrounding the politics of memory and how Native peoples face the contestation head-on.


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The settlers’ dream: Alejandra Mancilla, ‘A continent of and for whiteness?: “White” colonialism and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty’, Polar Record, 2019

22Nov19

Abstract: There are at least four ways in which Antarctic colonialism was white: it was paradigmatically performed by white men; it consisted in the taking of vast, white expanses of land; it was carried out with a carte blanche (literally, “blank card”) attitude; and it was presented to the world as a white, innocent adventure. While the first, racial whiteness has been amply problematised, I suggest that the last three illuminate yet other moral wrongs of the Antarctic colonial project. Moreover, they might be constitutive of a larger class of “white” colonialisms beyond the White Continent.


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