« Older posts
Newer posts »

Making Arizona settler: Kristin Sargeant, Sharlot Hall and the Naturalization of Settler Colonialism, MA dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017

19Jul17

Abstract: Sharlot Hall was an author, poet, historian, booster, ranch woman, presidential elector, clubwoman, and development advocate for the territory and subsequently state of Arizona at the turn of the twentieth century. As an influential public figure regionally and nationally, she helped to shape a collective understanding of Arizona’s geography, past, and its future potential. Examined holistically, Hall’s work is best understood within a settler colonial context. She described a backdrop of an empty, untamed wilderness, which she then peopled with peaceful, hardworking, law-abiding Anglo settlers to the region in her historical writing, preservation, and educational work. When combined with a carefully curated, timeless depiction of Native Americans and her fervent advocacy for Arizona’s full and equal inclusion into the nation, Hall’s narratives and actions lay the groundwork for the naturalization and justification of a settler colonialist project.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Most settlers would not dream of doing what they dream of doing: Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, ‘Animating the Indigenous, Colonial Affects, and “Going Native” in the City: Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles’, Western American Literature, 52, 1, 2017, pp. 75-94

17Jul17

Excerpt: Released in 1961, The Exiles follows a day in the life of a group of Indigenous migrants—Yvonne, the lead, Homer, her onscreen partner, and their friends Mary, Claudine, Cliff, and Tommy—as they drink, shop, sing, fight, and wander the spaces of Yaanga, the Gabrielino-Tongva village which is currently occupied by downtown Los Angeles. The Exiles was written and directed by Kent Mackenzie, a relatively unknown white male British filmmaker, who was then a graduate student in film production at the University of Southern California.

In a voiceover that opens the film, Mackenzie declares The Exiles to be “an authentic account of twelve hours in the lives of a group of Indians who have come to Los Angeles. . . . It reflects a life that is not true of all Indians today, but typical of many.”


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The animality of settler colonialism: Alex Calder, ‘Beyond Possession: Animals and Gifts in Willa Cather’s Settler Colonial Fictions’, Western American Literature, 52, 1, 2017, pp. 55-74

17Jul17

Excerpt: Sensing the deficiency, writers and artists born into a region made prosperous through settlement would seek a more authentic relation to place. Some were apt to find it in a return to primary dramas of discovery and settlement, revisiting them, as it were, in a manner that could be at once critical and compensatory, as well as productive of deeper affinities and identities.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler guilt as a narrative device: Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, “Do We Reverse the Medal?”: Settler Guilt, the Indian Speech, and the Untold Side of the Story’, Western American Literature, 52, 1, 2017, pp. 25-53

17Jul17

Excerpt: The issue becomes, then, not just guilt for the past crimes against the Indians but the continued guilt produced by not representing the Indians’ perspective on events and the reasons for their violence. […] this statement […] sums up the deep ambivalence of his book, which both shows settlers as heroes battling Indians and, in its inaugural story, questions settler morality. And by showing a narrator aware of this guilt, the story asks readers likewise to become aware and to admit their own participation.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Introducing a special issue on settler colonialism and western American literature: Alex Trimble Young, Lorenzo Veracini, ‘”If I am native to anything”: Settler Colonial Studies and Western American Literature’, Western American Literature, 52, 1, 2017, pp. 1-23

17Jul17

Excerpt: The field of western American literary studies emerged in the 1960s and ’70s as a regionalist critique that imagined a western ethics of place against the Turnerian consensus that then dominated American studies. Working in tandem with historical critiques that were recasting the frontier as a site of imperial, patriarchal, and ecological violence, the critique offered by western literary regionalism hinged on an effort to decouple the frontier from the West. By imagining a regional identification that would work in opposition to the logic of Turner’s frontier, this critique has reimagined the West as a potential emancipatory place for the staging of environmentalist, feminist, queer, and antiracist challenges to American political and cultural norms.

This tradition of place-based (and often bioregional) western literary studies met a challenge from a new generation of critics beginning in the 1990s. The “postwestern” critics, informed by poststructuralist theory, followed Turner to the extent that they understand the West more as a “form of society” than as a definable geographical space. Rejecting the place-centered critique as inflected with lingering patriarchal and nationalist politics, the postwestern critics worked to extricate “westness” as a social construct from the nationalist constraints that Turner imagined. In postwestern critique, there is no “authentic” frontier or “true” West, whether critical or celebratory, to which we have recourse to explain “westness.” “Westness” is reconceived as something between (in post-western critique’s more Baudrillardean mode) the totalizing simulacrum of the “hyperreal West” or (in its more Deleuzean mode) a transnational form of potentiality.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Saying the unsayable: Robert Mason (ed.), Legacies of Violence: Rendering the Unspeakable Past in Modern Australia, Berghahn, 2016

17Jul17

Description: Whether in the form of warfare, dispossession, forced migration, or social prejudice, Australia’s sense of nationhood was born from—and continues to be defined by—experiences of violence. Legacies of Violence probes this brutal legacy through case studies that range from the colonial frontier to modern domestic spaces, exploring themes of empathy, isolation, and Australians’ imagined place in the world. Moving beyond the primacy that is typically accorded white accounts of violence, contributors place particular emphasis on the experiences of those perceived to be on the social periphery, repositioning them at the center of Australia’s relationship to global events and debate.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Maintaing a place-based indigenous existence online: K. Mikkelsen, A. M. AL-Asadi, ‘Indigenous Techno-gogies: Blended Online & Land-Based Mahoodle in Indigenous Studies’, in J. Johnston (Ed.), Proceedings of EdMedia, AACE, 2017, pp. 329-333

17Jul17

Abstract: In this work in progress study and course redesign initiative learner perspectives on a blended online and land-based learning Indigenous Studies course at a regional college are explored. The inclusion of Indigenous pedagogies through an Indigenous resurgence paradigm and digital learning technologies inform a course design mix. The design incorporated Mahoodle and the creation of a land-based learning experience with an Indigenous land-based survival expert and knowledge keepers. The online and land-based interconnected aspects of the course were represented by learners through their ePortfolios. Our interim discoveries will focus on the relationship between Mahoodle and Indigenous land-based learning, while identifying the issues that presented challenges and solutions from the pilot course delivery. In this best practices session, we plan to show video clips of the land-based experience and ePortfolio examples so they may be seen and understood in the context of the project.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

‘Development’ is dispossession: Lena Meari, ‘Colonial dispossession, developmental discourses, and humanitarian solidarity in ‘Area C’: the case of the Palestinian Yanun Village’, Community Development Journal, 2017

12Jul17

Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Yanun village, which was categorized as part of ‘Area C’ by the Oslo accords, this article analyses the collusion of the mainstream hegemonic developmental discourse with the colonial project in colonized Palestine. It also analyses the politics of and limitations of contemporary forms of international solidarity with Palestinian communities in ‘Area C’. The article situates the devastating life conditions of Yanun community within the Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine with its ongoing structural and violent forms of dispossession, land appropriation, expulsion and displacement of Palestinians, particularly in ‘Area C’, which constitutes the current frontier for Zionist settler colonial expansionism. By examining Yanun community’s survival tactics, the article illustrates how the hegemonic developmental discourse on ‘Area C’ constitutes the masses of Palestinians as subjects of humanitarian aid. The article also shows how the humanitarian approach of solidarity with Yanun’s community constitutes the condition of Palestinian victimhood, cancels its anticolonial agency, and patronizes its forms of anticolonial resistance by employing the tactics of eye witnessing Palestinians’ life under occupation and employing the language of non-violence.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Decolonisation is … an international matter: Irene Watson (ed.), Indigenous Peoples as Subjects of International Law, Routledge, 2017

12Jul17

Description: For more than 500 years, Indigenous laws have been disregarded. Many appeals for their recognition under international law have been made, but have thus far failed – mainly because international law was itself shaped by colonialism. How, this volume asks, might international law be reconstructed, so that it is liberated from its colonial origins?

With contributions from critical legal theory, international law, politics, philosophy and Indigenous history, this volume pursues a cross-disciplinary analysis of the international legal exclusion of Indigenous Peoples, and of its relationship to global injustice. Beyond the issue of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, however, this analysis is set within the broader context of sustainability; arguing that Indigenous laws, philosophy and knowledge are not only legally valid, but offer an essential approach to questions of ecological justice and the co-existence of all life on earth.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Anticipatory citizenship is … not citizenship: Kate Coddington, ‘The re-emergence of wardship: Aboriginal Australians and the promise of citizenship’, Political Geography, 61, 2017, pp. 67–76

12Jul17

Abstract: In this paper, I suggest that the category of ‘ward,’ a designation used for Aboriginal Australians in the 1950s and 1960s, has re-emerged in contemporary Northern Territory (NT) life. Wardship represents an in-between status, neither citizens nor non-citizens, but rather an anticipatory citizenship formation constructed by the Australian state. The ward is a not-yet citizen, and the deeds, acts, and discourses that define the ward’s capacities to act as a political subject can maintain their anticipatory nature even as people ‘achieve’ formal citizenship. Wardship can be layered on top of citizen and non-citizen status alike. Rather than accounting for the grey areas between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen,’ therefore, wards exist beyond this theoretical continuum, demanding a more nuanced accounting of political subjectivities and people’s relationships to the state.

I trace the emergence of the category ‘ward’ in the 1950s and 1960s in Australia and its re-emergence for Aboriginal Australians impacted by the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response legislation. The promise of citizenship offered by the status of ‘ward’ is built upon expectations about family life, economic activity, and appropriate behaviour. These assumptions underscore an implicit bargain between individuals and the state, that neoliberalised self-discipline will lead to both formal citizenship rights and a sense of belonging. Built-in impediments, however, ensure that this bargain is difficult, if not impossible, to fulfil.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »