Abstract: Could the methods of history—and not just its objects of study—be decolonized? This essay explores analogous areas of cultural production, such as painting, to determine how historians might begin to produce work that lies outside the Western, Euro-Christian imaginary. It focuses on the case of Australia and the means by which Aboriginal artists have reanimated and recalibrated traditional forms of knowledge, offering new bases for thinking about the history and temporalities of Australia. The work of the painter Tim Johnson is then presented as an example for history in his demonstration of the ways in which indigenous methods and ways of seeing the world can be deployed by Others. The ethical, theoretical, and practical challenges that accompany such work are detailed, alongside a historiographical account of the way in which these discussions mesh with seminal debates in postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and settler colonialism as they relate to historical theory. Drawing on recent work in History and Theory, the article asks: what might be the consequences for history were it not to develop a meaningful “global turn,” arguing that a critical moment has been reached in which modes of understanding the world that come from outside the West need to be incorporated into historians’ repertoires for thinking and making.

Excerpt: The appropriation of Indigenous land, absorption of identity, and efforts to make Indigenous people disappear are intertwined elements of settler-colonialism. This is why the political struggle over the Washington football team matters, and why King’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in this issue and how settler-colonialism functions in relationship to it.

Rationale: This one day workshop kindly supported by the Institute of Latin American Studies and the OWRI Cross-Language Dynamics project will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars engaging with settler colonial theory and its application in Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC). Seldom is LAC considered within the ambit of Settler Colonial Studies, and settler colonialism in the region is not often theorized using insights from other settler contexts. Our aim is to bridge these gaps, asking how SCS might enrich interpretation of Latin American and Caribbean society, and how reflection on LAC might in turn enrich settler colonial theory. Designed as a brainstorming conversation to develop a field of enquiry, this event hosted by CECSAM (Swansea University’s Centre for the Comparative Study of the Americas) will enable a much-needed conversation about a theoretical framework that has significant potential to shape analysis of societies in LAC, but also to foreground the LAC region in academic debates outside the area studies niche.

Register here.

Description: This book offers an original and compelling analysis of women’s madness, gender and the Australian family. Taking up Anne McClintock’s call for critical works that psychoanalyze colonialism, this radical re-assessment of novels by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville provides a sustained account of women’s madness and masculine colonial psychosis from a feminist postcolonial perspective. This book rethinks women’s madness in the context of Australian colonialism. Taking novels of madness by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville as its point of critical departure, it applies a post-Reconciliation lens to the study of Australia’s gender and racial codes, to place Australian sexism and misogyny in their proper colonial context. Employing madness as a frame to rethink postcolonial theorizing in Australia, Gender, Madness, and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature psychoanalyses colonialism to argue that Australia suffers from a cultural pathology based in the strategic forgetting of colonial violence. This pathology takes the form of colonial paranoia about ‘race’ and gender, producing distorted gender codes and ways of being Australian. This book maps the contours of Australian colonial paranoia, weaving feminist literary theory, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory with poststructuralist approaches to reassess the traditional canon of critical madness scholarship, and the place of women’s writing within it. This provocative work marks a radical departure from much recent feminist, cultural, and postcolonial criticism, and will be essential reading for students of Australian literature, cultural studies and gender studies wanting a new insight into how the Australian psyche is shaped by settler colonialism.

Abstract: Located at the juncture of critical animal studies and decolonial theory, this analysis contemplates the connections and entanglements between settler colonialism and animality in Canadian constitutional discourse. How are coloniality and anthropocentricism — and the borders they draw between humanity, infra-humanity, and non-humanity — (re)produced with and through one another in Canadian constitutional jurisprudence and discourse? The very concepts used to understand and dispute the legal status of non-human animals (property and personhood, humanity and citizenship, rights and sovereignty) are shot through with the coloniality of their genealogies (see, for example, Anghie 2007; Isin 2012). Canadian constitutional law and legal discourse — the juridical warp and woof of the settler colonial state — therefore serves as one productive site for investigating the underexplored relationship between settler colonialism and animality, and for thinking through the mutual salience of decolonial and animal liberation projects.

Beenash Jafri, “Ongoing Colonial Violence in Settler States,” Lateral 6.1 (2017).

Melissa Gniadek, “The Times of Settler Colonialism,” Lateral 6.1 (2017).

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Thinking with Melissa Gniadek and Beenash Jafri,” Lateral 6.1 (2017).

Description: Often when Native nations assert their treaty rights and sovereignty, they are confronted with a backlash from their neighbors, who are fearful of losing control of the natural resources. Yet, when both groups are faced with an outside threat to their common environment-such as mines, dams, or an oil pipeline-these communities have unexpectedly joined together to protect the resources. Some regions of the United States with the most intense conflicts were transformed into areas with the deepest cooperation between tribes and local farmers, ranchers, and fishers to defend sacred land and water.

Unlikely Alliances explores this evolution from conflict to cooperation through place-based case studies in the Pacific Northwest, Great Basin, Northern Plains, and Great Lakes regions during the 1970s through the 2010s. These case studies suggest that a deep love of place can begin to overcome even the bitterest divides.

Excerpt: It was only a matter of time before Zionism and Native American Studies [NAS] came into conflict—or, to be more precise, before Zionists began targeting the field for acrimony and recrimination, as they have long done to various humanities and social science disciplines. 

Access the article here.

Abstract: While “inclusion” has been seen as a central mode of redressing ongoing injustices against communities of color in the US, Indigenous political experiences feature more complex legacies of contesting US citizenship. Turning to an important episode of contestation, this essay examines the relation between inclusion and the politics of eliminating Indigenous nations that was part of a shared policy shift toward “Termination” in the Anglo-settler world of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reading of Indigenous activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), it demonstrates how the construction of what I call the “civic inclusion narrative” in post–World War II American political discourse disavowed practices of empire-formation. Widely considered a foundational text of the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement, the work repositioned Indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization. Deloria’s work provides an exemplary counterpoint to the enduring thread of civic inclusion in American political thought and an alternative tradition of decolonization—an imperative that continues to resonate in today’s North American and global Indigenous struggles over land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.