« Older posts
Newer posts »

The Nortwest Ordinance had an implicit twin (the Southwest Ordinance?): they both stole indigenous land: Robert Alexander, The Northwest Ordinance Constitutional Politics and the Theft of Native Land, McFarland, 2017

28Apr17

Description: Passed by Congress in July 1787, the Northwest Ordinance laid out the basic form of government for all U.S. territory north of the Ohio River. That summer, the Constitutional Convention drafted the defining document of the American Republic as a whole. A bargain struck between Congress and the Convention outlawed slavery north of the Ohio, but gave Southern states a Congressional and Electoral College representation based on population figures that included slaves—each valued at three-fifths of a free white citizen.

Because of this agreement, the western lands acquired from Great Britain after the Revolutionary War were divided into slave and free states—a compromise which, when it failed, precipitated the Civil War 74 years later. For years most historians denied that this political deal took place. Drawing on contemporary letters and documents, this detailed analysis re-examines the Ordinance and how Congress silently permitted the South’s “peculiar institution” to move westward.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Indigenous protest is violent; is settler repression peaceful? Ueslei Marcelino, Anthony Boadle, ‘Indigenous protest over land rights turns violent on front steps of Brazil Congress’, The Age, 26/04/17

26Apr17

Excerpt: Indigenous people and police have clashed in Brazil’s capital city, as officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas while tribe members shot arrows in return during a protest against planned government changes to reservation legislation.

The Tuesday demonstration was peaceful until police blocked some protesters, their bodies painted and carrying colourful headdresses, from climbing a ramp that leads into the congressional building.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Anticapitalism is not enough (we really need to know how settler colonialism works): Oliver W. Baker, ‘Democracy, Class, and White Settler Colonialism’, Public, 28, 55, 2017, pp. 144-153

26Apr17

Abstract: This essay offers a critique of a set of responses to neoliberalism that emphasize liberal democracy and class solidarityy (worker identity) as the paramount sites today for productive collective struggle and creation of democratic life. Drawing on the insights of Indigenous critical theory and Afro-pessimist theory, I argue that theories of liberal democracy and worker-centered struggle fail to consider how the colonial antagonisms of Indigeneity and Blackness continue not only to underpin neoliberal forms of exploitation and dispossession but to overdetermine how we conceptualize and organize our struggles for genuine forms of democratic life. To create genuine forms of democratic life we must conceptualize and build struggles not around points of convergence among differentially positioned groups in capitalism, but around the antagonisms that make democratic social belonging impossible in the first place. This requires that we confront the colonial antagonisms that remain with us today in the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Anticapitalism is not enough (we need to know how settler colonialism works): Kevin Bruyneel, ‘The White Settler Romance with Anticapitalism: On Day’s Alien Capital’, Theory & Event, 20, 2, 2017, pp. 564-570

26Apr17

Excerpt: Iyko Day is here to warn us about the seductions of romantic anti-capitalism. This is a romance with the notion of concrete labor over and against the abstractions of exchange, the role of the producer over the financier, and that of ennobled, naturalized Indigeneity over the hyper-rational and manipulative alien—once Jewish, now Asian. The romantic anticapitalist is seduced by a fantasy of the authentic relationship of productive human capacity, agency, and concrete value over and against the seeming inauthenticity and oppressive manipulability of representation itself. For romantic anticapitalists, concrete labor stands for value that is produced through an unmediated ‘dirt-under-the-fingernails’ relationship to the material. This unmediated relationship is impeded by abstract forces, embodied in racialized others whose labor is central to the workings of white settler colonial capitalism but whose role in this system is constructed as an abstract threat to the status and freedom of the white settler. In this sense, romantic anticapitalism is a sublimated romance with racial-colonial capitalism.

Day’s Alien Capital attends to an under-examined historical, political and human register, that of Asian identity, representation, and experience in the North American settler colonial states. One can productively read Day’s work alongside Jodi Byrd’s The Transit of Empire, as Day’s concern with the alien settler openly draws from and speaks to Byrd’s conceptualization of the role of the ‘arrivante’ in settler colonial contexts. However, Day’s attention to the alien in relation to settler colonial capital focuses specifically on the Asian migrant/laborer, and in so doing offers a way to deconstruct the racialized, gendered, sexualized and colonial nature of the representation of value, and of indeed representation itself. In Day’s telling, it is the Asian migrant who comes to stand for the evils of abstraction with regard to valuation, exchange, and thus capitalism itself. 

While richly historical, the book’s subject of study is a diverse range of literary, visual, and cinematic representations—some of which are intentional works of art and others are created for their function in the economy. Examples of the latter frame the beginning and end of the book. An introduction entitled “The New Jews” starts by discussing the 2012 Canadian hundred-dollar bill, which at first depicted a female Asian scientist but was later supplanted by the ostensibly “‘neutral ethnicity'” of a “‘Caucasian-looking woman.” (1) The book’s epilogue pivots around an analysis of an early 20th century salmon-gutting machine from British Columbia called the “Iron Chink.” What connects both is that as “money or machine, the Asian is aligned with the destructive value dimension of capitalism.” (193) The presumption undergirding the analyses of these two subjects and those analyzed in the intervening chapters is nicely captured in Petrus Liu’s insight, quoted by Day, that “‘…the value of the commodity of human labor is determined by moral and discursive operations outside of the capitalist reproduction scheme.'” (47, emphasis original) Day’s approach compels the reader to take discursive practices seriously, rather than dismissively viewing them as epiphenomenal to the ostensibly unmediated, real practices of capitalist reproduction. Day lays bare and pursues the discursive as well as economic practices by which relations between people become transformed, diminished, and fetishized into a relationship between things. In that sense, there is no clear outside here, as moral and discursive operations motivate and define roles in capitalist production. This is a shaping that prefigures the answer to such questions as, who is presumed to serve in what role in the economy, what constitutes the concept of labor and laboring, to what end and what level of deprivation, to whose benefit and under what threat? As Day makes clear throughout the book, the value of a commodity of human labor does not exist apart from racialized, colonialist, gendered, sexualized, classed, and ableist meanings.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonialism is the glue that unites the ‘Zionist continuum’: Amal Jamal, ‘Neo-Zionism and Palestine: The Unveiling of Settler-Colonial Practices in Mainstream Zionism’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 16, 1, 2017, pp. 47-78

26Apr17

Abstract: This article examines the rise and key characteristics of Neo-Zionist political thought in Israel and its relationship with mainstream Zionist thought. It argues that despite the radical and repulsive discourses of Neo-Zionism and the critique expressed by liberal Zionists towards it, the former has always been embodied in classical Zionism. The justifications provided by Neo-Zionists are based on principles propagated by central leaders of mainstream Zionism. Utilising new perspectives in Settler-Colonial Studies, the article demonstrates how both strands encapsulate the Zionist continuum and continuous expansionist drive for new settlements in Palestine based on ‘Biblical right’ of Jews over the land of Palestine. Both advocate supremacist, exclusivist, and volkish rights for Jews with disastrous consequences for the indigenous people of Palestine. The convictions and practices of the Neo-Zionists in the post 1967 period help unveil the camouflaged motivations, justifications and practices of mainstream expansionist Zionism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Genocide and settler colonialism are implicated: John Docker, ‘Reconceptualising Settler-Colonialism and Genocide with Special Reference to Palestine, Sri Lanka and Australia: Reflections on Damien Short’s Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 16, 1, 2017, pp. 27-45

26Apr17

Abstract: Genocide studies are at a cross-road. In June 2016, the International Network of Genocide Scholars, sponsor of the Journal of Genocide Research, imperilled the future of genocide studies by aligning itself with Zionist Israel, which many scholars consider to be a genocidal settler-colonial perpetrator state. Almost at the same time, Damien Short’s important intervention Redefining Genocide was published, suggesting new directions for genocide studies in the Anthropocene and featuring Palestine as one of its case studies. In considering historical and ongoing genocides in Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Australia, Redefining Genocide inspires a rethinking of the relationship between genocide, settler-colonialism, and the state.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Cold War to Hot Planet via Aboriginal Rights: Launch; 50-Year Anniversary Issue of Arena Journal & Arena Magazine no. 147 (in case you are in Melbourne)

22Apr17

Access the invitation here.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

De-development is elimination: Marcelo Svirsky, ‘Review of Mandy Turner and Omar Shweiki (eds), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 2017

21Apr17

Excerpt: As the late Australian historian Patrick Wolfe influentially argued, settler polities are established on, and maintained by the logic of elimination of the Native, though the means to eliminate Indigenous peoples can take different forms – from expulsion and physical extermination, to forced assimilation, and even multicultural politics. Mandy Turner and Omar Shweiki’s edited collection schools the reader on one more form of Native elimination – de-development – as it historically inhibited Palestinian economy and life opportunities since 1948. Though not settler intentions but deeds are what the understanding of settler colonialism needs mainly to focus on, policy statements are nevertheless part of the discursive assemblage of a regime, and Israeli government officials’ testimonials are indeed very informative.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Collective memory is a weapon: Ilan Pappe, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Collective Memory’, Anthropological Quarterly, 90, 1, 2017 pp. 255-266

21Apr17

Excerpt: One of Michel Foucault’s enduring scholarly legacies is his formulation of biopolitics as a potent force in our lives. What he had in mind, among other issues, was the pervasive and comprehensive power of states and industries to affect all aspects of life. Power, for Foucault, could insinuate itself into all microphysical social and physical contact and thus disciplined bodies and minds alike. Ever since his death in 1984, we are looking for ways of shaking off his gloomy observation that rings true and yet we wish to resist (Foucault 2003:242–243).

Quite surprisingly, Foucault did not relate the concept of biopolitics, or biopower, to racism and colonialism as Robert Young observed already in 1995. For Foucault this was the domain of the modern nation state and its particular mode of domination (although he inspired one of the most important work on colonialism, Edward Said’s Orientalism [1979]). However, what happens if the modern state is a settler colonial state? Are we allowed to apply this micro domination to such a case study? I think we can, as the two books under review—without committing them to this paradigm they have not chosen—indicate the usefulness of this possible departure point for discussing the relationship between the settler colonial state of Israel and the native Palestinian population.

The first book, Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendars, Monuments, and Martyrs, by Tamir Sorek examines the commemorative culture of the Palestinian minority in Israel through formative events in their national lives (beginning, of course, with the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah). For Sorek, these commemorative spaces empower the minority within the Jewish state, but also indicate its willingness to dialogue with it. His approach is multidisciplinary and he provides us with a very thorough and comprehensive view on this culture in various manifestations since the inception of the Jewish State.

In Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012, Thomas Philip Abowd roams the streets of Jerusalem with local friends and tries to share with them the harsh reality of colonization. His focus is the urban reality as a scene of colonialist erasure and counter commemoration by the colonized. The book moves in and out of history, covering some of the most known acts of urbicide that Israel committed in Jerusalem as well as less known instances of the colonization as a project of the de-Arabization of the city. He gives much space to the people themselves and conveys not just their thoughts, but their emotions and aspirations as much as he can.

There are still today quite a few students of Israel and Palestine who find it hard to append the adjectives colonial, or settler colonial, to the Jewish State. However, recent scholarship is quite adamant that this is the appropriate paradigm for analyzing the past and the present of Israel and Palestine.1 This paradigm was applied by scholars to review the events of 1948; the Judaization policies in the south of Israel; the economic policies of Israel in the occupied West Bank and the industrial relationship during the Mandatory period, to mention but few of the major works in this area of inquiry (Lloyd 2012, Nasara 2012, Hever 2012, Mansour 2012). Major works in the field are those by Patrick Wolfe (2006), Lorenzo Veracini (2006), and Gaby Piterberg (2008).


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settlements are disciplinary spaces (settlements for all means there are no indigenous peoples): Andrea Fischer-Tahir, Sophie Wagenhofer (eds), Disciplinary Spaces Spatial Control, Forced Assimilation and Narratives of Progress Since the 19th Century, Transcript-Verlag, 2017

21Apr17

Description: This volume looks at territories such as reservations, model villages and collective towns as the spatial materialization of forced assimilation and “progress”. These disciplinary spaces were created in order to disempower and alter radically the behavior of people who were perceived as ill-suited “to fit” into hegemonic imaginations of “the nation” since the 19th century. Comparing examples from the Americas, Australia, North and East Africa, Central Europe as well as West and Central Asia, the book not only considers the acts and legitimizing narrations of ruling actors, but highlights the agency of the subaltern who are often misrepresented as passive victims of violent assimilation strategies.


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