Description: London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city’s past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.

Call for Papers for the 7th Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm June 18-21, 2017 

The socio-materialities of settler colonial economies 

Conveners: Rhys Machold (Danish Institute for International Studies) and Sigrid Vertommen (Ghent University)

Scholars have proposed a systematic connection between historical and ongoing forms of settler colonial violence and the growth and entrenchment of the current neoliberal modes of accumulation (Lloyd and Wolfe 2015). Yet, despite the growing recognition about the central role of settler colonial violence in the rise and entrenchment of global (neoliberal) capitalism, literature on settler colonialism still “leans towards the discursive aspects and imaginative geographies of settler colonialism” (Jabary Salamanca 2014:22), negating its material and infrastructural underpinnings. This session attempts to bridge the gap between studies of settler colonial formations and the political economy of capitalism by taking seriously the claim that economies are actively made through material practices and interventions related to access to land and natural resources, labour and property rights (Mitchell 2002: 82). While leading theorists of both settler colonialism and capitalism often tend to focus on the logics and structures behind these socio-historical formations, little consideration has been devoted to the practical failures, disruptions, frictions involved in practices of accumulation through violence and dispossession. This tendency has produced an unhindered picture of settler colonial economies and their resonance with neoliberal capitalism as natural and seamless. We hope to open up discussions about how settler colonial economies operate as globalizing capitalist projects through attention to the messiness of their actual constitution.

We welcome papers that empirically and conceptually address the socio-material constitution of settler economies, both within particular localities and/or across transnational space. Possible topics might include: resource extraction and pipelines, circuits of trade and logistics, development and agricultural production, bio-medical technologies, and the political economies of policing, security and the global weapons trade.

The session seeks to engage with some of the following questions:

• To what extent is contemporary global capitalism itself informed by specifically settler colonial logics (and vice versa)?
• How do practices, technologies and strategies of settler colonial control mutate and adapt as they travel geographically and manifest within particular localities?
• What modes of primitive accumulation and regimes of labour are undergirding settler colonial economies?
• How might we go about researching the connections and disjunctures between disparate settler colonial projects and to what ends?
• What can these continuities and discontinuities teach us in the context of political struggles of resistance?
• What is the relationship between material and the discursive in relation to settler colonial economies, both historical and contemporary?

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Rhys Machold (rhysmachold@gmail.com) and Sigrid Vertommen (sigrid.vertommen@ugent.be) by December 15, 2016

Abstract: Whether too much or the wrong kind, constraining Indigenous mobility is a preoccupation of the province of British Columbia. The province remains focussed on controlling Indigenous mobility and constructing forms of contentious mobility, such as hitchhiking, as bad or risky. In Northwestern British Columbia hitchhiking is particularly common among Indigenous women. Hitchhiking as a mode of contentious mobility is categorically named as “bad mobility” and is frequently explained away as risky behaviour. Mobility of Indigenous women, including hitchhiking is deeply gendered and racialized. The frequent description of missing and murdered Indigenous women as hitchhikers or drifters fosters a sense that “choosing” a bad mode of mobility alone is the reason that these women disappear. This paper will identify how hitchhiking, framed as contentious mobility, supports the construction of missing and murdered Indigenous women as willing, available and blame-worthy victims. Morality is tangled up with mobility in the province’s responses to Indigenous women who hitchhike. This paper engages in a critical discourse analysis of billboards posted by the province of British Columbia along the Highway of Tears that attempt to prevent women from hitchhiking. This paper will identify the point of convergence between contentious mobility, violence against Indigenous women and larger questions of colonialism and the negotiation of racialized and gendered power imbalances through the province’s constraining of Indigenous mobility.

Access this introduction here.

Abstract: A bicultural approach to the politics of settler-indigenous relations, rapidly increasing ethnocultural diversity and its status as an ex-British settler society, make Auckland a fascinating and complex context in which to examine contemporary British migrants. However, despite Britain remaining one of the largest source countries for migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the country’s popularity as a destination among British emigrants, contemporary arrivals have attracted relatively little attention. This thesis draws on twelve-months of qualitative research, including in-depth interviews with forty-six participants, photo-elicitation with a smaller group, and participant observation, in order to develop a nuanced account of participants’ narratives, everyday experiences and personal geographies of Auckland. This thesis adopts a lens attentive to the relationship between the past and the present in order to explore British migrants’ imaginaries of sameness and difference, national belonging, place and ‘the good life’ in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, through attention to the ‘colonial continuities’ of participants’ popular geographical and temporal imaginaries of Aotearoa New Zealand, and the lifestyles they associate with it, this thesis is part of growing attention to historical precedents of ‘the good life’ in international lifestyle migration literature. Secondly, by examining participants’ relations with Māori, other ethnicised groups, bi- and multiculturalism, I expand on whether these migrants’ invest, or not, in ‘the settler imaginary’ (Bell 2014). In doing so, I bring crucial nuance to understandings of ethnic and cultural difference, and settler-indigenous relations, in globalising white settler spaces. As neither fully ‘them’ nor ‘us’ (Wellings 2011), British migrants occupy an ambiguous position in ex-British settler societies. Finally, I examine participants’ notions of shared ancestry and of cultural familiarity with Pākehā, and, in doing so, problematise the notion of Britishness as a natural legacy or passive inheritance in this context.

Description: The impact of empires and the lingering presence of colonialism continue to be major preoccupations for scholars in the twenty-first century. This concise text explores the spread of settler colonies within the British Empire over the course of the nineteenth century, specifically those in New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and Australia.

Access the book here.

Access the article here.

Excerpt: In a 1973 article, Mormon scholar Eugene England described the decision of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to deny the priesthood to black men as a “cross” that white Mormons had to bear. England saw it as an Abrahamic sacrifice. God, he wrote, “asks us to sacrifice not only our political and social ideals and the understanding and good will of our colleagues and friends, but seems to ask us to sacrifice the very essence of His own teachings—the divine potential of all His children.^” England believed that the racism of white Mormons had ultimately forced God’s hand, causing Him “to institute a lower law” in which black men would not have full membership in God’s Church or be able to participate in all of its ordinances. On June 8, 1978, Spencer W. Kimball announced that he had received a divine revelation rescinding the ban. In spite of the announcement, Mormons have continued to struggle with the racial exclusivity. For instance, at a 2015 conference on being black and Mormon, an African American woman described feeling ostracized because the paintings of heaven in a Mormon temple she visited only included white angels. “Do they see me?” she asked herself^. The implicit answer was no.

Black Mormons could ask a similar question about official church histories. There has been an attempt among some Mormon historians, however, to excavate the lives of early black church members and to locate the origins of the black priesthood and temple bans. In 1973, for example, Lester Bush, Jr., argued that restrictions on the priesthood had originated not with Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founding prophet, but with his successors.⁴ Scholars like Russell Stevenson (Black Mormon, 2013) have contributed to the debates surrounding the nature of blackness within early Mormonism. This work has [End Page 450] tended to be biographical, adding individuals like Jane Manning James and Elijah Abel to the pantheon of Mormon pioneers. The most recent works in this subfield are under review here—Angela Pulley Hudson’s Real Native Genius and W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color. These two books differ from previous explorations of race within Mormonism in that their racial analysis brings American Indians and African Americans into the same frame. They also seek to reach a broader academic audience by using Mormonism to understand the intersections of race, sexuality, and religion in the nineteenth century.

Abstract: Verdesio discusses the shortcomings of a central category in the theoretical repertoire of the decolonial option: “coloniality of power.” By focusing on Uruguay as a case study, a country where the colonial legacies typical of settler colonialism are still alive, Verdesio shows the limited explanatory power of categories like coloniality of power, that were born out of the study of other forms of colonialism. The negative, sometimes passionate reactions the reemergence of the Charrúa Indians has elicited from a significant number of social actors (politicians, academics, and the general public) are discussed as a symptomatic phenomenon that may help one understand the deep roots and currency of present-day colonial legacies.