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On the poetics of settler peoples: Ben Etherington, ‘Unsettled Poetics Contemporary Australian and South African Poetry’, Wasafiri, 31, 2, 2016, pp. 1-4

28May16

Excerpt: For the first time, this Special Issue brings to the attention of Wasafiri‘s readers two poetry communities with which many will be unfamiliar: those of South Africa and Australia. These might be regarded as literary micro-climates, which the prevailing winds of postcolonial and world literature often sweep past. Each has its peculiar dynamic specific to its history of white colonial settlement and the effects this had on indigenous African and Aboriginal literary cultures. Each also bears the impress of local idiosyncrasies of personality and institution which do not necessarily track neatly with larger historical and social developments. Often the poets who have gained international attention are not the same as those who are regarded locally as significant. This is an opportunity, then, for readers of Wasafiri to tune into these poetry ecosystems and to hear voices shaped by local political and aesthetic concerns. They hardly follow the grain of societies with reputations for being focused on ‘lifestyle’.

This is not, however, an introduction to South African and Australian poetry. The poets and critics who have been assembled for this issue are not representative of trends or the spectrum of current poetic activity. The event I convened in Sydney, out of which this Special Issue arises, was specifically concerned with the relationship between poetic craft and the legacy of settler colonialism.

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Branding settler colonialism: Patricia Ann Thomas , ‘Emigration and imperial business: the New Zealand company brand 1839-1841’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 2016

27May16

Abstract: Purpose: This article offers an example of a comprehensive mid-nineteenth century branding strategy in practice. Design/methodology/approach: The article follows an historical research methodology using archival resources and secondary sources within a conceptual framework of present-day branding theory (Bastos and Levy) and communication theory (Perloff). It interrogates visual and material data to construct a production-led examination of the development of a company brand. Findings: The examination of the material suggests first, that the company developed a sophisticated, multi-dimensional, multi-functional, and materially coherent branding system. Second, it demonstrates that such a system represents an early example of a strategic practice that many scholars have considered to have arisen only in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Third, it provides evidence that the origin, if not always the implementation, of the strategy lay with one man, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Originality/value: This article is novel in its use of visual and material culture artifacts to demonstrate the intentions of those who produced them. It also offers an example of practice in an area that is often only explored in theory. It will be of interest to cultural, marketing, and visual and material culture historians.

 


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The other removal: John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians Northern Indian Removal, University of Oklahoma Press, 2016

24May16

Decription: The history of Indian removal has often followed a single narrative arc, one that begins with President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and follows the Cherokee Trail of Tears. In that conventional account, the Black Hawk War of 1832 encapsulates the experience of tribes in the territories north of the Ohio River. But Indian removal in the Old Northwest was much more complicated—involving many Indian peoples and more than just one policy, event, or politician. In Land Too Good for Indians, historian John P. Bowes takes a long-needed closer, more expansive look at northern Indian removal—and in so doing amplifies the history of Indian removal and of the United States.

Bowes focuses on four case studies that exemplify particular elements of removal in the Old Northwest. He traces the paths taken by Delaware Indians in response to Euro-American expansion and U.S. policies in the decades prior to the Indian Removal Act. He also considers the removal experience among the Seneca-Cayugas, Wyandots, and other Indian communities in the Sandusky River region of northwestern Ohio. Bowes uses the 1833 Treaty of Chicago as a lens through which to examine the forces that drove the divergent removals of various Potawatomi communities from northern Illinois and Indiana. And in exploring the experiences of the Odawas and Ojibwes in Michigan Territory, he analyzes the historical context and choices that enabled some Indian communities to avoid relocation west of the Mississippi River.

In expanding the context of removal to include the Old Northwest, and adding a portrait of Native communities there before, during, and after removal, Bowes paints a more accurate—and complicated—picture of American Indian history in the nineteenth century. Land Too Good for Indians reveals the deeper complexities of this crucial time in American history.


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Refusing to disclose as resistance: K. Wrightson, ‘Shifting colonialisms, shifting resistance: locating indigenous political resistance through Canadian and Scottish collaboration’, Museological Review, 20, 2016, pp. 52-62

24May16

Abstract: Focusing on the particular context of Canadian settler colonialism, this paper examines the use of museums and material culture histories to support Indigenous peoples’ political movements towards decolonisation. This paper focuses on two forms of protest; one accessible to the public and the second less so. The first example is the 1988 exhibition The Spirit Sings at the Glenbow Museum in Canada, the second example is the collaborative Scottish Project that took place in the Northwest Territories, Canada and Edinbugh Scotland. While The Spirit Sings is an example of the public form of protest, using the work of Métis artist David Garneau, this paper argues that other forms of protest are private and challenge Western epistemological privilege through processes of refusal to disclose. Through these two examples the paper shows that the forms that colonial domination takes over Indigenous peoples has shifted, but so has the forms of protest that can occur within museum spaces.


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Settling is reclaiming: Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, ‘Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Pontine Marshes’, Differences, 27, 1, 2016, pp. 94-142

24May16

Abstract: Fascism’s success in building communities and structures of conviviality was for many years avoided by the critical scholarship on Italian fascism. More recently, however, fascist land reclamation has become a favored topic in Italian historiographical revisionism: it has become an argument for the regime’s “revolutionary” aspects.

This article argues that “land reclamation” was a fundamental policy and ideology of Italian fascism. It claims that reclamation furnishes the literal and figurative grounds of consent to the regime: this is to say, reclamation as policy and ideology was not only successful in creating consent but was a crucial site for its creation: reclamation was rooted in the idea of a politics and discourse that arise from the ground. This essay is an intervention into these debates: it argues that “land reclamation” is the tool used now by revisionist postfascist discourses in a new politics of memory.


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Settler colonialism can help making sense of parasite and host: Warwick Anderson, ‘Postcolonial Ecologies of Parasite and Host: Making Parasitism Cosmopolitan’, Journal of the History of Biology, 49, 2, 2016, pp. 241-259

21May16

Abstract: The interest of F. Macfarlane Burnet in host–parasite interactions grew through the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease (1940), often regarded as the founding text of disease ecology. Our knowledge of the influences on Burnet’s ecological thinking is still incomplete. Burnet later attributed much of his conceptual development to his reading of British theoretical biology, especially the work of Julian Huxley and Charles Elton, and regretted he did not study Theobald Smith’s Parasitism and Disease (1934) until after he had formulated his ideas. Scholars also have adduced Burnet’s fascination with natural history and the clinical and public health demands on his research effort, among other influences. I want to consider here additional contributions to Burnet’s ecological thinking, focusing on his intellectual milieu, placing his research in a settler society with exceptional expertise in environmental studies and pest management. In part, an ‘‘ecological turn’’ in Australian science in the 1930s, derived to a degree from British colonial scientific investments, shaped Burnet’s conceptual development. This raises the question of whether we might characterize, in postcolonial fashion, disease ecology, and other studies of parasitism, as successful settler colonial or dominion science.


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Stealing indigenous and exogenous children: Shurlee Swain, ‘Enshrined in Law: Legislative Justifications for the Removal of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Children in Colonial and Post-Colonial Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2, 2016, pp. 191-208

21May16

Abstract: While the completion of two different inquiries, along with separate apologies and reparation packages, might suggest that the policies justifying the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Australia were distinct, the situation is far more complex. Both child and ‘native’ welfare were colonial and later state responsibilities, creating the potential for policies and practices to be informed by different forces and to vary by jurisdiction. However, by analysing the debates around legislation from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article establishes commonalities as well as differences in both the arguments used to justify Indigenous and non-Indigenous child removal and the practices that evolved in the implementation of such legislation. By interrogating such arguments through the lens of whiteness and race, the article identifies the role which child removal was imagined to play in the process of building the settler colonial nation.


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Frontier intimacies and estrangements: Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier’, Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2, 2016, pp. 209-224

21May16

Abstract: A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australia’s colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at the localised level of social relations that the cross-hatched intersections between violence and intimacy can emerge into clearest view. This article traces the threads of cross-cultural encounter on one Australian frontier to assess how violent conflict could arise as much from conditions of inter-connectedness and familiarity as from conditions of strangeness and fear, and to ask, under such conditions, what kinds of frontier violence drew the intervention of the law.


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On German settler colonialisms: Dörte Lerp, ‘Beyond the Prairie: Adopting, Adapting and Transforming Settlement Policies within the German Empire’, Journal of Modern European History, 14, 2, 2016, pp. 225-244

21May16

Abstract: The article investigates the emergence of state-sponsored settlement schemes in various empires throughout the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The main focus lies on the German Empire and how settlement policies were introduced to and implemented within it. Focusing on inter- and inner-imperial borrowings, as well as adaptations and transformations, the article explores whether or not and to what extent, the inner colonisation of the eastern Prussian provinces was influenced by North American settlement schemes like the United States Homestead Act of 1862 and the Canadian homestead legislation of 1872. It also takes a close look at the development of policies within Germany’s so-called settlement colony, German Southwest Africa: a process that was shaped by the Prussian precedent to some degree, but even more so by British settlement policies in South Africa. However, even though scholars and politicians were engaged in the transfer of ideas and concepts from one locale to another, it was primarily the administration that determined the directions the policies took. It is therefore not surprising that the settlement programmes in the eastern Prussian provinces and German Southwest Africa differed considerably not only from the settlement acts in North America or British South Africa, but also from each other. This article argues that, in order to fully grasp the emergence of various state-aided settlement programmes within and beyond the German Empire, we have to look beyond inter- or intra-imperial transfers and analyse the broader concepts of space and population that informed those programmes.


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Soviet settler colonialism: J. Otto Pohl, The Deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the Context of Settler Colonialism’, Uluslararasi Suçlar ve Tarih, 16, 2015, pp. 45-69

20May16

Abstract: The Soviet ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars, the subsequent settlement of their lands with Russians and Ukrainians, and the de-Tatarization of the peninsula s place names has a number of similarities with various cases of settler colonialism in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Palestine. The treatment of the exiled Crimean Tatars in Uzbekistan, the Urals, and other regions also had a number of similarities with how settler colonies treated their indigenous populations. These similarities, however, have not been thoroughly explored by historians and other scholars. Instead the USSR has been considered as being completely outside of the framework of colonial and ethno-racial relations that developed between Europeans and indigenous peoples in other parts of the world. This article seeks to make a first attempt at suggesting ways in which Soviet policies towards various indigenous peoples in the USSR can be compared to the better studied cases of settler colonialism in places like South Africa and Palestine. In particular it uses the Soviet deportation of the Crimean Tatars and their prolonged exile in Uzbekistan under various legal restrictions as a case study comparable in a number of important ways to settler colonialism. It is hoped that this article will inspire further inquiries and research in a comparative manner regarding this topic.


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