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Settler order: Kimberly Robertson, ‘The “law and order” of violence gainst Native Women: A Native feminist analysis of the Tribal Law and Order Act’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 5, 1, 2016

31May16

Abstract: In this essay, I aim to engage the growing body of scholarship that employs Indigenous feminist theories to understand and mobilize against the sexual and gendered violence committed against Native peoples. To accomplish this, I construct a Native feminist analysis of the 2010 Tribal Law and Order Act. I posit that despite the overwhelmingly positive characterizations of the legislation as “historic” in its potential to address violence against Native women and reduce crime in Indian country, a Native feminist reading of the Tribal Law and Order Act illuminates the degree to which the Act emerges from, engages with, and advances settler colonial and heteropatriarchal logics that cause violence against Native women in the first place. I suggest that although the Act does contain measures that have the potential to alleviate the experience of violence in Native women’s lives, it also diminishes tribal sovereignty, perpetuates the ongoing encroachment of tribal jurisdiction, regulates the boundaries of Native identity, and limits our ability to envision and enact practices of decolonization. 


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Transitional justice is settler justice: Jennifer Matsunaga, ‘Two faces of transitional justice: Theorizing the incommensurability of transitional justice and decolonization in Canada’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 5, 1, 2016

31May16

Abstract: Transitional justice is a complex form of political and legal intervention used by state governments to redress state-sanctioned and large-scale harms (Balint, Evans, & McMillan, 2014). The typical aims of this model include maintaining peace during times of political flux, installing rule-of law, creating new historical narratives, and reconciliation (Teitel, 2003). In both theory and practice, transitional justice usually concerns ‘fragile states’ or post-conflict states. Governments, academics and practitioners, however, are broadening transitional justice theory and practice to include harms to Indigenous peoples in settler states such as Canada. Notably, recent efforts seek to integrate ‘decolonization’ into transitional justice as a desired process or goal. This paper is a critical intervention into this trend. I demonstrate that Canada has two faces of transitional justice – one, internally focused on ‘reconciliation’ with Indigenous peoples and the other, externally focused on providing peace and security expertise to fragile states. I bring land-centered understandings of decolonization and Indigenous resurgence into conversation with this duality to argue that efforts to incorporate decolonization into transitional justice, without taking seriously its roots and the international transitional justice work with which Canada is engaged, does more to obscure and de-legitimize Indigenous nationhood and settler colonialism entirely.


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There was an anti-settler literature: Tamara S. Wagner, Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English, Routledge, 2016

31May16

Description: In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called ‘superfluous’ or ‘redundant’ parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the ‘unwanted’ might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.


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Indigenous decolonisation requires indigenous worlding which requires indigenous language: Carl Mika, ‘Worlded object and its presentation: A Māori philosophy of language’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 12, 2, 2016

28May16

Abstract: In an era concerned with the survival of Indigenous languages, language as a general phenomenon needs to be thought of as thoroughly connected to one’s worldview. In this article, I propose a different conception of language that sides more with what I call ‘the worlding of things’ than linguistics. To foreshadow my speculations on language, I consider the possibility that, within the representation of one entity in perception, there exist all other entities. An entity is hence ‘worlded’—a key aspect of the term ‘whakapapa’. I then turn to think about language as a general phenomenon for Māori, and its complex ability to world an entity even as it adumbrates that thing’s backdrop. I consider the verb ‘to be’ in that light, arguing that Māori identify language as a sort of gathering of entities rather than an instrument for singling out one thing as thoroughly and separably evident. This article is therefore as much about the full participation of the world as it is about language; it also aims to counter the belief that language is merely a conveyor of ideas.


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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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