settler colonial studies blog

Decolonisation is about sovereignty: David J. Carlson, Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature, University of Oklahoma Press, 2016

04Mar16

Description: “Sovereignty” is perhaps the most ubiquitous term in American Indian writing today—but its meaning and function are anything but universally understood. This is as it should be, David J. Carlson suggests, for a concept frequently at the center of various—and often competing—claims to authority. In Imagining Sovereignty, Carlson explores sovereignty as a discursive middle ground between tribal communities and the United States as a settler-colonial power. His work reveals the complementary ways in which legal and literary texts have generated politically significant representations of the world, which in turn have produced particular effects on readers and advanced the cause of tribal self-determination.

Drawing on western legal historical sources and American Indian texts, Carlson traces a dual genealogy of sovereignty. Imagining Sovereignty identifies the concept as a marker, one that allows both the colonizing power of the United States and the resisting powers of various American Indian nations to organize themselves and their various claims to authority. In the process, sovereignty also functions as a point of exchange where these claims compete with and complicate one another. To this end, Carlson analyzes how several contemporary American Indian writers and critics have sought to fuse literary practices and legal structures into fully formed discourses of self-determination. After charting the development of the concept of sovereignty in natural law and its permutations in federal Indian policy, Carlson maps out the nature and function of sovereignty discourses in the work of contemporary Native scholars such as Russel Barsh, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, D’Arcy McNickle, and Vine Deloria, and in the work of more expressly literary American Indian writers such as Craig Womack, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Gerald Vizenor, and Francisco Patencio.

Often read in opposition, the writings of these indigenous authors emerge in Imagining Sovereignty as a coherent literary and political tradition—one whose varied discourse of sovereignty aptly reflects American Indian people’s diverse political contexts.

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Indigenous cancer treatment in settler contexts (on the comparative politics of indigenous health; a special issue): V. Knott, D. Weller (eds), ‘Themed section: Cancer in Indigenous Populations’, European Journal of Cancer Care, 25, 2, 2016, 203–341

04Mar16

Access the special issue here.

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Craving a deep past: Robert Rouse, ‘Indigenising the medieval; or how did Maori and Awabakal become inscribed in medieval manuscripts?’, Parergon, 32, 2, 2015

02Mar16

Abstract: This article examines two moments in the history of two manuscripts now held in collections in Auckland, New Zealand. The first moment is the flyleaf inscription recording the gift of an early sixteenth-century Book of Hours from one settler to another in the Wellington colony in 1842, while the second is the addition of a faux-medieval decorative scheme to the Awabakal Gospel of St Luke under the orders of Sir George Grey in the early 1860s. Analysis of these two moments of manuscript re-inscription are revealing of the way in which nineteenth-century medievalism was deployed in the service of British imperial ideology.

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The end of settler societies (or their triumph)? Catherine Dauvergne, The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Societies, Cambridge University Press, 2016

28Feb16

Description: Over the past decade, a global convergence in migration policies has emerged, and with it a new, mean-spirited politics of immigration. It is now evident that the idea of a settler society, previously an important landmark in understanding migration, is a thing of the past. What are the consequences of this shift for how we imagine immigration? And for how we regulate it? This book analyzes the dramatic shift away from the settler society paradigm in light of the crisis of asylum, the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, and the demise of multiculturalism. What emerges is a radically original take on the new global politics of immigration that can explain policy paralysis in the face of rising death tolls, failing human rights arguments, and persistent state desires to treat migration as an economic calculus.

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Introducing a special issue on Germanness outside of Germany: Alexander Maxwell, Sacha E. Davis (eds), ‘Germanness beyond Germany: Collective Identity in German Diaspora Communities’, German Studies Review, 39, 1, 2016, pp. 1-15

28Feb16

Excerpt: In this special issue of German Studies Review, we examine how communities in the so called “German diaspora” have imagined and maintained a sense of Germanness in their various host communities. The experience of Germanness in any given immigrant community has followed a different historical trajectory from Germanness in the core German ethnoterritory in Central Europe, a region roughly coterminous with the territory presently administered by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Austria, but which also encompasses much of Switzerland and various lands directly adjacent to Germany and Austria.

Speaking of “collective identity” or “German identity” poses terminological problems. Inga Scharf argued that “German national identity appears to be too impossibly contradictory or paradoxical to be spoken of with any ease,” and the problem lies not only with the complexities of Germanness, but also with the word “identity.” In an influential article, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have shown that some scholars use the term to discuss both individuals and collectives; to discuss both something claimed for oneself and something externally attributed; and to discuss both something fluid, contextual, and contingent, and something solid, immutable, and enduring. Confusion results from the use of the same word for both halves of so many mutually exclusive binaries, though some scholars apparently underestimate the danger. Hans-Jochen Gamm’s study of “German identities,” for example, declared that “collective identities are apparently natural and for this reason require no further explanation,” though Gamm also offered several “clarifications.” While we have used the term “identity,” we take Brubaker and Cooper’s criticism seriously. We treat Germanness as something collective rather than individual. While we and our contributors examine Germanness both as something self-proclaimed and as something externally ascribed, we mostly emphasize self-understandings. Finally, we see Germanness as neither immutable nor ephemeral, but durably constructed within a given social and historical context. Informed by Brubaker’s analysis of “groupism,” we place our emphasis on “Germanness” as a “category of practice,” that is, as historical actors imagined and experienced it.

The content and significance of Germanness gradually evolves over the decades as historical actors contest its meanings, but its flexibility in a specific time and place remains limited. Our ambition is to examine how social practices and institutions help construct or maintain a given understanding of Germanness in particular contexts. Since the putative meaning of Germanness varies over historical time, from place to place, from historical actor to historical actor, and from scholarly observer to scholarly observer, what phenomena should scholars examine to explore the changing meaning of Germanness?

Several scholars analyze Germanness with reference to the state or states governing the core German ethnoterritory. Françoise Knopper and Alain Ruiz, for example, argued that the cold war division of Europe, and particularly the creation of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany, illustrate “significant difficulties in defining the German identity.” Louis Snyder thought Bismarck responsible for the “subservience, discipline, and respect for authority” that “when added to other characteristics, gave the German national character in the late nineteenth century a special quality of its own.” He also declared that postwar West Germany embodied “the new German character.” James Sperling similarly suggested that “American, British, and West German policy makers cooperated in forging a new German national identity that was liberal, democratic, irrevocably tied to the West and anti-Communist.” Mark Blacksell even claimed that the Kaiserreich (imperial Germany), the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic all “purported to represent all Germany and embrace a single national identity,” and thus that all these states “fostered German identity.” Others, including Friedrich Meinicke, Jürgen Habermas, and Rogers Brubaker, have explored Germanness in studies of legal citizenship.

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How Zionism used/uses the Bible: Ilan Pappe, ‘The Bible in the Service of Zionism’, in Ingrid Hjelm, Thomas L. Thompson (eds), History, Archaeology and The Bible Forty Years After ‘Historicity’, Routledge, 2016

26Feb16

Access the chapter here.

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Indigenous queer and a search for indigenisation? Casey S. O’Higgins, ‘Two-Spirit Indigenous Americans: Fact not Fiction’, Student Publications, 403, 2015

26Feb16

Abstract: This paper examines the narratives of Two-Spirit Indigenous Americans who have been oppressed by heteropatriarchal norms of colonization. Two-spirit creation stories are explored to show the prevalence and importance of their identities prior to contact with Euro-American settlers and the evolution of violence, exclusion, and marginalization due to colonization.The term “Two-Spirit” is examined as a cultural identity of the Indigenous Americans. Finally, the paper looks at how Two-Spirit scholars are looking to combine Queer Theory with Indigenous Studies to deconstruct colonial heteropatriarchal America.

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Incarcerating indigenous people is just that: Miriam Kelly, Hilde Tubex,’Stemming the Tide of Aboriginal Incercaration’, The University of Notre Dame Australia Law Review, 17, 2, 2015

26Feb16

Abstract: Western Australia’s prison population has the highest rate of Aboriginal over-representation in Australia. Research on the criminogenic effect of imprisonment suggests that the use of imprisonment as a deterrent to future offending is not empirically supported and that imprisonment may in fact contribute to further offending. Consequently, this article explores theoretical debates surrounding penality as a way to
inform alternative crime control strategies to imprisonment. It will be argued that any strategy to reduce Aboriginal imprisonment rates could benefit from a perspective that views Aboriginal imprisonment as a manifestation of Aboriginal resistance to settler colonial dominance.

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Same story? Calla Wahlquist, ‘It’s the same story’: How Australia and Canada are twinning on bad outcomes for Indigenous people’, The Guardian, 25/02/16

25Feb16

Check the article here.

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Problematising ethnography in a settler context: Dolores Calderon, ‘Moving from Damage‐Centered Research through Unsettling Reflexivity’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 47, 1, 2016, pp. 5-24

24Feb16

Abstract: The author revisits autoethnographic work in order to examine how she unwittingly incorporated damage‐centered (Tuck 2009) research approaches that reproduce settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities. The paper examines the reproduction of settler colonial knowledge in ethnographic research by unearthing the inherent surveillance that partly constitutes settler colonial subjectivities in the United States. Finally, the author discusses unsettling methodological approaches as a way to disrupt damage‐centered practices in ethnographic research. In the author’s data collection at the U.S./Mexico border, the deeply introspective method of unsettling reflexivity—the ways we might (both indigenous and non‐indigenous scholars) reproduce settler colonialism—helps challenge colonial‐blind knowledge production, which has affected our understanding of colonial histories and often shaped the research process.

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