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Indigeneity vs. extractivism: Lucas Savino, ‘Landscapes of contrast: The neo-extractivist state and indigenous peoples in “post-neoliberal” Argentina’, The Extractive Industries and Society, 2016

06Mar16

Abstract: Prior to the elections of left-leaning governments, Latin American states witnessed the organization, mobilization, and political participation of indigenous peoples demanding the recognition of new cultural and political rights. This new wave of indigenous mobilization took place in the midst of the return to electoral political systems and the consolidation of neoliberal development. In a context not exempt from violence, some states generally responded by granting the recognition of new collective rights, including territorial autonomy, while maintaining their commitment to neoliberalism. The collapse of the Washington Consensus that sustained neoliberalism in the region and the widespread popular resistance toward such policies resulted in the election of new governments committed to increasing the role of the state in development efforts. Such increased state activism, which included some efforts to redistribute wealth, resulted in the end of earlier neoliberal policies—although not necessarily in its logic of capital accumulation. The initial optimism and political support of indigenous organizations toward the “new left” have started to fade as the result of state-sponsored neo-extractivism. This paper focuses on Argentina’s support of resource extraction and the Kirchner’s government’s approach to “national-popular development” and argues that such discourses inform state practices that threaten not only indigenous lands but also future possibilities for indigenous peoples to secure their own visions of development, decolonization, and autonomy. This article also demonstrates how neo-extractivism serves to understand the deterioration of political negotiations between indigenous peoples and the state.


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With a chapter by Rosamund C. Rodman on settler place naming: Vincent L. Wimbush, Refractions of the Scriptural: Critical Orientation as Transgression, Routledge, 2016

04Mar16

Access the book here.


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With a chapter by Michael Phillips on Transitional justice in settler states: Claudio Corradetti, Nir Eisikovits (eds), Theorizing Transitional Justice, Routledge 2016

04Mar16

Access the book here.


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With a chapter by Jon Altman on neoliberalism as indigenous ‘improvement’: Chris Miller, Lionel Orchard (eds), Australian public policy: Progressive ideas in the neoliberal ascendency, Policy Press, 2016

04Mar16

Access the book here.


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Reconciliation is expensive: Jennifer Henderson, ‘Residential Schools and Opinion-Making in the Era of Traumatized Subjects and Taxpayer-Citizens’, Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes, 49, 1, 2015, pp. 5-43

04Mar16

Abstract: This essay tracks the media-led production of a Canadian common sense about residential schools in the decade leading up to the 2005 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Newspaper commentary on residential schools lawsuits accentuated the already constrained understanding of the agency, duration, and effects of the schools’ harm within private law. Civil litigation was a strategy for seeking the accountability of churches and government; however, arguments in the mainstream media repeatedly asserted that the wrong of residential schooling was limited to specific, individual crimes of sexual and physical assault. These arguments reinforced the parameters imposed by tort law. The newspaper commentaries cultivated a common sense about residential schools that drew on the discourse of trauma and a neo-liberal discourse delegitimizing claims on state resources. Trauma’s biographical scale and focus on the catastrophic event reinforced the emphasis on specific crimes. The neo-liberal taxpayer-citizen could empathize with the individual traumatized by violence, whilst dismissing broader claims about residential schooling. In newspaper commentary, then, residential schools became discursively dis-embedded from the broader framework of colonial policy. The claim of a collective experience of cultural loss was key in the struggle to resituate the schools within this framework; however, the recognition ultimately won may bear the imprint of a common sense that constrained what the recovery of culture could mean.


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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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