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On the literature of the settler experience: Tamara Wagner, ‘The New Chum girl: Upending Colonial Clichés in Lilian Turner’s Emigration Novel’, Journal of Australian Studies, 40, 1, 2016, pp. 45-58

06Mar16

Abstract: This essay analyses Lilian Turner’s Three New Chum Girls (1910) to show how settler authors played with colonial clichés as part of a critical reaction to shifting imperialist and nationalist ideologies at the turn of the century. In particular, Turner redefines the derogatory colonial term “new chum”—commonly used to describe a recent emigrant in the settler colonies—to suggest what the welcome of new arrivals ought to be like. Yet if her deliberate reworking of stereotypes consequently contains an element of wish-fulfilment, the narrative also offers a startlingly stark portrayal of settler life. Emigration, Turner contends in the novel, is neither easy nor a solution to problems at home. Nor does settler Australia provide a convenient space for fortune-seeking sojourns. Turner thus dismantles two clusters of common clichés: emigration as a pat ending in fiction and settlers’ return to the homeland as an equally expedient plot twist. The self-irony that runs through much of her intertextual rewriting of both metropolitan fiction and male-coded settler writing reveals how emigration and return were being imagined and written about differently in the settler colonies and how Turner was utilising the exposure of false expectations to promote her vision of a welcoming settler community.


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Protecting indigeneity: Ann-Elise Lewallen, ‘“Clamoring Blood”: The Materiality of Belonging in Modern Ainu Identity’, Critical Asian Studies, 48, 1, 2016 , pp. 50-76.

06Mar16

Abstract: The tension between silence and vocalization, embrace and rejection, of Ainu ancestry has been a key factor in negotiating Ainu subjectivity since Ainu territories were colonized in 1869. As early as 1799, expressions of Ainu ethnicity were alternately cloaked and exaggerated as Japan vacillated between assimilation and segregation policies in eastern Hokkaido Ainu communities. Officially recognized as Japan’s indigenous peoples in 2008, Ainu subjectivity has become increasingly politicized as the state and other stakeholders seek to define Ainu ethnicity for future legislation. Today Ainu belonging is frequently gauged by bodily metaphors of a vocalized blood. Cultural sensibility and blood are often conflated in Ainu discourses of identity: Ainu revivalists report that a sensation of “clamoring blood” (J: chi ga sawagu) inspires them to revisit ancestral memories and begin fashioning Ainu identities. Historically, intra-Ainu relations were not bound to blood but instead embodied in material expressions, such as invisible cords for women and crest-like emblems for men, symbols that enabled flexibility where needed. Since the twentieth century, the hyper focus on blood raises the specter of colonially imposed rhetorics of eugenics, assimilation policies, and specifically, the problem of race. Relatedness in the Ainu community is not exclusively defined by “consanguineal relations”; rather, a long history of adopting ethnic Japanese children and non-Ainu into Ainu families renders complex the question of identity. This article assesses how immutable notions of racial difference intersect with self-determination and current articulations of Ainu identity.


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Media machines and settler order: Thor Kerr, Shaphan Cox, ‘Media, Machines and Might: Reproducing Western Australia’s Violent State of Aboriginal Protection’, Somatechnics, 6, 1, 2016, pp. 89-105

06Mar16

Abstract: This paper addresses the prevalence of state violence directed at Aboriginal people. It examines how violence has been reproduced in recent years in the space of Western Australia through mutually-reinforcing relations of financial interest, and how the function of private capital accumulation – in state violence against sovereign Aboriginal people – has remained hidden in white sight. This paper argues that state violence is legitimised through a discourse of Aboriginal protection. After outlining how this discourse and violence have operated in Western Australia, the paper provides a substantive narrative challenging the routine reproduction of state violence against Aboriginal bodies through a close reading of public and media texts. These texts relate to state violence against a blockade preventing land-clearing machines from entering Aboriginal country in mid 2011; state violence against the Nyoongar Tent Embassy in early 2012; and, the government’s announcement in May 2011 that it would amend the Aboriginal Heritage Act. Through this analysis, lines are drawn between media, machines and might for the purpose of enabling white sight to see private capital accumulation functioning within the reproduction of state violence against Aboriginal people.


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Settlers are anxious folks: Kenton Storey, Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire Colonial Relations, Humanitarian Discourses, and the Imperial Press, UBC Press, 2016

06Mar16

Description: Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, fear of Indigenous uprisings spread across the British Empire and nibbled at the edges of settler societies. Publicly admitting to this anxiety, however, would have gone counter to Victorian notions of racial superiority.


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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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