« Older posts
Newer posts »

On the meaning of settler colonial borders: David Stirrup, Jan Clarke, ‘Straddling Boundaries: Culture and the Canada-US Border’, Comparative American Studies, 13, 1-2, 2015, pp. 1-15

08Jul15

Excerpt: Border studies of course long has demonstrated the ways in which cultural representation and production can effect, at least metaphorically, the deconstruction of the binary structures implied by a border ‘set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them’.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

On contemporary lastings: Kerry Hawk Lessard, Gregg Deal, ‘Real Indians, Last Indians: Art, Anthropology, and the Museumization of Indigenous Lives’, Practicing Anthropology, 2015, 37, 3, pp. 47-48

08Jul15

Abstract: Historical trauma is a term used to reflect the intergenerational losses experienced by American Indians and whose effects serve to depreciate the health, wellness, and resilience of a contemporary people. One of the lesser explored of these losses is that of identity, specifically the ways in which it is constructed and communicated. Using an image from the performance art piece The Last American Indian on Earth, authors consider the role of anthropology in creating a narrative of indigenous lives that while often at odds with a people’s understanding of themselves, is privileged as being far more authoritative. Exploring this contested imagery, authors engage a decolonized viewing practice to deconstruct and critique the problematic nature of museumization and its impacts on Indians and non-Indians alike.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

On Chinese settler colonialism in the nineteenth century: Eric Setzekorn, ‘Chinese Imperialism, Ethnic Cleansing, and Military History, 1850-1877’, Journal of Chinese Military History, 4, 1, pp. 80–100

08Jul15

Abstract: In the past two decades historical research and theoretical refinements have provided military historians with new insights into “Chinese imperialism,” late Qing warfare, and ethnic cleansing during the 1850-1877 campaigns in Northwest China, Central Asia, Yunnan, and Guizhou. In particular, Robert Jenks’ Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The Miao Rebellion, 1854-1873, David Atwill’s The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873, and Hodong Kim’s Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877have stressed the commonality of Chinese practices with other colonial and imperial states. These authors share a common conclusion that the Qing re-conquest resulted in widespread massacres, ethnic relocations, and subsequent immigration of Han settlers into each region. This historiography examines recent works on the military aspects of the 1850-1877 conflicts in these ethnic and territorial “frontiers” and highlights opportunities for historians to take advantage of new theoretical and archival resources.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Clarifying things: Robert J C Young, Empire, Colony, Postcolony, John Wiley & Sons, 2015

08Jul15

Description: Empire, Colony, Postcolony provides a clear exposition of the historical, political and ideological dimensions of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism, with clear explanations of these categories, which relate their histories to contemporary political issues. The Book analyzes major concepts and explains the meaning of key terms. The first book to introduce the main historical and cultural parameters of the different categories of empire, colony, postcolony, nation and globalization and the ways in which they are analysed today Explains in clear and accessible language the historical and theoretical origins of post-colonial theory as well as providing a postcolonial perspective on the formations of the contemporary world Young is an acknowledged expert on postcolonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

On the reproduction of indigenous heritage (in Taiwan): Marzia Varutti, ‘Crafting heritage: artisans and the making of Indigenous heritage in contemporary Taiwan’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2015

08Jul15

Abstract: Since the 1990s, Indigenous groups in Taiwan have been increasingly engaged in retrieving and reviving cultural practices that are considered ‘traditional’ and markers of Indigenous identities. This article takes such recent and ongoing revival of cultural practices and connected material culture amongst Taiwanese Indigenous groups as the departure point to argue that the idea of a ‘contemporary Indigenous heritage’ is constructed (notably by Indigenous artists and artisans) through the conflation of ‘tradition’, ‘value’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘indigeneity’, as well as creativity and innovation. In the article, I endeavour to explain this process. To this end, I identify and illustrate a set of strategies and discourses through which Indigenous artists and artisans in Taiwan construct their work as both ‘Indigenous’ and ‘heritage’. I suggest that such strategies and discourses revolve around the following: (i) materiality, (ii) visual display and performance, (iii) Indigenous cultural research and (iv) knowledge transmission. Building on the Taiwanese case study, this article furthers scholarly enquiries into the making of heritage by generating an enhanced understanding of the role of artists and artisans in the creation, renewal, authentication and transmission of ‘Indigenous heritage’.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

On archival power and ongoing settler colonialism: Jared Davidson, ‘The Colonial Continuum: Archives, Access, and Power’, forthcoming in Archifacts, 2015

07Jul15

Excerpt: The use of public records is at the heart of my job as an archivist. I view myself as a facilitator of cultural production, someone who aids the accessing of stories in order to weave new narratives (including counter-narratives). But this image of myself is constantly challenged in my day-to-day practice. As an archivist working with government records, my relationship with the user is immediately complex: I become the personification of the state. As a Pākehā archivist working with government records that document settler colonialism in its many forms—dispossession, theft, cultural suppression, sexism, murder—I become something more specific. Whether I like it or not, in my role and in relation to Māori researchers, I embody settler colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

On the settler colonialism of fisheries: Caitlin Krause, Howard Ramos, ‘Sharing the same waters’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 28, 1, 2015

05Jul15

Abstract: Fifteen years have passed since the ground-breaking 1999 Marshall decision and the Mi’kmaq Lobster Crisis that followed which saw two months of tit-for-tat violence. In this article, we examine how relations among Mi’kmaq and Settler fishers have changed since the decision and its aftermath, and interpret intergroup relations by using Herbert Blumer’s group-position theory. The article presents data collected from ethnographic observation and interviews with Mi’kmaq and Settler fishers in a Maritime community. We find that although fishers share the same waters, and have a generally amicable public relationship, many misconceptions and resentments persist.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Olive trees as sites of resistance; resisting settler colonialism one tree at a time: Lila Sharif, ‘Savory Colonialism: Land, Memory, and the Eco-occupation of Palestine’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 11, 2, 2015 pp. 256-257

05Jul15

Excerpt: As Palestinians continue to experience the violent decimation of their olive groves, the consumption of Palestinian olive oil grows increasingly popular through transnational fair trade circuits. A feminized commodity from the “land of milk and honey,” olive oil has emerged as a signifier of Palestinian femininity and indigeneity pitched to the conscientious palate. I use the Palestinian olive as an optic to explore the convergence of settler colonialism, environmental destruction, neoliberal multiculturalism, consumption, and desire through multisited and multisensory ethnography in a transnational feminist cultural studies framework. Tracing the production, circulation, consumption, and representation of Palestinian olives, I argue that settler colonialism relies on gendered logics of disappearing native peoples, lands, and cultures. I analyze the neoliberal consumption of Palestinian olive oil and visual representations in contemporary television shows, like Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, against the ongoing disappearing of Palestinian landscapes. While Palestinian olives are often represented as part of Palestinian dispossession, my ethnographic findings indicate that tasting, eating, and cooking animate alternative ways of narrating history and reanchoring Palestinians to their land. In particular, I show how Palestinian women use food to connect back to villages depopulated during and following the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe). This dissertation project asks new theoretical questions about settler colonialism as a process of vanishing native peoples and their subjectivities, one that coresides with neoliberal, multicultural tropes of consumption and desire. I introduce a framework I call transnational feminist food studies: an epistemology and methodological practice that explores how food mediates power but also challenges hegemonic narratives of colonialism and other structures of power. Transnational feminist food studies serves as an innovative intervention in cultural studies, food studies, post-colonial theory, and environmental justice.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Ethics in research involving indigenous peoples in a settler society; ‘Wherein lies the disconnect?’: Martha L. Stiegman, Heather Castleden, ‘Leashes and Lies: Navigating the Colonial Tensions of Institutional Ethics of Research Involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada’, The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 6, 3, 2015

04Jul15

Abstract: Ethical standards of conduct in research undertaken at Canadian universities involving humans has been
guided by the three federal research funding agencies through the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct
for Research Involving Humans (or TCPS for short) since 1998. The statement was revised for the first time in
2010 and is now commonly referred to as the TCPS2, which includes an entire chapter (Chapter 9) devoted
to the subject of research involving First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples of Canada. While the establishment
of TCPS2 is an important initial step on the long road towards decolonizing Indigenous research within the
academy, our frustrations—which echo those of many colleagues struggling to do research “in a good way”
(see, for example, Ball & Janyst 2008; Bull, 2008; Guta et al., 2010) within this framework—highlight the
urgent work that remains to be done if university-based researchers are to be enabled by establishment
channels to do “ethical” research with Aboriginal peoples. In our (and others’) experience to date, we seem to
have been able to do research in a good way, despite, not because of the TCPS2 (see Castleden et al., 2012). The
disconnect between the stated goals of TCPS2, and the challenges researchers face when attempting to
navigate how individual, rotating members of REBs interpret the TPCS2 and operate within this framework,
begs the question: Wherein lies the disconnect? A number of scholars are currently researching this divide
(see for example see Guta et al. 2010; Flicker & Worthington, 2011; and Guta et al., 2013). In this editorial,
we offer an anecdote to illustrate our experience regarding some of these tensions and then offer reflections
about what might need to change for the next iteration of the TCPS.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The critical trveler as a site of resistance to settler colonialism: Farah Nousheen, ‘The Critical Traveler at Pelastine/Israel International Border Crossings: Settler Colonialism, Postcolonial Critique, and the United States as a Third State’, MA Thesis, University of New Mexico, 2015

04Jul15

Abstract: I use the lens of the “critical traveler” to argue that the international border crossing of Palestine/Israel is both a settler colonial technology for the State of Israel, and a site of resistance for the transnational Palestinian solidarity movement. Israel deems certain travelers as critical to its settler colonial project. Israel marks Palestinian and Muslim travelers as racially critical to Israel that aims to be a Jewish majority state. Israel also marks travelers as critical because it suspects that these travelers espouse critical views of Israel’s settler colonialist ideology and practice. As such, Israel has established a border security system to identify and subject critical travelers; the system consists of segregated surveillance, intelligence collection, biopolitical techniques, and border expansion. Furthermore, Israel is an occupying power and critical travelers vary in nationalities; therefore, third states – states that are not Israel or Palestine – are also accountable to Israel’s treatment of critical travelers. As a third state, through policymaking and rhetoric, the United States has supported Israel’s unilateral control of international Palestine/Israel border crossings. However, the transnational Palestinian solidarity network harnesses the narratives written by critical travelers to inform the legal and cultural discourse of critique of Israel’s colonial past, present and future.The struggle between the critical traveler and Israel’s border security is not simply a matter between an individual traveler and a sovereign nation-state. Rather the struggle serves as an analytic for the global perpetuation of as well as the global resistance to Israel’s ongoing settler colonial project in Palestine.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »