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We have been pioneers too: Mariusz Kowalski, ‘Poles in the Dutch Cape Colony 1652-1814’, Werkwinkel, 10, 1, 2015, pp. 65-96

18Jul15

Abstract: The contribution of Poles to the colonisation and development of the Dutch Cape Colony is not commonly known. Yet, Poles have been appearing in this colony since its very inception (1652). During the entire period considered here the presence of Poles was the result of the strong economic ties between Poland and the Netherlands. At the end of this period there was an increase in their share, in connection with the presence of numerous alien military units on the territory of the Colony, because of Poles having served in these units. Numerous newcomers from Poland settled in South Africa for good, established families, and their progeny made up part of the local society. The evidence of this phenomenon is provided by the present-day Afrikaner families of, for instance, Drotsky, Kitshoff, Kolesky, Latsky, Masuriek, Troskie, Zowitsky, and others. A quite superficial estimation implies that the settlers coming from Poland could make up a bit over 1% of the ancestors of the present-day Afrikaners. Poles would also participate in the pioneering undertakings within the far-off fringes of the Colony, including the robbery-and-trade expedition of 1702.


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Call for papers: ‘Settler Colonialism in Palestine’ and ‘Subaltern Agency and Resistance in Settler Colonial Contexts – The Case of the Naqab Bedouin’ at the University of Exeter, 2-4 October, 2015

18Jul15

scip_exeter


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On the counting of indigenous peoples in settler contexts: Tahu Kukutaia, Maggie Walter, ‘Recognition and indigenizing official statistics: Reflections from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia’, Statistical Journal of the IAOS, 31, 2015, 317–326

17Jul15

Abstract: In FirstWorld colonised nations such as Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, population statistics form the evidentiary base for how Indigenous peoples are known and ‘managed’ through state policy approaches. Yet, population statistics are not a neutral counting. Decisions of what and how to count reflect particular assumptions about Indigenous identity, ways of life and wellbeing. More often than not, the requirements and priorities of government take precedence over the informational needs and priorities of Indigenous communities. Whereas National Statistics Offices (NSOs) once rendered Indigenous peoples invisible in official statistics through non-recognition, the more pressing problem in the 21st century is that of misrecognition. In seeking to move beyond statistical misrecognition, we propose a set of guiding principles for bringing government reporting frameworks and Indigenous concepts of identity and wellbeing into closer proximity. We argue that a principled approach to collecting, disseminating and analysing Indigenous data not only avoids misrecognising Indigenous peoples but enhances the functionality of official statistics for Indigenous peoples and NSOs alike.


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On primitivism and colonialism and settler colonialism (and on the transition from a denial of coevalness to ‘co-modernity’): Ruth B. Phillips, ‘Aesthetic Primitivism Revisited: The Global Diaspora of “Primitive Art” and the Rise of Indigenous Modernisms’, Journal of Art Historiography, 2015

12Jul15

Excerpt: During the early twentieth century, artists, critics, and scholars in Paris and other continental cities accomplished a radical revaluation of a wide array of non-Western objects, re-defining as ‘primitive art’ things which had largely been relegated to the lesser status of ethnographic specimens. Even as the taste for primitive art was growing and becoming an integral component of European modernist ‘taste cultures’ – to use sociologist Herbert Gans’s useful concept – artists from Africa, India, the Pacific and the Americas were producing modern arts of their own, some of which engaged directly with the modernisms of the European avant-gardes. Yet as Johannes Fabian has shown, the criteria by which the authenticity of primitive peoples and their arts were judged located both in a pre-modern time which was past or passing. Admiration for the construct Shelly Errington has described as ‘authentic primitive art’ thus dis-located and rendered anomalous the twentieth- century arts of the descendants of their makers. As the emerging literature on multiple modernisms makes clear, the development of modern art and its integral engagement with primitive art was a project shared by numerous artists and intellectuals from India, Egypt, Mexico and many other parts of the world who travelled back and forth between their homes and the European centres of modernism during the second and third decades of the century.

A second and, arguably, even more dynamic phase of the global dissemination of modernism occurred during the middle decades of the twentieth century, set in motion during the 1930s and 40s by the diaspora of artists, dealers, curators, collectors and intellectuals forced to flee Nazi-occupied Europe. As these men and women re-established themselves in settler societies and European colonies in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, they came to engage with new and distinctive matrices of art and politics. I argue in this essay that the engagements of Indigenous, settler and displaced European modernists forced into the open certain key contradictions embedded in European aesthetic primitivism, and ultimately led both to the recognition of the co-modernity of the world’s peoples and to the emergence of modernist Indigenous arts.


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On Nazi settler colonial Eastern Europe and its human materials: Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel, Hitler’s Brudervolk: The Dutch and the Colonization of Occupied Eastern Europe, 1939-1945, Routledge, 2015

10Jul15

Description: This is the first academic book on Dutch colonial aspirations and initiatives during WWII. Between the summers of 1941 and 1944, some 5,500 Dutch men and women left their occupied homeland to find employment in the so-called German Occupied Eastern Territories: Belarus, the Baltic countries and parts of Ukraine. This was the area designated for colonization by Germanic people. It was also the stage of the “Holocaust by Bullets,” a centrally coordinated policy of exploitation and oppression and a ruthless anti-partisan war. This book seeks to answer why the Dutch decided to go there, how their recruitment, transfer and stay were organized, and how they reacted to this scene of genocidal violence. It is a close-up study of racial monomania, of empire-building on the old continent and of collaboration in Nazi-occupied Europe.


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On the genealogy of environmental protection and its links with ‘protection’ as native policy: Fenneke Sysling, ‘”Protecting the Primitive Natives”: Indigenous People as Endangered Species in the Early Nature Protection Movement, 1900-1940’, Environment and History, 21, 3, 2015, pp. 381-399

10Jul15

Abstract: This paper draws attention to the role of indigenous people in the early nature protection movement in Europe. In the first half of the twentieth century, not only flora and fauna but on several occasions ‘natural people’ too were the object of the protection ambitions of nature conservationists. In discussions on the history of nature protection much attention has been paid to the ways indigenous people were separated from the nature in which they lived, while today they are often portrayed as ideal guardians of nature. However their complex position in the movement as endangered species themselves has been overlooked. This paper addresses this issue by examining the Swiss naturalist Paul Sarasin’s calls for the protection of indigenous people in the 1910s and the campaign of the Netherlands-based Committee for International Nature Protection in the 1930s to establish a reserve to protect the inhabitants of the highlands of New Guinea. These episodes in the history of nature protection show how shared communities of scientific expertise and their concepts of endangerment produced a continuum between ‘nature’ and ‘natural people’ in early conservation discourse that was then mobilised into protection schemes.


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On Israel colonial imagination and its contribution to shaping its moral geography: Haim Yacobi, Israel and Africa: A Genealogy of Moral Geography, Routledge, 2015

10Jul15

Description: Israel and Africa critically examines the ways in which Africa – as a geopolitical entity – is socially manufactured, collectively imagined but also culturally denied in Israeli politics. Its unique exploration of moral geography and its comprehensive, interdisciplinary research on the two countries offers new perspectives on Israeli history and society.


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On the representation of indigeneity in museal contexts: Bryony Onciul, Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonizing Engagement, Routledge, 2015

10Jul15

Description: Current discourse on Indigenous engagement in museum studies is often dominated by curatorial and academic perspectives, in which community voice, viewpoints, and reflections on their collaborations can be under-represented. This book provides a unique look at Indigenous perspectives on museum community engagement and the process of self-representation, specifically how the First Nations Elders of the Blackfoot Confederacy have worked with museums and heritage sites in Alberta, Canada, to represent their own culture and history. Situated in a post-colonial context, the case-study sites are places of contention, a politicized environment that highlights commonly hidden issues and naturalized inequalities built into current approaches to community engagement. Data from participant observation, archives, and in-depth interviewing with participants brings Blackfoot community voice into the text and provides an alternative understanding of self and cross-cultural representation.


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On settler foundational stories (appropriate reproduction and Argentina): Sarah Moody, ‘Eduarda Mansilla’s Mestizo Argentina: Orphanhood, Transnationalism, and Race in Lucía Miranda (1860)’ Decimononica, 12, 2, 2015, pp. 14-29

08Jul15

Excerpt: The first known writing of the Lucía Miranda legend, a story of Argentine national origins, dates to 1612 with a work by Spanish soldier Ruy Díaz de Guzmán. Though apparently fictional, the episode appears as a chapter in an otherwise fact-based account of early European activity in the River Plate region known as La Argentina manuscrita. Later writers reworked the legend in their own ways, adapting it to the circumstances of their own historical moment, but the consistent points of the storyline focus on irremediable interethnic conflict: Lucía was a young, virtuous Spanish woman who accompanied her husband on an early expedition to the area, around 1532; she is kidnapped by the indigenous people, whose chief falls in love with her; she and her husband refuse to renounce their marital vows and die tragically as martyrs to conjugal love. The legend, highlighting the exchange of women in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “contact zone,” where two cultures meet in an unequal relationship of power, keeps the point of view firmly on the side of the white settlers and what they considered their moral imperative to colonize indigenous spaces. María Rosa Lojo points out that “[e]l relato atribuye las causas de la Guerra interétnica (guerra de conquista, por la ocupación de suelo) a la pelea entre varones por una mujer” (32). The legend also functions as an attempt at justification for white, creole society’s occupation of collectively-held indigenous lands, with women’s bodies standing in as a metaphor of the territory to be usurped and dominated.


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On the ‘settler’s alibi: Leti Volpp, ‘The Indigenous As Alien’, UC Irvine Law Review, 5 2, 2015

08Jul15

Excerpt: Immigration law, as it is taught, studied, and researched in the United States, imagines away the fact of preexisting indigenous peoples. Why is this the case? I argue, first, that this elision reflects and reproduces how the field of immigration
law narrates space, time, and national membership. But despite their disappearance from the field, Indians have figured in immigration law, and thus I describe the neglected legal history of the treatment of Indians under U.S. immigration and citizenship law. The Article then returns to explain why indigenous people have disappeared from immigration law through an investigation of the relationship between “We the People,” the “settler contract,” and the “nation of immigrants.”


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