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Deflecting settler responsibility: Joanne Faulkner, ‘”Our own Hurricane Katrina”: aboriginal disadvantage and Australian national identity’, National Identities, 2015

03May15

Abstract: Since Prime Minister Howard’s declaration in 2007 that child sex abuse in Northern Territory aboriginal communities was Australia’s ‘own Hurricane Katrina’, the trope of natural disaster has been a regular feature of print and television media coverage of indigenous affairs in Australia. The effect of this rhetorical strategy is to separate what happens to aboriginal people from the fabric of ‘mainstream’ Australian cultural and political life; to render it alien and unconnected to the relative privilege enjoyed by other Australians. This strategy also produces peculiar temporal effects by erecting a cordon sanitaire around Australian history and the national identity that it supports. Howard’s comparison of aboriginal disadvantage with Katrina, if read alongside his politicization of the teaching of Australian history, demonstrates an unwillingness to incorporate systemic injustice toward indigenous people within the composition of that history. This article interrogates the relationships between the manifold understandings of aboriginal disadvantage and attempts to commemorate its violent history, as these aspects of Australian life are both integrated and refused by national identity narratives. Specifically, the paper reinterprets the trope of natural disaster as a means of comprehending indigenous disadvantage and Australian identity by drawing on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history. Benjamin’s understanding of activism as a constructive retrieval of the past will be developed to reconnect catastrophe to history, and to enable an exploration of responsibility for that history as an integral condition of contemporary Australian identity.


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Interlocking settler colonialisms: Eliko Kosaka, ‘Caught in Between Okinawa and Hawai‘i: “Kibei” Diaspora in Masao Yamashiro’s The Kibei Nisei’, Amerasia Journal, 41, 1, 2015

03May15

Excerpt: The term “Kibei” typically refers to U.S.-born individuals of Japanese ancestry who have had experience living for a specific period of time in Japan before returning to the U.S., particularly prior to World War II. In Japanese, the term is often written as 帰米, which literally translates to “return to the U.S.” However, one would be remiss to overlook the term’s inherent ambiguity. That is, in some instances, “return” does not adequately provide an accurate description for these individuals who neither fit the profile of the first-generation Issei nor the Nisei, who never left the U.S.


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On the liminality between colonialism and settler colonialism as distinct modes of domination: Sarita Echavez See, ‘Accumulating the Primitive’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

03May15

Abstract: What purchase, the imperial museum’s accumulation of the racial primitive in relation to the Marxist account of primitive accumulation? Do these two instances of the ‘primitive’ have anything to do with each other? How might they be connected to the processes of settler colonialism? These are sweepingly ambitious questions. But I would like to hazard an answer: The Filipino is flexible, and colonialism is supple.


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On indigenous studies: Birgit Däwes, Karsten Fitz, Sabine N. Meyer (eds), Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Indigenous Studies: Native North America in (Trans)Motion, Routledge, 2015

01May15

Description: In recent years, the interdisciplinary fields of Native North American and Indigenous Studies have reflected, at times even foreshadowed and initiated, many of the influential theoretical discussions in the humanities after the “transnational turn.” Global trends of identity politics, performativity, cultural performance and ethics, comparative and revisionist historiography, ecological responsibility and education, as well as issues of social justice have shaped and been shaped by discussions in Native American and Indigenous Studies. This volume brings together distinguished perspectives on these topics by the Native scholars and writers Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), and Tomson Highway (Cree), as well as non-Native authorities, such as Chadwick Allen, Hartmut Lutz, and Helmbrecht Breinig. Contributions look at various moments in the cultural history of Native North America—from earthmounds via the Catholic appropriation of a Mohawk saint to the debates about Makah whaling rights—as well as at a diverse spectrum of literary, performative, and visual works of art by John Ross, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, Emily Pauline Johnson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Emma Lee Warrior, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Stephen Graham Jones, and Gerald Vizenor, among others. In doing so, the selected contributions identify new and recurrent methodological challenges, outline future paths for scholarly inquiry, and explore the intersections between Indigenous Studies and contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies at large.


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On global settler genres: MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, Dayna Oscherwitz (eds), The Western in the Global South, Routledge, 2015

01May15

Description: The Western in the Global South investigates the Western film genre’s impact, migrations, and reconfigurations in the Global South. Contributors explore how cosmopolitan directors have engaged with, appropriated, and subverted the tropes and conventions of Hollywood and Italian Westerns, and how Global South Westerns and Post-Westerns in particular address the inequities brought about by postcolonial patriarchy, globalization and neoliberalism. The book offers a wide range of historical engagements with the genre, from African, Caribbean, South and Southeast Asian, Central and South American, and transnational directors. The contributors employ interdisciplinary cultural studies approaches to cinema, integrating aesthetic considerations with historical, political, and gender studies readings of the international appropriations and U.S. re-appropriations of the Western genre.


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Settler history wars compared: David B MacDonald, ‘Canada’s history war : indigenous genocide and public memory in the United States, Australia, and Canada’, draft paper

01May15

Abstract: In this article, I explore the slow development of a national debate in Canada about genocide in the Indian Residential Schools, which I compare to earlier “history wars” in Australia and United States. In the first section I begin with a brief introduction to the history of the IRS system and some of its legacies, as well as attempts at redress. These include financial compensation through the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement, an official apology, and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which has been a nodal point for articulating claims of genocide. I follow this in section two with an analysis of the history wars in the United States and Australia over indigenous genocide, before engaging in section three with debates about genocide in Canada. Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slower in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the “truth” about the IRS system while similarly engaging in “reconciliation” (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada’s history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, they may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia because of the more sustained mandate and national presence of the TRC. However as I will later discuss, a certain inbuilt caution on the part of the TRC due to lessons learned from the US and Australia may prevent any official finding of genocide.


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On settler commonalities (on Japan-Israel relations): John de Boer, ‘Before Oil: Japan and the Question of Israel/Palestine, 1917-1956’, Japan Focus, 2015

01May15

Excerpt: “Israel and Japan are situated at opposite ends of Asia, but this is a fact which binds them together rather than separates them. The vast continent of Asia is their connecting link, and the consciousness of their Asian destiny is their common thought.” (David Ben-Gurion, 1 July 1952 [1]).

Existing scholarship cannot explain what the then Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, was referring to when he expressed these words in response to Japan’s official recognition of Israel on 15 May 1952.


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Commenting a forthcoming issue of Settler Colonial Studies: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Afterword: a history of the settler colonial present’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

28Apr15

Excerpt: The papers collected in this special issue are significant. Collectively they provide a genealogical approach to the interpretation of the global settler colonial present. This is, I believe, a topic worth exploring.

How did settler colonialism as a particular mode of domination became a global phenomenon, a phenomenon that even exceeds the polities that emerged from the forcible and violent dispossession of indigenous homelands?


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With a chapter by Cameron Greensmith on ‘Settler Colonialism, Volunteerism, and Indigenous Misrecognition’: Caitlin Janzen, Donna Jeffery, Kristin Smith (eds), Unravelling Encounters Ethics, Knowledge, and Resistance under Neoliberalism, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015

28Apr15

Description: This multidisciplinary book brings together a series of critical engagements regarding the notion of ethical practice. As a whole, the book explores the question of how the current neo-liberal, socio-political moment and its relationship to the historical legacies of colonialism, white settlement, and racism inform and shape our practices, pedagogies, and understanding of encounters in diverse settings.

The contributors draw largely on the work of Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, each chapter taking up a particular encounter and unravelling the elements that created that meeting in its specific time and space. Sites of encounters included in this volume range from the classroom to social work practice and from literary to media interactions, both within Canada and internationally. Paramount to the discussions is a consideration of how relations of power and legacies of oppression shape the self and others, and draw boundaries between bodies within an encounter.

From a social justice perspective, Unravelling Encounters exposes the political conditions that configure our meetings with one another and inquires into what it means to care, to respond, and to imagine oneself as an ethical subject.


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Also on settler colonialism: Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, Michelle Raheja (eds), Native Studies Keywords, University of Arizona Press, 2015

27Apr15

Description: Native Studies Keywords explores selected concepts in Native studies and the words commonly used to describe them, words whose meanings have been insufficiently examined. This edited volume focuses on the following eight concepts: sovereignty, land, indigeneity, nation, blood, tradition, colonialism, and indigenous knowledge. Each section includes three or four essays and provides definitions, meanings, and significance to the concept, lending a historical, social, and political context.

Take sovereignty, for example. The word has served as the battle cry for social justice in Indian Country. But what is the meaning of sovereignty? Native peoples with diverse political beliefs all might say they support sovereignty—without understanding fully the meaning and implications packed in the word.

The field of Native studies is filled with many such words whose meanings are presumed, rather than articulated or debated. Consequently, the foundational terms within Native studies always have multiple and conflicting meanings. These terms carry the colonial baggage that has accrued from centuries of contested words.

Native Studies Keywords is a genealogical project that looks at the history of words that claim to have no history. It is the first book to examine the foundational concepts of Native American studies, offering multiple perspectives and opening a critical new conversation.


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