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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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On indigenous incarceration and settler colonialism: Jacquelyn May Teran, ‘Colonial Order and the Origins of California Native Women’s Mass Incarceration: California Missions and Beyond’, MA Dissertation, University of California, Los Angels, 2015

08Jul15

Abstract: This thesis begins to explore how understanding settler colonialism is significant to understanding and dismantling the prison industrial complex (PIC). Using the historical dehumanization, racialization, gendering and criminalization of California Indians as a lens reveals the way Native women specifically have become entrapped by a legal system that gives impunity to those who enact violence upon Native women but criminalize behaviors that are often associated with the trauma of victimization. I begin with the arrival of the Spanish in 1769 and closely examine the way the monjeríos , the room in every mission that locked young girls and women up until marriage, functions as a site of gendering and racialization through their imprisonment and specific conditions. Building off of that work and culling from newspaper sources, the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians formalized and codified the criminalization and carcerality of California Indians through the federal government, the state, and local communities. This specific time period marks a shift from mission and Spanish control to one of conquest by law and criminalization, which begins a period of jurisdictional law designed to leave Native women vulnerable to settlers. Later, adding to the complex matrix of jurisdictional injustice imposed on California Indians through The 1850 Act, was The Major Crimes Act, Public Law 280, Oliphant v. Suquamish, as well as other laws and policies, all which reinforce the gendered entrapment of Native women. The paper concludes by looking at the work of two California Indian women, Stormy Ogden (Pomo) and Deborah Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen) whose voices have illuminated how the historical legacies of settler colonialism continues to impact Native women today. Their voices are significant tools to begin to dismantle the PIC through sharing stories of survival.


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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’.


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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.

 

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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.


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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.


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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’.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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