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Normalising settler rule; indigeneity as disability: Karen Soldatic, ‘Postcolonial reproductions: disability, indigeneity and the formation of the white masculine settler state of Australia’, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2015

23Mar15

Abstract: There has been a growing debate within the broad field of postcolonial scholarship which seeks to challenge both its territorial boundaries with the advent of globalization and its limitations when applied to the realm of white-settler societies. The debate has been extremely fruitful in situating emerging scholarship that seeks to extend postcoloniality, its theoretical framing, and the internal processes of social categorization for peoples caught within the nation-state’s territorial sphere. Unfortunately, disability and indigeneity remain largely absent from these fresh debates; or when included, are explored as singular fields of analytical inquiry with little intersectional dialogue. With this paper, I aim to extend these nascent debates by critically engaging with both disability and indigeneity as two interlocking sites of (post)colonial nation-state power. To explicate this argument, my analysis focuses on a key historical moment in the Australian experience – the formation of the colonial white-settler society of Australia in its early years (1901–1920s), comparing and contrasting the systems of administrative management of disability and indigeneity. In doing so, the paper reveals the deep materialities of white, able-bodied, masculine, (post)colonial settler rule that bring together disability and indigeneity via gender reproductive controls. The conclusion reflects on the transformative effects of managing transgressive bodies and minds under the white able-bodied settler state and the potential this opens to negotiate practices of solidarity.


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On indigenous resistances: Robert Penner, ‘The Ojibwe Renaissance: Transnational Evangelicalism and the Making of an Algonquian Intelligentsia, 1812–1867, American Review of Canadian Studies, 2015

23Mar15

Abstract: Between the War of 1812 and the emergence of a self-sufficient Canadian Methodism in the 1850s, the combination of geopolitical instability, transatlantic evangelicalism, indigenous and settler enthusiasm for religious revival, and the ideas of romantic nationalism produced a distinctly Ojibwe Christianity. This Christianity is known to us primarily through the letters, journals, and publications of a small group of Algonquian-speaking intellectuals educated in American colleges who mobilized the ideology and institutional networks of the Protestant missionary project to mount a vigorous challenge to the encroachments of settler colonialism occurring on both sides of the Great Lakes. Ojibwe Christians participated in a movement to transform the world into a multiracial Christian commonwealth, a movement within which they could remain committed to a historiographical and nation-building project meant to establish an autonomous, or at least semi-autonomous, Indian polity within the imperialist state.


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‘Cryopolitics’ as transfer? Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, ‘Indigenous biospecimen collections and the cryopolitics of frozen life’, Journal of Sociology, 51, 1, 2015, pp. 63-80

23Mar15

Abstract: In the mid-20th century, scientists began to collect and freeze blood samples for a range of purposes. This article considers the broader implications of scientific freezing for conceptions of time and life by drawing on empirical research with scientists associated with a large collection of samples assembled from Indigenous Australians in the 1960s. We first review some key critiques of cryopreservation posed by Indigenous scholars and by science and technology studies. We then propose ‘cryopolitics’ as a concept to express the various political, ethical and temporal conundrums presented by the practice of freezing. We frame cryopolitics as a mode of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics. If biopolitical assemblages make live and let die, cryopolitical ones reveal the dramatic consequences of mundane efforts to make live and not let die. In our case study, we argue that frozen blood vacillates between two cryopolitical states, ‘latent life’ and ‘incomplete death’. Samples seen as latent life cannot be destroyed; samples understood as incomplete death require destruction. A state of incomplete death can be resolved through the return of blood samples to the Indigenous groups they were collected from, a process that has occurred in North America. Our cryopolitical analysis suggests another potential resolution: reviving a form of latent life aligned with futures envisaged by Indigenous communities themselves.


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On exogenous alterities: Ien Ang, ‘At home in Asia? Sydney’s Chinatown and Australia’s “Asian Century”‘, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2015

21Mar15

Abstract: It is widely recognised that the 21st century is seeing a geopolitical shift in global power relations towards Asia, particularly China. This has led Australia to officially embrace Asia as its regional home. But the neoliberal economic logic underpinning this embrace leads to a narrowly transactional conception of Australia’s relationship to Asia, governed by an opportunity/threat dichotomy. By contrast, this article describes Sydney’s Chinatown today as an increasingly hybrid, porous and transnational space of uneven and mixed-up, embodied Asian-Australianness. Juxtaposing the dynamic on-the-ground reality of this contemporary Chinatown with government discourse on Australia’s relationship to Asia, as exemplified by the 2012 White Paper Australia in the Asian Century, illuminates that Australia is not yet at home in Asia.


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On ‘Indigenous’: Kay Yandell, ‘Indian, Native, Indigene: The Reverberations of a Quiet Linguistic Revolution’, American Literary History, 2015

21Mar15

Excerpt: Over the past decade the people of aboriginal descent in the US who many know as American Indians or Native Americans are increasingly referring to themselves as—Indigenes. This word in turn has opened political and aesthetic possibilities whose linguistic inspirations, I would like to suggest, deserve greater critical acknowledgment and analysis than they often currently receive in US literary criticism. I will examine current uses of the terms Indigene and indigenous as they emerge from recent scholarly works on the concept. Yet first I would also like to explore why aboriginal people around the world might find “Indigene” a more accurate, more empowering term than others they have used in the past. Of course, within the mass culture that has come to characterize modernity, many groups tend to change the word by which they refer to themselves, so commonly in fact that the phenomenon of self-name change now has a new name itself: the “euphemism treadmill”.


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On Russian settlers: Kathryn E. Graber, Jesse D. Murray, ‘The Local History of an Imperial Category: Language and Religion in Russia’s Eastern Borderlands, 1860s–1930s’, Slavic Review, 74, 1, 2015, pp. 127-152

21Mar15

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On exception and settler orders: Juanita Sundberg, ‘The state of exception and the imperial way of life in the United States–Mexico borderlands’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2015

21Mar15

Abstract: This paper situates recent events in the US–Mexico borderlands in relation to modalities of power used in the expansion of US imperial hegemony. Specifically, I link acts of legal suspension to expedite construction of border barriers on the US southern border with genealogies of imperial dispossession and racial violence to build an argument about imperialism as a way of life in the US. In so doing, my goal is to support ongoing efforts to forge coalitions better able to contest legal suspension as a predominant technique of government.


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On all these things: Ravi de Costa, ‘Recognition and self-determination: Indigenous politics in settler states’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 50, 1, 2015, pp. 174-189

21Mar15

Review essay.


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On indigenous visibility and settler appraisal: Natalie J. K. Baloy, ‘Spectacles and spectres: settler colonial spaces in Vancouver’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

21Mar15

Abstract: This paper argues that non-Indigenous ideas of Indigenous alterity shape and are shaped by processes that render Indigeneity spectacular and/or spectral. In Vancouver, BC, the urban centre of the Northwest Coast and ancestral homeland of the Coast Salish people, performances, art, and other forms of display are experienced by non-Indigenous people as spectacles: cultural not political, visual not otherwise sensorial, passively observed not participatory. And Indigeneity also haunts; despite dispossession, erasure, and displacement, Indigenous people return again and again to exercise their sovereignty and refuse conditions of disappearance and display. This revenant spectrality combined with spectacular representation creates a complex structure of feeling in the city. I suggest that, for non-Indigenous people, these conditions produce a holographic Indigeneity: hyper-visible from some angles, invisible from others; constantly present even in moments of apparent absence. Drawing on urban ethnographic research with non-Indigenous subjects, I use the socio-spatial cases of Stanley Park’s totem poles and the Downtown Eastside’s social marginalization to exemplify how spectacular/spectral dynamics characterize and sustain settler colonial logics in a city decorated with Northwest Coast art, haunted by legacies of colonialism, and uncertain about the future of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. I argue that conditions of spectacle and spectrality must be identified and transgressed to reimagine a different future.


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Indigenous peoples in someone else’s settler place: Rodolfo Stavenhagen, ‘Ruta Mixteca Indigenous Rights and Mexico’s Plunge into Globalization’, Latin American Perspectives, 2015

21Mar15

Abstract: “Ruta Mixteca” is the name given to the circular migrations of indigenous farm workers between the Mexican state of Oaxaca and California long studied by Michael Kearney and his collaborators. Indigenous migrations to the United States have expanded in recent years as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement and changes in Mexico’s agrarian legislation that led to increased privatization of land and natural resources, dispossession of the traditional peasantry, and numerous local land- and resource-related conflicts. The Zapatista uprising stimulated the growth of a host of militant indigenous organizations, now also emboldened by constitutional changes that recognize the human rights of indigenous peoples according to international standards. Indigenous transnational migrations need to adapt to these changing conditions.


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