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Challenging settler nationhood through music: Stephanie B. Guy, ‘Bodies, Myth and Music: How Contemporary Indigenous Musicians are Contesting a Mythologized Australian Nationalism’, eSharp, 2015

09May15

Abstract: This article focuses on two Australian myths: terra nullius and the „noble savage‟. These myths have their nexus with the absence and presence (respectively) of Indigenous beings. This article argues that these myths formed the foundation of colonial nationhood, and that their repercussions are reverberating within post-colonial imaginings of Indigenous Australians today. The myth of terra nullius, empty land, enabled the construction of a nation at the expense of the Indigenous „other‟. Furthermore, the ways in which colonisers repressed Indigenous subjectivities was to essentialise them as „noble savages‟; a figure who is relegated into mysticism and obscurity, consolidated into a “melancholic anthropological footnote” (La Nauze 1959) of Australia‟s colonial triumph. Grounded in this understanding, this article will consider the ways in which these myths are being broken down by dynamic, engaging and distinctly visible Aboriginalities through the case study of contemporary Indigenous musicians. Contemporary Indigenous musicians occupy mainstream stages and screens with diverse, meaningful, accessible and modern Aboriginal identities. These didactic and exigent bodies are revoking the myth that Australia was vacant prior to 1770, and that its First Peoples are incapable of being modern. As such, this essay explores the deconstruction of terra nullius and the „noble savage‟, as a result of Indigenous presence within contemporary public realms.


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Railways and the remaking of settler orders: Brett André, ‘Dreaming on a railway track: public works and the demise of New Zealand’s provinces’, The Journal of Transport History, 36, 1, 2015, pp. 77-96

05May15

Abstract: The demise of New Zealand’ s provinces in 1876 demands explanation. I argue that public works policy undermined the provinces and that railway development provided the impetus for abolition. The failure of the six original provinces to meet hinterland settler demands for public works led to the creation of new provinces in 1858, destabilising the system. Reckless investment in railways in the 1860s robbed the provinces of popular support and led to a prohibition on borrowing. This created a developmental vacuum until the central government acquired public works policy in 1870. The provinces thus lost their primary reason for existence. New Zealand’s provinces are a valuable case study in how railways and other forms of transportation can shape political systems.


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Settler colonialism as trauma: William Aguiar, Regine Halseth, ‘Aboriginal Peoples and Historical Trauma: The processes of intergenerational transmission, National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2015

05May15

Excerpt: The current reconciliation process in Canada involving Aboriginal residential school survivors, their families, the Canadian government, and the churches is finally promoting awareness in Canadian society about the emotional costs Aboriginal families and communities have endured spanning a period of five generations.


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The right to settler colonise as a human right: Nicola Perugini, Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate, Oxford, 2015

03May15

Description: At the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged: conservatives, who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture, began to embrace human rights in order to advance their political goals. In this book, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon account for how human rights — generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices — are being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, The Human Right to Dominate describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by invoking human rights. The book underscores the increasing convergences between human rights NGOs, security agencies, settler organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how political actors of different stripes champion the dissemination of human rights and mirror each other’s political strategies. Indeed, Perugini and Gordon demonstrate the multifaceted role that this discourse is currently playing in the international arena: on the one hand, human rights have become the lingua franca of global moral speak, while on the other, they have become reconstrued as a tool for enhancing domination.


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John J. Buchkoski, Spider in the River: A Comparative Environmental History of the Impact of the Cache La Poudre Watershed on Cheyennes and Euro-Americans, 1830-1880, MA Dissertation, University of Nebraska, 2015

03May15

Abstract: This thesis is a case study of the Cache la Poudre watershed in Colorado in the mid-nineteenth century and how it contributed to cultural transformations of both Cheyennes and Euro-Americans. This research follows the relationship that developed between Cheyennes and rivers since they inhabited Mille de Lacs in Minnesota in the seventeenth century. It examines the creation of settler-colonialism through the formation of boundaries and colonies in Colorado through the use of rivers. This further illustrates the connectedness of both Euro-Americans and Cheyennes to the rivers and argues that there were battles over these rivers and not only over the land. Finally, this thesis examines how the colonists that settled Colorado also disputed between themselves over the right to these rivers, by committing themselves to the idea of the mythic West. Some were disillusioned and left, but founder of Union Colony, Nathan Meeker, propagated and promoted the mythic West, and by committing themselves to the rivers, survived in that region.


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Facing a settler colonial order: Ala Alazzeh, ‘Seeking popular participation: nostalgia for the first intifada in the West Bank’, Settler Colonia Studies, 2015

03May15

Abstract: This article analyzes Palestinian nostalgia in the West Bank for the first intifada and anxiety over the lack of mass participation in anti-colonial resistance following the Oslo Accords. I attribute three reinforcing components to explain the lack of popular resistance: shifts in the mechanisms of colonial control, structural sociocultural changes, and discursive representations of popular resistance. Understanding the changes in the post-Oslo period in the West Bank can help us to reflect on why the experiences of the first intifada have not effectively informed political resistance practices.


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On new Pacific histories: ‘Review Forum: Pacific Histories: ocean, land, people’, Journal of Pacific History, 2015

03May15

Reviewing David Armitage, Alsion Bashford (eds), Pacific Histories: Ocean Land, People, Palgrave, 2014.


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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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