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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Call for papers: Over the past decade, settler colonial studies has made a broad intervention in the study of US history and culture by considering comparative frontier processes in settler societies around the globe. One arena where settler colonial studies has yet to make significant inroads, however, is in the interpretation of the Western, arguably the most important cultural vehicle through which US and global cultures have mythologized and critiqued the frontier.

On this panel, we will work to relate the genre that is the most globally recognized production of Western American culture to the theoretical conversation that works to contextualize Westward expansion in a comparative global context. In so doing, we hope not only to ask what settler colonial studies can teach us about the Western, but also what the Western can teach us about settler colonialism. Among the questions we hope to explore as we examine the Western in literature and film are:

• How does the claim, made by many settler colonial studies scholars, that the frontier is a transnational phenomenon rather than a category exclusive to American exceptionalism alter our reading of classic Westerns?
• What can “Spaghetti Westerns,” “Indo Westerns,” “Osterns” and other Westerns produced in non-settler societies reveal about the impact of settler colonial political forms in these locales?
• How can we relate the separate discussions regarding liberalism and violence now circulating in settler colonial studies and in scholarship on the Western?
• How can readings of Western literature and film enrich the ongoing discussions regarding neoliberalism and the history of settlerism?

Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Lorenzo’s research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (2006) Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), and The Settler Colonial Present (2015). Lorenzo is managing editor of Settler Colonial Studies. Contact Lorenzo at: lveracini@swin.edu.au

Alex Trimble Young, University of Southern California. Alex is a Preceptor in Dornsife College, where he teaches American literature. He is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Let Us Fake Out A Frontier: Dissent and The Settler Colonial Imaginary in US Literature After 1945. His most recent article, “The Settler Unchained: Constituent Power and Settler Violence,” is forthcoming in Social Text this May. Contact Alex at: alex.trimble@gmail.com

Abstract: Cartography, place-naming and state-sponsored explorations were central to the modern European conquest of the earth, empire building and settler-colonisation projects. Scholars often assume that place names provide clues to the historical and cultural heritage of places and regions. This article uses social memory theory to analyse the cultural politics of place-naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ study of the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christian medieval pilgrims, the article shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies in Palestine, their superimposition of Biblical and Talmudic toponyms was designed to erase the indigenous Palestinian and Arabo-Islamic heritage of the land. In the pre-Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised nineteenth century Western explorations of Biblical ‘names’ and ‘places’ and appropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 percent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide and erasure. Continuing into the post-1967 occupation, these colonial methods threaten the destruction of the diverse historical cultural heritage of the land.

Abstract: This article uses a new conceptual approach to the question of Palestine, namely the settler-colonialism paradigm. This paradigm enabled scholars to develop the depiction of Zionism as a settler-colonialist project. However new approaches which have focused on Zionism as a settler-colonialist movement have, in fact, neglected indigenous Palestinian perspectives. The article advocates further refinement to the discourse of anti-colonialism by revisiting early Palestinian perceptions of Zionism. The article also shows that in the early stages of Zionism the movement was clearly depicted as a settler-colonialist project by Palestinian journalists and press commentators of the newspaper Filastin. However the existential implications of such an analysis were ignored by the Palestinian political elite, an oversight which also contributed to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).