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On settler orders; on Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945, by Todd Henry (University of California Press, 2014)

05Mar15

Review by Mark Caprio.


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On the indigenous right of return: Mason Wiley, ‘Circassian Right of Return: “Putin the Terrible or Putin the Enlightened?”‘, American University International Law Review, 29, 5, 2015, pp. 141-170

05Mar15

From the Introduction: Circassians are an indigenous ethnic group that originates in the northwestern Caucasus Mountains. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire enacted a policy to eradicate Circassians from their ancestral homelands, effectively pushing almost all surviving Circassians throughout the diaspora. Russia recently hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the heart of Circassian ancestral lands. Many Circassians have expressed an interest in returning to Circassia, particularly Circassians fleeing the conflict in Syria.


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Historians and judges: Susan E. Gray, ‘Indigenous Space and the Landscape of Settlement: A Historian as Expert Witness’, The Public Historian, 37, 1, 2015, pp. 54-67

05Mar15

Abstract: This essay examines my work as expert witness in the case of U.S. v. Michigan, a Indigenous use-rights case. I was charged with parsing the intention of a specific article of the 1836 Treaty of Washington compelling land cession by Anishinaabe peoples and with writing a history of land use in the area from that date to the present for the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority (my employer). The challenges were not only methodological (how do you estimate use from ownership?) and epistemological (what constitutes proof that will satisfy both historians and lawyers?), but also sociological and psychological: what happens when an associate professor puts her progress toward full professor on hold for the sake of a court case?


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Representing the contact zone: Joan Isabel Sangster, ‘Law and Order in the Arctic: “The Smiling People” and RCMP’, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 32, 2014

05Mar15

Abstract: Since the 19th century, Canadian culture has been rife with Mountie lore, and since the 1970s, many critics have deconstructed the Mountie myth, showing how this police force was romanticized in both non-fiction and fiction alike. This paper explores one example of such cultural mythmaking: a fictional television script about law and order involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the Canadian North. “The Smiling People” was one episode in the 1959 television series, RCMP, produced by Crawley films, the BBC, and CBC, and shown in Canada as well as around the world. The RCMP series featured a small-town detachment of three RCMP men in northern Saskatchewan who sometimes ventured further north to bring their version of policing and justice to both whites and Aboriginal peoples alike. In the case of “The Smiling People,” an Inuit woman is charged with the murder of her husband; the episode covers the unfolding trial as the Mountie hero uncovers the truth about the murder. “The Smiling People” offers a story about the “contact zone” of white and Inuit which features the clash of cultures, the imposition of white values, yet the paternalistic, and ultimately ‘superior’ knowledge claims of white, southern legal practices. As such, it is an excellent example of the emerging cultural justifications for colonial consolidation in the North in the post-World War II period.


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Settler colonial or diasporic? Stephen C. Lubkemann, ‘Diasporicity and Its Discontents: Generation and Fragmented Historicity in the Liberian Transnational Field’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies Volume 18, 1/2, 2015, pp. 208-227

03Mar15

Abstract: In this article I draw on a long history of successive transatlantic “displacements” and “returns” that have shaped and reshaped Liberian diasporan identities. Proposing that diasporicity is above all an identity discourse, the first part of this article documents and compares dramatic differences in that discourse across historical generations while also examining arguments about this form of identity and social differences in subscription to it within specific generations. This history has been one of successive and often mutually contradictory recastings of where “origin” is located, which have been subject to social argumentation. A comparison of these identity discourses across different historical generations suggests the need to investigate diasporicity as more than merely an affirmation of belonging but rather also a powerful critique of exclusion. Finally, I hone in on the variations of diasporicity that have emerged within the Liberian transnational field during a single historical period (the present) to demonstrate how diasporicity as a particular form of identity emerges under—and inherently references—conditions of experiential fragmentation that are largely unforeseen and fundamentally problematic for current analytical concepts of generation. Describing some of the multiple diasporicities within the current Liberian transnational field, I argue that any concept of diasporic generation must be one that empirically ascertains the boundaries of shared historicity rather than assuming that temporal and social boundaries coincide.


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On settler utopias/ucronias: Holly Hill-Stanford, ‘Hawthorne in Eden’, 2015

03Mar15

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Comparing metropolitan and settler propaganda: Brad Beaven, John Griffiths, ‘The City and Imperial Propaganda A Comparative Study of Empire Day in England, Australia, and New Zealand c. 1903–1914’, Journal of Urban History, 2015

28Feb15

Abstract: This article explores how the meaning of Empire Day in the British World was manipulated and transformed through a range of urban institutions before reaching the public at large. Selecting cities in England and the Antipodean colonies for comparison, we shall challenge the assumption that a hegemonic imperial ideology was streamed uncontested and unaltered to urban populations. Indeed, it is argued here that because of significant differences in urban development in Britain and colonial towns, the meaning of the imperial message was variable. In the British context imperial meaning was directed to cure perceived local crises while, alternatively, within a colonial setting imperial propaganda came secondary to national priorities. The conclusion is that, in the case of Empire Day, the urban setting is decisive to understanding how imperial propaganda was transformed to meet the needs of local or national environments. Key differences in the way civic culture and the provincial press evolved in Britain and her colonies ensured that Lord Meath’s desire that Empire Day would nurture a unifying and homogenous imperial identity proved an elusive aspiration.


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On settler colonialism and utopianisms: Susan Bruce, ‘Utopian Justifications: More’s Utopia, Settler Colonialism, and Contemporary Ecocritical Concerns’, College Literature, 42, 1, 2015, pp. 23-43

25Feb15

Abstract: This deliberately presentist essay uses More’s Utopia to contribute to the debate over the relationship between environmentalism and postcolonialism; explore the relationship between a text’s contexts and “meaning(s)”; and illustrate how utopian thinking can expose contradictions underlying other forms of imagining better worlds. Contextualizing Utopia with two different twenty-first-century comparators, it interrogates assumptions that Utopia has an unproblematic relation to colonialism and that it ignores environmental concerns. In illustrating how different contextualizations of the same passage can produce radically different readings of the text in which it appears, this essay foregrounds issues of interpretation that may be of use to scholars and teachers of literary texts. It concludes that although Utopia can help us acknowledge that environmental and colonial arguments sometimes share similar ethical premises, “Utopian” thinking, in its foregrounding of the difficulties, contradictions, and irresolutions of human interactions, is indispensable to a politics that seeks to imagine a better world.


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On settler pinkwashing: Michael Connors Jackman, Nishant Upadhyay, ‘Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada: Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 42, 3-4, 2014, pp. 195-210

25Feb15

Excerpt: Queer organizing against Israel’s deployment of gay rights discourses to mask the occupation of Palestine—referred to as “pinkwashing” within academic and activist circles—has raised pertinent questions about the relations between settler colonialism, sexuality, gender, race, and (gay) imperialism. Such campaigns have directed attention to the realities of occupation in Palestine/Israel while simultaneously obscuring the historical and present-day colonial processes that enable transnational political intervention on Turtle Island—or what is commonly known as Canada and the United States. In this essay, we ask how critics of Israeli pink-washing—known as pinkwatchers—varyingly challenge, engage, negotiate, perform, or reproduce settler colonialism on Indigenous lands. We examine debates over the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apart-heid (QuAIA) in Pride Toronto (Pride) in 2010 and the subsequent formation of the Pride Coalition for Free Speech (PCFS). By focusing on these debates, we seek to critically explore how certain queer praxes have worked to normalize and invisibilize settler colonialism in the Canadian context and to reproduce Canada as a progressive queer-friendly liberal state. While our discussion focuses on QuAIA, PCFS, and Pride 2010, the objective of our essay is not to single out groups and organizations but to contribute to conversations about the broader political stakes of anti-racism, anticolonialism, and decolonization in radical queer organizing. These examples serve as the entry point for us to consider in what ways the articulation of “radical queer perspectives” might be complicit with the white settler state project, wherein the casting of Canada as a gay-friendly nation invisibilizes past and ongoing processes of colonialism. Our essay suggests that criticism of the use of queer rights and liberal tolerance to justify governmental, industrial, and military actions often works to limit discussions of settler colonialism to places, nations, and peoples who are already invisible within that frame. Describing how queer groups naturalize notions of belonging and Canadian identity, as well as how queer critiques of pinkwashing fail to address settler colonialism in Canada, we seek to underscore the way Indigenous struggles for sovereignty are invisibilized in activists’ attempts to address issues of free speech, homonationalism, and occupation in Palestine/Israel. Where the pinkwashing of Israel has been criticized by queer activists who effectively surveil and organize against, or pinkwatch, such activities, the complicity of their activist efforts with settler colonialism ultimately whitewashes colonization in Canada. We argue, therefore, that the pinkwatching of Israel enables the pinkwashing, or rather whitewashing, of Canada.

Toronto has played a pivotal role in transnational organizing around Palestinian solidarity and challenging the apartheid state of Israel—with several labor, student, faculty, artist, and community organizations central to this organizing. Collectively they have pushed the limits of analyses of solidarity, colonialism, imperialism, race, gender and, increasingly, questions of queerness and sexuality (see, for example, Ravecca and Upadhyay 2013). Through the work of QuAIA, Toronto has come to serve as a key site on the global map in the struggle against Israel’s attempts to pinkwash its occupation of Palestine. Not only does QuAIA challenge Israeli apartheid, but it also informs queer praxis in Toronto. It engages a queer perspective that is intersectional and contextualized by an analysis of colonialism, racism, Islamophobia, and heteropatriarchy. QuAIA was formed to work in solidarity with queers in Palestine and Palestine solidarity movements around the world, alongside groups such as Queers in Solidarity with Palestine and Israeli Queers for Palestine. The group challenges homophobia in Israel, Palestine, and across all borders. QuAIA acknowledges on its website that “the struggle for sexual rights cannot come at the price of other rights” (queersagainstapartheid.org). QuAIA activists are very critical of Israeli apartheid and Israeli attempts to pinkwash and create an image of Israel as a “haven” of gay tolerance in the Middle East. They push queer politics beyond the liberal queer positive image of Israel, as a state that recognizes same-sex marriages, permits legal adoption for queer citizens, and allows gays to serve in the military. As a voice for critical intervention, QuAIA has also played a key role in the global call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.


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On colonialism and settler colonialism: Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies Self-Government and Imperial Culture, Oxford University Press, 2015

25Feb15

Description:  The 1820s to the 1860s were a foundational period in Australian history, arguably at least as important as Federation. Industrialization was transforming Britain, but the southern colonies were pre-industrial, with economies driven by pastoralism, agriculture, mining, whaling and sealing, commerce, and the construction trades. Convict transportation provided the labour on which the first settlements depended before it was brought to a staggered end, first in New South Wales in 1840 and last in Western Australia in 1868.

The numbers of free settlers rose dramatically, surging from the 1820s and again during the 1850s gold rushes. The convict system increasingly included assignment to private masters and mistresses, thus offering settlers the inducement of unpaid labourers as well as the availability of land on a scale that both defied and excited the British imagination. By the 1830s schemes for new kinds of colonies, based on Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s systematic colonization, gained attention and support. The pivotal development of the 1840s-1850s, and the political events which form the backbone of this story were the Australian colonies’ gradual attainment of representative and then responsible government.

Through political struggle and negotiation, in which Australians looked to Canada for their model of political progress, settlers slowly became self-governing. But these political developments were linked to the frontier violence that shaped settlers’ lives and became accepted as part of respectable manhood. With narratives of individual lives, Settler Society shows that women’s exclusion from political citizenship was vigorously debated, and that settlers were well aware of their place in an empire based on racial hierarchies and threatened by revolts. Angela Woollacott particularly focuses on settlers’ dependence in these decades on intertwined categories of unfree labour, including poorly-compensated Aborigines and indentured Indian and Chinese labourers, alongside convicts.


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