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Land and water: Timothy Neale, Stephen Turner, ‘Other people’s country: law, water, entitlement’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

25Feb15

Introducing a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies: This issue of Settler Colonial Studies comes out of a long-term collaboration between the guest editors which began, in earnest, with a panel on the theme of ‘Other People’s Country: Law, Water, Entitlement’ at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference held at the University of Sydney in December 2012. The panel’s topic was drawn from our own work on encounters between settler and indigenous ‘laws’ over specific waters, including Lake Omapere in the Hokianga district of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada, Lake Cayuga in upper New York State, and the Wenlock, Archer, Stewart and Lockhart rivers in far north Queensland, Australia. Further, the conference’s provocative title (Materialities: Economies, Empiricism, & Things) corresponded to our own interest in thinking through the entangled objects of law – legislation, policies, institutions, treaties and so on – that ‘govern’ waters and that make bodies of water ‘lawful’ within these settler colonial sites today. Informed by the theoretical interventions of cosmopolitics and political ecology, each opening up new approaches to questions of politics and ‘the political’, we were interested in attempting to locate these insights within material settler colonial ‘places’, rather than abstract structures of domination. A claim to water is not simply a claim to a resource. It is a claim to knowledge and to the constitution of place and therefore, in the terms of Isabelle Stengers, to the continued constitution of the past, present and future of a ‘real world’.


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On navigating settler spaces as an indigenous person: Amahl Bishara, ‘Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The politics of disorientation and the routes of a subaltern knowledge’, American Ethnologist, 42, 1, 2015, pp. 33–54

22Feb15

Abstract: Israel’s system of closure divides Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians of the West Bank. For members of both categories, road journeys spur political analysis, explicitly stated or implicitly packed into jokes or offhand comments. If, in liberal traditions, political knowledge is idealized as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate, Palestinian knowledge gained while driving is none of these things. Yet it can provide important insights into the operations of Israeli power less easily represented in more formal outlets. Because the road system is an everyday site at which its users come into contact with the work of the state, driving is an important practice through which to examine popular conceptions of politics. Still, these two communities of Palestinians face obstacles in communicating about shared understandings of space and politics. In examining everyday political knowledge of subaltern people, we must attend to varieties of subalterneity to examine how these differences can perpetuate marginalization.


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On settler changing the land: Tamar Novick, ‘Milk & honey: Technologies of plenty in the making of a Holy Land, 1880-1960’, PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2014

22Feb15

Abstract: Studies of modern Palestine and Israel usually highlight the struggle of European powers for control and the formation of Jewish and Palestinian nationalisms. This dissertation does otherwise. With a thesis centered on the physical “making of a Holy Land,” this work combines the perspectives of cultural history, environmental history, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine the ways in which settlers in Palestine and Israel in the late nineteenth and twentieth century used science and technology to construct a religious idea of the past. In particular, this project centers on the design of certain agricultural productions, which reflected the core belief that the Holy Land should be plentiful—essentially, a “land flowing with of milk and honey.” I explore the various ways that settlers understood the land, demonstrate how the configuration of the environment was intertwined with the construction of settler society, and highlight the ways in which religious sentiments became fused with—not replaced by—modern technological projects throughout the course of three political regimes. This dissertation also reveals the extent to which this process of making a Holy Land transformed the landscape and everyday lives of people and animals in the Middle East, and ultimately suggests that bodies were always recalcitrant mediators.


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On parallel constructions of settler manhood: Mark Sheftall, ‘Mythologising the Dominion Fighting Man: Australian and Canadian Narratives of the First World War Soldier, 1914–39’, Australian Historical Studies, Australian Historical Studies, 46, 1, 2015, pp. 81-99

22Feb15

Abstract: A stereotypical image of the nation’s First World War soldiers—and a conventional understanding of their war experience and its meaning—is not a concept unique to the British Empire’s former Pacific Dominions, but is also promulgated in other parts of the Empire. During the First World War and interwar period, Canada also saw the emergence of a ‘Myth of the Soldier’ that paralleled the Anzac legend in many ways. This article focuses on some of the similarities and differences in Australia and Canada’s mythologising of their First World War soldiers, proposing that this process reflects aspects of identity formation common to settler societies within the British world.


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On the construction of settler identity: David Kenrick, ‘The Past is Our Country: History and the Rhodesiana Society c. 1953-1970’

22Feb15

Abstract: This paper uses the work of an amateur historical society – the Rhodesiana Society – as a lens to explore the racialised nature of attempts to define a white Rhodesian identity in the crucial post-war period of 1953-1970. It builds upon the existing corpus of work on history and national identity, moving beyond the more traditional sites in which historical discourse is produced – academia and the state – looking instead at how individuals in private organisations sought to use the past to shore up identities in the present. It does so using the particularly interesting example of a British settler colony in the late twentieth century, where minority rule was being upheld even as the rest of the continent entered the first stages of its post – colonial life.

The paper focuses in particular on discourses of imperial legitimation which stemmed from the earliest history of white British/South African settlement in the colony. Historical work and narratives exploring early conflicts with Africans, specifically the 1896 Mashona and Matabele rebellions, served to legitimate the continued white presence by having shown that they had ‘won’ the country with their own blood. These histories also used techniques of historical silencing, culturally reinforcing the social, legal, and economic segregation which ascribed to Rhodesia’s Africans a state of permanent subservience and anonymity.

The paper also suggests how these sanitised narratives of Victorian (white) heroism may have resonated with white Rhodesians in the 1960s, embroiled as they were in their own slowly escalating guerrilla war. Constant reminders of the narratives of triumph in the past offered whites both an historical anchor in the past, despite the majority of the settler community’s origins outside Rhodesia, and also hope that the triumph over the adver sity of the late nineteenth century might be replicated in the contemporary conflict.


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‘American Sniper’ and settler colonialism: Alex Trimble Young, ‘”American Sniper”: is not a war movie: It’s a classic revisionist western, and one of Eastwood’s finest’, Salon, 19/02/15

21Feb15

Excerpt: The tragedies perpetrated and experienced by men like Kyle are not a conservative problem; they are an American problem. In one of the more insightful criticisms of “American Sniper,” Lakota/Dakota scholar James Fenelon argues that Kyle’s invocation savagery to describe his enemies cannot be understood as an invention of neoconservatism. The imagination of a category of human beyond the limits of reason, “the unreconstructed Other that needs to be obliterated,” enabled the violence that facilitated the settlement of the territorial United States long before it enabled American militarism abroad.

This ideological continuity between Westward expansion and the “Global War on Terror” means that the western still provides an apt form for exploring the contradictory relationship between American “civilization” and its violent “frontiers.” In condemning westerns like “American Sniper” rather than the ongoing political realities that drive their appeal, critics mistake a symptom for a cause.


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On settler-indigenous relations: Kate Darian-Smith, Penelope Edmonds (eds), Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers Conflict, Performance, and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim, Routledge, 2015

19Feb15

Description: Spanning the late 18th century to the present, this volume explores new directions in imperial and postcolonial histories of conciliation, performance, and conflict between European colonizers and Indigenous peoples in Australia and the Pacific Rim, including Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawaii and the Northwest Pacific Coast. It examines cultural “rituals” and objects; the re-enactments of various events and encounters of exchange, conciliation and diplomacy that occurred on colonial frontiers between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples; commemorations of historic events; and how the histories of colonial conflict and conciliation are politicized in nation-building and national identities.


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On settler colonial mobilities: Georgine Clarsen, ‘Frontiers of Mobility Studies’, Transfers, 5, 1, 2015, pp. 114-121

19Feb15

Abstract: Since its inception, this journal has been at the leading edge of publishing research that rethinks mobilities from a humanities perspective. We learned much in the process. A plenary panel held at the T2M conference in Drexel University in September 2014 re ected on the experiences of our editorial team and announced our plans to organize our future work through a number of broad portfolios. Each invites/dares our contributors to take our thinking into new territory.

Keywords: AFRICAN MOBILITIES; ASIAN MOBILITIES; MOBILITY AND MEDIA; MOBILITY AND TRAVEL WRITING; SETTLER COLONIAL MOBILITIES; TRANSOCEANIC MOBILITIES


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On settler colonial imaginings: Joanne Findon, Seeking Our Eden The Dreams and Migrations of Sarah Jameson Craig, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015

19Feb15

Description: One woman’s dreams of establishing a utopian colony and her fight for women’s equality.

Although few nineteenth-century rural Canadian women could read and write well, Sarah Jameson Craig (1840-1919) was not only literate but eloquent. Unlike many women writers of her time, Craig lived at the bottom of the economic ladder. Nevertheless, she dared to dream the utopian dreams more commonly associated with educated women from the middle and upper classes. Craig vividly documented her attempt to run away at age fifteen, her plans to found a utopian colony based on alternative medicine and women’s dress reform, and her lifelong crusade for women’s equality.

Quoting liberally from Sarah Craig’s unpublished diaries and memoir, Seeking Our Eden sets Craig’s life writing within the context of her early days in New Brunswick, her later migrations to New Jersey and then westward to Saskatchewan and British Columbia, and the American-based reform and utopian movements that stirred her imagination. Convinced that the tight corsets and long skirts demanded by conventional fashion undermined the fight for women’s equality, Craig wore the “reform dress” – a short dress over trousers – despite society’s disapproval, and rejected opiate- and alcohol-based medicines in favour of the water cure.


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On the ‘settler photographer’: Rachel McLean Sailor, Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West, University of New Mexico Press, 2014

18Feb15

Description: The early history of photography in America coincided with the Euro-American settlement of the West. This thoughtful book argues that the rich history of western photography cannot be understood by focusing solely on the handful of well-known photographers whose work has come to define the era. Art historian Rachel Sailor points out that most photographers in the West were engaged in producing images for their local communities. These pictures didn’t just entertain the settlers but gave them a way to understand their new home. Photographs could help the settlers adjust to their new circumstances by recording the development of a place—revealing domestication, alteration, and improvement.

The book explores the cultural complexity of regional landscape photography, western places, and local sociopolitical concerns. Photographic imagery, like western paintings from the same era, enabled Euro-Americans to see the new landscape through their own cultural lenses, shaping the idea of the frontier for the people who lived there.


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