Biopolitics – Geopolitics – Sovereignty – Life:  Settler Colonialisms and Indigenous Presences in North America

Organizers: Dr. René Dietrich (Mainz), Prof. Dr. Kerstin Knopf (Bremen)

Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)

This conference takes issue with biopolitics and geopolitics in the settler nation-states of North America, executed through continuing techniques of dispossession and surveillance of Indigenous populations, as well as with corresponding forms of sovereignty, agency, and life exercised in the matrix of biopower.

Biopolitical attempts to regulate Indigenous peoples – via removal, assimilation, education, administration, representation, genealogical politics, surveillance and disciplinary regimes – subject Indigenous nations to settler colonial rule by depoliticizing them. Biopolitical practices act towards Indigenous nations not as sovereign political entities in their own right, but subsume them under the imaginary racialized population of ‘Indians’ that is mainly defined through its separation from the settlers’ body politic proper. At the same time, Morgan Brigg’s concept of ‘terrapolitics’ and Mark Rifkin’s concept of ‘bare habitance’ have crucially pointed out that discussions of settler colonial biopolitics of racialization and regulation should not come at the expense of geopolitics of dispossession and removal. In this light, recent interrogations of settler colonial violence against Indigenous lands and lives in the production of colonial space in the U.S. and Canada (Mishuana Goeman) and the employment of “Indianness” for the transit of U.S. empire (Jodi Byrd) manifest the link between theories of bio- and geopolitics as an integral instrument to critique settler colonial techniques and practices.

Life itself, however, was less in the focus of critical inquiry. Putting forth that life is situated at a crucial junction between bio- and geopolitics, this conference wants to advance recent work by exploring and theorizing the different politics and epistemologies (concepts, forms, knowledges) of life in settler and Indigenous contexts in relation to bio- and geopolitical practices. It seeks to investigate how these can help to formulate ‘life’ as a category for political analysis and critique in settler-Indigenous relations, in evolving formations of sovereignty and agency, and in the struggle for decolonization.

We thus invite scholars of various disciplines engaged in these issues to discuss how an in-depth exploration of ‘life’ as a critical concept and political category in the tension between bio- and geopolitical practices and Indigenous forms of sovereignty and agency helps to further illuminate the complex, contested and still largely asymmetrical relations and interactions between settler colonialisms and Indigenous presences in North America.

Confirmed speakers include: Mishuana Goeman (U of California), Mark Rifkin (U of North Carolina), Andrea Smith (U of California), Michael R. Griffiths (U of Wollongong), Robert Nichols (U of Minnesota), Audra Simpson (Columbia), Brian Hudson (U of Oklahoma), Sandy Grande (Connecticut College), Jaqueline Fear-Segal (U of East Anglia)

For further information see: http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05-indigstudiesconf/

For any questions please contact: dietricr@uni-mainz.de, kknopf@uni-bremen.de

Description: In the nineteenth century, as the Russian empire expanded eastwards and the Japanese empire expanded onto the Asian continent, the Russo-Japanese border became contested on and around the island of Sakhalin, its Russian name, or Karafuto, as it is known in Japanese. Then in the wake of the Second World War, Russia seized control of the island and the Japanese inhabitants were deported. Sakhalin’s history as a border zone makes it a lynchpin of Russo-Japanese relations, and as such it is a rich case study for exploring the key themes of this book: life in the borderlands, migration, repatriation, historical memory, multiculturalism and identity.

Contents:

Australian Public Opinion on Indigenous Issues: Injustice, Disadvantage and Support for Recognition

Importance of Indigenous issues

The situation of Indigenous people in Australia today

Responsibility for problems experienced by Indigenous people

Policies for improving Indigenous education and employment

Constitutional recognition

ANUPoll questions

wolfe.forthcoming

Description: Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education uncovers and interrogates some of the inherent colonialist tensions that are rarely acknowledged and often unwittingly rehearsed within contemporary early childhood education. Through building upon the prior postcolonial interventions of prominent early childhood scholars, Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education reveals how early childhood education is implicated in the colonialist project of predominantly immigrant (post)colonial settler societies. By politicizing the silences around these specifically settler colonialist tensions, it seeks to further unsettle the innocence presumptions of early childhood education and to offer some decolonizing strategies for early childhood practitioners and scholars. Grounding their inquiries in early childhood education, the authors variously engage with postcolonial theory, place theory, feminist philosophy, the ecological humanities and indigenous onto-epistemologies.

Abstract: This article examines American elites, mostly from the Republican Party, in the 1860s and 1870s to explain how they understood European empires, and the British Empire in particular. Specifically, it looks at leading politicians and journalists who, perhaps quite naturally, compared the rapidly expanding United States to Great Britain and its dominions. During this period, they took an increasingly internationalist outlook as they sought to demonstrate, explain and justify growing Anglo-American influence in Asia and the Americas. The article argues that while many of these men were ambivalent about, skeptical of, and sometimes even opposed to the policies of the British Empire, they also often wanted the US to adopt some of the same practices in the Western hemisphere and beyond. They also sometimes claimed that British imperial rule brought the colonial populations the benefits of what they saw as Anglo-Saxon “civilization,” in the same way that Americans believed they had done on the Western frontier. Thus, the article shows that, despite their misgivings about European imperialism, these men often accepted that Britain’s was preferable to the empires of other European powers, and this view influenced their conceptions of America’s growing international stature.

Abstract: This article explores the role played by French Algeria in British imperial thinking during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that British commentators developed a remarkably stable vision of contemporary French colonial enterprise as unprogressive, incapable, authoritarian and militaristic, as well as harmful to French domestic politics. The explanations they offered for the miscarriage of France’s colonial project in Algeria cast light on mid-nineteenth-century British imperial thinking, throwing into relief the qualities and policies which were believed to make modern British imperial rule uniquely successful. The article contends that analysis of other European countries’ colonial projects contributed importantly to a domestic political culture which defined itself in significant part through contrasts with the Continent.

Abstract: Focusing on the uses of interactive and immersive technologies in Canadian exhibits from 1967 to the present, this dissertation investigates how embodied rites of cultural citizenship summon subjects to interface with nation and heritage in supposedly postcolonial and multicultural frameworks. The technologies I examine encompass the diverse processes and materials that render abstract notions of nation, heritage and citizenship into tangible archives that we encounter directly through our bodies. The first chapter centres on Iris Häussler’s immersive installation, He Named Her Amber, staged in Toronto’s historic Grange manor in 2008. This work elucidates the processes through which settler colonial history is rebranded through neoliberal Creative City discourses, and the audience is affectively positioned as naturalized settler who, unlike displaced Indigenous communities, is endowed with the right to occupy the home. Following this, the National Gallery of Canada’s introduction of the audio guide for its monumental 1967 Centennial exhibit provides the historical context from which to investigate the celebration and consecration of Canada’s technological modernity. This chapter analyzes how the construction of an interactive art-historical audio-scape facilitated the citizen’s entrance into national modernity through technological access and participation. The next chapter surveys the implementation of digital touchscreens at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, arguing that the expanded haptic interface is drafted as both material and rhetorical apparatus to strategically proclaim inclusive, multicultural paradigms. Concurrently, this interface reveals the very limits of interaction, and the paradoxes of the liberal public sphere. Lastly, the dissertation turns to the visitor-generated projections at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Alberta) in order to illustrate how motion-sensored, phantasmagoric projections work to locate but also unsettle the visitor’s body within official national—and “universal”—heritage frameworks. Here, I demonstrate how cultural citizenship is secured through the substantiating buttresses of heritage and archaeology, which emplace the visitor within an “ancient” landscape and narratology of nation which depends on inscription as much as erasure. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that these technological overtures of nation facilitate the everyday, quotidian encounters with violence which seduce subjects into—and out of—narratives of belonging.

Abstract: In 1985, Ontario’s French River was designated one of the inaugural Canadian Heritage Rivers by the Canadian Heritage Rivers System (CHRS), highlighting the important natural and cultural heritage of the French River to the Canadian nation. Specifically, the designation noted the role the French River played in the fur trade as a major link between the port of Montreal and the trading posts of the interior. Important to the CHRS is the ability to recreationally experience the French River by canoe, replicating the voyageur mode of travel. The connection between landscape, colonial heritage, and recreational vehicles is emblematic of a particular historiographic reading of Canadian rivers that celebrates the land of the nation as an encounter with the nation’s origins. In this heritage production, the tangled politics of colonialism, particularly the dynamics of the fur trade, are elided in the celebration of the nation as emerging from the landscape—not the social and political history of that landscape. By promoting this heritage through the embodied experience of a canoe trip, heritage promotion on the French risks reading history through a very limited lens, thus missing the value of understanding the historical geography of the French River as a contested space.

Abstract: The author discusses the identities and socioeconomic status of Indigenous people in a non-Indigenous environment, ways to recognize Indigenous belonging statistically, and ethnic policies in a Japanese context, specifically focusing on the Dogai Ainu; that is, the Ainu who left their original homeland of Hokkaido and live elsewhere in Japan. The Japanese Government’s 2010 socioeconomic survey of the Dogai Ainu demonstrated a socioeconomic gap between the Dogai Ainu and the majority of the Japanese. This survey also revealed the difficulty of conducting surveys of the Dogai Ainu because, in a non-Indigenous environment, many of them tend to conceal their ethnicity for fear of discrimination and hesitate to participate in surveys. Indigenous peoples in Anglophone countries are increasingly challenging the definition of Indigeneity as imposed by outsiders, and self-identification is becoming an essential component of recognizing Indigenous belonging to reflect the reality and diversity of Indigenous identities. Some countries such as the USA and Canada have also begun using self-identification for enumeration in statistics. The case study of the Dogai Ainu, however, suggests that Indigenous belonging cannot always be recognized by self-identification and Indigenous policies may have to be implemented without comprehensive data.