Abstract: Time is one mechanism through which Indigenous-modern dichotomies are created and maintained and an enduring trope of difference in the settler-colonial imaginary. This article explores the strange temporality of indigeneity within ‘progressive’ discourses in Australia. Taking Johannes Fabian’s concept of ‘allochronism’ as a point of departure, and drawing on ethnography of non-Indigenous people working in Indigenous health in the Northern Territory, I show how there is a kind of cultural Lamarckianism in operation. ‘Western’ individuals are seen to inherit the cumulative cultural knowledge, acquired over centuries, of germ theory and responsible alcohol consumption. By contrast, Indigenous people are seen to struggle with banking and infectious diseases because they have not had sufficient time to develop the appropriate cultural knowledge. Through the anthropomorphising of culture and the culturalisation of individuals, the Indigenous person/culture becomes the 40,000-year history of human occupation of the continent. I point to the limits of this settler-colonial imaginary and potential alternatives.

Abstract: The sport of baseball has played an integral role in constructing a national identity in the American settler state. This essay analyses baseball’s popularization as America’s national pastime and its interconnections with the formation of a settler colonial identity that seeks to erase Indigenous presence on Turtle Island. It does so by tracing the roots of baseball’s origin stories and their relationship to the creation of an American national identity. By examining the processes of colonialism, displacement, genocide, and xenophobia that characterized the game’s early history in North America and delving into baseball’s role in governing the boundaries of insiders and outsiders in the national imagination, this essay provokes questions with regard to the possibility of re-imagining the game of baseball in a decolonial context.

Abstract: Dr Heinrich Schnee was among Weimar Germany’s foremost colonial authors and agitators for the return of Germany’s overseas colonies. An examination of Schnee’s work and cultural milieu through the prism of Bakhtin’s concept of the literary chronotope reveals the differences and similarities between liberals and Nazis on the question of colonies and empire in the interwar period. It also assists in explaining the complex interrelationship between the proponents of a global colonial empire and contiguous eastern expansion between 1918 and 1945. Despite the appearance of a seemingly polyphonic Nazi foreign policy, Schnee’s irredentist demands for a global empire were never translated into war aims by the Nazi state, which found itself unable to realise its primary imperial goal of creating a German empire in Eastern Europe.

Abstract: The Aboriginal author Alexis Wright’s novels Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book have prompted scholars and critics towards enthusiastic comparisons with the ground-breaking work of a range of international writers. With her novels all set partly in the remote Gulf Country of north Australia, Wright’s work arises from intellectual and political commitment to Indigenous people, and aspires to the idea of a distinctive ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the mind’. Much less known yet, we argue, of complementary significance, are a broader suite of writings about this region, and we address representations of cultural identity and connections to place by authors with both Aboriginal and European ancestries. With our interest in a deliberately cross-disciplinary methodology, ethnographic research complements our focus on texts to facilitate analysis of diverse identities in a setting produced through both the resilience of Indigenous cultural traditions and the legacies of European settler colonialism. We argue that the range of authorial representations arising from this sector of Australian society provides a focus for understanding shared and contested postcolonial imaginaries about place, culture and identity.

The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which officially recognized the United States as a sovereign republic, also doubled the territorial girth of the original thirteen colonies. The fledgling nation now stretched from the coast of Maine to the Mississippi River and up to the Great Lakes. With this dramatic expansion, argues author Bethel Saler, the United States simultaneously became a postcolonial republic and gained a domestic empire. The competing demands of governing an empire and a republic inevitably collided in the early American West. The Settlers’ Empire traces the first federal endeavor to build states wholesale out of the Northwest Territory, a process that relied on overlapping colonial rule over Euro-American settlers and the multiple Indian nations in the territory. These entwined administrations involved both formal institution building and the articulation of dominant cultural customs that, in turn, served also to establish boundaries of citizenship and racial difference.

In the Northwest Territory, diverse populations of newcomers and Natives struggled over the region’s geographical and cultural definition in areas such as religion, marriage, family, gender roles, and economy. The success or failure of state formation in the territory thus ultimately depended on what took place not only in the halls of government but also on the ground and in the everyday lives of the region’s Indians, Francophone creoles, Euro- and African Americans, and European immigrants. In this way, The Settlers’ Empire speaks to historians of women, gender, and culture, as well as to those interested in the early national state, the early West, settler colonialism, and Native history.

This is the first sustained long-range history of the voluntary sector in Australia and the first internationally to compare philanthropy for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in a settler society. It explores how the race and gender ideologies embedded in philanthropy contributed to the construction of Australia’s distinctively ‘white male wage-earner’s welfare state’ and traces the intertwining trajectories of late 18th century philanthropy’s three main elements – moral reform, social reform and relief. While they changed in form and spawned a new lexicon in the 20th century, the direction of their gaze remained largely unaltered.

Contradictions in voluntary organisations have surfaced in the last few years. They have been at the forefront of struggles against neo-liberalism, but adult survivors have also told chilling stories of institutional care. These contradictions reflect the tensions at the core of philanthropy which this book explores – tensions between the aspiration to justice and the pull of discipline, the desire to help and the limits of imagination.

Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies, Volume 2, Number 2, 1 October 2014, pp. 157-172.

Abstract: Maori people maintain ambiguous relations with the rest of the Pacific. Genealogical relationships continue to be celebrated in ongoing connections across a wide range of domains and discourses, but the colonial history of New Zealand has also turned Maori into a community of indigenous people that has been eclipsed by European settlers over the past two centuries. As a corollary, Maori are embroiled in an intense struggle for recognition of their proprietary rights as the indigenous people of the islands of New Zealand. Over the past few decades, campaigns for a comprehensive settlement of their colonial grievances have gathered some momentum since the Treaty of Waitangi was gradually recognized again in the 1970s and 1980s. The negotiations between Maori and the government about historical and social justice for the indigenous population, however, may to some extent be counterbalanced by the increasing number of migrants arriving in New Zealand, from Asia and the Pacific Islands. In the current competition for scarce resources, Maori have consistently argued that within the New Zealand nation state the establishment of biculturalism should precede the development of multiculturalism, implying also that indigenous rights should prevail over those of settlers and migrants. The political dichotomy between Maori and Pacific Islanders raises the question to what extent it distorts historical and contemporary connections. This article explores the multiple histories and manifold relations between Maori and Pacific Islanders in the past and present in order to examine whether the paradox of historical connections and contemporary competition can be resolved.