Eve Darian-Smith, ‘Global Studies—The Handmaiden of Neoliberalism?’, Globalizations (Published online: 09 Sep 2014)

The field of global studies has gained momentum over the past 20 years and today occupies a significant presence within many universities. As a result, there is now a burgeoning array of institutional support for global studies scholarship. Perhaps not surprisingly, concurrent to such institution-building there has been a spate of essays engaged with the question ‘what is global studies?’ that have promoted lively debate and commentary. In this essay, I ask a rather different question which is ‘who gets to define global studies, and what is at stake in these kinds of delineating efforts?’ I argue that debate about global studies demands the inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives from around the world. I conclude by urging global studies scholars to be deliberately conscious of their taken-for-granted assumptions with respect to power and the related capacity to speak for others from the global south and east who are largely still absent in defining this new field of inquiry.

Nicholas Blomley, ‘Making Space for Property’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Published online: 10 Sep 2014).

A modern-day treaty process in British Columbia, Canada, involving First Nations and the federal and provincial governments, entails a struggle to carve out both metaphoric and material space for indigenous land and title. Despite considerable opposition, the state has insisted that First Nations will hold their treaty lands as a form of “fee simple,” this being the way most private property owners hold property, granting broad rights to access, use, and alienation. This is said to generate what the state terms certainty, a concept predicated on the idea of property as a priori, singular, and definite. I explore the resultant contest through a performative lens that treats property not as essence, but as effect. Tracing the complicated ways in which fee simple is performed in the treaty process reveals that fee simple is anything but. Multiple, competing, and overlapping fee simples are in circulation. The identification of this multiplicity offers valuable lessons for our understanding of the contemporary space of postcolonial reconciliation.

涉及第一民族、联邦以及省政府的加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚 (卑诗省) 的当代缔约过程, 招致为原住民土地和所有权开拓出隐喻及物质空间的斗争。儘管有大规模的反对, 国家仍然坚持第一民族所拥有的条约土地作为一种 “绝对且无条件的产权” (fee simple) 之形式, 而这是多数私有产权所有者拥有财产, 以及授与获取管道、使用与排除的广泛权利之方式。此一方式据说生产了国家称作绝对之事——一个依据产权作为先验、单一且确切之概念。我透过不把产权视为本质、而是一种效应的展演性视角, 探讨其所导致的争夺。追溯绝对且无条件的产权在缔约过程中所展现的复杂方式, 揭露了绝对且无条件的产权根本全然背离其宣称, 反而是多重、竞争且重叠的 “绝对且无条件的产权” 的盛行。指认此般多重性, 对于我们理解当代的后殖民和解空间, 提供了宝贵的经验。

Un proceso de moderno tratado en Columbia Británica, Canadá, que involucra a las First Nations (Primeras Naciones) y los gobiernos provincial y federal, implica una lucha para hacerse de un espacio metafórico y material de tierra y títulos indígenas. A pesar de una considerable oposición, el estado ha insistido en que First Nations conservará sus tierras obtenidas por el tratado como una forma de “pago simple,” que es la manera como la mayoría de los tenedores de propiedad privada ejercen el derecho de propiedad, lo que les otorga amplios derechos de acceso, uso y alienación. Se dice que todo esto genera lo que el estado identifica como certeza, un concepto respaldado en la idea de propiedad a priori, singular y definitiva. Yo exploro la disputa resultante a través de una lente performativa que trata la propiedad no como esencia, sino como efecto. Al trazar las maneras complicadas con las que el pago simple es llevado a cabo en el proceso del tratado revela que el pago simple está lejos de serlo. Por todo lado circulan pagos simples múltiples, contestatarios y superpuestos. La identificación de esta multiplicidad brinda valiosas lecciones que ayudan a nuestro entendimiento del actual espacio para la reconciliación poscolonial.

Aziz Rana, ‘Colonialism and Constitutional Memory’, UC Irvine Law Review (2015), Forthcoming.

The United States shares a number of basic traits with various British settler societies in the non-white world. These include longstanding histories in which colonists and their descendants divided legal, political, and economic rights between insiders and subordinated outsiders, be they expropriated indigenous groups or racial minorities. But Americans rarely think of themselves as part of an imperial family of settler polities and instead generally conceive of the country as quintessentially anti-imperial and inclusive. What explains this fact and what are its political consequences?

This essay, prepared for the Third “Law As…” Symposium, offers an initial response, arguing that a significant reason is the symbolic power of the American Federal Constitution in sustaining a particular narrative of the country as free and equal from the founding. Although this creedal narrative has played a powerful and productive role in creating a more inclusive national community, it has also, paradoxically, made it more difficult for Americans to appreciate the country’s colonial underpinnings and thus to address specific structural grievances. In developing these claims, the essay first explores how universalistic accounts of national identity and constitutional meaning began to take political hold with the country’s emergence onto the global stage following the Spanish-American War. It then analyzes the unacknowledged contemporary costs of creedal narratives by recovering a tradition of radical black critique, which viewed the dominant national identity as truncating dilemmas of race in part by deemphasizing the need for material restitution and symbolic rupture.

Keyan G. Tomaselli, ‘Who owns what? Indigenous knowledge and struggles over representation’, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 28, 4 (2014).

Ownership of field research records involving informants and subject communities is discussed with regard to doing research amongst indigenous populations. Intellectual property rights (IPR) law often assumes, for example, that an age-old mythical story retold by a contemporary informant is owned by the legal entity that facilitated its being captured in writing. The implication is that if the story-teller now wants to tell the same story to someone else, written legal permission from the legal entity would be required. IPR contracts freeze the dynamism of knowledge, killing its ‘lived’ relation, and the process owned by others (our research partners/hosts/subjects) is transformed into commodities that the original storytellers no longer own or control. For our ǂKhomani Bushman hosts, this constitutes information theft. A third party, in our case the academy, claims ownership of ideas our subjects thought were theirs. This article examines ensuing issues of IPR and ethics in relation to doing research amongst indigenous communities.

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Catherine Hall, ‘Gendering Property, Racing Capital’, History Workshop Journal 77, 1 (2014).

This essay started life as a lecture at the conference convened in 2014 to consider the directions in ‘History after Hobsbawm’. What are the resonances of Hobsbawm’s work in the present and what are the new directions that have been marked out in history-writing in the last decades? The essay, drawing on the work of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London, argues that gender and race are both critical to capital formation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Classical Marxist accounts of the development of industrial capitalism need to be rethought.

Mark McGranaghan, ‘Different people’ coming together: representations of alterity in ∣Xam Bushman (San) narrative’, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 28, 4 (2014).

Colonial processes around the world had major impacts on the indigenous populations with whom colonists interacted – this is particularly true for small-scale populations that relied heavily on foraging subsistence practices. Historical sources that document these impacts are in the main highly skewed toward representations made by colonial populations themselves. The dominance of these representations forms a major challenge to attempts to reinterrogate colonial historical accounts of the processes of colonisation, and renders opaque the ways in which indigenous populations themselves understood and manipulated their historical interactions with ‘Others’. The Bleek–Lloyd archive – focusing on the ∣Xam Bushmen of the arid interior Karoo of South Africa – offers the opportunity both to question colonial presentations of ‘Bushman’ identities, and to explore Bushman representations of their 19th-century situation. This article discusses one aspect of these representations, focusing on the way in which ∣Xam individuals constructed ‘alien’ identities, and how these were manipulated in social discourse.

Michael Titlestad, ‘South African end times: Conceiving an apolcalyptic imaginary’, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 51, 2 (2014).

The future of South Africa has most commonly been conceived as a prospective apocalyptic upheaval in which the nation fractures along race lines. This expectation preceded, but informed the rise of apartheid, and has accompanied its demise. This article argues that catastrophic prediction—the trope of a looming racial Armageddon—is like a worn coin: familiar currency so often spent. Nonetheless, we need to conceive how this particular political theology settled into our polity; why it has proved so adaptable (through and despite the “miraculous” transformation of 1994); and, how its tenacity—which is politically anodyne at best and fascist at worst—might be challenged. The article conceives of a study (comprising nine essays) which sets out to analyze aspects of this history of fear, without simply taking its existence and persistence for granted. Keywords: South African apocalypse, catastrophism, dystopia, political theology, white fear.

The rappers said they belonged to Mazibuye African Forum, a group that advocates the reversal of black economic empowerment benefits for Indian people, Chinese and white women. Co-founder of the forum, Zweli Sangweni said he did not know whether the rappers were in fact members of the organisation, but argued that the song should not be taken literally or opportunities for dialogue would be missed. 

“Issues of Indians going back to India are far-fetched, and we all know that, but you can’t use those lyrics to suppress dialogue, because that would be disingenuous and amounts to trying to protect the status quo. We need to confront the issues that give rise to these songs. Our leaders need to respond as leaders and address economic imbalances being spoken about.” 

Kwanele Sosibo for M&G.

Circe Sturm, ‘RACE, SOVEREIGNTY, AND CIVIL RIGHTS: Understanding the Cherokee Freedmen Controversy’, Cultural Anthropology 29, 3 (2014).

Despite a treaty in 1866 between the Cherokee Nation and the federal government granting them full tribal citizenship, Cherokee Freedmen—the descendants of African American slaves to the Cherokee, as well as of children born from unions between African Americans and Cherokee tribal members—continue to be one of the most marginalized communities within Indian Country. Any time Freedmen have sought the full rights and benefits given other Cherokee citizens, they have encountered intense opposition, including a 2007 vote that effectively ousted them from the tribe. The debates surrounding this recent decision provide an excellent case study for exploring the intersections of race and sovereignty. In this article, I use the most recent Cherokee Freedmen controversy to examine how racial discourse both empowers and diminishes tribal sovereignty, and what happens in settler-colonial contexts when the exercise of tribal rights comes into conflict with civil rights. I also explore how settler colonialism as an analytic can obscure the racialized power dynamics that undermine Freedmen claims to an indigenous identity and tribal citizenship.

Vanessa Sloan Morgan and Heather Castleden, ‘Framing Indigenous–Settler Relations within British Columbia’s Modern Treaty Context: A Discourse Analysis of the Maa-nulth Treaty in Mainstream Media’, International Indigenous Policy Journal 5, 3 (2014).

Media plays an integral role in (re)producing our social construction of reality. When viewed in light of Canada’s colonial legacy, media’s power has undoubtedly been implicated in circumscribing Indigenous peoples and Indigenous–settler relations. Employing a discourse analysis of mainstream media covering the recent (2011) implementation of a comprehensive land claims agreement in British Columbia, this study investigates how media has framed contemporary Indigenous–settler relations within the Canadian state. Findings indicate that mainstream media predominantly relies on stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and tends to neglect historical and current political complexities, thereby perpetuating stagnant Indigenous–settler relations. Concluding with empirically derived recommendations, this article points to education reform to create more robust mainstream media able to address stagnated (re)constructions of Indigenous–settler relations.