Andrea Smith, ‘Indigenous Feminists Are Too Sexy for Your Heteropatriarchal Settler Colonialism’, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies 8, 1 (2014).

Within the creation myths of the United States, narratives portray Native peoples as hypersexualized and sexually desiring white men and women. Native men in captivity narratives are portrayed as wanting to rape white women and Native women such as Pocahontas are constituted as desiring the love and sexual attention of white men at the expense of her Native community. In either of these accounts of settler colonialism, Native men and women’s sexualities are read as out of control and unable to conform to white heteropatriarchy. Many Native peoples respond to these images by desexualizing our communities and conforming to heteronormativity in an attempt to avoid the violence of settler-colonialism. I interrogate these images and provide sex-positive alternatives for Native nation building as an important means of decolonizing Native America.

Khanyisela Moyo, ‘Mimicry, Transitional Justice and the Land Question in Racially Divided Former Settler Colonies’, International Journal of Transitional Justice (2014).

This article argues that in its liberal form, transitional justice has no future as it cannot encompass structural injustices arising from issues related to postcolonial land conflicts. The bias of liberal transitional justice discourse towards corrective and retributive justice invites criticism that it is a tool for dealing with ‘uncivilized’ rogue states. In addition, transitional justice’s liberal individualism overlooks pluralistic arrangements of property rights which were secured by colonialism. Liberal justice mechanisms also take no account of the fact that postcolonial states did not start from a ‘veil of ignorance’ and as such cannot presume that liberty has to take primacy over redistribution. Nonetheless, the article also contends that the continuum of transitional justice can be assured if there is a serious engagement with recent postcolonial innovation which is ‘mimicry’ of the dominant discourse. The article’s use of the concept of ‘mimicry’ is inspired by the term’s use in postcolonial and colonial literature to describe the interaction between members of colonized people and their colonizers. In the context of transitional justice, mimicry can be shameful, empowering and subversive as it includes the shameless copying of former colonizers’ tactics by the postcolonial ruling elite and the diffusion of ‘western’ concepts of rule of law, justice and human rights, and also presents opportunities for postcolonial ‘agency.’ Postcolonial ‘agency’ occurs where postcolonial societies merge liberalism with postcolonial realities, thereby responding to these societies’ actualities without completely disavowing international law.

David Gramit, ‘What Does a City Sound Like? The Musical Dynamics of a Colonial Settler City’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 11, 02 (2014).

A study of public musical life in Edmonton, Alberta from the 1897 Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria through the beginning of World War I provides a case study in the development of new urban musical cultures during the settlement of western North America. The contrast between the Jubilee celebration and Alberta’s inauguration as a province in 1905 reveals growing ambition to demonstrate a capacity for the serious music that could be viewed as a marker of civic achievement, and the absence in 1905 of First Nations dancers and drummers, who had taken part in the 1897 event, provides a reminder of the displacement of indigenous peoples that accompanied the immigration booms that characterized settler colonialism. Popular music too developed with the city; as an alternative to non-literate, rural practices like fiddling, it could represent another form of urban sophistication, but also provided an opportunity to import high culture’s dismissal of the popular, yet another signifier of urban cultural practice.

Ben Silverstein, ‘Dispossession, Reconsidered (Review)’, History Australia 11, 3 (2014).

Until relatively recently, studies of settler colonialism have approached invasions, dispossessions, and eliminations as events which founded a polity and were exhausted as settlement came to fruition. Now, as in the case of dispossession in both Philippolis and Orania, they are considered instead as establishing persistent structures. The failure to reckon with that history and its implications establishes the democratic South African state as its successor. […]  But transposing the analysis of settler colonialism, developed with Australasia and North America in mind, to the South African context necessitates categorical revision. Cavanagh suggests we can understand Indigeneity on the nineteenth century Orange River ‘as a relative condition’. He differentiates between South Africa’s ‘most indigenous people’ and their ‘less indigenous’ followers, a distinction determined essentially by reference to antecedence (10). The Griqua, in other words, were settlers in relation to the San, but Indigenous in relation to the Boers who displaced them.
The settler emerges in this account as the bearer of sovereignty. Cavanagh describes the layered sovereignty of the nineteenth century and its resolution through the victory of the settler’s sovereignty as it becomes ‘ultimate’ or ‘perfect’. This represents an understanding of sovereignty as something which can be possessed: as a ‘capacity’, or as something that could be ‘vested’. And sovereignty determines land rights – ‘it is the sovereign that says which land rights are good and bad’ – and thereby constitutes the settler protagonist of settler colonialism (2, 6, 97–101).

Such definitions involve the historian in practices of arbitration, locating and naming settlers and natives, recognising the success of settler colonialism in its extinguishment of other sovereignties. Recognition, though, is never innocent, and in this case the citation of dominance under the sign of an ultimate sovereignty has the effect of settling the colonial contradictions so intricately traced, but consigned to the past; the book approaches sovereignty not as an ensemble of claims and aspirations but as fact. This produces such discomforting effects as the denotation of the Griqua – a people dispossessed by white settlers who today claim First Nations status – as nineteenth century settlers.

John Docker, ‘A plethora of intentions: genocide, settler colonialism and historical consciousness in Australia and Britain’, International Journal of Human Rights (published online: 13 December 2014).

This article examines the implications for contemporary historical consciousness in Australia and Britain of the Tasmanian genocide, the destruction of the indigenous nations of the island by British colonisation in the early nineteenth century and the subsequent removal of the survivors to Flinders Island, where most died. The article explores the culture of denial that attempts to deflect the challenge of genocide scholar Tony Barta, that Australia is a nation founded on genocide. It deconstructs the argument of prominent historian Henry Reynolds in his 2001 book An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History, that genocide did not occur in Tasmania since there was no intention to commit genocide. Reynolds’ conception of intention is analysed in terms of contemporary genocide theory. The article also explores the view of Holocaust scholar Tom Lawson in his 2014 book The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania that, in quite fantastical ways, British historical consciousness later in the nineteenth century managed to confirm its claim to civilisational superiority by the Tasmanian genocide.

Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pita, ‘Rethinking Settler Colonialism’, at the end of their guest issue in American Quarterly 66, 4 (2014).

The year 1948 was the Nakba, the year of catastrophe for Palestinians. For Mexicans in the US Southwest, Nakba came in 1848, with Mexico’s loss of almost half of its territory and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that subsumed the northwest of Mexico into the United States. There is much that we, the people of Mexican origin in the United States, share with the Palestinians living in Israel as well as those living in the West Bank and Gaza. Significant differences notwithstanding, what we do have in common is the dispossession of lands as well as a history of living a second-class status under a hegemonic state power imposed by historical circumstance. History has much to teach us in this regard, both in terms of commonalities and in terms of divergences.

We want to start by noting the marked differences between Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine and the situation of the contemporary Mexican-origin population in the United States, so as not to conflate the two situations. First off, an important distinction needs to be made between an indigenous population, like the Native Americans or the Palestinians, and a colonist settler population, like the Spanish Mexicans in the US Southwest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; there is also an important historical difference between the apartheid wall that separates the West Bank from Israel and, for example, the border wall that separates Tijuana from San Diego/San Ysidro. While both were clearly erected to divide, we must understand that they are barriers of different orders. Revealing parallels aside, while it is true that the Mexican-origin population suffered—and continues to suffer—acts of violence, racism, aggression, and xenophobia at the hands of the occupying dominant Anglo population since 1846, the Palestinians have been subject to far greater injustices under more recent Israeli colonialism. Moreover, racial profiling, segregation, and denial of equal rights in the United States have never been restricted solely to people living under settler colonialism in occupied territories, as is evident in the history of nineteenth-century Chinese workers, African Americans, and women in the United States. A look at these substantive differences begs a brief historical overview of the two geographic areas and of the issue of settler colonialism and its consequences.

Mabogo Percy More, ‘Locating Frantz Fanon in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Journal of Asian and African Studies (online December 11, 2014 )

There is a huge re-emergence of Frantz Fanon’s ideas and an equally huge interest in his work in post-apartheid South Africa, both in the academy and social movement and organizations. Contrary to some commentators, particularly his biographers, this article aims to locate Fanon within the South African struggle for liberation. It is argued here that Fanon, throughout his life, as evidenced by his writings, was highly concerned about apartheid just as he was about French Algerian colonialism. For him, the paper claims, apartheid was synonymous with colonialism and therefore his critique of colonialism was just as much a critique of apartheid. The resurgence of his name and ideas in the country is a consequence of this critique.

Rob White, ‘Indigenous Young People and Hyperincarceration in Australia’, Youth Justice
(Online December 2014).

This article describes and analyses the over-representation of Indigenous, young people in Australian juvenile justice. It contextualises this over-representation, through a brief discussion of colonialism and its continuing impacts. The concept of hyperincarceration is then used to describe the patterns of Indigenous detention, one that is overwhelmingly, disproportionate in terms of Indigenous status compared to non-Indigenous status. This article provides recent empirical evidence of the gross over-representations of Indigenous young people, especially in the harshest parts of the juvenile justice system. Alternative forms of intervention, such as justice reinvestment, are briefly discussed.

Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, ‘Towards a Genealogy of Minor Colonial Australian Character Types’, Interventions Published online: 15 Dec 2014

The business of colonization is often understood in terms of global frameworks, large-scale movements and top-down, ‘abstract’ perspectives; in which case, the turn to minor characters in the colonized world might seem almost like an act of bad faith. It runs the risk of breaking open stable, overarching categories, like the ‘white man’ – which, as minor characters are introduced, sometimes struggles to retain its ascendancy. This essay pursues the idea of minor settler types in colonial Australia as points of departure or differentiation from the macro-narratives of colonial discourse. Sometimes they do consolidate into something dominant, but they can also disassemble into peripheral identities that the nation might continue to invest in or want to leave behind, depending on the case. The narratives they inhabit are therefore especially important, throwing types together, leading them in different, sometimes contradictory, directions, juxtaposing them with one another. This essay will look at colonial investments in a range of major and minor character types, including the Coming Australian, the rouseabout, the Melbourne dandy, the ‘night auctioneer’, the Sydney pieman and the ‘inspector of nuisances’. It introduces a Sydney-based magazine called Heads of the People (1847–8), which immediately raised – and did not resolve – the problem of who is central and who is peripheral to the colonial economy. The magazine self-consciously drew minor character types back into public life, recognizing that colonial literature – like the colonial economy itself – was continually assembled, and disassembled, by the narratives these figures inhabited.

Daniel H. Usner, ‘Rescuing Early America from Nationalist Narratives: An Intra-Imperial Approach to Colonial Canada and Louisiana’, Historical Reflections 40, 3 (2014).

The effort to compare and connect different French colonies in North America encounters some treacherous roadblocks, including the powerful impact of Canadian and United States nation building on the treatment of French colonial regions and the widely divergent approaches taken by scholars of New France and French Louisiana. This essay attempts to explain why these obstacles appeared in the first place and to suggest how they might be overcome in the future. At a time when historians of early America are vigorously seeking new analytical frameworks and meaningful historical narratives, intraimperial research on complex relationships and comparative issues in French North America constitutes an essential area of study. Whether examining the role of Canadian families in the founding of Louisiana, the influence of Acadian settlers on south Louisiana culture, or the character of Indian relations in French colonies—among other issues—a shared history of early Canada and Louisiana will significantly improve our understanding of North American peoples and places.