« Older posts
Newer posts »

On settler alternative worlds: Mimi Dwyer, ‘The Brazilian Town Where the American Confederacy Lives On’, Vice, 05/02/15

06Feb15

One day last spring, near an old rural cemetery in southern Brazil, a black man named Marcelo Gomes held up the corners of a Confederate flag to pose for a cell-phone photo. After the picture was taken, Gomes said he saw no problem with a black man paying homage to the history of the Confederate States of America. “American culture is a beautiful culture,” he said. Some of his friends had Confederate blood.

Gomes had joined some 2,000 Brazilians at the annual festa of the Fraternidade Descendência Americana, the brotherhood of Confederate descendants in Brazil, on a plot near the town of Americana, which was settled by Southern defectors 150 years ago. The graveyard is usually empty save for its caretaker or the odd worshipper drawn to its little brick chapel. On the April morning of the festa, a public-address system blaring the Confederate battle song “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” had interrupted the cemetery’s silence. Brazilians in ten-gallon hats and leather jackets called out greetings.

For miles around the graveyard, unfiltered sun beat down on sugarcane fields planted by the thousands of Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction and fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. Their scattered diaspora has gathered annually for the past 25 years. The party they throw, which receives funding from the local government, is the family reunion of the Confederados, one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.

(With thanks to Alex Young)


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Pekka Pitkänen, ‘Reading Genesis–Joshua as a Unified Document from an Early Date: A Settler Colonial Perspective’, Biblical Theology Bulletin, 45, 1, 2015, pp. 3–31

04Feb15

Abstract: This essay proposes based on literary-compositional considerations how two authors working together could
have composed Genesis–Joshua. After this, it suggests that Genesis–Joshua can be seen to reflect a sociopolitical
transformation of ancient Canaanite societies into an Israelite one(s) through a process that can be labeled as
ancient settler colonialism, and that the document could have been written concomitantly. Subsequently, relevant
ancient Near Eastern and archaeological evidence will be considered, suggesting compatibility with the idea that
Genesis–Joshua has reused and readapted existing traditions together with creative narrative retelling for its sociopolitical
purposes, and that this could have already taken place from the late second millennium bce on. The essay
concludes by drawing out some explicit contemporary implications of such a reading of Genesis–Joshua.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Emma Kowal, ‘Time, indigeneity and white anti-racism in Australia’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2015

04Feb15

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Alexander Page, Theresa Petray, ‘Agency and structural constraints: Indigenous peoples and the Australian settler-state in North Queensland’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

04Feb15

Abstract: In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have long been subjected to attempts at extermination, exclusion, and assimilation, but continually resist these efforts. This history is woven through the social fabric of Australia. This paper is a single case study which looks at contemporary race relations in Townsville, Queensland, and describes current settler-colonial settings in terms of structure and agency. We focus primarily on agency as a strengths-based approach, but recognise the structural constraints Indigenous people face. Based on in-depth interviews and extensive fieldwork, we explore Indigenous perceptions of agency and constraints. Indigenous people have many ways to exercise agency, and our focus is on those who identify as activists and advocates. Participants expressed their capacity to undertake social action as high and varied in method, articulating agency as activism or advocacy. These agents view the state as both an enabler and a constraint, largely exclusionary of indigeneity. The settler-state only increases the capability for social action when it chooses to do so and has been and continues to be largely exclusionary of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Significant to agents is the local context of Townsville as a racist city distant from political decision-making. Participants describe experiences of continuing covert or implicit racism and ‘active apathy’ held by the wider non-Indigenous community of Townsville. Despite these constraints, Indigenous agents creatively adapt such structures in order to exercise their agency.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Craig Fortier, ‘Stealing home: decolonizing baseball’s origin stories and their relations to settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015.

04Feb15

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ‘Nazifying colonialism: settler colonialism and the fate of Germany’s colonial chronotope’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

04Feb15

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Richard J. Martina, Philip Meadb, David Trigger, ‘The politics of indigeneity, identity and representation in literature from north Australia’s Gulf Country’, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2015

04Feb15

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Matthew Hunter Price, ‘Methodism and Social Capital on the Southern Frontier, 1760-1830’, PhD Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014 History

04Feb15
Abstract, This dissertation explores the formation of social capital and middle-class culture on the revolutionary frontier. As a lens, I use Methodism, an evangelical movement rooted in the British colonial period that flourished in the American Revolutionary Era and by the Civil War accounted for one in three American church members. Methodism was more than the fastest growing major religious movement in early American history. Combining social theory with manuscript, print, and demographic sources, I argue that Methodism, by circulating itinerants and founding religious societies, was a powerful force for creating social and political capital. My study is the first to appraise Methodism’s role in the development of settler colonialism in the Old Southwest and the southerly regions of the Old Northwest. My research uncovers practices of social exchange and epistolary culture among Methodist men and women (who were the majority of members) to explain how Protestant Christianity transitioned from a discursive role—as a justification for indigenous dispossession—to a technique for possession. Methodism engendered social networks, disseminated knowledge, and aided pursuits of land development and commerce among middling settlers. These benefits of religious association were valuable social and economic resources, and they preceded the formal evangelical politics of the late antebellum era. They were the soil from which grassroots evangelical political power grew.

My research makes three main contributions. It intercedes in the debate on social capital in American society from a historical perspective. Addressing a dearth of historical analyses of social capital formation, it also provides a major assessment of social networks within the most dynamic popular movement of the first half of the nineteenth century. Whereas popular supporters and critics of the social capital thesis often align according to their philosophical embrace of communitarianism or individualism, I show that these categories are historically inseparable, as Euro- American settlers built societies in the West and reaped the benefits of individual and collective social capital to lay the foundation for a middle-class order. Second, my approach bridges an impasse in the historiographical debate on the Second Great Awakening: that is, whether popular evangelicalism democratized American culture. Scholars on one side of the debate have marshaled evidence of anti-elite ideology while others have focused on divisions according to race, class, and gender. Through Methodism I argue that evangelical networks allowed white middling settlers to weaken existing social hierarchies at the very time that they built new ones. Finally, my interpretation centers religion in the search for the origins of the southern middle class, a field currently among the most energetic in southern history. Rather than democratization or its opposite, the Methodists laid the foundation for the emergence of a nineteenth-century middle class of settlers who molded southern and western society according to their principles.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Bethel Saler, The Settlers’ Empire Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014

04Feb15

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Richard J. Martin, ‘Reconfiguring indigeneity in the mainland Gulf country: Mimicry, mimesis, and the colonial exchange of difference’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology

04Feb15

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »