According to Bolivia’s foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, the horological initiative is intended to help Bolivians rediscover their indigenous roots.

“We’re in the south and, as we’re trying to recover our identity, the Bolivian government is also recovering its sarawi, which means ‘way’ in Aymara,” he said. “In keeping with our sarawi – or Nan, in Quechua – our clocks should turn to the left.”

Sam Jones and Sara Shahriari for The Guardian.

Sug-In Kweon, ‘Japanese Female Settlers in Colonial Korea: Between the “Benefits” and ‘Constraints’ of Colonial Society’, Social Science Japan Journal (First published online: June 19, 2014).

This paper explores the gendered configurations and practices within the Japanese settler community in colonial Korea. More specifically, it focuses on the experiences of urban middle-class Japanese women. Existing data show that Japanese settler women, as citizens of the metropole, reaped benefits in arenas such as lifestyle, education, occupation, and family life. Their status as women, however, simultaneously subjected them to strict patriarchal and conservative standards. While privileged as colonists, they were publicly marginalized and silenced by the peculiar dynamics created by colonialism and modernity. Based on in-depth interviews and personal memoirs, as well as official archives and statistics, this research examines the forms of modernity that Japanese women experienced in colonial Korea, highlighting both the benefits and constraints that the colonial context offered to the women. These insights will complicate the existing historiography of Japanese colonialism in Korea by unveiling the history of a social group that has rarely been discussed by scholars.

Ivan Sablin, ‘Rearrangement of Indigenous Spaces: Sovietization of the Chauchus and Ankalyns, 1931–1945’, Interventions 16, 4 (2014).

This essay addresses the period when Chukotka, a distant region in the Northeast of the USSR, was incorporated into the state. This was done primarily by rearrangement of indigenous people’s spaces. The establishment of new centres of domination and collectivization was accompanied by a major shift in the official attitude towards the indigenous population of the region, and by the depreciation of their role in the exploitation of natural resources. The reconfiguration of spaces was carried out by means of repressive measures and produced major grievances and resistance among the indigenous population. The Second World War further aggravated the situation. The incorporation of Chukotka into the Soviet state resulted in the disruption of indigenous economies and a major decline in population. The essay relies on the methodology of colonial and postcolonial studies, employing and developing the notion of space reorganization used by Gray, Crush, Neumann and other authors, and Bhabha’s concept of ‘third space’.

Alexander Maxwell & Evan Roberts, ‘The Whangaroa Incident, 16 July 1824 A European–Māori Encounter and Its Many Incarnations’, Journal of Pacific History 49, 1 (2014).

This paper examines an incident in 1824 in which the Ngāti Pou of Whangaroa Harbour (New Zealand) boarded a European ship, holding its crew and three missionaries captive for two hours. During the 19th century the incident was retold approximately 30 times in Europe and America. This paper describes the original incident from primary sources and then discusses how the various incarnations of the story enabled different authors to draw diverse moral lessons. The changing narrative provides a window into various European attitudes towards the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand.

Lauren Benton and Kathryn Walker, ‘Law for the Empire: The Common Law in Colonial America and the Problem of Legal Diversity’, Chicago-Kent Law Review 89, 3 (2014).

no abstract

Stephen Jackson, ‘”In Accord with British Traditions”: The Rise of Compulsory Religious Education in Ontario, Canada, and Victoria, Australia, 1945–50’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Published online: 12 Jun 2014).

This article examines the establishment of legally mandated Protestant training in the Australian state of Victoria and the Canadian province of Ontario. Fearing moral decay at home and a menacing world environment seemingly unfavourable to the ‘British way of life’ in the 1940s, educators asserted that religion, and specifically Protestant Christianity, was the only means by which the moral core of their British democracy could be preserved. The teaching of religious instruction was highly controversial in both places. Supporters of the new curriculum believed the religious courses would strengthen the British identity and moral backbone of the Canadian and Australian nations, while opponents argued that imposing religion in the classroom was antithetical to British ideals of freedom and toleration. Educators struggled to reconcile these divergent views on how religion fitted into a wider British identity, and the resulting tension exposed the points of ethnic and cultural fracture that undermined the credibility of Britishness after 1950. The very efforts to impose a unifying sense of Britishness were so controversial and problematic that they ultimately required an alternative understanding of what it meant to be a citizen of Ontario or Victoria.

Jennifer Balint, Julie Evans, and Nesam McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm: A New Conceptual Approach’, International Journal of Transitional Justice (First published online: April 22, 2014).

Transitional justice has become the dominant international framework for redressing mass harm. To date, however, transitional justice has not adequately accounted for past colonial harms and their ongoing effects. How to confront and redress structural harm has been beyond the purview of its framework. Taking ongoing historical and structural harms against indigenous peoples in Australia as a reference point, we draw on the insights of settler colonial theory to propose a new justice model for transitional justice. We argue that a commitment to structural justice will enhance the ability of transitional justice to recognize and address structural injustice in settler colonial and other contexts. By elaborating the concept of structural justice with reference to postcolonial and settler colonial theory, this article sets out to support the development of a more robust theory of transitional justice.

Mark Munsterhjelm, ‘Corporate protectors of state sovereignty: Mitsubishi’s and a Taiwan affiliate’s accounts of relations with Taiwan Aborigines’, Asian Ethnicity 15, 3 (2014).

This paper compares two related corporations’ accounts of enacting sovereignty with Taiwan Aborigines. First, Mitsubishi corporate webpage histories constitute mythic origin narratives about how their patriotic founder, Yataro Iwasaki, helped the Japanese government transport munitions and troops to Taiwan in 1874 and the government rewarded him with 30 ships, starting their close relationship. These narratives about this state-centred assemblage omit why Japan sent the military expedition, which ostensibly was a punitive expedition against Paiwan Aborigines for the 1871 massacre of 54 Ryukyu Islanders, but was actually part of the new Meiji state’s annexation of the Ryukyu Islands. Second, it analyses the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines which was founded in 1994 by the wealthy chair of the Shung Ye Group, a Taiwan-based Mitsubishi-affiliated conglomerate. The museum is a private assemblage organized around hero narratives in which the chair demonstrates his patriotism by rescuing Taiwan Aborigines and their cultures. The museum contributes to the Taiwan-centred identity project which challenges One-China sovereignty claims over Taiwan.

Libby Porter and Janice Barry, ‘Bounded recognition: urban planning and the textual mediation of Indigenous rights in Canada and Australia’, Critical Policy Studies (Published online: 02 Jun 2014).

While the recognition of marginalized social groups has become widely accepted as an important consideration for contemporary planning, the particular challenge of Indigenous recognition has barely registered in urban planning contexts. In this paper, we use a discursive and interpretive analysis of urban planning texts from Victoria, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, to illustrate how the ‘contact zone’ between Indigenous peoples and urban planning is produced and reproduced through texts. Discursive processes serve to bound and limit the recognition of Indigenous rights and interests, allowing only very small and shallow zones of contact in each place. Our findings from these cases show that these processes arise from quite different orders of discourse, and two social fields: Indigenous recognition and urban planning. The discourses present in both fields really matter for how the contact zone is persistently bounded to established territorial, political and administrative orders. In identifying these boundaries, our paper opens up new ways of thinking about, and engaging in, boundary-crossing work in planning.

Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2014) 

is now available on Taylor & Francis Online.