Lucas Bessire, ‘The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality: Native Culture as a Neoliberal Politics of Life’, Current Anthropology 55, 3 (2014).

Scholars have suggested that the current era of indigenous citizenship in Latin America is characterized by a postmulticultural political order that effectively reverses the historical marginality of native populations in the region. This conception, however, minimizes the established insight that the social apertures of neoliberal culturalism depend on the creation of new exclusionary regimes based on the very same mechanisms of celebrating cultural difference. Drawing on a decade of field-based inquiries into indigenous experiences of marginality in South America’s Gran Chaco, this article identifies how the widespread political empowerment of an indigenous majority is structurally predicated upon the hypermarginality of a stigmatized few. I describe the general features of hypermarginality as lived experience and emergent political regime, in relation to three properties of the stratifying craft of the neoliberal state: the contraction of authorized culture, the culturalization of legitimate indigenous life, and the state management of a global economy of cultural preservation. This essay illustrates how hypermarginality is a concrete political quandary that holds significant implications for social analysis and policy, including the need to rethink the relationships between the neoliberal and the indigenous in Latin America.

Nicole Gombay, ‘”Poaching” – What’s in a name? Debates about law, property, and protection in the context of settler colonialism’, Geoforum 55 (August 2014).

Framed within debates about political ontology, this paper explores how, in a settler colonial context, state-governed wildlife management reflects a complex set of assumptions and power relations that structure understandings and enactments of law, property, and notions of protection. Drawing upon the statements of Inuit research participants, the paper examines the definition of ‘poaching’, and underscores the conceptually controversial assumptions underlying this word. The paper demonstrates how the term represents a culturally and historically specific set of beliefs and practices by the state that are unintelligible from an Inuit frame of reference, because the ontological, epistemological, and teleological assumptions upon which they rest are fundamentally incommensurable with their own. Critiques of political ecology and political economy claim that such forms of analysis have naturalized the assumption that there is one nature which different peoples understand differently. Instead the concept of political ontology stresses that there are many natures whose meanings are opaque and subject to negotiation. But ontological differences are only part of the puzzle. To understand the encounters between Indigenous peoples and the settler colonial state, it is not only the existence of different natures that are important, but also the ways of knowing these natures and the ends that people seek in ‘managing’ them. Ontology, epistemology, and teleology are intertwined; each fashions the other.

Rauna Kuokkanena, ‘Gendered Violence and Politics in Indigenous Communities: THE CASES OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE IN CANADA AND THE SÁMI IN SCANDINAVIA’, International Feminist Journal of Politics (Published online 20 May 2014).

This article examines the depoliticization of violence against women in indigenous communities. It argues that there is a pressing need to examine the ways in which gendered violence is explained, addressed and often sanctioned in indigenous communities. The article draws on Crenshaw’s concept of political intersectionality and examines responses to gendered violence in indigenous communities through two groups: Aboriginal women in Canada and Sámi women in Scandinavia.

Vasilis Grollios, ‘Philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology in J.S. Mill’s views on colonialism’, Journal of Political Ideologies (Published online: 20 May 2014).

The article aims to bring to light the philosophical background of J.S. Mill’s views of colonialism. His philosophy of history and his philosophical anthropology are strongly connected to his theory of democracy in this area of Mill’s social theory. Although he was undoubtedly radical according to the standards of his day, Mill adopts the anti-democratic logic of the capitalist mode of production and uses it as a gauge of cultural development. For the first time, this article aims to show that behind Mill’s adoption of a Eurocentric logic lies a fear of democracy that is ultimately based on the fact that, for Mill, private property, enterprise, industry, accumulation of wealth and the work ethic are the main pillars of capitalism and are used by Mill as the essential determinants of cultural progress. Even the key tenet of his philosophy, utility, bears a meaning that is determined by these values. The article attempts to prove that Mill’s ethical philosophy was formed on the basis of the social logic of capitalism and set the framework for Mill’s analysis of the hierarchy of civilizations, since his utilitarianism was not applicable to those who did not abide by the values of the industrial ethic.

John Gledhill, ‘Indigenous Autonomy, Delinquent States, and the Limits of Resistance’, History and Anthropology (2014).

This paper focuses on struggles by Mexican indigenous communities to defend their patrimony and guarantee their own security in an environment dominated by the parallel power of organized crime, paramilitary violence, impunity, and a neo-extractivist economy. After reviewing the relationships between the radicalization of indigenous autonomy demands and transformations of the Mexican state, analysis focuses on recent developments involving a Nahua community on the Pacific coast of Michoacán state that has a long history of successful defence of its communal lands, alongside a Purépecha community in the central highlands that has been its longstanding ally. The violence of external actors reflects the penetration of all levels of government by organized crime, but violence is not a new historical experience in this region. What has changed is that the capacity of these communities to resist has been affected by their internal disarticulation by the same forces.

Katherine Fobear, ‘Queer Settlers: Questioning Settler Colonialism in LGBT Asylum Processes in Canada’, Refuge 30, 1 (2014).

Refugee and forced migration studies have focused primarily on the refugees’ countries of origin and the causes for migration. Yet it is also important to also critically investi- gate the processes, discourses, and structures of settlement in the places they migrate to. This has particular signifi- cance in settler states like Canada in which research on refugee and forced migration largely ignores the presence of Indigenous peoples, the history of colonization that has made settlement possible, and ways the nation has shaped its borders through inflicting control and violence on Indigenous persons. What does it mean, then, to file a refugee claim in a state like Canada in which there is ongoing colonial violence against First Nations communities? In this article, we will explore what it means to make a refugee claim based on sexual orientation and gender identity in a settler-state like Canada. For sexual and gender minority refugees in Canada, interconnected structures of col- onial discourse and regulation come into force through the Canadian asylum and resettlement process. It is through this exploration that ideas surrounding migration, asylum, and settlement become unsettled.

Les études sur les réfugiés et les migrations forcées ont porté principalement sur les pays des réfugiés d’origine et les causes de la migration. Pourtant, il est également important d’aussi étudier de manière critique les proces- sus, les discours et les structures de peuplement dans les endroits vers lesquels ils migrent. Cela a une signification particulière dans les états coloniaux comme le Canada où la recherche sur les réfugiés et la migration forcée ignore en grande partie la présence des peuples autochtones, l’histoire de la colonisation qui a rendu le peuplement possible et les moyens par lesquels la nation a façonné ses frontières en usant de pouvoir et de violence sur les populations autochtones. Quel est le sens, alors, de déposer une demande d’asile dans un état comme le Canada où persiste la violence coloniale contre les communautés des Premières Nations? Dans cet article, nous allons explorer ce que cela signifie de faire une demande d’asile fondée sur l’orientation sexuelle et l’identité de genre dans un état colonial comme le Canada. Pour les réfugiés d’orientation sexuelle et d’identité de genre minoritaires au Canada, les structures interconnectées du discours colonial et de la réglementation entrent en vigueur dans le cadre de processus d’asile et de réinstallation. C’est grâce à cette étude que les idées entourant la migration, l’asile et le peuplement sont déstabilisées.

Jean Dennison, ‘Whitewashing Indigenous Oklahoma and Chicano Arizona: 21st-Century Legal Mechanisms of Settlement’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 37, 1 (2014).

This article interrogates the various tactics settler colonial legal systems use in establishing and entrenching authority over territories. By comparing a recent Osage Nation reservation court case with Arizona House Bill (HB) 2281, enacted into law as Ariz. Rev. Stats. § 15–112, which has been used to ban Mexican American/Raza Studies (MARS) from the classroom, it is possible to illustrate the varied processes by which legal systems attempt to render U.S. control of land an indisputable norm. In the context of both Oklahoma and Arizona, settler authority over territory is entrenched through the outlawing of institutions that contest its neutrality and universality. This article challenges U.S. settlement by making visible some of the legal processes by which it operates.

Daniel Huizenga, ‘Documenting “Community” in the ≠khomani San Land Claim in South Africa’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 37, 1 (2014).

In this article I explore how documents created in support of ≠khomani San land claimants, located in the southern Kalahari Desert, represent a specific way of knowing that contributes to a socio-legal construction of “community.” The documents that I use in this article have been authored by government organizations and NGOs, and compiled into a single repository of community information. By tracking the use of the term community throughout the repository, I demonstrate that the term is articulated through and across various fields of knowledge to achieve different social, political, and legal ends. This field of diverse motives, I argue, is neutralized and obscured through the standardized form of the documents themselves, contributing to a socio-legal construction of community wherein notions of indigeneity are both exclusive and temporally fixed.

Transgressing Racial Boundaries, 1857 to the Present Day

Institute for Humanities in Africa

University of Cape Town

28-29 November 2014

For a long time imperial historians writing on relationships that transgressed racial boundaries wrote almost exclusively of sex. More recently this work has started to open onto wider concerns, framed around the family, intimacy, emotions and affect. This symposium aims to think in new ways about relationships that cross racial bounds. These relationships were – variously – pragmatic and political, transactional, instrumental and, sometimes, deeply emotionally entwined. Most often, they combined elements of all of these. Almost always they contained conflict, not least because they were liable to stretch or subvert the same imperial or colonial ideologies from which they were produced.  Sometimes these relationships were long lived; at others they were so fleeting they can scarcely be described as relationships at all.

We welcome contributions that adopt counter-intuitive approaches to the relational history of race and empire – from any part of the imperial and post-imperial British world. Our starting point is 1857, the year of the Indian rebellion when, according to a well-worn historical narrative, a new and deepening racial consciousness began to take hold amongst Britons both at home and abroad. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, so this story goes, racial borders were embryonic and deeply porous. Europeans ‘went native’ with frequency and élan. But from the mid-nineteenth century, racial attitudes became more entrenched. Boundaries hardened. Distance and difference separated citizen from subject, white from black.  This symposium looks to complicate this linear narrative by considering the kinds of human contact that can exist within social landscapes forged from empire and its attendant racial codes. By working through the period of decolonisation, we hope to provide new opportunities for rethinking aspects of continuity and change across the colonial/postcolonial  divide.

We are particularly interested in work that speaks to the following themes:

• Emotional currencies: Besides fear and loathing, what was the emotional content of relations between European ‘colonisers’ and those they claimed to rule? What does it do to talk of love combined with hate or of kindness as an ancillary to colonial domination?  How did racial theory convert to racial practice? And what kinds of visceral energy did race possess?

• Disaggregating race:  colonial encounters were configured differently according to historical context and social locale.  What kinds of contacts developed during war-time, for example, as opposed to during peace? How did economic depression or flux shape the nature of cross-racial intimacies? And how can we adequately capture the porosity of racial borders that were themselves in constant motion?

• Shifting boundaries: How did changing racial ideologies alter the ways in which boundary-transgression was perceived and acted upon? To what extent did the very idea of transgression dissolve during decolonisation?  And how does a focus on race-as-practice advance existing understandings of imperial ideology during the long imperial decline?

To enter a proposal, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a 1-page CV to Will Jackson  before 1 July 2014. Accepted papers will be notified by 15 July 2014.

The symposium forms part of a collaboration between the School of History at the University of Leeds, the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town and the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA). It is enabled by support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and HUMA

Eiichiro Azuma, ‘Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and the U.S. Racial-Imperialist Politics of the Hemispheric “Yellow Peril”’, Pacific Historical Review 83, 2 (2014).

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This article examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime.