Settler Colonial Literatures in Comparison (ACLA — March 26-29, 2015. Seattle, Washington)

We are inviting papers for a seminar to be hosted at the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2015 Annual Meeting, in Seattle, Washington on March 26-29. This seminar explores how settler colonial studies contribute to our study of comparative literature, both within and beyond Anglophone settler spaces. 

Recent scholarship has re-conceptualized settler colonialism as a distinct structure of domination. Despite inherent heterogeneity within settler and indigenous societies, structural opposition between the two continues beyond invasion. As such, ethnic minorities in white settler countries may participate in indigenous dispossession, and third-world postcolonial nation states may have untold histories of settler colonialism. Settler colonial history in the global scale thus entails particularly complex flows of power and structures of relation, whereby one moves vertically (structurally) from being indigenous to being settler (or vise-versa) along the horizontal global flows of migration, invasion, and settlement. In this framework, it may also become possible to examine migrants in Australia, the USA, Canada, and New Zealand for their participation in the settler order, and to query how much settler colonial domination has given legitimacy to states like Taiwan or Japan’s many islands and contributed to the ongoing conflicts in Israel or the Chinese borderlands.

In response to these complex networks of relation brought to light by settler colonial studies, this seminar examines the particular challenges and new possibilities in reading literatures comparatively across settler colonial conditions and structural positions, between postcolonial, indigenous, and ethnic literary studies. What may be our new ethos and strategies of reading and how can we engage with the particular temporal and spatial juxtapositions and scaling in settler texts? In what sense may it be productive to study literatures outside of the Anglophone settler colonies as settler colonial? Then, do settler literatures in Chinese, Japanese, or other tongues, invoke distinct literary traditions to narrate settlement and do these narratives produce divergent structures of relation? Perhaps even more importantly, can literary texts effectively narrate and envision the decolonization of settler colonialism? 

We welcomes theoretical and methodological explorations of comparative settler colonial literary studies, close readings of specific sites of settler colonial heterogeneity, or comparative works that investigate relations across locations, languages, or political systems. 

To submit a paper proposal, please do so by Oct 15, 2014 on the ACLA website http://www.acla.org/settler-colonial-literatures-comparison-0/ . For questions, please contact Yu-ting Huang at <ythuang@ucla.edu>

Robert Nichols, ‘The Colonialism of Incarceration’, Radical Philosophy Review (online on September 20, 2014).

This essay attends to the specificity of indigenous peoples’ political critique of state power and territorialized sovereignty in the North American context as an indispensible resource for realizing the decolonizing potential latent within the field of critical prison studies. I argue that although the incarceration of indigenous peoples is closely related to the experience of other racialized populations with regard to its causes, it is importantly distinct with respect to the normative foundation of its critique. Indigenous sovereignty calls forth an alternative normativity that challenges the very existence of the carceral system, let alone its racialized organization and operation.

Contributions are sought for the following seminar, to be held during the 2015 Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA, March 26-29, Seattle, U.S.A).

CULTURES OF SETTLEMENT AND UNSETTLEMENT

Organizer: Bruno Cornellier, University of Winnipeg

Our seminar wishes to return to some of cultural studies’ earlier, formative insights about culture and hegemony, but this time in conversation with current developments in Indigenous and settler colonial studies, two complementary fields that offer us ways to dialectically connect postcolonial concerns over movement (conquest, migration, diaspora, etc.) with the anchoring violence of settlement and occupation. Most recently, Mark Rifkin momentarily went back to Raymond Williams’ work on hegemony and the everyday life in order to argue that settler colonial occupation is indeed supported by culture enabling one’s readiness to assume and enjoy the experience of occupation as one of banality and certainty. We are complementarily led to observe how settler state policies are often predicated on the belief that the State can and must reform and monitor Indigenous lives at the level of their everyday banality and mundane occurrences, for instance in kinship, labor, housing, family life, sexuality, etc. This seminar seeks critical contributions to the study of settler cultures and settler cultural texts as they “document” (deliberately or not) their conditions of production as colonial texts (or as text imbued with a specific coloniality). We are also interested in how acts of reading, viewing, or producing cultural texts likewise constitute an event during which the (conflicting) modes of occupancy and personhood of settlers, Natives, and arrivants are felt, asserted, and/or contested, sanctioned and/or unsettled, naturalized, reformed, or made to feel strange to themselves.

Please send your proposals directly via ACLA’s website by October 15. You may also contact the organizer prior to submitting your proposal if you have any questions or concerns about the seminar (or the seminar format privileged by ACLA): b.cornellier@uwinnipeg.ca.

Please follow this link to login and send your proposal: http://acla.org/cultures-settlement-and-unsettlement-0

The lawsuit, filed last week at Vancouver Federal Court, alleges that Chief Giesbrecht breached his duty to “obtain the free, prior and informed consent” of his people before extinguishing a claim to aboriginal title.

 

More at the National Post.

Paul Moon, ‘The Influence of ‘Benthamite’ Philosophies on British Colonial Policy on New Zealand in the Era of the Treaty of Waitangi, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Published online: 03 Sep 2014).

Most of the recent historiography on the British presence in the South Pacific in the first half of the nineteenth century rightly reflects the dichotomy of private commercial enthusiasm for imperial expansion set against a backdrop of official hesitance and vacillation over any possible enlargement of the empire—a stance manifested in Britain’s stance on New Zealand prior to 1840. However, such analyses, which emphasise the reactive, unplanned and incremental extension of British interests and involvement in New Zealand, tend to bypass consideration of the particular philosophical influences that helped to shape British colonial policy during this time. This article surveys those social philosophies formulated by Jeremy Bentham—and advanced by his followers—which prescribed a distinct form of colonial intervention and government. It focuses specifically on Bentham’s utilitarianism, and his notions of colonial trusteeship, and explores how these ideas insinuated their way into British colonial policy relating to New Zealand in the 1830s, culminating in the Treaty of Waitangi (1840).

Simone Bignall, Daryl Rigney & Robert Hattam, ‘The Postcolonial Time That Remains’, Interventions (Published online: 27 Aug 2014).

Sovereign authority to establish the colony of South Australia was given by Letters Patent (1836), signed by King William IV. The Letters Patent made explicit provision for the recognition and protection of Indigenous rights and interests in traditional lands and waters, establishing the basis for a peaceable and respectful interaction between Indigenous and settler societies. However, the preexisting sovereignty of Indigenous peoples was not respected and these written orders were ignored by the South Australian Company in its executive action to establish the Province of South Australia. Accordingly, the potential for development of positive forms of intercultural social relationship remained unrealized in this region, as was also the case throughout the Australian colonies. This essay reflects upon the transformative force of this unrealized potential, which remains immanent within the trajectory of Australian history. It makes use of Agamben’s conceptualization of time and exigency in The Time That Remains (2005) to theorize directed processes of historical discontinuity. We analyse colonial sources of contemporary Australian society, with a renewed attention to those aspects of political recognition and positively shared social life that were always possible but never came to pass into history. We argue that the experience of time and temporality in the ‘messianic mode’ enables new understanding of the problematic ‘time of the now’ and recreates possibilities for the communal invention of postcolonial futures that respond properly to ongoing and contemporary Indigenous practices of sovereignty and nationhood.

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Alexander Morrison, ‘Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Published online: 03 Sep 2014).

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916.

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P. G. McHugh, ‘Time Whereof–Memory, History and Law in the Jurisprudence of Aboriginal Rights’, Saskatchewan Law Review 77 (2014).

We each have a personal relationship with the past, one that is utterly our own. This lecture is not a law-as-biography, but it draws upon my personal experience of the past and the impact of my LL.M. year at the College of Law in 1980-81.1 will use personal recollection of the aftermath of the decision made in Calder v. British Columbia (Attorney General) 1 as a portal to the ways in which law, history and memory engage in the jurisprudence of Aboriginal rights. I will be suggesting that there are three modes of approach towards invocation of the past, two of them disciplinary practices that are quite distinct, and one that is inherently personal. Memory, history and law occur, often overlap, if not merge, together in the jurisprudence. As a human activity, this jurisprudence lives in time. It has been on a journey through time. It has historicity. This essay will attempt to describe that historicity in very general terms. It will end with a rather scathing view of the Supreme Court of Canada’s majority judgment in Manitoba Métis Federation v. Canada (Attorney General). 2 My perspective is entirely western, predominantly that of a common lawyer and historian of constitutional thought. It is not an account of knowledge-formation and discourse inside Aboriginal culture, but it does concern the ways, past and present, in which Aboriginal people have been incorporated into Anglo-Canadian legalism.

Lindsey Kingston, ‘The Destruction of Identity: Cultural Genocide and Indigenous Peoples’, Journal of Human Rights (posted online: 10 Sep 2014).

International law defines genocide in terms of violence committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” yet this approach fails to acknowledge the full impacts of cultural destruction. There is insufficient international discussion of “cultural genocide,” which is a particular threat to the world’s indigenous minorities. Despite the recent adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – which acknowledges the rights to culture, diversity, and self-determination – claims of cultural genocide are often derided, and their indicators dismissed as benign effects of modernity and indigenous cultural diffusion. This article considers the destruction of indigenous cultures and the forced assimilation of indigenous peoples through the analytical lens of genocide. Two case studies – the federally unrecognized Winnemem Wintu tribe in northern California and the Inuit of northern Canada – are highlighted as illustrative examples of groups facing these challenges. Ultimately, this paper seeks to prompt serious discussion of cultural rights violations, which often do not involve direct physical killing or violence, and consideration of the concept “cultural genocide” as a tool for human rights promotion and protection.

Daniel Rueck, ‘Commons, Enclosure, and Resistance in Kahnawá:ke Mohawk Territory, 1850–1900’, Canadian Historical Review 95, 3 (2014).

Historical communities that have held lands in common have, without exception, had strict regulations for using those lands. This was true also in Kahnawá:ke, a Mohawk community near Montreal, where community leaders articulated and enforced customary land laws until the last decades of the nineteenth century. Although a few Mohawks contested these laws in the nineteenth century, the Canadian government undermined, dismantled, and replaced customary land law in the 1870s and 1880s. This article reveals the way the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs exacerbated resource and land shortages in its attempts to undermine Kahnawá:ke leaders, gain control of the land, and ultimately to disperse the community. It describes a chaotic transition from regulated common property to a form of private property under the Indian Act and argues that this transformation was part of a global enclosure movement that continues to this day. Nevertheless, the Canadian government was unable to bring its project to completion, in large part the result of effective resistance offered by Kahnawá:ke Mohawks. The article draws attention to the extraordinary nature of this successful Indigenous resistance to the Canadian state in the late nineteenth century.

À travers l’histoire, toutes les communautés qui ont détenu leurs terres en propriété commune ont instauré des règles strictes relatives à l’utilisation de ces terres. Il en alla de même à Kahnawá:ke, une communauté mohawke près de Montréal, où les dirigeants communautaires réussirent à énoncer et à appliquer leurs règles pour la gestion des terres coutumières jusqu’aux dernières décennies du dix-neuvième siècle. Si certains Mohawks contestèrent ces règles tout au long du dix-neuvième siècle, ce n’est qu’au cours des années 1870 et 1880 que les règles relatives à la gestion des terres coutumières furent remises en cause, abolies et remplacées. Cet article révèle comment le ministère canadien responsable des Affaires indiennes exacerba les pénuries de ressources et de terres dans le but de miner l’autorité des dirigeants Kahnawà:ke, de prendre le contrôle des terres et, finalement, de disperser la communauté. Il décrit la transition chaotique d’une propriété commune réglementée à une forme de propriété privée en vertu de la Loi sur les Indiens et fait valoir que ce changement s’inscrivait dans un mouvement mondial des enclosures qui perdure encore aujourd’hui. Toutefois, le gouvernement canadien ne parvint pas à mener à terme son projet, en grande partie à cause de la résistance efficace opposée par les Mohawks de Kahnawá:ke. Cet article met en évidence le caractère extraordinaire de cette puissante résistance autochtone à l’État canadien à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle.