Tom Lynch, ‘“Nothing but land”: Women’s Narratives, Gardens, and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary in the US West and Australian Outback’, Western American Literature 48, 4 (2014).

This essay applies ecocriticism, informed by a transnational, settler-colonial theory, to a comparative analysis of texts by three US and three Australian women authors. Through an examination of both “wild” and domestic landscapes, the essay works to establish how these authors manifest the “settler-colonial imaginary” through their glorification of the process of establishing English-style gardens on homesteads founded in territory depicted as an “unland.” The essay reads the insistent use of a “nothing but” construction in descriptions of uncultivated land in both the Australian and US texts as signifying the literary imagining of the “unland” of the colonized territory, a discursive clearing of the land, as it were, to make room for settlement. From there, it proceeds to compare and contrast the different ways in which these texts imagined settlers’ occupation of land as an ecological struggle to wrest an arid or semi-arid landscape into a space amenable for the production of an English garden—the symbol of the settler-colonial project’s ultimate success. It then discusses texts by settler women in both Australia and the United States that imagine settlement in a more ecologically sustainable way, signaling a potential “counter-colonial” gesture of reconciliation with place.

Mark Mazower, ‘The End of Eurocentrism’, Critical Inquiry 40, 4 (2014). 

bit in lieu of abstract:

From one viewpoint, the years from 1945 to 1948 can be seen as a story about European reconstruction; from another, they emerge as the opening chapter of decolonization. Putting these two stories together raises the question of how Europe’s relations with the world changed in these years and, in particular, how contemporaries thought about Europe’s changing place in the world. This in turn was bound up with the ways in which they read the war and how the experience itself shaped their sense of Europe’s relationship with the world. This helps explain both Bidault’s surprise and Murray’s anxious discovery that there are other continents.

The Second World War marked the end of a long period of European ascendency, whose critical starting point was not the sixteenth century, let alone the Renaissance, but somewhere at the end of the eighteenth or the early nineteenth century. The age of Eurocentrism spanned the period from 1800 to 1945 in several senses. First, it marked the emergence of Europe as a center of world power through its formal colonialism and the technology gap created by the Industrial Revolution. Concurrently, there was the rise of settler societies, of which the “Anglo-world,” as James Belich tells it, was the most successful—although there was also the German-Russian settlement expansion south and eastwards, as well as its smaller Ottoman version.3 Subsequently, there was a kind of diplomatic intellectual counterpart to this European ascendancy: a new discipline of international law, one that enshrined the notion of a standard of civilization, that Gerrit Gong wrote about and that rested on a differentiated categorization of sovereignties in different parts of the world.4 This was accompanied by a changing conception of Europe. Paradoxically, as Europe expanded in power, Europe as a concept shrank. In 1840, for instance, the European powers could plausibly propose to Mehmet Ali that if he stopped threatening to invade Istanbul they would allow him to become part of the system of Europe. Forty years later, that was not an offer anybody was making. The geographical conception of Europe had become more focused even as Europe became more powerful.

David Williams, ‘Adam Smith and colonialism’, Journal of International Political Theory (online June 29, 2014).

In the context of debates about liberalism and colonialism, the arguments of Adam Smith have been taken as illustrative of an important line of anti-colonial liberal thought. The reading of Smith presented here challenges this interpretation. It argues that Smith’s opposition to colonial rule derived largely from its impact on the metropole, rather than on its impact on the conquered and colonised; that Smith recognised colonialism had brought ‘improvement’ in conquered territories and that Smith struggled to balance recognition of moral diversity with a universal moral framework and a commitment to a particular interpretation of progress through history. These arguments have a wider significance as they point towards some of the issues at stake in liberal anti-colonial arguments more generally.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott says we have all benefited from Britain’s original foreign investment because Australia was “unsettled” before the British arrived.

[…]

“As a general principle we support foreign investment. Always have and always will,” he said.

“Our country is unimaginable without foreign investment.”

“I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely-settled, Great South Land,” he said.

Gareth Hutchens for SMH.

Nicola Perugini, ‘The Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism: Israel and the “Evacuation Trauma”‘, History of the Present 4, 1 (2014).

The evacuations of settlements in a colonial situation can represent moments of potential rupture and reversal of a political order rooted in dispossession. In the case of Israel and Palestine, however, such moments are characterized by the re-articulation and re-legitimization of the settler colonial enterprise. This takes place through the development of a specific settler moral economy founded on the political mobilization of trauma. I utilize the notion of moral economy of settler colonialism in order to define the way in which, within the settler colonial polity, evacuations are couched as a national trauma and the evacuated dispossessor as a traumatized victim of injustice. Through the analysis of this moral economy, I maintain, we can grasp one of the dominant imaginaries in Israel’s settler colonial model. The underlying question of my investigation, how settler colonialism provides a moral sense of justice within the settler colonial polity and how decolonization is perceived as a threatening injustice, may seem like an old one. Nevertheless, it is curious that this question remains relatively unexplored in the case of Israel and Palestine.

For the first time, the court recognized the existence of aboriginal title on a particular site, covering a vast swath of the British Columbia interior. The court also spelled out in detail what aboriginal title means: control of ancestral lands and the right to use them for modern economic purposes, without destroying those lands for future generations.

[…]

Government still has a right to intrude but only if it can reconcile aboriginal interests with wider public purposes – which can include mining and logging projects and, though the court didn’t say so specifically, the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the B.C. coastal community of Kitimat.

[…]

The case involved the Tsilqhot’in Nation (pronounced Sil-KO-tin), a semi-nomadic people whose elders had testified about customs and practices in a remote valley west of Williams Lake, B.C., for the 400 people who lived there – in an area more than half the size of Greater Vancouver – when the British Crown asserted its sovereignty in 1846. The province had argued the population was too small to be in control of such a wide space. And the B.C. Court of Appeal had said title was a matter of small, specific sites such as rocks from which aboriginals had fished.

Sean Fine for Globe and Mail.

Darryl Leroux, ‘Entrenching Euro-Settlerism: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Nationalism in Québec’.

Malinda S. Smith, ‘Commissioning “Founding Races” and Settler Colonial Narratives’.

in

Canadian Ethnic Studies 46, 2 (2014).

Ravi de Costa, ‘Descent, Culture, and Self-Determination: States and the Definition of Indigenous Peoples’, aboriginal policy studies 3, 3 (2014).

Canada’s concept of “status” – the definition of who is an Aboriginal person under the Indian Act – has its analogies in the administrative practices of many countries. However, the European colonial expansion produced great variety, with contemporary states now relying on multiple categories of definition; descent from an enrolled historical population is often arbitrarily combined with particular cultural or demographic attributes. Effective activism has, in recent decades, pushed states towards policies of Indigenous self-definition. However, this remains constrained and uneven. While the initial goal here is a critical survey of definitions of Indigenous status in the “settler states” of Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa and the US, the paper examines practices in Latin America, Scandinavia and Russia as well as Asia and Africa. It concludes with a discussion about ongoing challenges for state practices of definition, including the implications of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Darren Peter Parker, ‘An aboriginal jurisprudential examination of constitutional recognition’, Griffith Law Review 22, 2 (2014)

Situating ourselves as a site of law through an Aboriginal jurisprudential modality is unequivocally required to even begin to understand the Aboriginal jurisprudential feeling of lawfulness. However, we must do so a priori, to even begin to understand the necessary feeling required for lawfulness to commence its emergence from within. It will be shown how experiencing this feeling represents the cosmological inheritance of feeling lawful through the paradigm of an Aboriginal jurisprudential modality and though represented in corporeal form, it internally galvanises a person’s relationships with other life forms, inter alia. This is the first step in understanding an Aboriginal jurisprudential examination for the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) peoples in Australia. It will then be our task to recognise this feeling of lawfulness and how it is intrinsic to the law of relationship. Further then, it will be demonstrated how the law of relationship provides for balancing energies. It is at this point, where the feeling of legality rather than the governance of men is crucial to as much as a result of, the enactment(s) of the law of relationship. Following this, we will then be introduced to the law of diplomacy along with its intrinsic model for rights and responsibilities and view how these diplomacies work in an equal triumvirate manner – a triadic organising – with the laws of feeling and relationship. With an understanding of the interrelatedness of these three laws – these legal doctrines – it will be demonstrated how Anglo-Australian ATSI constitutional recognition, without greater ATSI jurisprudential instruction, is simply another exercise in ideological and racial parsimony in Australia. It is ultimately the purpose of this article to present an exemplar of an Aboriginal jurisprudential model(s) to critique current proposals for constitutional recognition of ATSI peoples as lacking true and proper engagement with ATSI jurisprudence and concepts of lawfulness.

Angela Riley, ‘Native American Lands and the Supreme Court’, Journal of Supreme Court History 38 (2013).

The Supreme Court has been instrumental in defining legal rights and obligations pertaining to Indian lands since its first path-making decision in the field in Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823. But the groundwork for the Court’s contemplation of such cases predates Supreme Court jurisprudence, and it in fact predates the formation of the Court and the United States itself.

When Europeans first made contact with this continent, they encountered hundreds of indigenous, sovereign nations representing enormous diversity in terms of language, culture, religion, and governance. For those indigenous groups — as is a common attribute of indignity of similarly situated indigenous groups around the world — this land was and is holy land. Indigenous creation stories root Indian people in this continent — Turtle Island to many — as the focal point of life, creation, religion, culture, and language. In the settlement of the country, the colonial powers initially — and the United States subsequently — treated with Indian nations to negotiate the transfer of lands from Indians to Europeans, often in exchange for peace or protection.