Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘Contemporary Indigenous Affairs: Seeking the Radical Centre’, Australian Journal of Politics & History 59, 4 (2013).

bit in lieu of abstract

Indigenous policy in Australia appears to be following a pattern. Decades-long bipartisan stability breaks apart in rapid, highly partisan and controversial shifts to an alternative paradigm. A new consensus forms, and as the dust settles, public and academic commentators seek to make sense of the changed landscape and their role in it. This happened in the 1970s move from assimilation policy to self-determination, and we have just lived through it once again. For thirty years, the self-determination era prioritised social reconciliation, political and cultural recognition, collective land rights and support for Aboriginal self-management via a growing Indigenous NGO sector. The Howard government dismantled this policy assemblage piece by piece, beginning with challenges to the reconciliation process around 2000, accelerating with the abolition of ATSIC and the bureaucratic “quiet revolution” in 2004, and dramatically concluding with the Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2007 (the “Intervention”). The federal government openly presented the Intervention as the start of a new policy phase of normalisation, in which rights politics and cultural recognition could no longer trump material disadvantage. Policy focus narrowed to remote Indigenous communities as sites of dysfunction and suffering, and to the task of bringing these communities into mainstream economic and social systems by whatever means necessary.

 

Mori Ram, ‘White But Not Quite: Normalizing Colonial Conquests Through Spatial Mimicry’, Antipode 45, 5 (2013).

The role of mimicry in the construction and deconstruction of social identities has enriched our understanding of power relations considerably. However, as a spatial practice, mimicry has received scant consideration. In what ways can space itself become an object of mimicry? What strategies and practices are involved in this process and with what political objectives? The current paper treats these questions by analyzing processes of mimetic spatial production aiming to transform the Israeli-occupied territory of Mount Hermon into an “ordinary” western ski resort. Yet this concerted effort produces a variety of tensions and contradictions that ultimately undo the normalization of the colonial space, comprising a test case of the convoluted ways in which mimicry of space, not merely in space, generates various forms of slippage, excess and ambivalence.

Suren Pillay, ‘The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Dissensus’, Economic and Political Weekly 48, 50 (2013).

The story of the Marikana workers’ strife in South Africa suggests that the “migrant worker” is inadequately theorised as a political subject today. A more appropriate theorisation requires us to think more concretely about the migrant worker as the embodiment of indirect rule and apartheid, and not only as the archetypical figure of capitalism with fetters, or a consciousness waiting to be sublimated through socialist revolution.

Nicola Robinson, ‘Utopian Zionist development in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland‘, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 17, 3 (2013).

Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland depicts the opening stages of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Mandate Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Specifically, Herzl represents land use, agricultural labour and Zionist collectivism, in other words the material means by which settler-colonisation can be achieved. This essay examines utopia and other literary strategies including Bildungsroman to demonstrate the narrative trajectory’s move away from an underdeveloped environment and society towards a prosperous one. This essay argues that in Altneuland Herzl projects a vision of settler-colonialism that is different to the contemporaneous reality, such that the text can be regarded as an alternative to the real-world ‘utopian’ project of Israel/Palestine.

Christopher J Lee, ‘Beyond analogy: bare life in the West Bank’, Postcolonial Studies (iFirst 2013).

Interview and photographs.

Kieran Dolin, ‘”A Beautiful Fiction of Law”‘: Rhetorical Engagements with Terra Nullius in the British Periodical Press in the 1840s’, Journal of Victorian Culture 18, 4 (2013).

This paper analyses two critiques of the jurisprudential basis of settler colonialism in Australia published in the early Victorian periodical press. Review articles in the North British Review and Fraser’s Magazine in the 1840s deployed claims of legal sophistry to dispute the fiction that Australian colonies were settled, rather than conquered, and that the country was a terra nullius. By examining the politics and rhetoric of each article, the significance of legal ideology for both literature promoting colonization and humanitarian critiques of colonial policy is assessed. Through a combination of discourse analysis and intellectual history, the North British Review article is read as fusing Scottish Enlightenment concepts of social evolution with the rhetoric of sensibility to defend the existence of Indigenous rights to land and to argue for the degenerative implications of colonial social practices. Similarly, the Fraser’s Magazine article offers an epitome of the place of law in colonial policy-making by invoking utilitarian and pragmatic approaches to law to rationalize doctrines of sovereignty and jurisdiction, minimizing legal protections for Aborigines while maximizing the legal powers of colonists. By tracing the use of jurisprudential rhetoric in reviews published in two leading metropolitan journals, the paper offers evidence that the literary sphere contributed to the emergent culture of colonial legality.

Tina Dafnos, ‘Pacification and Indigenous Struggles in Canada’, Socialist Studies (2013).

Front-line police operations are deeply entwined with less visible activities – or practices not commonly identified as policing – that are carried out by a wide range of participants as strategies of settler-colonial pacification operating through the organizing logics of security and liberal legalism. Usingopen source texts and records obtained through access to information requests, this article unmaps some of the contemporary strategies employed byCanadian institutions to pacify Indigenous resistance. As a contribution to the body of work seeking to develop the politics of anti-security, the analysis disrupts the binary categories that animate security logic by examining the public order policing approach of the Ontario Provincial Police, the framing of Indigenous resistance as a security threat, and the integral role of Indian Affairs in securing the settler-state.

Bain Attwood, ‘Law, History and Power: The British Treatment of Aboriginal Rights in New South Wales’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (2013).

In recent decades historians have devoted considerable attention to the historical treatment of indigenous title in Anglophone settler colonies. These scholarly accounts have tended to emphasise the role metropolitan legal and intellectual discourses played in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this article I present a critical analysis of an influential example of such work in respect to the British denial of Aboriginal rights in land in the colony of New South Wales before providing an alternative account of the manner in which Aboriginal title was treated, which focuses on the nature of the relations on the ground between sojourners, settlers and Aboriginal people, the ways in which these encounters were represented by the British and the local practices regarding the transfer of land.

James V. Fenelon and Clifford E. Trafzer, ‘From Colonialism to Denial of California Genocide to Misrepresentations: Special Issue on Indigenous Struggles in the Americas’, American Behavioral Scientist 58, 1 (2014).

‘Indigenous peoples’ complex analytical issues include historical misrepresentation, struggles over sovereignty and autonomy, and Euro-American “conquest” including invasion, genocide, culturicide, and coercive assimilation, ranging over half a millennium of invasion and colonization. Perhaps the most critically contentious of these issues is genocide. We review historical construction of racial formation and cultural domination, focus on California genocide of Native peoples, and present articles in this special issue as means of understanding these processes and proposing future directions for indigenous studies.