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.

As long ago as 2001, faculty at Stanford convened a Mellon Foundation seminar at the Stanford Humanities Center on “Settlement, Race, and Sovereignty in North America, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine,” examining similarities and differences, paving the way for other comparative studies. Today there is at least one transnational journal, Settler Colonial Studies, with essays on a wide range of settler societies. Understanding how the United States is founded as a settler society with the exclusion of indigenous people and the expropriation of their land is not a calumny but an aid in understanding all of the further developments of the United States, including the “plantation colonialism” of slavery and the necessity of importing workers as immigrants. Scholars now examine a wide range of societies with this rubric, including New Caledonia (with French settlers and native people), Fiji (South Asians brought by the British and native people), Korea (during the Japanese occupation), Taiwan (the exclusion of indigenous people), Liberia (with the settlement of African Americans dominating native Africans), the more famous “white settler colonies” (Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, with its two major settler populations, English- and French-speaking), and the failed French colony of Algeria. A recent issue of Settler Colonial Studies features a comparative study of Nazi Germany’s expansion with settlers in the East with the US expansion of the frontier on the West. These are historical developments, and examining and debating their similarities and differences is not an exercise in calumny but necessary to understanding and ultimately dealing with the legacies of history in an honest, clear-eyed fashion — which of course is an important goal of humanistic scholarship.

[…]

Like all settler colonial societies, the formation of Israel has its own unique features. However, as a colonizing project modeled after European efforts, early Zionist leaders felt it was essential to have sponsorship by a great power, seeking a charter first from the Ottoman Sultan and then the Russian Czar. Eventually, the British Empire, as it was about to conquer Palestine during World War I, agreed to sponsor the establishment of a “Jewish national home.” The fact that the agenda of the Zionist leadership did not ultimately entirely fit British policy does not negate the initial tutelage, just as the 13 American colonies’ struggle for independence does not erase their colonial origins. Israel was planted in Britain’s hothouse, and it continues to seek a great power sponsor. Since the 1960s, that role has been played by the United States.

[…]

Many believed that Israel was part of that movement and, particularly because of its kibbutzim and other socialist features, that it would play a progressive role in world politics. This view began to shatter when Israel established its capital in Jerusalem, contrary to the 1947 UN partition plan and General Assembly Resolution 303 of 1949 on the international status of Jerusalem, and when it refused to repatriate Palestinian refugees in contravention of UN General Assembly Resolution 194. The government of Israel invented the myth that the refugees fled in response to Arab orders — a claim Walid Khalidi first debunked in well-researched articles published in 1959 and Israeli historian Benny Morris massively refuted based on declassified Israeli documents. When Israel joined with France and Britain to invade Egypt in 1956, many began to realize that the Israeli government was more interested in allying with the former colonial powers than with the postcolonial world. Today, many of those socialist appearances have been swept aside and Israel has become a garrison state to serve its own colonizing interests as well as those of the United States, even if those interests are not completely identical.

‘Let’s Have Reasoned Debate, Not Distortion and Calumny: A Reply to Russell Berman’, by Hilton Obenzinger, Joel Beinin & David Palumbo-Liu, for LA Review of Books (27 April 2014), in response to Russell Berman’s ‘The Goal of the Boycott’. 

Haifa Rashed, Damien Short and John Docker, ‘Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli Genocide of Palestine’, Holy Land Studies 13 (2014).

This essay furthers the debate on the Palestinian case as it relates to Genocide Studies, questioning the lack of substantive discussion of this case to date in traditional Genocide Studies fora. It reemphasises the importance of the settler-colonial dimension to Zionist settlement in Palestine, which, it argues, has so far not been explored sufficiently. The paper suggests that the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, which was based on appropriation of the land of Palestine without its people, comprising massacres, physical destruction of villages, appropriation of land, property and culture, can be seen as an ongoing process and not merely a historical event.

Olaf Zenker, ‘New Law against an Old State: Land Restitution as a Transition to Justice in Post-Apartheid South Africa?’, Development and Change (2014 advance).

Based on a case study of the so-called ‘Kafferskraal’ land claim, this article scrutinizes the ongoing land restitution process in post-apartheid South Africa with regard to its capacity to provide a transition towards ‘justice’. After sketching the legal and institutional set-up of land restitution, the justice of the actual restitution process is explored with reference to conflicting interpretations by various actors involved in this exemplary case. Here, a focus on divergent understandings of what historically constituted valid rights in land as well as forms of past compensation reveals continuing discrepancies regarding the legitimacy of various property regimes. These differences, leading to divergent evaluations of ‘the justice’ of this claim’s final outcome, are shown to be ultimately rooted in incompatible logics of exceptionality and the ordinary, which conceive of land restitution in terms of either ‘law making’ or ‘law preserving’. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of such a configuration of land restitution as a measure of transitional justice.

Settler-colonial violence has rarely prompted any condemnation from Israel and its institutions. Regularly dismissed as isolated incidents despite the constant phenomenon and its deleterious effects upon Palestinians, settler violence is sanctioned by the Zionist state. Its perpetrators are regaled with impunity for upholding the historical violence that facilitated the establishment of the settler-colonial state.

However, similar violence unleashed recently against the IDF evoked a firm condemnation. Following the army’s demolition of dwelling structures in the West Bank, Jewish settlers stormed the IDF’s headquarters, threatening the soldiers and vandalising military equipment and facilities. According to the Times of Israel, IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz warned that failure to respond to “nationalist crimes” will threaten Israel’s security.

Ramona Wadi for Middle East Monitor.

Frank F. K. Byamugisha (ed.), Agricultural Land Redistribution and Land Administration in Sub-Saharan Africa: Case Studies of Recent Reforms (World Bank Publications, 2014).

Agricultural Land Redistribution and Land Administration in Sub-Saharan Africa: Case Studies of Recent Reforms focuses on ‘how’ to undertake land reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa, but with relevant lessons for other developing countries. It provides details, with case studies, on how reforms were undertaken to address a pressing and controversial development challenge in Africa – land ownership inequality – and an intransigent development issue – inefficiency and corruption in land administration. An equally important contribution of the book is assessing reforms and highlighting valuable lessons for other countries contemplating reforms.

Warren Elofson, ‘The Universality of Frontier Disorder: Northern Australia Viewed Against the Northern Great Plains of North America’, Journal of Agricultural History 88, 2 (2014).

This paper compares the levels of violence and law breaking on the cattle frontiers of the northern Great Plains of North America and the Northern Territory of Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that various conditions peculiar to frontiers such as sparse settlement, gender imbalance, the absence of infrastructure, the weakness of traditional Old World institutions, and racism lowered respect for authority and made law enforcement extremely difficult. The author suggests that the truth of the latter thesis is bolstered by the fact that at the same moment in history the people in these two societies discarded conventional rules and values as they built their pastoral industry—literally a world apart.

Jarno Valkonena and Sanna Valkonena, ‘Contesting the Nature Relations of Sámi Culture’, Acta Borealia: A Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Societies. Published online: 14 Apr 2014

Sámi culture is said to be characterized by a very close relationship to nature, regardless of time and place. However, the human–nature relation is a complex, multidimensional issue. Before we can make any substantive claims about the Sámi relationship to nature, we need first of all to define the “nature” to which the Sámi relate themselves. We study presentations of the Sámi nature relation and compare them to empirical research. We argue that there are in fact two different nature relations, which we describe as practical and discursive. It seems that on the one hand, the “special” nature relation of the Sámi refers to local habits and areas and therefore is not generalizable. On the other hand, there are political and performative constructions of indigenous Sámi identity that are tied to notions of nature relations.