We are calling for contributions to an edited collection on settler colonialism in world history, to be published by Routledge in 2015. The collection has a large scope, and features contributions by specialists in their field. We are currently seeking the remaining contributions:

• settler colonialism in New Spain, and the American west generally, from contact to the early twentieth century;
• settler colonialism in Australia, from contact to early twentieth century;
• settler colonialism in Taiwan and Korea, WWII to the present;
• settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine, 1948 to the present;
• settler colonialism in the USA, early twentieth century to the present.

On top of this, we are also open to suggestions for further case studies, for thematic contributions, and for contributions featuring non-conventional geographies or periodisations.

Please send an expression of interest with CV jointly to Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini.

Shirleene Robinson, ‘Regulating the race: Aboriginal children in private European homes in colonial Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 37, 3 (2013).

This article focuses on the incorporation of Aboriginal children into European families on a private basis in the colonial era. While state-based missions and reserves were central sites where Aboriginal children were placed, other Aboriginal children were privately placed with European families during the colonial era. This article explores the shifting reasons for this practice. It finds that Aboriginal children who entered European families away from the control of the state came under the control of Europeans through a variety of ways. Initially, Aboriginal child removals were conducted during the course of violent frontier conflict or involved children who had been impacted by introduced European diseases. Smaller numbers of Indigenous children were taken as objects of curiosity. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, it became increasingly common for settlers to take Indigenous children for labour purposes. The article argues that the white middle-class family was positioned as a site for “civilising” children, where the moral regulation of childhood was conducted. This article adds a new dimension to colonial understandings about the role and structure of the family. It also expands understandings about Indigenous child removal in Australia’s past.

Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Why Settler Australia Needs Refugees’, Arena Magazine (2013).

Australia’s newest refugee policy, like its predecessors, is ostensibly designed to address the refugee ‘problem’. However, in this article I argue that beside concerns about ‘national interest’, ‘security’, and ‘border protection’, asylum seekers—dehumanised people piled up in different configurations outside of its borders—are useful, indeed necessary, to settler Australia. Here I adopt the specifically Australian definition of refugee: someone who must not be allowed to enter a particular space no matter how urgent his or her human right to do so, and someone who is not entitled to protection unless he or she is ‘processed’ first. It is a definition that only makes sense in the context of Australia’s public debate, and a definition that is not consistent with that of international law. Focusing on the ways in which a specifically settler-colonial understanding of Australia’s sovereign capacities informs public sensitivities can shed light on a particularly Australian process of paranoid abjection. (Not only are the two definitions different; one is the exact complement of the other: if a refugee is normally someone who must depart, in the Australian definition he or she is someone who must not arrive; in the one case, one can be anywhere but an original location; in the other, one can be anywhere but the hoped-for final one.)

Kate Bowan, ‘”…that keen interest we have for the strange and the rare…”: The Radio Broadcasts of Adelaide composer Hooper Brewster-Jones (1930–1933)’, Journal of Music Research Online 1 (2009).

The surviving transcripts of Adelaide composer Hooper Brewster-Jones’s lecture broadcasts given in the early 1930s on Adelaide’s recently established ABC radio station 5CL reveal a cosmopolitan Australian composer eager to engage with other cultures. His cosmopolitanism is very much a rooted even provincial one, clearly embedded in his particular historical and cultural context. Nonetheless, the story of Brewster-Jones’s broadcasts helps to destabilise and complicate the picture of early twentieth-century Australian musical history. His encounters with musics modern, ancient and exotic add a missing page

to Australian broadcasting history and challenge the received orthodoxy of Australian music from this period as a pale imitation of English pastoralism.

The Times (SA) (5/8/2013).

Our right to the land is entrenched in history. It is undisputed.We have ancestral rights to the land because it was not granted or sold to anybody. The land belonged to aborigines who were there long before Europeans settled.

[…]

But colonialists took the aborigines and classified them as coloured.

Then these “coloureds” had to go through a restitution process. But this process only further alienated them from their land, as it required property rights and title deeds. Even the Land Restitution Act alienated the aborigines, because its cut-off date was 1913.

Jan Cronje in conversation with Tania Kleinhans for IoL.

James L. Flexner, ‘Historical Archaeology, Contact, and Colonialism in Oceania’, Journal of Archaeological Research (August 2013).

The archaeology of colonialism can destabilize orthodox historical narratives because of its critical engagement with multiple lines of evidence, revealing ways that different perspectives can complement or contradict what was assumed to be known about the past. In Oceania, archaeology that blends evidence from landscapes, sites, and artifacts with written documents as well as oral traditions reveals the role of indigenous people in shaping colonial encounters across the region over the last five centuries. The challenge lies with how to interpret this material in terms of ongoing struggles over land, resources, and identity in the region today, encapsulated by the tension between global and local.

Karen Hughes, ‘”I’d grown up as a child amongst natives”: Ruth Heathcock (1901-1995) – disrupting settler-colonial orthodoxy through friendship and cross-cultural literacy in creolised spaces of the Australian contact zone’, Outskirts online journal 28 (2013).

Growing up in the small River Murray town of Wellington, South Australia as the twentieth century turned, Henrietta (Ruth) Sabina Heathcock (nee Rayney) enjoyed a childhood shaped as much by Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal friends and elders, as by her close-knit Anglo-Irish family. The Rayney family lived on the eastern, Aboriginal, side of town, where Ngarrindjeri had lived for millennia, and where, in the 1880s, a group of Ngarrindjeri families from nearby Point McLeay Mission had been granted hard-won title to farm the land and raise their families (Jenkin 1979, 229-231). Wellington, indeed, was one of a number of pockets across colonial Australia where lived processes of negotiation and exchange between Aboriginal peoples and newcomers blurred social boundaries and mapped dynamic inter-cultural terrains on the frontier (see for example Hughes 2012, Balint 2012, Ryan 2011, Landon and Tonkin 1999, Yu 1994). Reflecting on her childhood friendships forged at Wellington in the first two decades of the 1900s, Ruth Heathcock recalled, ‘I went to school with Aboriginal children. Skin colour? It was all the same to me. I didn’t even know it existed’ (Hughes 1986).

In the following article I explore continuities in the nature of cross-cultural intimacy over time by examining the friendships that Ruth Heathcock sustained with Aboriginal people at Wellington, and later across a range of other sites. These played out against a backdrop of restrictive race-based legislation that attempted to foreclose possibilities for such connectivity in early and mid-twentieth century Australia.

Poetic Craft and White-Settler Colonialism: A workshop on Australian and South African poetics. 13-14 September 2013, University of Western Sydney Bankstown campus (Bullecourt Ave, Milperra).

This workshop will bring together eminent Australian and South African poets and critics to con-sider how poets in societies with a white settler history think about their world through their poetry making. The subject is not white settler colonialism as a theme in poems, but as a limiting circum¬stance within which poets are concerned to develop particular idioms and techniques. How does this particular form of colonialism condition the aspiration to articulate truth in verse? What are the problems and politics of poetic craft generated by the settlement process and its aftermath? By comparing Australia and South Africa, we hope to avoid discussion of national ‘characteristics’, but, at the same time, to head off easy generalisations about postcolonialism or transnationalism. Our attention is on poetry’s material, approached in its regional specificity and through parallels in technical problems encountered during the global colonial expansion and its aftermath.

Ben Emmerson, the UN’s special rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, said a long-running dispute over land rights could boil over into serious violence at any moment.

[…]

Mr Emmerson said the state had repeatedly discriminated against the Mapuche and used anti-terrorism legislation against them “in a confused and arbitrary fashion that has resulted in real injustice”.

Gideon Long for BBC News.