Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, ‘Discursive manipulations of names and naming in Kate Grenville’s “The secret river”‘, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 36, 1 (2013).

This article stems from two observations arising from my reading of Kate Grenville’s three-part exploration of Anglo-Australia’s frontier history. The first is that, contrary to Grenville’s averred commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about the modern nation’s shameful origins, her recent historical fiction betrays a refractory tendency to portray Australia’s past in a sentimental light. The second is that names and the act of naming constitute a dominant strand in the narrative weave of each of the novels. In the discussion that follows I seek to demonstrate the existence of a causal link between these two apparently unrelated observations by showing that a recurrent narratorial emphasis on the affective importance that names of places, people and things assume in the life of the colonial subject constitutes a vital element in the “empathetic history” (Gall 95) of Australia’s frontier era that Grenville is intent on creating. Although this analysis can be applied to all three of Grenville’s colonial novels, the present article will focus solely on the trilogy’s opening volume, The Secret River – the work in which the author’s discursive manipulation of names is most transparent and the ideological direction the rest of her frontier saga will follow is clearly signposted.

Nadine Attewell, Better Britons: Reproduction, Nation, and the Afterlife of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).

In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his famous novel about a future in which humans are produced to spec in laboratories. Around the same time, Australian legislators announced an ambitious experiment to “breed the colour” out of Australia by procuring white husbands for women of white and indigenous descent. In this study, Nadine Attewell reflects on an assumption central to these and other policy initiatives and cultural texts from twentieth-century Britain, Australia, and New Zealand: that the fortunes of the nation depend on controlling the reproductive choices of citizen-subjects. 

Better Britons charts an innovative approach to the politics of reproduction by reading an array of works and discourses – from canonical modernist novels and speculative fictions to government memoranda and public debates – that reflect on the significance of reproductive behaviours for civic, national, and racial identities. Bringing insights from feminist and queer theory into dialogue with work in indigenous studies, Attewell sheds new light on changing conceptions of British and settler identity during the era of decolonization.

Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Review: Between Indigenous and Settler Governance’, Journal of Global History 9, 1 (2014).

Comparative settler colonialism as a scholarly field is relatively recent. The foundational works evinced critical interest in the white settlers and only indirectly in the indigenes, even if the critique was radical. They insisted that the dispossession and elimination of the native societies were not extrinsic ‘things’ that the settler nations once did but what those settler nations intrinsically are.

Alison Bashford, ‘Immigration restriction: rethinking period and place from settler colonies to postcolonial nations’, Journal of Global History 9, 1 (2014).

Immigration acts have long been analysed as instrumental to the working of the modern nation-state. A particular focus has been the racial exclusions and restrictions that were adopted by aspirationally white, new world nation-states: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This article looks again at the long modern history of immigration restriction in order to connect the history of these settler-colonial race-based exclusions (much studied) with immigration restriction in postcolonial nation-states (little studied). It argues for the need to expand the scope of immigration restriction histories geographically, temporally and substantively: beyond the settler nation, beyond the Second World War, and beyond ‘race’. The article focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, bringing into a single analytical frame the early immigration laws of New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada on the one hand and those of Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Fiji on the other.

Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance. – See more at: http://dev.dukeupress.edu/Mohawk-Interruptus/?viewby=author&lastname=Simpson&firstname=Audra&middlename=&sort=author&aID=2384894#sthash.Q1789Jz9.dpuf

Edward Cavanagh, ”Possession and Dispossession in Corporate New France, 1600–1663: Debunking a “Juridical History” and Revisiting Terra Nullius’, Law & History Review 32, 1 (2014).

Following Jacques Cartier’s voyages up and down the St. Lawrence River in 1534, 1535–36 and 1541–42, French interest in the region surged. This interest was confined to the region’s potential deposits of minerals, and then diverted realistically to the trade of furs, before ultimately, during the seventeenth century, it diversified to take into account the prospect of agricultural smallholding. So confined, this interest did not account for customary tenure and systems of property relations among indigenous inhabitants; generally these were matters avoided by merchants, traders, missionaries, and early settlers until the expediencies of settlement on the ground required otherwise. These were matters for which, in New France, the companies in charge devised no coherent policy. These were matters for which, at home, the French Crown was no beacon of advice either, meting out meager and inconsistent policies of empire before 1663, preferring instead to endorse trade monopolies while preparing for disputes with neighboring nations with competing designs to the New World. This article explores how settler colonialism got underway in New France without the recognition of indigenous property rights in land. Land was granted by companies seigneurially, and came to be held and farmed by censitaires. Titles carried no endorsement from resident indigenous communities, and the vague endorsement they carried from the Crown—whose role was less important in the development of New World feudalism than it was in earlier centuries at home—was universally purveyed by outsourced corporate entities, the biggest of which being the Compangie de la Nouvelle-France, chartered in 1627.

Unsettlement and Decolonization: New Directions

A Conference Organized by Dr. Michael R. Griffiths

Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University.

Confirmed Plenary Speakers: Kevin Bruyneel (Politics, Babson College); Jodi A. Byrd (English and American Indian Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); Mark Rifkin (English and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro); Dale Turner (Government and Native American Studies, Dartmouth College).

Respondents: Elizabeth Povinelli (Columbia University); Audra Simpson (Columbia University).

Presenters: Phanuel Antwi (St Mary’s University), Hadeel Assali (Columbia University), Bruno Cornellier (University of Winnipeg), Melissa Forbis (SUNY Stonybrook), Shiri Pasternak (Columbia University), Mezna Qato (Columbia University).

And featuring artist Stephen Paul Jackson (presenting as Stron Softi), theorist and music producer Jarrett Martineau, and filmmaker Hadeel Assali presenting on their creative work.

In 1923, Iroquois leader Levi General (best known by his title, Deskaheh) visited Geneva. The purpose of his visit was to petition the League of Nations to uphold the claim of the Iroquois Confederacy to nationhood. Under pressure from Britain, the United States, and Canada, Deskaheh’s petition was ignored by the League.

What does this moment of geopolitical misrecognition mark—across an archipelago of simultaneously distinct and comparable experiences of settler colonialism? What, further, is the nature of the fundamental political aspirations and assertions of the fourth world in relation to settler colonial power that has emerged after such impasses as Deskaheh’s mission to Geneva? In the absence of either recognition at the level of nation state-hood, or an alternative geopolitical formation (for instance of the kind instantiated at the Bandung Conference by third world nation-states 30 years after Deskaheh’s mission), indigenous peoples have evolved multiple strategies of political organization.

On the one hand, an alternative internationalism has emerged, culminating very recently in the 2006 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. On the other, the largely symbolic nature of this international order has meant that the politics of recognition has dominated indigenous politics across the fourth world. Do these strategies operate as decolonizing strategies? Even after the United Nations Declaration, indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada still rely on appeals for recognition from settler nation states in order to assert political rights.

In the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand, a comparable and yet distinct politics of recognition attends upon the history of treaty making (and breaking) and assertions of sovereignty that recall multiple specters from Deskaheh to Waitangi. What extant and possible avenues exist for transnational solidarity in light of the plural (and sometimes, arguably, incommensurable) modes by which indigenous peoples have elaborated decolonizing strategy in light of settler colonization? Further, might this comparison extend to settler colonial situations wherein subalternity is not predicated on precisely the same concept of indigeneity (such as in the Occupied Palestinian Territories)?

Department of Anthropology, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Center for Palestine Studies, INTERACT Initiative, The Middle East Institute, The Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Please see this link for the schedule:

http://udecolonization.wordpress.com/

Jeffrey Monaghan, Mounties in the Frontier: Circulations, Anxieties, and Myths of Settler Colonial Policing in Canada’, Journal of Canadian Studies 47, 1 (2013).

Examining correspondence records from 1886 onward, this essay details how the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) established patrol routes in the year following the North-West Rebellion. Discussing how patrols were intended to enhance the circulation of NWMP officers, the author borrows from Michel Foucault (2007) to examine how correspondence records characterize the objectives and methods of the new patrols. In part aimed at accumulating knowledge of natural and artificial conditions, the circulations aimed to anticipate, contain, and control outbreaks of perceived dangers. The circulation of patrols also produced various forms of knowledge and imaginings about the Indigenous population in the North-West. By continuously sorting and distinguishing between “good Indians” and “bad Indians,” circulations contribute to settler anxieties and elicit further calls for “law and order.” The author details how the enhanced circulation of NWMP patrols often produce anxieties and rumours that are rooted in the colonial imagination, serving to rationalize mechanisms of security as an essential function of liberal order-building.

Alyosha Goldstein, ‘Finance and Foreclosure in the Colonial Present’, Radical History Review 118 (2014).

The Claims Resolution Act (CRA) of 2010, which brought together and financed a series of historic US civil rights and Native American class-action lawsuit settlements, serves as the lens through which this essay examines debates over accountability, debt, and reconciliation and provides a means to consider how present-day efforts to foreclose the genealogies of historical injustice have been shaped in response to the contemporary crisis of global capitalism and financialization. Focusing on the salience of racialization and settler colonialism, this essay studies how and why the CRA’s juridical assemblage brings into proximity discrepant histories of dispossession and racism so as to situate these within an overarching teleology of progress and improvement in the face of contemporary economic volatility and social instability.

Dolores Calderon, ‘Speaking back to Manifest Destinies: a land education-based approach to critical curriculum inquiry’, Environmental Education Research (2013).

This article examines the ways in which settler colonialism shapes place in the social studies curriculum, producing understandings of land and citizenship in educational settings. To do this, the author uses the emergent framework of land education to move forward the important projects of place-based education, especially its potential for centering indigeneity and confronting educational forms of settler colonialism in environmental education. To emphasize how place-based education can intersect with land education, the author outlines how a concept of place, informed by Indigenous knowledge, renders settler colonialism visible. The author then describes how current models of place-based education differ from land education in a number of ways. Finally, using a land education approach, the author demonstrates how schooling, through social studies curriculum, transmits a settler colonial land ethic that must be made explicit in order to decolonize settler colonial relations attached to current pedagogical models of place. The author insists land education – like environmental education – must take place across the curriculum (k-16). However, land education implies a commitment to begin to understand the process of decolonization that takes seriously the centrality of settler colonialism.