Khoisan activists evicted for occupying a block of flats illegally in District Six erected a “matjieshuis” in the area on Sunday as a tribute to their aboriginal ancestors.

Tania Kleinhans, co-founder of the Institute for the Restoration of the Aborigine of South Africa (Irasa), one of the occupiers who had to vacate the flats meant for District Six land claimants, said the matjieshuis paid homage to their aboriginal roots.

It is a traditional Khoi dwelling. The houses were made of reed mats laid over a dome-shaped frame.

Nontando Mposo and Zodidi Dano for Independent.

J. Moufawad-Paul, ‘Sublimated Colonialism: The Persistence of Actually Existing Settler-Colonialism’, Philosophy Study 3, 3 (2013).

In my paper, “Sublimated Colonialism: The Persistence of Actually Existing Settler-Colonialism,” I interrogate the remaining settler-colonialisms that refused to disappear during the epoch of decolonization. I am most concerned with those settler-colonialisms that persist at the centers of world capitalism, and examine how this social context often produces an ideology that relegates the concrete reality of settler-colonialism to the past, pushing its existence under supposedly “modern” social relations. Since Frantz Fanon’s analysis of settler-colonialism, and the class contradiction between colonizer and colonized, was developed in an era where settler-colonialism was partially defined by the relationship between motherland and colony, some often imagine that the era of settler-colonialism is over. Clearly settler-colonialism did not vanish along with this distinction; internal colonies are retained in North America, for example, and the state of Israel is perhaps the most recent historical of this type of colonialism since it was settled and established in the 20th century. Moreover, there is often talk of a “world-wide indigenous movement” which claims to represent a global anti-colonialist front. The point of my paper, therefore, is to examine how settler-colonialism functions and persists when the settler-colony has become synonymous with the motherland. In this social context, colonizers often imagine themselves as the native inhabitants, while those who remain colonized are pushed even further out of history than they were during the previous era of settler-colonialism.

Kurt Eppinger’s community of German Christians arrived in the Holy Land to carry out a messianic plan – but after less than a century its members were sent into exile, the vision of their founding fathers brought to an abrupt and unhappy end.

The Germans were no longer welcome in what had been first a part of the Ottoman Empire, then British Mandate Palestine and would soon become Israel.

Raffi Berg for BBC News.

Six Native American tribes in the US state of Virginia are campaigning to win formal recognition from the federal government.

The tribes claim they have been denied their proper rights – enjoyed by 565 other tribes in the US which do have official status – since a 1920s state law on “racial integrity” decreed that people in Virginia were either “white or coloured”.

Yet the tribes are recognised in the UK thanks to a peace treaty signed in 1677 with the King of England.

More at BBC News.

Kristyn Harman, ‘Protecting Tasmanian Aborigines: American and Queensland Influences on the Cape Barren Island Reserve Act, 1912’, JICH (iFirst 2013).

Early twentieth-century Tasmanian discourses about racial difference reflected trans-imperial connections between England, its colonies, and the United States. This globalised discourse and ideological interconnectedness in turn produced recognisably and intentionally similar policies, although historians bounded by the interests of later nation-states have tended to overlook this. Tasmania’s Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1912 exemplifies how a particular colony’s ideology and policy, while attuned to local conditions and particularities, was nonetheless a product of an international framework for regulating the colonised. This legislation was demonstrably modelled on Aboriginal protection legislation passed in the Australian state of Queensland in 1897 and has significant commonalities with the Dawes Act passed in the United States in 1887 to provide for the subdivision of Indian reservations. In Australian historiography, the fact that Tasmania had an Aboriginal reserve and enacted Aboriginal protection legislation has been under-appreciated and even denied. This article redresses these omissions. It also contributes towards redressing the myopic focus on nation and/or colony that has, until recent years, left Australian historiography devoid of a full appreciation of colonial dependence on, and contributions to, a global discourse of race.

The Palestinian national movement and the anti-colonial struggle

Swinburne Institute for Social Research

Democracy & Justice – Special Seminar Wednesday, 17 July, 13:00-15:00, BA912 (Hawthorn Campus)

‘Comparative Contemporary Frontiers’

Alex Young and Timothy Neale

Two brief papers followed by discussion

Discussant: Lorenzo Veracini

‘“Are Mexicans Indigenous?” Settler Colonialism as A Paradigm for The Study of The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands’, Alex Young, University of Southern California

Abstract: As the work of Australian settler colonial theorists has begun to make inroads into U.S. scholarship as a paradigm for understanding “Westward expansion,” one region of the U.S. has proven a consistent stumbling block is the Southwestern Borderlands. The site of multiple forms of imperial conquest, the political and cultural formations of the contemporary U.S.-Mexican borderlands stand as something of a palimpsest of competing colonialisms, troubling any attempt to imagine a clear binary between settler and indigenous. Indeed, in one of the most controversial recent monographs, Comanche Empire, Pekka Hämäläinen argues that we must recognize indigenous sovereignties as themselves capable of imperialism. In this paper I will give an overview of recent works of scholarship of the US borderlands in order to explore both how the history of the Southwestern borderlands might serve to trouble the often Manichean applications of settler colonial theory in the U.S. context, but also to consider how the insights of transnational settler colonial studies might serve as an important explanatory tool for some of the borderlands’ more persistent contradictions.

‘Wild Rivers, Wild Time: Resilient Frontiers and Cape York Peninsula’, Timothy Neale, University of Melbourne Abstract: Recently, the Queensland government has begun attempting to ‘replace’ the Wild Rivers Act 2005, a

catchment-based environmental regulation requiring development setbacks from designated waterways. Decried as ‘green tape’ hampering Indigenous futures in the far north, the Act provoked sufficient ire in Cape York Peninsula to attract the attention of federal opposition leader Tony Abbott and, in turn, the interest of several parliamentary inquiries. But under Premier Newman’s administration the Act still survives and has continued to enjoy broad support in the Gulf and Channel country. Why this disparity between regions? This paper suggests that the Wild Rivers controversy should be understood in the context of the persistent failure of the settler project in Cape York Peninsula – its having been, to quote Noel Loos, a site of ‘uncompleted colonisation’ – a failure that has both led to the entrenchment of ‘wildness’ as a constitutive value of the region and, more recently, its availability to claim under native title and Indigenous land legislation. A resiliently remote, ecologically ‘intact,’ comparatively depopulated and majority Indigenous region, the present uses of the Peninsula’s persistent ‘wildness’ places pressure upon binary conceptualisations of the settler- Indigenous problematic and opens up questions about the future of such regions within the settler-colonial nation state.

Biographical notes:

Timothy Neale is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, currently engaged in a project concerning Queensland’s Wild Rivers legislation. He has recently published papers in Australian Humanities Review and Griffith Law Review on this topic.

Alex Trimble Young is a Provost’s PhD fellow in the English department at the University of Southern California. His recent publications include an article on Deleuzian rhizomatics and the settler colonial imaginary in Western American Literature entitled ‘Settler Sovereignty and The Rhizomatic West’. With Erik Altenbernd, he is co-editing, a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies on the concept of the frontier in transnational history.

Lorenzo Veracini is at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism. He has authored Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010). Lorenzo is managing editor of Settler Colonial Studies.

WHEN President Jacob Zuma opened an exhibition in Cape Town recently commemorating the centenary of the Natives Land Act of 1913, he reaffirmed his government’s commitment to resolving the “land question” and declared that state-led land restitution remained key to the liberation of South Africa — echoing sentiments two decades old and just as catchy today. Never mind that the Restitution of Land Rights Act (22 of 1994) remains, technically, expired.

Key political points were up for grabs. As he spoke, hundreds of families in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, were being evicted from their homes. No government representatives were on site, although a few police were called to flank the outsourced thugs (“red ants”) as they turfed out the bad tenants.

In South Africa today, dispossessions considered “historical” by the terms of the law — technically, those that took place between 1913 and 1998 — are the bread and butter of the government. Those in crowded cityscapes are left up to community leaders and a handful of advocates prepared to defend pro bono and pursue the expensive course of public interest litigation on their own wallets (or the ledger books of the NGOs for whom they work).

[…]

The search for the most dastardly policy in the South African past is futile, but if one were forced to, surely the bantustanisation of the 1960s trumps reservation of the 1910s. But still, we are restricting ourselves to twentieth-century/apartheid-era history. It would be easier to argue that the conquest of the Cape peninsular Khoekhoe in the 17th century, and the violent expansion of Dutch corporate trekboers into Khoekhoe, San, and Xhosa country in the 18th century, trump all other events of state-led dispossession. Here we must beware, for we enter the foggy realm of pre-1913 dispossession: of “tradition”, long off-limits to transformation gurus.

But this may not be so off limits anymore. In the speech delivered in January, Zuma declared that “our government will reopen the lodgement date for claims and provide for the exception to the 1913 cut-off date to accommodate historical landmarks, heritage sites and descendants of the Khoi and San who lost their land long before 1913”.

“These amendments to our laws,” he said, “will take effect this year” (although these amendments do not appear in the bill of May to extend the latter cut-off date). Yet the nature of these reforms remains unqualified. For instance, can “heritage” claimants expect to enjoy the same tenure to their “landmarks” as others in South Africa? Will all of this serve to resurrect the moribund land claims court circuit or can we expect pre-1913 claims to fall within the unaccountable purview of the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights? Is there a budget? What criteria must claimants meet to be awarded land? Who knows.

Dispossession is a terrible thing. All forms, whether past or present, are complicated to redress. They require more thoughtful discussion than what we’ve heard so far. All of this 1913 talk reeks of convenience. While a hundred-year anniversary does make a great opportunity for power brokers to gain easy political points on the “land question”, that question is not so easily resolved as the president often contends before his crowds of admirers. New debates need to begin.

Business Day.

Fred Hendricks, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Kirk Helliker (eds), The Promise of Land: Undoing a Century Of Dispossession in South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Press, 2013).

The starting point for this book is that the current land reform policies in the country fail to take this colonial context of division and exclusion into account. As a result, there is an abiding land crisis in South Africa. The book examines the many dimensions of this crisis in urban areas, commercial farming areas and communal areas. It argues for a fundamental change in approach to move beyond the impasse in both policy and thinking about land. Of particular importance is that social movements have a critical role to play in charting a new course, both in respect of access to land and in influencing broader policy options. Struggles from below are crucial for rethinking purely statist efforts at land reform and the book grapples with the interplay between oppositional campaigns of social movements and the state’s policies and responses.

Essentially, the book argues that in South Africa the 1994 transition from apartheid to democracy has not translated into a process of decolonisation. In fact, the very bases of colonialism and apartheid remain intact, since racial inequalities in both access to and ownership of land continue today. With state-driven attempts at land reform having failed to meet even their own targets, a fundamental change in approach is necessary for South Africa to move beyond the deadlock that prevails between the objectives of the policy, and the means for realising them. It is also necessary to question the targets set for land redistribution: Will these really assist in changes for the majority?

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 15, 2 (2013), Special Issue: Indigeneity and Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

Helen Gilbert, ‘INDIGENEITY AND PERFORMANCE’.

Jacqueline Shea Murphy, ‘CLEARING THE PATH: Contemporary Dance, Indigenous Methodologies and Michelle Olson’s Evening in Paris’.

Helen Gilbert, ‘INDIGENEITY, TIME AND THE COSMOPOLITICS OF POSTCOLONIAL BELONGING IN THE ATOMIC AGE’.

Therese Davis & Romaine Moreton, ‘INDIGENOUS PERFORMANCE OF HISTORY, LOSS AND REMEMBRANCE IN WHISPERING IN OUR HEARTS: The Story of the Mowla Bluff Massacre’.

Charlotte Gleghorn, ‘REVISIONING THE COLONIAL RECORD: La relación de Michoacán and Contemporary Mexican Indigenous Film’.

Tina K. Ramnarine, ‘SONIC IMAGES OF THE SACRED IN SÁMI CINEMA: From Finno-Ugric Rituals to Fanon in an Interpretation of Ofelaš (Pathfinder)’.

Angela Impey, ‘SONGS OF MOBILITY AND BELONGING: Gender, Spatiality and the Local in Southern Africa’s Transfrontier Conservation Development’.

Stephanie Pratt, ‘George Catlin in Europe, ‘OBJECTS, PERFORMANCE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC SPECTACLE’.

Peter Kulchyski,'”SPEAKING THE STRONG WORDS”: Notes on Performing Indigenous Community Politics in Denendeh’.