Brian Gettler, ‘Money and the Changing Nature of Colonial Space in Northern Quebec: Fur Trade Monopolies, the State, and Aboriginal Peoples during the Nineteenth Century’, Histoire sociale/Social history 46, 92 (2013)

An examination of the shifting boundaries of monetary space in nineteenth-century Quebec underlines the importance of currency to the processes of colonial expansion and state formation. As the Hudson’s Bay Company’s imperially backed corporate currency was gradually replaced with money that drew its legitimacy from colonial governors and legislatures, regions previously beyond the pale of settler society were reconceptualized as being part of the political space of “Canada.” This article examines the monetary experience of First Nations in Saguenay-Lac St. Jean, tracing the structural changes to the monetary system wrought by the replacement of British claims to sovereignty, embodied in the fur trade, by those based on settler colonialism. The region’s Indigenous population played a central role in this transformation.

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Un examen des frontières mouvantes de l’espace monétaire au Québec du XIXe siècle souligne l’importance de la devise pour l’expansion coloniale et la formation de l’État. À mesure que la devise au soutien impérial de la Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson a été remplacée par de l’argent tirant sa légitimité des gouverneurs et des législatures de la colonie, les régions jusqu’alors en retrait de la société coloniale ont été reconceptualisées dans l’espace politique du « Canada ». Cet article examine l’expérience monétaire des Premières Nations du Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, retraçant les changements structurels au système monétaire né du remplacement des revendications de la Grande-Bretagne en matière de souveraineté, incarnées par le commerce de la fourrure, par celles du colonialisme de peuplement. La population autochtone de la région a joué un rôle central dans cette transformation.

Sean Carleton, ‘Illustrating Racism: Challenging Canada’s Racial Amnesia with Comics’, Histoire sociale/Social history 46, 92 (2013).

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It has been ten years since Chester Brown challenged Canadian historians to think more carefully about comic books with the publication of Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. Over the past decade, comics with historical content have become increasingly popular resources for people to learn about the past. Yet many historians remain uncertain about the value and legitimacy of the emerging field of historical comics. This hesitancy is understandable; many comics practitioners make interpretive choices that disrupt disciplinary practices, often blurring distinctions between fact and fiction as well as popular and professional history. Historical comics are also rarely the products of archival research and are not subject to a peer-review process. Yet, prominent scholars such as American historian Paul Buhle and Canadian education historians Michael Cromer and Penney Clark argue that there is great pedagogical potential in engaging with comics in the history classroom. Cromer and Clark suggest that comics are “multilayered” and encourage students to “marry print and visual representations in order to read in ways that are deeply meaningful, because the narrative is incomplete without both dimensions.” Moreover, they contend that the process of reading comics, which requires readers to piece together the story through their own interpretation of the visual and textual material provided, has the potential to increase students’ “tolerance of ambiguity and appreciation for the nature of history as interpretation.” The scholarship of Buhle, Cromer, and Clark has sparked a much-needed academic conversation about the merits of comics as history. To add to this discussion, I offer a review of three recent Canadian history comics that make significant contributions to Canadian social history and warrant critical attention: David H. T. Wong’s Escape to Gold Mountain: A Graphic History of the Chinese in North America, Zach Worton’s The Klondike, and David Robertson’s and Scott Henderson’s Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story.

Each of these works, like Brown’s Louis Riel, draws attention to Canada’s hidden histories of racism. Despite the fact that racism has deep roots in settler societies, it is commonly believed that racism did not, nor does not, exist in Canada. Sherene H. Razack calls this forgetting a racial “amnesia.” Although attitudes toward race are socially constructed, their material and historical consequences are not. “’Race’ is a mythical construct,” Constance Backhouse reminds us, “’Racism’ is not.” Escape to Gold Mountain, The Klondike, and Sugar Falls illustrate for readers how racial differences have been “pressed into service” to justify, rationalize, and reproduce asymmetrical social relations to the benefit of settlers. By examining Chinese immigration to North America, the dynamics of race relations during the Klondike gold rush, and one student’s experience in a Manitoba residential school, these historical comics demonstrate the effects of racist practices in Canada. Far from being silly or irrelevant, these historical comics contribute to Canada’s complex social history and can be used to challenge Canada’s racial amnesia. Comics, then, might be used by historians as another tool in an increasingly diverse toolkit.

Katrine Barber, ‘Shared Authority in the Context of Tribal Sovereignty: Building Capacity for Partnerships with Indigenous Nations’, Public Historian 35, 4 (2013).

Indigenous and non-Indigenous public history partnerships present unique challenges. Historical colonial practices and their present persistence, divergent historical perspectives, and disciplinary standards that enforce antiquated notions of objectivity and historical truth complicate the spaces of “shared authority.” Moreover, public history institutions and their academic counterparts have historically broadcast colonial success. How can we foster partnerships that do not reinforce “asymmetrical relations of power”? How can educators build capacity in students to partner ethically with Indigenous Nations? This essay draws from a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship to argue that a triad of concepts–shared authority, contact zones, and survivance–can aid in the development of decolonial public history practices and curricula.

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

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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.