Lorena Rizzo, Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa’, Visual Anthropology 26, 4 (2013).

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.

Occasion 5 (2013) Special issue editor Brian Codding.

Brian F. Codding, Douglas W. Bird, Ethan Blue and Jon Christensen, Richard White, ‘An Introduction to the Comparative Wests’

Alistair Paterson, ‘Enduring Contact: Australian Perspectives in Environmental and Social Change’

Frank Lake, ‘Historical and Cultural Fires, Tribal Management and Research Issue in Northern California: Trails, Fires and Tribulations’

Judee Burr, ‘Burning Across Boundaries: Comparing Effective Strategies for Collaboration between Fire Management Agencies and Indigenous Comm’

Grant Revell and Jill Milroy, ‘Aboriginal Story Systems: Re-mapping the West, Knowing Country, Sharing Space’

Jared Aldern, ‘Making Space for North Fork Mono (Nium) Narrative: Land, Learning, Parataxis, Policy, and Water in Central California’

Ethan Blue, ‘Finding Margins on Borders: Shipping Firms and Immigration Control across Settler Space’

William M. Taylor, ‘Home Ports and Sailing Ships: Maritime Settlement and Seaborne Mobility in Forming the Comparative Wests’

Darren Jorgensen, ‘Aboriginal Australian Cowboys and the Art of Appropriation’

Lisa Ford, ‘Comments on Comparing Wests’

Whatever the opposite is of native or rooted, that is what we felt ourselves to be. We thought of ourselves as sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent without a home, without a homeland.

J. M. Coetzee, Summertime.

John Strachan, ‘From Poverty to Wretchedness: Albert Camus and the psychology of the pieds-noirs’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, 2 (2013)

This article uses the pieds-noirs (European settlers) of Algeria as a case study of how “poor whites” have been constructed, and have constructed themselves, in colonial historiography. Beginning with a reexamination of terminology, and of the socioeconomic status of the pieds-noirs, I argue that the poverty of this community is more often and more usefully understood as a form of psychological impoverishment. The work of Albert Camus represents a salient example of these discourses and offers the historian a productive means of rethinking the conceptually liminal space of “poor whites” between colony and metropole.

Will Jackson, ‘Dangers to the Colony: Loose women and the “poor white” problem in Kenya’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, 2 (2013).

While a great deal of recent scholarship has focused on the problematic presence of so-called “poor whites” across the European colonial empires, comparatively little work has tackled their presence in Kenya. In part this may be explained by the force of Kenya’s contemporary reputation as a destination for socialites and aristocrats. Yet it also reflects the fact that, until 1939, attempts by authorities to minimise the “poor white” presence succeeded. This article argues that only after this point, when existing social control mechanisms fell redundant, did a “poor white” problem in Kenya emerge. Yet to understand “poor whites” simply in terms of an anomalous conjunction of (White) race and (low) class is analytically insufficient. What the evidence presented here shows is that endeavours to manage “poor whites” centred on the management of women. Deviance was gendered. “Poor white” men were doubtless problematic in the settler colony but women, as mothers, produced them. The disciplining of a White female subjectivity demanded the policing of female deviants first of all. While there is evidence of “poor white” men throughout the history of colonial Kenya, it was only during the years of the Second World War that “poor white” women came to government attention. The endeavour to control them, moreover, brought with it the discovery of a “poor white” problem and a racialised welfare project designed to resolve it.

Edward Cavanagh, ‘Kingdom or Colony? English or British?: Early modern Ireland and the colonialism question’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, 2 (2013).

Plenty happened in the century between Henry VIII’s rise to the position of “King of Ireland” in 1541 and the countrywide protests against Crown plantation policy in the fateful Uprising of 1641. The “Gaelic Irish” (or “Native Irish,” those native to Ireland and predominantly Catholic), and the “Old English” (those descended from twelfth-century Anglo-Norman migrants, mostly Catholic and largely assimilated within Irish society) were met with increasing numbers of new settlers (Protestant “New English” and Presbyterian Scots) who sought to displace existing landowners and take up plots in accordance with late-feudal tenure arrangements recently introduced to Ireland. Tensions over land and custom heightened, and divisions of class and faith sharpened. Ireland descended into conflict, albeit of a kind that came in fits and spurts, differing from county to county. Eventually, the entire island’s status as subordinate to the rule of English monarchy was confirmed (if it wasn’t already) following developments after the Uprising. Despite a succession of ambivalent yet occasionally heavy-handed monarchs who watched on as events unfolded during this problematic hundred-year window — €”failing in their successive attempts to develop a coherent policy for the region — €””independence” eventually gave way to “occupation.”

For all the depth and richness of the historical literature on Ireland under English rule during the Tudor and Stuart period, significant inconsistency prevails as to how one best conceptualises the complex relationship between Irish society and imperial England. This relationship has become a source of considerable debate for historians; today the burning “colonialism question” remains as inescapable as it was when David B. Quinn first showed in the 1960s how expansion into Ireland and expansion into Virginia were parallel processes. Was Ireland merely one section, alongside Wales and Scotland, of the so-called “Celtic fringe,” a “kingdom united” with England, ideologically configured alongside Scotland into “the empire of Great Britain” rather than the English empire proper? Or was Ireland just a colony, albeit an exceptional one, imagined as part of a great “western enterprise” that spread outward into an “Atlantic world” of colonies that came in all shapes and sizes? To be fair to its participants, this debate is not so cleanly divided as I depict it, for the tendency among historians of early modern Ireland is not to cluster on either side of it but rather to adopt worthwhile arguments from both, or otherwise insist that the situation is “ambiguous”€ — as, for instance, the editors of the aptly entitled collection Natives and Newcomers put it in 1986, Ireland was “distinctive,” neither kingdom nor colony but instead “a constitutional anomaly” that was a bit of both.

[…]

The obvious starting point might be to draw a line between the Ulster “plantation” to the north and the  “plantations” in Munster, Connacht and Leinster to the south of it.  Howe was on the right track when he alerted us to “‘settler colonialism’, concentrated in the north” … 

The point is that justice was always going to elude Trayvon Martin, not because the system failed, but because it worked. Martin died and Zimmerman walked because our entire political and legal foundations were built on an ideology of settler colonialism — an ideology in which the protection of white property rights was always sacrosanct; predators and threats to those privileges were almost always black, brown, and red; and where the very purpose of police power was to discipline, monitor, and contain populations rendered a threat to white property and privilege.

Robin D. G. Kelly for Huffington Post.

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.