Rebe Taylor, ‘Genocide, Extinction and Aboriginal Self-determination in Tasmanian Historiography’, History Compass 11, 6 (2013).

The principal aim of this article is to survey the long and complex relationship between the ideas of genocide and extinction as they apply to Tasmanian historiography from the colonial period to the present moment. In so, doing this essay brings up to date Ann Curthoys’ 2008 essay on genocide in Tasmania and extends Curthoys’ principal inquiry: how there emerged ‘a paradox’ between international representations of Tasmania as a ‘clear-cut’ case of genocide and the fact ‘such a characterization is rarely adopted within Australia’. This essay finds Curthoys’ ‘paradox’ less relevant to popular Australian representations of Tasmanian history where, from the 1970s, the idea of genocide did not merely replace the older idea of extinction, but promulgated it. Such representations directly undermined an emergent movement for Tasmanian Aboriginal self-determination. The political protest of Tasmanian Aboriginal people influenced historical scholarship, lead foremost by Lyndall Ryan from the early 1980s: to characterize Tasmania as a case of genocide at that time may have potentially jeopardized an important message of Aboriginal survival in the face of colonialism.

Lorraine Weir, ‘“Time Immemorial” and Indigenous Rights: A Genealogy and Three Case Studies (Calder, Van der Peet, Tsilhqot’in) from British Columbia’, Journal of Historical Sociology (advanced edition 2013).

“Time immemorial” has operated as a legal fiction in the discourse of colonization, performing a genealogical function in the construction of “antiquity” and “legal memory” in English law, and repurposed in Indigenous rights cases in Canada. Beginning with a genealogical outline, this paper analyzes “time immemorial” in relation to Settler and Indigenous discourses of time, memory and the land in Calder, Van der Peet, and Tsilhqot’in.

Michelle R. Sizemore, ‘When are the People?: Temporality, Popular Sovereignty, and the U.S. Settler State’, South Central Review 30, 1, (2013).

This essay examines the subject of anti-imperialism through the lens of settler postcolonial studies, an approach that immediately confounds sure distinctions between pro- and anti- imperialism. In the mid-1790s, during the Whiskey Rebellion, farmers in western Pennsylvania revolted against a federal government that used them to advance the course of empire while simultaneously treating them as colonists within the empire they labored and risked to create.Even the briefest sketch of this historical episode hints at the complexity of settler subjects’ imperial affiliations and attitudes. Technically, the whiskey rebels were both: in favor of those policies and customs that sanctioned the appropriation of Indian lands and against those that positioned white settlers as subalterns. My contention is that this popular uprising against the imperialist dictates of the U.S. government clarifies two competing visions of empire much more than it reveals opposing stances for and against.

In this article I suggest that these competing visions of empire play out in the widespread debate over popular sovereignty, and my primary concern is how traditional notions of sovereignty were re-negotiated within the context of settler rights. Looking at the Whiskey Rebellion, including George Washington’s actual and symbolic role in suppressing the revolt, I argue that the last decade of the eighteenth century witnessed an uncomfortable shift from unitary to plural sovereignty. Made clear by documentary evidence from the rebellion, republican political culture shifted away from authority concentrated in a single individual to its anonymous dispersal far and wide. With this shift comes the dislocation of sovereign power, the diffusion of sovereignty in time as well as in space. This model of sovereignty, on which the decentralized settler model of empire thrived, would severely weaken the centralized federal model of empire.

Alex Trimble Young, ‘Settler Sovereignty and the Rhizomatic West, or, The Significance of the Frontier in Postwestern Studies’, Western American Literature 48, 1 & 2 (2013).

Contemporary “postwestern” literary scholarship has largely turned away from frontier historiography toward a “critical regionalist” approach in its efforts to move western literary studies away from familiar national paradigms. As western studies has moved away from what historian Kerwin Klein calls “big frontier tales,” frontier historiography has made a forceful reemergence in contemporary transnational settler colonial studies.This essay seeks to put the “big frontier tales” of settler colonial studies into conversation with postwestern studies through a reading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of “the rhizomatic West” in A Thousand Plateaus, a text that has been especially influential in postwestern studies and American studies writ large. In addition to exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s Beat Generation and Myth and Symbol School sources, this essay glosses critiques of Deleuze and Guattari by Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd and British-Israeli theorist Eyal Weizman, both of whom relate Deleuzian rhizomatics to the ideological and spatial forms of settler colonial expansion.Having outlined a critique of “the rhizomatic West” from this perspective, it offers a brief reading of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road through the lens of settler colonial theory in order to argue that an engagement with frontier historiography should inform our understanding of contemporary understandings of “westness.”

Edward Cavanagh, ‘The History of Dispossession at Orania and the Politics of Land Restitution in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39, 2 (2013).

This article takes for its subject a small piece of land on the southern banks of the middle Orange River, which has been known in the last few decades as ‘Orania’. A human history of its longue durée is presented, tracking the relationship between people and land, from San occupation right up to the introduction of individualist understandings of private property by European settlers. This is a history of dispossession that carries on into the twentieth century, when the land in question became state-owned before reverting, again, to private ownership. Using interviews, newspaper articles and existing official records, this article then recounts a little-known event: the dispossession of a small squatter community in Orania between 1989 and 1991. After this ‘removal’, Orania was transformed into a small Afrikaner volkstaat, a place exclusively white and Afrikaans. In 2005, the new community discovered that the town’s previous inhabitants had lodged a land claim with the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights. This article analyses the investigation and resolution of this claim in order to examine how the concept of restitution has been politicised in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that the discourses involved in the reclamation of land rights have often been ignorant of more comprehensive histories of dispossession.

Alabama high school graduate Chelsey Ramer was fined $1,ooo and denied her diploma and transcripts after wearing an eagle feather attached to her mortarboard as a symbol of her Native American heritage.

Katie McDonough for Salon.

Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien (eds), Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013).

This engaging collection surveys and clarifies the complex issue of federal and state recognition for Native American tribal nations in the United States. Den Ouden and O’Brien gather focused and teachable essays on key topics, debates, and case studies. Written by leading scholars in the field, including historians, anthropologists, legal scholars, and political scientists, the essays cover the history of recognition, focus on recent legal and cultural processes, and examine contemporary recognition struggles nationwide.

Contributors are Joanne Barker (Lenape), Kathleen A. Brown-Perez (Brothertown), Rosemary Cambra (Muwekma Ohlone), Amy E. Den Ouden, Timothy Q. Evans (Haliwa-Saponi), Les W. Field, Angela A. Gonzales (Hopi), Rae Gould (Nipmuc), J. Kehaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), K. Alexa Koenig, Alan Leventhal, Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee), Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), John Robinson, Jonathan Stein, Ruth Garby Torres (Schaghticoke), and David E. Wilkins (Lumbee).

Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch, ‘Empire and After: Toward a Framework for Comparing Empires and Their Consequences in the Post-Imperial Middle East and Central Asia’, Journal of Historical Sociology (early edition, 29 MAY 2013).

This article compares and contrasts the variations in paths from empire to sovereignty in the Middle East and Central Asia. We identify differences in empires and their impact; examine the drivers of transition from empire to sovereignty, the international system and nationalist mobilization; assess the consequences of imperial transmissions for state formation and nation-building; and link these factors to the degree of rupture with empire in the post-imperial period.

An amendment and announcement by Patrick Wolfe:

Settler Colonialism and Native Alternatives in Global Context is a collection of essays that will make up special editions, guest-edited by myself, of two international journals. Part 1, ‘The Settler Complex’, is due to appear this week as volume 37, no. 2 of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Part 2, ‘Recuperating Binarism’, will appear later this year as volume 3, no. 4 of Settler Colonial Studies.

This initiative in cross-journal collaboration is intended to bring developments in settler colonial studies into closer conversation with specialist scholarship in Indigenous studies.

The correction:

In my introduction to the print version of Part 1 (AICRJ, vol. 37, no. 2, p. 9), I wrongly state that Maya Mikdashi is Palestinian and Ojibwe. She is actually Lebanese and Ojibwe. The mistake will be corrected in the on-line version but it is too late for the print version. The mistake and the responsibility are entirely mine.

Patrick Wolfe.

A Response to A. B. Yehoshua, by Lorenzo Veracini:

Yehoshua wants to define Zionism ‘realistically’ (‘Defining Zionism: The Belief that Israel Belongs to the Entire Jewish People’, Haaretz, 21/05/13). ‘Realistically’, which appears in the subtitle and in the text, is key: different positions – all other opinions in a multifarious debate in fact, those located to one side and those positioned on the other (he places himself in the very middle) – are implicitly unrealistic; they are not premised on reality. Zionism, Yehoshua also implies, is about reality. But with a twist: not reality as is, but reality as it could or should become (which means that it isn’t about reality, only about changing it). Indeed, although he does not say it, this is an inescapable and defining feature of his definition, Zionism is about the future as distinct from the present. At first, a long time ago, it was about the future state, and once a state was finally constituted, about its future populations. On the other hand, as well as a conquest of the middle ground, his definitory exercise is presented as a return: once everyone knew what Zionism was: ‘simple, clear, easy to define and understand’. To get back to that pristine environment, Yehoshua offers a set of four negative definitions.

First, he argues, Zionism is not only about residing in Palestine. There are Zionists who operate from somewhere else, and there are, and there were, Jews who resided in Palestine and are/were not Zionists, Yehoshua notes. Besides, there are ‘Israelis’ (the collective category defining those who reside in the state of Israel, a category Yehoshua distinguishes away from Zionists), who are legitimately non-Zionists. It is not primarily about residency, he argues, because it is about sovereignty. Zionism, he notes, is a fundamentally state-centric. Yet again, Zionism is about a Jewish state in Palestine as a specific location, Zionists are not, for example, territorialists. Which means that Zionism actually is about resident populations.

Second, Yehoshua opines, Zionism is not an ideology because it does not require Zionists to agree on the particular nature of the Zionist state, only on the fact that the state must be sovereign and that it must operate as an autonomous political entity (which means that Zionism is indeed an ideology, and that he is proposing a minimalist definition of it in order to encompass as many Zionists as possible). So, while it is an ideology, albeit a flexible one, Yehoshua also notes, thirdly, that Zionism is not about territory. Size does not matter, he argues, and a variety of possible territorial configurations would not determine the state’s Zionist character. A full suite of sovereign capacities is the fundamental issue, he insists. But, of course, territory is both a prerequisite and a fundamental characteristic of any sovereign polity. Yehoshua cannot change this fact, and Zionism remains primarily about territory. As any general would also confirm, one can compensate with skill but size does matter.

Fourthly, he notes, since Zionism is about sovereignty and since sovereignty was achieved, Zionism is now about the Law of Return. Besides maintaining a sovereign character, the link between the Zionist state as the polity constituted by those who moved or were born there and those who could move there is all that remains. This is, in his words, the ‘belief that Israel belongs to the entire Jewish people’. In other words, Zionism is not, Yehoshua argues, anideology that pertains to those who have moved there and those who actually reside there, but about those who should reside there in the future. This means that Zionism is not about Israelis as they are but as they must be made to be. A capacity to bridge the distance between the actual and the potential resident populations of Israel/Palestine as a specific territory constitutes the biopolitical dimension of the Zionist sovereign polity (so Zionism is fundamentally about residency, and territory). This bridging is called ‘transfer’: transferring a specific socio-political body in, transferring another out. Zionism is the sovereign capacity to enact that transfer.

So far, nothing really new. But you can’t have both. Either ‘Zionism’ is sovereign, or the state it built is. This is a point that Yehoshua may want to consider: isn’t his definition of Zionism dispossessing all Israelis (and not just all Palestinians) of their inherent sovereign capacities? As in a dystopian science fiction movie, the state of Israel of the future is depriving the state of Israel of the present of its sovereign capabilities (that is, if you are a Zionist in accordance with Yehoshua’s definition you cannot accept that the Israel of the present may decide on matters that will affect the Israel of the future as defined by the Law of Return, which is as good a definition as any of a limited sovereign capacity). Let me propose an alternative definition: the transformative sovereign control of a particular territory’s population economy by an exogenous collective is called settler colonialism. Leaving the issue of morality aside, it is not a minor issue but it is not what is being discussed here, and only focusing on how it works, we should note that this specific socio-political formation asserted itself in North America, Australasia and other places. Settler colonialism is the territorialisation of populations and, relatedly, the population (and depopulation) of territory. Settler colonialism is transfer and Zionism is a particular settler colonial formation.

By fundamentally separating ‘Israelis’ and ‘Zionists’, Yehoshua locates Zionism beside (but, really, at least partially outside of) Israel. He does not know it, but his formula ‘Israeli statehood plus Zionist Law of Return’ amounts to the assertion of isopolitical relations between Israel and the Diaspora (isopolities are political entities that are constituted when two or more polities reciprocally or unilaterally bestow political and citizenship rights to each other’s citizens). By endowing Zionsim with a resilient biopolitical sovereign capacity that is distinct from that of Israel, Yohoshua endorses the absurdity of imperium in imperio, a sovereignty within a sovereignty. But a polity whose sovereignty resides partially outside of itself is an inherently defective one, no matter how powerful it is. Pace Yehoshua and paradoxically, as it defies the Zionist imperative of unfettered statehood, the Law of Return should be ultimately seen as an anti- Zionist anachronism. Herzl did not say in Basel ‘I founded the Jewish isopolity’; he said ‘a state’. Not only every aspect of his definition needs qualification, Yehoshua may be undermining Zionism by ostensibly defending it.

Isopolitical arrangements are also not unprecedented and could be looked at in a comparative framework. All settler colonial polities had them in place for a long time after their respective declarations/assertions of sovereign independence. Most US states, for example, had alien voting legislation until the early decades of the twentieth century and immediately granted access to land to immigrating co-ethnics. Australians were not formally distinguished from UK citizens until 1949, and Pakeha New Zealanders still bemoan having been abandoned when the UK joined another forming isopolity in the early 1970s. Whether they like it or not, all successful settler societies eventually assert their independence from the isopolities to which they once belonged. It is the culmination of a process that has the state at its core. That’s what all of them have done (of course, this does not mean that they did not have an immigration policy thereafter; only that prospective migrants were treated as suppliants, not as carriers of an inherent sovereign capacity.)

Despite Yehoshua’s definitory approach, Zionism as settler colonialism was and is about establishing/maintaining a country of some Jewish people (i.e., those who would move there). The recurring prospect of making Israel the country of all Jews (however this category may be defined) subjects Jewish Israelis to the political determination of others. This is also not unprecedented, and in the context of the relationships a settler collective entertains with external polities and agencies, contestations surrounding the ‘state of the Jewish people’ structurally replicate debates concerning the position of the 13 colonies during the revolutionary war in North America. Royalists and Loyalists claimed that the colonies were the indivisible property of the whole British nation (as represented by the king in parliament). The settlers begged to differ, had a tea party dressed up as Indians and established the most successful settler polity of all. Needless to say, the North American settler patriots did not fight for the rights of all as freeborn Englishmen, or for the rights of all freeborn Englishmen. They fought for their own specific rights as freeborn Englishmen and nobody else’s. Pace Yehoshua, discontinuing isopolitical relationships (i.e., repealing the Law of Return), would be the logical culmination of Zionism, its end as a dynamic process, not its discontinuation. Being an ideology defined by a specific objective, Zionism is fated to supersede itself by winning. Being post-Zionist may be the only Zionist thing left to do. Perhaps the actual settlers and their descendants, in alliance with the indigenous peoples, should take control.

Lorenzo Veracini

Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Melbourne