Empire and Colonies in Northeastern North America. Thursday, March 21, 2013 7:00 pm Atrium Room 101, Saint Mary’s University.

Panelists: 

JERRY BANNISTER: Department of History, Dalhousie University. Author of The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832, and Co-editor of The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era. EDWARD CAVANAGH: Department of History, University of Ottawa. Author of Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and Dispossession on the Orange River, and Editor of the journal Settler Colonial Studies. ELIZABETH MANCKE: Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies, University of New Brunswick. Author of The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760-1830, and Co-editor of Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550-1850.

Suren Pillay, ‘Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp’, Social Dynamics iFirst (2013).

Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of “anxious urbanity.” This, the paper suggests, has defined the urban subject of colonial and apartheid modes of governmentality and has consequences for how we think about the postcolonial present of citizenship.

Ariel Bultz, ‘Redefining Apartheid in International Criminal Law’, Criminal Law Forum (2013)

This article asks: to what extent is Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute—the crime of apartheid—a tenable crime in international criminal law? It will be argued that despite the obligations incumbent on states not to intentionally discriminate against social groups, there is no customary legal norm of apartheid as a distinct crime against humanity. This is premised on the distinction between state obligations as different from norms demanding individual liability in international criminal law, as well as inadequacies of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973) and the absence of case law relying on apartheid as a crime against humanity. Further, the weaknesses hindering the formation of a customary norm of apartheid as a distinct crime against humanity will be assessed with regard to the Rome Statute. Also it will be shown that the lack of coherence of Article 7(1)(j) demonstrates that the crime of apartheid is subsumed by the crime of persecution. Finally, two suggestions are offered on how the crime of apartheid could be established as a distinct offence in international criminal law. The central thesis of this paper is that the crime of apartheid is ambiguous and inoperable. In order for Article 7(1)(j) to be relevant in international criminal law, the offence must be reworked and clearly articulated.

David MacDonald and Graham Hudson, ‘The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 45, 2 (2012).

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been investigating the array of crimes committed in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. Genocide is being invoked with increasing regularity to describe the crimes inflicted within the IRS system, the intent behind those crimes, and the legacies that have flowed from them. We ask the following questions. Did Canada commit genocide against Aboriginal peoples by attempting to forcibly assimilate them in residential schools? How does the UN Genocide Convention help interpret genocide claims? If not genocide, what other descriptors are more appropriate? Our position might be described as “fence sitting”: whether genocide was committed cannot be definitively settled at this time. This has to do with polyvalent interpretations of the term, coupled with the growing body of evidence the TRC is building up. We favour using the term cultural genocide as a “ground floor” and a means to legally and morally interpret the IRS system.

Tom Pessah, ‘Violent representations: hostile Indians and civilized wars in nineteenth-century USA’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, iFirst (2013).

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, white settlers officially labelled most conflicts with Native Americans as ‘wars’, unlike the ‘massacres’ white settlers experienced. This differential description indicated each race’s respective ‘civility’ and ‘savagery’. Indiscriminate warfare was officially attributed solely to Indians, despite much contrary evidence. State bodies’ recognition of conflicts as ‘wars’ was also necessary for the remuneration of the militia, who exercised much of this organized violence. While historians have ascribed this differential representation of the violence to consensual white cultural chauvinism, I emphasize that it was contested from within the settler community, and needed to be continuously maintained. A comparison of an 1864 Colorado conflict to an 1860 California one demonstrates how local coalitions dominated by landowners and politicians usually managed to officially designate the militia’s violence as civilized ‘wars’ against ‘hostile Indians’. In the exceptional Colorado case, federal intervention disrupted this pattern.

Ellen Smith, ‘White Aborigines: Xavier Herbert, P. R. Stephensen and the Publicist’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2013).

This essay explores the way ideas about Aboriginality informed right-wing nationalist projects in Australia in the 1930s. Focusing on the publication by the proto-fascist Publicist group of Xavier Herbert’s classic anti-racist protest novel of the Australian frontier, Capricornia, I unpack the unlikely logic by which a deep identification with Aboriginality and with the political struggle for Aboriginal rights is at the core of a set of fantasies about white Australian ethnicity and the great Australian novel. Recent scholarship on race and Australian nationalism ties nationalist investments in a traditional Aboriginal presence to the dismantling of the white Australia policy and the rise of the liberal multicultural state. Attending to the earlier history of Aboriginal appropriation reveals the unstable place of the Aboriginal figure on the political right. I argue that Herbert’s novel stages the relationship between a white father and his mixed-race Aboriginal son as the potential site of legitimate white Australian belonging. Ultimately, however, the Aboriginal woman carries the violence of Herbert’s attempt to turn the white colonizer into a national indigene.

Brian Egan, ‘Towards Shared Ownership: Property, Geography, and Treaty Making in British Columbia’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 95, 1 (2013).

In British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, unresolved Aboriginal claims to land remain highly contentious. Since the early 1990s, a unique treaty negotiation process has sought to resolve questions about land ownership and establish a new relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. After almost two decades, the limitations of this treaty process are increasingly evident and answers to the land question remain elusive. This article examines this treaty-making process through a property lens, focusing on how particular models of property are privileged by and produced through this approach to treaty. I argue that the treaty process, as currently structured, works to entrench dominant Western forms of property across Aboriginal territories in a highly separate and unequal manner, and as such, serves to reinscribe asymmetrical relations of power between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. To a considerable extent, this asymmetrical approach to property making explains the lack of progress towards treaties. The final part of the article explores alternative approaches to treaty proposed by Aboriginal groups. I argue that these proposals, which reflect Aboriginal understandings of property, offer a new and more promising direction for treaty making. In particular, the emphasis on sharing lands and resources, as well as the wealth generated from these, provides a path to reconcile competing property interests and to build a new and more respectful relationship between the Crown and Aboriginal peoples. I suggest that the difficulties of treaty making in British Columbia reflect broader challenges associated with land restitution and reconciliation in settler colonies.

David B. MacDonald, ‘Reconciliation after Genocide in Canada: Towards a syncretic model of democracy’, AlterNative 9, 1 (2013).

Despite recent claims by Saul (2008) that Canada’s federal and provincial systems of government, including its justice systems, have been strongly influenced by Aboriginal peoples, this article advances that any infl uence has been largely coincidental. A detailed critical appraisal of Saul’s work reveals a romanticized glossing over of Aboriginal–settler history rather than a detailed engagement with it. Taking Saul’s purported goals rather than his analysis as a starting point, this article seeks to examine ways in which provincial and federal government legislative institutions might better incorporate (some) Aboriginal conceptions of power, justice, and decision- making. In so doing it argues for a process of “syncretic democracy,” which includes symbols, ceremonies, guaranteed Aboriginal seats in existing institutions, potentially new institutions, and a much larger process of deliberation around how best to indigenize (and change) Canada’s institutions.

Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (eds), Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena, vol. 37 of Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology (2013).

William Gallois, ‘Genocide in Nineteenth-Century Algeria’, Journal of Genocide Research 15, 1 (2013).

While the French colony of Algeria was known to have been a violent place, historians have rarely compared the specificities and contours of its violent culture with those of other nineteenth-century settler colonies such as Australia and America. This review article asks why this has been the case and whether new definitions of genocide that have emerged from the study of other colonies might not be applied to Algeria. It contends that the systematic qualities of organised French violence—chiefly in the form of massacres known as ‘razzias’—have been underestimated and that the Algerian case merits study by functionalist and intentionalist scholars of genocide. While work still needs to be undertaken connecting French ‘exterminationist’ literatures to the practice of mass killing in the colony, a series of recent histories of Algeria have suggested that traditional literatures underestimated the scope and effects of French violence upon the indigenous peoples of Algeria.