Dane Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Harvard University Press, 2013).

For a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional coterie of determined explorers. They sought knowledge, adventure, and fame, but often experienced confusion, fear, and failure. The Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations, from idea to practice, from intention to outcome, from myth to reality.

Those who conducted the hundreds of expeditions that probed Africa and Australia in the nineteenth century adopted a mode of scientific investigation that had been developed by previous generations of seaborne explorers. They likened the two continents to oceans, empty spaces that could be made truly knowable only by mapping, measuring, observing, and preserving. They found, however, that their survival and success depended less on this system of universal knowledge than it did on the local knowledge possessed by native peoples.

While explorers sought to advance the interests of Britain and its emigrant communities, Dane Kennedy discovers a more complex outcome: expeditions that failed ignominiously, explorers whose loyalties proved ambivalent or divided, and, above all, local states and peoples who diverted expeditions to serve their own purposes. The collisions, and occasional convergences, between British and indigenous values, interests, and modes of knowing the world are brought to the fore in this fresh and engaging study.

Jason Baird Jackson, ‘The Story of Colonialism, or Rethinking the Ox-Hide Purchase in Native North America and Beyond’, Journal of American Folklore 126, 499 (2013).

In this paper I offer a comparative assessment of the ox-hide purchase narrative (tale type AT 2400, ATU 927C*; Motif K185.1) in Native North America. Drawing on my own fieldwork and the beginnings of a historic-geographic treatment, I consider the story from the perspective of work on historical consciousness in Native North America and treat it as an opportunity to establish a link between folkloristics and other fields concerned with interpreting the legacies of colonialism.

Charles Geisler, ‘New Terra Nullius Narratives and the Gentrification of Africa’s “Empty Lands”‘, Journal of World-Systems Research 18, 1 (2012).

Extraterritorial ownership and control of sub-Saharan African land have a long and troubled history. This research investigates a much-studied practice—the recent enclosure of African land and resources—but asks a little-studied question: how are non-Africans reasserting terra nullius narratives of the past to justify the present transformation of African landscapes?  The answer  suggested here lies in a bulwark of de facto terra nullius claims couched in security needs of the global North and referenced to the low density of Africa’s rural population, its land and labor under-utilization, the ambiguity of its land tenure and related low yields, and its “arrested” civilization.  De facto terra nullius is neither narrow in scope nor static in application.  It is stirring again as a potent justificatory logic for north-south land relations. 

Camilla Boisen, ‘The Changing Moral Justification of Empire: From the Right to Colonise to the Obligation to Civilise’, History of European Ideas (2012).

This paper argues that the moral legitimating reasoning of terra nullius assumed an under-recognised, different guise in the later years of colonial justification in the form of trusteeship. The idea of terra nullius has a central place in the political thought of thinkers such as Grotius and Locke. Although terra nullius, consolidated in European colonial thought in the early modern period, differed conceptually from the doctrine of trusteeship as the colonial legitimation for Africa, both instituted a moral justification for the appropriation of native land, and of empire itself. The contention is that the trajectory from the one doctrine to the other was aligned with the change in the underlying moral framework of the rights and duties of Europeans and non-Europeans. In the early days of colonisation, there was a certain permissiveness on the part of the colonisers to appropriate the land of American Indians. By the late nineteenth century this seemed to change into a moral requirement for civilising the native Africans. Edmund Burke’s conceptualisation of trusteeship illustrates the way in which traditionally conceived natural rights were transformed into fundamental social rights, and central to this idea was the expansion of European ‘civilised’ moral communities on which rights now depended.

Book Forum: Pekke Hämäläinen’s Commanche Empire, in History & Theory 52, 1 (2013).

‘INTRODUCTION’: BRIAN GRATTON

‘INDIGENOUS POWER IN THE COMANCHE EMPIRE’: JOSH REID

‘INDIGENOUS EMPIRES AND NATIVE NATIONS: BEYOND HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN’S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE’: KARL JACOBY

‘GLOBALIZING THE COMANCHE EMPIRE’: JOHN TUTINO

‘IMPERIAL SPACES IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN’S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE’: RACHEL ST. JOHN

‘WHAT’S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES’: PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN

Karl Hardy, ‘Unsettling Hope: Settler-Colonialism and Utopianism’, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal 2nd series, 1 (2012).

Bit in lieu of abstract:

Critical investigation of the varied conceptualizations and historical effects of utopianism is an essential concern for utopian studies scholarship. Utopia has been theorized beyond a literary tradition initiated by Thomas More as “social dreaming” (Sargent) and “expressions of desire for a better way of being” (Levitas), to reference two of the more prominent contemporary formulations.

[…]

There is an opportunity, however, for a re-articulation of utopia as a means of accountability to settler colonial critique and the efforts of Indigenous peoples and their allies to reconstitute an unsettled society. This represents both a new area of focus for utopian studies scholars as well as a challenge to the imagination: the envisioning and actualization of an unsettled society.

 

Lee M. Panich, ‘Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America’, American Antiquity 78, 1 (2013).

This article seeks to define common ground from which to build a more integrated approach to the persistence of indigenous societies in North America. Three concepts are discussed— identity, practice, and context— that may prove useful for the development of archaeologies of persistence by allowing us to counter terminal narratives and essentialist concepts of cultural identity that are deeply ingrained in scholarly and popular thinking about Native American societies. The use of these concepts is illustrated in an example that shows how current archaeological research is challenging long-held scholarly and popular beliefs about the effects of colonialism in coastal California, where the policies of Spanish colonial missionaries have long been thought to have driven local native peoples to cultural extinction. By exploring how the sometimes dramatic changes of the colonial period were internally structured and are just one part of long and dynamic native histories, archaeologies of persistence may help to bring about a shift in how the archaeology of colonialism presents the histories of native peoples in North America— one that can make archaeology more relevant to descendant communities.

Palestinians, both at home and abroad, have found an unlikely partner in the struggle against colonization: First Nations, the indigenous peoples of Canada.

Native peoples from all over the world joined together on Monday as part of an international day of solidarity with Idle No More, an indigenous uprising that has supporters across the globe.

[…]

For 34-year-old Vancouverite Mike Krebs, a student of political geography who has indigenous Blackfoot ancestry, the connection between the Palestinian and indigenous Canadian struggle is a “natural one.”

Krebs met his extended Blackfoot family, who still live on a reserve in rural Alberta, the same year that the second Palestinian intifada began. That was a coincidence, he says, that gave fuel to his activism.

He remembers attending a talk in Vancouver by Israeli human rights activist Jeff Halper in 2001.

“He showed us a slide of different maps of Palestine – one from pre-’47, one from ’48, ’67 and 2000 – and that’s when the connection clicked for me, this image of a shrinking land,” Krebs says.

In Vancouver, Krebs collaborated with Palestinian activist and academic Dana Olwan to produce an article for an Australian journal called “Settler Colonial Studies,” comparing Canada and Israel. “We were just naturally interested in each other’s struggles,” he says.

From Haaretz.

Shannyn Palmer, ‘Making Histories ‘Ngapartji-ngapartji Way’: Exploring Collaboration, Exchange and Intercultural Histories in a Colonised Settler Nation’, History Compass 11, 2 (2013).

Moses Ochonu, ‘African Colonial Economies: Land, Labor, and Livelihoods’, History Compass 11, 2 (2013).

In what ways and through what mechanisms and policy instruments did colonial regimes seek to draw Africans into the colonial economy as laborers, wage earners, taxpayers, and consumers of foreign manufactured goods? How successful were colonial efforts to reform access to agricultural land as a way of establishing a foundation for colonial agriculture, undermining preexisting but disfavored African land tenure practices, compelling taxation, and mobilizing African labor? This essay responds to these and related questions, surveying the main debates, key conceptual turns, and points of discussion on a critical aspect of colonial economic management in Africa: the commoditization of land and labor by colonial regimes and its consequences. The essay discusses the intertwinements of land and labor mobilization regimes, and the ways in which African maneuvers, initiatives, and strategies of self-preservation produced outcomes that confounded and at times defeated colonial intentions in matters of land and labor.