Peter Denney, ‘Picturesque Farming: The Sound of ‘Happy Britannia’ in Colonial Australia’, Cultural Studies Review 18, 3 (2012).

This essay examines the way in which the British landscape tradition influenced perceptions of sound, noise and silence in colonial Australia, focusing on representations of rural soundscape in art and literature. It argues that poets and artists attempted to recreate an image of Australia as a new ‘Happy Britannia’, a noisy society engaged in virtuous agricultural labour. But this image was opposed to the prevailing taste for picturesque landscape, which accorded little value to human activity and placed great emphasis on silent, rural scenery. Accordingly, colonial perceptions of soundscape were ambivalent, as human-produced noise was heard as both a sign of the progress of civilisation and an obstacle to the spread of cultural refinement.

Thomas R. Metcalf, ‘Afterword: All Сolonialisms May Be Different, But in the End All Are the Same’, Ab Imperio 3 (2012).

In his afterthoughts written in dialogue with the editors of Ab Imperio, Thomas Metcalf recollects how, in the course of his academic career and observations of the changing world of the 1950s, he has learned to appreciate the importance of studying British imperialism of the second part of the nineteenth century, when classical liberal imperialism had to be adjusted to the reality of a growing imperial state. The firsthand observation of decline of European colonial empires and the rise of the new superpower, the United States, also contributed to Metcalf’s choice of research specialization. In recent years, he has been more active in the fields of global and comparative histories, while retaining his main focus on imperial polities and colonial regimes. Metcalf talks about the importance of a comparative approach, which allows one to make sense of multiple claims of uniqueness and exceptionalism. However, a comparative view acquires additional significance in light of the fact that imperial regimes of the second part of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries pursued mutually connected and dependent policies of imperial governance and legitimation of power. In the last part of the interview, Metcalf discusses how one can pursue a comparative history of modern empires, while avoiding the threat of simplification.

Damen Ward, ‘Territory, Jurisdiction, and Colonial Governance: “A Bill to Repeal the British Constitution”, 1856–60’, Journal of Legal History 33, 3 (2012).

Britain claimed full territorial sovereignty over New Zealand, even though substantive enforcement of its authority against Maori often faced significant challenges. Alarmed at the weakness of British governance in relation to Maori, Governor Thomas Gore Browne proposed a Native Offenders Bill. The Bill proposed giving the New Zealand Governor sweeping powers to ban ‘any communication’ or trade with any Maori within a specified district, or with a particular tribe. Such a ban would, it was claimed, ensure compliance with colonial law. However, the bill was twice rejected by the settler legislature (1856 and 1860), on both constitutional and practical grounds. The paper places the bill in its political and legal contexts, and examines some of the ways colonial administrators and politicians responded to the difference between the government’s claim to extensive legal authority and its more limited substantive power.

Adam J. Barker, ‘Locating Settler Colonialism’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, 3 (2012).

There has been a definite shift in recent years relating to studies of colonialism. Increasingly, scholars are asking what might seem like a regressive question—”what is colonialism?”—and encountering surprising answers. This shift has been sparked by a concept that, while part of the lexicon of “colonialism” for decades, was reinvigorated in the 1990s, and is now perceived as key to a critical and challenging new perspective on colonisation. That concept is “settler colonialism”: a distinct method of colonising involving the creation and consumption of a whole array of spaces by settler collectives that claim and transform places through the exercise of their sovereign capacity.

Work on settler colonialism has exploded recently, especially in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, but also with respect to Canada, the United States of America, South Africa, Israel and other places primarily colonised by the post-Columbian European or Euro-American empires. The result has been a reopening and reinvigorating of debates over self-determination and Indigenous resistance that, while still vitally relevant, have become at times frustratingly fragmented. Despite this upsurge of interest and attention, though, the location of settler colonialism is difficult to determine. How does one identify exactly where and when settler colonisation happens given the pervasiveness of its structures and institutions, and normalisation of its associated and myriad lifestyles? Settler colonisation is, Lorenzo Veracini tells us, largely invisible.

Understanding settler colonialism by definition requires piercing this invisibility, revealing that which colonial power would obscure for its own interests. A search for the location of settler colonialism—the source of the settler coloniser’s collective power—is likely as conceptual as it is material. Yet it still implies geography, and as such a spatial form or dynamic that can be identified as distinct.

David Waldron and Janice Newton, ‘Rethinking Appropriation of the Indigenous: A Critique of the Romanticist Approach’, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16, 2 (2012).

The aim of this paper is to set out the effects of romanticism on attitudes of the New Age movement to Indigenous Aboriginal Australian culture and people. Past scholarship has clearly expounded insensitive and exploitative New Age appropriation of Indigenous culture and emphasized inequalities in the power to represent one’s own group. Essentialist, romantic stereotypes detract from deep understanding of Indigenous Australians, and negotiated solutions are not really possible when the parties involved are in grossly unequal circumstances. Scholarship acknowledges diversity within Indigenous groups and the New Age movement as well as convergences and reciprocal cultural borrowing, often within romantic epistemologies. A simple dichotomy of cultural theft by New Age practitioners from Indigenous Australians is inadequate to explain the complexities of the interaction.

Georgine Clarsen and Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Settler Colonial Automobilities: A Distinct Constellation of Automobile Cultures?’, History Compass 10, 12 (2012).

A growing body of scholarship employs the concept of ‘automobility’ to understand the practices, meanings and values with which cars have become invested. Analysis of settler colonial phenomena has also recently cohered into a distinctive transnational research strand. This article aims to integrate the findings of these two previously unconnected scholarly agendas in order to ask the following questions: can the existence of a distinct settler colonial form of automobility culture be hypothesised; can a distinct notion of ‘settler colonial automobility’ be construed and profitably compared with other automobility traditions and, if so, what are its key characteristics? Given its inherently composite nature, this article aims to contribute to scholarly debates on both transnational automobilities and on settler colonial phenomena.

Haifa Rashed and Damien Short, ‘Genocide and settler colonialism: can a Lemkin-inspired genocide perspective aid our understanding of the Palestinian situation?’, The International Journal of Human Rights 16, 8 (2012).

This article examines the situation of the Palestinians through the sociological lens of the concept of genocide. Following a recent trend in genocide studies, the article engages with the original theorising of Raphael Lemkin – who coined the term ‘genocide’. These studies have highlighted the association Lemkin made between genocide and colonialism and have applied the genocide concept to settler colonial societies such as Australia. It argues that if Israel is conceivably a settler colonial project then by implication its relationship with the Palestinian people can be analysed through the genocide lens. Whilst some academics and journalists are now tentatively applying terms such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ to describe the events surrounding the creation of the Israeli state, the historical and continuing, cultural and physical, destructive social and political relations involved in the Israel/Palestine conflict is a somewhat neglected potential case study in the field of genocide studies. The objective of this article is to highlight the potential for a Lemkin inspired sociology of genocide in analysing aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict, through a consideration of the link he made between genocide and colonialism and some of his key ‘techniques of genocide’ as specified in the seminal text Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

David B. Coplan, ‘People of the Early Caledon River Frontier and Their Encounters’, African Historical Review 44, 2 (2012).

When the early white settlers began crossing the Orange River during the early nineteenth century, they claimed to have found an empty land, and not to have encountered the San (‘Bushman’), Euro-Khoe (‘Bastaard’/Griqua and Koranna) and Bantu-speaking (Batswana and Basotho) inhabitants of the country. This was not at all so, and the undeniability of the encounter was soon made patent by the violent but sometimes collaborative relations that ensued. Distinguished South African historians have given us harrowing and pitiless accounts of Khoe-khoe and, more often and more fiercely, San resistance to their dispossession, enslavement, and extirpation by white settlers in Transorangia in the first third of the nineteenth century. Accounts of cooperation and mutually benevolent interaction also exist, though they are far more the exception. This account explores who the Transorangians were and how they perceived and dealt with one another. The ‘identity violence’ practised on the frontier has shaped how they have related until today.

Settler Colonial Studies is a field of research which has developed dynamically in recent years. Most of the scholarly work, however, focusses on theoretical and conceptual questions, as Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds have emphasized in their volume Making Settler Colonial Space (2010). Analyzing the relationships of power, the violent acts as well as the micro-practices which established and sustain (postcolonial) settler societies until today has been neglected so far.

The efforts of the DFG-research group on the history of “Settler Imperialism in North America and Australia”, by contrast, aim at reconstructing the micro-history and -practices of appropriating indigenous land, of dispossessing, evicting and eliminating indigenous societies. Moreover, it reflects on the political and gouvernemental programs that went hand in hand with these practices. Ultimately, the projects aims at answering one central question: What are the economic, political and cultural conditions of settler violence at the frontier?

This one-day workshop connects the researchers engaged in this project with an international group of scholars who investigate this particular problem from different perspectives in their ongoing research. Together, they will investigate the various dimensions of settler imperialism as a historical phenomenon by discussing carefully chosen case studies in a transnational and comperative perspective. Particular emphasis will be put on reconstructing the roles different actors played in these processes, their individual experiences as well as on the social and physical (re-)organization of settler colonial space. The case studies will look at examples from across the Anglo-world including the United States, Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand.

The workshop will be conducted in English and German. Interested guests are welcome. Please contact Dr. Eva Bischoff to register (bischoff@uni-trier.de). Deadline for registration is 6 December 2012.

PROGRAMM

Dienstag, 11. Dezember 2012

14.00  Prof. Dr. Ursula Lehmkuhl (Trier): Begrüßung

14.15 – 15.45 Dimensionen der Landnahme: Messen und Ordnen

Hanno Scheerer (Trier)

Settlers, Surveyors, Speculators: Settler Imperialism in Ohio’s Virginia Military District, 1787-1810

Julius Wilm (Berlin)

“No man will go to Oregon unless you hire him to go there”: The Congressional Design of the First U.S. Homestead Laws

Björn Beyen (Köln)

Koloniale Reorganisation im postkolonialen Siedlerstaat? Der Native-Title-Fall der Yorta Yorta in Australien

15.45 – 16.15 Kaffeepause / Coffee Break

16.15 – 17.45 Dimensionen der Frontier: Zwischen Middle Ground und Low Intensity Warfare

Rebecca Burke (Wellington, NZ)

“Friendly relations between the two races were soon established”: Maori-Pakeha Interaction in Wellington, 1840-1860

Dr. Eva Bischoff (Trier)

Arms and Amelioration: Negotiating Quaker Peace Testimony and Settler Violence in 1830s Van Diemen’s Land

Prof. Dr. Ursula Lehmkuhl (Trier)

Cultures of Resilience: Innovation and Persistence in Western Australia and the Canadian Prairies, 1830-1860

17.45 – 18.15 Abschlussdiskussion

Moderation: Dr. Eva Bischoff (Trier)