Iyko Day, ‘Tseng Kwong Chi and the Eugenic Landscape’, American Quarterly 65, 1 (2013)

My essay examines Tseng Kwong Chi’s photographs of US and Canadian landscapes as a queer parody of the Western conventions associated with landscape art of the early twentieth century. Exploring the influence of Ansel Adams, Gutzon Borglum, and the Canadian Group of Seven landscape artists, I argue that Tseng’s photographs parody the eugenic ideals projected onto the settler colonial landscape.

Sam Moyo & Walter Chambati (ed.), Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe: Beyond White-Settler Capitalism (Dakar, CODESRIA & AIAS, 2013).

This book is a product of CODESRIA National Working Group on Zimbabwe

The Fast Track Land Reform Programme implemented during the 2000s in Zimbabwe represents the only instance of radical redistributive land reforms since the end of the Cold War. It reversed the racially-skewed agrarian structure and discriminatory land tenures inherited from colonial rule. The land reform also radicalised the state towards a nationalist, introverted accumulation strategy, against a broad array of unilateral Western sanctions. Indeed, Zimbabwe’s land reform, in its social and political dynamics, must be compared to the leading land reforms of the twentieth century, which include those of Mexico, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Cuba and Mozambique.

The fact that the Zimbabwe case has not been recognised as vanguard nationalism has much to do with the ‘intellectual structural adjustment’ which has accompanied neoliberalism and a hostile media campaign. This has entailed dubious theories of ‘neopatrimonialism’, which reduce African politics and the state to endemic ‘corruption’, ‘patronage’, and ‘tribalism’ while overstating the virtues of neoliberal good governance. Under this racist repertoire, it has been impossible to see class politics, mass mobilisation and resistance, let alone believe that something progressive can occur in Africa.

This book comes to a conclusion that the Zimbabwe land reform represents a new form of resistance with distinct and innovative characteristics when compared to other cases of radicalisation, reform and resistance. The process of reform and resistance has entailed the deliberate creation of a tri-modal agrarian structure to accommodate and balance the interests of various domestic classes, the progressive restructuring of labour relations and agrarian markets, the continuing pressures for radical reforms (through the indigenisation of mining and other sectors), and the rise of extensive, albeit relatively weak, producer cooperative structures.

The book also highlights some of the resonances between the Zimbabwean land struggles and those on the continent, as well as in the South in general, arguing that there are some convergences and divergences worthy of intellectual attention. The book thus calls for greater endogenous empirical research which overcomes the pre-occupation with failed interpretations of the nature of the state and agency in Africa.

Chris Cunneen, ‘Colonial Processes, Indigenous Peoples, and Criminal Justice Systems’, in M. Tonry and S. Bucerius (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration (New York: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming).

This chapter considers the interaction between colonial processes, Indigenous peoples and criminal justice systems. The commonalities in the experiences of Indigenous peoples in white settler societies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US) provide the focus for an exploration of the implications of the colonial process for understanding Indigenous contact with western criminal justice systems across a number of domains. A fundamental point derived from this exploration is that the politics and outcomes of colonization are not simply of historical interest. Rather, the contemporary relationship between Indigenous people and crime, punishment, and justice is structured by these longer term relationships.

Kathryn Fort, ‘The Vanishing Indian Returns: Tribes, Popular Originalism, and the Supreme Court’, St. Louis University Law Journal 57, 297 (2013).

Writing history is perilously tricky, weighing narratives, presenting facts, and making stories. This is particularly true when the history directly affects the legal rights of a present-day community. When the Supreme Court of the United States writes history, it imbibes the narrative with both cultural and legal authority, and the story the Court creates needs to be both persuasive and perceived as factual. The Court is not a body of historians, obligated to write nuanced history. However, the Court’s opinions and factual reiterations legitimize those facts and history. Once the Court releases an opinion, the history in it achieves a high level of popular authority. 

As the nation faces cultural divides over the meaning of the “Founding,” the Constitution, and who owns these meanings, the Court’s embrace of originalism is one strand that feeds the divide. The Court’s valuing of the original interpretation of the Constitution has reinforced the Founder fetishism also found in popular culture, specifically within the politics of those identified as the Tea Party. As addressed elsewhere, their strict worship of the Founders has historical implications for both women and African Americans, groups both marginalized and viewed as property in the Constitution. No one, however, has written about how the Court’s cobbled historical narrative and their veneration for the Founders has affected American Indian tribes. Tribes barely exist in the Constitution, and the Founders “original” understanding of tribes was that they would inevitably disappear. 

The “vanishing Indian” stereotype, promulgated in the early Republic, reaching an apex in the 1820’s, continues to influence fundamentally how the Court views tribes. Compressing history from the Founding through the Jacksonian era undermines tribal authority and sovereignty within the Court. In its federal Indian law cases, the Court relies on racial stereotypes, and popular conceptions of American history. As a result of these shortcuts, the Court folds all tribes into one large group, empties the American landscape of tribal peoples, and forces tribes into a past where they only exist to disappear.

Edward Cavanagh, Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and Dispossession on the Orange River (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Layers of dispossession and disruption are definitive of South African history. Bouncing from Griqua Philippolis (1824–1862) to Afrikaner Orania (1990–2013), this book shows how land rights are prioritised in pre-apartheid and post-apartheid contexts. The result is a new way of looking at the country’s history – different to the version of history that guided transformation and inspired an idiosyncratic system of land restitution.

‘[A] highly innovative study of substantial contemporary relevance. Cavanagh compares the Griqua Philippolis and Afrikaner Orania polities in a compelling analysis, foregrounding issues of dispossession, land rights, sovereignty, indigeneity, and restitution. Insightful and accessible, this is a book that will appeal to both academic and lay readers.’ — Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town

‘An intensely brilliant gem […] The conundrums and contradictions of land dispossession and restitution in South Africa are here presented both factually and analytically in a powerful argument for an, until now, politically submerged subterranean view of land rights and group identity. This study will surely renew much needed institutional as well as scholarly debate.’ — David B. Coplan, University of the Witwatersrand

‘Cavanagh makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, in a very original and persuasive way: applying this paradigm to the past and the present, and investigating very different sociopolitical collectives in very different historical circumstances. This book convincingly reintroduces settler colonialism to South African history.’ — Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne Institute for Social Research

Martin J. Wiener, ‘The Idea of “Colonial Legacy” and the Historiography of Empire’, Journal of The Historical Society 13, 1 (2013).

bit in lieu of abstract:

During the last half-century of the British Empire, few historians outside the political Left expressed concern about how British rule would be judged by future generations. To most scholars, at least through World War II, the empire appeared to be building a solid legacy of progressive political and economic institutions, which were gradually rooting both the “rule of law” and commercial, agricultural, and industrial development in native soil. As the Cambridge historian Eric Walker summed up in his wartime work, The British Empire: Its Structure and Spirit, the empire was “a great human achievement.” As historiography, this view had a number of basic flaws. It was morally and empirically one-sided, taking little account of the complaints coming from the governed or the criticisms from British scholars of the Left; it exaggerated not just the empire’s beneficence but its power and influence upon the colonized; it had no place for the agency of these colonized people themselves; and it treated the long centuries before British arrival as unimportant and irrelevant.

Nowadays, this view of empire and its influence has been widely and justly rejected; but, more problematically, it has been inverted. The idea of a strong “colonial legacy” remains pervasive, but now in highly negative terms. If one googles the phrase, one finds over twelvemillion entries, the great majority of them pejorative. Most of the problems new states have encountered have been attributed at some point to the legacy left by former European colonial rulers. Not surprisingly, criticism of European empires has been widespread in these states, but it has also been widespread in the West. Films representing heroic colonial battles, once very popular, have gone completely out of fashion. In the 1960s films like Zulu (1964) and Khartoum (1966) were great successes in both Britain and America, but nowadays only disillusioned or straightforwardly anticolonial films are made—one might cite Gandhi, A Passage to India, Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, Empire of the Sun, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and a good many others. In 2003, Channel Four’s documentary series, “Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World,” was far more balanced than the almost purely positive approach of previous generations, but nonetheless drew sharp criticism from journalists and historians for sugar-coating imperial history.

C. Richard King, Unsettling America: The Uses of Indianness in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

Unsettling America explores the cultural politics of Indianness in the 21st century. It concerns itself with representations of Native Americans in popular culture, the news media, and political debate and the ways in which American Indians have interpreted, challenged, and reworked key ideas about them. It examines the means and meanings of competing uses and understandings of Indianness, unraveling their significance for broader understandings of race and racism, sovereignty and self-determination, and the possibilities of decolonization. To this end, it takes up four themes: false claims about or on Indianness, that is, distortions, or ongoing stereotyping; claiming Indianness to advance the culture wars, or how indigenous peoples have figured in post-9/11 political debates; making claims through metaphors and juxtaposition, or the use of analogy to advance political movements or enhance social visibility; and reclamations, or exertion of cultural sovereignty.

Joyce Dalsheim, ‘Anachronism and Morality: Israeli Settlement, Palestinian Nationalism, and Human Liberation’, Theory, Culture & Society (2013).

This article is concerned with how the idea of anachronism can interfere with our thinking about social justice, peace, and human liberation. In the case of Israel/Palestine the idea of anachronism is deployed among liberals, progressives and radical theorists, and activists seeking peace and social justice who express animosity toward religiously motivated settlers and their settlement project. One of the ways in which they differentiate themselves from these settlers is by suggesting that settler actions belong to the past. They also pity Palestinians conceived of as stuck in an oppressive system of settler colonialism that also belongs to the past, preventing them from moving forward. Both perceptions of anachronism limit the ways we can think about human liberation and peace. This article sheds light on a conundrum about who or what belongs to the past, and how thinking in such terms can contribute to the production of a particular moral collective and to the production of enmity. Both perceptions of anachronism frame history as a kind of progress in which peoples or groups might be ranked according to their levels of civilizational attainment, an idea we abandoned long ago as an analytical tool, but seem to have retained as a matter of practical political sympathy and judgment. This temporal conditioning can interfere with the thinking of even some of the most progressive social theorists, and mimics a colonial impulse.

Forrest Wade Young, ‘Rapa Nui’, Contemporary Pacific 25, 1 (2013).

Bit in lieu of abstract:

“¡Fuera la Schiess! ¡Fuera! ¡Fuera Platovsky! ¡Fuera! ¡Fuera Chilenos! ¡Fuera! ¿Cuándo Immigracion? ¡Ahora! ¡Horo te henua! ¡Horo te henua! ¡Horo te vaikava! ¡Horo te vaikava!” (Get out Schiess [family]! Get out! Get out Platovsky! Get out! Get out Chileans! Get out! When immigration [laws]? Now! Demand the island! Demand the island! Demand the ocean! Demand the ocean!) These exclamations, first yelled by leaders and then collectively yelled by more than a hundred Rapa Nui people in cars and on foot, were repeated, with some variation, over and over for more than an hour during a march along the main streets of Hanga Roa town on 23 July 2011. They are symbolic of many of the sociocultural and political concerns articulated in Rapa Nui during the year under review.

On the first and second days of August 2011, international and national organizations concerned with indigenous peoples and local groups met at the auditorium of the public school Lorenzo Baeza in Rapa Nui for two days to discuss indigenous human rights issues and social problems confronting the Rapa Nui people. The majority of the Rapa Nui community was in attendance. The meetings, officially entitled “Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights: Implications for the Rapa Nui People,” were sponsored locally, independently of the Chilean state-organized municipality and governor’s office, by leaders of Rapa Nui hua’ai (clans/extended families), Parlamento Rapa Nui, Consejero Nacional Indígena Pueblo Rapa Nui ( CONADI), and Makenu Re’o Rapa Nui Women’s Organization. At the request of the local sponsors, two nongovernmental organizations helped facilitate and develop the proceedings: Observatorio Ciudadano (which is concerned with Chile’s indigenous peoples) and the Indian Law Resource Center of Washington DC (which provides legal representation for indigenous groups throughout the Americas). Jose Alywin, Consuelo Labra, and Nancy Yañez were the leading representatives of Observatorio Ciudadano. The Indian Law Resource Center was represented by its founder and executive director, attorney Robert “Tim” Coulter, and by Leonardo Crippa, the center’s attorney who filed precautionary measures at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights amid the 2010-2011 occupations and political demonstrations of Rapa Nui against Chile. In addition to myself, there were three official international observers of the proceedings: Clem Chartier, president of the National Council of Mètis Aboriginal Peoples of Canada; Alberto Chirif, a Peruvian anthropologist affiliated with the Indigenous Work Group for Indigenous Affairs ( IWGIA); and Dr Nin Thomas, a Māori professor of law at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Following the meetings in Hanga Roa, members of the local, national, and international organizations continued the discussion of the plight of Rapa Nui with Chilean state officials in Santiago and Valparaiso. The delegation ended with a public discussion at the Universidad de Chile.

Gregory Ablavsky, ‘The Savage Constitution’, Duke Law Journal (Forthcoming 2013).

Conventional histories of the Constitution largely omit Natives. This Article challenges this absence and argues that Indian affairs played a key role in the Constitution’s creation, drafting, and ratification. It traces two constitutional narratives about Indians: a “Madisonian” and a “Hamiltonian” perspective. Both views arose from the failure of Indian policy under the Articles of Confederation, where explicit national authority could not constrain states, squatters, and Native nations. Nationalists agreed that this failure underscored the need for a stronger federal state, but disagreed about the explanation. Madisonians blamed interference with federal treaties, while the Hamiltonians argued the federal military was too weak to overawe the “savages.”

Both accounts resulted in constitutional remedies. More important than the Indian Commerce Clause, provisions declared federal treaties supreme law, barred state treaty-making, and provided exclusive federal power over western territories. But expansionist states won concessions guaranteeing federal protection and western land claims, while other provisions created a fiscal-military state committed to western expansion.

The two narratives fared differently during ratification. Few embraced centralization, while the Federalists repeatedly invoked “savages” to justify a stronger federal state and a standing army. This argument swayed Georgia, which ratified to secure federal aid in its ongoing war with the Creeks. But it also elevated dispossession of Natives into a constitutional principle. The Article concludes by exploring this history’s interpretive implications. It suggests the Indian affairs context unsettles conventional understandings of the Constitution as intended to restrain the power of the state, and challenges both originalist and progressive assumptions about constitutional history.