I thought they wiped all the Aborigines from Tasmania out. […] I don’t see him representing black people, or coloured people. I don’t see him in the communities, I don’t see him doing the things I do to people, and fighting for the people. […] He’s got a white woman, he’s got white kids. I keep it real, all day every day.
Anthony Mundine, via ABC News.
Filed under: Australia, media, Quote | Closed
penn and the indians
Benjamin West, The Treaty of Penn with the Indians (1772). Oil on canvas. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Wikicommons.
Filed under: art | Closed
The latest issue of Arena Journal — Stolen Lands, Broken Cultures: The Settler-Colonial present — will be launched in Melbourne.
Settler-colonial attitudes go to the core of tensions in the world today, but are by and large ignored. They stand at the centre of the possibility of a nuclear exchange in the Middle East, as well as at the moral core of what it means to be human in relations between Indigenous and non-indigenous cultures. The forum/launch will include discussion of some of the issues around settler-colonial practices both historically and in the present.
Speakers: Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, John Hinkson
Chair: Paul James
Arena Centre, 2 Kerr Street, Fitzroy
6.30 pm Tuesday 6th November.
Filed under: Australia, launch | Closed
bit in lieu of abstract:
It is a mistake to imagine that Native peoples held political power only when they could align themselves with European empires and nation-states. Native peoples held power when they controlled territory and when they used political, military, and economic power to assert place and belonging on a continent undergoing massive transformation. The history of modern North America is a story of contact between immigrants and indigenous peoples that gave rise to concepts like race, nation, and sovereignty, which gave shape to the new nations of North America: indigenous tribal nations and composite nation-states.
Grounding the history of the West within the story of the emergence and evolution of a Native New World makes the history of indigenous peoples central to the history of North America. It also underscores the significance of settler colonialism to the history of the United States and the history of America’s western expansion. In the Old Northwest, the United States had to work hard as a colonizing power to make Anishinaabewaki into an American space. Michigan remained a territory until 1837, and Wisconsin and Minnesota were not even organized as territories until 1836 and 1849, respectively. In each of these places, Native peoples lost territory, but they resisted removal to Indian Territory and maintained reservations on tribal homelands. Even more remarkable, their mixed-race Anishinaabe relatives won the right to vote, sanctioned by Congress, during a century when Americans restricted the franchise to white men and excluded Indians and people of African and Asian descent from citizenship. In order to understand how some Anishinaabeg fought—and succeeded—in remaining Indians on their homelands whileothers used their Indianness to gain political power and citizenship in America’s newly created western territories, we need to understand the long trajectory of contact in North American history that begins in the West with the history of the Native New World.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Successful revolutionaries often find themselves in a distinctly uneasy position vis-à-vis the cultural burden of the pre-revolution which they inherit. Establishing a stable and effective government often means alienating their own ‘wild men screaming through the key hole’. Yet, they also need to stamp their revolutionary credentials both on the new society they wish to construct and as a territorialising edict to the defeated. This also serves as an implicit edict to the defeated that their day has passed. To achieve this, manipulation of imagery is fundamental in the successful revolutionary’s arsenal. This article documents the reaction of two very different counties, Ireland and South Africa, in their post-revolutionary eras. It notes their differing, and at times bizarre, attempts at re-branding nationhood in the image of the successful revolution. Ireland after 1922 was on the whole more restrained in its image-making than was South Africa after 1994, yet both, for reasons of revolutionary fervour, revenge or strategy, showed the old order that change was non-negotiable, be it in language policy, civic honours and titles, emblems and symbols of state, or simply in place and street names. In such instances heritage is frequently the handmaiden of political necessity, often crude but sometimes subtle.
Filed under: Éire, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
mau mau 2012
Three Kenyans who were tortured by British colonial authorities can proceed with their legal claims against the UK government, a court has ruled.
London’s High Court ruled the case, relating to the 1950s Mau Mau uprising, could proceed despite the time elapsed.
The ruling means the case will now go to a full trial. Lawyers for the three hailed it as a “historic” judgement.
Filed under: Africa, Empire, law, Political developments | Closed
carl nightingale on segregation
When we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow—two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows us in this magisterial history, segregation is everywhere, deforming cities and societies worldwide.
Starting with segregation’s ancient roots, and what the archaeological evidence reveals about humanity’s long-standing use of urban divisions to reinforce political and economic inequality, Nightingale then moves to the world of European colonialism. It was there, he shows, segregation based on color—and eventually on race—took hold; the British East India Company, for example, split Calcutta into “White Town” and “Black Town.” As we follow Nightingale’s story around the globe, we see that division replicated from Hong Kong to Nairobi, Baltimore to San Francisco, and more. The turn of the twentieth century saw the most aggressive segregation movements yet, as white communities almost everywhere set to rearranging whole cities along racial lines. Nightingale focuses closely on two striking examples: Johannesburg, with its state-sponsored separation, and Chicago, in which the goal of segregation was advanced by the more subtle methods of real estate markets and housing policy.
For the first time ever, the majority of humans live in cities, and nearly all those cities bear the scars of segregation. This unprecedented, ambitious history lays bare our troubled past, and sets us on the path to imagining the better, more equal cities of the future.
Filed under: Africa, Asia, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
In a break from the contemporary focus on the law’s response to inter-racial crime, the authors examine the law’s approach to the victimization of one Indigenous person by another. Drawing on a wealth of archival material relating to homicides in Australia, they conclude that settlers and Indigenous peoples still live in the shadow of empire.
Filed under: Australia, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Svirsky and Bignall assemble leading figures to explore the rich philosophical linkages and the political concerns shared by Agamben and postcolonial theory. Agamben’s theories of the ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’ are situated in critical relation to the existence of these phenomena in the colonial/postcolonial world.
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Agamben and Colonialism, Simone Bignall and Marcelo Svirsky; I. Colonial States of Exception; Imperialism, Exceptionalism and the Contemporary World, Yehouda Shenhav; 1. The Management of Anomie: The State of Exception in Post-communist Russia, Sergei Prozorov; 2. The Cultural Politics of Exception, Marcelo Svirsky; II. Colonial Sovereignty; 4. Indigenising Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples, Mark Rifkin; 5. Reading Kenya’s Colonial State of Emergency after Agamben, Stephen Morton; 6. Colonial Sovereignty, Forms of Life and Liminal Beings in South Africa, Stewart Motha; III. Bare Life and Bio-Politics; 7. Encountering Bare Life in Italian Libya and Colonial Amnesia in Agamben, David Atkinson; 8. Abandoning Gaza, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir; 9. Colonial Histories: Biopolitics and Shantytowns in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, Silvia Grinberg; IV. Method, History and Potentiality; 10. Metropolis and Colonisation, Leland de la Durantaye; 11. ‘The Work of Men is Not Durable’: History, Haiti and the Rights of Man, Jessica Whyte; 12. Potential Postcoloniality: Sacred Life, Profanation and the Coming Community, Simone Bignall; Notes on Contributors; Index.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
lea et al. on walkers
It is in the contemporary period of Indigenous cultural recognition that the biopolitical system of policing Aboriginal walkers in Australia’s frontier towns has become so normalized that it takes place without public notice, using universally accepted mechanisms for shedding metropolitan areas of the unsightly and unwanted. Ironically, the hypermarginalized hunter-gatherer population can be identified by their perambulation — they walk — a form of urban nomadism that is both desired and reviled. Aboriginal pedestrians who are temporarily not in motion are forced to keep moving but are not expelled altogether, for their presence is essential to the region’s wider economic interests. Since Aboriginal pedestrians are “moved on” when entrepreneurial imperatives cannot be met, and since moving is also a means of remaining invisible in the most heavily policed commercial zones, walking is thus overdetermined, a coproduced effect of racial excision and resistance in the ambivalent political economies of the Australian liberal-settler frontier.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
