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.

Christopher Lloyd, Jacob Metzer, and Richard Sutch (eds), Settler Economies in World History (Brill, 2013).

Settler colonialism was a major aspect of the imperial age that began in the sixteenth century and has encompassed the whole world unto the present. Modern settler societies have together constituted one of the major routes to economic development from their foundation in resource abundance and labour scarcity. This book is a major and wide-ranging comparative historical enquiry into the experiences of the settler world. The roles of indigenous dispossesion, large-scale immigrant labour, land abundance, trade, capital, and the settler institutions, are central to this economic formation and its history. The chapters examine those economies that emerged as genuine colonial hybrids out of their differing neo-European backgrounds, with distinctive post-independence structures and an institutional persistence into the present as independent states.

Contributors include Stanley Engerman, Susan Carter, Henry Willebald, Luis Bertola, Claude Lützelschwab, Frank Tough, Kathleen Dimmer, Tony Ward, Drew Keeling, Carl Mosk, David Meredith, Martin Shanahan, John K Wilson, Bernard Attard, Grietjie Verhoef, Tim Rooth, Francine McKenzie, Jorge Alvarez, Jim McAloon, as well as the editors. 

Robert Nichols, ‘Indigeneity and the Settler Contract’, Social Criticism 16 (2013).

This article examines the application of social contract theorizing to questions pertaining to the rights of indigenous peoples today, with particular reference to recent work by Jeremy Waldron. It is argued that such theorizing must be examined with reference not only to the content of its claims, but also with respect to its general mode of argumentation and its political function in specific contexts. Read in this light, social contract theory may function to unduly deny the claims of indigenous peoples, oftentimes by shifting the register of debate to a relatively abstract and counter-factual level and relieving settler-colonial societies of the burden of proof. Insofar as social contract theory operates to this effect, it is analysed in terms of a ‘Settler Contract’.

Capitalism produced not only the advanced industrial societies of the West and Japan, but also colonialism and underdeveloped countries. South Africa is a by-product of this twin process. To know how poverty, unemployment and inequality can be eliminated requires not only a correct knowledge of how the problem arose, but also of the economic history of the world.

Regarding the historical roots of our problem, it is not enough to refer to apartheid. It is simply an Afrikaner term for a policy and process that existed before 1948.

The roots of our problem lie in colonial conquest. Colonialism gave rise not only to a colonial state, but to a colonial economy and ideology. Here is a peculiar phenomenon: the death of the colonial state is survived by the colonial economy and the colonial ideology. The colonial state died in South Africa, but is survived by the colonial economy. Our economy bears the scars and shape of a colonial economy.

The representatives of England settled here together with a population from other parts of Europe, hence the designation “settler-colonial society”. The European population in this colony became the largest in Africa, giving rise to a strong emotional bond between this settler community and the West, which is untouchable.

 

This gave rise to two grossly unequal parts of South African society. One is black, forming the vast majority of society, a large part of which is in pre-industrial rural areas. Africans became the primary labourers, and this vast sector is poor, with the worst facilities and infrastructure.

The other part is the white community, a tiny minority, which is by and large wealthy. It has the best facilities and industrial infrastructure and is linked with the industrial Western capitalist economy.

From Business Report.

Paul S. Landau. Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvi + 300 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-19603-1.

Reviewed by Edward Cavanagh (University of Ottawa)

Underlying each of the book’s nuanced arguments is the idea that highveld polities, in all their complexity and diversity, barely correlate with the “tribal” titles that were attached to them, labels that remain “political” today. Words used to differentiate “tribal” affiliations were simply that–words–which may have conveyed political realities (albeit problematically), but always seemed to miscommunicate matters relating to culture, tradition, and “the religious sphere.” Moreover, they were titles that too often glossed over the hybridization of lived experience. And many of these misinterpretations, Landau points out, continue to pervade historical and anthropological scholarship (and, though he doesn’t suggest as much, popular discourse as well). Thus, “[o]nce we stop thinking in terms of ‘peoples’, who had ‘beliefs,’” he argues, “the highveld’s political tradition, in its real situation in history, comes better into focus” (p. 248). He’s being modest here. What also comes into focus are the many parallels between the prehistoric and the historic, the past and the present, and believe it or not, the black, the brown, and the white of South Africa.

Needless to say, I find this the most important finding of the book. Although it has been a long time in the making. Martin Legassick, back in 1988, in what was quite clearly a reiteration of a number of revisionist lines of enquiry proposed by himself and others in the 1970s, claimed that all “attempts to differentiate Bantu-speakers from Khoisan, Khoikhoi and ‘San’, Sotho from Nguni, and, within each, subtribes from subtribes” were flawed. But, enamored of a Marxist theoretical framework, Legassick in these years believed that only “the social relations of production” united and differentiated communities.[3] With hindsight, Legassick’s reductionism seems overly simplistic; surely the picture is more complicated than that. Paul S. Landau (albeit with minimal reference to Khoekhoe and San) shows just how complicated that picture was. Irrespective of this revelation of complexity (which, funnily, more and more historians seem driven to reveal these days), his main points, reduced to their simplest form–namely, that religion was imposed from outsiders and turned into political discourse by converts, that tribal names and ethnic labels are historically problematic–are really not all that objectionable, and are, in fact, probably universal in the history of settler colonialism. For this reason, one suspects Popular Politics in the History of South Africa will find its way into many footnotes, and this work deserves the wide readership it will receive.