This lecture was delivered on December 6, 2012 at Princeton University for the 10th Annual Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture.

Mahmood Mamdani is an academic, author, and political commentator. In 2008, Mamdani was voted as the 9th “top public intellectual” in the world on the list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy (US). From 1998 to 2002 he served as President of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa). He is the author of, among other books, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996), When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2002), Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (2010), and, most recently, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (2012). His works explore the intersection between politics and culture, the history of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the history and theory of human rights.

He is presently the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University in New York, and also Professor and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda, and. He grew up in Uganda and acquired his B.A from the University of Pittsburgh, before going on to attain his Masters degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1969 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1974.

This event was sponsored by the Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture Fund, the Princeton Committee on Palestine, the Department of English, and the Program in African Studies.

Watch the video here.

Scott Lauria Morgensen, ‘Destabilizing the Settler Academy: The Decolonial Effects of Indigenous Methodologies’, American Quarterly 64, 4 (2012).

The academy forms within settler societies as an apparatus of colonization. Indigenous researchers critically engage its colonial power by practicing Indigenous methodologies: an act that also implicates non-Indigenous people in challenging the settler academy. Indigenous methodologies do not merely model Indigenous research. By exposing normative knowledge production as being not only non-Indigenous but colonial, they denaturalize power within settler societies and ground knowledge production in decolonization. An activist impetus thus informs Indigenous methodologies, yet “activism” typically fails to invoke their full implications. Whereas “activism” in a settler society may invest social justice in state rule, decolonization anticipates that rule’s end. Decolonization is activist, but activism need not be decolonizing. Indigenous methodologies arise within the larger pursuit of Indigenous decolonization, a project that Indigenous critics theorize variously as ontological, psychic, governmental, and relational.

Mark Neocleous, ‘International Law as Primitive Accumulation; Or, the Secret of Systematic Colonization’, Eur J Int Law 23, 4 (2012).

The fact that the settler population is mostly white, English-speaking, and has European ancestors creates an illusion of identity. Politicians encourage this by constantly talking of Australia as a “Western country”, a nonsense term that a surprising number of social scientists still use.

Current trends in universities are worsening the problem. Neoliberal policy-makers drive Australian universities and academics to compete with each other. The key metrics for this competition involve recognition in the metropole, especially, publication and citation in highly-ranked metropolitan journals. Since metropolitan journals operate within metropolitan intellectual cultures (we can’t expect them to do otherwise!), the message for Australian scientists is clear: do it the US/EU way, if you want promotion and grants in Australia.

Social science in a settler-colonial society therefore tends to split between an abstractedtheoretical discourse, conducted as if in the metropole with little or no local reference, and an applied social science in which methodologies developed in the metropole are applied to empirical studies of local social problems.

From Southern Perspectives.

F. C. McGrath, ‘Settler nationalism: Ulster unionism and postcolonial theory’, Irish Studies Review 20, 4 (2012).

Despite the capacity of postcolonial theory to accommodate a wide variety of situations, one area of postcolonial experience still has not received much attention – the experience of non-hegemonic settler colonies, that is settler colonies that did not in the end succeed in dominating native populations politically or culturally. Analysis of the unionist community in Northern Ireland offers a number of refinements to postcolonial theory at the same time that it demonstrates how postcolonial theory can enrich our understanding of non-hegemonic settler populations. While every postcolonial culture, native or settler, is uniquely structured by specific historical circumstances, there are features that many of these cultures share, such as hybridity, estrangement, incommensurability, contradiction, mimicry, miscognition, ambivalence, resistance, and the construction of mythical/historical narratives. The structure of these features, however, differs between native and settler cultures, and it differs in a way that makes one culture the mirror image of the other. This should not be surprising since the same colonial situation produces both native nationalism and settler nationalism, and they are both subject to similar colonial contradictions. Recognising settler nationalism as a legitimate part of postcolonial studies opens up the possibility of exploiting the in-betweenness of settler cultures. Emphasising this in-betweenness, and thus its affinities with native nationalism, suggests that settlers, particularly non-hegemonic settlers, are likely to find more in common with the natives they see themselves in opposition to rather than with the colonisers they identify with.

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.