Juan Obarrio, ‘Symposium: Theory from the South’, Salon 5 (2012).
In lieu of abstract, first paragraph:
The essays that follow were originally presented at a round table on Jean and John Comaroff’s latest book, Theory from the South. Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa (Paradigm 2012) held at the American Anthropology Association annual meeting (Montreal, November 2011). They represent the spirit of collegial yet critical engagement in which the event was organized.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
This paper outlines the ways in which the conception of social integration and its practical realization have developed over time in Australia, and the various pathways that models of integration have followed. It makes a distinction between the approaches to inclusion of the indigenous population, the Australian Aborigines in broader Australian social life and social institutions, and those dealing with populations of incoming migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. Although there are similarities in the models of integration mobilized in both arenas, the differences and interactions are also significant and characteristic of what is specific about settler-colonial societies. The central models in both fields are assimilation, integration and multiculturalism, and the paper will sketch briefly how each model has operated both in theory and in practice, how they have succeeded and interacted with each other, how they have intersected with other types of concerns, such as citizenship, civilization and security, as well as what might be distinctive about the Australian approach to social integration in comparison with other countries.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
onur ulas ince on wakefield
Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862) is principally known for his historical role as a colonial entrepreneur involved in the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand. Less acknowledged and analyzed is his position as a British political economist. Wakefield edited annotated volumes of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, corresponded with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill on matters of political economy, and received Karl Marx’s critical praise in Capital.
This paper examines Wakefield’s writings on colonial political economy for excavating some of the social and cultural problems that attended British settler societies in the early Victorian period. Situating these problems at the intersection of imperial political economy and post-Enlightenment categories of civilization, I maintain that Wakefield’s schemes of “systematic colonization” presented an attempt to resolve the famous problem of “falling profits” in England, while at the same time ensuring “civilized” colonial settlements. Profitability could be restored, Wakefield argued, by exporting excess labor and capital to newfound colonies and establishing an imperial division of labor that would seal the prosperity of the empire as a single economic unit. However, spontaneous settlement of the colonies suffered from social dispersal, economic stagnation, and civilizational relapse characteristic of “frontier” communities. Under the centrifugal tendencies of free-for-all colonization, the social division of labor collapsed, and Britons, once members of the most advanced commercial society ever known, gradually descended into a semi-nomadic, rude, and barbarous state. In response, Wakefield advocated public-private partnerships in promoting colonization, strict government regulation of colonial settlements, and the imposition of an artificial, “sufficient” price on colonial lands. I contend that these policy measures coalesced into a grand plan for alleviating the economic troubles of the British metropole and making sure that such alleviation did not come at the price of barbarizing British subjects in the colonies. Political and legal power would be mobilized for transposing Britain’s distinctly capitalist civilization to the colonies in an orderly fashion, or put differently, the domain of capitalist civilization would expand to the colonies without a frontier. In the process, Wakefield justified imperial intervention in the economy by recasting it as simply the enforcement of a utilitarian settler contract he imagined to exist between colonial capitalists and colonial laborers. The paper concludes by drawing out the broader implications of this analysis for conceptualizing the constitutive role of political power in the history of capitalist economic relations, our present moment not excepted.
Filed under: Australia, Empire, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Indigenous activists and anarchist Settler people are articulating common ground in opposition to imperialism and colonialism. However, many anarchists have faced difficulties in Indigenous solidarity work through unintentional (often unwitting) transgressions and appropriations. Through the introduction of settler colonialism as a complicating power dynamic, we observe that anarchists bring unconscious spatial perceptions into their solidarity work. Further, Indigenous activists often perceive anarchists as Settler people first and foremost, which carries another set of spatial implications. We examine a number of examples of anarchist and Indigenous activism, at times empowering and at times conflictual, in order to reveal some general trends. Through an intensive synthesis of Indigenous peoples’ theories and articulations of place-based relationships, we suggest that deeper understandings of these relationships can be of great importance in approaching solidarity work in place and with respect.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
William and Mary Quarterly 69, 3 (2012).
FORUM: COLONIAL HISTORIANS AND AMERICAN INDIANS
James H. Merrell, ‘Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians'(pp. 451-512).
Andrew Cayton, ‘Not the Fragments but the Whole’ (pp. 513-516).
Wendy A. Warren, ‘More than Words: Language, Colonization, and History’ (pp. 517-520).
Juliana Barr, ‘The Red Continent and the Cant of the Coastline’ (pp. 521-526).
Michael Witgen, ‘Rethinking Colonial History as Continental History’ (pp. 527-530).
Mark Peterson ‘Indians and the National Narrative: The Trouble with Words and with Us’ (pp. 531-534).
James H. Merrell, ‘Coming to Terms with Early America(pp. 535-540)’.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict (2011-12). Contains, among others:
Tammy Murphy, ‘“Courses and Recourses”: Exploring Indigenous Peoples’ Land Reclamation in Search of Fresh Solutions for Israelis and Palestinians’.
Jacinta Chiamaka Nwaka, ‘Host-Settler Relations, Conflict Dynamics, and Threatened Identity in Kano’
Filed under: Africa, Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The majority of the 160,000 convicts transported to Australia in the nineteenth century were European, yet a small number of colonial subjects were also incorporated into Britain’s Antipodean penal settlements. These included Aboriginal prisoners from the New South Wales frontier. By the 1850s a few Aboriginal convicts were incarcerated at Cockatoo Island, Sydney Harbour, where their comparatively high rate of death attracted administrative attention. This article situates these deaths in custody within the broader history of convict transportation. As well as an analysis of comparative death rates it uses a series of case studies to explore the factors that contributed to the higher death rate experienced by Aboriginal convicts in colonial Australia.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Johnson v. McIntosh established the basic principles that govern American Indian property rights to this day. In the case, more than one Anglo-American purchaser claimed title to the same land in what is now southern Illinois. The Piankeshaw Indians had deeded the land twice—once to speculators in 1775, and again, thirty years later, to the United States by treaty. The Court decided in favor of William McIntosh, who had bought the land from the U.S. government. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the “discovery” of America had given “exclusive title to those who made it”— namely, the European colonizers. According to Johnson, the Piankeshaws did not own what they thought was their land. Indeed, no Indian tribe did.
Blake A. Watson’s examination of Johnson v. McIntosh and its impact offers a comprehensive historical and legal overview of Native land rights since the European discovery of the New World. Watson sets the case in rich historical context. After tracing Anglo-American views of Native land rights to their European roots, Watson explains how speculative ventures in Native lands affected not only Indian peoples themselves but the causes and outcomes of the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and ratification of the Articles of Confederation. He then focuses on the transactions at issue in Johnson between the Illinois and Piankeshaw Indians, who sold their homelands, and the future shareholders of the United Illinois and Wabash Land Companies.
The final chapters highlight the historical legacy of Johnson v. McIntosh for federal policy with regard to Indian lands. Taught to first-year law students as the root of title for real property in the United States, the case has also been condemned by the United Nations and others as a Eurocentric justification for the subjugation of the Indians. Watson argues that the United States should formally repudiate the discovery doctrine set forth in Johnson v. McIntosh.
The thorough backstory and analysis in this book will deepen our understanding of one of the most important cases in both federal Indian law and in American property law.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The dynamics of population and urbanization in South Africa have been recorded by a remarkable set of censuses during the 20th century. These censuses indicate a changing hierarchy of places that is typical of a settler society and of its representations of space and society. Over one century, the official census places and the pattern of population distribution have shifted from a selective colonial view of human settlements to an inclusive postcolonial society view closer to the distribution of the whole population.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
This fascinating look at the cultural and military importance of British forts in the colonial era explains how these forts served as communities in Indian country more than as bastions of British imperial power. Their security depended on maintaining good relations with the local Native Americans, who incorporated the forts into their economic and social life as well as into their strategies. This book uses official British records, traveler accounts, archaeological findings, and ethnographic information to reveal native contributions to the forts’ stories. Based on in-depth research at five different forts, the book considers features that seemed to arise from Native American culture rather than British imperial culture. The book’s perspective reveals that British fort culture was heavily influenced, and in some cases guided, by the very people these outposts of empire were meant to impress and subdue. The book recaptures the significance of small-scale encounters as vital features of the colonial American story, without arguing their importance in larger imperial frameworks. It specifically seeks to reorient the meaning of British military and provincial backcountry forts away from their customary roles as harbingers of European imperial domination.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
