David Waldron and Janice Newton, ‘Rethinking Appropriation of the Indigenous: A Critique of the Romanticist Approach’, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16, 2 (2012).

The aim of this paper is to set out the effects of romanticism on attitudes of the New Age movement to Indigenous Aboriginal Australian culture and people. Past scholarship has clearly expounded insensitive and exploitative New Age appropriation of Indigenous culture and emphasized inequalities in the power to represent one’s own group. Essentialist, romantic stereotypes detract from deep understanding of Indigenous Australians, and negotiated solutions are not really possible when the parties involved are in grossly unequal circumstances. Scholarship acknowledges diversity within Indigenous groups and the New Age movement as well as convergences and reciprocal cultural borrowing, often within romantic epistemologies. A simple dichotomy of cultural theft by New Age practitioners from Indigenous Australians is inadequate to explain the complexities of the interaction.

Georgine Clarsen and Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Settler Colonial Automobilities: A Distinct Constellation of Automobile Cultures?’, History Compass 10, 12 (2012).

A growing body of scholarship employs the concept of ‘automobility’ to understand the practices, meanings and values with which cars have become invested. Analysis of settler colonial phenomena has also recently cohered into a distinctive transnational research strand. This article aims to integrate the findings of these two previously unconnected scholarly agendas in order to ask the following questions: can the existence of a distinct settler colonial form of automobility culture be hypothesised; can a distinct notion of ‘settler colonial automobility’ be construed and profitably compared with other automobility traditions and, if so, what are its key characteristics? Given its inherently composite nature, this article aims to contribute to scholarly debates on both transnational automobilities and on settler colonial phenomena.

Haifa Rashed and Damien Short, ‘Genocide and settler colonialism: can a Lemkin-inspired genocide perspective aid our understanding of the Palestinian situation?’, The International Journal of Human Rights 16, 8 (2012).

This article examines the situation of the Palestinians through the sociological lens of the concept of genocide. Following a recent trend in genocide studies, the article engages with the original theorising of Raphael Lemkin – who coined the term ‘genocide’. These studies have highlighted the association Lemkin made between genocide and colonialism and have applied the genocide concept to settler colonial societies such as Australia. It argues that if Israel is conceivably a settler colonial project then by implication its relationship with the Palestinian people can be analysed through the genocide lens. Whilst some academics and journalists are now tentatively applying terms such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ to describe the events surrounding the creation of the Israeli state, the historical and continuing, cultural and physical, destructive social and political relations involved in the Israel/Palestine conflict is a somewhat neglected potential case study in the field of genocide studies. The objective of this article is to highlight the potential for a Lemkin inspired sociology of genocide in analysing aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict, through a consideration of the link he made between genocide and colonialism and some of his key ‘techniques of genocide’ as specified in the seminal text Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

David B. Coplan, ‘People of the Early Caledon River Frontier and Their Encounters’, African Historical Review 44, 2 (2012).

When the early white settlers began crossing the Orange River during the early nineteenth century, they claimed to have found an empty land, and not to have encountered the San (‘Bushman’), Euro-Khoe (‘Bastaard’/Griqua and Koranna) and Bantu-speaking (Batswana and Basotho) inhabitants of the country. This was not at all so, and the undeniability of the encounter was soon made patent by the violent but sometimes collaborative relations that ensued. Distinguished South African historians have given us harrowing and pitiless accounts of Khoe-khoe and, more often and more fiercely, San resistance to their dispossession, enslavement, and extirpation by white settlers in Transorangia in the first third of the nineteenth century. Accounts of cooperation and mutually benevolent interaction also exist, though they are far more the exception. This account explores who the Transorangians were and how they perceived and dealt with one another. The ‘identity violence’ practised on the frontier has shaped how they have related until today.

Settler Colonial Studies is a field of research which has developed dynamically in recent years. Most of the scholarly work, however, focusses on theoretical and conceptual questions, as Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds have emphasized in their volume Making Settler Colonial Space (2010). Analyzing the relationships of power, the violent acts as well as the micro-practices which established and sustain (postcolonial) settler societies until today has been neglected so far.

The efforts of the DFG-research group on the history of “Settler Imperialism in North America and Australia”, by contrast, aim at reconstructing the micro-history and -practices of appropriating indigenous land, of dispossessing, evicting and eliminating indigenous societies. Moreover, it reflects on the political and gouvernemental programs that went hand in hand with these practices. Ultimately, the projects aims at answering one central question: What are the economic, political and cultural conditions of settler violence at the frontier?

This one-day workshop connects the researchers engaged in this project with an international group of scholars who investigate this particular problem from different perspectives in their ongoing research. Together, they will investigate the various dimensions of settler imperialism as a historical phenomenon by discussing carefully chosen case studies in a transnational and comperative perspective. Particular emphasis will be put on reconstructing the roles different actors played in these processes, their individual experiences as well as on the social and physical (re-)organization of settler colonial space. The case studies will look at examples from across the Anglo-world including the United States, Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand.

The workshop will be conducted in English and German. Interested guests are welcome. Please contact Dr. Eva Bischoff to register (bischoff@uni-trier.de). Deadline for registration is 6 December 2012.

PROGRAMM

Dienstag, 11. Dezember 2012

14.00  Prof. Dr. Ursula Lehmkuhl (Trier): Begrüßung

14.15 – 15.45 Dimensionen der Landnahme: Messen und Ordnen

Hanno Scheerer (Trier)

Settlers, Surveyors, Speculators: Settler Imperialism in Ohio’s Virginia Military District, 1787-1810

Julius Wilm (Berlin)

“No man will go to Oregon unless you hire him to go there”: The Congressional Design of the First U.S. Homestead Laws

Björn Beyen (Köln)

Koloniale Reorganisation im postkolonialen Siedlerstaat? Der Native-Title-Fall der Yorta Yorta in Australien

15.45 – 16.15 Kaffeepause / Coffee Break

16.15 – 17.45 Dimensionen der Frontier: Zwischen Middle Ground und Low Intensity Warfare

Rebecca Burke (Wellington, NZ)

“Friendly relations between the two races were soon established”: Maori-Pakeha Interaction in Wellington, 1840-1860

Dr. Eva Bischoff (Trier)

Arms and Amelioration: Negotiating Quaker Peace Testimony and Settler Violence in 1830s Van Diemen’s Land

Prof. Dr. Ursula Lehmkuhl (Trier)

Cultures of Resilience: Innovation and Persistence in Western Australia and the Canadian Prairies, 1830-1860

17.45 – 18.15 Abschlussdiskussion

Moderation: Dr. Eva Bischoff (Trier)

Unparalleled in its breadth and scope, Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility brings together some of the freshest and most original writing on sovereignty being done today. Sovereignty’s many dimensions are approached from multiple perspectives and experiences. It is viewed globally as an international question; locally as an issue contested between Natives and settlers; and individually as survival in everyday life. Through all this diversity and across the many different national contexts from which the contributors write, the chapters in this collection address each other, staging a running conversation that truly internationalizes this most fundamental of political issues.

In the contemporary world, the age-old question of sovereignty remains a key terrain of political and intellectual contestation, for those whose freedom it promotes as well as for those whose freedom it limits or denies. The law is by no means the only language in which to think through, imagine, and enact other ways of living justly together. Working both within and beyond the confines of the law at once recognizes and challenges its thrall, opening up pathways to alternative possibilities, to other ways of determining and self-determining our collective futures. The contributors, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, converse across disciplinary boundaries, responding to critical developments within history, politics, anthropology, philosophy, and law. The ability of disciplines to connect with each other—and with experiences lived outside the halls of scholarship—is essential to understanding the past and how it enables and fetters the pursuit of justice in the present. Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility offers a reinvigorated politics that understands the power of sovereignty, explores strategies for resisting its lived effects, and imagines other ways of governing our inescapably coexistent communities.

Contributors: Antony Anghie, Larissa Behrendt, John Docker, Peter Fitzpatrick, Kent McNeil, Richard Pennell, Alexander Reilly, Ben Silverstein, Nin Tomas, Davina B. Woods.

Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (eds), Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Routledge 2012).

Between Indigenous and Settler Governance addresses the history, current development and future of Indigenous self-governance in four settler-colonial nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Bringing together emerging scholars and leaders in the field of indigenous law and legal history, this collection offers a long-term view of the legal, political and administrative relationships between Indigenous collectivities and nation-states. Placing historical contingency and complexity at the center of analysis, the papers collected here examine in detail the process by which settler states both dissolved indigenous jurisdictions and left spaces – often unwittingly – for indigenous survival and corporate recovery. They emphasise the promise and the limits of modern opportunities for indigenous self-governance; whilst showing how all the players in modern settler colonialism build on a shared and multifaceted past. Indigenous tradition is not the only source of the principles and practices of indigenous self-determination; the essays in this book explore some ways that the legal, philosophical and economic structures of settler colonial liberalism have shaped opportunities for indigenous autonomy. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance will interest all those concerned with Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations.

Dominic O’Sullivan, ‘Globalization and the Politics of Indigeneity’, Globalizations 9, 5 (2012).

Indigenous peoples inevitably associate globalization with imperial expansion and the colonization of their territories. One associated scholarly view is that globalization’s focus on capital accumulation sets aside indigenous cultural priorities to undermine self-determining authority over lands and resources (Fenelon and Hall, 2008; Friedman, 1999; Kelsey, 2005a, 2005b; Stewart-Harawira, 2005). Alternatively, globalization is an ambiguous paradox also providing significant benefits to indigenous peoples. In two very different Pacific countries, Fiji and New Zealand, the globalization of political and jurisprudential thought on the rights of indigeneity provides a significant counter to state assertions of absolute sovereignty. Globalization creates economic opportunities to reduce indigenous dependence on the state and in its contemporary expression is less significant than domestic factors in inhibiting indigenous aspirations.

‘Roundtable Q&A’, Puerto del Sol 47, 2 (2012).

Roundtable Discussion featuring Jacqueline Dutton, Daniel Heath Justice, Kim Stanley Robinson and Lorenzo Veracini.