Today the bulk of tangible wealth around the globe resides in buildings and physical infrastructure rather than moveable goods. This situation was not always the case. Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment represents the first attempt to delve into the period’s enhanced architectural investment—its successes, its failures, and the conflicts it provoked. Not just cultural but clear economic and environmental reasons existed for a rejection of the new architectural agenda. Whatever its efficacy or flaws, it ultimately served as a model worldwide for cityscapes and housing well into the twentieth century.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Introduction
John Hinkson, ‘Why settler colonialism?’.
Time
Edward Cavanagh, ‘History, time and the indigenist critique’.
Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, ‘The vanishing endpoint of settler colonialism’.
Sarah Maddison, ‘Seven generations behind: Representing native nations’.
Bodies
Mary O’Dowd, ‘Embodying the Australian nation and silencing history’.
Gaia Giuliani, ‘The colour lines of settler colonialism’.
Hokulani K Aikau, ‘More than preserving a polynesian paradise’.
Spaces
Alice Robinson and Dan Tout, ‘Unsettling conceptions of wilderness and nature’.
Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Settler-colonial landscapes and narratives of possession’.
Melissa Lovell, ‘A settler-colonial consensus on the northern intervention’.
Deirdre Howard-Wagner, ‘Reclaiming the northern territory as a settler-colonial space’.
Palestine: Past and Present
John Docker, ‘Orientalism and zionism: Dismantling Leon Uris’s “exodus”‘.
Patrick Wolfe, ‘New Jews for old: Settler state formation and the impossibility of Zionism: In memory of Edward W. Said’.
Afterword
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Settler colonialism: A global and contemporary phenomenon’.
Filed under: Africa, Asia, Australia, Éire, Canada, Empire, Europe, Genocide, Hawaii, Human Rights, Israel/Palestine, Latin America, middle east, New Zealand, Pacific, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
savages
‘Bushman’, ‘Maori’ and ‘Aborigine’, from the Savages series (2007-8), by artist Joe Levickas.
Filed under: art | Closed
book launch, ipcs
This book shows that the Griqua people are commonly misunderstood. Today, they do not figure in the South African imagination as other peoples do, nor have they for over a century. Cavanagh argues that their comparative invisibility is a result of their place in South Africa’s national narrative: an impediment that has precluded the Griqua from a number of new sources of redress for socio-economically disadvantaged peoples in the transformation era, in particular the program of land restitution developed in 1994. In this revisionist analysis of South African historiography, which connects with scholarship on other regions and peoples, the author analyses over a century’s worth of historical studies and identifies a number of narrative frameworks that have proven resilient to change over this time. The Griqua, in particular, have fared poorly compared to other peoples. They appear in, and disappear from, this body of work in a number of consistent ways, almost as though scholars have avoided re-imagining their history in ways relevant to the present. This book questions why that might be the case.
The book will be launched by Lorenzo Veracini, Queen Elizabeth II Fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism. He is the author of Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010) and Israel and Settler Society (2006). In 2010 he cofounded the journal settler colonial studies, and is currently the journal’s managing editor.
Edward William Cavanagh is a non-indigenous Australian, formerly a student of the Australian National University, the University of Alberta, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of the Witwatersrand. He is currently an Ontario Trillium Foundation Scholar, and will prepare a comparative legal history of companies within the British Empire from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, as a graduate student at the University of Ottawa. He specialises on the history of settler colonies, particularly focusing on matters relating to land and sovereignty. His scholarship attempts to explore some of the ways we can understand and address indigenous rights both in the past and in the present, both within and across national boundaries. He is the co-founder and reviews editor of the journal settler colonial studies, and he has authored a number of journal articles in the separate fields of history and law. The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902-1994 is his first monograph.
The Institute of Postcolonial Studies is an independent organisation committed to advancing the recognition of cultural difference, and encouraging mutual engagement and reconciliation. The Institute building was once a pub on the route to the Victorian goldfields, but has since been extensively remodelled to suit contemporary needs. The renovation of the building was overseen and designed by architect Shelley Penn and the gardens and plantings are overseen by landscape architect Mary Chapman.
Filed under: launch, public lecture, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Institute for Social Transformation Research, in cooperation with the School of History and Politics, Faculty of Arts @ University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, 24 & 25 September 2012.
Click here for the complete Collaborative Struggle program, featuring Henry Reynolds, Lorenzo Veracini, Ilan Pappé, and others.
Filed under: public lecture, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Indigenous struggles in Canada and the USA—the northern bloc of settler colonialism—have long been characterized by tactical occupations. It is often assumed that Indigenous peoples’ concerns are congruent with those of ‘the 99%’: broad-based opposition to economic and political marginalization, strong sub-currents of environmentalism and direct democracy, and antipathy towards state violence. Indigenous people and groups have engaged with Occupy, but have also raised powerful critiques of the goals, philosophies and tactics of various Occupy movements. As a result, there have been changes within the praxes of Occupy, but also conflict and disintegration. Many concerns of Indigenous peoples remain unaddressed; legacies of historical colonization and the dynamics of contemporary settler colonialism are powerfully entrenched. The Occupy movements seek to claim the spaces created by state power and corporate wealth—specific sites such as Zuccotti Park or Wall Street, and general spaces of urban poverty and suburban collapse. Indigenous occupations, by contrast, seek to reclaim and reassert relationships to land and place submerged beneath the settler colonial world. These occupations question the validity of settler colonial nation states. Simultaneously, the nationalistic, racialized content of Occupy movements in North America does not just leave Indigenous peoples out; it situates Occupy within a settler colonial dynamic, participating in the transfer of land and power to the hands of the settler colonial majority. Settler colonialism provides a powerful lens through which to examine Settler—Indigenous dynamics around Occupy.
Filed under: Canada, Political developments, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
There is a growing body of literature which argues that the two major theories of liberal citizenship (those of John Locke and J.S. Mill) were deeply enmeshed with both colonization (the processes by which the imperial state takes over the land and/or sovereignty of another country) and colonialism (the theoretical framework by which colonization is justified). This article, builds upon this literature but asks whether the existence of hundreds of domestic colonies within (as opposed to outside) the borders of Britain and British settler states for citizens (as opposed to foreigners) at the turn of the twentieth century challenges the scope and definition of ‘colonialism’ in previous literature. Liberal colonialism, it is argued, seeks to transform those deemed to be ‘idle’, ‘irrational’ and/or custom bound, both at home and abroad, into ‘industrious and rational’ citizens. Domestically this meant housing the idle poor and mentally ill/disabled in labour and farm colonies, respectively in order to break them free through segregation from their bad customs/habits and teaching them, through education and agrarian labour, to become proper citizens. Ultimately, it is hoped that this analysis will help to explain how liberal states could come to embrace rather than reject within their own borders such deeply illiberal practises as segregation and assimilation against ‘internal’ others well into the twentieth century.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Click on the ‘journal’ tab above to check out the table of contents and follow the links to the articles!
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Provocative and original, The Politics of Indigeneity explores the concept of indigeneity across the world – from the Americas to New Zealand, Africa to Asia – and the ways in which it intersects with local, national and international social and political realities. Taking on the role of critical interlocutors, the authors engage in extended dialogue with indigenous spokespersons and activists, as well as between each other. In doing so, they explore the possibilities of a ‘second-wave indigeneity’ – one that is alert to the challenges posed to indigenous aspirations by the neo-liberal agenda of nation-states and their concerns with sovereignty.
Timely and topical in its focus on global indigenous politics, and featuring a variety of first-hand indigenous voices – including those of indigenous activists, scholars, leaders and interviewees – this is a vital contribution to an often contentious topic.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
