Caroline Phillips and Harry Allen (eds), Bridging the Divide: Indigenous Communities and Archaeology into the 21st Century (Left coast Press: 2012).
The collected essays in this volume address contemporary issues regarding the relationship between Indigenous groups and archaeologists, including the challenges of dialogue, colonialism, the difficulties of working within legislative and institutional frameworks, and NAGPRA and similar legislation. The disciplines of archaeology and cultural heritage management are international in scope and many countries continue to experience the impact of colonialism. In response to these common experiences, both archaeology and indigenous political movements involve international networks through which information quickly moves around the globe. This volume reflects these dynamic dialectics between the past and the present and between the international and the local, demonstrating that archaeology is a historical science always linked to contemporary cultural concerns.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Science | Closed
David McCallum, ‘Liberal Forms of Governing Australian Indigenous Peoples’, Journal of Law and Society 38, 4 (2011)
This article considers three different historical events from the point of view of their connections to aspects of the history of liberal political reason: the actions of the British in New South Wales in the early nineteenth century in their claim to sovereignty over Indigenous lands; the establishment of Aboriginal missions and subsequent removal of Aboriginal children in the early twentieth century; and the Northern Territory Emergency Response and suspension of the Australian Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act (1975) early in the twenty-first century. The aim is to point to gaps between present claims about liberalism and ‘actual existing liberalism’, review the basis for examining accounts of governance deploying ‘authoritarian liberalism’ and ‘race war’ as central concepts, and call into question the Northern Territory campaign as an ‘exceptional’ event.
Filed under: Australia, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Michael Sommer, ‘Colonies – Colonisation – Colonialism: A Typological Reappraisal’, Ancient East and West 10 (2011).
Colonies, colonisation and, in particular, colonialism are concepts carrying heavy ideological subtexts – yet they loom over the current debate about the dynamism of the Iron Age Mediterranean. Forty years after M.I. Finley’s ‘attempt at a typology’, this paper tries to thin out the terminological jungle: by employing cross-cultural historical comparison, it demonstrates how complex and manifold seemingly straightforward ideal types are; and that ‘colonies’ and ‘colonialism’ in the classical period of European imperialism were altogether different from the settlements Greeks and Phoenicians established in their Mediterranean diasporas.
Filed under: Ancient History, Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Günther Schlee, ‘Review: Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity, and Culture’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, forthcoming.
It begins:
Most of the twenty contributors to this volume work in departments of English or Literature, but this volume is also of great interest to sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists. I regret that, for this review, I can only single out a few chapters, although I found all of them to be stimulating.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
book reviewers wanted
Books received:
Carol Campbell and James F. Smith, Necessaries and Sufficiencies: Planter Society in Londonderry Onslow and Truro Townships, 1761-1780 (Sydney, NS: Cape Breton Press, 2011).
2011 marks the 250th anniversary of the coming of New England and Irish Planters to Nova Scotia. “Necessaries and Sufficiencies,” is a social political, cultural and material microhistory of 18th-century daily life in the district of Cobequid, now part of Colchester County. Eight vignettes from a cross-section of immigrants detail migration and settlement and the evolution of New England and Irish cultural mores in this wilderness setting. Occupations of both men and women, family and religious life, educational and social institutions, health care, commercial links and more. A separate section chronicles Cobequid’s reaction to the American Revolutionary War.
We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Usargues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society.
Morgensen’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people.
Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers—Spaces between Usnewly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.
In Making Settler Cinemas, Peter Limbrick argues that the United States, Australia, and New Zealand share histories of colonial encounters that have shaped their cinemas in distinctive ways. Going beyond readings of narrative and representation, this book studies the production, distribution, reception, and reexhibition of cinema across three settler societies under the sway of two empires. Investigating films both canonical and overlooked, Making Settler Cinemas not only shows how cinema has mattered to settler societies but affirms that practices of film history can themselves be instrumental in encountering and reshaping colonial pasts.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
the struggle on four fronts
Last week the African National Congress celebrated its centenary, marking a full hundred years of valiant struggle against colonialism, settler colonialism, racism and Apartheid in South Africa. All of us who had occasion to work with that great movement and its leaders and militants celebrated too.
Jenerali Ulimwengu for the East African.
Filed under: media, Southern Africa | Closed
jeremiadus’s pilgrimage
I abandoned my thatch, my cobblestones, my tolerant Dutch protectors.
For barren oak trees. On empty shores. Under grey skies. The cold bites me in the arse.I died in great numbers. Half of me died. Most of my women.
I am not a Sachem, God damn it! I cannot heal. I cannot lead. And God did not help us.
We have nothing to give thanks for.I see Natives.
Squanto was not a Wampanoag.
He was a Patuxet.
Captured and sold off in Spain in a bundle,
Packaged with fish and corn.Squanto unbundled himself.
Escaped the Spaniards.
Traveled to England.
Returned alone to the New World.He spoke many languages but had no identity.
His people also had died.
The rest of the poem lives here.
Filed under: art, Quote | Closed
From the blurb:
Are you ready to leave behind your home in England and risk your life in the name of exploration? You will have to face starvation and angry natives if you are going to set up a colony.
Check out the mixed reviews on amazon here, and for the sequel (You wouldn’t want to be an American Pioneer), here.
Filed under: United States, wacky | Closed
janette habashi on palestine, guilt, unofficial histories and the israeli national narrative
Janette Habashi, ‘Colonial Guilt and the Recycling of Oppression: The Merit of Unofficial History in Transforming the State’s Narrative’, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education 6, 1 (2012).
This article juxtaposes colonial guilt with selective historical memory of Palestinian narratives as presented in the Israeli state-mandated history textbooks. The advancement of colonial guilt imposes a particular subjective truth of oppressed groups’ historical memories. The purpose of colonial guilt is to keep the power structure intact by maintaining a victimhood hierarchy that engages oppressed groups to compete for the highest level on this scale. The current curricula position the Palestinian narratives on a low rank through its historical interpretation as existing in the shadows of other events. This notion is interrupted by the unofficial history in the Palestinian community, which challenges the presumption of colonial guilt and its manifestation in the Israeli educational system.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
