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
Historians of the British empire recast their understanding of relations between the metropole and its peripheries in the late twentieth century, notably through the work of the ‘British world’ network and the ‘new imperial historians’. The former emphasized the material, emotional, and financial links between British colonizers across the imperial diaspora; the latter focused on the empire’s impact on Britain, particularly in terms of ‘everyday’ experience. This article critically reviews recent interventions, which extend and challenge these approaches by seeking new ways to juxtapose the macro with the micro, and balance the exceptional with the quotidian; by adopting a more transnational (or global) approach to colonialism; and by rethinking the categories of ‘settler’ and ‘colonizer’. Collectively, these works question the traditional frameworks within which both colonialism and the British empire have been understood. In conclusion, the article considers their impact on the vibrant field of Britain’s colonial legal history.
Filed under: Empire, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
In nations with a record of historical injustice, guilt about the past is deeply implicated in both efforts towards reconciliation and the construction of national identity. This is as true in notionally postcolonial nations, where past injustice is often denied or avoided, as it is in situations where conflict and injustice have been more recent, overt or visible to the rest of the world. Taking the Australian case as an example, this article considers the dimensions of historical collective guilt, and explores the implications of that guilt for contemporary national identity in postcolonial nations. It argues that until a nation is able to deal with social psychological barriers to addressing historical injustice, it is likely to construct and maintain a narrow and defensive form of nationalism.
Filed under: Australia, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The Sami people of Northern Europe and Aboriginal Australians are literally a world apart in geographical terms, yet share a common fate as Indigenous minorities emerging from centuries of internal colonisation. Their ancient cultures and languages severely eroded by policies of forced assimilation, their traditional lifestyles and economies damaged, and their political voices marginalised, recent decades have seen their struggles for collective survival rise to political prominence in national and international agendas, with the promise of Indigenous self-determination held out by national governments and the United Nations Declaration of Rights for Indigenous Peoples.
Both the Sami and Indigenous Australians have won important new rights during these decades, yet the outcomes are very different. In this volume – the only collection of essays specifically on the Indigenous peoples of Australia and Northern Europe – the similarities and differences between the Indigenous experiences in the Nordic countries and Australia are explored by renowned experts in the field including Indigenous authors. Some of the contributions are explicitly comparative and based on research experience in both areas, and two essays on New Zealand and Canada provide external points of reference to the volume’s focus on Northern Europe (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia) and Australia.
As always in Indigenous Studies, issues of cultural identity and survival are prominent but there is a special emphasis in many of the chapters on issues of socio-economic development and political representation, and a substantial introduction by the editors sketches out a historical-theoretical framework for understanding Indigenous struggles in First World countries that is critical of some currently fashionable approaches.
Filed under: Australia, Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
All of this is to say Brunyeel has a point but I am wary of blaming it all on “settler colonialism” or requiring that good scholarship in the field requires respect for the theory of “settler colonialism.” I am wary of relying too much on the past to decide how things are going to progress in the future. Indian tribes can’t go to the states and feds and say tribes are entitled to some aspect of sovereignty because of what happened in the past. Indian tribes have to earn it, even take it on occasion. No one’s giving anything away.
I think American Indian law and policy is worthy of study because it’s new and dynamic and involves the most modern and creative theories about what sovereignty means in a globalized world. Law schools and political science departments are slow to recognize that. Academic institutions are bit conservative in that way. As Indian law and policy scholars, we can earn recognition and force those staid institutions to do more by showing them more. In some areas of the US, mostly the west, law schools are committing educational malpractice by not compelling more students to at least acknowledge Indian law. North Dakota and Oklahoma law schools, for example, should require Indian law. New Mexico, South Dakota, and Washington state already know this. Everyone who practices in those states in the next 100 years will confront an Indian law question. That’s a fact.
I fear, though I don’t know for sure, that going back to the well of “settler colonialism” is going to open all the doors we want. Fear of the rise of tribal governments is a real thing (you can call that a product of settler colonialism) but it cannot be overcome by resort to the past. Maybe one time you could, but not anymore.
Academics interested in Indian law and policy should be arguing why American Indian law and policy is important as a practical matter. If we can’t do that, then I guess “settler colonialism” is all we have. But good academics will be able to do it.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
