It is not common for the Hasbara machine, disseminating Israeli state propaganda, to be exposed in such a way. As if by coincidence, two expatriate South African Jews, with a bit of a liberal reputation, came out of retirement to produce almost identical pieces for the press, rejecting the analogy between Israel and apartheid. That both have chosen to do that at the same time, using the same arguments and examples, raises an obvious suspicion that they speak from an identical script which looks as if it was produced by officials in the Israeli Ministry against Delegitimisation.
[..]
Having ignored the existence of refugees, Goldstone and Pogrund proceed conveniently to forget other components of the situation. Take settlers. Who? Good question. In their version of reality, the 1967 occupation is a temporary security measure that would end with successful negotiations. That the ‘peace process’ has served to entrench Israeli control over the territories, and has resulted in hundreds of settlements and hundreds of thousands of settlers, products of hundred billion US dollars in investment, is not something of which they seem aware. Goldstone, for example, tells us that the ‘security fence’, AKA the ‘apartheid wall’, aims to prevent terrorist attacks. If so, why is it not built on the Green Line, to separate Israel from the territories? Why is it constructed to include maximum land and settlers but exclude as many of the local as possible? Why does investment in settlements, roads, housing and infrastructure continue, making negotiations (over the ever-shrinking remaining land) increasingly meaningless? How long can this situation be regarded as ‘temporary’, when it has lasted longer than apartheid did, and shows no signs of coming to an end? On the contrary, it continues to expand and shape not only what is happening in the territories but also in Israel ‘proper’, thus making the distinction between the two irrelevant.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, media, Southern Africa | Closed
The July 14th Movement and Occupy Wall Street efforts have deservedly garnered press attention. Much more importantly, they have mobilized huge numbers of people who had not been politically active previously and have radicalised others. These are ‘awakenings’ of a rare kind and should be constructively engaged where possible. The lessons from the July 14th Movement show that some kinds of engagement, anti-colonial and anti-racist specifically, are made difficult by the very structures of the movements themselves. These can be fixed and, in the case of the Occupy efforts in the U.S., might still be avoided altogether. (Un)occupy Albuquerque, Occupy the Hood, and the Occupy Wall Street fight against anti-Semitism are clear examples where anti-colonial and anti-racist efforts have been had some success in making the Occupy efforts more inclusive. The July 14th response to the Trajtenberg Report too has the chance to incorporate Tent 1948 into its efforts at a more inclusive change, one that would empower all people ruled by the Israeli government to take a stand for social justice.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, media, Political developments, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
khoisan language revival
In order to create a cadre of Khoisan linguists capable of facilitating the preservation and development of the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa, CASAS administers a scholarship scheme for University linguistic studies in Cape Town, at the undergraduate level with possibilities of advancement to post-graduate studies thereafter. The KLSSS is supported by Brot fur die Welt, Stuttgart, Germany. The scholarship scheme started with the first cohort in the academic year starting in January 2002.
More details here.
Hat tip, Luke S.
Filed under: Southern Africa | Closed
Stumbled across this today, fresh of the press at the William & Mary Quarterly. Each contribution is available for free here.
Critical Forum. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865
Julia Adams, ‘Clear, Hold, Build: Patriarchy and Sovereignty in the Colonization of Early English America’.
Tamar Herzog and Richard J. Ross, ‘Law, Labor, and Civic Identities in the British and Spanish Empires’.
Paul K. Eiss, ‘Indigenous Sovereignty under and after Spanish Rule’.
Richard White, ‘Legal Pluralism and Native Sovereignty’.
Stuart Banner, ‘Legal History, Inside and Out’.
Christopher Tomlins, ‘Freedom Bound: A Response to Readers’.
Filed under: Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
In the late nineteenth century, European expansionism found one of its last homes in the North American West. While the settlement of the American West was renowned for its lawlessness, the Canadian Prairies enjoyed a tamer reputation symbolized by the Mountie and his legendary triumph over chaos.
Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada’s peaceful West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940, where offences ranged from rape and wife-beating to husband murder and prostitution. In doing so, Erickson opens a window onto a world where judges’ and juries’ responses to the most intimate or violent acts were coloured by a desire to shore up the liberal economic order by maintaining boundaries between men and women, Native people and newcomers, and capital and labour. Victims and accused could only hope to harness entrenched ideas about masculinity, femininity, race, and class in their favour. The results, Erickson shows, were predictable but never certain.
This fascinating exploration of hegemony and resistance in key contact zones not only complicates traditional narratives of prairie exceptionalism, it also draws the region’s history into larger debates about law, colonialism, and nation building. This book will be welcomed by social and legal historians, those with an interest in colonial and frontier history, as well as scholars and students of law and gender.
Filed under: Canada, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
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. This book argues that their comparative invisibility is a result of their place in the national narrative.
In this revisionist analysis of South African historiography, 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.
Filed under: Africa, Genocide, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Once in class, students receive lessons in indigenous rights, language and mythology and in the afternoons they get the chance to put practical skills to the test, herding buffalo and tending vegetable plots.
The Indigenous University is far removed from its counterparts in Venezuela’s cities. But that is because it has been constructed by and for indigenous communities.
Filed under: Latin America | Closed
The Shcherbina Expedition of 1896–1903 was the Russian Empire’s most concerted effort to gather the data necessary to facilitate peasant settlers’ migration to its largely nomadic steppe oblasts. Although this expedition was a massive exercise of imperial power privileging sedentary over mobile pastoralist lifeways, the oppositional views of its participants made matters more ambiguous. The civilizational hierarchies that emerged in its materials did not strictly privilege sedentary lifeways, and an effort was made to preserve mobile pastoralists’ lifeways and economic wellbeing. The project of objectively correct colonization that the expedition embodied was initially embraced by all interested parties as a certain solution to the clash of lifeways brought about by peasant migration to the steppe. After its work was published, however, contested use of its statistical norms made it clear that the idea of ‘correct colonization’ could not prevent the serious conflicts engendered by settlement in the steppe.
Filed under: Asia, Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
wall street’s real natives
Newspaper Rock has collected a few indigenous perspectives, here and here.
The omission of the realities of settler colonialism from this trendy little protest is ironic, he notes.
Filed under: media, Political developments, United States | Closed
Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement serving as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are visible, but they have agency to transform life on their lands and on their terms.
Filed under: Europe, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
