Shu-mei Shih, ‘The Concept of the Sinophone’, PMLA 126, 3 (2011).
Sinophone studies — conceived as the study of Sinitic- language cultures on the margins of geopolitical nation-states and their hegemonic productions — locates its objects of attention at the conjuncture of China’s internal colonialism and Sinophone communities everywhere immigrants from China have settled. Sinophone studies disrupts the chain of equivalence established, since the rise of nation- states, among language, culture, ethnicity, and nationality and explores the protean, kaleidoscopic, creative, and overlapping margins of China and Chineseness, America and Americanness, Malaysia and Malaysianness, Taiwan and Taiwanness, and so on, by a consideration of speciic, local Sinophone texts, cultures, and practices produced in and from these margins. Sinophone Tibetan literature and Sinophone American literature are two examples in an expansive consideration of Sinophone studies in literature. If the critical operation of Sinophone studies involves a trenchant critique of China- centrism, it equally involves a critique of Eurocentrism and other centrisms, such as Malay-centrism in Malaysia. It is, in short, always a multidirectional critique.
Three interrelated historical processes have produced Sinophone communities: continental colonialism, settler colonialism, and immigration.
Filed under: Asia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture offers an accessible overview of settler colonialism as a globally important cultural and political phenomenon within a range of historical and geographical contexts, including Palestine, Hawai’i, Canada, southern Africa, Ireland, and Australasia. Seventeen essays by leading scholars in the field argue that while different episodes of setter colonialism vary in different ways due to circumstances of time and place, they share a pervasive genocidal agenda for indigenous peoples. With its useful definitions and insights as well as its account of the opportunities that settler colonialism presents for resistance, this is a provocative study of a relatively unexplored topic of immense importance.
TOC:
Introduction; F.Bateman & L.Pilkington
‘An Unknown and Feeble Body’: How Settler Colonialism Was Theorised in the Nineteenth Century; T.Foley
Spenser, Purchas, and the Poetics of Colonial Settlement; D.Carey
‘Dycheyng and Hegeying’: The Material Culture of the Tudor Plantations in Ireland; J.P.Montano
A Settled Question?: Charles, Lord Cornwallis, the Loss of America and the Mind of Empire; D.Dix
International Anti-Colonialism: The Fenian Invasions of Canada; R.Young
Indirect Rule in Australia: A Case Study in Settler Colonial Difference; B.Silverstein
(En)gendering Faith?: Love, Marriage and the Evangelical Mission on the Settler-Colonial Frontier; C.McLisky
‘Wanted! A Real White Australia’: The Women’s Movement, Whiteness and the Settler-colonial Project, 1900-1940; J.Carey
From the Indigenous to the Indigent: Homelessness and Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i; L.E.Lyons
Searching for the ‘C’ word: Museums, Art Galleries, and Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i; K.K.Kosasa
A Dream Deterred: Palestine from Total War to Total Peace; J.Collins
Displaced Nations: Israeli Settlers and Palestinian Refugees; S.D.Hassan
Telling the End of the Settler Colonial Story; L.Veracini
JM Coetzee and the Idea of Africa; D.Attwell
Zionism Then and Now; S.Makdisi
Where We Belong: South Africa as Settler Colony and the Calibration of African and Afrikaner Indigeneity; E.Boehmer
Race and the Trace of History; P.Wolfe
Filed under: Australia, Empire, Hawaii, Israel/Palestine, New Zealand, Pacific, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
I offer that we need to find a way of interpreting settler colonialism that captures the variety of ways that settlers partake in exclusionary and assimilative practices.. Perhaps, then, it might be more precise to include in a definition of settler colonialism that often despite their most genuine anti-colonial or decolonizing intentions, settlers can nevertheless work within and to propagate colonial structures.
More here.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
david clark on comparative law
David S. Clark, ‘Comparative Law in Colonial British America’, American Journal of Comparative Law 59, 3 (2011).
American comparatists are unfamiliar with thinking about Roman, civil, and canon law influence on colonial British American laws and legal institutions or about American colonial lawyers using Roman and civil law examples in their legal argument or reform ef- forts in a manner that today we would consider practical comparative law. This Article explores whether American comparative law really began prior to 1776 with early European settlers. The aim here is to connect comparative law with its sister discipline, legal history, as far back as the evidence supports and to suggest promising avenues for further research. First, I consider the use of comparative law in England through the eighteenth century. Across the Atlantic, I then divide the analysis between intellectual legal history and social legal history. For the former,I consider the nature of legal education, availability of law books, and influential law-trained individuals. Because the social and physical environment in America was so different from that in England, I examine the importance of social factors on the development of law, especially on lawyers and courts. In addition, I speculate on the particular relevance for law of the religious and cultural diversity that existed in the thirteen colonies. Finally, I select John Adams as an exemplary legal comparativist in the pre-revolutionary period and describe his law practice and early political writings.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
700 people were arrested that day, several of them Columbia students, in an ongoing national campaign that began three weeks ago on Wall Street, where hundreds of mostly young people have been camping out or showing up for daily demonstrations.
Filed under: media, Political developments | Closed
Immigration and settler literatures provide contrasting approaches to the evaluation of conflict between ‘newcomers’ and ‘indigenous’ groups. On the one hand, immigration studies emphasize that newcomers, particularly migrants, almost never fight civil wars; on the other hand, studies on settlers in contested territories expect inherently unstable relations between settlers and native populations affected by colonization projects. While each provides strong evidence to support its argument, neither literature has adequately accounted for hybrid cases where the settler and migrant categories have become almost indistinguishable. The article focuses on Cyprus as a paradigmatic such case. Specifically, it looks at populations transferred from Turkey to the northern part of the island after 1974 described either as settlers or immigrants by rival accounts in the Cypriot conflict. While colonization constitutes a violation of international conventions and a major obstacle to peace, settlers in such places as Cyprus, Tibet or Western Sahara often meet the profile of migrant populations more interested in daily survival issues than in territorial politics. In contrast to other historical or contemporary cases of settler colonialism such as Algeria (France) or West Bank and Gaza (Israel), what is particularly puzzling in Cyprus and elsewhere is the absence of mobilization and politicization among settlers despite perceived discrimination and fear of relocation following a negotiated peace agreement. Addressing this puzzle is essential to bridging the gaps between immigration and settler literatures and in mediating the tensions between conflicting claims over space, land and the political geography of peace settlements in deeply divided societies.
Filed under: Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Reviewed by David Lindenfeld (Louisiana State University)
In this study, Hilary M. Carey sheds light on a relatively neglected aspect of missionary activity in the British Empire, namely, as directed to those who settled in the colonies rather than to the colonized–“an attempt to prevent the heathenizing of Christians” rather than “Christianizing the heathen,” as one enthusiastic advocate put it (p. 180). Thus the distinction between “colonial” and “foreign” missions runs through the book. Carey notes that the original meaning of “mission” (from the Latin “I send”) was to establish church structures in new geographical territories, and only incidentally to convert non-Christians. The lack of attention to the former in recent historiography, however, is not merely due to fashionable postcolonialism; the interest in converting the heathen increased steadily in British popular consciousness during the nineteenth century itself. Yet, as Carey points out, colonial settlers were far from a negligible quantity: the populations of the British in both Australia and Canada exceeded those in Scotland and Ireland by the 1920s, and most of these claimed allegiance to some Christian denomination. Carey’s work thus reinforces that of the New Zealand historian James Belich, whose 2009 study points to a “settler revolution” by English-speaking peoples. In New Zealand, for example, settlers saw their new homeland not merely a part of “greater Britain,” but as a “better Britain,” free of the class divisions that plagued the mother country
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
andrea smith on the local museum
In what ways does America’s settler colonial heritage shape how its citizens imagine the national past? I address this question through a study of county historical museums in rural Arizona, with a particular focus on the Navajo County Museum. This analysis suggests that we consider the “natural history” or “evolutionary” style of organizing collections as integrally tied to a foundational settler colonial logic. Conclusions are drawn about the ubiquity of this orientation to the national past and the difficulties curators may face in effectively challenging it.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
happy birthday adam kok
Members of the Royal Griqua Tribe, which organised the event, were dressed in full regalia.
Goab Bishop Kenneth Visser, a provincial leader of the Griqua Royal House, said it was of great significance to come back to the castle, where Adam Kok had once been imprisoned. “For us it means the freedom of the Griqua nation,” he said.
Maurice Vivian Kok, head of the Kok family, implored the ANC and the government to protect the “descendants of Adam Kok”.
“Our people’s morale is very low. This is leading people to crime. Our people feel rejected and we urgently need the assistance of government.
“The Khoi and the San people are seen to be a marginalised people. We must not destroy our status as an aboriginal group,” he said.
Filed under: media, Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
