When American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania appeared in 1999, it was situated within several broader contexts: American literary studies, of course, but also the field of America-Holy Land studies. And I placed America-Holy Land studies within the even broader framework of “settler-colonial studies,” a field that was barely, if at all, acknowledged twelve years ago. These three categories have developed considerably with regard to what had been two relatively neglected Melville works. In the last decade or so, scholars have engaged both Melville’s journal and poem-pilgrimage, either in monographs or as part of broader studies. Clarel has been increasingly recognized as a major work, one that calls out for further readings. Here I want to revisit the heuristics of America-Holy Land studies and settler-colonial studies. These evolving conceptual frameworks have raised new awareness about the effects of culture and colonialism upon each other, about religious-nationalist perceptions in the United States, and about the changing understanding of America’s relationship to the Middle East over an increasingly troubled decade. As a result, critical responses to Clarel are far richer now particularly because Melville’s poem-pilgrimage has come to feel so contemporary.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, literature, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
The growth of a network of remote communities in Australia’s Northern Territory followed the success of an Aboriginal land rights movement in the 1970s. In the course of the past two decades, there have been increasing reports of distress in these communities interpreted differently by anthropologists and opinion writers in the national press, some of the latter of a neo-liberal bent. This article examines critically the position of anthropologists and the relations between a politics of difference and equality as they bear on the position of remote Aboriginal Australians.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Some more recent evidence supports Du Bois’ prediction that the twentieth century would prove the century of the colour line. It indicates that men have always and everywhere shown a preference for fair complexioned women as sexual partners, whereas males seeking a mate are rarely disadvantaged by a dark complexion. In the employment market in the USA, a dark complexion is a significant disadvantage for both males and females. Though there is no properly comparable evidence from other countries, there appears to be a widespread tendency for any negative valuation of darker skin colour to be incorporated into a scale of socio-economic status. In some situations a colour scale is replacing the colour line.
Du Bois’ reference to differences of colour has been largely superseded in English-speaking countries by references to differences of race. From a policy standpoint, the switch from colour to race has had both positive and negative consequences. From a sociological standpoint, it has made it more difficult to disaggregate the dimensions of social difference and to dispel the confusions engendered by ideas of racial difference.
Filed under: Latin America, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This article draws upon my personal experience working across the boundaries of New Zealand, Canadian and Australian History. With attention to the British colonial past in these places I compare and contrast the politics of writing history. I explore national historiographies as counterparts, with a particular focus on writing women into history. I argue that transnational history must address the ongoing presence of cultural cringe in the historiography. Important gaps between national histories are revealed: gaps that might offer future direction for scholarship. Teaching beyond national boundaries is also discussed, and the danger of replicating the imperial past is foreshadowed.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, gender, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
nadia kanani on race and madness
The intersectional social construction of race and madness has significantly shaped the lived experiences of racialized people with psychiatric histories. Unfortunately, there are few studies that consider the intersections between race and madness, and fewer still that locate these intersections within the social and political contexts of colonization, Canadian and American settler states, and immigration. The primary purpose of this article is to provide a review of the literature that looks at the intersections of race and madness in Canada and the US. In particular, the author will highlight common themes that are articulated in this literature. The second goal of this article is to locate the experiences of racialized people with psychiatric histories within the socio-historical context from which they arise. The author will argue that race and madness have been mutually socially constructed in Canadian and American society. Further, the author will illustrate that psychiatric constructions of racialized people have allowed for the rationalization and justification of both historical and ongoing colonial and imperialist domination, slavery, and exclusionary immigration policies.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
extract:
The 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s were marked by two movements that were causally related yet contradictory: huge waves of global migration in tension with nation-states’ increased efforts to consolidate authority over their borders. Three villages and hamlets—one at Irish Creek in El Dorado County, California; one at Waiākea in Hilo, Hawai‘i; and one at Wushi in Xiangshan, China—exemplify this tension and illustrate its meanings. Tracing the connections that linked these three places demonstrates the utility of using borderlands to understand the complex relationship between global migration and restrictive border making in the nineteenth century. Each of these places might be considered a borderland, and examining them as such can demonstrate how borderlands scholarship turns our attention to important yet easily neglected meeting places in history and opens our eyes to the complexities and ambiguities of social relations in those places.
Studying these places can also point to the importance of resisting two limitations of the term “borderlands.” First, the word privileges contact between two nation-states. While binational contact is important, the emergence of the modern world saw the construction of spaces where global history became local: often more than two countries were in social and economic contact, rendering the coherence of national boundaries uncertain. Rather than studying places such as the U.S.-Mexican borderlands as the region surrounding one border, we can usefully conceive of them as nodes in a network of global processes and can use the sites’ global connections to understand these processes. Second, a nation-state focus in borderlands history risks obscuring the histories of indigenous peoples whose lands had been colonized or were at risk of colonization, such as nineteenth-century American Indians and Kānaka Maoli (one of the principal Hawaiian-language terms for indigenous Hawaiian people).
Filed under: Hawaii, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This collection extends our understanding of the colonial paradigm in early modern Ireland. An appraisal of Tudor government policy is complemented by one soldier’s view of late Elizabethan developments. Plantation cartography and building, colonial discourse, the peerage, Caroline political culture, language change and evolving views of the Irish past are further themes. For the 1640s, the administrative framework of the Depositions, revolt in one county, and the role of the Ulster Scots are explored. A final section considers how identities established earlier were shaped by late 17th-century developments: the recasting of the 1640s; the fate of the surviving Catholic elite in the wake of military defeat; and Irish Catholic emigrés in England.
For a H-Net Review by Christopher Maginn, see here.
Filed under: Éire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
common-place
Common-place is a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Common-place speaks–and listens–to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900. Common-place is a common place for all sorts of people to read about all sorts of things relating to early American life–from architecture to literature, from politics to parlor manners. And it’s a place to find insightful analysis of early American history as it is discussed not only in scholarly literature but also on the evening news; in museums, big and small; in documentary and dramatic films; and in popular culture.
Nice medium, nice feel.
Check it out here.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States, Website | Closed
Michael C. Blumm, ‘Why Aboriginal Title is a Fee Simple Absolute’, Lewis & Clark Law Review, 2011.
The Supreme Court’s 1823 decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh is a foundation case in both Indian Law and American Property Law. But the case is one of the most misunderstood decisions in Anglo-American law. Often cited for the propositions of the plenary power of the U.S. Congress over Indian tribes and the uncompensated takings of Indian title lands, the Marshall Court decision actually is better interpreted to recognize that Indian tribes had fee simple absolute to their ancestral lands. This article explains why the “discovery doctrine” should have been interpreted to be a fee simple absolute subject to the federal government’s right of preemption. Had the doctrinel laid down by Johnson been properly interpreted, its national and international effects today would have been much less pernicious.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
scs 2, 1 (2011) out now
check it out here.
Filed under: Africa, Ancient History, art, Asia, Australia, Éire, Call for papers, Canada, Empire, Europe, gender, Genocide, Hawaii, Israel/Palestine, Latin America, law, literature, media, middle east, New Zealand, outer space, Pacific, Political developments, postcolonialism, public lecture, Quote, Scholarship and insights, Science, Seminar, Southern Africa, Sovereignty, Uncategorized, United States, wacky, Website | Closed
