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
laura landertinger on the biopolitics of indigenous reproduction and the welfare state in canada
From its inception, Canada’s ‘Indian policy’ has sought to undermine the bond between indigenous children and their communities. Each era has seen a new reason and corresponding tactic to remove indigenous children. They have been institutionalized in residential schools, placed in foster homes, provincial ‘care’ facilities, and adopted by Euro-Canadian families. While it is widely accepted that the forceful removal of indigenous children during the residential school era and the “Sixties Scoop” was a colonial strategy, contemporary child welfare practices seem to escape the same scrutiny. This seems to be the case even though indigenous children continue to be removed en masse and are vastly overrepresented in the Canadian child welfare system. Indeed, there are more indigenous children in ‘care’ today than ever before in Canadian history, including the residential school era and following the “Sixties Scoop”. Given these trends the colonial effect of contemporary child welfare practices seems evident. This project thus seeks to problematize child welfare practices in relation to indigenous peoples. In particular, it is the aim of this thesis to shed light on some of the narratives that underlie these practices. Through a critical discourse analysis this thesis illuminates how news media in Alberta and Manitoba disseminate controlling images of indigenous peoples and their children. I argue that the discourses in both provinces normalize the removal of indigenous children while naturalizing colonial control.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
To this end we might consider the possibilities that ensue from what can be called a “subversive genealogy” of humanistic study in South Africa. Such a genealogy, which is aimed at forging a reconstituted concept of the humanities beyond a tradition that must also be cultivated, has two specific instances.
In the first a subversive genealogy may trace the sources of humanistic study in the deliberations surrounding the so-called “native question” in the first half of the 20th century with the founding of “Bantu studies” in the liberal university.
The native question was a response to the quagmire facing the South African state intent on reorienting and recasting the meaning of black subjectivity. Caught between a discourse on vanishing cultures and the story of progress, academic disciplines performed the role of trusteeship over the category of the native, which appeared resolutely bound to administrative decree and capitalist demand.
Here the compulsion to answer the state-sponsored native question resulted in considerable disciplinary reorientation, but one equally constrained by the demands of a segregationist state. Thus my claim to an unwritten contract at times, in the name of the humanities and social sciences, between the state and the university.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Aboriginal title represents one of the most remarkable and controversial legal developments in the common law world of the late-twentieth century. Overnight it changed the legal position of indigenous peoples. The common law doctrine gave sudden substance to the tribes’ claims to justiciable property rights over their traditional lands, catapulting these up the national agenda and jolting them out of a previous culture of governmental inattention. In a series of breakthrough cases national courts adopted the argument developed first in western Canada, and then New Zealand and Australia by a handful of influential scholars. By the beginning of the millennium the doctrine had spread to Malaysia, Belize, southern Africa and had a profound impact upon the rapid development of international law of indigenous peoples’ rights.
This book is a history of this doctrine and the explosion of intellectual activity arising from this inrush of legalism into the tribes’ relations with the Anglo settler state. The author is one of the key scholars involved from the doctrine’s appearance in the early 1980s as an exhortation to the courts, and a figure who has both witnessed and contributed to its acceptance and subsequent pattern of development. He looks critically at the early conceptualisation of the doctrine, its doctrinal elaboration in Canada and Australia – the busiest jurisdictions – through a proprietary paradigm located primarily (and constrictively) inside adjudicative processes. He also considers the issues of inter-disciplinary thought and practice arising from national legal systems’ recognition of aboriginal land rights, including the emergent and associated themes of self-determination that surfaced more overtly during the 1990s and after. The doctrine made modern legal history, and it is still making it.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, law, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
I examine Ontario history textbooks to demonstrate how the portrayal of the white settler fantasy of Canada being peacefully colonized and settled is enforced through the temporality and geography of the Canadian settler state, leading to the erasure of connections between indigenous and black communities in the development of the settler state. The temporality of the settler state is enforced through the Indian Act and the Multiculturalism Act, which work together to deny shared time between indigenous peoples, black peoples, and settlers. Settlers are positioned as inhabiting the here and now as reflected in the temporality of the modern settler state, while indigenous peoples are consigned to a status of primitivity, and black peoples are positioned as hailing from a primitive place, yet recently arriving in Canada. The temporality of the Indian Act is represented geographically through the reserve system, which works within the Indian Act to replace indigenous sovereignty and nationhood with Indian Bands, while the temporality of the Multiculturalism Act is represented geographically through the image of Canada as a cultural mosaic, which enforces the divide-and-conquer strategies of the settler state. If indigenous peoples and black peoples are always positioned as temporally and spatially distant, then it follows that their histories developed discretely. However, through analyzing how, what Patrick Wolfe terms, a “logic of elimination” is deployed within the Canadian settler state, it become clear that settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery have always been engaged in an intimate and mutually reinforcing relationship in Canada. By moving beyond the temporality and geography of the settler state, not only does it become clear that the connections between indigenous and black peoples are actually foundational to the Canadian settler state’s current formation, but space is also created to develop alliances between indigenous and black peoples. Developing alliances is integral to imagining a reconfiguration of the current settler state that moves beyond divide-and-conquer politics, and towards a more just way of organizing societies that takes seriously the flesh-and-blood of all individual subjects and the human species as whole.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Since Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, the fate of British convicts has burned brightly in the popular imagination. Incredibly, their larger story is even more dramatic–the saga of forgotten men and women scattered to the farthest corners of the British empire, driven by the winds of the American Revolution and the currents of the African slave trade. In A Merciless Place, Emma Christopher brilliantly captures this previously unknown story of poverty, punishment, and transportation.
The story begins with the American War of Independence, until which many British convicts were shipped across the Atlantic. The Revolution interrupted this flow and inspired two entrepreneurs to organize the criminals into military units to fight for the crown. The felon soldiers went to West Africa’s slave-trading posts just as the war ended; these forts became the new destination for England’s rapidly multiplying convicts. The move was a disaster. Christopher writes that “before the scheme was abandoned, it would have run the gamut of piracy, treachery, mutiny, starvation, poisonings, allegations of white women forced to prostitute themselves to African men, and not least several cases of murder.” To end the scandal, the British government chose a new destination, as far away as possible: Australia.
Christopher here captures the gritty lives of Britain’s convicts: victims of London’s underworld, rife with brutal crime and sometimes even more brutal punishments. Equally fascinating are the portraits of Fante people of West Africa, forced to undergo dramatic changes in their role as intermediaries with Europeans in the slave trade. Here, too, are the aboriginal Australians, coping with the transformation of their native land. They all inhabit A Merciless Place: a tour de force and historical narrative at its finest.
Filed under: Africa, Australia, Empire, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
