story tellers
On any continent or in any region in which they appear, colonizing settlers are not just migrants. Dutch, Roman, Israeli, Spanish, English, Chinese — whatever their origins, they are invaders who come to stay and carry with them a sense of supreme or ultimate power. After overcoming indigenous populations, they establish political orders and, in general, make use of native labor before trying to make try those natives vanish.
“Settler colonialism” is a subset of the scholarly field of colonial studies, but the phenomenon is studied, as well, in the fields of law, history, genocide studies, indigenous and postcolonial studies, historical geography, philosophy, gender studies and in virtually all the social sciences.
We are glad to hear good resonances across academia, and wish we could attend what promises to be an exciting and theoretically sound symposium.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Seminar, United States | Closed
Erica Neeganagwedgin, “Chattling the Indigenous Other”: A historical examination of the enslavement of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada’, AlterNative 8, 1 (2012).
Many historians writing about Canadian history have failed to acknowledge, and some have even downright ignored, the history of chattel slavery that existed within Canada where Aboriginal people were bought and sold like commodities. Generally, when one thinks of chattel slavery, there are images of people of African ancestry being branded, whipped and labouring in cotton and tobacco fields or on sugar plantations. Yet, this is only part of a much more complex canvas of slavery in the “New World”. And while the history of chattel slavery as it pertains to people of African ancestry is relatively unknown and at times distorted, as is the case particularly in the educational system in Canada, it comes as even more of a surprise to most that Aboriginal peoples in Canada were also enslaved.
This analysis includes a review of particular accounts of Indigenous people as chattel slaves in Canada. As mentioned, this is a topic seldom discussed. I investigate the connection between colonialism, notions of racial superiority and chattel slavery, using an anti-colonial theoretical framework to contextualize this history of slavery, and examine chattel slavery and the enslave- ment of Aboriginal people.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
Unsettling Colonialisms: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resistance in Global Context.
The collection will interrogate settler categories, including the category of settler colonialism itself. It will provide a space for Indigenous epistemologies to counter settler hegemonies, including established scholarly discourses on settler colonialism. It will critically engage with colonial discourses of conquest and Native alternatives alike. It will aspire to the kind of hard-nosed analytical rigor that can enhance the political options available to Indigenous groups.
For more details, click here.
Filed under: Call for papers, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Erich Steinman, ‘Settler Colonial Power and the American Indian Sovereignty Movement: Forms of Domination, Strategies of Transformation’, American Journal of Sociology 117, 4 (2012).
The article extends the multi-institutional model of power and change through an analysis of the American Indian Sovereignty Movement. Drawing upon cultural models of the state, and articulating institutionalist conceptions of political opportunities and resources, the analysis demonstrates that this framework can be applied to challenges addressing the state as well as nonstate fields. The rational-legal diminishment of tribal rights, bureaucratic paternalism, commonsense views of tribes as racial/ethnic minorities, and the binary construction of American and Indian as oppositional identities diminished the appeal of “contentious” political action. Instead, to establish tribes’ status as sovereign nations, tribal leaders aggressively enacted infrastructural power, transposed favorable legal rulings across social fields to legitimize sovereignty discourses, and promoted a pragmatic coexistence with state and local governments. Identifying the United States as a settler colonial society, the study suggests that a decolonizing framework is more apt than racial/ethnicity approaches in conceptualizing the struggle of American Indians.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Caroline Phillips and Harry Allen (eds), Bridging the Divide: Indigenous Communities and Archaeology into the 21st Century (Left coast Press: 2012).
The collected essays in this volume address contemporary issues regarding the relationship between Indigenous groups and archaeologists, including the challenges of dialogue, colonialism, the difficulties of working within legislative and institutional frameworks, and NAGPRA and similar legislation. The disciplines of archaeology and cultural heritage management are international in scope and many countries continue to experience the impact of colonialism. In response to these common experiences, both archaeology and indigenous political movements involve international networks through which information quickly moves around the globe. This volume reflects these dynamic dialectics between the past and the present and between the international and the local, demonstrating that archaeology is a historical science always linked to contemporary cultural concerns.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Science | Closed
David McCallum, ‘Liberal Forms of Governing Australian Indigenous Peoples’, Journal of Law and Society 38, 4 (2011)
This article considers three different historical events from the point of view of their connections to aspects of the history of liberal political reason: the actions of the British in New South Wales in the early nineteenth century in their claim to sovereignty over Indigenous lands; the establishment of Aboriginal missions and subsequent removal of Aboriginal children in the early twentieth century; and the Northern Territory Emergency Response and suspension of the Australian Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act (1975) early in the twenty-first century. The aim is to point to gaps between present claims about liberalism and ‘actual existing liberalism’, review the basis for examining accounts of governance deploying ‘authoritarian liberalism’ and ‘race war’ as central concepts, and call into question the Northern Territory campaign as an ‘exceptional’ event.
Filed under: Australia, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Michael Sommer, ‘Colonies – Colonisation – Colonialism: A Typological Reappraisal’, Ancient East and West 10 (2011).
Colonies, colonisation and, in particular, colonialism are concepts carrying heavy ideological subtexts – yet they loom over the current debate about the dynamism of the Iron Age Mediterranean. Forty years after M.I. Finley’s ‘attempt at a typology’, this paper tries to thin out the terminological jungle: by employing cross-cultural historical comparison, it demonstrates how complex and manifold seemingly straightforward ideal types are; and that ‘colonies’ and ‘colonialism’ in the classical period of European imperialism were altogether different from the settlements Greeks and Phoenicians established in their Mediterranean diasporas.
Filed under: Ancient History, Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Günther Schlee, ‘Review: Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity, and Culture’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, forthcoming.
It begins:
Most of the twenty contributors to this volume work in departments of English or Literature, but this volume is also of great interest to sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists. I regret that, for this review, I can only single out a few chapters, although I found all of them to be stimulating.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
book reviewers wanted
Books received:
Carol Campbell and James F. Smith, Necessaries and Sufficiencies: Planter Society in Londonderry Onslow and Truro Townships, 1761-1780 (Sydney, NS: Cape Breton Press, 2011).
2011 marks the 250th anniversary of the coming of New England and Irish Planters to Nova Scotia. “Necessaries and Sufficiencies,” is a social political, cultural and material microhistory of 18th-century daily life in the district of Cobequid, now part of Colchester County. Eight vignettes from a cross-section of immigrants detail migration and settlement and the evolution of New England and Irish cultural mores in this wilderness setting. Occupations of both men and women, family and religious life, educational and social institutions, health care, commercial links and more. A separate section chronicles Cobequid’s reaction to the American Revolutionary War.
We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Usargues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society.
Morgensen’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people.
Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers—Spaces between Usnewly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.
In Making Settler Cinemas, Peter Limbrick argues that the United States, Australia, and New Zealand share histories of colonial encounters that have shaped their cinemas in distinctive ways. Going beyond readings of narrative and representation, this book studies the production, distribution, reception, and reexhibition of cinema across three settler societies under the sway of two empires. Investigating films both canonical and overlooked, Making Settler Cinemas not only shows how cinema has mattered to settler societies but affirms that practices of film history can themselves be instrumental in encountering and reshaping colonial pasts.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
