Saliha Belmessous, ed., Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire (New York and Oxford: OUP, 2011).
This groundbreaking collection of essays shows that, from the moment European expansion commenced through to the twentieth century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonization is well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. These essays demonstrate how indigenous peoples throughout the world opposed colonization not only with force, but also with ideas. They made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law that applies between peoples – a kind of law of nations, comparable to that being developed by Europeans. The contributors to this volume argue that in the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonization should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim.
Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920 brings together the work of eminent social and legal historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, including Rolena Adorno, Lauren Benton, Duncan Ivison, and Kristin Mann. Their combined expertise makes this volume uniquely expansive in its coverage of a crucial issue in global and colonial history. The various essays treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America (including the British colonies and French Canada), and nineteenth-century Australasia and Africa. There is no other book that examines the issue of European dispossession of native peoples in such a way.
TOC:
Introduction: The Problem of Indigenous Claim Making in Colonial History, by Saliha Belmessous
Chapter 1: Possessing Empire: Iberian Claims and Interpolity Law, Lauren Benton
Chapter 2: Law, Land and Legal Rhetoric in Colonial New Spain: A Look at the Changing Rhetoric of Indigenous Americans in the Sixteenth Century, by R. Jovita Baber
Chapter 3: Court and Chronicle: A Native Andean’s Engagement with Spanish Colonial Law, by Rolena Adorno
Chapter 4: Powhatan Legal Claims, by Andrew Fitzmaurice
Chapter 5: Wabanaki versus French and English Claims in Northeastern North America, c. 1715, by Saliha Belmessous
Chapter 6: “Chief Princes and Owners of All”: Native American Appeals to the Crown in the Early Modern British Atlantic, by Craig Yirush
Chapter 7: Framing and Reframing the Agon: Contesting Narratives and Counter-Narratives on Maori Property Rights and Political Constitutionalism, 1840-1861, by Mark Hickford
Chapter 8: “Bring this paper to the Good Governor”: Indigenous Petitioning in Britain’s Australian Colonies, by Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell
Chapter 9: The Native Land Court: Making Property in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand, by Christopher Hilliard
Chapter 10: African and European Initiatives in the Transformation of Land Tenure in Colonial Lagos (West Africa), 1840-1920, by Kristin Mann
Afterword: The Normative Force of the Past, by Duncan Ivison
Filed under: Africa, Australia, Canada, Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
merry xmas
Get your ‘Cowboy/Indian Rabbit Fur Suede Christmas Stocking’ from here.
And enjoy the holiday if you have one.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
Janet McGaw, Anoma Pieris and Emily Potter, ‘Indigenous Place-Making in the City: Dispossessions, Occupations and Implications for Cultural Architecture’, Architectural Theory Review 16, 3 (2011)
This paper considers Indigenous place-making practices in light of an idea for a major Victorian Indigenous Cultural Knowledge and Education Centre in central Melbourne as championed by Traditional Owners in Victoria. With only eight Aboriginal architects in the country, collaboration with non-Indigenous architects will be inevitable. Two case studies from the recent past—the Tent Embassy in Canberra and a street corner in Collingwood—reveal that dominant cultures of place-making continue to marginalise Aboriginal people in urban Australia. This paper will contend that delivering spatial justice will require both an opportunity for Indigenous Victorians to build visibility in the centre of the city and a willingness within the dominant culture to be deterritorialised.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Jimmy Johnson, ‘How Zionism Paved Way for Permanent War’, Electronic Intifada.
Gabriel Piterberg noted in his masterful 2008 book The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel that the “achievements of the comparative study of settler colonialism have been at once scholarly and political,” that the young field “creates a language that amounts to a transformative alternative to the way in which these settler societies narrate themselves in their own words.”
Yet, like many academic fields, comparative settler-colonial studies has a difficult time translating into the sphere of organizing for policy change. The bridge between the academic and activist worlds is mostly missing. So one purpose of reviewing books such as the newly released collection Studies in Settler Colonialism for The Electronic Intifada is to help bridge the gap between the grassroots and the “ivory tower.”
Comparative settler-colonial studies carries tremendous potential for anti-colonial organizing in Palestine (as well as in countries that are the products of a settler-led colonization such as the US, Canada and Australia). Its baseline understanding is, as Piterberg put it, “the history of the interaction with the dispossessed is the history of who the settlers collectively are,” indigenous removal being the sine qua non of creating a settler society. In short, the field does not stop with describing the events of settler colonization. Instead it describes the political structure, settler colonialism, that endures long after the initial colonizing events. The field is vibrant but small, making Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture an important addition to a growing body of work.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza (eds), The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research: Reporting on Environmental Degradation and Warfare (Springer, 2012).
The decision to publish scholarly findings bearing on the question of Amerindian environmental degradation, warfare, and/or violence is one that weighs heavily on anthropologists. This burden stems from the fact that documentation of this may render indigenous communities vulnerable to a host of predatory agendas and hostile modern forces.
Consequently, some anthropologists and community advocates alike argue that such culturally and socially sensitive, and thereby, politically volatile information regarding Amerindian-induced environmental degradation and warfare should not be reported. This admonition presents a conundrum for anthropologists and other social scientists employed in the academy or who work at the behest of tribal entities.
This work documents the various ethical dilemmas that confront anthropologists, and researchers in general, when investigating Amerindian communities. The contributions to this volume explore the ramifications of reporting–and, specfically,–of non-reporting instances of environmental degradation and warfare among Amerindians.
Collectively, the contributions in this volume, which extend across the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, ethnohistory, ethnic studies, philosophy, and medicine, argue that the non-reporting of environmental mismanagement and violence in Amerindian communities generally harms not only the field of anthropology but the Amerindian populations themselves.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds new light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on Empire’s past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Suburbia, Settler Colonialism and the World Turned Inside Out’, Housing, Theory and Society 1 (2011).
While its primary aim is to explore possibilities for new research, this article contends that suburban and settler colonial imaginaries are related. It suggests that an awareness of the settler colonial “situation” and its dynamics can help an original approach to the interpretation of suburban forms (and vice versa). References to the suburban “frontier” have been frequent in both public discourse and scholarly debate, and suburban phenomena characterize in one way or another all settler societies. This connection, however, has not been the subject of sustained investigation. Thus, this article focuses on shared traditions of anti-urban perception and on a determination to pre-emptively secede from the metropole/metropolis in the presence of growing tensions and contradictions. Similarly, while settler colonial projects constitute separate political entities via an “outward” movement towards various “frontiers of settlement”, independent suburbs are also established via an “outward” movement and in an attempt to maintain local control over local affairs. In both instances displacement is a response/the only response to crisis.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
colonial film database
This website holds detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Over 150 films are available for viewing online. You can search or browse for films by country, date, topic, or keyword. Over 350 of the most important films in the catalogue are presented with extensive critical notes written by our academic research team.
The Colonial Film project united universities (Birkbeck and University College London) and archives (British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum) to create a new catalogue of films relating to the British Empire. The ambition of this website is to allow both colonizers and colonized to understand better the truths of Empire.
Filed under: Empire, media, Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
In the 1960s “internal colonialism” became an important theory advanced to explain the historical development of ethnic and racial inequality in the modern world. By the 1980s the theory had been dismissed as inadequate. Nonetheless, its influence persisted as more global colonial theories evolved. This article argues that internal colonialism continues effectively to explain the historic subordination of indigenous peoples within larger states dominated by other groups. Furthermore, internal colonialism is applicable globally to dynastic and national states, as well as contiguous empires, from antiquity to the present-a breadth that attests to this theory’s continuing significance.
Filed under: Latin America, Scholarship and insights | Closed
why pioneers bred like rabbits; or, how genetic scientists discursively erase prior inhabitants
The notion that pioneers tend to have more babies is consistent with the behavior of other species. Expose a bare patch of land, and the first plants to colonize it will most likely be species that grow quickly, reproduce early, and create many offspring. But these early colonizers eventually cede space to other plants that are slower growing but more efficient at using resources such as water, nutrients and space. Shrubs and trees, for instance, grow slowly and produce fewer offspring, but invest enough energy and resources in those offspring to make them highly competitive in the long run.
Humans are generally more like shrubs and trees: slow growing (children take more than a decade to reach adulthood) and efficient consumers of resources. (Quick-breeding rabbits and mice, by contrast, are the weeds of the mammal world.) But a change in environment can turn a slow grower into a weed. That is what happened, Harpending says, when North American settlers found themselves on the fringes of civilization.
Sarah Fecht of Scientific American. My emphases.
Hat-tip, Rob A.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights, Science, United States | Closed
