Once in class, students receive lessons in indigenous rights, language and mythology and in the afternoons they get the chance to put practical skills to the test, herding buffalo and tending vegetable plots.
The Indigenous University is far removed from its counterparts in Venezuela’s cities. But that is because it has been constructed by and for indigenous communities.
Filed under: Latin America | Closed
The Shcherbina Expedition of 1896–1903 was the Russian Empire’s most concerted effort to gather the data necessary to facilitate peasant settlers’ migration to its largely nomadic steppe oblasts. Although this expedition was a massive exercise of imperial power privileging sedentary over mobile pastoralist lifeways, the oppositional views of its participants made matters more ambiguous. The civilizational hierarchies that emerged in its materials did not strictly privilege sedentary lifeways, and an effort was made to preserve mobile pastoralists’ lifeways and economic wellbeing. The project of objectively correct colonization that the expedition embodied was initially embraced by all interested parties as a certain solution to the clash of lifeways brought about by peasant migration to the steppe. After its work was published, however, contested use of its statistical norms made it clear that the idea of ‘correct colonization’ could not prevent the serious conflicts engendered by settlement in the steppe.
Filed under: Asia, Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
wall street’s real natives
Newspaper Rock has collected a few indigenous perspectives, here and here.
The omission of the realities of settler colonialism from this trendy little protest is ironic, he notes.
Filed under: media, Political developments, United States | Closed
Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement serving as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are visible, but they have agency to transform life on their lands and on their terms.
Filed under: Europe, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
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
