Decolonization is widely thought of as one of the foundational processes of the modern world. An old imperial order was swept away: a new ‘world of nations’ emerged to replace it. The inviolable nature of national sovereignty, the right to self-determination and a portfolio of human rights acquired normative status as the basis of international law and practice. With all the wisdom of hindsight, statesmen, politicians and policymakers assured us in their memoirs that such was the vision that guided their actions through the ‘end of empire’. But how much of all this should we really believe? Were the statesmen really so wise and far-seeing or merely dab hands in self-interest and expediency? Is the modern world really a world of nations or (largely) the detritus of broken-down empires? Can the imprint of empire be erased from our culture(s): is it wise to try? Is a world of nations an attainable or even a desirable object? What alternative is there? There’s some room for debate.
New Spain became Mexico virtually over night, in 1821, although a decade of bloody civil strife preceded its final independence. Using the case of Mexico and the life and ideas of Lucas Alamán (1792-1853), one of the most important statesmen of the early republican period, Eric Van Young illustrates the layered and contradictory nature of decolonization as it crossed visions of Atlantic modernity. Decolonization is a transition that typically takes place in several planes or spheres interconnected in complex ways, yet each with its own rhythm. The fastest and most easily achieved may be in the political sphere, with the severing of formal ties between colony and metropolis and the formation of a new state (nation- formation being another matter). Economic decolonization may take a good deal longer, or never occur at all; dependency theory was developed to explain this. Slower still is social decolonization, with lingering ideas about ethnicity and social power embedded even in new institutions. And cultural redefinition within the new polity may be the most protracted change of all because the least susceptible of purposive social engineering by states and ruling elites. Mapping all this onto the struggle to achieve a controlled decolonization of Mexico, Eric Van Young explores the aphorism recently coined by one observer of the country that Mexico went straight from a condition of pre-modernity to one of post-modernity without ever passing through modernity.
Filed under: Empire, Latin America, postcolonialism, public lecture | Closed
the sculptor’s nostalgia
From an exquisite Victorian-era guest house, KwaZulu-Natal.
Filed under: art | Closed
This article is part of a larger study of inquests into the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody. I suggest that the Aboriginal body is considered to be one that is already dead, and thus a body on whom a full measure of care would be wasted. The inquest becomes a place where this “truth” is established. I explore how the deaths of Aboriginal people in police custody have been persistently “medicalized” – that is, attributed to the medical condition of alcoholism, with the inevitable consequence that they cannot be connected to the violence of an ongoing colonialism. Aboriginal death becomes a timely rather than untimely death, the only thing we can expect from a disappearing race.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The Indigenous past is largely absent from settler representations of the history of the city of Toronto, Canada. Nineteenth and twentieth century historical chroniclers often downplayed the historic presence of the Mississaugas and their Indigenous predecessors by drawing on doctrines of terra nullius , ignoring the significance of the Toronto Purchase, and changing the city’s foundational story from the establishment of York in 1793 to the incorporation of the City of Toronto in 1834. These chroniclers usually assumed that “real Indians” and urban life were inimical. Often their representations implied that local Indigenous peoples had no significant history and thus the region had little or no history before the arrival of Europeans. Alternatively, narratives of ethical settler indigenization positioned the Indigenous past as the uncivilized starting point in a monological European theory of historical development.
In many civic discourses, the city stood in for the nation as a symbol of its future, and national history stood in for the region’s local history. The national replaced ‘the Indigenous’ in an ideological process that peaked between the 1880s and the 1930s. Concurrently, the loyalist Six Nations were often represented as the only Indigenous people with ties to Torontonians, while the specific historical identity of the Mississaugas was erased. The role of both the government and local settlers in crowding the Mississaugas out of their lands on the Credit River was rationalized as a natural process, while Indigenous land claims, historical interpretations, and mnemonic forms were rarely accorded legitimacy by non- Indigenous city residents.
After World War II, with new influxes of both Indigenous peoples and multicultural immigrants into the city, colonial narratives of Toronto history were increasingly challenged and replaced by multiple stories or narrative fragments. Indigenous residents created their own representations of Toronto as an Indigenous place with an Indigenous history; emphasizing continuous occupation and spiritual connections between place and ancestors. Today, contention among Indigenous groups over the fairness of the Mississauga land claim, epistemic differences between western and Indigenous conceptions of history, and ongoing settler disavowal of the impact of colonialism have precluded any simple or consensual narrative of Toronto’s past.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Historical and cultural studies of residential enclaves reveal the range of patterns within a phenomenon that some have treated essentially as the result of contemporary neoliberal conditions. Gated and enclosed communities are by no means new, nor are they the product of universal principles or circumstances. Among other things, they reflect historical conditions, contemporary concerns, cultural ambitions and inter-group dynamics. Based largely on comparisons of national inventories of gated communities in Israel and Canada, this article explores some of the articulations and functions of enclosure. It illuminates the contrasts within a set of historic and contemporary enclosed and segregated settlements, and seeks to develop a framework to account for the range of patterns found and some of the motivations behind them. While many enclaves in Israel feature extensive security measures that include armed guards, Canadian gated communities typically use weak devices such as low fences. The patterns employed to mark difference reinforce divergent social conditions and generate varying spatial consequences. The comparison reveals variations in who produces enclosure, how, and for what purposes.
Filed under: Canada, Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Zimbabwe’s recent fast-track land reform was redistributive, but it retained significant enclaves of large-scale agro-industrial estates owned by transnational, domestic and state capital, despite unfulfilled popular and domestic elite demands for land. Such estates were encouraged by the state to produce agro-fuel (ethanol from sugar), sugar, tea, coffee, timber and citrus, with wildlife ranching for domestic and export markets, alongside expanded small food producers. This outcome reflects the unresolved contradictions of seeking autonomous development in the context of sanctions, domestic political polarisation and declining agricultural production, while promoting reintegration into broader world markets. Neoliberal policies replaced dirigisme by 2008 to promote stabilisation and agricultural recovery but with limited impact. Foreign agricultural investment in Zimbabwe is nonetheless atypical of the current neoliberal land grabbing in Africa, since Zimbabwe reversed past inequalities and retains some state autonomy, and residual land concentration remains contested.
Filed under: law, Political developments, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Picking up on current research about settler colonialism, this study uses a modified version of a model explaining modern-state formation to explain settler-colonial formation. Charles Tilly identified two simultaneous processes at work – war-making and state-making which produced modern states in Western Europe. Settler-colonial systems engage(d) in a particular type of war to produce their existence: total war. Hence, a modified version of total-war-making and settler-colonial-existence-making (production) occuring in the settler-colonial-creation phase is proposed. However, before this conceptual analytical framework could be developed, it was necessary to examine the meanings of terms such as ‘nation’ and ‘nation-state’ as well as concepts such as settler-colonialism and total war. The sample of relevant literature analyzed revealed inconsistencies in the meanings of the terms when applying W.H. Newton-Smith’s theory of meaning, suggesting the influence of what Edward Said identified as the workings of orientalism. This has conceptual implications on terms such as settler-colonialism and the meaning of the type of war it wages upon the indigenous nations. It also has implications on developing a conceptual analytical tool to understand the dynamics of the production of the settler-colonial existence. Thus, the terms and concepts needed to be de-orientalized before using them in the modified model which was then used to examine initially three settler-colonial cases: the United States, Australia and Apartheid South Africa. The modified analytical model was able to highlight particular dynamics relevant to settler-colonial systems and was then used – with the incremental and imbricate research done in the first three chapters – to examine the Zionist case. It illustrated that while the cases of the United States and Australia were able pass their creation phases, the Apartheid case could not and subsequently collapsed. The Zionist case seems to be still in its settler-colonial-creation phase. This has implications on current analysis concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Filed under: Australia, Empire, Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
Kevin Davie, of the Mail and Guardian:
What languages do you speak, I asked?
“Afrikaans and Zulu,” she said.
“Does that mean you are Zulu?”
“Nee, ek is ‘n Boesman.”
Kleintjie, who usually lives in Middelburg, is an aunt to Taki and Wole. The group of four, all of whom described themselves as Boesmanne, included daughter Elizabeth and son Rooipiet as well a relative, Linda van Rooi.
Kleintjie said she had a Zulu father and a Bushman mother. We asked how she knew that she was a Bushman if her father was black. She replied that her physical characteristics, notably her hair, are those of a Bushman.
She used to work in a kitchen but, other than piece work, the group does not have jobs or access to government grants. Kleintjie has no knowledge of the history of the Bushmen or how they came to live at Chrissiesmeer.
hat tip, Luke S.
Filed under: Southern Africa | Closed
Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (Palgrave UK, 2010) Edited by Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds. To be launched by Patrick Wolfe. The new journal, settler colonial studies, introduced by Jane Carey and Lorenzo Veracini.
When: Thursday 30th June, 5.00pm for a 5.30pm start
Where: Gertrudes Brown Couch, 30 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, VIC. AUSTRALIA.
RSVP: Penny Edmonds
—-
The new journal, settler colonial studies, to be introduced by Mohamed Adhikari (UCT) and launched by Edward Cavanagh (WITS).
When: Tuesday, 28 June, 12:30pm-2pm
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
