Mark Rifkin, ‘The Transatlantic Indian Problem’, American Literary History (2012), 1-19.
bit in lieu of abstract:
All three of these studies valuably indicate the significance of Indianness beyond a semi-ethnographic, and potentially fetishizing and exoticizing, concern with the lifeways of Indigenous peoples. Yet they also tend to treat the figure of the Indian as a mobile trope which can be read either as signifying principally in the somewhat insulated space of European reception or as a repeating (and relatively unchanging) marker of the limits of colonial modernity. In this way, their version of the transnational turn largely brackets consideration of the ways the production and dissemination of Indianness interfaces with particular strategies of settler governance. Attending to work within Indigenous studies that addresses the connection between figurations of Indianness/Aboriginality and the administrative management, dislocation, and erasure of Indigenous peoples might help reconnect the generic image to the sociopolitical processes affecting those so represented. Moreover, the transnational here appears as movement between fairly discrete sites, and the political, economic, and cultural affiliations among them seem to bear little on how Indianness is interpreted. There is a growing body of work focusing on the creation of transnational networks among peoples whose lands are claimed by different settler states and the use of international fora and discourses to do so.16 And scholarship increasingly has turned to the ways associa- tions among Indigenous peoples within the boundaries of the same settler state can be understood as transnational, highlighting their existence as distinct polities and the specificity of their ways of enacting diplomatic and other relations not routed through the political imaginary of the nation that presents them as part of its “domestic” space. Still, largely unaddressed are the ongoing forms of connection between imperial centers and spaces of settlement and among settler states themselves once independent. What role do figures of Indianness play in forging, mediating, regulating, and disavowing networks of settlement across geopolitically differentiated spaces? How does the production of the Indian as a problem—an obstruction, mystery, remnant—participate not only in local settler projects and programs but in broader formations of interdependence, investment, and influence? Although these three studies do not pursue such questions, they do implicitly raise them, indirectly gesturing toward the value of a different sort of transnational turn within Indigenous Studies.
Filed under: literature, Scholarship and insights | Closed
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
