Immigration and settler literatures provide contrasting approaches to the evaluation of conflict between ‘newcomers’ and ‘indigenous’ groups. On the one hand, immigration studies emphasize that newcomers, particularly migrants, almost never fight civil wars; on the other hand, studies on settlers in contested territories expect inherently unstable relations between settlers and native populations affected by colonization projects. While each provides strong evidence to support its argument, neither literature has adequately accounted for hybrid cases where the settler and migrant categories have become almost indistinguishable. The article focuses on Cyprus as a paradigmatic such case. Specifically, it looks at populations transferred from Turkey to the northern part of the island after 1974 described either as settlers or immigrants by rival accounts in the Cypriot conflict. While colonization constitutes a violation of international conventions and a major obstacle to peace, settlers in such places as Cyprus, Tibet or Western Sahara often meet the profile of migrant populations more interested in daily survival issues than in territorial politics. In contrast to other historical or contemporary cases of settler colonialism such as Algeria (France) or West Bank and Gaza (Israel), what is particularly puzzling in Cyprus and elsewhere is the absence of mobilization and politicization among settlers despite perceived discrimination and fear of relocation following a negotiated peace agreement. Addressing this puzzle is essential to bridging the gaps between immigration and settler literatures and in mediating the tensions between conflicting claims over space, land and the political geography of peace settlements in deeply divided societies.
Filed under: Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Reviewed by David Lindenfeld (Louisiana State University)
In this study, Hilary M. Carey sheds light on a relatively neglected aspect of missionary activity in the British Empire, namely, as directed to those who settled in the colonies rather than to the colonized–“an attempt to prevent the heathenizing of Christians” rather than “Christianizing the heathen,” as one enthusiastic advocate put it (p. 180). Thus the distinction between “colonial” and “foreign” missions runs through the book. Carey notes that the original meaning of “mission” (from the Latin “I send”) was to establish church structures in new geographical territories, and only incidentally to convert non-Christians. The lack of attention to the former in recent historiography, however, is not merely due to fashionable postcolonialism; the interest in converting the heathen increased steadily in British popular consciousness during the nineteenth century itself. Yet, as Carey points out, colonial settlers were far from a negligible quantity: the populations of the British in both Australia and Canada exceeded those in Scotland and Ireland by the 1920s, and most of these claimed allegiance to some Christian denomination. Carey’s work thus reinforces that of the New Zealand historian James Belich, whose 2009 study points to a “settler revolution” by English-speaking peoples. In New Zealand, for example, settlers saw their new homeland not merely a part of “greater Britain,” but as a “better Britain,” free of the class divisions that plagued the mother country
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
andrea smith on the local museum
In what ways does America’s settler colonial heritage shape how its citizens imagine the national past? I address this question through a study of county historical museums in rural Arizona, with a particular focus on the Navajo County Museum. This analysis suggests that we consider the “natural history” or “evolutionary” style of organizing collections as integrally tied to a foundational settler colonial logic. Conclusions are drawn about the ubiquity of this orientation to the national past and the difficulties curators may face in effectively challenging it.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
happy birthday adam kok
Members of the Royal Griqua Tribe, which organised the event, were dressed in full regalia.
Goab Bishop Kenneth Visser, a provincial leader of the Griqua Royal House, said it was of great significance to come back to the castle, where Adam Kok had once been imprisoned. “For us it means the freedom of the Griqua nation,” he said.
Maurice Vivian Kok, head of the Kok family, implored the ANC and the government to protect the “descendants of Adam Kok”.
“Our people’s morale is very low. This is leading people to crime. Our people feel rejected and we urgently need the assistance of government.
“The Khoi and the San people are seen to be a marginalised people. We must not destroy our status as an aboriginal group,” he said.
Filed under: media, Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
When American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania appeared in 1999, it was situated within several broader contexts: American literary studies, of course, but also the field of America-Holy Land studies. And I placed America-Holy Land studies within the even broader framework of “settler-colonial studies,” a field that was barely, if at all, acknowledged twelve years ago. These three categories have developed considerably with regard to what had been two relatively neglected Melville works. In the last decade or so, scholars have engaged both Melville’s journal and poem-pilgrimage, either in monographs or as part of broader studies. Clarel has been increasingly recognized as a major work, one that calls out for further readings. Here I want to revisit the heuristics of America-Holy Land studies and settler-colonial studies. These evolving conceptual frameworks have raised new awareness about the effects of culture and colonialism upon each other, about religious-nationalist perceptions in the United States, and about the changing understanding of America’s relationship to the Middle East over an increasingly troubled decade. As a result, critical responses to Clarel are far richer now particularly because Melville’s poem-pilgrimage has come to feel so contemporary.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, literature, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
The growth of a network of remote communities in Australia’s Northern Territory followed the success of an Aboriginal land rights movement in the 1970s. In the course of the past two decades, there have been increasing reports of distress in these communities interpreted differently by anthropologists and opinion writers in the national press, some of the latter of a neo-liberal bent. This article examines critically the position of anthropologists and the relations between a politics of difference and equality as they bear on the position of remote Aboriginal Australians.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Some more recent evidence supports Du Bois’ prediction that the twentieth century would prove the century of the colour line. It indicates that men have always and everywhere shown a preference for fair complexioned women as sexual partners, whereas males seeking a mate are rarely disadvantaged by a dark complexion. In the employment market in the USA, a dark complexion is a significant disadvantage for both males and females. Though there is no properly comparable evidence from other countries, there appears to be a widespread tendency for any negative valuation of darker skin colour to be incorporated into a scale of socio-economic status. In some situations a colour scale is replacing the colour line.
Du Bois’ reference to differences of colour has been largely superseded in English-speaking countries by references to differences of race. From a policy standpoint, the switch from colour to race has had both positive and negative consequences. From a sociological standpoint, it has made it more difficult to disaggregate the dimensions of social difference and to dispel the confusions engendered by ideas of racial difference.
Filed under: Latin America, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This article draws upon my personal experience working across the boundaries of New Zealand, Canadian and Australian History. With attention to the British colonial past in these places I compare and contrast the politics of writing history. I explore national historiographies as counterparts, with a particular focus on writing women into history. I argue that transnational history must address the ongoing presence of cultural cringe in the historiography. Important gaps between national histories are revealed: gaps that might offer future direction for scholarship. Teaching beyond national boundaries is also discussed, and the danger of replicating the imperial past is foreshadowed.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, gender, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
nadia kanani on race and madness
The intersectional social construction of race and madness has significantly shaped the lived experiences of racialized people with psychiatric histories. Unfortunately, there are few studies that consider the intersections between race and madness, and fewer still that locate these intersections within the social and political contexts of colonization, Canadian and American settler states, and immigration. The primary purpose of this article is to provide a review of the literature that looks at the intersections of race and madness in Canada and the US. In particular, the author will highlight common themes that are articulated in this literature. The second goal of this article is to locate the experiences of racialized people with psychiatric histories within the socio-historical context from which they arise. The author will argue that race and madness have been mutually socially constructed in Canadian and American society. Further, the author will illustrate that psychiatric constructions of racialized people have allowed for the rationalization and justification of both historical and ongoing colonial and imperialist domination, slavery, and exclusionary immigration policies.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
extract:
The 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s were marked by two movements that were causally related yet contradictory: huge waves of global migration in tension with nation-states’ increased efforts to consolidate authority over their borders. Three villages and hamlets—one at Irish Creek in El Dorado County, California; one at Waiākea in Hilo, Hawai‘i; and one at Wushi in Xiangshan, China—exemplify this tension and illustrate its meanings. Tracing the connections that linked these three places demonstrates the utility of using borderlands to understand the complex relationship between global migration and restrictive border making in the nineteenth century. Each of these places might be considered a borderland, and examining them as such can demonstrate how borderlands scholarship turns our attention to important yet easily neglected meeting places in history and opens our eyes to the complexities and ambiguities of social relations in those places.
Studying these places can also point to the importance of resisting two limitations of the term “borderlands.” First, the word privileges contact between two nation-states. While binational contact is important, the emergence of the modern world saw the construction of spaces where global history became local: often more than two countries were in social and economic contact, rendering the coherence of national boundaries uncertain. Rather than studying places such as the U.S.-Mexican borderlands as the region surrounding one border, we can usefully conceive of them as nodes in a network of global processes and can use the sites’ global connections to understand these processes. Second, a nation-state focus in borderlands history risks obscuring the histories of indigenous peoples whose lands had been colonized or were at risk of colonization, such as nineteenth-century American Indians and Kānaka Maoli (one of the principal Hawaiian-language terms for indigenous Hawaiian people).
Filed under: Hawaii, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
