whiteness conference
We encourage submissions which consider the various ways in which whites enter and encounter the non-West (as settlers, scholars, tourists, diplomats, soldiers, aid workers, missionaries, and so on) and how they have understood, deployed, and/or elided their whiteness. We also seek papers that will examine how indigenous populations (service workers, sex workers, Christian converts, colonial and corporate subalterns, and so on) experience, resist, mimic, reproduce, and discuss the whiteness in their midst.
Filed under: Call for papers, Scholarship and insights | Closed
More on the workshop for indigenous governance, here.
To participate in this conference will require a substantial commitment of your time. We estimate no less than a week: half a week (at the very least) to read the pre-circulated 18 papers, and half a week to attend the conference. We are hoping for a relatively small audience (perhaps 40 guests) made up of people with a strong commitment to studying and acting on problems of Indigenous governance. We anticipate an audience that is primarily academic, though we welcome practitioners from government and from Indigenous organisations. Postgraduate students are particularly welcome.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights, Seminar | Closed
Orin Star, ‘Here come the Anthros (again): The Strange Marriage of Anthropology and Native America’, Current Anthropology 26 2 (2011)
This article charts and tries to reckon with the relationship between anthropology and Native America. In an older time, most American anthropologists made their living studying Indians, this almost parasitic disciplinary dependence lasting well into the 20th century. Then came the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, the Red Power movement, and a period of estrangement between anthropologists and Native America. And now, quite unexpectedly, a tentative rapprochement has been taking place, albeit on very different terms with native anthropologists often at the forefront. This article focuses mostly on the United States, although also reflecting on new work about native peoples Canada and Latin America
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Audra Simpson, ‘Settlement’s Secret’, Current Anthropology 26, 2 (2011):
In the spirit of Orin Starn’s piece for Cultural Anthropology “Here Come the Anthros (Again): The Strange Marriage of Anthropology and Native America,” I offer the following response that orients to three periodizations within his review of the literature. These periodizations are marked by an anthropological (1) dependence on Native peoples, (2) estrangement from Native peoples, and (3) (tentative) rapprochement with Native peoples.
I depart from the premise of settler colonialism to meet Starn in the history he has mapped out for us. Settler colonialism is predicated on a territorial possession by some and, thus, a dispossession of others. In this model of colonialism, “the settler never leaves,” so the possession of territory requires the disappearance of “the native” (Wolfe 1999, 2006). The condition of Indigeneity in North America is to have survived this acquisitive and genocidal process and thus to have called up the failure of the project itself. In my reading of Starn’s piece and my admittedly particular rereading of the anthropological literature offered here, I respond to what I see as his central claims but do so with this reframing of the work of anthropology within the ongoing historical and political process of settlement. I organize my discussion in three parts that respond to the organization of Starn’s article: (1) spectacle, (2) anthropology, and (3) sovereignty.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
To a fruitful and lively blogobate about the value of (specifically) settler colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe has recently and insightfully contributed:
So what’s specific about [settler colonialism]? Or even, as Cheryl Harris asked me at UCLA, why not just call it imperialism? My answer is that, within the imperialist social formation, the settler-colonial relation of invasion is as specific as the relation of slavery, which often accompanies it, but that it hasn’t had the same level of recognition as the relation of slavery and this defect should be corrected. This is one of the reasons why it’s crucial to recognize the uninterrupted operation of the logic of elimination after the frontier, including into the present. Slavery was technically abolished a century and a half ago. Not so the attempt to eliminate the Native alternative. The impression you get from many histories is the precise reverse – they have slavery living on as a kind of half-life in the present (as in important senses it obviously does) while Indian dispossession figures as a one-off thing of the past (which it categorically is not). Against this kind of background, it’s no wonder that confusion has arisen as to why Indian rights can look so different to African American rights. Add to this the confusion of color – as Nandita Sharma wanted us to do at UCLA – and the profound historical differences distinguishing the different historical relationships of oppression into which Euroamerican colonisers have respectively sought to co-opt Indians and Black people get occluded in a multiculturalist fog.
[…]
I assume it’s understood throughout that what I’m attempting to analyze is NOT a fait accompli. Lest there be any mistake on this point, I’m careful to use words like ‘seek’ and ‘attempt’ when I spell out the settler logic of elimination. Natives have always devised and will continue to devise modes of resistance and ways around settler discourse that frustrate it and prevent it from usurping their right to determine their collective identities and ways of doing things. All the same, there is a power imbalance (genocide has its consequences) and settler discourse continues to wreak havoc, so, as a contribution offered to Native resistance and anticolonial, antiracist solidarities, we can try to develop a clear-sighted understanding of the nature of settler colonialism – of its background, its effects and, most of all, of the limitations and contradictions of settler discourse that can be turned against themselves for liberatory ends.
Filed under: Empire, postcolonialism, Quote, Scholarship and insights, United States, Website | Closed
Ron J. Smith, ‘Graduated incarceration – The Israeli occupation in subaltern geopolitical perspective’, Geoforum ?, ? (2011)
This paper highlights the importance of analysis of the microgeographies of occupation, and the spatially-differentiated means that the Israeli Occupation Forces use to maintain the occupation and create spaces of graduated incarceration for Palestinians. Using the examples of the hinterlands of Qalqiliyah and the old city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) in the occupied West Bank, this paper exposes the microgeographical differentiation the occupation mobilizes in its attempt to enact a panoptic sovereignty over the population, in the process of dispossession. This study challenges geopolitical formations of the state as primary actor, and focuses instead on narratives of Palestinians describing their own experiences of occupation by a hostile state. By relying on popular media, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, this paper seeks to incorporate a Palestinian vision of life under occupation to challenge traditional geopolitical visions of the Palestinian Israeli conflict, in effect creating a subaltern geopolitical narrative.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Edward Cavanagh, ‘A Company with Sovereignty and Subjects of its Own? The Case of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670-1763’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society 26, 1 (2011)
Questions about the ways in which colonial subjects were acquired and maintained, and how it was that multiple and often contradictory sovereignties came to overlap in history, may not be purely academic. We raise them today because they spring from issues that remain unresolved, concerning rights to land, resources, and self-determination. Following recent scholarship on the English East India Company, the author redefines the Hudson’s Bay Company, during the period before widespread settler colonialism, as a state (or “company-state”), and in this way argues that the HBC-state possessed its own kind of sovereignty. The article make three main arguments: that it was up to the HBC, not the Crown, to found Rupert’s Land, defend its establishments, make alliances with locals, and challenge intruders; that HBC rule extended to cover not only the company’s employees but, eventually, an indigenous “home guard” population; and that the HBC welfare regime transformed the relationship between ruler and ruled.
Filed under: Canada, Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty | Closed
A. Dirk Moses, ‘Official apologies, Reconciliation, and Settler Colonialism: Australian Indigenous Alterity and Political Agency’, Citizenship Studies 15, 2 (2011).
The burgeoning literature on transitional justice, truth commissions, reconciliation and official apologies tends to ignore the conditions of settler states in which ‘reconciliation’ needs to take account of indigenous minorities. The settler colonialism literature is worth including in the general discussion because it is exceptionally reflective about political theory (the constitutional recognition of indigenous rights) and ethnogenesis (the origin and viability of both settler and indigenous identities), challenging mainstream liberalism, in particular, to account for difference beyond platitudes about multiculturalism. This article highlights the postcolonial critiques of the Australian governments’ apology to the indigenous peoples of the country. The authors of these critiques seek to protect indigenous alterity from the Australian state, which they regard as irredeemably colonialist, especially in its liberal and progressive mode. The article suggests that Indigenous political agency transcends the resistance/co-option dichotomy presented in much of the apology’s commentary.
Filed under: Australia, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This interdisciplinary literature and law essay considers the legal mechanism of marriage as a site that joins notions of love and consent with the apparatus of state regulation, and how this affected indigenous communities in the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Foregrounding the legal context, this essay reads short stories by Mohawk author E. Pauline Johnson and Cherokee writer John M. Oskison that figure the stakes of two forms of marriage—one interracial, the other polygamous—for indigenous communities under the settler colonial laws of the United States and Canada. The law is animated in these stories in ways that both illuminate and challenge its reach; conversely, the literary tropes that these writers worked through and against are made salient through the law. The trope of the suicidal Indian woman, for example, gains new resonance when understood in the context of a Canadian law that required a type of legal suicide through interracial marriage. Competing concepts of sovereignty and the (national) family structure reveal the expectations of the state in co-constituting itself with its citizenry in Oskison’s story of a Creek family under pressure to dissolve during the drive to Oklahoma statehood. Significantly, these stories name consequences of the law for nonindigenous subjects, a problem obscured when reading the legal texts in isolation. That is, the stories show how laws aimed at nonconforming populations can entrap the settler nation’s most secure subjects: white men and women. As such, the unnamed subjects of law can be bound to its force as surely as those who are named, producing a broader critique that addresses all members of society.
Filed under: literature, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Between Indigenous and settler governance: histories and possibilities
To be held in the conference room of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, University of Western Sydney Bankstown campus, Building 3, August 18-20, 2011.
Waged/salaried: $400 (or $170 per full day, $85 per half day)
Casually employed and student rate: $150 (or $70 per full day, $35 per half day).
Brilliant line-up; see conference program here.
Send expressions of interest to Tim Rowse (UWS) or Lisa Ford (UNSW).
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, Seminar, Sovereignty | Closed
