Lorenzo Veracini of Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research, responding to a critique of settler colonialism as interpretative category, exclusively for settler colonial studies blog:
Tequila Sovereign (“a Native, progressive, forty-something, anti-racist, feminist, woman”) has recently reflected in a series of blog postings on her dissatisfaction with settler colonialism as an interpretative paradigm (“Why ‘Settler Colonialism’ Isn’t Exactly Right”, 13/03/11; “More Musings on Why ‘Settler Colonialism’ Doesn’t Work (For Me)”, 15/03/2011; “Reflections on the UCLA School of Law: Critical Race Studies Program; Race & Sovereignty Symposium”, 3/04/2011; “‘Settler’ What?”, 9/04/2011). As she engages with settler colonial studies as a consolidating field and methodology, a debate I am actively contributing to, I feel I should engage with her concerns.
Let me rehearse the most recognisable elements of her argument. She identifies a clearly discernible scholarly trend: after the publication of Patrick Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1999), several books and articles have developed settler colonialism as an interpretative category. Sovereign contends that this debate displaces “imperialism”, “colonialism” and “nation-state” as paradigms and she is not ready to let them go (even though I am not sure whether anyone has asked her to do so). Settler colonialism is not unique (or “specific”, see below), the conceptual categories that were used until what could be defined as the “settler colonial turn” were perfectly capable, she argues, of appraising what happens when people move somewhere else and decide to stay and found a new political order. Sovereign is also of the opinion that anticolonial and anti-imperialist rhetorics are more effective in supporting the struggles for indigenous self-determination and empowerment. This is fair enough, except that no scholar of settler colonialism (that is, not a single one) has ever said that “imperialism” or “colonialism” should be considered useless concepts, or suggested the language indigenous militancy should or should not use (Sovereign indeed overstates settler colonial studies’ capacity to displace). If anything, the study of settler colonialism as a specific formation aims to expand the available conceptual toolbox, certainly not to restrict it.
Where things become somewhat unfair is when Sovereign attributes to settler colonial studies a determination to “anticipate” the (reparation-less) reconciliation of indigenous survivors and settler genocidal histories (“to settle”, she notes is inherently about reconciling differences). It’s like saying that studying Germany is necessarily about advocating German things. Sovereign should rest assured: studying settler colonialism does not amount to advocating its practice, and her intuition about the language of “settlement” only applies to settlers, not to the scholars of their activities and language. After this, things stay unfair. Sovereign claims that “the lack of legal responsibility and reparation in the nation-state’s violence is exactly what is made illegible in ‘settler colonial’ narratives” and I am not sure where this may come from (certainly not from the works on settler colonialism that she quotes). She may be right in noting that settler colonialism is not necessarily the term indigenous peoples want to use, but no scholar of settler colonial formations uncritically accepts typically settler colonial discursive refrains like the teleological expectation of a progression from wilderness to civilisation, or from contestation and struggle to reconciliation and “settledness”. The aim is to study these claims, not to reproduce them. Similarly, no one among the scholars Sovereign mentions thinks that the study of settler colonialism should only apply to the past. The fact that some of these scholars are historians and that their work deals with the past should not be taken as an indication that they do not see the profound connections that link past and present. Indeed, most of those contributing to what has become a genuinely multidisciplinary debate do so in the awareness that the settler colonial situation retains an extraordinary capacity to impinge on the present. The very opposite of what Sovereign alleges.
It is not all in vain. If Sovereign’s charcterisation of settler colonial studies turns out to be a complete misreading, her last posting constitutes only a partial mischaracterisation. She notes an “insistence on specificity”, which “produces an obvious question”: what is the referent against which this specificity is measured? This is a crucial question, and while different scholars have responded differently (even though Sovereign has missed it), this is where the settler colonial turn remains a multifaceted debate. I, for example, have argued that settler colonial formations are specific in relation to metropolitan and colonial ones: the metropolitan experience is characterised by indigenous ascendancy, the colonial one by exogenous one, and the settler colonial one by an ascendancy that is asserted simultaneously against indigenous and exogenous others (this is brutally summarising: I present this argument in more extended fashion in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview [2010]). According to Lisa Ford, an author Sovereign explicitly targets while misapprehending her argument, a (precocious) settler sovereignty is specific vis a vis other forms of sovereignty. But in the context of a seemingly fortuitous convergence of scholarly pursuits (or is it?), there is no predetermined agreement on definitions. And so it should be. Different scholars from different backgrounds are proposing a variety of contributions, and while Sovereign laments a “profound confusion”, I would like to celebrate a genuine exchange between different approaches, agendas, idioms, and inherently provisional conclusions.
“So now we – the audience – are all really confused”, Sovereign asserts. While the coalescence of a particular body of scholarly literature and her confusion – the point she started with and her conclusion – are the only incontestable elements emerging from her postings, the issue of whether settler colonial studies is going to help indigenous peoples recovering their sovereignty is genuine. Her scepticism is a healthy reflex; but why should an awareness of the mechanics of a specifically settler colonial type of subjection (of indigenous alterities) be counterproductive? Why should the development of a language capable of representing a specific colonial formation and its operation be an obstacle to its supersession? Surely a better understanding of the contradictions and weaknesses of settler colonial discourse could aid indigenous struggles. At least, it should not hinder them.
LV
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States, Website | Closed
From Owen Bowcott of the Guardian:
Highly embarrassing colonial-era files detailing the British army’s repressive tactics against Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya during the 1950s will be revealed in a landmark compensation case.
The discovery of thousands of documents withheld for decades from the Kenyan government will raise awkward questions about the Foreign Office’s attempt to deny liability for the allegedly systematic mistreatment of thousands of Kikuyu victims prior to independence.
The case, brought by four survivors of the notorious detention camps operated by the colonial authorities could also set a precedent by forcing the release of files relating to other colonies once controlled by the UK.
Wow.
The impeccable file-keeping of British imperial administrators, for which historians have always been so grateful, may now come back to haunt them, should this case receive a favourable hearing — which it probably deserves to do. Watch, thereafter, as some arbitrary date will be set as a ‘cut-off’ date for potential claims; history then refashioned into a number of portions, some of which ‘behind us’, some ‘with us’.
Just which ‘natives’ might sue the British Empire will become heavily politicised.
This is a theme I develop in a forthcoming paper in arena journal, partly an homage to the insightful scholarship of Berber Bevernage, partly a siren call for a historiographical revolution, partly an observation on the overlap between law and history.
Of course, John and Jean Comaroff forsaw this kind of thing a number of years ago when they identified a new recourse to law (or ‘lawfare’) in the postcolonial world for the reparation of old wrongs. As they put it, the past
is increasingly caught up in the dialectic of law and disorder: hence the mobilization of legalities to fight anti-imperialist battles anew, which has compelled the British government to answer under oath for having committed acts of unspeakable atrocity in its African “possessions”, for having killed local leaders at whim, and for having unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another. By these means is colonialism, tout court, rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is made to break its silences, to speak in tongues hitherto unheard and untranslated, to submit itself to the scales of justice at the behest of those who suffered it, of its most abject subjects— and to be reduced to a cash equivalent, payable as the official tender of damage, dispossession, loss, trauma. In the process, too, it becomes clear that what imperialism is being indicted for, above all, is its commission of lawfare: its use of its own rules—of its duly enacted penal codes, its administrative law, its states of emergency, its charters and mandates and warrants, its norms of engagement—to impose a sense of order upon its subordinates by means of violence rendered legible, legal, and legitimate by its own sovereign word. And also to commit its own ever-socivilized, patronizing, high-minded forms of kleptocracy.
Never before now, perhaps, has the British Crown found itself so confronted by an African postcolonial polity for its wayward fits of imperial decision-making. That the case is draped in the language of human rights — and not necessarily, as we might expect, conjuring up the familiarily scandalised treatment of crucial commodites, i.e. misdirected land or ill-distributed capital — makes it all the more interesting, and potentially jurisprudentially ground-breaking.
Definitely watch this space.
Hat-tip, Jenny Mac.
Filed under: Africa, Empire, law, Political developments, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Emma Kowal of the University of Melbourne, sharing her provocative insights on ‘elimination’, exclusively for settler colonial studies blog:
As Veracini argues in his provocative introductory essay to new settler colonial studies journal, if settler colonialism is logic of elimination, then the anticolonial response is Indigenous survival. Only when we stop wanting Indigenous people to disappear will we have become post-settler colonial. But what is the parallel fate of settlers in the process or practice of decolonisation? What is the imagined end for settlers who oppose settler colonialism? People that I call ‘white anti-racists’ – a sub-group of settlers that includes me and probably most scholars of settler colonialism – have been the subject of my ethnographic research at an Indigenous health institute in the Northern Territory. I set out to understand the logic of Indigenous improvement that progressive white anti-racist people bring to their work in Indigenous affairs. Along the way, I found that white anti-racists experience their agency as a stigma – something inherently harmful to be minimised, rationalised, and ultimately, removed from the scene. They desire a state of powerlessness and vulnerability to Indigenous people. While white settlers want Indigenous people to disappear, white anti-racist settlers long to disappear themselves. There are many productive questions this article raises for settler colonial studies, but here is just one: What would this mean if it applied not just to the logic of white anti-racism, but to the logic of settler colonial studies?
Some of this is further developed in, ‘The Stigma of White Privilege’, Cultural Studies 25, 3:
Beginning in the 1970s, the efforts of the Australian settler state to help its Indigenous minority shifted away from ‘assimilation’ and embraced the principles of ‘self-determination’. According to the rhetoric of the self-determination era explored in this article as the ‘liberal fantasy space’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians should be in control of efforts to improve their lives, ultimately making state intervention redundant. A by-product of this shift was to radically change the role of non-Indigenous people who sought to participate in Indigenous development. No longer in charge of Indigenous advancement, they were now cast as partners and supporters. This article explores some of the complexities of White anti-racist subjectivities in the self-determination era. It draws on ethnographic research with a group of progressive Whites who work in Indigenous health in northern Australia. A striking feature of contemporary White anti-racist discourse is a reluctance to claim any agency in the process of Indigenous improvement. I argue that applying the concept of stigma to White privilege is a novel and productive approach to understanding this desire for self-effacement. White stigma works in a parallel fashion to the case of liberal Germans who believe the German collective identity is irrevocably tainted by the Holocaust. In the Australian case, the negative characteristics associated with Whiteness act as a barrier to the broader goal of constructing ethical White subjectivities fit for the ‘liberal fantasy space’ of post-colonial justice. In their attempts to overcome this barrier and transcend White stigma, White anti-racists mobilise the identity tropes of missionary, mother, and child. Ultimately, these efforts at self-fashioning point to the ultimate fantasy of decolonisation: the desire of White anti-racists to disappear.
Filed under: Australia, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
clearing the land
Palestinian villager Ibrahaim Salah faced a rude welcome after arriving at his olive grove Tuesday, claiming that his trees were cut down by settlers.
“I arrived at my land Tuesday morning and couldn’t believe my eyes,” said the Samaria resident, who is allowed to access his grove only a few times a year with a security escort. “We found some 150 olive trees that are dozens of years old cut down.”
So apparently, this land is part of ‘a disputed area’.
More from ynet news
found via Mondoweiss
Filed under: Israel/Palestine | Closed
democracy and afrikanerdom
“There are three people sitting around a table: a black man, an American, an Afrikaner,” says our Ventersdorp host, a modest and mellow man, in Afrikaans. At first we expect to hear a nasty joke of some kind, but we soon realise he’s in fact explaining why he cannot be motivated to vote.
“And there is an election coming up. Three different candidates from the same backgrounds – none of which the people at the table know. You ask the black man, ‘Who shall you vote for?’ His response will be, of course, that he is voting for the black candidate, even though he doesn’t know him! If you ask the American he will tell you, as well, that he is supporting the American candidate. It is no different for the Afrikaner in South Africa. They want to elect one of their own.”
This represents a huge discursive shift, and it’s not just limited to Ventersdorp; it’s spreading right across South Africa. Democracy has caused it.
Pride and nationalism remain, and always will remain, among the Afrikaner volk (just ask them about their history, their geskiedenis). But now these sentiments are seldom accompanied by armed rallies and hate speech – the AWB and its ilk are the exception these days. Today Afrikaner nationalism comes, for the most part, with a humble indifference, even a sense of defeatism.
Hardline groups across the country will try to mobilise the same old violent, gun-toting rhetoric made famous by the AWB in the 1980s. But those who subscribe to such notions are now a decided minority among Afrikaners – there are just a few thousand members in total, less than 1 per cent of the white Afrikaans-speaking population.
from Inside Story.
Filed under: media, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
The seventh annual conference of the very active SOAS Palestine Society attracted some 300 people over the weekend of 5-6 March 2011 (SOAS is the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury and the event was hosted by its London Middle East Institute). These conferences have become something of an institution, bringing together every year the current crop of activists, interested members of the public and academics (faculty staff, researchers, students) to explore aspects of Palestine. Those aspects considered in the past have included: the life and work of Edward Said; Palestine and international law; the economy of Palestine and the Occupation; the Nakba and Palestinian resistance; and (last year) the Left in Palestine. This year’s topic was Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine. It was the first of these conferences I have attended. As in previous years, speakers came from far afield: in this case, from Australia, USA, Canada, Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and the UK.
What follows is a personal and selective view of the presentations and discussions where I was present. I didn’t attend every session, but the whole event was a rich mix of information and ideas and a signal service to the Palestinian cause. This article has benefited from the advice of several activist friends who saw an earlier draft, but responsibility for the final version is mine alone.
read the rest, at the Palestine Chronicle, here.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Robert J. Miller, ‘Tribal Constitutions and Native Sovereignty’, working paper.
More than 565 Indigenous tribal governments exercise extensive sovereign and political powers within the United States today. Only about 230 of the native communities that created these governments, however, have chosen to adopt written constitutions to define and control the political powers of their governments. Many observers would no doubt ask how a government can function without a written constitution to guide its formation and operation, and how the rights of citizens can be defined and protected without a written constitution. This essay addresses these questions and many more concerning American Indian and Alaska Native tribal constitutions. It is clear that constitutionalism is nothing new to Indigenous peoples in North America. This fact is demonstrated by the Iroquois Confederacy of the Haudenosaunee people who have governed themselves under an unwritten constitution for many hundreds of years, by the Cherokee Nation who apparently created the first written tribal constitution in 1827, by the many dozens of tribal governments who adopted written constitutions from 1837-1930, and by the hundreds of Indigenous governments who adopted constitutions under the federal Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This essay examines these facts and more, and addresses whether modern day tribal constitutions adequately serve the needs of native communities and help these communities and their political entities to exercise and protect their sovereignty.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
As expert analysis concentrates on indigenous rights instruments, particularly the long fought for 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a body of jurisprudence over indigenous land and resources parallels specialized standard-setting under general human rights treaties. The aim of the present article is to provide a practical and comparative perspective on indigenous land rights based on the process of jurisprudential articulation under such treaties, principally in the Inter-American and African contexts. While specialized standards inevitably generate a view of such rights (and, indeed, indigenous rights more generally) as a set of entitlements separate from general human rights, judicial and quasi-judicial practice as it exists or is being developed within regional and global human rights systems is effectively shaping up their content and meaning. I argue that indigenous land rights jurisprudence reflects a distinctive type of human rights discourse, which is an indispensable point of reference to vest indigenous land issues with greater legal significance. From a practical standpoint, focussing on human rights judicial and quasi-judicial action to expand existing treaty-based regimes and promote constructive partnerships with national courts, though not a panacea to all the intricacies of indigenous rights, does appear to offer a more realistic alternative to advocacy strategies primarily based on universally binding principles (at least at this stage) or the disengagement of domestic systems from international (human rights) law.
Filed under: Africa, Canada, law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This paper begins at the Derby (western Kimberley, WA) bull rides, where young Aboriginal men compete to be champion bull riders – with the prize of a social status akin to an AFL football star. The abundance of life performed in this arena lies in stark contrast to the too often rehearsed appalling health and social statistics, which has produced policies such as the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, Shared Responsibility Agreements and ‘Close the Gap’. Too many Indigenous Australians are in a state of relentless poverty, which is responded to with short-sighted instrumentalist policies. Achille Mbembe argues that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die – the creation of death worlds (2003). Notably, above the Tropic of Capricorn 90% of the prison population is Indigenous, leading some to contend that we are in a state of war. The wounded Indigenous body is represented as an aberration – outside of the healthy civic body – and in need of mainstreaming. In the political moment there is a focus upon the war on terror, but what of the war at home? War upon Australian soil seemingly has been consigned to history. Is it productive to consider the ongoing death and destruction in Indigenous Australia as forms of state based terrorism? The challenge as a postcolonial scholar is to not only critique our time but to also think relationally and trace paths of decolonization – to create models of thinking that renew life.
Filed under: Australia, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Analyzing the United States as a settler society has the potential to bring together insights from the anthropology of Native North America and the anthropology of the United States. This article suggests several justifications for and implications of doing so, with focus on citizenship, sovereignty, economy, and nature. [settler colonialism, indigenous peoples, state of the field]
While considering the conference theme of power in contemporary America, I have been reflecting on the ways that Americans come to understand what kind of society we share and struggle over. Anthropology, with its comparative scope, has the opportunity and indeed responsibility to undertake “location work” in the United States. By “location work,”Gupta and Ferguson (1997:39) refer to the “idea that anthropology’s distinctive trademark might be found not in its commitment to ‘the local’ but in its attentiveness to epistemological and political issues of location.” As I discuss in an essay in the Annual Review of Anthropology (Cattelino 2010a), anthropologists of the United States have been concerned to locate the anthropological field (as discipline, ethnographic site, and theoretical domain) in three ways: in space, epistemology, and, more recently, in settler colonialism. In these comments, I focus on settler colonialism, suggesting that to think of the United States as a settler society illuminates forms of power that organize American and American Indian lives in perhaps unexpected ways. These sometimes reach the surface of public debate around tribal gaming, a phenomenon that has unsettled the economic position of some (but by no means all!) American Indians relative to other groups and has provoked heated debates on and off reservations about the social meanings of wealth, indigenous sovereignty, and the connections between the two.
Of all “location work” undertaken by anthropologists, perhaps none has been so vexed as the relationship to Indian Country. The anthropology of the United States and the anthropology of Native North America have been maintained to a large extent as separate anthropological traditions. For example, Michael Moffat reflected the state of the field when he defined the scope of his 1992 review of ethnographic writing about American culture as follows: “American in this article means ‘of the continental United States [excluding native American peoples]’” (Moffatt 1992:205 n. 1, brackets in original). To be sure, some have included American Indians within U.S. courses, anthologies, and the like. But I want to point to the need for a somewhat different project, one not of inclusion but rather of redefinition: to think of the United States as a settler society. Native America’s relatively marginal status in the theory-building projects of the anthropology of the United States and its ongoing legitimacy as a distinct site of anthropological study seemingly outside of the study of American cultural life (e.g., as a separate area of specialization for the purpose of job searches) reflect and reinforce the positioning of indigenous peoples as outside the time and space of modern American life. This is despite the work of a number of anthropologists (see, e.g., Biolsi 2005; Blu 2001; Sider 2003; Simpson 2008), including SANA members, who have worked to incorporate American Indian with more broadly American questions that go beyond the important but also constraining framework of Indian-white or Indian-black race relations.
By settler society, I refer especially (if not only) to the liberal democratic settler states of the former British empire with indigenous minorities: Australia, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the United States. The historian Patrick Wolfe (1999) differentiates settler colonialism’s target of land dispossession from the expropriation of labor in dependent colonies. Thinking in terms of settler society integrates indigenous and non-indigenous lives, while sustaining attention to power, by attending to the ways in which all of our conditions are structured by the legal, historical, cultural, and economic formations that are characteristic of settler societies.
What might some of these formations be, and what can we learn from analyzing them? In the spirit of a collective project, I do not offer answers but rather some suggestions—admittedly, ones clustered around areas of inquiry connected to my own research—for where we might look and what we might learn by thinking in terms of settler colonialism.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
