In the late nineteenth century, European expansionism found one of its last homes in the North American West. While the settlement of the American West was renowned for its lawlessness, the Canadian Prairies enjoyed a tamer reputation symbolized by the Mountie and his legendary triumph over chaos.
Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada’s peaceful West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940, where offences ranged from rape and wife-beating to husband murder and prostitution. In doing so, Erickson opens a window onto a world where judges’ and juries’ responses to the most intimate or violent acts were coloured by a desire to shore up the liberal economic order by maintaining boundaries between men and women, Native people and newcomers, and capital and labour. Victims and accused could only hope to harness entrenched ideas about masculinity, femininity, race, and class in their favour. The results, Erickson shows, were predictable but never certain.
This fascinating exploration of hegemony and resistance in key contact zones not only complicates traditional narratives of prairie exceptionalism, it also draws the region’s history into larger debates about law, colonialism, and nation building. This book will be welcomed by social and legal historians, those with an interest in colonial and frontier history, as well as scholars and students of law and gender.
Filed under: Canada, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The Griqua people are commonly misunderstood. Today, they do not figure in the South African imagination as other peoples do, nor have they for over a century. This book argues that their comparative invisibility is a result of their place in the national narrative.
In this revisionist analysis of South African historiography, the author analyses over a century’s worth of historical studies and identifies a number of narrative frameworks that have proven resilient to change over this time. The Griqua, in particular, have fared poorly compared to other peoples. They appear in, and disappear from, this body of work in a number of consistent ways, almost as though scholars have avoided re-imagining their history in ways relevant to the present. This book questions why that might be the case.
Filed under: Africa, Genocide, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Once in class, students receive lessons in indigenous rights, language and mythology and in the afternoons they get the chance to put practical skills to the test, herding buffalo and tending vegetable plots.
The Indigenous University is far removed from its counterparts in Venezuela’s cities. But that is because it has been constructed by and for indigenous communities.
Filed under: Latin America | Closed
The Shcherbina Expedition of 1896–1903 was the Russian Empire’s most concerted effort to gather the data necessary to facilitate peasant settlers’ migration to its largely nomadic steppe oblasts. Although this expedition was a massive exercise of imperial power privileging sedentary over mobile pastoralist lifeways, the oppositional views of its participants made matters more ambiguous. The civilizational hierarchies that emerged in its materials did not strictly privilege sedentary lifeways, and an effort was made to preserve mobile pastoralists’ lifeways and economic wellbeing. The project of objectively correct colonization that the expedition embodied was initially embraced by all interested parties as a certain solution to the clash of lifeways brought about by peasant migration to the steppe. After its work was published, however, contested use of its statistical norms made it clear that the idea of ‘correct colonization’ could not prevent the serious conflicts engendered by settlement in the steppe.
Filed under: Asia, Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
wall street’s real natives
Newspaper Rock has collected a few indigenous perspectives, here and here.
The omission of the realities of settler colonialism from this trendy little protest is ironic, he notes.
Filed under: media, Political developments, United States | Closed
Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement serving as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are visible, but they have agency to transform life on their lands and on their terms.
Filed under: Europe, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Shu-mei Shih, ‘The Concept of the Sinophone’, PMLA 126, 3 (2011).
Sinophone studies — conceived as the study of Sinitic- language cultures on the margins of geopolitical nation-states and their hegemonic productions — locates its objects of attention at the conjuncture of China’s internal colonialism and Sinophone communities everywhere immigrants from China have settled. Sinophone studies disrupts the chain of equivalence established, since the rise of nation- states, among language, culture, ethnicity, and nationality and explores the protean, kaleidoscopic, creative, and overlapping margins of China and Chineseness, America and Americanness, Malaysia and Malaysianness, Taiwan and Taiwanness, and so on, by a consideration of speciic, local Sinophone texts, cultures, and practices produced in and from these margins. Sinophone Tibetan literature and Sinophone American literature are two examples in an expansive consideration of Sinophone studies in literature. If the critical operation of Sinophone studies involves a trenchant critique of China- centrism, it equally involves a critique of Eurocentrism and other centrisms, such as Malay-centrism in Malaysia. It is, in short, always a multidirectional critique.
Three interrelated historical processes have produced Sinophone communities: continental colonialism, settler colonialism, and immigration.
Filed under: Asia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture offers an accessible overview of settler colonialism as a globally important cultural and political phenomenon within a range of historical and geographical contexts, including Palestine, Hawai’i, Canada, southern Africa, Ireland, and Australasia. Seventeen essays by leading scholars in the field argue that while different episodes of setter colonialism vary in different ways due to circumstances of time and place, they share a pervasive genocidal agenda for indigenous peoples. With its useful definitions and insights as well as its account of the opportunities that settler colonialism presents for resistance, this is a provocative study of a relatively unexplored topic of immense importance.
TOC:
Introduction; F.Bateman & L.Pilkington
‘An Unknown and Feeble Body’: How Settler Colonialism Was Theorised in the Nineteenth Century; T.Foley
Spenser, Purchas, and the Poetics of Colonial Settlement; D.Carey
‘Dycheyng and Hegeying’: The Material Culture of the Tudor Plantations in Ireland; J.P.Montano
A Settled Question?: Charles, Lord Cornwallis, the Loss of America and the Mind of Empire; D.Dix
International Anti-Colonialism: The Fenian Invasions of Canada; R.Young
Indirect Rule in Australia: A Case Study in Settler Colonial Difference; B.Silverstein
(En)gendering Faith?: Love, Marriage and the Evangelical Mission on the Settler-Colonial Frontier; C.McLisky
‘Wanted! A Real White Australia’: The Women’s Movement, Whiteness and the Settler-colonial Project, 1900-1940; J.Carey
From the Indigenous to the Indigent: Homelessness and Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i; L.E.Lyons
Searching for the ‘C’ word: Museums, Art Galleries, and Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i; K.K.Kosasa
A Dream Deterred: Palestine from Total War to Total Peace; J.Collins
Displaced Nations: Israeli Settlers and Palestinian Refugees; S.D.Hassan
Telling the End of the Settler Colonial Story; L.Veracini
JM Coetzee and the Idea of Africa; D.Attwell
Zionism Then and Now; S.Makdisi
Where We Belong: South Africa as Settler Colony and the Calibration of African and Afrikaner Indigeneity; E.Boehmer
Race and the Trace of History; P.Wolfe
Filed under: Australia, Empire, Hawaii, Israel/Palestine, New Zealand, Pacific, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
I offer that we need to find a way of interpreting settler colonialism that captures the variety of ways that settlers partake in exclusionary and assimilative practices.. Perhaps, then, it might be more precise to include in a definition of settler colonialism that often despite their most genuine anti-colonial or decolonizing intentions, settlers can nevertheless work within and to propagate colonial structures.
More here.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
