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
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
