Although most historical studies of the Pequot War acknowledge the existence of a trade alliance between the Pequots and the Dutch preceding the outbreak of the English-Pequot conflict, scholars have neglected to examine Dutch-Pequot relations in detail. Following a decade of material exchange between private traders and the Pequots, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) established a mutually beneficial trade alliance with the Pequots in 1626. When the relationship broke down in the early 1630s, WIC officials in New Netherland, distracted by personal and political feuds in the Dutch colony, were remarkably slow to repair the alliance. The inability of the WIC to restore stable relations with the Pequots drew the attention of the neighboring Puritan colonies, who coveted the fertile lands of the Connecticut Valley. By highlighting the complex role of the Dutch, this essay complicates our view of the Pequot War as an inevitable conflict between Puritans and Pequots.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
lorenzo veracini on settlerness
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘On Settlerness’, borderlands 10, 1 (2011).
Part of a larger project dedicated to a theoretical appraisal of settler colonial phenomena, this paper draws attention to the need to develop interpretative categories capable of accounting for the specificity of the settler colonial ‘situation’. In the first section, the paper suggests that settler colonialism establishes inherently triangular relations. It then goes on to argue that a fundamental disavowal of indigenous presences informs settler-indigenous relations. The final section suggests that settler colonialism is characterised by a libidinal economy that is ultimately incompatible with a colonial one. These structuring differentiations, it is argued, highlight the inherent difference between encounters in a colonial setting and encounters in a settler colonial one. While this ‘situation’ should not be seen as characteristic of a particular period or location, or necessarily restricted to the past (settler national independence, of course, does not discontinue settler colonial structures), this very cursory outline is primarily intended as a call for further research.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The American West and the Nazi East is a unique exploration of the conceptual and historical relations between the Early American and Nazi-German national projects of territorial expansion, racial cleansing, and settler colonization in their respective ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ empires, along with their associated campaigns of extreme political violence against ‘native’ indigenous peoples.
Kakel locates the Early American national project in ‘the West’ as a central part of the histories of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide, and offers a unique window on to the colonial origins, content, and context of the Nazi national project in ‘the East’, including the Holocaust. By asking new questions of supposedly familiar historical events and periods, this book brings to light the unexpected and unsettling connections between the ‘American West’ and the ‘Nazi East’, and links histories previously thought of as totally unrelated.
Filed under: Empire, Europe, Genocide, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
‘admit our imperial wrongs’: post-empire britain and the politics of apology in public discourse
David Anderson, of the Guardian:
History teaches us that empire can bring out the worst in people. In Britain we applaud the “civilising mission” of our imperial past, but are less happy to acknowledge the violence and brutality that so often girded our imperial endeavour. It is time we were more honest.
[…]
To the imperialist at the time, such matters were functional and may even have seemed immaterial; to the colonised, they marked out the experiences that mattered – the history of oppression, of occupation and of subjugation that shaped their national consciousness and, often, their political identity.
Hat tip, Jenny Mac.
Filed under: Africa, Empire, media | Closed
Debates in contemporary Indigenous affairs rarely question the settler-state framework and its accompanying institutions and processes. This silence persists despite Indigenous efforts to engage the settler-colonial order through repeated calls for treaties, for constitutional change, for self-determination and for better representation on the national political stage. These Indigenous efforts to enter into dialogue with mainstream Australia have thus far received little or no reciprocal movement from the settler state and its associated institutions.
To advance Indigenous affairs governance and develop a dialogue for improved Settler-Indigenous relations in the 21st century requires unsettling the silences around the settler-state and its institutions and processes. Instead, we need dialogue and exchange between Indigenous and Settler orders. Only by embracing the challenges of governance in an open an unapologetic way will we be able to address the anxieties associated with Indigenous governance and contribute to healing the persistent sore of the wider Indigenous-Settler relations that continue to trouble the Australian community.
To address these challenges, Unsettling the Setter State documents and analyses contemporary Indigenous efforts to engage with the settler state and its institutions. Chapters by Indigenous authors and settler interpreters and counterparts highlight Aboriginal creativity, vibrancy, and resistance while providing a crucial resource and pathways for rethinking governance and decolonising Australia in the 21st century.
Filed under: Australia, Political developments, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This article examines the operation of primordialist cultural stereotypes and their impact, particularly on the self-representations of Khoe-San people. The operation of these stereotypes is demonstrated by means of a study of a series of Khoe-San-related public events that occurred between 1996 and 2006. These events also reflected an unfolding Khoe-San revivalism. The article shows how stereotypical presumptions of what Khoe-San are like, have induced people assuming Khoe-San identities to become involved in primordialist self-representations aimed, in part, at legitimating their demands for recognition and related restorative endeavours. It is argued that such deployment of images not only plays on public expectations about the Khoe-San, but that their combination with non-primordialist elements can actually serve to unsettle the pervasive primordialist stereotypes which they invoke.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Isopolitics, Deep Colonising, Settler Colonialism’, Interventions 13, 2 (2011).
This essay contributes to interdisciplinary reflection on settler colonialism and decolonization by proposing an analysis of two characteristic traits of the ‘settler colonial situation’: isopolitics and deep colonizing. The first section outlines isopolitical relations as an alternative possibility to sustained colonial domination on the one hand, and internationally recognized independence within an international system of formally independent polities on the other. The second section concentrates on deep colonizing, a notion that upsets traditional amelioristic narratives emphasizing progressive processes culminating in the acquisition of social and political rights for colonized and formerly colonized peoples. Appraising concomitantly an isopolitical imaginary that persists in the present and the dynamics of deep colonizing, and, more generally, focusing on the (im)possibility of decolonization in settler colonial settings, can help reframing received narratives of decolonization.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty | Closed
miranda johnson on reconciliation, indigeneity and postcolonial nationhood in settler states
In the Commonwealth settler states of Australia, New Zealand and Canada in the last two decades, ‘reconciliation’ has become a key term for expressing a new relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous (primarily white settler) peoples. The term is usually associated with post-conflict societies and its use in the settler states is meant to acknowledge the historical injustices that indigenous people suffered in the colonial past. In this article, I examine how reconciliation evokes a kind of postcolonial nationhood in settler states in a post-imperial era. This is a peculiar form of postcoloniality since it does not mean the realization of political independence for indigenous people. It does, however, mean the reframing of settler states in more local terms. In fact, I suggest that the ways in which justice has been provided to indigenous people have invested their indigeneity with a high cultural value that non-indigenous people in these countries also want, in order to localize their expressions of postcolonial nationhood.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Reviewing:
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
introducing the scs network
Scholars who have published, or who have interests in the field of settler colonial studies (such as those writers featured in the settler colonial studies blog) are invited to join the new, settler colonial studies network. With time, it is hoped that the network will transform into a comprehensive directory of scholars.
If you’d like to join the network, send us an email, along with your affiliation, your email, and your homepage. An alphabetical list will be compiled shortly, and updated regularly.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
