Saree Makdisi, ‘Riding the Whirlwind of Settler Colonialism’, Victorian Studies 53, 1 (Autumn 2010)
a bit of it:
The structural logic leading to such catastrophes is precisely what Belich aims to uncover and retrace, though his book is ultimately more interested in colonial triumph than in the human catastrophes that have always accompanied it (of which, to be fair, it is well aware). And Replenishing the Earth accomplishes its task very ably. Belich’s book, from which any scholar interested in British or Anglophone culture in the nineteenth century has much to learn, reminds us of the virtues of transcending the limits and scale of the nation-state and opening our interpretive horizons to read the world in as wide a frame as possible. It resituates Victorian Britain in its global context and also adds much needed socioeconomic contextualization for the recent interest in transatlantic studies. It is also a valuable addition to the growing body of work on settler-colonial societies, though it would have been more valuable still had it done more to engage with some of the current scholarship in the wider field, for example, the work of Patrick Wolfe, or the recent books of Lorenzo Veracini, Gershon Shafir, Nur Masalha, Gabriel Piterberg, and others, which explore the last surviving example of classic settler colonialism in the world, namely the ongoing Zionist project in Palestine (which, curiously, is the only major case of settler colonialism that the book does not discuss or even mention in passing, despite its contextual discussions of French Algeria, Russian Siberia,and Chinese Manchuria).
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
…he seems to be claiming that ‘Indigenous Title’ is somehow different from ‘Aboriginal Title’ with the difference being that Indigenous Title is both an individual right as well as a communal one.
turtletalk, on Louison v. Ochapowace Indian Band #71
Filed under: Canada, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
griquas
griquas learn from voortrekkers:
Die Griekwavolk se droom om sy geskiedenis en erfenisterreine te bewaar, is lewendig en daarom het hulle heelpad per trein van die Noord-Kaap gekom om te kom kyk hoe dinge by die Voortrekkermonument gedoen word.
and long for zulu-esque memorialisation:
“Maar ons wil onder dieselfde wet as al die ander swart stamme val en dieselfde behandeling kry wat die Zoeloes byvoorbeeld kry.”
van Beeld.
Filed under: media, Southern Africa | Closed
Abstract:
The Doctrine of Discovery, viewed through the lens of six hundred years of international law, has shaped Brazil’s legal history and laws ever since 1500 when Portugal claimed first discovery of the territory. A comparative law examination of the Doctrine’s long history in Portuguese and European law demonstrates that Portugal’s domination of Brazil was founded on feudal, religious, racial, and ethnocentric justifications. The adaptation of many of the Doctrine’s elements into Portuguese and Brazilian laws and policies for over five hundred years has had profound implications for Indigenous peoples. Brazil’s attempts to create a more positive and equal future for all of its citizens, just as similar efforts in all settler/colonizer societies, must begin with an enlightened recognition of this history and the Doctrine of Discovery. Only then can serious efforts to eradicate the Doctrine from Brazilian law and international law provide some resolution to deeply-rooted issues in a place of justice and healing.
Filed under: Latin America, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
In his inaugural lecture on Tuesday 8 March, Professor Richard Boast will argue that there were many more ‘treaties’ in colonial New Zealand than just the 1840 document, and that an examination and debate about their significance is needed.
“It is often assumed that the Treaty of Waitangi was the only Treaty between the state and New Zealand’s indigenous population, making New Zealand unlike ‘multi-textual’ jurisdictions such as the United States.”
Filed under: law, New Zealand | Closed
a bit of it:
The structure of the book combines a regional and thematic approach. The four opening chapters deal with the three major destinations for British migration: Canada, Australia and New Zealand – plus ‘Africa South of the Sahara’. For experts on any of these particular regions, there will be much here that is already known; what is novel is the conceptual framing, the organising lens. The next half-dozen chapters are thematic, dealing with, in order: non-white migration; immigration into Britain; women; children; the emigration business and ‘homecoming’. Crucially, by placing all sorts of different kinds of migration between the covers of a single book, what the authors achieve is a study that not only draws meaningful comparative analysis according to those staple criteria of gender, race and class but can also incorporate a host of other variables as well – religion, nationality, culture, work – and very much else besides. While migration provides the thematic ‘way in’, however, it is also offered as something of a ‘grand narrative’ of its own. Whether the authors would agree with Niall Ferguson that the British Empire ‘made’ the modern world is doubtful, but they are certainly in no doubt as to the lasting impact of migration within that empire. The unlocking of natural resources; the development of international trade; the spread of English language and culture – all this was due in no small part to the movement of the British overseas. That many emigrants saw themselves not as migrants at all but as participants in a project of ‘overseas settlement’ is itself instructive: migration implied the movement to foreign lands; settlement, by contrast, meant the populating of a wider British world. Their descendants may have come to see themselves not as British but as Canadians, Australians or New Zealanders but this is not to detract from the formative historical significance of these earlier migrant flows.
The new imperial history has been, at least in part, about complicating direction. Movement was not unilinear. Change was not one way. Nor is the binary model of metropole-periphery sufficient to capture the multifarious, multi-directional movement of people, materials and ideas whose itinerant trails sprawled and stuttered across (and beyond) the British imperial world. There are two obvious inflections here. One is the influence of maritime history upon the history of empire; the other is the poststructuralist stress upon the haphazard.To some extent, we might contend, historians of imperial migration are still ‘writing back’ to J. R. Seeley’s 1883 treatise, The Expansion of England, a manifesto for forward motion and a foundational conceit. But if complexity is what defines migration, what on earth can be said of it that does not detract from that complexity? What can pull together what seems to be, by definition, moving incessantly apart?
Filed under: Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, Empire, New Zealand, Pacific, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
Tying up forever a large territory for the use of Kafirs in small bits each big enough to support a man and his family … to tie up the man whose labour is worth more elsewhere .. Does it not strike you as rather a waste of both the man and the ground? … Why give him legal title? And how will you dispossess him afterwards?
The evidence of Commissioner Hamilton to the South African Native Affairs Commission, 1903-5 (quoted in Martin Chanock, The Making of a South African Legal Culture, 2001, p. 379).
Filed under: Quote, Southern Africa | Closed
hosts and their unwanted guests
“This so-called zombie or brain-manipulating fungus alters the behaviours of the ant host, causing it to die in an exposed position, typically clinging onto and biting the adaxial surface of shrub leaves,” the study authors write.
The fungus then grows out of the head of the ant, releasing spores into the air, which rain down onto unsuspecting ants and the forest floor.
from abc.
Filed under: Science | Closed
interventions 13, 1 (2011)
Between Subalternity and Indigeneity, ed. Bird and Rothberg
Jodi A. Byrd; Michael Rothberg, ‘BETWEEN SUBALTERNITY AND INDIGENEITY: Critical Categories for Postcolonial Studies’.
This introductory essay addresses the conditions for possible exchange between subaltern studies and indigenous and American Indian studies. It highlights the special significance of Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ as an inaugurating moment of postcolonial studies in the US with important implications for those working in indigenous studies. Scholars in postcolonial and indigenous/American Indian studies share an interest in challenging the logics of colonialism and deploying incommensurability as a critical tool. However, the essay also points to tensions between postcolonial and indigenous studies that derive from indigenous people’s sense of living under ongoing colonial projects – and not just colonial legacies – and from postcolonial studies’ over-reliance on models of colonialism in South Asia and Africa that do not necessarily speak to the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Besides tracing the convergences and tensions that mark the relation between indigenous and postcolonial critical tendencies, this essay introduces the contributions to this special issue and seeks to prompt further dialogue that continues the project of interrogating subalternity.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘THE GOVERNANCE OF THE PRIOR’.
This essay asks how critical indigenous theory might intervene in the field of critical theory. What originates here that does not in other disciplinary phrasings and phases and cannot without doing some violence to the tasks indigenous critical theory sets for itself? It begins to answer this question by introducing a form of liberal governance – the governance of the prior – that critical indigenous theory illuminates. And it argues that rather than referencing a specific social content or context, social identity or movement, critical indigenous theory disrupts a network of presuppositions underpinning political theory, social theory and humanist ethics (obligation) which are themselves built upon this form of liberal governance.
Jodi A. Byrd, ‘BEEN TO THE NATION, LORD, BUT I COULDN’T STAY THERE: American Indian Sovereignty, Cherokee Freedmen and the Incommensurability of the Internal’.
This essay takes as its case study the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s 2007 vote to disenfranchise approximately 2,800 Cherokee Freedmen (African-Cherokee descendents of slaves once held by members of the Cherokee Nation) in violation of the treaty the Cherokee Nation signed with the United States in 1866 to end the Civil War. Arguing that indigenous sovereignty and political status is incommensurable with the ‘internal’ to the United States, the essay provides a genealogy of ‘internal colonialism’ in order to track how it has emerged as descriptor within postcolonial theory for indigenous peoples’ relations with the United States. In order to place indigenous critical theory into conversation with subaltern studies, the essay argues that disaggregating processes of racialization from colonization makes the ongoing settler colonization of indigenous nations visible in conversation with subaltern studies at the same time that it reveals the persistent racisms that have continued to inflect Cherokee nationalism.
Gaurav Desai, ‘BETWEEN INDIGENEITY AND DIASPORA: Questions from a Scholar Tourist’.
This essay proposes the category of subalternity as a tool to adjudicate between the often conflicting claims of diaspora and indigeneity. Written in the context of two itineraries on the part of the author – one a combined lecture/tourist trip to Ecuador and the second a talk presented at a symposium on indigeneity and postcoloniality in Urbana-Champaign – the essay begins by tracking the various knowledge claims that arise out of the experience of travel. It goes on to record a travel narrative to an indigenous community in Ecuador in which many of the concerns of representation, language and political recognition that colonized communities face are raised. The essay then moves on to a discussion of the risks of unilaterally privileging either the claims of indigeneity or the claims of diaspora.
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, ‘NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEXICANS: The Collision of Empires on the Texas Frontier’
This essay pairs documents dating from 1758 on the settlement of central Texas with the 2007 film No Country for Old Men to offer a comparative analysis of the competing racial geographies that emerged from Spanish and Anglo-American colonialism in the Southwest. These modes of European empire each produced distinctive racial geographies with lasting consequences for contemporary indigenous peoples. Settlers under the Spanish Crown represented the Texas territory as teeming with indigenous peoples, including the Apache and Comanche nations. Spanish coloniality, she suggests, was predicated upon indigenous presence. Without Indians, there could be no settlement. Meanwhile, Anglo-American colonization required not only the dispossession of indigenous peoples (and mestizo Mexicans) for the expansion of the US, but also the banishment of the figure of the Indian from the national imagination. Consequently, the Cohen brothers’ film is able to represent the very same Texas territory as barren and completely devoid of any Native Americans 250 years after the Spanish settlers penned their documents. It is suggested that the displacement of the Indian from the American landscape comes at great psychic cost. Thus, even a seemingly anti-war and anti-imperialist film like No Country operates under the shadow of this US colonial violence, registering the trace of the Indian as terrorist. The essay offers a revision of postcolonial methodology, and particularly of subaltern studies, to allow for the analysis of the complex relationship evident in the Spanish colonial archive between white settler and indigenous populations. Rather than a perpetual antagonism, it finds an attenuated set of relations between Spanish settlers and indigenous inhabitants of Texas, offering a broader interpretative framework for indigenous agency.
Robert Warrior, ‘THE SUBALTERN CAN DANCE, AND SO SOMETIMES CAN THE INTELLECTUAL’.
Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ emerged in and helped shape a specific moment in the development of literary theory in the US, and it continues to challenge Native American studies in significant ways. Spivak captures in Gramscian terms the dilemma that scholars and intellectuals from the colonized world face in positing their work as engaging in meaningful change of the conditions of colonization. Her reflexive approach becomes most meaningful for Native studies when the indigenous world is understood as featuring two forms of subalternity, one focused on economic depravation, the other more focused on the maintenance of the social and cultural forms of traditional cultural practitioners. The conclusion focuses on one place where intellectuals meet up with both these forms of subalternity, an Osage dance society. This is an example of one setting where subalterns and intellectuals can, in fact, meet each other and communicate.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
