Incredibly detailed and contextualised review of Lisa Ford’s Settler Sovereignty by Cambridge oracle Paul McHugh.
Law and History Review (2011), 29: 313-316
a bit of it:
Ford purposefully describes this as a predominantly legal story rather understating the impact of the huge socioeconomic and demographic changes that turned into steamrolling settler sovereignty. She could stress more emphatically that the earlier plurality and fluidity she describes was being ground down and away not simply because of changes in legal perception but also because of the devastating impact of (what Jamie Belich has recently and aptly termed throughout his book Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009]) the “explosive colonization” that licensed such a change. Explosive colonization, the sudden change from a trickle (usually welcome) of white settlement to unwelcome inundation, changed everything for the tribes. White settlers outnumbered, outgunned, and ravaged them with disease, leading to their collapse, crisis, depletion, and, in Georgia, forced removal. This simple but brutal phenomenon propelled the legal change that Ford describes. Greater emphasis upon this would slot her legal story into more of a context, highlighting the link between the physical crowding in of the tribes and the juridical transition at the center of her book.
Where this context is given, her narrative acquires extra power, giving a strong sense of the spatial, economic, and other factors enmeshed with the legal ones. One excellent example involves the role of roads through Indian Country in facilitating the demographic explosion of the Old Southwest. By skilful and vivid use of archival material, she shows how these roads presented important legal and spatial issues (many to this day never fully resolved). The “jurisdictional problem of the roads [was] very evident in their name, their legal classification, as well as their vital economic function” (68). They were key, incident-ridden sites of intercultural engagement that became more pressing and tension-ridden as yet more crisscrossed Indian Country (see Ford’s helpful maps showing their dramatic increase from 1796 to 1823) (72–73).
Filed under: Australia, Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Within few decades after the ‘conquest’, Britain, the dominating power in the region at the time, recognised the al-Khalifa tribal order. On several occasions, Britain deployed its forces to quell internal clashes or ward off external foes of al-Khalifa. British support, particularly since 1869, will continue to be the major resource for the regime, for its protection, stability and prosperity. In similarity with many chiefs of other tribal orders in other parts of the Arabian side of the Gulf, the al-Khalifa signed, since the beginning of 19th century a series of agreements with Britain. These agreements recognised Pax Britannica on the one hand and the established tribal political formations, regimes, on the other.
However, unlike other the tribal regimes sanctioned by Britain, the al-Khalifa failed to assimilate within its subject population as did, for example, al-Sabah in Kuwait, al-Thani in Qatar and al-Qawassim in Ras al-Khaimah and Sharja. And, unlike these political formations, Bahrain did not develop into becoming a unified political entity nor did the Bahrainis develop into becoming a single people. Also, unlike other tribal political formations in the region, the al-Khalifas continue to jealously guard their identity/image as ‘settlers-rulers’. However, their ‘tribal’ backgrounds and identity have not been static. To the dismay among their ‘own pure bloods’, and some of their ‘anti-tribal’ opponents, al-Khalifa tribal credentials have repeatedly been revised, with several additions and deletions, to suit vagaries of local and regional politics.
The fourth Nordic conference on Middle Eastern Studies:
The Middle East in globalizing world
Oslo, 13-16 August 1998
hat-tip zunguzungu
Filed under: Empire, middle east, Scholarship and insights | Closed
A provocative piece in mondoweiss:
Welcome to Palestine, even if it’s a century later. Now let’s reset the relationship. You came from faraway lands claiming an already inhabited one. Oppressed, massacred, and socially separated in Christendom/Europe, you felt as outsiders subject to anti-Semitic threats. Eventually, with the colonial age, a group of you, Eastern Europeans called Zionists argued your right to Palestine, from which ancient Jews were virtually absent from the 1st century and of whom you claimed tenuous descent. You claimed that Jews had a three thousand year cultural and emotional attachment to the holy land; that you are a single group whose roots are to this land and whose heart, spirit, character and center is Jerusalem. That your project wasn’t settler-colonialism, conquest through immigration under the aegis of a colonial power, but return or restoration, rendered moral by your religious roots in the land and in your suffering, hence giving you title to the land that transcends Palestinians rights, claims, attachments, and needs. You insisted that Jews require sovereignty for their safety, protection, and, in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, survival.
check it out here
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
book launch in melbourne
SETTLER COLONIALISM: A Theoretical Overview by Lorenzo Veracini
Readings Carlton – 309 Lygon St, Carlton
Friday, 18th February 2011, 6:30pm
The book will be launched by Henry Reynolds
Filed under: Australia | Closed
Hadas Weiss, ‘On value and values in a West Bank settlement’, American Ethnologist 38, 1(2011)
In this article, I use value theory to interrogate values in the West Bank settlement of Beit-El, particularly the coexistence of pragmatism with the valorization of self-sacrifice. My aims are threefold: to make sense of West Bank settlement values specifically, and contemporary fundamentalism by extension, within the socioeconomic coordinates of the present moment; to illustrate the contribution of value theory to an ethnography of values; and to tease out from the case study some generalizations regarding the formal relations between value and values as they pertain to contemporary possibilities for and limitations on social agency.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Typically, the news media have tended to portray Natives as a conquered people, a poor minority in a rich country, militant activists, remnants of an ancient North American past, and so on. As Canada’s Royal Commission pointed out, media outlets continue to perpetuate stereotypes and inaccurate generalizations about Indigenous peoples, and aside from a few independent and Indigenous-owned media sources, the misinformation continues mostly unchallenged and unabated. This essay will explore the use, perpetuation, and legitimization of anti-Indigenous rhetoric (discourses of Savagism) in media with regard to two major flashpoints of misrepresentation: racist sports imagery and anticolonial Indigenous protest.
Filed under: Canada, media, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Paul Giles, ‘The Postcolonial Mainstream’, American Literary History 23, 1 (2011).
In a review essay for this journal back in 2004, Malini Johar Schueller declared “that the suitability of postcolonial theory to the study of US culture should no longer be a subject of debate” (162). Arguing that “the period of critical isolationism and exceptionalism in American studies is over” (173), Schueller suggested how “the emergent field of postcolonial American studies” (164) was demonstrating “how US cultural history has always been a contradictory set of narratives with an endless entanglement of imperial and colonial experiences, and native resistances” (171). As she observed, the conceptual lines of battle in this theoretical debate were clear enough, with critics who wished to place more emphasis on American engagement with colonial issues—Peter Hulme, Edward Watts, and others—being countered by those who clung in some form to the old tenets of US exceptionalism, whose ethos of republican freedom claimed a special exemption for the nation from imperialist models. This dynamic was complicated by what Jeanne Boydston has described recently as the “doggedly antitheoretical” mindset of many early American cultural historians, who, even when dealing specifically with the colonial period, “still grumble that postcolonial methods offer little more than an esoteric vocabulary and tortured syntax” (1223). No academic method can ever be a universal panacea, of course, but the task now, six years after Schueller’s review essay, is not so much to justify the idea of postcolonial American studies in abstract terms but, rather, to consider what difference such an approach has made, and might make in the future, to the broader Americanist field. As this theoretical strategy has become more academically mainstream, both the risks and the benefits associated with the rotation of American literary scholarship on a postcolonial axis have come more clearly into view.
Filed under: literature, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
In the context of South Africa’s land reform programme, the concepts of ‘property’ and ‘rights’ carry a heavy ideological baggage. This is evident in the country’s land reform policies, which have sought to reach a compromise between differing and often contradictory histories involving both rights and property. A shift in government policy, from treating land reform as a question of rights to a question of the transfer of land, has been accompanied by a reification of the idea of community. The result is a policy that is seriously out of touch with the complex legacy of dispossession that the land reform programme was meant to address. As shown by the case presented in this article, these problems become exacerbated when the land in question is part of a conservation area.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Here’s a teaser for the forthcoming settler colonial studies 1 (2011).
ARTICLES
Lorenzo Veracini: Introducing settler colonial studies pp. 1-12
Patrick Wolfe: After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy pp. 13-50
Scott Lauria Morgensen: The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now pp. 51-75
Ivan Sablin and Maria Savelyeva: Mapping Indigenous Siberia: Spatial Changes and Ethnic Realities pp. 76-109
Jo Smith: Aotearoa/New Zealand: Unsettled State in a Sea of Islands
pp. 110-30
Carol Summers, Boys, Brats and Education: Reproducing White Maturity in Colonial Zimbabwe pp. 131-52
Edward Cavanagh, Review Article: Discussing Settler Colonialism’s Spatial Cultures pp. 153-66
DOCUMENTS:
Jim Windeyer, Foreword: Richard Windeyer (1806-1847) pp. 167-70
Richard Windeyer, On the Rights of the Aborigines of Australia: A Lecture pp. 171-94
Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini, Afterword: On the Rights of the Settlers of Australia pp. 195-200
Gary Fields, Photo Feature: Landscapes of Occupation in Palestine pp. 201-5
Full access to first issue available in march.
Tell your librarians!
Filed under: Africa, art, Asia, Australia, Éire, Call for papers, Canada, Empire, Europe, gender, Genocide, Hawaii, Israel/Palestine, Latin America, law, literature, media, New Zealand, outer space, Pacific, Political developments, postcolonialism, public lecture, Quote, Scholarship and insights, Science, Seminar, Southern Africa, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
