more on the transnational maori
Maori made their way willingly to Sydney to trade, acquire skills and learn new ideas. Many undoubtedly arrived as crew on whaling and trading ships. There’s a ‘Maori Lane’ in The Rocks in central Sydney which commemorates the Maori whalers who lived there. A significant number of Maori entering Australia may have also been slaves in the Bay of Islands who were fleeing a life of captivity, mirroring the way escaped Australian convicts often made for New Zealand.
After the 1840s and 1850s – when Maori were still a notable presence in Australia given the whaling trade, the export of their produce to the Australian colonies, and the presence of a number of them trying their luck on the Australian goldfields – the documentary record of Maori in Australia becomes somewhat slight. This is probably because Maori had become less of a novelty in Australia, but also doubtless because of their dwindling population and social dislocation in New Zealand.
from quite an interesting and well-written article in TangataWhenua,
found via Te Karere Ipurangi
Filed under: Australia, New Zealand | Closed
The Alberta Court of Appeal has sided with the Alberta government and against the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in a case involving oil and gas rights.
The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation argued that the Alberta Government through the Energy Minister can not grant resource rights in the form of long term oil sands leases without consultation. The Crown countered that the First Nation challenge was not filed within six months of a decision awarding a lease to Shell.
At issue was when did the clock start to count down…from the date of the government decision or from the date the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation was notified of the decision? A lower court agreed with the government that the challenge was filed too late. The First Nation launched an appeal
The Court of Appeal considered all of the arguments and Friday morning it dismissed the First Nation’s appeal.
Filed under: Canada, law, Political developments | Closed
Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, 1 (2011), pp. 219–226.
The field of settler colonial studies is attracting broad scholarly attention. Although it is comparative and transnational by definition, few scholars working in the field have made sustained inquiries into the historical particular- ity of the phenomenon across different sites. Arguing that settler statehood emerged in modern form when “perfect settler sovereignty” established the ter- ritorial authority of those states, Lisa Ford’s monograph makes a valuable con- tribution to the field by opening up new ways of thinking about the connected histories of Anglophone settler societies and their “uniquely destructive” impact on indigenous people (p. 2). Methodologically inventive, richly sup- ported by a wealth of archival research (to which the reader is directed in the generous footnotes), and written in unusually clear and precise prose, Settler Sovereignty will be of broad interest to scholars with an interest in colonialism and theories of imperialism, the relationship between law and sovereignty, and historical accounts of modernity.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
huckabee on israel
Far from Iowa, likely Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee told a crowd of Jewish Israelis yesterday that he’d be just as mad as they are if anybody tried to kick him out of America the way Israelis are being asked to not build or live in disputed lands.
“I cannot imagine as an American being told that I could not live in certain places in America because I was Christian, or because I was white, or because I spoke English,” Huckabee said. “I would be outraged if someone told me that in my country, I would be prohibited and forbidden to live in a part of that country, for any reason.”
hat-tip DG
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Political developments, public lecture, United States | Closed
In recent times, a number of academics and commentators have sought to offer a revisionist history of colonialism that sees it as something that wasn’t as bad as some others make out, that actually made the modern world as we now know it and so was essentially a good thing, or was something to be understood simply in terms of networks of circulation and distribution. The sense of colonialism as a wretched episode of human history that continues to distort the life chances of those unfortunate enough to live under its legacies is slowly being eroded. Similar revisions are underway to our understandings of modern transatlantic slavery and its continuing legacies. We believe that the historical processes of imperialism, colonialism and slavery shaped, and continue to shape, our common world in ways which have been and continue to be problematic. This conference seeks to confront head-on these new revisionist histories and provide the space for a more adequate understanding of these processes and their legacies as they continue into today.
Filed under: Call for papers, Empire | Closed
Excerpts:
Both volumes reviewed here take off from what has now become a familiar launching point for studies of whiteness: Ann Stoler’s contention that modern concepts of race and gender, including metropolitan assumptions, were profoundly shaped by colonial experiences. They reflect, at the same time, Homi Bhabha’s assertion that whiteness is a ‘strategy of authority.’ Not surprisingly, the editors and contributors in each case focus on situations of anxiety and represent colonialism as a set of productive anxieties brought about by new configurations of power: the imperial redistribution of bodies and identities, climates and terrains, homes and neighbors.
[…]
In The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia, as in Re-Orienting Whiteness, the authors chase elusive color lines, including the fissures within white identity. Here also, the editors aim to examine British colonialism ‘in a transnational light,’ focusing on the Indian Ocean region, subaltern subjects (or, at any rate, objects), and sea-borne networks of disorder and attempted-orders. They too attempt to move away from slaves and indentured labor, but instead of looking at settlers, they focus on sailors, racial ‘low-life’ and criminalized populations.
Filed under: Asia, Australia, Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Reviewed by Daniel Gorman (University of Waterloo)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2011)
Commissioned by Thomas Hajkowski
excerpt:
Despite work by scholars such as David Armitage, Uday Singh Mehta, Jennifer Pitts, and Duncan Bell, to cite just four examples of a recent upsurge of interest in empire and political theory, we still have only a partial understanding of the historical discourses surrounding the intellectual roots of empire. To be sure, imperial historians have devoted much ink to “discourse” as a dynamic feature of the history of empire. Whether invoking Orientalism, Michel Foucault, or the Subaltern School, much of the history very loosely grouped under the aegis of “postcoloniality” has argued that the very essence of imperialism was ideational. Relationships of inequality and power were inscribed in the various iterations of imperial rule and culture created by European powers. Recovering the history of these relationships requires historians to be attentive to how ideas and language were constructed and contested. This work has without question widened our understanding of how and why empires functioned, and how they shaped the lives of those in both the metropole and the colonized world. Yet like the politico-economic imperial history which is sometimes presented as its foil, the “new imperial history,” whether postcolonial or more empirically based cultural history, largely ignores the ideational beginnings and subsequent intellectual rationales of empire. The “idea of empire” is assumed from its later nature.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
scs update
Dear all,
I have been between countries and computers frantically over the last few weeks, but the blog should return back to normal soon.
Our first issue of the settler colonial studies (the journal) is coming along nicely and should be published and available online — in open access — in March. I will publish a table of contents teaser on the blog in the coming weeks.
Ed Cavanagh
for the settler colonial studies blog
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
Abstract
On the frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia in the mid-nineteenth century, a culture of violence prevailed. Frontier men accommodated violence in their lives as a routine and normal part of frontier living. The Victorian ethos of ‘manliness’ – the possession of essential virtues such as self-restraint, courage and strenuous effort – had within it the potential for violence. On the frontier the practice of manliness often entailed violence and the manly ethos could be distorted to justify and legitimise violent acts.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Why do so many individuals and organizations shy away from calling land grabbing what it is, and either put it in inverted commas or trot out such euphemisms as ‘responsible land-based investment’, ‘commercial pressures on land’ or ‘large-scale investment in land’?
Why are researchers who have worked on land grabbing so apparently timid and complacent in their conclusions, so desperately eager to seek magic, painless ‘win-win’ solutions, and so quick to retreat to ‘each case is different, the devil lies in the detail’ formulations. Could it be that they fear to antagonize their donors?
Why is such an enormous amount of effort, time and resources being invested by organizations such as the World Bank, FAO, IFAD, IFPRI etc, in the drawing up of international, but always voluntary, codes of conduct in an attempt to regulate land grabbing? These will increase the likelihood of poor people losing their land and it will be impossible to bring to account companies which violate them. I agree with Ian Scoones that such principles are ‘doomed to failure, given the lack of capacity, failures of institutional authority, corrupt practices and so on’ highlighted in the World Bank’s September 2010 report, Rising Global Interest in Farmland. Advocates of ‘win-win’ situations argue that many of these are ‘paper deals’ which may never come to fruition. I think that misses the point entirely. Are those whose land rights are threatened expected to sit patiently and wait to see what happens?
Finally, why, given that the long term impact of global land grabbing on many African rural communities could well be catastrophic, does there appear to exist an almost total conspiracy of silence on the subject? Although I sense that this may at last be beginning to change a little.
Parts of Africa are being targeted because ‘African farmland prices are the lowest in the world’ and ‘it is the last frontier’. Many African leaders, and foreign investors, peddle the myth that there is a vast amount of vacant, unused land, owned by no one – and hence available to outsiders. One suggested that pastoralists in Ethiopia ‘can just go somewhere else’, another that Zambia has well over 30 million hectares ‘begging to be utilised’, yet another that 36 million hectares of arable land in Mozambique could be used for biofuels without threatening food production!
Still, doesn’t sound like settler colonialism – but then what is it? I raised some of these issues here, but the matter is far from settled. More scholarship on this is required.
See full article here @ African Arguments.
Hat tip to Aaron B.
Filed under: Africa, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
