Abstract
The global neoliberal economic and political order impregnated the emergence of democracy in South Africa. One of the hallmarks of this order is that the capacity of the state to transform society is constrained, particularly in the rural hinterlands. The incapacity of the state to extend its grip, both economically and politically, has provided traditional leaders with an opportunity to both recast themselves as intermediaries between state and society and elevate themselves to decision makers on behalf of large communities. The article examines the way in which traditional leaders have repositioned themselves in the new democracy, what their source of support is, and why the African National Congress government has come to support these efforts.
Filed under: Political developments, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
With all its attendant cruelties, justifications, critiques, and regrets, Spanish colonizing was a narrative of the conquest of peoples living in civil societies. The narrative of English colonizing is one that progressively banishes existing inhabitants to the margins of its consciousness by denying their civic capacity, their sociability. In the English narrative the indigenous become brutes, in whose place the colonizer first desires, then actively imagines, an empty landscape to populate anew.
An extract from Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound (2010).
Filed under: Empire, Quote, Scholarship and insights | Closed
google ngram
‘When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the selected years’.
Some graphs I whipped up:
settler | colonist | colonizer
natives | settlers
colonialism | settler colonialism
colonialism | capitalism | race
Filed under: literature, Website | Closed
What does it mean to see the world through Indigenous eyes, to come to understand the ontological worldview that Indigenous peoples assert as an essential component of their existences? These questions have more than just theoretical relevance; for Settler peoples, understanding Indigenous ways of knowing is necessary for understanding the nature and causes of Indigenous-Settler conflicts. Eminent Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. asserted from the 1960s through to his passing in 2005 that colonial conflicts are rooted in deep philosophical and ideological disjunctures between colonizing Settler peoples and Indigenous resisters (see for example: (Deloria, 2006, 2003, 1997, 1988). Maori scholar Makere Stewart Harawira (2005) has linked divergent ontological and epistemological production of knowledge to the creation of very real social and political conflicts between Indigenous and Settler peoples.
Global networks of power have and do support colonialism, and interconnected networks of state and capital have and continue to concentrate the profits of colonization into the hands of imperial elites while improverishing and oppressing others. This situation is untenable, unjust and must change. As Settler academics the relevance of Indigenous ways of knowing and being has extended beyond the academic or the material; it has become a deeply personal project, necessary to critical engagement with our histories, our biases and unquestioned assumptions, and our privileges and responsibilities, both individually and as members of larger Settler society. We call on researchers in all disciplines to engage with Indigenous ways of knowing and doing in order to improve research practices, and to rebalance Indigenous-Settler relations worldwide.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Yep, I’m still stumped by the land grabs, investment, and extra-sovereign speculation taking place on the African continent – all at levels unprecedented since the winds of change.
For more balanced perspective, try this from the NY Times:
Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come.
Organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank say the practice, if done equitably, could help feed the growing global population by introducing large-scale commercial farming to places without it.
But others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse, they contend, much of the food is bound for wealthier nations.
[…]
A World Bank study released in September tallied farmland deals covering at least 110 million acres — the size of California and West Virginia combined — announced during the first 11 months of 2009 alone. More than 70 percent of those deals were for land in Africa, with Sudan, Mozambique and Ethiopia among those nations transferring millions of acres to investors.
Hat tip to Aaron B.
Filed under: Africa, media, Sovereignty | Closed
use your imagination
A study in Nature journal shows that Denisovans co-existed with Neanderthals and interbred with our species – perhaps around 50,000 years ago.
An international group of researchers sequenced a complete genome from one of the ancient hominins (human-like creatures), based on nuclear DNA extracted from a finger bone.
and this, which wow:
The study shows that Denisovans interbred with the ancestors of the present day people of the Melanesian region north and north-east of Australia. Melanesian DNA comprises between 4% and 6% Denisovan DNA.
Filed under: media, Science | Closed
top 10 posts of 2010
Sending a big thanks to all the followers of settler colonial studies! Here’s a list of the most clicked posts of 2010, FYI:
2. but i always wanted to be one of the good guys
3. the return of eugene terre’blanche and his AWB: youtube
4. new left review: palestine, settler colonialsm and gabriel piterberg’s returns of zionism
5. ngapuhi faction claims extra-sovereign maori capacity
6. felix driver on walter crane, socialist utopias and the imagery of settler colonialism
Filed under: Website | Closed
Abstract:
Scholars have emphasised the contribution of evangelical humanitarianism to the debate over British settler colonialism, especially around the time of the Select Committee on Aborigines in British Settlements (1835–7). This article draws attention to another strand of evangelical ethics, concerning idleness and industry. It examines the Protestant work values that colonial chaplain Samuel Marsden applied to indigenous people in New South Wales and New Zealand, and evaluates their role in his conspicuous refusal to support new missionary ventures among Aboriginal people. It suggests that evangelical work values, when disappointed, could undermine humanitarian impulses with significant implications for the issues of land rights and race.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Abstract
This article reviews the recent upsurge of writing on the history of the early colonial Cape Colony from the VOC period to the early nineteenth century. It responds to important questions raised by Nicole Ulrich’s review article of Contingent Lives in this issue. In particular it considers what is gained and what can be lost in the recent shift from class-based analyses characteristic of late twentieth-century revisionist South African historiography to research more influenced by the ‘cultural turn’, transnational and microhistorical approaches.
Keywords: Cape Colony; VOC; historiography; cultural turn; identity; microhistory; transnational history
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Abstract
Historical and literary accounts of the Graaff-Reinet and Swellendam rebellions of 1795 – 1799 are analysed in relation to three consecutive myths of Afrikaner national identity. In terms of the British imperialist myth of the Afrikaner as rural degenerate, the rebels were semi-civilised burgher racists, who sought to dignify their killing and enslavement of the Khoikhoi and Xhosa by recourse to northern hemisphere republican discourses. In terms of the apartheid myth of the Afrikaner as God’s chosen volk, the rebels were a beleaguered Christian people who were beset by marauding African foes, and who resisted heroically the tyrannical Dutch East India Company and British governance from Cape Town. In terms of the post-apartheid myth of the Promethean Afrikaner, a brave minority of Afrikaners (most notably the Graaff-Reinet landdrost Honoratus Maynier) opposed the racist violence of the frontier rebels, and stood up for equality and justice. In the same way that the image of the Afrikaner as rural degenerate should be related to British imperialism, and the image of the Afrikaner as God’s chosen volk to Afrikaner nationalism, the myth of the Promethean Afrikaner must be related to the nation-building ideological project of the African National Congress.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
