For over three decades, western women’s historians have been working not just to challenge male biases within western history scholarship but also to create a more multicultural inclusive narrative. Paradoxically, however, the overarching narrative of western women’s history continues to sideline women of color and to advance a triumphalist interpretation of white women in the West. This essay argues that a multicultural approach has not provided an adequate framework for understanding women and gender in the American West. Instead, western women historians must “decolonize” our narrative and our field through seriously considering the West as a colonial site. To do so, we must employ the tools and theories that scholars of gender and colonialism worldwide have developed to analyze other comparable colonial contexts and projects.
Filed under: gender, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Les personnes autochtones au Canada se sont lancées dans des centaines d’actions collectives. Utilisant la littérature sur les nouvelles et sur les événements collectifs, nous examinons d’une façon systématique les facteurs associés avec le nombre d’articles, leur placement sur la premiére page, et l’inclusion de photos. Nous trouvons que l’augmentation de la taille ou de la longueur d’un événement n’améliore pas sa couverture. Quand il s’agit de celle-ci, c’est uniquement la forme de l’événement qui compte. Certes, l’escalade de tactique accroít la quantité de couverture, mais c’est seulement les tactiques perturbatrices qui augmentent la couverture premiére page. Par contraste, ce sont principalement les routines de nouvelles du média et pas par les tactiques de la part des activistes qui déterminent l’inclusion d’une photo.
Indigenous peoples in Canada have engaged in hundreds of collective action events. Drawing on the news as organization and collective action literatures, we conduct a systematic examination of coverage across events, and we assess the factors associated with the number of articles, front page placement, and the inclusion of photographs. We find that increasing the size and the length of an event does not improve coverage. The latter is determined exclusively by the form of the event, and it is disruptive tactics alone that increase front page coverage. The inclusion of pictures, however, is largely determined by media news routines rather than by activists tactics.
Filed under: Canada, media, Scholarship and insights | Closed
A whole archive of this stuff here (‘the old west is a time and a place of heart’)
which I stumbled across courtesy of Unauthorised History
Filed under: United States, wacky | Closed
Ezequiel Mercau, ‘Abandoned Britons? The Sunningdale Agreement and Ulster Britishness’. MA Thesis, University College, Dublin, 2010.
The Sunningdale agreement was a very important effort to establish power-sharing in Northern Ireland, the first one since the creation of the State. This dissertation charts unionist reactions from its emergence at the end of 1973 to its demise in May 1974 through the lens of Stuart Ward’s ‘abandoned Britons’ model. More specifically, it analyses to what extent they can be viewed as the impact of the processes that led to the end of empire and the break-up of Greater Britain on the United Kingdom. There is, therefore, a twofold purpose to this thesis. On the one hand, it seeks to place the Northern Ireland conflict in the wider context of the post-war transformation of Great Britain, while, on the other, it explores to what extent the events in the Province followed a similar pattern to that of the White Dominions.
Two major research areas are blended together here, namely the Northern Ireland conflict – especially from the unionist perspective – and the end of the British Empire. Certainly, much has been written on both topics; nonetheless, this study seeks to introduce a new approach to them by combining both topics in the light of the ‘abandoned Britons’ model. A number of previous studies on these matters need to be mentioned here in order to locate this dissertation in the literature. Due to space constraints, however, a selection of them, grouped around the major lines of debate surrounding the topic of this dissertation will be considered here. A very important field of debate in this context concerns the impact of colonialism in Ulster. Two schools can be identified in this area. One of them, represented by Clayton, Miller, MacDonald, Lustick, Weitzer, Cleary and Howe, argues that it is very important to consider the legacy of settler-colonialism in Northern Ireland in order to understand the beginnings of the conflict as well as its persistence. The other one, supported by scholars such as Walker and Ellis, disagrees with this view, arguing that the colonial model seems too contrived for Ireland, as the differences between it and other cases around the world far outweigh the similarities.
A second field involves the impact of British policy on Northern Ireland. At one extreme, authors such as Farrell and de Paor maintain that the conflict in Ulster was one of British imperialism. In sharp contrast with this view, another school, whose leading advocates include Cunningham, Coulter, Dixon and Peatling, suggests that Britain’s Ulster strategy during the conflict was characterised by consistency and continuity, treating Northern Ireland as a ‘place apart’ and prioritising the attainment of peace and harmony above all other objectives. This analysis, nonetheless, is opposed by O’Malley, who argues that Westminster, in lacking continuity in its policy, had an adverse effect on the conflict.
Filed under: Éire, Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
CFP/Conference: Borderlands and Meeting Points, Brown University, Rhode Island, April 8-9 2011.
CFP/Journal: Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology.
CFP/Conference: Spanish Borderlands/Spanish Colonial texas, Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
CFP/Journal: Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies on Australian Literature.
Seminar: Colonial Science and its Histories, Oxford, London, October 8 2010.
CFP/Conference: Building an American Empire, 1763-1861, Oxford UK, 17 May 2011.
CFP/Conference: Origin Stories: Narratives of North American Diversity, Illinois, 20 December 2011
CFP/Conference: Colonial Development, 1929-1962, University of York, UK, July 2011.
CFP/Conference: Geographies of Power: mapping Indian borders, University of Florida, Oct 28 2010.
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
This state’s official name — The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations — is more than just a mouthful. To many, it evokes stinging reminders of Rhode Island’s prime role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Voters next Tuesday will decide whether to change the name by dropping the words “and Providence Plantations.” The issue has been debated for years, but lawmakers last year authorized a ballot question for the first time following an impassioned debate over race relations, ancestry and history.
via Yahoo News
Filed under: Political developments, United States | Closed
Just got word of a forthcoming conference via Legal History Blog:
Colonies and Postcolonies of Law, Princeton, March 18 2011.
The conference addresses the centrality of law in the construction of colonial rule. We aim to examine how colonial law emerged as colonialists interacted with diverse populations in the colonies. The study of the relationship between law and colonialism has taken two broad trajectories. On one hand, scholars have highlighted how law provided the instruments for the creation of the colonial state, allowing it to exercise a vast amount of power in restructuring the colony. Conversely, law opened up avenues of resistance for colonized populations. This conference aims to go beyond this dichotomy by focusing on law as a site of constant negotiation which produced new forms of bureaucracy and documentation practices. As colonial legal systems cast long shadows and formed the bedrock of the national legal systems today, this conference will also examine how these colonial legal regimes influence postcolonial nations. The last few years has seen a growth of interest in colonial legal history to which this conference hopes to contribute by bringing junior scholars together in conversation.
NYU Professor of History Lauren Benton will deliver a keynote address at the conference.
Defining Legality: Criminals, Outlaws and Rebels
New categories of legality emerged during the colonial period such that criminals and rebels became interchangeable notions. What makes a ‘rebel’ and a ‘criminal’? What counts as evidence of a crime? How were penal regimes created? How did colonial regimes contribute to the construction of the international laws of war and human rights?
Competing Legitimacies: Religious Law and Colonial Authority
The colonial state grappled with existing legal systems in the colony. Some systems were delegitimized while others were bolstered under the purview of colonial rule. By privileging certain forms of legitimacy, colonial states challenged traditional norms and institutions such as customary rights and religious laws. Why were certain legal systems granted legitimacy under the colonial rule? How did certain religious texts and figures emerge as more authoritative than others? How did the process of translation change understandings of key religious concepts? What forms of tensions were created between traditional authorities and the emerging modern legal profession in the colony?
Private Lives and Public Law
The modern colonial state crafted new boundaries between the public and private. For example, colonial projects of social reform transformed marital and kinship relations. How did the colonial legal regime come to delineate the private and the public sphere? How did colonized populations engage with this process of delineation? How did the changing legal order affect colonial subjects, in particular women, who often emerged as the sites for legal reform? Did postcolonial nations adopt colonial legal conceptions of the private and public spheres?
Constructing Borders
Colonial law demanded certainty of boundaries and jurisdiction, yet it operated within a plural legal order and had limited capacity to police frontiers. How were legal borders fixed? How did colonial populations choose between competing forums granted by neighboring jurisdictions? How did the emergence of the postcolonial nations complicate colonial mapping and
jurisdictional jostling?
Law and Capital
The centrality of trade and capital to the colonial project is increasingly overshadowed by cultural and social histories. Law, in the form of land revenue, forest laws and mercantile regulations, was in fact, central to the economic project of the colonial state. Can law be used to bring economic histories in conversation with the social and cultural? What economic practices came to be legitimized with the colonial reordering of the economy? How did colonial law engage with older kinship based mercantile networks such as those of the Arabs, Chinese, Parsis and Marwaris?
Sounds incredible.
Filed under: law | Closed
There is a massive “land grab” by foreign companies currently underway in Ethiopia, under the invitation of the regime in power. The move has settler colonialism written all over it. Indeed, it has already induced many in the international community, such as the UN, the EU, FAO to mention but few, to sound the alarm. Major news organizations that are otherwise notorious for their negligence of events pertaining to Ethiopia, have also described the move by echoing the word ‘colonialism’ one after the other. (See reports by The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Bloomberg and Japan TV using the links given at the bottom for example). Ethiopians, who are supposed to carry the brunt of the consequence, are not however anywhere to be found in heeding the warning.
[…]
This of course will come at a huge cost to Ethiopia and Ethiopians. More directly, it will deny, at least three generations of the rural masses in and around the sites of the foreign holdings, any access to land and turn them into squatters, thereby instituting an agrarian system akin to settler colonialism, which needless to say, was the worst brand of colonialism. Indirectly, it will have a snowball effect in further complicating and exacerbating our existing woes as a nation. The deals will create external players who will find it necessary to meddle in our internal affairs in order to safeguard their interests.[..]As for job creation, people in Gambella now working at Karuturi’s palm oil fields as daily laborers, have already started complaining that they were much better off working there own land. No sooner had companies started operating than complaints of inhuman treatment also started to surface.Child labor is also a common practice. According to one report, China has even threatened to bring its own workers unless the locals behave themselves, by which it meant accept reduction to servitude and treatment as squatters in a land, which Gambellans thought, was their own.
Filed under: Africa, Political developments | Closed
Actually placing “settlers” and “colonialism” in the same analytical field required overcoming a number of conceptual blockages. It took decades. The nineteenth century – the century of the “settler revolution” (see Belich 2009) – did not think that they could be compounded. Indeed the settler revolution had cleaved the two apart: Marx, who engaged extensively with Wakefield (see Pappe 1951), thought that the settler colonies were the only “colonies proper”; Mill, who wrote extensively on colonisation and colonialism kept them rigorously separate (see Bell 2010). Archibald Grenfell Price was probably the first, in 1929, to theorise a particular form of colonial activity distinct from other colonial endeavours. Settler-driven colonialism – “independent” settlers – had been more effective colonisers than other metropole-directed groups (Price 1929). He was explaining South Australian specificities in the context of Australian diversity; and yet, he did not propose an exceptionalist account. On the contrary, his outlook was systematically comparative, proof that paradigmatic shifts are often grounded in parochial concerns.
I have elsewhere followed the development of “settler colonialism” as a concept since the 1930s (Veracini forthcoming). In the context of this trajectory, the notion that settler colonial settings were fundamentally different from both metropolitan and colonial contexts was recurrently proposed from the “South”. The settler themselves said so (the Algerian, Rhodesian, and south African settlers, for example, all at one point or another claimed a local version of southern exceptionalism), and the scholars, even if their agenda differed dramatically from the settlers’, confirmed it (i.e., Donald Denoon’s outline of settler capitalism in the southern hemisphere [1983], the “staple theory” of economic development that turns into a staple “trap” at the antipodes [see Schedvin 1990], Patrick Wolfe’s emphasis on the fundamental inapplicability in the specific conditions of settler colonialism of the master slave dyad typical of colonial studies [Wolfe 1999], and James Belich’s discovery, even if he does not use these terms, that settler colonialism is primarily about reproduction, not production, and that settler colonialism is immediately autonomous from the colonising metropole [2009]). Whether at the level of practice or theory, the notion that settler colonialism should be seen as a distinct formation came from the South.
That this was an original development and that only recently this notion has become better received in the northern hemisphere should be emphasised. On the contrary, scholarly traditions have consistently understood settler colonial phenomena either as colonial or metropolitan ones, not as an autonomous formation (alternatively, parochialising exceptionalist paradigms have been put forward). Marx and Engels, as mentioned, thought that settlers and metropole were part of the same analytical field. Lenin, and twentieth century Marxisms, on the contrary, conflated colonial and settler colonial forms and considered all colonialisms part of the general process of imperialist appropriation. Imperialism, it was argued, reorganised precapitalist economies anywhere, and integrated all peripheries into the world capitalist economy – the settler was, in Ronald Robinson’s words, the “ideal prefabricated collaborator” of imperialist endeavours (Robinson 1972). Likewise, anticolonial “Third Worldism” routinely collapsed the settler locales and the colonising metrople within the “global North” category, while only some within postcolonial studies preferred to include the settler colonies within the bounds of the “postcolonial” experience (even though this remained contentious and it was acknowledged that settler postcolonialities should be considered a specific subfield [see Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 1989]).
From a presentation given at the IPCS last week
Filed under: Africa, Australia, Canada, Empire, Israel/Palestine, Latin America, New Zealand, Quote, Scholarship and insights, Seminar, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
This case was a bit special.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) short-changed some Native Americans; Native Americans finally secure compo (and more). This was a hard fought case, not about land or resource rights, but about a bureaucratic fluff up, which ignored the many obstacles — pertaining to capitalist agriculture — that stand before indigenous farmers today.
From native american legal update:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced an historic agreement to settle a decade-long class action lawsuit known as Keepseagle v. Vilsack, wherein Native American farmers and ranchers alleged discrimination in the USDA’s farm loan program dating back to 1981.
Under the agreement, the USDA will pay $680 million in damages to thousands of Native American farmers and ranchers and forgive up to $80 million worth of outstanding farm loan debt. The settlement also initiates new programs to improve USDA’s farm loan services for Native Americans. Those initiatives include the creation of a Native American Farmer and Rancher Council, where top USDA officials and Native American advocates will collaborate to make USDA’s programs more accessible for Native Americans farmers and ranchers, as well as enhanced delivery of technical assistance to Native American borrowers, the creation of sub-offices on tribal lands, a systematic review of the farm loan program rules to improve accessibility to Native Americans and other measures designed to improve the provision of farm loan services to Native Americans.
The Keepseagle lawsuit alleged that Native American farmers and ranchers were denied the same opportunities as white farmers to obtain low-interest rate loans from USDA. Congress has charged the USDA with serving as the “lender of last resort” for family farmers who can’t obtain credit from commercial banks. According to an expert report prepared by a former USDA economist, Native Americans suffered actual economic losses amounting to $776 million between 1981 and 2007 as a result of receiving less than their fair share of credit opportunities from the USDA.
Lead plaintiffs Marilyn and George Keepseagle, ranchers in Fort Yates, N.D.,said “We have been waiting nearly three decades for this day to come. This settlement will help thousands of Native Americans who are still farming and ranching. But more important, through this settlement we will leave to our children and grandchildren a farm loan system far more responsive to our community than the system we inherited from our parents.”
Filed under: law, United States | Closed
