CFP conference: Colonies and Postcolonies of Law, Princeton University, New Jersey. March 18 2011.
CFP conference, Sites of Citizenship 2011, Kings college London, June 2011.
CFP Conference, THE AMERICAN WEST IN LITERATURE AND FILM, San Antonio, Texas, 20-23 April 2011.
CFP Conference, Imperial Sites of Memory, University of St. Andrews, UK, 2-3 September 2011.
CFP Journal, Arena Journal, Special Issue on Settler Colonialism, DEADLINE EXTENDED TO APRIL 2011.
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
I have recently got word that the deadline for this call for papers is extended to April 2011, or by negotiation.
Here are the details.
Modernity and colonialism are intimately linked, and colonialism has mobilised people in unprecedented ways. While in many places processes of bloody or incremental decolonisation meant that the invaders returned home; in other settings they stayed. In countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Taiwan, and others, the settlers stayed, and remained the dominant power group. In other countries, locales as diverse as Brazil, Hong Kong and South Africa, the colonial settlers (or at least one set of them) were displaced from political power, but maintained considerable economic power. This volume explores the nature and consequence of settler colonialism. We are especially interested in considering the consequences of a system that aims to replace the indigenous inhabitants of a given place: that is, where at least in principle indigenous people are to ‘disappear’ by one means or another.
Amongst other possibilities we encourage contributions that address the implications of the neo-assimilation that seems implicit in the recent ‘Intervention’ into Aboriginal communities in Australia.
In general our focus is on the present, neo-assimilation and displacement.
This issue of Arena Journal will also be published as a book.
Introduction
Part 1. The Embodiment of Settler Colonialism
• What are the consequences of the politics of hybridity?
• How are embodied markers of identity lived and politically contested?
• What happens in those singular cases when the ‘white settlers’ lose their power but stay as a residual colonial population in a postcolonial setting?
• What happens when colonised peoples that were resettled in the context of global displacements find themselves in a postcolonial setting?
• What are the implications of the DNA revolution in understandings about ethnic genealogies and embodied difference?
Part 2. The Time of Settler Colonialism
• How are histories of ‘settlement’ being written and contested?
• What does it mean to have different senses of history (and different ideas about the future) for indigenous and settler peoples in the one nation-state?
• What are the consequences for indigenous peoples of the dominance of modern notions of progress?
• In what ways does it complicate issues of belonging that a generation or more of settlers have been born into a country since the first colonial ‘settlement’?
Part 3. The Space of Settler Colonialism
• How is sovereignty over land legally organised and culturally legitimised?
• How is land and place related to power?
• What happens to indigenous identity when land as a primary source of identity is displaced?
Considerations
• We do not want a series of straight country-by-country, period-by-period, or even comparative studies that just describe the circumstances in different locales.
• We need to distinguish colonialism, postcolonialism, and settler colonialism as related but inherently different global phenomena.
• We want to focus on the present and the recent past. We are interested in using historical references for their consequences for the present.
Submission Date: [april] or by negotiation
information available as a PDF
Lorenzo Veracini, John Hinkson and Paul James
Arena Journal
2 Kerr Street, Fitzroy
Editors: journal@arena.org.au
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
As Canada celebrates forty years of official multiculturalism (1971), a shifting urban/rural dyad (Neal) is central to its configuration. Its urban centers are positioned as diverse racialized spaces unlike their less diverse and more white rural counterparts. In this paper, I explore the relationships between rurality, whiteness, and multiculturalism through the rise of the redneck in North America and the Canadian Redneck Games in rural Ontario. While seemingly politically incorrect, I argue that these expressions of rural whiteness provide both critique and coherence to liberal whiteness and multicultural policies. Celebrations of rural whiteness uphold the frontier narratives (Furniss), the past which helps structure multiculturalism as a contemporary form of white liberal tolerance of and benevolence toward Indigenous peoples and racialized others. These mutually sustaining narratives constitute a contemporary politics which is unable to address past colonial crimes and contemporary racial violence.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Extract, in want of abstract:
“Legal pluralism” describes the situation in which different legal systems co-exist in the same geographic area, and it is not unique to the Dakota Territory of the 1880s. We continue to see clashes between state power and indigenous justice throughout the world, much of it exacerbated by the spread of Western law. The challenge comes not with expressing the need for mutual respect, but in finding ways for the divergent legal systems to function simultaneously in the same world, in the same state, and even in the same community. Jurisdictional tensions are inevitable.
So how should Western law interact with traditional, customary, or other non-Western legal traditions? Historically, the indigenous law has usually been subordinate. Even in the case of Crow Dog, where the Supreme Court decreed that indigenous law controlled the case, Congress responded by passing the “Major Crimes Act” asserting exclusive federal jurisdiction over serious crimes committed in Indian Country. There would never be another Crow Dog. Tribal courts were relegated to adjudicating only petty crime, because—based on the Crow Dog experience—they could not be “trusted” to handle the serious crimes.
The history of legal pluralism—which has been a reality for millennia, undoubtedly dating back to the first examples of invasion and occupation—has usually been marked by a profound lack of respect for indigenous justice. In British colonial regimes, indigenous law was allowed to function only as long as it did not run afoul of now-notorious “repugnancy clauses,” which assumed the superiority of British legal and cultural norms and invalidated any indigenous law repugnant to those values. These themes show up in the New Testament, which confirms that Roman authority was asserted as superior to Jewish law in Israel—Jesus could be judged by the Sanhedrin, but the Jewish authorities had no authority to administer capital punishment. The Roman occupiers reserved to themselves exclusive authority to do that, so Jesus was executed by crucifixion, a Roman penalty, rather than by stoning, which would have been called for under indigenous law.
We like to think that since colonial times, we have moved into a state of greater enlightenment and sensitivity with respect to indigenous peoples and values. We even romanticize indigenous customs and values, as depicted so broadly in the recent hit movie Avatar. But can chthonic cultures maintain their separateness and their customary justice in an increasingly globalized world?
Filed under: Africa, law, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
Editors introduction:
The historical sociologist Martin Shaw was asked, as a genocide scholar rather than a specialist on Israel-Palestine, to contribute to an edited book that examined that conflict in a perspective based on the growing awareness of settler colonialism as a context of genocide. He drafted his chapter but the book, for various reasons, did not appear. However, one of its editors, Nur Masalha, asked him to submit the paper to the interdisciplinary journal that he edits: it appeared as ‘Palestine in an international historical perspective on genocide’ in Holy Land Studies (Vol 9, No 1, 2010, pp 1–25). Coincidentally, Shaw was asked to contribute to a conference organized by the Wiener Library in London in June 2010, on ‘The Holocaust and other genocides’, at which the main speaker was Omer Bartov. It turned out that Bartov’s paper, among other criticisms of genocide scholarship (directed principally against Dirk Moses and Donald Bloxham), attacked ‘the idea that there is a link between assertions of the Holocaust’s centrality and uniqueness and the legitimization of the State of Israel as a colonial entity with its own history of ethnic cleansing and genocidal potential’. He also commented that ‘statements by historians of genocide about Zionist ideology and Israeli policies are mostly rhetorical expressions of opinion, not scholarly analyses of the politics and practices of nation-building and ethnic displacement’. In the light of this, Shaw thought Bartov might be interested in his own take in the issues involved in relating the genocide perspective to the Palestine situation, and sent him his article. In what follows, Shaw first summarizes his article for readers of Journal of Genocide Research; after this, we publish the email exchange in which Bartov criticizes Shaw’s approach, Shaw replies, and Bartov concludes the discussion.
and a bit of Bartov’s conclusion:
… while it is true that some countries such as Australia or the US have begun to look back at genocidal aspects of their past, the fact remains that their various ‘sorries’ have never in any way been seen as delegitimizing their exist- ence and sovereignty, even in the case of Germany and many other European states that were involved in the Holocaust.
Filed under: Genocide, Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
From Waatea News Update:
The head of a new demographic research unit wants the government to encourage young Maori families to move back from Australia.
At yesterday’s launch of the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis at Waikato University, Professor Natalie Jackson said for the first time in New Zealand’s history, fewer people are entering the labour market than are retiring. She says the situation will get worse from next year as post-war baby boomers reach retirement age.
“It’s not a case of trying to bluff people. It’s about government getting serious and saying, ‘we have got this gaping hole in our age structure where we are missing an enormous number of say 18 to 35-year-olds.’ That’s the key age of young Maori in Australia and if we want them back we have to do something seious which says ‘if you come back we will really try to help you,’” Professor Jackson says.
Filed under: media, New Zealand | Closed
Traci Watson for National Geographic News:
Five hundred years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a Native American woman may have voyaged to Europe with Vikings, according to a provocative new DNA study.
Analyzing a type of DNA passed only from mother to child, scientists found more than 80 living Icelanders with a genetic variation similar to one found mostly in Native Americans.
[…]
Historical accounts and archaeological evidence show that Icelandic Vikings reached Greenland just before 1000 and quickly pushed on to what is now Canada. Icelanders even established a village in Newfoundland, though it lasted only a decade or so.
Filed under: Europe, media, Science | Closed
quick, colonise them!
Bare to the waist and sporting rings in their upper lips, these are the extraordinary first pictures of a tribe lost in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
The natives are totally unknown to anthropologists, speak an unrecognisable language and do not even have a name for themselves.
The nomads had been hunting for food and were tracked back to a temporary village constructed from cane and palm leaves.
It was there that staff from the National Institute of Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvians (Indepa) studied them in secret for almost a year.
via Daily Mail.
Filed under: media | Closed
In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.
The notion of “sovereignty” is saturated with the certainty of jurisdictional and territorial authority over peoples and places. Yet nothing is simultaneously so certain and yet so fraught with precariousness as the practice of sovereignty— globally or locally. This uncertainty is read through the sign of its failure: territories that fissure and are fought over by force and by fiat, as well as by a precedential practice that continues to reinscribe states with their right to govern, and in the case of democratic systems, laws to also check the exercise of that governance. This uncertainty is especially precarious and, in different ways, onerous in Indian country.
Indian country may be conceptualized as spaces of Indigeneity that are framed by settler regimes. Once independent and autonomous, the spaces that are conceptualized and peopled and known as “Indian country” now have limited forms of political autonomy that may be exercised, but, in a double-bind situation, that autonomy is exercisable only because recognition is conferred upon those peoples to exercise this autonomy. This recognition, often temporalized in a moment (that of “treaty making,” for example) guarantees Indian polities their sovereign status.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
