Peter Limb, Norman Etherington and Peter Midgley, ed., Grappling with the Beast: Indigenous Southern African Responses to Colonialism, 1840-1930 (Brill, 2010)
This volume contributes rich, new material to provide insights into indigenous responses to the colonial empires of Great Britain (South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia)) and Germany (Namibia) and explore the complex intellectual, cultural, literary, and political borders and identities that emerged across these spaces. Contributors include distinguished global scholars in the field as well as exciting young scholars. The essays link global-national-local forces in history by analysing how indigenous elites not only interacted with colonial empires to absorb, adapt and re-cast new ideas, forms of discourse, and social formations, but also networked with “ordinary” people to forge new social, ethnic, and political identities and viable social forces. Translated and other primary texts in appendices add to the insights.
An interesting collection and a step in a new direction for Southern African studies, though one cannot but feel disappointed by its price ( € 119.00 / US$ 176.00 ).
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Jamie Allison, ‘Hamas, Gaza and the blockade’, International Socialism, 128 (13 October 10)
No abstract; here are clippings:
It is Hamas’s insistence on the Palestinian right to resist the occupation and their refusal to negotiate terms that will perpetuate it that earns the organisation the enmity of Israel and the Western powers.
How did Hamas come to occupy this position and does the movement have the capacity to end the blockade and liberate Palestine? Is the organisation really, as one fallen British leftist claimed in response to Israel’s 2009 attack on Gaza, “an anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, anti trade union, authoritarian, clericalist movement” seeking “the ultimate goal of establishing a theocratic state, where every detail of Palestinian life is governed by its hard-line misinterpretation of the Qur’an”? In what follows I argue against this view and trace Hamas’s origins as a national liberation movement with Islamist characteristics, emerging from the failure of the previous generation of secular and leftist Palestinian organisations. Although its popularity has increased as those movements have waned, Hamas remains trapped in the same contradictions faced by its predecessors: contradictions brought about by a strategic perspective that divorces Palestinian liberation from the struggles for democracy and equality in the wider Arab world.
[…]
There are two basic kinds of settler colonialism, which produce different economic and political relations between the colonists and the colonised. In Australia and most of the Americas the colonists simply destroyed the indigenous population (whom they outnumbered) and took their land. In Africa (Algeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Portuguese colonies) a relatively small number of settlers expropriated the indigenous population but remained economically dependent on their labour. In South Africa in particular, this meant that the black working class played a crucial role in ending apartheid.
The Palestinian experience lies between these two poles. The numbers of colonists and colonised are roughly equal, the Palestinians holding a slight majority when the refugees from the Israeli ethnic cleansing of 1948 are included. Much as the more genocidally minded Israeli liberals might call for it, Israel cannot get rid of the native Palestinian population. Thus the racist idea of a “demographic threat” (the “danger” posed by the relatively higher birth rate of Palestinians compared to Israeli Jews) is not just accepted in Israel: it has been bandied about by the prime minister. The Israeli dilemma is how to get the land without the people. This is why the Israeli vision of a two-state solution is to render the Palestinians politically absent even if they are physically present. The network of physical barriers to Palestinian life, such as the apartheid wall and checkpoints in the West Bank, has partially achieved this aim.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Political developments, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Abstract:
Discussions of hybridity have proliferated in cultural geography and in social and cultural theory. What has often been missing from these accounts are the ways in which mixed-race identities have been forged, contested, and embodied spatially. Inspired by recent calls in cultural geography to rematerialize race and drawing from the growing literature on law and geography, this article examines the material dimensions of hybridity, how it was legally produced, gained traction, and slipped in the quotidian spaces of everyday encounters. Focused on late-19th and early-20th-century British Columbia (Canada), I trace the emergence of the ‘half-breed’ as a new racial personage and juridical taxonomy that unsettled racial hierarchies and spatial distinctions between aboriginal and white settler populations. Unlike other colonial contexts, mixed-race peoples on Canada’s west coast did not threaten European superiority alone but were believed to endanger the protection and assimilation of aboriginal peoples. Proximities between ‘half-breeds’ and ‘Indians’ were politically charged for two reasons. First, racial differentiations between these populations were often imperceptible, and second, their putative distinctions were closely bound up with concerns over territory and with aboriginal well-being. The racial opacity of mixed-race peoples created some sites of mobility for those in-between. However, their unknowability shored up the uncertainties of colonial knowledge production and the limits of existing racial repertoires, creating persistent demands for new markers of racial otherness in the process. Crime and immorality became potent signifiers of racial inferiority aimed at differentiating half-breeds from Indians and providing authorities with additional optics through which to problematize and govern their affective and geographical encounters.
Filed under: Canada, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
From ABC News:
Aboriginal protesters have forced the temporarily closure of an exhibition of paintings at the Wollongong City Gallery. The protesters say the images portray the denigration of Aboriginal people and are highly offensive.
The exhibition called No Country For Dreaming is by nine-times Archibald finalist Paul Ryan.
Aaron Broad Henry helped bring the exhibition to a temporary close.
“I find it very offensive for any man, not matter what colour this person is, to hold a head with an axe in his hand,” he said.
The CEO of the Illawarra Aboriginal Land Council, Sharralyn Robinson, is also appalled.
“I don’t find anything humorous about an Aboriginal boy hanging from a tree and the title saying, ‘the local boy just seen to be hanging around all day’,” she said.
Ryan – who is currently holidaying in Bali – says his intention was to highlight the patronising, exploitative and violent nature of Australia’s colonial past.
He says the paintings are intended to be thought-provoking, not offensive.
“And they are actually being very critical of the colonisers for the way that they treated the Indigenous Australians,” he said.
'...hang around all day'
Filed under: art, Australia, Political developments | Closed
Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (UNC Press, 2010).
Long before lucrative tribal casinos sparked controversy, Native Americans amassed other wealth that provoked intense debate about the desirability, morality, and compatibility of Indian and non-Indian economic practices. Skillfully blending social, cultural, and economic history, Alexandra Harmon examines seven such instances of Indian affluence and the dilemmas they presented both for Native Americans and for Euro-Americans–dilemmas rooted in the colonial origins of the modern American economy. This wide-ranging book looks at controversies concerning Powhatan economic status and aims during the Virginia colony’s first years; the ambitions of some bicultural eighteenth-century Creeks and Mohawks; prospering Indians of the Southeast in the early 1800s; inequality among removed tribes during the Gilded Age; the spending of oil-rich Osages in the Roaring Twenties; resurgent tribal communities from Alaska to Maine in the 1970s; and casinos that have drawn gamblers to Indian country across the United States since the 1990s. Harmon’s study not only compels us to look beyond stereotypes of greedy whites and impoverished Indians, but also convincingly demonstrates that Indians deserve a prominent place in American economic history and in the history of American ideas.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
I am the corn, the beans, the squash, the sweet potatoes, and tomatoes on your dinner table. I am the gratitude you express every fourth Thursday in November.
[…]
I am the Indian in your living room.
I am the Great Law of Peace. I am the plan for the U.S. Constitution given you by the clan mothers of the Iroquois Federation. I am political freedom, free speech, equality, and freedom of assembly which you claim as part of being an American. I am the Delaware who allowed Washington’s troops to survive the winter at Valley Forge.
I am the caretaker of Mother Earth. I am the Grandfathers who tell the stories that teach us how to be human. I am the Ancestors who watch from the heavens. I am Powhatan, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea who helped the white man survive in a strange land. I am the Brotherhood of the Shield that used to care for and protect the people before the white men came.
I am the Indian in your living room.
I am the residue of Manifest Destiny. I am an inconvenience to progress. I am America’s Final Solution. I am the ghost of Osceola, Pontiac, and Seattle. I am the Trail of Tears, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee I and II. I am Baker’s Massacre, Ghost Ridge, and all the atrocities carried out in your name. I am the guilt you carry for these crimes.
I am the Indian in your living room.
I am blankets infected with smallpox. I am trade whiskey, forced conversions, and Indian schools. I am slavery, spoiled beef rations, and crooked Indian agents.
[…]
I am a long history of unpaid debts and broken promises. I am the spirit of the buffalo shot from train windows and left to rot on the plains. I am every treaty ever made and broken.
I am the Indian in your living room.
Excerpts from Ed Hanson, Indian in your Living Room, via Newspaper rock
Filed under: literature, United States, Website | Closed
Julie Bonello, ‘The Development of Early Settler Identity in Southern Rhodesia: 1890-1914′, International Journal of African Historical Studies 43, 2 (2010).
introductory paragraph:
White settlement in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, is little more than a century old, yet its development is a significant and exceptional episode in the complex history of colonial Africa. Like many incursions into Africa during the Scramble period of the late-nineteenth century, the colonization of Southern Rhodesia involved devastating conflict, economic upheaval and a reorganization of indigenous society predicated on importing the supposed benefits of European progress. British interest in southern Africa had intensified due to a combination of economic and strategic factors, especially lucrative gold deposits in the Witwatersrand within the Boer-ruled South African Republic, which had led to speculation of a “Second Rand.” As a primarily trade-driven empire, Britain’s colonial policy usually followed the inexpensive “indirect rule” model of administering through local elites, making settler colonialism, particularly settler rule, very rare. Yet in Southern Rhodesia a precariously small minority of white colonists came to assume political power of the country barely thirty years after its initial occupation in 1890. This development was fueled by the formation of a settler identity that not only ensured the superior political and socioeconomic position of white Rhodesians with respect to indigenous Africans, but also carved out distinctions between themselves and other Europeans. Though the Rhodesian settler community was comprised of different social and economic backgrounds, this “island of white” quickly developed strong local interests and ultimately obtained responsible government from Britain in 1923 — the first step towards greater political sovereignty as a dominion within the British Empire. Settlers’ enduring sense of themselves as a distinct people with a separate identity had a profound impact on their political ambitions and helped account for their resistance to black majority rule during the decolonization era. Thus when hopes for autonomy under white rule remained unfulfilled,. Southern Rhodesia declared unilateral independence in 1965, a drastic measure that would draw international criticism and push the settler government into a crippling fifteen-year civil war against African nationalists that eventually ended in white Rhodesia’s defeat. The chain of events that mark Zimbabwe’s tumultuous history since the Second World War has its basis, in part, with the fledgling group of pioneers who established a narrow but tenacious hold on Rhodesia in the 1890s. Studying the early self-perceptions of these settlers, therefore, sheds new and important light on the colonial era of Zimbabwean history.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Thursday 21 October 2010 7:30-9pm
Institute of Postcolonial Studies, North Melbourne
James Belich, Kate Darian-Smith, Lorenzo Veracini
The southern question is figured as a struggle by colonies to liberate themselves from metropolitan centres in order to realise their own destinies at the other end of the world. This includes taking up the challenge of co-existence with peoples originally displaced by the process of colonisation. But what remains of the relation between metropolitan centre and periphery? Is there evidence of exchange between oldland and newland that offers a more reciprocal arrangement? What does this mean for potential solidarity between countries of the periphery?
Professor James Belich is at the Stout Research Centre, University of Wellington. His two volumes on New Zealand history, Making Peoples andParadise Reforged, are considered comprehensive and engaging. His recent publication Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1780-1930 is described in the TLS as ‘one of the most important works on the broad processes of modern world history to have appeared for years.’
Professor Kate Darian-Smith is Professor of Australian Studies and History at the University of Melbourne. Kate has written widely on Australian history and on the British world. Her works include, as co-editor of Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, Melbourne University Press, 2007 and Text, Theory, Space: land, literature and history in South Africa and Australia, Routledge, 1996. She is currently working on an ARC-funded project (with Penny Edmonds and Julie Evans) on Conciliation Narratives in British Settler Societies in the Pacific Rim.
Dr Lorenzo Veracini is a Senior Research Fellow at Swinburne University and holds a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship. He joined the ISR in early 2009 and has studied history and historiography in Italy and the UK before moving to Australia in the late 1990s. He is the author of Israel and Settler Society (Pluto Press 2006) and What is Settler Colonialism? (forthcoming). He is currently writing a global history of settler colonialism and is on the editorial board of the new journal, Settler Colonial Studies.
Institute of Postcolonial Studies
78-80 Curzon Street
North Melbourne
Victoria 3051 Australia (map)
Tel: 03 9329 6381
Admission – $5 for waged, $3 for unwaged, and free for members.
Filed under: public lecture | Closed
This article argues that positive perceptions of American westward expansion played a major (and so far overlooked) role both for the domestic German debate about the necessity of overseas expansion and for concrete German colonial policies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During and after the uprising against colonial rule (1904–7) of the two main indigenous peoples, the Herero and the Nama, of German South-West Africa (Germany’s only settler colony), colonial administrators actively researched the history of the American frontier and American Indian policies in order to learn how best to “handle” the colony’s peoples. There exists a substantial literature on the allegedly exceptional enchantment of Germans with American Indians. Yet this article shows that negative views of Amerindians also influenced and shaped the opinions and actions of German colonizers. Because of its focus on the importance of the United States for German discussions about colonial expansion, this article also explores the role German liberals played in the German colonial project. Ultimately, the United States as a “model empire” was especially attractive for Germans with liberal and progressive political convictions. The westward advancement of the American frontier went hand in hand with a variety of policies towards Native Americans, including measures of expulsion and extinction. German liberals accepted American expansionism as normative and were therefore willing to advocate, or at least tolerate, similar policies in the German colonies.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
