Conference, Twentieth Annual World History Association Conference, Beijing, China 7-10 July 2011
Call for Papers, ‘Unruly Pedagogies; Migratory Interventions: Unsettling Cultural Studies’, Special Edition of Critical Arts
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
Carolyn B. Ramsey, ‘Domestic Violence and State Intervention in the American West and Australia, 1860-1930’, Indiana Law Journal 86 (2011)
Abstract:
This article calls into question stereotypical assumptions about the presumed lack of state intervention in the family and the patriarchal violence of Anglo-American frontier societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By analyzing previously unexamined cases of domestic assault and homicide in the American West and Australia, Professor Ramsey reveals a sustained (but largely ineffectual) effort to civilize men by punishing violence against women. Husbands in both the American West and Australia were routinely arrested or summoned to court for beating their wives in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Judges, police officers, journalists, and others expressed dismay over domestic assaults. However, legal authorities struggled with the dilemma of how to deter batterers whose victims were reluctant to prosecute. To be sure, the state’s response was not as aggressive as under modern mandatory arrest laws and no-drop prosecution policies. Yet the “why didn’t she leave?” question actually may have seemed easier to answer in the late 1800s and early 1900s than it did later in the twentieth century. Due to the failure of the state to prevent recidivist domestic violence, juries and even judges often deemed the actions of women who killed their abusive husbands wholly or partially justified. In contrast, husbands who killed their wives tended to be convicted of murder because their crimes violated the ideal of the “respectable family man” that was vital to the efforts of both the American West and Australia to project a civilized image.This article makes three contributions. First, it presents a complex and surprising picture of gender relations in the American West and Australia by showing that men punished other men for physically attacking their wives and that there was greater public concern about violent marriages than scholars have realized. Second, it documents the criminal prosecution of wife-beaters and wife-killers on two continents during a seventy-year period, which indicates that this was not just an isolated peak of intervention in a long history of apathy toward domestic violence. Third, Professor Ramsey shows that scholarly emphasis on women’s insanity claims has obscured the extent to which female defendants successfully raised self-defense arguments to obtain acquittal or mitigation in intimate-partner murder cases. The justification of abused women’s use of deadly force acknowledged the desperate circumstances they faced in societies that condemned domestic violence, but had neither succeeded in deterring it, nor provided victims with adequate escape routes.
Filed under: Australia, law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Jessica R. Cattelino, ‘Anthropologies of the United States’, Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010).
This article reviews recent research in sociocultural anthropology that has been conducted in and about the United States. I show that anthropologists of the United States have been concerned to locate the anthropological field in three ways: spatial investigations of region, community, and territory; epistemological and methodological projects of cultural critique and defamiliarization; and reconsideration of the place of Native North America in the anthropology of the United States. Emergent inquiry into settler colonialism and the politics of indigeneity has the potential to strengthen the anthropology of the United States by accounting for the ways that being a settler society structures all American lives.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
In the history of Aboriginal Australia, there is nothing all that new about a convoy of uninvited guests trekking across country to seek a new start.
Aboriginal groups have been known to flout jurisdictional boundaries – whether those erected by other Aboriginal groups across tens of thousands of years, or those more arbitrarily decided by imperial powers and settler governments in the recent post-contact period – for generations too many to count.
Matters became a little more complex as the settlers of the Australian colonies began to dominate the continent, and live up to their names and ‘settle’ (albeit in a rather piecemeal fashion). Jurisdictions grew in number, becoming complicated and sometimes downright contradicting legal-political inventions for Indigenous peoples to weave through. Out of necessity, however, many still tried.
With the Federation of the colonies in 1901 came the gradual standardisation of a complex layered system of government across the new nation-state, rolled out over the top of an intricate honeycomb of Indigenous governments, and a diminishing number of mobile polities, as though they were never even there to begin with. Officially, it would not be until 1967 that the Commonwealth came to identify this population, and accept responsibility for its maintenance.
[…]
It is my hope that the recent 1,800km journey of over 100 Walpiri people, from their ancestral homeland in Yuendumu to the city lights of Adelaide, is seen in continuity and not at variation with the rich conjunctures of Australia’s past. If not, I have no doubt that the Federal Government, along with South Australia and the Northern Territory, can only formulate bad approaches to deal with the ‘problem’ that now comes before them.
More from ABC’s Drum Unleashed
Filed under: Australia, media, Political developments | Closed
Matthew L. M. Fletcher, ‘Consent and Resistance: The Modern Struggle between American Indian Tribes and the United States’, MSU Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-16 (2010)
Abstract
After a few years of late 19th century confusion, the United States Supreme Court held definitively in 1898 that the United States Constitution does not bind Indian tribes. Indian tribes were not invited to the Constitutional Convention. Indian tribes never ratified the Constitution (nor were they asked). The Constitution places Indian tribes and foreign nations in the same category of governments that, by definition, were not American.
And yet in the 21st century, it is well understood that Indian tribes are a part – somehow – of the American Constitutional structure. Justice O’Connor wrote that Indian tribes are the “third sovereign.” It remains hornbook law that the Constitution does not bind Indian tribes, but the three branches of the federal each purport to maintain plenary control over critical aspects of Indian tribes, citing to admittedly dubious authority.
The book project will parse through that history into the modern era, and highlight areas in which federal government control over Indian affairs no longer makes sense. Using aspects of consent theory to generate separate theories of tribal and individual Indian consent, I propose a new way of viewing Indian affairs, in which Indian tribes and individual Indians strategically exercise resistance to federal law as a means of vesting Indian tribes and Indian people in the American constitutional structure.
Keywords: Supreme Court, Indian tribes, consent theory, constitutional law, federal common law, federalism, constitutional structure, tribal courts
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Stephen Allen and Alexandra Xanthaki (ed.), Reflections on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010)
The adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the United Nations General Assembly on 13 September 2007 was acclaimed as a major success for the United Nations system given the extent to which it consolidates and develops the international corpus of indigenous rights. This is the first in-depth academic analysis of this far-reaching instrument. Indigenous representatives have argued that the rights contained in the Declaration, and the processes by which it was formulated, obligate affected States to accept the validity of its provisions and its interpretation of contested concepts (such as ‘culture’, ‘land’, ‘ownership’ and ‘self-determination’). This edited collection contains essays written by the main protagonists in the development of the Declaration; indigenous representatives; and field-leading academics. It offers comprehensive institutional, thematic and regional analysis of the Declaration. In particular, it explores the Declaration’s normative resonance for international law and considers the ways in this international instrument could catalyse institutional action and influence the development of national laws and policies on indigenous issues.
Filed under: Africa, Australia, Canada, Hawaii, Latin America, law, New Zealand, Pacific, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
In South Africa we want the study of Anthropology to assist in dealing with the ever present native problem. I have always felt, and I think I have sometimes said, that the more we look upon the native in South Africa as a scientific problem the less we shall feel he is a social danger.
Colonel Sir Matthew Nathan, representative of the African Society, 1914.
Filed under: Quote, Southern Africa | Closed
Abstract
In the early twentieth century, botanists in South Africa’s Western Cape sought urgently to popularise and protect the region’s unique indigenous Fynbos flora. Plants imported from the 1840s, some of which proved invasive, became a physical and symbolic focus for their advocacy. The botanists’ efforts resonated with political attempts to forge a common white South African national identity that drew on notions of landscape and the indigenous flora for symbolism and that consciously exploited the politically integrative potential of the new science of ecology. Introduced by overseas-trained experts, ecological theory was, however, inappropriate for the local flora, and had unfortunate consequences for the scientifically-informed research and management particularly of the fire-maintained Fynbos. While botanists and conservationists were united in defending the local flora against invasive introduced plants, they drew distinctions between what was ‘indigenous’ and what was ‘natural’ that further complicated their attitudes to the local flora. These historical debates illuminate agendas and policies on introduced (‘alien’) and indigenous flora in the region today.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Robert Nichols, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Discourse of Foucault: Survey of a Field of Problematization’, Foucault Studies 9 (2010).
ABSTRACT:
This paper presents a critical survey of the use and interpretation of the work of Michel Foucault in the field of postcolonial studies. The paper uses debates about Foucault’s legacy and his contributions (or lack thereof) to postcolonialism as a means of parsing out the main lines of contestation within the field—that is, as a means of tracing the contours of the space of questioning or field of problematization, in part to foreground what has been at stake and, more to the point, what has not been at stake. Part I provides a general survey of what ‘Postcolonial Studies’ is: what its major questions and debates have been. Part II examines the ways in which Foucault has been taken up, interpreted and used within the field, and Part III comments on what aspects of Foucault’s work have not been taken up, suggesting that this is most revealing about the state of postcolonial studies today.
Keywords: Postcolonial theory; postcolonial politics; postcolonial ethics; Foucault; Bhabha; Said; Spivak.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Andrea Smith, ‘Decolonization in Unexpected Places: Native Evangelicalism and the Rearticulation of Mission’, American Indian Quarterly 62, 3 (2010).
Abstract
In Native studies, many scholars propose “decolonization” as a guiding principle for Native scholarship and activism. This work generally presumes a non-Christian framework for decolonization, because the imposition of Christianity within Native communities is understood as part of the colonial process. But interestingly, some Native evangelicals are reading the same works cited above and are also applying decolonization as a guiding principle for biblical faith. This article will focus on one “unexpected place” for indigenous decolonization—Native evangelical leaders and organizations that circulate through the North American Institute of Indigenous Theological Studies (NAIITS).
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
