American Quarterly 62, 3 (2010).
Special Issue: Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies.
Edited by Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith.
Filed under: Empire, Hawaii, Latin America, New Zealand, Pacific, United States | Closed
reblog: the good guys
Good post, good review, good responses. They all raise the question: in what ways can we look at those settlers who endure decolonisation? Can they be good guys, or must they be bad guys? Whatever your answer, this looks like an interesting documentary worth tracking down.
Filed under: media, Southern Africa | Closed
you are being watched, melbourne
Construction firm Grocon has unveiled plans for a new Melbourne apartment block featuring a giant 32-storey portrait of Wurundjeri leader William Barak.
via ABC News
Filed under: Australia | Closed
Part of the introduction:
In understanding international law as a key legitimating discourse of colonialism, this paper argues the need to view settler-colonial frontiers within a conceptual field that directs as much attention to the legal and historical precedents to settlement as to the period that follows it. The discussion addresses some recent concerns of Australian frontier historiography by calling on critical legal-historical scholarship that theorises the mutual constitution of law and nation as a reiterative dynamic in which seemingly universal claims persistently champion particular interests. It identifies some constraints of the literature’s nationalist preoccupations and seeks to articulate a way forward from stultifying debates about frontier violence that are inevitably drawn into divisive questions of national identity.
In extending the scope of inquiry to Europe’s expansion to the Americas, the analysis considers both the notion and the actuality of the frontier to explain its pivotal role as a threshold space between international law and domestic law, two apparently distinct jurisdictions, which, both jointly and severally, had to secure the transfer and transformation of sovereignty as European nations sought to establish their interests abroad. This broader legal and historical framework acknowledges the fact that settler frontiers did not arise autochthonously within each colony, which is simply to say that frontiers did not originate where they were variously made. Rather, the notion of the frontier was produced as a potent residue of international law’s responsiveness to colonialism, as a necessary complement to Europe’s initial claims to sovereignty under the so-called doctrine of discovery. For in order to defend a first discoverer’s claim to sovereignty against European rivals, the sovereignty of natives – already discursively denied in international law – had also to be transferred through their physical dispossession within the (emerging) field of domestic law. This task of completion – in acquiring the territorial dimension of sovereignty – in turn produced the actuality of the frontier in the form of the lived experiences of its various inhabitants post settlement. Bringing the notion and the actuality of the settler-colonial frontier within the one analytical field therefore recognizes and makes manifest the legal, temporal, and spatial gap between a discursive claim to sovereignty and its full expression in territorial hegemony.
Filed under: Australia, law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty | Closed
Abstract
This article examines the ways in which colonial policing and punishment of Indigenous peoples evolved as an inherent part of the colonial state-building process on the connected 19th century frontiers of south-central Australia and western Canada. Although there has been some excellent historical scholarship on the relationship between Indigenous people, police and the law in colonial settings, there has been little comparative analysis of the broader, cross-national patterns by which Indigenous peoples were made subject to British law, most especially through colonial policing practices. This article compares the roles, as well as the historical reputations, of Australia’s mounted police and Canada’s North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) in order to argue that these British colonies, being within the ambit of the law as British subjects did not accord Indigenous peoples the rights of protection that status was intended to impart.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Abstract
During the long era of ‘protection’ (enacted in 1897, flourishing in the interwar years and with effects continuing to this day) policy towards Australian Indigenous people suspected of interpersonal violence was ambiguous in its objectives and its means. Formally, Indigenous peoples in Australia were British subjects entitled to the full protection of the law. As a consequence, violence between Indigenous people was made visible through the conduct of inquests, police inquiries and, in many cases, subsequent arrest and charge with a criminal offence. Disposal of those charged or even suspected of crimes reflects tension between the universalising presumptions of the criminal law and the particularising effects of welfare regimes that ruled the lives of Indigenous people. Drawing on archives of inquests, courts and prisons in the Queensland jurisdiction before 1940, this article examines the policies and decision-making that characterised a state that remained determinedly colonial in its practices and ambitions. In conclusion, we consider briefly the question of how distinctive or how representative was Queensland practice as a state response to Indigenous violence during these decades of colonial subordination.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Bang on target again, Dr. Pillay.
Filed under: Africa, media, Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
Abstract
Many of the cross-cultural intermediaries who figure in the New Zealand historiography operated in ‘middle ground’ situations. However, in New Zealand as elsewhere in the Pacific, intermediaries also had roles to play in settings where the authority of the colonial state was more or less assured. Working from government records and the 1920 diary of the Pakeha interpreter Ben Keys, this article examines the sorts of cross-cultural expertise involved in negotiating sales and leases of Maori land and probes the relationship between such instrumental uses of knowledge of Maori culture and the ethnographic interests that this work nurtured. For some settlers, Keys included, amateur ethnographic inquiry constituted the active intellectual work of being a New Zealander. By examining the work of an intermediary and amateur ethnographer in an age of automobiles and cinemas, I seek to demonstrate — in a modest, textured way — how the colonization of New Zealand was an ongoing, twentieth-century process in the sphere of economics and law as well as culture and identity.
Licensed Native Interpreter:
The Land Purchaser as Ethnographer in Early-20th-Century New Zealand
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Abstract
Filed under: New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Abstract
This paper is a synoptic history of racial geography in the ‘fifth part of the world’ or Oceania — an extended region embracing what are now Australia, Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The period in question stretches from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment, to focus on the consolidation of European racial thinking with the marriage of geography and raciology in the early 19th century. The paper investigates the naming of places by Europeans and its ultimate entanglement with their racial classifications of people. The formulation of geographical and anthropological knowledge is located at the interface of metropolitan discourses and local experience. This necessitates unpacking the relationships between, on the one hand, the deductive reasoning of metropolitan savants, and, on the other hand, the empirical logic of voyagers and settlers who had visited or lived in particular places, encountered their inhabitants, and been exposed, often unwittingly, to indigenous agency and knowledge.
Filed under: Australia, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
