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
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
