Natalie A. Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 (Cambridge UP, forthcoming, 2010).
Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 is the first study of the history of the federated colony of the Leeward Islands – Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St Kitts – that covers all four islands in the period from their independence from Barbados in 1670 up to the outbreak of the American Revolution, which reshaped the Caribbean. Natalie A. Zacek emphasizes the extent to which the planters of these islands attempted to establish recognizably English societies in tropical islands based on plantation agriculture and African slavery. By examining conflicts relating to ethnicity and religion, controversies regarding sex and social order, and a series of virulent battles over the limits of local and imperial authority, this book depicts these West Indian colonists as skilled improvisers who adapted to an unfamiliar environment, and as individuals as committed as other American colonists to the norms and values of English society, politics, and culture.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Peter Limbrick, Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
In Making Settler Cinemas, Peter Limbrick argues that the United States, Australia, and New Zealand share histories of colonial encounters that have shaped their cinemas in distinctive ways. Going beyond readings of narrative and representation, this book studies the production, distribution, reception, and reexhibition of cinema across three settler societies under the sway of two empires. Investigating films both canonical and overlooked, Making Settler Cinemas not only shows how cinema has mattered to settler societies but affirms that practices of film history can themselves be instrumental in encountering and reshaping colonial pasts.
Filed under: Australia, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (Yale University Press, 2010).
This book uncovers what might seem to be a dark side of the American dream: the New World from the viewpoint of those who decided not to stay. At the core of the volume are the life histories of people who left New England during the British Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1640–1660. More than a third of the ministers who had stirred up emigration from England deserted their flocks to return home. The colonists’ stories challenge our perceptions of early settlement and the religious ideal of New England as a “City on a Hill.” America was a stage in their journey, not an end in itself.
Susan Hardman Moore first explores the motives for migration to New England in the 1630s and the rhetoric that surrounded it. Then, drawing on extensive original research into the lives of hundreds of migrants, she outlines the complex reasons that spurred many to brave the Atlantic again, homeward bound. Her book ends with the fortunes of colonists back home and looks at the impact of their American experience.
Of exceptional value to studies of the connections between the Old and New Worlds, Pilgrims contributes to debates about the nature of the New England experiment and its significance for the tumults of revolutionary England.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
A conversation between Tony Birch and Ross Gibson
Two figures from the early days of the Australian colony that have fresh relevance today – an English scientist at the founding of Sydney and an indigenous leader at the birth of Melbourne.
William Dawes arrived on the First Fleet as the official astronomer. After arriving, he developed a close relation with the Eora people and learned their language. In the South, Dawes experienced a kind of intellectual upheaval whereby he began to understand the world in a non-hierarchical, fluid and relational way that contradicted most of the rectitude that he’d been trained in.
William Barak was a Wurundjeri man and member of the party that met John Batman in the ‘purchase’ of the Melbourne area. During subsequent colonisation, Barak fought to protect Coranderrk, a self-sufficient Aboriginal reserve. This defence included three major walks to Parliament House.
During the early days of British settlement in Australia, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Europeans was potentially quite open. Out of the many possible relationships explored at that time, a particular colonial paradigm emerged of squatters, missionaries and miners. Is it worthwhile delving back into the start of the colony for alternative paradigms that can inform our understanding of biculturalism today? Are there resonances with other colonial beginnings across the South?
Institute of Postcolonial Studies
78-80 Curzon Street
North Melbourne
Victoria 3051 Australia (map)
Filed under: Australia, postcolonialism, public lecture | Closed
From Waatea News:
Taitokerau MP Hone Harawira, who chaired the Waitangi hui, says many people wanted to talk about the Declaration of Independence which preceded the Treaty of Waitangi, and about the constitutional issues being raised in the Northland claims now before the Waitangi Tribunal.
“People talked in particular about the issue Ngapuhi is raising at the moment which is that they never ceded sovereignty in the treaty and they wanted him to take that back and make it a major part of his report, certainly from the Taitokerau, so that the world understood how serious Ngapuhi takes this issue,” Mr Harawira says.
Filed under: law, New Zealand, Political developments, Sovereignty | Closed
The following is a response to Neve Gordon’s paper on ‘Democracy and Colonialism’, from Theory and Event. It has been written by Lorenzo Veracini, and only appears here.
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This is a promising proposal for a paradigm shift: colonialism and democracy are not incompatible – they actually are a necessary prerequisite of each other: “Notwithstanding the widespread conception among democracy theorists that there is contradiction between the two, in this paper I contend that colonialism has served as a crucial component in the historical processes through which modern democracies were created and sustained” (p. 1). Of course, this insight, while convincing in relation to the French and British colonial empires, for example, is especially significant because it emanates from Israel, a situation where the two have been and currently are a visible function of each other:
The Israel case helps clarify theat the colonial project is not merely the other of democracy. On the one hand, Israel’s colonial project [Gordon here only refers exclusively to the occupation that begun in 1967] is deployed to limit and unify the people and in this way helps manage democracy’s precarious and unruly elements. On the other hand, Israel’s truncated racialized democracy serves to preserve its colonial project since […] democracy is incessantly utilized to extend, hide and legitimate a colonial regime based on violent domination. Democracy, we see, has deployed colonialism to circumscribe itself (i.e., by demarcating and stabilizing the people); colonialism has needed democracy to produce its legitimation (p. 2).
Crucially, however, Gordon believes that Israel is “a unique case”: “the democratic project and the colonial project coexist within a contiguous space” (p. 2).
I disagree: settler democracies routinely collapse the two “projects”; indeed one structuring difference between colonial and settler colonial formations is that the fundamental dialectic between metropole and periphery is erased in the latter.
Referring to the activities of settlers in the colonies of democratic regimes, Gordon notes that settlers routinely exploited the “freedoms and civil rights that were conferred on them as citizens of their democratic state of origin in order to subjugate and oppress the indigenous population in ways that settlers originating from authoritarian regimes could not”, and that this has been the case in Israel as well (p. 2). But he is comparing settler colonialism (a circumstance in which the settlers on the spot are in charge) and colonialism with settlers (a circumstance where the metropole is in charge of both the settlers on the spot and the indigenous people). While colonialism is only democratic in the metropole and exclusivist in the periphery, settler colonialism is by definition simultaneously democratic and exclusivist in a periphery that is no longer a periphery. Israel is not an exception in the context of democratic colonialisms; Israel is a settler democracy. Gordon understands colonialism, but does not get settler colonialism, which is a pity, considering where his insight emanates from.
Lorenzo Veracini.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
D’Arcy, Jacqueline. ‘The Same but Different’: Aborigines, Eugenics, and the Harvard-Adelaide Universities’ Tasmanian Historical Studies, Vol. 12, 2007: 59-90.
Abstract:
Norman B Tindale and Joseph B Birdsell visited Cape Barren Island (CBI) Reserve in January 1939, as part of the Harvard-Adelaide Universities’ Anthropological Expedition. The Expedition, it is argued, was the last major eugenic research project to be undertaken in Australia. This is demonstrated most poignantly through Tindale’s and Birdsell’s use of the CBI Reserve as an anthropological and eugenic laboratory. Although much has been written on eugenics and on mixed-blood populations in general, a significant gap exists in the historiography of the CBI Reserve in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Expedition there in 1939. Whatever the reason for its omission, it is important now to include it in the historical record, as the CBI Reserve Expedition of 1939 has significant bearing on current discussions about Aboriginality, and implications for Native Title.
This paper is divided into two sections. The first presents new research into the nature of various reports written about the Islanders during the 1920s and 1930s. The reports clearly reflect changes in contemporary Australian opinion regarding race and miscegenation – an opinion that was moving steadily away from a Social Darwinist explanation of the ‘half-caste problem’, towards a eugenic solution The second section of the paper focuses upon Tindale’s and Birdsell’s field journals and notes. For both men, the CBI segment of the Expedition would prove crucial in their decision to advocate ‘absorption’ as the solution to the “‘half-caste problem” of the 1920s and 1930s’.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Some recent essays from borderlands I’ve been spruiking here contribute to a recent special issue of borderlands. Here is the abstract to the editors’ introduction:
As Stuart Hall, following both Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi, has explained, identity is deeply imbricated with colonialism both for the coloniser and the colonised. Their cultures meet in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the contact zone. Inevitably, this meeting is in circumstances of great inequality. Nevertheless, the identities of both coloniser and colonised are shaped through their interactions, and this shaping continues in the postcolonial experience. In this issue of Borderlands the essays all share a common concern with identity. Moreover, in diverse ways all the essays are founded in issues of marginalisation, power and (post)colonialism.
Right on, borderlands. Check out the issue here.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Leroux’s recent article on the commemoration of settler colonialism in Quebec reminded me of some photos I took… inside one of Montreal’s McDonalds restaurants.
Filed under: Canada, wacky | Closed
