Sovereignty for Indigenous nations!
Smash the state!
We are anti-colonial.
Filed under: Canada, Political developments | Closed
Terence Ranger, ‘Constructions of Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies 36, 2 (2010).
Some selections:
Yet the absence of a scholarly history of Zimbabwe has been sorely felt by all sort of people – by diplomats, for example; by teachers and students; by intelligent tourists; by the ‘general reader’; and by all those who find the relentless proclamation of public history and its lists of heroes and villains implausible and even repulsive. Of course, it is not as though there is nothing to read about aspects of Zimbabwe’s history. As readers of JSAS know, there is a superabundance of published Zimbabwean historiography written by Zimbabweanists and increasingly by Zimbabweans. Much of it is of high quality. A lot of it is exciting. But much of it takes the form of district case studies, of histories of individual towns or histories of great events, like the 1948 general strike or the guerrilla war; of biographies; of denominations. Anyone who wants a book that seeks to put everything together has had until now to depend on L.H. Gann’s A History of Southern Rhodesia (London, Chatto and Windus, 1965) or Ian Phimister’s An Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe (London, Longman, 1988). But the first only goes up to 1934 and the second to 1948; neither is now available in Zimbabwe.
[…]
‘[A] generation whose time has come to take the reins of the state cannot be stopped by anyone’. Sabelo writes this from Johannesburg. He was offered a place in the Prime Minister’s office in Harare but he chose to go on being an academic. Change will come if the academics get it right. It would be nice to think so.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
The central question of this book is when and how does indigeneity in its various iterations – cultural, social, political, economic, even genetic – matter in a legal sense? Indigeneity in the Courtroom focuses on the legal deployment of indigenous difference in US and Canadian courts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Through ethnographic and historical research, Hamilton traces dimensions of indigeneity through close readings of four legal cases, each of which raises important questions about law, culture, and the production of difference. She looks at the realm of law, seeking to understand how indigeneity is legally produced and to apprehend its broader political and economic implications.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009).
Contemporary discussions of multiculturalism and pluralism remain politically charged in former settler societies. Colonial Proximities historicizes these contestations by illustrating how crossracial encounters in one colonial contact zone — late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British Columbia — inspired juridical racial truths and forms of governance that continue to inform contemporary politics, albeit in different ways.
Drawing from a wide range of legal cases, archival materials, and commissions of inquiry, this book charts the racial encounters between aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations. By exploring the real and imagined anxieties that informed contact in salmon canneries, the illicit liquor trade, and the (white) slavery scare, this book reveals the legal and spatial strategies of rule deployed by Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities who, in the interests of racial purity and European resettlement, aspired to restrict, and ultimately prevent, crossracial interactions. Linking histories of aboriginal-European contact and Chinese migration, this book demonstrates that the dispossession of aboriginal peoples and Chinese exclusion were never distinct projects, but part of the same colonial processes of racialization that underwrote the formation of the settler regime.
Colonial Proximities shows us that British Columbia’s contact zone was marked by a racial heterogeneity that not only produced anxieties about crossracial contacts but also distinct modes of exclusion including the territorial dispossession of aboriginal peoples and legal restrictions on Chinese immigration. It is essential reading for students and scholars of history, anthropology, sociology, colonial/ postcolonial studies, and critical race and legal studies.
And Eve-Darian Smith gives an insightful review of the book in the recent edition of Canadian Journal of Law and Society.
Filed under: Canada, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
scs flyer
Filed under: Africa, art, Asia, Australia, Éire, Call for papers, Canada, Empire, gender, Genocide, Hawaii, Israel/Palestine, Latin America, law, media, New Zealand, Political developments, postcolonialism, public lecture, Quote, Scholarship and insights, Seminar, Southern Africa, Sovereignty, Uncategorized, United States, wacky, Website | Closed
Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet with the expansion of settlers into the First Nations territories that became southern Alberta and BC, liberalism proved to be an exclusionary rather than inclusionary force. Between 1877 and 1927, government officials, police officers, church representatives, ordinary settlers, and many others operated to exclude and reform Indigenous people. Presenting Anglo-Canadian liberal capitalist values and structures and interests as normal, natural, and beyond reproach devalued virtually every aspect of Indigenous cultures. This book explores the means used to facilitate and justify colonization, their effects on Indigenous economic, political, social, and spiritual lives, and how they were resisted.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The right of self-determination of indigenous peoples within states often branches in two directions: (1) a drive for more autonomy for indigenous nations and (2) a demand for greater participation in the decision-making institutions of the state. These two branches of indigenous self-determination appear to fit very closely with the twin pillars of federalism – self-rule and shared-rule. There are many aspects of federalism that can provide a context for accommodating the self-determination of indigenous peoples within federal states. The drive for greater autonomy, or self-rule, can be accommodated through a public form of government where indigenous people are the demographic majority in a region, or through the exercise of the aboriginal right of self-government and the negotiation of intergovernmental agreements. The demand for greater participation in the decision-making institutions of the state, or shared-rule, can be met by guaranteed representation for indigenous peoples in the legislatures of federations, in the creation of Aboriginal parliaments, in the creation of state dispute resolution mechanisms to address the needs of indigenous peoples, in the development of treaty-making and treaty-renewal processes, and through indigenous participation in the intergovern-mentalrelations of federal states.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Modernity and colonialism are intimately linked, and colonialism has mobilised people in unprecedented ways. While in many places processes of bloody or incremental decolonisation meant that the invaders returned home; in other settings they stayed. In countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Taiwan, and others, the settlers stayed, and remained the dominant power group. In other countries, locales as diverse as Brazil, Hong Kong and South Africa, the colonial settlers (or at least one set of them) were displaced from political power, but maintained considerable economic power. This volume explores the nature and consequence of settler colonialism. We are especially interested in considering the consequences of a system that aims to replace the indigenous inhabitants of a given place: that is, where at least in principle indigenous people are to ‘disappear’ by one means or another.
Amongst other possibilities we encourage contributions that address the implications of the neo-assimilation that seems implicit in the recent ‘Intervention’ into Aboriginal communities in Australia.
In general our focus is on the present, neo-assimilation and displacement.
This issue of Arena Journal will also be published as a book.
Introduction
Part 1. The Embodiment of Settler Colonialism
- What are the consequences of the politics of hybridity?
- How are embodied markers of identity lived and politically contested?
- What happens in those singular cases when the ‘white settlers’ lose their power but stay as a residual colonial population in a postcolonial setting?
- What happens when colonised peoples that were resettled in the context of global displacements find themselves in a postcolonial setting?
- What are the implications of the DNA revolution in understandings about ethnic genealogies and embodied difference?
Part 2. The Time of Settler Colonialism
- How are histories of ‘settlement’ being written and contested?
- What does it mean to have different senses of history (and different ideas about the future) for indigenous and settler peoples in the one nation-state?
- What are the consequences for indigenous peoples of the dominance of modern notions of progress?
- In what ways does it complicate issues of belonging that a generation or more of settlers have been born into a country since the first colonial ‘settlement’?
Part 3. The Space of Settler Colonialism
- How is sovereignty over land legally organised and culturally legitimised?
- How is land and place related to power?
- What happens to indigenous identity when land as a primary source of identity is displaced?
Considerations
- We do not want a series of straight country-by-country, period-by-period, or even comparative studies that just describe the circumstances in different locales.
- We need to distinguish colonialism, postcolonialism, and settler colonialism as related but inherently different global phenomena.
- We want to focus on the present and the recent past. We are interested in using historical references for their consequences for the present.
Submission Date: 30th September, 2010 or by negotiation
Lorenzo Veracini, John Hinkson and Paul James
Arena Journal
2 Kerr Street, Fitzroy
Editors: journal@arena.org.au
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
Places are complex entities, not necessarily defined by physical structure
or geographic location. Because of this, the ways of making place are many
and diverse. In Australia, Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples have
employed distinct strategies of place-making, and brought differing
attitudes towards the constitution of place. While non-indigenous Australian
histories of place-making have proved largely damaging to Indigenous places
and their cultural, socio-economic and political significance, a range of
innovative projects and practices have sought to locate the intersection of
these place-making histories, and to find a collaborative common ground in
the ambition to make place in non-destructive, ethically-guided, and
politically effective ways. Strategies for negotiating sites of difficult
memory and working with the complexity and diversity of Indigenous cultures
in processes of place-making are developing across architecture, heritage
management, museology, and other modes of cultural representation.
This symposium seeks to showcase some of these initiatives, and to explore
what insights into collaborative, cross-cultural place-making practice they
offer in the context of a campaign to advance and realise a Victorian
Indigenous Cultural Education and Knowledge Centre. The Victorian
Traditional Owner Land Justice Group, Reconciliation Victoria and the
Melbourne City Council are key stakeholders in this early stage of such a
Centre’s conceptualisation, which includes a prominent situation in
Melbourne’s CBD. This is the first proposal for a major civic precinct owned
and managed by and for all Victorian Aborigines. It is intended that the
Centre (VICEKC) will showcase the variety of Victorian Aboriginal cultures,
both in their traditional and contemporary expression, be a gateway for
tourism strategies in South-East Australia, and house spaces for education
and entertainment, exhibitions and performances, conferences and public
events. A dedicated space for the cultural expression of each Traditional
Owner Language Group in South-East Australia is considered to be a crucial
aspect of its design.
The symposium will bring together international, national and local
Indigenous and non-indigenous community members, academics, designers,
artists and architects, along with VICEKC stakeholders, to share experiences
and reflections on successful cross-cultural interactions in the realm of
place-making. A series of papers will address topics such as:
The traditions and contemporary manifestations of Indigenous place-making in
Australia and elsewhere.
What postcolonial place-making can learn from Indigenous place-making
practices, both historical and contemporary; and
How postcolonial place-making practice has engaged with Indigenous knowledge
systems of land and Indigenous spatial practice.
Examples of successful cross-cultural place-making practices between
Indigenous and non-indigenous practitioners, and also between other cultural
groups.
The symposium will follow on from a public conversation, held at BMW Edge,
Federation Square, in which three prominent speakers discuss the
possibilities for an Indigenous Cultural Centre that represents all
Indigenous Victorians.
Prince Philip Theatre
Faculty: Architecture, Building & Planning, University of Melbourne
25-26 June
For details please visit the website: http://www.indigenousplace.com/
Filed under: Australia, public lecture, Seminar | Closed
An older article I stumbled across today:
John Morrissey, ‘Geography Militant: Resistance and the Essentialisation of Identity in Colonial Ireland’, Irish Geography 37, 2 (2004).
Abstract
In recent years, a growing recognition of the interconnections (in addition to the conflicts) between the worlds of the coloniser and the colonised has enabled the construction of an enhanced collection of differentiated and nuanced historico-geographical accounts of the spaces and practices of colonialism. Indeed, it has become somewhat fashionable in postcolonial studies to emphasise the fluidity and ‘in-between space’ of ‘colonial’ projects and ‘native’ reaction. This is, however, arguably to the detriment of engaging the enmity and violence frequently an integral part of the colonial enterprise. This paper interrogates the in-between spaces of a colonial Ireland just beginning to be defined in the early seventeenth century and demonstrates how they were delimited ultimately by an essentialised envisioning of a radical settler colonial discourse and a corresponding exclusivism in colonial practice on the ground. By examining the outbreak of the 1641 Rebellion in Munster, the discussion considers the emergence of competing and exclusive Protestant and Catholic identities, and highlights the bounded nature of cultural interaction in early modem Ireland.
Key index words: Postcolonialism; identity; essentialisation; resistance
Filed under: Éire, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
