Israeli settler
THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND words and music by Woody Guthrie
This land is your land, this land is my land From California, to the New York Island From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters This land was made for you and me As I was walking a ribbon of highway I saw above me an endless skyway I saw below me a golden valley This land was made for you and me I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts And all around me a voice was sounding This land was made for you and me The sun comes shining as I was strolling The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling The fog was lifting a voice come chanting This land was made for you and me As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there And that sign said - no tress passin' But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin! Now that side was made for you and me! In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple Near the relief office - I see my people And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' If this land's still made for you and me.This land is your land, this land is my land From California, to the New York Island From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters This land was made for you and meIn the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple; By the relief office, I'd seen my people. As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, Is this land made for you and me?
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, media, Quote, wacky | Closed
Lynne Davis (ed.), Alliances: Re/Envisioning Indigenous-non-Indigenous Relationships (University of Toronto Press, 2010)
When Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists work together, what are the ends that they seek, and how do they negotiate their relationships while pursuing social change? Alliances brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders, activists, and scholars in order to examine their experiences of alliance-building for Indigenous rights and self-determination and for social and environmental justice.
The contributors, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, come from diverse backgrounds as community activists and academics. They write from the front lines of struggle, from spaces of reflection rooted in past experiences, and from scholarly perspectives that use emerging theories to understand contemporary instances of alliance. Some contributors reflect on methods of mental decolonization while others use Indigenous concepts of respectful relationships in order to analyze present-day interactions. Most importantly, Alliances delves into the complex political and personal relationships inherent in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous struggles for social justice to provide insights into the tensions and possibilities of Indigenous-non-Indigenous alliance and coalition-building in the early twenty-first century.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Victoria Kuttainen, Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite (Cambridge Scholars Press, Feb 2010).
The first study of the synergies between postcolonialism and the genre of the short story composite, Unsettling Stories considers how the form of the interconnected short story collection is well suited to expressing thematic aspects of postcolonial writing on settler terrain. Unique for its comparative considerations of American, Canadian, and Australian literature within the purview of postcolonial studies, this is also a considered study of the difficult place of the postcolonial settler subject within academic debates and literature. Close readings of work by Tim Winton, Margaret Laurence, William Faulkner, Stephen Leacock, Sherwood Anderson, Olga Masters, Scott R. Sanders, Thea Astley, Tim O’Brien and Sandra Birdsell are positioned alongside critical discussions of postcolonial theory to show how awkward affiliations of individuals to place, home, nation, culture, and history expressed in short story composites can be usefully positioned within the broader context of settler colonialism and its aftermath.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2010).
The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin.
However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This article undertakes a revisionist reading of the mini-series Against the Wind (1979) in order to explore the absence of a narrative of Indigenous dispossession. In doing so it seeks to explore the type of history about land, belonging, and nation that was produced in this late 1970s historical Australian television drama. The analysis focuses on a reading of a particular set of publicity materials and the DVD of the series and considers carefully the role of the single Indigenous character in the series. The place of this character, Ngilgi, is examined in relation to the series’ characterization of national trauma.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Dear readers,
I am pleased to announce that we have issued our first call for papers for our new, peer-reviewed, inter- and multi-disciplinary scholarly journal: settler colonial studies. It will explore a new theme every second issue, but will also present articles that don’t align with the theme, so long as they relate to the field.
Hopefully you will agree that a journal of this sort is long overdue, and support it by passing on its details to people and departments you think might be interested.
For more information, click ‘journal’ above.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
lalu on settlers, xhosa, myth-making, discourse, history, and a postcolonial critique of apartheid
Premesh Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the shape of recurring pasts (HSRC Press 2009).
In 1996, as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was beginning its hearings, Nicholas Gcaleka, a healer diviner from the town of Butterworth in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, set off on a journey to retrieve the skull of Hintsa, the Xhosa king. Hintsa had been killed by British troops on the banks of the Nqabarha River over a century and a half before and, it was widely believed, been beheaded. From a variety of quarters including the press, academia and Xhosa traditional leadership Gcaleka’s mission was mocked and derided.
Following the tracks of Nicholas Gcaleka, author Lalu explores the reasons for the almost incessant laughter that accompanied these journeys into the past. He suggests that the sources of derision can be found in the modes of evidence established by colonial power and the way they elide the work of the imagination. These forms and structures of knowledge in the discipline of history later sustained the discourse of apartheid.
The Deaths of Hintsa argues for a post-colonial critique of apartheid and for new models for writing histories. It offers a reconceptualisation of the colonial archive and suggests a blurring of the distinction between history and historiography as a way to set to work on forging a history after apartheid.
One does not have to be an expert on Nicholas Gcaleka, the Hintsa myth and Xhosa history/historiography to make use of Lalu’s book (though having recently read it, I’d say it would help in some parts). He does far more than his blurb attests, in fact. He is among the few to meaningfully synthesise a very postcolonial claim (no less than a redefinition of ‘the subaltern’ in world history) with a very settler colonial idea (the idea of history shared by settlers and their historians). He presents an argument that is at the same time analytically descriptive of the past and unwaveringly threatening to the discipline of history itself and the ways in which ‘the colonial archive’ figure in politics and myth, present and history. Moreover, he critically and thoroughly explores the idea of a ‘settler colonial historiography’, an idea that arises in historiographical critiques of Christopher Saunders, Ken Smith and others, but has never been fully explained or for that matter defined.
Congratulations to Lalu for publishing it with HRSC Press, a brilliant new hybrid press that combines a print press with an e-press. It means that yet another key piece of historical scholarship on South Africa is available for free download as an e-book. (see also Laura Mitchell, Belongings).
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Gregory D. Smithers, Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s–1890s (routledge, 2009).
This book combines transnational history with the comparative analysis of racial formation and reproductive sexuality in the settler colonial spaces of the United States and British Australia. Specifically, the book places “whiteness,” and the changing definition of what it meant to be white in nineteenth-century America and Australia, at the center of our historical understanding of racial and sexual identities. In both the United States and Australia, “whiteness” was defined in opposition to the imagined cultural and biological inferiority of the “Indian,” “Negro,” and “Aboriginal savage.” Moreover, Euro-Americans and Euro-Australians shared a common belief that “whiteness” was synonymous with the extension of settler colonial civilization. Despite this, two very different understandings of “whiteness” emerged in the nineteenth century. The book therefore asks why these different racial understandings of “whiteness” – and the quest to create culturally and racially homogeneous settler civilizations – developed in the United States and Australia.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
ABSTRACT
This essay examines a double bind that faces indigenous peoples in the Anglophone settler states, the double bind of need-based sovereignty. This double bind works as follows: indigenous sovereigns, such as American Indian tribal nations, require economic resources to exercise sovereignty, and their revenues often derive from their governmental rights; however, once they exercise economic power, the legitimacy of indigenous sovereignty and citizenship is challenged within settler society. Through analysis of Florida Seminole gaming and the threatened severance of Seminoles’ governmental status by mid-1900s federal “termination” policy, I show how economy-linked limits to indigenous sovereignty and citizenship rest on debates over culture, over what it is that renders American Indians distinctive as individuals and as collectives. Today, as during termination debates, Seminoles and other American Indian peoples struggle to position their economic wellbeing not as an anomaly or an abandonment of indigenous ways but, rather, as the result of an ongoing commitment to collective self-governance. With the sounds of termination echoing in gaming debates, it is possible to identify the reemergence of need-based sovereignty as a key modality of settler colonialism in the United States.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
