Indigenous activists have criticised the United Nations for placing Australia’s convict sites on the World Heritage List.
UNESCO has announced that 11 sites, including Port Arthur, Hyde Park Barracks and Fremantle Prison, should be preserved because of their “outstanding universal value”.
Australia already has 17 World Heritage areas, but only two are buildings.
The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre says UNESCO should not list any more “white Australian” sites while Aboriginal history is being neglected and destroyed.
But UNESCO says the sites are the best surviving examples of large-scale convict transportation and the colonial expansion of European powers through the presence and labour of prisoners.
Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre legal director Michael Mansell has written to UNESCO asking it not to approve Australia’s nomination due to the involvement of the Tasmanian Government.
Mr Mansell says it’s hypocritical for Tasmania to seek heritage protection for European sites when it destroyed an Aboriginal midden to build a prison wall.
via abc online
Filed under: Australia, Political developments | Closed
via ABC online
The Victorian Government has introduced legislation into Parliament that could take native title resolution out of the Federal Court.
The framework would allow Indigenous groups to settle with the Government out of court, if they drop current native title claims and agree not to lodge future claims.
The government says it could lead to better economic opportunities for Aboriginal groups in managing Crown land.
The Attorney General Rob Hulls says the existing Commonwealth system is too costly and time-consuming.
“It will mean quicker resolution of claims, reduced transaction costs, reduced compensation liability for the state, finality and certainty for the state, for business and for industry in relation to native title matters,” he said.
Filed under: Australia, law, Political developments | Closed
mulaudzi, shoeman and chirikure on interdisciplinary borders and the concept of the frontier
M. Mulaudzi, M. H. Schoeman and S. Chirikure, ‘Continuing Conversations at the Frontier’ South African Historical Journal 62, 2 (2010), pp. 219 – 228
Abstract
Researchers involved or interested in the 500 Year Initiative (FYI) gathered at the University of Cape Town in June 2008 to explore how different disciplines engaged in historical studies may better communicate and collaborate within and between each other. Appropriately titled ‘Continuing Conversations at the Frontier’, participants in this conference challenged themselves to cross the theoretical and methodological borders separating archaeology, history, geography, anthropology and linguistics, in order to understand how and under what influence modern southern African identities have taken shape over the past 500 years. These conversations made it clear that new insights are not only reliant on new data, but that it is equally important to expose our methodologies and processes of gaining understanding. In addition to confronting disciplinary boundaries and methods, social and spatial frontiers were key loci for discussion, although it became apparent that historians and archaeologists have approached frontiers in different ways. We briefly explore the roots of these approaches.Keywords: 500 Year Initiative; archaeology; boundaries; frontiers; history; interdisciplinary research; methodology; pre-colonial southern Africa
Filed under: Africa, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Shelona Klatzow, ‘Interaction between Hunter-Gatherers and Bantu-Speaking Farmers in the Eastern Free State: A Case Study from De Hoop Cave’, South African Historical Journal 62, 2 2010, pp. 229 – 251
Abstract
De Hoop is a large cave, located on the western slopes of the Platberg mountain, in the eastern Free State. The excavated archaeological sequence dates back to more than three and a half thousand years with a hiatus in occupation between the older levels and the re-occupation of the cave in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The nineteenth-century levels display a change in material culture from a post-classic Wilton assemblage, which is associated with hunter-gatherers, to one that includes Sotho ceramics and other farmer items, as well as a few European artefacts. The historical accounts of Stow, Norton, Casalis, Arbousset and Daumas, and Kirby suggest that the social and political processes which took place in this area during the tumultuous nineteenth century were complex. De Hoop Cave is situated in the middle of this contested area. By examining both the archaeological sequence from De Hoop and the available oral histories and missionary accounts, issues of interaction and the social dislocations and realignments that characterised this period are considered. Based on the aforesaid, I propose that Sotho farmers were living in this cave with San hunter-gatherers for a period during one of the many conflict situations that characterised the Caledon Valley in the nineteenth century.Keywords: De Hoop Cave; hunter-gatherers; Bantu-speaking farmers; interaction
Filed under: Africa, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Alexis Celeste Bunten, ‘More like Ourselves: Indigenous Capitalism through Tourism’, The American Indian Quarterly 34, 3 2010, pp. 285-311.
In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.
In the most remote and beautiful parts of the world where much of the world’s rural Indigenous populations still live, sustainable tourism is presented as an economic panacea for communities whose traditional economies and ways of life have been compromised by the dominant societies to which they belong. Indigenous communities are responding to this opportunity (or threat, depending on perspective) in unique and innovative ways that set them apart from their non-Indigenous counterparts. In an edited volume on the topic of Indigenous tourism Nelson Graburn and I defined it as “any service or product that is a) owned and operated at least in part by an Indigenous group and b) results from a means of exchange with outside guests.” Some of these businesses may not appear to stray far from non-Indigenous-owned tourism in terms of products offered, but their company ethos reflects the values that set apart Indigenous-owned tourism from its mainstream counterparts. Through a comparison of Indigenous-owned cultural tourism businesses in southeastern Alaska and New Zealand as well as secondary data examining Indigenous tourism across the Pacific, this article introduces the concept of “Indigenous capitalism” as a distinct strategy to achieve ethical, culturally appropriate, and successful Indigenous participation within the global economy.
Indigenous peoples have been involved with tourism since they first hosted guests through exploratory and early colonial encounters, yet Indigenous ownership and control of such venues is a relatively new phenomenon worldwide. Indigenous tourism encompasses a wide range of experiences, including cultural tourism, ecotourism, adventure tourism, gaming, resorts, and other related services. Most Indigenous tourism venues are less than a decade old, made possible largely through increased communications technology, the rapid expansion of the international tourism industry, and neoliberal government
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Abstract
This paper examines the legacy of the Duchy of Courland’s overseas colony of Tobago as it relates to present-day Latvian national identity using the ethno-symbolist approach of Anthony D. Smith and comparative cases. As Latvia is a small nation that has been an independent nation-state for only two short periods, national legitimacy and pride pose particular problems for Latvians. To this end, Latvian historians have worked to reinterpret the Baltic German-dominated Duchy of Courland as a positive period of Latvian national history and have sought to emphasize ethnic Latvian involvement in the Duchy’s colonial endeavors, especially on the island of Tobago. Their efforts have then filtered into the general Latvian consciousness through books, film, plays, and place names. Since Latvia’s independence from the USSR, the former colony of Tobago has gained renewed importance for Latvians who are experiencing a widely perceived notion of postcolonialism. This paper concludes that the appropriated colony of Tobago will continue to rise in importance as a component of Latvian national identity.Keywords: Latvia; Tobago; Duchy of Courland; historiography; colonialism
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Terror and the Postcolonial (Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, University of Oxford and University of Southampton).
Part I: Theories of Colonial and Postcolonial Terror:
1. The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share (Achille Mbembe, University of Wiwatersrand).
2. Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison (Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia).
3. The White Fear Factor (Vron Ware, Open University).
4. Sacrificial Militancy and the Wars around Terror (Alex Houen, University of Sheffield).
5. Postcolonial Writing and Terror (Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford).
Part II: Histories of Post/colonial Terror:
6. Revolutionary Terrorism in British Bengal (Peter Heehs, Independent Scholar).
7. Excavating Histories of Terror: Thugs, Sovereignty, and the Colonial Sublime (Alex Tickell, University of Portsmouth).
8. Terrorism, Literature, and Sedition in Colonial India (Stephen Morton, University of Southampton).
9. Israel in the US Empire (Bashir Abu-Manneh, Barnard College).
10. The Poetics of State Terror in Twenty-first-century Zimbabwe (Ranka Primorac, University of Southampton).
11. The Mediation of “Terror”: Authority, Journalism, and the Stockwell Shooting (Stuart Price, De Montfort University).
Part III: Genres of Terror:
12. Terror Effects (Robert J. C. Young, New York University).
13. “Gendering” Terror: Representations of the Female “Freedom Fighter” in Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Cultural Production (Neluka Silva, University of Colombo).
14. Terror, Spectacle, and the Secular State in Bombay Cinema (Sujala Singh, University of Southampton).
15. “The age of reason was over . . . an age of fury was dawning”: Contemporary Fiction and Terror (Robert Eaglestone. University of London).
16. Bodies of Terror: Performer and Witness (Emma Brodzinski, University of London).
Filed under: Africa, Asia, Empire, Israel/Palestine, Political developments, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
Abstract/Resumen:
This paper focuses on the anxiety of possession that underlies the anthropological inquisitiveness of the nineteenth-century Argentine explorer Francisco Pascasio Moreno. Moreno’s Viaje a la Patagonia Austral (1879) exposes a series of complex representational configurations that respond to specific national imperatives. Although Moreno negates the native peoples’ presence by depicting them as relics, his anthropological curiosity paradoxically makes evident that Patagonia was visibly populated by indigenous peoples. Significantly his portrayals of ‘Indian’ rituals make references to sex and violence, as well as allusions to female chastity. Since these elements are seldom overtly present in Europeans’ narratives of travel and exploration on Patagonia, these representations constitute a break from the writing travel tradition that precedes Moreno’s. But, more importantly, these references to uncontrolled passions and female virginity expose the ambiguities of a narrative that, while providing an account of a visibly inhabited Patagonia, also attempts to legitimize Argentina’s colonizing project in the region.
El presente trabajo centra su atención en las ansias de posesión que subyacen a la curiosidad antropológica del explorarador argentino decimonónico, Francisco Pascasio Moreno. El texto de Moreno, Viaje a la Patagonia Austral (1879), expone una serie de configuraciones representacionales complejas que responde a imperativos nacionales específicos. Si bien Moreno al representar a los pueblos originarios como reliquias niega la presencia de éstos, su curiosidad antropológica paradójicamente pone en evidencia que la Patagonia estaba poblada por indígenas. Es signficativo que sus descripciones de los rituales de los ‘indios’ hacen referencia al sexo y a la violencia así como también a la castidad femenina. Dado que estos elementos rara vez están tan explícitamente presentes en narrativas europeas de viaje y exploración a la Patagonia, estas representaciones constituyen un quiebre con la tradición que precede a Moreno. Pero, aún más importante, estas referencias a pasiones incontrolables y a la virginidad femenina exponen las ambigüedades de una narrativa que da cuenta de una Patagonia visiblemente habitada y que, al mismo tiempo, intenta legitimar el proyecto colonizador argentino en la región.
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the anxiety of possession that underlies the anthropological inquisitiveness of the nineteenth-century Argentine explorer Francisco Pascasio Moreno. Moreno’s Viaje a la Patagonia Austral (1879) exposes a series of complex representational configurations that respond to specific national imperatives. Although Moreno negates the native peoples’ presence by depicting them as relics, his anthropological curiosity paradoxically makes evident that Patagonia was visibly populated by indigenous peoples. Significantly his portrayals of ‘Indian’ rituals make references to sex and violence, as well as allusions to female chastity. Since these elements are seldom overtly present in Europeans’ narratives of travel and exploration on Patagonia, these representations constitute a break from the writing travel tradition that precedes Moreno’s. But, more importantly, these references to uncontrolled passions and female virginity expose the ambiguities of a narrative that, while providing an account of a visibly inhabited Patagonia, also attempts to legitimize Argentina’s colonizing project in the region.
Resumen:
El presente trabajo centra su atención en las ansias de posesión que subyacen a la curiosidad antropológica del explorarador argentino decimonónico, Francisco Pascasio Moreno. El texto de Moreno, Viaje a la Patagonia Austral (1879), expone una serie de configuraciones representacionales complejas que responde a imperativos nacionales específicos. Si bien Moreno al representar a los pueblos originarios como reliquias niega la presencia de éstos, su curiosidad antropológica paradójicamente pone en evidencia que la Patagonia estaba poblada por indígenas. Es signficativo que sus descripciones de los rituales de los ‘indios’ hacen referencia al sexo y a la violencia así como también a la castidad femenina. Dado que estos elementos rara vez están tan explícitamente presentes en narrativas europeas de viaje y exploración a la Patagonia, estas representaciones constituyen un quiebre con la tradición que precede a Moreno. Pero, aún más importante, estas referencias a pasiones incontrolables y a la virginidad femenina exponen las ambigüedades de una narrativa que da cuenta de una Patagonia visiblemente habitada y que, al mismo tiempo, intenta legitimar el proyecto colonizador argentino en la región.
Filed under: gender, Latin America, Scholarship and insights | Closed
