take the handle of this plow
The candidates for land titles were dressed in traditional costume and armed with a bow and arrow. After ordering a candidate to shoot his arrow into the distance, the presiding officer, usually the agent, would announce, “You have shot your last arrow.” The arrowless arches would then return to the tipi and re-emerge a few minutes later in “civilized” dress. He would be placed before a plow. “Take the handle of this plow,” the government’s man would say, “this act means you have chosen to live the life of the white man — and the white man lives by work.” The ceremony would close with the new landowner receiving a purse (at which point the presiding officer would announce “this purse will always say to you that the money you gain from your labor must be wisely kept”) and an American flag.
Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920.
Filed under: Quote, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Call for chapters, ‘Biomapping: Indigenous Identities”, proposals due by June 15.
The Commonwealth at 60, University of Sheffield, June 3 2010.
Scholarly networks in the British Empire, Oxford, 5-6 July 2010.
5th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Colorado, 2 August 2010.
EACLALS Postgrad conference, ‘Postcolonialism and Labour’, Germany, 26-7 March 2011.
Call for content, Global Indigenous Studies Collection, by Informit.
British Legal History Conference, Cambridge 13-6 July 2011.
Ab Initio: Law in Early America, June 16-7 2010, Philadelphia.
Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Workshop, Liverpool.
Ethnicity, Crime, Justice: Contemporary and Historical perspectives, Open University.
Empires of the Atlantic World in Revolution, Paris 28-30 June 2010.
Colonial and Postcolonial Connections in Dutch Literature, California, 15 Sept 2010.
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 1986.
And some other quotations that appear in the book:
Yet, if we wield the sword of extermination as we advance, we have no reason to repine the havoc committed.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Ecology, 1832.
When civilized nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871.
and my favourite:
We have the apparent double anomaly, that Australia is better suited to some English plants than England is, and that some English plants are better suited to Australia than those Australian plants were which have given way before English intruders
Joseph Dalton Hooker, 1853.
Filed under: Quote, Scholarship and insights | Closed
On the cards for a couple of years now, the South African government is (apparently) preparing to enact its Expropriation Bill. Yolandi Groenewald, from the Mail and Guardian:
On Tuesday Beeld reported that Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson had proposed a new empowerment charter for agriculture requiring farmers to sell a 40% share of their farms and land to black shareholders.
[…]
The original target was for the transfer of 30% of farmland into black hands by 2014, but earlier this year the government admitted that this will not be possible because of an inadequate budget.
The government estimates that less than 6% of land has been transferred to black ownership since 1994. Some analysts agree that reform is moving at a snail’s pace, but the figure has also been disputed because it takes no account of private land transactions.
[…]
Joemat-Pettersson’s proposal has not been met with enthusiasm in commercial farming circles.
“To expect farmers to transfer 40% of their agricultural interest to black shareholders is outrageous and totally unacceptable,” said Transvaal Agricultural Union president Ben Marais.
“We’ve been experiencing difficulty for some time in meeting the minister to discuss agricultural issues. Meetings were postponed and in the last case she didn’t even bother to give notice that she would not be available.”
Everyone is freaking out that another Zimbabwe style grab is around the corner. Need that be a particularly bad thing? Not really, writes Ben Cousin recently for the blog Another Countryside, who argues that ‘Land Reform in Zimbabwe is not the disaster it is made out to be’:
A widely-accepted understanding of land reform in Zimbabwe is that farm invasions and the massive land redistribution that took place from 2000/01 were nothing but a corrupt land grab by ZANU-PF and its cronies. This is said to have initiated a calamitous decline in the agricultural sector from which it has never recovered. The story is that Zimbabwe moved from being the ‘breadbasket’ of the region to being a ‘basket case’, dependent on humanitarian aid to feed its people. An oft-repeated phrase in the media is the ‘collapse’ of commercial farming, conjuring up images of empty farms and a ravaged landscape.
But this stereotype of Zimbabwean land reform is profoundly unhelpful. It is not based on empirical evidence of the impacts of land reform, or an understanding of underlying complexities and trends over time. Seeing land reform as a total failure clouds understanding of complex new realities that farmers, government officials, political parties and other players are grappling with in trying to chart a way forward.
[…]
Contradicting the myth of total failure, the study finds that crop yields and output on the redistributed farms, and particularly on A1, smallholder plots, have increased since the early 2000s. From 2006 onwards more than two thirds of households have produced more maize than they can consume, whenever rainfall is sufficient. Cotton production has been a notable success in one of the sites, helped by processing companies providing inputs and a reliable market. Livestock populations in most sites have increased steadily over time. Many of the new ‘settlers’ are adamant that their livelihoods have improved considerably after land reform, despite four droughts over the past decade. In Masvingo Province, former beef ranches or wildlife farms are now supporting much higher rural populations than they did before redistribution.
[…]
What is the way forward from here? Suggestions that a new Zimbabwean government should attempt to reconstruct the old, dualistic farming sector dominated by large scale commercial farming will encounter strong political resistance from the many ordinary Zimbabweans who have benefited from land reform. In any event, a key component of the Global Political Agreement is that land reform is irreversible.
The central challenge of land policy in Zimbabwe is rather to build on the emerging successes of the new farmers and foster a dynamic and efficient agrarian economy with strong links to industry and the urban economy. Resolving ambiguities and uncertainties around land rights and land administration will be critically important. These are the issues that media reports, editorials and public debates on Zimbabwe’s land reform should focus on, rather than tired stereotypes of ‘disaster and failure’.
A complex issue.
Filed under: law, Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
The United States has formally apologised to American Indian tribes for “ill-conceived policies” and acts of violence against them.
Republican Senator Sam Brownback read the congressional resolution at an event attended by representatives of five Indian nations at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington: the Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Pawnee nations.
Four of the five are based in Oklahoma and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate are in South Dakota.
The Cherokee originally were from the south-eastern United States but were forced to migrate to Oklahoma in the early 1800s.
from Press Association
Filed under: United States | Closed
Despite a shared interest in using borders to explore the paradoxes of state-making and national histories, historians of the U.S.-Canada border region and those focused on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have generally worked in isolation from one another. A timely and important addition to borderlands history, Bridging National Borders in North America initiates a conversation between scholars of the continent’s northern and southern borderlands. The historians in this collection examine borderlands events and phenomena from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Some consider the U.S.-Canada border, others concentrate on the U.S.-Mexico border, and still others take both regions into account.
The contributors engage topics such as how mixed-race groups living on the peripheries of national societies dealt with the creation of borders in the nineteenth century, how medical inspections and public-health knowledge came to be used to differentiate among bodies, and how practices designed to channel livestock and prevent cattle smuggling became the model for regulating the movement of narcotics and undocumented people. They explore the ways that U.S. immigration authorities mediated between the desires for unimpeded boundary-crossings for day laborers, tourists, casual visitors, and businessmen, and the restrictions imposed by measures such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 Immigration Act. Turning to the realm of culture, they analyze the history of tourist travel to Mexico from the United States and depictions of the borderlands in early-twentieth-century Hollywood movies. The concluding essay suggests that historians have obscured non-national forms of territoriality and community that preceded the creation of national borders and sometimes persisted afterwards. This collection signals new directions for continental dialogue about issues such as state-building, national expansion, territoriality, and migration.
contents:
- Introduction: Borders and Their Historians in North America / Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill 1
- Part I. Peoples In Between
- Conflict and Cooperation in the Making of Texas-Mexico Border Society, 1840–1880 / Miguel Ãngel GonzÃlez Quiroga 33
- Between Race and Nation: The Creation of a Metis Borderland on the Northern Plains, 1850-1900 / Michel Hogue 59
- Part II. Environmental Control and State-Making
- Epidemics, Indians, and Border-Making in the Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest / Jennifer Seltz 91
- Divided Ranges: Trans-border Ranches and the Creation of National Space along the Western Mexico-U.S. Border / Rachel St. John 116
- The Scales of Salmon: Diplomacy and Conservation in the Western Canada-U.S. Borderlands / Lissa Wadewitz 141
- Part III. Border Enforcement and Contestation
- Crossing the Line: The INS and the Federal Regulation of the Mexican Border / S. Deborah Kang 167
- Caught in the Gap: The Transit Privilege and North America’s Ambiguous Borders / Andrea Geiger 199
- Part IV. Border Representation and National Identity
- The Welcoming Voice of the Southland: American Tourism across the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1880-1940 / Catherine Cocks 225
- Projecting the In-Between: Cinematic Representations of National Borders in North America, 1908-1940 / Dominique Bregent-Heald 249
- Glass Curtains and Storied Landscapes: The Fur Trade, National Boundaries, and Historians / Bethel Saler and Carolyn Podruchny 275
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
macca
via the deliciously sceptical Newspaper Rock
Filed under: United States, wacky | Closed
mythology of eurocentrism
Reason Wafawarova, from the state-owned Zimbabwean newspaper, The Herald (via AllAfricaNews):
European history, Western values, as well as Western democracy are all mythological concepts — they are pretty much a well-packaged set of propaganda designed to create in us a personality other than our own, a culture divorced from our own reality, and beliefs that have nothing or very little to do with our own setting.
[…]
Almost all of us have at one time attacked or blamed someone wrongly because we had been given a wrong history. So many murders have been perpetrated because someone believed a lie.
// //So many wars have been started because the population was lied to and a history was projected in such a way that it motivated people to kill. The George W. Bush — Tony Blair — John Howard tripartite Iraq lie of 2003 quickly comes to mind.
So people kill, destroy, murder, engage in wars and persecute other people because a certain history creates that behaviour in them. Africa suffers today because of a history that has caused this suffering.
So history is no casual peripheral thing that one just comes across as they pass through high school. It is one’s total orientation towards the world.
This is precisely why the European has arrogated himself the role of the world’s sole valid historian. He knows this way that he can shape a majority world population that lives on lies presented as the truth.
[…]
PF-Zapu was never ashamed of Russian backing during the liberation struggle. Equally Zanu-PF was never ashamed of Chinese, Romanian, Bulgarian and Yugoslavian support when they waged the war to liberate Zimbabwe.
These are countries that never colonised Zimbabwe and as such there is no sense of history that brings with it a sense of shame, guilt or pain.
So the Westerner has to repress painful information to maintain his privileges over African resources. To maintain the equilibrium, he needs to profit from the lies he tells himself and others. So he thrives on the lies he tells, the false perceptions and consciousness he creates in himself and others.
He tells himself that he alone names and describes investment laws and market forces; he alone defines democracy and human rights, he alone knows best what constitutes terrorists and he alone fights just wars.
He is aware that the truth and a more realistic history will undermine his gains; so he maintains this mythology that says all other people cannot do much without his involvement.
[…]
When the coloniser established segregation laws in Zimbabwe, the laws were against the good and the bad black person, so were the apartheid laws in South Africa, and equally both the good and bad “Negro” sat at the back of the bus in the United States.
// //But today we are told to consider the good white person when redistributing our stolen land, to consider the good white person when deciding who should invest in our country and how, to remember the good white person when we draft our own constitution and so on.
The West demands moderate conduct from the Palestinians as if the ritual bombings they suffer at the hands of Israelis each year are moderate. It is demanded of Afghanis and Iraqis that they be moderate with the Western invaders occupying their countries, as if the invasion of these countries was in itself a moderate idea.
A mythology organises the world, organises behaviour and it organises interpersonal and intergroup relations. It provides answers, right or wrong, correct or false; it does not matter.
Filed under: media, Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
african hospitality
Check out the incredible series African Hospitality from photographic artist Andrew Putter (a postcolonial take on the portrait series of the same name, by painter George Morlan, from way back in 1790). From Michael Stevenson Gallery:
Putter focuses on the ‘Wild Coast’ of South Africa in his new series of portraits. Many Europeans were shipwrecked along this coast in the 1600s and 1700s. Most fled or perished, but a handful were taken in by local Xhosa-speaking communities. Some of these European castaways formed deep ties with their African hosts, learning the language, marrying into the tribe, and dying as Africans. ‘Bessie’, for example, was a six-year-old British girl who washed up on the Mpondoland coast in the early 1700s, married a chief and became a great Xhosa queen.
[…]
Putter draws equally on the cultural histories of Europe and Africa in these works. Although the adornments and landscape are largely south-east African, the poses, compositions and lighting are heavily indebted to 18th-century English painting. Putter proposes that it is not inevitable for one culture to thrive at the expense of another, but that it is possible for new forms to emerge through the interplay of dissimilar cultures. Indeed, he shows that this interplay is already present in colonial history, gently reminding purists that everything is always already a mixture.
Found this via Africasacountry.
Filed under: art, Southern Africa | Closed
j. s. mill on american settlers
The northern and middle states of America are a specimen of this stage of civilization in very favourable circumstances; having, apparently, got rid of all social injustices and inequalities that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to ensure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of Chartism, and they have no poverty: and all that these advantages seem to have done for them is that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters.
J. S. Mill, 1848.
Filed under: Quote, United States | Closed
