zunguzungu
It took me a long time to realize that the difference between settler colonialism and franchise/metropolitan/regular-old colonialism was the hinge for what I’m trying to do with the relationship between the United States and Kenya in my dissertation. In a very complicated way, of course; the problem with Kenya settlers is that they thought they were a settler colony when they actually weren‘t and couldn’t be, a problem they had in common with South African settlers, for whom the problem was not as grave but just as unsolvable. There just weren’t enough settlers, such that the colonial economy — and thus, the keys to the kingdom — always rested, in the final analysis, on African labor. The white settler community wanted Kenya to be a “white man’s country,” like the United States and Australia, and they failed because they lost the demographic war they often didn’t even realize they were fighting.
The reason it took me so long to find that piece of the conceptual puzzle, I think, was because “post-colonialism,” to the extent one can generalize, had quite programmatically taught me not to observe the distinction. Theorists of colonialism and postcolonialism tend to treat “it” like it’s one thing, tend to act as if it had a definite historical form and anatomy about which a variety of generalizations can be made and from which all sorts of statements about culture can be derived. This is not surprising; the pantheon of postcolonialist thinkers who rose to prominence in the 80′s traded on that notion quite successfully — and wrote a lot of important work whose foundational statusis is more or less proven by the extent to which we’ve moved beyond it — yet to the extent that “postcolonialism” became a subject of knowledge, it tended to turn “empire” and “colonialism” into an increasingly singular thing.
Without attributing intention to the founders of that canon, it’s not surprising that it happened that way. In part, making “the colonial” into a very specific thing allowed us to enjoy a triumphalist sense of post-colonialism in the present, insulating us in time from the sins of the past, and in this way making postcolonialism a safe discourse for us now. And it is also insulated us in political space; since empire was a thing that Britain and France did, the American postcolonialists — which was most of them — could safely excoriate the sins of an empire with whose legacy their audience had almost nothing to do with. The more specifically you defined “the postcolonial,” after all, the fewer people you alienated.
More here: ‘Postsettlerism is not a good thing’
Filed under: Africa, postcolonialism, United States | Closed
Cultural Studies Review, vol. 15 no. 2 September 2009.
Line-up:
Editorial—JOHN FROW & KATRINA SCHLUNKE
Critical Indigenous Theory
—Co-editor AILEEN MORETON-ROBINSON
Introduction—AILEEN MORETON-ROBINSON
‘In the City of Blinding Lights’: Indigeneity, Cultural Studies and the Errants of Colonial Nostalgia—JODI A. BYRD
‘There is Nothing that Identifies Me to that Place’: Indigenous Women’s Perceptions of Health Spaces and Places—BRONWYN FREDERICKS
In the Northern Territory Intervention What is Saved or Rescued and at What Cost?— IRENE WATSON
Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of Patriarchal White Sovereignty—AILEEN MORETON-ROBINSON
Critical Indigenous Studies: From Difference to Density—CHRIS ANDERSEN
Indigenous Existentialism and the Body—BRENDAN HOKOWHITU
Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn—ROBERT WARRIOR
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Selections:
The aim of The Returns of Zionism is clear, and Piterberg does not hide it: the total de-legitimization of the Jewish nation-state founded in Palestine. A quarter of a century ago, this idea had a certain novelty; it aroused curiosity, especially as Zionist historiography was characterized by conformism, not to say an antiquated and dusty quality; but since then the anti-Zionists have established their own conformism and become stuck in its mire. At the same time, Israeli historiography has liberated itself from many of its traditional weaknesses, very comparable to those of the French or German historiographies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Moreover, the extreme politicization of anti-Zionist discourse and its considerable exposure in the media have not benefited research. One could say that, like post-modernism, anti-Zionism has aged badly. But if works whose aim is the de-legitimization of the Jewish national movement and the State of Israel are legion, Piterberg’s is distinguished by its high intellectual standard and the general culture of the author. This does not mean that he succeeds in avoiding the usual faults of the genre; but if he does not discover America, his book has sufficient merit to deserve an in-depth critical reading.
[…]
For Piterberg, there can be no solution except for the end of the Jewish state. Any other nationalism can transform itself, but the only future for ‘settler colonialism’ must be the total disappearance of the state it produced. […] First of all, a colonization that is not comparable to any other colonial society in its social and economic structures cannot be called a colonization. If Mandate-era Jewish Palestine was not based on any of the characteristic features of a colonial society—the exploitation of a native work-force; the confiscation of the natural riches of the country; a monopoly of political power that created two different classes of inhabitants, citizens and others who had no rights—it could not have been a colonial society. The truth was rather the opposite: in order to build a nation, the Jews of Palestine formed themselves into a self-sufficient and closed society. The cult of manual labour and the necessity of creating an infrastructure for the reception of new immigrants helped to prevent the emergence of exploitative relationships.
[…]
The founders of Israel, the young people who came to Palestine a few years before and after the First World War, never hid their intentions. The aim of Zionism was the conquest of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. Berl Katznelson, the labour-movement ideologist, never thought there could be any doubt about it: ‘The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest’, he said in 1929. And in the same breath: ‘It is not by chance that I use military terms when speaking of settlement.’ In 1922 Ben-Gurion had already said the same: ‘We are conquerors of the land facing an iron wall, and we have to break through it.’ That is why the Jewish Labour Movement was never a socialist movement like the others, nor was the Histadrut ever a trade-union organization like the rest. The Labour Movement was mobilized to build the nation; for the sake of national unity it abandoned any real intention of changing society. Equality was not an aim as such. The social services—at that time perhaps the most advanced in the world outside the Soviet Union—were those required by the worker, conceived as a soldier in the great army of conquerors of the land, for a people that needed a home more than any other national community in Europe.
The conquest of the land was thus an existential necessity. Zionism was a stringent nationalism, a radical nationalism; but to claim that the arrivals were white settlers driven by a colonialist mind-set does not correspond to historical reality.
Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Settlers and their States’ (His response), New Left Review 62 March 2010.
Selections:
Politically, the most consequential theme is the thorny C-word, colonialism. I am frankly baffled by Sternhell’s misrepresentation, or misunderstanding, of my arguments for situating the Zionist project in Palestine and the state of Israel within the framework of comparative settler-colonialism. He attempts to refute them by stating that the Zionist venture in Palestine was not based on the exploitation of native Arab labour and that it did not have ‘monopoly of political power’. But the fundamental point about a white-settler colony—New England, Virginia, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina—is that it is predicated on white labour, on complete closure vis-à-vis the natives, on gradual territorial expansion, under the bayonets of a metropole colonial power for as long as necessary; and on the creation of a self-sufficient economy that can attract more settler immigration. Contrary to Sternhell’s allegation that this notion is ‘dated’, a buoyant field of comparative settler colonialism has produced some of the most penetrating new studies of these societies over the past decades. Their starting-point is the recognition that, from the 16th century on, European expansion and conquest produced two related but clearly distinguishable forms of colonialism. One was metropole colonialism, in which the European powers conquered and ruled vast territories, but without the emigration there of Europeans seeking to make these territories their national home: British India is a good example. The other type was settler colonialism, in which conquest brought with it substantial waves of European settlers who, with the passage of time, sought to make the colony their national patrimony. This process entailed a relationship with the indigenous people that could range from dispossession to elimination, or from slavery—which for the most part did not use the native population—to cheap labour, depending on the economic and social formation of the given settler society.
The achievements of the comparative study of settler colonialisms have been at once scholarly and political. Several of these colonies gave birth to powerful nation-states which have asserted their own hegemonic narratives, nationally and internationally. The comparative field not only questions these narratives, through countervailing evidence and interpretation; it also offers an alternative account of the social formations themselves. In the process, three fundamental features common to these hegemonic settler myths are undermined. The first of these is the putative uniqueness of each settler nation; the second, their privileging of the settlers’ intentions, as sovereign subjects, at the expense of the natives’ consciousness. Third, the supposed inconsequence of the natives to the form each settler society takes; in other words, the conflict with the natives is not denied, but the fundamental role that this conflict has played in shaping the identity of the settler nation is written out. It is within the typology of settler colonialisms that I place the Zionist colonization of Palestine and the state of Israel—a move which surely should have put to rest the tedious contention that Zionism could not be termed a colonial venture because it lacked the features of metropole colonialism; as if anyone were suggesting otherwise. What its apologists fail to confront is the settler-colonial paradigm.
I am by no means the first to suggest it.
Pointing to the groundbreaking works of Gershon Shafir and Patrick Wolfe, Piterberg then goes on to illustrate in greater depth the value of applying the settler colonialism paradigm to the Zionist designs of Israel. In doing so he makes an exquisite defence of his recent book, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (Verso 2008) – a watershed for settler colonial studies and critical revisionism on Israel/Palestine.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Maria Giannacopoulos, ‘The Nomos of Apologia’, Griffith Law Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2009.
Abstract:
On 13 February 2008, the newly elected Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, offered an apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous peoples – an apology he said he offered ‘without qualification’. His ‘unqualified’ apology, however, was crafted for the purpose of bringing ‘the first two centuries of our settled history to a close’. In this article, I not only contend that Rudd’s apology comes with qualifications but also that it is unqualified. Rudd says: ‘but my proposal is this: If the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia’. This is precisely a moment of ‘qualification’, since Rudd attempts to delineate the boundaries through which the recipients are to ‘accept’ his terms. But further, the delineation of the boundaries for the comprehension of this apology also draw our attention to the ways in which the apology is ‘unqualified’ – that is to say, it silences and denies the more complete context of colonial violence for which Rudd should be apologizing, or at least acknowledging, but instead is silent. This contradiction in the text of Rudd’s apology is not accidental: it reproduces the violent and productive contradictions that are constitutive of Australian law and sovereignty. Rudd’s apology is for specific laws of the past but not for the system of law itself, which in the Australian context is an effect and perpetuation of colonial violence. By remaining silent on the larger questions of the place of white law in a still-colonial Australian context, Rudd can seemingly logically call a period of history ‘settled’, ‘resolved’ and, alarmingly, ‘closed’.
Filed under: Australia, law, Political developments, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Corinn Columpar, Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010):
Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film examines the politics of representing Aboriginality, in the process bringing frequently marginalized voices and visions, issues and debates into the limelight. Corinn Columpar uses film theory, postcolonial theory, and Indigenous theory to frame her discussion of the cinematic construction and transnational circulation of Aboriginality. The result is a broad interdisciplinary analysis of how Indigeneity is represented in cinema, supported by more than twenty rigorous and theoretically informed case studies of contemporary feature films by both First- and Fourth-World filmmakers in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Columpar relies heavily on textual analysis of the films but also explores contextual issues in filmmaking such as funding, personnel, modes of production, and means of distribution.
Part one of Unsettling Sights focuses on contact narratives in which the Aboriginal subject is constructed in reactive response to a colonizing or invading presence. Films such as The Piano and The Proposition, wherein a white man “goes native,” and The New World and Map of the Human Heart, which approach contact from the perspective of an Aboriginal character, serve as occasions to examine the ways in which Aboriginal identities are negotiated within dominant cinema. Part two shifts the focus from contact narratives to films that seek to define Aboriginality on its own terms, with reference to a (lost) homeland and/or Indigenous practices of (hi)story-telling: while texts such as Once Were Warriors and Smoke Signals foster an engagement with issues of deterritorialization, relocation, and urbanization, discussion of beDevil, Atanarjuat, and The Business of Fancydancing, among others, bring questions of voice, translation, and the relationship between cinema and oral tradition to the forefront.
Unsettling Sights is the first significant, scholarly examination of Aboriginality and cinema in an international context and will be invaluable to scholars and students in many fields including cinema studies, anthropology, critical race studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
bastard
Adam Kok III
Nicholaas Waterboer
Hermanus van Wyk
You’re looking at some amazing South African leaders: first, Adam Kok III, the man who led the Griquas from Philippolis across the Drakensberg into Kokstad; Nicholaas Waterboer, the man who held the fort at Griquatown while Free State and colonial administrations (and their lawyers) squabbled over the diamond fields that fell within his inherited jurisdiction; and finally Hermanus van Wyk, the man who established Rehoboth as a city-state for his Baster polity.
These amazing (oil on canvas) portraits come from the 2010 series of the artist Cobus van Bosch, entitled Bastard.
which I found via Africasacountry
What a collection.
Filed under: art, Southern Africa | Closed
The Production of Colonial Historiography, Frankfurt University, Germany, October 4-5 2010.
What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, University of York, UK, July 3-5 2010.
Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies, De Paul University, Chicago, November 5-6 2010.
Exploring the Red Atlantic, University of Georgia, Nov 12-13 2010.
Reconceptualising Migrations: Movements and Struggles, University of Bologna, Italy, 20-21 May 2010.
AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, call for papers.
Postcolonial Intimacies, edited collection, call for papers.
(With thanks again to those who sent in their details. Keep it coming.)
Filed under: Call for papers, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Abstract:
Nearly six months after the horrific episodes of racist violence at Cronulla beach in Australia, Israeli artillery fire killed seven Palestinians on a northern Gaza beach. This article examines how, in both sites, the beach is constructed as the legitimate preserve of an aggressive majority that maintains its fragile sense of cartographic hegemony through an excessively violent mapping of the racialised Arab Other’s body. The trans-national mapping of the somatic violence of whiteness will be analysed through a reading of Arab embodiment in the Australian and Israeli contexts of racial oppression and territorial aggression.
Keywords: white cartographic anxiety; colonial settler cartography; Arab bodies; Cronulla beach, Australia; Beit Lahiya beach, Gaza; Palestine/Israel
more:
The present article discusses the current contexts of Australian and Israeli acts of colonial-settler territorial aggression on the beach. It traces how Arab bodies on beaches in Cronulla and Gaza have been occupied somatically and mentally by white centres of discursive, military and political hegemony. These centres comprise not only governments and their militaries but also their media and citizens who appropriate volatile yet sacrosanct imaginaries of self-definition through an anxious cartography of being. I argue that Australian and Israeli self-constitution as ‘‘sovereign’’ nation-states of a Eurocentric history have been made in a spatial geometry of oppression. The physical annexation of foundational violence against indigenous populations still informs the cultural behaviour of these states in dealing with threatening minoritised bodies evoking spectres of national guilt and of drowning otherness. Maps graphically lineate the borders that mark their porosity and solidity with bodies that inhabit, populate, roam and (un)settle the designated area. It is, however, often left unclear what the social construction of territory really implies and what it explains. As several meanings can be attached to territory, the key question is not whether territory is socially constructed but how it is constructed within a series of racialising and disciplining circumstances where such violent instantiations of power affect the bodies of those entangled in such cartographic distributions. This article tries then to sharpen facile constructivist claims regarding territory when faced with physical human loss and anguish. I proceed to do this by tracing the encompassing reach of colonial-settler oppression that treads over any racialised territory, even on the beach as a space of unmitigated enjoyment. Engendered in this textual corpus are the spectral corpses and wounds that haunt the generative violence of such a deconstructive project. I contextualise this project with the ability of suffering Arab bodies to disrupt and repudiate their reduction merely into aesthetic victims by explaining the political relationality and inextricability of these events from operations of sovereign power.
Filed under: Australia, Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The media frenzy over Eugene Terre’Blanche’s death has been a great source of interest over the past few weeks. It turned out to be remarkable for this blog, as I wrote a little piece on Mr. TB and the AWB over a month before his death. Sadly, no journalist (to my knowledge) thought it fit to reprint my inkling, that the AWB were on their way to formulating a (very indigenous-esque) land rights-based discourse, based on the historical exposition of property law as it developed in South Africa.
Rather, in the white popular media, emanating strongly from England and America, most journalists were motivated to show off their amazing rhetoric and hyperbole to (re-)prove just how repugnant that old chestnut (the racist white South Africa) still is. Violence in South Africa (read: the ‘poor, angry black’), in these accounts, was the exceptional but natural consequence of post-apartheid reconfigurations (read: the ‘evil whites’). What would have been more refreshing is if the authors contextualised the murder within a number of historical patterns of rural unrest, mistrust, reconciliation and compensation that feature not only in Southern Africa, but all settler sites.
Rather disconcertingly, parts of academic discourse reproduced a classic black/white binary just as good as the media. In the H-net discussion server – which is a brilliant resource, btw – two discussions on Violence in South Africa slowly transformed into a mudslinging debate centred around the ‘race’ of the writers and the meaning of a particular turn of phrase. As the discussion wore on, it became embarrassing to participate and even to read.
A recent article in a Kenyan newspaper has been published, that brings – albeit selectively and a little curiously in places – a number of conjunctures and ironies into focus with an appraisal of Eugene Terre’Blanche’s death and recent violence in South Africa. It is the most refreshing thing I have read on the whole furore. Jenerali Ulimwengu, ‘Terre’blanche the white supremacist is dead, the ironies of oppression live on’, The East African (via AllAfricaNews):
That he should die in a pay dispute is an anticlimax. One other irony is that he should get himself killed at a time when his antics had become so irrelevant to the politics of South Africa that the only interest he was drawing was from those in the business of studying curious insects.
Sadly, the ironies surrounding Terre’blanche and people of his ilk do not end there. His name — meaning ‘white land’ — suggests French ancestry. My guess is his people were among the French Huguenots who fled France to escape persecution at the hands of rabid Catholic inquisitors who were hunting down and burning at the stake all followers of the doctrine taught by a “heretic” named Martin Luther.
Some of those who ran away went to Holland, and some among these later moved again to Southern Africa with the “Boer” influx in the 17th and 18th centuries, which eventually led to the founding of a state based on extreme forms of exclusionism, racism and xenophobia.
Thus those who had run away from repression became master repressors themselves.
The irony of erstwhile victims becoming perpetrators of the injustices they themselves once suffered is one of those realities of life that beggars belief, even though here a crooked argument may be discerned: We were oppressed because we are special; we shall not allow ourselves to go through what we went through again, and to effect this resolve we are prepared for anything, including oppressing others.
It is the pattern that also emerges from the Middle East, where a Jewish state, basing its claims on land titles embedded in arcane scrolls that only the initiated can understand, is lording it over the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs whose only transgression is to want to live in a country that they have always called home. Apparently, the sufferings of the Jews during the Holocaust — which were truly horrific — justify any exactions that the state of Israel feels like imposing on its non-Jewish citizens and neighbours.
Just like the Huguenots who became “Boer” colonisers in South Africa, the Jewish state couches its philosophy in a doctrine of divine selection that bestows powers on Israel that no temporal arrangements can vary, literally dragging God into a land dispute.
Filed under: Africa, media, Political developments, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Libby Porter, Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2010).
Colonialization has never failed to provoke discussion and debate over its territorial, economic and political projects, and their ongoing consequences. This work argues that the state-based activity of planning was integral to these projects in conceptualizing, shaping and managing place in settler societies. Planning was used to appropriate and then produce territory for management by the state and in doing so, became central to the colonial invasion of settler states. Moreover, the book demonstrates how the colonial roots of planning endure in complex (post)colonial societies and how such roots, manifest in everyday planning practice, continue to shape land use contests between indigenous people and planning systems in contemporary (post)colonial states.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
