In a speech in Sydney yesterday, before an audience of American lawyers, Noel Pearson of the Cape York Institute argued that the developments in recognising Native Title during the 1990s have left most Aboriginal communities no better:
Native title in this country is the sum total of whatever berry-picking rights Indigenous claimants might be able to prove by reference to their traditional laws and customs as they existed in 1788. […] So in the Australian law, the Indigenous hardly own the economic property on the lands they successfully claim. […] The Australian law on Native Title, since the original 1992 decision, has been an absolute travesty of misconception and intellectual shortcoming by the academics who contributed to the misconceptions, [and] the advocates who provided poor guidance to our federal and high courts in relation to these questions.
If I have interpreted Pearson correctly, he is calling for an Australian resurrection of the ideal of self-determination, but in a local format where the responsibility falls on the shoulders of Aboriginal communities and their leaders. Neither the government, nor any of its officials, has much of a role:
Part of the challenge of Indigenous recovery will be for the state to retreat while we build Indigenous responsibility and rebuild Indigenous people taking charge of their own lives.
For more, view the ABC’s report.
Filed under: Australia, law, Political developments | Closed
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Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
call for papers: anzlhs law and history conference: owning the past – whose past? whose present?
From their website:
The use and study of the past is constantly being refashioned and reinterpreted to construct meaning in the present, imparting understandings of a common but chaotic humanity. Because everyone and no one ‘owns’ history, the ownership of historical events and the right to speak of them remains deeply contested. What are the outcomes and practical challenges surrounding the construction of historical consciousness through and about law? Whose past is told and by whom? How does law’s past influence history’s present? And is there any such thing as the orderly evolution of legal ideas? This conference invites papers on the subject of ownership in history and law, and may include contributions on any of several broad themes: the contestation of memory; the ethics of representation and remembrance; the commoditization and consumption of traumatic pasts; transcultural and transgenerational trauma; new technologies of historical documentation; testimony and bearing witness; Indigenous knowledge; identity politics; citizenship; the ethics of reproducing historical narratives; colonialism and hegemony; ‘dark’ tourism and artefacts of law; and new legal imaginings and the contest with the legal past.
This is an interdisciplinary conference and papers are invited from scholars across a broad range of disciplines, as well as chronological and geographical contexts.
The conference is hosted by the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society (ANZLHS): www.waikato.ac.nz/law/anzlhs/
Filed under: Australia, Call for papers, Canada, Empire, law, New Zealand, Political developments, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has recently released the “State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples” dossier. A good overview of the contents in context can be found here.
Like any UNPFII statement about the plight of Indigenous peoples, there are the same generalising prescriptions about ‘culture’ that will sound warning bells to ‘unaffiliated’ Indigenous/non-settler individuals that fall outside of the parameters of ‘tradition’: a problem that has arisen since the trend that began in the late 1980s, which seeks to identify, recognise and perpetuate Aboriginality’s global value.
But the UNPFII seems to be treading more carefully with every publication in this regard. Yet again it has proven that is unafraid to disseminate a document that is thorough and provocative, in the hope that national governments might amend policy relating to:
- Poverty and Well Being
- Culture
- Environment
- Contemporary Education
- Health
- Human Rights
- Emerging Issues
Overall, this is a victory for those who seek to advance a global discourse of Indigenous struggle. As APO writes,
Although the state of the world’s indigenous peoples is alarming, there is some cause for optimism. The international community increasingly recognizes indigenous peoples’ human rights, most prominently evidenced by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous peoples themselves continue to organize for the promotion of their rights. They are the stewards of some of the world’s most biologically diverse areas and their traditional knowledge about the biodibversity of these areas is invaluable. As the effects of climate change are becoming clearer, it is increaslingly evident that indigenous peoples must play a central role in developing adaptation and mitigation efforts to this global challenge.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
This smartly designed website is a hub for postcolonial thinkers in Melbourne and the world. It is worth checking out if you haven’t already. Their mission statement:
The spectre of colonialism still haunts the world, despite assertions about the end of formal colonial control and the rise of democracy and universal human rights. The aim of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies is to understand and undo the continuing legacies of colonialism today: dispossession, displacement, racism, and intercultural violence. In particular, this entails understanding social and economic pressures and cultural prejudices faced by indigenous peoples and impoverished communities, supporting those facing the consequences of political upheaval and violence, and generating dialogue across worlds of continuing and often positive cultural difference.
The Institute fosters new alliances between community-based individuals, groups, organisations, and academics. It has two patrons—Justice Anthony North and Robyn Archer. Membership is local and international, and open to people from all walks of life.
The objectives of the Institute are to:
- Support efforts towards reconciliation between indigenous, settler, and migrant peoples;
- Understand the causes and experience of migration, refugee movement, and displacement;
- Promote public debate on the injustices of cultural and economic dispossession;
- Question racism and ethnic prejudice;
- Challenge xenophobia and excision of political and human rights;
- Foster innovative research and collaborative action on environmental and cultural sustainability;
- Encourage new modes of philanthropic and public engagement that move beyond individual, corporate, or parochial interests.
The Institute engages in activities that encompass academic inquiry, public debate, and artistic expression. Over the past decade, IPCS has:
- Fostered international connections and exchanges with academic institutions and independent scholars committed to similar aims across Australia and the Indian and Pacific Oceans
- Established a strong intellectual reputation through its Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and its book series Writing Past Colonialism with the University of Hawai’i Press
- Organised conferences, seminars, visual and performance art relating to its objectives
- Created a convivial space for public discussions on indigenous claims, refugees, and human rights
- Supported collaborations between university academics and public intellectuals in pursuing innovative research on security and insecurity in International Relations
settlercolonialstudies.org supports and follows the IPCS , and looks forward to contributing in any way to the Melbourne intellectual environment tof which they are a significant part.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Website | Closed
Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorising Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities”, GLQ: A journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16 (2010):
Abstract:
Settlement conditions the formation of modern queer subjects and politics in the United States. This essay newly interprets the settler formation of U.S. queer modernities by inspiration of Jasbir Puar’s critique of homonationalism. Puar argues that homonationalism produces U.S. queers as regulatory over the racialized and sexualized populations targeted within the imperial biopolitics of the war on terror. I explain homonationalism as a quality of U.S. queer modernities having formed within a colonial biopolitics, in which the terrorizing sexual colonization of Native peoples produces modern sexuality as a function of settlement. This essay reinterprets historical accounts at the intersections of queer, Native, and colonial studies to show how a colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality relationally produces Native and settler sexual subjects. Modern queer projects enact this biopolitics when their normatively non-Native and settler form distances Native people from sexual modernity, even as they seek modern sexual freedoms in the settler state. Homonationalism arises here, as one effect of settlement’s naturalization and defense in U.S. queer modernities, and as one means by which the continued colonization of Native peoples and land shapes the imperial projections of the United States and its subjects. Settler homonationalism may be destabilized by marking and challenging its historical formation and holding queer projects accountableto Native struggles for decolonization.
Filed under: gender, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Adam J. Barker, “The Contemporary Reality of Canadian Imperialism: Settler Colonialism and the Hybrid Colonial State”, from American Indian Quarterly, Summer 2009.
Abstract:
My fundamental contention is this: Canadian society remains driven by the logic of imperialism and engages in concerted colonial action against Indigenous peoples whose claims to land and self-determination continue to undermine the legitimacy of Canadian authority and hegemony. While concepts such as colonialism or imperialism tend to conjure up dated images and notions of pre-twentieth-century European adventurism, the imperial reality of contemporary Canada is quite different. In order to understand how colonialism as an ideology that generates power for imperial elites is expressed in Canada, it is necessary to understand two key points: first, the nature of contemporary imperialism and the role Canada plays in an imperial system that extends geographically beyond borders and internally into individual lives; second, the nature of Canadian society as a Settler society and the channels that are created for colonial force through the Settler identity of the majority population of the Canadian state. I assert that colonialism as it is carried out internally in the Canadian state follows some aspects of established frameworks of contemporary imperialism but that understanding the unique identity of Settler peoples and assessing the power dynamics in the Canadian state are required for an accurate and useful model of Canadian colonialism. These two concepts allow for a discussion of the Canadian “society of control,” which pits Settler and Indigenous peoples against each other and Indigenous societies against themselves and benefits government and corporate elites at the expense of individual and collective autonomy.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
FEEGI’s biennial conference (Empire and Identity in the Early Modern World) is now only a couple of weeks away. From their website:
The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI) aims to encourage scholarship and collaboration across the boundaries of national histories and disciplinary frameworks.
Members come to FEEGI from a wide range of fields, interests, and perspectives. Some members study Europe, others European colonies overseas. Some focus on European expansion, while others work on powerful kingdoms and empires or small scale societies around the globe with which Europeans had different kinds of interactions. We focus on the colonist and the colonized, on the conqueror and the conquered. We specialize in different oceanic basins and land masses. Some of us adopt a global perspective while others pursue microhistory. Some live within nations whose histories are deeply entangled with the issues central to FEEGI’s intellectual scope. But, together, we look at places and people touched directly and indirectly, benignly or catastrophically, by the process of enhanced global interaction that commenced in the fourteenth century.
FEEGI holds a biennial conference in even-numbered years. The first meeting in 1996 established a practice that continues to the present: panels at FEEGI meetings are organized thematically, rather than geographically or by nation, to encourage comparative thinking across large amounts of space and time. By custom all sessions have been plenary, thus privileging the collective and collegial interaction which is at the heart of FEEGI’s enterprise, and offering the possibility of making theoretical connections outside the limits of a conference session.
The conference program has been published too:
Friday, 22 February 2008
On Friday, registration and all panels and breaks will be in the Leavey Program Room in Leavey Center, Georgetown University. The evening reception is in the historic Riggs Library.
8:30am–9:00am—Registration
9:00am—Welcome from the President of FEEGI
Kris Lane, College of William and Mary
People in Motion
9:15am–10:45am—Session OneChair: Kris Lane, College of William and Mary and President of FEEGI
Mary Jane Maxwell, Western Kentucky University—“Journeys of Faith and Fortune: Christian Merchants in the Dar al-Islam”
Richard Bond, Virginia Wesleyan College—“‘Most Villainously Detaining’: English and Spanish Captives in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic”
Jeff Fortin, State University of New York at Oneonta—“African-American Imperialism: Creating the Black Atlantic World, 1795–1817”10:45am–11:15am—Coffee Break
Imperial Strategies
11:15am–12:30pm—Session TwoChair: Carla Gardina Pestana, Miami University
Mark Meuwese, University of Winnipeg—“Underestimating the Natives: Revisiting the Dutch West India Company’s Failure to Capture the Portuguese Empire in the Southern Atlantic, 1623–1626”
Lauren Benton, New York University—“Island Chains: Penal Colonies and Imperial Sovereignty, 1780-1840”12:30pm–2:30pm—Lunch
Lunch independently—a list of local restaurants will be provided.
Transforming Local Identities
2:30pm–4:00pm—Session ThreeChair: Willem Klooster, Clark University
Sebastian Marc Barreveld, Stanford University—“‘Can Leopards lose their spots?’ The education of Ambonese children in the United Provinces, 1621–1629”
Zoltán Biedermann, Center for Overseas History, Lisbon—“Manipulating Identities: Princely Conversions in Early Colonial Sri Lanka (1500–1650)”
Poppy Fry, Saint Anselm College—“The ‘Fingo Emancipation’ of 1835 and the Development of Cape Liberalism”4:00pm–4:30pm—Coffee Break
Framing Empire
4:30pm–6:00pm—Session FourChair: Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania
Anya Zilberstein, Concordia University—“‘England is Like this a Cold Northern Country’: Natural History, Climate, and the Idea of Regions in the British Empire”
Giancarlo L. Casale, University of Minnesota—“Empires of the Mind in Tunuslu Hajji Ahmed’s World Map”6:15pm–7:15pm—Reception
Riggs Library, Georgetown University
Saturday, 23 February 2008
On Saturday, our base is the Intercultural Center (ICC), home of the GU History Department. For lunch, we return to the Leavey Program Room. For the banquet, we head to Adams-Morgan.
8:30am–9:00am—Registration
History Department, ICC 600
Trades and Traders
9:00am–10:30am—Session FiveChair: Marcy Norton, George Washington University
Location: ICC 103
Peter Mark, Wesleyan University and Jose da Silva Horta, Universidade de Lisboa—“New Christian and Jewish Weapons Traders in 17th-century West Africa: From Lisbon to Amsterdam to Marrakesh to Senegal”
George Bryan Souza, University of Texas at San Antonio—“Sri Lankan Cinnamon, the Mahabadda, the Portuguese and the Company: Commerce and Communal Relations, c. 1590–c. 1690”
Henriette de Bruyn Kops, Georgetown University—“Seaborne Imperialists or Tightfisted Opportunists? Conflicting Images of the Dutch in the 17th Century”10:30am–11:00am—Coffee Break (ICC 600)
Views of Empire
11:00am–12:30pm—Session SixChair: Philip J. Stern, American University
Location: ICC 103
Eleanor Hughes, Yale Center for British Art—“Classical Orient, Romantic Orient: 18th-Century British Visual Culture and the Levant”
Phyllis Hunter, University of North Carolina Greensboro—“From Massachusetts to Madras: Renegotiating Identity in the First British Empire”
Amélia Polónia, University of Porto—“Global and Local Interactions in the Portuguese Overseas Empire: Networks and Cooperation Patterns in the Construction of Social Identities of Seafaring Communities”12:30pm–2:00pm—Business Meeting and Lunch
Leavey Program Room, Leavey Center.
All FEEGI members are welcome.
On the Agenda: Elections and other discussion of FEEGI business.
Sandwiches and drinks will be provided.Commodities and Objects
2:00pm–3:30pm—Session SevenChair: David Hancock, University of Michigan
Location: ICC 103
Elizabeth Sutton, University of Iowa—“Natural History and Ethnography: Classifying Animals, Plants, and Africans in Early Modern Dutch Travel Accounts”
Michelle Craig McDonald, Stockton College—“From Imperial to National Commodity: How Coffee’s Identity Was Repackaged”
Christina Folke Ax, University of Copenhagen—“Objects of Empire and the Construction of Identity in 18th-century Colonial Iceland”3:30pm–4:00pm—Coffee Break (ICC 600)
Conflict on the Margins
4:00pm–5:30pm—Session EightChair: Linda Rupert, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Location: ICC 103
Matthew Restall, Pennsylvania State University—“Yucatan and Belize: A New History of a Forgotten Frontier”
John Savage, Lehigh University—“Sacred Science in Slave Society: ‘Poison’ and Identity in Martinique”
Allan Dwyer, Memorial University of Newfoundland—“‘The most outrageous Set of People’: British Imperial Identity and the Newfoundland Irish Threat, 1740–1800”
Banquet and Keynote Address
6:30pm–8:30pmKris Lane, President of FEEGI, College of William and Mary:
“Everybody Must Get Stoned:
Rock Medicine in the Early Modern World”
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights, Seminar | Closed
The latest edition of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies includes some pretty interesting reviews. District 9 (the 2009 film that director Neill Blomkamp insisted was not meant to convey a “political” message, but contains all sorts of settler colonial signposting) is given a roundtable review. Also, in the book reviews section, you can find a number of provocative new books given a working over.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
The Legal History Blog has called our attention to a conference to be held at UC Irvine in April. The program looks great:
April 16th
Welcome and Introduction: Catherine Fisk (Law, UC Irvine)
Session 1: Interactions – Law, Text, History
Chair Dirk Hartog (History, Princeton)
Speakers:
Steven Wilf (Law, Connecticut), “Law/Text/Past”; Norman Spaulding (Law, Stanford), “On the Interdependence of Law, History and Memory”; Kunal Parker (Law, Miami), “Common Law Thought and the Problem of History”; Marianne Constable (Rhetoric, Berkeley), “‘In the Name of the Law’: Law as Claim to Justice”; Commentator: Christopher Tomlins (Law, UC Irvine)
Session 2: Intersections – Law, History, Culture
Chair Ariela Gross (Law, USC)
Speakers:
Peter Goodrich (Law, Cardozo), “Specters of Law: Why the History of the Legal Spectacle has not been Written”; Shai Lavi (Law, Tel Aviv), “Law as World: Secular History and Jewish Ritual in Nineteenth Century Germany”; Assaf Likhovski (Law, UCLA and Tel Aviv), “Chasing Ghosts: On Writing Cultural History of Tax Law”; Roger Berkowitz (Political Studies & Human Rights, Bard College), “History and the Noble Art of Lying”; Commentator: John Comaroff (Anthropology, Chicago)
April 17th
Session 3: Interpretations – Law, Polity, Economy
Chair: Risa Goluboff (Law, Virginia)
Speakers:
Ritu Birla (History, Toronto), “Law as Economy: Convention, Corporation, Currency”; Roy Kreitner (Radcliffe Institute and Law, Tel Aviv), “Money in the 1890s: The Circulation of Law, Politics, and Economics”; Christopher Schmidt (Law, Chicago-Kent), “Conceptions of Law in the Civil Rights Movement”; Barbara Welke (History & Law, Minnesota), “Owning Hazard in the Modern American Consumer Marketplace”; Commentator: Morton Horwitz (Law, Harvard)
Session 4: Instantiations – Law, Sovereignty, Justice
Chair Laura Kalman (History, Santa Barbara)
Speakers:
Laura Edwards (History, Duke), “The Peace: The Meaning and Production of Law in the Post-Revolutionary U.S.”; John Witt (Law, Yale), “Escape and Engagement: The Laws of War in the Early American Republic”; Paul Frymer (Politics, Princeton), “Building an American Empire: Territorial Expansion and Indian Removal, 1787-1850”; Mariana Valverde (Criminology Centre, Toronto) “‘The honour of the Crown is at stake’: Aboriginal Land Claims Litigation in Canada and the Epistemology of Sovereignty”; Commentator: Robert W. Gordon (Law, Yale)
Filed under: Call for papers, Seminar | Closed
