Swinburne Institute for Social Research

Democracy & Justice – Special Seminar Wednesday, 17 July, 13:00-15:00, BA912 (Hawthorn Campus)

‘Comparative Contemporary Frontiers’

Alex Young and Timothy Neale

Two brief papers followed by discussion

Discussant: Lorenzo Veracini

‘“Are Mexicans Indigenous?” Settler Colonialism as A Paradigm for The Study of The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands’, Alex Young, University of Southern California

Abstract: As the work of Australian settler colonial theorists has begun to make inroads into U.S. scholarship as a paradigm for understanding “Westward expansion,” one region of the U.S. has proven a consistent stumbling block is the Southwestern Borderlands. The site of multiple forms of imperial conquest, the political and cultural formations of the contemporary U.S.-Mexican borderlands stand as something of a palimpsest of competing colonialisms, troubling any attempt to imagine a clear binary between settler and indigenous. Indeed, in one of the most controversial recent monographs, Comanche Empire, Pekka Hämäläinen argues that we must recognize indigenous sovereignties as themselves capable of imperialism. In this paper I will give an overview of recent works of scholarship of the US borderlands in order to explore both how the history of the Southwestern borderlands might serve to trouble the often Manichean applications of settler colonial theory in the U.S. context, but also to consider how the insights of transnational settler colonial studies might serve as an important explanatory tool for some of the borderlands’ more persistent contradictions.

‘Wild Rivers, Wild Time: Resilient Frontiers and Cape York Peninsula’, Timothy Neale, University of Melbourne Abstract: Recently, the Queensland government has begun attempting to ‘replace’ the Wild Rivers Act 2005, a

catchment-based environmental regulation requiring development setbacks from designated waterways. Decried as ‘green tape’ hampering Indigenous futures in the far north, the Act provoked sufficient ire in Cape York Peninsula to attract the attention of federal opposition leader Tony Abbott and, in turn, the interest of several parliamentary inquiries. But under Premier Newman’s administration the Act still survives and has continued to enjoy broad support in the Gulf and Channel country. Why this disparity between regions? This paper suggests that the Wild Rivers controversy should be understood in the context of the persistent failure of the settler project in Cape York Peninsula – its having been, to quote Noel Loos, a site of ‘uncompleted colonisation’ – a failure that has both led to the entrenchment of ‘wildness’ as a constitutive value of the region and, more recently, its availability to claim under native title and Indigenous land legislation. A resiliently remote, ecologically ‘intact,’ comparatively depopulated and majority Indigenous region, the present uses of the Peninsula’s persistent ‘wildness’ places pressure upon binary conceptualisations of the settler- Indigenous problematic and opens up questions about the future of such regions within the settler-colonial nation state.

Biographical notes:

Timothy Neale is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, currently engaged in a project concerning Queensland’s Wild Rivers legislation. He has recently published papers in Australian Humanities Review and Griffith Law Review on this topic.

Alex Trimble Young is a Provost’s PhD fellow in the English department at the University of Southern California. His recent publications include an article on Deleuzian rhizomatics and the settler colonial imaginary in Western American Literature entitled ‘Settler Sovereignty and The Rhizomatic West’. With Erik Altenbernd, he is co-editing, a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies on the concept of the frontier in transnational history.

Lorenzo Veracini is at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism. He has authored Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010). Lorenzo is managing editor of Settler Colonial Studies.

Sarah Maddison, ‘Indigenous identity, ‘authenticity’ and the structural violence of settler colonialism’, Identities (iFirst 2013).

In many ways, the structural violence of settler colonialism continues to dominate the lived experience of Indigenous populations, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in contemporary Australia. One aspect of this structural violence concerns the regulation of Indigenous identity, today perpetuated through state monitoring of the ‘authenticity’ of Aboriginal people. This article argues that the contest over Indigenous identity perpetuates a form of symbolic political violence against Indigenous people. It considers the ways in which structural violence against Indigenous identity has featured in Australia’s settler colonial regime and examines the particular violence faced by urban-dwelling Aboriginal people, who endure much contemporary scrutiny of the ‘authenticity’ of their Indigeneity. As a case study, the article examines the symbolic violence associated with a particular legal case in Australia and, in light of this analysis, concludes that settler colonies could make a decolonising gesture by legislating for the protection of Indigenous identity.

Rebe Taylor, ‘Genocide, Extinction and Aboriginal Self-determination in Tasmanian Historiography’, History Compass 11, 6 (2013).

The principal aim of this article is to survey the long and complex relationship between the ideas of genocide and extinction as they apply to Tasmanian historiography from the colonial period to the present moment. In so, doing this essay brings up to date Ann Curthoys’ 2008 essay on genocide in Tasmania and extends Curthoys’ principal inquiry: how there emerged ‘a paradox’ between international representations of Tasmania as a ‘clear-cut’ case of genocide and the fact ‘such a characterization is rarely adopted within Australia’. This essay finds Curthoys’ ‘paradox’ less relevant to popular Australian representations of Tasmanian history where, from the 1970s, the idea of genocide did not merely replace the older idea of extinction, but promulgated it. Such representations directly undermined an emergent movement for Tasmanian Aboriginal self-determination. The political protest of Tasmanian Aboriginal people influenced historical scholarship, lead foremost by Lyndall Ryan from the early 1980s: to characterize Tasmania as a case of genocide at that time may have potentially jeopardized an important message of Aboriginal survival in the face of colonialism.

Lorraine Weir, ‘“Time Immemorial” and Indigenous Rights: A Genealogy and Three Case Studies (Calder, Van der Peet, Tsilhqot’in) from British Columbia’, Journal of Historical Sociology (advanced edition 2013).

“Time immemorial” has operated as a legal fiction in the discourse of colonization, performing a genealogical function in the construction of “antiquity” and “legal memory” in English law, and repurposed in Indigenous rights cases in Canada. Beginning with a genealogical outline, this paper analyzes “time immemorial” in relation to Settler and Indigenous discourses of time, memory and the land in Calder, Van der Peet, and Tsilhqot’in.

Michelle R. Sizemore, ‘When are the People?: Temporality, Popular Sovereignty, and the U.S. Settler State’, South Central Review 30, 1, (2013).

This essay examines the subject of anti-imperialism through the lens of settler postcolonial studies, an approach that immediately confounds sure distinctions between pro- and anti- imperialism. In the mid-1790s, during the Whiskey Rebellion, farmers in western Pennsylvania revolted against a federal government that used them to advance the course of empire while simultaneously treating them as colonists within the empire they labored and risked to create.Even the briefest sketch of this historical episode hints at the complexity of settler subjects’ imperial affiliations and attitudes. Technically, the whiskey rebels were both: in favor of those policies and customs that sanctioned the appropriation of Indian lands and against those that positioned white settlers as subalterns. My contention is that this popular uprising against the imperialist dictates of the U.S. government clarifies two competing visions of empire much more than it reveals opposing stances for and against.

In this article I suggest that these competing visions of empire play out in the widespread debate over popular sovereignty, and my primary concern is how traditional notions of sovereignty were re-negotiated within the context of settler rights. Looking at the Whiskey Rebellion, including George Washington’s actual and symbolic role in suppressing the revolt, I argue that the last decade of the eighteenth century witnessed an uncomfortable shift from unitary to plural sovereignty. Made clear by documentary evidence from the rebellion, republican political culture shifted away from authority concentrated in a single individual to its anonymous dispersal far and wide. With this shift comes the dislocation of sovereign power, the diffusion of sovereignty in time as well as in space. This model of sovereignty, on which the decentralized settler model of empire thrived, would severely weaken the centralized federal model of empire.

Alex Trimble Young, ‘Settler Sovereignty and the Rhizomatic West, or, The Significance of the Frontier in Postwestern Studies’, Western American Literature 48, 1 & 2 (2013).

Contemporary “postwestern” literary scholarship has largely turned away from frontier historiography toward a “critical regionalist” approach in its efforts to move western literary studies away from familiar national paradigms. As western studies has moved away from what historian Kerwin Klein calls “big frontier tales,” frontier historiography has made a forceful reemergence in contemporary transnational settler colonial studies.This essay seeks to put the “big frontier tales” of settler colonial studies into conversation with postwestern studies through a reading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of “the rhizomatic West” in A Thousand Plateaus, a text that has been especially influential in postwestern studies and American studies writ large. In addition to exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s Beat Generation and Myth and Symbol School sources, this essay glosses critiques of Deleuze and Guattari by Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd and British-Israeli theorist Eyal Weizman, both of whom relate Deleuzian rhizomatics to the ideological and spatial forms of settler colonial expansion.Having outlined a critique of “the rhizomatic West” from this perspective, it offers a brief reading of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road through the lens of settler colonial theory in order to argue that an engagement with frontier historiography should inform our understanding of contemporary understandings of “westness.”

Edward Cavanagh, ‘The History of Dispossession at Orania and the Politics of Land Restitution in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39, 2 (2013).

This article takes for its subject a small piece of land on the southern banks of the middle Orange River, which has been known in the last few decades as ‘Orania’. A human history of its longue durée is presented, tracking the relationship between people and land, from San occupation right up to the introduction of individualist understandings of private property by European settlers. This is a history of dispossession that carries on into the twentieth century, when the land in question became state-owned before reverting, again, to private ownership. Using interviews, newspaper articles and existing official records, this article then recounts a little-known event: the dispossession of a small squatter community in Orania between 1989 and 1991. After this ‘removal’, Orania was transformed into a small Afrikaner volkstaat, a place exclusively white and Afrikaans. In 2005, the new community discovered that the town’s previous inhabitants had lodged a land claim with the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights. This article analyses the investigation and resolution of this claim in order to examine how the concept of restitution has been politicised in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that the discourses involved in the reclamation of land rights have often been ignorant of more comprehensive histories of dispossession.

Alabama high school graduate Chelsey Ramer was fined $1,ooo and denied her diploma and transcripts after wearing an eagle feather attached to her mortarboard as a symbol of her Native American heritage.

Katie McDonough for Salon.

Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien (eds), Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013).

This engaging collection surveys and clarifies the complex issue of federal and state recognition for Native American tribal nations in the United States. Den Ouden and O’Brien gather focused and teachable essays on key topics, debates, and case studies. Written by leading scholars in the field, including historians, anthropologists, legal scholars, and political scientists, the essays cover the history of recognition, focus on recent legal and cultural processes, and examine contemporary recognition struggles nationwide.

Contributors are Joanne Barker (Lenape), Kathleen A. Brown-Perez (Brothertown), Rosemary Cambra (Muwekma Ohlone), Amy E. Den Ouden, Timothy Q. Evans (Haliwa-Saponi), Les W. Field, Angela A. Gonzales (Hopi), Rae Gould (Nipmuc), J. Kehaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), K. Alexa Koenig, Alan Leventhal, Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee), Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), John Robinson, Jonathan Stein, Ruth Garby Torres (Schaghticoke), and David E. Wilkins (Lumbee).

Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch, ‘Empire and After: Toward a Framework for Comparing Empires and Their Consequences in the Post-Imperial Middle East and Central Asia’, Journal of Historical Sociology (early edition, 29 MAY 2013).

This article compares and contrasts the variations in paths from empire to sovereignty in the Middle East and Central Asia. We identify differences in empires and their impact; examine the drivers of transition from empire to sovereignty, the international system and nationalist mobilization; assess the consequences of imperial transmissions for state formation and nation-building; and link these factors to the degree of rupture with empire in the post-imperial period.