Broken Dreams 3 2010

Michael Cook
Bidjara people
digital colour photograph
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
purchased 2011

One of the pieces in unDisclosed, the 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, May 11 – July 22, 2012.

Lifted from ABC News.

extract in lieu of abstract:

Certain dates are now viewed as classic loci of the time and contradictory temporalities of the postcolonial: 1492 (Columbus’s arrival in America and the expulsion of Jews from Spain); 1603 (Lord Mountjoy’s colonization of the northern counties of Ireland); 1798–1801 (Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign); 1791–1804 (the Haitian revolution); 1810–25(the independence of Brazil and Spanish America); 1833 (the abolition of slavery in the British Empire); 1857 (the bloody Sepoy uprising in Kanpur); 1884 (the Berlin Conference and the scrambling of Africa); 1947 (the independence of India, its partition, and the birth of Pakistan); 1954–62 (Algeria’s war of independence); 1955 (the Bandung Conference); 1955–75 (the Vietnam War); 1994 (the end of apartheid). hese dates are as emblem- atic of the spatial dynamics generated by the events they mark as they are of period demarcation. Of the inaugural dates just listed, 1492 and 1947 may be taken as useful bookends for the discussion here. he explorer’s notorious “discovery” of America was to trigger a wide range of spatializing processes. Sidney Mintz points out that sugar cane was irst carried to the New World by Columbus on his sec- ond voyage, in 1493. In 1516 Santo Domingo was the irst Spanish settlement to ship sugar to Europe, and by 1526 Brazil was shipping sugar to Lisbon in commercial quantities (32–34). Columbus’s sugar cane signaled the progressive incorporation of the West Indies into the world capitalist economy through a particular spatial arrangement of centers and peripheries, the resultant inequalities of which are being worked through to this day. Equally dramatic is 1947, marking the independence and partition of India, which entailed the mass displacement of populations. hese dates appear nonequivalent on irst look, but they share features of historical violence and the processes of space making during and ater the colonial period.

 If postcolonialism is necessarily tied to the colonial owing to the simultaneous temporal and discursive framing of the field, it is the entire domain of colonial space making and its aterefects in the contemporary world that gives postcolonialism its significance today. Colonial space making is not merely the constitution of a geographically demarcated reality, though that is important. Colonial space making is first and foremost the projection of a series of sociopolitical dimensions onto geographic space. hese sociopolitical dimensions involve not just society and politics but also economy, culture, and a wide range of symbolic and discursive practices. Colonial space making is thus to be understood in terms of the relations that were structurally generated and contested across interrelated vectors throughout the colonial encounter.

Ann Curthoys, ‘Indigenous People and Settler Self Government: Introduction’.

Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Slavery, Settlers and Indigenous Dispossession: Britain’s empire through the lens of Liberia’.

Rachel Standfield, ‘Protection, Settler Politics and Indigenous Politics in the work of William Thomas’.

Mark McKenna, ‘Transplanted to Savage Shores: Indigenous Australians and British birthright in the mid nineteenth-century Australian colonies’.

Marilyn Lake, ‘The Gendered and Racialised Self who Claimed the Right to Self-Government’.

John Keane, ‘Restorative Justice: Rethinking the history of the impact of representative democracy upon Indigenous peoples’.

From introduction:

Vincent Ward’s Vigil (1984) and Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) can be considered as significant points in the filmic depiction of the settler psyche. These films depict the settler struggling against the land – a desire to tame and cultivate “wildernesses” into a manageable environment. From Alisdair Stewart’s tenuously planted fence-posts in The Piano to Birdie’s archaic derrick in Vigil, the (male) settler is positioned living against the land rather than within it. However, Vigil and The Piano offer another instance of settling in the form of the child-settler, a character negotiating ambivalent feelings encompassing both environmental and familial factors. The child-settler is the settler par excellence; the child who is to grow up in the growing settler colony is symbolic of “potential” in the settler polity, the society to come, emphasised in the parallels between settlement and growing up. Both are characterised by an impossibility of return, as settlement implies the intention to stay and the growing child cannot return to an earlier phase of existence. That these child-settler characters are girls rather than boys displaces another archetypal settler character: that of the Man Alone, erasing any assumed inheritance along paternal lines. Rather than the son acquiring the father’s struggles against the land, the girl functions as a witness to tensions orchestrated within the bounds of the domestic space linked to the mother, and the external landscape connected with the father. Thus, for Toss in Vigil and Flora in The Piano settlement is an anxious process, articulated in their ambivalence towards their environments and compounded by their inclusion in a triangulated familial relationship that results in destabilised space being figured domestically, but also externally. The final “place” of settlement is determined to lie “elsewhere,” a site removed from the setting of the bulk of the narrative.

This article takes the child-settler’s witnessing of the “primal scene” – an occurrence in both narratives – as a locus of anxiety in which the child is triangulated within the parental couple yet simultaneously wholly outside it. Neither narrative places the primal scene as witnessed by infants or very young children; rather, Toss and Flora are older (roughly twelve and nine respectively), and within the ‘latency stage’ of Sigmund Freud’s model of the stages of psychosexual development. For Toss and Flora, their positions as child-settlers are inherently anxious due to the particular emphasis on reality and the denial of phantasy characteristic of the latency stage. This anxiety is augmented by the arrival of a stranger, a thorn that twists the organisation of familial relations and by extension destabilises the settler-family’s grasp on the landscape. Moreover, the very presence of the child-settler rejects the positioning of the mother (and by extension, landscape) as ‘virgin’ soil – a myth that premises settler colonialism as the first “act” of cultivating a foreign landscape. This myth erases indigenous presence and prior inhabitation, which are invisible in Vigil, or relegate the indigenous population to the background as fauna, “authenticating” the exotic wilderness, as in The Piano.

With the appearance in 2010 of an essay by Martin Shaw, ‘Palestine in an International Historical Perspective on Genocide’, Holy Land Studies has taken the hermeneutic initiative in bringing together into the one field of analysis two areas that have usually been kept separate, genocide studies and studies of the history of Palestine-Israel. In an important challenge to contemporary scholarship, Shaw makes a cogent critique of the notion of ‘ethnic cleansing’ as euphemistic and perpetrator-inflected. I follow Shaw in translating ‘ethnic cleansing’ as ‘genocide’ of a group or society by deploying the terms and argument of Raphaël Lemkin, the creator of the concept of ‘genocide’ and prime mover in the 1948 UN Convention on genocide.

Session I: 2:30p.m.—4 p.m Aziz Rana (Cornell University) will present his book, The Two Faces of American Freedom . Discussant: Lorenzo Veracini (Swinburne University of Technology and Visiting Professor at UCLA)

Session II: 4:30—6 p.m. Craig Yirush (UCLA) will present his book, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory . Discussant: Patrick Wolfe (Stanford University and La Trobe University)

Convened by Gabriel Piterberg (UCLA).

Poster available here.

In their influential work on settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini explained that settler societies are not only predicated upon the structural elimination of Indigenous societies, but also on a historical trajectory culminating in settler colonialism’s own self-suppression. This accounts for recent scholarly efforts to deconstruct rhetorical and discursive attempts to represent our multicultural, settler societies as not colonial anymore. In Québec, the situation is even more complex because the francophone majority, on account of its declared state of minorityhood on a continental level, has not only disassociate itself from settler colonialism per se, but its own claims over identity, home, and nationhood appear not to require the rhetorical suppression of a colonial legacy. It is in such context that Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, in their publicly commissioned Report on cultural difference and accommodation practices, defined interculturalism as an alternative to official forms of multiculturalism. In this paper, I argue that, by attempting to theorize the acquired status of a racially neutral concept of ‘Nativeness’, such an understanding of interculturalism completes the political erasure of the settler colonial specificity of Québec’s claim to nationhood and minorityhood.

And find an interview between Robert-Falcon Ouellette and Bruno Cornellier here.

Opening paragraphs:

What were the broad processes by which settlers of European stock created new forms of tenure and wrested control of lands from indigenous peoples, first in the Americas and later across wide stretches of Africa and Oceania? Anyone interested in this basic question about colonization and dispossession in an Atlantic world setting may be tempted to think in terms of a great “enclosure movement” that took shape first in England and Western Europe and then extended overseas to the New World, bringing survey lines, fences, and legal rules fostering exclusive access and transferability. More than one historian has pointed in the direction of such an extended conception of enclosure, although none has so far made the case in detail. “When the English took possession of lands overseas, they did so by building fences and hedges, the markers of enclosure and private property,” write Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. In relation to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, E. P. Thompson has also pointed to a connection between enclosure within England and the imposition of private property across the overseas British Empire, notably in India, where the Permanent Settlement of Bengal (1793) represented a particularly brutal and doctrinaire attempt to establish unitary proprietorship over land. Thompson’s argument about enclosure and colonization appeared in an essay published late in his life, and it touches on North America, New Zealand, and Africa as well as India. Richly suggestive, it remains schematic and preliminary, pointing to a long‐term global movement to privatize the commons that emanated outward from the British Isles. Certainly, there is an intriguing, if rough, coincidence of peak periods of enclosure in England—the Tudor period and the late eighteenth century—with times of imperial expansion and reinvigoration.

 

Settlers did frequently erect fences, since “enclosure” in that mundane sense of the term played an important part in separating ruminants and crops, the two elements whose coexistence typified European agriculture. It is also true that commodified, individualized forms of property usually followed in the wake of colonization, although the transition may not have been as rapid as some imagine. While the long‐run tendency may indeed have been in the direction of an enclosed private property regime that largely excluded natives, colonization was also accompanied by the establishment of commons. Evidence from seventeenth‐century New Spain, New France, and New England can shed light on the interplay of enclosure and commons in the formation of colonial property regimes in North America. It shows that common property was a central feature of both native and settler forms of land tenure in the early colonial period and that dispossession came about largely through the clash of an indigenous commons and a colonial commons.