The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West is pleased to present:
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AN AGE OF TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY
An international symposium on the concept of the frontier in its global contexts
Saturday, February 25, 2012, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm. Friends’ Hall, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
All lectures and roundtables are free and open to the public. A luncheon with the participants will be available for $10 (students) and $20 (faculty and public). Please RSVP by contacting icwfrontiersymposium@gmail.com
Sponsored by: The Huntington-USC Institute on California and The West; The Salvatori Fund, Dornsife College of Arts and Sciences; The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, The USC English Department, The USC American Studies and Ethnicity Department, Research Division, The Huntington.
Keynote Speakers:
Kerwin Klein, University of California at Berkeley
Patrick Wolfe, La Trobe University
Roundtable Participants:
Jodi Byrd, University of Illinois
Krista Comer, Rice University
Brian DeLay, University of California, Berkeley
Jay Gitlin, Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and
Borders, Yale University,
Melody Graulich, Utah State University
William Handley, University of Southern California
David Igler, University of California, Irvine
Margaret Jacobs, University of Nebraska at Lincoln
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Center of The American West, University of Colorado
Laura Mitchell, University of California, Irvine
Donald Pease, Dartmouth University
Aziz Rana, Cornell University
Mark Rifkin, University of North Carolina,Greensboro
John Carlos Rowe, University of Southern California
David Wrobel, University of Oklahoma
Filed under: Australia, Seminar, United States | Leave a Comment
Paul A. Kramer, ’Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World’, American Historical Review 116, 5 (2011).
Excerpt:
What would a post-exceptionalist account of U.S. imperial history look like? It would purposively engage in dialogue with other societies’ globalizing historiographies, which have often involved imperial turns. One of the most striking and unremarked developments of the late 1990s and early 2000s was a serious misalignment between U.S. transnational history and a diversity of new imperial histories, richly informed by postcolonial studies, gender analysis, and cultural history, within British, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese historiographies.33 Except where it referred to European colonial empires in the Americas, or to 1898, “empire” was almost entirely absent from the manifestos calling for a new transnational U.S. history, ironically reproducing an exceptionalism that was ostensibly its chief target. Perhaps, unlike everybody else, U.S. historians could venture outward from nation-based historiography without “empire.”
A post-exceptionalist history of the United States in the world, by contrast, employs categories used in non-U.S. histories precisely to align them for purposes of non-exceptionalist comparison. One concrete example involves the reframing of the “U.S. West,” which, incarnated as the “frontier,” long lived at the center of U.S. exceptionalist narratives. Rigged with impressive explanatory—and exceptionalist—power vis-à-vis the virtues of democracy, Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier” parachuted U.S. history safely away from a universe of potential counterparts.
By contrast, some recent scholarship situates the United States within broader histories of modern settler colonialism. This concept, first used within Australian geography, has emerged as the hub of a comparative and inter-imperial history. Defined as the seizure of land and natural resources from indigenous populations, the politico-legal production of “territory,” and governance through the rule of colonial difference, settler colonialism has been identified by historians as a fundamental process in the making of numerous modern societies.
Understanding the U.S. West as the setting for a particular (that is, a unique but unexceptional) instance of settler colonialism raises comparative questions that were not easy to ask about Turner’s frontier: questions about comparative colonial violence, about economic exploitation and environmental management, about legal categories and the claims of subjects and citizens (particularly with regard to land), and about the balance of power between core and periphery during processes of territorial incorporation. Placed in this context, the U.S. West appears as a variation on a global theme, alongside Australia, Argentina, and Algeria.
Filed under: Empire, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, United States | Leave a Comment
Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Notes on the postmodernity of fake(?) Aboriginal literature’, Postcolonial Studies 14, 4 (2011).
This article examines issues of authenticity in Australian culture. From the very beginning, Australia has been plagued and entertained by literary hoaxes. The recent revelation that Mudrooroo, who was for several decades Australia’s leading Aboriginal author, is of African-white and not Aboriginal descent is an extreme yet typical example of the difficulties faced by many authors and artists who want to claim authentic Aboriginality. How does anyone claim such authenticity when there are no longer any authentic Aborigines (in the sense of indigenes whose culture has not been affected by the invasion of Europeans, modernity, and now postmodernity)? The impossible struggles over authenticity of authors and artists like Mudrooroo and Sally Morgan are a perfect (if ironic) fit with the postmodern stress on inauthenticity, or a commodified and globalized capitalist culture in which everything is a copy, nothing is original (let alone Aboriginal). The ‘Ern Malley’ hoax, the basis for Peter Carey’s postmodern novel My Life as a Fake, is one of many that do not involve Aboriginality, but which show that it is not just Aboriginals who struggle with the problem of authenticity.
Filed under: Australia, literature, Scholarship and insights | Leave a Comment
Saliha Belmessous, ed., Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire (New York and Oxford: OUP, 2011).
This groundbreaking collection of essays shows that, from the moment European expansion commenced through to the twentieth century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonization is well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. These essays demonstrate how indigenous peoples throughout the world opposed colonization not only with force, but also with ideas. They made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law that applies between peoples – a kind of law of nations, comparable to that being developed by Europeans. The contributors to this volume argue that in the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonization should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim.
Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920 brings together the work of eminent social and legal historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, including Rolena Adorno, Lauren Benton, Duncan Ivison, and Kristin Mann. Their combined expertise makes this volume uniquely expansive in its coverage of a crucial issue in global and colonial history. The various essays treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America (including the British colonies and French Canada), and nineteenth-century Australasia and Africa. There is no other book that examines the issue of European dispossession of native peoples in such a way.
TOC:
Introduction: The Problem of Indigenous Claim Making in Colonial History, by Saliha Belmessous
Chapter 1: Possessing Empire: Iberian Claims and Interpolity Law, Lauren Benton
Chapter 2: Law, Land and Legal Rhetoric in Colonial New Spain: A Look at the Changing Rhetoric of Indigenous Americans in the Sixteenth Century, by R. Jovita Baber
Chapter 3: Court and Chronicle: A Native Andean’s Engagement with Spanish Colonial Law, by Rolena Adorno
Chapter 4: Powhatan Legal Claims, by Andrew Fitzmaurice
Chapter 5: Wabanaki versus French and English Claims in Northeastern North America, c. 1715, by Saliha Belmessous
Chapter 6: “Chief Princes and Owners of All”: Native American Appeals to the Crown in the Early Modern British Atlantic, by Craig Yirush
Chapter 7: Framing and Reframing the Agon: Contesting Narratives and Counter-Narratives on Maori Property Rights and Political Constitutionalism, 1840-1861, by Mark Hickford
Chapter 8: “Bring this paper to the Good Governor”: Indigenous Petitioning in Britain’s Australian Colonies, by Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell
Chapter 9: The Native Land Court: Making Property in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand, by Christopher Hilliard
Chapter 10: African and European Initiatives in the Transformation of Land Tenure in Colonial Lagos (West Africa), 1840-1920, by Kristin Mann
Afterword: The Normative Force of the Past, by Duncan Ivison
Filed under: Africa, Australia, Canada, Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Leave a Comment
merry xmas
Get your ‘Cowboy/Indian Rabbit Fur Suede Christmas Stocking’ from here.
And enjoy the holiday if you have one.
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Janet McGaw, Anoma Pieris and Emily Potter, ’Indigenous Place-Making in the City: Dispossessions, Occupations and Implications for Cultural Architecture’, Architectural Theory Review 16, 3 (2011)
This paper considers Indigenous place-making practices in light of an idea for a major Victorian Indigenous Cultural Knowledge and Education Centre in central Melbourne as championed by Traditional Owners in Victoria. With only eight Aboriginal architects in the country, collaboration with non-Indigenous architects will be inevitable. Two case studies from the recent past—the Tent Embassy in Canberra and a street corner in Collingwood—reveal that dominant cultures of place-making continue to marginalise Aboriginal people in urban Australia. This paper will contend that delivering spatial justice will require both an opportunity for Indigenous Victorians to build visibility in the centre of the city and a willingness within the dominant culture to be deterritorialised.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Leave a Comment
Jimmy Johnson, ‘How Zionism Paved Way for Permanent War’, Electronic Intifada.
Gabriel Piterberg noted in his masterful 2008 book The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel that the “achievements of the comparative study of settler colonialism have been at once scholarly and political,” that the young field “creates a language that amounts to a transformative alternative to the way in which these settler societies narrate themselves in their own words.”
Yet, like many academic fields, comparative settler-colonial studies has a difficult time translating into the sphere of organizing for policy change. The bridge between the academic and activist worlds is mostly missing. So one purpose of reviewing books such as the newly released collection Studies in Settler Colonialism for The Electronic Intifada is to help bridge the gap between the grassroots and the “ivory tower.”
Comparative settler-colonial studies carries tremendous potential for anti-colonial organizing in Palestine (as well as in countries that are the products of a settler-led colonization such as the US, Canada and Australia). Its baseline understanding is, as Piterberg put it, “the history of the interaction with the dispossessed is the history of who the settlers collectively are,” indigenous removal being the sine qua non of creating a settler society. In short, the field does not stop with describing the events of settler colonization. Instead it describes the political structure, settler colonialism, that endures long after the initial colonizing events. The field is vibrant but small, making Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture an important addition to a growing body of work.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Leave a Comment
Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza (eds), The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research: Reporting on Environmental Degradation and Warfare (Springer, 2012).
The decision to publish scholarly findings bearing on the question of Amerindian environmental degradation, warfare, and/or violence is one that weighs heavily on anthropologists. This burden stems from the fact that documentation of this may render indigenous communities vulnerable to a host of predatory agendas and hostile modern forces.
Consequently, some anthropologists and community advocates alike argue that such culturally and socially sensitive, and thereby, politically volatile information regarding Amerindian-induced environmental degradation and warfare should not be reported. This admonition presents a conundrum for anthropologists and other social scientists employed in the academy or who work at the behest of tribal entities.
This work documents the various ethical dilemmas that confront anthropologists, and researchers in general, when investigating Amerindian communities. The contributions to this volume explore the ramifications of reporting–and, specfically,–of non-reporting instances of environmental degradation and warfare among Amerindians.
Collectively, the contributions in this volume, which extend across the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, ethnohistory, ethnic studies, philosophy, and medicine, argue that the non-reporting of environmental mismanagement and violence in Amerindian communities generally harms not only the field of anthropology but the Amerindian populations themselves.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Leave a Comment
Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds new light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on Empire’s past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Leave a Comment
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Suburbia, Settler Colonialism and the World Turned Inside Out’, Housing, Theory and Society 1 (2011).
While its primary aim is to explore possibilities for new research, this article contends that suburban and settler colonial imaginaries are related. It suggests that an awareness of the settler colonial “situation” and its dynamics can help an original approach to the interpretation of suburban forms (and vice versa). References to the suburban “frontier” have been frequent in both public discourse and scholarly debate, and suburban phenomena characterize in one way or another all settler societies. This connection, however, has not been the subject of sustained investigation. Thus, this article focuses on shared traditions of anti-urban perception and on a determination to pre-emptively secede from the metropole/metropolis in the presence of growing tensions and contradictions. Similarly, while settler colonial projects constitute separate political entities via an “outward” movement towards various “frontiers of settlement”, independent suburbs are also established via an “outward” movement and in an attempt to maintain local control over local affairs. In both instances displacement is a response/the only response to crisis.
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