scholarly journals Unsettling Experience, Perception, and Display

Screen Bodies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
Sol Neely
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
European Analytical ◽  
Screen Shot ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Perpetrators And Victims ◽  
Source Materials

This Screen Shot section includes three texts—an interview and two articles—that, together, occasion an unsettling movement in the development of an Indigenous phenomenology staged upon Screen Bodies’ concern for the critical tryptic experience, perception, and display. Such phenomenology, moreover, takes shape in the spirit of an enduring and persistent Indigenous cosmopolitanism, one organized by an appeal to a pan-tribal solidarity that is also not shy about drawing from efficacious sources of critique internal to European critical traditions. Together, these texts—and the source materials that inspire them—build rich ecumenical perspectives in the service of decolonial justice and pedagogy. And while the texts included here are composed in English, each draws from and references Indigenous languages, articulating one kind of Indigenous cosmopolitanism that makes use of English as a kind of “trade language.” To stage an Indigenous phenomenology by appeal to an Indigenous cosmopolitanism, in our contemporary political moment, thus calls for critical attention attuned to the perspectives, traditions, and imaginations of what Tlingit poet and author Ernestine Hayes describes as “Indigenous intellectual authority.” In this spirit, Indigenous cosmopolitanism occasions a decolonial-critical cosmopolitanism rooted not in the secular, Habermasian cosmopolitanism of Europe but in the modalities of consciousness, the literary genius and acumen, of Indigenous oral literary traditions. In the context of such a cosmopolitanism in which everyone is variably situated, across the spectrum that divides descendants of perpetrators and victims of settler colonialism, the critical imperative becomes a decolonial one, and non-Indigenous readers are called to shed the epistemological, ontological, and political priorities that broadly characterize European analytical and continental traditions, whatever their internal debates may be. Such an imperative forces phenomenological attention not only on the macrological instantiations of settler-colonial power but also against the “micrological textures of power” that ultimately shape the inner contours of self and, thus, what becomes phenomenologically legible to individuals situated in their cultural contexts.

Re-presenting Genocide: The Canadian Museum of Human Rights and Settler Colonial Power

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Kaur Dhamoon
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Forced Movement

AbstractIn settler societies like Canada, United States, and Australia, the bourgeoning discourse that frames colonial violence against Indigenous people as genocide has been controversial, specifically because there is much debate about the meaning and applicability of genocide. Through an analysis of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, this paper analyzes what is revealed about settler colonialism in the nexus of difficult knowledge, curatorial decisions, and political debates about the label of genocide. I specifically examine competing definitions of genocide, the primacy of the Holocaust, the regulatory role of the settler state, and the limits of a human rights framework. My argument is that genocide debates related to Indigenous experiences operationalize a range of governing techniques that extend settler colonialism, even as Indigenous peoples confront existing hegemonies. These techniques include: interpretative denial; promoting an Oppression Olympics and a politics of distancing; regulating difference through state-based recognition and interference; and depoliticizing claims that overshadow continuing practices of assimilation, extermination, criminalization, containment, and forced movement of Indigenous peoples. By pinpointing these techniques, this paper seeks to build on Indigenous critiques of colonialism, challenge settler national narratives of peaceful and lawful origins, and foster ways to build more just relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Textual Encounters in an Age of Transition: Thomas More’s Translations between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Humanist’ Literary Culture

Moreana ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 48 (Number 185- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 149-171
Author(s):  
Gabriela Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Complex Variety ◽  
Critical Attention

Unlike the martyr, the politician and the humanist, Thomas More, the translator, has received little critical attention to date. Nonetheless, a remarkable number of More’s writings, especially during the early 1500s, were either direct translations or indirect transformations of foreign literary traditions. It is precisely his output as a translator that reveals More to be a transitional figure, who was as thoroughly aware of the trends in late medieval and early humanist literature in the vernacular as he was closely involved with the new humanist learning brought into England through Erasmus and his circle. By examining some of More’s early translations and imitations and placing them within the context of similar contemporary works, this article intends to present the rapidly changing literary culture of the early Tudor years as a crucial period of transition, whose complex variety can hardly be grasped through the simple binary opposition between ‘medieval’ and ‘humanist’.

scholarly journals Keywords: Militarism

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Emalani Case
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Global Crisis ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Using the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) maritime exercises as an example, this keywords entry explores the concept of militarism and seeks to understand ideologies of justified violence in relation to the structure of settler colonialism and the logics of white supremacy. Using three brief reflections from RIMPAC 2020, I examine how militarism sustains, and is sustained by, racial hierarchies and colonial power. I also draw links to the Covid-19 global crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement, demonstrating how the impacts of militarism, like a disease, extend far beyond what are usually identified as militaries, infecting all aspects of society.

Electric News in Colonial Algeria

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Asseraf
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Two Sides

How do the things which connect us divide us at the same time? This book tells a different history of globalization by tracing how news circulated in a divided society: Algeria under French rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years between 1881 and 1940 were those of maximum colonial power in North Africa, a period of intense technological revolution, global high imperialism, and the expansion of settler colonialism. Algerians became connected to international networks of news, and local people followed distant events with great interest. But once news reached Algeria, accounts of recent events often provoked conflict as they moved between different social groups. In a society split between its native majority and a substantial settler minority, distant wars led to riots. Circulation and polarization were two sides of the same coin. Looking at a range of sources in multiple languages across colonial society, this book offers a new understanding of what news is. News was a whole ecosystem in which new technologies such as the printing press, the telegraph, the cinema and the radio interacted with older media like songs, rumours, letters, and manuscripts. The French government watched anxiously over these developments, monitoring Algerians’ reactions to news through an extensive network of surveillance that often ended up spreading news rather than controlling its flow. By tracking what different people thought was new, this history of news helps us reconsider the relationship between time, media, and historical change.

“Gather Your People”: Learning to Listen Intergenerationally in Settler-Indigenous Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 665-691
Author(s):  
Emily Beausoleil
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Politics ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
Colonial Histories ◽  
Learning To Listen

Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social group—apparent in paradigmatic approaches to engaging social difference in settler communities—is at the heart of the particularity of settler group identity and also stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in settler-Indigenous politics. This essay thus seeks to mark the particular ground of this unmarkedness of settler identity in Western philosophies that set being unmarked as both ontology and ideal; the dominance of settler communities in places of settlement; and the willful forgetting of the colonial histories brought about by such dominance.

New Frankensteins; or, the Body Politic

2017 ◽  
pp. 195-207
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gothic Novels

In the introduction to his 2001 anthology of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’, Alan Bissett argues that Gothic ‘has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic’ (2001: 6). While virtually every contemporary Scottish author has made use of Gothic elements or tropes in some part of their work, many of the most important recent texts to be labelled ‘Scottish Gothic’ are centrally concerned with such a re-examination of the past. For many authors, however, the past is not to be found in historical events or cultural contexts, but specifically in the interrelation between established Scottish and Gothic literary traditions. Beginning with Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), one of numerous twentieth-century reworkings of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), many contemporary Gothic novels have explicitly relied on earlier texts; adapting the work of Hogg, Stevenson or even Shelley becomes a way of challenging preconceived notions of stable national and individual identities.

Settler Colonialism and African Americans

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany King
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Native Studies ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
White Settler

Emerging from the ranks of white settler scholars in Australia and New Zealand in the mid-2000s, the discourse of settler colonialism has become the “official” idiolect with substantial influence in the social sciences and the humanities. The term settler colonialism circulated in Native studies, more specifically in Haunani K. Trask’s book From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993) before white settler scholars reintroduced and repackaged the term in the first decade of the 21st century (see the journal Settler Colonial Studies, edited by Lorenzo Veracini and Edward Cavanagh) and asserted it as an irreducible form of colonial power. The “new” settler colonialism focused on the ways that the conflict over land structured a violent antagonism between settlers and indigenous peoples. This paradigm shift calls attention to the distinction between colonial relations, in which the colonizer and settler displace the indigenous population through violence and remain on the land, as opposed to franchise colonialism, in which the colonizer remains (abroad) in the metropole and establishes control through an extensive and diffuse network of repressive and discursive measures of colonial power (sometimes including native elites as proxy). The theoretical preoccupation of settler colonial studies has been overwhelmingly concerned with the native-settler binary. The native-settler binary constructs the primary antagonism under settler colonial relations as one between European (and other) settlers and indigenous peoples of the Americas (racialized as Amerindians) and the Polynesian and Malayan peoples of Oceania. Due to the field’s emphasis on the native-settler binary, it has been critiqued for its lack of attention to Africans and people of African descent in the Americas. Fields that have traditionally theorized colonialism as a broad and capacious formation that included material and discursive (power) domination have been compelled to embrace the “settler colonial” turn in critical theory. For example, Chicana/o studies, Asian American studies, postcolonial studies, and even Native studies have had to readjust in order to respond to the field’s narrow focus on elaborating the native-settler binary and contestations over land as the paradigmatic frames for mapping power in North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. Similarly, the fields of African American studies, African diaspora studies, and Black studies have only recently integrated the discourse of “settler colonialism” into their scholarly traditions. While, Black and African diaspora studies have historically been attentive to issues concerning indigenous people, colonialism, and the intersections of native and black life, these studies have largely deployed and relied on colonialism as a theoretical frame. As multiple disciplines adjust to the “settler colonial turn,” the use of the term remains uneven and inconsistent across disciplines and fields of study. Searching for scholarship that exists at the intersections of—or that pairs the terms—settler colonialism and African Americans can be challenging. To date, few texts exist with the explicit aim of addressing “settler colonialism and African Americans.” The texts included in this article cut across disciplinary boundaries and represent diverse sources that include historiographies, theoretical and philosophical texts, edited anthologies, special issues of journals, blog posts, activist writings and statements, and annual reports of organizations.

Translating and Retranslating “Fallen Star”

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 178-185
Author(s):  
Sarah Hernandez
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Creation Story ◽  
Oral Storytelling ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Interpretation

Abstract This article provides a comparative close reading of Ella Deloria’s and Stephen Riggs’s translations of the ancient and sacred Dakota creation story “Fallen Star.” Although Deloria, a fluent Dakota/Lakota speaker, published several books on the Dakota oral storytelling tradition, Riggs is often viewed as the expert on Dakota culture, language, and literature. The impulse to privilege Riggs is problematic, because it is a new iteration of settler colonialism and patriarchy that further oppresses the Dakota nation and delegitimizes its rich and complex literary traditions. As an ethnologist and linguist, Riggs transformed the rich and complex Dakota oral storytelling tradition into a static cultural artifact. This article examines how Deloria corrected Riggs’s work to incorporate tribally specific beliefs, values, and worldviews into a new interpretation of “Fallen Star.”

scholarly journals De-Colonizing the Boundary-Object

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sadhvi Dar
Keyword(s):  
International Development ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
English Language ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Boundary Object ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Language Play ◽  
Stakeholder Groups ◽  
Development Organizations

What role does language play in disciplining subjects in the international development sector? Previous critiques of international development organizations have focused on the role of knowledge tools, such as reports, in reproducing dichotomies between developed and under-developed subjects. In this paper, I de-colonize NGO reporting through a reappraisal of the boundary-object concept. I utilize Ngugi’s (1986) problematization of language and translation to demonstrate how the boundary-object is experienced differentially across stakeholder groups and caste/class structures. Using findings garnered from a multi-sited ethnography of an international NGO in India, I examine the prominence of English language in NGO reports over indigenous languages. This paper therefore contributes to contemporary understandings of neo-colonial power relations as sustained by the English language within India.

Melville's Ship of Fools

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 604-608
Author(s):  
Edward H. Rosenberry
Keyword(s):  
Moral Evil ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Source Materials ◽  
Competent Study

Two of the surest critical propositions about Melville are that his prevailing theme is the problem of moral evil and that his prevailing narrative vehicle is the ship-microcosm. With few exceptions his major works have some fairly obvious basis in the fusion of that image and that theme. In most cases the competent study of source materials and of the image-theme pattern peculiar to the work in question has yielded an understanding sufficient to the purposes of responsible criticism. Only The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade has continued to tantalize both casual readers and dedicated students, notwithstanding the scholarly and critical attention which has long been lavished on it and which is now available to all in the admirable edition of Miss Elizabeth Foster. The singularly baffling quality of this novel is the more surprising, too, for its wearing so plainly on its face the signs of its author's characteristic theme and image; not even Moby-Dick bespeaks its artistic character so forthrightly. In order to penetrate a little farther into the stubborn mysteries of The Confidence-Man I propose to examine some antecedents, both in and out of Melville's own writings, which may have exerted a significant or even a definitive influence on its structure and meaning.

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