AustLit

'How race rose and spread across the globe

'Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on Aboriginal people in Australia, on Blacks and Native Americans in the United States, on Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe, on Arab Jews in Israel/Palestine, and on people of African descent in Brazil, this book shows how race marks and reproduces the different relationships of inequality into which Europeans have coopted subaltern populations: territorial dispossession, enslavement, confinement, assimilation, and removal.

'Charting the different modes of domination that engender specific regimes of race and the strategies of anti-colonial resistance they entail, the book powerfully argues for cross-racial solidarities that respect these historical differences.' [publisher's summary]

'Unparalleled in its breadth and scope, Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility brings together some of the freshest and most original writing on sovereignty being done today. Sovereignty’s many dimensions are approached from multiple perspectives and experiences. It is viewed globally as an international question; locally as an issue contested between Natives and settlers; and individually as survival in everyday life. Through all this diversity and across the many different national contexts from which the contributors write, the chapters in this collection address each other, staging a running conversation that truly internationalizes this most fundamental of political issues.

In the contemporary world, the age-old question of sovereignty remains a key terrain of political and intellectual contestation, for those whose freedom it promotes as well as for those whose freedom it limits or denies. The law is by no means the only language in which to think through, imagine, and enact other ways of living justly together. Working both within and beyond the confines of the law at once recognizes and challenges its thrall, opening up pathways to alternative possibilities, to other ways of determining and self-determining our collective futures. The contributors, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, converse across disciplinary boundaries, responding to critical developments within history, politics, anthropology, philosophy, and law. The ability of disciplines to connect with each other—and with experiences lived outside the halls of scholarship—is essential to understanding the past and how it enables and fetters the pursuit of justice in the present. Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility offers a reinvigorated politics that understands the power of sovereignty, explores strategies for resisting its lived effects, and imagines other ways of governing our inescapably coexistent communities.' [publisher's summary]

'The article explores the relationship between genocide and the settler colonialism. The author asserts that though the settler-colonial logic of elimination has manifested as genocidal-they should be distinguished. The article further analyzes the negative and positive dimensions of settler colonialism. While on the one hand it attempts to dissolve native societies, it also establishes a new colonial society on the seized land base.' [publisher's summary]

This work analyzes the politics of anthropological knowledge from critical perspective that alters existing understandings of colonialism. At the same time, it produces insights into the history of anthropology. Organized around an historical reconstruction of the great anthropological controversy over doctrines of virgin birth, the book argues that the allegation a great deal about European colonial discourse and little if anything about indigenous beliefs. By means of an Australian example, the book shows not only that the alleged ignorance was an artifact of the anthropological theory that produced it, but also that the anthropology was an artifact of the anthropological theory that produced it, but also that the anthropology concerned has been closely tied into both the historical dispossession and the continuing oppression of native peoples. The author explores the links between metropolitan anthropological theory and local colonial politics from the 19th century up to the present, settler colonialism, and the ideological and sexual regimes that characterize it. [publisher's summary]