Native America and the study of colonialism, Part 2: colonial presents?

Abstract

‘One of the most striking of all “postcolonial” intellectual shifts, on a global perspective, has been a rapid and massive growth of the language and sometimes the conceptual tools of “colonialism” and “decolonisation” in relation to indigenous North Americans, past and indeed present.’ This has, however, so far very rarely involved substantive comparative analysis. This article (the second of two parts) attempts a broad survey of the intellectual genealogies of these developments, both in their longer term evolution and their more recent effervescence. It seeks to probe the uses of comparison in modern writing on Native American history and their limits, and to suggest how comparative analysis in the colonial frame might be pursued further in future. It takes up a series of major themes which emerge from the relevant literatures: the historiography and politics of comparison between the subjugation of Native North Americans, especially in the American West and colonial situations elsewhere; debate over connections or continuities between the ‘internal expansion’ of the USA and the country’s external, global role, often seen as imperial or imperialist; and the ‘colonial model’ for understanding the situation of Native Americans in modern times including the ‘colonial present’.