On the Politics of Indigeneity and Asian Settler Colonialism in Asia: A Roundtable Discussion

<i>Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear</i> by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Scholarship from the nascent subfield of Indigenous politics illuminates an enduring tension between Indigenous politics and political science. Settler colonialism continues to configure the contemporary politics of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in profound ways that political science has been slow to grapple with. In a related concern, political science has little ability to engage in Indigenous knowledge production. This article reviews the structural exclusion of Indigenous knowledge despite increased inclusion of Indigenous scholarship and argues that Indigenous understandings of settler colonialism, sovereignty, and authority hold the potential to reconfigure political science's approach to Indigenous politics in research and teaching. This reconfiguration will not only impact the development of the Indigenous politics subfield but also expand the analytic potential of political science more broadly.

Develops a new theory of political temporality to demonstrate how to conduct political analysis in times of conflict and uncertainty Offers an important differentiation between a political theory of temporality and philosophies of time Examines contemporary debates on migration and border control to demonstrate the myopia in the understanding of historical contexts that give rise to the displacement and/or mobility of migrants Analyses current debates about the decline of or lack of faith in democratic institutions exemplified by the rise of populism and highlights the limitations of elite politics Develops a new theory of political temporality focused on process-driven accounts of political development Adrian Little demonstrates how different conceptions of past, present and future contribute to the nature of political conflict in the world today. Reacting against narratives of political disillusionment and apathy, he focuses on how a new understanding of political temporality can inform our approach to political problems. He forms his argument around three major cases in which the nature of past, present and future is contested: Indigenous politics in settler colonies; the politics of bordering and migration; and debates over the future of democracy. Little shows how to rethink ways in which we can act on intractable issues in politics beyond philosophical analysis. In doing so, he brings together a theory of temporality with a model of political action derived from process philosophy to reinvigorate temporal understandings of the problems that political actors face.

This essay compares the Zionist movement with other settler colonialist movements in Palestine and West Africa. The historical context, the formative years, the ideological infrastructure, the symbolic world, and activities on the ground are examined in three cases: the Zionist movement, the Templers' movement, and the Basel Mission. Particular focus is given to the relationship with a mother country or metropole in order to find out how unique the Zionist case study was in the history of colonialism. The comparative approach validates the need to further examine Zionism as a settler colonialist phenomenon, despite its unique origins and chronological timing. This scholarly orientation was shunned for many years and was not properly attempted due to ideological considerations. This essay is an addendum to the important recent attempts by a few critical Israeli sociologists to introduce the paradigm of colonialism into the study of Israel and Zionism.

Lager beer spread around the world during the age of empire as a result of trade, colonization, and flavor. European travelers carried beer to preserve their culture, and merchants sold it to local elites desiring a taste of European modernity. The pure taste of lager was contrasted with strong-flavored indigenous beverages, heightening the association of European culture with civilization. This lightness also contributed to the triumph of Central European lager over heavier English porters and pale ales, even among British overseas agents. Guinness stout nevertheless achieved a niche market among Europeans and natives through its medical associations. The establishment of lager breweries by settler colonists and indigenous entrepreneurs limited exports by European firms. Japan built its own empire of lager, acquiring European brewing technology and selling beer in Asian colonies. In southern Africa, imperial authorities sought to outlaw native brewing and use municipal brewing monopolies to fund segregated township governments.

ABSTRACTIndigenous politics and history are central to and, indeed, intertwined with the history and politics of many if not most contemporary nations, yet the topics of indigenous politics and settler colonialism are rarely taught in undergraduate political science programs. This article outlines the pedagogical utility of an undergraduate course focused on indigenous history and politics, approached through a comparative race politics framework. The course on which this article is based compares state power and indigenous rights in the United States, Australia, and Latin America in historical context, but many variations are possible. The article first reviews the context for developing the course, the challenges related to teaching the subject, and my primary teaching objectives. It then outlines three pedagogical strategies applicable in other course frameworks and discusses positive learning outcomes I have observed as I refine this teaching area.

Reviewed by: Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai'i by Judy Rohrer Hi'ilei Julia Hobart Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai'i, by Judy Rohrer. Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2016. isbn 978-0-8165-2051-6, 232 pages, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, us $55.00. It is perhaps unusual for an author to appear so visibly in an academic text. However, in Judy Rohrer's Staking Claim, there she is, body slackened and seasick in the waters off O'ahu's western shoreline, contemplating Disney's Aulani Resort in all of its glossy commercialization of Hawaiian culture. In this way, she offers herself up to readers both literally and metaphorically to grapple with the complexity of Hawai'i's settler colonial history and present and in doing so walks a tightrope: writing about whiteness in Hawai'i, as a self-identified haole from Hawai'i, with anecdotal evidence recalled from living in Hawai'i, while working hard to avoid centering haole positionality in an assessment of the meaning of race. This is no small task, and Rohrer respectfully engages with the work of her Kanaka Maoli peers—J Kēhaulani Kauanui, Noenoe Silva, and Hokulani Aikau, among others—in order to show how non-natives "stake claim" or articulate a sense of belonging in Hawai'i. Staking Claim is a sharp evolution of Rohrer's previous works on whiteness, or haole, in Hawai'i going back to her 2005 University of Hawai'i dissertation, "Haole Matters: An Interrogation of Whiteness in Hawai'i," and 2010 book Haoles in Hawai'i. To such past efforts Rohrer adds theoretical weight with the key concept of racialization, a social process by which values are attached to particular communities in order to substantiate ideas of racial difference. Racialization is a useful name to give the phenomenon of native elimination within the Hawaiian context and helps, in Rohrer's words, to reveal how "the dual settler colonial processes of racializing native Hawaiians (erasing their indigeneity) and indigenizing non-Hawaiians enable the staking of non-Hawaiian claims to Hawai'i" (7). This process is, she points out, ancillary to the inherent categorical messiness of how race is constructed. Hawai'i's multiculturalism, sometimes referred to as the "melting pot," often obscures Kanaka Maoli claims to indigeneity at the same time that it articulates the overlapping native/settler/arrivant communities that call it home. An interdisciplinary application of literatures from Hawaiian and Native Pacific cultural studies, indigenous studies, whiteness studies, and Chicano/a studies—through which Rohrer emplaces her own genealogic identity—supports a very strong argument that, in order for race and indigeneity to be useful social analytics, one must move toward a necessary acknowledgment of how racial categories are porous, discursive, and continually made and remade over time. The book's main chapters focus first on theory and then on analysis, which lends to the book's utility. The first two chapters, "Going to the Ocean" and "Weaving Analytics and Disrupting Dyads," treat foundational concepts—first racialization and then settler colonialism—with patience and clarity so that they can underpin [End Page 380] the three chapters that follow. The resulting text is almost a sophisticated primer. For example, the key elements of Patrick Wolfe's seminal formulation of settler colonialism are enumerated and expanded (ie, "1. Structure, Not an Event" [56]) by drawing on important works about Hawai'i and its history. The author's strategy of breaking down complex theory into component parts and then providing concrete applications for each is synthetic, and with good reason: readers will recognize Rohrer's intention to highlight the intellectual contributions of Native Pacific (including Kanaka Maoli) scholars first and foremost so as not to reproduce settler colonial power within the text itself, as well as to map out more generally the existing conversations within indigenous studies that she wishes to build on, drawing heavily on Native American scholars like Audra Simpson, Scott Morgensen, and Jodi Byrd. Even so, the author would have done well to provide a more muscular engagement with the literature on Asian settler colonialism, which has its own distinct contours. This would...

Emma Cervone’s Long Live Atahualpa contributes to the scholarly trend of examining Ecuadorian indigenous political activism from the perspective of grassroots organizations rather than only via national indigenous leaders. Also important is Cervone’s focus on activism in the central highland civil parish of Tixán, Chimborazo, rather than on the better-known cases in the northern highlands of Ecuador. Cervone asserts that examining national events from a local perspective “works at the frontier of culture, identity, and power to explore the meanings generated in the everyday by the people who resist domination” (p. 19).The focus on Tixán and Cervone’s many years in residence there provide a richly detailed discussion of indigenous versus nonindigenous perceptions of the rise of the Inca Atahualpa organization in the region. She shows, for example, how the context of national indigenous uprisings emboldened local indigenous peoples to act on their grievances (particularly over land) and how the rise of the indianada made nonindigenous tixaneños both resentful of indigenous actions and afraid to counter them. Moreover, her discussion of local indigenous politics considers not only the big moments of overt confrontation but also the resistances offered through daily interactions, particularly the ways in which indigenous peoples often ignored abusive demands rather than submitting to them. It was out of this particular convergence of local and national politics that the Inca Atahualpa organization came to serve as an alternative justice system in Tixán (p. 171), holding meetings on Sundays to hear disputes between indigenous peoples and to mete out justice, including punishments for those found guilty.Perhaps the best discussion of the overlapping issues of identity, politics, and inter-ethnic interactions in Tixán can be found in chapter 6, “Celebrating Diversity,” in which Cervone scrutinizes the “festival of the Quichuas” held in Tixán around the summer solstice in June. The celebrations date back to the days in which hacienda owners presided over harvest festivals, but in the aftermath of the 1960s agrarian reform, indigenous peoples gradually took over the planning and oversight of the festival, which became an indigenous event located in the white-mestizo town center of Tixán. It was symbolically, culturally, and politically crucial as an event that developed alongside rising political activism. Eventually, the festival became more inclusive of nonindigenous as well as indigenous peoples. Cervone offers a particularly fine discussion in this chapter of the variety of ways that indigenous peoples used clothing to highlight distinct parts of their identities at different times. In this chapter, theory and detail, collective and individual experiences, and indigenous and nonindigenous views all blend seamlessly for a powerful and fascinating look at a well-known yearly event.Other chapters do not blend theory and detail or description and analysis nearly as well. Cervone offers interesting quotes and descriptions throughout the monograph, but these are typically separated from theoretical discussions, and the connections between the two are often not well developed. Moreover, despite Cervone’s emphasis on doing “politically engaged” anthropology by collaborating with the indigenous group she studied (p. 31), she makes only brief references to things like organizing workshops in Tixán. This was a missed opportunity to explore the significance of anthropological engagement along the lines set out by Maximilian Viatori in One State, Many Nations: Indigenous Rights Struggles in Ecuador (2009), in which he discusses his political involvements with the Amazonian community that he studied.Cervone is at her best when discussing the rising political power of both the Inca Atahualpa organization and the broader Ecuadorian indigenous movement in the 1990s. Her discussion of events from 2000 forward offers a useful summary of scholarly studies on national developments, but her references to local activities are brief in contrast to her richly textured and specific discussions of the Inca Atahualpa movement in the 1990s. More problematic is her discussion of the earlier twentieth century: she often takes indigenous peoples’ memories of the hacienda system as fact rather than analyzing them in light of the context in which they were made. Furthermore, she does not take full advantage of some of the available scholarship on the preagrarian reform decades, such as Marc Becker’s groundbreaking study of Indian-state relations in the early to mid-twentieth century, Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements (2008), which, while included in her bibliography, is underutilized. Similarly, although she often mentions haciendas in Chimborazo and the problem of respect for indigenous peoples, she never references the important work of fellow anthropologist Barry Lyons on these subjects, Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador (2006).Even with these limitations, Long Live Atahualpa is a solid book that will be of interest to scholars who focus on the complex issues of indigenous identity and politics, particularly with regard to local versus national experiences of political change both in Ecuador and in Latin America more generally.

Feminist Studies 45, no. 2/3. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 455 Jennifer McLerran Theorizing Settler Colonialism: Alternative Indigenous Methodologies In Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd asserts that US imperialism propagates itself, expanding into new territories through a “transferable ‘Indianness .’”1 Positioning those it wishes to dominate and whose land and resources it seeks to appropriate as “savage” facilitates its project. Building on the theories of Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe, Byrd asserts that this process continues into the present through settler colonialism .2 Byrd notes, “How we have come to know intimacy, kinship, and identity within an empire born out of settler colonialism is predicated upon discourses of indigenous displacements that remain with the present everydayness of settler colonialism, even if its constellations have been naturalized by hegemony.”3 Wolfe argues that settler colonialism, which is predicated on the disappearance of the Indigenous subject, is a structure, not an event; and, because it structures modern Western culture in seemingly intractable ways, it remains with us today. Byrd 1. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 5. 2. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Continuum International , 1999); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 102–132. 3. Byrd, xviii. 456 Jennifer McLerran Books Discussed in This Essay Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Edited by Joanne Barker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Indigenous Americas series). By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. asserts, “Our contemporary challenge is to theorize alternative methodologies to address the problems imperialism continues to create” (xxvi). She explains, “The challenge facing indigenous studies in the academy is not just the need to negotiate the Western colonial biases that render indigenous peoples as precolonial ethnographic purveyors of cultural authenticity instead of scholars capable of research and insight, but also the need to respect the local specificities, histories and geographies that inform the concept of indigeneity” (xxix). The best Indigenous critical theory, Byrd asserts, is first grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and the specific beliefs and practices of the communitiesfromwhichtheyoriginateandwhichtheysustain.Founded on an Indigenous base, such theory may then be productively explored in relation to European cultural and legal systems. Byrd explains, “Indigenous critical theory could be said to exist in its best form when it centers itself within indigenous epistemologies and the specificities of the communities and cultures from which it emerges and then looks outward to engage European philosophical, legal, and cultural traditions in order to build upon all the allied tools available . . . indigenous critical theory has the potential in this mode to offer a transformative accountability ” (xxx). Indigenous scholars have risen to this task, grounding Indigenous theory in local epistemologies, transforming the discourse, and opening Jennifer McLerran 457 new avenues of inquiry. Works by three innovative theorists, Lenape scholar Joanne Barker, Native Hawaiian J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, and Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson are reviewed here. Each explores Indigenous strategies of resistance to settler colonialism. Barker advocates for a heuristic based on a “polity of the Indigenous,” which she describes as “the unique governance, territory, and culture of Indigenous peoples in unique and related systems of (non)-human relationships and responsibilities to one another” (5). Positioning her arguments in the context of critical Indigenous, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, Barker stresses the importance of sovereignty and self-determination as well as critical exploration of the ways in which these values are represented, conceived, and exercised. Barker begins with a discussion of the terms and debates that comprise the intellectual genealogy of “critical Indigenous gender, sexuality, and feminist studies” (5). Her introduction and the essays comprising...

This article reviews recent research in sociocultural anthropology that has been conducted in and about the United States. I show that anthropologists of the United States have been concerned to locate the anthropological field in three ways: spatial investigations of region, community, and territory; epistemological and methodological projects of cultural critique and defamiliarization; and reconsideration of the place of Native North America in the anthropology of the United States. Emergent inquiry into settler colonialism and the politics of indigeneity has the potential to strengthen the anthropology of the United States by accounting for the ways that being a settler society structures all American lives.

The social science literature on identity politics around questions of race and ethnicity is profuse, prolix and contentious. Indigenous identity politics have seen a parallel growth and are equally complex. While there are analogies and overlaps, indigenous identities and social movements are neither conceptually nor empirically a sub-set of ethnic identities. The central issue of indigenous groups is the place of first peoples in relation to the nation-state system. This takes different forms in old world states of Asia and Africa to those of new world settler (ex-colonial) states of the Americas and Australasia. While the major issues of the indigenous peoples have expanded beyond their national boundaries, their modes of participation in the national political arenas vary. They share a gradual nationalization of indigenous movements, including stronger links with socio-political forces of the respective countries in the region, a heightened consciousness of global processes and the broadening and enrichment of their socio-cultural and economic objectives. This paper looks at trans-national dimensions of indigenous social movements and identity politics in relation to nation-state policy regimes and examines the varying routes taken by indigenous peoples to achieve their goals.

Transnational Settler Colonial Formations and Global Capital: A Consideration of Indigenous Mexican Migrants Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera (bio) and Korinta Maldonado (bio) The Los Angeles Central Library’s exhibition “Visualizing Language: A Zapotec Worldview,” which opened this past September, features a series of murals produced by the Oaxacan artists collective Tlacolulokos. The murals are envisioned as providing a “counter-narrative” to existing ones painted by Dean Cornwell, in 1933, depicting a history of California in four stages: Era of Discovery, Missions, Americanization, and Founding of the City of Los Angeles.1 In these paintings Native people are depicted as marginal and subservient figures within grander visions of colonization. The new murals are thus intended to provide a new voice by putting “a different protagonist in the center of the story.”2 What is of interest for the present essay is who gets to tell this story. It is not Native artists on whose land the library is built, but Oaxacan Indigenous people. In this way, this project continues a legacy of erasure embedded in current discourses of multiculturalism that reinforce settler colonial dispossession and hegemony.3 Taking Indigenous Mexican migration as a point of departure, this essay joins critical scholarship on settler colonialism exploring the role of the migrant in settler processes. Following Patrick Wolfe’s theorization of settler colonialism as a structuring force rather than as a historical passage,4 we ask: How might a comparative framework on settler colonialisms help us articulate theoretical discussion beyond the dominant settler–Native racial binary? And in which ways does the settler colonial theoretical framework render visible the ways in which distinct bodies are racialized within and beyond national boundaries? We understand settler colonialism as the complex reverberations originating from Indigenous dispossession and white possession.5 As a global and transnational phenomenon,6 settler colonialism is a structuring force that in coproduction with the transatlantic slave trade, indentured labor, and other forms of racial [End Page 809] ordering enables particular racial logics and forms of exclusions integral to global capital and empire.7 We also examine settler colonialism within a relational framework promoted by Indigenous and Indigenous studies scholars. A comparative perspective provides synergistic opportunities to compare histories of dispossession and racialization between US and Mexican native populations while recognizing differing colonial experiences. A relational framework examines specific contingencies and conditions of settler colonial contexts to avoid a flattening of distinct historical trajectories that are contained within differences. Thus we place settler colonialism in relation to other imperial formations that allow us to better understand how Indigenous migrants move among distinct race, class, gender, and other colonial formations, as Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein have argued.8 Our consideration of settler colonialism expands beyond Latinx or Chicanx contexts by destabilizing hegemonic categories that draw on national or racial distinctions and erase Indigenous peoples’ experiences.9 Despite constitutional reforms recognizing Mexico’s plural composition, Indigenous peoples in Mexico are subjected to racism, oppression, and dispossession, much like Native Americans in the United States. The multicultural shift in Mexico has served as a governance strategy10 that aims to control and disable radical politics by creating legal frameworks of “conditional inclusion”11 while erasing Indigenous peoples’ demands for autonomy and self-determination. Ultimately these policies further promote Indigenous migration. Through a comparative analysis of settler colonialism in the context of Mexican Indigenous migration to California and Washington, we demonstrate distinct ways in which Indigenous migrants mobilize and articulate their indigeneity. We argue that Indigenous migrant forms of engagement are framed by the particular settler logics and imperial formations in which they find themselves. We show that settler colonialism is contingent and historical. Further, we examine how Los Angeles becomes a site where logics of erasure stand out, while in Yakima connections and relationality that move us beyond settler–colonial binaries prevail. By looking at the case of Zapotecs in a dense urban environment inhabited by many Indigenous bodies, we propose that Natives become invisible at different places and historical moments, whereas in the Yakima valley a rural context renders Indigenous recognition more visible. [End Page 810] Indigenous Mexicans in the United States Until recently, we have tended to think of...

Developing a fuller understanding of US imperialism requires engagement with settler colonial and Indigenous studies. I expand Amy Kaplan's analysis of US empire as "riddled with instability, ambiguity and disorder" to consider how settler colonialism is fortified via walls. Walls stake settler claims and scale from individual property (home) to national borders (homeland). Examining Donald Trump's US-Mexico border wall and a sea wall in front of beachfront property Barack Obama has purchased in Hawai'i reveals the inherent instability and impermanence of settler colonialism, and thus this particular form of imperialism. That instability manifests in three ways: (1) settler colonial anxious, repetitive insistence on its dominion, its claims, especially via the law and physical intervention; (2) the multiple ways human and other-than-human actors resist the walls, refuse capture/containment, call out the fiction/myth of the border and sea wall's power to divide; and (3) the way "once and future ghosts" haunt settler claims, unsettle territorial and temporal assertions of possession/domination/belonging. Based on this finding and analysis drawn from Indigenous and settler colonial studies, I argue that settler colonialism, and thus US imperialism, ultimately fails because of its inherent unsustainability and the myriad of ways it is resisted. What succeeds instead is Indigenous resilience and radical resurgence.

Works on Indigenous histories have long been sites for both the production and application of theoretical models. In this chapter, I examine the emergence of a school of histories of settler colonialism, locating it within a genealogy that has built upon and critiqued frontier histories in Australia and the U.S. The frontier as a method has led historians to return to its performative representations in order to understand settler colonial relations and to emphasise continuities and draw histories into the present. This chapter traces the influence of frontier historiographies of the late nineteenth century, before turning to revisionist moves first to include Indigenous people and colonial violence in these accounts and second to do away with the frontier model and instead examine contact zones, middle grounds, borderlands, and Indigenous political formations. More recently, many historians have returned to the frontier motif to insist on the continuity of the relationships developed during persistent struggles over land and sovereignty. But though some of these histories centre Indigenous perspectives, some others adopting a similar analytic have neglected Indigenous politics and agency: the chapter calls for a renewed attention to Indigenous social structures, articulated with but not necessarily dominated by those structures of invasion inaugurated on frontiers.

Geography scholarship about Indigenous politics in Canada frequently draws upon ideas from the field of settler colonial studies (SCS). Yet, criticisms of SCS and the application of its concepts to Canadian contexts are becoming increasingly common. Such criticisms include: an overly rigid distinction between settler colonialism and so-called ‘franchise’ colonialism, a tendency to rely on a small number of non-Indigenous scholars as foundational thinkers in the field and a lack of attention to the ways in which Canadian colonialism has varied across space-time. This article argues that re-engaging the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ – an older approach that focuses on identifying parallels between the imperialist domination of the third world and the colonial subjugation of peoples that are ‘internal’ to nation states – can help advance our understanding of Canadian colonialism.