Colonial Citizenship Research Articles

Miscegenation and militarization: undoing racial colonial citizenship for the next century

ABSTRACT This essay considers the Immigration Act of 1924, otherwise known as the Johnson-Reed Act (JRA), within historical and contemporary contexts of anti-miscegenation and Indigenous erasure that are undercurrents of citizenship and immigration processes. By using a framework of settler colonialism carried out by the U.S. nation-state, we explore connections among racialized peoples in U.S. American empire and the push for racial purity through systems of blood quantum and anti-miscegenation laws. With attention to how colonialism from the continental USA flows to locales such as Guåhan/Guam, a place enacting sovereignty despite occupation and colonial possession, we consider how immigration and citizenship are wielded as tools of U.S. American militarization. Ultimately, we argue that critiquing miscegenation and militarism is necessary to overcome racial and colonial violences of empire.

Relational filmmaking

Relational filmmaking

Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship

This article extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. The article then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency. I do so through examining the Palestinian citizens in Israel, specifically centering the Internally Displaced Persons—Palestinians who received Israeli citizenship even as they were displaced from their places of origin. I conclude by asserting citizenship’s double paradox in settler colonial contexts: It regulates certain rights and mobilities but simultaneously entraps the indigenous in a structure in which recursive accumulation is constitutive, thus entrenching dispossession and the further loss of collective rights and other claims.

Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 by Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres

Reviewed by: Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 by Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres Aldo A. Lauria Santiago Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres, Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018. 318 pp. Black British Migrants in Cuba is an impressive, in-depth history of the migration and experience of British Caribbean people, most of them Black, in Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century. Sugar mills that were US, Canadian, and locally owned required vast numbers of laborers for cane cutting and other kinds of manual labor. Under American tutelage, Cuban authorities allowed what was often privately controlled migration of workers from the rest of the Caribbean. Migrants were persistently seen as threatening aliens in racist terms. The book is framed by a fascinating idea: how could black colonial subjects consider their liberation from colonialism and racism from within their diasporic condition? A second persistent theme is the long tradition of antiblack racism and fear and the particular forms these took in nineteenth and early twentieth century Cuba. The book is based on extensive archival research in dozens of archives in nine countries. It is difficult to imagine a more thorough work of archival research, especially as it includes sources drawn from the diverse local origins of English Caribbean migrants as well as the places in Cuba that ended being permanent or temporary home for thousands. The author also carried out many oral histories and identified older ethnographic materials in various archival sites. The one persistent claim through the book is the weight of the (sometimes indistinguishable) complex multiple forms of subordination (and agency) of immigrant workers: as black, colonial, and migrant guest workers with few rights in Cuba subjected to exploitation, violence, and mistreatment, and as colonial subjects of the English crown, which essentially served as their own form of racially framed colonial citizenship. The most interesting dimension of this, which has been considered and debated by other authors working on the West Indian diaspora, is how well the crown and crown officials served to [End Page 329] protect and support their subjects while in Cuba (or any other country or area like the Panama Canal Zone, New York City, or Honduras). At just over three hundred pages, the book is organized into ten chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. The introduction provides an important framing device for the book: a 1944 call for a pan-Caribbean workers' movement free from British rule, issued and supported in Cuba. Chapter 1 introduces the history of English-speaking Antillean workers in Cuba as part of larger movements of black bodies to and in the Caribbean. It also introduces readers to one of the principal contexts discussed throughout the book: the origin of the persistent fears by Cuban elites of blackness, black agency, and black bodies. This chapter reviews the history of antiblack fears, policies, and black resistance since the early nineteenth century. The book carefully traces the importance of the migrants to Cuba's sugar industry and their presence produced both mistreatment and resistance. Chapter 2 reviews the processes of departure and arrival of the migrants works through the 1940s. It covers demographics, policies, origins, and settlement through ethnographic and archival sources. The data on the diversity of people's origins and paths, and the United Fruit Company enclaves in Cuba and its pan-Caribbean networks, are especially important. The third chapter presents extensive evidence of violence against black migrants and generalized fear. Especially valuable here is the detailed discussion of the Jobabo massacre of 1917. Chapter 4 discusses the transnational networks of support claimed by English Caribbean migrants while in Cuba. Here the author provides a very nuanced discussion of how responsive British authorities, including consuls, were to the demands and claims of their subjects while in Cuba. It also considers the role of Afro-diasporic solidarities including the UNIA. The book also reviews how the migrants experienced the depression, repatriation, and the postdepression years? Next, chapter 5 considers the impact of economic crisis on migrants' work conditions, mobility, and status. It introduces evidence of the...

The liberal corporate order and the market transition in colonial Upper Canada, 1825–1841

ABSTRACT This analysis of the corporate ‘franchise state’ in the settler colony of Upper Canada (Ontario) highlights its role in introducing both a liberal market and a corporate revolution. I contrast the liberal legislative project to create laissez faire markets with the private corporate agenda of those legislators, a group of ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ known as the Family Compact. The corporation became the vehicle by which these oligarchs controlled trade and introduced managed markets in the fictitious commodities of land, labor and money; the fictitious commodities were legal reifications (as was the corporation itself) used to govern the trade in real commodities. Control of these corporations allowed these gentlemanly capitalists to also assume control of British emigration and thereby introduce new forms of ‘systemic colonization’ and settler colonialism; and change conceptions of colonial citizenship from loyalism to liberalism. The corporate revolution was thus key to the formation of liberal settler colonialism in the province.

Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere

Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere

Comfort and insecurity in the reproduction of settler coloniality

ABSTRACT Understood as a practice, citizenship can bring benefits across affective and material registers; however, its possibility also rests on logics of exclusion. This is especially the case in Anglosphere settler colonial contexts in which citizenship is both a function of settler state authority while simultaneously reproducing that very authority. Using Canada as an illustration, the paper reads citizenship through the concepts of implicated subjecthood and colonial liberalism. In doing so it puts forward a phenomenon described as ‘settler insecurity’ to underscore one aspect of how this reproduction occurs. Relating this insecurity to mythologies of the settler geographic imaginary and the affective and material benefits of citizenship, the paper argues the comforts of settler colonial citizenship and this insecurity are co-constitutive. When understood in relation to the un-realised nature of settler coloniality as a genocidal project, the paper outlines how these interconnected phenomena represent important logics in ongoing processes of remaking settler sovereignty through the domestication of Indigenous nationhood and erasure of colonial relations.

Missing Links: Data Stories from the Archive of British Settler Colonial Citizenship

Digitized sources and digital methods are changing the way that we do history. For historians of the British Empire, the digital age offers new possibilities for investigating the lives of those who moved around the empire and across the world. However, much discussion of the possibilities and problems of digital history have focused on the creation and use of full text resources, skipping over the analytical opportunities offered by the descriptive systems in which those texts are embedded. This article is an attempt to fill this gap by documenting a journey through archival data relating to nineteenth-century Chinese naturalization in the Pacific Rim settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. We argue that such data stories are critical if we are to understand both possibilities and pitfalls of research in digital collections.

Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere, by Lara Atkin, Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis and Nathan Garvey

<i>Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere</i>, by Lara Atkin, Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis and Nathan Garvey

The good Arab: conditional inclusion and settler colonial citizenship among Palestinian citizens of Israel in Jewish Tel Aviv

AbstractDominant majorities often use idealized categories to validate the ‘goodness’ and deservingness of minority citizens. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, this category is the ‘good Arab’. Since its origins in early Jewish settlement of Palestine, it has become a powerful and controversial metaphor in Israeli public discourse. As an experienced condition of limited inclusion, the ‘good Arab’ exemplifies the Palestinian dilemma of accessing socioeconomic opportunities in Jewish Israeli spaces that stigmatize and fend off their ethnonational identity. Combining a historical genealogy of the ‘good Arab’ with ethnographic research among Palestinians in Tel Aviv, this article shows how a historically evolved logic of settler colonial control and indigenous erasure continues to define liberal frameworks of conditional citizenship and inclusion. Theorized through the emerging concept of conditional inclusion, these insights open up new avenues for analysis and comparison in anthropological debates surrounding indigenous struggles, settler colonialism, urban inclusion, and citizenship.

‘A stranger from this homeland’: deportation and the ruin of lives and livelihoods during the Palestine Mandate

ABSTRACTThis article explores Mandate Palestine’s immigration policy through the stories of migrants and settled residents who attempted to resist government-issued deportation orders for their removal from the territory. Individuals who lived in and crossed the borders and frontiers of interwar Palestine without the necessary permissions from the mandate government began to negotiate their relationship with the state once they received deportation orders, had their identity documents revoked, or found themselves under arrest. Through a close reading of archival sources including petitions, letters court case extracts and police correspondence, the article argues that Palestine’s immigration and deportation policies caused and exacerbated precarity and dislocation, all of which represented elements of the modern experience of colonial citizenship.

First World War veterans and the state in the French and British Caribbean, 1919-1939

ABSTRACTAs demobilization gathered pace in 1919, the colonial authorities in both the British and French Caribbean fretted about the reintegration of thousands of men imagined to have been rendered volatile and dangerous by their time overseas. By 1939, however, the situation appeared quite different. Veterans in the British islands were restive and dissatisfied, while their French Caribbean counterparts were comparatively settled. This contrast was not simply about disparities in state generosity. Rather, the article explores how differing conceptions of the relationship between military service and citizenship shaped the actions of the colonial and imperial governments. Where the governments of Martinique and Guadeloupe helped to foster the growth of veterans’ associations which were then incorporated into local policy-making and, more broadly, an imperial network of state aid, the British colonial authorities sought to suppress veteran identity in pursuit of the ultimately unachievable ideal of a final settlement with the demobilized men. An analysis of the interwar veterans’ movements therefore opens up questions of colonial governance, citizenship, and identity.

When dialogue means refusal

In my response to Rose-Redwood et al.’s (2018) ‘The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue’ ( Dialogues in Human Geography 8(2): 109–123), I attend to the question of what it means to refuse dialogue. Dialogue as it is often deployed is supported by a host of colonial logics that position many marginalized humans, and nonhumans, as unable to communicate ‘rationally’ (that is to dialogue). Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars, Glen Coulthard ((2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.), Audra Simpson ((2007) Ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67–80; (2014) Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, UK: Duke University Press.), and others, I suggest that refusal can mean more than merely stepping outside dialogue, allowing the problematic to pass unchallenged. Rather, refusal may be a way of resisting, reframing, and redirecting colonial and capitalist logics, constituting both an important political strategy and an assertion of diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds. Refusal, in these contexts, is neither a negation of the need for dialogue nor a withdrawal from the need to counter colonialism, but a refusal to be drawn into politics that enable colonialism, and so can be a strong assertion of sovereignty. I then position myself in relation to this work, thinking through what refusal as dialogue might mean as a non-Indigenous human geographer living and working on stolen land, committed to the complex, even intractable, task of supporting decolonization.

Review essay: on Mamdani’s mode of thought

ABSTRACTThis essay tracks the formation of a global intellectual, perhaps the only one, whose work moves across Africa, America and Asia. Mahmood Mamdani has been a central figure engaging in explaining the most controversial issues such as refugees, popular versus state nationalism, mass killings (Rowanda), settler versus native, colonial citizenship and its governed subject, September 11, the Dafur movement (and its self-indulgence), Imperial Human Rights, decolonizing university and knowledge production (the US as the first and never decololinzed), settler colonialism, etc. Fearless and thoroughly grounded, Mamdani’s mode of thought is to historicize the conditions of the existence of the problematics in question with a theorization emerging out of the analyses. As a whole, Mamdani’s political practices as educator and public intellectual and the body of brilliant work have been inspirational. The essay is written as an introduction to Decolonizing the World: A Mahmood Mamdani Reader, a collection of his selected work, to open the channel of interaction between Asia and Africa.

Contesting Citizenship in Post-Handover Hong Kong

The British colonial rule inscribed a passive citizenship in Hong Kong with its de-politicized and de-nationalized governing strategies. Central to this passive citizenship is a political subject featured by individualism, political apathy and economical self-reliance. Attachment to the nation as well as to the local community was basically absent in the notion of colonial citizenship. The end of colonial rule in 1997 and the reconfiguration of Hong Kong as the Special Administrative Region of China embarked on a political project of redefining citizenship in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong SAR government intended to enhance the national identity of the Hong Kong people. But meanwhile, it also largely inherited the passive citizenship from the colonial rule, discouraging political participation while promoting individualism. Nevertheless, the new political structure of HKSAR has in effect empowered the Hong Kong people. While the public demand for further democratization increases, the tension between the government’s citizenship project and the society’s own preference escalates. Instead of being willingly incorporated into the government citizenship project, the civil society has been actively organizing a counter-movement to articulate a localized and participatory citizenship. The findings indicate that citizenship formation is by no means merely a statist project, especially when the state lacks political legitimacy. Instead, it is an outcome of complex struggles between the state and the society.

Costruire il dominio coloniale. La conquista dell'Africa orientale tedesca e la politica della cittadinanza

In the colonial context, the legal institution of citizenship often assumed a bio-political meaning; in this way ethnic and racial differences became legal categories. A look at the citizenship policy in German East Africa confirms this and offers a new perspective on the relationships between the colonized and the colonizers. This article concentrates on the occupation and establishment of German rule in East Africa at the turn of the 20th century, a period marked by a crisis caused by the new regime's impact on the local population. On the one hand, colonial rule quickly sought to fragment the local society and assign its different parts a broad multiplicity of juridical statuses, seeking to divide the colonizers from the colonized on a racial basis; on the other hand, this operation also created margins of negotiation for sectors of colonial society that hoped to position themselves in this new political context. The article highlights the necessity of placing the issue of colonial citizenship in a broad postcolonial interpretative framework that takes into consideration the local actors and does so by joining together issues of (internal) colonial and international policy and those of economic interests and cultural dimensions.

Becoming Indonesian citizens: Subjects, citizens, and land ownership in the Netherlands Indies, 1930–37

For decades after their introduction in 1854, state-defined categories of subjects and citizens in the East Indies remained largely uncontested. But a furore erupted when Indo-Europeans — legally Europeans and citizens of the Netherlands — demanded rights to own land, rights exclusively apportioned to the autochthonous population. This article recounts a contentious campaign in the 1930s by the Indo-European Association to gain rights to own land, and the vehement rejection by Indonesians expressed in various civic outlets. I argue that by challenging state categories of entitlement, race, and belonging, the debates on rights to own land defined more sharply notions of citizenship among the Indies population. Drawing on ‘acts of citizenship’, I situate the discourse of rights at the centre of the debate on colonial citizenship. In so doing, I offer an insight into the genealogy of exclusion that has haunted the idea of citizenship in postcolonial Indonesia.

Citizenship from the Margins: Vernacular Theories of Rights and the State from the Interwar Caribbean

AbstractThis essay explores debates over political membership and rights within empire from the interwar British Caribbean. Although no formal status of imperial, British, or colonial citizenship existed in this era, British Caribbeans routinely hailed each other as meritorious local “citizens,” demanded political rights due them as “British citizens,” and decried rulers' failure to treat colored colonials equally with other “citizens” of the empire. In the same years, the hundreds of thousands of British West Indians who labored in circum-Caribbean republics like the United States, Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and Costa Rica experienced firsthand the international consolidation of formal citizenship as a state-issued credential ensuring mobility and abode. This convergence pushed British Caribbeans at home and abroad to question the costs of political disfranchisement and the place of race within empire. The vernacular political philosophy they developed in response importantly complements the influential theories of citizenship and rights developed by European thinkers of the same generation, such as T. H. Marshall and Hannah Arendt.

Colonial Citizens of a Modern Empire: War, Illiteracy, and Physical Education in Puerto Rico, 1917-1930

Abstract The year 1917 marked a critical moment in the relationship between the United States and its Puerto Rican colony. It was the year the U.S. Congress approved the Jones Act, which further consolidated the island’s colonial relationship to the empire. Through the Jones Act, U.S. Congressmen granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. In turn, Puerto Rican men were asked to fulfill the obligations of their new colonial citizenship and join the U.S. military. The Porto Rican Regiment provided 18,000 colonial military recruits to guard the Panama Canal during the war. How did historical actors make sense of this new colonial citizenship? How did they interpret, debate, and adapt to the newly consolidated colonial status? This essay examines how local teachers and educators defined colonial citizenship. Puerto Rican teachers struggled to promote a citizenship-building project that cultivated student commitment to the patria (the island), while acknowledging the colonial relationship to the United States. In the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s, teachers debated military participation in World War I and the rights and obligations of U.S. citizenship. At the core, these debates were informed by anxieties over broader changes in constructions of gender. In the 1920s, Puerto Rico women aggressively and persistently challenged traditional gender norms. Working-class women joined the labor force in ever larger numbers and led labor strikes. Bourgeois women became teachers, nurses, and social workers. Both groups were committed suffragists. The historiography on citizenship and gender in the 1920s has focused on women’s emerging role in public spaces and their demands for just labor rights and the franchise. In this article, I propose we look at teachers, as intermediate actors in the colonial hierarchy, and examine their anxieties over changing gender norms. They debated men’s capacity to serve in the U.S. military and promoted modern physical education for the regeneration of boys and girls in the service of their patria. Debates among teachers in the 1920s sought to define the new category of colonial citizenship. As they did so, they helped liberalize some gender norms, while ultimately reinforcing patriarchy.

Etre algérien en situation impériale, fin XIXème siècle – début XXème siècle: L'usage de la catégorie «nationalité algérienne» par les consulats français dans leur relation avec les Algériens fixes au Maroc et dans l'Empire Ottoman

Among the many problems posed by colonial citizenship laws regulating Algerians was the special case of people born within the confines of Algeria and their descendants who had emigrated outside of the country. Algerians in Algeria already inhabited an imprecise place of incomplete French citizenship. And those living abroad, the ‘Originaires d'Algérie’, had to contend with the decisions of French consular authorities, who laboured to interpret and implement the rules established by the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Justice to define the legal status of Algerians living abroad. The French state claimed this category of people as « French » according to the legal theory of State succession. Then, the Indigenat served as an Algerian nationality. This paper argues that this Algerian nationality was an imperial nationality for internal use.