Colonial Landscape Research Articles

Systemic racism, a prime minister, and the remote Australian school system

Remote Australian schools face complex contextual issues due to systemic and enduring disadvantage. The structures and systems put in place to support and provide advantage for Indigenous Australians continually fail to meet their mark due to colonial structures, policies and inability to understand remote contextual demands. In South Australia, the context of this paper, systemic disadvantage disproportionately affects Indigenous people. This article explores the contemporary colonial landscape of a remote school context, provides background on the colonial institutions which shape the interactions and services provided to people in remote Australian areas, and provides two empirical examples of the contemporary, structural, and harmful influence of policy and political figures in a remote school. By examining the politics of being a school leader, the policy background for remote Australian schools, and the unique challenges of position both in policy and physical terms, we show how contemporary racism structures and conditions the lives of young people in remote contexts today.

Virtual Returns: Colonial postcards online and digital \u2018nostalg\xe9rie\u2019 among the former European settlers of Algeria

This article analyses how certain former European settlers of Algeria (pieds-noirs) have created a digital space of remembrance online using scans of colonial-era postcards. Tracing the role of colonial-era postcards in pied-noir memory narratives, from the phototexts of the 1980s to websites from the mid-2000s onwards, I suggest these digital sites of memory attempt to maintain a connection to an imagined Algerian homeland during the so-called ‘memory wars’. By collecting, scanning, and reproducing postcards and photographs of colonial landscapes, pieds-noirs websites aim to reconstruct a lost topography of houses, shops, streets, and towns that have been renamed and rebuilt since independence. These ‘virtual returns’ to Algerian urban topographies rely predominantly on affective responses to ‘nostalgérie’ or nostalgia for Algeria. However, in relying on colonial-era postcards they ultimately recreate the ‘visual economy’ (Welch and McGonagle) of French Algeria in the early 20th century. I argue that, despite the radical ‘connectivity’ presented by the internet, these websites remain primarily focused on creating a homogenous collective memory for an imagined audience of pieds-noirs online. Nonetheless, I conclude by suggesting that this online model of colonial nostalgia has permeated, in limited but influential ways, how other groups interpret visual ‘nostalgérie’.

The Colonial Landscape of the British Caribbean, by Roger Leech & Pamela Leech (eds.)

The Colonial Landscape of the British Caribbean, by Roger Leech & Pamela Leech (eds.)

Mendicants, Minimalism, and Method: Franciscan Scientific Travel in the Early Modern French Atlantic

Abstract This article explores the scientific travels of French members of mendicant orders in the early modern Atlantic World. The Royal Cosmographer André Thevet, the Capuchin Claude D’Abbeville and the Minim Charles Plumier demonstrate a coherent but evolving Franciscan perspective in missionary scientific observation on the colonial frontier. It argues that the Franciscan monastic tradition, the Franciscan reform movement, and the teachings of the Minim order interacted with the colonial landscape and encounters with local environments and indigenous peoples in the Atlantic and Caribbean to produce a unique tradition of natural knowledge production. This tradition culminates in the convergence of the Minim worldview with the cartographic and observational program of the Paris Academy of Sciences in the Atlantic voyages of the French Minim friar and scientific traveler Louis Feuillée at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Dis/locating Preferential Memory within Settler Colonial Landscapes: A Forward-Looking Backward Glance at Memoration’s Per/formation

The degree to which authorized sites of commemoration such as monuments perpetuate deep-rooted practices of selective remembering and forgetting in settler states, and in doing so, help to entrench narratives and mythologies that mask ongoing colonial occupation and violence while denying Indigenous sovereignty, has arguably never been more evident. While official sites of remembrance undoubtedly shape the dominant imaginary, vernacular forms of commemoration exerted implicitly and explicitly in everyday life are also powerfully influential in the circulation of the nation’s ascendant ideation as what Audra Simpson calls “narration[s] of truth.” This paper will examine the ways “memoration,” an artistic/performance methodology I have developed through my inter-media art practice and scholarship, performs interventions into commemoration in the guise of public, national, and personal memory. As an adaptable and inherently relational, embodied and place-based methodology, memoration offers a framework of in Andrew Herscher's terms, “remembering otherwise”: one that activates a reckoning with the intergenerational responsibilities of being-in-relation, in my case as a white settler, on Indigenous lands that are at the same time “occupied” and unceded.

Landscape footprints of peopling and colonisation from the Late Bronze Age to Antiquity in the coastal hinterland of Emporion-Emporiae, NE Iberia.

The Empordà plain attests to a remarkable mixture of Late-Holocene cultural exchanges and colonial processes. This includes the founding of Emporion, the earliest Greek colony in Iberia, and of the Roman city of Emporiae. This study aims at assessing landscape changes related to indigenous and colonial settlement in this unique scenario where the shaping of cultural landscapes occurred within a dynamic coastal ecosystem. We carried out a high-temporal resolution palaeoenvironmental study in Els Estanys, a palaeowetland located in the vicinity of Emporion-Emporiae. Palynological, sedimentological and geochemical indicators were coupled with available archaeological and archaeobotanical data-sets. Between 1100 and 800 cal BC, the settling of Urnfield Late Bronze societies resulted in the sustained clearance of woodlands and moderate agropastoral exploitation of coastal ranges. During this period, marine-influenced lagoonal areas were poorly exploited. During the Iron Age (800–450 cal BC), a threshold in the landscape construction of the area occurred with the first pastoral exploitation of lagoonal areas, intensified cereal cultivation, controlled burning, and enhanced deforestation following the settlement of Iberian groups. Greek colonisation (580–200 cal BC), did not trigger intensified farming exploitation or landscape clearance, nor did it imply the introduction of new land uses or crops in the hinterland. Exploitation of the latter continued relying on cereal cultivation and grazing, as before, suggesting the permanence of indigenous landscapes and practices in the hinterland. To the contrary, urban and periurban landscapes played a significant role in the construction of the colonial landscape with the introduction of olive groves likely as ornamental trees. Roman conquest and colonisation of the area constituted a new threshold in the occupation and management of the hinterland with (1) intensified rural settlement; (2) expansion of wet pastures and removal of littoral woodlands; (3) development of diversified cropping activities; and (4) development of mining and smelting activities.

Nautico-imperialism and settler-colonialism: water and land in the New South Wales colony

ABSTRACT This article outlines the role of rivers and oceans in colonial land 'settlement' in Sydney. The analysis exposes a form of thalassic colonisation, whereby territoriality was a defining feature of settler-colonialism in the first decades of the colonial invasion, but wherein claiming and/or controlling vast bodies of water was necessary to that territoriality. Britain was a maritime empire and Sydney a maritime town in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and there was a maritime pathway to early land theft in Australia. This archival analysis follows the colonial ships and Aboriginal nawi (bark canoes) to undertake a history from the water. Three nautico-imperial logics of settler-colonialism are presented. 1) ‘Aboriginal resistance and labour’ highlights the role of Aboriginal action against and incorporation into the colonial maritime economy and industries, and British Royal Navy exploration more broadly. 2) ‘Atomised colonial landscapes’ shows how Aboriginal Country was used as a colonial resource in the early maritime industries, with land claimed for ship building yards and whaling and sealing infrastructure, and trees felled for ship building. 3) Theorising the rivers and oceans as a ‘nautico-imperial infrastructure’ shows that water preceded land as a pivotal colonial infrastructure for the British maritime empire.

Italian fascist modernisation and colonial landscape in Albania 1925-1943

Environmental history and landscape transformations vis-à-vis agricultural modernization policies such as the reclaiming of land hardly features in studies on the Italian fascist annexation of Albania. This paper focuses on the main features of Italian economic and landscape efforts in Albania during the fascist years through a general overview of the Italian period with respect to economic and land reclamation works, and an exploration of Italys colonial policies in the modernization and regeneration of Albanian landscape. Its scope includes Italys interwar interventionist efforts in Albania in economy and land reclamation, but not the substantial literature on Italian contribution to the transformation of Albanian urban landscapes during the interwar period. The urban planning of Albania by Italian architects, engineers, and urbanists that developed from 1920 to 1939 has been dealt with extensively in scholarship regarding Albania.

Translating Race on the French Stage

Translating Race on the French Stage

EPINICIOS GRATULATORIOS AL CONDE DE GALVE

This paper circumscribes Epinicios Gratulatorios within the textual corpus written during the Nine Years’ War that simultaneously confirms their vassalage to Spain and demonstrates a Novohispanic pride. This merging can be appreciated in all the silvers and sonnets that commemorate Gaspar de la Cerda’s triumph. In Epinicios, the colonial landscape denatures the European encomiastic tradition. The Pythoness, Daphne, Thetis, Mars, among others, are adapted to the “Novohispanic peculiarities” making a difference between the self and the other.

Health for all?: Histories of international and global health

AbstractThis essay presents a survey of recent work in the history of international and global health from the mid‐nineteenth to the early twenty‐first centuries. It considers longstanding narratives alongside recent studies that have deployed approaches consonant with scholarship in the emerging global history of science and medicine. The cumulative impact of this work is to show how the history of international health has long been embedded in colonial landscapes of power, even as it also fostered revolutionary nationalism and grew from anti‐colonial socialist internationalism; and how the absence, as well as presence, of intervention has shaped understandings of global health in recent decades.

Trans and White Trash: An Ethnography of Trans People in the Deep South

Trans and White Trash: An Ethnography of Trans People in the Deep South

Visualising Order: Photography and the Production of the Colonial Police in India

Stationed in cities, towns and villages across the Indian subcontinent, the colonial police were a ubiquitous presence under the British Raj. Visuality was central to the policing project; the police’s effectiveness was predicated on colonial subjects’ recognition of police authority. Photographs of policepersons and police buildings, appearing in manuals, histories and memoirs, private albums, imperial educational propaganda and on postcards, testify to the pervasiveness of the policing institution within the colonial landscape and the institution’s commitment to visuality. The sheer volume of these photographs invites consideration. While existing scholarship on the colonial police and photography has largely focused on how the police harnessed the medium in their efforts to visualise colonial criminals, this article considers photography as a means of producing the police to make legible the imperial social order. Various photographs of policepersons and police buildings – mundane and propagandistic images when considered within the broader history of colonial Indian photography – index imperial interactions, revealing the visual language the police relied on to assert their authority.

The Borders of Black Power

The Borders of Black Power

Author Response

Author Response

Enduring Dimensions of Indigenous Foodways in the Southern Alta California Mountain Hinterlands

ABSTRACT Colonization dramatically impacted native ecosystems and Indigenous foodways in the Alta California coastal regions, but its impact in colonial hinterland landscapes remains poorly understood. This study contributes information on the indirect effects of colonial ecological transformations on hinterland Indigenous foodways by examining archaeofauna from the California Historical Landmark Black Star Canyon Puhú village (CHL#217; CA-ORA-132/317) in the Santa Ana Mountains of Orange County, California. In 1832 CE, the Indigenous residents of Puhú were allegedly subsisting off stolen livestock and were massacred in retaliation by colonists. Zooarchaeological analyses of the village revealed a continuation of montane endemic hunting traditions whereas livestock had a minimal, if not non-existent, impact on the community's foodways. We suggest that the outcome of postcolonial ecological change on food availability was variable in proximal hinterland areas, and for the Puhú village, potentially enhanced access to certain native faunal resources, which enabled a different mode of cultural persistence.

The City as Fac¸ade in Velha Goa: Recognising Enduring Forms of Urbanism in the Early Modern Konkan

What do we know of early modern colonial urbanisms in South Asia? Rich archival sources provide meta-narratives of the ‘rise and fall’ of colonial outposts and their spatial projects. This article revisits these histories through the results of an archaeological project conducted at Portuguese Goa. In settings such as Velha Goa, histories of the city are unavoidably structured by elite, top-down understandings of social processes, principally owing to the limits of the colonial archives themselves. Quotidian material transformations, essential to urban process, remain largely unconsidered. In Goa, the archaeological data suggest the dominant historical narratives that characterise this capital of empire as the ̒Rome of the East’ work to substantiate a vision of the city that erases other socialities. The archaeological data allow us to productively think of the colonial early modern urban landscape as both a physical and conceptual façade. Historical tropes of ruination mask rich and varied archaeological evidence of enduring forms of urbanism. The idea of the city as façade allows at once a characterisation of the concealed failures of colonial urban governance and its legacies in perpetuating certain ideals and understandings of urbanism, and it questions narratives of urban decline that still resonate today.

Wild Legalities: Animals and Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel

AbstractThis article examines the underlying biopolitical premises of wildlife management in Palestine/Israel that make, remake, and unmake this region's settler colonial landscape. Drawing on interviews with Israeli nature officials and observations of their work, the article tells several animal stories that illuminate the hierarchies and slippages between wild and domestic, nature and culture, native and settler, and human and nonhuman life in Palestine/Israel. Animal bodies are especially apt technologies of settler colonialism, I show here. They naturalize and normalize settler modes of existence, while criminalizing native livelihoods and relations. Utilizing the terra nullius doctrine, creating biblical landscapes by reintroducing extirpated wild animals, controlling the movement of Palestinians and their animals while letting Jewish settlers and their animals roam unhindered, criminalizing the Palestinians’ more‐than‐human relations, and introducing restrictions on native engagement with animals are all an inherent part of nature administration in Palestine/Israel. But while they serve as tools for advancing colonial practices, nonhuman animals are also subject to the same violence that afflicts humans. Understanding the more‐than‐human dimensions of the settler colonial order is instrumental for thinking about how to subvert this order and redirect its violence toward decolonized, or “wild,” legalities. [animal studies, settler colonialism, biopolitics, nature conservation, Palestine/Israel]

In the “Fissures of Infrastructure”

Abstract This article offers an account of “toxic infrastructures” as mutually material and discursive arrangements operating in the postwar, postcrash, and settler colonial landscapes of the United States. It specifically responds to Jennifer Scappettone’s multimodal poetic work The Republic of Exit 43, developed after the author’s discovery that the industrial landfill site she grew up alongside in New York had been classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as requiring federal intervention. Tracing Scappettone’s poetic geographies from the “corporate dump” of Syosset Landfill to the more (in)famous waste site Fresh Kills, the article argues that Scappettone exposes the ways that certain bodies and ecologies are rendered physically and conceptually toxic and implicates readers in the uneven social, embodied, and ecological conditions of composition and response. It suggests that Scappettone’s practices of collage, salvage, and collaborative performance destabilize lyric subjectivity to address a “garbage arcadia” compounding the material accumulations of US consumerism and neoliberal financialization with longer processes of dispossession and displacement. Reading this text with feminist materialisms and Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s queer Indigenous poetry, the article considers how poetics might reckon with the material conditions and residues of uneven wasting and generate situated, critical, and relational approaches to toxic infrastructures.

Coffee Frontier in Proto-Colonial and Colonial Angola

Coffee plantations were unquestionably one of the defining features of Angola’s colonial landscape. From the 1870s to independence, coffee was the main export of this former Portuguese colony, barring a couple of intervals during which rubber and diamonds held first place. During this time, Angola ranked consistently among the world’s largest robusta producers, which it might still have been today had the country’s civil war (1975-2002) not made commercial farming all but impossible. In Angolan popular memory, coffee occupies an ambivalent position: for some people it brings up memories of colonial forced labor, while others recollect stories of successful family farms. My research project, “Coffee and Colonialism in Angola, 1820-1960,” aims to reconstruct the multiple, intertwined realities behind these contrasting memories. Focusing on northern Angola, where smallholding and estate farming always coexisted, it investigates how African farmers, colonial settlers, foreign traders, and global consumers shaped one of the oldest commercial coffee frontiers in sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it reflects on the question to what extent “colonialism” is the proper lens through which to study the history of coffee cultivation in Angola.