Colonial Recognition Research Articles

Colonial Recognition? The Appropriation of Dutch Land and Population Registers as Legal Documents in Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka

Abstract This paper considers the utilisation, appropriation, and renegotiation of colonial knowledge in the form of land and population registers by local litigants in eighteenth-century Dutch colonial Sri Lanka. Using a database compiled from thirty-three civil court cases held before the Landraad rural council of Colombo, I highlight how Lankan litigants frequently used the colonial thombo registers as evidence to have their property recognised. Moreover, I show that these registers were not just utilised but also altered through this process, particularly through the promotion of alternative knowledge in the form of local witness testimonies and ola palm leaf documents during court cases. I subsequently argue that we should reconsider how we view colonial knowledge. Rather than a static, top-down view from a foreign bureaucracy on a colonised society, this knowledge could be appropriated and even altered through the acts of local agents, in turn changing what was known by the colonial state and thus creating a “looping effect” of knowledge production.

A critical love letter to my ancestors: perhaps a therapeutics of recognition?

Preface: Part memoir, part Chinese history, part theoretical reckoning with settler positionality of my lineage as an immigrant on Turtle Island from Hong Kong, this article is a critical self-study and creative nonfiction experiment that dialogues with colonial recognition and with the abjection method to the self and ancestry, to wrestle with generational failures and what it means to honor my ancestors. I walk through the lens of Kristeva, Fanon, Muñoz, and Coulthard, using their frameworks to understand my distance and relationship with my ancestors and to speculate on their contexts, mindset, and behavior with the colonizers and as the colonizing others, engaging from a place of critical love. This article aligns with the mode of “depth education” as discussed by Andreotti (2021), as an inquiry to expand the researcher’s capacities and dispositions to observe our own affective responses and to hold space for complexities and paradoxes within and around us, without feeling immobilized or demanding to be rescued from discomfort. The writing uses a performative writing approach to interrupt conventional scholarly texts and discourse and seeks to generate curiosity and responses in knowledge-creation spaces.

Minor Settler Grief: Korean Diaspora, Settler Colonialism, and the Pastoral Fantasy in Minari (2021)

Abstract: The critically acclaimed film Minari (2021), directed by Lee Isaac Chung, has been recognized for its emotionally moving on-screen representation of a rural Asian American experience. Building on transpacific scholarship, the present essay examines Minari as a narrative of "minor settler grief," an expression of grief by minor settlers that is closely tied to colonial and militarized aesthetics of earth across the Pacific. The article ties Minari's Korean American farming efforts in 1980s Arkansas to the intersecting histories of settler colonialism in the US and Japanese empires and South Korean authoritarian developmentalism. It considers the Korean nativist aesthetics of earth at work in Minari , an aesthetics of pastoral fantasy that had served imperialism and authoritarian developmentalism, as well as anticolonial imaginations in modern Korea and the diaspora. The essay argues that minor settler grief functions by obscuring relationalities, such as the histories of Native American removal in present-day Arkansas. Mining these histories and visual references enables a critique of certain expressions of grief that produce settler colonial recognition and forgetting.

Geographies of collective responsibility: decolonising universities through place-based praxis

ABSTRACT This paper asks how can we as geographers, occupying positions of relative privilege but also beholden to institutions entangled with legacies of colonialism and ongoing colonization, find and embody our responsibilities to Indigenous people and nations and contribute to decolonization within and beyond the academy? We begin by reflecting on Doreen Massey’s (2004) theorization of geographies of responsibility and critiques of it in the intervening years. We then engage with important considerations including the politics of recognition, relational grammars of settler colonialism and Indigenous notions of relationality. To avoid the traps of recognition politics, which often foreclose the more transformative possibilities of responsibility, we propose ways of taking of decolonial responsibility in our teaching, research and professional service. While we cannot provide simple solutions to the difficult challenge of pursuing decolonization in the academy, we believe that centralizing and prioritizing relationships of responsibility to and through place in support of resurgent Indigenous nationhood is required to avoid the denuding, individualizing process of colonial recognition and superficial performative decolonisation.

Illegible Histories, Invisible Movements: Indigenous Refusal in Blake Hausman's Riding the Trail of Tears

AbstractThis essay analyzes Blake Hausman's Riding the Trail of Tears to explore the complexities of rendering history visible—both viewable and knowable—in the context of settler colonial capitalism. The novel centers on a virtual reality (VR) experience called the Tsalagi Removal Exodus Point Park (TREPP), which allows tourists to experience the Cherokee Removal as an educational and entertaining experience. Through the trope of VR, the novel articulates how historicizing invested in visibility risks turning Native people and knowledge into consumable objects. Instead of seeking colonial recognition by making their history visible, characters in Riding the Trail of Tears mobilize invisibility to jam the machine of settler colonialism. Their surreptitious movement leads to direct action that counters settler appropriation. The novel thus highlights the importance of Indigenous refusal and models specific strategies for enacting it.

Mahamari Plague: Rats, Colonial Medicine and Indigenous Knowledge in Kumaon and Garhwal, India

ABSTRACT Colonial approaches to animal and zoonotic diseases are often scrutinized in terms of their recognition or dismissal of indigenous knowledge. In this article I examine British colonial approaches to “Mahamari plague” in mid-nineteenth century Kumaon and Garhwal, in the Indian Himalayas. Discussing two key colonial medical expeditions in the region, I argue that the eventual recognition of the validity of Kumaoni and Garhwali knowledge of Mahamari and its relation to rats intensified intrusive colonial intervention on indigenous lifeways. I examine this neglected impact of the colonial recognition of indigenous knowledge and urge for approaches that place more emphasis on the practical impact of colonial epistemologies.

Kia Whakatōmuri Haere Whakamua: Implementing Tikanga Māori as the Jurisdictional Framework for Overlapping Claims Disputes

This article addresses the misconception that overlapping rights to land are always in tension with one another. In this article, I apply a tikanga-based analysis to the policy on overlapping rights that is used in the settlement of historical Treaty of Waitangi claims. I argue that the supremacy of colonial law within the State legal system continues to suppress indigenous relationality and limit the mechanisms for reciprocity. This article problematises the following claims made about overlapping claims disputes. First, that overlapping rights are too complex for judicial resolution. This article examines the ways in which overlapping rights are capable of co-existing to preserve relationships between different iwi and hapū. Second, that tikanga is a contestable system of law and should not be regarded as a question of law or as a jurisdictional framework for resolving such disputes. This article critically analyses the extent to which these claims are based on the supremacy of colonial law within the State legal system by considering the application of tikanga in the courts and alternative dispute resolution processes. I argue that tikanga Māori is the only applicable framework whereby differences can be mediated in a way that preserves the relationships between the parties and provides redress mechanisms for continuing reciprocity. This article concludes that the State legal system at present continues to delegitimise indigenous relationality in ways that amalgamate rights into a colonial recognition framework, which fails to recognise tikanga Māori as an equal system of law in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Frantz Fanon and the oval four episode: refusing colonial recognition

Frantz Fanon and the oval four episode: refusing colonial recognition

Reconciling violence: Policing the politics of recognition

Over the course of several months in 2018, more than 240 people were arrested in Burnaby, BC, Canada for disrupting the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. While those arrested shared a willingness to defy Canadian law in opposition to this pipeline development, the police applied differing degrees of force and violence while making these arrests. Informed by interviews with land defenders and engagements on the frontlines of this conflict, this paper considers what these discrepancies in police tactics teach us about logics of settler colonial law, authority, and violence. We do so by engaging in a discussion of the foundational paradox of the state – that its constitutional law is unlawfully constituted – and by presenting the politics of recognition as a strategy employed by the settler colonial state in its attempts to reconcile the contradiction between the state’s claims to legal authority and its own unlawful foundations. However, whereas recognition and reconciliation are often presented in contrast to earlier more violent eras of colonial governance, we argue that colonial recognition is a logic of state violence which determines how, and against whom, state violence is distributed. When assertions of Indigenous jurisdiction take unrecognized or deviant forms, the state ultimately resorts to violence to remove these competing claims to legal authority. Moreover, we argue that police violence against Indigenous peoples asserting “sovereignty on the ground” should not be understood as merely a matter of law enforcement – rather, this is a productive form of violence through which the legal authority of the state is actively established.

Métis Survivance: Land, Love, and Futures in Cherie Dimaline's Dystopian Novels

Métis Survivance:Land, Love, and Futures in Cherie Dimaline's Dystopian Novels Celiese Lypka "Who knows what it's like to leave, to give up a piece of land? If you do, it might haunt you forever, follow you till you come back." Marilyn Dumont1 Although widely different in their composition of Indigenous futurisms, Métis author Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (set in the dystopian future, [2017]) and Empire of Wild (set in the present as a dystopian landscape, [2019]) reveal the impossibility of a shareable future between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism. In both novels, Indigenous bodies and land are co-opted by settler communities to be mined for capital gain. The Marrow Thieves presents a horrific future in which Indigenous bodies are harvested for their ability to dream, something that non-Indigenous peoples have lost the ability to do. The narrative focuses on a young man named Frenchie, who is trying to make sense of the colonial past and present, while looking toward an Indigenous-centric future. In Empire of Wild, Joan searches for her husband who loses control over his mind and body after suggesting they sell her family land to developers for mining and pipeline projects. The protagonists of both texts are Métis,2 and the novels can be read as quests to find a sustainable community for the characters who, through processes of colonization, have forgotten Métis practices and ways of being—knowledge that is integral to healing and reconnecting with the land to build a better future in a postcapitalist world. Both Frenchie and Joan3 begin their respective narratives lost and alone, in search of a specific place or person rooted in "decolonial love," what Leanne Betasamosake [End Page 27] Simpson outlines as "a rebellion of love, persistence, commitment, and profound caring" that is a "generative refusal of colonial recognition."4 Kyle Whyte articulates how, through the sustained militaristic campaigns of settler colonialism across the globe (which includes damaging ecosystems for colonial gain, violent assimilation, and containment processes, as well as forced dependency and instilling conditions of mass fear), Indigenous peoples "already inhabit what our ancestors would have understood as a dystopian future."5 This essay analyzes the representation of Métis communities within the dystopian settings of both novels, identifying the fractures of Métis identity as a result of land dispossession. Dimaline's dystopias detail various ways in which Indigenous people and the land they live on have been devastated by the violence of settler colonialism, leaving them in a nightmarish landscape where they are insidiously disconnected from land and Indigenous ways of being. I argue that through the processes of learning and putting into practice Indigenous storytelling rooted in landedness—what acclaimed Métis scholar Emma LaRocque defines as "Metis love of land"6—the protagonists come to embody decolonial love that cultivates Indigenous futures by upending colonial constructions of identity and community through relational resilience. Landedness, in its relationship with "a particular and unique land area … where we carry out body and home-stitching everydayness" is a "place where we become familiar" to ourselves, a place where we live and grow in decolonial love that nurtures Métis identity outside of colonial structures. This idea is particularly important in Dimaline's novels, as landedness is continuously threatened by the dystopian structures that abolish Indigenous land and ways of being. Reading the colonial history of North America reveals the specific and insidious instances in which Indigenous peoples have been systematically eradicated to legitimize settler state claims to land, practices, and power. However, as Danika Medak-Saltzman identifies, "Yet, and despite the best efforts of settler colonial societies to deny Native peoples the possibility of meaningful futures, narratives about the future have always been, and remain, deeply entrenched in, and important to, Native communities."7 And it's important to note, more specifically, how Indigenous storytelling embodies the interplay between the past, present, and future, acting as a method of narrative resistance in the face of the ongoing violent and linear colonization processes. At the same time, it also offers persistence in Indigenous peoples' connection and relationship to the land by providing...

A Colonial‐Scientific Interface: The Construction, Viewing, and Circulation of Faces via a 1906 German Racial Atlas

ABSTRACTAtlases of anthropometric portraits—a scientific genre that emerged during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the context of classical physical anthropology—invite readers to compare different races from all over the world. Concentrating on Bernard Hagen's Atlas of Heads and Faces of Asian and Melanesian People (1906), this article describes the apparatus that enabled such a way of viewing. A microanalysis of Hagen's facial atlas reveals the circumstances under which the portraits were produced, the reading strategies the atlas stimulates, as well as the reification of data through their circulation. It shows how precisely a facial atlas could function as an imperceptible interface between harsh colonial practices and German public support for colonizing “missions,” between individual subjectivity and racialized category, and between everyday colonial recognition and scientific analysis of “races.” Obscuring the apparatus facilitating such a vision naturalizes the position of a viewer surveying, analyzing, and comparing people of different geographic backgrounds as races. [colonial history, photography, face, racial science, Dutch East Indies]

식민지 조선인의 제1차 세계대전 인식과 3･1운동

식민지 조선인의 제1차 세계대전 인식과 3･1운동

Towards a Decolonial Narrative Ethics

This essay explores the contribution of two works of German literature to a decolonial narrative ethics. It analyzes the structures of colonialism, taking narratives as a medium of and for ethical reflection, and reinterprets the ethical concepts of recognition and responsibility. This essay examines two stories. Franz Kafka’s Report to an Academy (1917) addresses the biological racism of the German scientists around 1900, unmasking the racism that renders apes (or particular people) the pre-life of human beings (or particular human beings). It also demonstrates that the politics of recognition, based on conditional (mis-)recognition, must be replaced by an ethics of mutual recognition. Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978) uses the cross-reference of history and fiction as an aesthetic principle, narrating the history of the German genocide of the Nama and Herero people at the beginning of the 20th century. Intercultural understanding, the novel shows, is impossible when it is based on the conditional, colonial (mis-)recognition that echoes Kafka’s unmasking; furthermore, the novel illuminates the interrelation of recognition and responsibility that requires not only an aesthetic ethics of reading based on attentiveness and response but also a political ethics that confronts the (German) readers as historically situated agents who must take responsibility for their past.

Recognizing Settler Ignorance in the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance.

Carceral Recognition and the Colonial Present at the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge

Glen Coulthard’s 2014 book, Red Skin, White Masks is a much needed critique of the Canadian state’s increasing use of colonial recognition politics. I suggest that Coulthard’s approach is also well-attuned to interrogate current forms of prison reform in Canada. At stake is the possibility that unchecked recognition-based policies in Correctional Service of Canada’s (CSC) mandate – such as the utilization of ‘traditional healing’ in penal programming and the construction of prisons designed solely for Indigenous inmates –undermine the needs of Indigenous people in prison, while propagating settler colonialism through the often invisible mechanisms of the prison system. By analyzing the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge federal prison for Indigenous women, in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, I posit the emergence of a carceral recognition politics in Canadian prisons: a strategy whereby the penal system parades its willingness to accommodate Indigenous difference in order to reconcile Indigenous peoples with the authority of the State – often through the implementation of colonial teleologies towards a supposedly non-colonial present – while simultaneously developing a durable and comprehensive prison system for the more effective incarceration of federally sentenced Indigenous women.

Testing the role of cuticular hydrocarbons on intercolonial agonism in two subterranean termite species (Coptotermes) and their hybrids

Recognition of nestmates is an important function in many social insects, as it maintains colony integrity by preventing outsiders from entering the colony. Agonism usually results from the interaction of con-specific non-nestmate individuals in termite colonies. Previous studies hypothesized that the cuticular hydrocarbon (CHC) profile of individuals had a role in nestmate recognition. However, contradictory results from previous studies in some subterranean termites raise questions on the validity of the cuticular hydrocarbon hypothesis. In the current study, Coptotermes gestroi (Wasmann), Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki and their hybrids were reared in identical conditions from colony foundation. This approach eliminates sources of variability in their cuticular hydrocarbon profiles aside from a genetic component. The parental species displayed dissimilar profiles of predominant alkanes and methyl alkanes, but both hybrid types displayed an overlapping, intermediate profile of these CHC. The mixture of the most abundant CHCs alone did not determine kin recognition; while the two hybrid types’ CHC profiles converged, the hybrids still showed strong agonism. One of the hybrid mating types easily merged with C. formosanus, despite only partial genetic similarity and dissimilar cuticular profiles for the common alkanes and methyl alkanes. This study suggests that in Coptotermes termites, the variable abundance of the major alkanes and methyl alkanes commonly found in most Coptotermes species does not explain agonistic patterns, and that other factors such as possibly more complex but less abundant CHC are likely to be involved in colonial recognition.

A ‘PNG’ Study into Racial Difference In Contemporary Service Delivery Practices

The people of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australia have established linkages through a history of colonisation, Christianity, corporate capitalism and development. This creates an intricate and complex environment within PNG which social relations and interactions occur, between, expatriates, especially Australians, and PNG people. A nuanced understanding of these interactions as they relate to perceived differences in service delivery is likely to generate insights into contemporary understandings of racial differences, colonial legacies and how PNG can ‘develop’ in to a modern society. At issue for PNG people delivering and receiving service, is how differences in service delivery can sometimes translate into debilitating or inequitable interactions.<br />As part of my honours thesis, I am undertaking a study based on the narrative accounts of PNG people in Cairns (Australia), Port Moresby and Lae (PNG) about their experience of PNG-expatriate interactions within the context of contemporary urban service delivery and business operations. Through the study, specific accounts will highlight the perceptions of the narrators and their remembered actions. At issue will be perceptions that Australian and other expatriates receive better or different service then the PNG narrator.<br />Undertaking this research as a Papua New Guinean, working specifically with PNG participants will have specific implications on the research process, and on my role as dually, a PNG person and researcher. This research will involve understanding perceptions of PNG people as told to a PNG researcher. I want to explore (i) how being an identified Papua New Guinean impacts research process; (ii) how being an identified researcher documenting the accounts of a known cohort, impacts participant narrative and story-telling; and (iii) the ways being an identified PNG researcher can contribute to the discussion/debate surrounding indigenous research methodologies and the implications of this for PNG specific research. Academics and institutions recognise indigenous methods in undertaking indigenous specific research. PNG people have an identity that is not easily defined as an indigenous identity, given PNG’s unique colonial and post colonial recognition of land ownership and associated forms of local power. Through this paper, I wish to discuss the implications of this in understanding what it means to be PNG, in undertaking PNG specific research.

The colonialism of Canada’s Métis health population dynamics: caught between bad data and no data at all

In the last two decades, Canada’s brand of colonial recognition politics has fueled several social and cultural changes that have, in turn, produced startling growths in the “Metis population” in Canada. Demographers and policy makers alike have expressed dubiousness about the extent to which “non-demographic factors” (that is, factors other than fertility and mortality) are fueling this growth, a dubiousness expressed in the growing use of “ethnic mobility” to explain population growth. In this article I explore the historical contexts within which the idea of a single Metis population took hold as a statistical technology, the kinds of social and cultural juxtaposition that making use of a single population masks, and the impact single population estimates have on the ability of Metis nation policy actors to fashion evidence-based policy relevant to the concerns of the Metis nation. While the dynamics and the data perused in this article are specific to Canada, they possess broader resonances with other nation-states grappling with their colonial histories and longstanding Indigenous peoples as these dynamics relate to official data dynamics.

Pupal experience and nestmate recognition in Polistes dominula wasps

Social insects can discriminate between nestmates and aliens by comparing the chemical phenotype of an individual with the neural representation of their own colony odor (template). For social paper wasps of the genus Polistes, a general recognition model has been proposed and tested on few North American species: wasps learn colonial recognition cues from the nest paper during the first hours after emergence as adults. However, a recent study revealed that workers of Polistes dominula do not necessarily use the nest paper for early post-emergence cue-learning, suggesting that cues used for the formation of the referent template in this species could be learned at different life stages. Pre-natal learning is a widespread phenomenon in animals and it can shape various behaviors in adults. Here, we investigated whether pre-imaginal learning affects later nestmate recognition in P.dominula wasps. We reared worker pupae in artificial conditions to test whether the absence of nest material, or the exposure to nest material taken from a foreign conspecific colony, during pupal development would alter the nestmate recognition ability in adult life. Our results show that wasps maintain their correct recognition ability regardless of the treatment, suggesting that wasps do not form their referent template during the pupal stage from the nest paper. Alternative hypotheses for template formation timing and source of recognition cues are discussed. Moreover, we investigated whether young wasps already possess, on their own body, reliable chemical cues to form a recognition template by self-referent phenotype matching.

The Cuticular Hydrocarbons Profiles in the Colonial Recognition of the Neotropical Eusocial Wasp, Mischocyttarus cassununga (Hymenoptera, Vespidae)

Cuticular hydrocarbons are chemical messengers with fundamental role in information transfer on the nestmate recognition, physical or behavioral caste, age, task specialization and reproductive status among individuals of colony. In basal (primitively) eusocial wasps, the role of cuticular hydrocarbons in the colonial recognition has been extensively studied in genus Polistes (Polistinae) and Stenogastrinae. Although the genus Mischocyttarus (Polistinae) is a large group of neotropical eusocial wasps, the cuticular hydrocarbons were only investigated in a few species. This study aimed to verify whether the cuticular hydrocarbons can discriminate the intercolonial identity in Mischocyttarus cassununga . Our results showed that the cuticular hydrocarbons can play a role in intercolony recognition.