Expression Of Sovereignty Research Articles

Giving Up "Indians"

Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges. By David Murray. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Since the publication of Roy Harvey pearce's acclaimed Savagism and Civilization in 1953, Native American scholars have approached the study of Indian and European encounter from, one could argue, two distinct positions. On the one hand, Robert F. Berkhofer Jr.'s influential The White Man's Indian (1978) argues that the "Indian" is culturally constructed, an image of European imaginings. For Berkhofer, the border is a site of incommensurability; the study of "Indians" is always only a study of the European mind. In contradistinction to this well-established tradition that promotes a static model of encounter, recent scholarship has shifted the focus of study in ways that acknowledge the dynamic nature of exchange and, consequently, recognize the border as a site of negotiation.1 David Murray's Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges similarly proceeds from the premise that cross-cultural relations are, to a greater or lesser extent, reciprocal in design. However, unlike the bulk of scholarship in Native American studies that focuses almost exclusively on [End Page 271] the accord and mutual understanding produced in the wake of encounter, Indian Giving also attends to the loss—misinterpretation, mistranslation—that takes place alongside these same instances of accommodation. The title is, of course, suggestive of the book's primary intention; the phrase "Indian giving" entails the parallel actions of giving and taking, loss and gain. Before turning to the epistemological and political implications of Murray's theoretical commitments, I want to briefly outline the scope and content of the book's seven chapters. As those familiar with Murray's work have come to expect, Indian Giving is the product of extensive research and meticulous scholarship, and in this, the author's second book-length study, the reader is presented with a project that is as ambitious as it is broadly conceived: "This book is about value and the circulation of value, within and across cultures. More specifically, it is about what was given and exchanged in early encounters between Europeans and Indians and how these transactions were understood and represented on each side" (1). Indian Giving engages a wide range of texts—from the canonical work of Roger Williams to lesser-known texts such as the writings of Protestant missionary David Brainerd—to explore acts of giving and exchange in seventeenth-century Indian and European encounter in the Northeast. In addition, although the book focuses primarily on the seventeenth century, its scope spans from the late fifteenth century (Columbus) to the middle of the nineteenth century (Melville). After a lengthy introduction to theories of the gift and exchange, the succeeding chapters consider the struggle for sovereignty and power, the creation and translation of word lists, the uses of wampum, and the process of religious conversion. Murray is particularly attentive to the way objects/signs take on value and circulate in a particular system—religious, linguistic, financial, material—and how these systems overlap in the discursive economy of early encounter. He argues that exchange across cultures takes place within a "set of interlocking and overlapping economies," and as such, the value of what was exchanged became unstable and confused. Subsequently, Murray contends that European attempts to control exchanges by imposing ordering systems to "fix" the circulation of meaning and value were, in the end, unsuccessful. By virtue [End Page 272] of operating within economies that are inextricably intertwined, what circulated was to a degree uncontainable. Something always got lost in the exchange. In "Abundance and Traces," Murray turns his attention to an area where exchange and power might most commonly be witnessed: in expressions of sovereignty and wealth in European accounts of the New World. His reading of Captain John Smith's A Map of Virginia (1612), specifically the coronation scene between Captain Newport and Chief Powhatan, illustrates how European and Indian acts of giving and exchange were not simply attempts at...

Surrealist poetics and the cinema of evil: the significance of the expression of sovereignty in Catherine Breillat's A ma soeur (2001)

A ma soeur—the title is a dedication, ‘for my sister’—is an attempt to give cinematic expression to sovereignty, after its writer and director, Catherine Breillat, had first pursued the task through poetry and prose. As such, the film's antecedents are literary, and also painterly, rather than cinematic, even if Breillat has made previous films that pursue similar goals. In A ma soeur Breillat takes up an established theme, the ambiguity of the face and the body, particularly as it is depicted in Magritte's painting Rape, and renders it cinematically. Like that of the painting, the thesis of Breillat's film is that while the face rapes the body, the body simply effaces. Sovereignty, which exists only in the instant, is realized only through this self-effacement.

Public Enterprise as an Expression of Sovereignty: Reconsidering the Origin of Canadian National Railways

AbstractRailway nationalization, the anvil on which national public enterprise was hammered together between 1917 and 1923, forms a misunderstood episode in the development of the Canadian state. This article examines the convergence of domestic politics and international economics that facilitated an unprecedented transformation of Canada's capacity to control its economy. State autonomy was used to create public enterprise as an instrument by which the gains of industrial restructuring could be distributed to favoured domestic financiers while its costs were imposed upon foreign investors. This power to manage the gains and losses arising from industrial change formed a new expression of economic sovereignty, one that ought to be viewed as an important step in the transition from imperial to national governance.

The United Nations and Some African Political Attitudes

What constitutes “sovereign statehood”? Elaborate answers can be given under international law, under theories of international relations, under jurisprudence, and under general political philosophy. But from the point of view of African countries the empirical answer is perhaps the simplest. These countries know that it was not when they assumed control of their domestic affairs that they ceased to be colonies. As a matter of experience, many of them found that the ultimate expression of sovereignty was not direct rule internally but direct diplomatic relations with other countries abroad. The very process of attaining independence might, in their case, be reduced to a single catch phrase—“from foreign rule to foreign relations.” In other words, an African colony was said to have attained independence when it had moved from the status of being under foreign rule to the status of conducting foreign relations with full authority.