Non-white Peoples Research Articles

Searching for the Exotic: Textiles, Orientalism, and Identities

Textiles, with their economic, sartorial, and identity-constructing functions, have long been at the center of cultural discourses, whether narrative or visual. Objects of desire, but also objects of curiosity, textiles have been the topic of costume books, offered in diplomatic exchanges, collected by private collectors and museums alike, and have traveled, sometimes as sample books. Their Othering function did not only differentiate between members of different civilizations, but also the members of the same society, where clothing was used to signal rank and function. The case studies presented intend to elaborate further on the role and symbolism associated with textiles, by reiterating their centrality in their various forms, whether costume albums (Cabrera Lafuente), collected textile pieces (Coman), costumes created for the burgeoning film industry (Kulpa), or as samples for a society wardrobe (Parry-Williams). The common characteristics of the specific examples build on the use of textiles to signal Othering, exotic curiosity, and even sexually charged sensuality, or Orientalist interest in the Asia Minor populations. In many of the examples analyzed, the impact of Western and Western-influenced discourses is discernible, to the point of the self-fashioning of a collector originating from interwar Romania (a former Danubian Principalities tributary to the Ottoman Empire) who commissioned a portrait of himself wearing the clothing of what he calls an “Arab sheikh.” During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Western world embraced a broadly racialized perspective, Othering non-white peoples in the colonial context. Orientalism served as an intellectual justification for imperialism, portraying the Eastern world as ‘primitive’, and in need of modernization through the civilizing mission. Colonial empires thrived on essentialist representations, establishing a binary division between The Orient and The Occident, perpetuating the Western Self and the non-western Other. Orientalism played a role in cultural imperialism by promoting homogenization, feminization, and essentialization, reinforcing the perceived superiority of Western civilization. Even though we have been living in a postcolonial world for decades, the study of Exoticism, Othering, and Orientalism remains relevant, and demands scholarly inquiry. This brings forth the need for a specific methodology inherent to each case study and, at the same time, unites them in the nuanced approach to the main applied concepts.

On the longevity of visual colonial stereotyping and its influence on twenty-first-century societal and identity debates

This paper engages with current societal identity debates related to select postcolonial southern African circles, whose European origins can partially be traced back to the creation of the colonial photography genre. The contemporary visualisation of non-white Africans in the European landscape is linked to a genre that was born in the times of High Imperialism. As a child of its time, colonial photography laid the foundation for both racist and racial depiction patterns of certain African peoples and what their supposed traits and looks were from the coloniser’s point of view, thereby creating seeing patterns. Until today, social debates and political movements are linked to the visualisation of non-white peoples. This project is about the historical muting of sub-Saharan Africa through stereotypical images and its links to the shaping and maintenance of postcolonial identity debates concerning racialised visualisation traditions in Europe. This repetitive visual blinding is another form of colonial aggression by constantly perpetuating certain image(rie)s and thereby facilitating colonial mentalities. Examples presented below show how far-reaching the colonial photographic stereotypes are by not limiting the scope of seeing traditions to photographs. Instead, other areas of visible everyday spaces like street names, monuments, statues, lawsuits or book covers are included.

Commemorating Madison Grant in California State Parks

A memorial in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in Northern California continued to honor the name of Madison Grant (1865–1937) until 2021. De Forest Grant (Madison’s younger brother), John D. Rockefeller Jr., the New York Zoological Society, and others dedicated the monument in 1948. Madison Grant’s most well-known book, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), became the basis for monumental atrocities leading up to and during World War II. This article explores Grant’s racist legacy and claims he made that successfully convinced lawmakers to pass legislation restricting the rights of non-White peoples and immigrants. His book and the ideas it contained continue to serve as a basis for hate and exclusion in the United States.

Hugo Bettauer, Feminism, and the Non-White World in Interwar Vienna

This article examines how the 1920s Viennese journalist and magazine-publisher Hugo Bettauer, a Christian convert from Judaism, harnessed images of and stories about non-White peoples to the cause of Austrian female liberation. In Bettauers Wochenschrift, Bettauer and his contributors highlighted non-White ways to illuminate, by comparison, the confining nature of the social and cultural mores that structured Austrian women's subjugation. This had the effect of reaffirming the existence of a racial hierarchy, one with Black people on the bottom, despite Bettauer's sympathy for the plight of Black Americans and the magazine's open admiration of certain non-White practices regarding sex and marriage.

White Internationalism and the League of Nations Movement in Interwar Australia

AbstractPopular support for the League of Nations spread around the world in the interwar period but it did not spread evenly. Instead, it was concentrated in white-majority countries: both in Europe and beyond in the form of settler societies around the world. This article explores the relationship between the League movement and white supremacy in one such community: Australia. Citizens in that country combined their allegiance to the League with their beliefs in white supremacy: about the need to restrict immigration through the ‘White Australia’ policy; about the rationale of them ruling over non-white peoples in the territories they held under League ‘mandate’; and about their treatment of Indigenous Australians. In short, they were ‘white internationalists’. Australia’s white internationalists were relatively few. But they reveal a global history of popular white internationalism. Interwar Australians might have been some of the most blatant white internationalists but they were far from the only ones.

Validity of a Self-Assessment Skin Tone Palette Compared to a Colorimeter for Characterizing Skin Color for Skin Cancer Research

Our goal is to determine whether our objective 9-point Self-Assessment Skin Tone Palette (SASTP) is correlated with a colorimeter's assessment of a melanin index, so that Hispanic and Black people can be included in skin cancer research where scales were developed for White populations. Subjects were asked to self-identify their skin tones using the SASTP. This study assessed the criterion validity of the SASTP by measuring a range of skin colors compared to a melanin index reported from a colorimeter for the upper-inner arm (non-sun-exposed skin color), and the outer forearm (sun-exposed). Among 188 non-artificial tanners, 50% were White, 30% were Hispanic or White-Hispanic, and 20% were other racial categories. Meanwhile, 70% were female (30% male) and 81% were age 18-29 (19% age 30+). The mean melanin of the upper-inner arm decreased with lighter skin color and stronger tendency to burn. The SASTP in comparison to melanin index values was correlated for both the upper-inner arm (r = 0.81, p < 0.001) and the outer forearm (r = 0.77, p < 0.001). The SASTP provides a 9-point scale that can be considered as an alternative, less expensive method that is comparable to the objective colorimeter melanin index, which may be useful in studies on skin cancer among White, non-White, and Hispanic peoples.

Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong

Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong Chinelo Ezenwa, Respondent Angie Wong’s article “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” addresses the subtle ways in which two recent acclaimed Hollywood films reinforce cinematic violence against Asian women, who are either hypersexualized, rendered mute, or shown as carriers of deadly diseases that disrupt the Arcadian world of the whiter Westerner. The article shows that in Venom (2018), the two pre-action Asian women are depicted as disease-ridden bodies, whose main role, it seems, is to deliver the disease from Malaysia to San Francisco. Their transference of disease to the white world also conveniently takes place at an airport, at the border where non-white peoples are often designated as non-beings. Kyoko in Ex Machina (2014) is similarly subjugated by Nathan, her white creator; she represents the white male exploitation of the body, labour, and sexuality of the Asian woman by a hypermasculine white society. Wong points out that in both films, there is neither character development for those women nor any escape for them as soon as they serve the perverse purposes of their “creators.” Perhaps this is because, on the aggregate, they are simulations of real people (“SimulAsians”). But, based on Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, Wong argues that using the fragmented prism of a technological form of Orientalism (techno-Orientalism) and creating such “SimulAsians” allows these movies to violate and exploit the Asian female characters. Kyoko, the Asian housekeeper-mistress figure in Ex Machina, is the ultimate “Simulacrum” and “SimulAsian,” as Wong demonstrates. This is because, for most of the film, one is uncertain if Kyoko is a cyborg created to look Asian, or if she is [End Page 232] an Asian deliberately presented to look like a cyborg. Whatever reality exists for her is premised on Nathan’s (her manufacturer’s) stereotypical perception of the Asian woman as cold, silent, and sexually available (Wong 9). But it is not even Kyoko’s poor development that bothers one most about Ex Machina. Instead, it is how the film manages to minimize Kyoko when shown against Ava, the Caucasian cyborg. The latter in fact becomes triumphant by exploiting both Kyoko and the unnamed Asian woman’s body. Ava’s only means of escape, it seems, is by literally cherry picking the skin off the bones of the unnamed female Asian figure in order to achieve “humanity.” Therefore, after their final “battle,” only Ava is triumphant while Kyoko remains a victim of the liberation march. Yet, as Wong equally observes, though the film seems to criticize the “dehumanization” of the Asian cyborgs, it is only able to achieve this critique by presenting them as sacrificial lambs, without any will and ability to achieve liberation. This double subjugation is not uncommon for “women of colour.” In my discussion of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, for instance, I show how the Zimbabwean women are double yoked under colonial and traditional patriarchies. The difference is that where the Zimbabwean girls and women are deliberately portrayed in Nervous Conditions with critical voices, Ex Machina and Venom do not allow the Asian women any such power. They are stereotyped as figures of annihilation, while the extreme physical violence against them is masked under the notion that they are not human. The horror of that form of cinematic occlusion of violence is perhaps clearer when one considers the implications of the two Asian diseased bodies in Venom, as Wong does. They are pitted against the white heroic journalist, Eddie Brock, and his lawyer girlfriend, Anne Weying. Despite their flaws, the latter two characters are somehow found the acceptable bodies of the “future” who are able to not only achieve symbiosis with the alien but still maintain their societal moral codes, act out their heroisms, and rescue their world from the threats of the extraterrestrial disease embodied in the Asian women and the equally Asian-looking genius inventor, Riz Ahmed. In both films, the viewer is encouraged to ignore the scenes of violence against the Asian women because the action is conveniently set in the magical world of the movies. Wong rightly points...

What Must I Do to Be Saved? Punishment and Redemption under Incarceration

ABSTRACT This essay tells a story about how American Protestant theologies of sin and redemption, realized in a racialized caste system, have shaped an American culture of punishment where brutal forms of imprisonment have been and continue to be socially acceptable. To explore these Protestant traces, the founding theological vision of penitentiaries in the Northeast and its evolution into professional bureaucracy is described. I contrast this standard modernist account with the distinctive development of prisons in the Southern/Sun Belt states where white domination excluded African-Americans (and other non-white peoples) from redemption/rehabilitation. This Southern heritage of racializing criminal justice has been critical for the rise of mass incarceration, turning away from rehabilitation to support harsh punishment of those who are both “sinful” and a “risk” to “order.” The conclusion points to small signs of change in this discourse.

The United States at the Center of the Action

The United States at the Center of the Action

On Having Whiteness.

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has-a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which "white" people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind, and in one's world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts' appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness's infiltrated appetites-to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning ("never again") or as temptation ("great again"). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

Without Centering Race, Identity, and Indigeneity, Climate Responses Miss the Mark

In this essay, I argue that it is time we put an end to the epistemic silences in predominant climate change discourses, which erase and ignore the agency, knowledge, and experiences of non-Western, non-White peoples, and Indigenous communities. Effectively responding to the immense challenges posed by climate change requires a climate justice approach that centers the voices and experience of those most vulnerable. Foregrounding these voices and experiences, including those relating to traditional ecological knowledge, will serve not only to better understand and address the challenges raised by climate change, but also to end the “cognitive annihilation” of Indigenous heritages and world-views. It is simply not enough to focus only on the economic and scientific issues raised by climate change, without paying attention to those relating to race, identity, and indigeneity. To make that claim, I examine three major approaches to thinking about climate change: sustainable development; social justice cosmopolitanism; and post-development. A comparative analysis reveals significant variation in the ways these approaches exclude the viewpoints of vulnerable communities. Furthermore, these approaches remain largely isolated from one another, which makes coordinating effective climate-change action an even greater challenge. In contrast, climate justice theorists, practitioners, and activists acknowledge race, gender, identity, and Indigeneity; accordingly, they address the limits of development and market orthodoxy in the aforementioned approaches, and also highlight the “issues and concerns that arise from the intersection of climate change with race, poverty, and preexisting environmental risks.” These aspects of climate justice are critical because they make visible the most urgent impacts of climate change that have so far been peripheral in policy discussions that are dominated by scientific and economic considerations. Ultimately, I make the case that climate justice is by no means a settled and uncontested concept, but more than any of the aforementioned approaches, it opens up climate change discussions to a broader set of considerations and should be embraced alongside the predominant economic and scientific approaches that currently dominate discussions on climate change.

DE ÁFRICA, NZINGA; DA DIÁSPORA, DANDARA: COSMOPERCEPÇÃO DESCOLONIZANDO O CORPO NEGRO

The Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónke Oyěwùmí (1997) proposes a distinction between the Western way of producing a word and the African way. The Wester’s way, who here we will take as White (SODRÉ, 1988), produces a world through a cosmovision, privileging a single sense, the vision. Non-White peoples, like de traditional Yoruba people living in Nigeria, produce a world relating all senses, without hierarchizing them, what Oyěwùmí calls “cosmoperception”. Thus, from the cosmoperception of the Bantu peoples of the Quilombo dos Palmares of Brazil, it is intended to investigate the place that bodies like Nzinga Mbande and Dandara dos Palmares occupy in non-White societies. Other senses that potencializes policies for the decolonization of black bodies that have been and are to come.

The ‘other America’ and its performers: pathways to socialism in the DEFA Indianerfilme

The DEFA Indian films, known as ‘Red Westerns’ or Indianerfilme, depict historical confrontations between Native American tribes and an expansionist United States. The Indianerfilme have attracted interest as expressions of East German enthusiasm for Native American culture and as multidimensional allegories of both Third World resistance movements and an idealized GDR. This study considers the films as Marxist analyses of American society querying whether the United States has a viable path to socialism. The analysis centers on the presentation of ‘other American’ characters: conscientious white people who oppose Washington’s racial imperialism and join forces with the resisting natives. These characters form part of a trend in East German politics in which some Americans were considered exempt from their country’s moral failures on account of their vigorous criticisms of U.S. society and policy. The study examines ‘other American’ characters in three Indianerfilme: Weiße Wölfe (1969), Osceola (1971) and Blutsbrüder (1975). Although these films cover distinct historical periods, native tribes and geographies of North America, they all suggest a similar conclusion: if America is to progress toward socialism, white characters must completely renounce their country’s oppressive order and, crucially, offer a viable alternative system that can replace it. Any eventual American socialism, however, will be one in which virtuous whites are dominant and nonwhite peoples are absent or subordinate.

Racialized Organizations and Color-Blind Racial Ideology in Brazil

Although the relationship between organizations and structural racism is well established, less is known about how racialization occurs within organizations. Overlooking how racial ideology is imbued in organizational logic obscures the role organizations play in reproducing structural racism. The prevalence of color-blind racial ideology further complicates the study of racialization, as most societies deny the existence of racism targeting people of color. In this article the author asks, How does color-blind racial ideology guide management decisions and the rationalization of racially unequal organizational practices? Using an extended case study method, the author examines sugar-ethanol mills in Brazil, where nonwhite workers are disproportionately exposed to hazardous risks. The author argues that the racialization of organizational practices occurs through a twofold process in which white elites use nonracial discourse to rationalize unequal outcomes and to reproduce the social conditions that steer nonwhite peoples into hazardous worksites. This article makes two contributions to the literature. First, through the discursive frames of cultural racism, naturalization, victimization, and politicized markets, the author shows how the allocation of resources and opportunities at the organizational level shapes and is shaped by racialized social systems. Second, by studying unequal relations in Brazil, the author elucidates the long-standing presence of color blindness in Iberian America while also tracing similarities and differences with color-blind racism in the United States.

‘Nonwhiteness’ in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i: sovereignty, white settlers, and Japanese migrants

ABSTRACT This paper examines the way considerations of race factored into the colonisation of Hawai‘i and its subsequent governance of immigration and different racial groups. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i faced unprecedented demographic change due to its rapidly declining native population and inflows of people from abroad. To preserve its sovereignty, the kingdom attempted to forge solidarity with Japan and Samoa governed by nonwhite people under threat of Western colonisation. Although official rule by European and American settlers did not start until the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, they steadily expanded their influence over Hawaiian politics and economy by monopolising the sugar industry. Wary of the effects of nineteenth-century geopolitics, the kingdom attempted to resist the establishment of a white-dominated society that pursued its political, economic, and social agenda through the management of sugar plantations and the opening up of immigration. In the process of stabilising and maintaining the kingdom's sovereignty in the late nineteenth century, nonwhiteness became a significant racial foundation to confront the white dominance in the Islands and to establish an ally with nonwhite peoples and nations in the Asia-Pacific basin.

American Indian Inferiority in Hume's SecondEnquiry

It is fairly well known that Hume added a footnote to his essay ‘Of National Characters’ in which he asserts that all non-white peoples are naturally inferior to white people. Subsequently, he revised the note to assert only that black people are naturally inferior to white people. But while the view expressed in this footnote has been described as ‘shockingly bigoted’, and even as his ‘racial law,’ it is still commonly thought that in Hume's voluminous writings it is apparently just this single passage which is definitely racist in its import. My aim in this paper is to show how American Indians are thought to be naturally inferior to white people in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. There are, therefore, passages in Hume's second Enquiry which are also definitely racist in their import.

Beyond the Borders of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West ed. by Katrina Jagodinsky and Pablo Mitchell

Reviewed by: Beyond the Borders of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West ed. by Katrina Jagodinsky and Pablo Mitchell Benjamin C. Montoya Beyond the Borders of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West. Edited by Katrina Jagodinsky and Pablo Mitchell. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. Pp. 368. Illustrations, notes, index.) Beyond the Borders of the Law argues against a long-held perception of the American West as a historically lawless borderland region of the United States. Instead, this edited volume contends that an "abundance of law" played a key role in tying nascent, distant territories to U.S. society (viii). Even as law covered the land, however, the meanings and applicability of law in the borderlands were fluid and negotiated between the colonized and the colonizers. The volume demonstrates how marginalized peoples used "cracks and fissures" in the law to their advantage in the liminal spaces of the American West (ix). The volume's introduction highlights the various scholarly approaches that underline a critical legal history of the North American West. First is the new western history approach that focuses on histories of conquest and dispossession as a way to critique the Turner thesis; second, critical race theory, whichindicates how race, racism, and racialism were central to legal and historical formations of American authority over western border territories; third is new western legal history, which accounts for the statutory and social factors that marginalize nonwhite peoples in the West; and fourth is critical legal history, which signals how law is complicit in establishing and preserving inequality. The ten contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies of how law is interpreted, negotiated, and made across various borderlands spaces. Chapters 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9 will be of particular interest for readers [End Page 229] of southwestern history. Alicia Gutiérrez-Romine analyzes how American women increasingly crossed the border into Mexico to seek abortions as medical-legal constraints on the procedure became more prevalent in California between the 1930s and 1960s. Not coincidentally, increasing legal restraints on abortions led to the creation of an underground abortion market, which, in tandem with increasing restrictions against immigration, led to a "more visible" border between the United States and Mexico (117). Dana Elizabeth Weiner demonstrates how African Americans viewed property ownership as a way to forge autonomy and citizenship in mid-nineteenth century California. Land ownership represented independence at a time when the legal standing of African Americans and the institution of slavery itself were being fundamentally challenged nationwide. Tom Romero emphasizes how water law and policy created racism and racial hierarchy in the American West between the 1890s and 1930s. Access to water rights often paralleled the distinction between "desirable" immigrants who were considered fit for U.S. citizenship and "undesirable" immigrants who were deemed inferior. Kelly Lytle Hernández shows how the U.S. Bureau of Prisons designed programs to deport Mexican nationals to Mexico in the early twentieth century. Such actions were concurrent with increased federal efforts to restrict Mexican immigration during the 1920s and 1930s. Allison Powers Useche discusses how during those same years Mexican nationals filed claims to the U.S.-Mexico Claims Commission to seek legal redress for relatives who had been harmed while residing in the United States. These "now-forgotten claims" represented an "unanticipated challenge" to U.S. notions of political economy and to U.S. diplomatic power (282). Beyond the Borders of the Law shows how even as law was important in codifying the colonization of territory and the marginalization of borderlands peoples, it was utilized by colonized and marginalized persons to protect their interests and to provide for their needs. The chapters' vignettes of personal experiences along with the various liminal spaces of the American West are particularly suited for classroom use, especially at the graduate level. As such, a glossary explaining such terms as "the doctrine of prior appropriation" (167) and "mens rea defense" (241) would make this book more usable for student and non-scholarly readers. Benjamin C. Montoya Schreiner University Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Louis Sullivan and the Physiognomic Translation of American Character

Louis Sullivan and the Physiognomic Translation of American Character examines the racial politics of Louis Sullivan's democratic vision for American architecture, as manifest in his interpretations of physiognomic character in people and the built environment and in his reflections on U.S. nationalism. Charles L. Davis II argues that while Sullivan believed that ordinary Americans would produce an indigenous culture reflective of democratic ideals, his assimilationist conception of American citizenship excluded recent white immigrants and resident nonwhite peoples and limited his democratic architecture, as in the case of Kehilath Anshe Ma'ariv Synagogue in Chicago. While Sullivan's ornament for the synagogue expressed Jewish identity in Chicago, its Richardsonian exterior referred to his secular-assimilationist model of national culture. The synagogue's subsequent use as Pilgrim Baptist Church by an African American congregation complicates our understanding of Sullivan's assimilationist political theory and its expression in his architecture.

Making the White Man's West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West by Jason E. Pierce

Reviewed by: Making the White Man's West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West by Jason E. Pierce Mikal B. Eckstrom Making the White Man's West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West. By Jason E. Pierce. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016. 312 pp. Figures, maps, bibliography, index. $45.00 hardcover. Jason Pierce traces the process by which whites first feared the American West as an untamed place and later viewed it as an edenic space where they exercised authority over nonwhite peoples. For Pierce, the nexus of creating a white man's West began with the Louisiana Purchase, but the railroad was the engine that turned that mythic West into reality. Through-out the nineteenth century, white men controlled American Indians, Chinese, and Hispanics through violence. And because the work concerns itself with whiteness, the book pulls from intermountain West archival sources paired with national and regional newspapers. Making the White Man's West also relies on archives from Northern Pacific Railway Company to make a very crucial claim: railroads participated in social engineering throughout the Great Plains. They did so by recruiting and working with immigration agents that they felt best suited—both in musculature and moral terms—the needs of the railroads. This fact, along with how Pierce charts the shift from the wildness of the West to a white civilization, is what makes his book so persuasive. Disease, immigration, and contradictions shaped the West. As rates of tuberculosis rose, Colorado, California, and New Mexico actively competed by building sanitariums for the wealthy. The West transformed from a savage space to a safe haven from the "diseased East." Some characterized this not only in epidemiological terms, but also racially. The agreeable climate and the vision of a space where white masculinity and stamina could reimagine itself turned the American West from an expendable space into a white sanctuary from the sullied eastern seaboard. And yet, whites always knew that American Indians were there and that Hispanics and Chinese provided the necessary labor for the railroads and mining. Social critics like Frank Law Olmsted detailed how immigrant white farmers tilled their fields, while Charles Fletcher Lummis, a noted champion for American Indians, sought to ensure that white Anglo-Saxons remained secure in their dominant position. Mormons, who largely came from European stock, and Armenians also sought to stake their claims of whiteness in the West, albeit with mixed results. Pierce does a fine job unpacking the various ways in which whiteness operates in the American West. As he points out, debates over immigration and the control over who inhabits the West have not stopped, making his argument all the more important to the present. [End Page 154] Mikal B. Eckstrom Department of History University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Stabilising Violence in Colonial Rule: Settlement and the Indentured Labour Trade in Queensland in the 1870s

This article examines the dynamics of colonial violence through three apparently insignificant and disconnected events. In Queensland in the 1870s, a structural framework of laws and regulations standardised violent and often fatal conditions in the labour trade. In the imagined remoteness of frontiers from civilisation, Indigenous, indentured and non-white peoples were grouped together with environmental and natural hazards to be battled. Colonial governance called for more subtle forms of violence. Inaction and acquiescence played a role in the sanction, maintenance and institutionalisation of violence in conventionalised forms. The central theme of the article is that violence was inherent to the colonial project. It shows the shared role of humanitarian concerns and the need for land and labour in the performance and regulation of colonial violence. It provides insight into the role of violence in colonial relations more generally as it illustrates how violence in and around Queensland was consciously produced and operated. Each of the chosen incidents shows that violence was highly rationalised around principles such as race, and how implicit sanctions rendered violence non-visible as understandings of violence and its justification were normalised.