Violent Frontier Research Articles

The frontier on the doorstep: development and conflict dynamics in the southern rangelands of Kenya

ABSTRACT Rural parts of Kenya are undergoing or are expected to undergo massive social-ecological change as a result of the government’s ambitious development agenda driven by infrastructure and extraction. The pastoralist rangelands near the dormant Mount Suswa volcano in Narok, Kajiado and Nakuru counties have witnessed the creation of a modern railway and a geothermal project, and plans for further geothermal developments are expected together with a large inland port and industrial park. Other scholars identify structural, discursive, organisational and directly violent frontier characteristics which occur at the interface of two social orders and are well recognised in parts of northern Kenya. This article considers how these phenomena play out in a frontier inhabited by marginalised pastoralists but ‘on the doorstep’ of Nairobi and other urban centres. It concludes that most frontier phenomena are also present in marginalised areas closer to the centre and as such, the frontier is not necessarily geographically determined. However, formations of violence and dynamics of policing are different to the north and proximity to the economic and political centre makes a difference, allowing the state to remain more in control.

Conservation, extraction and social contracts at a violent frontier: Evidence from eastern DRC’s Itombwe Nature Reserve

Conservation efforts must develop strategies to perform at violent frontiers where environmental values, mineral extraction and conflict intersect. Using war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Itombwe Nature Reserve as an illustrative example, this article explores how community conservation is implemented and received at a violent frontier. Taking inspiration from an emerging body of literature which portrays conservation as a form of ‘social contract’ in regions where the nation state is weak or absent, it explores some of the expectations and obligations that surround community conservation initiatives. It draws the conclusion that conservation social contracts are likely to produce unintended consequences when left unfulfilled or broken. Conservation actors perceived to be breaking the terms of (implicit) social contracts can inadvertently encourage local communities to embrace alternative contracts with other actors seeking to extract value from the resources located in frontiers, such as industrial mining companies.

Communism, Cold War and Commodity Chains: Southeast Asian Labor History in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective

The geographical term “Southeast Asia” dates from the 1930s, and came to denote a topic for academic studies in the early days of the Cold War. As such, it includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indochina, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Southeast Asia has become thoroughly incorporated in the global economy over the past 150 years; first, as a producer of commodities, and later, as a supplier of cheap garments and electronic components. Under Dutch colonialism and British hegemony—the latter established by the conquest of Burma and the imposition of free trade on Siam and the Philippines in the 1850s—Southeast Asia was turned into a key provider of commodities for the industrializing countries. During high colonialism, from 1870 to 1930, the region became increasingly intertwined, via Singapore as the central port and through the role of mainland Southeast Asia as the rice basket for the plantations of maritime Southeast Asia. After the Second World War, the region was the world's most violent frontier of containment for communist expansion. In recent decades, Southeast Asia has become integrated in global commodity chains as a producer of cheap industrial goods, often as a subcontractor for more advanced economies, such as those of Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and later on, Southeast China.

Conservation as a social contract in a violent frontier: The case of (Anti-) poaching in Garamba National Park, eastern DR Congo

Protected areas located in areas of violent conflict are often conceived as spaces where the state has lost its control and parks are ‘dissolved’, to the point where poaching and violent extraction of resources run free. Our analysis of conservation in Garamba National Park, in eastern DRC, shows that forms of regulation of (anti-)poaching activities continue to exist within such spaces through the persistence of social contracts that bind different actors in and around the park around conservation. We show that these contracts have long histories and change substantially over time, and yet continue to function as reference points for populations and authorities with regards to (anti-) poaching activities, and the organization of social life in and around the park more broadly. Faced with insecurity, poverty and uncertainty, the population living close to Garamba National Park continues to refer to these social contracts, or seeks to devise new ones in search for predictability, livelihoods, security and the provision of basic social services. By focusing on the ‘contractual layer’ of conservation in a violent frontier, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the re-configuration of public authority in these spaces, and demonstrate the conceptual and empirical relevance of analysing social contracts for geographers. We do so by drawing a conceptual and empirical bridge between the literature that has conceived conservation as enclosures, and the literature that has focused more on the contractual dimension of conservation.

"In Constant Fellowship with One Unseen": Negotiations with the Native Other and American National Identity in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona

"In Constant Fellowship with One Unseen":Negotiations with the Native Other and American National Identity in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona Alex McDonnell (bio) Writers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Octave Mannoni have used postcolonial psychoanalysis to analyze the interrelations between the political aspects of the colonial situation and the psychological conditions of the colonizers and colonized. However, there has been little research into the development of the national "psyche" of the United States as a postcolonial state during the nineteenth century in relation to its own brand of imperialism, namely Indian removal. This article draws on the recent postcolonial psychoanalytic methodology of Ranjana Khanna to extrapolate how U.S. nineteenth-century fiction dealt with the legitimacy of national expansion and the American state pertaining to Indian displacement. I will discuss Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) in terms of how it works against masculine conceptions of violent frontier conquest while advocating for Indian assimilation. Nonetheless, I propose there is a dissonance at the heart of her reform agenda, which more generally reflects the nation's melancholic negotiation with its historical treatment of the Indian. Jackson's national ideal emerges from the conflicts between her assimilationist discourse, her racial attitudes, and her preservation of tribal sovereignty, an ideal that underscores her conception of the U.S. as a participatory, democratic state. The preservation of an undefined Indian-otherness, one that cannot be reduced to the parameters of the American imaginary, exists to validate the choice of assimilation and define the boundaries of national community in the novel. Nonetheless, this epistemic space of the Other is never fully delineated or directly explored. Jackson incorporates rather than assimilates the Native American into the nation by variously drawing upon and repressing his otherness to define a sense of national community. [End Page 571] I will propose that her conception of American subjectivity is melancholic as a result of this dissonance, which links back to the national psyche's historically conflicted understandings of Western frontier colonization. ________ Bringing a postcolonial psychoanalytic apparatus to Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) enables exploration of the novel's conflicted approach to Native American assimilation, recognition for tribal sovereignty, and the national ideal in nineteenth-century southern California. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and postcolonial theories advanced by Ranjana Khanna in Dark Continents (2003), I propose there is a melancholic dissonance at the heart of Jackson's reform agenda which emerges from the preservation of a racially and culturally different unassimilable Other—"the Indian"—that is also used in discourses of native sovereignty as an extension of the democratic ideal of the American state. Although Jackson condemns the violent nature of U.S. imperialism, she nevertheless supports the idea of civilizational expansion under the proviso that it is regulated by the enlightened dictates of domesticity. This article will examine a conflict in the narrative of Ramona between its desire for assimilation, its suppression of resistance towards this end, and yet its implicit recognition of Indian sovereignty, which underscores its particular national ideal. This recognition in turn necessitates its paradoxical acknowledgment of native resistance. Melancholic markers are produced by the failure of the narrative's approach to show national identity in which the Other is absorbed and erased. Such signifiers of melancholia are identifiable, for example, in Ramona's repressed Indian subjectivity at the end. Furthermore, the novel's romantic plot deflects attention from its compromised political agenda and therefore tries to contain the unassimilable elements generated by an inability to effectively assimilate the Indian into the national corpus. Postcolonial Psychoanalysis Before turning to analysis of Jackson's conflicted national ideal and her ambivalent treatment of the Other, I will detail some key concepts dealt with by Khanna and others which will later afford unique insights into the political-psychical dynamics of the text. One of Khanna's central contentions is that national affiliation entails specific forms of haunting, narrative, sites of memory, and psychical effect. She also adopts Freud's [End Page 572] terms, melancholy and melancholia, demonstrating how they can be used to critique colonialism and its effects. For Khanna, melancholia can be characterized in an ethico-political context as a remainder which "insists on...

Predatory peace. Dispossession at Aceh’s oil palm frontier

The end of the civil war in Aceh brought peace, but it has been of a predatory nature. As a moment of rupture, the peace revealed interests, powers and dynamics, and it offered an opportunity for their reconfiguration. When unrest ceased, old agrarian conflicts between smallholders and planters resumed. Peace held promise of land reform. Yet old patterns of smallholder dispossession were entrenched as the former insurgency leadership aligned with the old elite of plantation companies. Oil palm contract-farming schemes effectively alienated smallholders from their land, and violence precluded their organization. As a result, large-scale plantation production expanded. Through the creation of a violent frontier, smallholders were denied recognition of independent rights and property. In essence, smallholders were dispossessed by a combination of violence, political power and duplicitous paperwork. The study is based on fieldwork in areas where current land conflicts are played out, as well as on secondary sources.

Regulating the race: Aboriginal children in private European homes in colonial Australia

This article focuses on the incorporation of Aboriginal children into European families on a private basis in the colonial era. While state-based missions and reserves were central sites where Aboriginal children were placed, other Aboriginal children were privately placed with European families during the colonial era. This article explores the shifting reasons for this practice. It finds that Aboriginal children who entered European families away from the control of the state came under the control of Europeans through a variety of ways. Initially, Aboriginal child removals were conducted during the course of violent frontier conflict or involved children who had been impacted by introduced European diseases. Smaller numbers of Indigenous children were taken as objects of curiosity. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, it became increasingly common for settlers to take Indigenous children for labour purposes. The article argues that the white middle-class family was positioned as a site for “civilising” children, where the moral regulation of childhood was conducted. This article adds a new dimension to colonial understandings about the role and structure of the family. It also expands understandings about Indigenous child removal in Australia's past.

Captive Audiences: Gender, Storytelling, and the Closing of the Illinois Frontier

IntroductionThe spring of 1832 was a season of war on the Illinois frontier. On the last day of May, readers of Springfield's Sangamo Journal could experience the horrors of war vicariously as they read a reprint of a week-old letter by an army lieutenant, Reuben Holmes, whose dramatic prose was matched by the horrifying details he related. Lieutenant Holmes reported:15 men, women and children, the victims of a most inhuman butchery, perpetrated yesterday morning by the ruthless, inhuman barbarians-The men were mutilated beyond the reach of a modest description; the women hung up by the feet, and the most revolting acts of outrage and indecency practiced upon their bodies.1As they read on, Springfielders learned that two teenaged sisters were yet from the site of the massacre, an isolated cluster of cabins on Big Indian Creek in LaSalle County. Readers were likely unaware that by the time they had read of the missing girls, their tribulations had already reached a conclusion. Abducted by the band of Potawatomi Indians that had perpetrated the massacre on May 20th, the sisters-seventeen-year-old Rachel and nineteen-year-old Sylvia Hall-were held captive for ten days, and had since been ransomed for the price of ten horses, wampum, and corn by a delegation of Ho Chunk2 Indians who subsequently delivered them into the custody of Colonel Henry Gratiot at Blue Mounds Fort in Wisconsin. The young women's return to white society had occurred on the same morning that the Journal had reported them missing. As a newspaper item, the story of the Indian Creek Massacre and the Hall captivity was over before it was reported. Yet, for years to come, the incidents would be among the most repeatedly recounted episodes of the four-month fiasco known as the Black Hawk War.3The episode and its subsequent replication provide a unique opportunity to witness the intersecting historical forces of gender, warfare, literature, and politics during Illinois' Jacksonian era. In their immediate context, the sources that chronicled the Halls' experience constitute a rich description of a brief piece of the military and social narrative of the Black Hawk War. As literature, the account eventually earned a place in the broader genre of the captivity narrative. As a repeated episode of gendered history, the Hall story has its appropriate place as a commentary on the role of femininity and masculinity on a violent frontier. While the Black Hawk War granted Illinois' frontier generation one last opportunity in which to forge their martial credentials against an unassimilated Indian foe, it was the constant repetition of a female narrative that would effectively script the meaning of manhood in a state free from Indian resistance.4The central purpose of the present essay is to conduct an analysis of three distinct generations of the Hall captivity tale-as they proliferated between 1832 and 1855-against the gendered landscape of Illinois' changing political culture. To ground the source material for such an endeavor, it is first necessary to set the context for the incident at Indian Creek itself. As such, a prologue of Indian-white relations in the region- beginning with the settlement story of the Old Northwest, narrowing eventually to the details of the Black Hawk War, and ultimately to the fate of Rachel and Sylvia Hall-will precede the interpretive portion of this essay.5The Long War for the Old NorthwestAn understanding of the broader sweep of history into which the Hall sisters and their Potawatomi captors stepped as they fled the grisly scene at Big Indian Creek in May of 1832 requires contemplating over two centuries of Indian crisis in the Western Great Lakes. Faced with demographic, economic, and imperial revolutions of unprecedented scale, the hundreds of Algonquian groups that inhabited the region bounded by the bounded by the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Appalachians, and the shores of the Great Lakes cobbled together as many policies as might be imagined to maintain their interests and their dignity as successive waves of Europeans fought and negotiated for access to land, resources, and loyalty. …

Archive Stories/Symptomatic Histories: The Commemoration of Australian Frontier Space at Purrumbete, 1840–1902

The essay analyses commemorations of the colonial period in the Federation art and architectural program of the Purrumbete homestead (1840–1902), a country house near Camperdown in the western district of Victoria. Using Aboriginal Protectorate and judicial archives, it reconstructs Purrumbete's early spatial and racial frontier relationships in order to reinterpret the Federation depiction of colonial Purrumbete. The 1901–1902 rebuilding and mural works produced coded signs of a violent frontier past. The bloody nature of the colonial encounter surfaced in Purrumbete's Federation representation as a set of symptoms: “suddenly manifested knots of association or conflicted meaning”.1 This paper brings new archival documents to light, re-reading the oral and painted accounts of the homestead's origin, and concludes by arguing for the importance of repressed, illegible, and cryptic evidence in cultural representations of frontier history.

Gary: The Most American of All American Cities by S. Paul O’Hara (review)

Reviewed by: Gary: The Most American of All American Cities by S. Paul O’Hara Jennifer F. Hamer Gary: The Most American of All American Cities. By S. Paul O’Hara. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2011. Gary: The Most American of All American Cities is an analysis of Gary, Indiana as imagined mostly through the narratives of those who lived outside of the city. Created in 1906 by U.S. Steel, its “physical spaces were built by and controlled by U.S. Steel but its narrative” was shaped by multiple others with varied visions of its meaning and purpose (9–10). For U.S. Steel, it “was not simply capital relocation but an opportunity for vast expansion and efficient production . . . and an opportunity to create industrial order with no intention of designing a city of benevolence or social responsibility that catered to workers.” Indeed, argues S. Paul O’Hara, U.S. Steel’s greatest accomplishment may have been its construction of a city that manifestly separated the flow of work and community. For reformers in the early twentieth century, it presented a model city of “order and efficiency” and a “lost opportunity to implement new planning strategies” (70). For populists, it was a violent frontier similar to America’s Wild West, where men sought prospects in a new terrain characterized by violence and economic opportunities. For President Woodrow Wilson, and like-minded others, it was an aberration—an example of monopoly capitalism that was indefensible in its ability to undermine the success of Americans. By mid-century, for the workers, it was a place of home, employment, and families. It was simultaneously a place of communities separated by race and ethnicities and the strife that accompanied these persistent American dilemmas. Overall, according to O’Hara, the dynamic images and realities of Gary are contradictory and convoluted, ranging from utopian, dystopian, adventurous, and dangerous, as well as a site of worker strength and activism. Regardless of how the city was imagined, by the end of the twentieth century, Gary, like many of America’s Midwestern industrial suburbs, had become the image of the heartland’s decay. Like Benton Harbor, Michigan, and East St. Louis, Illinois, it was a place that once housed manufacturing, robust neighborhoods, quality education, and social and economic opportunities. Now it seems, they are places abandoned by the corporations which they were designed to serve. Their populations have declined and shifted from majority white to African American, infrastructures have been devastated, and residents suffer from high rates of poverty, unemployment, and failing educational systems. How, then, do imaginings of a city help us to make sense of the facts of the city, its residents, and their everyday lives? Overall, O’Hara provides a historiography that captures and emphasizes the multiple and varied imaginings of a place. A city, after all, is more than just its physical space. It is also what it represents and means for the past, present, and future of a society. O’Hara’s work highlights the need to appreciate the role places play in our [End Page 83] conceptualization of social, economic, political, and cultural values, change, direction, and popular memory. Gary, Indiana was a place of contention, and professional and public intellectuals fought to define its potential, purpose, and fundamental meaning for what America had become and where its future was headed. It seems from O’Hara’s critical synthesis, those outside the city saw the promise and problems of Gary as a model American city. What seems less clear is how the envisioned city was complicated by imaginings and realities of the Gary residents themselves. How, for example, did the U.S. Steel workers, parents, teachers, and municipal leaders think about Gary, Indiana and how did they understand its purpose? What meaning did they give to the city space and macrostructure with which they engaged? What meaning did imaginings by outsiders actually have for local daily lives and socioeconomic policies? How were the physical mappings of Gary contradictory or not to the promise and problems that those living within its boundaries understood? Cities are not abstract. They interplay not only with popular and political imaginings, but also real life and its shifting...

Neither “Kriegerisch” nor “Quäkerisch”: Moravians and the Question of Violence in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT The moral dilemma created by violence, warfare, and coercive power has vexed the Christian tradition for centuries. While institutional forms of Christianity have routinely justified violence by appealing to Just War ethics, the historic peace churches have rejected this justification, believing instead that violence and warfare are not compatible with Christian morality. Although these issues have been examined within the context of other peace churches, less critical attention has been paid to the Moravians with regard to the question of violence. Giving due emphasis to the teachings of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, this article seeks to provide a nuanced and primarily theological treatment of Moravian pacifism that acknowledges the complexity and tensions that existed as Moravians navigated the challenges of a violent frontier and the American Revolution. It argues that eighteenth-century Moravians operated with a strong peace ethic, but allowed for flexibility and freedom of conscience. In short, Moravians fostered a religious culture that rejected needless conflict as well as rigid absolutes.

Introduction

Introduction Victoria Haskins (bio) and Margaret D. Jacobs (bio) From the cover of this special issue a group of Tasmanian Aboriginal women stare out in silent and defiant witness to the dispossession that brought them before the camera. Their heavy European garments seem to weigh them down, testimony to attempts by unseen actors to cover their bodies and mold them into new gender roles.1 Behind them a European house (represented like a child's drawing of a four-square windowed box) bears another kind of witness to the place of the home and the domestic in the process of colonization. In colonization's embrace the home has always occupied a special significance as both harbinger and tool of "civilization." As a metonym for white womanhood as well as the metropole in settler colonies, the establishment of "the home" symbolized the end of the violent frontier period and the arrival of modernity and the comforts of civilization. Moreover, colonizers—especially women reformers—often imagined that the adoption of European-style homes (and the domestic work within them by Indigenous women) would miraculously transform native peoples into "civilized" colonial subjects.2 Thus the cover photo, taken just a few decades after the violent "Black War" had driven nearly all of the Aboriginal inhabitants from the Tasmanian mainland to Flinders Island, conveys a confident sense that the white invaders were no longer threatened by the Indigenous presence, and could now settle upon the land in proper British style.3 Although many Tasmanian Aboriginal women had negotiated and indeed resisted such attempts to "domesticate" them, this melancholic image seems to suggest otherwise. As revealed in this photograph, "the home" has represented a powerful symbol of colonial dominance and displacement. In this special issue of Frontiers, however, we move beyond the use of the home as a metonym and metaphor. Instead we have set out to consider the home itself as a key arena in which to analyze the intricate workings of colonial dynamics. We have gathered together poetry, artwork, historical articles, and [End Page ix] essays of art history and literary criticism to reflect upon and to interrogate the nature of colonialism within the home, inside the realm of the domestic and intimate, and along "domestic frontiers." While the term "frontier" is a contentious one, we use the term here to designate a contact zone that brought together colonizers with indigenous inhabitants, sometimes blurring and other times redrawing the boundaries between them. Thus we draw upon Mary Louise Pratt's conception of "contact zones" to investigate cross-cultural imperial and colonial exchanges; but our focus is resolutely upon those that took place within the home.4 As Ann Laura Stoler puts it, such domestic or intimate frontiers provided "a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between colonizer and colonized could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule."5 Our collection follows the lead of other feminist and postcolonial scholars who, over the past two decades, have reinvigorated the study of colonialism through focusing on the home, the domestic, and the intimate as both a site of and archive for colonialism. Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler, Anne McClintock, Catherine Hall, Antoinette Burton, and Margaret Jolly have demonstrated the inextricable link between the intimate and the state, the private and the public, in the histories of colonialism.6 Inquiries into the nexus of colonialism and domesticity often focus primarily on what we might call "imperial colonies" such as India, where colonizers and scholars have, until recently, made sharp distinctions between metropole and colony, "home" and away, and "the gap between metropole and colony [that] was central to the system of colonial rule." Though we made no distinction in our call for papers on the theme of "Domestic Frontiers: The Home and Colonization," as it turned out the majority of pieces in this special issue address the domestic frontier within "settler colonies," including Australia, southern Africa, and the United States. In a recent essay, Catherine Hall ponders whether "the logics of racial thinking" were "differently constructed in frontier territories," bringing to mind the very types of settler colonies upon which this volume...

Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War

Creating an South: Middle Florida 's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War. By Edward E. Baptist. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 392. Illustrations. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $19.95.)Edward E. Baptist's history of antebellum Middle Florida will be of interest to all students of the South. Focused especially on two counties, Leon and Jackson, it is the best sort of local history, one that uses small places to answer big questions. Middle Florida evolved, after Florida's accession to the United States in 1821, into a region dominated by cotton cultivation and slave plantations. To some extent, Baptist agrees with the famous argument of W. J. Cash, in The Mind of the South (1941), that the frontier, more than anything else, defined the South. But in Baptist's account, this process is historicized and rooted in local circumstances. Middle Florida's society was not a simple replication of an older but the product of a history that was contingent, unplanned, and riddled by conflict (10). His is the story of an South, not the South, and of its creation, not simply its unfolding.This story follows, roughly, a three-part chronology. Until the Panic of 1837, Middle Florida was a rough and violent frontier. Planters migrated with their slaves, mainly from the Upper South, and small farmers-countrymen, in contemporary parlance-more often came from the Carolinas and Georgia. Planters dominated territorial politics and assumed that it was their right to do so; they did not hesitate to enforce their rale with personal violence. Raw accumulation of wealth was the goal; there was no room for paternalism with respect to slaves, most of whom suffered much from planter indifference and brutality.One way the elite expanded its wealth and power was through control of the Union Bank of Florida, which extended liberal credit to its stockholders for purchases of land and slaves. The crash of the bank after the Panic of 1837 rained some of these planters and humbled others. That, and the rise of competitive political parties dependent on the votes of a majority, curbed planter power and elevated the political status of countrymen.After about 1850, rising cotton prices underwrote greater prosperity for both planters and countrymen. Evangelical Christianity tempered character, and communities became more rooted and stable for whites; slaves, too, were able to build up new family and community relationships. Violence of all kinds declined. Planters began to see themselves as paternalists. In his most original chapter, Baptist argues that, in this final period, both private and public documents demonstrate the rise in the popular imagination of the idea of a mythological Old one which elided Middle Florida's violent past and celebrated the area as an extension of an old, stable Virginia society, made up of slaveholding squires, deferential yeomen, and grateful slaves. This myth, Baptist concludes, helped Florida's white men convince themselves that their society was worthy of independence and sufficiently united to win it.Baptist's research is both broad and deep. A variety of sources provide basic information on property ownership and enable him to trace the origins of black and white migrants. Using family papers, newspaper accounts, WPA slave narratives, court records, and public documents, he traces his themes through the stories of individuals. …

Women on the frontier: Self‐representations of the conqueror: Which frontier? Conqueror of what?

The frontier in question is one that has experienced none of the literary recognition accorded the American west, for example, and which is in fact the little known but equally violent frontier of the Eastern Cape in South Africa...