American Settler Colonialism: A History

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American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 36

by Walter L. Hixson


  5. Associated with the French Annales School, the longue dureé emphasized long-term economic and social analysis rather than viewing history conventionally through a series of reigns of kings and queens. In the pre–World War II era, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre launched a journal centered on the “longue dureé linking mentalities with economic forces.” In the postwar era, Fernand Braudel added prominence to the Annales School with two major works focusing on the longue dureé of the Mediterranean world and on civilization and capitalism. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (London: Harper-Collins, 1972).

  6. John McLeod, ed., The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 8–9.

  7. With a vocabulary drawn from myriad disciplines as well as theoretical realms, including Marxism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies can be daunting. Research methodology is highly interdisciplinary and can center on archives and/or literary texts; sources can be both fictional and nonfiction. Postcolonial studies take up “issues of hybridity, creoloization, and mestizaje—with the in-betweenness, diaspora, mobility and cross-overs of ideas and identities generated by colonialism.” As Robert Young notes, “Those encountering postcolonial theory for the first time can be intimidated or baffled by the terminology, concepts and apparently cryptic language being used.” However, “It is also the case,” Ania Loomba points out, “that the newer critical vocabularies are not always merely ‘jargon.’ “ See Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, UK, Walden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 67; and Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998; 2005), 145, 2. For criticisms of postcolonial analysis, see Arif Dirlik, Vinay Bahl, and Peter Gran, History After the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2000), 10; Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  8. Anthony C. Alessandrini, ed., Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1999), 91; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967; 1952), 10–14.

  9. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Random House, 1961), quotations on 313, 311; see also Nigel C. Gibson, ed., Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999).

  10. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972; 1950), 35–43, 71, 85; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston, MA: The Beacon Press, 1970; 1965), 88–89, 61.

  11. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

  12. “Combining a Fanonian model of resistance with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,” Jenny Sharpe explains, “Bhabha identified in colonial discourse an inherent ‘ambivalence’ that allowed for slippages and native appropriations.” Jenny Sharpe, “Postcolonial Studies in the House of U.S. Multiculturalism,” Schwarz and Roy, eds., Companion to Postcolonial Studies, 112.

  13. Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 112 and passim.

  14. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 15.

  15. Ibid., 14.

  16. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2005), 2; Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 35; See also “Settler Colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 107, 4 (special edition, Fall 2008).

  17. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 2; James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21–23.

  18. John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 12, 104.

  19. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 16, 18.

  20. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 558.

  21. Ibid., 81, 554.

  22. Annie E. Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 2; Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 554–558.

  23. Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney and Richard T. Ford, The Legal Geographies Reader: Law, Power and Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), xvi; David Delaney, The Spatial, The Legal and the Pragmatics of World Making: Nomospheric Investigations (New York: Routledge, 2010); see also David Featerstone and Joe Painter, Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013).

  24. See Chapter 2.

  25. Ibid., 90.

  26. Lynette Russell, ed., Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001), 3.

  27. Ibid., 3; Weaver, Great Land Rush,5.

  28. British settler societies can be distinguished from exploitative British colonies such as India.

  In settler societies, extensive settlement, natural population increase, the consolidation of power by self-confident native-born elites and the more or less successful transformation of these societies into highly Anglicized colonial variance of British Metropolitan culture had by the mid 18th-century not only differentiated these colonies from newer and more marginal American colonies, but also differentiated them from every other area in the world where Britain had a presence.

  Trevor Burnard, “Placing British Settlement in the Americas in Comparative Perspective,” in H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid, eds., Britain’s Oceanoic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds c. 1550–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 411.

  29. Weaver, Great Land Rush, 18–19.

  30. See Jill St. Germain, Indian Treaty-Making in the United States and Canada, 1867–1877 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).

  31. Roger L. Nichols, “National Expansion and Native Peoples of the United States and Canada,” in Maybury-Lewis, MacDonald and Maybury-Lewis, eds., Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples, 162; see also Nichols, Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); and Bruce Vandervort, Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada, and the United States, 1812–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2006).

  32. Nigel Penn, “The Northern Cape Frontier Zone in South African Frontier Historiography,” in Russell, ed., Colonial Frontiers, 19–21; Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 7.

  33. Weaver, Great Land Rush, 148; 160–167; see also Robert Ross, A Concise History of South Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21–53.

  34. Grant Morris, “ ‘The Final Legal Frontier’: The Treaty of Waitangi and the Creation of Legal Boundaries between Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand Society,” in Russell, ed., Colonial Frontiers, 119–133.

  35. Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 211.

  36. Weaver, Great Land Rush, 145–147.

  37. Philippa Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 72–81.

  38. A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History,” in Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 3–48; Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Stuart McIntyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003).

  39. Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (London: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.

  40. Macintyre, Concise History of Aus
tralia, 28; see also Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13–46.

  41. Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006; 1981), 31.

  42. Benjamin Madley, “Tactics of Nineteenth-Century Colonial Massacre: Tasmania, California and Beyond,” in Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, eds., Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity Throughout History (New York: Berhahn Books, 2012), 112–113.

  43. Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders, and Kathryn Cronin, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland: A History of Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1988; 1975); Henry Reynolds and Dawn May, “Queensland,” in Ann McGrath, ed., Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines Under the British Crown (Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1995); Moses, “Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History”; Colin Tatz, “Genocide in Australia,” in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, eds., Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York: Routledge, 2013).

  44. Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 186–206; Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  45. Jennifer Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 9; Russell, ed., Colonial Frontiers, 91; Miller, Ruru, Behrendt, and Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands, 186–206; Rod Macneil, “Time After Time: Temporal Frontiers and Boundaries in Colonial Images of the Australian Landscape,” in Russell, ed., Colonial Frontiers, 47–48; See also McGrath, ed., Contested Ground,1.

  46. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996); I have dealt with the role of the other in US foreign policy in The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

  47. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 102; Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Post-Colonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 8.

  48. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 61; Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 2010), 96.

  49. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 99; Norbert Finzsch, “Discourses of Genocide in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America and Australia,” A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (London: Berghahn Books, 2008), 3–4. See also David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002) and the classic work by Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Norton, 1968).

  50. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 24; Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race.

  51. Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 294; Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005); Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, ed., Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives (New York: Penguin Books, 1998); Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 84.

  52. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 141.

  53. Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson, “Settler Colonies,” in Schwarz and Roy, eds., Companion to Postcolonial Studies, 364–366.

  54. Ibid., 364; Philip J. DeLoria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 184; Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993), 68–87.

  55. Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., The History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Henry Holt, 1996); McIntyre and Clark, History Wars; Ross, Concise History of South Africa, 198–201; Laurence J. Silberstein, ed., Postzionism: A Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

  56. Johnson and Lawson, “Settler Colonies,” 362; Sharpe, “Postcolonial Studies in House of U.S. Multiculturalism,” 122.

  57. Quoted in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, Culture of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 3; Julius W, Pratt, America’s Colonial Experiment: How the United States Gained, Governed, and in Part Gave Away a Colonial Empire (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950), 2–3.

  58. Schwarz, “Mission Impossible,” 10; Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 205.

  59. Pease, “U.S. Imperialism: Global Dominance with Colonies,” in Schwarz and Roy, eds., Companion to Postcolonial Studies, 205.

  60. Malani Johar Schueller and Edward Watts, eds., Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 2; see also, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

  61. For overview see R. David Edmunds, “Blazing New Trails or Burning Bridges: Native American History Comes of Age,” Western Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 2008), 4–15. John R. Wunder, “Native American History, Ethnohistory, and Context,” Ethnohistory 54 (Fall 2007), 591–604; see also the studies cited below and in Chapters 2–6.

  62. The “metaphysics of Indian hating” is a reference drawn from Herman Melville’s novel, The Confidence Man (1857) and was applied by scholars such as Roy Harvey Pearce and later Richard Drinnon. See Pearce, Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969) and Drinnon, Facing West, The Meta-Physics of Indian hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); Drinnon’s classic study enjoyed a long shelf life precisely because it did effectively draw connections between Indian removal and subsequent US imperial history, but scholars have since allowed that connection to wane. See also Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Bantam, 1970).

  63. Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); see also the studies cited below and in Chapters 2–6.

  64. Samuel Truett and Eliott Young, Continental Crossing: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); the classic work is Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New York: United States Publishers Association, 1977; 1921) see also David Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); for some qualifications see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999), 814–841; the reference to “middle ground” is from Richard White’s now classic, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011; 1991).

  65. Lance R. Blyth, Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680–1880 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 211; Andrew R. L. Cayton, “Writing Native American History,” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (Spring 2002), 105–111; Colin G. Calloway, “2008 Presidential Address: Indian History from the End of the Alphabet; And What Now?” Ethnohistory 58 (Spring 2011), 197–211. For the dialogue on global, world, and transnational histories, see
“AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111 (December 2006), 1440–1464; Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective Since 1789 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York:Hilland Wang, 2006); Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American Historical Review 106 (December 2001), 1692–1720; David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History: A Special Issue,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999).

  66. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernandez, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping the U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham, NC Duke University Press, 2011), 30.

  67. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 3; and passim.

  68. See Chapter 2.

  69. R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1992), 3; see also Chapter 2.

  70. Frederick E. Hoxie, “Retrieving the Red Continent: Settler Colonialism and the History of American Indians in the U.S.,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2008), 1153–1167; Calloway, “2008 Presidential Address”; Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight Over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 9. See also Nancy Shoemaker, “Categories,” in Shoemaker, ed., Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51–74.

  71. Berkhofer, Jr., White Man’s Indian, 176; Peka Håmålåinen The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 369n.

 

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