Remapping Sovereignty

"An original account of the stakes of sovereignty for recovering anticolonial pasts and fashioning anticolonial futures. Despite their signal contributions to present-day anticolonial struggles from #NODAPL to Idle No More, Indigenous societies around the globe are recurrently neglected in histories and theories of decolonization. What results from this disregard is not only skewed history, but also diminished political horizons for those (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) striving to transform an unequal world profoundly shaped by colonialism. Bridging political theory and Indigenous Studies, political theorist David Temin shows how key 20th-century Indigenous intellectual-activists in lands today claimed by Canada and the United States fundamentally recast the philosophical substance and normative goals of decolonization. Through history, textual interpretation, and conceptual analysis, his book recasts a vision of anticolonial thought and agency that circles around a politics of self-determination disentangled from sovereignty as institution and ideal-one committed to the relational flourishing of human and other-than-human beings against colonial domination"--

Since the late 1980s, critical geopolitics has gone from being a radical critical perspective on the disciplines of political geography and international relations theory to becoming a recognised area of research in its own right. Influenced by poststructuralist concerns with the politics of representation, critical geopolitics considers the ways in which the use of particular discourses shape political practices. Initially critical geopolitics analysed the practical geopolitical language of the elites and intellectuals of statecraft. Subsequent iterations have considered the role that popular representations of the international political world play. As critical geopolitics has become a more established part of political geography it has attracted ever more critique: from feminists for its apparent blindness to the embodied effects of geopolitical praxis and from those who have been uncomfortable about its textual focus, while others have challenged critical geopolitics to address alternative, resistant forms of geopolitical practice. Again, critical geopolitics has been reworked to incorporate these challenges and the latest iterations have encompassed normative agendas, non-representational theory, emotional geographies and affect. It is against the vibrant backdrop of this intellectual development of critical geopolitics as a subdiscipline that this Companion is set. Bringing together leading researchers associated with the different forms of critical geopolitics, this volume produces an overview of its achievements, limitations, and areas of new and potential future development. The Companion is designed to serve as a key resource for an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners interested in the spatiality of politics.

A Christian imagination of colonial discovery permeated the early modern world, but legal histories developed in very different ways depending on imperial jurisdictions. Indigenous Rights and the Legacies of the Bible: From Moses to Mabo explores the contradictions and ironies that emerged in the interactions between biblical warrants and colonial theories of Indigenous natural rights. The early debates in the Americas mutated in the British colonies with a range of different outcomes after the American Revolution, and tracking the history of biblical interpretation provides an illuminating pathway through these historical complexities. A ground-breaking legal judgment in the High Court of Australia, Mabo v. Queensland (1992), demonstrates the enduring legacies of debates over the previous five centuries. The case reveals that the Australian colonies are the only jurisdiction of the English common law tradition within which no treaties were made with the First Nations. Instead, there is a peculiar development of terra nullius ideology, which can be traced back to the historic influences of the book of Genesis in Puritan thought in the seventeenth century. Having identified both similarities and differences between various colonial arguments, and their overt dependence on early modern theological reasoning, Mark G. Brett examines the paradoxical permutations of imperial and anti-imperial motifs in the biblical texts themselves. Concepts of rights shifted over the centuries from theological to secular frameworks, and more recently, from anthropocentric assumptions to ecologically embedded concepts of Indigenous rights and responsibilities. Bearing in mind the differences between ancient and modern notions of indigeneity, a fresh understanding of this history proves timely as settler colonial states reflect on the implications of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Brett's illuminating insights in this detailed study are particularly relevant for the four states which initially voted against the Declaration: the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

An original and stimulating critique of American empire

After the Second World War, national self-determination became a recognized international norm, yet it only extended to former colonies. Groups within postcolonial states that made alternative sovereign claims were disregarded or actively suppressed. Showcasing their contested histories, Lydia Walker offers a powerful counternarrative of global decolonization, highlighting little-known regions, marginalized individuals, and their hidden (or lost) archives. She depicts the personal connections that linked disparate nationalist struggles across the globe through advocacy networks, demonstrating that these advocates had their own agendas and allegiances, which, she argues, could undermine the autonomy of the claimants they supported. By foregrounding particular nationalist movements in South Asia and Southern Africa and their transnational advocacy networks, States-in-Waiting illuminates the un-endings of decolonization-the unfinished and improvised ways that the state-centric international system replaced empire, which left certain claims of sovereignty perpetually awaiting recognition. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book outlines a critical theory of citizenship, with an emphasis on how citizenship institutes power relations and organises the rights and obligations of those who become its subjects. Whether it is the question of the rights of animals, children, migrants, minorities, mothers, or mountains, and whether such rights are protected or guaranteed by national law, international law, or human rights law, the issue of citizenship has already indelibly marked the 21st century. As an institution, citizenship governs the relationship between a polity and its peoples by dividing them into citizens and noncitizens, with differentiated rights and obligations. So necessarily, this book argues, citizenship is an institution of domination and emancipation that brings into play the struggles of those who want to protect certain privileges and the struggles of those who are against being caught in either second-class or noncitizen categories. Deconstructing dominant theories and practices of citizenship, a critical theory of citizenship must, therefore, not only analyse intersecting rights, but also connect citizenship to these broader social struggles. For it is these struggles, the book maintains, that give meaning to citizenship itself. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in sociolegal studies, sociology, politics, and as well as those working in citizenship, migration, and refugee studies.

This book reflects on the variety of ways in which mourning affects political and social life. Through the narrative of the contributors, the book demonstrates how mourning is intertwined with politics and how politics involves a struggle over which losses and whose lives can, or should, be mourned.

The contributors to Remapping Sound Studies intervene in current trends and practices in sound studies by reorienting the field toward the global South. Attending to disparate aspects of sound in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Micronesia, and a Southern outpost in the global North, this volume broadens the scope of sound studies and challenges some of the field's central presuppositions. The contributors show how approaches to and uses of technology across the global South complicate narratives of technological modernity and how sound-making and listening in diverse global settings unsettle familiar binaries of sacred/secular, private/public, human/nonhuman, male/female, and nature/culture. Exploring a wide range of sonic phenomena and practices, from birdsong in the Marshall Islands to Zulu ululation, the contributors offer diverse ways to remap and decolonize modes of thinking about and listening to sound. Contributors Tripta Chandola, Michele Friedner, Louise Meintjes, Jairo Moreno, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Jeff Roy, Jessica Schwartz, Shayna Silverstein, Gavin Steingo, Jim Sykes, Benjamin Tausig, Hervé Tchumkam