Settler Memory

Faint traces of Indigenous people and their histories abound in American media, memory, and myths. Indigeneity often remains absent or invisible, however, especially in contemporary political and intellectual discourse about white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racism in general. In this ambitious new book, Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself. By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past from the seventeenth century to the present, Bruyneel reveals the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity. He also shows how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism. Envisioning a new political future, Bruyneel challenges readers to refuse settler memory and consider a third reconstruction that can meaningfully link antiracism and anticolonialism.

From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to the United Nations Permanent Memorial to the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, many worthwhile processes of public memory have been enacted on the national and international levels. But how do these extant practices of memory function to precipitate justice and recompense? Are there moments when such techniques, performances, and displays of memory serve to obscure and elide aspects of the history of colonial governmentality? This collection addresses these and other questions in essays that take up the varied legacies, continuities, modes of memorialization, and poetics of remaking that attend colonial governmentality in spaces as varied as the Maghreb and the Solomon Islands. Highlighting the continued injustices arising from a process whose aftermath is far from settled, the contributors examine works by twentieth-century authors representing Asia, Africa, North America, Latin America, Australia, and Europe. Imperial practices throughout the world have fomented a veritable culture of memory. The essays in this volume show how the legacy of colonialism’s attempt to transform the mode of life of colonized peoples has been central to the largely unequal phenomenon of globalization.

Violence and Public Memory assesses the relationship between these two subjects by examining their interconnections in varied case studies across the United States, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Those responsible for the violence discussed in this volume are varied, and the political ideologies and structures range from apartheid to fascism to homophobia to military dictatorships but also democracy. Racism and state terrorism have played central roles in many of the case studies examined in this book, and multiple chapters also engage with the recent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The sites and history represented in this volume address a range of issues, including mass displacement, genocide, political repression, forced disappearances, massacres, and slavery. Across the world there are preserved historic sites, memorials, and museums that mark places of significant violence and human rights abuse, which organizations and activists have specifically worked to preserve and provide a place to face history and its continuing legacy today and chapters across this volume directly engage with the questions and issues that surround these sometimes controversial sites. Including photographs of many of the sites and events covered across the volume, this is an important book for readers interested in the complex and often difficult history of the relationship between violence and the way it is publicly remembered.

Focusing on the long history of contact between indigenous peoples and the white colonial communities who settled in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, this book investigates how histories of colonial settlement have been mythologized, narrated and embodied in public culture in the twentieth century through monuments, exhibitions and images.

"In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a 'long continued course of aggression and sufferings' between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, 'aggression' and 'sufferings' are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South. Traditionally, the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the eastern woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes, confederacies, and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white Southerners, Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white Southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South.This, in turn, formed the development of Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically, 'Aggression and Sufferings' prioritizes events in the frontier territories of Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the emergent region and examines the involved societies' conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Nooe then investigates the contemporary and historically interconnected consequences of a series of murders of encroaching white settlers by a faction of the Creek nation known as the 'Red Sticks' in the years preceding the 1813 Creek War. Each episode was connected to immediate grievances by Native Southerners against white colonialism, while white Southerners looked upon the incidents as confirmation of Native savagery. Nooe considers the effort by the burgeoning white population to combat the Red Sticks in the Creek War of 1813-1814 and explains how chroniclers of the white South's past memorialized the 1813 Creek War as a regional conflict. Next, Nooe explores the events between the August 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson to the September 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek to evaluate the implications of persistent low-level white-Native conflict in a period traditionally interpreted as the end to the Creek War. He then examines how the Florida Indians' resistance to their expulsion from the South sparked a unifying call to arms from white communities across the region. Finally, Nooe explores how white Southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as innocent victims in the violent expulsion of the region's Native peoples before concluding with notes on how this emerging sense of regional history and identity (which ignored the interests and agency of enslaved and free Black people in the early nineteenth century South) continued to flower into the Antebellum period, during Western expansion, and well into the twentieth century. Readers interested in Southern, Indigenous, and Early American history will find a thorough, scholarly examination of the tensions and violence between Natives and white settlers and the construction of a regional memory of white victimization by white Southerners during this period. 'Aggression and Sufferings' speaks to scholarship on settler-colonialism, violence, Native dispossession, white identity, historical memory and monuments, and Southern Studies"--

In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution.

Settling and Unsettling Memories analyses the ways in which Canadians over the past century have narrated the story of their past in books, films, works of art, commemorative ceremonies, and online. This cohesive collection introduces readers to overarching themes of Canadian memory studies and brings them up-to-date on the latest advances in the field. With increasing debates surrounding how societies should publicly commemorate events and people, Settling and Unsettling Memories helps readers appreciate the challenges inherent in presenting the past. Prominent and emerging scholars explore the ways in which Canadian memory has been put into action across a variety of communities, regions, and time periods. Through high-quality essays touching on the central questions of historical consciousness and collective memory, this collection makes a significant contribution to a rapidly growing field.

Explores the uncalculated and incalculable elements in historical re-enactment - unexpected emotions, unplanned developments - and locates them in countries where settlers were trying to establish national identities derived from metropolitan cultures inevitably affected by the land itself and the people who had been there before them.