(RE)MAPPING INDIGENOUS ‘RACE’/PLACE IN POSTCOLONIAL PENINSULAR MALAYSIA1

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous ‐ were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno‐nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.     

Nationalising indigenous peoples,legalising indigenous lands: a (post)colonial critique of the land demarcation process in Brazil by the analysis of the Guarani-Mbyá case

The Brazilian 1988 constitution recognises indigenous peoples as ‘first and natural owners of Brazilians land’ and the 231st Article ensures their right to special territories where they could live their culture and traditions without colonising presence. The authentication of these territories, however, requires Public Power promotion, which lies on colonising, juridical accounts and depends on anthropological, scientifically historical research. Our argument here is that the bureaucratisation of the land demarcation process is only possible within a context of epistemological advantage of science, i.e. modernity, which ignores indigenous territory and time conceptions. We will also argue that this bureaucratisation has been contributing to the (neo)colonisation of the territory by retarding the recognition and protection of indigenous rights.     

Towards Decolonisation of Australia's Protected Area Management: the Nantawarrina Indigenous Protected Area Experience

Management of Australia's National Parks and Protected Areas originally developed according to the United State's ‘Yellowstone’ model. Aimed primarily at preserving ‘wilderness’ areas, this form of protected area management has excluded indigenous habitation and land management, effectively colonising these landscapes. Since the 1980s indigenous exclusion from protected area management has been contested in the public sphere. Indigenous peoples have become involved in protected area management in various ways, such as the joint management of national parks. However, greater indigenous control is necessary to truly decolonise protected area landscapes and fully recognise the importance of indigenous Australians in land management. This paper explores a new initiative in protected area management: the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) program. IPAs are established through voluntary declaration of indigenous land with the aim of enhancing indigenous control of protected area landscapes. Nantawarrina, the first declared IPA, is considered as a case study. Although some manifestations of colonialism are still evident in the Nantawarrina IPA, the program has made some significant contributions to the decolonisation of protected area management in Australia.     

Unsettling time(s): Reconstituting the when of urban radical politics

In Indigenous/settler colonial contexts, cities are both rich and lived, multitemporal Indigenous places/spaces and sites of ongoing Indigenous dispossession. In this paper, we aim to unsettle linear notions of time associated with mainstream constructions of colonisation. We suggest that doing urban politics on stolen land requires a reconstitution of the when of urban struggles to engage with colonising pasts, presents and futures, and with multi-temporal survivances of Indigenous peoples and Country, in the here and now. Time in and as city-as-Country is multiple, non-linear, active, and made through/as relationships. As we engage with the gifts and responsibilities of non-linear time, we are led by Meanjin [so-called Brisbane, Australia], the teachings of activists from the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy and week-long protest actions that took place to coincide with the G20 Leaders' Meeting in 2014. We do this as two settler geographers, with complicities and responsibilities in/to the present, past and future as uninvited guests on unceded Aboriginal land. We signal a need to deepen the engagements of urban geographical and anti-capitalist politics with the specificities of the urban as Indigenous place/space/Country in order to complicate geographical conceptualisations of the urban and work towards decolonising the city in Indigenous/settler-colonial contexts.     

‘Being in Being’: Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and “world” in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology—of being differently: ‘being in being’ rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or “possessive” modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than “provincializing” dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.     

Sheepology: The Postcolonial Politics of Raceless Racism in Switzerland

Discussing racism and its colonial genealogy remains difficult in contemporary Switzerland. This article addresses the politics of racism's name-ability at the crossroads of studies of ‘postcolonial Switzerland’ and ‘raceless racism’ in continental Europe. The former highlight Switzerland's self-conception as outside colonialism. The latter emphasize the complexities of Euro-racism, in particular its production through the absence of explicit racial references. Drawing on postcolonial discourse-analytic methodology, I explore the famous case of the ‘sheep poster’ that supported the far right-wing Swiss People's Party campaign in 2007 and triggered an important controversy around legitimate public images of ‘Swissness’ and ‘difference’. The first section analyses the (untold) history of colonial racialised discourses that are conveyed by the poster. The second and third sections comprise a discourse analysis of the public claims that were expressed by various actors against or in defence of the poster. I show that the controversy consisted of a struggle between three antagonistic articulations of ‘Swissness’ and ‘difference’, namely between an antiracist discourse, and anti-exclusionary discourse, and defensive interventions. As the two latter discourses became hegemonic at the expense of the anti-racist critique, this struggle reasserted and renewed a regime of raceless racism, revealing both specificities and commonalities between the Swiss case and the broader context of postcolonial Europe.     

‘The Pacific Way’ as Postcolonial Discourse

In 2005, an entry entitled ‘Pacific Way’ appeared in a collection of essays on postcolonial thought. While this seems unremarkable, it invites questions concerning both the Pacific Way idea and the nature of postcolonial critique. This article is especially concerned to examine the specific circumstances in which the term was initially articulated and the precise meaning with which it was imbued. Although the Pacific Way acquired some ‘postcolonial’ characteristics in subsequent years, it was evidently anything but in its original formulation. Rather, it was a conservative discourse embracing notions of class hierarchy common to elites among both colonisers and colonised. This brings into question the status of the Pacific Way as a postcolonial discourse, and whether postcolonialism's ‘anticoloniality’ is in fact hospitable to indigenous hegemony, thus undermining its general anti-hegemonic credentials.     

Ways of Belonging: Reconciliation and Adelaide's Public Space Indigenous Cultural Markers

As an arguably ‘post colonial’ society, Australia is evolving its particular identity and sense of self, but reconciliation with its Indigenous peoples remains a significant political and cultural issue. Social inclusion or marginalisation is reflected in the construct of the civic landscape and this paper traces and contextualises public space Indigenous representation or ‘cultural markers’, since the 1960s in Adelaide, South Australia, the Kaurna people's land. This paper identifies social phases and time periods in the evolution of the ways in which Indigenous people and their culture have been included in the city's public space. Inclusion of Indigenous peoples in civic landscapes contributes not only to their spiritual and cultural renewal and contemporary identity, but also to the whole community's sense of self and to the process of reconciliation. This has the potential to provide a gateway to a different way of understanding place which includes an Indigenous perspective and could, symbolically, contribute to the decolonisation of Indigenous people. An inter‐related issue for the colonising culture is reconciliation with the Indigenous nature of the land, in the sense of an intimate sense of belonging and connectedness of spirit through an understanding of Indigenous cultural landscapes, an issue which this paper explores. The paper also sets out suggestions for the facilitation of further Indigenous inclusion and of re‐imagining ways of representation.     

War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

Land and Sea Tenure at Erub,Torres Strait: Property,Sovereignty and the Adjudication of Cultural Continuity

Approaching property as social practice, and native title as a confluence of indigenous, ethnographic, and legal discourses, we address two themes: firstly, the ethnocentrism of the state's division of ‘property’ from ‘jurisdiction,’; applied to deny indigenous societies' practice of the latter; and secondly, the contradictions inherent in judicial evaluation of continuity and discontinuity in indigenous law and custom. We explore the relationship of ‘home place’ to tenure at Erub, where island, reef and ocean comprise a cultural and experiential continuum. Rights across a full spectrum of material/symbolic resources involve a dynamic tension between principles of exclusion and incorporative reciprocity. The issue of how to balance more particular against more collective rights is at play with each nesting of more local into more inclusive socio-territorial identities: from households and lineages, through island communities, sub-regional island groups, and Torres Strait regionally, to the encapsulating state and evolving international orders. At Erub, an island community long regarded as a vanguard of creolization for Torres Strait, newcomers have by-and-large been assimilated to indigenous systems of land- and sea-holding and authority. The connection between people and territory is a complex practice of social identities and interests responding to political opportunity, according to cultural forms that manifest substantial and traceable continuities to indigenous arrangements, as innovation has proceeded. The continuities appear sufficient to satisfy criteria for native title recognition as articulated in the Mabo decision, but the criteria themselves are too narrowly based to accommodate the processual dynamics of evolving culture and tradition. A reordering of territorial jurisdiction, predicated on the principle of Islander consent to development activities in their homelands/seas, would provide more authentic conditions for cultural autonomy.     

Pluralising political legitimacy

Does the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.     

The socionature that neo-extractivism can see: Practicing redistribution and compensation around large-scale mining in the Southern Ecuadorian Amazon

In this article I address the complex processes of transformation taking place due to industrial mineral extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon through a focus on state and company led practices of redistribution, social investment and compensation. The analysis of three empirical examples related to the Mirador industrial mining project is viewed in relation to a more extensive assembling of a mining surface. I introduce the concept ‘surfacing’ to refer to discursive and material practices that state and corporate actors make use of to manage, facilitate and enact a redistributive economic policy, and at the same time produce value in and for the global capitalist market. A main argument is that these practices make certain socio-natural relations visible to the project of large-scale mining while obscuring affected peoples' ‘place-based life projects’. Restricted by neo-extractivist modes of recognition, of ‘seeing’ and ‘not-seeing’, indigenous Shuar, and mestizo livestock peasants, colonos, respond to mining intervention based on their differentiated engagements and trajectories with the Amazonian landscape and ecology. The paper is an intent to understand geosocial transformations and the differentiated practices of non-recognition while analyzing these responses.     

A Space and Time for a Generation to React: The Gattjirrk Cultural Festival in Milingimbi

This article deals with the annually held Gattjirrk Cultural Festival organised in Milingimbi, a Yolngu community in Northeast Arnhem Land, and has the objective of analysing its socio‐cultural and political meaning. Although this event is considered an amusement (wakal), it nevertheless constitutes an arena to negotiate postcolonial realities in which Yolngu people are forced to live. Focusing on the organisers' overall frame of ‘sharing culture’ and youths' interpretations of hip‐hop dances as ‘performative tactics’, I suggest that the Milingimbi Festival creates a space in which generational perspectives within the community as well as the tension between Yolngu people and the non‐indigenous (balanda) world may be displayed and mediated. While the Festival has been mainly conceived as a space for encountering and ‘sharing culture’ with other groups and people both within the community and with the balanda world, it is also seized as an opportunity by young people to generate new ways to engage with and challenge others. By weaving together elements of Yolngu heritage and pop culture, I argue that fun or burlesque dances (wakal bunngul) are ‘tactics of cultural remix’ that through laughter and irony demand a witnessing: a mutual recognition, engagement, and responsibility to participate and to respond. It is thus in their own ways that these performances produce new connections and relationships bringing together old and young, Yolngu and balanda in an effective although fleeting encounter.     

Rhetoric and communication in Joseph Conrad

Early modern natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon are frequently seen as providing a legitimating ideology for British imperial expansion. Although this has been challenged by one recent study, much of Bacon's work on English colonisation remains unexplored. This article argues that far from being an ideological apologist for English colonisation, Bacon had two sets of colonial anxieties. The first derived from a tradition of civic humanism which concerned the moral corruption, dispossession of indigenous people and the greed involved in the British colonization of Ireland and America. Bacon's second anxiety was not moral but epistemological, and stemmed from his natural philosophy. For Bacon, colonies were not simply new commonwealths, they were places which potentially produced the natural knowledge vital for the recreation of man's original, epistemic empire over the world. Consequently, Bacon was not only interested in the morality of colonising, but also whether the knowledge produced in colonies was reliable. An exploration of Bacon's views on colonisation also offers us a point of entry into the scholarly debate about the relationship between Bacon's natural philosophy and his political thought.     

Challenging Hegemonies through Connecting Places,People and Ideas: Jan Monk's contribution to international gender geography (with particular reference to Spain)

The main goal of the paper is to study Jan Monk's contribution to the development of international gender geography, in particular in Spain. Our aim is also to explain the experiences and numerous connections among places, people and ideas that she has been weaving to foster international scholarship and, in this way, how she has challenged hegemonic approaches in feminist geography. Jan Monk comes originally from the Southern hemisphere and therefore she is well aware of the extent to which ‘Northern’ (or Anglo-American) ways of seeing the world define concepts, theories and ideas in geography (and also in feminist geography). Being an ‘insider’ and an ‘outsider’ as well as her sensibility to the important of place has permeated Jan's contribution to international gender geography.     

New Boundaries of Influence in Highland Papua: ‘Culture’, Mining and Ritual Conversions

This article considers the new boundaries of influence among Fuyuge speakers in the Udabe Valley (Central Province, Papua New Guinea [PNG]). These new boundaries have arisen through the conjunction of epochal shifts implicating the PNG State, and local forms of ritual. On the one hand the PNG State's particular advocacy of widespread resource extraction is coupled with its need to comply to signed agreements of international bodies such as the World Trade Organization. Both have consequences for the way boundaries are newly conceived with respect to the ‘land’ (‘landowners’) and with respect to ‘culture’ (‘cultural property’). On the other hand, peoples such as the Fuyuge create and recreate local boundaries of influence through the performance of ritual conversions ‐ as regards persons, place names, or collective names. At the same time a local Fuyuge perspective on ‘culture’ suggests that its boundaries be delineated, analogous to the definitions of boundaries for ‘landowners’ compelled by mining operations. The article highlights connections between these local changes and the current concerns of PNG academic scholars to mandate the protection of localised PNG cultural property, an outgrowth of current epochal alterations.     

Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas

This article provides an introductory overview of themes raised in this special edition of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. We suggest that, while recent work such as Michael Barnett's Empire of Humanity has begun to explore the history of western humanitarianism, academic researchers can do more to address the intricate framework of relations between humanitarianism and empire, and that the history of humanitarianism can usefully be viewed as a fundamental component of imperial relations, a way of bridging trans-imperial, international and transnational approaches. We set the papers in this collection within the wider historiography of nineteenth and twentieth century humanitarianism, and outline how the humanitarian ‘impulse’ intersected with debates around anti-slavery, colonial administration and the protection of indigenous peoples. We also outline the ways in which twentieth-century international ‘networks of concern’ engaged with, and built upon, the discourses of imperial humanitarianism. Finally, we briefly consider the benefits of a ‘transnational’ approach in sketching the history of empire and humanitarianism.     

Mining (Dis)amenity: The Political Ecology of Mining Opposition in the Kaz (Ida) Mountain Region of Western Turkey

Opposition to mining activities is an increasingly global phenomenon. A key feature of political ecology literature examining this opposition is its focus on the power of multinational corporations to gain access to resources on lands principally claimed by indigenous peoples and peasants in ‘Third World’ countries. These struggles often play out within the context of tensions between neoliberal natural resource policies and interventions by non‐governmental and civil society actors. Meanwhile, political ecology scholars of natural resource conflicts in ‘First World’ countries are documenting conflicts over environmental management that emerge from complex commodification processes and competing forms of capital investment, such as those associated with amenity migration, that privilege different characteristics of landscapes. These perspectives are rarely combined into a single framework, despite the recognition that common dimensions may intermingle in regional contexts around the world. Using the case of conflict over gold mining in the Kaz (Ida) Mountains of western Turkey, this article explores the intersection of state neoliberalism with competing forms of rural capital, which produce a regional mining conflict. Our case highlights the value of ‘locating the First and Third Worlds within’ when it comes to studies of social processes that shape environmental conflicts.     

‘In aid of civil power’: The colonial army in Northern India,c.1919–42

India's tribal northeast continues to be a footnote in national and international historiography. Influenced by James C. Scott's recent characterisation of the non-state hill peoples of Zomia and their deliberate evasion of subject status, this article reappraises the 1826 treaty between the British political agent and Khasi leader U Tirot Sing, and the subsequent Nongkhlaw massacre. It further explores a set of British expectations of the hills as a potential site for missionisation and white colonisation. In this way, it asserts the purchase of Scott's theories, but argues for the further potential of micro-history and the colonial archive to render indigenous histories more visible.