Settler colonialism in Canada and the Métis

Although the literature on settler colonialism intends to identify what is specific about the settler colonial experience, it can also homogenize diverse settler colonial narratives and contexts. In particular, in Canada, discussion of the ‘logic of elimination’ must contend with the discrete experiences of multiple Indigenous groups, including the Métis. This article examines relationships between Métis people and settler colonialism in Canada to distinguish how Métis histories contribute to a broader narrative of settler colonial genocide in Canada. Cast as ‘halfbreeds’ and considered rebels by the newly forming Canadian nation-state, Métis peoples were discouraged from ‘illegitimate breeding’. Moreover, their unique experiences of the residential school system and forced sterilization have heretofore been underexplored in historiographies of genocide and settler colonial elimination in Canada. These social, political and racial divisions in Canada are magnified through genocidal structures and they reach a critical juncture between colonialism and mixed ethnicities. At that juncture, groups like the Métis in Canada are within a metaphorical gap or, more accurately, a jurisdictional gap. Colonial treatment of the Métis demonstrates, in part, the broad reach of colonial control and how uneven it is, often to the detriment of the Métis and Indigenous groups in Canada.     

Pots,pens and ‘eating out the body’: cuisine and the gendering of African nations*

Whether cooking in a pot in the back yard, or in a modern kitchen, African women have generally prepared food for their men. More recently, they have collated and written cookery books both in the West and in Africa so that the ruling elites, mostly all men, have been able to display their new ‘national cuisines’ on their states’ official websites. This article reviews how ‘national cuisines’ have emerged recently in parts of Africa and then examines how these emerging cuisines might contribute to the gendering of African nations. It will also contrast Western notions of ‘the slender body’ with some African notions, of ‘eating out the body’, building a respectable but large body to construct an ‘authentic physical masculinity’ on the one hand, and a healthy and fertile wife and mother on the other. The article investigates how this might be reflected in African national cuisines.