The Significance of The Frontier in The Age of Transnational History

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Settler Colonial Studies

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Introduction: The significance of the frontier in an age of transnational history

Erik Altenbernd & Alex Trimble Young
a b a b
Department of History, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Department of English, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Published online: 19 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Erik Altenbernd & Alex Trimble Young , Settler Colonial Studies (2013): Introduction: The significance of the frontier in an age of transnational history, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.846385 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846385
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Settler Colonial Studies, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846385
INTRODUCTION The signicance of the frontier in an age of transnational history

Erik Altenbernda and Alex Trimble Youngb*
a
Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Ms Alex Lazzari] at 14:06 19 December 2013
Department of History, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA; bDepartment of English, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA The concept of the frontier has been central to many recent studies of settler colonialism. In Patrick Wolfes work, the frontier constitutes the primal settler/indigenous binary that structures and belies the ostensible commitment of settler societies to multicultural pluralism. While Wolfe thus calls attention to the role the frontier binary plays in the logic of elimination, he has also criticized the frontier as a representational trope that works to memorialize and whitewash settler invasion. In contemporary historiographic debates in the elds of western and borderlands history within the USA, the concept of the frontier has fared much differently. For US scholars, the very word frontier is irrevocably linked to the legacy of historian Frederick Jackson Turner (18611932), who, in his 1893 essay The Signicance of The Frontier in American History, cast the frontier as both a moving line of settlement and the well-spring of American individualism and democracy. Today, US scholars reject Turner s frontier thesis as inherently ethnocentric and nationalistic and have largely backed away from the idea that the frontier is the locus of US history and culture. This introductory essay puts the critiques of Turnerian historiography articulated by scholars of the US West and southwestern borderlands into conversation with the rather Turnerian concept of the frontier that informs many analyses in settler colonial studies. Reviewing the work of a broad range of scholars who have offered various alternatives to Turners narrative of settler expansion, we argue at a moment when settler colonial studies is poised to make a valuable intervention into the study of settler/indigenous contact and conict in the USA that recent historiographic debates in western and borderlands history have much to offer the growing eld of settler colonial studies.
In the summer of 1908, Frederick Jackson Turner (18611932) went on vacation. Rather than luxuriating on a beach, Turner took a ve-week, labor-intensive canoe tour of the extensive lake and river systems that straddle the USACanada border. An avid outdoorsman for most of his life, Turner by this time was also a well-established professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and on the verge of serving as president of the American Historical Association, a deputation that would pave the way to his subsequent appointment as professor of history at Harvard University in 1911. Turner s summer retreat from the settled connes of Madison to the soggy wilds Americans today call the Boundary Waters in many ways functioned as a re-enactment of the history he is famous for studying.1 The Boundary Waters were formed by the retreat and deposition of the Laurentide Ice Sheet at the end of the last Ice Age more than 10,000 years ago. Turner s trek across this glaciated landscape began in Ely, Minnesota, a small town located just outside of what is today the Boundary
*Corresponding author. Email: alexanty@usc.edu

2013 Taylor & Francis
E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young
Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (one of the four major US and Canadian government-protected parks and forests just west of Lake Superior), and ended at Lake Nipigon, the large freshwater lake in the province of Ontario. A decade and half prior, Turner drew on the geological forces that created the Boundary Waters as a metaphor to describe the frontier in his famous essay, The Signicance of the Frontier in American History (1893). In Turner s words, As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics.2 For Turner, frontier processes shaped American society over the course of time just as indelibly as retreating glaciers had shaped the landscapes of this region in which he was raised. When Turner took his canoe trip across the Boundary Waters an adventure preserved by his daughter Dorothy in a now crispy, black turn-of-the-century photo album he partook in a recreational wilderness experience nostalgic for a particular historical process and era that of the fur trade, the inter-imperial, multinational, and multicultural venture at the heart of Euro-American expansion into North America.3 The family photo of Turner portaging his canoe reproduced on the cover of this issue of Settler Colonial Studies (Figure 1) situates Turner as something of
Figure 1. Frederick Jackson Turner portaging a canoe near the Atikokan River, Ontario, Canada (1908). F. J.T en portage, Turner Family Photo Album, Box 58, Frederick Jackson Turner Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
a modern voyageur, the French word used to describe those fur traders who traveled the Boundary Waters region via canoe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The image of Turner recreating for the purpose of leisure this chapter of North American history is rather ripe with ironic symbolism.4 Take, for instance, the transnational context that locates Turner, author of arguably the most inuential theory of American exceptionalism, roughing it in the Canadian rather than American wilderness, re-enacting a frontier heritage more often associated with Canada French Canada in particular than with the USA.5 When viewed through the prism of modern historiography, the geographic location of Turner en portage takes on additional resonances. The Boundary Waters region bisects the northwestern portion of what French colonials referred to as the pays den haut (upper country), the region historian Richard White identied and termed the middle ground.6 The image of Turner traversing through Whites middle ground a case study of frontier social development White deployed as a direct challenge to the sweeping generalizations of Turner s The Signicance of the Frontier is itself a rather fascinating, direct, and unexpected intersection of the old with the new, of two competing (if inter-related) orthodoxies in the historiography of North America. This image, and the story of Turner s transnational frontier tourism, was very much on our minds as we organized the symposium that inspired this special feature. This journal roundtable, which explores intersections not only within US historiography but also between the historiography of the US West and transnational settler colonial studies, has its origins in a symposium of the same title that we hosted for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California on 25 February 2012.7 This symposium was conceived of during a series of discussions that began while we were in a graduate seminar on the history of the American West taught by William Deverell, Professor of History at the University of Southern California. These discussions continued thereafter during our year-long tenure as Mellon interns in the Huntingtons Manuscripts Department during which time we had the opportunity to work extensively in the Frederick Jackson Turner Collection. One of the topics we repeatedly returned to was the startling disjuncture between how the eld of western American history and transnational settler colonial studies regard the frontier as an analytic concept. Despite the elds origins in Turnerian frontier historiography, the word frontier, paradoxically, holds little analytical weight in the contemporary scholarly conversation on the history and culture of the US West; whereas, conversely, many scholars of settler colonial studies a eld in which Turner is rarely cited embrace the rather Turnerian notion that a frontier binary is the structuring principle of settler societies. As we traded articles and books from scholars in both elds, we realized that the contemporary moment in which settler colonial studies is poised to make an important intervention in our understanding of the settlement of North America presents an opportunity for a consideration of two questions: How, broadly speaking, can scholars of US history and culture, especially those trained and working in the USA, protably import the insights of settler colonial studies and the elds repurposing of the frontier binary? And, on the other hand, how might scholars working within settler colonial studies prot from considering the problems and debates within US historiography and its ongoing critique of Turner s frontier thesis? Theorizing the frontier: Frederick Jackson Turner, transnational nationalist Any attempt to answer these questions must include a consideration of Turner s seminal essay The Signicance of the Frontier in American History. The inuence of this essay, which US scholars often refer to as the frontier thesis, on twentieth-century Western American historiography was so profound that scholars in the USA have been bemoaning the necessity of discussing its inuence for 70 years or more.8 The impact of Turner s thought has extended well
beyond academic discourse, transguring the very conception and meaning of the word frontier.9 Turner conceptualized the American frontier not as a boundary between nation-states, or even a boundary between indigenous and settler sovereignties, but rather as a primal place: the outer edge of the wave the meeting point between savagery and civilization.10 Thus, on the one hand, Turner conceives of the frontier as a transhistorical and translocatable site where civilization clashes with the wilderness and is renewed by nature. In the words of literary critic William Handley, Turner s frontier is an almost Emersonian, spatial-temporal, moving site whose circumference was nowhere but whose center was everywhere.11 On the other hand, the frontier for Turner was also an objective geography, one produced by demographics and one that could be mapped. An often referred to but little studied aspect of Turner s essay is the empirical basis of Turner s soaring rhetoric and sweeping theorization: namely, The Progress of the Nation, the section of the 1890 federal census report that detailed the growth and geographic distribution of the US population between 1790 and 1890. In addition to providing a detailed statistical demographic accounting and analysis, the Census Ofce staff also visualized the Ofces data into a series of individual maps that represented population densities of the US east of the 100th Meridian. These maps charted decadal patterns of migration to the nations frontier, which the Ofce dened as settlements which do not reach an average of 2 [persons] to the square mile.12 Turner s interest in the report focuses on its pronouncement which Turner made famous when he quoted it at the outset of his essay that the nation no longer had a frontier of settlement due to the fact that the unsettled area has been so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line and thus that the discussion of its extent and its westward movement can not [sic] any longer have a place in the census reports.13 Turner took this statement to mean that the American frontier was now an historical rather than contemporary phenomenon, and thus concluded his essay with the declaration that four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the rst period of American history.14 Turner s pronouncement of the closure of the frontier was expressed with some anxiety and nostalgia because, for Turner, the frontier was not merely a means of territorial expansion, but rather a process that structured the whole of American history. In his words, The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.15 This ongoing social regression of Euro-American settlers into the wilderness of the American interior occasioned not only the production and reproduction of American history but also its national identity: This perennial rebirth, this uidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.16 For Turner, American individualism and American democracy emerged from the experience of settling the American continent rather than from European antecedents. The frontier, Turner stressed, is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization . Little by little [the frontiersman] transforms the wilderness but the outcome is not old Europe...[but] a new product that is American. Americans and their democratic republic were therefore something new, something exceptional. The advance of the frontier, Turner concluded, has meant a steady movement away from the inuence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.17 Turner s emphasis on the structuring and symbolic signicance of the frontier binary for the US nation-state should resound with an uncanny familiarity for readers of contemporary settler colonial theory. Turner s frontier thesis could, for example, rather seamlessly take the place of the Australian ideology of settlement Patrick Wolfe critiques in Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (1999). Wolfes
characterization of the primary paradigm of Australian settler colonialism as a classic binarism that opposes two types (civilization vs. savagery, etc.) is directly analogous to Turner s binary of civilization and wilderness.18 The resonance of Turner s analysis within Wolfes diagnosis suggests more than just a structural parallel. Turner in fact exerted a strong inuence on mid-twentieth-century Australian historians like Russell Ward, who identied the pastoral bush-worker as the progenitor of Australias national character.19 With the shift away from ethnocentric and nationalist history in the late twentieth century, however, Australian historians did not jettison the frontier as a category of analysis. For instance, in The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), Henry Reynolds decisively recast the Australian frontier as a site of settler conquest and indigenous resistance rather than of nation building in the wilderness. Unlike the contemporaneous critique of the New Western Historians in the USA, who rejected the frontier outright as a category of analysis, Reynolds, in The Other Side of the Frontier and other works, transformed the content and conclusions of Australian frontier historiography by recuperating the suppressed history of the violence that subtended settlement, and the indigenous agency expressed through various forms of resistance. The stark binary form of the Australian frontier is, however, never called into question. As Reynolds later observed, there was no middle ground in Australia that long era of American history described by Richard White when Indians, whites and mestizos mixed on terms of equality and left abundant documentary evidence behind.20 Unlike New Western Historians like White working in the USA, Reynolds transformed the ideological content of Australian frontier historiography without questioning its form. Wolfes work, which always operates in productive tension with Australian frontier historiography, transforms Reynolds conception of the frontier in several key ways most notably, perhaps, by arguing that the frontier is a transnational and transposable concept rather than one specic to the Australian situation. For Wolfe, there is no middle ground in Australia, or in any other settler society. Wolfe employs the concept of the frontier, somewhat paradoxically, to describe both a foundational moment in the development of settler colonial projects, and a discourse of settler nationhood aimed at whitewashing or disavowing the violence of settler invasion. For Wolfe, settler frontier narratives such as Turner s, that imagine the frontier as a site of dynamic pluralism, serve to distract both from the past violence of the historical frontier and from the contemporary forms of violence and administrative power employed by the settler state against indigenous societies. As he pithily puts it, the point is not simply that the idea of the frontier is misleading. What matters is that it was a performative representation it helped the invasion to occur.21 In his diagnosis of the performative representation of the frontier, Wolfes analyses can often read like the ideological obverse of Turner s writing on the frontier:
[T]he truth of the frontier was that the primary social division was encompassed in the relation between natives and invaders. This notwithstanding, the suppression of divisions within settler society was an ideological effect of the concept of the frontier. Correspondingly, though the truth of present day multiculturalism is a racially divided society, the reduction of the primary Indigenous/settler divide to the status of one among many ethnic divisions within settler society is an ideological effect of multiculturalism.22
Wolfes binary, of course, is one that replaces the civilized and the savage with settlers and indigenous natives, reframing both the terms and the ideological signicance of the Turnerian frontier. The carefully bracketed truth which Wolfe employs to describe his own historical narrative further indicates that the signicance of his frontier is relational rather than world-historic his critique of the representational strategies of settler societies lacks the ontological certainty of
either Turner or many of his critics. Nonetheless, strong echoes of Turner remain in Wolfes work. Just as Turner argued that a frontier binary explains American development, Wolfe argues that a frontier binary structures settler invasion. Turner s argument that the the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people aligns closely with Wolfes contention that the suppression of divisions within [Australian] settler society was an ideological effect of the concept of the frontier.23 Similarly, Turner s conception of the frontier as a moving site whose circumference was nowhere but whose center was everywhere maps closely onto Wolfes representation of the Australian frontier as shifting, contextual, negotiated, moved in and out of and suspended.24 For Wolfe, however, settler representations of the frontier are Janus-faced, on the one hand, offering sanitized representations of the frontier as a space of hybridity and nation-building such as Turner s, and on the other, portraying the frontier as a lawless violent space of exception beyond the reach of the law of the settler state.25 This latter mode of performative representation of the frontier serves as a sort of screen that works to insulate the juridical order of the settler state from the genocidal violence that facilitated indigenous dispossession. This disavowal of frontier violence as the work of irregular mavericks, however, belies the fact that the settler state directly beneted from their unlawful activity. As Wolfe puts it, rather than something separate from or running counter to the colonial state, the murderous activities of the frontier rabble constitute its principal means of expansion.26 It is in Wolfes explication of the historical frontier behind such performative representations, however, that the Turnerian aspects of his work are most evident. In his recent essay Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction, Wolfe addresses Turner s legacy directly in an argument that makes his most strident case yet for the validity of an historical frontier binary. He opens with a provocative observation and question:
As one who argues that settler colonialism is premised on a zero-sum logic whereby settler societies, for all their internal complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives, I have regularly been accused of binarism though not once by a Native. Why should it be that the spectre of binarism, so disturbing to non-Native sensibilities, should be less troubling to Natives?27
Wolfe suggests that the answer to this question might be found by examining the role the frontier plays in producing the affective dimensions of settler subjecthood (or what the exceptionalist Turner might have called the American character):
To situate settler subjecthood historically, we can start with the frontier. For all its empirical inadequacy, the concept of the frontier has the virtue of expressing the protean fact of a historical coming together of societies that had previously been mutually discrete. Prior to a certain point or points, their separateness had been unqualied. In our theoretical enthusiasm at the complexities, hybridities and transgressions that the study of frontiers opens up, therefore, we should not lose sight of the fact that, for all the holes and inconsistencies in the concept, its primary referent is stable enough. Behind all the indeterminacy, the frontier is a way of talking about the historical process of territorial invasion a cumulative depredation through which outsiders recurrently advance on Natives in order to take their place. Go back far enough, in other words, and there can be no disputing the existence of an unqualied empirical binarism.28
Wolfes description of a site of settler subject formation dened by an unqualied empirical binarism that is historically and empirically specic, yet also recurrent and translocatable, certainly has strong echoes of the Turnerian frontier. It is in his description of the closure of the frontier, however, that Wolfe acknowledges that he agrees with Frederick Jackson Turner insofar as both scholars read the years surrounding 1890 marking a watershed moment in US history. Wolfe describes this moment as the profoundest of ruptures occasioned by the end of the era of
Indians armed military resistance that coincided with the same year that Turner identied as the end of the rst period of American history.29 For Wolfe, however, the closing of the US frontier does not signal an uneasy new beginning for an erstwhile frontier society, but rather a shift in the tactics of the logic of elimination. The post-frontier era emerges when the settler colonial logic of elimination in its crudest frontier form was transformed into a paternalistic mode of governmentality which, though still sanctioned by state violence, came to focus on assimilation rather than rejection.30 This tendency to repurpose rather than reject Turnerian frontier historiography is not, however, limited to Wolfe or even Australian settler colonial studies. In a recent essay in which he suggests that Baruch Kimmerling and Gershon Shar laid the groundwork for the legitimization of the colonization approach within Israeli scholarship, Uri Ram notes that both Kimmerling and Shar modify [Turner s] original thesis in a number of ways, and draw different conclusions about the effect of the frontier on this society (our emphasis).31 Like much scholarship working with the settler colonial paradigm, Kimmerling and Shar s analyses of Israel as a settler society are predicated on a conception of the frontier as the structuring binary of the settler society. What is more remarkable, especially from the US perspective, is that both writers Kimmerling in particular cite Turner s frontier thesis relatively uncritically as a source that adequately describes the relationship between frontier processes and democracy in the USA.32 By appropriating certain aspects of Turner's frontier thesis, scholars of settler colonialism often work through a Turnerian tradition of frontier historiography even as they work to discredit that traditions ideological underpinnings. While it might seem unremarkable from the perspective of scholars outside the USA, such embraces of the frontier binary and use of a frontier/ post-frontier periodization break one of the biggest taboos in contemporary Western American scholarship. US historiography since the 1980s has been so insistent in its rejection of Turner s ideology that even a gesture as seemingly benign as Wolfes repurposing of Turner s periodization has come to be viewed, by many scholars in the USA, as problematic at best. Wolfe claims that the rejection of the frontier binary by US scholars partakes of a certain sacredness. In assessing the political valence of US scholars rejection of the primal binarism of the frontier, however, it is important to recognize that these scholars have not been reciting poststructuralist pieties, but rather conducting a broad-based reassessment of the Eurocentric and exceptionalist focus of Turnerian historiography.33 New Western History and the frontier in US historiography Understanding the extent to which Turnerian conceptions of the frontier inform the eld of settler colonial studies explains in part why many scholars in the USA, especially those who study the US West, have been slow to identify settler colonialism as a useful category of analysis. Just as settler colonial studies began to emerge as a distinct eld of analysis in the last 20 years of the twentieth century, the historiography of the US West was undergoing transformations that were leading the eld away (even if only temporarily) from the comparative study of settler colonial expansion, and toward a more inward-looking regionalist approach. Perhaps, because Turner was such an omnipresent gure in US historiography, many of the scholars associated with New Western History sought to push the study of the US West beyond the nationalist and ethnocentric biases that framed Turner s thesis by rejecting the frontier binary as a structuring principle of US history. If one had to choose one work that most fully (and forcefully) represents New Western Historys rejection of the frontier thesis, it would be Patricia Nelson Limericks The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987). As its title suggests, this monograph
shared with contemporaneous interventions in settler colonial studies the goal of foregrounding the history of indigenous dispossession and its consequences indeed, Wolfe cites it favorably in an early essay comparing the USA and Australian indigenous policy.34 A synthesis of numerous secondary works, The Legacy of Conquest recontextualized Western American history in a number of important ways. For one, Limerick charged that frontier was an unsubtle concept in a subtle world. Worthy of study as an historical artifact, narrative trope, or national origin story, the frontier thesis was, Limerick argued, sorely outmoded as an analytical tool.35 Limerick faulted the unfolding panorama of the frontier thesis and its unidirectional, east-towest focus for two main reasons.36 First, it consecrated a triumphalist teleology of Western expansion that relentlessly trivialized the West by celebrating the conquests of white men; and second, it denigrated place in favor of processes that distorted historical analysis by focusing almost solely on the early phases of settlement.37 When civilization had conquered savagery at any one location, Limerick argued, the process and the historians attention moved on.38 Limerick, unlike Wolfe, took particular exception with Turnerian historiographys focus on the closure of the frontier. If Western history is dened by a frontier that ceases to exist in 1890, then the horizon of Western history effectively ends then too. To combat this temporal enclosure, Limerick argued in favor of a regionalist approach, one that situated the American West (a region she identied as all US territory west of the Mississippi River) as a place and that stressed continuity as well as change within the history of the region. Such an approach, Limerick contended, would situate the West as an important meeting ground, the point where Indian America, Latin America, Anglo-America, Afro-America, and Asia intersected and thus as a preeminent case study in conquest and its consequences.39 To treat the trans-Mississippi West as a distinct and coherent region rather than a process was to treat the West as a signicant and illustrative theater of national history rather than national myth. The New Western History, in many ways inaugurated by the publication of Limericks Legacy of Conquest, set in motion a vigorous, and at times hard-fought, historiographic debate. In her call for a robust historical regionalism, Limerick was joined by a host of other scholars, most notably Richard White and Donald Worster. Equally concerned with separating the historical wheat from the mythical chaff, Worster argued that Turnerian historiography, in all its abstractness, obfuscated the real signicance of Western history for late twentieth-century scholars and readers. Worster tethered regional identity to aridity (the dominant climatic condition across large parts of the US West) and argued for regionalism as a methodology that could narrate not only a more socially inclusive history of the West, but also a more rigorous total history that could unify the region as an evolving human ecology.40 Worster put this body of theory into practice in a number of works, including Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985). Following the works of Limerick and Worster, Richard White published in a single year two major challenges to the frontier thesis. In Its Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (1991), White argued that The West that Americans recognize in the twentieth century is not the byproduct of some bygone, pre-1890 era, but rather the product of their own work; which is to say, a place dened not by geography but by the ongoing history of conquest and of the mixing of diverse peoples.41 In one fell swoop, White reproved not only Turner, but also regionalist allies like Limerick and Worster, both of whom identied aridity as a key denitional feature of the American West. Whites rejection of Turner was twofold: he jettisoned Turner s contention that Western history ended in 1890 by looking primarily at the twentieth-century West, and excised the word frontier from the entire text. As for Worster and Limerick, White advanced a political rather than environmental denition of the American West one that focused on all the territory west and south of the Missouri River, all of which was acquired by the USA after national independence, beginning with the Louisiana Purchase
of 1803.42 As White put it, Geography did not determine the boundaries of the American West; rather history created them.43 For all the attention it received at the time, Its Your Misfortune and None of My Own has fared poorly in comparison to Whites other major work of 1991: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 16501815. A highly inuential and deeply researched history of collaborative colonialism, The Middle Ground thoroughly challenged Turner s frontier thesis by documenting in subtle detail a frontier society altogether different from the settler frontier imagined by Turner. The mutually unintelligible but interdependent societies created by French colonials and Algonquin Indian refugees in the pays den haut, White argues, contained none of the Manichean binaries imagined by Turner, but pivoted instead around the inability of both sides to gain their ends through force and thus the need for people to nd a means, other than force, to gain the cooperation and consent of foreigners.44 The result, as White famously put it, was a sociocultural middle ground sustained by the fur trade where neither side had economic or military primacy. The contrast with Turner could not be more striking. Whereas Turner reveled in the triumph of Euro-American modes of settlement and conceptualized their frontier as an inexorable historical force, like a moving glacier, White countered not only with a picture of a European frontier that was largely non-Anglo, but one also predicated on contingency, collaboration, and exchange rather than conquest.45 In his preface to the recent 20th anniversary edition of the book, however, White has also challenged those who have employed the notion of the middle ground as a transposable and transhistorical descriptor for colonial contact. For White, the metaphor of the middle ground cannot be unmoored from the cultural dynamics of the pays den haut.46 Regardless, The Middle Ground, by describing a historically and geographically specic exception to any generalizable theory of settler conquest, poses a challenge to any historiographic project (such as that of Turner or Wolfe) that would imagine a transhistorical, translocatable frontier. The historical American regionalism advocated by Limerick, White, Worster, and others was met with a number of critics and detractors. The most thoughtful critics of New Western History and its attention to regionalism defended the utility of the frontier thesis (shorn, of course, of its ethnocentric and nationalistic trappings) by using Turner to call attention to the most fundamental contradiction of the regionalist argument. For all its attention to historical continuity, convergence, conquest, and complexity, New Western Historys regionalism still dened itself in relation to the American nation-state and thus, ultimately, to a narrative of American national development.47 New Western Historians were, after all, and quite proudly in most cases, historians of the American West. In their attempt to unshackle twentiethcentury Western history from the frontier thesis, they imposed new and equally vexing limitations related to geography and periodization by rather arbitrarily focusing on the trans-Mississippi West. This regional approach was ahistorical in that it disregarded and denied one of the fundamental continuities of US history: namely, the continuity of US patterns of settlement and conquest that originated east of the Mississippi. As historian Stephen Aron noted, to ignore the fact that the American West in 1776 was the trans-Appalachian West rather than the trans-Mississippi West was to ignore the contingent nature of US expansion and that the history of the conquest, colonization, and capitalist consolidation of the continent did have an east-to-west trajectory.48 Similarly, William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin argued that the parallelism of Turner s theory the notion that the frontier repeated itself in different times and places (both original italics) was not a liability but in fact the theorys greatest strength, because it provided an analytic that could examine continuities in American patterns of settlement. Moreover, the frontier thesis provided the means by which to explain the tendency for different parts of the continent to make the long transition from frontier to region.49 To maintain that the trans-Mississippi West was historically determined but also somehow historically
10
discrete from other regions of the nation particularly those regions whose histories might illustrate similar patterns and problems of settlement was, Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin argued, simply untenable. This critique of the New Western History was amplied in the late 1990s in the work of Kerwin Klein, who, in a 1996 article entitled Reclaiming the F Word, or Being and Becoming Postwestern, and the historiographic monograph, The Frontiers of The Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America (1997), outlined a robust revisionist historiographic tradition that emerged out of Turner s emphasis on frontier processes. In addition to highlighting a tradition of US frontier historiography at odds with the triumphalist frontier tales that New Regionalists rightly criticize, Klein criticized the New Western History for (potentially) foreclosing the opportunity to contextualize the history of the US West within transnational and interdisciplinary frameworks. New Western Regionalists, Klein argued, have written some wonderful histories, but they have chained them to a geographic abstraction created by western historians:
They would also segregate the eld from all the exciting frontier history now in the works, at a time when even Shakespearean scholars like [Stephen] Greenblatt are scurrying to get in on the action. Worse, they would separate the West from the imperial processes that placed it at the center of national memory and joined it to transnational global histories. And they propose that replacing frontier with West, historically the key word of Orientalism, will eliminate ethnocentrism from our scholarly discourse! It is more than faintly ironic that we arrived at this parochial position out of a desire to reconnect the specialty to larger dialogues about race, class, gender, and sexuality.50
Arguing against the turn toward New Western Regionalism, Klein imagined an alternative agenda, a postwestern history that optimistically imagines a return to the big frontier tales of the European occupation of Native America as a central event in our past, and a future in which histories set in California or (dare we say it) Sonora are as American as those set in Massachusetts and Virginia.51 Kleins over-the-top rhetoric marked something of a high (or low) point in the process versus region debates that dominated Western historical discourse in the 1990s. These conversations, however, acrimonious as they were, resolved themselves with an uneasy dtente rather than any sort of decisive paradigm shift. In her 2000 presidents address to the Western Historical Association entitled Going West and Ending up Global, Limerick offered something of an olive branch to Klein and her other critics by pointing out that the aim of New Western History was to contribute to the cause of freeing the history of the American West from the grip of American exceptionalism and restoring it to a position of signicance in the global history of European expansion, but admitted that that aim was lost, to a certain extent, amidst the whole vexing, endless fray over the frontier. Her aversion to the word, she explained, was rooted in her concern that frontier ran the risk of conrming the claims of exceptionalism, and that her attempt to substitute the word conquest ended up giving some people the impression that I was attempting to restrict their First Amendment right to use the f-word.52 Limerick thus suggests that her initial opposition to frontier historiography was rhetorical rather than categorical before concluding her address with a call for a new generation of western historians willing to develop comparative studies of colonialism and conquest. In the decade since Limericks address, her dismissal of the arguments over the term frontier as being semantic rather than substantive seems to have resonated with many younger scholars. In Killing for Coal: Americas Deadliest Labor War, his Bancroft Prize-winning monograph on the Ludlow Massacre and the rise of the coal industry in Colorado, Thomas Andrews relegated his denition of frontier (a term he uses as an occasional descriptor rather than as a structuring
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concept) to a footnote in which he tersely states, I dene the frontier as a zone of intercultural contact and conict, not, with Frederick Jackson Turner, as the dividing line between civilization and savagery.53 If contemporary Western historians share in Limericks fatigue regarding denitional debates, they have not, with a handful of notable exceptions Margaret Jacobs own Bancroft Prize-winning White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 18801940 (2009) being one demonstrated a similar enthusiasm for comparative transnational history.54 Twenty-rst-century Western history has certainly gone transnational and global, but not quite in the fashion that either Klein or Limerick foresaw. In some of the most celebrated recent Western histories narrating some aspects of settler contact and conict with indigenous societies, the transnational emerges not through comparative history, but through an examination of the multiple ways in which the American West is a region that has been both shaped and perforated by multiple and conicting migrations, cultures, conquests, and sovereignties. The post-New Western frontier: the Southwest and borderlands historiography One of the primary ways the history of the Western US has been transformed by transnationalization is through an embrace of the historiographic tradition of borderlands scholarship. While borderlands scholars were affected by the frontier debates precipitated by New Western History, they were largely unmoved by New Western Historys case for Western American regionalism. In fact, in recent years it has been to the borderlands that the Western historians have turned for ways out of not only the restrictive east-to-west axis of the frontier thesis (the paradigm that still dominates US history textbooks to this day), but also for a way out of the region-process dichotomy that many by the mid-1990s had identied as the new Scylla and Charybdis of the eld.55 To be sure, New Western History had a profound impact on the eld of Western history. Its attention to the study of race, environment, women and gender, [and] urban issues, as well as its encouragement of the adoption of comparative frameworks, certainly moved the eld well beyond the easy acceptance of notions of national and regional exceptionalism.56 Still, perhaps the most salient development since the end of the debates over New Western History in the 1990s has been the manner in which western historians have incorporated geographically and historiographically the work and insights of borderlands scholars into their narratives of U.S. history and expansion. This is not surprising given the fact that borderlands scholarship, going back to Herbert Eugene Boltons call in the 1930s for comparative histories that could narrate The Epic of Greater America, have generally developed more uid and exible understandings of frontier processes and places.57 In 1992, at the height of the debates over New Western History and the frontier thesis, the late David J. Weber published his landmark study of Spanish colonization of North America titled The Spanish Frontier in North America. In The Spanish Frontier, Weber offered an expansive denition of the frontier, one surprisingly similar to Whites middle ground and the earlier reconguration of the frontier thesis developed by Howard R. Lamar and Leonard Thompson, who theorized the frontier not as a boundary or line, but as a territory or zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies.58 Spains North American frontier was, Weber argued, a process of expansion and contraction that gave shape to the place that Spain regarded as its North American frontier or its multiple North American frontiers.59 The expansion of Spanish frontier settlements, Weber argued, set into motion several simultaneous frontier processes, including urbanization, agriculture, ranching, and commerce.60 The changing tides and fortunes of Spanish colonization efforts, which sometimes resulted in territorial contraction, were the consequence of Spanish intrusion into a multifarious,
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multidirectional frontier shaped by colonialindigenous, indigenousindigenous, and colonial colonial contact, exchange, and conict. For Weber, the frontier was a useful analytic in that it revealed contention and transformation relating to land and resources.61 Weber s focus on frontier spaces as seedbeds of historical change is, Weber happily admits, fundamentally Turnerian, insofar as the frontier thesis explains how frontier societies come to differ from their respective metropoli [sic] due to their location at those edges where cultures come into contact, friction, and cross-fertilization transform[s] local peoples and institutions.62 Less Turnerian, though, is Weber s proposition that there were multiple Spanish frontiers and that every frontier was a meeting ground of multiple cultures a borderland composed of strata or sub-frontiers embodying heterogeneous migrations and conquests that cannot be distilled into reductive binaries of savagery and civilization, colonizer and colonized, or even indigene and settler. Contemporaneously with the work of Weber, the eld of borderlands studies was also being transformed by the interventions of Chicana/o scholars and activists who reimagined la frontera as a generative site of an oppositional, mestisaje subjectivity. Gloria E. Anzaldas genre-bending Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) stands as perhaps the most inuential text in this effort to reconceptualize the interstices of borderland and frontier across both space and time. In Borderlands/La Frontera (itself a generic hybrid of poetry as well as ctional and non-ctional prose), Anzalda who was a bilingual queer woman from a family of migrant agricultural workers with one foot in the academic world and another in the world of activist art situated the borderlands in opposition to la frontera. The borderlands are a real as well as metaphoric space of mobility, hybridity, and non-normative identity repeatedly torn asunder by la frontera, the borders of the nation-state which aim to impose a conceptual as well as spatial binary of order and control over the borderlands.63 For Anzalda, mestisaje border culture is dened by illicit mobility and hybrid subjectivities that constantly contest state violence and elude normative subjectivities through its transgression of la frontera. As she memorably characterizes the mestizas relationship to the borderlands, this is her home, this thin edge of barbed wire.64 In The Frontiers of The Historical Imagination, Kerwin Klein notes that the rhetoric of Chicana/o nationalism is often split into two distinct but inter-related directions. There is, on the one hand, an indigenist claim that is the frontier romance in revolt: spirit, consciousness, heritage, blood, power, destiny, all rooted in the soil, the homeland described in Aztec tradition as Aztln, the place of origin; and, on the other hand, narratives that recognize that Mexicano culture could not pretend to an uninterrupted holism, and that explore, in Anzaldas words, how the new mestiza copes with the plural nature of her heritage by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity [and] a plural personality.65 Noting Anzaldas commitment to a composite or hybrid identity, Klein draws a provocative parallel between Anzalda and Turner. As he puts it:
Pluralistic experience demands pluralistic forms, but pluralism was not chaos, and Anzaldas narrative description of the new mestizo consciousness emplotted an ascending dialectic We have seen history as dialectic before, and while Anzalda scarcely reproduced the historical imagination of a Frederic Jackson Turner or [mid-century Tejano American studies scholar] Americo Paredes, in some ways the book lies closer to those traditions than to the works dominating the canon of modernist and postmodern literature For Anzalda this was history, not an ironic parody The future will belong to the Mestiza, because it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures.66
However tenuous the parallels between the uidity of American life on Turner s frontier and the plural hybridity of Anzaldas borderlands, the interventions of Ramon A. Gutirrez, Jos David Saldvar, James F. Brooks, and other scholars of the Southwestern borderlands had a similar effect to Turner, insofar as they decisively drew the attention of US scholars across disciplines in the humanities to a new region and problematic of US history and culture.67
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Western historians were no exception: Western and borderlands historians now enjoy a broad and productive scholarly exchange. One early landmark effort to synthesize Turnerian frontier historiography, Southwestern borderlands scholarship, and Whites notion of the middle ground came late in the 1990s with Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Arons From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History (1999). Published just as the embers of the New Western History debates were passing from glowing orange to dying pink, and just as borderlands historiography was about to go through a prodigious period of growth, From Borderlands to Borders expanded on Arons critique of New Western History by building on both Turner s attention to frontier periodization and borderlands scholarships focus on the contingent nature of power and cultural exchange. Stressing Boltons characterization of New Spain as a theater of European competition and rivalry that structured postcolonial America and its various transitions from colonies to nation-states, Adelman and Aron inverted what up to that point had been standard usage of frontier and borderland by dening frontier as a borderless land a meeting place of peoples in which geographic and cultural borders were not clearly dened (original italic) and borderlands simply as the contested boundaries between colonial domains.68 Stressing change over time as opposed to cross-cultural mixing, social uidity [and] the creation of syncretic formations that sideline profound changes in favor of continuity, Adelman and Aron aimed to synthesize frontier and borderlands studies into a broad-based methodology that could explain how the shift from inter-imperial struggle to international coexistence turned borderlands into bordered lands (original italics); how, to put it another way, colonial borderlands gave way to national borders and uid and inclusive intercultural frontiers yielded to hardened and more exclusive hierarchies.69 Focusing on Native agency, the far-reaching and unintended consequences of colonialism, and the historical contingencies of nation-building projects in the Southwestern borderlands, a number of recent histories both challenge and work through the various elements of Adelman and Arons borderlands-to-bordered lands thesis. These histories have largely resisted framing themselves within the meta-narrative of settler conquest that predominates in historical narratives as disparate as Limericks and Wolfes. As historians Pekka Hmlinen and Samuel Truett recently put it, borderlands histories have instead privileged processes of economic exchange, cultural mixing, and political contestation at the edges of empires, nations, and world systems, and places where human interactions are dened by spatial mobility, situational identity, local contingency, and the ambiguities of power.70 One work that brilliantly exemplies this formulation is Brian DeLays War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the USMexican War (2008). Delay convincingly demonstrates the centrality of various non-state actors the Comanche and Apache Indians in particular to US territorial expansion and Mexican nation-building efforts in its beleaguered northern states prior to the USMexican War of 18461848. In the early decades of their national independence, the USA and Mexican nation-states were bordered polities in name only. Straddling much of the southern Great Plains of modern Oklahoma and Texas was La Comanchera, the home range of the Comanche Indians, a powerful organization of nomadic pastoralists, as well as numerous other Indian peoples. In the 1830s, the Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and others conducted a decade-and-a-half-long series of raids deep into northern Mexico that resulted in the depopulation and abandonment of numerous Mexican towns and settlements along that nations northern frontier. These raids did more than frustrate Mexico Citys plans for its northern border and territories; they created, in DeLays words, a vast theater of hatred, terror, and staggering loss for independent Indians and Mexicans alike.71 This vast theater of hatred, DeLay demonstrates, greatly inuenced the course and outcome of the USMexican War, the war that concluded with Mexico ceding more than a half of its territory to the USA.72 The story of the Mexican Cession is thus really the story of a forgotten nexus between state actors and non-state
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actors; one, moreover, where non-state actors prove to be utterly central to the histories of the two contemporary nation-states. DeLays story, then, is one of how a frontier borderland became a bordered land not so much through the struggles of native peoples to resist, cope with, and even prot from the activities of Europeans and their descendents, but rather the efforts of Mexicans and Americans to resist, cope with, and sometimes prot from the activities of Indians.73 Delays work therefore portrays the emergence of the contemporary state formations that now dene the bordered lands of the USMexican border not as products of transnational settler conquest, but rather the product of the violent struggles of specic communities of settlers and indigenous peoples (and even mixed coalitions of both) that were pitted against each other in a struggle that had more to do with the contingencies of local environmental and economic conditions than global trends. In The Comanche Empire (2008), Pekka Hmlinen makes a series of similar claims. Whereas DeLay sees the Comanche as one of many (though, the most powerful to be sure) Indian peoples to challenge the dominance of North Americas two edgling nation-states, Hmlinen argues not for indigenous agency but rather for indigenous empire. A detailed history that examines nearly every aspect of Comanche political ecology on the southern Great Plains a region spanning New Spain to the south and southwest and the Louisiana territory to the north and east during the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, The Comanche Empire explicitly smoothes over many of the contingencies foregrounded by DeLays forgotten nexus of USMexican-Indian history. For Hmlinen, the story is rather simple: where Mexico and the USA were continental nations or empires in name only, La Comanchera was an empire in everything but name. The Comanche empire might not have conformed to European modes imperial governance for instance, it did not have a rigid structure held together by a single central authority, nor was it an entity that could be displayed on a map but it was nonetheless a deeply hierarchical and integrated intersocietal order that was unmistakably imperial in shape, scope, and substance.74 In Hmlinens formulation, the Southwestern borderlands of the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century were not dened by a middle ground or a similar diffusion of power between Indians and Euro-American colonists. Additionally, raiding, enslaving, ethnic absorption, and exchange (the dominant modes of economic behavior at the time) did not benet all indigenous peoples equally. On the contrary, the process toward inequality [among American Indians] was a cumulative one one that resulted in the Comanche achieving the status of regional hegemon.75 The borderlands of the Comanche era, then, were dened by stark asymmetries of power, only in reverse of those we typically associate with modern colonial spaces. The Comanche, Hmlinen argues, used the terms and material of Spanish colonization to establish a political order that eclipsed their allies and enemies, both Indian and European, alike.76 Both in terms of historical content and representational strategy, Karl Jacobys Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (2008) stands as a particularly dramatic example of borderlands scholarships focus on contingency, competition, and cooperation, and thus as a compelling counterpoint to the frontier binary paradigm at work in settler colonial studies. A fractured narrative history of the Camp Grant Massacre of 1871, Shadows at Dawn investigates how a coalition of white Americans, Tohno Oodham natives, and Mexicans came together to execute the mass-murder of nearly 150 Apache men, women, and children. Jacoby deftly moves between American, Mexican, Tohno Oodham, and Apache archives in narrating a tragedy that hitherto had been largely superseded in the American national imaginary by the massacre of Northern Plains Indians by US Cavalry at Bear River in 1863 and Wounded Knee in 1890. The complex cross-cultural nature of the Camp Grant Massacre has made it difcult to assimilate into paradigms of US national historiography, and likewise poses an equal challenge to transnational settler colonial paradigms that
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would imagine the settler-indigenous frontier as a zone of binary competing sovereignties. In response to this dilemma, however, Jacoby deploys an extreme representational strategy in recounting the complexities of the event. Instead of interweaving his work in the four archives into a single narrative, he instead presents each archive separately in four discrete narratives of the massacre, each of which recounts the massacre from the perspective of the four cultural communities involved. Jacoby contends that this strategy is necessary because we cannot conne ourselves to a single one of these narratives without enacting yet another form of historical violence: the suppression of the pasts multiple meanings.77 Jacobys claim regarding the epistemological violence of synthetic history situates his representation of the history of Native genocide as something of a direct antithesis to Wolfes. Wolfes history of the logic of elimination refuses to categorize Indigenous strategies of resistance, survival or anything else, because he reads such [c]laims to authority over indigenous discourse made from within the settler-colonial academy as necessarily participat[ing] in the continuing usurpation of indigenous space.78 Wolfes one-sided account, of course, is put in the service of a harsh indictment of the contemporary settler state. Jacoby, on the other hand, works to recuperate indigenous histories as hermetic narratives, even narrating the origin stories of the Tohno Oodham and Apache peoples, but undertakes this representation in the spirit of a history that imagines the frontier moment, narrated as it has been through a multiplicity of cultural and political communities, as an alterity that is impossible to refract into a critical narrative that could be brought to bear on the present.79 The stark contrast of Wolfe and Jacobys representational modes neatly dramatizes the questions that we hope the future dialog between transnational settler colonial studies and Western American studies will explore. On the one hand, how can we think about the settler indigenous binary in a frontier as complex as that described by Jacoby? In particular, how can we theorize the place of former subjects of nation-states with their own distinct modes of indigenous oppression, such as Mexico, within the context of the conict between Anglo settlers and indigenous peoples? Can the violent and asymmetric relationships between indigenous peoples be subsumed within an historical narrative that privileges a settler-indigenous binary without engaging with a form of historical violence? On the other hand, contemporary borderlands and Western history scholarship surely stand to gain from a consideration of Wolfes question and injunction to scholars of settler colonialism concerned with writing in the agency of the subaltern. As Wolfe has observed:
A question that generally goes resoundingly unasked in this connection is, Writing into what? In the settler colonial contest, the question answers itself: the ideal of writing agency is a contradiction in terms. It follows, therefore, that what needs to be written in is not the agency of the colonized but the total context of inscription.80
Do not interpretive frames like Jacobys, that privilege complexity, contingency, and historical specicity over the total context of settler invasion and indigenous dispossession, risk reproducing the strategic pluralism that continues to thwart indigenous peoples claims to sovereignty?81 There are scholars of the Southwestern borderlands that have taken a notably different tack than the one exemplied by the work of DeLay, Hmlinen, and Jacoby, and in so doing suggest some potential trajectories for future dialog between borderlands studies and transnational settler colonial studies. In a recent review essay of War of a Thousand Deserts, historian Jared Farmer identied Ned Blackhawk as an historian working against the scholarly current in borderlands studies insofar as he does not portray Indian violence in the Southwest as comparable to settler violence, but rather suggests that Indian violence during the frontier period was a chaotic
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effect produced by the violence of settler invasion.82 The work Farmer refers to here is Blackhawks Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006), an intricate history of the socio-politics of empire- and nation-building in the Great Basin (the mountainous desert region most closely associated with the states of Utah and Nevada). Blackhawks focus is the bloody and tortured history of SpanishIndian and USIndian relations and the reverberative effects of imperial contact and violence on Indian communities between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. So central is violence to the work, Blackhawk atly states in the books introduction that violence serves as both a subject and a method throughout the work.83 By focusing on the Great Basin, a region closely tied to but geographically distinct from New Mexico and Texas (the states or regions typically studied by borderlands scholars), Blackhawk is able to trace the deleterious effects of colonization particularly slave and livestock raiding and trading as they radiate outward beyond the boundaries of the colonial borderlands. In Blackhawks words, The shifting relations of violence that remade Native worlds throughout the early West did so largely outside of colonial settlements and the purview of authorities.84 For Blackhawk, violence was so pervasive that it came to organize the regions nascent economies, settlements, and polities.85 Much like DeLay, Blackhawk situates American incorporation of the Great Basin in the context of antecedent political economies of violence. As Blackhawk puts it, violence both predated and became intrinsic to American expansion.86 Echoing Kleins call for big frontier tales of the European occupation of Native America, and following Turner in his contention that American expansion is the foundational experience of American history, Blackhawk also incorporates Boltons call for an inter-regional history by tying the conditions of American expansion to the colonial regimes that preceded it, in this case Spain and Mexico. European expansion and contact is the vector not only for the violent deformations of Native communities but also for situating indigenous pasts within the broader eld of European global expansion.87 In many respects, then, Blackhawks conception of frontier violence, which clearly distinguishes between colonizer and indigene, has more in common with Wolfes embrace of frontier binaries than it does with his fellow borderlands scholars conception of a borderlands history in which uidity, contingency, and complexity trump settler conquest as organizing narrative principles. At the same time, by tracing the heterogeneous effects of settler invasion beyond the frontier, understood as a spatial site of contact or a singular conict, Blackhawks method engages with the complexities of frontier violence in a way that exceeds the sometimes Manichean lens of settler colonial studies. Recent work by literary scholar Ben V. Olguin in the Chicana/o archive, an area of research that thus far has had little exchange with transnational settler colonial studies, offers a nal example of how settler colonial studies might impact borderlands scholarship. In his provocatively titled Caballeros and Indians: Mexican American Whiteness, Hegemonic Mestisaje, and Ambivalent Indigeneity in Proto-Chicana/o Autobiographical Discourse, 18582008 (2013), Olguin reads Chicana/o studies through settler colonial frameworks to reconsider the origins of Chicana/o identity. Focusing on early Tejana/o autobiography, Olguin identies the origins of Chicana/o identity as being at least partially settler colonial in orientation. Olguin critiques early Chicana/o writers like Amrico Paredes and Anzalda for trading in the cultural capital of a model of indigeneity overdetermined as always already subaltern.88 For Olguin, the expanding scholarly literature on borderlands history and culture that seeks to map interstitial and Third Space modalities performed through an innite number of intersections and negotiations is haunted by the unacknowledged specter of a nostalgic performance of indigenismo that risks effacing the claims of specic indigenous groups.89 Olguin contrasts these contemporary indigenist performances with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Tejano autobiographies that contain a troubling triangulation: one in which Tejano identity is shaped by Tejanos participation in colonial frontier violence at the constitutive moment of cultural nationalist constructions of
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Mexican American and Chicana/o identity as inherently oppositional to white American settler colonialism.90 By gesturing toward this contradiction, Olguin does not seek to condemn all articulations of Chicana/o nationalism as settler colonial, but rather to effect an expanded mapping of the indigenous/indigenist aspects of Chicana/o subjectivity in order to acknowledge the troubling role settler colonial processes played in the formation of that subjectivity.91 This analysis of the role of violent frontier processes and their representation played in forming the complexities and contradictions of contemporary identity in the borderlands stands as one example of the rich potential for a continuing conversation between scholars of settler colonial studies and those of the history and culture of North America. The signicance of the frontier in an age of transnational history: roundtable and commentary The scholars represented in this roundtable are all pioneers (to use a particularly inapt metaphor) in the effort to put the incisive critical narratives of transnational settler colonial and indigenous studies into conversation with those that aim to present the complexities of the USAs settler empire, to use contributor Aziz Ranas compelling description of the post-frontier form of US hegemony.92 While not all of them are immediately engaged with the historiographic genealogy outlined above indeed, they work in a remarkably diverse range of disciplines, ranging from American Indian studies, gender studies, history, indigenous studies, legal history, literary studies all of them have made incisive interventions in our understanding of the past and present of the settler invasion of indigenous societies, challenging and extending our understanding of frontier processes. Trained as a literary scholar, Jodi Byrd (American Indian Studies and English, University of Illinois, Urbana) has made a major impact on interdisciplinary American Indian studies and transnational settler colonial studies with her rst monograph, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (2011). In her contribution to the roundtable, she addresses head-on the limitations of the frontier binaries that inform settler colonial studies. Byrd argues that while the dialectical binaries produced through the European logics of colonialism provide scholars the means to draw the sometimes necessarily hard Manichean differentiations that separate settler from native, ultimately these binaries reect the continuing dependence of settler colonial studies on Hegelian (and Eurocentric) paradigms of thought. Byrd suggests that the alternative to the equally unappealing options presented by a Manichean understanding of the settler/indigenous binary and the strategic pluralism of liberal multiculturalism lies in a future conversation that would privilege indigenous ontologies and epistemologies that have the priority, the right, and the responsibility to determine the frames of debate. Such a shift, Byrd concludes, would allow us to see that U.S. empire propagates itself at the site of a transposable Indianness rather than through a forever relocatable frontier. Margaret Jacobs (History, University of NebraskaLincoln) is perhaps the most notable scholar who has emerged from the eld of Western American history to engage with transnational colonial studies, and her Bancroft Prize-winning White Mother to A Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Materialism, and The Removal of Indigenous Children in The American West and Australia, 18801940 (2009) stands as one of the most notable comparative Western history monographs since Lamar and Thompsons comparative study of the USA and South Africa. Jacobs contribution to the roundtable addresses rst the origins of her work on the abduction of Australian Indigenous and American Indian children, how her comparative work opened up for her a new perspective on history, and concludes with an expansive overview of the questions about specic historical phenomena and broader historiographic issues toward which the
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burgeoning conversation between Western American history and settler colonial studies might address itself. Trained as an historian of South Africa, Laura Mitchell (History, University of California, Irvine) has taught and published on African, colonial, and world histories. Her book, Belongings: Property, Family, and Identity in Colonial South Africa (2009), for instance, studies the connections between land tenure, household formation, and frontier conict. Her contribution here, which draws from her current research into art created by Africans, settlers, and visitors in South Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, looks at the material culture of settler colonial South Africa, and the settler colonial frontier more generally. Focusing on four objects from the nineteenth-century Western Cape region, Mitchell poses compelling questions about how South African settlers related to the cultures of indigenous peoples, exogenous others, the colonizing metropole, and the settler colony itself. Putting this exploration of the Cape Colonys material culture into conversation with both US frontier historiography and broader conversations regarding the history of colonialism globally, Mitchell makes a compelling case for the import and role that an attunement to alternative archives such as the household items she carefully considers in her paper can play in shaping broader theoretical discussions regarding settler colonial culture. Aziz Rana (Law School, Cornell University) is a legal historian whose 2010 monograph The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010) has had a wide-reaching impact on how scholars across a variety of disciplines view the relationship between US jurisprudence and the status of the USA as a settler society. In his contribution, Rana argues that early violent conicts between European settlers and American Indians provided the young US nation-state with key political and legal scripts concerning which political communities can claim full sovereignty as well as who rightly enjoys meaningful protections during wartime, and that these scripts continue to inform the contemporary US national security state. Through a deft reading of the infamous decisions of the Marshall Court regarding Indian title and sovereignty in Johnson v. MIntosh (1823), Rana outlines how US juridical discourse grounds its understanding of what constitutes a just war in such early justications of settler conquest. Rana extends this argument to international law, arguing that similar settler colonial juridical genealogies inform the contemporary category of the unlawful combatant in international humanitarian law. Mark Rifkin (English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro) is another scholar trained in US literary studies who has branched out into interdisciplinary indigenous and settler colonial studies, and has published three transformative monographs in these elds: Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (2009), When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (2011), and The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination (2012). These last two titles have been instrumental in facilitating the growing exchange between indigenous studies and queer studies regarding the central role of heteronormative kinship structures played in the imposition of settler sovereignty. In his contribution to the roundtable, Rifkin thinks through the concept of the frontier via Giorgio Agambens concept of the state of exception, arguing that the frontier is an extra-juridical concept that is better understood as a settler state of feeling that not only constructs indigenous peoples as bare life at the threshold of the settler state, but also imagines a space in which settler subjects can envision a kind of space beyond the political authority of the state but yet not within that of another state or polity. Thus, the frontier stands as a state of feeling that reects the settler societys deepest contradictions about its ostensible commitment to constitutionalism. Lastly, we are very pleased to conclude this roundtable with commentary by John Mack Faragher, Howard R. Lamar Professor of History at Yale University. In addition to serving as director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, Faragher is author and
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editor of numerous books and articles on the frontier history of North America, including Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979); Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Signicance of the Frontier in American History and Other Essays (1994); A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (2005); and Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (2007), with Robert V. Hine. His current research examines the problem of violence and justice in nineteenth-century frontier Los Angeles, California. Faragher s comments here range across the contours of his own work as well as the historiographic trajectories of both Western history and settler colonial studies. By situating North America and the USA as the original laboratory for modern practices of settler colonialism, Faragher opens a number of channels of discussion and debate between scholars of North America and transnational settler colonial studies, including the observation that settler colonialism posits a ternary [rather than binary] model of relations among metropole elites, colonial settlers, and aboriginal peoples (a triangulation utterly vital to understanding early US history); but also signicant differences as well, including two case studies the native Lenni Lenape people of the Delaware Valley and the French settler colony of Acadia that demonstrate that not all settler projects are predicated (at least initially) on the logic of elimination. Faragher ends his essay with a call for more local and comparative studies of settler projects over time.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the following for all their support and encouragement in helping make this roundtable possible: William Deverell, John Mack Faragher, William Handley, David Igler, Lorenzo Veracini, Patrick Wolfe, the staff of the Huntington Library, as well as all the scholars who participated in the symposium of the same name.
Notes
1. Accompanying Turner on this particular outing were (among others) his wife Mae, his daugher Dorothy, and the family of C.R. Van Hise (18571918), professor of geology and president of the Univeristy of Wisconsin. The families were friends and neighbors in Madison and together made a similar canoe trip across the same region the prior summer. See Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 236. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Signicance of the Frontier in American History, in The Frontier in American History, ed. Frederick Jackson Turner (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), 4. The literature on the North American fur trade is voluminous. Richard Whites The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 16501815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) is perhaps the most inuential study of the trades pre-national phase. For a brief but highly readable account of French fur traders, and the fur trades global dimensions and importance in Canada, see Timothy Brook, Vermeers Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 2653. For a history of the fur trade during the era of the nation-state that situates the fur trade as transcending state afliations at the dawn of the nineteenth century, but as circumscribed by them ve decades later, see Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the American West, 18001860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). There can be little doubt that Turner was quite conscious of the historical antecedents of his holiday and that his adventure was something of an historical reenactment. Ever the student of frontier society and culture, Turner identied the fur trade as one of the ve key economies along with shing, farming, ranching, and mining of the American frontier. See Turner, Frontier in American History, 12. For a study of voyageur history and culture, as well as its importance to Canadian national identity, see Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). See the map of the pays den haut in White, Middle Ground, xiiiii.
2. 3.
4.
5. 6.
20
7.

The program of the event covered the state of the frontier in current US Western historiography; literary studies of the American West and the frontier; and the state of the frontier in settler colonial studies and indigenous studies. Audio les of a majority of the event can be accessed through iTunesU under the title The Signicance of the Frontier in an Age of Transnational History, or through the iTunes website at https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/signicance-frontier-in-age/id542709249 For a brief overview of Turners frontier thesis, its critics, and its inuence on US historiography, see John Mack Faragher, Afterword: The Signicance of the Frontier in American Historiography, in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Signicance of the Frontier in American History and Other Essays, ed. Frederick Jackson Turner and John Mack Faragher (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), 22541. For an extended analysis of Turner and his continued usefulness to Western American historiography, see William Cronon, Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner , Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 2 (April 1987): 15776. For discussions of how Turner refashioned the meaning and usage of the word frontier in the USA, see Kerwin Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 1822; and John T. Juricek, American Usage of the Word Frontier from Colonial Times to Frederick Jackson Turner, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110, no. 1 (February 1966): 1034. For a contrary account, one that situates Turner s use of frontier tropes as being highly conventional rather than innovative, see Richard White, Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill, in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 1226. Turner, Frontier in American History, 3. William Handley, Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63. See Robert P. Porter, Henry Gannett, and William C. Hunt, Progress of the Nation, in Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part I, by Ofce of the Census (Washington, DC: Government Printing Ofce, 1895), xvii. For a study of Progress of the Nation and its inuence on Turner, see Robert E. Lang, Deborah Epstein Popper, and Frank J. Popper, Progress of the Nation: The Settlement History of the Enduring Frontier , Western Historical Quarterly 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 289307. Porter, Gannet, and Hunt, Report on Population of the United States, xxxiv. Turner, Frontier in American History, 38. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 34. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 165. See Ronald Lawson, Towards Demythologizing the Australian Legend: Turner s Frontier Thesis and the Australian Experience, Journal of Social History 13, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 57787, for a discussion of the inuence of Turner s frontier thesis on the work of Russell Ward and the mid-century debates over Wards The Australian Legend, 2nd ed. (1958; Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1966). Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1981; Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), 7. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 165. Ibid., 168. Ibid. Ibid., 165. We build off this aspect of Wolfes writing on the settler representations of the frontier in an argument about Western genre lms and television programs in Erik Altenbernd and Alex Trimble Young, A Terrible Beauty: Settler Sovereignty and the State of Exception in the Home Box Ofces Deadwood, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2013): 2748. It has also productively been explored in David Lloyd, Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 5980, and Mark Rifkin, Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the Peculiar Status of Native Peoples, Cultural Critique 73 (Fall 2009): 88124.
8.
9.
10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.
21
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 392. Patrick Wolfe, Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 34 (2013), 257. It is important to note that, contrary to Wolfes implication, examples abound of indigenous scholars in the U.S. who do not share Wolfes enthusiasm for binary thinking, even insofar as that thinking relates to the frontier. See, for instance, Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 256: Within the language of the colonizer the term frontier may indeed, as [Mary Louise] Pratt argues, be grounded within a European expansionist perspective and thus bear the burden of a discourse grounded in genocide, ethnocide, and half a millennium of determined efforts to erase indigenous peoples from the Americas. I want to suggest, nonetheless, that when one is looking from the other direction, frontier is a particularly apt term for this transcultural zone for precisely the reason that Pratt cites. Because the term frontier carries with it such a heavy burden of colonial discourse, it can only be conceived of as a space of extreme contestation. Frontier, I would suggest, is the zone of trickster, a shimmering, always changing zone of multifaceted contact within which every utterance is challenged and interrogated, all referents put into question. In taking such a position, I am arguing for an appropriation and transvaluation of this deadly clich of colonialism for appropriation, inversion, and abrogation of authority are always trickster s strategies. Frontier stands, I would further argue, in neat opposition to the concept of territory as territory is imagined and given form by the colonial enterprise in America. Whereas frontier is always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate, territory is clearly mapped, fully imagined as a place of containment, invented to control and subdue the dangerous potentialities of imagined Indians. See also Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Post-Indian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), and Jodi Byrds contribution to this volume. Wolfe, Recuperating Binarism, 257. Ibid., 258; Turner, Frontier in American History, 38. Patrick Wolfe, After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in U.S. Indian Policy, Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 13. See also, Wolfe, Corpus Nullius: The Exception of Indians and Other Aliens in U.S. Constitutional Discourse, Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 12751, where Wolfe analyzes the problems and paradoxes of Native American sovereignty in US law and culture. Wolfe maintains the notion of a post-frontier era here as well, noting at one point, that For internalized Indian wards of the US Government, the constitutional no-mans land of the post-frontier condition held a refusal of rights that was without limit or restraint. Wolfe, 143. Uri Ram, The Colonization Perspective in Israeli Sociology, in The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader, ed. Ilan Papp (New York: Routledge, 1999), 60. See Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimension of Zionist Politics (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Research Series no. 51, 1983), 18; and Gershon Shar, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conict, 18821914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xi. Wolfe, Recuperating Binarism, 257. Patrick Wolfe, The Limits of Native Title, Meanjin 59, no. 3 (2000): 133, n. 2. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 25. For an example of the Turner s unidirectional vision of frontier history, one that locates the frontier moving westward from the Atlantic coast, to the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains, to South Pass in the Rocky Mountains, see Turner, Frontier in American History, 12. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Trail to Santa Fe: The Unleashing of the Western Public Intellectual, in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick et al. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 69. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 26. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 27, 28. Donald Worster, New West, True West: Interpreting the Regions History, Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 2 (April 1987): 147, 149. Richard White, Its Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 4, 3.
28. 29. 30.
31. 32.
33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.
22
42. 43. 44. 45.

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 3. White, Middle Ground (1991), 52. In Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Lorenzo Veracini argues forcefully against White and what he calls middle ground traditions of historical representation. Where Reynolds argued against the empirical applicability of the concept of the middle ground in the Australian context, Veracini argues that the whole perspective is premised on a sort of nostalgia: As he puts it, the Middle Ground sustains a fantasy of returning to a non-colonial past, failing to address the specicities of the settler-colonial situation. Veracini, 112. For a discussion of the books wide-ranging inuence, and Whites mixed feelings on the matter, see Richard White, Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition, in The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 16501815, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (1991; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xixxiv. See also, Philip J. Deloria, What is the Middle Ground, Anyway?, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 63, no. 1 (January 2006): 1522, for nuanced analysis of the book, and the utility and perils of using the middle ground as an analytical concept outside of the pays den haut. The descriptors continuity, convergence, conquest, and complexity are taken from Patricia Nelson Limericks most recent summation of New Western Historys intellectual intervention. See Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), 1826. Stephen Aron, Lessons in Greater Conquest, Pacic Historical Review 63, no. 2 (May 1994): 127. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History, in Under and Open Sky: Rethinking Americas Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), 6, 7. Kerwin Lee Klein, Reclaiming the F-Word, or Being and Becoming Postwestern, Pacic Historical Review 65, no. 2 (May 1996): 182. Ibid., 214. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Going West and Ending Up Global, Western Historical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1011. Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: Americas Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 296, n. 8. See Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 18801940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). See also Jacobs comments on the state of western historiography and settler colonial studies in the roundtable below. For appraisals of, and attempts to move beyond the debates over New Western History, see John Mack Faragher, The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West, American Historical Review 98, no. 1 (February 1993): 10617; William Deverell, Fighting Words: The Signicance of the American West in the History of the United States, Western Historical Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 185206; and David M. Wrobel, Beyond the Frontier-Region Dichotomy, Pacic Historical Review 65, no. 3 (August 1996): 40129. David M. Wrobel, What on Earth Has Happened to New Western History?, The Historian 66, no. 3 (September 2004): 440. Herbert E. Bolton, The Epic of Greater America, American Historical Review 38, no. 3 (April 1933): 44874. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 7. Lamar and Thompsons notion of the frontier, it should be noted, is Turnerian in that they conceive of frontiers as temporally determined (i.e. they open and close) and as dichotomous sites of colonial invasion and struggle. Usually, Lamar and Thompson argue, one of the societies [of a frontier zone] is indigenous to the region, or at least has occupied it for many generations; the other is intrusive. The frontier opens in a given zone when the rst representatives of the intrusive society arrive; it closes when a single political authority has established hegemony over the zone. (Lamar and Thompson, 7)
46.
47.
48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.
55.
56. 57. 58.
59.
Stephen J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 1112.

60. 61.
23
62. 63. 64. 65. 66.
67.
68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.
Ibid., 12. Ibid. In frontier zones like Spanish North America, Weber emphasizes, colonizers and native peoples contended not only against external enemies but also with external threats that exacerbated internal social ssures. Transfrontier contact and contention, Weber postulates, brings forth both intramural and intermural contention, both of which lead to cultural exchange and change over time. Weber, 13. Weber, 13. Anzalda, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books: 2007). Ibid., 25. Ibid., 101 Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, 271; Anzalda, Borderlands/La Frontera, 79, 80, quoted in Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, 271. Ramon A. Gutirrezs, When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 15001846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), examines the emergence of a hybrid population in New Mexico on the eve of the Mexican Revolution by tracking changes in native Pueblo and Spanish sexuality and marriage practices. The book became something of a cause clbre and was vociferously criticized by Pueblo scholars and activists after it was widely hailed and bestowed with multiple awards. For a collected account of Gutirrezs critics, see Commentaries: When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 15001846 by Ramon A. Gutirrez, compiled by Native American Studies Center, University of New Mexico, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17, no. 3 (1993): 14177. The increased interest in cultural hybridity throughout New Mexico and the Southwestern borderlands during the 1990s and early 2000s climaxed with the publication of James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), an expansive recasting of the political economy of colonial New Mexico which Brooks argues was deeply regulated by similarities between Indian and Spanish notions of masculinity and honor as a system of inter-cultural reciprocity that mediated resentments over raiding and war through the exchange of livestock and captive slaves. Similarly, in Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), Jos David Saldvar resituates the study of American culture through a sustained analysis of the hybrid cultural forms shared by Mexican and Mexican-Americans on both sides of the USMexican border. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History, American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 8156. Ibid. Aron later put this theory into practice in a monograph-length study of the US state of Missouri. See Stephen Aron, American Conuence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006). Pekka Hmlinen and Samuel Truett, On Borderlands, Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 2001): 338. Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.Mexican War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), xvii. Ibid., xviii. Ibid. Pekka Hmlinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 3, 4. Ibid., 11. Stephen Howe gives a good overview of Hmlinens argument and the critical debates it has engendered in Native America and the Study of Colonialism, Part 1: Contested Histories, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2013):10226. Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands History and the Violence of History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), 278. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 3, 212, 3. For compelling alternative consideration of the Camp Grant Massacre, and the representational stakes involved with narrating it today, see Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernndez, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 214. Ibid., 167.
24
82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Jared Farmer, Borderlands of Brutality, Review of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.Mexican War, by Brian DeLay, Reviews in American History 37, no. 4 (December 2009): 550. Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 9. Ibid. Ibid. B.V. Olgun, Caballeros and Indians: Mexican American Whiteness, Hegemonic Mestizaje, and Ambivalent Indigeneity in Proto-Chicana/o Autobiographical Discourse, 18582008, MELUS 38, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 31. Ibid. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 45. Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3.
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Follow the typical signs: settler sovereignty and its discontents

Jodi A. Byrd
a a
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA Published online: 17 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Jodi A. Byrd , Settler Colonial Studies (2013): Follow the typical signs: settler sovereignty and its discontents, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.846388 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846388
Follow the typical signs: settler sovereignty and its discontents

Jodi A. Byrd
Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA Comments made as part of a roundtable discussion on the signicance of the US frontier to settler colonial and indigenous studies. Reecting on the creation and circulation of settler sovereignty as a technology of territoriality, this essay considers how frontier logics inform Jacques Derridas delineation of the beast and the sovereign in his late lectures. Finally, this essay argues for a perspectival shift in the questions scholars ask about the role of the frontier in order to activate indigenous critiques of settler colonialism.
The concept of the frontier has circulated productively within the USA as a site of the constitutive processes of civilization and as a spatialization that marks thresholds of contact at the edges of governmentality, violence, and racialization. The frontier has underwritten the rubrics of disciplinarity at the turn of the twentieth century, and it has created a lasting logic through which the USA both imagines and critiques itself. The wild wild west, cowboy diplomacy, Indian country, the nal frontier, unforgiving wilderness, and Geronimo circulate as meme beyond the remembrance of indigenous peoples to serve as synecdochal trophies of genocide that rewrite mastery into perpetual repetition. As more and more elds attempt to chart the relationship between the conquest and genocide of indigenous peoples and the larger structures of US colonialism and imperialism, one of the lasting questions about the signicance of the frontier whether to American or to transnational history is the agency and authority indigenous peoples have to intervene in or theorize differently the violences of empire. Here at the start, I would like to do a bit of denitional work to help ground the stakes for me especially as I take up Eriks and Alexs charge to consider how contemporary settler colonial and indigenous scholarship makes use of frontier binaries in the comparative study of settler colonialism and indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism has circulated as a critical term since the end of the 1970s, and for too long, it was not a phrase used to describe US society. In substantial ways now at the beginning of the twenty-rst century, settler colonialism has matured into a richly interdisciplinary conversation that scholars deploy to speak across national and local contexts to the deeper historical patterns of the disavowals, dispossessions, and territorializations that have structured colonialism within breakaway societies around the globe. According to Lisa Ford, such settler polities structured themselves in ways that bolstered their legitimacy through sheer legal temerity, innovating doctrine, and demanding adherence to settler law in settler territory in order to obliterate indigenous rights. Perfect settler sovereignty, Ford writes, rested on the conation of sovereignty, territory, and jurisdiction.1 For such settler
Based on Presentation at the The Signicance of The Frontier in The Age of Transnational History symposium held at The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, USA, 25 February 2012.
J.A. Byrd
sovereignties in the Pacic and the Americas, the frontier was not so much lawless as it was in need of law to seize sovereignty and jurisdiction from indigenous peoples and conscript their lands and nations into settler territoriality, an alchemy of empire that helped to conate indigenous peoples with land to be violated, razed, and cultivated. That conation with land, however, necessitated a secondary alchemical transformation that affectively absented indigenous peoples into territoriality and rendered them lamentable casualties of nineteenth-century westward expansion rather than active agents persistently engaged in anticolonial resistance into the present. Lumbee scholar Robert A. Williams points out in Like a Loaded Weapon that earlier iterations of the frontier arose as the founding fathers of liberalism grappled with the rights of man and nature at the intersection of slavery and colonization. Williams observes that George Washington evoked the Western country to signify the bestial and hostile savages lurking at the edges of civilization and settlement, creating in the process, the space of the Indian as metonymy for frontier. When Washington described the expropriation of land from Indians as an experience that
is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest which return as soon as the pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left there; when the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire; both being beasts of prey though they differ in shape,
he captured the dialectical binds of sovereignty perfect and settler or something else entirely that depend upon exception, abandonment, and difference to demarcate power and dominion.2 There are a couple of things to note here within this quote. First, the evolution of frontier and Indian country from the Western country signals some of the semiotic transformations that settler colonialism, as a system of replacement, affects spatially as well as temporally. Western country has come to mean something radically different in the wake of postcolonial critiques that rendered the world into the West and the rest of us and such a semiotic shift over time fullls the structural intent of Washingtons plan to retire and replace both savage and wolf with white humanity, cultivation, and civilization. Second, and more importantly within Washingtons plans for settlement, is the fundamental dialectical trap of sovereignty that is marked, according to Derrida, by a savage absence and a metonymic substitution. The savage as the wolf, announced by Washington, functions as a bestial taxonomy that provides the foundational threshold between human and inhuman, civil and uncivil, that conjoins Indian with savage and savage with beast at the same time that it creates the sovereign as an enunciative force of law who is, like the beast, also outside law. According to Derrida, sovereignty articulates itself at the threshold between humanity and bestiality and is, within Derridas discussion of the frontier, forever caught within a double bind that creates the necessity of the beast at the exact moment that the beast is abandoned as inhuman in order to differentiate the human. Simultaneously, the sovereign is always already in a process of becoming beast precisely because the sovereign must prey upon beast and human alike to establish the exception or the threshold that is the sovereigns power. Derrida explains: The beast becomes the sovereign who becomes the beast; there is the beast and the sovereign, but also the beast is the sovereign, the sovereign is the beast.3 In his nal lectures, Derrida grappled with both the grammar of political power and the relationality of biopolitics that delineate humanity, masculinity, and sovereignty at the threshold of the casting off of bestiality, femininity, and subjugation. Within the conjunctive analogics of and and is, Derrida powerfully stages the paradox of settler colonialism where inclusion, symmetry, and equation function as the basis for rights on the one hand and termination of indigenous lives and nations on the other. Rather than achieving the perfect settler sovereignty that Lisa Ford describes as a conation of sovereignty, territory, and jurisdiction, Washingtons enunciation of
the savage as the wolf , however, anticipates Derrida and reveals the quagmires that settler colonialism and sovereignty present to indigenous studies. Settler sovereignty requires the indigenous as sovereign at the same time that it seeks to conquer it, appropriate it, and render it contained if not nullied once and for all. Slipping amongst and through the binaries of settler/native and civilized/savage that have come to dene frontier and settler colonial studies, indigenous sovereignty becomes the necessary ontological prior through which settler nations differentiate themselves and enact their own sovereignty and subjectivity in a process that depends upon a simultaneous recognition and refusal of indigeneity altogether. The Manichean allegories that continue to inform settler colonial studies are indicative of the persistence the frontier has in disciplining the eld and reects some of the Hegelian dialectics that remain operationalized within critical theory. Within Southeastern American Indian philosophies of spatiality and temporality of which my own tribe, the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, is a part the world is structured through a slightly different system of complementary balance that places Upper and Lower Worlds into relation with this world. As Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice explains, the worlds of Southeastern cosmology exist in an intimate relationship of enforced balance, and could be traversed or connected at certain geographic locations or moments in time, or through prescribed ritual acts, events, or behaviors.4 Always in ux and motion, the interconnected worlds work on each other by introducing order and chaos into the system and requiring active engagement in multiple directions to maintain cohesion, liveability, and right relations between and among. Anomalies, as Justice explains, are powerful because they transgress the boundaries by existing simultaneously within all worlds. Though the system depends upon dened categories placed in tension, it privileges movement over stasis, uidity over rigidity, and multidirectionality over master narrative. Such models seem as useful for indigenous studies and settler colonial studies as does a continued focus on frontier historiographies. Certainly, the dialectical binaries produced through the European logics of colonialism provide scholars the means to draw the sometimes necessarily hard Manichean differentiations that separate settler from native, north from south, and east from west in ways that matter to anticolonial and indigenous studies around the globe. However, within the domains of US imperialism that have exported liberal multiculturalism as promissory asylum for the world, indigenous peoples in lands that now constitute the global north face a continued colonialism that has mapped multiple dispersals, removals, relocations, and arrivals into the structures settlers have wrought. One of the persistent questions for settler colonial studies is how to address those horizontal histories of slavery, indentureship, and diaspora that force indigenous peoples to take root elsewhere and in someone elses land. Such spatializations collapse onto and into each other as the Black Atlantic and the Pacic Imperium collide within those territories that have come to mimetically signal US frontiers. On the ipside, one of the challenges facing indigenous studies in conversation with settler colonial studies and frontier histories is to resist the continual prioritizing of an effect for a cause, of requiring the settler and the frontier rather than the indigenous as the structuring analytic through which to assess the consequences of colonialism. For indigenous peoples, the frontier was neither lawless nor a wilderness lled with beasts, and colonialism, whether settler or formal, has not ended as it continues to distillate through arrivals necessitated by late capitalism and the need for individual survival. As an imperial power that achieved global ascendency through a deeply structured and genocidal colonialism, the USA uses juridical precedence and prepositional afnities within its constitution and laws to expand its inuence and hegemony. In the process, US empire propagates itself at the site of a transposable Indianness rather than through a forever relocatable frontier. Such an observation
J.A. Byrd
depends upon a perspectival shift within these elds to center indigenous ontologies and epistemologies such as those from the Southeast that have the priority, the right, and the responsibility to determine the frames of debate. Notes
1.
2. 3. 4.
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 17881836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1. Robert A. Williams Jr., Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 42. Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Soverign, Vol. 1, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 30, 40. Daniel Heath Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 219.

Parallel or intersecting tracks? The history of the US West and comparative settler colonialism
Margaret D. Jacobs
a a
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA Published online: 17 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Margaret D. Jacobs , Settler Colonial Studies (2013): Parallel or intersecting tracks? The history of the US West and comparative settler colonialism, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.846390 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846390
Parallel or intersecting tracks? The history of the US West and comparative settler colonialism
Margaret D. Jacobs
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA Through mapping her own scholarly journey, Margaret Jacobs explores the possibilities of engagement between historians of the US West and scholars of settler colonialism. By connecting to the vibrant scholarship on settler colonialism and pursuing comparative work, western US historians might further reveal how developments in the western US were linked to global trends and processes. At the same time, delving into the complex history of the US West could enrich settler colonial scholarship.
The prominent Winnebago artist Angel DeCora was born in 1871 at the Winnebago Agency near present-day Thurston, Nebraska, a few hours-drive from where I teach now at the University of Nebraska. In 1883, when she was 12 years old, she later recalled:
I had been entered in the Reservation school but a few days when a strange white man appeared there. He asked me through an interpreter if I would like to ride in a steam car. I had never seen one, and six of the other children seemed enthusiastic about it and they were going to try, so I decided to join them, too. The next morning at sunrise we were piled into a wagon and driven to the nearest railroad station, thirty miles away. We did get the promised ride. We rode three days and three nights until we reached Hampton, Va.
Much to her shock, DeCora was brought and admitted to the Hampton Institute, a boarding school originally set up for African-Americans that began to educate Native American children, too, in the 1870s. Later DeCora learned of how aggrieved her parents were, as they had not given their permission for her to attend the distant boarding school. My parents found it out, but too late, she writes. Three years later when I returned to my mother, she told me that for months she wept and mourned for me. In the time she attended Hampton, her father as well as the old chief and his wife had died. To DeCora, the old Indian life was gone.1 DeCoras personal upheaval was multiplied by the thousands as Indian children across the American West traveled far from their families and communities sometimes voluntarily but often as the result of trickery or force to attend distant Indian boarding schools. I came upon DeCoras story as I worked from 1998 to 2008 on a comparative history of indigenous child removal and institutionalization in the US West and Australia. In this essay, I share my own personal scholarly journey as a historian of women, gender, and indigenous peoples in the US West as I encountered settler colonial studies and applied its ideas to the Indian boarding
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schools. In doing so, I hope to encourage western US historians to consider the value of a comparative settler colonial approach. At the same time, I wish to inspire settler colonial scholars to consider the ways in which the scholarship on the history of the US West might offer insight into current debates and issues within settler colonial studies. Just 10 years after DeCora was literally railroaded to an Indian boarding school, Frederick Jackson Turner made his famous speech on the signicance of the frontier in American history. If he had been aware of Angel DeCoras removal to boarding school, he surely would have interpreted it through the prism of his own frontier thesis; that is, as the nation advanced across the continent, primitive Indian ways inexorably gave way to the advance of civilization. Turner theorized that the process of expanding into and then settling the frontier was the quintessentially American act that gave the USA its national character and founding narrative.2 Nearly a century later, as I studied the history of the American West in graduate school, new western historians were pillorying Turner for creating a nationalistic narrative that told the story of westward expansion from only the conquerors point of view.3 Seeking to uncover multiple perspectives in the history of the US West, new western historians interpreted the Indian boarding schools critically as a form of education for extinction.4 A second generation of new western historians amended this interpretation; many of the Indian children who attended boarding schools became important mediators between cultures and some like DeCora seized upon aspects of their education in order to eventually challenge the paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the goals of assimilation.5 By the late 1990s there was such a rich literature on the Indian boarding schools that I did not think there was anything new to say about them. But by chance, a trip to Australia in 1998 exposed me to a settler colonial framework that suggested a new way to understand the Indian boarding schools specically and the history of the American West more generally. In 1998, Australia was reeling from the 1997 release of the Bringing them Home Report, the results of a lengthy government inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander children from their families.6 This hefty government report had become an unlikely bestseller, and scholars, social critics, and everyday Australians were debating its ndings every day in the media. A prominent Australian historian, Peter Read, had dubbed Aboriginal children who were taken from their families and institutionalized the stolen generations. His evocative phrase set the framework of academic debate in Australia. My exposure to the Australian framework led me to wonder about the process whereby American Indian children came to be in the boarding schools. With a new focus on removal and separation (DeCoras train ride), rather than education (her experience at Hampton), I set out on my 10-year project, which ultimately led me to rethink the history of the Indian boarding schools and the US West. While there were important differences between the stolen generations and Indian children who were taken to boarding schools, I did nd haunting parallels between their experiences. This commensurability of indigenous child removal in the US West and Australia led to deeper questions. What was it that these places had in common? What led them to carry out these types of policies and practices? I found that Australian and Canadian scholars had developed a new framework of settler colonial studies that was helpful to answering these questions and applicable to the history of the US West. In contrast to what I call extractive colonies, which have focused on mobilizing a native labor force to enable colonizers to extract natural resources or to farm cash crops for export, settler colonies sought to appropriate land through a dual process of dispossessing indigenous people while replacing them with a settler population and importing labor.7 After many violent confrontations and massacres in both the USA and Australia throughout the nineteenth century, both nations turned to indigenous child removal in the late nineteenth century to complete their colonization of indigenous lands. When seen in the light of comparative settler colonial
history, DeCoras involuntary journey and sojourn at Hampton Institute now registered with me not only as a story of the US West but as a chapter in a larger comparative global settler colonial and indigenous history. Despite some calls for transnational and comparative histories linking the US West with other places, western US history has, until fairly recently, remained embedded in national American history and conversant primarily with only US scholarship.8 However, of late, transnational scholarship in borderlands and immigration history has propelled the eld beyond its national borders.9 By connecting to the vibrant scholarship on settler colonialism and engaging in comparative work, western US historians might further discover and reveal how developments in western US history were linked to trends and processes occurring globally. A number of fruitful areas for comparative and/or transnational inquiry suggest themselves. A global approach to Mormon history that studied transnational migrations, establishment of a settler colony in Utah, and expansion to Mexico and Canada would merit study. A transnational, comparative history of mining in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would also be a valuable project, and one that might show the persistence of extractive modes of colonialism within larger settler colonial endeavors. A transnational/comparative project on nuclear testing and indigenous peoples in the twentieth century, that encompassed the American West, South Australia, and the South Pacic, might also provide insight into ongoing colonial abuses against indigenous peoples in these several different contexts. At this point, alarm bells may be ringing in readers heads. Just when historians were nally attending to the singular experiences and perspectives of some of historys most silenced actors Angel DeCora, for example might not we risk neglecting the lived experience of historical actors if we subsume their experiences too deeply under the weight of these larger comparative colonial constructs? Indeed, we do need to be mindful of the interplay between micro- and macro-histories and not become so disassociated from specic historical events and people that we lose the rich texture of history.10 Or perhaps readers are feeling exhausted just thinking about the enormity of such comparative transnational projects. It is difcult enough to master the archives and historical literature in ones own eld of study; how can one possibly become conversant in several different elds? These projects can become more manageable through the study of discrete regions and archives or through collaboration among scholars in many different locales and with their own areas of expertise.11 If western US historians have not by and large familiarized themselves with settler colonial studies, many scholars of settler colonialism have often avoided the history of the US West and its thriving scholarship. In many ways, however, the complex history of the US West could enrich some settler colonial formulations. For one thing, many different European groups sought to colonize what became the US West, but with different strategies. The French and Russians sought to extract natural resources from the region without establishing permanent settlements. The Spanish did seek to lay claim to the area by establishing missions and settlements, but without adequate numbers of Spanish settlers, they relied on indigenous peoples and mestizo populations to populate their colonies. Only the USA sought to overwhelm the indigenous inhabitants of its western territory with waves of European American settlers. This proved to be a winning strategy, but the USA had to contend with the legacies of other colonial projects, including the presence of nuevomexicanos and californios who continued to lay their own claims to the land and new waves of immigrants from Mexico and Asia who challenged their exclusion from full citizenship. The presence of Mexicans and Asians in the US West confounds the sometimes dichotomous formulation of settler colonial studies that focuses on British settlers and indigenous peoples.12 Thus attention to the US West may generate productive analysis in settler colonial studies. Moreover, bringing US western historians into intellectual conversation with settler colonial scholars would likely produce valuable insights for both. Scholars of settler colonialism and
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comparative indigenous histories are wrestling with at least three big issues. First: how to think about postcolonialism and decolonization in a settler colonial context. Scholarship on settler colonialism is relatively new, in part because national narratives in many settler colonies have cloaked colonial conquest in the benign or positive terms of expansion and progress. Scholars of extractive colonialism have set the terms of debate; the narratives they tell of colonization, the rise of nationalist movements, and decolonization and independence have a different trajectory than that of settler colonialism. Thus the term postcolonial is very problematic within settler colonies, where dispossession is a perpetual process.13 Similarly, decolonization has little meaning in settler colonial societies. As Lorenzo Veracini puts it, settler colonies possess an ambivalent circumstance where the settler is colonized and colonizing at once, which leads to two moments of decolonization settler independence and yet-to-be determined indigenous self-determination.14 What insights might US western historians contribute to this debate? If the US West was an American settler colony in the nineteenth century, what did it become in the twentieth century? As Indian nations have gained greater self-determination in the late twentieth century, has the West become decolonized? Can we speak of it now as postcolonial? Second, following Patrick Wolfes assertion that settler colonialism rests on the logic of elimination, many scholars have moved to debating whether settler colonialism is inherently genocidal or has generated genocidal moments or events.15 These debates have so far left little imprint in the eld of western US history, in part, because a focus on genocide has seemed to be out of step with other trends in the eld that have sought to understand indigenous agency.16 Is it time to reopen this question in a more nuanced fashion? Would studies of particular periods and specic regions such as Texas in the 1830s or California in the 1850s contribute to debates on settler colonialism and genocide? To some extent, the settler colonialism-as-genocide approach clashes with another area of interest in settler colonial studies: the growing body of feminist scholarship on gender that studies what Ann Laura Stoler calls the intimacies of empire (or Albert Hurtado has dubbed intimate frontiers), the ways in which everyday interactions of colonized subjects, colonizers, and immigrant others in the intimate domain create racial categories and strategies of rule.17 In this approach, colonial policies take shape from on-the-ground encounters and relationships between disparately located actors, not primarily through top-down edicts from distant administrators. Moreover, several feminist scholars have pointed out that settler colonialism has rested on control of female reproduction, not only of indigenous inhabitants, but also of settler women. As Australian historian Jane Carey points out, if settler colonialism is driven by logic of elimination, then the imperative of vigorous white propagation was its necessary corollary.18 What might US western womens and gender historians contribute to thinking about the role of intimacy and reproduction in the US West as a settler colony? Like Angel DeCora, historians of the US West who board the settler colonial train out of curiosity might nd themselves on an unintended journey, one with intellectual strangers destined for an unfamiliar location where the language is alien and it is difcult to get home. And scholars of settler colonialism, comfortably settled already on the train, may balk at these new passengers who want to make unexpected stops and detours. However, unlike DeCoras one-way train to Hampton, this train shuttles passengers and their ideas back and forth and fosters exchange, collaboration, and intellectual inquiry that can be enlivening for both western US historians and settler colonial scholars. Funding
Sponsored by Huntington Library and the University of Southern California Institute on California and the West.
Settler Colonial Studies Notes

1.
Angel DeCora, An Autobiography, The Red Man 3, no. 7 (1911): 27980. For more on DeCora, see Linda M. Waggoner, Fire Light: The Life of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); Margaret Archuleta, The Indian is an Artist: Art Education, in Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 18792000, ed. Margaret Archuleta, Brenda Child, and Tsianina Lomawaima (Phoenix, AZ: Heard Museum, 2000), 847; Jane Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860 1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 183214. After leaving Hampton Institute, DeCoras interest in art led her to study at the Burnham Classical School for Girls, to the Smith College Art Department for four years, to Drexel Institute in Philadelphia to study with renowned illustrator Howard Pyle for over two years, and on to Boston where she studied rst at the Cowles Art School and then the Museum of Fine Arts. DeCora then opened a studio in Boston and later in New York, where she engaged in portraiture, landscape painting, illustration, and design, which she found to be a more lucrative branch of art and the best channel in which to convey the native qualities of the Indians decorative talent. See DeCora, An Autobiography, 280, 285. In 1906, Carlisle Institute the most famous of the Indian boarding schools hired DeCora to teach art. She sought to infuse the Carlisle curriculum with a respect for Indian experience. The educators seem to expect an Indian to leave behind him all his heritage of tribal training, DeCora declared, and in the course of ve years or more to take up and excel in an entirely new line of thought in mental and industrial training whose methods are wholly foreign to him. An Indians selfrespect is undermined when he is told that his native customs and crafts are no longer of any use because they are the habits and pastimes of the crude man. See Mrs. William Dietz, Native Indian Art, Report of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference (Lake Mohonk, NY: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1908), 178. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Signicance of the Frontier in American History (a paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, July 12, 1893). It rst appeared in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 14 December 1893, and has been reprinted in many volumes, including Turners collection of essays, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), 138. See particularly Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987). David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 18751928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). Some examples include Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of the Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Clyde Ellis, To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 18931920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Brenda Child, Boarding School Seasons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Archuleta, Child, and Lomawaima, eds., Away from Home; Clifford Trafzer and Jean Keller, eds., Boarding School Blues: Revisiting the American Indian Boarding School Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 1997). One of the rst theoretical works on settler colonialism emerged from Canadian scholars Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (London: Sage, 1995). A classic and signicant work on settler colonialism is Patrick Wolfes, Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race, American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (2001): 865905. See also Tracy Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, Introduction, Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place, and Identity (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 4, for a helpful denition. Scholarship on settler colonialism has taken two divergent paths. On the one hand, some scholars have approached the subject at a macro-level through comparing the growth of settler colony nations. See, for example, James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Rise of the Anglo-World, 17831939 (London: Oxford University Press, 2009), which studies the American settlement of the American West in concert with the British settlement of its west, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Stuart Banner s Possessing the Pacic: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) similarly
2.
3. 4. 5.
6. 7.
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takes a Jared Diamond-like approach to the comparative history of settler societies. Other scholars have approached comparative history in the way suggested by anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler in her provocative essay, Tense and Tender Ties: The Politic of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies, Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 82965. Stoler believes that comparative histories that focus on national histories perpetuate the fetishization of the nation. She advises instead that we focus on commensurate processes. Accordingly, her scholarship has focused more on racial formation in comparative contexts. For other scholarship taking this approach see Penelope Edmonds, Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th- Century Pacic Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010); Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 17881836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 18871937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Angela Wanhalla, Women living across the line: Intermarriage on the Canadian Prairies and in Southern New Zealand, 18701900, Ethnohistory, 55, no. 1 (2008): 2950. For other recent books and anthologies on settler colonialism, see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington, Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Caroline Elkins et al., Settler Colonialism in the 20th Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005); Annie Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Several western historians have promoted comparative history for some time, including Patricia Nelson Limerick, Going West and Ending up Global, Western Historical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2001): 523. American Indian historian Frederick Hoxie also sees value in using a settler colonial paradigm. See his Retrieving the Red Continent: Settler Colonialism and the History of American Indians in the US, Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 6 (2008): 115367. A few western historians have carried out comparative histories. See, for example, James Gump, The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). See, for example, Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S. Mexican War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Benjamin Johnson and Andrew Graybill, eds., Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta/Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the U.S. Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Eiichiro Azama, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). As Lorenzo Veracini puts it, The study of colonialism has recurrently needed to confront colonialisms simultaneously localized and transnational nature, and to discuss whether colonial phenomena are intractably specic, or whether they constitute a body of systemic relations. See Lorenzo Veracini, The Imagined Geographies of Settler Colonialism, in Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place, and Identity, eds. Tracy Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 180. See, for example, Tamara J. Levi, Food, Control, and Resistance: Rations and Indigenous Peoples in the American Great Plains and South Australia (PhD diss., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006). See http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3215320/. For a collaborative effort, see Carol Williams, ed., Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012). New scholarship on settler colonialism is challenging this dichotomous tendency. See, for example, Veracini, Settler Colonialism. Veracini argues that all settler projects need to manage in specic ways the triangular relationships involving settlers on the one hand, and indigenous and exogenous Others on the other (18). Mar and Edmonds, Introduction, 4. Regarding postcolonialism, Penelope Edmonds eschew[s] any suggestion of a break between the present and the past. See Edmonds, Indigenous Peoples and Settlers, 9. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington assert that it is misleading to refer to settler colonialism in the past tense because it continues to exercise a profound effect on an extensive range of
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
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16. 17.
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societies. See Introduction, Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 23. My co-panelist Aziz Rana has a very different view, seeing the end of settler colonialism or empire as coincident with the moment when free land was no longer available, roughly the time of the Turner thesis. From the perspective of indigenous communities, however, settler colonial policies designed to undermine their land claims and rights to natural resources did not end in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries but continue to this day in various forms. See Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Lorenzo Veracini, Telling the End of the Settler Colonial Story, in Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture, ed. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 297, 208, 214. Wolfe, Land, Labor, and Difference; A. Dirk Moses, Conceptual Blockages and Denitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century: Genocides of Indigenous peoples and the Holocaust, in Colonialism and Genocide, eds. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (Oxon England: Routledge, 2007), 14880; Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Journal of Genocide Research, special issue on settler colonialism, 10, no. 4 (2008); Robert Van Krieken, Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and Settler-Colonial State Formation, Oceania 75 (2004): 12551. See, for example, Pekka Hmlinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Ann Laura Stoler, Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen, in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Empire in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 122; Albert Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). Jane Carey, Wanted! A Real White Australia: The Womens Movement, Whiteness and the Settler Colonial Project, 19001940, in Studies in Settler Colonialism, 136. Claire McLisky, in her study of missionaries, notes that the discourse of elimination was gendered in other ways as well. See Claire McLisky, (En)gendering Faith?: Love, Marriage and the Evangelical Mission on the Settler Colonial Frontier , in Studies in Settler Colonialism, 1067.

Global context, local objects, and cultural frontiers: unsettling South Africa's national history in four moves
Laura J. Mitchell
a a
The University of California, Irvine, CA, USA Published online: 17 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Laura J. Mitchell , Settler Colonial Studies (2013): Global context, local objects, and cultural frontiers: unsettling South Africa's national history in four moves , Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.846391 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846391
Global context, local objects, and cultural frontiers: unsettling South Africas national history in four moves
Laura J. Mitchell
The University of California, Irvine, CA, USA Contested cultural spaces characteristic of colonial South Africa persisted through the twentieth century. Material evidence of cross-cultural encounters in South Africa reveals the long-term viability and productive elasticity of the concept of frontier as a space of cross-cultural encounter. An analysis of four objects that date from the eighteenth to the twentieth century demonstrates the signicance of African and Asian agency, even in settler-focused historical narratives. This approach also establishes points of comparison that challenge exceptionalist readings of South Africas national history.
This paper interrogates the long presence of frontier as contested cultural space in South Africa by examining the material culture of colonial settlement and its changing relationship to indigenous cultures. I approach this topic informed by the premise that the expansion of settler societies unfolded in a global context, so South African experiences were not necessarily unique. Nevertheless, the particular details of how South African colonists engaged with, ignored, or effaced elements of Asian and African cultures in their midst shows the extent to which local identity and national history are still being negotiated. South Africas history is neither one of monolithic settler dominance nor African nationalist resistance, but rather an uncomfortable, centuries-long struggle over boundaries: moral, material, intellectual, and territorial. It is no longer daring to imbricate a national history with world history; arguments for the intellectual gains made by putting national or local histories in global and context have been made quite forcefully.1 The benets of this line of inquiry typically work one way, though. A local study in global or comparative context rarely reshapes how we think about the macro-level process.2 Instead, the global context illuminates the local in new ways, or helps us see connections across regions that we had previously overlooked. That said, in this paper, we are thinking outwardly from South African evidence, reasoning inductively, in spite of the pitfalls that often entails for historical methods.3 Based on South African-focused research, we argue that the concept of frontier is not settled, intellectually; the persistent attention to frontiers in local, regional, and global scholarship suggests this concept and line of inquiry maintains its vitality and an elastic analytical utility over a century after Turner rst articulated a specic understanding of processes of cross-cultural encounter and territorial expansion in US history. The growing body of work on comparative settler colonialism is one venue where frontier questions continue to loom large. That literature,
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however, presumes a shared notion of cross-cultural interactions that permeated European and Neo-European interactions with indigenous peoples in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. While this paper is situated in those conversations, we also want to suggest that the concept of frontier has salience beyond a European-other dichotomy, and provoke conversations about how Wolf s people without history were not, in fact, without borders.4 My efforts to integrate South African colonial history into world historical narratives do, I hope, productively trouble a national narrative focused on European expansion in Africa, demonstrating multiple cultural inuences at play, and pushing for greater recognition of African contributions to settler cultural spaces. South Africa, like the USA, has a strong national historiographical tradition that emphasizes local exceptionalism.5 Using world historical research methods specic attention to geographic scale, comparison, and cross-cultural encounters to interrogate a national history challenges the exceptional characterization of the South African past. This approach also emphasizes the utility of scalability in historical research. I shift your focus now to Southern Africa an area Europeans began to map in 1488 when Bartholomeu Dias sailed to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1652, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a refreshment station to support sailing between Amsterdam and Batavia, on the island of Java. The VOC established a second town at the Cape in 1679, rmly establishing the trope of colonial expansion into wilderness regions of the interior of Africa a national story subsequently couched in terms of Fredrick Jackson Turner s frontier.6 After a brief period of transition in the nineteenth century, the British Crown decisively assumed control of the Cape in 1813 and from there began to incorporate southern African territories into the British Empire. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 heightened Britains interest in the region. The brutality and expense of the South African War (18991902) demonstrated the Empires commitment to maintaining access to mineral and other resources and compounded the ability of South African historians to cast a national tale in terms of us against them the classic frontier scenario. Such notions of frontier are still alive and well in South Africa (as elsewhere I am explicitly not being exceptionalist here). Ultimately, I am not sure it is all that startling to argue that, in a postcolonial state, frontiers are never actually closed, or that legacies of colonialism are not actually legacies but active structures. It is, though, perhaps a little unsettling to think about someone like Harry Openheimer (19082000) who, in the late twentieth century was one of the worlds richest men, and who for nearly three decades controlled the worlds diamond market, as a frontiersman.7 I will not try to put him in a coonskin cap, but I do want to suggest that choices he made about material objects reect an ambiguous and uncertain relationship between settlers and Africans. Of course, relationships among Europeans settlers (and their descendants), local African communities, and slaves imported from throughout the Indian Ocean region (and their descendants) already had a long and tangled history.8 In order to move through that history from conversations about the imprint of Dutch colonial settlement in the eighteenth century to Harry Oppenheimer in the twentieth, I ask you to consider a set of objects: a copper kettle, a Chinese porcelain plate, a watercolor landscape, and a collection of Africana. From this material evidence, we can see elements of a shared settler identity proclaimed, and use these proclamations as a way to think about cultural interactions in an omnipresent contact zone: not necessarily wilderness or the backcountry as a frontier, but the quotidian space of collision that is a settler-colonial society (Figure 1).9 An unremarkable copper kettle was an object of daily use in middling and more afuent settler households. Though one cannot with certainty match most remaining examples of eighteenthcentury domestic objects to specic households, the kettle on display at the Koompans-de Wet
Figure 1. Copper kettle. Source: Author s photo. From Koopmans-de Wet House Iziko Musuems, Cape Town.
House museum in Cape Town is in keeping with hundreds of probate inventories from the colonial Cape.10 Knowing this object was not a solitary sample, we can interrogate the context in which copper kettles appeared in settler households. A kettle such as this one was an expensive purchase. There was a particular choice in a household buying a copper implement rather than pewter, tin, or a cast-iron pot or eschewing extraneous material goods altogether.11 In addition, a kettle was a task-specic tool you can boil water without having a kettle. In the Koopmans-de Wet house, the kettle is currently displayed hanging in the kitchen replace, which we know from room-by-room probate inventories and travel accounts was a common practice.12 Such large, open replaces were developed for Northern Europe, where the room needed heating and where wood to burn in a big replace was plentiful. Such large hearths are not maximally efcient heating or cooking technologies, though. And their rate of wood consumption was not well-suited to the Capes ecosystem. Even if inefcient, the heat from such a large hearth would have been welcome in the Capes cold, damp winter. Whether rooted in cooking habits or architectural esthetic preferences, a large, open replace was a staple of settler domestic architecture. The Koopmans-de Wet House reconstructs an elite household, clearly making claims of afnity with European material culture. I have argued elsewhere that particular afnities to European material culture were important to settlers in the eighteenth century alongside cultural markers
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Figure 2. Porcelain plate. Source: http://elogedelart.canalblog.com/tag/%27Cape%20Town%27.
that were specic to the colonial Cape.13 A handsomely wrought copper kettle hanging in a big open hearth seems to conrm the notion that settlers, especially the cultural and economic elite, sought to demonstrate their afnity with northwestern European cultural practices though their management of domestic space. But conspicuously lacking from this cozy kitchen scene, and from the hundreds of inventories I have looked at, are explicit markers of non-European material culture. Yet we know from other sources that such cultural inuences were there. Even without specic documentation, we can work from inferences. Much of the wooden furniture in Koopmans-de Wet House was made by Asian artisans and has Asian motifs, even if most of the basic forms are European.14 The labor likely enslaved effaced in the presentation of elaborate or imposing Europeanshaped furniture as a marker of elite settler status has corollaries back in the kitchen. A kettle heated water, which at times would have been used to make medicines and tea from local herbs. How did settlers get the knowledge to do this? How did they know which plants would work as medicines and which would work as tea? A kettle also tells us about gendered and racialized allocations of labor: who chopped or gathered the wood, who laid the re, who tended the ame, who steeped the local rooibos twigs, who ultimately served it as tea? (Figure 2) In keeping with a domestic theme, I turn next to examine a porcelain plate. I do not have direct evidence that this export-ware from China was ever in Cape Town, but it does have a denite image of Table Mountain, so it was clearly intended to evoke the Cape, whether or not it was ever used there. When the plate was auctioned at Christies in Amsterdam in 2009, it was dated to around 1770 detailed its decorations and described as
coloured enamels with a view of Cape Town from the bay with various Dutch ships and rowing boats in the foreground, in the horizon Table Mountain anked by Lions Head and Signal Hill, within a trellis border and four sprays of pink owers, small glaze cracks, slight rubbing.15
I started to look for examples of Chinese export porcelain with links to the Cape in response to work by Michael North, an art historian whose work has focused primarily on household inventories of Netherlandish art. His recent work analyzes inventories of Dutch colonial households in
Batavia, the VOCs capital on Java.16 North, like archeologists Antonia Malan and Jane Close, focused on more afuent households in or near the growing city of Cape Town.17 Although I was aware of the importance of the porcelain trade and found evidence of plates and serving ware in frontier households, given the relative paucity of porcelain objects in even the most abundant, afuent inventories I analyzed, I had relegated porcelain to the realm of to the urban elite not the material of frontier life. Norths attention to the presence of small porcelain gurines in some colonial households, however, prompted me to reconsider porcelain in the context of frontiers. When displayed in a settler s home, were little guardian lion statues (dogs of Fo) simply decorative trinkets, souvenirs of particular interactions, or signals of a deeper understanding of religious beliefs and cultural practices of Europeans new home in Asia?18 Malan quite reasonably suggests such objects would have had different meanings in the houses of elite settlers compared to the houses of Free Blacks at the Cape, noting that the presence of numerous leeuwtjie gurines in relatively modest inventories points to intentional spending choices and more than a passing interests in objects simply for display.19 The potential for multiple and shifting meanings attached to imported porcelain gurines shifts the focus of a contested frontier zone from the rural outposts of colonial settlement at the Cape to the heart of growing, cosmopolitan Cape Town.20 The notion of frontier, then, is not just the geographic fringes of the expanding empire but embedded in the idea of contact zones at the heart of trans-oceanic and overland connections the very centers of imperial power that older theories of cross-cultural engagements would categorize as closed frontiers, secured for the hegemonic display of settler norms. Coming back to a set of inventories to look again at lists suggestive of household consumption and display pointed out to me elements of a frontier mentality embedded in historical research methods. Documents carefully read, meticulously cataloged, mined for data to be entered in a database are, of course, far from closed. The sources themselves are sites of encounter, the terms of which change with time and attendant contextual knowledge. The challenges of approaching a set of sources several times to look for different kinds of evidence are compounded in the context of transnational research. How do you know what you are looking for, when the impetus to spark a comparison across time, space, or cultures is yet to be discovered in some other archive? While there is utility in re-tracing your steps, it can be hard to make a convincing case for funding to return to a collection in search of the pieces you missed because you were not yet looking for them. When connections like terrain newly claimed for an empire have yet to be completely mapped, the intellectual potential to forge a new understanding is great. But the logistical challenges of pursuing such transnational work are real. We are always confronted by the question of what you should be looking for or where you should be going next and whether you have found enough at the current stop to be able to see the connections down the road.21 So rather than an object clearly from a settler household, whether in urbanizing Cape Town or the agricultural hinterland of the colony, I am thinking with a symbolic porcelain plate that may never have been used or displayed in Africa. Whether or not this plate was actually transferred across Cape Town, many other porcelain decorative art objects did. From as early as 1700, we have evidence of Chinoiserie decorative porcelain objects in addition to functional serving ware in colonial households at the Cape. This is a good half century early than the Chinoiserie fad in Western Europe.22 This temporal disjuncture asks us to question what constituted claims to European-ness expressed through material objects. Malan suggests that the emerging gentry among the settlers used porcelain displays to communicate their elite status. But given porcelains obviously Asian origins and the political importance of Batavia in the hierarchy of the VOC, should we be looking more carefully for markers of high status among settlers to be exercised through claims to both European and Asian connections? Such a question prompts us to look
L.J. Mitchell
Figure 3. Jan Brandes, The Lochner Plaats (Vergenoegd), Watercolor, 1786, Rijskmuseum, Amsterdam, NG-19857277. Source: See Note 24.
even more carefully for evidence of material culture adopted from other regions in eighteenthcentury settler households (Figure 3). Now I turn to a watercolor done by Jan Brandes. He was not a professional artist, but a Swedish minister who visited the Cape on his way to Southeast Asia in 1786. This watercolor shows farm laborers at work an idiosyncratic subject for eighteenth-century travel art. The oxen-drivers in this image are most likely indigenous Khoisan indentured servants rather than Asian slaves. But the other laborers who are there might be either Khoisan or slaves the farm owner at this time owned slaves and had indentured indigenous laborers on the farm.23 Brandes made drawings and watercolors while he traveled as a kind of visual diary a record for himself and to share with his family. This scene was bound along with many others into a large book of drawings he made in Africa and Asia. The book was passed down through generations of his heirs in Sweden before it was purchased by the Rijksmueum in the Netherlands.24 This painting style evokes a bucolic scene, except for the presence of the violently subordinated labor in the foreground. We see neither an overseer nor the effect of the lash, but we know from other sources that this was the principle form of disciplining and coercing labor at the Cape.25 This image also effaces any hints at independent meaning not colonized or subordinated African lifeways.26 We do, however, see one example of indigenous material culture: the hippo hide whip used for driving the oxen. Brandes, as a visitor, saw furniture made of Asian hardwoods; he may well have seen Chinese porcelain, but despite documentation such as this of Africans engaged, albeit unwillingly, in the colonial economy, our available evidence provides severely limited clues about the ways that settlers engaged with African objects and cultures. I am inclined to think that this is an absence of evidence, rather than a complete absence of practice. To make the point, I want to leap forward into the twentieth century and consider the Africana collection of Harry Oppenheimer. Objects from his private collection furnish almost all of the Johannesburg Art Gallerys display of early African art. Like many modern
museums, the Johannesburg Art Gallery grew from the private collections of wealthy, well-connected individuals, so Oppenheimer s contribution to the public appreciation of art is in keeping with contemporary museum practice. But the specic focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African ritual and practical objects sets Oppenheimer s contribution apart from the rest of the museum collection. Established in 1910, the Gallerys rst focus was European great masters. The exhibition of work by South African artists, whether in European or African genres, did not begin until well after the mid-century. Oppenheimers collection of African ethnographic objects distinguishes among white South African elites in the mid-twentieth century. His early twentieth-century peers in South Africa were collecting European great master art, on the model of the industrial barons of the late nineteenth-century USA.27 Although Oppenheimer did he indeed purchase a Rembrandt, he spent a great deal of his time and fortune purchasing ethnographic art from his local surroundings. He amassed a sufcient quantity of high quality, well-cataloged objects to create a collection readymade for a museum wing. Oppenheimer was certainly not the rst person with European cultural esthetics to value African cultural objects as art.28 But his voracious collecting which in itself confers value on African production differs markedly from early settler engagement with African material culture. Of course historians expect to encounter change over the course of two and a half centuries. Our job is pinpointing those changes and explaining them. But direct evidence for when colonial settlers and their descendants began to value African objects remains elusive. I have not yet found documentary evidence of settlers owning African objects for use or decoration prior to the twentieth century. That does not mean such evidence is absent; I just have not found it yet. This disjuncture prompts me to pose a set of questions. Was the eighteenth-century practice of collecting ora, fauna, and geological specimens completely divorced from ethnographic objects? Earlier wunderkamers did not dwell on such distinctions.29 Was the British military culture, which during the nineteenth century collected trophy heads after battle, completely disinterested in inanimate objects? 30 Did no settlers have examples of beadwork or basketry in their homes? Did the great white hunters, including Theodore Roosevelt and Fredrick Selous, really only take lions back home with them?31 Openheimer did not start seriously collecting until after Picassos discovery of West African masks, so there were obviously changing European cultural and esthetic values at play here, but I cannot help thinking that collecting, cataloguing, organizing, and displaying elements of a culture still very much locked in conict with your own, and in a continuing colonial context, suggests a shift in settlers relationship to the land and people whose territory they were in the process of claiming. Frontiers are still alive in South Africa. Saying that makes me feel that I am treading uncomfortably into the terrain of Frederick Jackson Turner. His historiography and South African historiography have been intimately bound up in the colonial period, and South Africa also had its moment of rapture bound up in celebratory memories of wagon-driving pioneers.32 But we know that this vision of the frontier does not explain enough about the complicated social relationships that actually took place as colonists and indigenous peoples negotiated, typically quite violently, the conditions of their co-existence. Nevertheless, the presumption of frontier areas sites of heightened social and identity formation allow for the consideration of spaces where the rules of engagement whether for daily life in centuries gone past or for historians investigations remain contested and the map of the region is still being plotted.
Notes
1. Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997); Jonathan T. Reynolds and Erik Gilbert, Africa in World History (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson
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Educational, 2004); Howard Roberts Lamar and Leonard Monteath Thompson, The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Kerry Ward, Networks of empire forced migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacic Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Timothy Brook, Vermeers Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press: Distributed to the trade by Macmillan, 2008). Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) is a notable exception. Again, there are notable exceptions, including Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Reprint, 1984); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). And more recently, Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon, 2007). Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). William Miller Macmillan, Bantu, Boer, and Briton: The Making of the South African Native Problem. New edition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Reprint, 1979); Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); J.D. Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa, 2nd ed. (Melton: James Currey, 1994). Eric Walker, The Frontier Tradition in South Africa: A Lecture Delivered at Rhodes House on 5 March 1930 (London: Oxford University Press, 1930); Leonard Guelke, The Making of Two Frontier Communities: Cape Colony in the Eighteenth Century, Historical Reections/Reexions Historiques 12, no. 3 (1985): 41948; Martin Chateld Legassick, The Politics of a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 17801840 (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2011). Maryilyn Berger, Harry Oppenheimer, 91, South African Industrialist, Dies New York Times, New York Times, August 21, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/21/business/harry-oppenheimer-91-southafrican-industrialist-dies.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (accessed February 11, 2013). T. Gregory, Ernest Oppenheimer and the Economic Development of Southern Africa (New York: Arno Press, 1977). Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, The Shaping of South African Society, 16521820 (London: Longman Group United Kingdom, 1980); Robert Ross, Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993); Susan Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 17601803, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On social interpretations of material culture, see Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. 1st Paperback Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Brook, Vermeers Hat; Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods, 2nd ed. (Abbingdon: Routledge, 1996). On quotidian settler interactions, see Laura J. Mitchell, Belongings: Property, Family, and Identity in Colonial South Africa, an Exploration of Frontiers, 1725C. 1830, 1st ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, 2nd Revised edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2005). Antonia Malan, Households of the Cape, 1750 to 1850: Inventories and the Archaeological Record (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 1993); Tracey Randle, Patterns of Consumption at Auctions: A Case Study of Three Estates, in Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World, ed. Nigel Worden (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007), 5374, Mitchell, Belongings. For the inventories themselves, see Inventories of the Orphan Chamber of the Cape of Good Hope, http://www.tanap.net/content/activities/documents/Orphan_Chamber-Cape_of_Good_ Hope/index.htm (accessed February 15, 2012). Newton-King, Masters and Servants. Malan, Households of the Cape; Anders Sparrman, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, Towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, Tound the World and to the Country of the Hottentots and the Caffres, from the Year 17721776, Based on the English Editions of 17851786 Published by Robinson, London, ed. V. S. Forbes (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1975). Mitchell, Belongings, Chapters 6 and 7. Deon Viljoen, Cape Furniture and Metalware (Johannesburg: Thorolds Africana Books, 2001).
2.
3.
4. 5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11. 12.
13. 14.

15. 16. 17.
18.
19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.
31. 32.
Alain Truong, Eloge de lart, July 2, 2009. elogedelart.canalblog.com/archives/2009/07/02/ 14269723.html (accessed February 20, 2012). Michael North, Art and Material Culture in the Cape Colony and Batavia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, ed. Michael North and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2012), 15370. Antonia Malan, Investing in Status or Serving the Household? The Role of Oriental Ceramics at the Cape of Good Hope, 16801780 (paper presented at the XVIth World Economic History Congress, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, July 913, 2012, 7). Jane Klose, Excavated Oriental Ceramics from the Cape of Good Hope: 16301830, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 57 (1992/ 1993): 6981. Ruth Bliss Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 17001900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 1st paperback ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). Malan, Investing in Status, 8. Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1998). Kerwin Klein, keynote address, The Signicance of the Frontier in an Age of Transnational History, February 28, 2012, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. North, Art and Material Culture. Laura J. Mitchell, The Plaats Vergenoegd, in The World of Jan Brandes, 1742180: Drawings of a Dutch Traveller in Batavia, Ceylon and Southern Africa, ed. Remco Raben and Max de Bruijn (Amsterdam: Waanders Uitgevers, 2004), 37380. Max De Bruijn and Remco Raben, The World of Jan Brandes, 17431808: Drawings of a Dutch Traveller in Batavia, Ceylon and Southern Africa (Amsterdam: Waanders Uitgevers, 2004). Robert Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, 1983); Nigel Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Reissue, 2010). Peter Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968). Michael Stevenson, Art and Aspirations: The Randlords of South Africa and Their Collections (Winnipeg: Fernwood Press, 2002); Cynthia Saltzman, Old Masters, New World: Americas Raid on Europes Great Pictures (New York: Viking Adult, 2008). Dennis, The Discovery of the African Mask, Research in African Literatures 31, no. 4 (2000): 2947. doi:10.2307/3821076. Roger Cardinal, Cultures of Collecting, 1st ed. (Edinburgh: Reaktion Books, 1994). Pippa Skotnes, ed., Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998); Robert James Gordon, Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925, 1st ed. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997); Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin, eds., Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1st ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Donna Haraway, Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 19081936, Social Text Winter, no. 11 (December 1, 19841985): 2064. doi:10.2307/466593. Walker, The Frontier Thesis; Leslie Witz, Apartheids Festival: Contesting South Africas National Pasts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

Settler wars and the national security state

Aziz Rana
a a
Cornell University, New York, USA Published online: 17 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Aziz Rana , Settler Colonial Studies (2013): Settler wars and the national security state, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.846386 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846386
Settler wars and the national security state

Aziz Rana
Cornell University, New York, USA These roundtable comments explore the relevance of settler conicts on the frontier with Native Americans for the contemporary national security state. I argue that we tend to think of frontier wars between settlers and natives as episodes in a distant historical past that say very little about the present. But in actuality, it was precisely through these conicts that American settlers developed key legal and political scripts inuential even today about what constitutes war, which political communities can claim full sovereignty, and who enjoys meaningful wartime protections. I develop these thoughts through a reading of John Marshalls 1823 decision in Johnson v. MIntosh and a discussion of its continued legacy.
Frederick Jackson Turner famously stated that the rst ideal of the pioneer was that of conquest and that the rie and the ax were his principal symbols. For my remarks, I plan to develop this thought by assessing what settler wars on the American frontier specically conicts with native peoples over land and material resources tell us about the contemporary national security state. Due to limitations of time, the argument I am going to make is a schematic one, so bear with me in its bluntness and lack of nuance. The basic claim is that we tend to think of frontier wars between settlers and natives as episodes in a distant historical past that say very little about the present. But in actuality, it was precisely through these conicts that American settlers developed key political and legal scripts concerning which political communities can claim full sovereignty as well as who rightly enjoys meaningful protections during wartime. Today, these scripts continue to inuence foreign and domestic policy not only in the United States and Europe but even in postcolonial states and mirror current debates (such as over the status of non-state actors or the use of drones in international humanitarian law). For all these reasons, I think it is worth taking a moment to go back to the early nineteenth century and to revisit especially how American jurists in the context of the frontier conceived of the legal rules governing war with native communities. To begin with, a quick word about international humanitarian law (IHL) (or the law of armed conict) may be useful. IHL has long been thought of in the nineteenth century as well as today as providing both a sword and a shield. In other words, the historic purpose behind IHL was to sanction practices that during peace time would be viewed as criminal. For instance, although in peace time you cannot engage in murder, during warfare certain forms of violence against individuals become legally acceptable. As a result, the laws of war provide a sword to belligerents, justifying their capacity to employ coercive violence. At the same time, these laws are also meant to be a
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shield to those groups caught up in armed conicts; they are supposed to establish clear limitations and constraints on the use of force and to ensure that individuals (combatants and civilians) enjoy basic rights. What settler wars raised, in the interaction between the US federal government and American Indian nations, was a central question about whether communities whose forms of political and social organization were not cognizable under traditional ideas of Western statecraft, especially the Westphalian state, would nonetheless be treated as self-determining and rightsbearing subjects. After independence, one of the very rst responses to this question was presented by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1823 case Johnson v. MIntosh. As I discuss in my book, The Two Faces of American Freedom, the case concerned whether American courts should respect the validity of revolutionary-era land purchases between white settlers and native peoples. In speaking for a unanimous Court and holding such sales invalid, Marshall argued that private citizens could not buy land directly from American Indians. Rather the US federal government enjoyed ultimate title to the land and alone could extinguish native occupancy. I am not going to go through Marshalls holding in great detail, but he grounded his argument in what he called the Doctrine of Discovery. According to Marshall, this doctrine had long been recognized as part of international law (or the law of nations), and gave to European states in the New World an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy either by purchase or conquest. Such customary imperial authority meant that native peoples did not possess legally recognizable sovereignty, akin to European states, over their own territory. Indeed, if a European state were to stake a claim to territory within the American zone of discovery (but still practically controlled by an Indian nation) this was in fact an act of aggression against the USA, the relevant sovereign power. A far less explored element of this case is how Marshall struggled with the issue of frontier confrontations between settlers and natives, and particularly which laws were supposed to govern these military conicts. As a normative matter, Marshall was deeply wary of defending indigenous conquest not to mention frontier violence against native peoples through arguments about the superior genius of Europeans or the character and religion of American Indians. He viewed many of these claims as ultimately justications for the mistreatment of native communities. Nonetheless, Marshall accepted the inevitability of war on the frontier and maintained that the Doctrine of Discovery could be legitimately converted into a right of conquest one that presumed that local peoples could be removed at will by settlers. The problem as he saw it was that native societies at root could never be made peaceable, a fact tied for Marshall to the very nobility of the American Indian. Precisely because the US federal government was engaged in a project of conquering their land, native peoples would refuse to submit. In his view, American Indians were as brave and as high spirited as they were erce, and were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence. This indigenous bravery meant that in refusing to submit native peoples would use all the available means of violence at their disposal. And as a consequence, they could not be counted on to engage in selflimitation or to abide by basic principles of just war, principles that European states supposedly respected. Unless white settlers conquered denitively their indigenous neighbors on the frontier, American colonists would risk exposing themselves and their families to the perpetual hazard of being massacred. It is for this reason that Marshall reached a stunning conclusion: both the laws of war and the laws of occupation that applied among Europeans and ensured that the conquered shall not be wantonly oppressed could not apply with native peoples. For Marshall, the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were erce savages, whose occupation was war. Any effort to extend legal protections, ordinarily granted to European publics, to native communities would be fatal to internal security. It would be the equivalent of waging war with one hand tied behind your
back. In a sense, Marshall, whatever his qualms with the frontier treatment of indigenous neighbors, nonetheless articulated an initial defense of total war. Such war was acceptable in the context of conicts with native peoples, precisely because settlers would be trapped in an asymmetrical ght with an opponent that ignored the classic rules of military engagement. Marshalls arguments have had a remarkably long shelf life in both national security policy and international humanitarian law. First of all, one could well argue that for Americans (perhaps even more so than the Civil War or the World Wars) it was the confrontation with native peoples that helped to dene what war itself meant. Marshalls claims about the limited rules that applied in the context of the frontier were directly tied to a view about what actually constitutes a legally cognizable war, complete with a formal declaration. Real wars were those between states where assumptions about reciprocity applied these were conicts governed by limitations on coercive force and fought between legitimate sovereigns. But conicts with native peoples, however violent, were not true wars; they were skirmishes at the edges of American power. Since US expansion into territory within its zone of discovery was not invasion (unlike an aggressive act against an actually sovereign state), conicts on the frontier were simply threats that needed to be pacied for domestic security. And since the ordinarily rules did not apply to these pacication efforts, not surprisingly federal ofcials persistently refused to formalize these encounters with declarations of war or explicit congressional authorizations. According to this logic, you do not declare war against the Indian communities in the Southwest or on the Great Plains because they do not have a structure that looks like the state, they cannot claim sovereignty, and above all they cannot be expected behave as a rational state would. One of the great ironies of these presumptions about what constitutes real war (and so brings with it reciprocal rights protections) is that in historical fact the real wars think only of the two World Wars produced a degree of unconstrained and organized violence on both sides that dwarfed any danger posed by native peoples ghting to protect their land. If Marshalls claims have justied a framework for what counts as legitimate war, they also have been integrated into the basic discourses of IHL and underscore the dark side of the laws of war themselves. The classic argument made by public international lawyers as well as by legal historians is that the expansion of IHL across the globe in the twentieth century was really a bumpy but progressive spread of basic rights. But again in historical fact, the very construction and entrenchment of IHL rested in practice on arguments not that different from those made by Marshall. Indeed, as Frdric Mgret has shown in his essential article, From Savages to Unlawful Combatants European lawyers in the late nineteenth century who played a central role in devising IHL norms developed their views against the backdrop of colonial wars in Asia and Africa. In the process, they too employed similar legal and political scripts in making claims about the limited responsibilities owed indigenous peoples (due to the presumed failure of local communities to distinguish non-combatants from combatants, to self-limit, or to respect legal reciprocity). For Mgret, the way that non-Western communities nally got treated as formally sovereign equals and rights-bearing subjects during wartime was by simply adopting the modern Westphalian state after independence, and in particular by replicating the institutions of a standing army and thus the national security state (complete with hierarchy, discipline, and a separate military class of experts to make key decisions about the use of force). Now, there are evident parallels between the American frontier context and the present moment. The rst and most obvious is in the title Mgret gives his article and concerns the status today of non-state actors. We see a clear continuity between those presently viewed as unwilling and unable to obey the laws of war (unlawful combatants) and native communities in the historical past. But more tellingly, we also see the continuity of claims about provisional or incomplete sovereignty. Just as expansion into native land was not viewed as invasion
A. Rana
because of the limited control exercised by native peoples over their territory, contemporary American policymakers argue that you can use specic kinds of violence, like drone attacks, in places such as Yemen (whether or not they are a hostile nation), because Yemen is fundamentally a failed state. Using a drone attack in Yemen is different than using one in Germany or France given the underlying nature of the political community and existing institutional structures. The very persistence of claims even in the era of formal sovereign equality about provisional sovereignty suggests the embeddedness of settler frameworks in our national security narratives. One need look no further than the common security conversation about the dangers of asymmetrical conict. Now one might think, just as an objective fact, that the relevant asymmetry in our post-9/11 world not to mention the settler wars that Marshall discussed nearly 200 years ago is an asymmetry between a state that can organize tremendous resources to engage in largescale forms of violence and its far weaker foe. Moreover, this asymmetry is further compounded by the additional fact that the relevant state claims the sword of IHL (all its coercive legitimacy) but rejects most of the shields that might limit it (those protections guaranteed to rights-bearing subjects). But in point of fact that the argument about asymmetry is the one we have all been conditioned to accept by our national security discourse. This is the claim that the USA nds itself ghting wars at a military disadvantage due to existing rules of engagement. As we have seen, such a claim goes all the way back to the settler conicts and recurs time and again: in the late nineteenth century colonial wars in Asia and Africa, during independence struggles in the midtwentieth century, throughout the Cold War in the depiction of guerrillas, and of course at the present moment. Perhaps even more pointedly we see the continued power of classic colonial scripts in how the national security state has itself become the universal institutional form governing the connection between statecraft and warfare. One of the remarkable features of the early twenty-rst century is the practical elimination of alternative modes of political and social life, modes that proliferated at the time Marshall penned his opinion in Johnson v. MIntosh. Today, even in postcolonial settings, institutions marked by executive centralization, limited transparency, and a professional military increasingly denes modern decision making in the context of armed conict or presumed emergency. Indeed, there are tremendous incentives for previously colonized communities to adopt these dominant forms of statecraft; such forms not only help validate claims to territorial sovereignty but also greatly enhance the capacity of governments to mobilize resource, protect citizens, and (more ominously) suppress dissent. Still, at the end of the day one might say, what is the problem with either the dominance of the Westphalian state (particularly in its national security iteration) or an IHL regime that privileges state actors over non-state ones? Certainly belligerents during armed conicts that refuse to selflimit or do not respect reciprocity should be seen as problematic. But it is nonetheless worth noting that the dominance of the national security state its institutions and legal prerequisites comes at profound costs (and this is where I will end). To begin with, these structures drawn from the Westphalian model and adopted in colonized societies reinscribe historic conicts between settlers and natives but only now between what Antony Anghie has called the third and the fourth world (i.e. postcolonial states and local indigenous communities within them). In contemporary struggles over land and resources, precisely due to the logics of statecraft indigenous peoples often still nd themselves framed as outsiders without meaningful political legitimacy or full rights-bearing status. This leaves them in the remarkable position of facing threats and coercion in the post-independence period from previous anti-colonial allies. More generally, the global mimicry of a particular mode of statecraft tied to a colonial past and bound today to national security discourses has pointedly failed to produce a more peaceful global community, precisely what jurists like Marshall imagined would be the result of an international community of civilized Westphalian states. Instead, this form has generated an
insulated war-making apparatus, able to organize resources on a vast scale and engage in total war. Such power has been a recipe not only for truly brutal international conicts but also for the domestic application of violence against suspected internal enemies, often deemed terrorists. And in the post-9/11 American context, the persistence of ofcial claims about asymmetry, provisional sovereignty, and threats from failed states and non-state actors has in practice promoted greater not less instability at the present day edges of US power. Not unlike Marshalls old fears of ineradicable danger from native communities, these ofcial judgments have justied a continual project of expanding the American footprint into the frontier, a footprint that has left in its wake more local insurrections and even greater need for territorial presence. The ultimate result is a vicious cycle of temporary pacication and sustained conict, one sadly familiar to scholars of the American frontier but seemingly unrecognized by todays political elites.

The frontier as (movable) space of exception

Mark Rifkin
a a
The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC, USA Published online: 17 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Mark Rifkin , Settler Colonial Studies (2013): The frontier as (movable) space of exception, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.846393 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846393
The frontier as (movable) space of exception

Mark Rifkin
The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC, USA The essay explores the ways the idea of the frontier allows for settlers to envision a space within the boundaries of the state, yet beyond its jurisdiction. In this way, the concept of the frontier translates the ongoing institutional exceptionalization of Native peoples and lands into a space of settler possibility.
The frontier is not a juridical concept. As opposed to terms like public lands, homestead, municipality, it does not name a legal or administrative mapping. Unlike those other terms, it presents itself as a way of envisioning place beyond governmental requirements and categories, in the sense of not being beholden to them due to the lands location past the perimeters of ofcial oversight. It conjures the sense of a periphery not quite, or perhaps not yet, integrated into the bureaucratic web of the nations legal geography, past the edge of laws effective sphere of exercise. However, if the frontier in some sense lies beyond the reach of the juridical apparatus, that does not mean it occupies a relation exterior to the sovereignty of the state. The frontier is not foreign, or at least in envisioning somewhere as the frontier , it is not understood as geopolitically distinct and under the legitimate governance of another sovereign. Those entering the frontier as such do not conceptualize their movement and presence as an act of invasion. The frontier imaginary, then, conjures a space both inscribed within state sovereignty and in which the juridical structures of the state are suspended. In this way, frontier might be distinguished as a designation, or structure of feeling,1 from a term/concept like borderlands, with the latter s connotation of an area at the intersection of claims by multiple sovereign entities or over which political sovereignty is indeterminate. Given the location of the US frontier on Native lands, it could be read as a borderland, helping promote a transnationalist understanding of Indigenous polities, but to understand the territory as frontier, I want to suggest, is to conceptualize and experience it as if questions of sovereignty were not relevant. Even as it suspends the problem of entering alien territory under another political regime, the gure of the frontier suggests an inhabitance at the limits of law, entry into a space often characterized (especially from the perspective of the metropole) as lawless and as one of potential conict with non-citizen populations, which in the case of the US means Indians. That instability being within the sphere of state sovereignty but not covered by the normal legal principles of national law bespeaks the fundamental anxiety that animates the settler-state. Created over top of already existing polities through the institutional incorporation of their lands into/as the domestic space of an alien people, who recreate this space as home through that ongoing
M. Rifkin
imperial (re)production of nation-making, the settler-state, in the terms of Hawaiian scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask, forcibly change[s] the nationality of Indigenous peoples in their own homeland[s].2 The knowledge of the prior presence and continuing existence of Indigenous peoples in now-domestic space, though, enters settler law as the difculty of legitimizing the states jurisdiction over Native peoples. The attendant series of logical and normative confusions, contradictions, and crises generated by this problem leads to the legal and administrative construction of a state of exception for Native peoples.3 For Giorgio Agamben, the exception marks the process by which the sovereign ruler decides what is included in the juridical order and what is excluded from it, and [i]n this sense, the exception is the originary form of law.4 Native peoples are narrated as an exception from the regular categories of US law, such as through repeated insistence on it as a special, peculiar , anomalous area of jurisprudence and policy-making as well as the production of incoherent categories like domestic dependent nation,5 and this process can be seen as, in Agambens terms, a form of sovereign violence which opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law.6 The potential disjuncture in US jurisdiction opened by the presence of nonnational entities with claims to land ostensibly inside the nation is sutured over by proclaiming an overriding sovereignty that supposedly alleviates the potential conict between US and Native mappings. Presented as simply logically following from Native peoples residence on, in the words of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), territory admitted to compose a part of the United States,7 the invocation of sovereignty casts them as exceptional, an aberration from the normal operation of law but one contained within the broader sphere of US national authority. US political discourses seek to contain the instability of the settler-state by repeatedly declaring the nations geopolitical unity, but at moments when that avowal is brought into crisis by the continuing presence and operation of Native polities, the topos of sovereignty emerges. As Judith Butler suggests, it is not that sovereignty exists as a possession that the US is said to have Grammar defeats us here. Sovereignty is what is tactically produced through the very mechanism of its self-justication.8 While it rhetorically appears to validate or underwrite US law, the gure of sovereignty results from the exception, making possible the founding of the regime of domestic policy. US authority over Native peoples cannot be derived from the constitutional order of law, instead tracing a threshold on the basis of which outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter into those complex topological relations that make the validity of the juridical order possible.9 From that perspective, settler-state sovereignty can be viewed less as an expression of the nations rightful control over the land within its boundaries than as the topological production of the impression of boundedness by rendering peculiar , anomalous, unique, special competing claims to place and collectivity by Indigenous peoples. I want to suggest that the notion of the frontier translates the juridical problem of settler sovereignty into a broader, ostensibly nonjuridical, imaginary in which settler subjects can envision a kind of space beyond the political authority of the state but yet not within that of another state or polity. In other words, the assignment of Native peoples to a state of exception by the settler-state, making possible the (re)production of US sovereignty and the domestic space of the nation, also opens up an imaginative space for settler speculation. From this perspective, the prior and ongoing exceptionalization of Native peoples creates the potential for non-natives to inhabit that space as their own but as less a relation of state-sanctioned ownership than of a supposedly ajurisdictional and politically unmediated experience of place. Although others, most notably Patrick Wolfe, have characterized settler colonialism as a process of extermination and replacement,10 the logic of exception as I am framing it works a bit differently. More than allowing non-natives to take up legally recognized property rights on Native lands, the process
of exception helps coalesce and catalyze the popular sense of a space within the sovereignty of the nation but yet not subject to constitutional order. Here, proximity to Indians or engagement in supposedly Indian-like behavior can signal entry into the place of exception in which non-natives can conjure an escape from the state its modes of selfhood, regulations, codications without the difculty (logistical and moral) of envisioning that movement as invasion/conquest. In this way, the frontier has less to do with particular plots of land or regions than with a concept/feeling that persists as a means of designating a particular settler structure of feeling, one that requires the existence of a place paradoxically within the state yet beyond it. That fantasized experience of freedom, and the anxieties that attend it (lacking the comfort of the known and ordered routines and expectations made possible by the rule of law), translates the prior exceptionalization of Native lands as the space of settler potentiality. The sovereign violence of the settler-states tortured self-legitimation provides the basis for the settler sensation of possible self-elaboration beyond law and politics, for which Indians serve as the sign and (in Jodi Byrds terms) the transit.11 This frontier-effect can be thought of as existing on what might be termed a spectrum of exception. The feeling by settlers of the potential for a legally unmediated relation to place extends beyond the frontier to other notions, such as nature or the wilderness. Henry David Thoreaus essay Walking suggests such a connection.12 In speak[ing] a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness (149), Thoreau posits walking as a means of moving beyond the sedimented conventions of civilization to be found in cities and towns. He claims that in moving from a bean-eld into the forest, politics is forgotten (154). This search for wildness in the wilderness, he suggests, is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving (158), and thus, the walker represents the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow (159). He insists, The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild (162).13 Here, the frontier and nature merge as ways of guring an escape from tradition and from the state, entering into an untamed space that exceeds the regulated possibilities to be found in more settled areas. He notes of his own trip west of the Mississippi that he beheld the Indians moving west (162), later adding that the very winds blew the Indians corneld into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow (166). This line of discussion culminates in the assertion, The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet (168). The wildness of the wilderness and the West derives from the prior inhabitance of the savage in those spaces. The settler takes up the Natives status as exception in order to inhabit a place envisioned as extrajuridical occupying a sovereignty-less space but one that actually is produced by the contortions of settler sovereignty in its engagement with Indigenous presence and peoplehood.14 This sensation of exception might provide a comparative frame for addressing the ways the legal logics of the settler-state become part of popular experience, including analysis of how processes and technologies of exception are circulated among settler-states. Tying settlement to the production of a state of exception also can bracket the equation of settlement with whiteness (understood as a specic racialized subject position and/or a particular regime of possession/ self-possession),15 a connection which can work well for analyzing Anglophone settler colonialism but that does not capture other forms (such as in Latin America and postcolonial Asia and Africa).16 In order to encompass the dynamics of dispossessing and managing Indigenous peoples by states without a dominant white class and not organized around Anglo notions of property, thereby allowing both for more comparative work and scholarly discourse perhaps more attuned to forms of international Indigenous rights and solidarity movements working across different languages and legal congurations, a more exible framework may be necessary.17
4 Notes
1. 2. 3.
M. Rifkin
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
13.
14.
On structures of feeling, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in HawaiI (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 30. For engagements with Agamben within Indigenous studies, see Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 185220; Mark Rifkin, Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the Peculiar Status of Native Peoples, Cultural Critique 72 (Fall 2009): 88124; Karen Shaw, Creating/Negotiating Interstices: Indigenous Sovereignties, in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, ed. Jenny Edkins, Vronique Pin-Fat, and Michael J. Shapiro (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16587. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (1995; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 19, 26. See Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 US 1 (1831). Agamben, Homo Sacer, 64. Cherokee Nation, 17. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 82. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 19. See Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (New York: Cassell, 1999). See Byrd, Transit. Henry David Thoreau, Walking, in The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Lewis Hyde (New York: North Point Press, 2002), 14778. Further citations will be parenthetical. For readings of Thoreaus work, including Walking, as expressing ecocritical consciousness, see see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); John R. Knott, Imagining Wild America: Wilderness and Wildness in the Writings of John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martins Press, 2000); David M. Robinson, Natural Life: Thoreaus Worldly Transcendentalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). On the essays relation to manifest destiny, see Richard J. Schneider, Climate Does Thus React on Man: Wildness and Geographic Determinism in Thoreaus Walking, in Thoreaus Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 4460. On the dialectic between the wild and wilderness in Thoreaus writing, see Jane Bennett, Thoreaus Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994); Thomas L. Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Knott, Imagining, 4982; McKusick, Green Writing, 14169; Schneider, Climate; Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). In Thoreaus Nature, Jane Bennett reads his account of nature as a heteroverse (one that does not form a unied or self-sufcient whole [xx]), and Sharon Cameron has argued that Thoreaus writing, particularly his journal, reveals a process of making nature strange, as a site of difference, deferring, and alterity that challenges efforts to claim knowledge about the world (Writing Nature: Henry Thoreaus Journal [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985]). However, such claims about the potential for difference/newness to be found within nature, still conceived as a kind of place within the political space of the nation yet somehow unaffected by those politics (thus providing a means of escaping the nations sovereignty), strike me as continuing to rely on the frontier effect, which I argue itself arises from the exceptionalization of Native peoples. While I cannot ll out this claim here, I also suspect that recent work in affect theory that posits nonconcious affect as a site for the emergence of the new/potential within an otherwise regularized spaced, rather than understanding affect as also and mainly part of the processual production of regularity, also takes part in the kind of frontier effects that I am addressing. For examples, see Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary; Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, An Inventory of Shimmers, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 125; and Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press,
15.
16.
17.
2007). On this tendency to see affect as newness/change, see Ben Anderson, Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of Total War, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 16185. For a powerful example of such work, see Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Whiteness, Epistemology, and Indigenous Representation, in Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004), 7588; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Writing Off Indigenous Sovereignty: The Discourse of Security and Patriarchal White Sovereignty, in Sovereign Selves: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2007), 86102. Patrick Wolfes denition of settler colonialism as elimination/replacement, as contrasted with labor extraction, also may describe Anglophone models but speaks less well to other modes (especially those arising out of Hispanophone legal and colonial traditions). See Alison Brysk, From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and International Relations in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 17001850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Mara Josena Saldaa-Portillo, How Many Mexicans [Is] a Horse Worth?: The League of United Latin American Citizens, Desegregation Cases, and Chicano Historiography, in Settler Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein and Alex Lubin, SAQ 107.4 (2008), 80932; Patricia Seed, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). On such movements, see S. James Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Brysk, From Tribal Village; Claire Charters and Rudolfo Stavenhagen, eds., Making the Declaration Work: The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 2010); Karen Engle, The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Maivn Clech Lm, At the Edge of the State: Indigenous Peoples and Self-Determination (Ardsley, New York: Transnational, 2000); Nelson, Finger; Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Commentary: Settler colonial studies and the North American frontier

John Mack Faragher
a a
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Published online: 17 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: John Mack Faragher , Settler Colonial Studies (2013): Commentary: Settler colonial studies and the North American frontier, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.846389 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846389
COMMENTARY Settler colonial studies and the North American frontier

John Mack Faragher
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Settler colonial studies offer a valuable perspective on the history of the North American frontier. Although the comparative study of settler colonies was an important project of American historians in the 1970s, it was not until the eld had developed in Australia in the 1990s that it became an important part of historical practice in the USA. Applying the model to the history of the earliest settler colonies in North America, however, suggests the need to rethink the implicit assumptions and premises of the concept of settler colonialism.
In one way or another, nearly all my historical work has focused on settlers in North America. Yet I must confess that until quite recently I was barely acquainted with comparative historical work on settler colonialism, and even less familiar with work that theorizes and problematizes that concept. Reading these roundtable contributions, as well as the larger body of work they engage, offered an opportunity to assess the relationship between two separate historiographies, one focusing on the North American frontier and the other on the transnational phenomena of settler colonialism. As I have often remarked to students, my goal as a historian has been to understand the frontier history of North American as a chapter in the global history of colonialism. Indeed, that was the starting point for historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who declared, in his eld-dening essay of 1893, that American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. When my students read this line, it provokes a discussion about the meaning of the term colonization. And that discussion, in turn, recongures their notion of frontier.1 This essay begins with an attempt to dene terms, moves to a consideration of the rst histories of settler colonialism and their impact on historical practice in Australia and the USA, and concludes by an examination of two early American frontiers. Settler colonial studies, I conclude, offer a valuable new perspective on the history of the North American frontier. In turn, the diversity of North America frontier history suggests the need to broaden the concept of settler colonialism. If colonization denotes the acquisition of foreign territory by a metropole, and colony the political organization of such territory, colonialism refers to the relations of dominance and subordination within colonial society. In this regard, scholars of colonialism recognize an important distinction between exploitation and settler colonies. As an ideal type, colonialism in exploitation colonies such as British India, Dutch Indonesia, or the American Philippines was characterized by the relationship between colonial ofcialdom and the indigenous masses, which provided the colonial labor power. Settler colonies, however, included a third group, the settler families who came to stay and often became the colonial majority, dispossessing and displacing the native population. There is considerably more to say about this distinction, but for starters it is worth noting that in contrast to the binary concept of the frontier, focusing on relationships between indigenes and invaders, settler colonialism posits a ternary model of relations among
J.M. Faragher
metropole elites, colonial settlers, and aboriginal peoples. The ideal type of settler colonialism offers a considerably more subtle and malleable conception of social relations than does the standard conception of the frontier, which as Mark Rifkin suggests, in his provocative contribution to this roundtable, may be better understood as a settler imaginary.2 The phrase settler colonialism, rst appeared in the discourse of decolonization in the years following World War II, particularly in reference to places such as Algeria, Rhodesia, South Africa, Israel/Palestine, and Northern Ireland. But it was not until the late 1960s that scholars began to write about settler colonialism as a category of analysis. The rst extended discussion with implications for historians was a remarkable 1972 essay in New Left Review by Arghiri Emmanuel, a Greek-born political economist living and working in France, best known for his work on global unequal exchange. In his succinct yet expansive piece, Emmanuel argued that settler colonies were among the rst overseas enclaves established in the modern history of imperialism, and that ultimately they proved to be, in his words, the worst of all, that is, the most violent and intractable. Englands rst colony, sixteenth-century Ireland, was invaded by thousands of Anglo settlers who established themselves on land seized from the native Irish. Over subsequent centuries, Emmanuel noted, the two communities have not been able to take the least step towards integration. It was, he argued, a striking example of the irrevocable nature of the antagonism between invading settlers and indigenous peoples.3 Yet, Emmanuel noted, theorists of colonialism and imperialism, beginning with Hobson and Lenin, largely ignored the critical role settlers played as independent imperial agents. He chided his fellow Marxists for their simplistic notion of colonialism as an uncomplicated binary between the undifferentiated colonizer and the colonized. It was crucial, he argued, to incorporate settlers into classical descriptions of the class struggle, in order to appreciate the contradictions that developed between settlers and colonial authorities. Throughout the modern history of colonialism, he argued, settlers had waged a two-front struggle: unyieldingly and wholeheartedly against the natives, but also very violently against the great capitalists back home. The most intractable problem for imperial authorities, Emmanuel believed, had not been with the natives in their colonies but with their own settlers. The outcome had been decisive. If England is a second-class power today, this is due to her defeat in a conict of this type and the subsequent founding of the United States. Without this, North America would now be an ex-colony of Red Indians recently promoted to independence and still exploited by England. Not only was Emmanuel among the rst to elaborate on settler colonialism as an analytic concept, he also extended the concept to the North American colonies that would become the USA and suggested that the American Revolution was a settlers revolt.4 Emmanuels ideas were soon being pursued by a number of historians working in the comparative mode. One of the rst into print was Donald Denoon, an African historian, born in Scotland and raised in South Africa, where as a young student he joined the multiracial Liberal Party. In the early 1960s he went to Cambridge for graduate study, writing a dissertation on British imperial policy in the Transvaal. He married an Australian biochemist and once they began having children Denoon decided that he was unwilling to return home to apartheid. South Africa was still no place for my kind of history, Denoon writes, or our kind of children. He took a position at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, where he taught for a number of years. Then, in the aftermath of Idi Amins 1971 coup he moved to the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), before eventually landing a tenured position at the Australian National University in Canberra. His work was animated by the decolonizing spirit of these times and places. It was the questions of his students at UPNG, Denoon writes, that encouraged him to undertake the comparative study of settler colonialism. Why was it, they asked, that while they worked as hard and as cleverly as anyone else, they were so poor and the Australians so rich? In 1979, Denoon published the rst results of his project, an essay entitled Understanding
Settler Societies that compared settler colonialism in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. Four years later he nished his important (but neglected) monograph, Settler Capitalism. The planting of settlement colonies, Denoon noted, occurred in temperate North America as well as temperate South America, in Siberia as well as Australia and southern Africa. Not only did these phenomena resemble each other, they were quite different from the common experience of tropical regions. He carefully traced relations among the three major social divisions of settler colonialism indigenes, settlers, and ofcials of the metropole capitalist state. Amid local, regional, and ethnic variations, he discerned a global pattern that included the colonies that became the USA.5 Meanwhile, historians in North America also turned to the comparative study of settler colonialism. R. Cole Harris and Leonard Guelke, historical geographers at the University of Toronto, collaborated on a comparative study of French settlers in New France and Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope that resulted in a series of suggestive articles published in the late 1970s. In 1981, George M. Fredrickson published a celebrated comparative history of race relations in South Africa and the USA. And that same year Howard R. Lamar, historian of the American West (one of my mentors), and Leonard Thompson, a historian of Africa, published an edited collection of essays on the comparative frontier histories of South Africa and North America, the result of a long-running seminar at Yale University joined by many visiting scholars, including Guelke and Fredrickson. While these three projects focused on different problems and adopted differing methodological approaches, they reached conclusions similar to Denoons regarding the early history of settlement colonialism.6 The settlement colonies they examined were peopled by European migrants who permanently relocated to obtain cheap land. In all the three cases, the modus operandi of settlers was the same: seizing the estate of indigenous inhabitants and putting it to their own productive use, a struggle that resulted in decades of violent conict with indigenous peoples, ending either in the violent destruction of native communities or their forced migration to conned homeland reserves under colonial domination. In contrast to their complex and hierarchical European societies of origin, settler societies developed into relatively simple, egalitarian, and family-centered communities. The weakness of colonial agricultural markets meant that most settler production was for local use, yet authorities dened imperial objectives in terms of trade and commerce. Conicting economic interests between metropole elites and settlers led to settler revolts and the creation of independent led to settler states. (Learning this lesson during the American Revolution, Great Britain authorized forms of self-government for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in the nineteenth century.) Yet, while escaping the imperial control of a distant metropole, the settler state continued the practice of dispossessing indigenes and incorporating their land into the settler domain, with state authorities and settlers themselves frequently reenacting the same conicts over squatting on public lands or dispersing native peoples by violent means. These conclusions were strengthened by a number of comparative studies of contemporary settler states, including important works by Ronald Weitzer, Thomas G. Mitchell, and David Prochaska. Settler colonialism, Weitzer concluded, was characterized by three historical imperatives: the establishment of total control over indigenous populations, the maintenance of an ideology of caste solidarity among settlers, and the achievement of political independence from the metropole. Unfortunately, these contemporary studies failed to connect with the historical work of Harris/Guelke, Lamar/Thompson, or Fredrickson. I had to create my own theory as I went along, Mitchell wrote, since none existed that specically referred to settler states. Prochaska noted the ubiquity of the phrase settler colonialism but complained that no one to date has shown exactly how settlers are signicant, or established satisfactorily settler colonialism as an important and legitimate subtype of imperialism and colonialism. Despite an impressive array
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of scholarship, there had been little cumulative effect. In the early 1990s there was, as yet, no distinct eld of settler colonial studies.7 The eld took shape during the 1990s in Australia, where settler colonial studies had their greatest impact. Following the lead of Donald Denoon, a number of important histories of Australian settler capitalism had appeared in the 1980s. But it was the new critical histories of settler indigenous relations that really shook things up. It began with the 1981 history by Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, which Reynolds followed with a whole shelf of books and articles on the conict between settlers and indigenous peoples. Reynolds deeply inuenced the perspective of other Australian historians, including Lydall Ryan (the violent settler campaigns against indigenous Tasmanians), Richard Broome (the continuing struggle of Aboriginal peoples for justice), and Bain Attwood (the construction of Aboriginal identity). Their work was provoked by and in conversation with the continuing human rights campaign of Aboriginal Australians themselves, which gained public prominence during protests accompanying the celebration of the bicentennial of Australian settlement in 1988. In 1992, basing its decision on the new histories of settler colonialism, the High Court of Australia, ruling on a suit brought by an Aboriginal man named Eddie Mabo, rejected the legal doctrine of terra nullius that had justied the dispossession of Aboriginal communities and ruled in favor of native title under common law.8 Political reaction quickly followed. In 1993, Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey kicked off what would become known as the History Wars, criticizing the new scholarship for what he termed was its black armband view of Australian history. Conservative Prime Minister John Howard picked up the phrase, caricaturing the new history as little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. Historical politics continued to roil Australia for years afterward, but settler-colonial scholarship thrived amid the controversy. In a 1995 essay, Donald Denoon argued that his earlier work in Settler Capitalism had underplayed the agency of indigenous peoples in the history of settler colonialism. The struggle was unequal but not one-sided, he wrote. Every advance was in some degree negotiated, even when it was also enforced by violence. Denoons essay was a sign of the elds full emergence. Five years later, in what would become a kind of manifesto of settler-colonial studies, anthropologist Patrick Wolfe summarized the consensus. Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies, he wrote. The split tensing reects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizer came to stay invasion is a structure not an event.9 Twenty years earlier Donald Denoon had criticized what he characterized as a tradition of self-imposed isolation among Australian historians, and called for new approaches to reintegrate Australia into the history of humanity. The rise of settler colonial studies transformed the practice of Australian history, which now assumed must know status for historians of settler colonialism. By the late 1990s historian Tom Grifths of Australian National University, with only a mild sense of irony, could entitle the introduction to a collection of essays on the history of settler societies, Towards an Australian History of the World.10 It was soon thereafter that settler colonial studies rst entered American historiographic discourse in earnest. In 2002, Australian historian Ian Tyrell proposed that American history can be reconsidered in the context of the history of settler societies, arguing that such a project would be productive of a more cosmopolitan version of the past, with less rigid boundaries between the local, regional, national, and global. Michael Adas made a similar argument in the American Historical Review that same year, arguing particularly for the positive impact such a move would have on the history of the American West by demonstrating that expansion in the United States was by no means exceptional, but represented one example of a distinct variation on a more general pattern of population movement that has recurred over much of the globe throughout human history.11
But historians of the American West have paid relatively little attention to this appeal. That is unfortunate, since the settler colonies in North America had much in common with others that came later: the seizure of land and its conversion to private property; the destruction, forced migration, or removal of indigenous communities; the assertion of ideological justications for dispossession and repossession; the structural antagonism between settler and imperial actors; the development of creole settler cultures; and the construction of a doubled settler identity as both colonizer and colonized. As Laura J. Mitchell, a historian of frontier South Africa, writes in her contribution to this roundtable, the study of global settler colonialism illuminates the local in new ways, or helps us see connections across regions that we had previously overlooked. Yet few historians of the American frontier have explicitly utilized the model of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism in North American developed many distinctive features, but a couple of examples will sufce to make the point. By the late seventeenth century the southern colonies had fully committed to the slave labor system, resulting in a distinctive course of social and cultural development in which landed Indian proprietors were pushed aside in order to introduce enslaved African laborers. And by the early eighteenth century a pattern had developed in the middle colonies of drawing settlers from a wide range of European societies, adding ethnic divisions among settlers to the relational complications of colonialism. The point is: these developments emerge as distinctive only when explored in comparison with other settler colonies. Raising comparative questions is the best insurance against parochialism, as well as its ideological twin, exceptionalism. Settler colonial studies have had somewhat more impact on the history of the early American republic, helping to illuminate the apparent contradiction of anti-imperial colonialism what Thomas Jefferson called the Empire for Liberty. The American settler state was founded on the promise of westward expansion, and the colonization of vast areas of the continent intensied as settlers moved across the Appalachians into the great Mississippi Valley, waged wars of extirpation against indigenous peoples, and pushed the national state to enact a comprehensive policy of Indian Removal. Postcolonial theory problematizing the experience, consciousness, and practice of historical actors in the aftermath of formal imperial independence raises intriguing questions about the continuation of settler colonialism under new auspices. Three insightful recent histories examine the American case. In The Two Faces of American Freedom (and in his fascinating contribution to this roundtable), Azia Rana explores the legal and ideological history of the American settler state. In Settler Sovereignty, Lisa Ford compares the concept of political sovereignty in the emerging settler states of the USA and Australia. And in Replenishing the Earth, James Belish places the American experience in the context of what he terms the global settler revolution of the nineteenth century. It is worth noting that Ford is an Australian and Belish is a New Zealander.12 It is American Indian Studies that has been most affected by settler colonial studies. Pathbreaking works by Jeffrey Ostler, Ned Blackhawk, Pekka Hmlinen, Margaret Jacobs, and Jodi A. Byrd have utilized the concept in diverse and sophisticated ways. And what was a mere trickle of peer-reviewed articles only a few years ago has become a surging stream. The problem of settler colonialism has certainly been a preoccupation of the continents indigenous peoples over the entire course of American history. Frederick E. Hoxie, distinguished historian of the American Indian experience and former director of the DArcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library, argues that focusing on settler colonialism offers a way of reframing North American history, moving American Indians from the margin to the center. Viewing indigenous groups as participants in an ongoing contest with settler colonialism, he writes, brings a wide array of Native American experiences into focus and encourages scholars to look beyond single tribes or culture areas.13
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Some of this new work, however, fails to invoke the ternary model that distinguishes the settler colonial concept, replacing it with what the author of one recent essay calls the native/ settler binary. This collapses the important distinction between settlers on the ground and the elites at the level of the state or metropole and prevents a full understanding of the dynamics of settler colonialism. Settlers not only displaced natives, but also settler cultures frequently claimed native status for themselves in their conicts with elites. Without examining the conicts and contradictions in the relationships between settlers and elites, such moves may seem to be tendentious hypocrisy and nothing more. Colonialism is not a matter of good guys and bad guys, Patrick Wolfe cautions. But reducing the cast of characters to two principal players tends to move us in that direction.14 Some scholars have trouble with the term settler itself. Anne E. Coombes speaks for numerous critics when she writes that the word has about it a deceptively benign and domesticated ring which masks the violence of colonial encounters. True enough. I have engaged in numerous discussions with colleagues and students on the problematics of this nomenclature. But the fact is, the work of elision the word performs began with its coinage. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) denes it as one who settles a new country, and suggests seventeenth-century North American origins for the term. Indeed, the earliest colonial example, dated 1683 (13 years before the rst quotation cited by the OED), culled from Early English Books Online, is a reference to Captain John Smith as the rst setler [sic] of the Plantation of New-England in the Reign of King James. The term settlement came rst. In 1599, Richard Hakluyt quoted the adventurer Ralph Lane speaking of the island of Roanoke as the place of our settlement or inhabitati [sic], and in 1625 Samuel Purchas wrote of the men of the Virginia Company making a settlement and habitation on the Chesapeake. Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson of the University of Queensland conclude that the term settler itself was, and always has been, tendentious and polemical , [a] part of the process of invasion. The invasion of North America by the English entailed the creation of a colonial model that differed from the Iberian pattern of armed conquest of centralized civilizations and the extraction of wealth from indigenous workers. The Anglophone literature of planting which included the invention of its own distinct terminology (the word settler has no cognate in French, Spanish, or Dutch) charts a history of colonial intentions and outcomes.15 Other historians worry that focusing on the independent role of settlers tends to lavish renewed and theoretically energized attention on the population that needs it least. But as Johnston and Lawson insist, the settler subject is a crucial site for the investigation of colonial power at work. Neglecting to investigate the society and culture of settlers, they argue, would have the effect of bracketing off from examination the very location where the processes of colonial power are most visible. Settler colonialism was a messy business, and scholars require concepts with sufcient subtlety to parse their histories.16 Indeed, applying the settler colonial concept to the North American frontier might require some rethinking of the implicit assumptions and premises of the concept itself. In their contributions to this roundtable, Jodi A. Byrd and Margaret Jacobs criticize the model for its inexibility. The complicated lived experience of the North American frontier, Jacobs writes, could enrich some settler colonial formulations. Indeed, the varieties of settler colonialism in North America stretch the concept in some unexpected directions. Consider the colonization efforts along the Delaware River in the years before William Penn founded his proprietary colony in the 1680s. Several decades after Henry Hudsons initial voyage up the river in 1609, the native Lenni Lenape people had not been displaced by the settlers of the New Sweden colony. Although there were certainly tensions between settlers and indigenes, including periodic violence on both sides, most conicts were settled through negotiation and accommodation. Relatively peaceful relations between Delaware valley natives and European
newcomers were the norm rather than the exception. In a letter to his sister in Sweden, written in the 1690s, elderly settler Peter Gunnarsson Rambo, who had lived along the Delaware for nearly half a century, contrasted his situation with those in neighboring colonies. We live in Harmony, Love, and Loyalty with the Indians, he wrote, when the surrounding countries and neighbors have been greatly forced by the Indians, and I must say in truth that God has strangely kept and protected us and had a singular care for us in this heathen land. What Rambo attributed to Gods grace, historians may trace to the circumstances of European colonization and local conditions on the ground.17 The Delaware Valley of the early seventeenth century was an intensely competitive region. Rivalry between riverine Algonquian-speaking Lenapes and inland Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks for access to Dutch trade goods at New Netherland produced local ghting that by the 1630s had depopulated the west bank of the Delaware. Thus when Swedish and Finnish settlers arrived in 1638 to found the rst outpost of the New Sweden colony, they found the area open to settlement. They did not displace or antagonize native communities because, for the moment, there were none. The Lenapes, in fact, welcomed the Swedish colony as a convenient source of goods as well as a buffer against continued Susquehannock raiding. Settlers devoted themselves to growing tobacco, while Lenapes supplied them with foodstuffs in exchange for trade goods. The motley mix of Finnish and Swedish settlers, with the addition of a few English and Dutch, did not exceed four or ve hundred persons during the seventeenth century, so there was more than enough land for both settlers and indigenes.18 A pattern of dispersed living seems to have characterized both settlers and indigenes. For one thing, that may have lessened the impact of epidemic disease. Colonial ofcials recorded outbreaks, but no great decline in the size of the Lenape population before the 1680s. Disease, in itself was not capable of destroying the Lenapes, writes Gunlog Maria Fur, in one of the few recent histories of New Sweden. To do that epidemics had to enter into an interplay with threats against subsistence, politics, and culture . Recovery from epidemics was possible as long as these other threats against the societys infrastructure were limited.19 Evidence suggests that rather than assaulting Lenape infrastructure, settlers insinuated themselves within it, mingling with indigenous communities on the land. The savages and our Swedes are like one people, noted one observer. Settlers and Lenapes communicated using a jargon or pidgin based on the southern Lenape dialect of Algonquian and incorporating Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English words. The Lenapes called the Scandinavians nattappi, meaning those who are like us, reserving the word sanaares or alien for other Europeans. Although the colonial archive makes no mention of formal settler-Indian marriages, it does provide evidence of sexual intimacy. A number of settler men cohabited with native women in Lenape households, and in the words of a contemporary, liken more and more to the Indians. Peter Kalm, who traveled through the region in the early eighteenth century, was told that the Swedes were already half Indians when the English arrived in the year 1682.20 The colonial establishment of New Sweden was extremely weak and unable to prevent such interactions. Governor Johan Printz, a professional soldier and veteran of the Thirty Years War, arrived at New Sweden in 1643 and was not pleased with what he found. He did not like the Lenapes, nor the easy way settlers interacted with them. He wrote home requesting a force of 200 men in order to break the necks of every Indian on the river, reasoning that once they were exterminated we could take possession of the places which are the most fruitful that the savages now possess. Sometimes aggressive intentions came from colonial ofcials rather than settlers. But Printzs request was denied and he was forced to curb his pretensions. So weak was his authority that conicts between settlers and Indians were frequently adjudicated according to Lenape custom.21
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Another factor that may have contributed to the harmonious settler experience in the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley was the remarkable compatibility between the material cultures of Scandinavians and Lenapes. Swedes and Finns were the only European settlers who came to North America with a hunting tradition, were accustomed to building with logs and practiced forms of shifting cultivation. They, thus, found themselves in remarkable accord with the similar strategies of the woodland Lenapes. The settlers of New Sweden, in the words of cultural geographers Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups, were culturally preadapted to life on the Indian frontier. During the relative peace of the seventeenth century, the Delaware Valley became the cultural hearth for the development of a composite frontier material culture adopted by settlers and Indians alike. Settlers took to growing Indian corn and hunting in the woods while Indians adopted the use of metal tools and began to build log shelters for themselves.22 New Sweden was conquered by the Dutch and incorporated into New Netherland in 1655. But the local settler-Lenape accord continued until the 1680s when the rst of tens of thousands of settlers began arriving in Pennsylvania. Penns treaty so famously recorded in Benjamin Wests celebratory painting of 1771 and evoked in Peaceable Kingdom folk art of Edward Hicks in the early nineteenth century might be reinterpreted as marking an ending rather than a beginning. The end of a contrasting variety of settler colonialism: no painful dialectic of dispossession and repossession, no Indian hating, and a closer association between native and settler than between settler and overlord. The irony, of course, is that the signal accomplishment of this colonial formation the composite material culture developed in the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley was adopted by many of the settlers of Pennsylvania and eventually fueled a powerful juggernaut of classic settler colonialism that swept across the continent over the next 150 years. Consider another example from early North America, the French settler colony of Acadia, established in the early seventeenth century, roughly the same time English colonists were settling Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Like the Delaware Valley, Acadia was a highly contested region. French colonial authority, which was already weak, was further undercut by the violent intrusions of the English, who also laid claim to what they called Nova Scotia. A Puritan eet from Boston captured the colony in 1654 and maintained nominal control for the next 16 years. France regained possession in 1670, lost it once again to New England from 1690 to 1697, then permanently lost the colony to Great Britain in 1710, during Queen Annes War. Weak colonial authority left French settlers to their own devices. And how did those settlers conduct themselves? Just as on the Delaware, in Acadia there was a considerable amount of mingling between settlers and the native people, the Mkmaqs. The two peoples came to think of themselves as kindred, in much the same way that Scandinavians and Lenapes did. A jargon based on the Mkmaq dialect of Algonquin became the lingua franca of Acadia. And there was a material side to this accommodation as well. Ceding the wooded uplands to the native Mkmaq for their migratory hunting, shing, and gathering, the settlers conned themselves to the coastal lowlands where the tidal variation is one of the greatest in the world. In one of the more remarkable developments in the history of the colonization of North America, French settlers developed a distinctive practice of diking the tidal marshlands to create pastures and elds. This was no small task, and required the energies of the entire community. It sealed a pattern of good relations with the Mkmaq, for instead of moving onto native lands the settlers created land of their own without infringing on the native estate. I will not go into the subsequent history of the Acadian settlers, a subject I have treated at length elsewhere. The point I want to make is simply that the settler colonies of Acadia and New Sweden differ in important ways from typical settler societies. Both represented seventeenth-century variants of what would become the dominant type of settler colonialism. One might object that these were anomalies. But how do we know that when the comparative
history of settler colonialism has only just begun? We need detailed studies of settler formations in different times and places. Two examples are not a sufcient base for generalization, although the history of these two marginal colonies suggests that a combination of weak colonial authority, competition among imperial powers, strong but welcoming indigenous societies, and relatively small settler populations could produce unexpected outcomes. Our theory needs to be good enough to extend to the margins.23 For decades Australian courts understood the legal title to land in only one way, from the perspective of the settlers. Then, with the Mabo Case, they acknowledged the importance of seeing things from the native point of view as well. If Australian judges can acknowledge co-existing value systems in the same territory, writes Donald Denoon, historians must also try to do so. Here we have the abstract doctrine of post-modernism made tangible, generating parallel narratives about the same physical space. We need good theory, but that alone does not make for good history. It certainly helps, says Denoon, but it has no value without three qualities which are hard to teach but vital to cultivate: imagination in asking questions, passion in researching them, and poetry in expression.24 Notes
1. The Signicance of the Frontier in American History, in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Signicance of the Frontier in American History and Other Essays, ed. John Mack Faragher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 31. I undertook a self-directed crash course in settler colonial studies while preparing for a colloquium entitled Settler Colonialism in Comparative Perspective, convened in the spring of 2008 by professors Caroline Ford and Gabriel Piterberg, under the sponsorship of the Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles. Jurgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (1995; 2nd English edition, Princeton: Marcus Wiener, 2005), 411. Arghiri Emmanuel, White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism, New Left Review 73 (MayJune 1972): 3557, quotes 467. Two signicant studies of settler colonialism preceded Emmanuel: Maxime Rodinson, Israel, Fait Colonial?, Les Temps Moderne 253 (June 1967): 1788, later revised and published in English as Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York: Monad Press, 1973), and George Jabbour, Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and the Middle East (Khartoum: University of Khartoum, 1970), both of which employed the concept of settler colonialism in a comparative frame, but without Emmanuels historical sweep. For another account of the emergence of settler colonialism as a category of analysis see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: Career of a Concept, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2013): 31333. Emmanuel, White-Settler Colonialism, 3840. In 1970 civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael argued that the United States originated as a settler colony; see Baltimore, African-American, April 4, 1970 and Chicago Defender, April 21, 1970. Douglas Denoon, An Accidental Historian, The Journal of Pacic Studies 20 (1996): 20912; Denoon, Understanding Settler Societies, Historical Studies 18 (1979): 51127; Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). About the same time, Kenneth Good, a colleague of Denoons at UPNG, was writing analytical essays on settler colonialism in Kenya, Algeria, South Africa, and Rhodesia, but his focus was contemporary rather than historical; see Good, Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation, The Journal of Modern African Studies 14 (1976): 597620. R. Cole Harris and Leonard Guelke, Land and Society in Early Canada and South Africa, Journal of Historical Geography 3 (1977): 13553; R. Cole Harris, The Simplication of Europe Overseas, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (1977): 46983; Leonard Guelke, The Making of Two Frontier Communities: Cape Colony in the Eighteenth Century, Historical Reections/Rexions Historiques 12 (1985): 41948; George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Howard R. Lamar and Leonard Thompson, The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); Lamar, Editing and Publishing The Frontier in History with Leonard Thompson, 19711981, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 7 (2004): 14.
2. 3.
4. 5.
6.
10
7.
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Ronald Weitzer, Transforming Settler States: Communal Conict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 268; Thomas G. Mitchell, Black Faces, White Heads: Internal Settlements in Southern Africa (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1990); Mitchell, review of Weitzer, Transforming Settler States, The Journal of African Studies 31 (1993): 715; David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bne, 18701920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7. Settler capitalism: Brian Head, ed., State and Economy in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983); Philip McMichael, Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Ricardo E. Gerardi, Australia, Argentina and World Capitalism: A Comparative Analysis, 18301945 (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1985). Settler-indigenous conict: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Townsville, QLD: James Cook University, 1981); Lyndall Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1981); Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance, 17881980 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982); Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989). Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 137; Denoon, Settler Capitalism Unsettled, New Zealand Journal of History 29 (1995): 129 41(132); Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 2. Donald Denoon, The Isolation of Australian History, Historical Studies 22 (1986): 25260 (252); Tom Grifths and Libby Robbin, Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1987). Ian Tyrell, Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies, and the Internationalization of American History, in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 16891; Michael Adas, From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History, American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 16921720 (1712). Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 17881836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); James Belish, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Pekka Hmlinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 18801940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Frederick E. Hoxie, Retrieving the Red Continent: Settler Colonialism and the History of American Indians in the US, Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2008): 115367 (1157). Beenash Jafri, Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37 (2013): 7386 (75); Patrick Wolfe, The Settler Complex: An Introduction, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37 (2013): 122 (15). Annie E. Coombes, Memory and History in Settler Colonialism, in Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa, ed. Annie E. Coombes (New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), 112 (2); Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson, Settler Colonies, in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. 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Settler Colonial Studies

Introduction: The significance of the frontier in an age of transnational history

Department of History, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

Settler Colonial Studies, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846385

INTRODUCTION The signicance of the frontier in an age of transnational history

*Corresponding author. Email: alexanty@usc.edu

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Settler Colonial Studies

28. 29. 30.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

56. 57. 58.

Settler Colonial Studies

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

E. Altenbernd and A.T. Young

Settler Colonial Studies

Follow the typical signs: settler sovereignty and its discontents

Settler Colonial Studies, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846388

Follow the typical signs: settler sovereignty and its discontents

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Settler Colonial Studies

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Settler Colonial Studies

Settler Colonial Studies, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846390

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Settler Colonial Studies

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Settler Colonial Studies Notes

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Settler Colonial Studies

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Settler Colonial Studies

Settler Colonial Studies, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846391

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Settler Colonial Studies

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013

Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries], [ALEXANDER YOUNG] at 15:37 19 December 2013