Race and Indigeneity

Looking at processes of racial boundary formation, especially in everyday practices, allows for researchers to understand how racialized distinctions are made, remade, and understood. For Native Nations, membership is heavily influenced by Indigenous kinship practices. Kinship systems reinforce laws that maintain place-based forms of social organization; however, Indigenous kinship practices are not always accounted for in discussions regarding American Indian racial boundary formation. Overlooking Indigenous kinship practices leaves room for misidentification, especially when misidentification is grounded in anti-Indian and anti-Black racism. Overlooking Indigenous kinship systems also leaves room for Native identity and trauma to be appropriated, namely by white American settlers. This chapter discusses how not accounting for Indigenous kinship systems leaves room for misclassification, appropriation, and racial violence.

"Not at Home in Empire"

Amitav Ghosh opposes the “agonistic” or “reconciliatory” strand in postcolonial studies espoused amongst others by Bhabha. By fusing postcolonialism with postmodernism, this school of postcolonial thought rejects resistance and reconfigures the historical project of invasion, expropriation and exploitation as a symbiotic encounter. As a staunch anti-colonialist, what Ghosh presents in his writing is the ubiquity of the Eurocentrism of the colonized. The Glass Palace represents how colonial discourses (primarily the military discourse) have molded native identity and resulted in severe vulnerability and existential crisis. Self-alienation is apparent in the characters of the Collector, a Britain-trained colonial administrator and the soldier, Arjun, who has been transformed into a war-machine in the hands of British military discourse. The narrative attempts to revisit and reframe the colonial past by questioning the ideological, epistemological and ontological assumptions of the imperial powers, the masks of conquest. The community of the disillusioned soldiers of the British Indian army presented in The Glass Palace is one that challenges, provokes, threatens, but also enlivens, is a community of disagreement, dissonance, and resistance. Popular or insurgent nationalism thus reclaims or imagines forms of community and challenges colonial rule giving shape to a collective political identity. This article also intends to trace the failures of Burmese nationalism after a series of insurrections on ethnic grounds belied the aspirations of the postcolonial nation state.

Hanna Yablonka, Yeladim beseder gamur: biyografiyah dorit shel yelidei haaretz 1948–1955 (Children by the Book, Biography of a Generation: The First Native Israelis Born 1948–1955). Rishon Letziyon: Miskal, 2018. 430 pp.

This chapter examines Hanna Yablonka's Children by the Book, Biography of a Generation: The First Native Israelis Born 1948–1955 (2018). This book is unique in that it is neither politically committed to nationalist political slogans that are thrown daily into the arena of Israeli politics in the days of Netanyahu nor connected to the one-dimensional, sweeping condemnation of critics of the Israeli enterprise on the Right and Left. Instead, it suggests to set aside, even if only for a moment, what Yablonka calls “the current Israeli discourse, which furiously shatters everything that has happened in the state since it was established, brutally erasing all the achievements of Little Israel.” Yabonka is guided by Karl Mannheim's concept of a “historical generation”: a group in which there is a shared historical consciousness derived from historical experience. She shows how the state educational system fashioned the image of the new Israeli, endowing children with a local, native identity and imbuing them with the consciousness of belonging both to the people and to the land.

Richard Murphy’s The God Who Eats Corn: A Colonizer’s Critique of British Imperialism in Ireland and Africa

With the passing of Richard Murphy in 2018, Ireland lost its last poet of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Yet his poetry often displays the poet’s sense of unease with his background and features attempts to reconcile Ireland’s colonial history with feelings of guilt and self-consciousness as an inheritor to the gains of the British imperialist project. A dedicatory poem to his aging father who had retired to what was then known as Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe), ‘The God Who Eats Corn’ draws parallels between Irish and African colonial experiences. Yet far from celebrating the ‘civilizing’ mission of British imperialism, Murphy deftly challenges and questions the legitimacy of his family legacy. I argue that rather than reinforcing the poet’s image as representative of the Ascendancy class, ‘The God Who Eats Corn’ reveals sympathies with the subject peoples of British imperialism and aligns Murphy with a nationalist narrative of history and conception of ‘native’ identity. For this reason, the poem should be considered a landmark of modern Irish poetics in its articulation of trans-racial anti-colonial solidarity.

A Critical Analysis of the Eurocentric Dimensions of Ghose's Aesthetic Views

The present article has attempted to discuss the essential Eurocentrism of the Anglophone Pakistani writer Zulfikar Ghose that has shaped his subjective identity as well as literary outlook. The argument has used Frantz Fanon's theorization about the colonized intellectual whose exposure to foreign culture engenders anxiety and eventually becomes a precondition for his cognitive maturation. However, reading Ghose's prose, we find no traces of any such conflict in his subjective and artistic expression as he chooses to call himself a native-alien with an ambivalence which, turns many times, into an alienation, even outright rejection of his native identity as an Indian-Pakistani. The article concludes that instead of coming to terms with his native subjectivity, Ghose's voice remains Eurocentric as it is predominantly based on an explicit admiration and identification with the dominant English culture and his simultaneous distance from his native culture and its historical memory.

Trust in Ethnography: Narrating the Difficulties, Rewards and Dilemmas of Entry, Engagement and Exit (3Es) in the Research Field

Field engagement of the researchers in ethnographic research determines the quality and the rigor of academic work. The engagement of the researcher in the field to elicit information, however, is a result of confidence and/or faith, named trust, that the researcher develops with his/her participants during the research process. Trust-building is a basic but fundamental research phenomenon that a researcher goes through in his/her fieldwork. But how to establish trust with research participants? This article is a reflection based on the product of my fieldwork and narrates my experience of the trust-building process that I had undergone in my research field. Though hailing from the same area, I had entered my ethnographic space like a university researcher rather than my native identity for different reasons. Thus in this paper, I narrate my field experiences of difficulty, reward, and the dilemma of my field journey i.e., difficulty in establishing trust while entering the research field; rewards with my shifting identity (revelation of my native identity) while engaging in the field; and my dilemma in protecting my participants' trust and their voices while exiting from the field. Out of many perspectives and approaches to conceptualize and establish trust, I take one put forth by Williamson (1993), who says trust builds mainly on repeated positive experiences, formally or informally, made over time and longstanding relations, and is built on the initial knowledge about the other.

Ghosting history/historicizing the ghost: Time passage in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge

This article investigates the representation of time in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge as shaped by the writer’s British North American context as well as his political background and agenda. It pays attention to the manner in which the text prepares the ground for native identity formation by providing a version of Nova Scotia’s recent history that is nonetheless presented as bygone and ancient. In The Old Judge, temporal distance of the past, apart from its richness — both confirmed by the presence of the properly historicized settler ghost — is the condition for cultural distinctiveness, maturity and heritage. Approaching The Old Judge from the perspective of Cynthia Sugars’ Canadian Gothic and Lorenzo Veracini’s settler colonialism, I argue that the text represents the past of the province as curiously extended in time in the Old World fashion, so that it may encompass the stages of cultural development required to gain the Empire’s recognition. Simultaneously, the text’s intricate play with heterochronies suggests that Haliburton’s Nova Scotia contains heterotopic spaces in Foucauldian terms, where the ordinary time passage is necessarily breached for the colony to attain proper legacy and distinct cultural status.

The Location of Settled Diasporas in Nova Scotian Fiction

This article offers a comparative study between two novels by Nova Scotian writers: George and Rue (2006), by George Elliott Clarke, and No Great Mischief (2000), by Alistair MacLeod. The main purpose of this analysis is to transform some of the pervasive assumptions that dominate interpretations of diasporic ontologies. Most conceptual contexts of diaspora, constructed around the idea of a homeland that is located elsewhere, can only partially be applied to historically long-established communities. Clarke’s and MacLeod’s works emphasize “native” identity, the historical presence of Africans and Scots in Nova Scotia and their ensuing attachment to the (home)land. The novels illustrate how the hostland may be transformed into a homeland after centuries of settlement. The favoring of routes over roots of many current conceptualizations of the diaspora thus contravenes the foundations on which these groups construct a “native/diasporic” identity. However, in settler colonies such as Canada, identifying these groups as unequivocally native would imply the displacement of the legitimate Indigenous populations of these territories. A direct transformation from diaspora to indigenous subjectivity would entail the obliteration of a (however distant) history of migration, on the one hand, and the disavowal of Indigenous groups, on the other. For these reasons, new vocabulary needs to be developed that accurately comes to terms with this experience, which I propose to refer to as “settled diaspora.” In settled diasporas, the notions of attachment to a local identity are reconciled with having distant points of origin. At the same time, there is conceptual room to accommodate claims of belonging that differ from those by Indigenous populations. Thus, the concept of the settled diaspora redresses critical restrictions in diaspora theory that prevent discourses of migration from being applied to spaces of settlement.