The Stolen Generations of Australia: Narratives of Loss and Survival

Australian texts for the young run the gamut of representational approaches to the removal of Indigenous children. Early colonial texts treated child removals as benign acts designed to rescue Indigenous children from savagery, but from the 1960s Indigenous writers produced life writing and fiction that pursued strategies of decolonisation. This essay plots the history of Stolen Generation narratives in Australia, from the first Australian account for children in Charlotte Barton's A Mother's Offering to Her Children to Doris Pilkington Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Philip Noyce's film Rabbit-Proof Fence, and pedagogical materials that mediate the book and film to children. Garimara's book and Noyce's film expose the motivations of those responsible for child removal policies and practices: to eliminate Indigenous people and cultures and to replace them with white populations. Many pedagogical materials deploy euphemistic and self-serving narratives that seek to ‘protect’ non-Indigenous children from the truths of colonisation.

Decolonial linguistics as paradigm shift

This commentary focuses the creation of often contradictory disciplinary boundaries, practices, and institutions. It argues that writing on colonial linguistics can traverse several components of this knowledge project. These colonial texts can tell us about the researchers’ encounter with materials, i.e. the data of linguistics, and with the human sources of this data, the “informants.” They tell us about the search for patterns, the moment of generalization and theorizing. And they tell us about the workforce of the knowledge project, particularly its academic workers, and the publication of ‘results’. The collective character of the project, and its close but ambiguous relationship with the political structure of empire, stand out very clearly. There are various conclusions to be drawn at this point. One thing we can be sure about: there is struggle ahead before we have decolonized the academy.

Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations

The role of the roughly 600 Indian princely kingdoms in the transformation of the law of nations into international law during the 19th century is an overlooked episode of international legal history. The Indian princely states effected a gradual end of the Mughal and the Maratha confederacies while appropriating international legal language. The Privy Council—before and after 1858—sanctified within common law as the acts of state, both, the seizure of territories from Indian kings and the ossification of encumbrances attached to the annexed territories. After the Crown takeover of the East India Company in 1858, the British India Government carefully rebooted, even mimicked, the native polyandric relationship of the tribal chiefs, petty states and semi-sovereigns with the Mughal–Maratha complex using multi-normative legal texts. Put down in the British stationery as engagements, sunnuds and treaties, these colonial texts projected an imperially layered nature of the native sovereignty. I challenge the metropole's claims of a one-way export to the colonies of the assumed normative surpluses. I argue that the periphery while responding to a ‘jurisdictional imperialism' upended interational law's civilisation-giving thesis by exporting law to the metropole.

Invenciones de Caliban: cultura, humanismo y posoccidentalismo en Roberto Fernández Retamar

The goal of this research is to analyze the different critical dimensions of the writing of Roberto Fernández Retamar. We are guided by the hypothesis that in the anti-colonial texts of the Cuban poet, one intuits a heterogeneous and non-essentialist reading of the Latin-American culture, which is embedded with the elaboration of a metaphoric concept of Caliban, able to disorganize the cultural dichotomies of the colonial modernity. In the first part, we verified how the particularity of “Caliban” consists in his capacity of resisting any cultural derivation and unilateral writing, being related with what Jacques Derrida defines as différence. Secondly, we reflect on the humanism developed by Fernández Retamar with the well-known trope: the anticolonial humanism conceived from a relationship of aggressiveness between the “own” and the “other”. Finally, we analyzed the impact of the notion “posoccidentalismo” suggested by the Cuban in his criticism of the Latin-American post colonialism. We agree with Caliban; a symbol is not an authority of the absolute. On the contrary, it is a tool that wants to undo scriptural and epistemic modes offered by the western culture, and that takes form, within the work of Fernández Retamar, in an anticolonial and post western humanism, which is still budding.

The Colonial Texts Corpus for the Digital Library of Old Spanish Texts

This article offers a detailed description of the Colonial Texts Corpus, one of eleven subcorpora of the Digital Library of Old Spanish Texts published by the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Launched in 2018, the corpus allows interactive access to semi-paleographic transcriptions of texts produced in the Americas during the colonial period, a textual type that is under-represented in existing electronic corpora. The rationale of the project is provided, as well as the criteria for the selection of texts to be included and their method of preparation. Finally, the interface of the corpus is illustrated, and its functionality is exemplified.

‘Beast of No Nation’: Bribery, Corruption and Late Colonial Administration in

Chapter Four explores the competing demands made upon young Nigerian civil servants in the colonial administration, through an examination of Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease. The chapter contextualizes the social and sexual pressures under which the novel’s protagonist, Obi, buckles through discussion of contemporary popular culture and the experiences of real-life Nigerian colonial administrators. The novel is also discussed in relation to the British colonial texts to which it responds, notably Joyce Cary’s Mr Johnson and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. Achebe’s own reflections on the social uses of fiction are also considered. The chapter argues that as readers we are invited by Achebe into judgement of Obi, and in doing so we are brought into larger debates about the nation state and the law.

Translation, a Tudor political instrument

Starting with an overview of F. O. Matthiessen’s work on the role of translation during the Elizabethan period, this article delves into the paratexts of the translations of Spanish colonial texts by Richard Hakluyt, Edward Grimeston, Michael Lok and John Frampton to discuss the underlying reasons why Spanish accounts of the conquest were rendered into English. The analysis of the dedications and addresses shows that, although these translations may have served to express admiration for the Spanish conquerors or to criticize their actions, the ultimate goals of these texts were to encourage England to replicate the Spanish empire in the Americas, on the one hand, and to obtain social, political and economic benefits for the translators, on the other.

Eschatological Encounters

The corpus of missionary and indigenous colonial texts in the highland Maya language K’iche’ is an exceptional resource for studying the colonial encounter of Christianity and pre-Columbian religion. To translate Christianity into K’iche’, the missionaries appropriated lexical concepts from highland Maya religion, while indigenous authors took up the doctrinal discourse to negotiate both cosmologies and maintain religious tradition. This article examines the terminology used by missionary authors to express conceptualisations of Christian eschatology and analyses how the new Christian discourse of Heaven and Hell was mapped onto pre-Columbian notions of afterlife and otherworld dimensions.