Unsettling Spaces: Grassroots Responses to Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women During the Harper Government Years

Abstract

In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are 4.5 times more likely to become victims of homicide than other women. Over the last 30 years, more than 1000 women identified as First Nations, Inuit, or Métis were murdered in Canada, and more than 100 are still missing. However, the Canadian government has not acknowledged the economic, social and environmental colonialism that has allowed this violence to become naturalised. Focusing on activism around the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in Canada during the years of the Conservative Harper Government, this article examines how these grassroots initiatives challenge Canadian politics, reclaim streets and liminal zones, and make space for sacred commemoration. Specifically, Twitter campaigns, memeing, the REDress Project, and Walking With Our Sisters are studied. Engaging with scholarship that analyses spaces of violence, this article, in turn, discusses how activism can disrupt violence by transforming physical, virtual and affective spaces.     

Articulation,national unity and the aesthetics of living against occupation in Elia Suleiman’s Palestine Trilogy

This article interrogates questions of political subjectivity and representation in the context of late modern colonialism, by reading Elia Suleiman’s Palestine trilogy against a wider history of Palestinian political articulation. It suggests that Suleiman’s films detach the Palestinians’ struggle from the national paradigm, and create a political aesthetics that does not reduce the Palestinians to passive victims, nor depends upon their ability to reconstruct national unity and a coherent struggle for liberation. The political importance of this post-nationalism cannot, however, be understood unless it is tied to the specific historical and discursive conjuncture in which the Palestinians exist today. Undoing discourses of Palestinian nationalism, I argue, has become particularly important since the break up of the Oslo accords, not despite, but because of the exigencies of the colonial occupation and the imperative of finding efficient ways of resisting it.     

Changing place names in post-apartheid South Africa: accounting for the unevenness

This paper examines the renaming of South Africa’s public places, following the country’s democratic breakthrough in 1994. The process has unfolded unevenly throughout the country’s nine provinces. The paper explains this unevenness. Fundamentally, it contends that the act of renaming has unfolded largely as a restoration of indigenous memory, which, in turn, is mediated by a number of factors. The lopsided nature of renaming is indicative of the similarly uneven manner in which South Africa’s black population recalls indigenous memory. How black people relate to colonial memory also determines whether or not they would want to change it: some came to identify with colonial memory, while others were offended by it. This contrasting symbolism of colonial memory is a result of the varying ‘native policies’ pursued by the Boer republics, on the one hand, and the British colonial states, on the other. In other instances, indigenous memory simply vanished due to the absence of reminders, while some descendants evolved a new identity that to some extent erased the memory of their ancestry.     

Explicating race privilege: examining symbolic barriers to Aboriginal and non-indigenous partnership

Processes of racialisation and patterns of privilege continue to structure relations between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australia. This study explored the everyday ways race is reinscribed and unequal relations of power expressed, constituted and legitimised in a context marked by a history of oppressive colonisation. Conceptualising barriers to partnership as ideologically reproduced through discourse, critical discourse analysis was utilised to examine non-Indigenous and Aboriginal participants' understandings of the history of poor relations between groups. Participants were four male and three female non-Indigenous local government representatives and five female and four male Aboriginal community members, recruited for semi-structured interviews or a focus group. We focus the first part of our analysis on the discourse of ‘abstract liberalism’, which was identified in local government representatives' talk. Arguably, this hegemonic discourse, which reflects a monological conception of the world, is indicative of the circuits and consequences of dispossession within this particular local context. The discourse of ‘disregard’, mobilised by Aboriginal participants, demonstrates the continuity of coloniality and offers a counter story to the dominant ideological narrative. Explicating the reproduction of race privilege, while engaging with Indigenous knowledge as a space of critique and resistance is discussed as central to decolonisation and anti-racism praxis.     

Necronationalism: managing race,death and the nation's skeletons

This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe's sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery's deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined.     

从基督教入侵看西方国家对汤加的殖民

19世纪以前,汤加就有自己的宗教信仰并持续了几百年。然而19世纪以后,在西方基督教的强势入侵下,其本土宗教分崩离析。基督教在汤加生根发芽,奠定了其作为汤加主要宗教的基础,反映了西方国家对汤加的殖民统治。时至今日,汤加的政治、经济和文化教育等社会领域仍深受影响,基督教已成为当今汤加社会生活中重要的组成部分。     

生态殖民主义：本质、表现及其对策

生态殖民主义是西方在全球化进程中基于资本主义生产方式而采用的一套极为野蛮、腐朽、落后、甚至制度化了的对外政策和做法。它的本质就是殖民主义在生态领域的具体体现与发展,西方垄断资本利用所控制的国际垂直分工体系、通过区域化和全球化以及环境壁垒政策等来施行其生态殖民行为。发展中国家必须实行南南合作形成合力来共同应对西方的生态殖民行为,作为发展中大国的中国在南南合作的基础上要采取有理、有利、有节的战略步骤。     

魔鬼的笔迹(二)--前殖民话语,人种/族类见解和跨文化认同在德国殖民过程中的作用

萨摩亚人———“高贵的野蛮人”在殖民接管的前夜,最有影响的关于萨摩亚人的人种观念即为“高贵的野蛮人”[24](P205232)他者时,人们常常启用高贵的野蛮人这一套话,但这一比喻与其他比喻的不同尚待仔细分析。③我们都熟悉这样的说法:在19世纪社会理论的框架内,法国和苏格兰的启蒙运动把当代的非欧洲人说成是与欧洲人不同步,不是生活在一个时代。①大部分社会进化学说似乎不承认与非西方人有真正的亲族关系,它们也不认为人类的早期发展阶段有什么美德。最有影响的高贵的野蛮人的说法却恰恰相反。在这里,非西方人成了欧洲人的一个早期版本。…     

Copyright Culture and Pirate Politics

This article approaches the recent debates about copyright and piracy from a cultural and historical perspective, discussing how problems surrounding intellectual property rights (IPR) reflect cultural conflicts that are central to cultural studies. It sets out with a study of how international copyright norms developed in nineteenth-century Europe were implemented in two different national contexts: Sweden and the USA. This historical background shows how copyright has been embedded in the cultural history of Europe and intertwined with the idea of an evolving Western civilization. The examples from the past are thus used to highlight the underlying cultural implications that affect the contemporary discussions. Particular interest is paid to how the historical association between the spread of copyright and the development of civilization affects the understanding of Asian piracy and Western file sharing today, and how a multitude of social movements both in the West and the Third World simultaneously challenge the cultural legitimacy of the current system of IPR. Eventually this is also taken as an example of how law and culture intersect and how the broad, interdisciplinary field of copyright studies that has emerged over the last decade can be seen as an extension of the cultural studies tradition.     

Troubling constructions of Canada as a ‘land of opportunity’ for immigrants: a critical disability lens

This article presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis study of the constructions of people with disabilities within the Canadian immigration system and how this shapes the immigration experiences of people with disabilities, especially those from countries in the Global South. Findings suggest that dominant discourses of opportunities not only construct Canada as a ‘land of dreams’ for immigrants and newcomers but are also used to hide, justify, normalize and facilitate the operation of ableist, racist and colonial discourses that immigrants and newcomers with disabilities experience during their immigration. Recommendations for settlement workers involved in facilitating the settlement and integration process for immigrants and newcomers with disabilities are also presented. The article concludes by emphasizing the actual and potential contributions of postcolonial and critical disability lenses for a social justice-oriented practice at the intersection of disability and immigration.