Showing papers in "South Atlantic Quarterly in 2011"

Democracy and Minimal Politics: The Political Difference and Its Consequences

Abstract: Innovation may be triggered by crossing the lines that delineate the fields of spatial knowledge and practice. Transgressing epistemic boundaries could bring about the possibility of new approaches to researching and transforming space. This paper identifies three interrelated types of epistemic boundary, and critically explores how they may be crossed. Set by definitions of the disciplinary subject matter, concepts, and practices, these boundaries may be crossed, respectively, through relational ontology, meta-disciplinary paradigms, and dialogic practices. These crossings, however, have problems of their own. Epistemic practices are both cognitive and social, and need to be addressed through dynamic and democratic multiplicity.

Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Canada's Far North: The Arctic and Inuit Sovereignty

Abstract: A century after excitement peaked around the race to the North Pole and the drive to navigate the Northwest Passage, the Arctic has reentered the imagination of those living below the 60th parallel. As temperatures dramatically rise, the focus now shifts to “opening up” the region, with debates swirling around questions of jurisdiction, travel and shipping, security, resource man agement, and environmental protection. Eight Arctic states bordering or close to the Arctic Ocean (Russia, the United States, Norway, Fin land, Sweden, Iceland, Canada, and Denmark [in relation to Greenland]) dominate these discussions, not only in how these debates progress but in how they are framed and understood. The states bordering the Arctic Ocean, however, all contain Indigenous populations, communities composed of people whose lives, cultures, histories, and societies predate the imposition of the nation- state on them, people who have lived on the northern cap of the globe for thousands of years. The content and tone of current debates about the Arctic are captured in Michael Byers’s Who Owns the Arctic? which provides a window into how certain kinds of language and ways of framing issues and solutions can pull everyone

Maturing Australia through Australian Aboriginal Narrative Law

Abstract: This essay is a nonlinear narrative that attempts to "unthink" the ways in which Australian Indigenous peoples' identity, sovereignty, and law are discussed. An Australian Aboriginal law narrative and poetry are part of the unthinking language used to discuss these definitions. The essay challenges some of the Australian definitions of Indigenous identity, sovereignty, and law, which come out of a Western epistemology and value system. This challenge includes the role of the United Nations' special rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of Indigenous peoples and its lack of female representation. The essay goes on to critique Australia's lack of maturity in accepting its geographical location in the Southern Hemisphere. The overall critique, however, is balanced with a suggested alternative governance system based on the classic thinking of Australian Aboriginal senior law persons.

Indigeneity, Sovereignty, and the Law: Challenging the Processes of Criminalization

Abstract: The processes of criminalization lay the foundation for creating significant disadvantage among Indigenous people across the former settler societies of Australia, New Zealand, and North America. Yet the massive incarceration of Indigenous people has not resulted in ensuring the safety of individuals within Indigenous communities. Imposed criminal justice systems have not ensured the maintenance of social order in Indigenous communities. This essay explores the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. Throughout Australia, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, Indigenous communities continue to exercise authority or have at least attempted to develop localized methods of dealing with problems of social disorder. Indigenous practice has provided us with the opportunity and the necessity to rethink the possibilities of a postcolonial relationship between criminal justice institutions and Indigenous communities. The essay argues that the recognition of Indigenous claims to governance offer the possibility of new ways of thinking about criminal justice responses to entrenched social problems like crime.

What Is a Just Society? Native American Philosophies and the Limits of Capitalism's Imagination: A Brief Manifesto

Abstract: Postcolonialism begins from its own knowledges, many of them more recently elaborated during the long course of the anticolonial movements, and starts from the premise that those in the west, both within and outside the academy, should take such other knowledges, other perspectives, as seriously as those of the west. Postcolonialism . . . is a general name for these insurgent knowledges that come from the subaltern, the dispossessed, and seek to change the terms and values under which we all live. —Robert J. C. Young. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction

Indigenous Sovereignty, Culture, and International Human Rights Law

Abstract: Indigenous peoples' concept of sovereignty is intimately linked to their culture, their language, and their land. These three essential components of their self-determination have been, and remain, under existential threat. This essay explores how international law has responded to Indigenous peoples' demands for cultural survival, appraises progress made and suggests further improvements to the international legal regime. In doing so, the essay focuses on the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, overwhelmingly passed by the UN General Assembly, as well as pertinent treaty and customary international law.

Real-Life Death: Between Public and Private, Interior and Exterior, the Real and the Fictional

Abstract: This essay examines the expansion of death and grief from private experience and spaces, into public spheres via a range of media events and communication technologies. This shift is increasingly acknowledged and documented in death studies and to some extent in media research. The modern experience of "sequestered death" has passed. Death images and events are now thoroughly mediated by the visual and communication technologies used and accessed by a vast number of people across the globe. At the same time, the proliferation and accessibility of death imagery and narratives do not necessarily equate to a familiar and especially an existential acceptance of death, as it is faced and experienced in everyday life and relationships. Indeed, what we may be facing and witnessing is a widening gap and experiential differential between media/technological death culture and "real-life" contexts and temporalities of death and bereavement.