Invading the Waikato: A postcolonial re-view

The article discusses images of the Waikato Region of New Zealand from the 1860s, examining them within the context of British colonization and invasion. It comments on photographs by surveyor Daniel Manders Beere and British Army Royal Artillery Regiment Assistant Surgeon William Temple. The author also comments on a map of New Zealand's North Island made by surveyor Charles Heaphy and a map of Newcastle, New Zealand, depicting its earlier names of Ngāruawāhia and Queenstown. Other topics include spatial history, postcolonialism, and the 1863 to 1864 British invasion of Waikato

Imaging and Imagining the Waikato: A Spatial History c.1800-c.1914

This thesis reframes the history of the Waikato from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries through a spatial history approach using a visual archive. I argue that Pākehā images of the Waikato were both contemporary records and instruments of colonisation in the region, and that the discursive power of these images is undiminished. In this thesis I focus on spatial occasions represented by maps and photographs in order to reframe the history of colonisation in the Waikato. First, I move visual sources of historical evidence, specifically maps and photographs, from the periphery to the centre of the frame. An exploration of the historical context of the selected maps and photographs serves as the narrative framework for the thesis in a strategy that replaces the more usual method of choosing images to illustrate a text that has already been written. This theoretical and methodological framework for what I consider to be a richer and more satisfying use of visual evidence in history is a key feature of this thesis. Second, I employ a colonisation lens to emphasise the negative consequences of colonisation for the indigenous people and landscapes, as well as the diverse and far from unproblematic experiences of the colonists themselves. This thesis positions three phases of Pākehā colonisation: Reconnaissance, Invasion and Occupation. These overtly militaristic labels apply to real military actions as well as to less obvious but longer-lasting and wider-spread discursive strategies of incursion and control. While this thesis emphasises the negative impacts of colonisation, this is a history from the colonisers’ point of view. The images that form the focus of the thesis were created by Pākehā in the service of Pākehā intentions, actions and identities. But, rather than serving to justify or excuse colonisation as an end that justified the means, I undermine the inevitability inherent in the traditional settlement narrative. I do this by highlighting the ambiguities and contradictions of the colonisers’ intentions and experiences through a close and contextualised reading of the images they made to record and represent themselves. In the process, I refute the legitimacy and validity of Pākehā claims to control Waikato spaces

Still policing the crisis?

Writing this has been a troubling experience. Returning to a text 30 years on in this way combines intellectual, political and personal reflections in an unsettling way. These range from a powerful attachment to processes of collective or collaborative intellectual work that Policing the Crisis (PTC; Hall et al., 1978) embodied and enhanced to a rather depressed sense of how many things the book got right about the trajectory of the British social formation in the mid 1970s (other futures might have been preferable). And above all, there is a sense of what the book stands for in the emergence of cultural studies as an institutionalized academic field. As a way of trying to digest these different responses, I have tried to address three sorts of questions: why PTC mattered, where it belongs and why it continues to have echoes in the present

Of crises and conjunctures: the problem of the present

In this article I reflect on the ‘present crisis’, using it as a entry to questions about how we understand crisis, and how we understand the present. In trying to avoid the speedy movement from crisis to political economy, I return to an older source - Policing the Crisis (1978) - to ask what it might have to say to us in this new moment. I also consider what it might not tell us in relation to the present crisis and the present conjuncture. In the process, I raise some questions: how many crises are there? Are there crises of legitimation, social authority or hegemony? What are the sites and forms of politics in an era of ‘anti-politics’

Figures d’empire, fragments de mémoire

Ont été particulièrement étudiés la figure de l’empereur et ses modes de commémoration, les provinces de la partie hellénophone de l’empire et la diversité des approches politique, sociale, économique et religieuse du contrôle d’une cité-État capitale d’empire, enfin le droit romain, des étapes de sa codification aux modalités de son étude par les modernes, de l’élaboration d’une norme aux exemples concrets de son application. En vingt-quatre étapes et selon trois grandes orientations thématiques (notion d’empire et pouvoir impérial, administration et société politique, norme et identités), ce livre propose une lecture méthodologique et historiographique des grands enjeux de la recherche universitaire française, européenne et américaine, des trente dernières années en histoire romaine (du IIe siècle avant notre ère au seuil de l’époque médiévale). Tous les types de sources, littéraires, épigraphiques, numismatiques, juridiques et iconographiques, sont convoqués pour illustrer les renouvellements de l’approche du monde romain impérial, depuis ses territoires, cités et provinces, et ses formes de pouvoir, du prince aux élites sénatoriales et équestres, jusqu’à son administration, militaire et civile, et ses identités sociales et religieuses. C’est de la complémentarité des objets d’étude, des modalités d’approche et des sources utilisées que naît une vision d’ensemble permettant d’aborder d’une manière ample, sinon exhaustive, le contenu d’une romanité une et plurielle

Post-millennial local whiteness: racialism, white dis/advantage and the denial of racism

In the tumultuous early 21st century, vigorous appeals to whiteness in Britain are largely attributed to populist ethno-nationalism. This article offers a complementary critical account focusing on the use of ‘racialism’ as a purportedly non-invidious theoretical framework for describing racial differences and resultant societal impacts. Drawing on recent examples, especially the work of David Goodhart and Eric Kaufmann, I consider the deployment of racialism to characterise a benign white ethno-racial communalism based on ‘self-interest’ and a positive preference for ‘co-ethnics’ sharing common values. I suggest that racialist local whiteness is used to pursue two repudiatory projects: first, politically weakening black, Asian and minority ethnic groups by constituting white disadvantage; and second, disarming accounts of pervasive and systemic racism by naturalising racial stratification. Ultimately, I argue that an understanding of racialist local whiteness guards against the racial reification of populist nationalism and illuminates the deeper entrenchment of racism