Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences In A Revolutionary Age, Edited By Kate Fullagar And Michael A. Mcdonnell, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Few scholars have tried to write a history that gives authorship and agency to Indigenous peoples within and across imperial borders. Expanding and drawing on recent scholarship, Facing Empire bridges multiple histories of British imperialism in Australia, North America, West Africa, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, the Persian Gulf, and the Cape of Good Hope, to unravel the intricacies of Indigenous peoples’ contacts, interactions, and negotiations with neighbors and newcomers throughout the Age of Revolution, 1760–1840. At the book’s core, editors Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell recenter Indigenous agency as a vital analytic framework for understanding how and why …

Book Review: The Conceptual Foundations Of Transitional Justice, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Review of The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice. By Colleen Murphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Over the past few decades, communities around the world have embarked on transitions from conflict, repression and historical injustice to the rule of law and respect for human rights. Societies have established legal institutions, such as truth-telling commissions and criminal trials to confront past abuses and attempt to transition into a new era of human dignity. Theorists have coined the term “transitional justice” to describe processes involved in confronting legacies of historical wrongdoings. Pressing questions raised in such contexts include: what does it mean …

Review Of Dust Bowls Of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, And The Injustice Of “Green” Capitalism, By Hannah Holleman, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Drawing on a rich multidisciplinary scholarship and extensive original literature, Dust Bowls of Empire resituates the local horror and human tragedy of the 1930s Dust Bowl into a global historical development of the modern world system. At its center are privatization, commodification, and erosion of land, soil, and nature. Holleman takes direct aim at the root causes of an imperial ideology— capitalism— which legislates, institutionalizes, and practices ecological injustices. She explains that the Dust Bowl in the Southern Plains embodies an imperial instance of a global crisis of soil erosion that began in the 1870s and lasted through the first …

Review Of Raymond I. Orr. Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, And Intratribal Conflict, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Social research on American Indian internal politics has oft en been labeled sensitive and uncomfortable, and it tends to deter scholarly work. To Raymond I. Orr, from the University of Oklahoma, intratribal politics forms the core of decision- making processes inside and outside American Indian communities or Indian Country and should not be concealed from open debate. In Reservation Politics, he calls on social scientists and scholars to appraise the origins of intratribal politics and what informs their contemporary and future decisions. He explains that these decisions or motivational behaviors are not random; instead, they are informed by key variables, …

Baby Steps (On Chantal Kalisa), Margaret D. Jacobs

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Maybe our problems seem insurmountable. Perhaps we have aspirations that cannot be achieved in a morning, a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime. Maybe there are some mysteries we can never fully comprehend. Still, we stand up, we let go of the safe and familiar-if only for an instant-and we toddle forward. We might only take a few steps before we fall, but we eventually get up and walk again. Baby steps.