RHN 163/2020 | Call
Organisers: Iain Robertson (University of the Highlands and Islands; UK) and Carl Griffin (University of Sussex; UK)
Rural History 2021, 23–26 August 2021, Uppsala, Sweden
Deadline for paper proposals: 15 January 2021– Extended deadline: 22 January 2021
Call for Papers for Rural History 2021 Session S12:
Colonisation within and the internal subaltern
Iain McKinnon has recently argued that the process of making private common land in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland was considered a necessary act of ‘domestic colonisation’ inside the imperial ‘mother country’. In this act, the will of the English ruling classes was imposed on the peoples and lands of Scotland, those peoples and lands colonised in a way with striking similarities – and critical differences – to the processes of colonisation enacted by the English (then later the British) Empire on territories beyond England. If imperial history is written as an exercise in invading then governing once sovereign spaces and nations overseas, the parallel processes of colonisation enacted upon the peoples and spaces of the ‘metropole’ has been given scant attention at best, with the very different Irish experience an inexact shorthand for deeper engagement.
In this session we do not wish to consider every act of cultural and material dispossession in England, Scotland, and Wales as an act of colonisation. And yet, where such dispossessions represented an external imposing of wills and alien systems by those at a distance on a peoples conceived as other and inferior, this was internal colonisation pure and simple. Moreover, cultural and material dispossession was further buttressed not just through telling such peoples as other but by positioning them discursively and through acts of dispossession as, after Spivak, subaltern.
We contend that this system was invariably a rural one, played out not in the towns but in and on the land. We also contend that it played out in all imperial contexts, not just the British one. Certain spaces – at certain times – of other European ‘metropoles’ likewise subject to the same processes of internal colonial dispossession and the inscribing of certain peoples of the metropole as an internal subaltern. And such processes remain as the example of China’s treatment of the Uighur peoples and their lands attest. It is important to note that as well as being geographically and temporally fractured, these processes were, in part, shaped by local opposition and acts of resistance, in some places strong and sustained, in others barely audible. In this session we would therefore welcome contributions from scholars working on acts of ‘colonisation within’ and their oppositions in any context – and comparative studies – throughout the globe to open up global dialogue and discussion.
Papers might consider, but are not limited to:
- Practices and policies of dispossession
- Governing spaces of internal colonialism
- Internal settler colonialism
- The making of the internal subaltern
- Applying imperial knowledge to governing the metropole
- Opposition and resistance to internal colonial schemes
Paper Proposals
As time is now quite short before the deadline of 15 January (extended deadline: 22 January 2021), please submit your proposal direct to the conference website. Details for submission can be found here. Prospective authors are also very welcome to email either Carl Griffin (C.J.Griffin@sussex.ac.uk) or Iain Robertson (iain.robertson@uhi.ac.uk)
The Rural History 2021 Call for Papers can be found in RHN 150/2020.
Conference Website: https://www.ruralhistory2021.se/