Last week, I apologized to my comps field supervisor for not being as strong at the theoretical side of things as he and I would like. He responded that I seem to be struggling with the empirical side of history as well. Ouch! Hopefully I've rectified it this week! Two very interesting books, of which I've focused more on Harris's historical geography as it is a bit further than Perry's work from the sort of study that I'm accustomed to.
Cole Harris, The
Resettlement of British Columbia
Adele Perry, On the
Edge of Empire
Adele Perry and
Cole Harris, in their work on the history of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century British Columbia, destabilize the narratives of “settlement”
that they argue is problematic to Canadian history. Perry accomplishes this
through an intersectional, poststructural analysis that emphasizes colonialism
as a “popular social experience” that pervaded nineteenth-century British
Columbia.[1]
Harris portrays the European presence in British Columbia as one of resettlement, highlighting the important
link between pre-existing First Nations communities and the land. Both authors
focus on linkages in this colonial experience: Perry describes gender and race
as “mutually constitutive,” while Harris argues for a similar entangled relationship
between colonialism and land, in which colonialism was a product of geography,
yet also shaped it.
Perry’s work
follows from a wide body of postcolonial work, such as that of Catherine Hall
and Ann Laura Stoler, which emphasizes gender as a major category of analysis
for colonialism. She argues that race must be treated in a similar manner, suggesting
and modeling an interrogation of whiteness just as previous historians have
done with masculinity, and interweaving these problematized categories. It is
likely through this development that Perry’s work has become prominent in
postcolonial histories of British Columbia and Western Canada more broadly. She
is careful to note, however, that her own work is not explicitly ‘post’
colonialist; she is hesitant to use such a label, but draws from postcolonial
theory to inform her analysis of imperialism and race. Perry gradually unfolds
the discourses that constructed Aboriginal peoples and white settlers, showing
these discourses to be “fictive and changing” constructions.[2]
Both Perry and
Harris purport to use discourse in their analyses. Perry clearly does this;
Harris, arguably, does not. Perry’s monograph is replete with analyses of songs
and poetry describing the experiences and perceptions of a variety of settlers.
These verses show evolving and often contradictory images of Aboriginal peoples
and settlers, predicated upon gendered representations, furthering Perry’s
argument that colonialism was about contact between two peoples as men and
women, rather than in the absence of gender relations. For example, by
portraying Aboriginal women as opposite to white women, colonists could define
womanhood to be the exclusive purview of white women; on this basis, Perry
claims that “woman” as a category had clear “racial contours.”[3]
Perry notes that in a poststructuralist approach, all sources are discursive in
character. Her consideration of discourse is strongest in her analysis
representations through poetry and lyrics; while she analyzes laws and policies
as well, she does not attempt the same depth of textual analysis with these
sources as she does with those of a more literary slant. Much of her analysis
of legal texts focuses on inclusion and exclusion of various bodies from the
law.
Cole Harris has
a decidedly unorthodox definition of discourse. Whereas poststructuralists
would generally define discourse as pertaining to language, seeing words as key
to the construction of meaning, Harris defines it without relation to language
(“the interrelated ideas, assumptions, and practices associated with a
particular configuration of social power”[4]).
This allows him to write a chapter that is ostensibly focused on discourse, with
minimal analysis of language itself. This chapter analyzes power relationships
in the fur trade with reference to performances of surveillance and discipline.
From a theatrical perspective, however, it is akin to a play with a set and
stage directions, but no script.
Another theme
running through both Perry’s and Harris’s work is that of discipline,
regulation, and reform. In several of Harris’s essays, the resettlement of
British Columbia is portrayed as one of discipline, surveillance, and ordering
of native peoples and land. He frames forts in the fur trade, for instance, in
relation to their potential as sites of discipline and surveillance for the fur
trade, emphasizing their status as ordered space.[5]
There is a definite drawback to this strand of analysis, however: through this
emphasis on colonialism implementing order and discipline, Harris implies,
likely inadvertently, that Native society and land use was disorderly. This is
also a potential pitfall in Perry’s work. While she considers Aboriginal agency
to a greater extent than Harris, there is a clear division in her
conceptualization of power, whereby Aboriginal attempts to manipulate society
are framed as resistance, and European settler attempts to manipulate society are
framed as discipline. In Perry’s analysis, non-Aboriginal targets of reform
projects could cross or straddle this line between implementing discipline and
effecting resistance, while Aboriginal peoples were, by default, objects of
imperialism.
Harris’s chapter
on the 1881 nominal census, written with Robert Galois, illustrates how he
engages with both power and discourse, while also highlighting the regional
specificity of British Columbian history. Harris and Galois analyze the 1881
census as a means to show the recalibration of space and society, considering
it as “an instrument of the growing regulatory power of the modern
nation-state, and a reflection of the white Canadian society that devised and
administered it,” again emphasizing both the mutually constitutive role of
colonialism and the nation-state in relation to land and the centrality of
regulation and discipline in Harris’s own analysis. Harris’s consideration of
census categories borders on discursive analysis, scrutinizing representations
of Native peoples as “Indians” rather than simply “people.”[6]
This analysis is more in relation to the space allocated to various
categorizations within the census, rather than language itself, however. More
consistently with the rest of Harris’s collection, Harris and Galois indicate that
the 1881 census overall shows British Columbia as a unique and regionally
diverse society, and one to be considered on its own terms rather than subsumed
into a wider history of colonialism.[7]
A particularly
fascinating insight in Harris’s work is his consideration of ‘space-time
compression’ as a factor that makes British Columbia a unique site in European
colonialism. Harris’s sixth essay, “The Struggle with Distance,” shows the
importance of communication and transportation infrastructures to British
Columbia as a colonial project. The implementation of such infrastructures was,
according to Harris, part of the integration of British Columbia into a
modernizing world, and therefore neither politically nor culturally neutral.[8]
Unlike in other areas of a modernizing world, these changes occurred very
quickly, as Harris outlines in his discussion of the Fraser Canyon as a
compressed story of emerging modernity, with a unique periodization of
colonialism and resistance compared to other areas.[9]
There are a
handful of peculiarities in Harris’s collection of essays. These include his
references in a couple of chapters to “Coyote” as representative of Aboriginal
peoples. This quite problematically situates Aboriginal peoples within a
spiritual realm, referring to religion without truly analyzing it or
considering its impact on Aboriginal worldviews. As a rhetorical device, such
references are jarring, and border on inappropriate given Harris’s position as
a white scholar with an admitted lack of Aboriginal perspective. Harris’s work
is occasionally quite self-conscious in tone, with many autobiographical notes
and caveats in his introduction to position him as a settler with a clear link
to particular places in British Columbia. In one essay, this self-consciousness
is troubling: in fairly extensive prefatory remarks to his seventh essay,
“Industry and the Good Life around Idaho Peak,” Harris notes that this
particular essay is an older work than the rest of the collection, and
criticizes his own previous assumptions and assertions that Aboriginal peoples
had not been present in the land around Idaho Peak as symptomatic of the
hegemony of colonial narratives.[10]
It is therefore puzzling that Harris opted to include this particular essay
without significant edits. It has certain value in expanding Harold Innis’s
staples thesis, through Harris’s demonstration of the importance of economies
that lay on the margins of staples trades.[11]
However, this section is theoretically a step behind the rest of the
collection, and less integrated into the trajectory of Harris’s overall argument.
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