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THE INDIGENOUS REDEMPTION OF LIBERAL UNIVERSALISM*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2014

TIM ROWSE
TIM ROWSE*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Communication Arts and Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Accounts of liberalism as an ideology of European imperialism have argued that when liberals discovered that colonized people were, in various ways, intractable, they questioned and then abandoned the postulated universal human capacity for improvement; the racial and cultural determinants of native “backwardness” seemed stronger than any universal susceptibility to the civilizing projects of liberal imperialism. While the intellectual trajectory of some canonical liberals illustrates this decline in liberal universalism, some colonized intellectuals—while acknowledging distinctions of race and people-hood—adhered to the universalist optimism of liberalism. In pursuit of a global history of liberalism, this essay examines writings by Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, Apirana Ngata and William Cooper to illustrate a robust indigenous universalism. Drawing on the intellectual heritage of Christianity and universal (or “stadial”) philosophy of history, these intellectuals affirmed emphatically that their people were demonstrating the capacities to be subjects of liberal civilization.

Type
Forum: Global Liberalisms
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , November 2015 , pp. 579 - 603
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Sarah Irving, the participants of the Global History of Liberalism seminar (University of Sydney, July 2012) and two anonymous referees for comments that helped me improve this paper.

References

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14 Ibid., 17.

15 Peter Jones, The Sermon and Speeches of the Rev. Peter Jones, alias, Kah-ke-wa-quon-a-by, the Converted Indian Chief, Delivered on the Occasion of the Eighteenth Anniversary of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society for the Leeds District, Held in Brunswick and Albion Street Chapels, Leeds, September the 25th, 26th, and 27th, 1831, Taken in Short Hand, Verbatim as Delivered (Leeds, n.d.), 15.

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68 NZPD, 29 Nov. 1918, vol. 183, 579.

69 NZPD, 30 May 1916, vol. 175, 519.

70 NZPD, 31 May 1916, vol. 175, 573.

71 NZPD, 1 June 1916, vol. 175, 612.

72 NZPD, 1 June 1916, vol. 175, 612.

73 NZPD, 1 June 1916, vol. 175, p. 613.

74 In contrast, arguably, with his stance in his 1943 pamphlet The Price of Citizenship: “Has he proved a claim to be an asset to his country? If so he asks to be dealt with as such. An asset discovered in the crucible of war should have a value in peace.” Quoted in Ramsden, E., Sir Apirana Ngata and Maori Culture (Wellington, 1948), 61Google Scholar.

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76 Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings (New York, 2003), 244. Eastman also used Indians’ First World War service as an argument for citizenship. See Wilson, Ohiyessa, 141, 161.

77 Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories, 181.

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80 Ibid., 243.

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82 Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories, 191.

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87 Cooper to Patterson, 31 Oct. 1936, in Attwood, Bain and Markus, Andrew, eds., Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League (Canberra, 2004), 56Google Scholar.

88 Cooper to Lyons, 16 Jan. 1937, in ibid., 65.

89 Cooper to Harris, 16 March 1937, in ibid., 69.

90 Cooper to Gribble, 31 Oct. 1933, in ibid., 38.

91 Herald (Melbourne), 15 Sept. 1933; notes on meeting with Paterson, 23 Jan. 1935; Cooper to Lyon, 31 March 1938, in Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, 35, 43, 94.

92 Notes on meeting with Paterson, 23 Jan. 1935, in Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, 45.

93 Cooper to Lyons, 23 Oct. 1933, in ibid., 36.

94 Cooper to Lyons, 26 Oct. 1937, in ibid., 80.

95 Cooper to Lyons, 28 July 1934; notes on meeting with Paterson, 23 Jan. 1935, in ibid., 41, 44.

96 Cooper to Lyons, 26 Oct. 1937, in ibid., 81.

97 Cooper to Lyons, 31 March 1938, in ibid., 94.

98 For a black South African parallel see Bickford-Smith, Vivian, “African Nationalist or British Loyalist? The Complicated Case of Tiyo Soga,” History Workshop Journal, 71 (2011), 74–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Soga, celebrated by the ANC as a “black nationalist,” wrote, “The more I know of good English people, the greater is my admiration of them as a race . . . I know nothing of the justice of other nations; but I know something of the ‘fairplay’ of an Englishman” (quoted at 84). Bickford-Smith employs the distinction between “ethnic” and “civic” nationalism to make sense of Soga's anticolonial ideology and of the ways it has been remembered.

99 Cooper to Perkins, 13 Jan. 1934, in Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, 39.

100 Cooper to minister for the interior, 22 Feb. 1936, in ibid., 48.

101 Cooper to editor of The Ladder, 5 Nov. 1936, in ibid., 58, 62.

102 Cooper to Menzies, 31 Aug. 1940, in ibid., 127.

103 Cooper to editor of The Ladder, 5 Nov. 1936, in ibid., 58.

104 Cooper to McEwen, 17 Dec. 1938, in ibid., 109.

105 Cooper to Selby, 1 Feb. 1937, in ibid., 67.

106 Cooper to McEwen, 19 Feb. 1938, in ibid., 90.

107 Cooper to Paterson, 18 Feb. 1937, in ibid., 68.

108 Cooper to the minister for the interior, 22 Feb. 1936, in ibid., 48.

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112 Cooper to Paterson, 25 June 1937, in ibid., 75.

113 Cooper to McEwen, 19 Feb. 1938, in ibid., 90, emphasis in original.

114 Mantena, “Mill and the Imperial Predicament”, 299–300.