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(Un)Mapping the City Beautiful: Orlando Florida’s “Ugly” Settler Colonial Legacy
Abstract
This chapter reflects on the production of Orlando, Florida and how the prevailing vision of its downtown development reiterates the enduring legacy of settler colonialism through its anti-homeless policies. These policies manifest as ugly laws, laws designed to define the unsightly and unwanted bodies of the citizenry in order to keep them from view. These laws are presented simultaneously as concerning aesthetics, safety issues, and even charity, while also serving the enduring settler colonial power structures that first shaped and sanctioned the state of Florida. The focus for analysis is the existing policies that regulate the downtown district of Orlando. These policies exhibit many of the characteristics that Susan Schweik identifies in the ugly laws, particularly with regard to the social, textual, and performative contexts in which the laws are deployed. Ultimately, this analysis denaturalizes downtown space in order to disrupt notions of white settler innocence and neutrality of space. The chapter demonstrates how Orlando’s strategies of city regulation are used to ensure the absence of ugliness, and how these techniques are deployed to maintain the dominance of both settler colonialism and the dynamics between settler society and ableism.
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So-called “ugly laws” were mostly municipal statutes in the United States that outlawed the appearance in public of people who were, in the words of one of these laws, “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” (Chicago City Code 1881). Although the moniker “ugly laws” was coined to refer collectively to such ordinances only in 1975 (Burgdorf and Burgdorf 1975), it has become the primary way to refer to such laws, which targeted the overlapping categories of the poor, the homeless, vagrants, and those with visible disabilities. Enacted and actively enforced between the American Civil War (1867) and World War I (1918), such laws and their enforcement can tell us much about the very sorts of people who were also, a generation later, subject to explicitly eugenic laws, such as sterilization legislation. And like eugenic laws and policies, such laws continue to affect the lives of people with disabilities to this day (Schweik 2011).
settler colonial studies aims to contribute to the consolidation of a new scholarly field. This process requires that colonial and settler colonial phenomena be analytically disentangled. They have generally been seen either as entirely separate, or as different manifestations of colonialism at large. Neither stance, however, allows a proper appraisal of settler colonialism in its specificity. In contrast, in this introduction to this new scholarly journal, I suggest that colonialism and settler colonialism should be understood in their dialectical relation. On the basis of this distinction, in the second part of this introduction I reflect on the need to develop dedicated interpretative tools capable of sustaining an approach to the decolonisation of settler colonial formations.
Settler Common Sense considers how writings by several canonical mid-nineteenth-century authors that are not “about” Indians still participate in processes of settler colonialism. More than focusing on the ways Native peoples are treated and imagined by non-natives, the book illustrates how the legal concepts, practices, and geographies developed in claiming Native lands and displacing Native peoples live on in the everyday lives of non-natives even when political struggles with Native peoples seem to be of the past. Rifkin shows how authors implicitly draw on such ongoing histories as the background for offering queer critiques of state policy. While displacing the nuclear family and engaging with forms of desire and family-formation that would have been understood as deviant, these writers all imagine a kind of place to which one might flee that allows one to exist beyond government influence – a space in which one can discover and experiment with more democratic ways of being in the world. However, those very spaces become available for such imaginative investment as a result of displacing Indigenous sovereignties, treating the “domestic” space of the nation as self-evident despite the persistence of Native peoples and claims. Unlike existing work that focuses on representations of Native peoples, Settler Common Sense emphasizes how the imperial incorporation of Native lands into the U.S. nation-state shapes everyday non-native perception, experience, and ethics.
Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled. This book argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, the book explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.
Adventure stories, produced and consumed in vast quantities in 18th-19th- abd 20th-century Europe, narrate encounters between Europeans and the non-European world. They map both European and non-European people and places. They make it possible to imagine, and to naturalise and normalise, identities that might seem implausible closer to home. They make it possible to map new forms of masculinity. At the same time, adventure stories chart colonies and empires, projecting European geographical fantasies onto non-European, real geographies, including the Americas, Africa and Australasia. The ambivalent geography of adventure has potential to be a site of resistance. Writers and readers have appropriated adventure, and found a metaphorical space in which to challenge hegemonic constructions of identity and colonial geography. The geography of adventure is alluring, fluid, liminal and open, a space in which people and places are continuously mapped, unmapped and remapped.
Short and accessible, this book interweaves a discussion of the geography of property in one global city, Vancouver, with a more general analysis of property, politics, and the city.
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, municipallaws targeting "unsightly beggars" sprang up in cities across America. Seeming to criminalize disability and thus offering a visceral example of discrimination, these "ugly laws" have become a sort of shorthand for oppression in disability studies, law, and the arts. In this watershed study of the ugly laws, Susan M. Schweik uncovers the murky history behind the laws, situating the varied legislation in its historical context and exploring in detail what the laws meant. Illustrating how the laws join the history of the disabled and the poor, Schweik not only gives the reader a deeper understanding of the ugly laws and the cities where they were generated, she locates the laws at a crucial intersection of evolving and unstable concepts of race, nation, sex, class, and gender. Moreover, she explores the history of resistance to the ordinances, using the often harrowing life stories of those most affected by their passage. Moving to the laws' more recent history, Schweik analyzes the shifting cultural memory of the ugly laws, examining how they have been used-and misused-by academics, activists, artists, lawyers, and legislators.
In the closing months of 1918, Haitian government officials grew impatient with what seemed to them the obvious "injustice" then being perpetrated against their nation by "the powerful Republic of the United States." For over three years, they had attempted to maintain some semblance of independent action in the face of an uninvited military occupation replete with what one Haitian diplomat termed "imperious injunctions and another named more baldly "the vexatious and unfair tyranny of American officials."' When Louis Borno, then Haiti's minister of finance, authorized an appeal to Washington for redress of those grievances, he sought to give U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing and President Woodrow Wilson a way to rise above such injustice, a way to square the occupation with the president's rhetoric about fairness for small nations. "With the American Government's help," he sought to assure them, "the Haitian people are firmly resolved to carry out . .. all the reforms that progress demands." But they would do so, he insisted, "through that most cordial cooperation . . . which proceeds on joint examinations and not on imperative commands notified without regard to national dignity and prompted perhaps by sentiments of a private nature, in which the higher interests of the two countries are given no consideration. 2 The private sentiments that "perhaps" prompted U.S. officials' imperious behavior were amply in evidence in occupied Haiti, both before and after Borno's complaint. They were in evidence in the summer of 1915, when a U.S. military officer rained down a shower of condescension on the revolutionary leader and heir apparent to the
Preface and AcknowledgmentsPart 1. Politicizing Bodily Differences1. Disability, Identity, and Representation: An Introduction2. Theorizing DisabilityPart 2. Constructing Disabled Figures: Cultural and Literary Sites3. The Cultural Work of American Freak Shows, 1835-19404. Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe, Davis and Phelps5. Disabled Women as Powerful Women in Petry, Morrison, and LordeConclusion: From Pathology to IdentityNotesBibliographyIndex
Settler colonialism has been characterized as a structure, a system, and a logic. However, how do varied administrative projects of settlement and accompanying legal categories, geographies, and subjectivities become part of the everyday life of non-Natives? How do they come to shape settler self-understandings in ways that are not experienced as falsifiable philosophical propositions or as an integrated public policy program? Affective networks need to be explored as part of understanding how settler colonial governmentality comes to be lived as the self-evident conditions of possibility for (settler) being. This essay addresses that feeling of givenness and the kinds of social trajectories from which it emerges and which it engenders – a set of dynamics that can be described as settler common sense. Instead of suggesting that quotidian forms of settler sensation, self-hood, and possession follow axiomatically from policy formulations and official legal geography, it argues that the (shifting) parameters of settler governance help provide orientation, inclination, and momentum for non-Native experiences of the everyday.
This paper discusses the relationship between Christian imperialism, colonialism and sexual violence within Native communities. It is inadequate to conceptualize sexual violence simply as a tool of patriarchy, because sexual violence has served as a primary tool of racism and genocide against Native peoples. Thus, colonialism and sexual violence cannot be separated. This relationship also compels anti-violence advocates to develop responses to sexual violence that do not at the same time strengthen institutions of colonialism and racism.
Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son - explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies.
The emphasis on culture in studies of colonialism tends to obscure other forms of colonial power while making it impossible to contextualize the cultural argument and assess its salience. Rather than focusing on texts, systems of signification, and procedures of knowledge generation, as the colonial discourse literature is wont to do, a fuller understanding of colonial powers is achieved by explaining colonialism's basic geographical dispossessions of the colonized. In so doing, the issue of power is not prejudged and the particular roles of different modes and theories of colonial power come into focus. I explore these propositions by considering the powers underlying the reserve (reservation) system in British Columbia, a system that, by allocating a tiny fraction of the land to native people and opening the rest for development, facilitated the geographical reorganization of the province. My conclusions are these: the initial ability to dispossess rested primarily on physical power and the supporting infrastructure of the state; the momentum to dispossess derived from the interest of capital in profit and of settlers in forging new livelihoods; the legitimation of and moral justification for dispossession lay in a cultural discourse that located civilization and savagery and identified the land uses associated with each; and the management of dispossession rested with a set of disciplinary technologies of which maps, numbers, law, and the geography of resettlement itself were the most important. Although no one body of theory explains colonial power, several theoretical perspectives yield crucial insights.
ngoing indigenous struggles against colonialism consist mainly of efforts to redress the fundamental injustice of being forcibly removed from the land or being denied access to the land to continue traditional cultural activities. Yet there is another aspect to colonialism which is often ignored in the public discourse, and certainly does not form a major focus of either First Nation organization or Canadian government policy efforts. This aspect is the colonially-generated cultural disruption affecting First Nations that compounds the effects of dispossession to create near total psychological, physical and financial dependency on the state. The cumulative and ongoing effects of this crisis of dependency form the living context of most First Nations existences today. This complex relationship between the effects of social suffering, unresolved psychophysical harms of historical trauma and cultural dislocation have created a situation in which the opportunities for a self-sufficient, healthy and autonomous life for First Nations people on individual and collective bases are extremely limited. As is typical in all colonial societies, First Nations today are characterized as entrenched dependencies, in physical, psychological and financial terms, on the very people and institutions that have caused the near erasure of our existence and who have come to dominate us. When one considers the material consequences of Canada's century-long policy of state-sponsored, forcible assimilation, a simple fact emerges: for generations, opportunities to live well as an Aboriginal person have been actively frustrated. Successive governments, committed to the notion that Aboriginal cultures belong only to the past, have made no provision for the well-being of these cultures in the present and future. In the arrangement of Canada's social affairs, only the assimilated Indian has been offered even the prospect of wellness. For those who resisted or refused the benefits of assimilation, government policies assured a life of certain indignity. That is the essence of life in the colony: assimilate and be like us or suffer the consequences (Kirmayer & Valaskakis, 2009, p. xi).
The article explores the relationship between genocide and the settler colonialism. The author asserts that though the settler-colonial logic of elimination has manifested as genocidal-they should be distinguished. The article further analyzes the negative and positive dimensions of settler colonialism. While on the one hand it attempts to dissolve native societies, it also establishes a new colonial society on the seized land base.
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