Please join us on Tuesday, April 29, 2014 from 4:10pm to 6:00pm (in Hugel 100) for a presentation by anthropologist Tate LeFevre (Franklin and Marshall) on “Representations and Repossession: Indigenous Youth in a Settler Colonial City.”
Focusing specifically on New Caledonia (a French territory in the South Pacific), this talk explores how settler colonialism refashions space in ways that enable the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people. In New Caledonia’s capital city, Nouméa, settler colonialism has transformed indigenous Kanak lands into French spaces of “civilization and progress.” Today, as more and more Kanak move to the city, young people increasingly struggle to “repossess” Nouméa as an indigenous space. Professor LeFevre will examine some of the forms this struggle has taken, including graffiti, squatter settlements and even the recent construction of a “tribal village” in the middle of a parking lot.