Ben Silverstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 95215 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Silverstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Silverstein |
| SIGNATURE | BEN SILVERSTEIN |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3566-2138 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
We are all connected to each other
This article considers relationships through deep history. While the field is often characterised by expressions of distance or estrangement from the longue durée, this article instead takes as its starting point a reflection on the past as intimate and present today. This form of narrating deep history, expressed from Yawuru Country in and around Broome, presents that history as a site of and a vehicle for connection. Written collaboratively, th…
We open our eyes despite the pain it causes’
We write this piece across February, March and April 2025, as the ceasefire – which was never fully in place – was completely wiped aside by Israel. Bombing resumed, with Gazan journalist Anas Al-Sharif reporting one day that: ‘The airstrikes that hit Gaza tonight were unlike anything witnessed since the beginning of the war.’ These ongoing horrors are recognised by almost every reputable source around the globe – and most significantly by Palest…
Indigenous Legal Judgments
Rail relations
Australian railway histories are dominated by narratives of engineering triumphs, colonial expansion into empty land, and bringing civilisation and development through railway infrastructure. These settler-colonial stories can be read back on themselves as histories and geographies of Aboriginal dispossession and colonial possession. Indeed, Aboriginal people, lands, waterways, and cultures have always been implicated in railway infrastructures, …
Dividing Highways
We examine the barrier effects of freeways in California. We analyze the association between freeways and nearby street network connectivity and quantify the frequency and quality of crossings—underpasses or bridges that enable pedestrians and cyclists to cross the freeway. We find that barrier effects are most pronounced in communities of color. We also find that even where crossings exist, they are unpleasant or even hazardous for pedestrians a…
Beyond presentism
We take up the challenge to extend the ‘archive of mnemonic practices’ beyond recent histories of violence by facilitating a dialogue between scholarship on deep history and the fourth wave of memory studies, both emerging under the sign of the Anthropocene. In so doing, we engage with the problem of transmission as it has emerged in both fields. Works in cultural memory studies provide us with compelling ways of thinking through mediated practic…
Empire and Indigeneity
Deep Historicities
In seeking to understand the deep past, the knowledges of First Nations peoples and of the various academic disciplines can seem incommensurable. In this essay, we argue the concept of “historicities”, that is, the encultured ways of narrating and conceiving of the past offers to enrich the study of deep history. Sensitivity to the various ways the past is remembered and understood, as well as the ways in which these historicities are dialogicall…
Deep history and deep listening
This article outlines the possibilities of a deep history practice that engages with rather than sidelines Indigenous historical knowledges. Many Indigenous people insist that their knowledge of the deep past demands engagement. They do so, we suggest, because scientific historicism and Indigenous knowledge-systems and historicities already impinge upon and inform each other: they are intertwined. We propose ‘deep listening’ as a way historians m…
Throwing Mud’ on Questions of Sovereignty
This article addresses two arguments about Chinese settlers in the Northern Territory. The first, in 1905, was sparked by criticisms of Chinese mining practices and accusations that Chinese people contaminated those Aboriginal people with whom they came into contact. The second was prompted by the imposition, in 1910–11, of restrictions on Chinese rights to work and employ in the Territory. Both were opposed by the Chinese, who represented themse…
In Apartheid’s Shadow
In Apartheid’s Shadow: Australian Race Politics and South Africa, 1945–1975." Australian Historical Studies, 51(2), pp. 242–243
Thinking with and beyond settler colonial studies
This article presents a review of recent work in settler colonial studies, provides a new genealogy for the concept, and argues for a return to approaches that tend to Indigenous experiences alongside and in relation to the settler colonial
Reading sovereignties in the shadow of settler colonialism
The Northern Territory of Australia is often described by historians as marginal and anomalous, characterised by plurality and set apart from the settler colonial south(east). But it has long been subjected to practices of government designed to articulate settler colonialism upon and through its distinctive character. In this article, I take one such governmental project in order to read the antagonistic work of Indigenous and settler sovereignt…
Thomson in Canberra
This chapter examines Donald Thomson’s Australian discovery of ‘native society’ in Arnhem Land, representing the recognition of Indigenous difference in the north. In 1933, Aboriginal people at Woodah Island in eastern Arnhem Land killed a policeman who was ostensibly in the area to investigate previous killings of Japanese men who had intruded into Yolngu country. Aboriginal legal responses, including violence, disabused settlers of the notion t…
The ‘Proper Settler’ and the ‘Native Mind’
Governing natives
In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia's Northern Territory. This book examines archives and texts of colonial administration to study the emergence of ideas and practices of indirect rule in this unlikely colonial situation. It demonstrates that the practice of indirect rule was everywhere an effect of Indigenous or 'native' people's insistence on maintaining and reinventing…
Possibly they did not know themselves’
The Aboriginals Ordinance of 1918 was the first piece of Commonwealth legislation to address the government of Aboriginal people. Covering the Northern Territory, it focused primarily on conditions in Darwin and operationalised Baldwin Spencer’s understanding of the project and terrain of government. This article focuses on the confusion that attended its idiosyncratic definition of ‘Aboriginal’, arguing that its uncertainty was not a problem but…
Genocide on Settler Frontiers
Reviewed by: Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers clash ed. by Mohamed Adhikari Ben Silverstein Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers clash Edited by Mohamed Adhikari. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2015 In his 1983 classic, Settler Capitalism, Donald Denoon explored the colonial encounter between settler pastoralists and Indigenous hunter-gatherers. Could the s…
Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria
Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria." Australian Historical Studies, 47(2), pp. 334–335
Patrick Wolfe (1949-2016)
On 18 February 2016, in the morning, one of the most original, committed, and giving historians of colonialism ceased his work. In Patrick Wolfe's death, an immeasurable loss has been sustained by those of us thinking about and trying to challenge settler colonialism around the world. Encountering Patrick for the first time was arresting. All enthusiasm and intensity, wisdom and warmth, with a willingness to engage, discuss, and argue. I first me…
Protests, Land Rights and Riots
Protests, Land Rights and Riots: Postcolonial Struggles in Australia in the 1980s, by Barry Morris. New York, Berghahn Books, 2015. xii, 218 pp. $80.00 US (cloth). The riot, around which this book pivots, looms over Australia today in a manner far outweighing its immediate reality. One might ask how a single event, one characterized by Barry Morris as a that lasted some ten minutes and resulted in serious injury to one policeman, could resonate s…
Books
John Fitzgerald reviews the book 'Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century', edited by David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, published by UWA Publishing, Perth, 2012
The Rule of Native Title
Since 1992, Indigenous land rights have been granted in Australia under the legal doctrine of native title. The Mabo judgment which established this body of law in Australia has met with mixed reception: some have heralded it as the basis for a new, post-colonial Australia, others have damned it for its failure to live up to this promise, and conservative governments have attacked and restricted it. In this article, I place Australian native titl…
Thinking with and beyond settler colonial studies
This article presents a review of recent work in settler colonial studies, provides a new genealogy for the concept, and argues for a return to approaches that tend to Indigenous experiences alongside and in relation to the settler colonial
Deep history and deep listening
This article outlines the possibilities of a deep history practice that engages with rather than sidelines Indigenous historical knowledges. Many Indigenous people insist that their knowledge of the deep past demands engagement. They do so, we suggest, because scientific historicism and Indigenous knowledge-systems and historicities already impinge upon and inform each other: they are intertwined. We propose ‘deep listening’ as a way historians m…
Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria
Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria." Australian Historical Studies, 47(2), pp. 334–335
Beyond presentism
We take up the challenge to extend the ‘archive of mnemonic practices’ beyond recent histories of violence by facilitating a dialogue between scholarship on deep history and the fourth wave of memory studies, both emerging under the sign of the Anthropocene. In so doing, we engage with the problem of transmission as it has emerged in both fields. Works in cultural memory studies provide us with compelling ways of thinking through mediated practic…
Reading sovereignties in the shadow of settler colonialism
The Northern Territory of Australia is often described by historians as marginal and anomalous, characterised by plurality and set apart from the settler colonial south(east). But it has long been subjected to practices of government designed to articulate settler colonialism upon and through its distinctive character. In this article, I take one such governmental project in order to read the antagonistic work of Indigenous and settler sovereignt…
Rail relations
Australian railway histories are dominated by narratives of engineering triumphs, colonial expansion into empty land, and bringing civilisation and development through railway infrastructure. These settler-colonial stories can be read back on themselves as histories and geographies of Aboriginal dispossession and colonial possession. Indeed, Aboriginal people, lands, waterways, and cultures have always been implicated in railway infrastructures, …
Governing natives
In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia's Northern Territory. This book examines archives and texts of colonial administration to study the emergence of ideas and practices of indirect rule in this unlikely colonial situation. It demonstrates that the practice of indirect rule was everywhere an effect of Indigenous or 'native' people's insistence on maintaining and reinventing…
The Rule of Native Title
Since 1992, Indigenous land rights have been granted in Australia under the legal doctrine of native title. The Mabo judgment which established this body of law in Australia has met with mixed reception: some have heralded it as the basis for a new, post-colonial Australia, others have damned it for its failure to live up to this promise, and conservative governments have attacked and restricted it. In this article, I place Australian native titl…
Books
John Fitzgerald reviews the book 'Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century', edited by David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, published by UWA Publishing, Perth, 2012
Protests, Land Rights and Riots
Protests, Land Rights and Riots: Postcolonial Struggles in Australia in the 1980s, by Barry Morris. New York, Berghahn Books, 2015. xii, 218 pp. $80.00 US (cloth). The riot, around which this book pivots, looms over Australia today in a manner far outweighing its immediate reality. One might ask how a single event, one characterized by Barry Morris as a that lasted some ten minutes and resulted in serious injury to one policeman, could resonate s…
Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria
Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria." Australian Historical Studies, 47(2), pp. 334–335
Patrick Wolfe (1949-2016)
On 18 February 2016, in the morning, one of the most original, committed, and giving historians of colonialism ceased his work. In Patrick Wolfe's death, an immeasurable loss has been sustained by those of us thinking about and trying to challenge settler colonialism around the world. Encountering Patrick for the first time was arresting. All enthusiasm and intensity, wisdom and warmth, with a willingness to engage, discuss, and argue. I first me…
Possibly they did not know themselves’
The Aboriginals Ordinance of 1918 was the first piece of Commonwealth legislation to address the government of Aboriginal people. Covering the Northern Territory, it focused primarily on conditions in Darwin and operationalised Baldwin Spencer’s understanding of the project and terrain of government. This article focuses on the confusion that attended its idiosyncratic definition of ‘Aboriginal’, arguing that its uncertainty was not a problem but…
Genocide on Settler Frontiers
Reviewed by: Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers clash ed. by Mohamed Adhikari Ben Silverstein Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers clash Edited by Mohamed Adhikari. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2015 In his 1983 classic, Settler Capitalism, Donald Denoon explored the colonial encounter between settler pastoralists and Indigenous hunter-gatherers. Could the s…
Thomson in Canberra
This chapter examines Donald Thomson’s Australian discovery of ‘native society’ in Arnhem Land, representing the recognition of Indigenous difference in the north. In 1933, Aboriginal people at Woodah Island in eastern Arnhem Land killed a policeman who was ostensibly in the area to investigate previous killings of Japanese men who had intruded into Yolngu country. Aboriginal legal responses, including violence, disabused settlers of the notion t…
The ‘Proper Settler’ and the ‘Native Mind’
Governing natives
In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia's Northern Territory. This book examines archives and texts of colonial administration to study the emergence of ideas and practices of indirect rule in this unlikely colonial situation. It demonstrates that the practice of indirect rule was everywhere an effect of Indigenous or 'native' people's insistence on maintaining and reinventing…
In Apartheid’s Shadow
In Apartheid’s Shadow: Australian Race Politics and South Africa, 1945–1975." Australian Historical Studies, 51(2), pp. 242–243
Thinking with and beyond settler colonial studies
This article presents a review of recent work in settler colonial studies, provides a new genealogy for the concept, and argues for a return to approaches that tend to Indigenous experiences alongside and in relation to the settler colonial
Reading sovereignties in the shadow of settler colonialism
The Northern Territory of Australia is often described by historians as marginal and anomalous, characterised by plurality and set apart from the settler colonial south(east). But it has long been subjected to practices of government designed to articulate settler colonialism upon and through its distinctive character. In this article, I take one such governmental project in order to read the antagonistic work of Indigenous and settler sovereignt…
Deep Historicities
In seeking to understand the deep past, the knowledges of First Nations peoples and of the various academic disciplines can seem incommensurable. In this essay, we argue the concept of “historicities”, that is, the encultured ways of narrating and conceiving of the past offers to enrich the study of deep history. Sensitivity to the various ways the past is remembered and understood, as well as the ways in which these historicities are dialogicall…
Deep history and deep listening
This article outlines the possibilities of a deep history practice that engages with rather than sidelines Indigenous historical knowledges. Many Indigenous people insist that their knowledge of the deep past demands engagement. They do so, we suggest, because scientific historicism and Indigenous knowledge-systems and historicities already impinge upon and inform each other: they are intertwined. We propose ‘deep listening’ as a way historians m…
Throwing Mud’ on Questions of Sovereignty
This article addresses two arguments about Chinese settlers in the Northern Territory. The first, in 1905, was sparked by criticisms of Chinese mining practices and accusations that Chinese people contaminated those Aboriginal people with whom they came into contact. The second was prompted by the imposition, in 1910–11, of restrictions on Chinese rights to work and employ in the Territory. Both were opposed by the Chinese, who represented themse…
Empire and Indigeneity
Beyond presentism
We take up the challenge to extend the ‘archive of mnemonic practices’ beyond recent histories of violence by facilitating a dialogue between scholarship on deep history and the fourth wave of memory studies, both emerging under the sign of the Anthropocene. In so doing, we engage with the problem of transmission as it has emerged in both fields. Works in cultural memory studies provide us with compelling ways of thinking through mediated practic…
Dividing Highways
We examine the barrier effects of freeways in California. We analyze the association between freeways and nearby street network connectivity and quantify the frequency and quality of crossings—underpasses or bridges that enable pedestrians and cyclists to cross the freeway. We find that barrier effects are most pronounced in communities of color. We also find that even where crossings exist, they are unpleasant or even hazardous for pedestrians a…
We are all connected to each other
This article considers relationships through deep history. While the field is often characterised by expressions of distance or estrangement from the longue durée, this article instead takes as its starting point a reflection on the past as intimate and present today. This form of narrating deep history, expressed from Yawuru Country in and around Broome, presents that history as a site of and a vehicle for connection. Written collaboratively, th…
We open our eyes despite the pain it causes’
We write this piece across February, March and April 2025, as the ceasefire – which was never fully in place – was completely wiped aside by Israel. Bombing resumed, with Gazan journalist Anas Al-Sharif reporting one day that: ‘The airstrikes that hit Gaza tonight were unlike anything witnessed since the beginning of the war.’ These ongoing horrors are recognised by almost every reputable source around the globe – and most significantly by Palest…
Indigenous Legal Judgments
Rail relations
Australian railway histories are dominated by narratives of engineering triumphs, colonial expansion into empty land, and bringing civilisation and development through railway infrastructure. These settler-colonial stories can be read back on themselves as histories and geographies of Aboriginal dispossession and colonial possession. Indeed, Aboriginal people, lands, waterways, and cultures have always been implicated in railway infrastructures, …
Political science (20 works) · History (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Colonialism (14 works) · History (11 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Ethnology (8 works) · Indigenous (8 works) · Australian History and Society (7 works)