Genocide's tension, etc.

 Thoughts on the reading: 

To use the term "genocide" to describe a process has continuously troubled me, as McDonnell and Moses lay out in their conclusion of "Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas." Like them, I am also struck by the notion that on one hand, calling something a genocide brings attention to the event. On the other hand, genocide has struck me as a term for "victims" or peoples that somehow lack historical agency, perhaps because it conjures images of prisons, camps, and lifeless bodies. It somehow seems to turn away from "the continuity of folk cultures that persisted just as they changed" (McDonnell and Moses 521) as these people employ survival strategies. Maybe because of the Jewish presence in media, the genocide of the Holocaust never seems like the Jewish people are lost to history, but for Native American and Hawaiian genocides, there is a certain "pastness" that at least in my experience, appears to cling, which goes back to Lemkin's idea of genocide as cultural death--could this be related to Renato Rosaldo's "imperialist nostalgia?"* 

Moreover, if Lemkin "regarded the extinction of culture as genocide" and "equated culture with high culture" (McDonnell and Moses 514), does this mean he did not believe in such a thing as decolonization? What did he think of decolonization? 

Another question that came up for me while reading Las Casas (it's a bit random and different from my other question): Most of the places, especially in the beginning of Las Casas's account speaks of the islands of the Indies, and one of the main points Las Casas makes is that these islands go from "populous and filled with native-born peoples" (5) to "uninhabited and despoiled of people" (7). Do reports that Las Casas writes against and even Las Casas's account itself help contribute to the idea of islands as solitary and isolated? Elizabeth DeLoughrey notes in Routes and Roots that Western empires used “western models of passive and empty space such as terra and aqua nullius, which were used to justify territorial expansion” (3) that separates the routes of connection among island archipelagoes. 

*a mood of nostalgia that makes racial domination appear innocent and pure; people mourning the passing or transformation of what they have caused to be transformed. Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: A person kills somebody and then mourns the victim; or someone deliberately alters a life form and then regrets that things have not remained as they were. . . Imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of "innocent yearning" both to capture peoples' imagination and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination (R. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis), quickie def. from here.