They liked what they saw: Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ‘Nazi Views on Race and Genocide in Australia: A Comparative and Contrastive Approach’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2026

19Oct26

Abstract: Via an examination of comparative approaches to radically violent societies such as Nazi Germany and colonial Australia, this article investigates how German representations of Australian state racism shed light on the similarities and differences between the Holocaust and frontier violence in Australia. Indicative of these German views, it suggests, were those of government officials like Rudolf Asmis, who frequently wrote and spoke on the question of radical violence against Indigenous people in Australia against the backdrop of increasing antisemitic violence in Germany that culminated in the Holocaust. Assessing the position of Australia in Nazi views on the racial state, it suggests that there are important differences between settler colonial violence and the Holocaust that can only be uncovered through comparative historical method.


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The limits of a paradigm: Jean Muteba Rahier, ‘The settler colonial studies paradigm as a discursive reaffirmation of the preeminence of Indigeneity in the field of ethnoracial alterity in the Andean sub-region’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies’, 2026

19Oct26

Abstract: This article critically assesses the analytical utility of the Settler Colonial Studies (SCS) paradigm to make sense of sociopolitical realities in the Andean sub-region. It contends that the foundational ‘settler-Indigenous’ binary of SCS – predicated on Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’ – reproduces a long-standing discursive tradition in the sub-region that grants Indigeneity a position of preeminence while marginalizing the specific trajectories and experiences of Afrodescendants and others. By uncovering the ‘microphysics’ of this ethnoracial hierarchy from colonial law to contemporary multiculturalism, I intend to illustrate how the ‘ideological biology of national identity’ in countries like Ecuador has historically integrated the Indigenous subject as a symbolic ancestral root while treating Blackness as an external, disposable, and excluded presence. Through ethnographic data from the Ecuadorian Province of Esmeraldas, an overview of Indigenismo in Ecuador, and an appreciation of the work done on the ‘Indianization’ of Afrodescendant legal claims in the Inter-American System, the essay argues that the SCS paradigm’s amalgamation of Blackness and Indigeneity ends up sustaining colonial hierarchies. Ultimately, I call for a ‘multiversal’ or pluriversal horizontalism that rejects the primacy of any single identification in favor of an equitable, non-hierarchical coalition of truly equal partners.


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Logocentric settlers: Janice Feng, ‘”Peoples Without Writing?” Logocentrism, settler colonialism, and indigeneity’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 31, 5, 2026, pp. 33-49

19Oct26

Abstract: How does logocentrism, which rests on the strict separation between speech and writing and posits Indigenous peoples as “peoples without writing,” erase Indigenous sovereignty, both historically and at the present? In this essay, I take up Jacques Derrida’s critique of European logocentrism that he develops through a critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of writing to argue that it is by positing Indigenous peoples as innocent and self-present beings who possess full self-presence that settler-colonial discourses denied their political subjectivity and failed to acknowledge them as rule-governed peoples. Taking up this critical lens, I show how logocentrism was deeply ingrained in concrete settler-colonial practices by closely reading the early Jesuits Relations written by French missionary Paul Le Jeune in the New France Colony in the 1630s. Facing incommensurability between Indigenous and French social and political orders, Le Jeune painted Indigenous peoples as devoid of all laws and governance so that Catholic and European rules and norms could be imposed. Derrida’s critique of logocentrism, I argue throughout the essay, provides us with ample resources to disrupt the logic of logocentrism that underwrites settler colonialism.


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The ‘traditional culture’ of settler colonialism: Anthea Compton, The Politics of Traditional Culture under Australian Settler Colonialism 1963-2007, Australian National University Press, 2026

19Oct26

Description: The Politics of Traditional Culture under Australian Settler Colonialism 1963–2007 interrogates the deployment of the term ‘traditional culture’ within Indigenous affairs discourse from the 1963 Bark Petitions to the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention. In so doing, this critically important book establishes how a shifting and malleable discourse on Aboriginality operated as a key method of engagement between the Australian state and First Nations peoples. Over a forty-year period, ‘traditional culture’ was increasingly employed by First Nations and settler actors in diverse and often contradictory ways. Throughout politics, policy, academia and media, ‘traditional culture’ emerged as a foundational political concept, central to the granting or retracting of rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Understanding this contested discourse around ‘traditional culture’ helps to reveal the complexities of settler responses to Indigenous peoples’ aspirations around sovereignty, self-government and Country. By exposing this discourse, this book speaks to issues that strike at the heart of modern Australian national identity, revealing the ultimately ambiguous and fickle nature of settler sovereignty.


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Toxic, toxic, toxic: Noam Leshem, ‘Settler Toxicity: Contaminated Restitutions and the Contagion of Hope’, Antipode, 2026

18Oct26

Abstract: This article introduces settler toxicity: the symbolic charge that lodges itself in Indigenous cultural-material worlds through their passage through settler institutions, producing real harm through institutional and epistemic vectors rather than particle matter. Drawing on participatory workshops with Palestinians engaging with objects from one depopulated village, it documents three components through which settler toxicity operates—polluted provenance, contamination by association and toxic epistemologie —and examines what communities do when restitution frameworks prove inadequate. Settler toxicity persists even under conditions designed to resist it: good intentions do not detoxify. Yet toxicity does not foreclose action. We document how belongings turn into instruments of solidarity and sovereign assertion. Restitution is not a dispute over possession but a struggle over Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination and the right of return. Just restitutions require contaminated alliances: relations of co-resistance that acknowledge settler scholars cannot stand outside the toxic structures they seek to contest.


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Settler colonial unchilding: Nadera Shahloub-Kevorkian, ‘Children’s cartographies of refusal and life-making: wilfulness and decoloniality amid spaces of death in Gaza’, Children’s Geographies, 2026

18Oct26

Abstract: This article examines Palestinian children at the nexus of settler-colonial control and genocidal violence, foregrounding their capacities to resist, reconstitute life, and sustain childhood under extreme dispossession. Building on the concept of unchilding, it shows how children are targeted by colonial and genocidal violence while also interrupting these processes through their bodies, spatial practices, and communal relations. Conceptualizing children as producers of knowledge, politics, and relational practices of liveability and futurity, the article challenges representations of children as passive victims. Drawing on a child-guided epistemic methodology and childist philosophical framework, it centres children’s affects, voices, bodies, spaces, and relationalities as generative sites of knowledge. The analysis examines fifty media and social media posts from publicly accessible accounts collected over two years of genocidal violence, attending to children’s everyday routines, spatial practices, and cartographic renderings of violence. It identifies wilfulness as a spatial, affective, and cartographic practice: an embodied insistence on occupying space, sustaining relational life, and mapping violence in ways that refuse erasure and fragmentation. Childhood wilfulness thus becomes a political and epistemic intervention through which children affirm life, continuity, and childhood liveability, sustaining childhood as a horizon of decolonial possibility amid genocidal unchilding.


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Absent settler colonialism: Emma Brennan Chapman, Disappearing Connections: War, Absence, and Kin in New France and New England, 1680-1740, PhD dissertation, UC Davis, 2026

17Oct26

Abstract: Cycles of violence and displacement engulfed Indigenous, French, and English groups in the area around what is now the border between Canada and northern New England as European settlers and trade pushed into Indigenous homelands throughout the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. These violent cycles led to long absences of family and kin members who were captured, injured or fleeing from violence. These absences had spiritual, economic, political, and emotional dimensions for European and Indigenous families who made up the societies and governments of northeastern North America in the colonial period. This dissertation argues that the concept of absence and absent people themselves were key elements of how Indigenous and invading European societies conceived of themselves, connected with each other, and built larger economic and political systems. The informal networks, altered relationships, and spiritual conceptions that families and kin relations built up to negotiate the problems of absence became the major ways that the competing polities in the area related to each other and claimed and resisted authority. As both Indigenous and European families innovated existing cultural traditions and legal or economic frameworks, they also incorporated the living absent into their societies, illustrating the strong influence that absent people had on the formations of culture and societies they were not physically present with. This dissertation examines those conceptions and the ways these individual navigations of absence from below formed culture and authority from below.


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Triangular settler relations: Li-Chun Fang, Yushen Fang, ‘Colonial Encounters and Identity Formation: Dutch Colonizers, Hoklo Immigrants, and Indigenous Peoples in Seventeenth-Century Formosa’, Dutch Crossing, 2026

17Oct26

Abstract: This study combines Anderson’s concepts of spatial boundaries and administrative classification with Gellner’s theories of state and nationalism to analyse identity reconstruction in seventeenth-century Formosa under the tripartite interaction of colonial powers, Hokkien immigrants, and indigenous peoples. Multiple toponyms – Ilha Formosa, Takasago – reveal external powers’ construction of Formosa as a ‘strategic frontier’ in their geopolitical imagination; naming and cartography abstracted scattered spaces into governable units. Under Dutch and Spanish colonial rule, indigenous societies were systematically restructured. Colonizers, driven by resource extraction, governed through military repression, religious assimilation, and economic control. Nevertheless, indigenous peoples demonstrated agency through resistance and strategic cooperation – e.g. the Matta Incident and exile of inibs (indigenous priestesses). Driven by maritime prohibition policy and the Ming-Qing transition’s push-pull dynamics, Hokkien immigrants developed an instrumental, situationally adaptable ‘maritime Hokkien Chinese’ identity; under certain conditions, they formed cross-ethnic anti-colonial alliances with indigenous groups. Although seventeenth-century colonial governance did not immediately give rise to modern nationalism, the ‘territorialized’ imagination it established laid the historical and epistemological foundation for the subsequent formation of Taiwanese identity.


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Resident(ial) evil: Kayla Boileau, Karine Vanthuyne, ‘Legacies of Mass Violence: Indian Residential Schools in Canada’, in Nerina Weiss, Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Linda Green (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of Mass Violence, 2026

17Oct26

Abstract: Indian Residential Schools were created by the Government of Canada and Christian Churches to assimilate Indigenous children into settler colonial culture. This method was developed at the end of the 1880s, when the settler government formalized agreements with the Churches to establish and manage boarding schools aimed at evangelizing and assimilating Indigenous children. From 1920 to 1960, this policy of assimilation through forced schooling was in full force. Education, specifically, was an insidious weapon for the removal of any sense of Indigeneity in the Survivors, but not the only weapon utilized by the settler state.


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The body of settler women: Jess Libow, Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2025

17Oct26

Description: Nineteenth-century America saw profound changes in the ways people viewed their bodies, their health, and their corporeal connection to their environments. Though much of the writing about bodies was produced by men, Vigorous Reforms focuses on the understudied literary history of how women came to understand physicality and its connection to their everyday lives. The introduction of physical education allowed women to conceive their own and others’ bodies not as static entities, but as adaptable to their own needs, goals, and labor. Jess Libow also shows the limits of the science of the era—since bodily differences were often understood as biologically determined, theories of health defined womanhood in terms of racialized bodily abilities. For example, settler colonial ideology coded Native women as deteriorating due to their “uncivilized” ways of life, and proponents of slavery insisted that Black women’s inherent strength made them suitable for enslavement. Drawing on a wide-ranging archive of ideas about exercise, hygiene, and nutrition, Libow argues that women’s writing about health was fundamental to the development of what we now think of as American feminism.


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