If the gothic genre is about something from another world, then rez gothic is about settlers: Mallory Whiteduck, ‘Rez Gothic: Monstrous Aunties, Double Selves, and the Detritus of Settler Colonialism’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 13, 2, 2026, pp. 38-61

21Oct26

Abstract: Rez gothic aesthetics sit at the intersection of rez aesthetics and the gothic and speak to Native American and Indigenous experiences of the world. Their location in everyday Native life produces an ambivalence about binaries like good/bad, beauty/ugly, and comfort/fright that prevent simple associations between the rez and tragedy and Native American and Indigenous peoples themselves from being understood as flattened stereotypes or victims. The socioeconomic conditions of the reservation are sometimes interpreted by onlookers as terrifying. Rez gothic aesthetics show how Native people interpret and transform those so-called horrors to show that the true horror is not ofNative life, but of the centuries of settler colonial strategies weaponized to eliminate it. I study the rez gothic aesthetics in Trickster, a 2020 fantasy drama television series that was embroiled in an ethnic fraud controversy. I suggest that we view Tricksteras a text with multiple authors and create space to celebrate the work of the Native American and Indigenous writers, producers, actors, designers, choreographers, and musicians who worked together to create art worthy of critical attention.


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Settler social sciences: Terry Wotherspoon, ‘Social Science and Settler Colonial Governance: The Panel on Indian Research’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 2026

21Oct26

Abstract: Social scientists have only recently come to explore in depth the ways in which the work that they do, the knowledge that they produce, and the ways in which they undertake these activities have emerged within and influenced colonialism. This article explores the role of social scientists in one federal government initiative introduced after the Second World War, a formative period for the social sciences in Canada. The Panel on Indian Research, introduced by the Indian Affairs Branch in the late 1940s, served as a vehicle for government officials to learn about social scientific knowledge that might assist in addressing matters that they considered problems. The activities undertaken by and associated with the panel revealed that social scientists were willing to assist the government in its aims to assimilate and integrate Indigenous peoples into Canadian society, but it also exposed some tensions and contradictions in those relationships.


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Indigenous bodies are shaped by settler colonialism (this is why resistance is invincible): Rami Salameh, ‘Palestinian anti-colonial violence and conditions of non-being’, Race & Class, 2026

21Oct26

6Abstract: This article examines Palestinian anti-colonial violence from within the lived experience of colonisation, starting not with the act itself, but from the oppressive spaces that have already formed the colonised perception of being-in-the-world. Unlike juridical, liberal and security-centred approaches, it starts from how the Palestinian body has been produced as conditionally recognisable, by drawing on Fanon, Palestinian studies, settler-colonial theory and critical phenomenology. Checkpoints, walls, starvation, forced displacement and the destruction of liveable infrastructures are inscribed on the body, shaping everything from space and time to grief and desire. Gaza is neither an exception nor a turning point, but reveals, in concentrated form, an eliminatory logic that has structured colonisation since the Nakba in 1948. The author argues that spatial control and the destruction of the conditions of life are not successive stages but entangled registers of a single project in which Palestinians are rendered hyper-visible to colonial power as bodies to be counted, monitored, displaced or killed, while denied the authority to appear as world-making subjects. The question that remains – for debates on violence, decolonisation, settler colonialism and political ontology alike – is how a people can inhabit a world that attacks the very conditions of their being.


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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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