Even self-colonisation requires an Indigenous other! Kosuke Shimizu, ‘Eurocentrism and the construction of the ‘self’ in colonialism: The Okinawa–Japan relationality’, Political Studies Review, 2026

12Jul26

Abstract: This paper examines how Japan colonised itself through the colonisation of Okinawa. While postcolonial scholarship has primarily focused on how colonised peoples were dominated and exploited under Eurocentrism, comparatively less attention has been paid to how non-Western colonisers internalised colonial norms within the international order and ontologically constituted themselves as modern subjects. This article seeks to address this gap. By analysing the Okinawa–Japan relations during the transition from the tributary system to the Westphalian order and subsequently within the post-war US-centred East Asian security architecture, the paper demonstrates that Eurocentrism operated not merely as a geopolitical ideology but as an ontological presupposition of stable and hierarchical subjects. It shows how Japan externalised violence onto Okinawa in order to consolidate its position as a legitimate member of the liberal international order. Finally, drawing on Mahayana Buddhist thought – particularly the doctrine of dependent origination and the concept of non-self – the article proposes an alternative ontology of relationality as a way to unsettle this fixed international order. Decolonisation, it argues, must therefore be understood not only as a political project but also as an ontological reconfiguration.


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The settler colonial limit of acceptability: Mark Mallory, ‘The Names of Four Scouts: Slavery, Settler Colonialism, and the Limits of Incorporation at the Texas Capitol Complex since 1983’, Journal of Texas History, 2, 1, 2026, #4

12Jul26

Abstract: This essay takes the commemorated names of four Seminole Negro Indian Scout Medal of Honor recipients to examine public memory at the Texas Capitol Complex since 1983. Using archival documents, newspapers, exhibits, and monuments, it traces how the Texas State Preservation Board responded to criticism through limited incorporations of Black, Tejano, and women’s histories while preserving narratives that disavow slavery and settler colonialism. It argues that these incorporations reinforce a framework centered on Texas “pioneers,” obscuring Native histories and misrepresenting the complex intersections of Blackness and Indigeneity embodied by Black Seminole history.


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Environmental resistance against settler colonialism: Holly Randell-Moon (ed.), Environments of power: Vibrant terrain and landscapes of resistance, Manchester University Press, 2026

12Jul26

Description: Environments of power provides unique case studies of environmental inclusion and exclusion across the Americas, Africa, Japan, India, and the South-Pacific. Using more-than-human and Indigenist approaches, chapters focus on Indigenous environmental resistance, marginalisation across social and physical environments, ecology as art, and how local communities are caught up in and resist development and infrastructure projects. The book demonstrates how environments influence which bodies and other matter belong (or not) in certain places.

Check Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11


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Gendered settler colonialism: Lihi Ben Shitrit, Idan Chazan, ‘Demographic Anxieties of Jewish Sovereignty: Palestinian Women’s Bodies in Israeli Annexation Politics’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2026

12Jul26

Abstract: This article analyzes the demographic discourse in Israeli annexation politics, focusing on how the Sovereignty Movement—one of the most influential networks advocating for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank—conceptualizes Palestinian women primarily through their reproductive capacity. Employing discourse analysis of publications from 2013 to 2022 and examining post-October 7th developments, the article reveals how annexationists co-opt the feminist language of “women’s rights” to promote a racialized demographic agenda. The research identifies two distinct approaches in the annexation discourse: in the West Bank, concerns focus on Palestinian women’s fertility rates, celebrating their “Westernization” and reduced reproduction (biopolitical control), while for Gaza, the emphasis shifts to “voluntary emigration” or transfer (biopolitical elimination). Both approaches employ humanitarian rhetoric while ultimately advancing Jewish demographic dominance. Theoretically, the article expands on the intersections of gender, biopolitics, and settler-colonialism by showing how variations of biopolitical logics apply to different territories within the same political context.


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Poetic fragmentation against settler mythscapes: Doro Wiese, ‘Unsettling Coloniality: Opaque White Space in the Cut-Up Poetry of Jordan Abel’s (Nisga’a) Un/Inhabited’, English Studies, 2026

11Jul26

Abstract: Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited—a cut-up poetry collection from 91 Western novels in the public domain—disrupts, fragments and resists colonial narratives of Indigenous vanishing through the agency of its white space. Through a process of appropriation that erases, fragments and disrupts ongoing settler-colonial ideas, Un/inhabited critiques colonial practices of land-seizure and its representations, while its white space becomes a metaphor for Indigenous ways of relating to the land that make themselves felt without being articulated, resisting legibility. In this essay, it will be shown how Abel’s aesthetic procedures interrogate and dismantle the settler-colonial mythscape of the American West, shaped in the USA by popular culture and the idea of a Manifest Destiny and in Canada by legal discourses. Attention is paid to the affective presence of the white space, and Indigenous and decolonial interpretative methods that respect and relate to its opaqueness are sought and discussed.


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Settler penetration and appropriation are gendered: Christie Harner, ‘Louisa Anne Meredith, Ethel Pedley, and Gendered Ecological Knowledge of the Australian Bush’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 22, 1, 2026

11Jul26

Abstract: Writing in to The Bulletin in 1892, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson participated in what Manu Samriti Chander has called a “poetry war” and “literary debate” about the Australian bushlands (74).(1) The men were well-known contributors to the newspaper, including for Lawson’s “A Song of the Republic” (1887) and Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” (1890). Ostensibly, the poetic debate is over the nature of the bushlands, the “region of farms, forests, mines, and provincial towns and villages that supports Australia’s primary and export industries” (Lawrence 212). The apparent disagreement rests on the harshness of bush life. In a poem initially titled “Borderland,” in the July 9 Bulletin, Lawson writes of the “burning wastes of barren soil and sand / With their everlasting fences stretching out across the land!” (21). Two weeks later, Paterson’s poetic response sings of the land’s “moods and changes, as the seasons rise and fall / And the men who know the bush-land—they are loyal through it all” (15). On August 6, in a poem titled “In Answer to ‘Banjo,’ and otherwise,” later retitled “The City Bushman,” Lawson emphasizes the inhumanity of a barren landscape, even as he admits a yearning to affiliate himself with the mythic bush, “to feel once more a little like a native of the land” (5). Paterson, by contrast, highlights the humanity of those who live and work in the bush, their camaraderie, traditions, and capacity to endure. Despite their disagreement, the men share a distinctive vocabulary that casts the bush as a masculine, distinctly Australian space. Both strive to associate the bush with a new, emergent national identity within and against other versions of bush ecology. Whether or not they wrote for money or increased readership, Paterson and Lawson also wrote into being a “demonstrably non-British iconography at a time when Australian nationalism was burgeoning” (Lawrence 212). Australian literature of the 1890s, in the decade leading up to Federation (January 1, 1901), or the joining of the separate states, is almost exclusively read in this way: male, anti-authoritarian, and allied to an uncanny bush landscape that refused understanding by outsiders. As Susan Lawrence has argued, Paterson and Lawson, alongside other writers and visual artists, were “responding to, even rebelling against, a colonial, British past,” and so “seeking distinctive and unique attributes from which to form a new identity” (221). Their works asserted what Jason Rudy has described as “an almost ontological relationship between Australia’s distinct landscape and emerging nationalist sentiment,” between the stark, phantasmagoric imagery of the bush and masculinist independence from domestic life (174). To the extent that Paterson’s and Lawson’s poems repeatedly invoke ecological motifs—topological formations, species’ names, weather patterns—they do so to emphasize the absolute singularity of the bush landscape: an ecology without peer, impervious to comprehension by a non-initiate, an outsider, or, pointedly, someone British. My aim in this essay is to offer a counterpoint, to analyze how two women writers of the “Federation decade” complicate late nineteenth-century formulations of a masculine bush ecology, and to argue that women’s writing of the 1890s offers an alternative view of human-ecological bonds. Louisa Anne Meredith’s 1891 Last Series. Bush Friends in Tasmania, an illustrated guide to local species, and Ethel Pedley’s 1899 children’s novel Dot and the Kangaroo use representations of the native landscape to challenge conventional readings of Australian identity formation. I put them in dialogue because they use two distinct genres often associated with nineteenth-century women’s science writing—the botanical guide and the children’s text—and because they are both invested in a specific ecological pedagogy. Unlike earlier ecological and naturalist texts, including Meredith’s own mid-century volumes, these 1890s works refute logics that either completely align the settler colony with Britain or segregate emergent colonial knowledge from existing British “leadership in these observational sciences” (A. Johnston 216). Rather, Meredith and Pedley’s 1890s texts model modes of ecological thinking that emphasize interconnection and entanglement. In what follows, after a brief introduction to both authors and texts, I will highlight three components of Meredith’s and Pedley’s engagement with Australian ecology: species naming conventions, visual illustrations, and patterns of economic exchange. The first two hinge on paratextual elements and the volumes’ print format, linking ecological content to multi-scalar form and invoking broader, more expansive readings of bush ecosystems. References to economic exchange exist explicitly on the level of content and, implicitly, in the global circulation of both authors and texts. Together, the three components offer a reading of 1890s Australian ecology that foregrounds interconnectedness rather than isolationism: a feminized alternative to the masculine logic of settler nationalism.


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Ruthless settler colonialism: Rebecca Lindsay, Reading Ruth in Settler Colonial Australia, Society of Biblical Literature, 2026

08Jul26

Description: Rebecca Lindsay reads the book of Ruth from her location in Australia, paying attention to the impacts of colonization on biblical interpretation. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, including decolonial studies, this volume places the book of Ruth in conversation with texts from Australia and stories from Linday’s own experience, revealing common themes of home, land, memory, and identity. Engagement with Indigenous voices and settler colonial studies leads to an honest grappling with the challenges of decolonizing biblical interpretation. Scholars and students of both biblical studies and Australian studies will discover how to adopt the embodied reading postures of feet on the ground, being in relationship, ceding control, and attending to justice. Lindsay’s embodied interpretive approach offers an alternative to the colonial legacies of biblical hermeneutics as it is practiced today.


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Crimea as a settler colony: Mariia Shynkarenko, Identity as Weapon: Crimean Tatars and their Quest for Indigenous Self-determination, University of Toronto Press, 2026

08Jul26

Description: Identity as Weapon presents a study of Crimean Tatar resistance to Russian settler colonialism through the strategic deployment of identity. Since the first Russian annexation of Crimea in 1783, Crimean Tatars have been the victims of the classic tools of settler colonial violence: land dispossession, racialization, deportation, and assimilation. In her investigation of Crimean Tatar political activism, researcher Mariia Shynkarenko shows the continuity of Crimean Tatar claims to self-determination. During the early years of the Soviet Union, Crimean Tatar activists embraced the language of “backwardness” to access political resources available to them through Soviet korenizatsiia (indigenization) policies. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, Crimean Tatars have alternately invoked European, Indigenous, Ukrainian, and Muslim identities. These identities – sometimes state sponsored, but often not – have been powerful weapons of the Crimean Tatar struggle for self-determination. Shynkarenko critically applies lessons from Indigenous studies to explain why Indigeneity has become an important category for Crimean Tatar politics, while challenging presumptions about the nature of Indigenous identity and politics that have been drawn predominantly from examples in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.


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Settlers Magdalenism (i.e., rescuing ‘fallen’ women for the purpose of settlement): Marine Berthiot ‘Decolonising the Character of the Magdalene in White Settler Colonies’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2026

08Jul26

Abstract: Magdalenism is often associated with Ireland; however, it was in fact practised in more than 60 western and westernised countries from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. This structure, which is known for oppressing, repressing, and censoring femininity, women’s rights over their own bodies, and women’s access to the public sphere, also participated in the Baby Scoop Era (1940s–1980s), separating more than 1 million unwed mothers from their babies in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Visual narratives by Magdalene survivors themselves are the focus of this article, which examines the cultural and historical specificities of Magdalene trauma as experienced in Canada and Australia. A decolonial, transnational, and feminist approach to trauma-reading will be applied on two shorts: Zuma, a filmed performance by Sharon Alward (non-Indigenous Canadian) (2011), as well as the visual poem, Magdalen Diaries (2011) by Rachael Romero (non-Indigenous Australian) (2011). This article examines how both women artists stage Magdalene trauma on the screen to decolonise the character of the Magdalene in their respective white settler colonies, focusing on clothes/costumes, narratorial perspectives, and institutional silence.


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Post-settler disorder and colonial contact fatigue: Jenny Morgan, ‘Naming the Fatigue, Rekindling the Fire: Gitxsan Matriarchs’ Fight Against Colonial Disorder’, Fourth World Journal, 26, 1

08Jul26

Abstract: This article introduces two conceptual frameworks—Post-Settler Disorder (PSD) and Colonial Contact Fatigue (CCF)—to describe the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples in Canada. Written from the perspective of a Gitxsan woman, the paper draws on Indigenous epistemologies, storytelling, and feminist scholarship grounded in lived experience. PSD functions as a satirical analytical lens exposing settler denial, historical amnesia, and narratives of innocence that sustain colonial systems. CCF names the cumulative spiritual, emotional, and physical exhaustion experienced through continuous contact with colonial institutions. The article highlights the role of Indigenous women, humor, and matrilineal knowledge as sources of resilience, resistance, and pathways toward healing.


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