Settler-colonial poetry sucks: Virginia Jackson, ‘”Our Poets”: William Cullen Bryant and the White Romantic Lyric’, New Literary History, 49, 4, 201p, pp. 521-551

22Feb19

Abstract: William Cullen Bryant’s abstraction of the British Romantic poetics he has been accused of merely borrowing had lasting effects on the lyricization of transatlantic poetics and on current ideas of Romantic lyric (specifically on versions of “the” Romantic lyric taught in American English departments) and on the naturalization of lyric reading. Bryant’s lyricized racism is and was inherent in the very Englishness of the forms he used to establish what it was and is to be a poet in America. By making American poetics in the image of British Romanticism, Bryant made American poetry dead and white at the very moment of its invention. Bryant’s poems were often about that predicament—that is, about whiteness and the difference settler colonialism made to British Romanticism, which is to say that if Cleanth Brooks was right that (what he thought of as) “Romantic poetry . . . foreshadows the characteristic structure” of modern poetry, then this is only true of modern American poetry if we consider the long shadow that Bryant (and nineteenth-century American poetics more generally) cast within that structure.


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The military/settler/anthropology complex: David Hyndman, Scott Flower, The Crisis of Cultural Intelligence: The Anthropology of Civil–Military Operations, World Scientific, 2019

22Feb19

Description: Military and civilian organizations in the past have attempted to understand culture and the cultural environment of conflict zones through anthropology. While there is a small and growing number of studies examining the use of anthropology for counterinsurgency, no studies have compared the Anglo-Saxon ABCA Armies’ approaches to understanding cultural factors for counterinsurgency and civil-military operations.Crisis of Cultural Intelligence: The Anthropology of civil-military Operations thus represents a timely investigation into a number of issues regarding the past and present relationship between militarized anthropology, settler colonialism, and Indigenous militancy and the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which has internationalized the claim of encapsulated nations for equal rights. Covering issues such as the use of militarized anthropology in the Vietnam War and the controversial Human Terrain System (HTS) program used in Afghanistan, this book addresses the need for constructive and informed discussions about the nature and function of cultural data collection and analysis for counterinsurgency, peace-building, and conflict prevention operations.Crisis of Cultural Intelligence: The Anthropology of civil-military Operations is particularly important today, as cultural values and heritage continue to inform civil-military interventions of intrastate armed conflict amongst the people. Following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book will provide some insights into how militaries will now need to look ahead and consider the types of conflicts they may become involved in.


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Settler frontiers in unexpected places: Oliver Charbonneau, ‘”A new west in Mindanao”: settler fantasies on the U.S. imperial fringe’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2019

20Feb19

Abstract: This essay analyzes white settler formations in the Southern Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century. Occupied by the United States in the wake of the Spanish-American War, the Muslim-majority regions of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago became sites of colonial experimentation and reconfiguration. This led to a brief-but-concerted push by Euro-American fortune seekers to settle the “Muslim South.” Supported by U.S. policy makers and colonial officials, white colonists were drawn to Mindanao-Sulu by visions of permanent settlement and limitless economic opportunity. This analysis contends that settler attempts to build a “white man’s country” in the Southern Philippines were shaped by vernaculars and modes of conquest developed on the continental frontier. It interrogates the creation of transoceanic frontier spaces in Mindanao-Sulu and the practical attempts to exploit them, which drew inspiration from diverse sources in the American West and across the colonized globe. In its study of settler fortunes and failures, the essay blurs distinctions between national and imperial peripheries, and contributes to a growing scholarly interest in reassessing the importance of U.S. extraterritorial possessions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


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Settler memory: Vicki Hsueh, ‘Reckoning with Settler Memory: Barbara Arneil’s Domestic Colonies and Adam Dahl’s Empire of the People’, Perspectives on Politics, 17, 1, 2019, pp. 168-172

20Feb19

Access the review article here.


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Native title as settler colonialism: Catherine Howlett, Rebecca Lawrence, ‘Accumulating Minerals and Dispossessing Indigenous Australians: Native Title Recognition as Settler‐Colonialism’, Antipode, 2019

20Feb19

Abstract: The changes in regulation of mineral development on Indigenous people’s lands, wrought by the advent of native title in Australia, created an impression that the political economy of mining on Indigenous people’s lands would be fundamentally transformed. In this paper we argue, in reality, a deeply seated settler‐colonial mentality endures in Australia within the institutions presiding over mineral governance, particularly in those States that are heavily dependent upon resource extraction. Focusing on the governance of mineral development in Queensland, Australia, we offer an analysis of the rationalities that inform the endurance of an inequitable architecture of extractive governance in that State. Our conceptual framework draws on a synthesis of the concepts of “accumulation by dispossession”, “settler colonialism”, and Indigenous critiques of the politics of recognition, to argue that liberal states remain deeply committed to the facilitation of mineral development on Indigenous people’s lands in direct contravention to international norms.


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‘Space-off’! Settler colonialism and visual representation: Peta Jeffries, ‘Locating Settler Colonialism in the Myths of Burke and Wills – Aboriginal and Islamic Peoples’s Involvement in Reimagining Successful Exploration of Inland Australia’, Australian Journal of Islamic Studies, 3, 3, 2018

20Feb19

Abstract: Within Australian settler colonial history, a process of ‘space-off’ in exploration cultural representations has created erasure and denial of Aboriginal and Islamic people’s involvement. The implications of this erasure are significant due to the legacy of the myth in maintaining particular views about the Australian inland landscape and the use and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. Focusing on visual artwork of sociocultural productions associated with the 1860 Victorian Exploring Expedition (VEE), commonly referred to as “Burke and Wills”, this article identifies representations that reflect ongoing social and ecological knowledge of human relationships with nature. As a simple strategy to reimagine Australia’s myths, this article draws on visual artworks and other colonial era secondary sources, plus more recent literature associated with cameleer and Aboriginal histories, to identify representations of settler colonialism and erasure to highlight shared histories worthy of further research. This article examines the structural mechanism of space-off as a strategy to increase understanding of the ways in which settler colonialism pervades not only the national psyche, but also ways in which knowledge and culture are (re)produced based on “an appropriationist logic of domination.”1 Highlighting the ways settler colonialism is maintained, in particular through processes of racialisation, space-off and particular history practices, this article contributes to the growing discipline of Australian Islamic studies and will support further research into shared histories of cross-cultural knowledge production.


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Settler-colonial dispossession is gendered: Salem Kimberley Anne Hicks, Gendered dispossession and settler colonialism: A feminist carceral analysis of the privatization of Indigenous land, PhD Dissertation, University of Leicester, 2019

20Feb19

Abstract: This theoretically based thesis employs a critical feminist analysis to examine the gendered aspects inherent in the implementation of private property on Indigenous reserve land in Canada. Although Indigenous peoples in Canada have previously rejected privatization of their reserve lands for fear of assimilation of their traditional lands to market-based commodification and rationalities, as well as fragmentation and reduction of their traditional land base, versions of privatization policies continue to be advocated by some government officials, think tanks, scholars, and a small but significant number of Indigenous peoples themselves. With the Canadian governmental shifts to neoliberal socioeconomic policies converging, in some ways, with Indigenous demands for more self-determination, it is foreseeable that both the anxiety and appeal of privatization of Indigenous reserve lands will resurface. Recent advocates of privatization of reserve lands present it as necessary for unlocking the market value of dead capital in land leading to investment certainty thereby unleashing an entrepreneurial “spirit” leading to prosperity. The neoliberal ideological linkage of private property to purportedly emancipatory entrepreneurialism is depoliticized from historical and ongoing gendered and racial colonialism. Settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous women from their traditional relationships to land and labour, coupled with current growing expectations of women as participants in entrepreneurialism, has inspired the main question of the thesis as: How does the contemporary rationalization of private property for First Nations reserve land operate as a gendered tool of dispossession for Indigenous women? To answer this question, this thesis uses an interdisciplinary socio-political lens to interrogate the First Nations Private Property Ownership Act (FNPOA) as a contemporary example of Indigenous land privatization policy. It is argued that the logic underlying the policy, including entrepreneurialism as dependent on private property, along with gender-blind historical revisionism, operates to erase and obscure not only the historical colonial dispossession of Indigenous women but also the current carceral mechanisms in capitalism that work to maintain the heteropatriarchal settler state status quo. The thesis employs an interdisciplinary framework drawing on Indigenous feminist theory and carceral geography, historicizing historical and anthropological research to elucidate how past dispossession is still operational in the contemporary state. This critical feminist analysis unsettles the common sense of private property and contributes to feminist engagement with settler colonial studies.


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Born settler-colonial, not yet capitalist: James Parisot, How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West, Pluto Press, 2019

18Feb19

Abstract: In an age of political and economic uncertainty, from the Great Recession to the election of Donald Trump, it is essential to understand the ways capitalism and imperialism are central to the American way of life. The story told in this book brings together a new interpretation of American history beyond mainstream perspectives to chart the ways in which white-settler colonialism pushed expansion on the western frontier of empire, and locates the history through which empire gradually took on a capitalist form. It follows the pathway of expansion from the making of an Atlantic world market through the creation of white colonies in New England and Virginia. From here the book charts the growth of empire across the north and south, highlighting the gendered dynamics of empire-building, and culminates in a discussion of the Civil War and the consolidation of over two centuries of capitalist development explaining how a society with capitalism became a capitalist society.


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Where do indigenous economies fit? Sarah A. Radcliffe, ‘Geography and Indigeneity III: Co-articulation of Colonialism and Capitalism in Indigeneity’s Economies’, Progress in Human Geography, 2019

10Feb19

Abstract: In this final report of three, I examine Indigenous peoples’ dynamic co-constitution with contemporary political economy in its manifestations of neoliberalism, resource extractivism, reordering production and labour relations. Indigenous subjects and spaces are not reducible to the status of capitalism’s side-effects, necessitating analytical attention to the co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in particular, variegated ways. Debates around extractivism, neoliberalism and economic want are hence recent manifestations of 500-year-old disputes over monetary and normative values, resources and livelihoods. Whether as corporations, labourers, welfare recipients, or ambassadors for culturally distinctive forms of livelihoods-exchange, Indigenous peoples occupy complex, relational positions across economic spheres. The paradox of indigeneity’s economies is that Indigenous populations have been constituted as Other to homo oeconomicus, yet their embeddedness within the economic flows, labour processes and forms of accumulation that make the modern world belie any separation. The report ends by raising questions about decolonising accounts of indigeneity’s economies.


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Breaking the settler contract one duck at a time: Miranda Johnson, ‘The Case of the Million-Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract’, The American Historical Review, 124, 1, 2019, 56–86

10Feb19

Abstract: In settler states such as Canada, indigenous peoples’ claims for sovereignty in the late twentieth century became matters of intense public and political debate. Provoked by widespread indigenous rights activism of the 1970s, the Canadian state embarked on a large-scale examination of claims for rights and restitution. By focusing on the 1962 case of a duck hunter who insisted on his treaty right to hunt as he pleased in a Canadian borderlands region that was becoming more tightly woven into the fabric of the settler nation, this article argues for the value of recovering the discursive strategies of indigenous peoples in making sovereign claims prior to 1970s activism. I suggest that such claims were effective in bending the “settler contract,” which refers to the founding of settler states in dispossession and the silencing of indigenous actors. My approach brings to the fore a distinctive form of non-elite politics, what I call “treaty talk,” or the vernacular stories, civic rituals, and political disputes concerning the treaty promises that Canadian authorities made to northern indigenous communities earlier in the twentieth century. Although treaty talk did not break the settler contract, it posed a significant challenge to settler law and led one judge to reinvent a Canadian myth of benevolent empire.


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