With a chapter entitled ‘Four Frames – Israeli Self-Defense, Genocide, Apartheid, Settler Colonialism: Ethnic Cleansing/Sociocide in Understanding Israel/Palestine’: Eve Spangler, Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict, Brill, 2019

20May19

Access the chapter here.


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Women as ‘systematic’ colonisers: Sarah Sharp, ‘”Your vocation is marriage”: Systematic Colonisation, the Marriage Plot and Finding Home in Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854)’, Scottish Literary Review, 11, 1, 2019, pp. 27-45

17May19

Abstract: Scottish-born author Catherine Helen Spence’s 1854 novel Clara Morison is a landmark in Australian literary history and has often been identified as the first work of fiction about Australia written by a woman. Eschewing the now more prominent iconography of the Australian bush, the novel focuses almost exclusively on domestic spaces and women’s experiences. This article considers Spence’s preoccupation with the domestic in relation to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s ideas of ‘Systematic Colonisation’. In his writings Wakefield identified a crucial role for women in the development of the British settler colonies as wives and mothers. This article argues that Spence engages with this context by drawing upon the nationally figurative role of the marriage plot in contemporary writing to explore and complicate the gender roles which underwrote the development of Australia’s first and only Wakefieldian colony.


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The treaties are numbered: Gina Starblanket, ‘The Numbered Treaties and the Politics of Incoherency’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2019

15May19

Abstract: This article explores the role of the numbered treaties relative to the continuity of the settler colonial project in Canada. Although the treaties are often invoked to characterize the federal government’s commitment toward strengthening or renewing its relationship with Indigenous peoples at a symbolic level, there remains a disjuncture between the “nation-to-nation” depictions of treaties and the complex political relationships that Indigenous peoples have called for since their signing. This article explores the inconsistent ways in which treaties have been taken up within Canadian legal and political institutions, arguing that the incoherency surrounding treaties promulgates the notion that treaties are being implemented while simultaneously obscuring, distorting and minimizing the rights of Indigenous peoples in practice. It demonstrates that the failure to engage with treaties as the locus of Indigenous peoples’ distinct political relationship with the Canadian state functions to continually produce conditions of colonization and dispossession through the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction as affirmed in treaties.


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The settler colonialism of indeterminate people: Matthew Hill, ‘”Half-breeds”, squatters, land speculators, and settler colonialism in the Des Moines-Mississippi confluence’, MA dissertation, University of Northern Iowa, 2019

15May19

Abstract: Americans are accustomed to a standard historical version of American expansion: The United States pushed West, removing Indians in its wake and filled the land with American settlers. This is often seen as a form of settler colonialism. Westward expansion and settler colonialism were much more complicated. They often occurred on the periphery of the American centralized state, proceeding any serious government involvement, and involved a wide mix of culturally indeterminate people. This paper examines westward expansion in the Des Moines-Mississippi Confluence, a 119,000-acre region in what is now southeastern Iowa. At one time or another, Sauk and Meskwaki Indians, mixed-race people then called “half-breeds,” lawless squatters, and manipulative land speculators all claimed the land, fighting over it using an array of tools and without much government interference. This mixing of racially and culturally indeterminate people shows that westward expansion was often more complicated than a meeting of two developed cultures, that we need to rethink the role of extralegal squatters in westward expansion, and the federal government often exercised less power in the American West than we usually believe.


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Hysteresis is the onset of settler colonialism: P. O’B. Lyver, P. Timoti, T. Davis, J. M. Tylianakis, ‘Biocultural Hysteresis Inhibits Adaptation to Environmental Change’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, May 2019

11May19

Abstract: Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC) often use natural resources as both a reason and mechanism for environmental management, yet a number of environmental, social, and economic drivers disrupt this relationship. Here, we argue that these drivers can also trigger a set of feedback mechanisms that further diminish the efficacy of local management. We call this process biocultural hysteresis. These feedbacks, which include knowledge loss and a breakdown of social hierarchies, prevent IPLC from adapting their management to change. Biocultural hysteresis worsens as IPLC spend an increasing amount of time outside their social–ecological context. Therefore, we argue for adaptive policies and processes that favour protecting and enabling IPLC engagement with their environment.


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Black and Indigenous (and in a double bind): Rocío Gil Martínez de Escobar, Becoming Legible: The Racial Making of the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole People in the Coahuila-Texas Borderland, PhD Dissertation, CUNY, 2019

11May19

Abstract: This historical ethnography analyzes the making of the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as part of the production of the Coahuila-Texas borderland. In the quest to become legible to improve their living conditions and maintain a sense of dignity, Negros Mascogos/Black Seminoles use history and racialization as tools of negotiation between themselves and the two nation-states where they live: Mexico and the United States. I analyze the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as a case of racialization that illustrates the ongoing mechanisms of settler colonialism (dispossession, exploitation, and elimination via genocide or assimilation), as they play out in specific socio-historical contexts.

The main argument in this work is that Negros Mascogos/Black Seminoles have been in a double bind since the nineteenth century. Numerous external forces have put them in the position to choose between Blackness and Indianness, doing violence to the ways they understand themselves. However, this apparent paradox does not completely negate the possibility of Black-Indianness. Negros Mascogos/Black Seminoles have understood the double bind and have made their racialization more flexible to claim Blackness in relation to some socio-historical processes, and Indianness in relation to others.


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Environmental struggles are decolonial struggles: Karl Forst, ‘First Nations sovereignty, Environmental Justice, and Degrowth in Northwest BC, Canada’, Ecological Economics, 162, 2019, pp. 133-142

10May19

Abstract: Environmental Injustice has been intrinsic to Canadian extractivism, with First Nations displaced from their traditional territories and their cultural identity suppressed through an explicit policy of cultural genocide to make way for colonial extractivist practices. Likewise, this extractivism has long been legitimized in Canada through a rhetoric of economic growth. This paper presents an overview of Northwest Coast and Interior First Nations peoples anti-colonial struggles in British Columbia, Canada and demonstrates how First Nations struggles in BC for environmental defense, sovereignty, and traditional culture and governance deeply interweave shared objectives with both Environmental Justice and Degrowth.


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Settler-colonial expulsions today (on the global settler-colonial present): Aram Ziai, ‘The legitimation of expulsion in development discourse. A comparative analysis of World Bank projects in sub-Saharan Africa’, DPS Working Paper Series, 6, 2019

08May19

Abstract: Comparing examples from Kenia, Ethiopia and Nigeria, the article examines how displacement through infrastructure projects is being legitimised in development discourse. Three typical justifications are the inevitability of progress, the greater common good and property rights. They are closely linked to elements of development discourse: the transformation of geocultural differences into historical stages, Othering of allegedly backward peoples, the concept of trusteeship and the assumption of the beneficial effects of investments.


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Racial exclusion in an inclusive settler society (peopling is governing): Benjamin Bryce, ‘Undesirable Britons: South Asian Migration and the Making of a White Argentina’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 99, 2019, 2, pp. 247-273.

08May19

Abstract: This article examines the history of South Asian immigration to Argentina before the First World War. The arrival of a relatively small group of Sikh laborers in 1912, alongside other Japanese and Chinese immigrants in the preceding decade, sparked a huge reaction from Argentine politicians and immigration bureaucrats. They restricted entry, pushed for labor market exclusion, and engaged in diplomatic exchanges with British imperial authorities. In their view, mass migration not only had the power to make a white, European nation but also threatened to undermine that same project. This article argues that the dominant vision of Argentina as a white nation was built on not only transatlantic immigration but also Asian exclusion. Drawing on archival research in Buenos Aires and London, it casts new light on both Argentine nationalism and the language of racial hierarchies mobilized in discussions of immigration.


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Settlers as victims (too?): Rosario Pollicino, Postcolonial Trauma in the Mediterranean: The Italian-Libyan Transnational Community, PhD dissertation, The University of Western Ontario, 2019

08May19

Abstract: This study aims to recuperate the Italian collective remembering originating from the colonial offense in Libya. Focusing on works of testimony in different genres of contemporary literature written by the Italian former settlers in Libya, I analyze how these former settlers who moved to Libya have been subjected to different kinds of traumas by the Fascist government. I focus on how these traumas, individual and collective, are documented through these works and discuss how they continue to be relevant today. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, history, literary and trauma studies I argue that these cultural representations prove the existence of a transnational and transcultural community, which still today is traumatized by the postcolonial vicissitudes.

Chapter One focuses on the deportation of the settlers ‘children from Libya to the mainland boarding schools opened by Mussolini, as documented in Grazia Arnese’s testimonial work I tredicimila ragazzi italo-libici dimenticati dalla Storia. In chapter Two, I analyze the historical trauma of the Sephardi Jews of Libya, due to their permanent statelessness, through Victor Magiar’s novel (inspired by his childhood in Libya) E venne la notte. Chapter Three highlights the intellectual exile of Andrea Amedeo Sammartano, focusing on the way he identifies as Libyan rather than Italian through his novel Festa Grande alla Dahra based on his life experience. In the last chapter I focus on the trauma of forced repatriation of the Italian former settlers who were expelled from Libya to Italy in 1970. Specifically, putting in dialogue the testimonies’ collection Tripoli 1970 by Luisa Pachera and Capretti’s novel Ghibli I analyze how the Italians lived in Tripoli in preparation to leave Libya and through Mennuni’s novel I Ventimila I highlight the exile and ensued traumas experienced on their forced repatriation to Italy in 1970.

This work shows that postcolonial, migration and diaspora studies focusing on Italy and the Mediterranean area have left out the Libya’s settler perspective. By revisiting the consequences of colonialism and postcolonialism, the works in question are now intended as solid tools of social denunciation of the trauma(s) suffered as they aim to legitimate the past of their community by recovering a collective remembering that is still in process.


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