Global settler America: Carroll P. Kakel III, A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History: American Wests, Global Wests, and Indian Wars, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

23Aug19

Description: Challenging the still widely held notion that American history is somehow exceptional or unique, this book argues that early America is best understood as a settler-colonial supplanting society. As Kakel shows, this society undertook the violent theft of Indigenous land and resources on a massive scale, and was driven by a logic of elimination and a genocidal imperative to rid the new white settler living space of its existing Indigenous inhabitants.


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Indigenous Comics (i.e., nonsettler comics): Camille Callison and Candida Rifkind, ‘Introduction: Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography’, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 11, 1, 2019, pp. 139-155

21Aug19

Excerpt: Working on this project, we have learned that Indigenous comics and graphic novels matter for the same reasons, that Indigenous characters can be just as brave, resilient, complex, messy, smart, and funny as any other comic book heroes. And we have also learned that a popular form like comics can make those “zombies, vampires, and ungentled ghosts” of settler colonialism come alive in the most literal of ways, along with the superheroes, guardians, and tricksters needed to fight and survive them. 


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Settler economies are flexible: Laura Maravall Buckwater, ‘Factor endowments on the “frontier”: Algerian settler agriculture at the beginning of the 1900s’, The Economic History Review, 2019

21Aug19

Abstract: This article examines rural settlement in Constantine, a département in French Algeria, at the beginning of the 1900s. By taking into account the timing of colonial settlement for almost 100 municipalities, it shows how the changing geographical conditions and the relative quantities of land and labour shaped the colonial land policy and settler modes of production. As fertile land grew scarcer on the settlement ‘frontier’, the ability of settlers to participate in the export market was increasingly dependent on the capacity to make use of modern agricultural techniques that required larger fields and intensive labour. Thus, the outcome of rural settlement was determined by the relative abundance of indigenous labour and the adaptation of the land policy to Algeria’s agricultural needs. The results demonstrate that—even within a country itself and during the settlement process—the colonial land policy and settler modes of production change significantly, depending on the region being occupied.


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Reactive settler colonialism (the Ulsterisation of Crimea): Serhy Yekelchyk, ‘The Crimean Exception: Modern Politics as Hostage of the Imperial Past’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 46, 3, 2019

18Aug19

Abstract: The author proposes a new perspective on the political mobilization of ethnic Russians in the Crimea as reactive settler nationalism. After the Russian imperial conquest of the peninsula and the gradual displacement of the Crimean Tatars, the 1917 Revolution galvanized the Tatar national movement, which entered into an alliance with the Ukrainian one. A similar situation developed in the late 1980s, when the peninsula’s Russian ethnic majority found itself threatened by the loss of status and land in what could become a Tatar autonomy within Ukraine. Based on the implicit approval of Stalin’s genocidal deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, the political mobilization of ethnic Russians in the 1990s made the Crimea an easy target for Russian annexation, which, however, took place twenty years later because of Russia’s internal reasons and the Euromaidan Revolution being perceived as a threat to the Putin regime.


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Two ways of resistance (defending water from settler-colonial encroachment): Andrew Curley, ‘”Our Winters’ Rights”: Challenging Colonial Water Laws’, Global Environmental Politics, 2019

18Aug19

Abstract: Much of the scholarship on Indigenous water rights in the United States focuses on legal and political rights awarded or denied in water settlements. This article highlights the voice of settlement opponents within Diné communities over the proposed Little Colorado River Settlement in 2012 between the Navajo Nation and Arizona. Using interviews with key actors, observations of water hearings, and a mini focus group with settlement opponents, my research finds that the proposed water settlement produced contradictory logics, practices, and frameworks that combined two “traditions of Indigenous resistance,” one rooted in the language of self-determination and sovereignty and the other in emerging notions of decolonization. This hybridity of seeking increased water recognition within colonial law, while advocating for decolonial waterscapes, speaks to the complicated and fundamentally entangled political landscapes of Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, in opposing the water settlement, Diné opponents and community members demonstrate that they seek to rectify the injustice of ongoing settler colonialism and realize their collective capabilities as nations, not “Indians,” “tribes,” or “minorities” within and against the authorities of the colonial state.


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The urban ecology of contemporary settler colonialism: Jessica Parish, ‘Re-wilding Parkdale? Environmental gentrification, settler colonialism, and the reconfiguration of nature in 21st century Toronto’, Environmant and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019

18Aug19

Abstract: In 21st century Toronto, the labour of caring for urban trees is entangled with both gentrification processes and the social reproduction of settler colonial space. This paper contributes to the study of environmental gentrification through a study of the social reproduction of settler colonial relations to land in the Parkdale–High Park area of Toronto. Specifically, I take up the hyper-visibility of some forms of social reproduction, in order to shed light on how the mundane, quotidian ‘non-work’ of living in/with/for capitalism becomes a site of privilege and a luxury pursuit for more affluent residents. The paper highlights the processes and practices whereby settler colonial urban subjects seek out ‘nature’ as a temporary outside where they can escape from widely accepted downsides of capitalist urbanism, including a diverse array of social and physical ills, from stress, to obesity, to ecological degradation. The paper asks: whose social reproduction does the presence of urban trees serve? In the context of 21st century financialized gentrification, cities are increasingly normalized as spaces of wealth and luxury. It is therefore crucial to pay attention to the raced, gendered, and colonial micro-politics through which urban ecologies are transformed in the service of an anti-democratic vision of the city as a space of leisure and luxury.


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The travels of US settler colonialism: Tyler Norris Taylor, Italy’s American West: Brava Gente, American Indians, and the Circulation of Settler Colonialism, PhD Dissertation, William & Mary, 2019

16Aug19

Abstract: The racialized logics that uphold and perpetuate U.S. settler colonialism are not confined within U.S. borders. Instead, the legacies of white settler colonization and American Indian resistance are woven into processes of Americanization, globalization, transnational migrations, and cultural exchange. The role of white settler cultural production in the ongoing process of U.S. settler colonialism is well-established, as well as the advent of mass culture in facilitating cultural exchange between the U.S. and Europe. Regarding the specific relationship between the United States and Italy, many studies have noted the immense influence of the mythology of the American West in Italian cultural production and, conversely, the impact Italian emigrants to the United States left on American culture and society. The ways in which U.S. settler colonialism intersects with and connects these histories brings to light how U.S. settler colonialism has evolved into an international, rather than solely American, project. “Italy’s American West: Brava Gente, American Indians, and the Circulation of Settler Colonialism” positions the Italian state and Italians as settlers-from-afar of the American West in this evolution. The simultaneity of circulations of American mass culture in Italy, Italian colonialism in Africa, and mass Italian emigration to the United States imbued the development of Italian national identity with U.S. settler colonial logics and expanded the global influence of U.S. settler colonialism. Buffalo Bill’s two tours of Italy in 1890 and 1906, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and Western-themed Italian comic books published from 1948 to today intertwined U.S. white settler cultural production with Italian cultural production. Viewing this cultural production under the umbrella of “transnational settler colonialism”—the circulation of U.S. settler logics and Native resistance in the movements of people and ideas between Italy and the United States—frames them as evidence that U.S. settler colonialism helped construct Italian national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues to inform Italian expressions of colonial desires.


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Settler-colonial violence is capitalist violence: David Maile, Gifts of Sovereignty: Settler Colonial Capitalism and the Kanaka ʻŌiwi Politics of Ea, PhD Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2019

16Aug19

Abstract: This dissertation examines Hawaiian sovereignty in history, law, and activism. The project tracks Indigenous claims, negotiations, and articulations of sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Using a critically Indigenous approach to Hawaiian studies, I advance two main theses. First, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) are discussed as a community divided on Hawaiian sovereignty. However, I contend that Kānaka Maoli exercise a diversity of strategies and tactics for Hawaiian sovereignty. I show how Kānaka Maoli practice multiple modalities of sovereignty that cumulatively produce the Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Indigenous Hawaiian) politics of ea (life and sovereignty). Second, the historical development of settler colonial capitalism operationalized the US settler-state in Hawai‘i and fuels its management of Kānaka Maoli in contemporary struggles with federal recognition, nation-building, and astronomy industry development. Yet, Kanaka ‘Ōiwi artists and activists engage in geontologies of aloha ‘āina—a geographic way of being in the ‘āina (land and that which feeds)—that seek to overturn settler colonial capitalism and its champion the US settler-state. I argue that these practices issue gifts that disidentify with dominant ideologies of sovereignty as a way of reimagining ea for a decolonized then and deoccupied there. Therefore, my project explains the nefarious ways that the settler-state attempts to cohere territorial control to juridical authority and how Kānaka Maoli antagonize and disrupt the precariousness of settler sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Intervening into Indigenous Studies, Hawaiian Studies, and critical theories, the study offers new insights on the complex relationship between settler colonial capitalism and Hawaiian sovereignty.


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Settler-colonial violence is gendered: Luhui Whitebear, ‘VAWA Reauthorization of 2013 and the Continued Legacy of Violence Against Indigenous Women: A Critical Outsider Jurisprudence Perspective’, University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review, 9, 1, 2019, pp. 75-89

16Aug19

Excerpt: Indigenous women. Often termed as the backbone of our nations, that solid foundation that keeps our people moving forward through the multiple waves of colonization. Indigenous women. Often labeled as the sustainers of life, birthing new generations. Indigenous women. They will help sing the songs of remembering, dry the tears, heal the wounds, and forgive without second thought. Indigenous women. Enduring vicious forms of violence to both body and spirit. Indigenous women. Expected to withstand this settler colonial violence as our lands are continued to be subjected to the same forms of violence. Indigenous women. Expected to do so even beyond the grave as they become yet another statistic in the long list of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Indigenous women. Can the laws protect us? Indigenous women. What will it take for them to hear our cries?


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Settler colonialism (i.e., taking possession of the population economy)! Mirza Waheed, ‘India’s illegal power grab is turning Kashmir into a colony’, The Guardia, 15/08/19

15Aug19

Excerpt: India has […] abrogated article 35A, introduced in 1954. It empower[ed] the state legislature in Srinagar, the capital [of Kashmir], to define who is a permanent resident with the right to buy property and apply for jobs. It’s the dissolution of this article that perhaps presents a graver threat to Kashmiris, as it potentially clears a way for Indians to acquire land. […] I asked a Kashmiri journalist who had returned to Delhi after spending two days in the state if he knew where it was all headed. He responded with one word, Falasteen, the Urdu for Palestine – a clear reference to the settler-colonialist occupation there [emphases added].


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