Settler colonialism and resurgence in relation: José Antonio Lucero, Inuit Compromise and Resurgence: The Legacies of the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement, MA dissertation, University of Washington, 2018

20Jan19

Abstract: Tension between Anglophone and Francophone Canadians is well documented, and these disparate parts have been infamously dubbed the “two solitudes.” However, there is another, often ignored solitude – the Indigenous population of Canada. When construction began on the James Bay Hydroelectric facility in the early 70s, the Inuit and Cree of Northern Québec allied to take the provincial government to court for failing to properly consult them before undertaking this project on Indigenous lands. The James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement (JBNQA) was reached in 1975. This is arguably the first modern land claims agreement in Canadian history and is often considered one of the most successful agreements for Indigenous peoples in terms of monetary compensation. For the Inuit of Northern Québec (the Nunavimmiut), this agreement resulted in $90 million in compensation as well as provisions for hunting and fishing rights, and the creation of governance institutions for the Nunavimmiut including the establishment of the Makivik Corporation and the Kativik Regional Government. While these were remarkable achievements for the Inuit negotiation team, the JBNQA has a nuanced legacy. Even today, over 40 years after the signing of the JBNQA, there is still tension and dissatisfaction among Inuit communities over the results of this agreement. How can we explain the paradoxical status of the JBNQA as both a success and a disappointment in the eyes of the Nunavimmiut? How can we better understand the disagreement surrounding the legacy of the JBNQA and the tensions that continue to exist today over this agreement? This paper argues that examining the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement through a framework of settler colonialism and resurgence explains these seemingly contradictory legacies.


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The poetry of settler colonialism: Jason R. Rudy, Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017

20Jan19

Description: Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada—often disparaged as derivative and uncouth—should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax.

Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical—including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans—and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe.

Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.


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Reviewing settler empire: Jennifer Fuller, ‘Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty by Nathan K. Hensley, and: Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863–1902 by Sam Hutchinson, and: Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art by Fariha Shaikh (review)’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 51, 4, 2018, pp. 741-745

20Jan19

Excerpt: British rule in the nineteenth century was marked by forays into new lands and territories and inevitable questions about how new citizens should behave as settlers and colonists of these new territories. While Victorians may have viewed their civilization as one of order and progress, many of these interactions were marked instead by violence, confusion, and disorder. These three books each interrogate England’s position as a global empire by focusing on the networks of settlers and citizens that wrote visions of civilization on the margins of empire. In different ways, each text explores how these fractured citizens, who viewed themselves as an integral part of the home country yet permanently separated from it, worked to recreate empire to include their own voices.


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Colonisation is trauma; decolonisation is psyhoteraphy: Riel Dupuis-Rossi, Vikki Reynolds, ‘Indigenizing and Decolonizing Therapeutic Responses to Trauma-Related Dissociation’, in Nancy Arthur (ed.), Counselling in Cultural Contexts: Identities and Social Justice, Springer, 2019, pp. 181-201

18Jan19

Abstract: Trauma, as conceptualized and defined by the mainstream field of psychology, is better understood as oppression rooted in political violence. Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island (known by some as “North America”) continue to be effected by historical and contemporary forms of colonial oppression which is at the root of dissociative responses to “trauma”. Dissociation is a response to colonial violence in the form of land theft and its resulting systematic confinement of Indigenous people in residential schools, foster homes, reservations, prisons, structural poverty, etc. and is widespread in Indigenous adults seeking counselling services. Dissociative responses to colonial violence are considered in our decolonizing psychotherapy as acts of resistance that preserve parts of ourselves and internal experiences in the context of ongoing systematic attacks on the integrity of one’s person. Acknowledging colonialism and its impact is the cornerstone of indigenizing and decolonizing trauma therapy.

Indigenous clients, presenting with dissociative responses to historical and ongoing colonial violence, are best served by utilizing “culturally responsive and socially just change processes” based on culture-infused counselling (CIC; Collins & Arthur, 2010a, 2010b) and the revised CIC framework outlined in Chap.  2). In fact, it is only through the process of decolonizing our “treatment” of dissociative responses to trauma and indigenizing trauma therapy, as a whole, that Indigenous clients will reconnect to a sense of agency and be empowered to heal in culturally relevant ways.


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The settler colonial present: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Containment, elimination, settler colonialism’, Arena Journal, 51/52, 2018, pp. 18-39

17Jan19

Abstract: One of the founding statements of settler colonial studies as an autonomous scholarly field, a field that has consolidated in the last two decades, is that the ‘settler invasion is a structure, not an event’. Patrick Wolfe’s invitation was to look for settler colonialism in the ongoing subjection of indigenous peoples in the settler societies. The contemporary settler polities, he noted, have been ‘impervious to regime change’. It was an Australian-produced response to the consolidation and global spread of postcolonial studies as discourse and method (interestingly, postcolonial studies was also originally an Australian intellectual export). This article exceeds Wolfe’s invitation and looks for settler-colonial structures beyond the contemporary polities established by settlers during the age of the ‘settler revolution’ and controlled by their political descendants. After all, it is a collection of former settler colonies that eventually became the uncontested ‘global hegemon’. My most recent book argues that settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination has gone global and fundamentally defines present dispensations. This article focuses on the need to understand, and on the urgency to respond to, a new reality.


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Teaching about settler privilege: Cynthia Fabrizio Pelak, ‘Teaching and Learning about Settler-colonial Racism: A Case for “Unsettling” Minoritizing and Multicultural Perspectives’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2019

17Jan19

Abstract: This article contributes to emerging efforts to decolonize race-based approaches and antiracist pedagogies in sociology. Building on recent scholarship on settler colonialism and decolonization as well as her experiences of being unsettled, the author discusses the limitations of her critical sociological toolkit for understanding and teaching about the cultural violence associated with “Indian” sport mascots. By discussing an active-learning writing assignment and students’ work from an online course in sport and society, the author argues for sociologists to go beyond frameworks that conceptualize American Indians as a racial or ethnic group seeking greater inclusion in a multicultural nation and consider ongoing settler colonialism that structures U.S. society. The author contends that adding land back into sociological frameworks will help make visible legitimized racism and the cultural logic of elimination and replacement of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. To conclude, the author advocates for instructors to be critically self-reflective and to use sociology classrooms as sites of decolonization.


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The settler as ignorant: Anna Cook, Unable to Hear: Settler Ignorance and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, PhD Dissertation, University of Oregon, 2019

17Jan19

Abstract: My dissertation provides an epistemic evaluation of settler colonialism in terms of settlers’ disavowal of past and ongoing settler colonial violence. I seek to explain how settlers can fail to hear Indigenous testimonies in ways that disrupt structural inequality and challenge settler colonial legitimacy. This theoretical consideration of settler ignorance reveals how the elimination of Indigenous peoples requires the delegitimatization of Indigenous peoples as knowers. This insight is crucial in evaluating contemporary governmental apologies and truth commissions aimed at reconciliation. In particular, I focus on the epistemic assumptions that do not challenge what I call ‘settler ignorance’ and so do not transform settler nation-myths that disavow past and present settler colonialism. My epistemic evaluation of settler colonialism demonstrates how the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from the realm of reason, what I call their ‘epistemic elimination,’ is not accidental, but integral to the settler colonial project of eliminating Indigenous presence. Using this characterization of settler ignorance, I evaluate the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in terms of its ability to accomplish its mandate of “establishing and maintaining respectful relationships” between Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians. I conclude that the TRC fails on its own terms because it does not challenge epistemic assumptions that prevent testimonies of residential school survivors to be heard as expressions of Indigenous refusal of settler authority. Without challenging these epistemic assumptions, testimonies cannot disrupt structural settler ignorance and so, cannot lead to meaningful reconciliation. Meaningful reconciliation requires of settlers a reparative transformation of epistemic assumptions that work to maintain a structural ignorance of past and ongoing settler colonial violence. The goal of what I call ‘reparative knowing’ is both a personal one and a critical intervention into how settlers can become epistemically responsible agents. In the context of ongoing settler colonial violence, reparative knowing involves a troubling of settler common sense, and so, a disruption of structural settler ignorance. Without such an understanding of settler ignorance and reparative knowing, an investigation into the aims and transformations of settler colonialism would remain incomplete.


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Educating indigenous children: Rebecca Swartz, Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880, Palgrave, 2018

17Jan19

Description: This book tracks the changes in government involvement in Indigneous children’s education over the nineteenth century, drawing on case studies from the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa. Schools were pivotal in the production and reproduction of racial difference in the colonies of settlement. Between 1833 and 1880, there were remarkable changes in thinking about education in Britain and the Empire with it increasingly seen as a government responsibility. At the same time, children’s needs came to be seen as different to those of their parents, and childhood was approached as a time to make interventions into Indigenous people’s lives. This period also saw shifts in thinking about race. Members of the public, researchers, missionaries and governments discussed the function of education, considering whether it could be used to further humanitarian or settler colonial aims. Underlying these questions were anxieties regarding the status of Indigenous people in newly colonised territories: the successful education of their children could show their potential for equality. 


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The settler as curator: Bronwyn Labrum, ‘Collecting, curating and exhibiting cross-cultural material histories in a post-settler society’, in Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy (eds), Curatopia, Manchester University Press, 2018

17Jan19

Abstract: This chapter considers social history in a postcolonial contest. It specifically examines how the history of the majority culture in a post-settler society has been and might be curated. Using Aotearoa New Zealand as its case study, it considers the figure of the Pākehā (non-indigenous) curator in relation to, and also in contrast with, Indigenous collections and displays. What does a history curator look like in a post-settler society? Does the history curator continue the mutual asymmetry that has characterised relations and curatorial endeavours? Or is there a way to recognise cross-cultural material histories? In considering the development of history, and specifically social history, it suggests that a more useful concept is material history, rather than historical material cultures studies. The rest of the chapter ranges across a broad range of material history, including fashion and clothing, and design, to consider how contemporary museums deal with everyday life and its material aspects in museums, which are still to a large extent focused on discrete objects and forms of material culture, and which carry the burden of the historical development of their collections into a post-settler world.


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Migration and settler colonialism: Julia Katz, From coolies to colonials, PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2018

13Jan19

Abstract: Focusing on the period 1870-1920, my dissertation offers a social history of colonization and exclusion that integrates the experiences of Chinese migrants, indigenous Hawaiians, and white colonial and territorial officials. Drawing from government records and reports, newspaper articles, and family histories, I recover the aspirations of Chinese migrants who arrived in the islands as plantation laborers, but staked claims to alternative futures through independent, collective, creolized, and occasionally illicit economic networks, frequently capitalizing on their intimate contact with Native Hawaiians. I argue that although the management of Asian contract labor was critical to the expansion of American empire in the Pacific, migrants also undermined Americanization by pursuing autonomous endeavors. While migrant mobility and enterprise frustrated both American imperial plans for Hawai‘i as a white settler society and local elites’ development of a plantation colony, migrants cooperated as well as competed with indigenous investments in the islands. I treat American annexation and the extension of Chinese exclusion laws as a crucial hinge that profoundly changed the conditions and possibilities of Chinese settlement in Hawai‘i, incentivizing migrants’ accommodation to American empire and mobilizing the politics of Asian settler colonialism.

The dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first interrogates opium regulation in the Hawaiian kingdom as a racializing colonialist discourse that patronized Native Hawaiians and criminalized migrant Chinese, laying the ideological groundwork for both annexation and exclusion. The second chapter considers the rise and fall of Chinese rice culture, and examines immigration exclusion laws as economic policies designed to constrict non-white migrant enterprise. The third chapter investigates Chinese success in commercial food production, specifically fishpond and poi factory operation, as the result of collective financial networks, cultural appropriation, and interracial economic intimacies. My final chapter explores Chinese diplomatic and grassroots resistance to exclusion laws and the culture of racial violence that these laws fostered. I argue that legal, economic, and political insecurity around annexation freighted organized responses to everyday transgressions against Chinese subjects, overlaying concerns about the treatment of marginalized migrants with the weight of exclusion.

Ultimately, I contend that Hawai‘i Chinese mobilized settler colonial politics in response to American imperial takeover and exclusion, which curtailed the possibility of grounding migrant rights in transnational frameworks of belonging, and reduced diasporic Chinese to aliens unable to make political claims on the territory from outside the category of citizenship. As American imperial policies threatened the security of Chinese futures in the islands, migrants couched their claims to belonging in a discourse of racial and economic exceptionalism premised on their alleged superiority to Native Hawaiians.


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