The settler conquest of ‘nature’: Roberta Pergher, ‘Killing Fields: Environment, Agency, and the Fascist Conquest of Colonial Libya’, Perspectivas, 25, 2021

25Jan22

Abstract: The article seeks to reflect on the question of “nature’s agency” in histories of violence. It thus revisits the choices and outcomes of Fascist policy in Libya by foregrounding the colony’s ecology. The determination to win a war on inhospitable terrain led to the regime’s decision to set up concentration camps for Bedouin tribes and their herds in the desert-like and semiarid areas of Cyrenaica, which in turn had a murderous effect on humans and animals. From there, the article moves on to the second phase of Italian conquest, when the defeat of the anticolonial resistance turned into a “conquest of nature”, with the agricultural reclamation of the highlands of Cyrenaica for Italian settlers. These agricultural centers and their people, which might at first sight seem bucolic and benign, were just as injurious to the Bedouin ecology predating the Italian occupation as were the concentration camps. The conclusion ponders the moral imperatives in writing histories of Fascist violence and the openings for environmental history.


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Recovering settler colonialism: Jacob J. Sauer, ‘”Iñche kai che”: settler colonialism and erasing the past in Gülumapu/Chile’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

25Jan22

Abstract: Setter colonialism is dedicated to the elimination of the native, not just from territory but from the past. This form of elimination comes from the mistranslation or misunderstanding of names and terms that identify individuals and communities, which the colonists then use to separate Indigenous peoples from their own pasts. Many researchers have argued that the modern Mapuche are the result of ethnogenesis in the late eighteenth century, in part from misuse of the Mapuche language mapuzugun in describing communities in the past. This paper argues that, based on ethnographic, archaeological, and historic evidence, Che is the correct autonym to use for the Indigenous inhabitants of Wajmapu, the territory comprised of southern Chile and western Argentina, before the Che themselves began using the autonym Mapuche in the eighteenth century.


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Rights to settler colonialism: Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Rights, Interpersonal Violence and Settler Colonialism in Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa: Thomas Pringle and Scottish Colonialism at the Cape, 1820-1834’, Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, 5, 2, 2021, pp. 185-214

25Jan22

Abstract: Thomas Pringle, a Scottish settler at the Cape Colony and later secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in England, was both a settler in territory recently conquered from the Xhosa and an advocate against violence on Eastern Cape borderlands. This article examines both aspects of his career in the 1820s and early 1830s, and asks how they relate to one another. While working to put accounts of abuse into transimperial circulation, Pringle was caught up in the structures of settler colonialism at the Cape, including militarization and the quest for African labour. The evidence he provided was nonetheless politically significant. The article places Pringle’s work in the context of a larger history of the development of human rights and their interaction with both humanitarianism and colonialism. The article further asks what difference, if any, Pringle’s Scottishness made to his own sense of identity,
political activity and views of colonialism.


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Settler colonial gendering and racialising: Magdalena Pycińska, ‘Postcolonial Racialisation of Gender and Religious Experience within the Settler Colonial Context: Ahed Tamimi’s Experience of a Racialised Practice’, Literature and Theology, 35, 4, 2021, pp. 414-432

23Jan22

Abstract: Processes of racialisation and gendering take place within social relations and hierarchies that have an impact on bodies and inform people’s actions. ‘Material religion’ describes the exploration of how religion happens in material culture, that is, in different practices that draw on the category of religion or put it to work. In this article, I explore how the meaning of acting as a Muslim differs depending on interrelations with social categories such as race and gender within the Israeli settler colonial project in Palestine. I focus my case study on a young activist, Ahed Tamimi, whose everyday resistance to the Israeli occupation, both in terms of categories of religion and gender, has been racialised as Palestinian. Her experiences add to the discussion of how postcolonial women challenge various forms of hegemony in their everyday lives and how others interpret their actions. I also challenge the limitations of the category ‘postcolonial’, especially in this context.


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Cultural production perpetuating settler colonial relations: Cécile Heim, ‘Commodifying Tragedy: Representing Violence against Native American Women in The Cold Dish and Longmire’, Lateral, 10, 2, 2021

23Jan22

Abstract: By focusing on the representation of violence against Native American women in Craig Johnson’s The Cold Dish and the television show Longmire, this article demonstrates how these cultural productions perpetuate settler-colonial power relations. Although Longmire is one of the more progressive shows thanks to its development of Native American characters and storylines, the settler-colonial status quo is affirmed in four main ways. Not only do the novel and TV show redeploy the racist stock characters of the Magical Indian and the White Savior, but the TV show especially also reiterates a version of the stereotypical Vanishing American narrative inherited from the Western genre. Furthermore, both cultural productions heavily pathologize the Cheyenne community, depriving them of agency. Finally, the novel and show both transform pain, suffering, and grief into transferable commodities. This allows them to disinvest the pain and tragedy suffered by the Native American characters in order to reinvest this tragic potential in white characters, which serves to reinforce the white characters’ heroism. The commodification of tragic potential and emphasis on its sentimentalization help obscure the settler-colonial origins and systemic perpetuation of violence against Native American women. In sum, this analysis shows that the deeply ingrained and normalized settler-colonial ideology inherent to representational strategies limit the progressive potential of even the most benevolent and well-meaning white cultural productions.


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The settlers’ affective grounding: Jennifer Lawn, ‘The anti-Antigone: Pākehā settler masculinity, racialized kinship, and contested paternity in Carl Nixon’s Settlers’ Creek’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2022

23Jan22

Abstract: This article places Carl Nixon’s novel Settlers’ Creek (2010) alongside Sophocles’ Antigone as the springboard for an inquiry into the dynamic relationship between kinship bonds and state legitimacy in a settler-colonial context. Loosely based on a high-profile legal case in Aotearoa New Zealand regarding funerary practices, the novel highlights tensions between settler and indigenous constructions of law. Settlers’ Creek and Antigone share a central premise: rival claims for justice centred around the matter of an unburied corpse. However, where Antigone has been read in Continental philosophy to theorize the ascendance of the impersonal modern state and the deposition of kinship, Nixon’s novel can be read as an allegory of the reverse historical process through a (re)turn to filiative relationships in western nation states. By highlighting the Pākēhā protagonist’s failures to engage with bicultural kinship, the novel critiques a paternalistic colonial regime and undermines the affective grounding of settler cultural racism.


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Is accounting for indigeneity a trap? M. Scobie, G. Finau, J. Hallenbeck, ‘Land, land banks and land back: Accounting, social reproduction and Indigenous resurgence’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2022

19Jan22

Abstract: This paper situates Indigenous social reproduction as a duality; as both a site of primitive accumulation and as a critical, resurgent, land-based practice. Drawing on three distinct cases from British Columbia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and Bua, Fiji, we illustrate how accounting techniques can be a key mechanism with which Indigenous modes of life are brought to the market and are often foundational to the establishment of markets. We argue that accounting practices operate at the vanguard of primitive accumulation by extracting once invaluable outsides (e.g. Indigenous land and bodies) and rendering these either valuable or valueless for the social reproduction of settler society. The commodification of Indigenous social reproduction sustains the conditions that enable capitalism to flourish through primitive accumulation. However, we privilege Indigenous agency, resistance and resurgence in our analysis to illustrate that these techniques of commodification through accounting are not inevitable. They are resisted or wielded towards Indigenous alternatives at every point.


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‘Better Britons’ are men and are made: Matthew Fulford, Becoming ‘Better Britons’: Canadian Emigration Schemes and Imperial Masculinity, 1880-1914, MA dissertation, University of Colorado, 2021

19Jan22

Abstract: Between 1880 and 1914, charitable emigration societies run by middle-class reformers worked to recruit and relocate London’s working-class men to work in western Canada. These societies were motivated by fears about unemployment and the moral degradation of men in the city and sought to reunite working men with the land. For the men involved, emigration provided an opportunity to improve their status and assert their masculinity by becoming rugged imperial men. For Canadians, meanwhile, recruiting a steady stream of honorable hard-working men to settle rural lands in the west was essential to their early nation-building efforts. Both the emigration societies and Canadian officials were preoccupied with the kinds of men that moved to the region, and both parties were influenced by ideas of urban degeneracy, race, and social categorization in how they described the men. English reformers believed they were working to save the empire from a moral crisis related to overcrowding and sinfulness; Canadians argued that receiving good quality Anglo-Saxon men was necessary to build a strong nation within the wider British world. For the men themselves, success in their new lives would elevate them from a status as failed breadwinners to manly, imperial men.


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A domesticating settler Leviathan: Janice Feng, ‘Domesticating Political Resistance: Rhetoric, Time, and (the Limits of) Settler Sovereignty in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan’, Theory & Event, 25, 1, 2022, pp. 4-24

19Jan22

Abstract: Indigenous movements against settler sovereignty are often characterized as “civil disobedience.” This characterization is problematic as it domesticates Indigenous peoples within the boundaries of settler states. Taking up this problematic, this essay shows that the logic and rhetoric in Hobbes’ Leviathan is one that either dissolves collective political resistance into individual self-defense, or delegitimizes it by domesticating Indigenous peoples within the confines of the “civil” order that they challenge. It also shows that Hobbes’ attempt to erase past conquests and foreclose future challenges to absolute sovereignty proves that he has to reckon with the temporal origins of political beginnings.


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Representing a settler fantasy space: Lindsay R. Stephens, Unsettling South Dakota Literature: Countering Lionized Representations of a Frontier Fantasy Space, PhD dissertation, University of South Dakota, 2021

19Jan22

Abstract: In this dissertation, I challenge the pervasive notion of South Dakota as a settler fantasy space by considering several of its twentieth and twenty-first century literary offerings through the lens of Settler Colonial Studies. Settler colonial ideology has long dominated historical, sociopolitical, and literary narratives in South Dakota, affecting state policy, Lakota and Dakota sovereignty, public school curricula, the state’s economy, and even state and local responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Notions of Manifest Destiny and a Wild West frontier continue to evolve, shift, and resolidify in South Dakota, playing a key role in the perpetuation of institutionalized disenfranchisement and dispossession of Native peoples. In literature, these troublesome binaries of cowboy / Indian and pioneer / Indian have historically been represented by South Dakota writers such as Laura Ingalls Wilder, O.E. Rӧlvaag, and Charles “Badger” Clark, who collectively constitute the state’s canon. Yet South Dakota boasts a multitude of writers who take up urgent issues of settler colonialism and grapple with them in productive ways. In this dissertation, I consider the novels of Black pioneer Oscar Micheaux, the oeuvre of bison rancher-turned-Lakota ally Dan O’Brien, the collaborative memoirs of American Indian Movement activist Mary Brave Bird, the contradictory and contentious works of Linda Hasselstrom, and the ecocentric poems of Courtney Huse Wika. I argue that these writers expose the tensions and complexities of settler colonialism in South Dakota. Their works challenge the dominant settler paradigm in South Dakota literature and culture, showing that despite its oversimplified, stereotypical, and deeply problematic frontier fantasies, settler colonialism in South Dakota remains complicated and unstable.


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