Internal and settler colonialisms: Upasana Bibha, Agustin Laó-Montes, ‘The Multiple Lives of Internal Colonialism’, Sociological Forum, 2026

14Jul26

Abstract: This paper takes as its centerpoint the critical category of “internal colonialism,” an important concept in both social movements and in sociology across different contexts. We trace a world-historical genealogy of the concept, focusing on North America (the United States), Latin America (Mexico and Bolivia), and South Asia (India), evaluating its epistemic-political values for critical theory, social research, and a politics of liberation today. While many scholars consider the concept passé, we argue, following scholars such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, that internal colonialism is a key analytical framework that continues to be relevant. We emphasize three points. First, against internal colonialism formulations that characterize it as a US theory of race grounded upon debates of the 1960s–70s, we note its internationalist and transnational dimensions, and locate its significance in both framing struggles for self-determination and in critiques of the modern territorial state (national and/or imperial) and uneven development. Second, we locate internal colonialism as a category that can be brought into conversation with settler-colonial studies, the “decolonial turn,” and racial capitalism—an encouraging trend we already observe in recent literature. Third, we recenter internal colonialism’s significance in formulating a historically grounded, anti-capitalist, antiauthoritarian framework that eschews a liberal politics of multiculturalism and a neat Global North/South divide, calling instead for a transcalar methodology.


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Settler environmentalism is childish: Anastasia Murney, ‘Australian property is theft: environmentalism and settler- colonialism in children’s television’, Continuum, 2026

14Jul26

Abstract: This article revisits the environmentalism of children’s television of the 1990s and early 2000s. I focus on two examples representative of this era: Round the Twist and The Genie from Down Under and read them through the lens of Nicole Seymour’s ‘bad environmentalism’ (2018), which deploys humour, absurdity, excess, irreverence, and perversity to challenge the whiteness and heteronormativity of the mainstream environmentalist movement. Both programs demonstrate a productive eschewing of ‘good’ environmentalisms predicated on sentimental engagements with nature, instead offering strange, queer, messy and disturbing environmentalisms. This is valuable in expanding our understandings of what environmentalism should look and feel like. However, I question the extent to which these programs are able to undermine whiteness in the settler-colonial context of Australia. I do this through exposing an ambivalent politics of property. On the one hand, the bad environmentalists formulate resistance to large-scale developments that pose an environmental threat. On the other, the characters assert their right to a native ‘home’ and fabricate a deeper imprint of whiteness on the land. This means the bad environmentalism of these programs, while bold, promising, and worth reactivating in the present, is contained within a limiting structure of settler environmentalism.


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The settler’s hill: Maya Charlton, “On This Very Hill”: Narratives of Conquest in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, PhD dissertation, Leigh University, 2026

14Jul26

Abstract: A Lost Lady by Willa Cather reproduces a dominant cultural narrative that glorifies the aesthetic of the upper-class early settlers of the Western United States who accumulated wealth and property in the process of constructing a new colonial society. Cather does not entirely erase the losses experienced by Indigenous people as a direct result of colonization, but histories of land theft and colonial violence remain marginal to the venerable origin story of settlement in her novel. While Cather occasionally references both settler violence and an Indigenous presence, she works to separate these two traces of settler knowledge about conquest: settler characters generally enact or think of violence while erasing its racialized and colonized victims, and allusions to Indigenous people appear in recollections of seemingly peaceful conquest. I build on settler colonial theory to examine the mechanisms by which Cather occludes the harm of colonization, including through the transferal of the settler violence against Indigenous people onto non-human life, the privileging of upper-class settler narratives, and the implementation of a colonial temporal order. I examine how Cather’s faultless characterization of Captain Forrester, whose life story comes to stand for the experiences of early settlers, works to preserve a palatable narrative of Westward expansion and facilitates the cross-generational transmission of a glorified origin story within dominant collective memory.


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Even self-colonisation requires an Indigenous other! Kosuke Shimizu, ‘Eurocentrism and the construction of the ‘self’ in colonialism: The Okinawa–Japan relationality’, Political Studies Review, 2026

12Jul26

Abstract: This paper examines how Japan colonised itself through the colonisation of Okinawa. While postcolonial scholarship has primarily focused on how colonised peoples were dominated and exploited under Eurocentrism, comparatively less attention has been paid to how non-Western colonisers internalised colonial norms within the international order and ontologically constituted themselves as modern subjects. This article seeks to address this gap. By analysing the Okinawa–Japan relations during the transition from the tributary system to the Westphalian order and subsequently within the post-war US-centred East Asian security architecture, the paper demonstrates that Eurocentrism operated not merely as a geopolitical ideology but as an ontological presupposition of stable and hierarchical subjects. It shows how Japan externalised violence onto Okinawa in order to consolidate its position as a legitimate member of the liberal international order. Finally, drawing on Mahayana Buddhist thought – particularly the doctrine of dependent origination and the concept of non-self – the article proposes an alternative ontology of relationality as a way to unsettle this fixed international order. Decolonisation, it argues, must therefore be understood not only as a political project but also as an ontological reconfiguration.


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The settler colonial limit of acceptability: Mark Mallory, ‘The Names of Four Scouts: Slavery, Settler Colonialism, and the Limits of Incorporation at the Texas Capitol Complex since 1983’, Journal of Texas History, 2, 1, 2026, #4

12Jul26

Abstract: This essay takes the commemorated names of four Seminole Negro Indian Scout Medal of Honor recipients to examine public memory at the Texas Capitol Complex since 1983. Using archival documents, newspapers, exhibits, and monuments, it traces how the Texas State Preservation Board responded to criticism through limited incorporations of Black, Tejano, and women’s histories while preserving narratives that disavow slavery and settler colonialism. It argues that these incorporations reinforce a framework centered on Texas “pioneers,” obscuring Native histories and misrepresenting the complex intersections of Blackness and Indigeneity embodied by Black Seminole history.


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Environmental resistance against settler colonialism: Holly Randell-Moon (ed.), Environments of power: Vibrant terrain and landscapes of resistance, Manchester University Press, 2026

12Jul26

Description: Environments of power provides unique case studies of environmental inclusion and exclusion across the Americas, Africa, Japan, India, and the South-Pacific. Using more-than-human and Indigenist approaches, chapters focus on Indigenous environmental resistance, marginalisation across social and physical environments, ecology as art, and how local communities are caught up in and resist development and infrastructure projects. The book demonstrates how environments influence which bodies and other matter belong (or not) in certain places.

Check Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11


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Gendered settler colonialism: Lihi Ben Shitrit, Idan Chazan, ‘Demographic Anxieties of Jewish Sovereignty: Palestinian Women’s Bodies in Israeli Annexation Politics’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2026

12Jul26

Abstract: This article analyzes the demographic discourse in Israeli annexation politics, focusing on how the Sovereignty Movement—one of the most influential networks advocating for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank—conceptualizes Palestinian women primarily through their reproductive capacity. Employing discourse analysis of publications from 2013 to 2022 and examining post-October 7th developments, the article reveals how annexationists co-opt the feminist language of “women’s rights” to promote a racialized demographic agenda. The research identifies two distinct approaches in the annexation discourse: in the West Bank, concerns focus on Palestinian women’s fertility rates, celebrating their “Westernization” and reduced reproduction (biopolitical control), while for Gaza, the emphasis shifts to “voluntary emigration” or transfer (biopolitical elimination). Both approaches employ humanitarian rhetoric while ultimately advancing Jewish demographic dominance. Theoretically, the article expands on the intersections of gender, biopolitics, and settler-colonialism by showing how variations of biopolitical logics apply to different territories within the same political context.


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Poetic fragmentation against settler mythscapes: Doro Wiese, ‘Unsettling Coloniality: Opaque White Space in the Cut-Up Poetry of Jordan Abel’s (Nisga’a) Un/Inhabited’, English Studies, 2026

11Jul26

Abstract: Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited—a cut-up poetry collection from 91 Western novels in the public domain—disrupts, fragments and resists colonial narratives of Indigenous vanishing through the agency of its white space. Through a process of appropriation that erases, fragments and disrupts ongoing settler-colonial ideas, Un/inhabited critiques colonial practices of land-seizure and its representations, while its white space becomes a metaphor for Indigenous ways of relating to the land that make themselves felt without being articulated, resisting legibility. In this essay, it will be shown how Abel’s aesthetic procedures interrogate and dismantle the settler-colonial mythscape of the American West, shaped in the USA by popular culture and the idea of a Manifest Destiny and in Canada by legal discourses. Attention is paid to the affective presence of the white space, and Indigenous and decolonial interpretative methods that respect and relate to its opaqueness are sought and discussed.


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Settler penetration and appropriation are gendered: Christie Harner, ‘Louisa Anne Meredith, Ethel Pedley, and Gendered Ecological Knowledge of the Australian Bush’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 22, 1, 2026

11Jul26

Abstract: Writing in to The Bulletin in 1892, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson participated in what Manu Samriti Chander has called a “poetry war” and “literary debate” about the Australian bushlands (74).(1) The men were well-known contributors to the newspaper, including for Lawson’s “A Song of the Republic” (1887) and Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” (1890). Ostensibly, the poetic debate is over the nature of the bushlands, the “region of farms, forests, mines, and provincial towns and villages that supports Australia’s primary and export industries” (Lawrence 212). The apparent disagreement rests on the harshness of bush life. In a poem initially titled “Borderland,” in the July 9 Bulletin, Lawson writes of the “burning wastes of barren soil and sand / With their everlasting fences stretching out across the land!” (21). Two weeks later, Paterson’s poetic response sings of the land’s “moods and changes, as the seasons rise and fall / And the men who know the bush-land—they are loyal through it all” (15). On August 6, in a poem titled “In Answer to ‘Banjo,’ and otherwise,” later retitled “The City Bushman,” Lawson emphasizes the inhumanity of a barren landscape, even as he admits a yearning to affiliate himself with the mythic bush, “to feel once more a little like a native of the land” (5). Paterson, by contrast, highlights the humanity of those who live and work in the bush, their camaraderie, traditions, and capacity to endure. Despite their disagreement, the men share a distinctive vocabulary that casts the bush as a masculine, distinctly Australian space. Both strive to associate the bush with a new, emergent national identity within and against other versions of bush ecology. Whether or not they wrote for money or increased readership, Paterson and Lawson also wrote into being a “demonstrably non-British iconography at a time when Australian nationalism was burgeoning” (Lawrence 212). Australian literature of the 1890s, in the decade leading up to Federation (January 1, 1901), or the joining of the separate states, is almost exclusively read in this way: male, anti-authoritarian, and allied to an uncanny bush landscape that refused understanding by outsiders. As Susan Lawrence has argued, Paterson and Lawson, alongside other writers and visual artists, were “responding to, even rebelling against, a colonial, British past,” and so “seeking distinctive and unique attributes from which to form a new identity” (221). Their works asserted what Jason Rudy has described as “an almost ontological relationship between Australia’s distinct landscape and emerging nationalist sentiment,” between the stark, phantasmagoric imagery of the bush and masculinist independence from domestic life (174). To the extent that Paterson’s and Lawson’s poems repeatedly invoke ecological motifs—topological formations, species’ names, weather patterns—they do so to emphasize the absolute singularity of the bush landscape: an ecology without peer, impervious to comprehension by a non-initiate, an outsider, or, pointedly, someone British. My aim in this essay is to offer a counterpoint, to analyze how two women writers of the “Federation decade” complicate late nineteenth-century formulations of a masculine bush ecology, and to argue that women’s writing of the 1890s offers an alternative view of human-ecological bonds. Louisa Anne Meredith’s 1891 Last Series. Bush Friends in Tasmania, an illustrated guide to local species, and Ethel Pedley’s 1899 children’s novel Dot and the Kangaroo use representations of the native landscape to challenge conventional readings of Australian identity formation. I put them in dialogue because they use two distinct genres often associated with nineteenth-century women’s science writing—the botanical guide and the children’s text—and because they are both invested in a specific ecological pedagogy. Unlike earlier ecological and naturalist texts, including Meredith’s own mid-century volumes, these 1890s works refute logics that either completely align the settler colony with Britain or segregate emergent colonial knowledge from existing British “leadership in these observational sciences” (A. Johnston 216). Rather, Meredith and Pedley’s 1890s texts model modes of ecological thinking that emphasize interconnection and entanglement. In what follows, after a brief introduction to both authors and texts, I will highlight three components of Meredith’s and Pedley’s engagement with Australian ecology: species naming conventions, visual illustrations, and patterns of economic exchange. The first two hinge on paratextual elements and the volumes’ print format, linking ecological content to multi-scalar form and invoking broader, more expansive readings of bush ecosystems. References to economic exchange exist explicitly on the level of content and, implicitly, in the global circulation of both authors and texts. Together, the three components offer a reading of 1890s Australian ecology that foregrounds interconnectedness rather than isolationism: a feminized alternative to the masculine logic of settler nationalism.


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Ruthless settler colonialism: Rebecca Lindsay, Reading Ruth in Settler Colonial Australia, Society of Biblical Literature, 2026

08Jul26

Description: Rebecca Lindsay reads the book of Ruth from her location in Australia, paying attention to the impacts of colonization on biblical interpretation. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, including decolonial studies, this volume places the book of Ruth in conversation with texts from Australia and stories from Linday’s own experience, revealing common themes of home, land, memory, and identity. Engagement with Indigenous voices and settler colonial studies leads to an honest grappling with the challenges of decolonizing biblical interpretation. Scholars and students of both biblical studies and Australian studies will discover how to adopt the embodied reading postures of feet on the ground, being in relationship, ceding control, and attending to justice. Lindsay’s embodied interpretive approach offers an alternative to the colonial legacies of biblical hermeneutics as it is practiced today.


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