Settlers are territorial: Carsten-Andreas Schulz, ‘Territorial sovereignty and the end of inter-cultural diplomacy along the “Southern frontier”‘, European Journal of International Relations, 2018

16Dec18

Abstract: European politics at the turn of the 19th century saw a dramatic reduction in the number and diversity of polities as the territorial nation-state emerged as the dominant form of political organization. The transformation had a profound impact on the periphery. The study examines how embracing the principle of territoriality transformed relations between settler societies and indigenous peoples in South America. As this shift coincided with independence from Spain, Creole elites rapidly dismantled the remnants of imperial heteronomy, ending centuries of inter-cultural diplomacy. The study illustrates this shift in the case of the “Southern frontier,” where Spain had maintained a practice of treaty making with the Mapuche people since the mid-17th century. This long-standing practice broke down shortly after Chile gained independence in 1818. What followed was a policy of coercive assimilation through military conquest and forced displacement — a policy that settler societies implemented elsewhere in the 19th century. In contrast to explanations that emphasize the spread of capitalist agriculture and racist ideologies, this study argues that territoriality spelled the end of inter-cultural diplomacy along the “Southern frontier.”


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Settler colonialism shapes settler democracy: Adam Dahl, Empire of the People Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought, UniversityPress of Kansas, 2018

12Dec18

Description: American democracy owes its origins to the colonial settlement of North America by Europeans. Since the birth of the republic, observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and J. Hector St. John de Crvecur have emphasized how American democratic identity arose out of the distinct pattern by which English settlers colonized the New World. Empire of the People explores a new way of understanding this process—and in doing so, offers a fundamental reinterpretation of modern democratic thought in the Americas.

In Empire of the People, Adam Dahl examines the ideological development of American democratic thought in the context of settler colonialism, a distinct form of colonialism aimed at the appropriation of Native land rather than the exploitation of Native labor. By placing the development of American political thought and culture in the context of nineteenth-century settler expansion, his work reveals how practices and ideologies of Indigenous dispossession have laid the cultural and social foundations of American democracy, and in doing so profoundly shaped key concepts in modern democratic theory such as consent, social equality, popular sovereignty, and federalism.

To uphold its legitimacy, Dahl also argues, settler political thought must disavow the origins of democracy in colonial dispossession—and in turn erase the political and historical presence of native peoples. Empire of the People traces this thread through the conceptual and theoretical architecture of American democratic politics—in the works of thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexis de Tocqueville, John O’Sullivan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and William Apess. In its focus on the disavowal of Native dispossession in democratic thought, the book provides a new perspective on the problematic relationship between race and democracy—and a different and more nuanced interpretation of the role of settler colonialism in the foundations of democratic culture and society.


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The ethnographer as settler spy: Susan Slyomovics, ‘”The Ethnologist-Spy Was Hanged, At That Time We Were a Little Savage”: Anthropology in Algeria with Habib Tengour, Boundary2: An Online Journal, 2018

11Dec18

Abstract: Following Mohammed Seddik Benyahia’s call to boycott, ethnology was banned outright at the twenty-fourth International Conference of Sociology in Algiers in March 1974. This essay reads Algerian poet and anthropologist Habib Tengour’s sly voicing of the violent indigene consigning ethnology to the gallows to rethink authority and expertise in the social sciences.


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Settlers name (others don’t): Karen Pennesi, ‘Differential responses to constraints on naming agency among indigenous peoples and immigrants in Canada’, Language & Communication, 64, 2019, pp. 91-103

09Dec18

Abstract: This article illuminates the social structures and relations that shape agency for members of two marginalized groups in Canada and examines how individuals respond differently to constraints on their power to name themselves and their children. Constraints on spelling, structure and choice of name are framed according to the particular positions of indigenous peoples and immigrants in relation to European settler society as either ‘original inhabitants’ or ‘recent arrivals’. These historically unequal power relations are manifest in intertwined ideologies of language, identity and nation, evident in ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary. Differential responses include resistance, endurance and assimilation.


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Settler colonialism is transnational: Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform, Harvard University Press, 2018

09Dec18

Description: The paradox of progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In a bold new argument, Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. Progressive New World demonstrates that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism. 

White settlers in the United States, who saw themselves as path-breakers and pioneers, were inspired by the state experiments of Australia and New Zealand that helped shape their commitment to an active state, women’s and workers’ rights, mothers’ pensions, and child welfare. Both settler societies defined themselves as New World, against Old World feudal and aristocratic societies and Indigenous peoples deemed backward and primitive.

In conversations, conferences, correspondence, and collaboration, transpacific networks were animated by a sense of racial kinship and investment in social justice. While “Asiatics” and “Blacks” would be excluded, segregated, or deported, Indians and Aborigines would be assimilated or absorbed. The political mobilizations of Indigenous progressives—in the Society of American Indians and the Australian Aborigines’ Progressive Association—testified to the power of Progressive thought but also to its repressive underpinnings. Burdened by the legacies of dispossession and displacement, Indigenous reformers sought recognition and redress in differently imagined new worlds and thus redefined the meaning of Progressivism itself.


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Settler colonialism is economical: Benjamin Huf, Making Things Economic: Theory and Government in New South Wales, 1788-1863, PhD Dissertation, Australian National University, 2018

09Dec18

Abstract: This thesis is a study of the invention and consolidation of a domain of knowledge and government we today denominate as the ‘economic’ in the particular context of the British colonisation of New South Wales. Two lines of argument are pursued. The first recovers the idea of British imperialism in New South Wales as an ‘economic’ project, in which phenomena that have been typically assumed as essential to colonial development – convict work, land settlement, wool growing, migration and their impact on Aboriginal societies – came to be classified, organised and administered as distinctly economic problems. As imperial and colonial authorities increasingly appropriated the ‘constitutive metaphors’ of Ricardian political economy in their reports, inquiries and correspondence, they re-narrated these phenomena from discrete problems of state to integrated dynamics of production, distribution and wealth-accumulation. This economic project is studied in distinction from, even as it intersected with, the paradigms of democratisation, settler colonialism and legal-positivist statism with which historians have tended to frame the colony’s political and intellectual history in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its legacies, in the identities it forged and projects it legitimated, have been as enduring as the colonial constitution but less closely assessed. The second line of argument, arising from this reading of colonial history, revises the significance of nineteenth-century political economy as an emergent political vocabulary in a nascent Australian political culture, and in English-speaking Anglophone culture more generally. In appropriating political economy as an official discourse, imperial authorities not only helped insulate the ‘economic’ as a domain of knowledge, but consolidated a new, reductive framework for interpreting, governing and debating social interaction, regulated by the imperatives of supply and demand, profits and wages. Together, these two lines of argument are offered as a critical exercise in recovering and recognising the historical functioning of economic language in official, public and everyday speech. They provide a fresh perspective on aspects of the colonial past, and recover legacies which continue to shape our world today.


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Uncanny creature against settler colonialism: Penny Edmonds, ‘The Bunyip as Uncanny Rupture: Fabulous Animals, Innocuous Quadrupeds and the Australian Anthropocene’, Australian Humanities Review, 63, 2018, pp. 80-98

09Dec18

Excerpt: The Macleay Museum ‘bunyip’ can be traced back to an era of colonial expansion in southeastern Australia that violently displaced Aboriginal peoples and wrought rapid, widespread change to local biosystems. It therefore takes us to the unsettling antipodean Anthropocene, to the midst of invasion of Aboriginal worlds concurrent with the importation and acclimatisation of new species in the name of perfection. Here, colonists brought in new animals and rearranged biota, disordering landscape, environment, and animal and human bodies. The bunyip thus, as I will show, takes us to the violence of settler colonialism and its restless, productive energy, with its ever ‘vanishing endpoint’ (Strakosch and Macoun). As Aboriginal people were rapidly removed and dispossessed of their lands, the Macleay bunyip emerged as a confounding mythical figure: it was made from the bones of a colonial import—the horse of European invasion and pastoralism—but was mistakenly thought to be native and ancient. In the 1840s scientific men in southeastern Australia took this confected bunyip specimen as a serious object of enquiry and hypothesised that it may have been a living prehistoric relic, in a period which saw the first scientific discoveries of megafaunal fossils.


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Settling on guilt: Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, Frontier Fictions Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt, Palgrave, 2018

05Dec18

Description: This book compares the nineteenth-century settler literatures of Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States in order to examine how they enable readers to manage guilt accompanying European settlement. Reading canonical texts such as Last of the Mohicans and Backwoods of Canada against underanalyzed texts such as Adventures in Canada and George Linton or the First Years of a British Colony, it demonstrates how tropes like the settler hero and his indigenous servant, the animal hunt, the indigenous attack, and the lost child cross national boundaries. Settlers similarly responded to the stressors of taking another’s land through the stories they told about themselves, which functioned to defend against uncomfortable feelings of guilt and ambivalence by creating new versions of reality. This book traces parallels in 20th and 21st century texts to ultimately argue that contemporary settlers continue to fight similar psychological and cultural battles since settlement is never complete.


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The other dominion: David Rock, The British in Argentina: Commerce, Settlers and Power, 1800–2000, Palgrave, 2018

05Dec18

Description: Drawing on largely unexplored nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources, this book offers an in-depth study of Britain’s presence in Argentina. Its subjects include the nineteenth-century rise of British trade, merchants and explorers, of investment and railways, and of British imperialism. Spanning the period from the Napoleonic Wars until the end of the twentieth century, it provides a comprehensive history of the unique British community in Argentina. Later sections examine the decline of British influence in Argentina from World War I into the early 1950s. Finally, the book traces links between British multinationals and the political breakdown in Argentina of the 1970s and early 1980s, leading into dictatorship and the Falklands War. Combining economic, social and political history, this extensive volume offers new insights into both the historical development of Argentina and of British interests overseas.


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The performance of settler colonialism: Stephanie Nohelani Teves, ‘The Theorist and the Theorized: Indigenous Critiques of Performance Studies’, TDR/The Drama Review, 62, 4, 2018, pp. 131-140

02Dec18

Abstract: Performance studies requires an engagement with Native studies scholarship and settler colonial critiques to be fully accountable to the global stakes of indigeneity and Indigenous performance. An exploration of the legacies of colonialism, scholarly misinterpretation, and the pressures of cultural authenticity reveals the division between performance studies and Native studies and the need for performance studies to engage Native studies scholarship and settler colonial critiques to enrich analyses of Native/Indigenous performance and the field in general.


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