Suburban settler colonialism: Sean Tyler, ‘The Settler-Suburban Imaginary: Improvement, John Claudius Loudon, and Colonial Dispossession in the Swan River Colony’, Fabrications, 2026

25Oct26

Abstract: This article examines how a settler-suburban imaginary organised land, labour, and legitimate possession in the Swan River Colony on Whadjuk Noongar Country, where relationships to Country precede and continue beyond colonial occupation. It traces the emergence of an ideology of landscape improvement and follows its legal and aesthetic translation through British colonial property regimes. Situating John Claudius Loudon’s writings within this process, the article shows how his suburban ideals provided settlers with a vocabulary that bound moral and intellectual cultivation to domestic landscape improvement. Loudon’s texts circulated alongside seeds as well as reports between Britain and the Swan River colony, demonstrating a bi-directional exchange of knowledge concerning the ideal landscaping of the suburban garden. I argue that the suburban condition in Swan River was not simply a by-product of urban growth, but a foundational mode of dispossession through which landscape improvement was reorganised at the scale of the individual allotment, garden, and dwelling.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonial panopticons: Emily Lanman, ‘Panopticons in the antipodes: why Bentham’s reforms found success in Western Australia’, Journal of Bentham Studies 24, 1, 2026

25Oct26

Abstract: Significant work conducted by Bentham scholars indicates that Benthamite ideas on penal reform were present in the Australian colonies. This has been demonstrated in part through discussions of a number of panoptic-inspired institutions across Australia. Despite this, there have been fewer debates on why the panopticon became a favoured tool for punishment in colonial settings rather than in Britain. This is significant as the first Australian colonies were established for the reception of imperial convicts, which Bentham argued against. Drawing on an analysis of the writings set out in A Picture of the Treasury, this article explores Bentham’s explanation of why the British government thwarted attempts to establish a panopticon penitentiary and his comments on what spurred its popularity in the colonies. It will do this by using as a case study Western Australia, where the panopticon was implemented in key penal institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such use of Western Australia is also significant. It was the first Australian colony to be established as a settler colony, which also signified a turning point in the invasion of Australia, as penal colonies were no longer the default method of colonisation. However, poor economic growth and limited labour led to the introduction of imperial convict labour from 1850 to 1868 in order to increase colonial development. The panoptic-inspired institutions that will underpin this case study are Fremantle Gaol (1831–56), which was the colony’s first purpose-built gaol, the prison for Aboriginal resistance prisoners, known as the Quod (1863–1904); and the radial yard built in New Division within Fremantle Prison (c. 1908–12). Through this analysis, this article seeks to uncover the circumstances that led to the deployment of the panopticon model, the people the institutions sought to reform and the events that resulted in their closure.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Travellers as the antisettlement: TraVision, ‘To Be Settled or to Be Unsettled? The Historical Formation of the Settled Population in Ireland’, Zenodo, 22/10/26

23Oct26

Abstract: This Traveller-led paper examines how settlement became the dominant institutional and cultural standard in Ireland. It distinguishes Gaelic habitation from colonial settlement and the later administrative division between Travellers and a settled majority. Drawing on historical documents, legislation, government reports and Traveller testimony, I examine changes in landholding, livelihood, schooling and public authority. Native incorporation and settler descendants’ changing Irish belonging are followed through conquest, plantation, famine, land purchase and independence. The Commission on Itinerancy (1963) and the Programme for the Settlement of Travellers—Ireland (1975) show how the state prescribed the surrounding population as the destination of assimilation. Population genetics informs the demographic comparison; stress and microbiome research illuminate relationships between bodies, environments and imposed change. I argue that the authority of settledness was made through institutions acting across a population divided by ancestry, class, religion and region. Understanding that formation places the settled standard itself under examination and requires those institutions to account for its continued enforcement.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The Indigenous response: Yann Allard-Tremblay, Disjunctures: Indigenous Redirections in Political Theory, Oxford University Press, 2025

22Oct26

Description: Disjunctures: Indigenous Redirections in Political Theory offers a critical, comparative engagement with North American Indigenous and dominant Euro-modern political traditions, and explores the irreconcilable differences between them. These differences disclose political options that cannot be pursued simultaneously or, in a word, disjunctures. For contemporary political societies committed to reconciliation, choices will have to be made. While these disjunctures are explored in the context of Canada, they are nevertheless disclosive of an edifying political otherwise to currently dominant dispensations. Disjunctures argues that dominant Euro-modern traditions model political societies according to notions of justice, and following the determinations of an independent, autonomous people. The associated practices of governance express an ethos of mastery that is fundamentally unreciprocal and unresponsive to other humans, other-than-humans, and ecological contexts. In contrast, Disjunctures argues that Indigenous traditions model political societies as part of a broader ecological context of understanding, and thus give priority to the search for, and maintenance of, harmony. These traditions provide a political model that is nonhierarchical, noncoercive, and primarily focused on the need to sustain and preserve relationships with others, other-than-humans, and the land itself. As such, they require a deep reciprocal responsiveness in governance. Disjunctures explores the consequences that recognizing these irreconcilable political options will have for the political project of reconciliation, arguing that reconciliation must be transformative, of both political structures and subjectivities. Ultimately, Disjunctures argues that Indigenous political traditions disclose an attractive, decolonial path toward which political theory and conduct should be redirected.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Violence, frozen and reheated: David Shane Lowry, ‘Frozen Violence: Understanding the Permanence of Genocide Against American Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples Within the United States and Canada’, in Scott Gac, Caroline E. Light (eds), American Violence: Histories, Structures, and Legacies, Routledge, 2026

22Oct26

Abstract: Historians, sociologists and other scholars claim that enslavement of African peoples funded the “dispossession and removal” of American Indians. This is false. After 1492, enslavement and murder of American Indians funded dispossession and removal of American Indians. More recently, the Civil War ended (and many Black peoples were freed) because the U.S. military chose to turn its resources toward continued genocide across Native America. Today, celebrations of justice and humanity, in various spheres of American life, are garnished with beheaded Indians (e.g., Chicago Blackhawks) and celebrations of Indigenous suffering (use of the buffalo mascot at Howard University). In this chapter, I assert that violence against Indigenous peoples is not one of many violences within American society but the primary, permanent violence that defines life in the United States and Canada.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

If the gothic genre is about something from another world, then rez gothic is about settlers: Mallory Whiteduck, ‘Rez Gothic: Monstrous Aunties, Double Selves, and the Detritus of Settler Colonialism’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 13, 2, 2026, pp. 38-61

21Oct26

Abstract: Rez gothic aesthetics sit at the intersection of rez aesthetics and the gothic and speak to Native American and Indigenous experiences of the world. Their location in everyday Native life produces an ambivalence about binaries like good/bad, beauty/ugly, and comfort/fright that prevent simple associations between the rez and tragedy and Native American and Indigenous peoples themselves from being understood as flattened stereotypes or victims. The socioeconomic conditions of the reservation are sometimes interpreted by onlookers as terrifying. Rez gothic aesthetics show how Native people interpret and transform those so-called horrors to show that the true horror is not ofNative life, but of the centuries of settler colonial strategies weaponized to eliminate it. I study the rez gothic aesthetics in Trickster, a 2020 fantasy drama television series that was embroiled in an ethnic fraud controversy. I suggest that we view Tricksteras a text with multiple authors and create space to celebrate the work of the Native American and Indigenous writers, producers, actors, designers, choreographers, and musicians who worked together to create art worthy of critical attention.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler social sciences: Terry Wotherspoon, ‘Social Science and Settler Colonial Governance: The Panel on Indian Research’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 2026

21Oct26

Abstract: Social scientists have only recently come to explore in depth the ways in which the work that they do, the knowledge that they produce, and the ways in which they undertake these activities have emerged within and influenced colonialism. This article explores the role of social scientists in one federal government initiative introduced after the Second World War, a formative period for the social sciences in Canada. The Panel on Indian Research, introduced by the Indian Affairs Branch in the late 1940s, served as a vehicle for government officials to learn about social scientific knowledge that might assist in addressing matters that they considered problems. The activities undertaken by and associated with the panel revealed that social scientists were willing to assist the government in its aims to assimilate and integrate Indigenous peoples into Canadian society, but it also exposed some tensions and contradictions in those relationships.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Indigenous bodies are shaped by settler colonialism (this is why resistance is invincible): Rami Salameh, ‘Palestinian anti-colonial violence and conditions of non-being’, Race & Class, 2026

21Oct26

6Abstract: This article examines Palestinian anti-colonial violence from within the lived experience of colonisation, starting not with the act itself, but from the oppressive spaces that have already formed the colonised perception of being-in-the-world. Unlike juridical, liberal and security-centred approaches, it starts from how the Palestinian body has been produced as conditionally recognisable, by drawing on Fanon, Palestinian studies, settler-colonial theory and critical phenomenology. Checkpoints, walls, starvation, forced displacement and the destruction of liveable infrastructures are inscribed on the body, shaping everything from space and time to grief and desire. Gaza is neither an exception nor a turning point, but reveals, in concentrated form, an eliminatory logic that has structured colonisation since the Nakba in 1948. The author argues that spatial control and the destruction of the conditions of life are not successive stages but entangled registers of a single project in which Palestinians are rendered hyper-visible to colonial power as bodies to be counted, monitored, displaced or killed, while denied the authority to appear as world-making subjects. The question that remains – for debates on violence, decolonisation, settler colonialism and political ontology alike – is how a people can inhabit a world that attacks the very conditions of their being.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

They liked what they saw: Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ‘Nazi Views on Race and Genocide in Australia: A Comparative and Contrastive Approach’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2026

19Oct26

Abstract: Via an examination of comparative approaches to radically violent societies such as Nazi Germany and colonial Australia, this article investigates how German representations of Australian state racism shed light on the similarities and differences between the Holocaust and frontier violence in Australia. Indicative of these German views, it suggests, were those of government officials like Rudolf Asmis, who frequently wrote and spoke on the question of radical violence against Indigenous people in Australia against the backdrop of increasing antisemitic violence in Germany that culminated in the Holocaust. Assessing the position of Australia in Nazi views on the racial state, it suggests that there are important differences between settler colonial violence and the Holocaust that can only be uncovered through comparative historical method.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The limits of a paradigm: Jean Muteba Rahier, ‘The settler colonial studies paradigm as a discursive reaffirmation of the preeminence of Indigeneity in the field of ethnoracial alterity in the Andean sub-region’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies’, 2026

19Oct26

Abstract: This article critically assesses the analytical utility of the Settler Colonial Studies (SCS) paradigm to make sense of sociopolitical realities in the Andean sub-region. It contends that the foundational ‘settler-Indigenous’ binary of SCS – predicated on Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’ – reproduces a long-standing discursive tradition in the sub-region that grants Indigeneity a position of preeminence while marginalizing the specific trajectories and experiences of Afrodescendants and others. By uncovering the ‘microphysics’ of this ethnoracial hierarchy from colonial law to contemporary multiculturalism, I intend to illustrate how the ‘ideological biology of national identity’ in countries like Ecuador has historically integrated the Indigenous subject as a symbolic ancestral root while treating Blackness as an external, disposable, and excluded presence. Through ethnographic data from the Ecuadorian Province of Esmeraldas, an overview of Indigenismo in Ecuador, and an appreciation of the work done on the ‘Indianization’ of Afrodescendant legal claims in the Inter-American System, the essay argues that the SCS paradigm’s amalgamation of Blackness and Indigeneity ends up sustaining colonial hierarchies. Ultimately, I call for a ‘multiversal’ or pluriversal horizontalism that rejects the primacy of any single identification in favor of an equitable, non-hierarchical coalition of truly equal partners.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts

top posts today

Archives

stats for wordpress