Abstract: This article re-examines modalities of governing the ‘halfcaste’ legal category in Central Australia between 1914 and 1937. It mainly analyses administrators’ discourse, with a focus on the Alice Springs half-caste children’s home, the Bungalow. Robert Stott’s regime in Central Australia (1911–1928) has received limited attention in the literature. Stott sought to prop up the failing settler colony in Central Australia by establishing the half-caste cohort as a colonised labour pool. He pursued policies that would increase their population while eroding their claims to the land. The administration of Cecil Cook (1931–1938) continued this policy agenda, contrary to his infamous eliminationist rhetoric. Ex-alumni of the Bungalow resisted state controls over them as half-castes and, in 1937, one graduate, Emily Geesing, won a court case that determined she was not beholden to half-caste regulations. The victory redefined the limits of state control ahead of the end of Cook’s tenure as Chief Protector in 1938. Overall, the Bungalow emerges as both a mechanism of colonisation and a breeding space for ‘decolonised consciousness’.

Abstract: This thesis examines the depiction of the settler colonial family as a site of trauma from a female-gendered perspective in selected novels by New Zealand women writers. I argue that women are vulnerable to psychic trauma through their subordinate and marginalized positions in the heteropatriarchal formulation of the settler colonial family and the sociocultural, economic and political structures and norms of settler colonialism. I use the relationships and affective dimensions of family as the lens to examine the ideological and material manifestations of settler colonialism in New Zealand society and culture, focusing on their impact on women.The temporal timespan of the selected novels – The Story of a New Zealand River (1920) by Jane Mander, The Butcher Shop (1926) by Jean Devanny, Wednesday’s Children (1937) by Robin Hyde, The Book of Secrets (1987) by Fiona Kidman, Enemy Territory (1997) by Elspeth Sandys, and Rain (1994) by Kirsty Gunn – demonstrates that settler colonialism is a persistent structure that continues to exert a pervasive influence on the family in the postcolonial period. Each of the novels depicts not only how trauma impacts on an individual woman, but also what it reveals about the interrelationships between trauma experienced in the interpersonal affective intimacies of the family and the broader sociocultural and historical context.I draw on trauma theory to examine the manifestation of traumatic symptomology and sequelae, and to situate the interpersonal locus of individual trauma in its sociocultural and historical context. Structural, non-event-based trauma theories which encompass relational, inter-generational, cumulative and insidious trauma open up ways of exploring the selected novels as trauma narratives. Feminist trauma theorists expand contemporary understandings of trauma through their foregrounding of female experiences of trauma in the interpersonal realm. Their contributions are important for the theoretical frame of my argument that the trauma women experience in the familial locus needs to be understood within its wider context. The novels call attention to the importance of examining how the power relations of the settler colonial family continue to render women vulnerable to psychic trauma.

Abstract: In the current age of rural mobilities and economic restructuring, the ethnic and racial compositions of rural towns across Anglosphere nations of the Global North have significantly transformed. As a result of these changes, the conditions which support rural multicultures are increasingly relevant to scholarship and policy-making. ‘Everyday multiculturalism’ and ‘convivialities’ have become key approaches within such research in rural environments. These perspectives offer important insights into understanding complex social relationships, reciprocities and circumstances of belonging in rural places. However, as UK-based critiques argue, a focus on ‘everyday multiculturalism’ and ‘convivialities’ may also risk obscuring how colonial legacies have shaped and informed racialised and classed hierarchies of belonging in distinct contexts. In this paper we turn these critiques to settler colonial Australia and its increasingly diverse rural towns. We bring together emerging literature in the study of rural migration with scholarship from Indigenous studies and anthropology on Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal rural social relations. Working at the intersection of these bodies of works, we argue that the histories and structures of settler colonialism be centred in research on rural multicultures, as these legacies and ongoing conditions shape social relationships in contemporary rural Australia.

Abstract: The demands of indigenous peoples pose radical questions about how we understand the capitalist mode of production, socio-cultural relations and the distribution of political power within a state. This paper presents a systematic study of the way in which these three dimensions (territorial, socio-cultural and political) are addressed in the constitutions of 59 countries in different parts of the world. We identify what we refer to as four worlds of recognition, based on these texts’ distinctive configurations of indigenous rights. We then analyse emblematic cases as a means of better illustrating each of these groups. The paper makes a theoretical–conceptual and empirical contribution by identifying certain clusters of indigenous rights that are present cross-regionally and within regions of the world.

Abstract: Recognition theory responds to political exclusion. It provides ways of thinking about the tension between universal liberal citizenship and the distinctive claims that indigenous peoples make with reference to prior occupancy and the universal right to self-determination. However, the complex and contested political questions that recognition theory examines are not easily answered. In this article, I propose Nancy Fraser’s participatory parity as a transformative, and not simply distributive, approach to recognition, which offers scope for substantive indigenous voice in state policy making. I use participatory parity to contest arguments that the meaningful recognition of indigenous peoples is not possible in liberal democracies like Australia and New Zealand. I argue that, instead, participatory parity complements the extant authority that indigenous peoples claim over their own affairs. This kind of recognition, through differentiated citizenship, means that indigenous peoples are simultaneously inside and outside the state. Recognition through participatory parity provides a foundation for self-determination. However, its full potential and moral acceptability to indigenous peoples depend on it being the genuine recognition of equals and on its capacity to provide reasons to accept the moral legitimacy of the state which may, for many indigenous people, be an unrealistic and unreasonable expectation.

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Abstract: This thesis consists of three self-contained essays that investigate self-government accounting practices in the salient context of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt). The first essay (Chapter 2) explores the enactment of New Public Financial Management (NPFM) as a component of the liberal peace-building discourse, disseminated by the World Bank. The study relies on the Fairclough dialectical relational approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (1992, 1999, 2010, 2012). The essay performs a semiotic analysis of the text of the World Bank’s (NPFM) strategies in the context of the peace-building efforts in the oPt. The analysis revealed the use of the genre of governance to mediate the relationship between the donor community, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority post-peace-agreement. This mediating genre specialises in ‘action at a distance’, such as initiating mechanisms for budget revenue transfers. The essay identifies value assumptions in the NPFM discourse, and exclusion of social agents (nominalisation) on several occasions, for instance, in the revenue-collection process or invoice validations. Further, extensional assumptions are ideologically vital as they reflect powerful representation. The second essay (Chapter 3) explores the budget of indigenous self-governing entities in the context of settler colonial studies. It adopts settler colonialism theory (SCT) as a theoretical framework and was initially introduced by Denoon (1979), subsequently developed by Wolfe (1994, 1999, 2001, 2006), and theoretically extended by Veracini (2010, 2012, 2018). The study highlights several strategies implemented by settler-colonisers to liquidate indigenous self-governing entities—and ultimately indigenous nations—using the budget as a weapon (e.g., the legitimisation of budgetary cuts and the suspension of the main source of indigenous self-government revenues, known as clearance revenues). It also presents an account of how settler corporate capitalism serves illegal settlements by channelling services and investing in the intelligence architecture of these settlements. This type of capitalism has also promoted settlers’ collective obsession with sovereignty, which has translated into a segregation regime that prevents indigenous self-governments from holding settler states financially accountable. The third essay (Chapter 4) examines the nature of accountability between settler state and indigenous self-government in an extreme power imbalance. The essay deploys Hopwood’s (1994, 1990) account of accountability and visibility. Three examples were presented in the essay regarding the nature of accountability between the settler state and indigenous-self government. The first example discusses the sharing revenue mechanism and the refusal of computerised system invoice. The second example presents the failure of revenue transfer from the settler state to indigenous self-government. The third example presents an untraceable deduction in health and electricity bills. All examples indicate that the settler state refuses to ‘provide an account’ to indigenous self-government, which enhances the invisibility. This has also weakened the internal accountability of indigenous self-government.

Abstract: Through mainstream discourses that infuse all components of society, settler superiority is naturalized in Canada. This process occurs at the expense of Indigenous peoples who continue to be displaced from the land, which is conceptualized as a ‘resource’. Despite the seemingly static nature of settler colonialism, its hegemony is both contested and reinforced through the participatory social space of Instagram. Though it is primarily known for its aesthetic and visual communication properties, Instagram’s visuality contributes substantially to public discourse, enabling resistant and political expressions around specific issues. Using data collected from Instagram, this article maps the social life of Canada’s controversial Trans Mountain pipeline issue, as it develops under medium-specific affordances. Around the Trans Mountain pipeline issue, hashtags and imagery mutually inform one another on Instagram, connecting highly located and temporal experiences with national policies, as users performatively challenge and reinforce social relations as they exist under settler colonialism.

Abstract: Considering the shared, lived experiences of Afro-Cubans and Taíno Indians under conquest reveals the violent, repressive conditions of nationalist ideologies and colonial domination that have continued to obscure these groups from dominant historical narratives in Cuba. This is evident through an investigation of Fidel Castro’s totalizing dictatorship that began in 1953 and was crystallized in 1959. Western​i​zed historical accounts of settler colonialism have a tradition of portraying the hegemonic perspective of the colonizer. This is to say that these dominant historical narratives not only uphold the power dynamic between the colonizer and the colonized, but limit the scope of critical historical inquiry about marginalized, historical actors. Castro’s work of redeveloping a new ​Cubanidad​, being a unique understanding of Cuban nationhood and national identity, in the wake of the nation’s long fight for independence is incomplete. It was produced under a totalizing agenda of homogenization and through a forgetting of Cuba’s history of racial discrimination. As a result, it has suppressed the contributions that Afro-Cubans and Taínos brought to the framework of ​Cubanidad​, further subjugated these marginal groups under the new Cuban Oneness, and has thwarted discussions of their possible futures. This independent research will use a critical race theory approach to critique Castro’s production of a post-Revolution ​Cubanidad t​hat was predicated on notions of homogenization, stability, and contained identities. This critique will reshape ​Cubanidad to envision an alternative ​Cubanidad ​that considers alternative Afro-Cuban and Taíno futures by privileging notions of hybridity, impurity, and instability. This research will consider the role of race and identity in Cuban constructions of nationhood and the extent to which these conditions have and have not been investigated comprehensively. To consider alternative futures, this project will complicate binaristic modes of identity formation to reveal underlying power dynamics resonant of colonial structures, cultivate a methodology of “reading silences” that are present in historical narratives, and investigate critical moments where Afro-Cubans and Natives embody and exemplify an early understanding of a central component of ​Cubanidad​: revolutionary subjectivity. Drawing on Tiffany Lethabo King’s metaphor of the ​shoal as a conceptual foundation, a term of scientific origin employed to theoretically conceptualize a “third space” of identity, where a subject is positioned as being “both, neither, and in between,” I challenge the rhetorics and ideologies that contain and homogenize Blacks and Natives, posit a multi-temporal and hybrid analysis of ​Cubanidad​, and reignite discussions of Black and Native futures through a reconceptualization of post-Revolution ​Cubanidad​. By offering an analysis of Black and Native intersubjectivity, I will situate an ethical relationality within the framework of Cubanidad​ as the basis to envision collective futures of mutual care.

Abstract: This article offers a critique of the Wolfe-an model, which has become so dominant within contemporary Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). It focuses particularly on the central claim made by Patrick Wolfe, and others after him, that settler colonialism is categorically differentiated from other forms of colonialism by its drive to “eliminate the native”, instead of exploiting them. This paper builds on the literature that shows how settler colonies have used elimination as well as exploitation in their relations with indigenous peoples—even transitioning from one to the other. Instead, the paper argues that focusing on accumulation by dispossession allows for an analysis of the specificity of settler social relations to emerge. It highlights the specific ways in which settlers collectively expropriate indigenous peoples and struggle amongst different settler classes over the distribution of the colonial loot.