Colonies for like-minded people: David R. Como, ‘Castles in the Air: Sectarian Puritanism, the Revolutionary Caribbean and the Forgotten Colony of New Warwick, Trinidad’, History, 2026

05Nov26

Abstract: This article examines an overlooked attempt to colonize the island of Trinidad during the English Revolution of the 1640s. This project was engineered by a consortium of radical puritans, seeking to create a protected enclave in the New World for separatists, anabaptists and other sectaries. ‘New Warwick’, as the colony was called, quickly collapsed, but reconstructing the Trinidad enterprise allows for the examination of important developments in the history of the English Atlantic, including the rise of religious divisions in parliament’s civil-war armies; the interplay between the revolution and events in England’s Atlantic colonies; the colonial policy of parliament during the wars; the emergence of pockets of religious toleration in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the English Atlantic; the radical shifts in the political economy of the West Indies during the formative rise of a regime centred on sugar and enslaved labour; and the conflicts that roiled the English Caribbean after the regicide, resulting ultimately in the consolidation of the newly integrated Atlantic empire under the English Republic during the era of the first Navigation Act (1651).


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The tradwives of the settler imagination: Terra Sage Wallin, The Grammar of Return: Tradition, Gendered Performance, and Moral Formation in the Digital TradWife Movement, PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2026

05Nov26

Abstract: This thesis examines how “return” operates as a grammar of moral formation in the digital TradWife movement. Across Instagram, TikTok, conferences, influencer accounts, and land-based communities, calls to return to tradition, femininity, the home, God, the body, and the land organize a moral world in which recently assembled practices come to feel inherited, coherent, and true. This thesis asks how performances that often appear hypocritical, nostalgic, or overly staged become persuasive, how audiences participate in sustaining them, and how their affective appeal becomes tied to broader projects of gender hierarchy, Christian nationalism, racial belonging, and settler attachment to land. Methodologically, the thesis draws on digital ethnography, close reading, platform analysis, and performance theory. Its archive includes TradWife and homesteading content collected from Instagram and TikTok between 2024 and 2026; the online persona and comment sections of Christ With Cali; the platformed gender discourse of Savanna Faith Stone; Turning Point USA’s 2025 Young Women’s Leadership Summit; and Return To The Land, a white identitarian settlement project in Arkansas. The analysis brings these materials into conversation with scholarship on religion and media, affect, ethical formation, invented tradition, professional wrestling, Christian nationalism, settler colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty. The thesis argues that return becomes powerful through repetition, participation, and scale. In digital TradWife media, tradition is staged through kayfabe: a performed reality sustained by creators, audiences, critics, and platforms. Viewers may believe, expose, mock, defend, or parody the performance, and each form of engagement helps keep the world of return available. As these scenes circulate, fabricated heritage becomes a lived orientation. Practices such as modest dress, submission, raw milk consumption, fertility preparation, sourdough baking, and domestic labor come to function as signs of ethical alignment. Under platform conditions, this process becomes algorithmic traditionalism: the circulation of traditionalist signs through affective intensity, ambiguity, ragebait, and engagement-driven visibility. The argument culminates in the claim that digital TradWife domesticity translates larger political and theological imaginaries into intimate form. Blood names lineage, fertility, and reproductive futurity; soil names stewardship, sacred inheritance, and land made morally available; sourdough names the repetitive domestic labor through which continuity is maintained and passed forward. In the case of Return To The Land, the grammar of return becomes territorial, organizing ancestry, membership, education, reproduction, and settlement into a project of white ecological belonging. Placed alongside Indigenous accounts of return, revitalization, refusal, and sacred land protection, this settler return appears politically uneven. Return can authorize possession and sustain obligation. It can make longing feel like belonging while also binding people to responsibilities already present in land, ceremony, sovereignty, and ancestors. Ultimately, this thesis shows that return functions as a formative grammar within digital TradWife culture. Through return, subjects learn how to feel, desire, inhabit, and defend a world that appears old precisely because it is being continually remade.


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Documentarying settler colonialism: Azraf Chowdhury, ‘The lens of resistance: Using No Other Land (2025) and The Settlers (2024) as contemporary documentaries to understand the Israeli settler project’,  Journal of Global Faultlines, 13, 2, 2026, pp. 155-179

05Nov26

Abstract: This article investigates how contemporary documentary films construct political, visual, and narrative understandings of the Israeli settler project, which is an ongoing settler-colonial project that is sustained by territorial expansion, displacement, and the structural domination of Palestinians. While scholarship has examined settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel, less attention has been given to how contemporary documentaries narrate and visualize this evolving project. The research question is: how do the documentaries No Other Land (2024) and The Settlers (2025) narrate and visualize the expansion of the Israeli settler project, and what do they reveal about the broader political, ideological, and colonial structures that sustain and normalize settlement expansions? Analyzing No Other Land (2024) and The Settlers (2025), the study analyzes how first-person, collaborative, and long-form documentary practices challenge dominant narratives, expose settler violence, and highlight human security concerns such as personal, economic, and community insecurity. Analysis of No Other Land, directed by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, showed that the film visualizes settler colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than an isolated event. Scenes of home demolitions, filmed with handheld cameras, created emotion and gave the film a sense of authenticity. The documentary foregrounds Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) through the portrayals of families who refuse to leave their homes, while exposing the collaboration between Israeli settlers and soldiers during attacks on Palestinian homes. In contrast, The Settlers, directed by Louis Theroux, interrogates the ideological and political forces driving settlement expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The study concludes that contemporary documentaries serve as powerful tools of political critique and public understanding of the Israeli settler project. Together, they demonstrate how documentary film can shed light on the mechanism of settler colonialism, challenge dominant Israeli and Western framing of this conflict, and contribute to broader debates on occupation, settler violence and resistance.


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Settlers see ‘surplus land’: Myrzantay Zhakyp, ‘Communicating Colonial Space: How Imperial Discourse Produced “Surplus Land” in the Kazakh Steppe’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2026

05Nov26

Abstract: This article examines how Russian-language press debate and official statistical reporting produced, disputed, and operationalized “surplus land” in the Kazakh Steppe and adjoining Turkestan territories. It analyzes 43 items reproduced in the Turkestanskii sbornik: 37 newspaper and publicistic texts and six Resettlement Administration studies published between 1885 and 1915. Rather than treating the archive as a unified imperial voice, it distinguishes advocacy, regional criticism, and official calculation. Claims made availability plausible; counterclaims exposed instability; statistical practices converted disputed assumptions into surveys, pastoral norms, tables, maps, and calculable surpluses. A comparison with Port Phillip in 1835 distinguishes Crown authorization of possession from the calculation of pastoral requirements. Communicative legibility is a general process of making representations actionable across genres. Its colonial configuration here joined imperial authority, the subordination of Indigenous territorial claims, and settler allocation, rather than constituting a mechanism exclusive to colonial governance.


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An Irish island in the bush … Ronan McDonald, ‘Hy-Brasil in Australia: Irish myth and settler belonging’, Southerly, 81, 1, 2026, pp. 234-244

03Nov26

Abstract: ‘She is Eutopia, she is Hy-Brasil.’ It is a strange and luminous thing to say of Australia. Hy-Brasil was the phantom island of Irish legend, glimpsed intermittently through Atlantic mist and long associated with westward longing, prophecy, and imagined renewal. In Bernard O’Dowd’s long Federation poem ‘The Bush,’ however, this drifting Irish island is relocated onto the Australian continent. A legend of apparition and non-arrival becomes a name for settlement, arrival, and national destiny.


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Ungrounding while unhinged: Eyal Weizman, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, Fern Press, 2026

03Nov26

Description: A devastating, meticulous account of the history of Israel’s destruction of Gaza from an acclaimed architect and investigator. Eyal Weizman is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel. In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the ‘deep cartography’ of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable. Taking us through the broader geographic and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised – and how Israel’s actions after 7 October escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide. Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.


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Good question: Alessandra Spadaro, ‘International Law and Racial Capitalism in Palestine: Occupation Gone Wrong or Settler Colonialism Done Right?’ Third World Approaches to International Law, 7, 2026

02Nov26

Abstract: In its 2024 Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice found that Israel’s ongoing presence as an occupying power in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) is unlawful. The Court scrutinized the existence of illegal Israeli settlements in the OPT and found, among other things, that Israel prioritizes its settlers in the allocation of water and allows them to exploit natural resources whilst denying the same opportunities to Palestinians, in violations of its obligations under international law. The Court also found that Israel discriminates against Palestinians, including on the basis of race, without however reaching a clear conclusion on the question of apartheid. Focusing on these two issues, this article offers a critique of the Advisory Opinion through the concepts of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. It demonstrates that the economy of occupation is not limited to the exploitation of natural resources, nor to the OPT. It is rather part of a broader settler colonial project aimed at facilitating capital accumulation through the elimination of the Palestinian people. The article employs the concept of racial capitalism to show the entanglement of profit-making and race-making that results in the racialization of Palestinians as inferior. Beyond Palestine, this analysis highlights challenges and opportunities for political-economic analyses of international law.


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The current settler colonial conjuncture: Shannon Speed, ‘Hearing Her Breathing: Indigenous Knowledges and the World Beyond Settler Capitalism’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 54, 3-4, 2026, pp. 351-355

02Nov26

Excerpt: And we are in such a moment, at least in what is currently called the United States, in which there is not only no attempt to obscure settler capitalism’s fascist underpinnings, there is an aggressive effort to flaunt them. What we are seeing from the United States government and military right now is not aberration—it’s acceleration. The logics of elimination and extraction that have structured settler colonialism since its inception have always operated in relationship to capital, and what the current moment makes visible is the degree to which those logics are now operating…


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The settler in good relation? Jordyn Sheldon, ‘The Land in My Pocket: Unsettling Portals from Palestine to Turtle Island’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 54, 3-4, 2026, pp. 153-163

02Nov26

Abstract: Through the thread of a small pouch, this hybrid creative nonfiction essay weaves connections between memory, place, and political accountability. Moving between a harm reduction workshop on Treaty 1 and 3 territories, a childhood sewing lesson, a university classroom, a family DNA revelation, and a field course in Palestine and Israel, this essay explores the complex weight of oppressive inheritance. Drawing on the work of postcolonial and Indigenous theorists Aimé Césaire, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Vanessa Watts, as well as harm reduction thinker and practitioner Shira Hassan, and others, this piece asks whether and how a settler can be in good relation with stolen land. Sage, which grows in Turtle Island and Palestine, serves as a portal facilitating a layered analysis of violence, harm reduction, Indigenous Place-Thought, the Yiddish concept of doikayt (hereness), and the portability of colonial sovereignty.


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The good settler? Richard Shaw, The Good Settler: Essays from other people’s lands, Massey University Press, 2026

02Nov26

Description: Incisive, engaging writing on race and racism. ‘Where once I saw a view as I drove around the Taranaki coast along State Highway 45, I now see confiscated land from an invasion road. The creation story I used to subscribe to, the one in which hard-working people came here and settled the land, now jars. Weirdly, even the lawn looks different.’ So writes Richard Shaw in his third book examining colonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. Both have been warmly welcomed by readers and this third volume of powerful essays, with its wide lens, will not disappoint. As he says, ‘Growing numbers of Pākehā find themselves standing on restless ground these days: they, too, are seeing things differently, and in these pages you will also hear their voices as we reach — fitfully and painfully, individually and collectively — for an accommodation with our colonial past.’


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