Digital indigeneity against settler colonialism? Maurice Ebileeni, ‘Digital Palestine and the National Imagination’, Critical Inquiry, 52, 4, 2026

02Jul26

Abstract: It seems that Palestine has found a convenient spot in the cloud, as a complex, yet seemingly cohesive, digital nation comes into being. The growing possibilities of online connectivity through social media, search engines, and streaming services, along with the newly designed features of online articulation (posting, sharing, commenting, reacting, and so forth), are intensifying the idea of a single people, a single heritage, and a single national destiny. This article presents the concept of digital Palestinian nationalism as a critical prism for examining how online political activism in support of Palestine reveals the multiple, somewhat conflicting, layers of present Palestinian temporality. My contention is that digital Palestinian nationalism operates in an algorithmic present that significantly intensifies the historical temporality of national imagination but is simultaneously in conflict with various ongoing temporalities of Palestinian displacement. Deeply entangled in the sociometer of user engagement, algorithmic processes amplify deep national sentiments among Palestinians everywhere in reaction to footage of Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip (since 7 October 2023) within a constant frame of “real-time” and “right-time.” However, in buttressing national sentiments, this algorithmic presentness hinders attempts to imagine differently so that the Palestinian story might branch out to comprehend the multiple ongoing political and cultural developments of Palestinian experience in the various contexts of displacement in Israel-Palestine and the world at large.


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Emergent cultural heritage against settler colonialism: Claudia Vlad, ‘Reclaiming Palestinian Cultural Heritage under Settler Colonialism: Grassroots Practices in Kafr ‘Aqab, Jerusalem’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2026

02Jul26

Abstract: Grassroots cultural heritage in Palestine functions as a pivotal arena of resistance, challenging hegemonic heritage approaches adopted by the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority, and international heritage organisations. Focusing on the NGO Riwaq’s initiatives in rural Jerusalem, this paper demonstrates how heritage becomes a site for reimagining Palestine beyond flagged symbols of nationhood. Through these counter-hegemonic frameworks, this article sheds light on how grassroots actors subvert hegemonic heritage models. The analysis traces three interconnected practices through Riwaq’s projects: the rehabilitation of Kafr ‘Aqab Historic Centre, the ‘Mapping Rural Jerusalem’ project, and the ‘Engaged Margins’ exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023). These scales are explored through theoretical frameworks, including Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’, Euro-American heritage management and the human rights discourse. Drawing on Chatterjee’s critique of Western modular forms of imagined communities, Barakat’s ‘deruination’ and Muñoz’s disidentification from a victim-centred aesthetic regime, this paper argues that Riwaq broadens what counts as heritage. Ultimately, the paper posits that cultural preservation is a form of resistance, enabling grassroots organisations to challenge colonial power structures, assert the right to narrate overlooked histories, and advance ‘Alter-Native’ forms of self-determination.


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Humouring settler colonialism: Derek Hilligoss, The Rhetoric of Gallows Humor: The Settler Colonial Unconscious in Reservation Dogs, PhD dissertation, University of Kansas, 2026

02Jul26

Abstract: This dissertation examines how Native comedy operates as a rhetorical and psychoanalytic critique of settler colonialism. Focusing on the television series Reservation Dogs, I argue that gallows humor, which is defined as comedy engaging death, trauma, and suffering, functions as a distinctly Native rhetorical practice that reveals and resists ongoing colonial violence. Drawing on rhetorical studies, Native studies, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the project theorizes the “settler colonial death drive,” defined as the unconscious compulsion within settler society to reproduce eliminatory logics that render Native life precarious. Through close textual and contextual analysis, I demonstrate how Reservation Dogs uses humor to expose these conditions while fostering survivance, refusal, and community. Chapter one situates Native comedy historically as a form of gallows humor emerging from conditions of marginalization. Chapter two analyzes the Tall Man trope and representations of suicide, reframing death as a structural condition rather than individual pathology. Chapter three examines the Deer Lady to theorize the gendered dimensions of settler colonial violence and Native feminist refusal. Ultimately, this project positions Native gallows humor as a critical rhetorical practice that confronts, rather than escapes, the enduring violences of settler colonialism.


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Sovereignty is an unequal relation: Amy Swiffen, ‘Contesting sovereignty: Indigenous legal and political responses to settler colonialism in Canada’, in Marinos Diamantides, Michel Rosenfeld, Giuseppe Martinico (eds), Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Sovereignty, Elgar Online, 2026, pp. 95-112

29Jun26

Abstract: This chapter deals with the complex interaction between Indigenous sovereignty and state sovereignty within the context of settler colonialism in Canada. The author examines how European concepts of sovereignty have shaped and constrained Indigenous authority, with the Canadian legal system often seeking to limit the sovereignty of Indigenous nations, despite constitutional recognition of their inherent rights.


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Thoreau as settler disaster: Andrew Wildermuth, ‘Foraging, Forging, Forgoing – or, Thoreau as Settler Disaster in the Age of Walker and Apess’, in Linda Hess, Sylvia Mayer, Katja Sarkowsky, Christoph Straub (eds), Environmental citizenship: politics, practices, representations, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2026, pp. 69-83

29Jun26

Excerpt: In Concord, Massachusetts, a few years ago, I attended a two-week summer residency on the topic of Thoreau and social reform in the American Renaissance. On the final day, we discussed “Native American Rights in Antebellum America.” At the very start of the event, one of the event’s panelists, Linda Coombs, an historian and educator of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, began with a question: “What Native American rights?” The mostly White audience stiffened. Coombs laughed. “What rights, really?” She offered this like it was the punch line everyone had long known was coming. “It just doesn’t compute,” she said. It was clear that Linda Coombs was unimpressed with and disinterested in both Henry Thoreau’s person and work. She dismissed Thoreau with turns of phrases that were startling, even sacrilegious, to many in the room – in “The Concord Colonial Inn,” which Thoreau’s family once owned, and where a young Thoreau roomed while studying at Harvard – and where, for the last weeks, many of us, myself included, had worshipped at and swum in his and Transcendentalism’s shrines. Coombs, on the other hand, referred to him as a settler and mocked his fame for spending years on Indigenous land. She also asked why it was only on our final day that we focused on Indigeneity in North America. These and other inquiries exacted a certain speechlessness – a general liberal confusion, at a conference about reform, in good liberal Massachusetts – that became utterly pervasive, palpable, indeed, in this windowless room in Thoreau’s literal basement.


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Settler psychopathologies: Shakeel Anjum, Anissa Haddadi, ‘Symptoms and the Symptomatologists: A Study of Settler Psychopathology’, in Priyanka Chandra (ed.), Undisciplining IR: Beyond Mainstream International Relations, Routledge, 2026

29Jun26

Abstract: This chapter discusses how, in their refusal to become pathological objects, Palestinians transform into foremost symptomatologists and physicians of not only settler colonial and capitalist psychosis but also of the world. Breaking from the laws of discourse, they resist and isolate the capitalist machine and its fascist, paranoid desire from the world. The text traces the lineages of colonial pathology and outlines how Zionism inherits and embeds its paranoiac delirium of brute coldness and cruel genealogy onto the Palestinian social body. In the practical-discursive-extractivist frame of the racial, biopolitical, and just plainly psychopathological transatlantic phantasm, the Palestinians, otherwise absent from ethics, are at the centre of the political diagnosis of the world.


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Settler colonialism in Vietnam: Ngan ‘Hazel’ Le, ‘Indigeneity and Ecology in Vietnam: A Settler Colonial History’, Backstory, 2, 1, 2026

29Jun26

Abstract: This paper examines the complex nature of indigeneity in Vietnam within a broader settler colonial framework. While Vietnam’s 54 ethnic groups are officially recognized as minorities, the inhabitants of the Central Highlands—including the Co Tu, Jarai, Ede, and Cham peoples— are specifically identified here as Indigenous, owing to their status as original inhabitants of the southern mountainous regions. Drawing on chronological analyses of French colonialism, the U.S.-Vietnam War, and postwar Vietnamese government resettlement policies, I argue that Indigenous Vietnamese communities have faced overlapping and distinct forms of colonialism that have systematically disrupted their lands, livelihoods, and cultural histories. The concept of salt-water settler colonialism is used here to complicate the recognition of Indigenous identity in Southeast Asian contexts, where long-term European land occupation did not occur. Employing Espiritu’s method of critical juxtaposition, I compare the experiences of Co Tu women in Quang Nam Province with those of Pawnee and Lakota women in the United States. In both cases, Indigenous women emerge as central agents of ecological resilience, whose knowledge and practices offer essential models for contemporary climate justice. Centering Indigenous women’s narratives is crucial to understanding the entangled relationships between colonialism, Indigeneity, and the environment.


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The roots of settler colonialism: Aysha Sana, ‘Olive Trees, Resistance, and Colonial Contestations in Palestine: A Political and Ecological Analysis’, in Priyanka Chandra (ed.), Undisciplining IR: Beyond Mainstream International Relations, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: Olive trees, emblematic of Palestinian identity, resilience, and sustenance, occupy a central yet precarious role in the ongoing colonization of Palestine by Israel. The proposed paper explores the ecological, cultural, and political significance of olive trees in the Zionist settler-colonial project. The destruction of over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees since 1967 reveals a deliberate strategy to dispossess Palestinians of their land, disrupt food sovereignty, and undermine their deep-rooted connection to their homeland. While olive groves are crucial to Palestinian livelihood and symbolize sumud (steadfastness), they are also targeted as “enemy soldiers” in a legal and ideological battle over land ownership. The chapter examines the paradoxical use of olive trees in Zionist narratives, first as symbols of a biblical homeland and later abandoned in favor of European pines to erase Palestinian history and conceal Nakba atrocities. Through literary and artistic works, like those of Mahmoud Darwish and Sliman Mansour, olive trees emerge as “sites of memory,” preserving Palestinian narratives against erasure. Simultaneously, Israel’s monocultural afforestation, environmental exploitation, and the uprooting of olive trees for settlement expansion demonstrate ecological imperialism and environmental Nakba. It also analyses the ideological tensions within Zionism, where the destruction of olive trees contradicts both Jewish religious laws and environmental claims, further exposing its colonial ambitions. The paper looks into how olive trees, beyond their economic and symbolic roles, stand as a powerful counter-narrative to Zionist myths, asserting the enduring presence and resistance of the Palestinian people. Through these trees, the struggle for Palestinian liberation intersects with the broader fight for environmental justice, challenging ongoing acts of both genocide and ecocide.


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Translation across space and meaning: Katsuya Hirano, Daniel Abbe, ‘Settler-Colonial Translation: “Civilization” and the Ainu Voices’, in Talal Asad, Jun’ichi Isomae, Naoki Sakai, Katsuya Hirano, Gouranga Charan Pradhan (eds), Beyond the Untranslatable: Theorizing Postcolonial Translation, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: In this chapter, I examine how imperial Japan’s settler colonization of Hokkaido produced a regime of translation that effectively rendered the Indigenous Ainu people a vanishing race. Focusing on Kyosuke Kindaichi, the founder of Ainu linguistic studies, and his relationship with his Ainu assistant, Yukie Chiri, I maintain that the contemporary translation practices of Japanese linguists functioned as a mode of domination, enabling the settler-colonial logic of dispossession and elimination to masquerade as a civilizing mission aimed at liberating the Ainu. I show that this paradoxical logic of liberal humanism—simultaneously erasing and claiming to protect—was structured by the binary of humanitas and anthropos as argued by Naoki Sakai, as well as by Talal Asad’s concept of the violence inherent in secular translation. By situating the regime of translation within these theoretical frameworks, I highlight how linguistic practices can reproduce systemic violence and explore the broader ethical and political dimensions of translation under settler-colonial conditions.


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Environmental settler colonialism: Kristi Leora Gansworth, Otto Muller, ‘Not your blood, not your soil: Land and belonging in colonial matrices’, in Lise Benoist, George Edwards, Bernhard Forchtner, Balša Lubarda, Sonja Pietiläinen, Kjell Vowles (eds), Global Far-Right Ecologies, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: This chapter outlines key framing narratives and iterative practices of settler colonialism and its project of erasure and replacement. It uses these frameworks to analyse facets of recent US white supremacist moves including the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally and 2021 Capitol Insurrection along with right-wing representations of American history and their manifestation in the Executive Orders of the second Trump administration. Gansworth and Muller argue that the neofascist upturn in right-wing politics is a contemporary amplification of settler colonial frameworks that shape American identity and land relations writ large. The authors suggest that a meaningful refusal of this authoritarian shift requires a divestment from the fundamental narratives of American settler exceptionalism. Embodied relationalities and adaptive, enduring social configurations persist among Indigenous communities, despite centuries of colonial dispossession, offering political ecologies entirely outside of that presented by the settler state.


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