The recreation of a settler society: Lisa Tink, Fit to be Canadian? The Recreation Industrial Complex in Canada, PhD dissertation, University of Alberta, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: In recent years, both recreation scholars and practitioners began calling for a sectoral return to municipal recreation’s historical roots as a public good (e.g., Mahaffey, 2011; ISRC & CPRA, 2015; Cureton and Frisby, 2011; Smale and Reid, 2002; Taylor and Frisby, 2010). Blaming neoliberal ideology for the current pay-per-use model, these calls for a more inclusive recreation system not only highlighted the negative impacts of a consumer-based recreation system, they suggested that the profession’s ‘business-like’ practices should be of concern because they are in direct opposition to the field’s historic mandate of ‘equal opportunity’ for access. A central assumption underlying these calls for the recreation profession to return to ‘its historical roots’ is that municipal recreation services, until late ‘80s and ‘90s, were available to all members of society. This narrative – of a more inclusive and equitable era in recreation’s past – is, however, a romanticized account of public recreation’s history. As I will argue throughout this dissertation, public recreation has always been, and continues to be, a location where racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, outcomes are (re)produced. Using Foucauldian genealogy, I trace some of the conditions that have given rise to what I have labeled the recreation industrial complex. More specifically, I use a vast collection of formal and informal archival documents to demonstrate how our public recreation facilities (both past and present) are intricately linked to the white supremacist logics of Western exceptionalism, settler colonialism, ableism, racism, capitalism, and (hetero)patriarchy. I begin by analyzing three seemingly unrelated pieces of Canada’s past: Indigenous legislation, immigration policy and race science. I do so in an attempt to politicize the category ‘Canadian’ and demonstrate how it has been taken-for-granted in our traditional recreation histories. I then weave these seemingly unrelated pieces of Canadian history into a recreation context. More specifically, I analyze two distinct eras of recreation facility development – the social medicine era (1880s-1920s) and the social welfare era (1930s-1970s) – and provide examples of how recreation was both produced by, and reproduced technologies of white supremacy. Finally, I demonstrate how these historical discourses, practices, and policies have created the conditions for the a public recreation system that positions everyone except white, middle to upper class, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied boys and (younger) men as an excludable type (Titchtosky, 2003). By exposing the ways particular bodies came to be centered in a recreation context, the purpose of this work is to demonstrate how historical inclusions and exclusions (whether intentional or not) were in fact part of a broader biopolitical project intended to sustain white supremacy, with the goal of encouraging critical dialogues about what is inherently problematic, difficult, and dangerous in the discourses, practices, and policies that govern our contemporary public recreation systems.


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Indigenous to settler: Caroline Kahlenberg, How Locals Became Settlers: Mizrahi Jews and Bodily Capital in Palestine, 1908-1948, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: This dissertation explores early twentieth-century Palestine through the lens of bodies and material culture. While histories of modern Palestine often treat “Jews” and “Arabs” as naturally distinct categories, I examine how these categories were constructed as racialized, embodied, and opposing identities. At a time when Palestine witnessed major changes— including the transition from Ottoman to British rule, mass Zionist settlement, shifting labor patterns, and the rise of Palestinian nationalism—residents made sense of their identities by spreading ideas about whose bodies were like, or unlike, their own. This dissertation focuses on Sephardi and Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews, many of whom lived in Palestine prior to modern Zionist settlement, which offers a unique lens to explore the process of Arab-Jewish boundary-making. At the turn of the twentieth century, Mizrahi Jewish bodies were not always clearly marked as exclusively “Jewish” or “Arab.” Their clothing, accents, and cultural tastes were often indistinguishable from those of their Muslim and Christian neighbors in Palestine. However, the growing colonial-national conflict in the 1920s and 1930s forced Mizrahi Jews to confront their position vis-à-vis Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. They adopted several strategies in light of this new reality. Many abandoned “Arab” clothing and accents in order to assimilate into the Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish community (Yishuv). In doing so, they helped produce a visual and sonic Arab-Jewish division on the ground. Others challenged the emerging divide by refusing to change their bodies. They expressed pride in their cultural and linguistic heritage in the Islamic world. Yet others selectively employed their “Oriental” bodies as a way to assert Zionist belonging and nativeness in Palestine. This dissertation makes three broader contributions. First, using photographs, oral histories, material culture, and written sources, it illuminates how clothing, sounds, sexuality, and age become racialized in circumstances of colonial-national conflict. Second, while scholars often point to one “year zero” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the founding of a political movement, the outbreak of ethnic violence, or the publication of a specific document, I demonstrate that building a Jewish-Arab division demanded the constant policing of how individuals looked and sounded. Finally, the dissertation’s focus on Mizrahi Jews pushes scholars of settler colonialism to think beyond a local-versus-settler paradigm. Many Mizrahi Jews in Palestine were locals who also became part of a settler movement; they were, as I term them, “local settlers.” The story of this dissertation, then, is the story of how the locals became settlers.


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Settlers would rather not talk: Marc Carpenter, ‘Rake Up No Old Stories of Evil’: Memory, Celebration, and Erasure of Settler Violence in the American Pacific Northwest, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: This dissertation is both a new historical synthesis of pioneer violence within and beyond the wars on Native people in the mid-nineteenth-century American Pacific Northwest, and a new history of how these wars—and broader tides of colonial violence—were remembered, commemorated, and forgotten. Violence against Native people was even more frequent and more accepted across pioneer spaces than has typically been argued—indeed, I contend that most of the wars and associated violence were part of a single broad-based war on Native people across the Northwest. Early generations of regional history writers deliberately distorted the historical record to paint pioneer volunteer soldiers as heroes. But disagreements about which acts were heroic accidentally preserved archives of atrocity, from the mouths and pens of pioneers themselves.I draw on numerous virtually unused archival sources from pioneer perpetrators to make a number of interventions into the history of the pioneer Northwest: reframing wars, uncovering acts of genocide, relating unrecognized instances of lynching and sexual violence, and unmasking murderers along with the people and politicians who supported and joined them, at the time and since. Proving the untruths deliberately propagated by pioneers and their historians weighs on the balance of historical narratives about key events. Stripped of the veneer of deceit added for posterity, pioneer memories often mirror Indigenous histories of the same events—with the differences crafted through the efforts of generations of history writers, who preferred gauzy tales to hard truths. By delving into the work and specific mechanics of erasure and nostalgia, I demonstrate both deliberate intent behind the cover-ups and the failures of those who attempted them. This should not only reshape the history of colonialism and genocide in the Pacific Northwest, but suggest useful methodological and theoretical interventions in the history of American colonialism specifically and settler colonialism broadly. This dissertation affirms the existence of the structures of oppression that support colonial projects, but recognizes the fissures and cracks in those structures that Indigenous activists and their allies were able to use—sometimes in acts of difficult compromise—in their ongoing struggles for life, rights, and sovereignty.


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Starving, force feeding, and settler colonialism: M. T. Samuel, ‘The jurisprudence of elimination: starvation and force-feeding of Palestinians in Israel’s highest court’, International Journal of Law in Context, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: This paper assesses the functioning of law and legal institutions in Palestine/Israel through the lens of settler colonialism by analysing two thematically interconnected decisions issued by the Supreme Court of Israel, the first involving the starvation of besieged Palestinian civilians and the second involving the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners. Following a discussion regarding the role of law in settler colonialism, it proceeds to argue that the Court enabled, legitimised and legalised state-sanctioned violence that targeted the native Palestinian population by and through a jurisprudence of elimination in order to facilitate the attainment of Israeli settler-colonial objectives. By so doing, the paper provides further evidence in support of the appropriateness of settler colonialism as a theoretical framework for the case of Israel, including in legal matters.


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Layers of settler colonialism: Jesse Robertson, ‘The Closed West: Rajneeshpuram and the Failure of Utopia in Antelope, Oregon’, Utopian Studies, 32, 3, 2021, pp. 652-667

28Nov21

Abstract: Settler colonialism lay at the heart of the dispute between Oregonians and the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who built a utopian community called Rajneeshpuram in central Oregon between 1981 and 1985. Rajneeshpuram’s inhabitants believed their environmentalist ambitions would align them with settler-spirited and eco-minded Oregonians. However, Oregon’s land use laws were rooted in the dispossession of Native land, a foundational theft that was reinstantiated in present-day hierarchies of land use and ownership. Many Oregonians simultaneously saw the residents of Rajneeshpuram as invaders and invoked frontier narratives in their defense, blending them with prevalent political and cultural concerns of contamination. Rajneesh and his followers’ disregard for zoning laws and inflammatory tactics brought about their community’s undoing. Rajneeshpuram thus challenged an arrangement that was the historical product of settler colonialism while replicating it. The conflict was mired in the idealistic—and incompatible—self-interest of opposing settler groups.


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A French wild west: Timothy Roberts, ‘”Almost as it is Formulated in the So-Called ‘Homestead Act'”: Images of the American West in French Settlement of French Algeria’, Journal of World History, 32, 4, 2021, pp. 601-629

28Nov21

Abstract: Nineteenth-century American expansion has been shown as a type of Anglo-American “settler revolution,” but the United States was also connected with France in France’s ideas for the imperial development of Algeria. The two countries alike were ambitious empires, their leaders committed to expansion as a means of political and economic regeneration. More than this, the French empire “borrowed” images from its republican cousin to help incorporate Algeria. Writers during the July Monarchy saw American Indians’ decline as a forerunner to white settlement’s consequences in North Africa, although they rationalized how Algerians might be treated more benevolently. Napoléon III vowed to prevent an American analogue by setting aside Arab tribal land. Liberal reformers during the early Third Republic, however, called for assimilation of Algerians through land privatization, hailing the U.S. Homestead Act for how it could facilitate egalitarian, private land ownership, and thus help establish what Michel Chevalier had earlier imagined as the French “West.”


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An artistic life in repressive authenticity: Oliver Basciano, ‘Jimmie Durham obituary’, 27/11/21

28Nov21

Excerpt: ‘Controversial artist whose work explored Native American imagery and themes ‘.


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Undoing erasure: Eva Corlett, ‘Long fight for justice ends as New Zealand treaty recognises Moriori people’, The Guardian, 27/11/21

28Nov21

Excerpt: Indigenous settlers of the Chatham Islands celebrate ‘significant milestone’ as treaty enshrined in law apologises for wrongs and returns land.


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Undermining Australian settler schooling: Amy Thomas, Beth Marsden, ‘Surviving School and “Survival Schools”: Resistance, Compulsion and Negotiation in Aboriginal Engagements with Schooling’, Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History, 121, 2021, pp. 33-55

26Nov21

Abstract: In Australia, Aboriginal peoples have sought to exploit and challenge settler colonial schooling to meet their own goals and needs, engaging in strategic, diverse and creative ways closely tied to labour markets and the labour movement. Here, we bring together two case studies to illustrate the interplay of negotiation, resistance and compulsion that we argue has characterised Aboriginal engagements with school as a structure within settler colonial capitalism. Our first case study explains how Aboriginal families in Victoria and New South Wales deliberately exploited gaps in school record collecting to maintain mobility during the mid-twentieth century and engaged with labour markets that enabled visits to country. Our second case study explores the Strelley mob’s establishment of independent, Aboriginal-controlled bilingual schools in the 1970s to maintain control of their labour and their futures. Techniques of survival developed in and around schooling have been neglected by historians, yet they demonstrate how schooling has been a strategic political project, both for Aboriginal peoples and the Australian settler colonial state.


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Australian capitalism is settler capitalism: Hannah Forsyth, Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Introduction: Political Implications for the New History of Capitalism’, Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History, 121, 2021, pp. 1-7

26Nov21

Excerpt: Labour history, long a particular strength of historical studies in Australia, has always sustained a critical stance towards capitalism as a historical phenomenon. In recent years, such histories of capitalism have expanded and interacted with other sub-fields, such as cultural history, environmental history and settler colonial studies.


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