Dance! Miguel Martínez, ‘Danza Azteca as a form of resistance to White Settler colonialism’, International Journal of Human Rights Education, 10, 2026, pp. 1-17

28Apr26

Abstract: White settler colonialism is a systematic process by which Europeans and their descendants migrate to and settle in a new land with the explicit expectation of taking over the land, regardless of any Indigenous peoples that may live on the land (Speed, 2017; Wolfe, 2006). The Indigenous people who reside there can be exploited for labor, removed, exterminated or some combination of the three. In the process of settling the land, the settlers rename places, transform land use, create a new sense of cultural identity, and work to eliminate any remnants of what had existed prior to their arrival. Indigenous ways of living, epistemologies and religious practices and beliefs are replaced by White political, religious, social, cultural and economic systems and structures. While the impact of White settler colonialism is felt across essentially all Indigenous people in the United States, there has been a significant amount of resistance against it. In this paper, I aim to describe the impact of White settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples of the United States, with an emphasis on the ways that Indigenous people lost access to their cultural practices, and how traditional Danza Azteca, as practiced in California, is a way of resisting against White settler colonialism. As someone who has practiced Danza since 1987, I will discuss some of the history of Danza in the U.S. and how it is a search for Indigeneity and a form of resistance against White settler colonialism.


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The seeds of future settler colonialism (i.e., for those who are too distracted to look at apocalyptic thinking, if the apocalypse comes, what comes after will be settler colonial): Annukka Paajanen, ‘Reconciliation or re-colonization? Critical perspectives on seed banking and colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: Major actors within the United Nations and academia have suggested that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a ‘backup’ facility for the world’s crop diversity, could facilitate reconciliation between Indigenous and ex situ conservation approaches. This paper examines the collaboration between the SGSV and their Indigenous depositor, Parque de la Papa (Parque), to assess this proposition. Although the SGSV promises to ‘secure’ crop diversity ‘for the benefit of everyone’, work in decolonial and Indigenous studies has shown that neoliberal capitalist and colonial structures underpin and hinder reconciliation and conservation efforts. By critically analyzing literature from various fields and content from institutional websites, I demonstrate how the SGSV’s methods, while intended to safeguard crop diversity, may inadvertently perpetuate colonial dynamics by integrating Indigenous seeds into a system that prioritizes Western/settler colonial, neoliberal capitalist values. Reading the two conservation approaches vis-à-vis, I highlight the asymmetrical exchange that the Parque must navigate to preserve Indigenous knowledge and resources amid climate change challenges in the Andean highlands. Based on the analysis, I assert that despite the collaboration’s benefits, it risks transforming Indigenous communities along Western lines, potentially undermining biodiversity. Understanding these challenges is crucial for improving biodiversity protection and supporting the communities involved.


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Inception is a structure, not an event: Haifa Mahabir, The Holy Waste Land: A theoretical discourse on Palestine and the settler-colonial state of inceptional exception, PhD dissertation, University of Kent, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: This doctoral thesis interrogates the colonial and juridical foundations of Israel through a new conceptual framework: the inceptional state of exception-a condition of permanent emergency inscribed at the very origin of Zionist settler-colonial sovereignty. Rather than viewing Israel as a democracy in decay or degeneration, the study reframes it as a state constituted through the routinisation of legalised violence, racialised exclusion, and bureaucratic domination. In this account, the state of emergency is not an aberration but the baseline structure of legal and political order-embedded from the outset and sustained through the colonial logic of exception. The analysis proceeds through critical engagements with Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, and Giorgio Agamben, reread through the prism of Palestine. From Arendt’s account of imperialism and bureaucracy, the thesis develops the concept of subaltarianism: a mode of domination that governs silently through legal-administrative routine, embedding violence in ordinary governance. From Said’s confrontation with Orientalism and exile, it advances the claim of dehumanisation as the founding logic of empire, tracing how Palestinians are produced as illegible, expendable, and structurally unknowable-and how narration emerges as a form of resistance against erasure. At its conceptual keystone, the thesis builds on and extends Agamben’s framework, elaborating Israel as a paradigmatic state of inceptional exception: a wholly unprecedented formation where emergency is foundational to sovereignty. In its culminating gesture, the study turns to Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, neither peripherally nor incidentally, but as the poetic horizon in which these conceptual trajectories converge. Dante’s poetics of exile and redemption provide the necessary counterpoint to juridical foreclosure, reframing the waste land as a site of resistance and renewal. By bridging settler-colonial studies, Palestine studies, political theory, socio-legal analysis, and the historiography of empire, this dissertation forges an integrated frame that makes visible what each field alone cannot: how juridical suspension, bureaucratic domination, and erasure form the structural core of colonial sovereignty. This interdisciplinary intervention reframes sovereignty, law, personhood, and hope through the colonial crucible-pressing beyond description toward conceptual innovation, confronting the evasions of canonical theory, and generating the conceptual resources necessary to name Israel’s singular condition.


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Deterritorialise to reterritorialise: Argha Bhattacharyya, ‘Transforming the settler narrative: reading Kim Scott’s Taboo as becoming minor’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: This paper critically analyses Kim Scott’s Taboo in reference to the Deleuzean notion of ‘becoming minor’. The novel discusses Noongar characters dealing with historical trauma and land dispossession against the persistent impacts of forced assimilation, reflecting on their positioning as the ‘other’ in their ancestral land. Through the use of omniscient and communal storytelling, the tale subverts the settler colonial worldview and asserts Aboriginal sovereignty. This paper purports that the revival of the Noongar language together with cultural practices can be viewed as an act of deterritorialisation, reconstructing new forms and narratives to express Aboriginal knowledge, memory, and agency. The analysis of the novel as an act of ‘becoming minor’ demonstrates how Scott’s novel can be read as a testament to new ways of Aboriginal sense of belonging and sovereignty within the field of Australian literature.


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Drinking settler colonialism: Linda Myrsiades, Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection: The Legal Culture and Trials, 1794-1795, University of Georgia Press, 2024

28Apr26

Description: Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection treats the legal culture that informed the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and its trials. Linda Myrsiades examines conflicts between state and federal courts and the judicial philosophy of Federalist judges, as well as grand jury charges, law reports, judges’ bench notes, and defense notes for the trials, to develop a portrait of the hegemony of official interpretations of the law. At the same time, the book illuminates popular attitudes about the courts and the law and explores the nature of extralegal courts operated by the people. Myrsiades captures the agitation-propaganda efforts mounted by rebel communities and groups together with petitions and speeches in the rebel assemblies in demonstrating that popular culture offered a clear politico-legal justification within the rebel movement on the unofficial side of legal culture. Myrsiades thus presents a holistic picture of the legal culture of the rebellion. Her examination denies the common perception that the rebel movement was incoherent and chaotic and presents an alternative view that its perceptions are a necessary correlative to understanding how treason law functioned and what its critical elements were in the late-eighteenth century, serving as a lesson for democracy in the present era.


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But where is that settler colonialism? Emilie Cameron, ‘Where is Settler Colonialism?’ ACME, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: This essay considers both the limits and necessity of mobilizing settler colonial frameworks in the contemporary moment. It traces the rise of Settler Colonial Studies as the dominant framework for making sense of colonial relations in Canada and considers the limits of this framework for understanding colonization in Inuit Nunangat, where the settler state’s interest in dispossession, extraction, and proletarianization have played out differently than in southern Canada. Guided by Aimé Césaire’s directive to ask, again and again, what colonization is, I consider why Settler Colonial Studies frameworks are so readily mobilized in the study of northern Canada but are hyperpoliticized when they are applied to Israel/Palestine, why Inuit theories of colonization barely figure in Qallunaaq research about the North, and what this means for theorizing colonialism in the current conjuncture.


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Recovering from settler colonialism use disorder: Sara Cannon, Braiding More Than Sweetgrass: A Proposed Support Group Model for (Non)Tribal Native Americans in Recovery’, PhD dissertation, Eastern Kentucky University, 2026

27Apr26

Abstract: Native Americans (also referred to as American Indian/Alaska Natives or Indigenous persons) have too often been neglected in mental health interventions. This is a disservice, as they are disproportionately affected by challenges such as alcohol use disorder (AUD) and substance use disorder (SUD). Interventions directly speaking to AI/AN culture are rare to non-existent (at least in a published form), with the exception of White Bison’s Wellbriety (White Bison, 2002, 2024). It is not all together uncommon for individuals with Native roots to seek to (re)learn these traditions while in recovery from alcoholism and addiction. The aim of this project is three-fold: to deepen understanding of how expressing one’s Native American cultural identity may affect one’s quality of AUD/SUD recovery; to provide a culturally informed, outpatient treatment proposed support group model that addresses this disparity in intervention options for AI/AN individuals and communities; and to seek input, approval, and guidance from (non)tribal AI/AN community members to ensure cultural sensitivity. To achieve this aim, a community-based participatory research (CBPR) design was implemented.


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Settlers on the moon: Laura Goldblatt, ‘”We On the Moon Now”: The Space Race and Legacies of Settler Colonialism’, Amerikastudien / American Studies, 71, 1, 2026, pp. 25-42

27Apr26

Abstract: This article seeks to reorient the space race and especially the 1969 Apollo 11 mission within Civil Rights, Black, and Native American Movements’ resistance to an oppressive U.S. state. In contextualizing the space race as part of a Cold War contest between the United States and the ongoing threat of the Soviet Union, I draw heavily on studies of space exploration that turn outwards to analyze space flight primarily within the history of technological innovation and international diplomacy, noting, too, the cross-pollination between actual space exploration and science fiction. Yet rather than using this literature to provide further insight into the space race’s role in global politics, in this essay, I turn inwards to consider how Native and Black artists and activists firmly tethered the Moon flight to the earthly realm in order to satirize the Apollo mission. Their aesthetic strategies highlight a structure of feeling in which lived affects like ridicule or disappointment compete with officially encouraged sublimity. In doing so, I argue that Native and Black artists and authors—namely Howlin’ Wolf, Faith Ringgold, and Simon J. Ortiz—took up the very formal features of the performance of the Apollo 11 mission to reject the government’s celestial and inspirational framing of space flight by focusing instead upon the everyday to diagnose space exploration as an escapist fantasy that can only compulsively repeat the injustices they face on earth. Through my attention to non-hegemonic audiences and strategies I hope to make two interventions. First, I situate the Apollo mission as an aesthetic event, if also a geopolitical one, following the literary critic Hortense Spillers. Second, this framing allows me to show how Black and Native authors and artists like those I consider seized on space flight as a performance, using its specific formal features not to dismiss that performance, but rather to render it absurd.


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Settlers are classed: Chris M. Hansen, ‘Marxing the Westward March: A Case Study on a Marxist Approach to Family History and Great Plains Migration’, Literature & Aesthetics, 36, 1, 2026, pp. 36-50

25Apr26

Abstract: This article provides a new look at conducting family history research from the perspective of historical materialism (Marxism). Instead of typical family histories isolating and atomizing the individual and family oral accounts which center the “great man” of the past, this work provides an analysis firmly rooted in class conflict and how individuals directly receive their conditions as mediated by the past. This specifically takes family history in the American western migration as a way to reconceptualize conducting this type of historical research, and using family stories, legends, and oral traditions as a window into the class ideologies present both in the present and the past moderating how they were shaped and transmitted, and what stories were regarded as important (especially in erasing the memory of indigenous peoples who had lived in the originally settled areas).


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The negativity of settler colonialism: Shahira A. Hathout, ‘Critical negativity in Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520–22), settler colonialism, and the death of myth’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

25Apr26

Abstract: This paper draws on the critical negativity presented by Julia Kristeva and Édouard Glissant. Despite their differences, both accounts agree on three points: First, they respectively reject the fixation of an original meaning or original identity, moving towards a more indeterminate open-ended rethinking of loss, trauma, and the fragmented subject. Like Glissant’s ‘womb abyss’, Kristeva’s ‘black sun’ is another abyss, through which fragmentation, trauma, meaning, and the possibility for differential collectivity emerge. Secondly, both accounts expose the violence inscribed into settler colonialism to unsettle master narratives and myths of civilization. Thirdly, Kristeva and Glissant acknowledge the capacity of art and poetics to operate as sites of intertextuality and negativity where myths of civilization that sustain the violence of settler colonialism could possibly activate its own collapse. Within this framework, I explore Hans Holbein’s painting, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, alongside images of the dead bodies of Palestinian children, starved by Israel’s genocide in Palestine, not as aesthetics of suffering that reproduce the sites of subjection but as aesthetics of negativity and accountability to show how myths of spiritual and cultural superiority that sustain settler colonialism collapse at the site and sight of settler colonial violence.


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