The bugBear of settler colonialism: Yung-Ying Chang, John Chung-En Liu, ‘The Formosan Black Bear and Taiwanese Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, 2026

19Jun26

Abstract: Building on scholarship that situates nations and nationalism within colonial relations, this article examines nationalism in settler-colonial Taiwan amid China’s colonial claim to sovereignty. Drawing on interviews, conservation documents and popular representations, we show how the Formosan black bear became a national symbol of resistance to Chinese irredentism across three cumulative stages: early-2000s symbolic competition with China’s giant pandas; mid-2010s diffusion through branding, commodification and political advocacy; and post-2017 politicisation amid intensifying cross-strait tensions. However, Han Taiwanese often attribute bear deaths to Indigenous communities and prioritise bear conservation, whose public popularity is partly associated with the bear’s national symbolism, over Indigenous communities’ everyday experiences of living with bears. We show that Taiwanese nationalism has anticolonial origins and continues as antihegemonic resistance, while suggesting that this bear symbolism may subordinate Indigenous perspectives in public discussions of human–bear conflicts. The paper offers a relational account of nationalism’s resistant and oppressive possibilities.


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The settler equation: P. L. Krapivsky, ‘Riviera model with egoistical settlers’, arXiv, 2026

19Jun26

Abstract: The Riviera model mimics a densifying settlement along the coastline. In the lattice version, houses are built sequentially in empty sites with the constraint that every newly built house has at least one empty neighboring site. The distribution of clusters of adjacent houses does not obey a closed set of evolutionary equations, but the void-cluster-void distribution does. We compute the latter and extract the cluster distribution from it. In the jammed state, when all voids have length one and the evolution ceases, the cluster distribution has a neat form and exhibits a factorial decay with the length of the cluster. To investigate finite systems, we employ a static approach directly treating jammed states. If the coastline is a finite segment, we determine the statistics of the number of empty sites in the jammed state (the average, variance, and higher cumulants). We also study a continuum version in which houses are built along the line so that each newly built house is sufficiently separated from at least one neighboring house.


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It’s settler colonialism, actually: Marije van Lankveld, Laura M. De Vos, ‘We Are Not Protecting “the Environment”: Unist’ot’en Pipeline Resistance as Resistance against Settler Colonialism’, in Frank Mehring (ed.), The Environment in Sustainable American Studies, Routledge, 2026

19Jun26

Abstract: This chapter examines Wet’suwet’en resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline at Unist’ot’en Camp as a struggle against ongoing settler colonialism rather than a narrowly “environmental” conflict. Using Patrick Wolfe’s conception of settler colonialism as a structure and Gerald Vizenor’s “survivance,” we analyze how dual governance frameworks enable the Canadian state and industry to bypass Indigenous sovereignty, producing a settler colonial loophole. We show how denial of Indigenous jurisdiction, environmental racism, and gender-based violence are causally intertwined in extractive projects. Framing Unist’ot’en as a site of Indigenous resurgence, healing, and land-based governance, the chapter argues for sustainability grounded in justice, decolonization, and relational worldviews.


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Settler colonial Carthago delenda est! Dominic Machado, Michael J. Taylor, ‘The Carthaginian Masters: Settler Colonialism and Racecraft in Ancient North Africa’, Arethusa, 59, 2, 2026

15Jun26

Abstract: Settler colonial praxis and the racecraft it engendered profoundly shaped the Carthaginian state, its society, and imperial trajectory. Perched against the geographic span of the Maghreb and the demographic heft of native Libyan and Numidian populations, Carthage exerted a tenuous dominance over its African hinterland. Peculiar aspects of Carthage’s mythic self-definition and constitutional system owed less to the city’s supposed commercial orientation than to its settler colonial legacy. Pathologies inherent to the settler colonial project manifested themselves in moments of crisis, contributing to Carthage’s defeat and the creation of an indigenous Numidian state.


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The painful making of territory is a settler colonial conjuncture: Benedikt Korf, Michael Watts, ‘At the edge of the sword: Toward a spatial theory of the frontier’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2026

15Jun26

Abstract: Scholarly research on frontiers has exploded over the last two or three decades. ‘Frontier’ is a word with a long history, and shifting meanings with complex relations to settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. As a geographical keyword, the frontier has been put to work to understand a variety of colonial and postcolonial settings in which new commodity frontiers – land-based, oceanic, outer-space – have arisen. But the explosion of frontier talk is marked by conceptual elasticity, contradictory meanings, and a lack of precision. We ask: what makes a frontier a frontier? A frontier, we argue, marks a conjuncture, a particular moment in state time where the social and spatial outside is transformed into the inside of state and capital. The frontier is a form of social space where ‘the edge of the sword’, understood as a threshold at the limits of state capacity, articulates a liminal condition of authority, state, and capital that brings about the painful birth (and rebirth) of territory at the margins or edges of states.


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The settler colonial hell of psychoanalysis: Martin Kemp, ‘Iterations of Hell: Settler Colonialism as Societal Abuse’, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 23, 2, 2026

15Jun26

Abstract: This paper attempts to contribute to thinking about the ethical responsibilities of the psychoanalytic profession in the context of the Gaza genocide. In a world inured to mass suffering, and paralyzed by a sense of impotence, the crisis in Palestine has had a unique impact on the collective consciousness and conscience, engendering unprecedented mobilizations across society. A situation with such devastating consequences for the physical and psychological well-being of a whole society confronts health professionals with pressing questions about their response, as citizens and as members of civil society institutions, made more urgent by their location, more often than not, within societies that have participated in the genocide. The approach is idiosyncratic. The paper explores a perceived split between an acceptance of moral responsibility matched with a sense of agency where harm is perpetrated in the domestic and private setting, as against the denial or avoidance of a recognition of being implicated in analogous situations in the public realm. It does this through an overlapping discussion of two issues, one from each sphere: pedophilia/child sexual exploitation, and settler colonialism. With an eye to the relevance of this to the ethical life of psychoanalysis, this author argues that the basis for inaction—a performative commitment to human rights accompanied by a tenacious passivity or paralysis—is ripe for revision, to bring the profession into line with long-established medical ethics.


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The book of settlers: Stephen B. Chapman, ‘Joshua, Violence, and Settler Colonialism’, in Lissa M. Wray Beal, Craig A. Evans, D. Allen Hutchison (eds), The Book of Joshua: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, Brill, 2026, pp. 404-423

15Jun26

Abstract: This essay investigates the reception history of Joshua to determine whether the book has generated violence. After noting how recent scholarship has minimized the influence of Joshua on the medieval Christian Crusades, three uses of Joshua from the early modern period are explored: in the sixteenth-century Spanish Conquest of the Americas, the seventeenth-century Jamestown colony in Virginia, and the eighteenth-century Conestoga Massacre in Pennsylvania. These examples suggest that the rise of settler colonialism led Europeans to interpret Joshua opportunistically as a biblical warrant for genocidal violence against indigenous peoples.


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The novel settlers: Porscha Fermanis, Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890: Race In Nineteenth-Century Literatures And Cultures, Oxford University Press, 2026

15Jun26

Abstract: Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890 posits that the nineteenth-century settler novel, far from being a generic and belated version of metropolitan fiction, can assist us in understanding complex, transitionary modes of settler and migrant cultural identification across and between multiple settler colonial spaces. It therefore seeks to disrupt linear understandings of Angloworld migration as a single ship voyage from Europe or America in favour of a broader heuristic grounded in the thickness of networks and interrelations, and in relations of entanglement, connection, proximity, and contiguity. The book’s focus is on two themes: first, the ways in which settler fiction encodes regional spatial imaginaries, such as Australasia, Oceania, and the trans-Tasman world; and second, representations of imagined noncommunities, marginalised or precarious political subjects, and the historically punishable bodies of Indigenous and mixed-race peoples, indentured labourers, non-European diasporas, convicts, white paupers, and those considered eugenically unfit. Moving away from curiously static understandings of settler cultural history as the reproduction of modular British institutions, this book demonstrates that settler fiction requires us to read settlerism against its professed ideology of stability, permanence, and coherence.


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Even more ancient settler indigenising: Cecily Devereux, ‘Eugenic maternalism and the figure of the ‘Indian maiden’ in young women’s organizations: the Wauneita Society and the Camp Fire Girls’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

12Jun26

Abstract: In the early twentieth century in North America, as Philip J. Deloria (Dakota) has observed, non-Indigenous women began to join the men who had been ‘playing Indian’ since the late eighteenth century. This paper considers the Wauneita Society, formed in 1910 as the women students’ organization at the University of Alberta in western Canada. Like the young women’s organization the Camp Fire Girls, also formed in 1910, the Wauneitas’ costumes and performances drew on the figure of the ‘Indian maiden’ that circulated in commercial and popular culture in Canada and the US. This paper draws attention to similarities between the Wauneitas and the Camp Fire Girls, situating both organizations in settler colonial ideologies of eugenic maternalism. It suggests that when white women dressed up as ‘Indian maidens,’ they enacted the ‘logic of elimination’ that Deloria has shown is fundamental to all Indigenous impersonation, while also affirming that the logic of elimination has as its ideological correlative a logic of population. In this register the work of white women as eugenic ‘mothers of the race’ would be central, and the image of the early twentieth-century white ‘Indian maiden’ would index the colonial state’s increasing interference with Indigenous women’s reproductive bodies.


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Iron Maiden’s settler indigenising: Karen Fournier, ‘Asserting the Missing Indigenous Voice in “Run to the Hills”: Iron Maiden (1982); Tanya Tagaq and Damian Abraham (2018)’, in Mike Alleyne, Lori Burns (eds), The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song, Routledge, 2026

12Jun26

Abstract: Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” (1982) tells a story about the history of genocide that is often erased from settler histories about westward expansion and, because of its frank depiction of settler violence against Indigenous communities, the song has been cited as an influence by Indigenous bands like Testify and Testament and by solo artists like Tanya Tagaq. Despite its enormous popularity among fans, critics of the song point to a central paradox: while the song’s lyrics seem to empathize with the plight of the Indigenous communities to which it alludes, every character in the song, including a fictional Cree man who vanishes from the narrative after the introduction, is performed by a settler vocalist (the band’s lead singer, Bruce Dickinson). This contradiction is reflected in the song’s video, which portrays settlers as hapless fools, but which also features white actors in redface whose performances merely reinforce racist stereotypes of the wily or bloodthirsty “Indian.” In 2018, Inuk singer Tanya Tagaq teamed up with punk vocalist Damian Abraham to rework the song in a way that would allow each musician to provide a different perspective on the story. In terms of vocal timbre, Tagaq’s vocal practice depicts what Kateryna Barnes (2021) calls the sounds of Sila, or Mother Earth, while Abraham’s growling gut voice represents what David Pearson (2019) describes as the “(in)humane” sounds of industry. With these sonic contrasts, and a reworking of the song that retains the Indigenous voice throughout, I will argue that the 2018 cover of “Run to the Hills” presents its listener not only with a story about the genocide of Indigenous peoples, but also with an apocalyptic warning about the killing of Sila by settler industrialization.


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