One colony after the other: Jane Lydon, ‘A Secret Longing for a Trade in Human Flesh: the Decline of British Slavery and the Making of the Settler Colonies’, History Workshop Journal, 2020

22Sep20

Abstract: Focusing upon the achievement of the abolition of British slavery in 1833 has obscured significant continuities between slavery, apprenticeship, and the post-emancipation period, particularly in the new Anglophone settler colonies. During the decade leading up to abolition, domestic unrest intensified the tension between the elite abolitionist movement’s humanitarian concern for Caribbean slaves, and its leaders’ simultaneous implication in the repression of British workers – a corollary of which relegated convicts to the category of unreformable ‘voluntary slaves’. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s 1829 proposal for colonization entered a longstanding debate about labour discipline that was central both to ameliorative slave reform and to experiments in emigration and settler colonialism, and expressed his ambivalence regarding the benefits of ‘free labour’. In the transition to new labour regimes, systematic colonization translated categories and practices developed in the Caribbean into colonial projects, including raced and classed labour hierarchies targeted to specific climatic zones. As Caribbean slavery ended and settler colonialism began, the new colonies offered a solution to the loss of the ‘trade in human flesh’ by removing dissenters from the British social order, opening up new fields for investment, and creating a disciplined colonial labour force.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Chasing the settlers: Aileen Friesen, ‘Omsk bishops and spiritualized travel amidst settler colonization of Siberia, 1890–1917’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2020

19Sep20

Abstract: This article examines the role episcopal visitations played in traversing, constituting, and representing religious space in the newly founded diocese of Omsk in late imperial Russia. As the Russian state encouraged the movement of millions of peasants to Siberia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Russian Orthodox Church struggled to define its role under these new conditions of settler colonization. Using travelogues from these trips, this article illustrates how diocesan officials aimed to represent the bishops of Omsk as spiritual fathers, sacralizing this vast territory historically neglected by the institutional church.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Indigenous labour and settler colonialism: Chantal Norrgard, ‘Indigenous Labor, Settler Colonialism, and the History of the Fraser River Fishermen’s Strike of 1893’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 7, 2, 2020, pp. 114-144

19Sep20

Abstract: Despite a valuable body of scholarship on Native American and Indigenous labor, few studies explore the unionization of Indigenous workers or their participation in labor movements. The Fraser River Fishermen’s Strike of 1893 was the first major strike in British Columbia’s history. The Indigenous history of this strike illuminates how settler colonialism built the commercial fishing industry, defined the interests of settler workers, and led to the development of the labor movement. The strike also demonstrates how Indigenous people’s anticolonial struggles were embedded in their actions as workers. A range of historical sources, including provincial and federal legislation, legal cases, hearings, the reports of Indian agents, newspaper articles, and autobiographies, document the longer history of colonial expansion and Indigenous labor and resistance leading up to the 1893 Fraser River Fishermen’s Strike. I argue that Indigenous people’s early participation in British Columbia’s labor movement was tied to their efforts to resist colonial encroachment on their fishing rights. The interests of a number of Indigenous leaders from across the province in asserting their sovereignty and retaining power over their labor ultimately led to the creation of a new Indigenous political movement that centered on the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia and its counterpart, the Native Sisterhood. This history challenges labor historians to further address the gaps between labor history and Indigenous histories.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The city as settler: Janice Barry, Julian Agyeman, ‘On belonging and becoming in the settler-colonial city: Co-produced futurities, placemaking, and urban planning in the United States’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, 2020

19Sep20

Abstract: With a few notable exceptions, settler-colonial theory has not been applied to the study of U.S. cities and urban planning. Settler-colonial theory is a relatively new field of scholarship that interrogates the destruction of Indigenous laws, ways of knowing, and connections to place to make way for a new settler futurity. This futurity is particularly pronounced in cities, where Indigenous peoples have been rendered almost completely invisible and where their opportunities to shape urban development are highly circumscribed. We use settler-colonial theory, as well as Indigenous scholars’ responses to it, to extend ideas of belonging and becoming in urban planning and placemaking. We turn to the theory and practice of co-production as one possible intervention into how the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous placemakers could be conceived and enacted in the urban environment.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonialism as an infinite pause: John Connell, Robert Aldrich, ‘New Caledonia: The Infinite Pause? In John Connell, Robert Aldrich, The Ends of Empire: The Last Colonies Revisited, Palgrave, 2020, pp. 195-225

19Sep20

Abstract: By the end of the twentieth century, the French overseas territory of New Caledonia was relatively calm and peaceful after a protracted period of considerable, violent disorder in the 1980s, that had resulted in several deaths. Most of the indigenous Melanesian (Kanak) population had struggled for independence in the 1980s, while most other residents of the OT had opposed it. Of all the present OTs, New Caledonia is the only one where people have literally fought for independence. While peace was restored, and violence ended, it remained the OT where independence seemed most likely, but more probably through persuasion and the ballot box, rather than through the barrels of guns. However, significant pressure for independence came primarily from the indigenous Kanaks who now constituted less than half the population, the remainder being migrants from France, Asia and Polynesia, and their descendants. As in many other OTs, efforts to achieve independence were intimately linked to questions of identity in what had become, in the nineteenth century, a settler colony.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonialism and urban space: Jessica Ty Miller, ‘Temporal analysis of displacement: Racial capitalism and settler colonial urban space’, Geoforum, 2020

16Sep20

Abstract: Researchers have often called for micro-scale analyses of residential displacement, and more recently, for work that acknowledges the importance of temporal and spatial relationships that influence current iterations of residential displacement. Relying on grounding in urban political ecology, and work in gentrification, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism, this paper highlights the historic relationships between development interests and resident groups in Gowanus, Brooklyn to examine how historic context shapes the development of displacement patterns. Relying on historic texts and images found in New York City archives, this work documents the developmental history of Gowanus, which has held a prominent place in New York City history since before the 1600s, when European settler colonists began to create farms and mills based on existing local knowledge of the landscape held by the Canarsee, a Munsee speaking Indigenous group of Lenape people who lived in the area now known as Gowanus. Over time, several groups of developers and industrialists dominated this space by morphing the tidal wetland into an industrial waterway, capitalizing on the waterfront as a commodity. Most recently, residents who can afford luxury rentals with views of waterfront have moved into the area. At the same time, city plans and the United States Environmental Protection Agency are addressing the legacy of contamination in the area. The varying access and attitude toward the canal over time continues to impact the development in the area, with some people being forced out, while others are moving in. This work builds on the growing literature on residential displacement to argue that even with embedded silence in archival materials, investigating the long-range historic patterns of development can be a useful method for understanding current iterations of development and displacement, including the most recent shift towards high-end waterfront living.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Capitalism and colonization: Edwyna Harris, Sumner La Croix, ‘Understanding the Gains to Capitalists from Colonization: Lessons from Robert E. Lucas, Jr., Karl Marx and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa Department of Economics Working Paper Series, 20-23, 2020

16Sep20

Abstract: Britain after the Napoleonic wars saw the rise of colonial reformers, such as Edward Wakefield, who had extensive influence on British colonial policy. A version of Wakefield’s “System of Colonization” became the basis for legislation establishing the South Australia colony in 1834 and the New Zealand colony in 1840. We use extended versions of Robert Lucas’s 1990 model of coordinated colonial investment to show how Wakefield’s institutions were designed to work. We also find that the critique of Wakefield’s system by Karl Marx in Das Kapital closely follows Lucas’s analysis of colonial institutions.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Misbehaving settlers: Emanuele Ertola, ‘”White slaves”: labor, whiteness, and settler colonialism in Italian East Africa (1935-1941), Labor History, 2020

16Sep20

Abstract: In the context of settler colonialism the immigration of white workers has generated a complex network of dynamics between race, labor, and whiteness. The intertwining of these three concepts can be better understood by analyzing them together, as interconnected tesserae of the same mosaic. Italian East Africa is the perfect case study. In a few years this settler colony was the site of a peculiar migratory wave by Italian workers: the phenomenon, rarely seen elsewhere in these proportions, was first encouraged by the authorities as an outlet for national unemployment, but it soon became clear that economic contraindications far outweighed the advantages. Furthermore, the presence of unskilled white workers constituted a threat to the settler social order, characterized by a strictly hierarchical racial distinction. While anxiety over their presence grew among the settler bourgeoisie, the authorities then moved from State-sponsored immigration to the compulsory repatriation of unskilled workers, to police raids for internment and expulsion of those who were unemployed. This case therefore demonstrates how unskilled white labor’s uncertain whiteness jeopardized the workers’ possibility of being part of a settler society in which race and class were closely connected.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Compassion as a settler colonial device: Carmela Murdocca, ‘”Let’s help our own”: Humanitarian compassion as racial governance in settler colonialism’, Oñati Socio-legal Series, 2019

13Sep20

Abstract: This article explores narratives of humanitarian compassion as rendered intelligible through the relational intersecting concerns about Syrian refugees and the suicide crisis in the Indigenous community of Attawapiskat, Ontario. Fuelled by a combination of anti-refugee rhetoric, racism and ongoing colonialism experienced by Indigenous people and communities, public and media discourse reveals how humanitarian governance is constitutive of the genealogy of settler colonialism. I suggest that examining the political genealogy of humanitarian governance in white settler colonialism assists in revealing the centrality of racial colonial violence in producing public and media discourse that is contingent upon the relational currencies of anti-refugee rhetoric, racism and humanitarian compassion. As expressions of a grammar of racial difference in liberal settler colonialism, these discourses ultimately reveal how racial colonial violence is constituted through the genealogy of humanitarianism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Red tape as a settler-colonial device: Jennifer Matsunaga, ‘The red tape of reparations: settler governmentalities of truth telling and compensation for Indian residential schools’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

13Sep20

Abstract: This paper brings into conversation truth telling and compensation as forms of reparation for historical injustices in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine how settler bureaucracy engages with stories of Indian residential schools and former students through analysis of the Common Experience Payment program’s application form and final evaluation. This program, which provided former students with compensation for their collective experience in residential schools, erases survivor-centred forms of truth telling within the records and practices of the public service. I argue that the Common Experience Payment process both produces a new Indigenous population to be governed and perpetuates longstanding settler colonial rationalities that attempt to manage and marginalize the emotion and voices of Indigenous peoples and racialize them as inferior by way of being a ‘challenge to overcome’ for the bureaucracy. I emphasize that assimilation is not located simply in the spectacular or brute acts embedded in settler colonial policy, but in the everyday procedural instruments and mechanisms of the public service such as application forms and final evaluations which are largely taken for granted as benign.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts

Archives

stats for wordpress