Abstract: U.S. citizens rarely feel implicated in the harm caused by the U.S.’s widespread use of drones, and both drones’ opponents and proponents focus on value calculus of their usage. Nasser Hussain’s “Phenomenology of a Drone Strike” looks at the problem from the wider angle of the harm continuous use of drones wages on affected communities. […]

Abstract: Inspired by postcolonial and feminist scholarship and new work on the law and British humanitarian governance, along with recent considerations of the maritime and ‘oceans connect’ approaches, this article examines the apparent ’emancipation’ acts of colonial officials and Quakers who turned to the law to retrieve high-status Aboriginal women from sealers on both sides of […]

Abstract: A large body of scholarship has explored how interracial marriages and informal sexual contracts alike became the target of state regulation in settler colonial societies, as categories of racial identity and their classifications in law became increasingly fixed through the late nineteenth century. In late colonial western Canada and Western Australia, settler governments deployed different […]

Abstract: China’s three northeastern provinces (Fengtian, Heilongjiang, and Jilin) were transfigured by Japanese imperialism in the opening decades of the 20th century. South Manchuria and the Kwantung Leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula in particular became the site of a railway imperialism that would, beginning in 1905, allow Japan to claim a sphere of influence in the […]

Abstract: In the post-World War Two period, the federal government of Canada initiated a series of food subsidy programs (the Food Mail Program and Nutrition North Canada) and nutrition and health education initiatives that were officially intended to address hunger and malnourishment in Northern Indigenous communities by imposing settler foodways on Indigenous people. Interrogating food subsidy programs and nutrition and […]

Abstract: Contributing to recent research into settler colonialism, this paper takes an on the ground look at how this system manifests today. This research turns its lens on the white settler, unmasks settler myths of innocence and contributes to an understanding of how whiteness and white supremacism shape settler colonialism in what is now called the United Sates. This is […]

Excerpt: On November 3, 2016, a ritual burning of the Doctrine of Discovery (the European legal concept that justified the dispossession of native lands by Europeans) was held at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in North Dakota. Episcopalian Reverend John Floberg, who was acting at the invitation of the Standing Rock Sioux, held a copy of the […]

Excerpt: The Los Angeles Central Library’s exhibition “Visualizing Language: A Zapotec Worldview,” which opened this past September, features a series of murals produced by the Oaxacan artists collective Tlacolulokos. The murals are envisioned as providing a “counter-narrative” to existing ones painted by Dean Cornwell, in 1933, depicting a history of California in four stages: Era of […]

Excerpt: The displacement of black and indigenous peoples from sites of economic opportunity in Honduras, and the systematic enclosure of the natural resources within their territories, is intimately tethered to white socio-spatial imaginaries and the politics of frontier making. In this essay, I analyze how elite investors, with support from the state and multilateral development banks, […]

Excerpt: The history of state formation in the Americas is largely a history of indigenous dispossession. But not all dispossessions function the same. In Guatemala the forms of stealing of indigenous territory varied over time. Spanish colonizers made Maya communities buy their own lands. After independence, the modern liberal state defined indigenous territories as “waste land.” […]