settler colonial studies blog
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Integration requires disintegration: Paloma E. Villegas, Breanna Barrie, Serriz Peña, Jilanch Alphonso, Alveera Mamoon, ‘Integration, Settler Colonialism, and Precarious Legal Status Migrants in Canada’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2019, pp. 1–17
Erasing present indigenous people by focusing on long gone ones: Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, ‘Categorical Denial: Evaluating Post-1492 Indigenous Erasure in the Paper Trail of American Archaeology’, American Antiquity, 2019
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Foreclosing indigenous people, literally: K-Sue Park, ‘Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America’, Law & Social Enquiry, 41, 4, 2016, pp. 10006-1035
01Sep19
Abstract:
In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.
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Settler colonialism is a global and transnational phenomenon, and as much a thing of the past as a thing of the present. Settlers 'come to stay': they are founders of political orders who carry with them a distinct sovereign capacity.
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Climate fiction as settler absolution: Nicole Seymour, ‘Comedy as White Immunity: Settler-Colonial Evasions in Contemporary US Cli-Fi’, Literature and Medicine, 44, 1, 2026, pp. 120-146
Settlers with Bibles: Emily Colgan, Brian Fiu Kolia, Michael Mawson (eds), Rereading the Bible in the Wake of Colonisation, Routledge, 2027
On settler emplacement: Nancy Menning, ‘Emplacement, the Settler Colonial Imagination, and Decolonization’, in Daniel Boscaljon, Verna Marina Ehret (eds), Engaging Culture, Nature, and Religion: Forrest Clingerman and the Importance of Emplacement, Bloomsbury, 2026
Diplomacy and evasion: Annemarie McLaren, ‘Indigenous Diplomacy and Colonial Entanglement Through the Native Institution of New South Wales’, History Compass, 2026
Unfree workers, but then settlers: Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Michael Quinlan, Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-1860, Palgrave, 2022
Is it time? Andrew Thibaudeau, ‘”The Last of the Monacan”: Settler Time and Queer Time in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”‘, Poe Studies, 59, 2026, pp. 93-116
Sheepish settler colonialism? Irus Braverman, ‘The New Jewish Shepherd: Land Grabbing and Redemption in the Occupied West Bank’, American Anthropologist, 2026
Indigenous resistances: Linda Tabar, The Indigenous Anti-Colonial: A Palestinian Resistance Tradition and a World Beyond Settler Colonialism, Duke University Press, 2026
A settler for protection: Samuel Furphy, ‘Protector of Settlers? Charles Symmons and Aboriginal Protection in Western Australia, 1840-1855’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2026
Genderising settler colonialism: Éloïse Décoste, ‘The Indian Act and the Gendered “Logic of Elimination”‘, McGill Law Journal, 71, 4, 2026, pp. 1001-1035
Federalism is settler colonialism: Zachary Jericho Couture, ‘Weaponizing Federalism for Settler Colonialism: Canadian Court (Mis-)use of Federalist Prinicples against Indigenous Jurisdiction’, McGill Law Journal, 71, 4, 2026, 1177-1217
Colonies for like-minded people: David R. Como, ‘Castles in the Air: Sectarian Puritanism, the Revolutionary Caribbean and the Forgotten Colony of New Warwick, Trinidad’, History, 2026
The tradwives of the settler imagination: Terra Sage Wallin, The Grammar of Return: Tradition, Gendered Performance, and Moral Formation in the Digital TradWife Movement, PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2026
Documentarying settler colonialism: Azraf Chowdhury, ‘The lens of resistance: Using No Other Land (2025) and The Settlers (2024) as contemporary documentaries to understand the Israeli settler project’, Journal of Global Faultlines, 13, 2, 2026, pp. 155-179
Settlers see ‘surplus land’: Myrzantay Zhakyp, ‘Communicating Colonial Space: How Imperial Discourse Produced “Surplus Land” in the Kazakh Steppe’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2026
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