« Settler colonial infrastructure: Holly Randell-Moon, ‘First Nations foundations: cities and the infrastructuring of settler colonisation’, in Nicola Piper, Kavita Datta, The Elgar Companion to Migration and the Sustainable Development, Elgar, 2024, pp. 226-239
Settler/farmer/peasant: June Ann Jones, The Peasant and the Farmer: (Re)Constituting Settler Colonialism and Capitalist Relations in the US Imaginary, PhD dissertation, Virginia Tech, 2024 »

Indigeneity, settler commodified: Gabi Kirk, ‘Commodifying Indigeneity: Settler colonialism and racial capitalism in fair trade farming in Palestine’, Historical Materialism, 2024

22Apr24

Abstract: The recent proliferation of settler colonial and Indigenous studies of Palestine have addressed historical and present-day enclosure of Palestinian land, yet the question of ‘indigeneity’ is underexamined in this literature. Claims to indigeneity in Palestine straddle varied definitions: a racial category; as constructed through the colonial encounter or preceding colonialism; and as a local relation or an international juridico-political category. Using discourse analysis of a specific Palestinian sustainable agriculture initiative. I show how for Palestinians, claiming indigeneity brings into tension potential political economic gains, social relations of struggle, and discursive formations of collective subjectivity. A valorisation, commodification, and privatization of indigeniety narrows notions to the biological-cultural, offering challenges for Palestinian struggles for sovereignty. I conclude by asking what theorizing from Palestine offers to Marxist theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and whether indigeneity can exceed its commodification.


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