Collaborative settler colonial studies: Janne Lahti, introducing ‘Of settler colonial connections and collaborations: a book forum on Sidney Xu Lu’s Collaborative Settler Colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Collaborative settler colonial studies: Janne Lahti, introducing ‘Of settler colonial connections and collaborations: a book forum on Sidney Xu Lu’s Collaborative Settler Colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

06Sep26

Excerpt: Sidney Xu Lu’s Collaborative Settler Colonialism: Japanese Migration to Brazil in the Age of Empires (University of California Press, 2025) makes a significant contribution to settler colonial studies by expanding the cast and by making settler colonialism to be of connections and collaborations, oftentimes fragile, imperfect, and contested. In Lu’s analysis we get to read of settler colonialism that is multilateral, produced through cooperation among multiple imperial and national actors. This book shows how networks matter, how Japanese on the move became settlers not through direct Japanese territorial conquest, but through collaboration between the Brazilian state, Japanese imperial institutions, private companies, and global racial-capitalist logics. Thus Lu moves beyond the Anglo-phone emphasis of settler colonial histories while showing that settlers did not have to originate from the same imperial power that governed the territory, but how settler colonialism could be enacted through trans-imperial cooperation. In this Book Forum we asked scholars whose expertise blended Japanese, Asian, and Latin America, ranging from literature to local and global histories of diasporas and imperial mobilities to take a look and voice their views on Lu’s book. They were to raise what they perceived as important points in the book, to evaluate its premise, execution, and contribution. As a result, we have a lively set of views and arguments, multiplicity of voices, but also coherence and praise on the value and significance of Lu’s study. Pedro Iacobelli raises the question of colonial ownership by emphasizing how Lu unsettles linear narratives of Japanese history in Brazil, locating them instead within a dense web of inter-state collaboration, intersecting Japanese and Brazilian settler-colonial projects, and enduring ties between Japanese emigrants and Japan’s own settler ambitions. From a literary and methodological standpoint, Shannon Welch highlights how Lu provides a strikingly effective framework for tracing the interactive and overlapping workings of settler colonial power in the modern world. Building on this, John Hennessey underscores Lu’s careful reconstruction of the personal, institutional, and ideological linkages connecting Japanese settler colonialism in Asia to emigration to Brazil, demonstrating with rich empirical detail just how contingent and internally fractured Japanese settler positions were. Mariko Iijima similarly stresses that Lu repositions Japanese settler experiences within expansive global regimes of colonial expansion, land seizure, and racial governance, reframing them as integral – rather than peripheral – to the history of settler colonialism writ large. The Book Forum ends with Sidney Xu Lu’s self-reflective response, in which he elaborates on his views on the book’s purpose, the commentaries, and the broader connotations involved. This marks the third Settler Colonial Studies Book Forum, which we plan to continue as a sustained feature of the journal. The Forum aims to spotlight timely, innovative, and consequential new work in the field, and to place it in generous yet rigorous conversation with a diverse group of experts, in dialogue with the author. As with the previous iterations, we believe this Forum succeeds in bringing cutting-edge settler colonial scholarship into focused, energetic discussion.

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