Abstract: From the vantage point of Philadelphia and the surrounding region, this article situates refuge within a framework attentive to settler colonialism and imperialism. Through the example of Fort Indiantown Gap, a space of both temporary refuge and colonial war, I note that making refuge in the United States entails a demarcation of those deemed […]

Abstract: The distinctive traits of early settlers at initial stages of institutional development may be crucial for cultural formation. In 1973, the cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky postulated this in his doctrine of “first effective settlement”. There is however little empirical evidence supporting the role of early settlers in shaping culture over the long run. This […]

Abstract: This paper explores how John Locke’s theory of property, elaborated in chapter five of his Second Treatise of Government, provided a compelling conceptual and practical justification for the appropriation of Indigenous peoples’ territories in America by the early English settler colonists of the 17th century. It examines how his property theory facilitated the nullification […]

Excerpt: A group of German, Austrian and Swiss immigrants has implanted an ideologically driven settlement in one of the country’s poorest regions. A 1,600-hectare (4,000-acre) gated community, dubbed El Paraíso Verde, or the Green Paradise, is being carved out of the fertile red earth of Caazapá, one of Paraguay’s poorest regions. The community’s population – […]

Excerpt: Sheriff Traylor did not make it out alive, and his story adds to the continuum of Indigenous stories that will be told to his grandchildren and to their grandchildren and seven generations into the future. Traylor is played by Plains Cree actor Michael Greyeyes in the 2019 zombie film Blood Quantum,written and directed by […]

Excerpt: Since the 1970s, Darwinian scientists of the last third of the long nineteenth century have been represented in connection with the efforts of Indigenous Australian communities to have the remains of their ancestors returned for burial, as having acquired and investigated their skulls and other bodily structures to prove their evolutionary inferiority, and thereby […]

Abstract: The article seeks to reflect on the question of “nature’s agency” in histories of violence. It thus revisits the choices and outcomes of Fascist policy in Libya by foregrounding the colony’s ecology. The determination to win a war on inhospitable terrain led to the regime’s decision to set up concentration camps for Bedouin tribes […]

Abstract: Setter colonialism is dedicated to the elimination of the native, not just from territory but from the past. This form of elimination comes from the mistranslation or misunderstanding of names and terms that identify individuals and communities, which the colonists then use to separate Indigenous peoples from their own pasts. Many researchers have argued […]

Abstract: Thomas Pringle, a Scottish settler at the Cape Colony and later secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in England, was both a settler in territory recently conquered from the Xhosa and an advocate against violence on Eastern Cape borderlands. This article examines both aspects of his career in the 1820s and early 1830s, and asks […]

Abstract: Processes of racialisation and gendering take place within social relations and hierarchies that have an impact on bodies and inform people’s actions. ‘Material religion’ describes the exploration of how religion happens in material culture, that is, in different practices that draw on the category of religion or put it to work. In this article, […]