Abstract: This article provides an overview of late nineteenth-century Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido, a land long inhabited by indigenous people, the Ainu, with a particular theoretical question in mind: What was the precise relationship between the settler colonization of Hokkaido and the Japanese government’s drive for primitive accumulation of capital? This question deepens our […]

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a unique form of colonial domination, as its successful operation makes it increasingly difficult to identify as a colonizing project. The author asserts, in agreement with much of the literature, that settler colonialism follows a spatializing logic that transmorgrifies the territory of indigenous peoples into settler spaces. Moving beyond the literature, […]

Description: Commentary on Philip F. Kelly’s ‘Transnationalism, emotion and second-generation social mobility in the Filipino-Canadian diaspora’.

Abstract: In 2014, the Zapatistas (EZLN) celebrated the twentieth anniversary of their 1 January uprising in Chiapas against the Mexican state and the imposition of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The uprising took place in the aftermath of an upswing in hemispheric indigenous organizing around the quincentennial anniversary of the conquest of the Americas, […]

Abstract: The Kuzbass coalmining region in western Siberia (Kuznetsk Basin) was explored, populated, and exploited under Stalin’s rule. Struggling to offset a high labour turnover, the local state-run coal company enrolled deportees from other regions of Russia and Siberia, who were controlled by the secret police (OGPU). These workers shared a common experience in having […]

Abstract: This paper is concerned with what I define as a cultural politics of ‘being from’ in the American settler colony. I use Tom Dey’s Western/‘cop-buddy’ hybrid Shanghai Noon (2000), and most specifically what is presented in the film as actor Jackie Chan’s failed and comedic partaking in the white and homosocial tradition of Indian […]

Excerpt: Resistance as a political strategy proves unsatisfying, but often seems to be the only trope available to contemporary political theory. Theorists find “resistance” in movements from Occupy to protests against racialized police brutality, and often imply that all political engagement must, at some deep level, be about resisting. But the individual and collective aptitudes […]

Abstract: “Settler colonialism” presents a vexing challenge to voting rights theory and praxis in liberal-democratic states. I call this challenge “Kymlicka’s dilemma,” after Will Kymlicka, the political theorist who has led contemporary discourse on “minority nation” rights. As Kymlicka observed, members of a state’s dominant cultural nation, or staatsvolk, may, by exercising universal mobility rights, […]

Abstract: This article examines representations of American Indians in a Swedish family magazine from the 1860s/1870s, tying these ‘Indian stories’ to perceptions carried by emigrants to the Americas. It argues that these representations conveyed a certain notion of the colonial process that allowed Swedes to both participate in and disavow the more unsavoury aspects of […]

Abstract: Working Holiday programs have been identified as an increasingly significant source of temporary migrant labor for several wealthy states. This case study adds to limited work on this phenomenon in the Canadian context by offering a partial chronology of Irish Working Holiday migration to Canada and a critical analysis of Canadian government discourse that […]