Archive for the ‘United States’ Category

The notion that pioneers tend to have more babies is consistent with the behavior of other species. Expose a bare patch of land, and the first plants to colonize it will most likely be species that grow quickly, reproduce early, and create many offspring. But these early colonizers eventually cede space to other plants that […]


Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Book Review’, Ethnic and Racial Studies (2011). The Two Faces of American Freedom outlines the rise and fall of the US ‘experiment’ in settler constitutionalism. It is an ultimately convincing outline of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American history as the history of a settler colonial project. While this project and the conception of freedom […]


Jimmy Johnson, ‘Lessons from the Other Occupiers: A critical engagement of #Occupy and J14’, Mondoweiss. The July 14th Movement and Occupy Wall Street efforts have deservedly garnered press attention. Much more importantly, they have mobilized huge numbers of people who had not been politically active previously and have radicalised others. These are ‘awakenings’ of a […]


Stumbled across this today, fresh of the press at the William & Mary Quarterly. Each contribution is available for free here. Critical Forum. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 Julia Adams, ‘Clear, Hold, Build: Patriarchy and Sovereignty in the Colonization of Early English America’. Tamar Herzog and Richard […]


  Newspaper Rock has collected a few indigenous perspectives, here and here. The omission of the realities of settler colonialism from this trendy little protest is ironic, he notes.


Jodi A. Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Settler Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement serving as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground to reimagine a future […]


Fiona Batemen and Lionel Pilkington (eds), Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2011). Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture offers an accessible overview of settler colonialism as a globally important cultural and political phenomenon within a range of historical and geographical contexts, including Palestine, Hawai’i, Canada, southern […]


David S. Clark, ‘Comparative Law in Colonial British America’, American Journal of Comparative Law 59, 3 (2011). American comparatists are unfamiliar with thinking about Roman, civil, and canon law influence on colonial British American laws and legal institutions or about American colonial lawyers using Roman and civil law examples in their legal argument or reform […]


Andrea L. Smith, ‘Settler Historical Consciousness in the Local History Museum’, Museum Anthropology 34, 2 (2011). In what ways does America’s settler colonial heritage shape how its citizens imagine the national past? I address this question through a study of county historical museums in rural Arizona, with a particular focus on the Navajo County Museum. […]


Hilton Obenzinger, ‘Melville, Holy Lands, and Settler-Colonial Studies’, Leviathan: A journal of Melville Studies 13, 3 (2011). When American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania appeared in 1999, it was situated within several broader contexts: American literary studies, of course, but also the field of America-Holy Land studies. And I placed America-Holy Land […]