Abstract: In August 2019, the Hindu nationalist government led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) unilaterally abolished Kashmir’s autonomous status, the basis of its provisional accession to India. Since then, the Indian government has revoked Kashmir’s special land protections that prevented outsiders from buying land in Kashmir. Some scholars have responded to this political moment by situating Jammu and Kashmir within a theoretical settler-colonial model, interpreting India’s past integration policies, surveillance, assimilation agenda, land dispossession, and more through this lens. However, this chapter demonstrates the limitations of the settler-colonial framework to explain the rich and complex post-1947 history of Kashmir. Instead, it places the land question in Kashmir within its unique regional context and examines the complex dynamics at play. Drawing on laws and legislation, court cases, and legal narratives, this chapter historicizes India’s territorialization efforts across different temporal frames against the backdrop of state-subject laws, agrarian reforms, urban spatial changes, and the recent transformation of Kashmir into a site of neoliberal economic extraction. It also highlights the emotional significance of land for Kashmiris and its role in shaping their politics of collaboration and resistance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that India’s forcible integration of Kashmir reflects a postcolonial nation-building strategy focused on producing territorial sovereignty, shaped by the entanglements of imperial capitalism, neoliberalism, and corporate interests.

Abstract: Settler colonialism instantiated not only new regimes of property relations that privilege mastery and ownership but also a suite of concepts that define humans apart from land and Earth processes. Addressing the legacy of settler colonialism warrants addressing not only the historical legacy of political and economic arrangements but also the conceptual legacies that continue to insert, into scholarship, the fiction of human independence of the conditions of local habitability. Building on the call of Danowski and De Castro (2016) to refigure the concept of the human which universalises the illusion of people’s separation from nature, their concept of the “Terran” invites an integrative science of local habitability based on material flows, exchanges, and relations. Critical zone sciences, I suggest, frame the terms of such a science that avoids reducing the world to calculative reason sans context.

• Jane Komori, ‘“Worried Over This Boat”: Archives of Asian Settler Colonial Critique’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This article examines the history of racialized labor in pre-World War II primary resource industries along British Columbia’s Fraser River. I argue that settler colonial policies and practices that restricted the activities of Indigenous peoples and Asian Canadians – while often meant to divide them – were productive of dynamic relationships and solidarities. At the same time, I articulate a historiographical method for Asian settler colonial critique that brings together the wealth of records of Asian immigrant and Indigenous relationships.

• r. Shizuko Hayashi-Simpliciano, Sachi Edwards, ‘De-Imperializing Through Moshiri: An Ainu in Diaspora Framework for Addressing Internalized Empire and Japanese American Apathy’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: In this paper we introduce the Moshiri Model, a framework to guide the process of de-imperialization that is rooted in Ainu in Diaspora spirituality and experience. Using reconstructed dialogues as a storytelling method, we illustrate what it can look like to engage in de-imperializing work within ourselves and our communities. Doing so requires confronting how internalized Japanese imperialism, Christian supremacy, and Zionism (and their historical interconnections) have shaped, and continue to shape, Asian settler colonialism. Ultimately, the de-imperialization work we describe aims to guide critical reflection about our individual and collective relationships with and responsibilities toward Indigenous communities.

• Tabitha Espina,Kristin Oberiano, Josephine Ong, ‘Deconstructing Asian Settler Colonialism and the American Dream in Guåhan/Guam and Other Sites of U.S. Empire’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This is a conversation between several co-founders of Filipinos for Guåhan to discuss academic and community work on the specific articulations that Filpino colonial setter colonialism plays in Guåhan/Guam. We consider the ways that Asian settler colonialism enables us to deconstruct dehumanizing social, political, epistemic, and linguistic hierarchies and instead build in and through inafa’maolek as a value and practice.

• Ryan Buyco, ‘Filipinx Reflections on Travel Writing and Asian Settler Colonial Critique in Okinawa’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This essay is a reflection on my ongoing book project, Island Under the Sun: Filipino American Detours in Okinawa, which is a travelogue informed by Asian settler colonial critique. This project considers how histories of Japanese and American colonialisms shape the relationship that Filipinos have to this place, especially given how the U.S. bases have historically brought, and continue to bring, Filipinos to these islands. In this essay, I suggest that the genre of travel writing can be used in decolonial ways, to express forms of relationality that disrupt the tourist image of Okinawa as “Japan’s Hawai’i.

• Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal, Goldie Osuri, Beenash Jafri, Zunaira Shakur, ‘Critical Kashmir Studies and Asian Settler Colonial Critique: A Conversation’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: In this conversation, three scholars of Critical Kashmir Studies – Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal, and Goldie Osuri – reflect on how Asian settler colonial critique might usefully be mobilized toward understanding the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Asian settler colonial critique not only disrupts India’s postcolonial narrative, but also shifts the conversation on Kashmir away from discourses of geopolitical security or bi-lateral relations between India and Pakistan.

• Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman, Mengzhu Fu, ‘Spiraling In and Out: A Conversation on Decolonial Asian and Indigenous Solidarity from Aotearoa and So-Called Canada to Asia’, Amerasisa Journal, 2025

Abstract: As Indigenous resurgence and resistance globally make visible the violence of colonization, the growth of Asian diasporic solidarity introduces new possibilities and challenges. Literature examining Asian-Indigenous solidarities in settler colonial states primarily focuses on so-called North America. This conversation between organizers Nabilah Husna Abdul Rahman and Mengzhu Fu spirals from Aotearoa-based practices of decolonial solidarity outwards to Singapore, Canada-occupied Indigenous lands, and beyond. They explore place-based practices of solidarity, pedagogies, and their potential connections to international Indigenous communities. Offering practical strategies, from “small” to “big,” they reaffirm the centrality of the protection of Indigenous land and waters in solidarity efforts.

• Nishant Upadhyay, ‘Fraught Solidarities: Diasporic Hindutva and Claims to Indigeneity’, Amerasisa Journal, 2025

Abstract: In recent years, diasporic hindu right has mobilized discourses of indigeneity to forge solidarities with Indigenous peoples across varying white settler colonial contexts of the U.S, Hawaiʻi, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. These solidarities are not decolonial but are colonial and casted manifestations of hindu nationalism. Rooted in brahminical supremacy, these solidarities are not only fraudulent but also disavow the lives and struggles of Indigenous peoples globally. These solidarities demonstrate how the hindu right works in insidious ways in the disguise of multiculturalism and liberal anti-racism to co-opt and manipulate anti-colonial and decolonial agendas.

• Leah M. Kuragano, ‘Four Lessons from Winnipeg on Asian Settler “Belonging”’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This essay contemplates my (re)settlement to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the form of a personal narrative, mapped out through four lessons in border-crossing, safety, orientation, and unlandedness. Each lesson reflects on the fraught complexities of “belonging” for Asian settlers as well as the liberatory potential of a relationship to place for Asian settlers that takes sacred connection, a love for community, and devotion to land as its lodestar.

Abstract: This chapter critically speculates on landscape collectives in Aotearoa New Zealand in relation to Māori sovereignty in the context of setter-colonialism. It explores how landscape design, when informed by Māori relations and worldview can shift the whiteness of settler-colonial socio-spatial epistemologies that govern landscape architectural practice. Drawing on material occasions, the chapter discusses how landscape design intersects with hyperlocal Māori ways of being and knowing through drawing and mapping practices to effect renewed inscriptions upon colonised lands. The inquiry demonstrates how landscape architects can navigate the complex entanglement of Māori and Pākehā ontologies, asserting that landscape is a vehicle for renewed collective relationality. Ultimately the chapter envisions “landscapes-to-come” in Aotearoa NZ as becoming more Māori, rooted in the principles of whakapapa and reciprocity. However, at stake in such a future is the demand for non-indigenous landscape architects to divest of landscape imaginations aligned to the hegemonies of whiteness.

Abstract: As a cultural landscape inhabited by different agricultural cultures over time, the World Heritage listing of Battir recognises its potential to be simultaneously interpreted as both as a biblical landscape, and an historic Palestinian village (without negating other actors and periods). The interpretation of the site’s environmental and aesthetic values have already succeeded in bringing Israeli and Palestinian activists together to call for its preservation. International experts working for UNESCO were crucial in bringing the landscape to the world’s attention. UNESCO’s designation of the site shepherded both Israeli and Palestinian experts to recognise the site’s value. In short, Battir has many of the elements which serve as prerequisites for localised conflict transformation, and potentially ‘reconciliation’ to take place. However, the withdrawal of Israel and the USA from UNESCO has once more put such aims at risk. Regular demolitions of structures continue to take place in and around the village under the auspices of the Israeli authorities, incursions by potential settlers are on the rise, and the difficulties of the legal quagmires of the ‘area systems’ of the Oslo Accords make Battir’s continued efforts a barometer of the impact that heritage interpretation is having in the area.

Abstract: This article examines the role of banana plantations in the settler-colonial, capitalist transformation of Mandate-era Palestine. A microcosm of Zionist settlement and Indigenous Palestinian resistance, the cultivation of bananas reveals competing visions of development and national legitimacy, rooted in the cultural politics of ecological and economic nationalism. Framing banana cultivation in Palestine as a site of eco-nationalist struggle, the article details the convergence of capitalism, agriculture and ecology at the heart of the Zionist-Arab conflict. While bananas were not new to Palestine, efforts to significantly expand production under the British Mandate were constrained by the region’s poorly suited soil and climate, giving rise to competing discourses of scientific knowledge and cultural rootedness. Neither native to Palestine nor grounded in biblical tradition, bananas evoked in the settlers an ersatz ‘secular’ imagination of their inherent capability and expertise, which clashed with the lived reality of the Indigenous people’s deep familiarity with the local ecology and comparative agricultural success. Drawing on extensive primary sources, the article traces scientific discourses and cultural representations of banana cultivation in the districts of Beisan and Jericho, shedding new light on the ways in which agriculture shaped the Zionist-Arab conflict, including the role of the Palestinian capitalist class in resisting settler-colonial dispossession. The article thus explicates the role of bananas in uneven regional development and the struggle for control over land, demonstrating the usefulness of eco-nationalism as a lens to better understand economy and ecology as tools of capital accumulation and control.

Abstract: The Book of Mormon’s portrayal of a great peace that followed the climatic appearance of Jesus Christ in ancient America presents a conundrum. The people of Nephi reportedly became especially “white,” a label that is described simultaneously as not an “ite.” On the one hand, the narrator Mormon represented the “people of Nephi” as “fair and delightsome.”² Yet, a few verses later he declared that there were no longer “any manner of ites.” The paradox in this portrayal is that Nephites, even if they absorbed whitened Lamanites and renamed themselves the people of Nephi, remained rather literally (wh)ites. Put more bluntly, the label “white”—just like “Lamanite” and “Nephite”—remains an ite. In his 2017 book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, historian Max Perry Mueller confronts the same troubling passage from Fourth Nephi, noting that “Lamanites and Nephites unified to become one raceless (white) Christian people.” Mueller recognizes an unseemly paradox: “whiteness is the racial category that is, ironically, empty of race.” White is presented as “the original and universal racial category” as well as a mutable one: “within the Book of Mormon hermeneutic of restoration whiteness becomes an aspirational identity, which even those cursed with blackness can achieve.”³ In his 2024 book, The Testimony of Two Nations, Michael Austin, provost of Snow College, applauds the mutability of curses and races in the Book of Mormon. Austin asserts that in contrast to curses in biblical texts, “The curse in the Book of Mormon is reversible and tied clearly to continuing behavior.” He suggests that despite “the overt racism in some of its passages concerning race and skin color, it [the Book of Mormon] injected something genuinely new in to the divine-curse-as-racial-etiology genre of scripture.”⁴ I seek to unsettle this applause by highlighting Indigenous readings of the Book of Mormon that expose its broader colonial implications. Is the narrator Mormon’s suggestion of racial mutability actually something novel to be praised or might it be, instead, a rather common but disguised instrument of settler colonial erasure?

Description: Generations of Indigenous artists have sought to make a place for Native art in North American culture and society as well as the broader art world. Written at the intersection of history and art history, Painting Native America tells the social history of Indigenous artists and their experiences as they negotiate such questions as how to use art for social and political goals, what constitutes “Indian art,” and how to make a living as an artist, showing how each generation’s approach to these issues in the twentieth century was shaped by previous struggles. Nicolas G. Rosenthal demonstrates that by exhibiting their paintings in museums, galleries, and public spaces, Native American artists rewrote dominant narratives of North American history, foregrounding Native perspectives while indigenizing the art world. Featuring seventy color illustrations, Painting Native America examines generations of American Indian and First Nations painters, including Oscar Howe, Pablita Velarde, Allan Houser, Woody Crumbo, T. C. Cannon, Fritz Scholder, Frank LaPena, Jean LaMarr and others. Rosenthal situates Indigenous artists in twentieth-century modernity, attesting to the dynamism of survivance and the cultural and visual sovereignty practiced by these artists. Rosenthal also provides one of the first social and urban histories of Indigenous artists and art scenes in the North American West and examines the origins of the regional art scenes these artists created in Oklahoma, New Mexico, California, and British Columbia.

Abstract: Emotional political ecology is a subfield that unpacks the ways power is negotiated via emotions in struggles around the environment. Although scholars have influentially outlined critical “dimensions” of emotion in environmental conflict, they pointedly leave their framework open to further theorization. This article thus proposes greater attention to the forces (i.e., stressors) that propel emotional responses in struggles over the environment, and the role of material or emotional coping tools that can disarm otherwise mobilizing emotions. I take the example of farm stress in the U.S. Midwest as a case to advance this point and focus on an underresearched group—Iowan conventional row-crop farmers. Conceptualizing stress as an affective and emotional bodily disposition, I demonstrate how stressors emanate from political economic structures, representational and discursive politics, and the materiality of everyday human–environment relations. I argue that although the materiality of weather causes in-the-moment anxiety, and discursive critiques of industrial agriculture cause frustration and anger, commodity farmers have established emotional and economic tools to cope with these stressors. These stressors are concomitant to more private feelings of grief, sadness, and confusion about how to navigate the changing political economy of agriculture, however, which respondents have less idea how to address. I conclude by drawing out how stressor–emotion–action responses can yield insights on how to grapple with farm stress and struggles over the environment more broadly.

Excerpt: The “civilian Population” addressed by the fundraisers, meaning the European settler population, was in an even shakier position as these threats intensified. The number of European colonists in Algeria had grown from a few thousand in the early 1830s to 44,500 by the end of 1842. But they continued to fall short of colonization advocates’ visions of a settler colony like British North America or Australia, where French families would replace the indigenous inhabitants and transform the territory into an extension of the mother country. Europeans remained vastly outnumbered by the Algerian majority, estimated at some three to four million in this period, and their demographic profile failed to meet colonialist ideals. Over half of the Europeans living in Algeria in 1842 were Spanish, Italian, or Maltese, rather than French. There were twice as many men as women. And most were not living on rural farms, but in towns and cities. Efforts to recruit French farming families to settle on confiscated Algerian land in 1841 largely attracted poor urban workers not the “families of small landowners, with excellent morality, including able-bodied, working-age children, able to bring at least 1,500 to 2,000 francs to the colony” administrators had hoped for. These disappointing results added fuel to bitter debates raging among political economists and policymakers about how to colonize Algeria and whether it was worth the financial and administrative costs to do so at all. Europeans already in the colony in the early 1840s lived in fear of losing the military protections and the investments in colonial development on which their physical and economic survival depended. Finally, to understand why the men of the monument commission wished to erect a statue of King Louis-Philippe’s eldest son in Algiers, we must understand the situation of the French monarchy in the 1840s.