settler colonial studies blog

The mobility of settler tourists: Firenze Leem, ‘Mobility and Immobility and the Indigenous “Sacralized” Land in Australia: From the Settler Colonial Past to the Decolonial Future of Indigenous Tourism to Uluru’, in Maximiliano E. Korstanje, Vanessa GB Gowreesunkar (eds), Anthropology of Tourism: Exploring the Social and Cultural Intersection, Apple Academic Press, 2024

17Nov24

Abstract: Australia globally promotes itself as a country of diversity, immigration, and tourism, which implies that modern mobilities and travel have been actively occurring in the country. In other words, national branding in Australia cannot be separated from the modern concepts of mobility. Modern mobility and travel to and within Australia, however, can be traced back to the late 19^th century, when settler colonialization started in Australia. In other words, mobility and travel were keys to the history of Australian nation-state building, even before multi-racial immigrants started to compose the diversity and the tourist industry flourished in Australia. In this chapter, Indigenous tourism to Uluru, considered one of the most appealing tours in the Australian tourist industry, in the colonial past, post-settlement current, and decolonial future will be mainly dealt with. Exploring the tourism at Uluru in a time-linear structure, the chapter 90will further discover how the nation-state building, white Australian nationalism, and socio-political circumstances of Australia have been entangled with Indigenous tourism, with concepts of “othering” and “outsiders inside.” Tracking back to the settler colonialist era and reflecting on the current limits of Indigenous tourism, a decolonial and sustainable future of Uluru tourism will be imagined.

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Settlers cropping up: Gabi Kirk, ‘”A fairly good crop for white men”: The political ecology of agricultural science and settler colonialism between the US and Palestine’, Journal of Political Ecology, 2024

17Nov24

Abstract: From 1919 through the early 1950s, agricultural scientists affiliated with the University of California and agricultural scientists setting up settlements in Mandatory Palestine traveled between California and Palestine on a series of research trips. Building on conversations in historical political ecology and critical political ecologies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, this article sets out to answer, how was agricultural science part of the project of settler colonialism in both California and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century? Through an analysis of archival materials–field notes, professional and personal correspondence, and scholarly and popular media publications by US and European Jewish Zionist scientists—I argue that these scientists naturalized and made universal racial hierarchies through transnational technoscientific collaboration. US and Zionist scientists engaged in exchange and debate in two topics: over the proper physical organization of and location of farms, and over the concept of carrying capacity of the land of historic Palestine. In both, agricultural science was used as an objective reason to elevate Western ideologies of proper cultivation and capitalist yield. This justified the dispossession of Palestinians from their land because they were “poor stewards.” This historical case study holds implications for contemporary issues around land and population by Zionists in Israel today, and related debates in global sustainable development at large.

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NEPA settler colonialism: Michelle L. Edwards, ‘Resisting settler colonialism: comments from tribes on NEPA “modernization”‘, Environmental Sociology, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: In 1969, the United States passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which became a model for environmental policies across the globe. These regulations were intended to improve federal agency actions by bringing information on social and environmental impacts into decision-making. In 2020, the United States Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) drastically changed, or in their terms, ‘modernized’ NEPA regulations. Critics have called these changes socially and environmentally harmful. Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by changes to the NEPA process; thus, I argue that it is critical that we consider the viewpoints of Tribal-affiliated organizations and individuals on these changes. I analyze the officially submitted comments from Tribal-affiliated organizations and individuals on the 2020 NEPA rule changes. I provide quantitative and qualitative data demonstrating views on 1) the rulemaking process, 2) five specific NEPA changes, and 3) the proposed changes overall. Using these data, I explore how the NEPA changes represent continued settler colonialism, and how these comments represent a form of resistance.

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Firing up the resistance: Sherena Razek, ‘Fire as Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: In August 2021, wildfires erupted in the southwestern hills of Jerusalem, engulfing and ultimately destroying up to 20,000 dunums of pine forests planted by Israeli settlers. The burned landscape revealed a stunning vista of terraced hillsides, a visual testament to the existence of Palestinian land-based relations hidden under the camouflaging foliage. In this experimental visual essay, fire is postulated as an elemental force of Indigenous Palestinian resistance to the ongoing conditions of environmental and human Nakba imposed on Palestinian lands and bodies under Zionist settler colonialism. Fire, as a transformative and atmosphere-altering medium, is thus theorized and visualized as elemental intifada.

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Indigenous highway: Stuart Taylor, Retracing the Keowee Trail: A Deep Map of the Cherokee Path in the History of the Carolinas, Cascade Books, 2024

15Nov24

Description: In Retracing the Keowee Trail, the author tells the story of the Cherokee Path that connected the low country of colonial Carolina with the mountain homeland of the Cherokee Nation. The Keowee Trail was a busy trading route for a burgeoning deerskin trade. Along this same path, epidemic disease made its way inexorably from the colony toward Cherokee society, reducing their population by more than half. Along this path, warfare was waged in both directions, by Cherokee war parties determined to defend their homeland and by settlers like the author’s Scots Irish ancestors, evermore hungry for land. That ancestral history is an entry point into this larger narrative. A “deep map” approach to the Keowee Trail will hold together multiple lines of perspective, including memoir, family history, migration patterns, religious history, Indigenous wisdom, trauma theory, ghost stories, mythology, archeology, geography, the watersheds, and the flora and fauna of the Southern Appalachians.

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Wild settler colonialism: Tiffany Dang, Nature Unsettled: the making of the wilderness imaginary and the Canadian settler state, PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: Despite the economic significance of extractive resource industries to the national economy, Canadians hold their national parks—as spaces of untouched nature—in high regard as a key aspect of national pride and identity. By critically investigating the cultural framing of nature in Canada as contextualized within the structure of settler colonialism, I attempt a fuller understanding of these landscapes. Paying particular attention to how settler colonial difference has historically intersected with the cultural framing of nature in Canada, this thesis aims to bring to light histories of racialized labour and non-settler migration alongside histories of Indigenous dispossession regarding the design and control of natural landscapes. Three intersecting themes drive the core of this thesis: (1) landscape representation as a tool of colonisation, (2) the relationship between urbanization, infrastructure, and settler colonisation, and (3) the potential for landscapes futures engaged in decolonial and other-than-human knowledges. This work has primarily focused on the development of landscapes in the Canadian Rocky Mountains as a hinge between Indigenous dispossession and racialized migrant work regimes at the turn of the twentieth century. This is achieved by achieved by an analysis of three historically significant moments in Canadian history. The first considers the development of the earliest national parks in the Rocky Mountains at the turn of the twentieth century as discursive landscapes of settler colonial nationalism. The second recounts the significant racial component of the labour behind infrastructure construction and facilitation i.e. the work of accessing the wilderness. In the third, a major flood event reveals tensions between other-than-human agencies and the material infrastructures of settler colonialism. The scale of these settler colonial landscapes not only encompass Canada as a settler nation, but also the broader geographies of the British Empire. The historical aspects of this thesis have been informed by archival research conducted in Canada and the UK, with significant attention paid to the marketing materials produced by the Canadian Pacific Company and the Canadian Parks Department. These archival sources are complimented by readings of contemporary news media and scientific papers on river hydrology and ecology. Ultimately, this thesis unsettles the nature imaginary in Canada by bringing together landscape studies, urban theory, and settler colonial studies; it expands landscape studies through new considerations around labour, poses a spatial-power link between processes of urbanization and settler colonisation, and moves beyond Indigenous-settler binaries in settler colonial studies by intersecting it with racial histories and other-than-human futures.

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Settlers controlling Indigenous mobility: Isabela Agostinelli dos Santos, Reginaldo Nasser, ‘From forced displacement to forced immobility: the Israeli mobility regime to the post-disengagement Gaza Strip’, Monções: Revista de Relações Internacionais da UFGD, 13, 25, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: The article investigates the effects of the mobility regime imposed by Israel after the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, when Israel withdrew all its Jewish settlements from the region. Although the Israeli State claims to have no further responsibility for Gaza under international occupation law, its remote-control policies reveal the continuation of colonial domination by other means. In this scenario, we argue that Gaza emerges both as a space of expulsion, where Palestinians must move and remain, and as a deathscape, since the effects of the policy of (im)mobility of people generate fatal effects. In a historical perspective, the article argues that Gaza experienced two contrasting phenomena: a moment of forced displacement, when 200,000 Palestinians took refuge in the region during the creation of the State of Israel, in 1948, and a moment of forced immobility, caused by restrictions on the movement of people and products, occurring since 2005. Although contrasting, both phenomena can be understood through the Zionist settler colonialism framework, which, since its foundation, has sought to deal with the “Arab” problem: the demographic threat to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

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Settler war is a structure (not only an event): Tariq Dana, ‘Death dealers: Dynamics of Israel’s permanent war economy’, Capital and Class, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: This study critically explores Israel’s permanent war economy, examining its core principles and strategic impacts. It analyzes how the war economy is integral to Israel’s settler-colonial structures and functions, fulfilling various ideological, geopolitical, and financial goals through a sustained conflict footing, rather than being a transient occurrence. To this end, the study identifies and analyzes four key dynamics underpinning Israel’s war economy: First, acute societal militarism serves as an economic growth engine, nurturing skilled military capital and advanced technologies that feed the war economy system. Second, the role of American patronage is examined as a key enabler of the Israeli war economy. In the absence of a traditional colonial metropole, the United States functions as an imperial sponsor, providing extensive military aid, technological transfers, financial assistance, and diplomatic backing–without which Israel’s military posture would be inconceivable. Third, the article investigates Israel’s exploitation of the occupied Palestinian territories as a laboratory for testing, optimizing and marketing military systems’ performance to international clients. Fourth, examines how Israel’s arms export multiplies revenues for the Israeli war economy while also providing diplomatic leverage to advance Israel’s geopolitical agendas and foreign policy objectives.

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Parenting pretendians: Taylor Elyse Mills, ‘Protecting the Next Seven Generations: Self-Indigenization and the Indian Child Welfare Act’, Genealogy, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: In 1978, the United States enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) “to protect the best interest of Indian Children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum Federal standards for the removal of Indian children and placement of such children in homes which will reflect the unique values of Indian culture.” The ICWA was codified to address centuries of genocidal government policies, boarding schools, and coercive adoptions that ruptured many Native families. Now one of the strongest pieces of legislation to protect Native communities, the ICWA was designed to ensure that Native foster children are placed with Native families. Implementing the ICWA has not been smooth, however, as many non-Native foster parents and state governments have challenged the ICWA. While the ICWA has survived these legal challenges, including the recent 2023 Haaland v. Brackeen Supreme Court case, the rise of non-Natives claiming Native heritage, also known as self-indigenizers or “pretendians,” represents a new threat to the ICWA. This Article presents a legal history and analysis of the ICWA to unpack the policy implications of pretendians in the U.S. legal context. This Article demonstrates how the rise of pretendians threatens to undermine the very purpose of the ICWA and thereby threaten the sovereignty of Native peoples. By legally sanctioning the adoption of Native children into non-Native pretendian homes, the ICWA can facilitate a new era of settlers raising Native children, rather than preventing this phenomenon as intended. In response, this Article offers concrete policy recommendations to bolster the ICWA against this threat.

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Fantasies of settler inhabitance (emerge when one faces migrants instead): Federica Guazzini, ‘Colonial Encounters and Land Tenure in Early Italian Rule in Africa. A Critical Enquiry into Recently Rediscovered Personal Papers of Leopoldo Franchetti’, in Uoldelul Chelati Dirar, Karin Pallaver (eds), Africa as Method: A Handbook of Sources and Epistemologies, Springer, 2024, pp. 145-159

09Nov24

Abstract: To what extent is it possible to disclose an epistemic coloniality within a corpus of primary sources related to encounters with Otherness in the Italian colonies in Africa from the late 1880s till the eve of the First World War? This paper draws on newly rediscovered private diaries and letters related to fieldworks conducted in the African colonies with the aim of analyzing the local land systems which paved the way for settler societies. A preliminary critical analysis of the manuscripts allows an understanding of colonial taxonomies in the making, and how they depended on African intermediaries, whose knowledge informed the colonizers of social and individual disputes, as well as on the local balance of power. The manuscripts are the outcomes of extensive traveling, eyewitness accounts and evidence gathered on the location. Thus, their study contributes to deciphering the framed view of African territories, and the methods employed to manage people’s lives, providing insights into the issue of land tenure during early colonial rule.

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