« Older posts
Newer posts »

Fantasies of settler resilience (emerge when one intuits settler fragility instead): Anthea Garman, ‘Tropes Have Fangs: Elsa Dutton, 1883, “Going Native”, Adaptive Whiteness and Trope Resilience’, Journal of Literary Studies, 40, 2024

09Nov24

Abstract: In Taylor Sheridan’s television miniseries 1883, the origin story of his American neo-Western series Yellowstone, the voice-over narration is given by the central character, 18-year-old Elsa Dutton. Elsa is travelling with her family from Texas to Oregon on the wagon trail to the West along with migrants from Eastern Europe who have little idea of the country they have arrived in. Despite her death at the end of the series, the voice-over in the next edition of the Dutton family saga, 1923, is also given by Elsa. Her role and her ongoing spectral presence are the mythical centre of these stories and of the Yellowstone series. In 1883, she plays the daughter who takes advantage of the freedoms of the trail to get out from under her mother, Margaret Dutton’s, control to join the men herding the cattle, and to have two sexual liaisons, including one with a Native American, Sam. In 1923, as a voice-over only, she plays the role of the ancestor whose grave marks the place in Montana where the Dutton family are fighting for their possession of the land. Interesting directorial and narratival questions arise in relation to the role and voice of Elsa when stories are told of a past in which dispossession from land was being carried out ruthlessly and systematically. While her character exercises enviable freedom for a woman of her time, by contrast her voice-over carries warnings of danger, destruction, hell and disaster for both series, captured in the words, “freedom has fangs”. This gaining of freedom for the settlers and great loss of freedom and autonomy for the Indigenous peoples is a complicated story for the director to manage. This article looks at the storytelling tropes activated in 1883 and shows how they work against intentions to tell an old story differently.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Collecting settler colonialism: Christian Jarling, ‘Settler Colonialism and Collecting for Museums: The Namibia Collection in Bremen’s Übersee-Museum (1880s to 1970s)’, in Jürgen Zimmerer, Kim Sebastian Todzi, Friederike Odenwald (eds), Displacing and Displaying the Objects of Others: The Materiality of Identity and Depots of Global History, De Gruyter, 2024, pp. 65-104

08Nov24

Excerpt: The ethnographic Namibia collection in Bremen’s Übersee-Museum encompassed more than 1,500 objects at the end of 2020. Most of these objects, unlike the museum’s other collections from former German colonies, were not exclusively collected during the period of formal German rule. Rather, the objects and their documentation came together over the course of many decades, largely between the 1880s and 1960s, and thus attest to a longstanding relationship between Namibia and the Bremen museum. An evolving historical context informed how objects were first collected and the museum’s desire to have them. These two phenomena were mutually reinforcing and tell a shared story. This essay depicts the formation of the Bremen collection as a process with caesuras and continuities. Over eight decades, individual objects and groups of items found their way to Bremen under specific circumstances and with the help of various actors. The museum did not receive these items directly from their African producers or previous owners (with one notable exception). Instead, museum workers engaged with German actors on site, who enabled the transfer of Namibian objects to Bremen. Within the system of settler colonialism4 in Namibia, civilian actors supported the museum and continuously expanded its holdings. In Cameroon and German East Africa, by contrast, colonial soldiers and government officials more often performed this work.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Queer settler colonialism: Cameron Greensmith, Queer Professionals and Settler Colonialism, University of Toronto Press, 2024

08Nov24

Description: Queer Professionals and Settler Colonialism works to dismantle the perception of an inclusive queer community by considering the ways white lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ2S+) people participate in larger processes of white settler colonialism in Canada. Cameron Greensmith analyses Toronto-based queer service organizations, including health care, social service, and educational initiatives, whose missions and mandates attempt to serve and support all LGBTQ2S+ people. Considering the ways queer service organizations and their politics are tied to the nation state, Greensmith explores how, and under what conditions, non-Indigenous LGBTQ2S+ people participate in the sustainment of white settler colonial conditions that displace, erase, and inflict violence upon Indigenous people and people of colour. Critical of the ways queer organizations deal with race and Indigeneity, Queer Professionals and Settler Colonialism highlights the stories of non-Indigenous LGBTQ2S+ service providers, including volunteers, outreach workers, health care professionals, social workers, and administrators who are doing important work to help, care, and heal. Their stories offer a glimpse into how service providers imagine their work, their roles, and their responsibilities. In doing so, this book considers how queer organizations may better support Indigenous people and people of colour while also working to eliminate the legacy of racism and settler colonialism in Canada. This book analyzes queer organizations in Canada and explores the ways health care, counselling, and social services address the intersecting oppressions facing Indigenous people, families, and communities.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Shocking settler colonialism: Meghan C. L. Howey, The Shock of Colonialism in New England: Fragments from a Frontier, University of Alabama Press, 2024

08Nov24

Description: Explores the untold impacts of colonialism in New England through diverse colonist lives, Indigenous encounters, and environmental legacies. In The Shock of Colonialism in New England, archaeologist Meghan C. L. Howey uses excavations in the seventeenth-century colonial frontier of the Great Bay Estuary/P8bagok in today’s New Hampshire to trace the connection between European global colonialism and the planetary climate crises. Howey shows how this landscape holds forgotten stories of what it meant to live through the shock of colonialism. These stories reveal an unexpected diversity and dynamism among English colonists, multifaceted encounters with Indigenous peoples, and lasting environmental damage from labor-intensive industries. Early Euro-American maps and stunning archaeological finds, such as a broken pickaxe embedded in a hearth and a historical marker for the Oyster River “Massacre” of 1694, complicate our limited views of a shared past. The reality of English colonialism in the dispossession of Indigenous lands and its wake is not what is seen commemorated. Howey’s work is a powerful corrective that traces the rise of intergenerational colonial wealth made possible by land commodified as property, the increased labor required to work newly opened land, the importation of indentured Scots and enslaved Africans to provide that labor, and the resulting degradation of the natural environment. Through Howey’s insights into the stories they tell, these fragments from a frontier can help contemporary readers better understand the past as they seek a more just and sustainable future.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settlers are weird: Daryl Celeste Meador, Melancholic Texas: Cinema and the Settler Colonial Uncanny, PhD dissertation, New York University, 2024

05Nov24

Abstract: This dissertation traces a melancholic archive of Texan culture, arguing that the fraught psyches it contains are formed by the radical imaginative foreclosures imposed by the state’s settler colonial history. Texas’ history of discursive and forceful claims to Anglo sovereignty parallels that of the United States at large, but in a condensed space and time, placing it within the problematics of settler colonial theory in ways that have yet to be fully understood. Building upon theories of psychoanalysis, settler colonial studies, and Indigenous critical theory, this dissertation considers cultural mediations of Texas for their continued imaginative work of repression and disavowal, work that is necessitated by the central violences and constitutive fraudulences of the state. I look to cinema and literature as realms of shared fantasy that reflect the psychopathological conditions of settler colonial subjectivity. Texas often forms a conflicted site in the national imaginary, one of both desire and disavowal, a screen through which realities of broad and structural historical violences can be effaced, quarantined, or assuaged. I write colonial histories into and alongside these cultural texts, arguing that the violence necessitated by forcing settler fictions into reality offers crucial context to the oftentimes inexplicable or misattributed psycho-affective confusion of Texas cultural characters. The literature of Larry McMurtry, and filmic adaptations of his work, serve as a central locus through which to explore the melancholic psyche of Texan settler masculinity and the trauma of colonial Oedipal demands in Texas. I argue that the centrality of loss that permeates the cultural archive of Texas is best understood as a settler neurosis, a symptom of subjectivities that remain haunted by what they necessarily disavow but are unable to mourn. This dissertation ultimately proposes a radical abandonment of attachments to Texas, motivated by understanding the violent and irreconcilable logics structured within it, in hopes of building more sustainable shared futures.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The welfare of the settlers: James Keating, ‘Winning the Vote in a “World Without Welfare”: Aotearoa New Zealand from Representative Government to a Universal Franchise, 1840-1933’, in Fia Cottrell-Sundevall, Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir, (eds), Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 81-105

05Nov24

Abstract: Following the institution of responsible government in 1852, New Zealand rushed towards “full” democracy. Within seventeen years manhood suffrage was won and, by 1893, all adults could vote. The feat stood foremost among the “firsts” that allowed the colony to style itself as a “social laboratory.” Unlike most competitors in the “race” to universal suffrage, New Zealand’s franchise was not accompanied by citizenship disqualification for welfare recipients. Instead, Pākehā (white settlers) had long determined that welfare would not be a public provision. Rather than distribute aid, the state regulated migration to maintain wages and alienated Māori land to settlers. 1893 constituted a turning point; thereafter the colony gradually replaced its ad-hoc charitable aid system with an expansive notion of citizenship. The vote bridged the settlers’ “world without welfare” and the social experiments of the fin-de-siècle. Nevertheless, not all enjoyed the fruits of democracy. Attending to the subsequent contraction of the polity, women’s struggle for substantive equality, and the racialized limits of citizenship—extended unequally to Māori and denied to “Asiatic peoples”—this chapter troubles Pākehā claims to have built a truly democratic society and challenges linear narratives of franchise expansion with a contingent history of Aotearoa New Zealand’s path towards universal suffrage.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The violence of settler colonialism is gendered: Leslie Dawson, ‘Reclaiming Being: Applying a Decolonial Lens to Gendered Violence, Indigenous Motherhood, and Community Wellbeing’, Societies, 14, 11, 2024, #224

03Nov24

Abstract: Indigenous women and children in Canada are significantly more likely to experience some form of family violence than their non-Indigenous counterparts. However, biomedical and academic discussions around the violence that Indigenous women and their families and communities face reflect a colonial narrative emphasizing Euro-Canadian perspectives and values; a colonial narrative that disconnects the role of past and ongoing forms of colonial violence and naturalizes family violence within Indigenous communities, informing a view of Indigeneity as risk. Through a decolonial lens, the underlying causes of family violence in Indigenous communities can be connected to the gendered violence of patriarchal colonialism targeting Indigenous women. It is revealed how Indigenous women’s bodies became a site of the coloniality of violence as colonization disenfranchised and displaced Indigenous women from their lands, communities, and central roles. Gendered colonial violence attacked Indigenous women’s scared status in their societies and disrupted Indigenous relational modes of being. This informed a coloniality of being for Indigenous peoples; a coloniality of being integral to intergenerational trauma and family violence. Through the lens of Indigenous laws as a decolonial approach to family violence, the centrality of Indigenous women’s roles and responsibilities as mothers is linked to community wellbeing and intertwined with leadership and governance. By grounding the rights of Indigenous women within relationships, Indigenous women can reclaim their sacred places within respectful, reciprocal, and interconnected ways of being.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonialism is an experiment: Anne Kwaschik, Claudia Roesch, ‘Experimental Spaces: Knowledge Production and its Environments in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Charlotte A. Lerg, Johan Östling, Jana Weiß, Anne Kwaschik, Claudia Roesch (eds), History of Intellectual Culture 3/2024, De Gruyter, 2024, pp. 125-136

03Nov24

Abstract: This introduction conceptualizes man-made social environments as ex-perimental spaces and arenas for scientific observation. First, it offers a broaddefinition of the term environment following Etienne Benson’s conceptualizationof environments as relational, mental and physical realms that exerted influenceon various entities. It then discusses the investigative framework of experimentalspaces including both a physical and discursive dimensions as well as the embed-ding of this special section in the history of knowledge. The central part of thisintroduction refers to the historiography on experiments in Science and Technol-ogy Studies (STS) and highlights how our approach is distinct linking conceptuali-zations of experiments with recent scholarship on intentional settlements as sitesof knowledge production. We relate Bruno Latur’s concept of the laboratory topractices of knowledge production in intentional settlements and agriculturalcommunities. The third part addresses the entanglements between experimentalspaces and settler colonialism, discussing a) how knowledge production couldsupport imperial expansion, even for regions that were not (yet) imperial powers,b) how colonial infrastructures and a colonial mindset of settlers aided knowl-edge production in intentional settlements and c) how historiographical researchabout colonies as laboratories of modernity emphasizes that colonies became en-abling spaces for utopian settlement projects in itself.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The places you’ll go will be SETTLER places, and it makes a difference since the beginning: Stephanie A. Fryberg, Arianne E. Eason, ‘“Oh, the places you’ll go”: The psychological consequences of omission and misrepresentation for Native children’, Child Development, 2024

02Nov24

Abstract: All children navigate the world by searching for information in their sociocultural contexts (e.g., schools, media, laws) to make sense of their experiences and potential futures. In doing so, Native children, however, must contend with the legacy and ongoing oppression of their Peoples, communities, and ways of being. In this manuscript, we highlight how sociocultural contexts stemming from settler colonialism undermine Native futures. We detail how settler colonialism, specifically its manifestation in acts of omission and misrepresentation, impacts children’s self and identity development, and intergroup relations. We close by acknowledging the importance of understanding development in context, and the power that the representational landscape can have for promoting paths toward positive child development and greater equity.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

What does an Indigenous foreign policy looks like? Kate Alba Reeve, ‘Between Empire and State: Haudenosaunee Sovereignty at the League of Nations’, Law and History Review, 2024

02Nov24

Abstract: In 1923, Haudenosaunee leader Deskaheh Levi General traveled to Geneva and launched a campaign for Indigenous statehood at the League of Nations. Drawing on a not-so-distant imperial past, the campaign was a novel attempt to use international law to assert Indigenous sovereignty. The Haudenosaunee claim hinged on a seemingly impossible conceit: that an independent native polity might persist within the borders of a settled state. The League of Nations’ primary institutional frameworks for grappling with other such problematic sovereignties were minority treaties and the mandate regime. But the Haudenosaunee case, which hinged on the persistence rather than the novelty of sovereignty, fit within neither paradigm. Their campaign illuminates a larger crisis of legal legibility that characterized Indigenous-settler relations from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. By reading Indigenous history into international legal history, this paper shows how Haudenosaunee people leveraged older norms of imperial relationality in their engagements with international law. In doing so, it revises a persistent genealogical account of the history of Indigenous human rights in favor of a more capacious narrative of Indigenous internationalism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »