settler colonial studies blog

Romantic settler dreamings: Miguel Gaete C., ‘A New Moral World Order: Carl Alexander Simon and the German Colonization of Southern Chile’, German History, 2024

02Nov24

Abstract: This article focuses on overlooked aspects of German colonization in southern Chile by examining the treatise Auswanderung und deutsch-nationale Kolonisation von Süd-Amerika mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Freistaates Chile (Emigration and German National Colonization of South America with Special Attention to the Free State of Chile) by Carl Alexander Simon. Simon was a Romantic artist who advocated for overseas colonization and settled in Chile to promote his ideas. His treatise, which blended poetry and Romantic rhetoric with political ideas, aimed to encourage German occupation of Chile and South America based on the supposed physical and intellectual superiority of the Germans. This article argues that Simon’s work is integral to understanding the intersection of Romanticism and German colonialism in the nineteenth century and how racial and nationalistic sentiments fuelled German colonialism in remote corners of the world. Furthermore, it contributes to discussions on German nation-building overseas and the connections between German colonialism and race, the legacies of German colonialism, German colonial fantasies, and indigeneity and Germanness. Finally, this study of Simon’s work complements existing research on German settlements in Africa, Asia and the Pacific from 1850 onwards, highlighting the importance of considering the role of Germany in the global colonial project.

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The stars as the only refuge from settler colonialism: Alaia Snell, ‘Space/Race: Octavia E. Butler, Off-Earth Futures, and Life Beyond Settlerism’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2024

02Nov24

Abstract: Sketching possibilities for planetary futurity, the first pages of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) unveil an illusive dreamscape where earthly remembrance and intercosmic imagination merge. Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is “learning to fly” as she sleeps, but drifting further from the safety of her imagined doorway, she becomes engulfed by flames (4). “[G]rabbing handfuls of air and fire” as she “kick[s]” to safety, Lauren’s reverie exposes a climatic anxiety that inundates her subconscious (4). Lauren obtains respite once she “fade[s] into the second part of the dream” she describes “as ordinary and real,” a memory from years ago (4). The incinerated environment becomes illuminated by stars whose “cool, pale, glinting light” offers cosmic shelter from the heat of the day (5). Figuring stars and celestial bodies as evocations of distinct memories, Lauren’s dream echoes throughout Sower as a representation of astronomical potentiality. Her reverie, unearthed in a half-conscious state, serves to inspire otherworldly and emphatically material hope of survivance amidst Earth’s collapse, as “life alone is enough” to invite promise for remote planets free from ecological disruption (83). By presenting the stars as a common space distant from the violent environs of a burning dreamscape, Sower invites readings where potential life-worlds are corporeal sanctuaries compared to the blaze violently spreading in her dream, in her community, and on Earth. Lauren’s imagining within a dire future lends itself to a spatial intimacy where the stars, in their vast remoteness, are also a tangible source of refuge.

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Legendary settler colonialism? Jennifer Eastman Attebery, As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity, University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

01Nov24

Description: Spanning more than 100 years of Swedish American local history in the Midwest and the West, Jennifer Eastman Attebery’s thorough examination of nearly 300 historical legends explores how Swedish Americans employ these narratives in creating, debating, and maintaining group identity. She demonstrates that historical legends can help us better understand how immigrant groups in general, and Swedish Americans in particular, construct and perpetuate a sense of ethnicity as broader notions of nationality, race, and heritage shift over time. The legends Swedish Americans tell about their past are both similar to and distinct from those of others who migrated westward; they participated in settler colonialism while maintaining a sense of their specific, Swedish ethnicity. Unlike racial minority groups, Swedish Americans could claim membership in a majority white community without abandoning their cultural heritage. Their legends and local histories reflect that positioning. Attebery reveals how Swedish American legends are embedded within local history writing, how ostension and rhetoric operate in historical legends, and how vernacular local history writing works in tandem with historical legends to create a common message about a communal past. This impeccably researched study points to ways in which legends about the past possess qualities unique to their subgenre yet can also operate similarly to contemporary legends in their social impact.

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Re-committing to settler conquest: Federica Caso, ‘Settler militarism: Affective colonial pursuits and the militarized atmosphere of war commemoration’, Security Dialogue, 2024

28Oct24

Abstract: This article examines settler militarism and how it is mobilized through affective practices that ultimately bolster the settler colonial project. With this intent, it develops the concept of ‘militarized atmosphere’ defined as a staged environment where war is positioned outside politics and critical scrutiny through a series of affective manoeuvres and aesthetics. A militarized atmosphere operates through military aesthetics to attune people’s bodies to a position of uncritical validation of a given discourse of war. This article argues that a militarized atmosphere crucially sustains the settler colonial project by removing or reducing contestation around the theme of war, which is a pillar of settler colonialism. In settler societies, numerous Indigenous individuals perceive themselves as embattled and seek acknowledgement of the history and legacy of colonial violence and warfare. In contrast, settler governments have a vested interest in concealing this history and its enduring legacy, and they do so by exalting military warfare as the foundation of the modern nation and creating affective attachments to the military. The article uses the case of Australia to elucidate the argument. It examines how the aesthetics of war commemoration at the Dawn Service, Australia’s major commemorative event, contributes to producing a militarized atmosphere that sustains the Australian settler colonial project. It proposes a framework that links the feminist concept of affective militarism to settler colonialism and contributes to the emerging literature on settler colonialism and militarism.

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Again, on Martí’s antisettler indigenism: Jose O. Fernandez, ‘US print culture and José Martí’s Crónicas on US-Indigenous peoples’ rights’, Latino Studies, 2024

28Oct24

Abstract: This essay argues for the centrality and increasing influence of late nineteenth-century US print culture, in the form of printed books, mass-circulation newspapers, and literary magazines, on José Martí’s US-based crónicas (chronicles) that reflect his gradual critical interpretation related to the violence and land dispossession of Indigenous people in the US and their lack of basic rights. Martí’s interest in and writings about US-Indigenous people are connected to the increased advocacy for Native peoples’ rights in US print culture by white reformers, particularly Helen Hunt Jackson. My analysis builds on the works of scholars who have studied Martí’s writings on US-Indigenous people, including his 1887 translation of Jackson’s reform novel, Ramona (2002 [1884]), and draws from Indigenous and Indigeneity scholars’ emphasis on settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. While Martí initially concurred with reformers who advocated for the passing of the Dawes Act of 1887, which offered US citizenship to Native groups who accepted allotment, he came to question US jurisdiction over US-Indigenous populations in part through his realization that Indigenous people and Black people in the South have shared a history of racialization, violence, and disenfranchisement within the confines of the US nation-state.

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Indigenous people do not display diffuse support in settler institutions (go figure): Liam Midzain-Gobin, Feodor Snagovsky, Chadwick Cowie, ‘Indigenous Diffuse Support and Descriptive Representation in the Canadian House of Commons’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 2024

28Oct24

Abstract: Do Indigenous peoples in present-day Canada display lower levels of diffuse support than non-Indigenous settlers? Given settler colonial relations (both historic and contemporary) and Indigenous peoples’ own political thought, we can expect that Indigenous peoples would have even lower perceptions of state legitimacy than non-Indigenous peoples. However, there are conflicting expectations regarding whether the descriptive representation of Indigenous peoples in settler institutions is likely to make a difference: on one hand, Indigenous people may see themselves reflected in these institutions and consequently feel better represented; on the other hand, these forms of representation do not challenge the underlying colonial nature of these institutions. Using data from the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, our statistical analysis demonstrates that: (1) diffuse support is significantly lower among Indigenous peoples than non-Indigenous peoples, including people of color; (2) Indigenous respondents across multiple peoples have similarly low levels of diffuse support, and (3) being represented by an Indigenous Member of Parliament does not change the levels of diffuse support among Indigenous peoples. Overall, our research highlights the outstanding challenges to achieving reconciliation through the Canadian state and points to ways large-N analyses may be made more robust.

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Red coding as Indigenous transfer: Stephen Warren, ‘Red Codes and Removal: Racial Exclusion and Indigenous Persistence in the Midwest’, The American Indian Quarterly, 48, 2, 2024, pp. 165-194

28Oct24

Abstract: The Midwest is typically defined as a site of Indigenous erasure. But citizens of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma continue to live in their original homeland despite the official removal of their people from the Wabash River Valley in 1846. Myaamia families who stayed behind used fee simple family reserves as a tool to combat ethnic cleansing. Despite their keen understanding of American property law, settlers in the Hoosier state crafted “Red Codes,” laws and enforcement regimes targeting Indigenous peoples, to achieve their dispossession. Red Codes, akin to the more well-known Black Codes, reveal how state and local authorities designed laws to advance white supremacy. The appropriation and performance of Indigeneity grew out of the race-based legal regimes that defined the nineteenth-century Midwest.

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The settlers’ ‘right to return’: Alessandro Pes, ‘Colonists or Migrants? The Political Debate on Returns From the Former Colonies in Post-war Italy’, in Sarah Oberbichler, Eva Pfanzelter, Valerio Larcher (eds), Return and Circular Migration in Contemporary European History, De Gruyter, 2024

28Oct24

Abstract: After World War II, the end of Italian colonialism was marked by the1947 Peace Treaty and subsequent UN resolutions in 1949. From 1946 to 1949, post-war Italian governments sought to regain control of their lost colonies by craftingnarratives emphasizing Italian colonists’efforts to establish a“right”to“return toAfrica.”This chapter, drawing from a range of sources including diplomatic ar-chives and colonists’associations, examines how labor emerged as the focal pointin the reconstruction of Italy’s colonial history from 1946 onward. The narrativesportrayed Italian colonialism as a migration of proletarians and lower-class indi-viduals, distinguishing it from other European colonial powers’exploitative prac-tices. Examining the evolution of thesenarratives, this chapter assesses theirimpact on how post-war Italian society perceived its colonial history and depictedItalian former colonists as migrants.

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Settler biocolonialism: Colin B. Weaver, ‘How Not to Undiscipline Religion and Science: Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, Epistemic Resistance, and the Settler Imagination’, Religions, 15, 11, 2024

27Oct24

Abstract: Taking settler-environmental interest in Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (ITEK) as a case study, this paper critically examines some ethico-political pitfalls that can accompany attempts to undiscipline the conceptual and academic boundaries between religion and science. Although settler interest in ITEK appears to heed calls to center Indigenous perspectives in response to ecological crises, I argue that in practice such turns repeatedly enact neocolonial maneuvers that risk obfuscating and exacerbating the settler-colonial status quo. Employing the analytic of biocolonialism, I focus in particular on the discursive construction of Indigenous knowledge as a universal good that any interested parties might access and circulate. I criticize this conception on anti-colonial grounds and propose that it depends on a picture of knowledge as such as an apolitical commodity. By way of parochializing that conception and loosening its grip on the settler-environmental imagination, I examine expressions of Indigenous epistemic resistance which generate a competing picture of knowledge as anti-public or secret. I conclude by suggesting that this second picture invites settler environmentalists to cultivate capacities of going without ITEK and claiming that analysts should continue to pursue the sort of critical and constructive work performed here if experiments in undisciplining are to cohere with anti-colonialism.

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Stoic settlers: Trevor Cook, ‘Othering Anger: Spenser’s Stoic Colonialism’, The Comparatist, 48, 2024, pp. 20-35

26Oct24

Excerpt: As an English settler colonist in Munster during the Nine Years’ War (1593–1603), Edmund Spenser had reason to fear the Irish insurgents. He understood where righteous indignation can lead. In his epic romance The Faerie Queene (1590/96), the wronged show no mercy. After the servant of justice defeats and dismembers the villainess Munera in Book Five, he razes her castle to the ground and defaces the stones, “That there mote be no hope of reparation, / Nor memory thereof to any nation” (5.2.28.4–5). So when the forces of Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, advanced toward Spenser’s residence at Kilcolman Castle in October 1598, he fled to nearby Cork and thence to London. It would be reported afterwards, “That the Irish, having robbed Spenser’s goods and burnt his house and a little child newborn, he and his wife escaped” (Jonson 599). Spenser died the next year. His wife and children would later return to Ireland and rebuild Kilcolman, only for it to be destroyed by fire again in 1622. Today, all that remains are the ruins of the south tower, where the locals are keen for them to lie forgotten, despite ongoing efforts by English scholars to promote their historical significance.

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