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Seeing settlers and their others (then and now): Anna Brickhouse, ‘Hemispheric Literary Networks and José Martíɴs Charleston Earthquake’, in Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Graciela Montaldo (eds), The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America, Routledge, 2024

19Oct24

Abstract: This chapter considers how the most well-known hemispheric literary networks of the nineteenth century refract the Americas’ shared histories of settler colonialism. It does so through a close examination of José Martí’s 1886 “El Terremoto de Charleston” (The Charleston Earthquake)—a chronicle that troubles the boundaries of nineteenth-century Latin America as Martí would delineate them five years later in “Nuestra América” (1891). Martí’s chronicle on the earthquake portrays the event as the decimation of a US southern city while offering a wider meditation on multiple, overlapping southern spaces in the hemisphere. The chronicle’s focus on the Black population of Charleston and its detailed descriptions of diasporic religious practice call into question the fundamental opposition of the two Americas that Martí would later elaborate and offer a contemplation of racial violence throughout the hemisphere. Martí engages myriad Souths, positioning his chronicle within multiple literary networks beyond the US newspapers from which he derived his information about the earthquake. Ultimately, the chronicle elaborates an anti-secular mode of poetic apprehension that embraces the potential of the very “race war” that Martí denied was possible in Cuba, even while revealing unexpected links between Martí’s dissonant writings on Indigenous people in the hemisphere and his writings on the Black population of Charleston.


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Seeing settlers while being settlers (then, but also now): Asa McKercher, ‘Canadian Orientalism: Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East in the ‘Golden Age’ of Canadian Foreign Policy’, The International History Review, 2024

19Oct24

Abstract: Beyond the issues of Palestine’s partition and the Suez crisis, the Middle East has received little attention within the history of Canadian international relations. And yet, in 1947 and in 1956, Canadian officials undertook fateful actions that shaped this region’s politics. This paper examines Canadian foreign policy toward the Middle East during the 1940s and 1950s, the so-called golden age of Canada’s international influence. In this period, and despite a reputation as honest brokers, Canadian officials came to identify with and support Israel, a country they viewed favourably because they saw it as a fellow Western state that stood out from its Oriental neighbours. Examining how Canadian foreign policy elites viewed Israel, Palestine, the wider Arab world, and the people of these regions during the 1940s and 1950s, this paper traces Orientalism’s important influence on Canada’s relations with the Middle East and stance toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.


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The settler colonial soundscape: Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, University of Minnesota Press, 2020

19Oct24

Description: Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies,” Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism’s “tin ear” that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, Hungry Listening offers examples of “doing sovereignty” in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence. Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, he demands a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space. 


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Humanitarian relief ‘terrorises’ settlers: Caroline Lund, Brendan Ciarán Browne, ‘Stigmatisation as settler colonialism: designating humanitarian and civic society organisations in Palestine as security threats’, Peacebuilding, 2024

17Oct24

Abstract: Since Hamas’s 7th October attacks on southern Israel, the Palestinian population living in the Gaza Strip has been subjected to an unprecedented level of destruction that has decimated every aspect of Palestinian life. The ongoing Israeli military invasion has been considered a ‘plausible case of genocide’, and the humanitarian catastrophe has been compounded by major restrictions on access to humanitarian aid. Accusations of supporting ‘terror’ have been levied against UNRWA, the major provider of humanitarian services in Gaza, leading to an initial suspension of donor support to the organisation by many western governments. In this article, we consider the Israeli government’s tactics used to delegitimise those involved in providing humanitarian and lifesaving support for the Palestinian population, concluding that the construction and dissemination of narratives that depict them as being ‘terroristic’ or having ‘terrorist’ connections is a sophisticated additional layer of the settler colonial logic of elimination and erasure.


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Racial settler colonialism, and apartheid: Nahla Abdo, ‘Racial Capitalism: From British Colonialism to the Settler Colonial Apartheid State’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 23, 2, 2024, pp. 187-203

17Oct24

Abstract: This article explores the development of capitalism in Palestine under British colonialism and the Zionist settler colonial project. It examines first, Israel’s internal and external capitalist dynamism, including its treatment of its non-European citizens, namely indigenous Palestinians, and non-Ashkenazi (Arab) Jewish settlers. Second, it explores the state’s interdependent relationship with Western, especially US imperialism. The article argues that the British colonial state was crucial in enabling the Zionist project to materialize, leading to weakening the socio-economic fabric of the Palestinians in their own lands and homeland, creating a favourable condition for the Zionist project to gradually penetrate the land of Palestine and dispossess its population. As a European (Jewish) settler colonial movement, Zionism, founded on racism and racialization, aimed at establishing a new Jewish enclave separate and independent from the indigenous Palestinians. This separateness made it resemble apartheid South Africa, yet the historical specificity of Palestine, where the Zionist settlers did not just alienate, exclude and when needed, use and exploit the Palestinians, but also expelled the indigenous Palestinians and claim Palestine as a ‘pure’ Jewish state.


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Racial settler colonialism: Sai Englert, Gargi Bhattacharyya, ‘Capital’s Genocide: A Conversation on Racial Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, and Possible Worlds after Gaza’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 23, 2, 2024, pp. 165-186

17Oct24

Abstract: Taking as a starting point the desire of many to locate the unfolding genocide in Gaza in the irrationality of its perpetrators — the Israeli state and/or its imperial backers — this article proposes instead to understand it as an extreme expression of the continuous violence necessary to maintain not only local settler colonial rule, but the global capitalist system as a whole. Building on the existing literature on settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and insisting on the ways that both should be understood not as discrete, self-contained objects of study, but as co-constitutive elements of the global order, this article attempts to illuminate the structural logics at play in Israel’s latest and most brutal assault on Palestinian life. In doing so, the article emphasises Zionism’s role in maintaining western imperialism at a crucial nodal point of the world economy and, in turn, the latter’s commitment to guaranteeing its stability and dominance. The article resists, however, the urge to move from explaining current structures of domination to declaring them as final or unshakable. It therefore ends by proposing possible different tomorrows, through an engagement with the Palestinian revolutionary tradition.


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Facing the settler: Hatem Bazian, ‘Introduction: Fanon’s Palestine and the Colonial Dividing Line’, Islamophobia Studies Journal, 2024

17Oct24

Excerpt: Fanon’s insights on colonialism, oppression, and the division between colonizers and the colonized resonate profoundly when examining the complex and enduring struggle in Palestine. His writings shed light on the intricacies of a struggle where a colonial dividing line has been etched deep into the landscape and consciousness of the region. In exploring Fanon’s perspective on the colonial experience, and applying it to the Palestinian context, we gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics that have shaped the Israeli-Palestinian colonial entanglement. From the physical barriers of walls, checkpoints and daily violence to the social, cultural, and psychological divides, Fanon’s framework provides valuable insights into the ongoing struggle for justice, freedom, right of return, sovereignty, and peace in Palestine. This exploration seeks to illuminate the multifaceted layers of the conflict through the lens of Fanon’s astute analysis, highlighting the enduring relevance of his work in understanding the complexities of colonialism and its lasting impact on societies around the world, including Palestine. Palestine’s geographical world is a colonized one divided in two; the colonized are the indigenous Palestinians and the colonizers are the Zionists and all their Western allies. In this geography and per Fanon’s framing, “the dividing line, the border, is represented by the” military barracks, bases, concrete walls, and the sniper stations. Thus, in the Palestinian colonial experience, everything revolves around the “power” of the Israeli (colonial) Defense Force, settlements and settlers, and persistent structured violence.


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‘Hard neighbors’? (or actually invaders?): Colin G. Calloway, Hard Neighbors: The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America and the Making of an American Identity, OUP, 2024

17Oct24

Description: An intricate portrayal of the early American settlers who came to be known as Scotch-Irish, who through collusion and bloody conflict acted as the tip of the spear of white colonial expansion into Indian lands. Offers a complex depiction of Scotch-Irish interactions with Native Americans over time and across the continent. Explores historic roots of resentment and violence against government and minorities, connecting them to current tensions and the politics of resentment. Reconsiders terms like “American expansion” by focusing on the stories of violence and conflict that transformed Indian people into racial others and allowed “English settlers” to consider themselves Americans.


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The recognition dilemma, literarily: Florencia Lauria, ‘More than “A Matter of Deciding To”: Citizenship, Border Positionality, and Irresolution in Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman’, American Literature, 2024

17Oct24

Abstract: This article considers Indigenous refusal to state-imposed US citizenship through a reading of Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020). The novel follows the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa’s struggle to remain a federally recognized tribe during the US government’s move toward tribal termination in the 1950s. While the characters’ appeal to the US government could be construed simply as a plea for state recognition, the novel’s insistence on Chippewa kinship structures as a simultaneous and legitimate expression of the characters’ political identities suggests otherwise. Taking up conversations in Indigenous studies pertaining to the limits of state recognition and the possibilities of generative forms of refusal, the article expands upon Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson’s (2014) model of refusal with an emphasis on irresolution. This irresolution is manifested in the novel’s narrative form—which refuses closure. The article uses the term border positionalities to describe the unresolved and unsettled tension between the characters’ Indigenous and settler political identities. It contends that the incommensurability of these social and political identities makes Erdrich’s novel an important text for reading citizenship as an ongoing site of struggle for Indigenous people.


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The imaginaries of settler images: Jonah Peter Gray, Troubling Settler-Colonial Imaginaries in Contemporary Art, PhD dissertation, UC Sand Diego, 2024

17Oct24

Abstract: This dissertation focuses on artworks by Andy Warhol, Brian Jungen, Mike Kelley and Rebecca Belmore. These works emerged in the wake of a shift that commenced in the 1960s and 1970s, as Canada and the United States largely changed their state policies towards Indigenous peoples from coercive assimilation to a form of political recognition based on the accommodation of cultural difference. These changes were a response to Indigenous activism across the continent, which altered the terms of engagement between these nation-states and Indigenous peoples with respect to settler colonialism’s characteristic process of dispossession. The artists I study explore the persistence of settler imaginaries, revealing both the seeming exhaustion of old stereotypes and their tenacious emotional and psychological grip on mainstream North American culture. The promises of multiculturalism and equal citizenship held out by the paradigm of political recognition were never suited to mediate relations between citizens from a multitude of Indigenous nations with complex sovereignty claims overlapping with the settler states of Canada and the United States. Yet this new paradigm also faced profound challenges posed by the neoliberal drive, starting in the 1970s, to impose market logics on more and more aspects of life. The struggles of the civil and women’s rights movements to win recognition as equal citizens involved emphasizing the differences of their respective constituencies, a social dynamic to which capitalist consumer markets quickly adapted. The artworks I address here reflect on forms of subjectivity profoundly shaped by the pervasion of consumerism and reveal the increasing demands placed on artists to perform their identities in ways that foreground their difference to gain recognition from the art market, state arts funding bodies, and the dominant organs of art criticism. My first case study, discussing some of Warhol’s final works, ruminates on how his commitment to “business art” figured this kind of subjectivity in relation to a settler-colonial imaginary that he explicitly associated with the commodity par excellence: money. Jungen, Kelley and Belmore each incorporated these new pressures to perform into their work, even as they slyly subverted, or outright refused the imperatives fueling these demands. Each of the projects discussed here calls attention to the economic circuits through which performances of identity are mediated in institutional art contexts. They show that this economy refracts both the desires and expectations of a broader public, but is deeply contingent on the unique emotional incentives that structure art’s consumption in its rarified institutional spaces.


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