settler colonial studies blog

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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Concrete settler colonialism: Eden Bywater, Bronwyn Fredericks, ‘Country under Concrete: Enduring Indigenous Connections to Country amidst Development’, M/C Journal, 27, 5, 2024

17Oct24

Excerpt: Morgan and other Indigenous Australian scholars (see Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive; Dodson; Rose, Nourishing Terrains) identify themselves through their cultural and spiritual connections to specific areas of land and the peoples of those lands. Since the colonisation of Australia, Indigenous peoples have been dispossessed of their land through squatting, land grants, leasehold, purchase, or via violence. Over time, land has been farmed, and exploited, and many prime locations developed into industrial and housing estates. This has had a lasting impact on Indigenous people who have witnessed their land harmed via development, which has often involved the damage and destruction of sacred and significant sites and the extinction of some species. The impacts of this are far-reaching. However, as Quandamooka artist Megan Cope points out, this has never severed Indigenous peoples’ relationship or obligation to the land, which she and other Indigenous people call Country. This article explores how development has impacted on Indigenous Australians and their relationship to Country. We discuss how Indigenous artists are resisting development, exercising resilience, and restoring their connection to Country.

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The midwife of settler colonialism: Melanie Murdock, Sarah Durant, ‘Settler Midwifery: A Colonial Tool in Canada’s Reproductive Healthcare System’, Birth, 2024

17Oct24

Abstract: Introduction: The land we call Canada is a settler colonial country where reproductive healthcare is used as a mechanism to control, subjugate, and erase Indigenous people and to advance the White settler state. Healthcare providers play an integral role in the healthcare system and contribute to Canada’s colonization. In this piece, we critically analyze how settler midwifery is complicit with colonialism in reproductive healthcare by exploring the history of midwifery in Canada, midwifery education, and contemporary settler midwifery. Discussion: European settlers omitted the history of Indigenous midwifery in Canada and to justify their erasure, they conceptualized Indigenous Peoples as uncivilized and their birthing practices as substandard. To establish a colonial healthcare system, settler midwives replaced traditional Indigenous birth attendants. When midwifery became regulated, midwives were required to train in formal post-secondary institutions that sustain colonial logics, systems, and practices. Midwifery education programs maintain colonialism by reinforcing medicalized Western practices and sustaining barriers to the growth of Indigenous midwifery. As a result, Western birthing practices are widespread among settler midwives and Indigenous Peoples face barriers to comprehensive and culturally sensitive care. To decolonize Canadian midwifery, we must dismantle stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples and their birthing practices in historical narratives, implement an anti-colonial approach to midwifery education, support Indigenous midwives in returning birth home, and improve the provision of culturally sensitive care. Conclusion: Settler midwifery in Canada is complicit in colonialism; building anti-colonial alliances can help support Indigenous midwives in leading a decolonial future for reproduction and birthing.

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No basis for claim that 80% of uncomprehending arrogance is not found in settler brains: Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Julia E. Fa, Dan Brockington, Eduardo S. Brondízio, Joji Cariño, Esteve Corbera, Maurizio Farhan Ferrari, Daniel Kobei, Pernilla v, Guadalupe Yesenia H. Márquez, Zsolt Molnár, Helen Tugendhat, Stephen T. Garnett, ‘No basis for claim that 80% of biodiversity is found in Indigenous territories’, Nature, 2024

11Oct24

Excerpt: For the past 20 years or so, a claim has been made in all sorts of outlets, from reports and scientific publications to news articles, that 80% of the world’s biodiversity is found in the territories of Indigenous Peoples. Those using this figure invariably aim to highlight the essential roles that Indigenous Peoples have in conserving biodiversity, and seem to have quoted it in the belief that it is based on solid science. Numerous studies demonstrate that Indigenous Peoples and their territories are indeed key to safeguarding biodiversity for future generations. But the claim that 80% of the world’s biodiversity is found in Indigenous Peoples’ territories is wrong.

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The settler neofrontier: Julia H. Lee, ‘Asian American Settlers, the Neo-Frontier Narrative, and the Problem of History’, Amerasia Journal, 2024

11Oct24

Abstract: This article explores the contemporary Asian American neo-frontier narrative, focusing on two conflicted features of this emerging subgenre. First, the neo-frontier narrative signals Asian America’s resistance to the idea that history requires embodied presence or a recoverable past. This questioning of the relationship between Asian figures and history is important because of the way that Asians have traditionally been racialized as foreigners with no place in the nation. That resistance meets its limits, however, in the second characteristic of the neo-frontier narrative: the absence of Native American figures in these stories or any kind of meaningful reckoning with the nation’s settler colonialism.

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Indigenous hunger in settlerland: Nicole Gombay, ‘Food security and the ma(s)king of indigenous peoples’ dispossession: the example of Inuit in Canada’, Social & Cultural Geography, 2024

11Oct24

Abstract: Focusing on constructions of food security in settler colonial contexts, this article demonstrates how its contemporary conceptualization is heir to long-standing schemes to reform Indigenous peoples and validate state projects. It highlights how discursive regimes of food security in the areas of health, conservation, and economics were conceived within frameworks that instruct Indigenous peoples as to correct behaviour, blame them for their misconduct, and ignore the role of settler states and populations in defining notions of right and wrong and in creating the conditions that promote and sustain those definitions. Ignorance, blame, and indoctrination are thus constitutive features of state interventions aimed at promoting Indigenous peoples’ food security. Using instructional publications directed at Inuit, the article demonstrates how, through the provision of services, and in the exercise of settler nation-building, Indigenous peoples have been subjected to programmes of indoctrination and ideological pacification whilst larger contexts of dispossession are bracketed out.

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Fear and loathing in settlerland (on miscegenation): Sebastian Jackson, ‘Miscegenation Madness: Interracial Intimacy and the Politics of ‘Purity’ in Twentieth-Century South Africa’, Du Bois Review, 2024

11Oct24

Abstract: In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d’être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of interracial sex involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to “White purity” was generally represented through images of White women—volks-mothers and daughters—in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women’s wombs symbolized the future of “Whiteness.” This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African “exceptionalism” paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa’s “petty apartheid” laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these “cornerstone” policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in trans-oceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/sex taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and critical race theory.

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The decolonial / settler colonial interface: Pavel Shlossberg, Hector Amaya, ‘Violences, displacements, and responses: exploring settler colonialism in North and Central America’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 19, 4, 2023, pp. 383-400

10Oct24

Abstract: The essays in this special issue engage with the multiple enduring and contemporary violences that Indigenous communities – and in particular Indigenous women – experience within and across states in North and Central America. The special issue incorporates a hemispheric and transborder focus, situating accounts of violence, dispossession, and migration experienced by Indigenous communities in Guatemala and Mexico, next to, or side-by-side with accounts of multiple violence that Native communities face in the US. Indigenous peoples and cultures in the Americas have collectively endured some of the most violent and lethal acts of colonization, elimination, and erasure in the world, and the essays here directly address shared aspects of this historic and ongoing legacy. Summarizing the major themes addressed in articles in this special issue, this Introduction reflects on the content with special attention in the ways in which settler colonialism, and a focus on gender in relation to settler colonialism (Simpson 2014; Speed 2019; Theidon 2022) forces neo-Marxian Latin American studies perspectives such as coloniality to reevaluate foundational assumptions including historical periodizations and theoretical positionalities.

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Untreatying: Rowland Keshena Robinson, ‘Unravelling settler ideology: navigating treaty dynamics in settler-colonial contexts’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

10Oct24

Abstract: Indigenous activism in North America often hinges on the conceptual apparatus of the treaty relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state to ground struggles waged in a wide array of political, cultural, and social sites. Yet, a persistent question lingers: Why do Indigenous activists continue to emphasize treaties, despite a history of broken promises by the settler state? This article scrutinizes the ideological role of treaties as a means of concealing the underlying systemic violence of settler colonialism through Marxist ideology critique. I challenge the notion that treaties can supply a solid foundation for decolonial justice, and further suggest that a heavy focus on treaties and rights-based discourse risks inadvertently offering an ideological alibi to the settler state and legitimizing its claims to sovereignty and territory. This deeply complicates struggles for reconciliation and justice within the socio-political context of settler colonialism, and there is an urgent need to encourage exploration of alternative strategies for achieving decolonial justice beyond the structures of settler colonialism.

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The settler colonial studies cultural interface: Callum Stewart, Franka Vaughan, ‘Race, sovereignty, and White settler colonial studies: placing settlers at the Cultural Interface’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

10Oct24

Abstract: White settler colonial studies has been widely criticised for representing settler colonialism as an impenetrable and inevitable structure. This article therefore turns to explore how race preconditions and limits the construction of settler subjects. We draw on Torres Strait Islander theorist Martin Nakata’s Cultural Interface theory to unsettle ‘common-sense’ theories of race, and reconceive of the place where European and Indigenous cultures meet as sovereign Indigenous land. We extend Cultural Interface theory to locate White settler standpoints within the intertwined histories of racial capitalism and European and US imperialism. We argue that these histories orient settlers towards White possessive sovereignty. This article then deploys this framework to provide a deeper understanding of the disciplinary limits of White settler colonial studies through two case studies. First, we analyse Liberia’s construction as a settler colonial nation to denaturalise and historicise White settler standpoints. Second, we analyse the White settler standpoint institutionalised in White settler colonial studies’ descriptions of the settler/Indigenous binary, the logic of elimination, and settler sovereignty. In both cases, White settler standpoints are shaped and limited by the racialised logics of White possessive sovereignty. We nevertheless conclude that settlers may reorient themselves towards Indigenous sovereignty.

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