settler colonial studies blog

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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Settler colonialism as necropolitics: Mehak Bakshi, Sandeep Kumar Sharma, ‘The Necropolitical Order: Indigenous Marginality and Sovereign Power in Settler Colonialism’, Library Progress International, 44, 3, 2024, pp. 5131-5240

10Oct24

Abstract: This paper examines the concept of the necropolitical order as it manifests within the context of settler colonialism, focusing on the relationship between Indigenous marginality and sovereign power. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Achille Mbembe, Patrick Wolfe, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, we argue that settler colonialism operates as a distinct form of necropower, one that seeks to eliminate Indigenous peoples not only physically but also culturally and politically. The paper analyses how land dispossession, genocide, legal frameworks, and ongoing systemic inequalities function as mechanisms of necropolitical control, producing and maintaining Indigenous marginality. We explore how settler states assert sovereignty through the control of life and death, shaping the life chances of Indigenous populations and limiting their ability to exercise self-determination. Furthermore, the paper examines Indigenous resistance movements and decolonial struggles as forms of counter-necropower, challenging the settler colonial order and asserting Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. This paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the ongoing struggles for Indigenous rights and justice by analysing the necropolitical dimensions of settler colonialism.

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Inappropriate settlers: Jamie Marie Lukow, Inappropriate Settlers And East End Heathens: The Philanthropic Abduction Of The British Home Children, MA dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2024

10Oct24

Abstract: This project captures the intricacies of the BHC movement’s eugenic philosophy from the British perspective starting in 1868, charting its origins within Poor Law policy and Galtonian theory, as well as establishing its pervasive presence within in the works of Thomas Barnardo and William Booth. For this research, I utilize dozens of primary and secondary sources including, but not limited to, the entire collection of Dr. Thomas John Barnardo’s self-funded publications and The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. I also demonstrate how the eugenic philosophy undergirding the British Home Children Movement originated in Britain. Inappropriate Settlers and East End Heathens: The Philanthropic Abduction of the British Home Children. This project establishes the survivors of the British Home Children Movement as settler colonial anomalies whose complicated identities as well as resistance to settler colonial constructs contributed to their mistreatment in the settler Dominion of Canada. Undergirding this research are primary and secondary sources in the form of periodicals, philanthropic publications, and personal testimonies which illuminate how the Home Children’s experiences share drastic similarities with the First Nations Children forced into residential homes across Canada. My research also incorporates the works of immigration and British Poor Law scholars like Sally Brooke Cameron and Lydia Murdoch to establish the transatlantic tensions which rendered the subjects of the British Home Children Movement as settler colonial outcasts with no home or heritage. This parallels the First Nations Children of Canada who were abducted from their families, dispossessed of their heritage and homelands, and shunned by the invading settler community. In its paying attention to the Home Children’s abductions, institutionalizations, and burials within mass unmarked graves across Canadian provinces, this project challenges the settler colonial binary and reestablishes the Home Children as what historian Patricia Rooke calls “inappropriate settlers.”

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Landed settler republic: Mary Shi, Settlers’ Republic: Land, Infrastructure, and the Emergence of New Technologies of Government in the United States, 1789-1862, PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2024

10Oct24

Abstract: This dissertation puts land at the center of the American state formation to analyze the emergence of the American administrative and developmental state. As the first nation to emerge from revolt against colonial rule, in the United States empire and republicanism collided to produce a settlers’ republic. Therein, it was through the work of acquiring, surveying, and selling land; promoting infrastructure projects such as canals and railways; and managing western territories that a people wary of centralized authority paradoxically found themselves building an expansive, bureaucratized, and increasingly developmental American state. Significantly, with so much of the activity of the early American state directed towards the acquisition, settlement, and incorporation of land, territory emerged as the orienting object of government. Territory was reimagined a space to be governed—to be improved, economized, and developed in the nation’s interest. It was in pursuing settlers’ visions of an empire for liberty that early Americans found themselves building the administrative institutions and ways of relating government to territory, economy, and society now pervasive in today’s nation-states. I make this argument in a series of studies. In the first, I construct a novel dataset characterizing antebellum Congressional debate activity from 1789 to 1861 (N=12,658), to demonstrate that the majority of early Congressional activity was concerned with acquiring, defending, and transforming land. Theorizing this centrality of land requires considering how modern state formation involved not only the expansion and bureaucratization of state administrative capacities, but also a transition from expansive empires of difference to territorially, economically, and socially contiguous nation-states. In the United States, this transition occurred via settler colonial practices of territorial incorporation such as, in the antebellum period, the integration of new states on equal political footing, and the construction of transportation and communication infrastructures. In the second study, I examine the period in the United States before it was taken-for-granted that government should promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways to stimulate what is now called economic development. I demonstrate how the public lands—the broad swathes of land in the national domain for which title had not been transferred to private owners—were repeatedly called upon as a fiscal resource, thereby allowing early American state builders the flexibility to experiment with various institutional arrangements and new governmental rationalities to justify government support of infrastructures. Crucially, to mobilize the public lands in this way, early American state builders relied on assumptions of Native dispossession and erasure. These assumptions lowered the perceived costs of mobilizing the public lands as a fiscal resource, and institutionalized processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure in American political and economic development. In a third study, I analyze the legislative debates leading up to the authorization of the first transcontinental railroad as a window into how federalism complicated territorial expansion and development. I theorize federalism as the outgrowth of empire to demonstrate how federalism territorialized understandings of sovereignty, thereby rendering decisions over territorial expansion and development politically destabilizing in ways that they would not be under empire. I analyze the debates leading up to the passage of the 1862 Pacific Railway Act to examine how federalism complicated territorial development in practice. The fact that the railroad could not be approved until after the outbreak of the Civil War, which removed Southern sectional interests from Congress, illustrates the limitations of federalist systems to make decisions over land. Because federalism allows legislators to sidestep conflict by excluding dissenting positions via the re-drawing or strategic selection of political boundaries, federalism does not incentivize meaningful compromise over questions of territorial development. I conclude by sketching the evolution of the United States’ settler political economy. I discuss how the various efforts to manage land examined in detail above were situated in the United States’ evolving land policy, administrative capacities, and governmental rationalities. From the General Land Office to the Department of Interior, it was to meet the demands of managing vast territories that some of the United States’ earliest and most technocratic administrative agencies were established. And it was from the bird’s eye view of those agencies that early American state builders experimented with ways of promoting and optimizing public welfare using land policy that echo the economizing reasoning of today. Analyzing the United States as a settlers’ republic makes visible the trade-offs and exclusions constitutive of American state formation and establishes the central role that land played in American political and economic development. By doing so, this dissertation points to the horizon needing to be transformed therein to perfect democratic government and reimagine relationships between land, government, and people more generally.

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