settler colonial studies blog

Documentary solidarity against settler colonialism: Lara El Mekaui, ‘Lands of Solidarity: Understanding Contemporary North American and Palestinian Indigenous Realities through Interactive Documentary’, in Francesca Mussi (ed.), Indigenous Storytelling and Connections to the Land: More-Than-Human Worlds, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 253-275

28Sep24

Abstract: Malek Rasamny and Matt Peterson’s 2018 documentary Spaces of Exception explores the histories and political commonalities found between Indigenous and Palestinian communities in North America and South-West Asian refugee camps, respectively. Building on the theory of inter/nationalism developed by Steven Salaita (Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), as well as on Mike Krebs and Dana Olwan’s comparative study of settler colonialism between Canada and Israel (‘From Jerusalem to the Grand River, Our Struggles Are One’: Challenging Canadian and Israeli Settler Colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies 2(2): 138–64), this chapter analyzes the potential, as represented in Spaces of Exception, for solidarity between Indigenous peoples and Palestinian refugees. I argue that the documentary’s use of changing cartography reveals a historical parallel of land seizure that incites necessary political solidarity among nations occupied by settler colonialism. Spaces of Exception is an interactive documentary, which, Kathleen Ryan and David Staton state, “provides an opportunity for decolonization,” as “it offers a shared authority with narrators, audiences, and filmmakers” (Ryan and Staton, Interactive Documentary: Decolonizing Practice-Based Research. London: Routledge, 2022, p. 3). Through this interactive practice, the documentary’s depiction of daily life in Indigenous reservations and Palestinian refugee camps—and the larger project The Native and The Refugee it is part of—contributes to decolonizing efforts in these communities through reorienting focus from the state to the nation, and therefore reaffirming the need for Indigenous and refugee political solidarity. With the insight of interactive documentary theory, I also make the claim that beyond showing solidarity, Spaces of Exception contributes to decolonial work through the documentary medium.

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The settlers and their libraries: Olivia Radbill, ‘Settler Narratives: Colonial Genocide, Westward Expansion, the Gendering of Librarianship, and the Appointment of City Librarian Nellie Keith’, Journal of Radical Librarianship, 10, 2024, pp. 162-177

27Sep24

Abstract: The gendering of the library profession toward female dominance, occurring between 1876 and 1905, coincided with an influx of affluent, educated white settlers in California. The simultaneity of Westward expansion and gendering of librarianship laid the framework for white women settlers to find successful careers in libraries in California. The first City Librarian of the South Pasadena Public Library, located in South Pasadena, California, was a woman named Nellie Keith. Viewed through an intersectional lens, Keith’s journey, from her birth on a New Hampshire farm to her appointment as a City Librarian in California, was paved by both her access to white privilege and her subjection to the sexism of nineteenth century male figureheads in the field of librarianship.

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The settlers and their religion: Stephen Jackson, ‘”Harmonise with the rest of the Empire”: Empire’s influence on religious instruction in Australian and New Zealand primary schools, 1880-1962’, Journal of Beliefs & Values, 2024

27Sep24

Abstract: This article argues that imperial identities embracing Britishness within Anglo-settler colonies significantly influenced provisions for religious education in Australia and New Zealand primary schools from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, corresponding with James Belich’s chronology of recolonisation. The article begins with an overview of the foundational Education Acts of Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and New Zealand, each of which included stronger legal provisions for secularity than in other Australian and settler colonial contexts. The article then tracks the enduring campaigns to promote additional religious instruction in classrooms, revealing a common imperial imaginary shared by Protestant settlers within Australian and New Zealand contexts. Proponents drew upon one another’s tactics, including campaigns for referenda, the creation of Bible-in-Schools Leagues, and parliamentary lobbying campaigns. They also drew upon the idea that Britishness necessitated Christianity, though their calls sometimes did not reflect the legislative reality in Great Britain itself. In the mid-twentieth century, the context of the Second World War precipitated a renewed focus on Britishness as a bulwark and protector of the British Empire. When combined with the diffusion of Agreed Syllabuses, this enabled religious instruction advocates to overcome fierce opposition to strengthen systems of religious instruction from 1940 to 1962.

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The settler grand (or tiny) tour: Bryan S. R. Grimwood , tebrakunna country and Emma Leeb, Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, ‘Unsettling geographies of tourism’, Tourism Geographies, 2024

25Sep24

Abstract: This article introduces the Special Issue on unsettling geographies of tourism. The overarching aim of this collection of articles is to bring together critical and creative analyses that help destabilize tourism’s relationship to settler colonialism. In this Introduction, we provide an overview of literature on geographies of settler colonialism and tourism, which works to situate the ‘unsettling’ agenda in relation to the decolonial and Indigenous geographies and the respective contributions of each article in the Special Issue. We also review the ethics of care and decolonizing approach that oriented our process of peer reviewing articles, understanding that peer review is fraught with practices of erasure, exclusion, and prescription and that decolonizing tourism geographies must include intentional practices of transforming our individual and collective responsibilities to each other and with the lands and waters from which scholarship originates. Towards the end of our Introduction, we present a summary of each article that amplifies and synthesizes their respective contributions to unsettling tourism geographies knowledge and research.

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Settler squares: D. B. H. Lehman, ‘The Midwest: Land of the Squares’, Middle West Review, 11, 1, 2024, pp. 77-87

25Sep24

Excerpt: In the age of settler invasion, all this rectangularity has been a convenient spatial link between local and federal understandings of belonging and ownership.

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Reflection of a reflection: Mary Stockwell, ‘Reflections on Settler Colonialism’, Middle West Review, 11, 1, 2024, pp. 411-421

25Sep24

Excerpt: Everybody’s story must be told because everybody—not just the few heroes we picked out from the great panorama of the past—made our lives possible.

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Settler robots!! Douglas C. Youvan, ‘Synthetic Humanity: The Role of Advanced AI in Resynthesizing Human Life on Mars and Beyond’, Whatever, 2024

23Sep24

Abstract: As humanity looks toward the stars, the prospect of colonizing other planets, particularly Mars, becomes increasingly feasible. However, the enormous challenges posed by space travel, environmental hostility, and human biological limitations have sparked new avenues of exploration. One such avenue involves the use of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to prepare extraterrestrial environments and potentially resynthesize human life itself. This paper explores how AI could lead the charge in space colonization by autonomously constructing habitats, terraforming hostile planets, and ultimately recreating human life through synthetic biology and cloning. By considering AI as not only a tool but a caretaker and creator of future civilizations, we open a discussion on the ethical, philosophical, and technological implications of this groundbreaking approach. The role of AI in resynthesizing human biology, preserving culture, and shaping human evolution across the cosmos invites us to rethink our identity, our legacy, and our future as a multi-planetary species.

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A forgotten genocide is a successful settler project: Jeffrey S. Bachman, Esther Brito Ruiz (eds), A Modern History of Forgotten Genocides and Mass Atrocities, Routledge, 2025

23Sep24

Description: This is the first textbook of its kind to amass cases of genocide and other mass atrocities across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries that have largely been pushed to the periphery of Genocide Studies or “forgotten” altogether. Divided into four thematic sections – Genocide and Imperialism; War and Genocide; State Repression, Military Dictatorships, and Genocide; and Human-Caused Famine, Attrition, and Genocide – A Modern History of Forgotten Genocides and Mass Atrocities covers five continents, including case studies from Biafra, Yemen, Argentina, Russia, China, and Bengal. They range from the French conquest of Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century to the Yazidi genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, and show that at times of rising authoritarianism, military conquest, and weaponization of hunger, lines between what is war and what is genocide are increasingly blurred. By including genocides and mass atrocities that are often overlooked, this volume is crucial to the ongoing debates about whether “this atrocity or that one” amounts to genocide. By including key points, events, terms, and critical questions throughout, this is the ideal textbook for undergraduate students who study genocide, mass atrocities, and human rights across the globe.

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The violence of settler digital communication: Madi Day, Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Predators and Perpetrators: Cultures of White Settler Violence in So-Called Australia’, in Denton Callander, Panteá Farvid, Amir Baradaran, Thomas A. Vance (eds), Sexual Racism and Social Justice: Reckoning with White Supremacy and Desire, Oxford Academic, 2024, pp. 189-205

23Sep24

Abstract: White settlers across the continent now known as Australia have violently imposed on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives since first contact and continue to do so through digital communication technologies. This chapter examines how a culture of white violence toward Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples occurs both offline and online, applying Indigenous queer and feminist analysis to situate this violence within broader settings of settler colonialism and colonial heteropatriarchy. The chapter analyzes online discourse and predatory behavior from white settlers within larger systems of violence that service settler colonial societies. It troubles the distinction between offline and online violence and considers how hierarchies of desirability are reproduced in each. Finally, it argues that while there is significant attention to those targeted by white settlers, there is need for greater attention paid to the predators and perpetrators who enact violence in online and offline spaces.

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Storytelling the end of settler colonialism? Francesca Mussi (ed.), Indigenous Storytelling and Connections to the Land: More-Than-Human Worlds, Palgrave, 2024

23Sep24

Description: This book builds on the perspective that, for Indigenous peoples, relations to the land are familial, intimate, intergenerational, spiritual, instructive, and life nourishing, and it is these relations that Western societies sought to destroy as part of their colonial projects of territorial conquest and exploitation of resources. Positioning storytelling as a research methodology and a model of decolonial practice, this edited collection seeks to explore the following key questions: how does Indigenous storytelling contribute to understanding Indigenous identity and the crucial role of the land in Indigenous ways of life? How can Indigenous storytelling subvert colonial narratives of the land? How can Indigenous storytelling contribute to addressing colonial exploitations of the land and its resources? Can Indigenous storytelling become a rich mode for the investigation of current climate crises? And, finally, how does storytelling assist Indigenous peoples in restoring their intimate relations to the land and its natural gifts? Through critical analysis of a unique range of Indigenous storytelling practices, including fiction, performative art, new media platforms, archaeological findings and personal live-experienced stories, this collection aims to examine the interplay between colonialism and current environmental challenges, and to expose the impacts – past, present, and future – of Western worldviews on Indigenous connections to the land, whilst simultaneously bringing to the fore Indigenous ethos of care and land custodianship.

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