settler colonial studies blog

Postsettler transition?Jeremie M. Bracka, ‘”It Begins with Victoria” — The Yoorrook Justice Commission & Innovating Transitional Justice for First Nations in Australia’, Griffith Journal of Law & Human Dignity, 12, 1, 2024, pp. 29-65

14Sep24

Abstract: Transitional justice is long overdue to address colonialism and ongoing harms to First Nations people in Australia. The full truth of Australian history is ripe for recognition; yet, until recently, national efforts to address the colonial past have been partial, disconnected and Statecentric. Moreover, the Federal government has often used the term ‘reconciliation’ politically as a rhetorical device, rather than a term of transitional justice.Nevertheless, in 2021, the State of Victoria established Australia’s first ever comprehensive truth-telling process with the Yoorrook Justice Commission. Seeking to address the harms since colonisation, the state process is unprecedented, based on its scope, First Nations ownership, powers of a Royal Commission and ability to hold the state accountable. This article examines the Commission’s contribution to structural truth-telling, First Nations empowerment, and institutional reform. It also identifies the Victorian initiative as a ground-breaking transitional justice model for settler-colonialism. Despite the challenges, incorporating truth and reconciliation through a First Nations lens might allow actual healing and practical change to occur.

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The other settler tea party: Blair McIntosh, Addicted to Empire? Tea, Sugar and Whiteness in Colonial New Zealand, MA dissertation, University of Auckland, 2024

13Sep24

Abstract: Tea and sugar have long been a mainstay of New Zealanders’ diets, but how these foodstuffs intersect with histories of racism, white protectionism and debt slavery remains underexplored in local scholarship. This thesis uses tea and sugar as mediums for interrogating Pākehā-settler identity. Crucially, it argues the discourse around these commodities in late-colonial New Zealand reflects the construction of Pākehā identity as superior, pure and progressive. While ostensibly ‘British’, these traits were actually a proxy for whiteness. Moreover, the discourse around tea and sugar—seen in advertisements, parliamentary debates, colonial exhibitions and more—worked to silence the working conditions non-white, indentured labourers endured to produce these commodities. However, this did not mean that New Zealanders were ignorant of where their tea and sugar came from. The use of indentured labour on Ceylonese, Fijian and Queensland plantations was well-known in colonial New Zealand. Pākehā were generally untroubled by the coercive nature of this labour too, unless there was a threat of intrusion into white spaces or competition against white workers. When there was such a threat, indentured labourers were scapegoated as the source of tea and sugar’s troubles. The race and class of indentured labourers was treated as the problem, rather than the inherently exploitative and imperialistic nature of indenture itself. The importance of tea and sugar for reinforcing Pākehā identity, then, was two-fold; its domestic marketing helped Pākehā identify what they were, while the imagined spectre of indentured labour sharpened the boundaries of what Pākehā were not. This thesis contributes to a wider argument within New Zealand historiography that race was equally important as class in shaping Pākehā identity. Humble, everyday commodities like tea and sugar are key mediums for understanding that identity because they reflected and shaped its formation in colonial New Zealand. Moreover, where current scholarship has focused on the vesting of meaning in such commodities, this thesis focuses on how these meanings relate to or diverge from commodities’ actual conditions of production. Indeed, the disconnect between production and consumption, coloured and white, ‘out there’ and ‘over here’, arguably endures to this day.

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Atomic settler colonialism: Jessica Urwin, ‘Following the yellowcake road: exploring the colonial roots and routes of Australian radioactive minerals, 1900s–1950s’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

13Sep24

Abstract: Over the past 40 years, environmental justice activists and scholars have drawn greater attention to the disproportionate environmental burdens borne by marginalised communities. This includes the consequences of ‘nuclear colonialism’, a phenomenon defined as constituting ‘a system of domination through which governments and corporations target indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process’. In this article, I seek to complicate this definition of nuclear colonialism by exploring the role of uranium mining in consolidating both British and Australian settler colonial power during the first half of the twentieth century. I will do so through an examination of Australian uranium’s roots and routes as both a manifestation and facilitator of settler colonialism in Australia between 1900 and 1955. Combining sources from both British and Australian archives, this article seeks to contribute to emergent scholarship on the colonial dimensions of mineral extraction in two ways. Firstly, by explicating the role uranium played in fuelling the extractive mentalities of settler colonial Australia. And secondly, by exploring uranium extraction’s contribution to the consolidation of the British Empire’s waning power in the mid-twentieth century.

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A colony of one’s own: S. Karly Kehoe, Ciaran O’Neill, ‘”A Colony to Themselves”: Scottish Highland Settler Colonialism in British North America, 1770–1804’, Journal of British Studies, 2024

13Sep24

Abstract: This article explores the links between anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom and the acceleration of settler colonialism in British North America, and it does so by considering two group migrations from Catholic districts in the North West Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Occurring over 30 years apart, the Glenaladale settlement (1772) in Prince Edward Island and the Glengarry settlement (1803) in Upper Canada offer instructive insight into how anti-Catholicism activated Highland Catholic colonial agency. Not only did significant numbers of Highland Catholics choose to quit Scotland forever, but their settlement in places like Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada accelerated the process of settler colonialism and the establishment of the Catholic Church. The colonies at Glengarry and Glenaladale were peopled by settlers who were doubly motivated to settle in the empire. They stood to prosper economically—certainly—and they also stood to gain the freedom to practice their faith free of obvious interference. To the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral lands they settled, the consequences were not softened by this pretext for settler colonization, and too often the history of antiCatholic discrimination in the four nations elide the fact that Catholics were enthusiastic colonizers elsewhere, and that the two processes were often related.

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Settler houses: Ian Lochhead, ‘Modern Architecture and the Pioneers: Paul Pascoe and the New Zealand House, 1933-1950’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 38, 2024, pp. 134-152

13Sep24

Abstract: The publication of the Group Manifesto, “On the Necessity of Architecture,” in 1948 is widely regarded as a defining moment in New Zealand architectural history. The Group’s ideal of a modern architecture shaped by the environment of their own country was, however, anticipated in the pre-war writings and subsequent buildings of the Christchurch architect, Paul Pascoe (1908–1976). Although unacknowledged by the younger generation of modernists, Pascoe highlighted unexpected parallels between colonial primitivism and modernist functionalism and helped to shape the intellectual climate in which architectural modernism developed in New Zealand during the post-war period.

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Settler nostalgia – settler colonising the past: Hugh Pattenden, ‘Changing interpretations of Ian Smith in the British press, 1980–2007’, Historical Research, 2024

12Sep24

Abstract: This article seeks to advance the debate surrounding contemporary attitudes to settler colonialism in Britain by looking at the reinvention of the reputation of the former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith in British print media. This is becoming an increasingly important area of historical debate, but one that has not yet been fully explored. In order to investigate these issues, this article uses journalistic sources to reconstruct the ways in which Smith was talked about in public debate during the period from Zimbabwean independence in 1980 to his death in 2007. It argues that, while in the 1980s Smith was generally dismissed and condemned for his role in Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, by the later 1990s and 2000s assessments were far more mixed, with many people comparing him favourably against Robert Mugabe. Indeed, it suggests that the suffering of Zimbabwe under Mugabe was the catalyst for Smith’s rehabilitation. Ultimately, it posits that interest in Smith highlights the unusually extensive interest that opinion formers had in Zimbabwean affairs, which was a legacy of the unique status of Rhodesia within the British empire.

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The deconstruction of ‘Indian Country’: Eric Cheyfitz, The Colonial Construction of Indian Country: Native American Literatures and Federal Indian Law, University of Minnesota Press, 2023

12Sep24

Description: A guide to the colonization and projected decolonization of Native America. In The Colonial Construction of Indian Country, Eric Cheyfitz mounts a pointed historical critique of colonialism through careful analysis of the dialogue between Native American literatures and federal Indian law. Illuminating how these literatures indict colonial practices, he argues that if the decolonization of Indian country is to be achieved, then federal Indian law must be erased and replaced with independent Native nation sovereignty—because subordinate sovereignty, the historical regime, is not sovereignty at all. At the same time, Cheyfitz argues that Native American literatures, specifically U.S. American Indian literatures, cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of U.S. federal Indian law: the matrix of colonialism in Indian country. Providing intersectional readings of a range of literary and legal texts, he discusses such authors as Louise Erdrich, Frances Washburn, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others. Cheyfitz examines how American Indian writers and critics have responded to the impact of law on Native life, revealing recent trends in Native writing that build upon traditional modes of storytelling and governance. With a focus on resistance to the colonial regime of federal Indian law, The Colonial Construction of Indian Country not only elucidates how Native American literatures and federal Indian law are each crucial to any reading of the other, it also guides readers to better understand the genocidal assault on Indigenous peoples by Western structures of literacy, politics, and law.

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The language of settler colonialism: Ève Ryan, Giovanna Arnaq Wilde, ‘Two voices, one paper: Using storywork to reassess the impact of academic language on “English Learners” in Alaska’, Linguistics and Education, 84, 2024, #101344

11Sep24

Abstract: In this paper, featuring a collaboration between Ève, a white applied linguist from Réunion Island, and Giovanna, an Indigenous Yupik undergraduate student from Mountain Village, we offer perspectives from Alaska on the topic of academic language. Academic English has served as a tool to further marginalize Alaska Native students, who make up a large segment of the student population designated as English Learners in Alaska. After providing background information on the linguistic landscape of Alaska, we discuss considerations for the academic language construct, and end with implications for assessment, suggesting ways to indigenize our approach to language assessment.

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A specter is haunting settler colonialism (its South): Anna C. Bills, ‘”The Ghosts of Predators Past”: Nonhuman Specters and Extinction in Henry Clay Lewis’s “Valerian and the Panther”‘, Mississippi Quarterly, 76, 3, 2024, pp. 327-345

10Sep24

Abstract: Henry Clay Lewis’s “Valerian and the Panther” (1850) offers a rich source for thinking about the haunting discourses of animals, extinction, and human geographies in the Anthropocene channeled through the focus on North America’s infamous panther. The panther has become immortalized within the culture of the US South through both its significant role within the history of North America as well as its subsequent mythological construction as the American “ghost cat.” Lewis’s shadowy panther traverses the boundaries between life and death, between past and present, to haunt the swamp as the shadowy “ghost cat”—an effectively extinct animal whose continued place within the literary landscape is maintained by its spectral mythologization. Ultimately, this article argues that Lewis’s panther materializes as a ghostly omen of the ecological destruction wrought by settler colonialism and a testament to the consequences of this destruction felt in our present moment through the large-scale extinction and notable absence of key species.

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Identifying settler colonialism (in Mexico): Dominique Salas, Identifying a Traditionalism of the Past: Settler Colonialism and the Rhetoric of Mexicanness, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2024

10Sep24

Abstract: This dissertation arose from discussions around privilege and the settler-slave-exogenous triad popularized in settler colonial studies, specifically regarding this project’s object of study: Mexicanness or Mexican cultural identity. The triad maps out uneven relationships created through the structure of settler colonialism but can unproductively flatten political dynamics of communities and their relationships to settler states. To pivot from discussions of privilege, this project instead considers complicity with the settler colonial states by examining how practices of identification with or of Mexicanness are informed by their (settler) colonial contexts. Chapter 1 surveys ways in which settler states have structured ways of identifying Mexicanness from the inception of New Spain, the rise of Mexico as a settler state, and the effects of incorporating Mexican citizens into the U.S. after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This pan-historiography provides a “palimpsest” of history that serves as a reference for the second and third chapters of this project. Chapter 2 examines over 50 genetic ancestry videos and their comments published on YouTube from 2014 to 2023 by self-described “Mexicans.”. Chapter 3 examines practices of identification in promotional material surrounding Mexico’s recently operational railway development project, Tren Maya, from its announcement in 2018 to its operation in 2023. While the latter two chapters differ in the structural view they provide on practices of identification, the first through the affective reactions from communities themselves and the second through the contextualized actions of the Mexican settler state, the case studies trace when the histories of the settler states are not confronted or averted. In sum, this project aims to highlight the importance of considering historical and transnational structures with practices of identification and Mexicanness, especially in response to colonial experiences.

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