settler colonial studies blog

The sincerity of settlers: Ana Schwartz, Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America, University of North Carolina Press, 2022

09Sep24

Description: New England’s Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty. But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates, if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her “city on a hill” with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England.

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The mission of settler colonialism: Lori J. Daggar, Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022

09Sep24

Description: Cultivating Empire charts the connections between missionary work, capitalism, and Native politics to understand the making of the American empire in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. It presents American empire-building as a negotiated phenomenon that was built upon the foundations of earlier Atlantic empires, and it shows how U.S. territorial and economic development went hand-in-hand. Lori. J. Daggar explores how Native authority and diplomatic protocols encouraged the fledgling U.S. federal government to partner with missionaries in the realm of Indian affairs, and she charts how that partnership borrowed and deviated from earlier imperial-missionary partnerships. Employing the terminology of speculative philanthropy to underscore the ways in which a desire to do good often coexisted with a desire to make profit, Cultivating Empire links eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century U.S. Indian policy—often framed as benevolent by its crafters—with the emergence of racial capitalism in the United States. In the process, Daggar argues that Native peoples wielded ideas of philanthropy and civilization for their own purposes and that Indian Country played a critical role in the construction of the U.S. imperial state and its economy. Rather than understand civilizing missions simply as tools for assimilation, then, Cultivating Empire reveals that missions were hinges for U.S. economic and political development that could both devastate Indigenous communities and offer Native peoples additional means to negotiate for power and endure.

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A settler society must be defended: M. T. Samuel, ‘Legal fictions and settler colonialism: the case of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, 1945 in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

09Sep24

Abstract: Since Israel’s establishment, the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, 1945 has served as the primary law enabling the state’s repression and dispossession of Palestinians, authorizing land confiscations, house demolitions, deportations, warrantless searches and arrests, administrative detentions, movement restrictions, surveillance, censorship, the outlawing of civil society associations, and the establishment of military courts. This article demonstrates that the law is invalid and that its artificial validity has been sustained by a legal fiction, thereby illuminating the indispensability of legal fictions to the legitimation of settler colonial conquests.

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Black settlers? Anthony W. Wood, Forty Years within the Veil: The Black West and Counternarratives of Race and Place in the Rocky Mountains, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2024

09Sep24

Abstract: In the years between the end of Greater Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration, Black Americans founded communities across the Rocky Mountain West. Many of these towns prospered and grew during an era in which racial ideologies underwent profound realignment. As numerous scholars of race document, both national and regional politics along with cultural forces shaped how race was made and remade in America between 1877 and the 1920s. Black settlers in new western cities and towns navigated the ongoing social construction of race and the effects of racism in their everyday lives while participating in the co-constructing forces of place-making where they lived and made their homes. This dissertation focuses on three Rocky Mountain towns, Pueblo, Colorado, Pocatello, Idaho, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, as instructive and heretofore unstudied sites where the Black West might be grounded by a place-based analysis. Doing so allows us to better understand not only how, but where, race was made in America. In order for histories of Black western communities to offer such insights, the chapters in the second part of this dissertation argue that place-based studies of Black communities must consider and contextualize, rather than foreclose, the variegated narratives and counternarratives of the West’s incredible ethnic, religious, and racial heterogeneity. Linking the local Black histories in Part I with broader local analysis of the racialized politics of belonging and place-making, Part II urges historians of race, African Americans, and the North American West to be attentive to both the locality and relationality of racial formations.

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Settler colonialism at the border: Davide Grasso, ‘Ethnic or political cleansing? Identity, cultural heritage and demographic engineering in the Turkish-occupied territories of northern Syria’, De Europa, 7, 1, 2024, pp. 61-83

07Sep24

Excerpt: Since 2016, the Republic of Turkey has conducted a series of air and ground military operations in the northern territories of the Syrian Arab Republic. The abducted motivation of these operations was the need to clear those areas of political organisations that threaten Turkish domestic security. The main target has been the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), that are classified as terrorist organisations under Turkish law. The YPG and YPJ were founded in 2012 as the armed branches of the Democratic Union Party (PYD). Turkey considers the PYD as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting a guerrilla war against the Turkish state since 1984. Another belligerent targeted by Turkish operations between 2015 and 2017 was the Islamic State (IS), a Salafist movement that controlled swaths of Syrian territory between 2014 and 2019. This study focuses solely on the Turkish operations targeting the SDF and the subsequent demographic engineering in the occupied areas. We will attempt to answer the following question: Which identification process is more relevant to understanding Turkish operations and the related demographic engineering policy?

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Political indigeneity is not an island: Youjeong Oh, ‘The Emergence of Political Indigeneity: The Resistance Movement on Jeju Island against Colonization by Development’, Critical Asian Studies, 2024

07Sep24

Abstract: While Jeju Island South Korea is internationally known for its longstanding anti-base movement at Gangjeong Village, the island’s modern history of resistance can be traced to 1991, when the South Korean government’s Special Act on Jeju-do Development ignited an extensive resistance movement. Two conceptual frameworks—colonization by development and political indigeneity—are employed to explain the island-wide social movement that continued over a sixteen-month period. Mirroring the ways that settler colonialism dispossesses people of their land and land-based social and ecological relations, colonization by development refers to the ways in which local places and people are colonized by land-oriented tourism and property development. This legislation became a specific geographical and historical conjuncture from which Jeju indigeneity emerged, linking it to islanders’ deeply rooted experiences of oppression and injustice. During the movement, Jeju people used indigeneity as a form of political subjectivity, as a weapon against dispossession, and as a form of agency for local autonomy. As a form of colonization, development initiatives function as an ongoing regime of dispossession. The emergence of political indigeneity describes the new sense of consciousness that spread among Jeju people, catalyzing and sustaining place-based contestation to reject developmentalism and promote self-determination.

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More retribution: Kelly Tabbutt, Incarceration as Carceral System Space of Native Racialized (In)Equality: Comparing Sentencing Outcomes Between Native and White People Incarcerated in US Federal and State Prisons, PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2024

06Sep24

Abstract: Overincarceration of Indigenous peoples across North America is a critical and deep-rooted social issue. Racialized structural inequality are theorized to underpin racialized inequalities in carceral system outcomes including sentence length, monetary penalties, and supervision. Settler colonialism is theorized to underpin these inequalities per Native people. Taking structural settler colonialism for granted and applying the intertwined frameworks of carceral capitalism and necrocapitalism, my research answers three interrelated questions: How do economic precarity and Native visibility influence racialized differences in: 1) sentence length, 2) the likelihood of being assessed legal financial obligations in addition to incarceration, and 3) the likelihood of expecting post-release supervision? My research relies primarily on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Survey of Prisoners. My research utilizes linear regression to examine the outcome of sentence length and binary logistic regression to examine the outcomes of the likelihood of fines or fees and expecting supervision, applying the same models to two separate subsamples for the Native and white incarcerated people surveyed. My research findings indicate a limited influence per Native visibility and no influence per individual-level economic precarity on the outcomes for the Native subsample. Though individual-level measures of economic precarity did have some influence on the outcomes for the white subsample. Further, the group-level measures of white economic precarity influenced these outcomes across subsamples and Native economic precarity had a limited influence for both subsamples. My research contributes to the literatures examining both racialized carceral system inequality and Native structural inequalities by investigating patterns of inequality across states, demonstrating at least limited applicability of critical theories of carceral system inequalities to Native experiences, and, most significantly, illuminating directions that future research in the area of Native racialized carceral system inequalities must take to unpack this complex structural issue.

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Retribution! Brieanna Marie Watters, Robert Stewart, Michele Statz, ‘Retribution for tribal sovereignty: Settler colonial policing and civil justice impacts’, Punishment & Society, 26, 4, 2024

06Sep24

Abstract: Unique among marginalized groups, American Indians are both citizens of the United States and citizens of sovereign tribal nations, as recognized (but not granted) by federal Indian law. However, even as tribal nations exert increasing economic and political power, criminal legal outcomes for tribal members—who interface with an array of tribal, local, state, and federal law enforcement and justice systems—remain detrimental or are worsened. These outcomes also include increased contact with state courts and the delegitimization of tribal courts, which uniquely implicate the civil justice context. We use the settler colonial framework to investigate how tools of state criminal law, such as heavy policing and disparate punishment, may impact the civil justice needs of Indigenous people, and more broadly, the very sovereignty these policies aim to protect. Drawing on interviews and observations in tribal and county-level courts, we examine the experiences of American Indians and other stakeholders in Indian country. We identify how enforcement practices, surveillance of space, and the complexities of layered policing within a “jurisdictional maze” contribute to the deterioration of tribal sovereignty. We contextualize our findings by considering the historical, cultural, and socio-economic factors that influence the experiences of American Indians in the criminal justice system, and by examining the civil justice implications.

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From peoples without history to peoples without nostalgia: Martin Deuerlein, ‘Indigenous Nostalgia’, in Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia, Routledge, 2024

06Sep24

Abstract: This chapter explores the relationship between indigenous peoples and their historical and cultural connections to the past. It critically examines the concept of “indigenous nostalgia”, demonstrating how indigenous groups are often seen as communities where nostalgia is expected to be found. Established concepts like “imperial nostalgia” focus on indigenous peoples as objects of remembrance by settlers who express nostalgia for an idealized, but supposedly vanishing indigenous population. To describe how indigenous communities themselves relate to the past, however, “nostalgia” is rarely used. The negative connotations of the term, characterized as romantic and emotionalized longing for an irretrievable past, threaten to delegitimize the aspirations of indigenous activism and conflict with indigenous temporalities. One response is to use alternative terms like “memory”, “heritage”, and “tradition” which not only avoid the sentimentality of nostalgia but are also more in tune with the insistence that the past persists as an integral part of the present. Efforts to reconceptualize the idea of nostalgia from the perspective of indigenous peoples are another response. Here, the past and expressions of “healing nostalgia” serve as a set of cultural resources that continue to inform the present and help to develop a positive vision for the future.

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Settler apocalypse now: Santhosh Chandrashekar, Christina R. Foust, ‘Apocalyptic Rhetoric and Settler Power: Lessons for the End Times in Eruption’, in Nathan Crick (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Rhetoric and Power, Routledge, 2024

06Sep24

Abstract: Apocalypse is a persistent form of rhetoric that appears in moments of collective upheaval, a genre that sets up certain courses of action while discouraging others. As rhetoric scholars have recognized, premillennial Christian discourses influence our understanding of apocalypse as the prophetic foretelling of a “world-ending” event—to which the proper response is agreement with prophesy (and perhaps atonement). This chapter reads the 2009 telefilm Eruption to better understand how such forms shore up settler-colonial (and white masculine) power at moments in which it is most threatened. We underscore the necessity of challenging settler apocalyptic frames as we navigate life in the sixth mass extinction.

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