settler colonial studies blog

A specter is haunting the settler polity: Brett Nicholls, ‘The communist empty signifier: the Australian League of Rights and the Voice to Parliament referendum, Continuum, 2025

19Dec24

Abstract: In 2023, voters across Australia resoundingly rejected the Constitutional institution of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Among several claims made by vote no campaigners against this institution, a text published in the 1980s by the notorious extreme right organization, The Australian League of Rights, surfaced. The central claim of this text, titled Red Over Black, is that Aboriginal claims for justice and land rights are a communist conspiracy. In the lead-up to the referendum, the campaign to vote no echoed this claim. Drawing upon the Laclauian Discourse Analysis, this paper considers how this signifier, ‘communist,’ continues to resonate in political campaigns in Australia. My claim is that the foundations for this continued resonance emerge in enduring reactionary organizations such as the Australian League of Rights, which was founded in the 1940s. The paper thus outlines how the League imagines the communist conspiracy and explains how this conspiracy remains embedded in political discourse today.

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Revering the settler past, disallowing Indigenous futures: Sarah LaVoy-Brunette, Dusti C. Bridges, ‘Anglo-Saxonism and Indigenous Dispossession: Land-Grab Universities and the Emergence of Medieval Studies’, Speculum, 100, 1, 2025, pp. 46-78

19Dec24

Abstract: Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone’s 2020 report on the Morrill Act of 1862 tied the founding and funding of “land-grab” universities, including several institutions key to the development of medieval studies in the United States, to the forceful dispossession of Indigenous peoples. When this history of active policies of Indigenous displacement, genocidal campaigns, and corrupt negotiations is considered in light of the growth of medieval studies in American institutions, this context brings forth the uncomfortable settler colonial association of the active erasure of Indigenous histories and their replacement with a Western medieval past. Motivated by the development of American Anglo-Saxonism and further bolstered by an academic focus on American medieval lineages, medieval studies profited from and contributed to Indigenous erasure both tangibly and intellectually, as its intellectual contributions to the American state and the academy became a tool of settler colonialism. We argue that the connections between medieval studies and Indigenous studies need to be recognized alongside and beyond the Indigenous turn, postcolonial studies, and medievalism to include the field’s historical implications and ongoing benefit from systemic Indigenous dispossession in the United States.

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And settlers too: H. L. Hennessey, ‘J. L. (2024). ‘Preacher, Trader, Soldier, Spy: Studying Transimperial Individuals through their Occupational Roles’, in B. Schär, M. Toivanen (eds), Integration and Collaborative Imperialism in Modern Europe: At the Margins of Empire, 1800-1950, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, pp. 17-36

18Dec24

Excerpt: In virtually every example of modern settler colonialism, settlers have unsurprisingly been the staunchest defenders of the unequal colonial order, whether in the form of segregation, harsh punitive laws or even genocidal militia warfare against colonized peoples. Settler lobbies often fiercely resisted humanitarian reforms issued by the metropole and resented other metropolitan interference in colonial affairs. This dynamic may have been exacerbated as transimperial settlers attempted to assimilate into the majority settler culture. As James McDougall writes of Algeria, ‘As the divisions between communities and individuals of different European origins became blurred and tended to dissipate, so the line demarcating Europeans en bloc from [Muslim] Algerians … became harder, remaining as the primary focus of social and political antagonism.’ In this way, the most vulnerable segment of colonial societies, the indigenous population, could thus come to bear the brunt of transimperial settlers’ desire for inclusion as they sought to differentiate themselves from such subalterns.

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Bookish settler colonialism: Hannah August , Gabriella Edelstein, ‘Collecting Early Modern English Books in British Settler Colonies: Contexts, Problems, and Opportunities’, Parergon, 41, 2, 2024, pp. 189-215

17Dec24

Abstract: Although it differs from other Australian and New Zealand libraries’ rare books collections in several ways, the Emmerson Collection is only the most recent private collection of early modern English books to find a home in a public library in a British settler colony in the South Pacific. In this article, we consider the similarities and differences between the Emmerson Collection and these other named collections of early modern English books in New Zealand and Australia, exploring both the Emmerson’s particular affordances and the ways in which all these collections invite scholarly reflection on the relationship between their origins, their content, and their location on colonised land.

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Mediated settler colonialism: Marco Castillo, Carolina Bank Muñoz, ‘Media Tropes and the Legacy of Settler Colonialism in Chile’s Constitutional Reform Process’, Critical Sociology, 2024

17Dec24

Abstract: This article examines the legacies of racism and settler colonialism in contemporary Chile by examining political discourses in the context of the country’s failed Constitutional reform process. We analyze newspaper articles during the period of the first progressive and the second conservative constitutional projects, which were both rejected in popular referendums in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Through our analysis, we find how media narratives of the two main printed national outlets created a notion of dual enemies, portraying Mapuche indigenous people as internal enemies or ‘terrorists’ and immigrants, particularly Black immigrants, as external agitators during this period. We argue that settler colonial legacies and racial dynamics are central but understudied features in the analysis of Chilean social reality and show how the constitutional process provided an opportunity to see these dynamics enacted in the context of political transformation.

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The settler colonial asylum: Tim (Thanh) Nguyen, ‘Insanity’ as an American Empire: The Canton Asylum for Insane American Indians, 1902-1934, MA dissertation, Dartmouth College, 2024

17Dec24

Abstract: This graduate thesis involves a retelling of the history of the now defunct Canton Insane Asylum, built in the early 20th century located in Canton, South Dakota. It was America’s first federal psychiatric facility dedicated exclusively for American Indians. The Canton Insane Asylum for American Indians is a touchstone whose microhistory reflects larger political and economic sentiments in both the state of South Dakota and in the United States writ large. Conceiving South Dakota, as first and foremost a white settler society erected on land forcibly wrested from American Indian people, the asylum played an important economic development role and helped transform Canton, South Dakota. All of this was accomplished through physical and medical violence and exploitation of vulnerable American Indians. The Canton Insane Asylum for American Indians was aided and abetted by cheerleading state officials and callously managed by various colonial superintendents of whom one is particularly noteworthy—Dr. Harry Reid Hummer. Methodologically, this thesis leverages archival records (housed and littered across three national archives: Kansas City, Dallas, Texas, and Washington, D.C. as well as state archives) consisting of governmental reports, the insane asylum’s financial records, oral testimonies, and patient case files. Where primary sources are lacking, secondary sources are used. More specifically, the thesis highlights the brutal scientific management and medical practices as carried out by the insane asylum executives and staff members; the inherent capitalistic ethos propelling the insane asylum, the business of confinement, and the manner in which pseudoscience and epidemiology data were contorted to justify the confinement of American Indians. The first patient arrived in 1902, and the facility permanently closed in 1934 due to dehumanizing conditions. Over its lifetime, it warehoused more than three-hundred and seventy American Indians.

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Food for anti-settler colonial thought: Christiane Dabdoub Nasser, ‘Food and the Transmission of Culture: Linking Past, Present, and Future’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 2024

17Dec24

Excerpt: The transmission of food culture is a long, slow, organic process, an immersive experiential learning communicated across generations and across frontiers, with ruptures due to emigration, war, and displacement. The contributions to this second special edition of the Jerusalem Quarterly devoted to Palestinian food and foodways draw attention to the role of women, men, and children in securing this transmission, and the deliberate interference in this transmission to serve political agendas. From traditional wedding celebrations in early twentieth-century Palestine to contemporary cookery books and vlogs, transmission is examined through the lenses of Palestinian and diasporic identities, settler colonialism, commodification, resistance, survival, and “gastro-diplomacy.” Lifestyles become an embodiment of food practices interwoven with relationships and identities, with the Gaza Food Kitchen as a poignant example of community mobilization and documenting “the heartbreaking [current] realities on the ground.” Social media posts and reels show the preparation of traditional dishes while bombs are being dropped on Gaza, familiar existential images as the war enters its second year, confirming how sheer survival is a form of resistance. Settler colonialism is scrutinized as an agent of rupture that unsettles age-old practices, denies Indigeneity, tampers with memory, and alters history in the service of a triumphant Zionism keen on constructing a narrative to suppport its colonizing claims to Palestine.

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Violence, silence, then some information, still violence: Justin Hawkins, ‘From Violence to Silence: Native History in the Indiana Magazine of History, 1905-2024’, Indiana Magazine of History, 120, 4, 2024, pp. 318-330

16Dec24

Abstract: Indiana Magazine of History assistant editor Justin Hawkins examines the transformations in how the IMH has covered Indigenous history from its 1905 founding until the current one-hundred-and-twentieth volume. During its first six decades of publication, the journal evolved from an open celebration of Native American Removal to a silent marginalization of Indigenous history. In the 1970s, new methodologies in the field started to move the journal in a more critical direction, while an added regional focus in the twenty-first century helped to decenter paradigms of settler colonialism and the colonial nation state. Despite this shift, new methods are needed in our pages if we are to write Native history that is not simply a retelling of pioneer stories through a less racist lens.

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The Indigenous sector as a sovereign laboratory: Anthea Compton, Donna Murray, Alison Vivian, ‘The Indigenous Self-Government Landscape in Australia: A Descriptive and Conceptual Model’, Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, 27, 1-2, 2024, pp. 63-81

16Dec24

Abstract: Despite the increasing acceptance of Indigenous Nation Building (INB) practice in Australia, pervasive questions remain about the nature and operation of Indigenous self-government. This paper offers a descriptive and hypothetical model to conceptualise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nation selfgovernment both within and outside of the ‘Indigenous Sector’. It argues that from the perspective of an Indigenous Nation looking outward, the Sector can be reimagined as a series of differing zones of jurisdiction, both exclusive and shared. Such repositioning helps to elucidate relations between Indigenous Nations and the settler-state, highlighting the ways in which some Nations are utilising particular vehicles within the Indigenous Sector to build their selfgovernance.

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Settler colonialism of accountants: Dalia Alazzeh, Shahzad Uddin, ‘Accountability and sovereignty: Financial controls in the Palestine-Israel Indigenous-settler relationship’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 101, 2025, #102784

16Dec24

Abstract: This paper examines the intricate dynamics of accountability within the context of historical and political power imbalances in the Palestine-Israel relationship. It explores the paradoxical nature of accountability in settler-colonial contexts, focusing on why accountability mechanisms frequently fail to serve Indigenous populations. Using empirical illustrations of revenue-sharing mechanisms, the study reveals how the settler state—Israel—exerts control over tax revenues accrued to the Palestinian Authority (PA), arbitrarily deducting expenses without transparency or oversight. This lack of transparency leaves the PA uninformed about actual revenue figures and unable to scrutinise deductions, exacerbating power imbalances, weakening internal accountability mechanisms, and increasing vulnerability to corruption. The paper contributes to the growing body of research on accountability practices affecting Indigenous populations by examining their intersection with settler colonialism. It highlights how settler states prioritise their sovereignty to undermine accountability structures and marginalise Indigenous governance. Drawing on concepts such as “settler sovereignty” and “primitive accumulation,” the paper advances the literature on accounting’s role in dispossession, disempowerment, and systemic oppression. Furthermore, it underscores the pivotal role of financial control as a tool of settler-colonial domination, offering valuable insights into the broader implications of accountability within such frameworks.

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