« Older posts
Newer posts »

Coasting settlers: Meredithz McCullough, Coastal Feelings: Colonizing Affects in Nineteenth-Century Australia, PhD dissertation, Rice University, 2024

03Sep24

Abstract: My dissertation, “Coastal Feelings: Colonizing Affects in Nineteenth-Century Australia,” produces an affective account of settler colonialism in the context of Australia’s coastal environments. In nineteenth-century Australia, coasts were the first environments to be seen, then settled, by invading British colonists. They remained places not only of encounter but also of connections to England, and were central to the nostalgia and violence of the settler imaginary. Coasts provided settlers with a site for defining themselves against Indigenous peoples, for imagining their new home, and for mourning the home they left behind. I argue for the centrality of affect to the settler colonial project by focusing on textual and visual depictions of coastal environments in nineteenth-century Australia. I find that gender is central to many of these accounts, which coalesce around real and fictional White women. The four chapters of my dissertation take me to four places along the southern Australian coast. Each is an example of a different kind of geographically-inflected discourse. Whether about the shore, islands, a coastal classroom, or a seemingly tranquil bay, each chapter shows how literature captures and creates affective relationships with coastal environments. It is my hope that by naming and understanding the violent colonial imperatives shaping the history of literary coasts we will be able to reexamine our contemporary relationships with coastal environments and reorient them toward justice, inclusion, and ethical littoral living.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Rewilding against settler colonialism (is not easy): Forrest Hisey, Melissa Heppner, Andrea Olive, ‘Fears and Fences: Social and Material Barriers to Plains Bison on the Canadian Prairies’, Society & Natural Resources, 2024

02Sep24

Abstract: Plains Bison once had the largest population and range of any terrestrial herbivore in North America. Bison now occupy less than 2% of their historic range, mostly behind fences of state-run and private organizations. In 2014, Indigenous groups across North America signed The Buffalo Treaty, calling for bison rewilding. This paper examines barriers to rewilding on Canada’s prairies in the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Through interviews we asked government and NGO representatives what prevents bison reintroduction and rewilding. Our results suggest that the main barriers are social acceptance and material resources. These findings support previous research in the United States and Europe and provides a foundation for future research that could include other actors, such as landowners, Indigenous organizations, and industry representatives.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Nostalgic settlers: Gianmarco Mancosu, ‘Rituals of Colonial Memory: Crafting Imperial Nostalgia in Republican Italy’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2024

31Aug24

Abstract: The latest historiographical trends are revealing how the end of colonialism has influenced the political and social configuration of former metropolitan centres. In particular, the return of former colonial settlers has raised a series of issues that have resonated in European political debates and societies. In Italy, these processes were shaped by a peculiar decolonization process, coinciding with the equally tortuous transition from fascism to the Republic. Drawing on recent historiography on the return of colonial settlers, and expanding the chronological span and methodological scope of previous works through original archival sources, my intervention aims to reconstruct how imperial nostalgia became a political resource exploited by both repatriate associations and conservative political factions. Although similar to contemporaneous cases, in Italy colonial commemorative practices had peculiarities linked to the role of Catholicism and to the fact that far right and even neo-fascist movements exploited the demands of repatriates for their own political benefit. This article thus broadens the historiographical understanding concerning the decline of Italy’s empire and deepens the analysis of its lasting impacts on the politics and society of Republican Italy.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Eco-decolonial communism against settler colonialism: Wayne Wapeemukwa, Journey to a Critical Theory of Discovery, PhD dissertation, Penn State, 2024

30Aug24

Abstract: In July 2022, Pope Francis undertook a penitential pilgrimage to Canada, where he apologized to Indigenous peoples for “the evil” committed by Christians during the Age of Discovery. Then, in March 2023, the Holy See––the ‘government’ of the Catholic Church––issued a historic “Joint Statement [on] the ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’” identifying this “Doctrine” as the philosophical framework Europeans used to colonize the globe and the articulation of a conjunction of factors that birthed anti-Indigenous racism. Despite this increased public profile, the “Doctrine of Discovery” is not salient to philosophers. Yet this paucity is not benign. Those who ignore this Doctrine’s historical and ongoing impact on Indigenous peoples offer missed opportunities at best or eliminationist agendas at worst. These are existential stakes, indeed; but there is also much at stake, philosophically. Journey to a Critical Theory of Discovery stakes a claim on Indigenous social relations to land. In Chapter One, I examine how the Doctrine of Discovery evolved into a racialized “agricultural argument” for Indigenous dispossession and a new religion of whiteness. In Chapter Two, I reanimate Karl Marx’s lost texts on dispossession and offer my distinctive research contribution, speculative expropriation. In Chapter Three, I use my novel concept to demonstrate how the invention of private property and white masculinity lay at the social, political, and erotic origins of the settler state. In Chapter Four, I explore Indigenous responses to Discovery developed by Jim Brady (1908 – 1967), an Indigenous Marxist who established a partitioned mode of eco-decolonial communism. In the Conclusion, I suggest that Brady’s land-based economic co-ops pose crucial, urgent, and necessary implications for the history of our present climate crisis. As an urgent contribution to Indigenous philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, and Political Theory, this “journey” presents an alternative eco-political imaginary that opens up for us only when we seriously consider the wisdom embodied in Indigenous social relations to land, relations that contain concrete solutions for transcending capitalism, colonialism, and climate change. Responses to settler-colonialism must not merely seek to re-possess the land––as if it were inherently fungible––but take the even more radical step of ameliorating and recruiting land as a subject in decolonization; an ameliorative politics of territorial rematriation we hear echoed in the grassroots call, “Land Back.”


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler capitalism: Jack W Davies, Wages of Settlers: An Intellectual History of Settler Colonialism and Capitalist Development, PhD dissertation, UC Santa Ceuz, 2024

29Aug24

Abstract: This dissertation studies selections of intellectual production on settler colonialism as it concerns the theory and history of capitalism. Part I engages the consolidation of an intellectual paradigm in the post-Cold War period, which I call, “settler colonial reason.” This critical orientation to the history and present of society combines a schematic theory of settler colonialism with the remarkable salience of Marx’s notion of so-called primitive accumulation in the same decades. In the paradigm, the passage of history, particularly the history of capitalism, is principally intelligible as a repetition of origins. Whatever might happen in history, it is always and ultimately an expression of its foundational and structural “logics”—so many new forms or rounds of enclosure, dispossession, and elimination. I elaborate a critique of this paradigm across two chapters: one treating it directly and the other assessing its recent application to the history of Palestine. Part II seeks alternatives in a longer intellectual history of colonization and the uneven historical development of capitalism, beginning with classical political economy. The combined colonial and commercial policy of specific heterodox thinkers provided a conceptual solution to impasses in industrial capitalism’s early stages. I argue that “systematic colonization” in theory and Anglo settler colonialism in practice facilitated the co-existence, in metropole and colony, of high wages and high profits—in a word, “economic development.” This assigns paramount significance to the unprecedented and unrepeatable mass migration of working people from an industrializing center to an agrarian settlement for absolutely high wages, and the trade and investment relations between these regions. The final chapter tracks these themes into twentieth-century thought on economic development, including mainstream postwar development theorists, economic historians, and their critics. Through this investigation, I formalize the role of wage spreads to global patterns of economic development and underdevelopment, especially those opened by the non-replicable history of Anglo settlement. Altogether, the dissertation advocates for an approach to settler colonialism that is not typological (differentiated by internal “logics” at the national level). It pursues instead the intellectual means for determining settler colonialism concretely within and as part of the uneven historical development of capitalism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The animality of settler colonialism: Severin M. Fowles, Julia F. Morris, ‘On Wolves and Predation: Toward a Multispecies Archaeology of Settler Colonialism’, Historical Archaeology, 2024

29Aug24

Abstract: This article traces the life and death of two wolves that perished at the hands of 18th-century settlers in the small agropastoral community of San Antonio del Embudo in what is today northern New Mexico. Through a study of their interred remains, we examine how wolves became entangled in the unfolding negotiations between settler and Indigenous communities in the American West, playing varied ecological, political, and symbolic roles. In the process, we advance two wider arguments: first, that the archaeology of settler colonialism would do well to adopt a multispecies perspective in which nonhuman animals are counted among both the colonizers and the colonized, and second, that doing so requires a new mode of historical narration focused on the experiences of individual nonhumans as opposed to the anonymous, animalistic mass.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

University of Pluriversity? Sarah Maddison, ‘Making space at the institutional table: Co-work and risk in the colonial university’, in Susan Nemec, Billie Lythberg, Christine Woods (eds), Settler Responsibility for Decolonisation, Routledge, 2024

29Aug24

Abstract: Over the past several decades, settler colonial universities have begun to grapple with their relationships with Indigenous peoples. Different contexts and histories have given rise to diverse approaches to the project of transforming universities, variously framed as decolonising, indigenising, or reconciling the university. With increasing momentum, these strategies are now altering curricula, changing research priorities, and shaping employment practices, structures, and traditions. This work is difficult: institutions founded in empire do not easily displace their Western knowledge systems to engage with the knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples; primarily white, patriarchal hierarchies do not easily reconfigure themselves to make space for Indigenous leadership − at least not of the kind that might challenge the epistemological foundations of the institutional enterprise. This paper analyses the different frames (decolonisation, indigenisation or reconciliation) through which universities are seeking to transform their relationship with Indigenous peoples, on Indigenous lands. It considers the opportunities and limitations of these different approaches, including how their relative influence has changed over time. The paper draws on the author’s own experiences of working to transform both her institution and her discipline, describing strategies that settlers might use to both ease the burden of labour often placed on the shoulders of Indigenous scholars, while always working to make space for Indigenous people at the tables of institutional decision-makers.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Unruly settlers: Amir Reicher, ‘Nomos aversion and the art of being somewhat governed among Jewish outpost settlers in the West Bank’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024

27Aug24

Abstract: Since the mid-1990s, in clandestine co-operation with state agencies, West Bank settlers have been establishing what have become known as the illegal outpost settlements. These are typically rustic communities located deep inside the frontier. Publicly, outpost residents insist that they want the state to retroactively legalize their communities. This is also the long-sought goal of the leaders of the settlement movement. However, this article exposes how, in fact, many ‘outpost people’ actively resist and subvert the efforts of their leadership to legalize and subsequently enlarge their communities. They do so, I argue, from a sense of ‘nomos aversion’, which at its heart is a rejection of the law and the state. This article shows how, in this context, with the aim of keeping the state at a safe distance, the on-the-ground settlers – who are at the frontlines of settler-colonial expansion – navigate their ambivalent relationship with the colonial centre by constantly reshaping their social structure between anti-statist and statist modes. I conceptualize this social technique in terms of the ‘art of being somewhat governed’. By introducing these terms, this article offers an analysis of how an internal rivalry that latently underlies a settler colonial society shapes colonial expansion.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Curricular futurity against settler colonialism (introduci ng a special issue): Hollie Anderson Kulago, Leilani Sabzalian, Jeremy Garcia, ‘Indigenous Futurities in Curriculum’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 39, 3, 2024, pp. 1-7

26Aug24

Excerpt: We begin this issue by sharing the diverse lands, waters, and relations that we bring with
us. Evident in our opening narratives, our relations to these lands and waters realign and connect
us with our ancestors. Just as Indigenous lands and communities are diverse, so too are Indigenous
futurities in education and beyond. In her article on rematriating curriculum studies, Unangax̂
scholar Eve Tuck (2011) foregrounds rematriation as an important framework for upending settler
colonialism in curriculum studies. Rematriating here means returning lands, attending to the
significance of land in curriculum, as well as “the redistribution of power, knowledge, and place,
and the dismantling of settler colonialism” (p. 37). As Tuck offers, “When curriculum studies are
rematriated, alternative aims of curriculum in communities begin to surface” (p. 35), and in this
issue, we connect diverse futurity work to these alternative aims. Curriculum theorizing that begins
from specific Indigenous lands and waters as vital and diverse systems of relationality has the
potential to upend settler colonialism and support Indigenous futurity.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonial sins of omission and commission (when it comes to murdering Indigneous women): Paulina García-Del Moral, ‘State Complicity: Settler Colonialism, Multisided Violence, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2024

26Aug24

Abstract: This article theorizes and analyzes the Canadian state’s complicity in the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in terms of the acts of omission (inaction) and commission (action) of the police and courts. Building on the intersectional perspective of Indigenous and antiracist feminist scholarship on MMIWG, I argue that these acts of omission and commission are rooted in a context of “multisided violence” that is colonial in nature: state action and inaction reproduce and normalize the conditions in which Indigenous women and girls can be murdered with impunity. I analyze reports by Indigenous and feminist civil society organizations as part of their transnational advocacy to compel the Canadian state to address MMIWG. I show that state acts of omission and commission are intertwined and reinforce each other through a pattern of inconsistent, deficient, and contradictory institutional responses to violence against Indigenous women and girls.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »