settler colonial studies blog

Settlers somewhere else: José Angel Hernández, Colonizing Ourselves: Tejano Back-to-Mexico Movements and the Making of a Settler Colonial Nation, University of Oklahoma Press, 2024

17Aug24

Description: In the late nineteenth century, the Mexican government, seeking to fortify its northern borders and curb migration to the United States, set out to relocate “Mexico-Texano” families, or Tejanos, on Mexican land. In Colonizing Ourselves, José Angel Hernández explores these movements back to Mexico, also known as autocolonization, as distinct in the history of settler colonization. Unlike other settler colonial states that relied heavily on overseas settlers, especially from Europe and Asia, Mexico received less than 1 percent of these nineteenth-century immigrants. This reality, coupled with the growing migration of farmers and laborers northward toward the United States, led ultimately to passage of the 1883 Land and Colonization Law. This legislation offered incentives to any Mexican in the United States willing to resettle in the republic: Tejanos, as well as other Mexican expatriates abroad, were to be granted twice the amount of land for settlement that other immigrants received. The campaign worked: ethnic Mexicans from Texas and the Mexican interior, as well as Indigenous peoples from Mexico, established numerous colonies on the northern frontier. Leading one of the most notable back-to-Mexico movements was Luis Siliceo, a Texan who, with a subsidized newspaper, El Colono, and the backing of Porfirio Díaz’s administration, secured a contract to resettle Tejano families across several Mexican states. The story of this partnership, which Hernández traces from the 1890s through the turn of the century, provides insight into debates about settler colonization in Mexico. Viewed from various global, national, and regional perspectives, it helps to make sense of Mexico’s autocolonization policy and its redefinition of Indigenous and settler populations during the nineteenth century.

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It is not over, settler colonialism remains contested: Kay Yandell, ‘Indigeneity Buried, Then Unearthed, in Mohja Kahf’s “Fayetteville as in Fate” and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf’, MELUS, 2024

17Aug24

Abstract: When Mohja Kahf met Winona LaDuke, Kahf referenced Native America’s long history of resistance against occupation, land theft, displacement, and genocide. Kahf couched her observation in assumptions that Indigenous Americans lost that battle, and that Native resistance has ended. Kahf notes her own feelings of mortification on hearing LaDuke’s response, that Native resistance is not over, and, on further research into Native history and modern Native lives, Kahf considers the ways that her poem “Fayetteville as in Fate” (written 1995, published 2003) and her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) engage in the sorts of simplified images and cultural appropriations that her earlier assumptions of the disappearance of Native resistance might engender. This kind of simplified vision of Native peoples and cultures is easy for Americans of all backgrounds to adopt inadvertently. LaDuke’s and her family’s own work, in fact, has long been accused of simplification, erasure, and cultural appropriation. Beth Link, for example, calls Winona LaDuke’s Ashkenazi mother, visual artist Betty Bernstein LaDuke, “a white artist whose subjects are exclusively people of color. [For Betty LaDuke,] non-white cultures and bodies can be mimicked and possessed by white artists without substantively critiquing power or legacies of colonization” (17). For American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means, Winona LaDuke’s Ojibwe father, spiritual practitioner Vincent LaDuke, or Sun Bear, “is a liar. . . . The most non-Indian thing about Sun Bear’s ceremonies is that he’s personally prostituted the whole thing by turning it into a money-making venture” (Churchill). Critics have accused Winona LaDuke herself of presenting romantic, essentialist, simplified visions of Native lifeways, in order to appropriate them for her own environmentalist imaginings. For Kimberly Tallbear, for instance, LaDuke’s All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999) “presents a very narrow definition of authentic tribal or indigenous identity, relies on simplistic traditionalist rhetoric, . . . then conditions legitimate governance on the restrictive definition of authentic indigenity that she assumes her readers will innately accept to be true” (234). Yet, even amid such accusations that LaDuke’s stories of Native political actions insist “that authentic indigenous cultures must be representative of a static, generic, and uncomplicated traditionalism” (Tallbear 241), LaDuke performs the desperately needed intellectual work of documenting, compiling, and publicizing modern Native nations’ determination to undergird and strengthen their tribal lands, endangered cultures, and national sovereignties.

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The settler legal masquerade: Michal Rotem, Liberal Masquerade: Settler Colonial Pedagogies in Israeli Legal Education, PhD dissertation, Queen Mary University of London, 2024

16Aug24

Abstract: The case of the Israeli juridical field poses a puzzle. The political situation in Israel/Palestine deteriorated over the years from a temporary conquest, to an abiding belligerent occupation, and lately, to an apartheid regime. The Israeli juridical field elevated in the opposite direction, from a formalistic arena to a liberal, active, individual-oriented and human rights focused sphere. If the application of liberal law within a repressive political context is conflictual, then the Israeli case would lead to a head-on collision. Yet, reality suggests otherwise. On the surface, liberal law and apartheid regime are necessarily conflictual, as liberal legal philosophy and particularly the principle of the rule of law allegedly stand against repression. However, on the ground, liberal law and repressive political situations work together to complement and reinforce one another. The research interrogates this apparent enigma by using the Israeli legal education enterprise as a case study. It asks how Israeli legal education work to interpellate law students into a liberal juridical field that operates within a repressive political atmosphere. Based on four years of ethnography conducted within an Israeli law school, this inquiry provides a critical account of how law is being taught in Israel. The dissertation exposes several settler colonial pedagogies that are deployed in the law classroom. Silence and utterance allow to mute some areas and aspects of the law while putting emphasis on others. Legal Judaisation works to make sense of the contradictory definition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. De jure and de facto distinctions allow to teach the law itself while disregarding reality on the ground. Spatial ambiguity and the fragmentation of space overlook the Israeli apartheid regime through a vague description of the State’s territory. These settler colonial pedagogies not only bolster settler colonial logic among future members of the Israeli juridical field, but also bridge the relation between liberal law and apartheid regime.

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Mascot settler colonialism: Linda J Kuckuk, The Persistent Voice of the Colonizer: Troubling a Mascot’s Settler-Colonial Past, MA dissertation, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, 2024

16Aug24

Abstract: The legacy of settler-colonialism permeates American culture. Remnants of westward expansion remain in our societal divides, political differences, environmental inequities and economic inequalities. Conversations about decolonization, gentrification, and other ongoing practices that precipitate and uphold colonialism are notably found in literature, art, social structures, icons and symbols. Mascots that rely on stereotypes or caricatures can contribute to negative perceptions and reinforce discriminatory attitudes, making it necessary to reevaluate and change representational practices. In this analysis I apply historical, textual, and visual methods to explore Cal Poly Humboldt’s mascot Lucky Logger and identify how this character is a “persistent voice” by way of the object’s own history and of the history it reflects. As a rendition of the American mythic hero Paul Bunyan, Lucky Logger is a remnant of Manifest Destiny and inseparable from this mythos. Further, I compare Shing Yin Khor’s graphic novel The Legend of Auntie Po, a counter-narrative, to the legacy of white male superiority inherent in Paul Bunyan tales and by extension in Lucky Logger. I argue that Cal Poly Humboldt’s mascot perpetrates “the persistent voice of the colonizer” and does not represent the values of a Polytechnic University within the California State University system.

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Engels (and Marx) on the colonial question (and on the role primacy of the colonised in the struggle): Ken Olende, ‘Engels on Colonialism: Ireland and the Agency of the Colonised’, Socialist History, 65, 2024, pp. 47-62

15Aug24

Abstract: Frederick Engels’ 1856 tour of Ireland was key to his and Karl Marx’s political shift away from the idea that colonialism might have a progressive element. This article will examine how this relatively early experience, before the Great Indian Uprising of 1857, was part of a shift in Marx and Engels in relation to the agency of oppressed peoples in colonised countries in their own liberation. This replaced the idea that they should wait for help from an outside working class or the development of their own working class. As such it conceptualised capitalism as an interrelated world system.

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Marx on Indigenous communism against settler relations to land: Wayne Wapeemukwa, ‘Primitive Speculation: Marx on Precapitalism, Social Relations to Land, and Indigenous Dispossession’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 38, 3, 2024, pp. 359-370

15Aug24

Abstract: Marx studied how capitalism changes relations to land before and after Capital—but wielded different methodologies and reached different conclusions. In Grundrisse, Marx investigates precapitalism from a speculative standpoint. In Capital, Marx provides a selective and historical description of dispossession but delimits his analysis to Western Europe. Post-Capital, Marx wields Henry Lewis Morgan’s anthropology and Justus von Liebig’s ecology as scientific bases upon which to critique capitalist property relations. Specifically, Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production installed a historically specific relation to land; and that this relation was abstract, accumulative, and proprietorial. This article shows that Marx began to develop a critical theory of dispossession that overspills the historical, metaphysical, and developmental sequencing usually attributed to him. This late Marx believes that Indigenous peoples have a concrete, metabolic, and communal relationship to the land that communism must recapitulate and rehabilitate; this thesis has been misunderstood by readers of Marx, who impose an overly historicized interpretation upon his work.

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Touristic indigeneity: Richard Butler, Anna Carr (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Indigenous Peoples, Routledge, 2025

13Aug24

Description: The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Indigenous Peoples presents an up-to-date, critical and comprehensive overview of established and emerging themes around Indigeneity and connections between Indigenous peoples and tourism development. Offering socio-cultural perspectives and multidisciplinary insights from leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and tourism practitioners, the book explores contemporary issues, challenges and trends. Organised into six sections, the handbook explores Indigenous community involvement in tourism, Indigenous entrepreneurship and innovation, Indigenous tourism policies and politics, and the complexities of colonialism and decolonisation issues. This text focuses on the active role that Indigenous peoples have in the industry and uses international case studies and experiences to explore the global context of Indigenous tourism. This handbook fills a notable gap by offering a critical and detailed understanding of the role of Indigenous practitioners and societies in tourism and how they interact within the tourism nexus. It will be of interest to scholars, students, tourism practitioners and policymakers working in tourism, development studies, anthropology, human geography and sociology.

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The settler colonial suicide: Deanna Zantingh, Brandon Hey, Jeffrey Ansloos, ‘Unsettling Settler-Colonial Suicidology: Indigenous Theories of Justice in Indigenous Suicide Research’, in Alvin Dueck, Louise Sundararajan (eds), Values and Indigenous Psychology in the Age of the Machine and Market, Palgrave, 2024, pp 103-130

13Aug24

Abstract: This paper reflects on suicide research from a critical Indigenous studies perspective, drawing on pluralistic epistemologies of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial contexts. It argues that suicide prevention research must center on Indigenous knowledge systems to address the complex, interconnected nature of suicide and the broader ecological, cultural, and spiritual harms of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism. Indigenous scholars suggest contemporary suicide research is often based on binary-anthropocentric Western epistemologies and insufficiently attentive to holistic, communal, and land-based dimensions of Indigenous life-promoting relations. To unsettle settler-colonial suicidology is to reconceptualize prevention as the process of communal, environmental, social, and cultural healing that emphasizes the importance of harmony in the interconnectedness of all life. This more expansive and contextualized approach recognizes the structural entrenchment of suicide and system factors contributing to suicidal distress. Justice in suicide research involves co-creating meaning and relationally evolving to support all beings’ conditions for life. Indigenous studies of care, life promotion, and healing offer promising frameworks to reorient suicide research from individual responses toward collective healing-justice that is generative and supportive of interdependent communities. Thus, resisting narrow definitions of health and justice operative within the state’s normative desires; re-centering Indigenous communities’ fights to address the structures that thwart life.

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The settler colonial logic of elimination, displaced: Anna Younes, Hanna Al-Taher, ‘Erasing Palestine in Germany’s Educational System: The Racial Frontiers of Liberal Freedom’, Middle East Critique, 2024

13Aug24

Abstract: Since the first Merkel government in 2009, Germany’s reason of state (Staatsrason) has been increasingly formulated as ‘unconditional solidarity’ with the state of Israel, thus evolving into a logic and practice of erasing Palestine and Palestinians. In such a context, the article delves into the most recent events at German schools and universities since October 7, 2023, and examines how these educational sites have become fundamental avenues for reaffirming Germany’s Staatsra€son, as well as potential spaces for its contestation. Combining the work of Lisa Lowe and Nadera Shaloub-Kervorkian, we show how liberal notions of freedom emerge and follow racial frontiers that systemically erase Palestine in the educational structures, from schools to universities. While these processes consolidate Germany’s Staatsra€son, protest movements of students and pupils offer the most radical spaces to resist it.

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Pottering settler colonialism: Martin Crawford, Land and labour: The Potters’ Emigration Society, 1844–51, Manchester University Press, 2024

12Aug24

Description: Land and Labour narrates the history of the Potters’ Emigration Society, the most widely discussed project of its kind in the era of mass migration to America. Founded by the revived potters’ union in 1844, and the brainchild of a young Welsh-born activist, William Evans, it sought to solve the problems of surplus labour by changing pottery workers into farmers on land acquired in Wisconsin through a subscription and lottery scheme. The book examines the Society’s industrial and Owenite origins, including the impact of the 1836–37 strike and 1842 riots, and competition from rival labour organisations and Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist Land Plan. In 1848, short of funds, the Society opened its doors to other trades and regions. At its peak it comprised over one hundred branches, including members in Scotland, Lancashire and London. Beset by naivety, over-ambition and the inherent difficulties of transatlantic communication, the Society collapsed at the beginning of 1851. Land and Labour is based on intensive research into British and American newspapers, passenger lists, census, manuscript, genealogical and other sources. Despite the Society’s failure, its history offers a unique insight into working-class dreams of landed independence in the American West and illuminates the complex and contingent nature of transatlantic emigration in the mid-nineteenth century.

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