settler colonial studies blog

Orphan settler colonialism: Erna Anderson, Children Of Empire: Whiteness And Place In American Orphan Narratives, 1911-1928, PhD dissertation, William & Mary, 2024

08Aug24

Abstract: This dissertation studies the function of whiteness in early twentieth-century American orphan narratives. Building upon previous scholarship on literary orphans, postcolonial studies, and Critical Race Theory, this dissertation links the study of literature, whiteness, and imperialism to the forces behind the renegotiation of race in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines close readings of primary texts from different literary genres with theoretical frameworks ranging from scholars such as Karl Marx to bell hooks in order to examine how race relates to and is informed by place. Divided into four chapters that each focuses on a different American orphan narrative, this dissertation examines the complex dynamics that shape ideas and perceptions about race, citizenship, and imperialism. Chapter One argues that The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson Burnett interrogates the fraught relationship between domestic seats of empire and Othered colonies, which is manifested when a white orphan raised in India is sent to live in an ancient manor in the Yorkshire countryside. There, whiteness is located in the eponymous secret garden and the novel’s orphans must shed their Other-coded traits in order to gain entrance. Chapter Two looks at how whiteness is informed by consumerism, eugenics, and changing ideas of citizenship in Dear Enemy (1915) by Jean Webster. For the orphans to become useful Americans, they must shed their familial connections, perform chores, and are taught the importance of money and self-reliance. Whiteness resides in an orphan asylum in upstate New York. Disabled children are considered beyond salvation are refused tenure. Chapter Three looks at American Indian Stories (1921) by Zitkala-Ša and argues that Indian Boarding Schools function as institutions of whiteness that forced Indigenous children into cultural orphanhood. Using the Marxist theory of alienation as well as scholarship on different types of timekeeping, the chapter argues that forced changes to the perception of time, labor, families, and learning brought about by settler colonial practices intentionally estranged Native children from their families and nations, thereby rendering them cultural orphans that are more easily–albeit conditionally–brought into the white supremacist settler colonial fold. Chapter Four analyzes the novel Quicksand (1928) by Nella Larsen and proposes the term “traveling orphan narrative” to explore the long history of literary orphans on the road. Here, whiteness follows the orphan wherever she travels, and her orphanhood status is complicated due to having a dead, white immigrant mother and an unknown Black father. Throughout the novel, motherhood is a fraught position, and mothers and maternal figures continuously fail the protagonist. In the end, she herself becomes a mother, but her choices mean that her children will become orphans, too. By uncovering the portentous relationship between whiteness, orphanhood, and space in early twentieth century American literature, this study provides new layers of possible interpretation that enrichen the fields of literary studies, whiteness studies, gender studies, and research on American imperialism.

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Indigenous petrification in the settler colony: Anne-Marie McManus, ‘Race, Time, and the Petrified Subject in Algeria: Reading Frantz Fanon’s Algerian Writings and Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 44, 2024, pp. 287-302

08Aug24

Abstract: Two major thinkers of anti-colonialism in Algeria—Kateb Yacine, author of the novel Nedjma (1956), and Frantz Fanon—described the impacts of colonial violence through figures of petrification that blur the border between human and nonhuman. Their works ground this article’s relational reading across anti-Black and anti-Algerian racializations, drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s concept of rhythmic reading and scholarship on comparative racialization. Petrification seeks to capture subjective absence: a modality of living as a negated subject who is excluded from the category of the human. This relational frame suggests absence as a plural, disappearing mode of knowledge production under colonialism. Yacine’s novel fleshes out alternative modalities of being human that appear, in Fanon’s Algerian writings, as flickers en route to revolution, or clinical diagnoses. Fanon’s oeuvre and its readers generate a new critique of Yacine’s canonical novel. This article develops absence as a new vocabulary, beyond colonial psychiatry and its agentive resistance, for the reading of literature from the settler colony. Building on feminist critiques of Nedjma, it names anti-Blackness in the novel as an instance of the text’s participation in the field of Man at the moment it tries to write, through absence, its outside.

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Settler colonialism as a mirage: Angelo Matteo Caglioti, ‘”Natural” disasters, ignorance, and the mirage of Italian settler colonialism in late nineteenth-century Africa’, Past & Present, 2024

08Aug24

Abstract: This article places the origins of Italian settler colonialism and its defeat in the battle of Adwa (1896) in the global perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism. It argues that the Italian project to turn the highlands of the Horn of Africa into a settler colony was an “imperial mirage”: the perception that the momentarily depopulated landscape of Ethiopia, produced by “natural” disasters that were in fact the social products of colonial warfare, would be available to Italian settlers in the future. This mirage was based on a domino effect of environmental catastrophes connecting climate history, animal disease, and the politics of European imperialism. Italians’ introduction of rinderpest in Eritrea in the wake of an El Niño-related drought triggered “the Great African Rinderpest Panzootic” and the “Great Ethiopian Famine”. The mixture of willful ignorance and wishful self-deception that fueled Italian projects explains Italy’s defeat in the battle of Adwa. Building on the methodology of environmental historians and scholars in Science and Technology Studies, this article shifts focus from the power of the state to the techno-politics of colonialism in its impact on natural environments and African communities through the lens of the cultural production of ignorance.

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Settler colonial tourism: Holly Eva Katherine Randell-Moon, ‘Seeing like a settler: place-making, settler heritage, and tourism in Dubbo, Australia’, Tourism Geographies, 2024

06Aug24

Abstract: This paper focuses on the settler colonial landscapes of tourism in the regional city of Dubbo, Australia. Dubbo is situated on Wiradyuri Country in the Orana region of New South Wales. Focusing specifically on the heritage-listed Old Dubbo Gaol and the Dundullimal Homestead, a former pastoral station, I explicate how these tourist sites offer experiences that normalise settler dwelling and occupation of First Nations Country. The Old Dubbo Gaol and Dundullimal occupy a broader settler colonial landscape where Dubbo is presented historically as ‘empty’ until settlers exploited the town’s ‘natural’ resources. By occluding the relationship between invasion, pastoralism, and Indigenous dispossession, the sites reproduce for visitors settler colonial metanarratives of dwelling. Using Tim Ingold’s notion of taskscape, I show how the tourist sites create taskscapes which invite visitors and consumers to engage in settler forms of dwelling that normalise a settler colonial landscape. Tourist taskscapes consist of the activities and interactions in a heritage site that encourage visitors to take an active role in experiencing place and history. By aligning these experiences and activities to settler narratives and histories, the sites interpellate visitors into the processes of autochthony that were/are used to negate First Nations sovereignties. While these taskscapes are leaky and contain the presence of First Nations in select parts of the heritage sites, the taskscapes dominate heritage tourism and normalise settler colonisation as a feature of place-making that does not require explicit explanation or education.

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Toxic settler colonialism: Anita Lam, Steven Kohm, ‘Sensing Toxic Injustice: Exploring the Polluting Touch of Colonialism’, The British Journal of Criminology, 2024

06Aug24

Abstract: The bodies of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls are often discovered at polluted sites in Winnipeg, Canada, including the Red River. Left at toxic sites that authorities deem environmentally dangerous, these women became untouchable in death, mired in sociocultural representations of disposability and wasting practices. We link murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls to the polluting effects of white settler colonialism especially pertaining to the degradation of Winnipeg’s waterways. As a means for enacting slow, environmental violence, current waste allocation practices remain tied to colonial systems that continue to harm Indigenous peoples. To foreground overlapping devaluations of Indigenous lands and people, we argue for a sensory criminology that is sensitized to the ongoing damage of colonial violence.

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Settler moral ecologies: Heather B. Trigg, Stephen A. Mrozowski, ‘Dominion and improvement: The moral ecologies of colonial encounters’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 2024

06Aug24

Abstract: Environmental relationships were critical to most early colonial encounters, especially for those involving permanent settlements. The ability to successfully establish a colony required developing relationships with plants, animals, and the land because they were central to providing for the colonists’ basic subsistence needs. The ways European colonizers developed these new relationships rested on their moral ecologies, a mix of beliefs and practices which give a sense of right and wrong to actions that are informed by ontologies. In this paper we use the concept of moral ecologies to explore the relationships that two empires—the British in New England and the Spanish in New Mexico—created as they established colonies that also entangled Indigenous peoples. The differences in moral ecologies between these empires and the peoples they invaded help explain tensions in the past that remain powerful today.

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Settler representations: Brian Buud, News Framing of Indigenous Politics in Canada: Representation in the Era of Reconciliation, Palgrave, 2024

06Aug24

Description: This book explores the news media’s coverage of Indigenous-settler reconciliation following the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Using a comparative case study research design, the book examines news coverage of three significant Indigenous rights issues and events during the post-TRC era. The findings presented demonstrate that in the post-TRC era, the Canadian news media continue to produce systemic patterns in coverage which reject, marginalize and erase the territorial rights and claims of Indigenous Peoples. The author concludes that rather than helping to move the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and settlers forward along a path of reconciliation, power-sharing, and the resurgence of land-based self-determination, the news media are continuing to construct discourses and representations that work against the political objectives of Indigenous Peoples and reinforce settler colonial power relationships in Canada.

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Cynophiliac settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, ‘Gaza’s underdogs: From zoometrics to domicide’, Political Geography, 114, 2024, #103162

06Aug24

Excerpt: Images of Israeli soldiers saving dogs and cats buried in rubble by explosions have become popular in the Israeli press and social media in the current round of violence in Gaza. But what can be gleaned from the fact that no images circulate that depict Israeli soldiers digging Palestinian children out of the rubble? How does Israel’s empathy toward dogs and cats in Gaza relate to statements by Israeli officials describing Gazans as hayot-adam, a term that translates to “animal-humans” and is used colloquially in Hebrew to refer to beasts or savages? And how might animal survival and animal death help us understand the shifting meaning of humanness and humaneness amid the ongoing violence in Gaza?

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Antarctica’s settler colonial traditions: Alice E. Oates, ‘Settler colonial mindsets at Halley research station, 1955–present’, in Peder Roberts, Alejandra Mancilla (eds), Colonialism and Antarctica: Attitudes, logics and practices, Manchester University Press, 2024, pp. 248-270

06Aug24

Abstract: Colonialism is an area of growing interest for Antarctic scholars, but settler colonialism has so far received only minimal attention. This chapter utilises interviews with over-winterers from Halley research station, a British station on the Brunt Ice Shelf in West Antarctica, to argue that viewing British Antarctic activity within the broader context of settler colonialism can expand our understanding of the operation of Antarctic science and governance. Drawing on literature dealing with British colonial philosophies, settler colonial studies, and Antarctic humanities and social sciences, this chapter questions definitions of settler colonialism dependent on the dispossession of Indigenous people and focuses instead on appropriation of space as an explanatory factor in British settler colonialism in Antarctica. It identifies threads of a settler colonial mentality among Antarctic over-winterers, and in doing so contributes to scholarship that calls for a focus on the micro-history of settler colonialism, and seeks to situate Antarctica within the geopolitical context beyond 60o south.

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Genocide, the latest stage of a dying settler colonialism: Faris Giacaman, ‘Netanyahu’s willing executioners: how ordinary Israelis became mass murderers: After ten months of relentless genocidal war, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that both the Israeli state and society are partners in the genocide. The picture that emerges is a genocide from above and below’, Mondoweiss, 30/07/24

03Aug24

Excerpt: Drawing historical analogies is always tricky, not least because political regimes and their underlying motivations for carrying out atrocities during war vary wildly. The kind of imperial German racial supremacy that was part of the genocide of European Jewry was different from the settler colonial imperative of the “elimination of the native” that characterized the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas by European colonists, or indeed the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 or the Gaza genocide today. But despite these differences, a common thread still runs through them, and so drawing these comparisons becomes unavoidable.

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