Abstract: The article explores the strategic use of the pseudonym “Yakut” by a group of Sakha (Yakut) intellectuals in the late Russian Empire to assert their political voice against imperial authority and settler colonialism. Operating from the margins of the empire, this collective voice engaged in sophisticated public discourse that did not merely respond to imperial misrepresentation but actively constructed a political language of Indigenous self-assertion. The article systematically examines three key thematic areas in which the pseudonym was deployed: rewriting Sakha history to legitimize traditional governance, rigorously critiquing land policy and settler colonialism with environmental realism, and advocating for Indigenous self-government by repurposing imperial legal frameworks. Ultimately, the article argues that “Yakut” was a discursive position crafted by an educated elite to assert intellectual sovereignty and redefine the terms of Sakha participation within a contradictory imperial system.

Abstract: This essay is framed by the author’s decision to invent a historical document – a fictitious guide to colonization management written by the imagined bureaucrat Andrei Ivanovich Korotich – to visualize the real but unsystematized Russian colonization ideology of the 1840s. Focused on peasant resettlement ( pereselenie) as a bureaucratic tool for rationalizing the relationship between land and people, this invented “Guide to Russian Colonization Management,” highlights the chaos, corruption, and “unauthorized” movement of state peasants. This thought experiment synthesizes a nonexistent bureaucratic manual based on the general governmentality of the era, as represented by Nicholas I’s legislation and numerous instructions. Published alongside a real analytical memo on colonization penned in 1907 by the longtime colonization expert Fyodor Umnov, this essay exposes the limitations of applying settler colonialism models based on clear binaries and homogenizing the “colonial mind” as suggested by settler colonial theorists. The complex and historically evolving semantics of settler colonization in the imperial context renders those binaries uninformative – whether these are empire versus subject or resettlement versus the state.

Abstract: Animal rights activism has been criticised in settler-colonial states for overlooking human rights abuses and shielding colonial powers. However, the efforts of animal rights activists to expand their political alliances with subaltern and colonised others are laden with tensions, stemming from the oppression and violence of settler-colonial projects. The steps that progressive non-Indigenous activists can take to support alliances with colonised others are therefore unclear. In this article, we contend that Indigenous activists’ perspectives offer critical insights into the development of alliances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists towards linked human and animal rights in settler-colonial states. Drawing on an ethnography with Indigenous activists in Occupied Palestine (pre-October 7), we show that the conditions for alliance-building exceed the rejection of racialised settler colonialism. They also require commitments by non-Indigenous activists towards Indigenous grassroots movements encompassing the diverse political agendas and heterogeneity of Indigenous societies. Beyond the hegemony of Israeli occupation, Palestinian activists seek alliances that centre community and youth development, and self-determination as key dimensions of linked animal and human rights. These priorities unsettle the Western strictures of animal rights anchored in veganism as the sole political concern of Palestinian activists. Questioning the efficacy of inflexible moral and ethical frameworks as platforms for alliance-building, we instead locate alliances for linked animal and human rights within a politics of listening anchored in settler-colonial discomfort, the labour of yielding to Indigenous priorities and remaining open to contingent, ‘on the ground’ politics. In so doing, we show that activist ethnography can reveal complex postcolonial engagements with the political, and the plural and hybrid human and animal activisms that these geographies give rise to.

Abstract: This chapter proposes cement – the world’s most widely used building material, as a lens through which to theorize the processes of Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. It draws on an ethnographic case study of Israeli settlement construction of private villas in Nokdim and follows cement’s material and immaterial flows. By attending to cement’s material properties, ideological connotations, geopolitical and legal deployment, and unpredictable connections and trajectories, this chapter goes beyond the categorical separation between “the material-lived” (the built environment) and “the representational” (discourse on settlements). The open-ended assemblage that emerges from this case shows that “the material-lived” and “the representational” are co-constitutive and cannot be studied separately and that centring the building material can reconceptualize theory on settler colonialism, its practices, and processes. This chapter invites the political and material anthropologist to think with and through building materials and urges the architect to think of materials beyond their physical, sustainable, and aesthetic properties.

Abstract: In August 2019, the Hindu nationalist government led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) unilaterally abolished Kashmir’s autonomous status, the basis of its provisional accession to India. Since then, the Indian government has revoked Kashmir’s special land protections that prevented outsiders from buying land in Kashmir. Some scholars have responded to this political moment by situating Jammu and Kashmir within a theoretical settler-colonial model, interpreting India’s past integration policies, surveillance, assimilation agenda, land dispossession, and more through this lens. However, this chapter demonstrates the limitations of the settler-colonial framework to explain the rich and complex post-1947 history of Kashmir. Instead, it places the land question in Kashmir within its unique regional context and examines the complex dynamics at play. Drawing on laws and legislation, court cases, and legal narratives, this chapter historicizes India’s territorialization efforts across different temporal frames against the backdrop of state-subject laws, agrarian reforms, urban spatial changes, and the recent transformation of Kashmir into a site of neoliberal economic extraction. It also highlights the emotional significance of land for Kashmiris and its role in shaping their politics of collaboration and resistance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that India’s forcible integration of Kashmir reflects a postcolonial nation-building strategy focused on producing territorial sovereignty, shaped by the entanglements of imperial capitalism, neoliberalism, and corporate interests.

Abstract: Settler colonialism instantiated not only new regimes of property relations that privilege mastery and ownership but also a suite of concepts that define humans apart from land and Earth processes. Addressing the legacy of settler colonialism warrants addressing not only the historical legacy of political and economic arrangements but also the conceptual legacies that continue to insert, into scholarship, the fiction of human independence of the conditions of local habitability. Building on the call of Danowski and De Castro (2016) to refigure the concept of the human which universalises the illusion of people’s separation from nature, their concept of the “Terran” invites an integrative science of local habitability based on material flows, exchanges, and relations. Critical zone sciences, I suggest, frame the terms of such a science that avoids reducing the world to calculative reason sans context.

• Jane Komori, ‘“Worried Over This Boat”: Archives of Asian Settler Colonial Critique’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This article examines the history of racialized labor in pre-World War II primary resource industries along British Columbia’s Fraser River. I argue that settler colonial policies and practices that restricted the activities of Indigenous peoples and Asian Canadians – while often meant to divide them – were productive of dynamic relationships and solidarities. At the same time, I articulate a historiographical method for Asian settler colonial critique that brings together the wealth of records of Asian immigrant and Indigenous relationships.

• r. Shizuko Hayashi-Simpliciano, Sachi Edwards, ‘De-Imperializing Through Moshiri: An Ainu in Diaspora Framework for Addressing Internalized Empire and Japanese American Apathy’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: In this paper we introduce the Moshiri Model, a framework to guide the process of de-imperialization that is rooted in Ainu in Diaspora spirituality and experience. Using reconstructed dialogues as a storytelling method, we illustrate what it can look like to engage in de-imperializing work within ourselves and our communities. Doing so requires confronting how internalized Japanese imperialism, Christian supremacy, and Zionism (and their historical interconnections) have shaped, and continue to shape, Asian settler colonialism. Ultimately, the de-imperialization work we describe aims to guide critical reflection about our individual and collective relationships with and responsibilities toward Indigenous communities.

• Tabitha Espina,Kristin Oberiano, Josephine Ong, ‘Deconstructing Asian Settler Colonialism and the American Dream in Guåhan/Guam and Other Sites of U.S. Empire’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This is a conversation between several co-founders of Filipinos for Guåhan to discuss academic and community work on the specific articulations that Filpino colonial setter colonialism plays in Guåhan/Guam. We consider the ways that Asian settler colonialism enables us to deconstruct dehumanizing social, political, epistemic, and linguistic hierarchies and instead build in and through inafa’maolek as a value and practice.

• Ryan Buyco, ‘Filipinx Reflections on Travel Writing and Asian Settler Colonial Critique in Okinawa’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This essay is a reflection on my ongoing book project, Island Under the Sun: Filipino American Detours in Okinawa, which is a travelogue informed by Asian settler colonial critique. This project considers how histories of Japanese and American colonialisms shape the relationship that Filipinos have to this place, especially given how the U.S. bases have historically brought, and continue to bring, Filipinos to these islands. In this essay, I suggest that the genre of travel writing can be used in decolonial ways, to express forms of relationality that disrupt the tourist image of Okinawa as “Japan’s Hawai’i.

• Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal, Goldie Osuri, Beenash Jafri, Zunaira Shakur, ‘Critical Kashmir Studies and Asian Settler Colonial Critique: A Conversation’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: In this conversation, three scholars of Critical Kashmir Studies – Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal, and Goldie Osuri – reflect on how Asian settler colonial critique might usefully be mobilized toward understanding the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Asian settler colonial critique not only disrupts India’s postcolonial narrative, but also shifts the conversation on Kashmir away from discourses of geopolitical security or bi-lateral relations between India and Pakistan.

• Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman, Mengzhu Fu, ‘Spiraling In and Out: A Conversation on Decolonial Asian and Indigenous Solidarity from Aotearoa and So-Called Canada to Asia’, Amerasisa Journal, 2025

Abstract: As Indigenous resurgence and resistance globally make visible the violence of colonization, the growth of Asian diasporic solidarity introduces new possibilities and challenges. Literature examining Asian-Indigenous solidarities in settler colonial states primarily focuses on so-called North America. This conversation between organizers Nabilah Husna Abdul Rahman and Mengzhu Fu spirals from Aotearoa-based practices of decolonial solidarity outwards to Singapore, Canada-occupied Indigenous lands, and beyond. They explore place-based practices of solidarity, pedagogies, and their potential connections to international Indigenous communities. Offering practical strategies, from “small” to “big,” they reaffirm the centrality of the protection of Indigenous land and waters in solidarity efforts.

• Nishant Upadhyay, ‘Fraught Solidarities: Diasporic Hindutva and Claims to Indigeneity’, Amerasisa Journal, 2025

Abstract: In recent years, diasporic hindu right has mobilized discourses of indigeneity to forge solidarities with Indigenous peoples across varying white settler colonial contexts of the U.S, Hawaiʻi, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. These solidarities are not decolonial but are colonial and casted manifestations of hindu nationalism. Rooted in brahminical supremacy, these solidarities are not only fraudulent but also disavow the lives and struggles of Indigenous peoples globally. These solidarities demonstrate how the hindu right works in insidious ways in the disguise of multiculturalism and liberal anti-racism to co-opt and manipulate anti-colonial and decolonial agendas.

• Leah M. Kuragano, ‘Four Lessons from Winnipeg on Asian Settler “Belonging”’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This essay contemplates my (re)settlement to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the form of a personal narrative, mapped out through four lessons in border-crossing, safety, orientation, and unlandedness. Each lesson reflects on the fraught complexities of “belonging” for Asian settlers as well as the liberatory potential of a relationship to place for Asian settlers that takes sacred connection, a love for community, and devotion to land as its lodestar.

Abstract: This chapter critically speculates on landscape collectives in Aotearoa New Zealand in relation to Māori sovereignty in the context of setter-colonialism. It explores how landscape design, when informed by Māori relations and worldview can shift the whiteness of settler-colonial socio-spatial epistemologies that govern landscape architectural practice. Drawing on material occasions, the chapter discusses how landscape design intersects with hyperlocal Māori ways of being and knowing through drawing and mapping practices to effect renewed inscriptions upon colonised lands. The inquiry demonstrates how landscape architects can navigate the complex entanglement of Māori and Pākehā ontologies, asserting that landscape is a vehicle for renewed collective relationality. Ultimately the chapter envisions “landscapes-to-come” in Aotearoa NZ as becoming more Māori, rooted in the principles of whakapapa and reciprocity. However, at stake in such a future is the demand for non-indigenous landscape architects to divest of landscape imaginations aligned to the hegemonies of whiteness.

Abstract: As a cultural landscape inhabited by different agricultural cultures over time, the World Heritage listing of Battir recognises its potential to be simultaneously interpreted as both as a biblical landscape, and an historic Palestinian village (without negating other actors and periods). The interpretation of the site’s environmental and aesthetic values have already succeeded in bringing Israeli and Palestinian activists together to call for its preservation. International experts working for UNESCO were crucial in bringing the landscape to the world’s attention. UNESCO’s designation of the site shepherded both Israeli and Palestinian experts to recognise the site’s value. In short, Battir has many of the elements which serve as prerequisites for localised conflict transformation, and potentially ‘reconciliation’ to take place. However, the withdrawal of Israel and the USA from UNESCO has once more put such aims at risk. Regular demolitions of structures continue to take place in and around the village under the auspices of the Israeli authorities, incursions by potential settlers are on the rise, and the difficulties of the legal quagmires of the ‘area systems’ of the Oslo Accords make Battir’s continued efforts a barometer of the impact that heritage interpretation is having in the area.

Abstract: This article examines the role of banana plantations in the settler-colonial, capitalist transformation of Mandate-era Palestine. A microcosm of Zionist settlement and Indigenous Palestinian resistance, the cultivation of bananas reveals competing visions of development and national legitimacy, rooted in the cultural politics of ecological and economic nationalism. Framing banana cultivation in Palestine as a site of eco-nationalist struggle, the article details the convergence of capitalism, agriculture and ecology at the heart of the Zionist-Arab conflict. While bananas were not new to Palestine, efforts to significantly expand production under the British Mandate were constrained by the region’s poorly suited soil and climate, giving rise to competing discourses of scientific knowledge and cultural rootedness. Neither native to Palestine nor grounded in biblical tradition, bananas evoked in the settlers an ersatz ‘secular’ imagination of their inherent capability and expertise, which clashed with the lived reality of the Indigenous people’s deep familiarity with the local ecology and comparative agricultural success. Drawing on extensive primary sources, the article traces scientific discourses and cultural representations of banana cultivation in the districts of Beisan and Jericho, shedding new light on the ways in which agriculture shaped the Zionist-Arab conflict, including the role of the Palestinian capitalist class in resisting settler-colonial dispossession. The article thus explicates the role of bananas in uneven regional development and the struggle for control over land, demonstrating the usefulness of eco-nationalism as a lens to better understand economy and ecology as tools of capital accumulation and control.