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The settler nation takes place: Katherine Szadziewicz Scharfenberg, Nations Taking Place: Unsettling Geographies in Indigenous and American Literatures, PhD dissertation,  Northwestern University, 2024

30Jul24

Abstract: “Nations Taking Place: Unsettling Geographies in Indigenous and American Literatures” considers the resistant, political, and affective power of geographic discourse in North America produced in the decades before and after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830—that is, roughly between the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War (the late 1760s) and the decade preceding the Civil War (the mid 1850s). This study explores how geographic discourse simultaneously produced and unsettled social models for different kinds of communities. My analysis is particularly interested in how Native people used settler geographic discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a way to resist colonialist violence and assert Native sovereignty. I also examine the central formal literary features—such as irony and narrative cohesion—that provide the mode of expression to demonstrate geographic discourse’s formally disruptive potential. The archive of “Nations Taking Place” includes treaty literature and other diplomatic writings, natural history, Native life-writing, and novels and poetry by Indigenous and settler writers including Hendrick Aupaumut (Mohican), Thomas Jefferson, William Apess (Pequot), John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), Unca Eliza Winkfield (pseudonym), and Mary Jemison (adopted Seneca).


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Land and genocide: Mikalla N. Freisinger, Unveiling Environmental Injustice: Exploring the Genocidal Consequences of Settler Colonialism on Navajo Land, MA dissertation, Northern Arizona University, 2024

30Jul24

Abstract: This thesis project investigates the historical trajectory and contemporary implications of colonial environmental destruction on the Navajo reservation in North America, focusing specifically on the detrimental effects of uranium mining. Three central research questions guide this inquiry: (1) What is the historical context of colonial environmental destruction on the Navajo reservation? (2) How has colonial environmental destruction harmed the residents on the Navajo reservation? (3) How can the ways settlers have obscured the harms done on the Navajo reservation be explained by theories of racial capitalism, environmental racism, and state corporate crime, as it relates to environmental genocide? Utilizing a historical approach informed by critical Indigenous theory, this research draws upon a diverse range of secondary data sources. Through this lens, the research uncovers the deep-rooted patterns of colonial exploitation and environmental degradation on Navajo lands. The findings reveal the multifaceted impacts of colonial environmental destruction on Navajo communities, including adverse health effects, cultural displacement, and ecological degradation. Furthermore, the study elucidates how settler interests have often aligned with state and corporate entities, as well as perpetuated environmental injustices through mechanisms of racial capitalism, environmental racism, state corporate crime and human right violations. By contextualizing these findings this research underscores the urgent need for environmental justice approaches that center Indigenous sovereignty, community resilience, and restitution for past injustices. It calls for recognition of the ongoing battle of colonial exploitation and a commitment to transformative action to address systemic inequalities and environmental injustices faced by many Indigenous communities.


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Plain settlers: Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders, University of Nebraska Press, 2024

29Jul24

Description: Great Plains Homesteaders tells the epic story of how millions of people, white and Black, women and men, young and old, and of many different religions, languages, and ethnic groups, moved to the Great Plains to claim land. Most were poor, so the government’s offer of “free” farms through the Homestead Act of 1862 seemed a godsend. The settlers found harsh growing conditions and many perils—including exploitation by railroads and banks, droughts, prairie fires, and bitter winters—yet they persisted. The settlers successfully “proved up” nearly a million claims between the 1860s and the 1920s. They filled up the immense grassland, transforming it into productive farms, the beginning of the region’s agriculture. They also created a distinct culture that continues to shape their estimated fifty million descendants living today. Every homesteader’s experience was different, as particular and distinct as the people were themselves. Yet their collective story, with all its hardships and toil, its ambitions and setbacks, its fresh starts and failures and successes, is central to the American experience.


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Deliberative democracy against settler democracy: Roger Davis, ‘Rethinking Australian democracy as a deliberative system’, AlterNative, 2024

28Jul24

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between Australia’s Indigenous and settler colonial systems of democracy through the lens of deliberative systems theory. It suggests that the ongoing effects of colonialism have rendered Indigenous democracy largely invisible causing a harmful divide in Australia’s democracies. A pluralist conception of democracy is necessary to understand the disconnect between the two systems, evidenced by a striking absence of literature on Australian Indigenous democracy. In response, this paper first theorizes a conceptual framework of a concurrent deliberative system, then describes the Indigenous deliberative system and the colonial system’s efforts to eliminate Indigenous democracy. Against this theoretical and empirical background, it considers whether the recent referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament was just a colonial legacy or represented a pathway towards a shared postcolonial democratic future.


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Settler engineering: Tyler McCreary, Frank Schmitz, ‘Engineering indigenous dispossession and plantation slavery in the Southeast Gulf coast’, Journal of Historical Geography, 86, 2024, pp. 107-116

28Jul24

Abstract: In this paper we examine the activities of US Army topographers and engineers in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) watershed during the violent transformation of the region from the heartlands of the Creek confederacy to US territorial control. A vital waterway for the Creek in the late eighteenth century, the rivers would become an important transportation network in the US plantation economy by the early nineteenth century. We emphasize that the army made its initial infrastructural improvements in the region to provide security for the plantation system. Army engineering in the ACF watershed began in the struggle for the Gulf borderlands, as white American settlers, British forces, Indigenous peoples, and Black maroons fought for control over the contested terrain. US engineers and topographers produced territorial knowledge and physical infrastructure to facilitate the occupation of Indigenous territory and elimination of potential spaces of Black freedom. Topographic knowledge would later serve as the foundation for restructuring the land as property, naturalizing its possession by white plantation owners. Similarly, roads and waterway improvements, created to facilitate troop movements, would later serve as vital transportation infrastructure for settlement and expanding plantation slavery. This paper demonstrates how military engineering techniques designed to secure the Nation in the context of race war subsequently provided the coordinates for reorganizing the land within an emergent plantation economy inside its territorial borders.


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Digital poetics against settler colonialism: Rana A. Sharif, Digital Poetics and Languages of Refusal: Enunciation, Narration, and the Technomediated Question of Palestine, PhD dissertation, UC Riverside, 2024

28Jul24

Abstract: What does it mean to narrate the human condition when it is forced to confront militarization, occupation, and displacement? What does it mean to author experiences violently constrained by settler colonialism? Furthermore, what does it mean to engage in such practices using digital media? Reflecting on these questions, my dissertation explores the affirming ways Palestinians narrate their experiences using new and digital media, communicating what I refer to as a digital poetic. In my work, I illustrate how a digital poetic reveals technomediated possibilities for Palestinian sociality not foreclosed by the disembodying and death-making logics of settler colonialism, militarization, occupation, or displacement. I take as my point of departure the impossibility of narration advanced by Edward Said in his essay, “Permission to Narrate” (1984). Said highlights obstacles to narrating a Palestinian experience due to the pejorative powers of Israel and the West’s “disciplinary communication apparatus.” In attending to Said’s call for a Palestinian-authored narration, my dissertation advances a decolonial feminist reading practice illuminating an exclusively Palestinian sociality unconcerned with externalized validation and unrestricted by the disciplinary powers of the state. To undertake this work, my project first outlines a poetics of refusal, by centering Palestinian examples of life-making, life-preserving, and life-affirming practices. To illustrate this, I first engage with the writings of contemporary Arab women writers Etel Adnan, Adania Shibli, and Suheir Hammad to articulate a poetics of refusal that gives rise to a grammatology of an embodied sociality. Then, to exemplify the layered textures of a Palestinian digital poetic, I turn my attention to the 2020 Palestine Writes Literature Festival. Taking place over five days and accessible on the festival’s “Virtual Venue,” social media sites including YouTube and Instagram, Palestine Writes is a celebratory invitation into Palestinian life, culture, and futurity. Untethered by the settler-colonial state’s “disciplinary communication apparatus,” the festival’s literary, cultural, political, and experiential presentations of Palestinian life offer a new language of resistance. These digital poetics not only unearth new publics capable of examining power, but also birth new ways of existing and knowing for those who produce them and those who engage them.


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The climate emergency and the settlerocene: Johan Höglund, The American Climate Emergency Narrative: Origins, Developments and Imaginary Futures, Palgrave, 2024

24Jul24

Description: The American Climate Emergency Narrative reveals reveals how much of what has been called “climate fiction” casts ecological breakdown as an emergency for American capitalist modernity rather than for the planet. The book traces the origins of this narrative back to the arrival of settler capitalism in America, when the understanding of the planet and its people as extractable resources was established. Since then, this narrative has elided the violent history of the climate crisis while at the same time leveraging the military as a bulwark against the crises capitalism has caused, the people it has uprooted, even the ailing planet itself.


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The settlers are dominating a settler society (and Indigenous peoples): Edo Konrad, ‘Israel’s Unseen Second Front: While the war in Gaza rages on, militant Jewish settlers are pushing further into the Palestinian heartland’, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 11/07/24

23Jul24

Excerpt: “We talk a lot about settler violence as if it is the problem, but it is a symptom of the problem — the real issue is the occupation and settler colonialism. The state itself sees its settlers as a good thing for its expansionist ambitions, so it makes sense that there is less law enforcement against them”.


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So let’s unsettle now: Anna-Leah King, Kathleen O’Reilly, Patrick J. Lewis (eds), Unsettling Education: Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Land, Canadian Scholars, 2024

23Jul24

Description: This edited collection tackles “unsettling” as an emerging field of study that calls for settlers to follow Indigenous leadership and relationality and work toward disrupting the colonial reality through their everyday lives. Bringing together Indigenous and non- Indigenous scholars and activists, Unsettling Education considers how we can reconcile and transcend ongoing settler colonialism. The contributors reflect on how the three concepts of unsettling, Indigenization, and decolonization overlap and intersect in practical and theoretical ways. Questions are raised such as how can we recognize and address historical and current injustices that have been imposed upon Indigenous Peoples and their lands? How can we respect the fundamental and inherent sovereignty and rights of Indigenous Peoples as we work toward reconciliation? And how do we work collectively to build more equitable and just communities for all who call Canada home? Unsettling Education is well suited for college and university courses in Indigenous studies or education that focus on decolonization, land-based learning, Indigenization, unsettling, and reconciliation.


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The Indigenes-environment nexus (it infuriates the settlers): Rashed Daghamin, ‘Environmental Terrorism: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Study of Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah’, The International Journal of Critical Cultural Studies, 22, 2, 2024, pp. 175-191

23Jul24

Abstract: Drawing inspiration from the principles of postcolonial ecocriticism, this research investigates the correlation that Mourid Barghouti constructs in his autobiographical novel I Saw Ramallah (2003) between the occupied Palestinians and their exploited environmental and natural world. This essay contends that the novel presents a comprehensive perspective that necessitates an appreciation of the interconnectedness between the national and bioecological struggles and resistance of the colonized people. Nature serves as a source of inspiration and resistance. In this context, the Palestinians’ fight against the loss of their land and identity is concurrently a resistance against the exploitation of their environment; thus, the Palestinians’ connection with their natural environment represents a form of attachment and resistance. This research advances the main postcolonial ecocritical claim that the natives’ existence is inextricably linked to the survival of their environment. Through depictions of the natural and environmental worlds, the author conveys his feelings about the environment, demonstrating the principle of human-ecosystem interconnectedness and revealing the environmental consciousness that permeates the narrative. Thus, an examination of the novel demonstrates the principles of the critical intersection of ecocriticism and postcolonialism.


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