settler colonial studies blog

The settler logic of language elimination: Cory A. Buckband, ‘A genealogical inquiry into raciolinguistic ideology and language policy among Spanish Franciscan missionaries in Alta California’, Language Policy, 2024

09Jul24

Abstract: This paper utilizes raciolinguistic genealogy (Flores, in International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2021:111–115, 2021) to explore an historical case study of Spanish Franciscan missionaries in Alta California during an early period of colonization spanning the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries. In the study, I apply a raciolinguistic lens to investigate the racialized and racist basis for a language ideology of contempt (Dorian, in: Small-Language Fates and Prospects (pp. 264–283). Brill). Imported from Europe, this ideology devalued both Indigenous languages and Peoples, acting as a filter for language policymaking at multiple levels of the Spanish Empire and the mission institution. Guided by this ideology, Franciscan missionaries strategically implemented both monolingual and multilingual pedagogies for forced assimilatory religious schooling, which was intended to contribute to a project of linguicide among local Indigenous Peoples in the region. This structural “killing of languages without the killing of speakers” (Bear Nicholas in Briarpatch 40:5–8, 2011: 4) would contribute to Spanish settler colonization in New Spain and Alta California, which sought to dominate Indigenous Peoples and extract their labor power through “elimination via absorption” (Wolfe, in: Traces of history: Elementary structures of race, Verso Books, 2016). The concept of genocidal multilingualism is offered to interpret the missionaries’ strategy to learn and expropriate the languages of local Indigenous communities for the purposes of linguicide and forced assimilation. Today, multilingualism is often affiliated with political support for linguistic and cultural diversity and challenges to hegemonic monolingualism (Kubota in Applied Linguistics 37:474–494, 2016). However, the current neoliberal political context in California and the U.S. may be similarly influenced by a raciolinguistic ideology of contempt that devalues minoritized languages and users, including Indigenous Peoples and their languages, reproducing the linguicidal language shift that characterizes the historical legacy of colonization in the United States.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The place of settler memory: Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell, ‘Memory in Place: Memory at scale: Interdisciplinary engagements with Australian histories’, in Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell (eds), Memory in Place: Locating Colonial Histories and Commemoration, ANU Press, 2023

09Jul24

Excerpt: The nation-state is often the container for conversations about how to remember and commemorate aspects of Australia’s history. In Australian memory studies, much of the research on settler colonialism, Indigenous–settler relations and colonial forgetting focuses on the national level. Cutting through this tendency, chapters in this collection focus on the local level, on places and landscapes where the potency of history and memory come together in lived relations that resonate across generations. While official national and state influences are still a critical concern, many of the essays turn to specific landscapes, biographical accounts or family histories to look at how memory plays out on a more intimate scale. The authors locate us in particular places: a museum, a beach, a tree, a sign, a memorial stone, a digital photograph, the ruin of a children’s home. In many of these cases, people grapple with the same challenge that faces the nation: how to remember what has been forgotten, especially violent and traumatic histories. Yet, the specificities of place and personal histories make it difficult to fall back on the generalising and mythologising strategies that underpin settler-national memories. In some places, national memory still looms large, particularly in state-funded institutions, where the work of curators consists of navigating channels for particular pieces of memory to speak beyond the well-worn mythos of white settlement that has so often served as the default in cultural institutions. This can mean taking leave of the usual houses of history – archives, books, universities – and rethinking where it is that histories are told and commemorative practices performed, and by whom.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settlers and their dreamlands in action: Meredith McKittrick, Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid, University of Chicago Press, 2024

08Jul24

Description: How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state. In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority. Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite. A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Colonization endures: Valarmathi Vishnu, ‘The American Colonization Society (ACS) and Liberia: Unforeseen Legacies of U.S. Intervention’, Columbia Journal of History, 2024

08Jul24

Excerpt: The founding of Liberia by the American Colonization Society (ACS) in the early 19th century represents a pivotal moment in US foreign intervention, initiating a series of events whose consequences reverberated beyond its historical time frame. The ACS was founded in 1816 with the primary intention of repatriating free African Americans and emancipated slaves to a colony in West Africa. The society believed in the concept of colonization as a solution to racial tensions and the issue of slavery in the United States and aimed to recruit volunteers from among free African Americans and emancipated slaves in the United States. These individuals were offered the opportunity to emigrate to Liberia with the promise of land and the prospect of building a new life free from the racial oppression and economic hardship they often faced in the United States. While some individuals volunteered willingly, others were pressured or even coerced into emigrating. The motivations behind the ACS were multifaceted, driven by a blend of humanitarian, racial, and political factors. Some members genuinely believed that resettling freed African Americans in Africa would offer them opportunities unavailable in the United States due to racial discrimination and economic challenges. Others saw this resettlement as a means to remove freed slaves, whom they considered a threat to social order and stability. Additionally, some believed the ACS aimed to do good by spreading Christianity and “civilization” in Africa.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Trafficking settler monuments (on the afterlives of settler structures): Susan Slyomovics, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage, Stanford University Press, 2024

07Jul24

Description: “Statuomania” overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria’s hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were “repatriated” to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage. Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in both countries and interviews with French and Algerian heritage actors and artists, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Monuments emerge here as objects with a soul, offering visual records of the colonized Algerian native, the European settler colonizer, and the contemporary efforts to engage with a dark colonial past. Richly illustrated with more than 100 color images, Monuments Decolonized offers a fresh aesthetic take on the increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate settler colonial histories.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Another strawman argument (if it is a ‘structure and not an event’, and therefore not only ‘a structure’, it is also a relationship and a process): Warren Bernauer, ‘Canadian settler colonialism: Structure, event, relationship, or process?’ Canadian Geographies, 2024

07Jul24

Abstract: Geography scholarship examining Canadian colonialism often draws upon concepts and
categories from the field of Settler Colonial Studies, including Patrick Wolfe’s definition of
settler colonialism as a “structure rather than an event.” In this brief intervention, I argue
that historical Marxist debates about structuralism and social class have important
lessons for the way geographers characterize Canadian colonialism today. The definition
of class as both relationship and process is especially relevant, because Indigenous
intellectuals and activists tend to speak about (de)colonization in similar terms. By
reframing Canadian colonialism as relationship and process rather than structure, we can
better engage Indigenous criticisms of Settler Colonial Studies, understandings of (de)
colonization, and epistemologies and ontologies.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler gastrocolonialism in action: Evelyn Lambeth, ‘Settler Colonial Classifications of Edibility’, Gastronomica, 24, 2, 2024, pp. 43-57

06Jul24

Abstract: The pastoral economies introduced during the colonial invasion have radically transformed Australian diets, cultures, and ecosystems. Stolen land was tenured to settlers and emancipated convicts to develop profitable and productive enterprises for the British Empire. Land rights and animal care are intrinsically linked to modern food systems, yet there is a gap in Australian literature regarding the legacy of colonial pastoralism and its connection to current food systems. This essay questions how introduced species evolved to command the Australian diet. Wallabies and kangaroos were legally relegated to national emblems, and thus inedible. Their conditions of being, whether edible, iconic, or wild, were dictated by the Commonwealth Government. The taboo nature of these native marsupials leaves them largely unconsumed, and therefore, unprotected. Modern conditions of edibility are less concerned with physical metabolic matters, instead driven by historic cultural attitudes and political and economic motives. Nourishment was commodified. My research uses Tasmanian legal archives in conjunction with cookbooks and popular iconography to trace the historical legacies of foodways since the invasion. Scholarship around waste, sociology, ecology, and food justice and sovereignty are incorporated to consider how modern agricultural practices perpetuate violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and ecosystems. Modern agriculture affects every being on the planet, both human and more-than-human. My research goal is to encourage people to question their metabolic practices to ascertain how everyday acts of consumption implicate them within unjust systems. Though consumptive wallaby culling is legal, the industry remains privatized, and Indigenous Australians have little agency to influence how their native species are used, and who profits from their utility. By sharing these concerns with researchers from a broad range of disciplines, I hope to connect with individuals who can help to make future metabolic matters more inclusive, more ethical, and more sustainable.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler gastrocolonialism on display: Zoe Tennant, ‘Terra Nullius on the Plate: Colonial Blindness, Restaurant Discourse, and Indigenous Cuisines’, in Shelley Boyd, Dorothy Barenscott (eds), Canadian Culinary Imaginations, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022

06Jul24

Excerpt: On any given night in a Canadian city, it is possible to eat at restaurants offering a wide variety of cuisines – from Moroccan to Vietnamese, from French to Sri Lankan. However, it is almost impossible to go to a restaurant that serves Indigenous cuisines. In Canada, there are foods that are considered “Indigenous” (taas guz, whipped soapalillie, and roe-on-kelp, to name a few), but one is hard pressed to find these dishes on a menu. French gastronomic writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s oft-quoted “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are” – better known as “you are what you eat” – sums up the basic tenet of the social science of food: that what we eat and the way we eat reflect wider cultural, social, and political processes. What if we were to flip this? What does it mean when a cuisine is not consumed? Cultural anthropologist Carolyn Morris, writing about the absence of Maori cuisine in restaurants in New Zealand, argues that restaurants are signifiers of the public visibility of cuisines and are indicators of capital. According to Morris, “the public culinascape can be read as a map of the field of race relations.” What do Morris’s remarks suggest about the culinary field, the restaurant culture, and the state of settler colonialism in Canada?

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Social work is settler social work: Jill Hoselton, ‘Implicated Subjects: Social Workers, Settler Colonialism, and the Quest for Non-innocence’, Canadian Social Work Review, 41, 1, 2024, pp. 113-132

06Jul24

Abstract: Drawing from Michael Rothberg’s (2019) concept of the “implicated subject,” this paper examines Canadian social work’s implication in settler colonialism from past to present through its role in Indigenous child removal from the Indian Residential Schools to the Sixties Scoop and contemporary child welfare. The “implicated subject” untangles social work from dominant discourses that position social workers as morally superior, innocent, and good, which prevents practitioners from seeing how their professional role perpetuates unintentional harm towards service-users. A practice of non-innocence is proposed, which centres the development of a critical consciousness among social workers regarding the profession’s implication in historical and contemporary harm towards Indigenous Peoples (and other marginalized populations) by way of settler colonial practices. This awareness positions practitioners as political actors with a responsibility to engage in political action dedicated towards social justice.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonial PSYOPS: Desmond Hassing, Settler Dreams and Affective Warfare: The Communications Campaign that Formatted the United States of America, PhD dissertation, University of California San Diego / University of California Irvine, 2024

06Jul24

Abstract: “Settler Dreams and Affective Warfare: The Communications Campaign that Formatted the United States of America” proposes a methodology of analysis which (re)considers cultural products as intentional war messaging, or what is commonly referred to in military circles, as psychological operations (PSYOPS). By conducting a close reading of Indigenous representation, and the rhetoric that surrounded its production in the films, mascots, and comic books of the 20th and 21st century, this dissertation argues that the purpose of what we think of as Indian tropes was to further a wartime message of national identity creation, and further that cultural products are the best strategic weapon available to minoritarian subjects in the present for altering national identity formation.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute