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Antiterrorist settler colonialism: Michael Clarke, ‘Xinjiang in the 21st century: Surveillance, social reengineering and settler colonialism in Xi Jinping’s “new era”‘, in Czeslaw Tubilewicz (ed.), Critical Issues in Contemporary China, Routledge, 2024

10Aug24

Abstract: This chapter examines the Chinese Communist Party’s policies towards Turkic Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. It argues that the systematic repression of Xinjiang under Xi Jinping’s leadership demonstrates that the Party-state’s approach is an outgrowth of the convergence of two distinct yet interrelated imperatives – an ideological shift toward assimilation of ethnic minorities and adaptation of global models of ‘counterterrorism’ – that seek to eradicate Turkic Muslim identities and replace them with ‘domesticated’ ethnic identities aligned with Han Chinese political and socio-economic norms. The ideological shift toward outright assimilation of ethnic minorities is informed by a perception that the security threat posed by the ‘extremism’ is generated by the Party’s perception that there is an inherent link between socio-economic ‘under-development’ and Turkic Muslim identity. As such, a core goal of the Party is to break this link through the application of a development strategy that facilitates the economic, social, demographic and physical transformation of Xinjiang into a ‘normal’ Chinese province. The adaptation of global models of ‘counterterrorism’ to Xinjiang, in turn, has yielded a system of surveillance designed to predict and interdict ‘terrorism’ before it occurs based on the collection and assessment of outward ‘signs’ of ‘deviancy’.


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Settler infrastructure must be defended: Jenna Inch, ‘Securitizing “Critical Infrastructure” in So-Called Canada: Petro-Colonialism, Land Defence, and Alberta’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act’, On Politics, 17, 1, 2024, pp. 1-19

09Aug24

Abstract: In June 2020, Alberta’s United Conservative government under Jason Kenney passed the Critical Infrastructure Defence Act (CIDA). This provincial act codifies penalties for trespassing or obstructing various forms of “critical infrastructure,” including infrastructure attributed to Alberta’s fossil fuel economy. However, unbeknownst to many, CIDA was passed in direct response to Wet’suwet’en land defenders blockading pipeline infrastructure on their lands in the central interior of British Columbia and the cross-country solidarity blockades which followed. This paper analyzes the securitization of pipeline infrastructure throughout Canada’s contemporary history, showcasing how fossil fuel infrastructure has been discursively lodged as “critical” for Canada’s socio-economic well being since Stephen Harper’s reign as Prime Minister. As a consequence, Indigenous land defenders have been narrativized as extremist threats by actors within Canadian settler-state governance, including actors within the Alberta provincial government during the passing of CIDA, in an effort to maintain fossil fuel hegemony and uphold the present petro-colonial order. In doing so, the settler-state has inhibited Indigenous communities from protecting their own “critical infrastructures” – the lands, waters, and non-human others – without legal penalty, threatening the survival of Indigenous nations and the planet at large whilst compromising future exercises of peaceful civil disobedience in Alberta.


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Settlers curate the city: Taylor Nishimura, ‘Rebuilding the City of Political Depression’, On Politics, 17, 1, 2024, pp. 59-75

09Aug24

Abstract: Drawing from Billy Ray Belcourt’s (2020) A History of My Brief Body, this article draws an analogy between the City of Victoria, B.C., located on unceded Lekwungen territory, and a museum to explore the affective nature of settler colonialism within the urban landscape. Like a museum, cities are curated. Each piece of art in a museum is collected and positioned relative to each other to tell a story. Likewise, the relationships between the people, objects, and spaces that make up the city denote the place’s meaning. This article considers how the ubiquity of Coast Salish symbols and imagery in the public art of Victoria’s built environment stands in comparison to the resurgent stewardship of the kwetlal (camas) system on Lekwungen traditional territories. Examining these elements through the lens of place, affect, and materiality, this article subverts the notion of “public art” in a critical examination of how different creative expressions of Indigenous presence are accentuated or made invisible in the built landscape. Illuminating the stories that have been hidden in urban spaces highlights the transformative power of collective expressions of Indigenous creativity.


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Escaping the settler monopoly on external relations: Evgeniia (Jen) Sidorova, ‘Canadian foreign policy analysis and Inuit within Canada’, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, 2024

09Aug24

Abstract: This article examines transnational Indigenous cooperation among Permanent Participants in the Arctic Council using decolonialism and Indigenization in Canadian foreign policy analysis. The mainstream IR approaches primarily consider Indigenous NGOs as civil society groups united by common interests and cultures and as organizations that promote social change. This study argues that unlike other types of NGOs, Indigenous organizations have a complex social identity, which is influenced by settler-colonial heritage. Besides this, transnationalism promotes collective Indigenous agency. Like feminist IR, Indigenous IR scholarship challenges dominant worldviews and conceptualizations of Westphalian sovereignty, nation-state, and security. This study suggests comparing the state-centred IR concepts and Inuit within Canada’s understandings of the same terms. Although the Inuit within Canada perceive international relations distinctly, their conceptualizations of IR should be recognized by state structures. The article suggests that CFPA should incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and promote transnational Indigenous IR studies to decolonize foreign policy and include Indigenous views in analysis.


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Perhaps they are not even settlers? (and perhaps it is not decolonisation either) Yehezkel (Ezekiel) Lein, ‘Why do they stay? A spatial perspective on settler colonialism, decolonization and the case of Kosovo Serbs’, Space and Polity, 2024

09Aug24

Abstract: This study offers a new perspective on settler colonial theory through the case of Serbia/Kosovo. It develops two hypotheses: (1) settler colonial projects in neighboring territories differ markedly from those overseas, necessitating a revised conceptualization called here ‘contiguous settler colonialism,’ and (2) these projects may prompt settlers to remain amid decolonization despite adverse conditions. The empirical analysis identifies three key factors leading to this outcome: the ’Serbianization’ of the physical environment, the (im)mobility arrangements of Kosovo Serbs, and Serbia’s coercive cooptation system, resulting in a ’settler colonial make-believe space’ between the former colonial state and the emerging decolonizing polity.


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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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