settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is unhealthy: Yara M. Asi, Mienah Z. Sharif, Bram Wispelwey, Nadia N. Abuelezam, A. Kayum Ahmed, Goleen Samari, ‘Racism as a Threat to Palestinian Health Equity’, Health Equity, 8, 2024

29Jun24

Abstract: Between October 2023 and April 2024, more than 30,000 Palestinians were killed, and countless others injured, displaced, and traumatized, in the fifth major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip since 2006. Recent events, along with the trajectory of events over the past 75 years, demonstrate that using a public health framework could help recognize racism as a structural and social determinant of Palestinian health. Using the principles of health equity, we show how Palestinian health inequities are rooted in settler colonialism and racism, amounting to violence and oppression against Palestinian Arabs as a racialized group, regardless of religion or citizenship. Structural racism should be recognized as a driver of Palestinian health inequities.

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Settler colonialism is hungry: Nicole Marie Koenigsknecht, Nurturing Resistance: Food Sovereignty in Jonny Appleseed and The Seed Keeper, MA dissertation, Wien University, 2024

29Jun24

Abstract: “Nurturing Resistance: Food Sovereignty in Jonny Appleseed and The Seed Keeper” investigates how Indigenous literary characters engage in subsistence practices—growing, preparing, and consuming food—as a means of resisting the resource extraction, industrial agriculture, and ecological degradation perpetrated by settler-colonial powers on traditional First Nations and Métis territories in present-day Manitoba and Minnesota. This master’s thesis reads works of fiction by authors Diane Wilson (Dakhóta) and Joshua Whitehead (Two-Spirit Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation) as “case studies” that contribute to a better understanding of the real-life struggles Indigenous people face to reclaim their ancestral lands and lifeways. North American settler society’s aggressive consumption of land, resources, and even Indigenous bodies looms large in both novels. In Wilson’s and Whitehead’s texts, Indigenous characters undermine these exploitative Euro-American power structures and challenge cultural hegemony by exerting bodily autonomy, nurturing familial relationships, and cultivating (traditional) foods. Multiple generations of Dakhóta women in The Seed Keeper (2021) struggle against the cultural and environmental destruction inflicted upon their traditional territory by Euro-American settlers. Ripped from her family by the predatory policies of the U.S. foster care system, Wilson’s protagonist Rosalie eventually finds her way back to her roots through the seeds and plants of her Dakhóta homeland. In Jonny Appleseed (2018) Whitehead’s protagonist similarly connects to his ancestors and sustains friendships through sharing meals. This literary analysis explores characters’ fraught relationships with highly processed foods which simultaneously bring them and their relatives closer together while also contributing to high rates of diet-related diseases within their communities. Despite the pervading food insecurity he experiences in Peguis First Nation and in Winnipeg, Jonny and his family manage to renegotiate and resurge their culture’s traditional foodways to meet their contemporary needs. In both novels the struggle for food sovereignty reaches far beyond physical survival. For Indigenous characters, cultural survival is inextricably rooted in food sovereignty.

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Settler colonialism is thirsty: Allison Madia, Transforming the Tohono: Water Management, O’odham Labor, and Settlerhood, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2024

29Jun24

Abstract: This dissertation investigates the reproduction of American settler colonialism in the Tohono (desert, Tohono O’odham territory) and waterways’ physical and ideological reconstruction via the appropriation of O’odham labor and indigeneity since the early twentieth century. Social scientists have emphasized the role of infrastructure, land, labor, race, and gendered and sexualized power in the physical and ideological reproduction of settler colonialism in the United States. Looking at the transformation of the Tohono following American colonialism, I ask, “How has indigeneity been appropriated to reconstruct waterways in the Tohono since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal? How has American settler colonialism established collaborative arrangements with O’odham in the form of governance and labor? How have ideas and responses to water management impacted the everyday lives of O’odham?” I focus on historical and current experiences and perceptions of drought to trace the role of power in local and national discussions of water management. This research argues four main points: 1) both water management and the racialization of Tohono O’odham labor have been intricately tied to the expansion of settler colonialism, 2) commercial agriculture has worked to shape the racial and gendered experiences of Indigenous women, 3) American scientists and media sources in Southern Arizona have historically nationalized discussions about water to garner political and economic support for conservation projects, and 4) Collaborative arrangements between Tohono O’odham elites and Anglo American elites have produced structures of stratification expressed in fiscal inequality and historically recurring experiences of environmental and political violence.

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Cosmopolitan settlers: Lorenzo Cañás Bottos, ‘Exclusionary Cosmopolitanism in Buenos Aires’, Anthropological Forum, 2024

21Jun24

Abstract: In this article I explore the organisation of practices of vernacular cosmopolitanism in the city of Buenos Aires. The starting point is a series of festivals and activities organised by the city government to promote and celebrate its cosmopolitanism. I then explore the spaces where they take place, and the monuments built by immigrant communities that populate the urban landscape. I read these in relationship to the ideological making of the Argentine nation and state, showing that the vernacular cosmopolitanism being promoted is exclusionary in character, and Eurocentric in orientation. Furthermore, I suggest that this form of exclusionary cosmopolitanism has an ideological affinity and shared genealogy with the settler colonialism that underpins Argentine nation building and its territorial state consolidation. I also show that in these celebrations of diversity, the government of the city of Buenos Aires strategically uses immigrant institutions and their networks, subsuming their particularity and multiplicity to that of the city and the nation.

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Recursive settler colonial dispossession: Libby Porter, David Kelly, Priya Kunjan, ‘Possessory stratigraphy: land title, dispossession and housing crisis’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2024

21Jun24

Abstract: The myth that Indigenous sovereignty lives in the past is central to the lore of settler colonial societies. Sustaining that myth entails significant material and symbolic work, particularly organised around the recursive placement of the ‘original moment’ of dispossession and colonisation in the past to make the settler sovereignty that has been imposed appear legitimate and complete. This paper presents an analysis of the story of one public housing estate in inner Melbourne, Walker Street, that has been the subject of recursive dispossession and multiple enactments of displacement. We examine the history of title documents at Walker Street, tracing back and forward through time to consider how those land titles have come to be and the work they do to constitute questions of belonging and housing inequality on stolen land. The methodology we develop seeks to understand land title as a literal register of the ongoingness of settler colonialism to reveal how title documents affectively and materially underscore the myth of a thickening settler claim to territory whilst distancing Indigenous sovereignty: we call this a possessory stratigraphy.

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The settlerocene? Marina Pingler, ‘The “Colonial Anthropocene” Imaginary: Re-Imagining Climate Change in Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018)’, Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, 5, 2, 2024, pp. 142-162

21Jun24

Abstract: Climate imaginaries – collectively held visions of future climate change – take shape in a variety of media and genres, from computer models to poetry. While some cli-mate imaginaries have proven particularly enduring and have managed to attain a hegemonic status in climate change discourse – for example, the “techno-market” imaginary and the “climate apocalypse” imaginary – others remain marginalized. Drawing on Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), this article theorizes the “colonial Anthropocene” imaginary as an alternative imaginary and examines its co-production at the intersection of academic discourses, activism, and literature. The “colonial Anthropocene” imaginary generally and Moon of the Crusted Snow spe-cifically negotiate ideological tensions that have emerged in the discourse on the An-thropocene and forge a connection between the seemingly exceptional event of an-thropogenic climate change and a historical sequence of colonial violence and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. As one of this imaginary’s manifestations in the literary domain, Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) embeds climate change into a longer story that begins with settler colonialism on the North American continent by drawing on an equally old genre: the Indian captivity narrative. Significantly, the “co-lonial Anthropocene” imaginary is a reaction to the impulse toward claims to univer-sality resurfacing in the discourse on the Anthropocene, particularly in the notion of “the human.”

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Antisettler resistance and transnational solidarity: Francesco Pontarelli, ‘Rooted in Resistance: Historical Perspectives on South Africa–Palestine Solidarity – a Conversation with Professor Salim Vally’, Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power, 2024

20Jun24

Excerpt: FP: Would you also say that the solidarity between Palestinians and South Africans originates from a recognition of similar experiences of oppression, rooted in racist systems of settler colonialism? SV: I think these similarities are very stark because we can talk not only at the level of economic relationships, but also at the level of socio-psychological relationships. The Afrikaners saw themselves as beleaguered, as a chosen people and, based on their interpretation of the Bible, they considered that they were given this land by God. There were strong similarities between the Afrikaners’ Calvinistic religious fundamentalism and political Zionism, and these were both overlayed by deep racism. Both peoples were imbued with a sense of superiority and a civilising mission against the native people. They share the kind of psyche of settler colonialism and racial capitalism where the indigenous people are seen as savages and uncivilised. The difference is that Israel has managed to spin it in such a way that they had been there for centuries, which is actually not true. It’s a myth. The Zionists, many of whom were atheists, opportunistically used the Old Testament, and – like the Afrikaners – their claim to the land was based on the view that it was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’.

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Emigrants into settlers? Benjamin Coleman Van Zee, The Underdog Imperialists: Poles, Germans, and Interwar Emigrant Colonialism, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2024

20Jun24

Abstract: This dissertation traces the evolution of “emigrant colonialism” from the late nineteenth century through the interwar years. During this period, several traditionally emigrant-sending nations, including Poland, Germany, Italy, and Japan, developed similar strategies for channeling their outflows of migrants into projects for overseas expansion. What they called “emigrant colonialism” involved forming private companies to purchase large tracts of isolated territory abroad. By settling their compatriots in linguistically homogeneous company towns on the frontiers of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, they sought to simulate a national settler colonial experience while expanding economic and political influence overseas. Although some aimed to use these demographic enclaves as foreign extensions of their domestic economies, others aspired to transform their settlement colonies into fully independent “daughter states” in South America. While the specifics of their respective agendas varied, German, Polish, Italian, and Japanese emigrant colonialists all developed analogous geopolitical imaginaries and approaches to managing migration. This dissertation explains how and why they developed such a simultaneously idiosyncratic yet similar expansionist strategy. By reconstructing the perspectives of German and Polish emigrant colonial activists from the 1880s through the 1930s and situating them within the secondary scholarship on Japan and Italy, this study argues that emigrant colonialism was not nationally unique to any one of these nations, as previous historians have held. Rather, emigrant colonialism was a subgenre of imperialism that all four collaboratively pioneered through their rivalry and mimesis. In addition to pinpointing the unique spin each nation gave to the practice, this dissertation highlights the cross-pollination and convergent evolution of the German, Polish, Italian, and Japanese emigrant colonial projects over the interwar years. This study advances two major claims to explain this entangled history. First, it contends that the transnational flows of influence between their expansionist projects were facilitated by a shared “underdog imperialist mentality,” defined as a specific way of viewing the world and their nations’ place within it. Second, it argues that the international system of the interwar world played a crucial role in fostering the growth and development of emigrant colonialism during this period.

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Climbing settlers: D’Arcy Molan, Katya Johanson, Emily Potter, ‘Repurposing Agricultural Infrastructure to Build Cultures of Democracy in Rural Communities: A Case Study from North-West Victoria’, in Tom Borrup, Andrew Zitcer (eds), Democracy as Creative Practice, Routledge, 2024

20Jun24

Abstract: Natimuk is a small rural Australian town that is currently home to farmers, Indigenous Wotjobaluk families, and people attracted by a rural lifestyle. It possesses a history of settler colonialism and oppression of Wotjobaluk communities. The area also attracts rock climbers, whose activities come into conflict with First Nations sites and sacred and endangered plant and animal species. This chapter offers case studies of “democratic spectacle,” a combination of practice, process, and outcome to achieve community participation and co-creation through arts-based methods. The two cases are immersive multimedia arts events, Space and Place, and Vault. These arts interventions brought together diverse communities around inclusively soliciting, telling, and celebrating their different stories and the multiple histories of place, refusing a monolithic account of a place.

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It’s settler property time! (I think) Hun Kim, ‘Property-time: serial archives, settler logics, and illiberal space–time oddities’, City, 2024

18Jun24

Abstract: Liberal theories of property assume a linear and serialized temporal orientation facilitated by title registries, recording systems, and the exaltation of land archives. These assumptions, what I call ‘property-time’, can be productively put into relation with dominant geographic theories of space in two ways. First, I argue that distinguishing liberal notions of property-time from geographic space–time allows us to observe a key dialectic involving the attachment of value (and capital) to space, a process that tracks alongside contradictions of capitalist desire: the desire to continually reshape space (becoming) and to extract enduring and permanent, individuated value from it (being). Second, liberal temporalities of property struggle to apply in illiberal global contexts. Here, states enact urban accumulation regimes that deviate from linear, individuated and sequential notions of property by manipulating records and surgically erasing past ownership. These acts are often characterized as forms of state variegation and provisionality. They are also endemic to how both capital and value are created and/or arbitraged by states through the land regime. These formations remain difficult to connect to traditional theories about the production of value under capital because assumed time logics of property limit our theoretical capacity to describe illiberal urban accumulation regimes.

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