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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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Imagining settlers over there: Steven Conn, ‘The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t, University of Chicago Press, 2023

23Jul24

Description: It seems everyone has an opinion about rural America. Is it gripped in a tragic decline? Or is it on the cusp of a glorious revival? Is it the key to understanding America today? Steven Conn argues that we’re missing the real question: Is rural America even a thing? No, says Conn, who believes we see only what we want to see in the lands beyond the suburbs—fantasies about moral (or backward) communities, simpler (or repressive) living, and what it means to be authentically (or wrongheadedly) American. If we want to build a better future, Conn argues, we must accept that these visions don’t exist and never did. In The Lies of the Land, Conn shows that rural America—so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind—has actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Examining each of these forces in turn, Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we’ve believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.


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Authoritarian settlers in outer space: Julian G. Waller, ‘Characterizing Future Authoritarian Governance in the Space Domain’, Journal of Advanced Military Studies, 15, 1, 2024, pp. 115-135

22Jul24

Abstract: Traditionally, discussions of governance beyond Earth have largely been held to the purview of debates about space law and global governance regimes. Yet, the priority of space exploration among ambitious, tech-industry associated billionaires and its continued potential for militarization suggest that a more dynamic approach may be needed, given that state-sponsorship of extraterrestrial colonial projects may be more akin to partnerships between private and public actors rather than nation-states assuming traditional roles as sole sources of decision-making. Permanent settlements in space will require forms of localized government that may look distinct from contemporary models of political order. This article thus asks a provocative question associated with the empirical record of human colonization and settlement in prior eras: What sort of authoritarian governance is most likely to form in human space settlements during the medium term? Reviewing variations on political order in small-scale colonial settlements in light of recent conceptual work on authoritarian rule, the article identifies three theoretical models of governance that may emerge once beyond Earth settlements become permanent fixtures of human society.


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Settler viruses and Indigenous salmon: Darcey Evans, Salmon Viruses and Sovereignties-at-Sea: A Settler Colonial Politics of Salmon Aquaculture, PhD dissertation, University of California Santa Cruz, 2024

22Jul24

Abstract: This dissertation examines the settler colonial, multispecies, and microbial politics of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in what is now British Columbia, Canada. Salmon aquaculture production systems enable 18 million Atlantic salmon to be raised in nets that are anchored to the seafloor in the coastal waters of British Columbia each year. Aquaculture is recognized as the fastest growing method of food production worldwide and is often positioned as a “blue revolution” capable of providing sustainable, affordable seafood in the midst of salmon population declines. In British Columbia, however, the raising of Atlantic salmon in critical Pacific salmon migration routes has engendered concerns about emerging industrial uses of the waterscape and the ability for farm-borne viruses to move between species. By investigating how industrial aquaculture is encountered, negotiated, and resisted on-the-ground, particularly by Indigenous communities in whose waters the practice is occurring, I instead propose that aquaculture is not a radical departure or a revolutionary break from the past, but is steeped within and dependent upon histories of colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism that have long transformed salmon and waterscapes into sites of state and economy-building. Stemming from ongoing uncertainties regarding the potential for pathogens to transfer between Atlantic and Pacific salmon, this dissertation particularly focuses on historic, scientific, and political controversies that surround salmon viruses. In the absence of state monitoring for salmon pathogens like Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), Indigenous leaders and their allies travel to sites of aquaculture production to monitor the daily operations of farms and gather underwater video footage from within farm sites. Campaigns to enact stronger fish health protections and document the spread of viruses and pollution also become part of broader political movement aimed at reclaiming territory and restoring Indigenous forms of governance within coastal waterscapes. While pathogens come to reflect and reinforce colonial structures of dispossession, I argue that Indigenous-led efforts to track pathogens throughout salmon bodies and ecosystems are shifting power dynamics in ways that offer new possibilities for the “blue revolution.” This research brings scholarship on pathogens and industrial landscapes into conversation with enduring concerns about the material consequences of environmental injustice and colonialism. In situating aquaculture as part of an under-explored extension of settler colonial logics, structures, and governance into marine space, I suggest that the dominant framing of settler colonialism as land-based leaves large openings for understanding how colonialism and sovereignty are enacted in water-centered and maritime regions. Illuminating how industrial aquaculture and efforts to track pathogens take place within a broader politics of asserting sovereignty “at sea” reveals how historical inequalities and ongoing power dynamics become inscribed within oceans, with important implications for understanding contemporary ocean politics in the 21st century.


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Settler sword and Indigenous neck: Rashid Khalidi, ‘”The Neck and the Sword”, Interviewed by Tariq Ali’, New Left Review, 147, 2024, pp. 5-38

22Jul24

Excerpt: ‘If you accept the settler-colonial framework of analysis, then the metropole is as important as the settler colony. Israel is not a typical settler colony, by any means; it’s also a national project, with a significant Biblical dimension, and a refuge from persecution. No other settler colony was a refuge from persecution to such a degree—the Puritans and other religious dissidents, like the Quakers, who came to North America, certainly experienced repression, but not on the same scale. Basically, this combination of characteristics is unique to the Israeli project. But the core of it, the settler-colonial core of it, relates to a metropole. And the elites in that metropole, unfortunately, have barely changed from the time when I was a child. The new generations are going to have to deal with this‘.


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Adapting settler discourse on climate change: Faisal Bin Islam, Lindsay Naylor, James Edward Bryan, Dennis J. Coker, ‘Climate coloniality and settler colonialism: Adaptation and indigenous futurities’, Political Geography, 114, 2024

21Jul24

Abstract: Climate change puts an inequitable and heavy burden on people who are forced to adapt to unjust socioenvironmental conditions created by the legacy of ongoing climate coloniality and historical settler and imperial colonialism. However, universalizing climate adaptation discourses fail to conceptualize these historical processes by framing climate change as external to complex social and human systems. A plural reconceptualization of adaptation instead asks us to question what it means to adapt to environmental changes not just under the guise of global climate change, but as embedded in coloniality and settler colonialism in place. Critically engaging with different epistemologies of adaptation and grappling with what it means to do this work in the context of settler colonial realities asks scholars to co-produce knowledges of adaptation that embody place-based histories and human-environmental relations that are too often erased, elided, or appropriated in mainstream Eurocentric adaptation science. In this paper, we draw on an environmental oral history with the Chief of the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware to understand how the possibility of indigenous futurity and climate adaptation unfolds towards confronting climate coloniality and efforts to unsettle settler colonialism on stolen lands. Addressing climate coloniality on settler colonial territories suggests that as part of discussing climate change adaptation, scholars should make way for repatriating indigenous knowledges of adaptation and climate change to repair colonial wounds.


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