settler colonial studies blog

Settler women get to vote: Deborah Jordan, Australian Women’s Justice: Settler Colonisation and the Queensland Vote, Routledge, 2024

27May24

Description: This book explores how women spearheaded the democratic suffrage campaign in colonial Queensland engaging with international debates on women’s activism, leadership, advocacy, print culture, and social movements. Australian Women’s Justice provides a nuanced reading of the diversity and differences of the women’s movement in Queensland, from the time of first white colonisation, federation to World War 1 by new research on key women’s organisations: notably the Women’s Equal Franchise Association and the Women’s Peace Army. Framed through the lives of women suffrage participants, including their encounters with First Nations women, it also looks beyond microhistory to explore broader themes of the intersection of race, gender, property, war, and empire in the colonial context. Campaigns for enfranchisement and property rights and against conscription connect this story with larger international movements for women and labour, and organisations such as the League of Nations. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Australian feminism and suffragism, as well as historians of feminist, labour, and peace movements both in Australia and internationally.

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Canada and settler colonialism: Jim Reynolds, Canada and Colonialism: An Unfinished History, University of British Columbia Press, 2024

26May24

Description: Canada and Colonialism presents the history Canadians must reckon with before decolonization is possible, from the nation’s establishment as a settler colony to the discriminatory legacies still at work in our institutions and culture.

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Incandesecent settler colonialism: Maxine Matheson-Lieber, An environmental analysis approach to understanding the effects of the legal use of white phosphorous munitions: slow violence, settler-colonialism, and Western hegemony, Senior dissertation, Claremont, 2024

26May24

Abstract: This paper aims to critically examine the interplay between environmental degradation, settler-colonialism, and the neo-imperialist biases embedded within our international law institutions due to their Eurocentric origins and interest centers. It seeks to demonstrate how these biases contribute to a system that disproportionately empowers certain nations, particularly the United States and other great powers, at the expense of widespread injustices unto humans and their environments globally. This paper will use theory, frameworks, and scholarship rooted in environmental analysis and justice, intersectional analytics, Indigenous, and post-colonial theories. Ultimately, it will argue that we must examine and correct international institutions and rulings that work against the well-being of innocent civilians and close these loopholes left to naturalize and legally enforce Western hegemony. This paper will focus on the loopholes in international law allowing the highly problematic, indiscriminate, and deadly use of WP munitions in conflicts due to its “dual” use. In short, the dual-use clause provides for a hazardous and sometimes fatal weapon to be wielded by the world’s most powerful military forces, no matter the embedded humanitarian and ecological harm involved in dispersing any amount of WP into the environment. This interconnected system around the legal right to wield power and violence is entrenched with other systems of power, including colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, which will be explored in this paper through the case study of WP use by the Israeli military in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

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Gendered settler colonialism: Myra J. Tait , Lorna Stefanick, ‘Structural Racism and Sexism in Settler Societies: Families at the Confluence of Colonialism and Neoliberalism’, Feminist Formations, 36, 1, 2024, pp. 57-82

26May24

Abstract: This study problematizes the intersections of settler colonialism and neoliberalism with heteropatriarchy/heteropaternalism when considering the vast overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the Canadian child welfare system and Indigenous women in prisons. Using the lens of historical institutionalism, we demonstrate how heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism provide the normative social order for settler colonial governance, including its most recent iteration, neoliberal governance. We argue that the neoliberal rhetoric of individual rights and responsibilities to assess fitness of families (and more specifically mothers) against a western European neoliberal ideal underpins Canada’s social policy reproducing the structural racism and sexism imposed by colonization. In Canada, there is growing awareness of system dysfunction; it is Indigenous women who are providing the leadership to resist this oppressive model. Resisting neoliberal family policies pushes back against oppressive colonial structures that exacerbate growing systemic inequities thereby negatively impact all families.

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The settler doesn’t care: Nicole Ineese-Nash, Kathryn Underwood, Arlene Hache, Patty Douglas, ‘The Commodification of Care: Precarious Custodial Relationships, Disability, and Settler-Colonialism’, in Gabriele Ciciurkaite, Robyn Lewis Brown (eds), Disability and the Changing Contexts of Family and Personal Relationships, Emerald, 2024

25May24

Abstract: In this chapter, we explore the intricate relationships between young disabled children, their families, institutional settings, and disability services in Canada, with an emphasis on the challenges stemming from unstable custodial dynamics and governmental interference. Drawing on data from a 9-year longitudinal Institutional Ethnography across three provinces and one territory, we analyze the experiences of 41 families who have interacted with the child welfare system, foster care, adoption processes, family courts, or other custodial procedures – many of them are Indigenous or live with low income. The historic and ongoing state control and institutionalization of disabled children in Canada are interrogated through the lens of settler-colonialism (Awj, 2017; Disability Rights International, 2021). This chapter scrutinizes constructs framed by colonial narratives, including disabled childhoods, notions of disability, the “best interest of the child,” the archetype of the “good parent,” and the designation of custodial “status.” We present Institutional Ethnography as a method of de-constructing these systems and identifying care principles in the changing context of family.

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Indigenous incarceration and the logic of elimination: Danielle Bird, ‘Indigenous Incarceration and Settler Colonial Genocides’, Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, 33, 2, 2024

25May24

Abstract: The article examines the intersection of Indigenous incarceration and settler colonial genocides in Canada. Topics discussed include the systemic oppression of Indigenous peoples within the criminal justice system, the definition and recognition of genocide within settler colonial contexts, and the role of settler colonial laws and institutions in perpetuating genocidal policies targeting Indigenous communities.

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Supersitious settlers: Clara Iwasaki, ‘The Settler Supernatural: Contemporary Taiwanese Popular Culture, the Environment, and the Nativisation of Han Taiwanese Legends’, International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 2024

25May24

Abstract: This article examines how Han Taiwanese myths and urban legends have been associated with the environment and native fauna in the best-selling popular non-fiction publication Monstrous Taiwan and the hit horror film The Tag-Along. This article also looks at how these works can be considered within the framework of settler colonial studies in East Asia. Both works are interested in intervening in popular culture and genre cinema while reframing the horror or supernatural genre as particularly Taiwanese, drawing on urban legends and traditional folk tales. However, the creators of these works persistently characterise Han Taiwanese legends as interchangeable with the native fauna of Taiwan. This move positions Han Taiwanese as inheritors of the natural environment of Taiwan while minimising or, in some cases, tokenising the presence of indigenous Taiwanese people.

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Methodic settlers: Hunter Price, Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty, University of Virginia Press, 2024

25May24

Description: How Methodist settlers in the American West acted as agents of empire. In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary association. Following the contours of settler expansion, the Methodist Episcopal Church also quickly became the largest denomination in the early American West. With Sacred Capital, Hunter Price resituates the Methodist Episcopal Church as a settler-colonial institution at the convergence of “the Methodist Age” and Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.” Price offers a novel interpretation of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a network through which mostly white settlers exchanged news of land and jobs and facilitated financial transactions. Benefiting from Indigenous dispossession and removal policies, settlers made selective, strategic use of the sacred and the secular in their day-to-day interactions to advance themselves and their interests. By analyzing how Methodists acted as settlers while identifying as pilgrims, Price illuminates the ways that ordinary white Americans fulfilled Jefferson’s vision of an Empire of Liberty while reinforcing the inequalities at its core.

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If it is about a timeless land, it’s probably dated: Fiona Morrison, Brigid Rooney (eds), Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction, Sydney University Press, 2024

24May24

Description: Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark’s fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark’s writing. This volume not only establishes a new view of Dark’s fiction as a whole, but also reflects on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era. Above all, the revisiting of Dark’s fiction is mandated by a desire to recognise the ways in which it anticipates vital debates in Australian literary and national culture today, about settler colonialism and its legacies, and with regard to the histories, condition and status of Australia’s First Nations people. This volume interweaves varied topical themes, from formal debates about modernism, historical realism and melodrama, to questions about modernity’s time and space, about gender and cultural difference, and about the specifics of built and natural environments. Time, Tide and History intentionally loosens the conventions of literary scholarship by including other kinds of work alongside critical and scholarly readings: a written dialogue between two contemporary historians about Dark’s legacy, and a biographical piece on the life and role of Eleanor Dark’s husband, Eric Payten Dark. Bringing together the interwar fiction’s feminist and modernist dimensions with the historical turn of The Timeless Land trilogy, the essays in Time, Tide and History collectively pursue ethical and political questions while teasing out the distinctive thematic, formal and aesthetic features of Dark’s fiction.

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The violent rhetoric of settler colonial peace: Éléna Choquette, Land and the Liberal Project Canada’s Violent Expansion, UBC Press, 2024

23May24

Description: In 1867, Canada was a small country flanking the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, but within a few years its claims to sovereignty spanned the continent. With Confederation had come the vaunting ambition to create an empire from sea to sea. How did Canada lay claim to so much land so quickly? Land and the Liberal Project examines the political, legal, and rhetorical tactics deployed by Canadian officialdom in the cause of nation making, from the first articulation of expansionism in the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act to the consolidation of authority over the prairies following the North-West Resistance of 1885. Drawing on numerous archival sources, Éléna Choquette contends that although the dominion purported to favour a gentle absorption of Indigenous lands through constitutionalism, administration, and law, it resorted to police repression and military force in the face of Indigenous resistance. She investigates the liberal concept that underpinned land appropriation and legitimized violence: Indigenous territory and people were to be “improved,” the former by agrarian capitalism, the latter by so-called protection and enforced schooling. By rethinking this tainted approach to building a transcontinental state, Choquette’s clear-eyed exposé of the Canadian expansionist project offers new ways to understand colonization. This challenge to nationalistic narratives will find a keen audience among scholars and students of political science and political theory, Canadian history, and Indigenous studies.

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