settler colonial studies blog

Beauty in destruction (it’s a settler thing): Sadie Couture, ‘Melodies of the toppling trees: the tree farm pastoral, extractivism, and attachment in British Columbia, Canada’, Cultural Studies, 2025

31Oct25

Abstract: This paper develops a concept, ‘the tree farm pastoral,’ that describes the ability to perceive beauty in the midst of destruction and dispossession through a particular framing of the extraction of wood and the cultivation of crops. The tree farm pastoral is an affective orientation marked by a series of profound transformations in the management of forests – the development of ‘sustained yield forestry’ – which occurred around the middle of the twentieth century and that fundamentally shifted the relationship between settlers and trees in British Columbia, Canada. Emerging from an analysis of forest management documents as well as the life and work of Robert Swanson – a poet, logger, engineer, railway inspector and whistle inventor – this paper argues that this transformation was also discursive and perceptual, occurring on the level of language and sound. Bringing insights from cultural studies, sound studies, settler-colonial, and Indigenous studies into conversation with primary sources about forestry from the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that the tree farm pastoral – as constructed materially, discursively, and perceptually – serves to help settlers affectively navigate the tension between loving and caring for, while disrespecting and destroying, the forests of British Columbia. The tree farm pastoral names a particular entanglement between the material and discursive forms of extraction and dispossession – the concrete and physical versus the ideological and affective – that can be hard to parse when theorized in general or out of context. This paper offers the tree farm pastoral as a tool we can use to describe a way of being oriented towards the world that fuels and enables settler-colonialism, to complicate our understanding of the affective dimensions of extractivism, and to add to discussions about metaphor, language, and sound as they relate to techno-utopian discourses in media studies and beyond.

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Understanding India as a Brahminical settler colony: Shaista Patel, Sunder John Boopalan, ‘”Rooted in the soil”: defining Dalitness as an ethic and worldview’, Cultural Studies, 2025

31Oct25

Abstract: This article, written by two Dalit scholars from different religions and nationalities, reflects on the contours of Dalitness as an ethic and worldview. Drawing on Dalit and Black writers, they put forward the praxis of Dalitness as ‘rooted in the soil’ to present Dalitness as negotiated, as lived, and dreamt rather than as always understood on dominant-caste society’s dehumanizing terms as broken, crushed, and damaged. Thinking through the praxis of rooted in the soil, they argue, offers methodological and ethical challenges that should concern readers and writers interested in questions and alternatives of awareness, intention, worldview, method, and material life/s rooted in communal imaginations of beauty and remedy amidst violence of Brahminism. In order to not essentialize such Dalitness as guaranteed by those born outside the caste system, they turn to Dalit novelist Vauhini Vara’s much-celebrated novel, The Immortal King Rao, to reflect on the function of Dalitness of the main protagonist of the novel, King Rao. They argue that beyond a label, Dalitness is a dynamic lived reality – a reality that emerges alongside an itinerary of contradictions that Dalit people deal with throughout their lives and a reclamation of their humanity in and through critiques of structures of domination in a caste-hierarchized world.

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The settler backlash (in Argentina, for example): Claudia N. Briones, ‘Argentina’s indigenous policy under a libertarian regime: An oxymoron with worrying nuances’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 15, 3, 2025, pp. 627-634

28Oct25

Abstract: Although Javier Milei’s administration has only just begun, some of its statements and initiatives already indicate policies that threaten the lives and rights of indigenous peoples. Deeply embedded libertarian principles are in clear conflict with key constitutional mandates regarding indigenous policy. Moreover, libertarian modes of governance amplify entrenched narratives of Argentina’s formation of alterity, which hinder the full implementation of indigenous rights. Consequently, a qualitative shift towards heightened conflict appears to be underway, as the current presidency not only fails to suppress but actively amplifies the racist rhetoric of the country’s most anti-indigenous sectors and interests.

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High settler modernism? C. Oliver O’Donnell, ‘The Armory Show, Walt Kuhn, and Settler Modernism’, Archives of American Art Journal, 64, 2, 2025

28Oct25

Abstract: The artistic production of Walt Kuhn, as well as the watershed exhibition he helped organize—the Armory Show of 1913—were shaped by the legacies of United States colonialism. This essay substantiates this claim by positioning the Armory Show’s pine tree emblem as well as Kuhn’s own work in relation to deeper iconographic histories and interpreting them as forms of settler modernism. This interpretative framework recasts the controversial reception of the Armory Show, especially when placed in dialogue with the politics of Theodore Roosevelt—who prominently reviewed the exhibition—as well as with the particularities of Euro-American nationalism. The resulting interpretation clarifies the key role race played in displacing the academic tradition from its position of authority within the US and in excluding nonwhite artists and cultures from histories of American modernism.

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Settler colonialism is a prison: Kelly Tabbutt, ‘Indigenous Carceral System Inequalities in the US: A Synthesis of the Literature About the Nature and Sources’, Sociology Compass, 19, 10, 2025, #e70123

28Oct25

Abstract: Racially disproportionate incarceration, or over-incarceration, of Indigenous people is a significant issue in the US. Overincarceration of Indigenous people in the US is a critical and deep-rooted social issue. Racialized structural inequalities in general are theorized to underpin racialized inequalities in carceral system capture (arrest and incarceration) and outcomes including sentence length, monetary penalties, and supervision. Further, settler colonialism is theorized to underpin these inequalities where they are experienced by Native people. However, this research area is still in the earlier stages of development in the US. Nonetheless, a notable body of literature is available that demonstrates the existence of Native carceral system, or “criminal justice system,” inequality at the stage of arrest, incarceration, and post-release supervision, as well as in the case of the assessment of legal financial obligations. As well as those that theorize the underlying structures that create, maintain, and exacerbate these inequalities of criminalization and carceral system capture. This review and synthesis of the literature provides a comprehensive illustration of the state of carceral system inequalities experienced by Native (Indigenous) individuals and communities in the United States from the criminalization of Nativeness within US law and culture to the modern experiences of disparate carceral system involvement and the disparately harsh outcomes of this involvement.

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The place of place learning: Samantha Lancaster, ‘Experiencing Indigenous Spaces Available to Purchase’, in Hongyu Wang, Jo Flory (eds), Curriculum as Lived: Currere, Mindfulness, and Nonviolent CompanionshipAvailable to Purchase, Emerald, 2025

26Oct25

Abstract: This chapter focuses on place-based learning experiences of a White, non-Indigenous, settler educator. The chapter describes her experiences as she visited Indigenous historical places in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Following the Indian Removal Act, peoples from the Mvskoke Creek Nation settled in the area that is now known as Tulsa. Through laws and policies established by Whites, some of these Indigenous spaces have almost completely been erased from public memory. This chapter reveals how place-based learning can enhance learning experiences of students through storytelling and counter-storytelling that focus on Indigenous experiences to combat settler colonial narratives of Indigenous places.

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Commissioning ‘the truth’: Sara Amighetti, ‘Truth commissions in the decolonisation context: a philosophical appraisal’, Rethinking History, 2025

25Oct25

Abstract: This paper offers a philosophical appraisal of the role truth commissions might play in addressing the legacy of colonial injustice in contexts that do not fit the paradigmatic model of transitional justice. In recent years, calls for redress in democratic settler states have prompted interest in the extension of transitional justice mechanisms beyond post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies. Yet this extension raises two important challenges. The scope challenge concerns whether transitional justice is conceptually suited to settings without political rupture, while the bootstrapping challenge questions whether institutions shaped by liberal assumptions can adequately respond to structural and ongoing forms of colonial violence. The paper analyses the normative and conceptual stakes of these challenges, drawing on recent work in political theory and the Indigenous studies. While acknowledging the limits of the transitional justice paradigm, it argues that truth commissions may still contribute to processes of historical reckoning—particularly by enabling practices of collective unlearning and public confrontation with inherited structures.

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Italian colonialism and settler colonialism: A History of Italian Colonialism: The Promised Land, Giuseppe Finaldi, Routledge, 2026

25Oct25

Description: This book examines Italy’s colonial history from the outbreak of the First World War to the first stirrings of Fascism in 1919. Offering a sweeping account of events and a vast array of characters, this second volume moves between Rome and the Alps, Libya, East Africa and beyond to tell of an Italy struggling to profile itself as an empire while it fought out the First World War. It recounts how Italy clung on in Africa with anti-colonial forces triumphing in Libya and threatening in Eritrea and Somalia, and how finally emerging victorious in Europe, it hoped to reap the rewards of victory on the colonial front. This volume is of great value to students and scholars alike interested in Italian, European, African and colonial history.

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More settlers out there (on settler colonialism in Star Trek): E. Leigh McKagen, ‘(Re)Creating Home and Empire in Contemporary Star Trek’, in Caroline Alphin, E. Leigh McKagen, Shelby E. Ward (eds), Future Spaces of Power: The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces, Bloomsbury, 2025

23Oct25

Description: Future Spaces of Power explores political, cultural, and societal narratives of future space(s) on a global scale to complicate the cultural logic of systemic futures that exist outside the boundaries of dominant political imaginaries. Contributors critically engage with alternative visions found in literature, film, and other cultural artifacts that encourage us to either live with or escape from the systemic conditions of neoliberalism and late capitalism and consider what these alternative visions might do – or fail to do – in combating anti-democratic futures, environmental degradation, and new forms of imperialism. Through these analyses, the volume collectively argues that anti-postmodern and postmodern readings of future spaces overlook the everyday lived experiences of certain bodies – including chronic health problems, effects from systemic racism, and other experiences of insecurity, fear, and death in the face of institutionalized violence – by disregarding differential experiences of time within different spatial contexts. Contributors suggest that critiques of narratives occurring within and about virtual and metaspaces, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and even the colonization of outer space can provide critical insights concerning global futures and our perceptions of space and time, especially as they inform how we should live in the present amid environmental destruction, information capitalism, neoliberalism, and the remaining infrastructures of colonialism. Ultimately, this book interrogates how a variety of media shape and inform our understanding and assumptions about conceptualizations of future space(s) as it demonstrates how governmentality eliminates and regulates surplus bodies – both overtly and covertly – through the technological, spatial, discursive, and temporal management of space.

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Settlers out there: Kyle Boggs, Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors, The Ohio State University Press, 2025

23Oct25

Description: In Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors, Kyle Boggs chronicles the struggle between Indigenous peoples who have rooted religious and cultural ties to outdoor sites across the US and elsewhere and the settlers who claim the right to freely recreate in those same places. Synthesizing theories of rhetoric, environmental studies, and settler colonialism, Boggs confronts the ways that settler colonial experiences and expectations have been narrated through rhetorical practices on these so-called public lands. Fusing journalism and personal narrative with scholarly research, Boggs’s argument comes to bear on his central case study of a northern Arizona ski development on a mountain held sacred by at least thirteen Indigenous tribes. In illuminating the striking ways that settler imaginaries are accommodated, performed, and sustained in the everyday, Boggs offers a powerful reminder that even during leisure activities (in this case, sports such as ultrarunning, rock climbing, and skiing), complex webs of power control who can access resources and land and who has the right to protect histories and cultures.

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