« Older posts
Newer posts »

Is settler internationalism even possible? A special issue of Labour History: 126, 1, 2024

03May24

Access the special issue here.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler trainspotting: Katie Maher, ‘They put me on a train: Assimilation and the Australian railways’, Geographical Research, 2024

02May24

Abstract: This article explores the involvement of the Australian railways in the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. Focusing on the visions and voices of Aboriginal peoples who were taken away from their families by train, the article considers how railways were used in the attempted assimilation of First Nations peoples into White society. The last train ride, an artwork by South Australian Yankunytjatjara artist and Stolen Generations survivor Kunyi McInerney, serves as a point of departure to study how the settler colonial infrastructure of rail operationalised the Australian government policies of assimilation. I ask how railway infrastructures have affected Aboriginal peoples and how Aboriginal peoples have responded to railway infrastructures. In centring the artworks and narratives of Aboriginal people taken away by train, I extend an invitation to readers to rethink geography through the visual expressions and stories of First Nations peoples. Close attention to the perspectives of affected peoples opens possibilities to view infrastructures in a different light. The visions and voices of Aboriginal families impacted by assimilation policies show that the railways played a pivotal role in the separation of Aboriginal children from families and that railway infrastructures have also been sites of resistance to and subversion of assimilation and child removal. Paying careful attention to First Nations voices and visions, the article informs how the Australian railways have been complicit in assimilation policies and how Aboriginal peoples have used the railways to resist and survive such settler colonial projects.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Undoing settler climate change: Acton Éamon McHenley, Landback As A Way Forward: The Return of Stolen Public Lands as Adaptation in the Alaskan Climate Crisis, MA Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2024

02May24

Excerpt: Access to land and property ownership has been racialized since the inception of the US settler colonial state, with the relocation, resettlement, and genocide of Indigenous peoples through the dispossession of their traditional homelands serving as a key origin point. Today, Alaska Natives are facing a similar process, having lost around 80% of their traditional lands to colonization via the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, and losing more land each day with upwards of 70 of their 200 communities facing imminent threats from the colonially created climate crisis. With climate change and the associated increase in frequency and intensity of natural hazards putting millions of people at risk around the world, especially Indigenous Peoples, the cycle of dispossession and forced relocation could start all over again if the US government fails to address the colonial past and present. Yet, despite increasing climate impacts globally, no single set of policies or strategies exists to determine if or when communities can no longer be protected in-place in the face of climate impacts. So, while the federal government has a duty to assist Alaska Native communities in proactive, preventive community relocation in the face of rising sea levels and eroding coastlines, the current legal and funding structures have thus far limited federal and state response to piecemeal, reactive projects, and left ANVs with little recourse to address climate change. However, investing in Indigenous land return, often referred to as “Land Back,” could provide a way forward. Land Back, rematriation, or land return—defined sometimes as the return of Indigenous lands to Indigenous hands—is a process that “addresses the root of colonization—the theft of Indigenous lands (including their destruction through resource extraction), the violence committed against Indigenous peoples to build capitalism across the country, and the effects that [Indigenous] communities still experience today”. As an Indigenous-led movement and a decolonial set of actions, the structure and strategy of Land Back are built with the tacit understanding that existing systems are what is causing climate change, not what will solve the climate crisis. Looking to a tool such as Land Back to address the urgent needs of Alaska Native communities, and recognizing the difficulty faced by these communities in accessing their rights in existing legal and policy frameworks, it is essential to reassess existing (and inadequate) disaster recovery and climate adaptation systems. Recent legal research on the duty of the federal government—via the Federal Trust Doctrine and international Indigenous human rights law—combined with the social pressure for reparations and climate justice, could create an environment that is ripe for systemic change, which could leave the door open for the beginning of Indigenous land return and just climate adaptation via existing but underused legal tools.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonialism’s replacement paradigm’: Niall Martin, Ilios Willemars (eds), The Replaceability Paradigm: Replacement and Irreplaceability from Dante to DeepDream, De Gruyter, 2024

02May24

Description: The trope of humans being ‘replaced’ by ‘AI’ is one of the most familiar examples of the rhetoric of replaceability. Not only have questions about what is unique and what is replaceable gained momentum in digital culture, but notions of ‘fungibility’ have emerged in many other contexts as well such as ecology, management theory, and, more sinisterly, in racist and conspiracist thinking. This volume argues that there is a ‘replaceability paradigm’ at work throughout the culture of modernity, from the European Renaissance, through Freudian psychoanalysis, Chinese science fiction and postcolonial theory, all the way to neural network programs such as Google’s DeepDream. This collection will be of interest to anybody engaged with the conceptual architecture of contemporary culture, whether through film, literature, or new digital media.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Paranoia about the settler past: Sarah Maddison, ‘De-Commemorating Australian Settler Colonialism’, in Sarah Gensburger, Jenny Wüstenberg (eds), De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places, Berghahn, 2023

30Apr24

Excerpt: During 2020, the resurgent global Black Lives Matter movement demanded a new reckoning with violent, racist, colonial histories. Across the United States and the United Kingdom statues of white colonizers and slave traders were pulled down as protestors insisted that these men—and these histories—should no longer be celebrated. Far from the United States and Britain, these scenes were repeated in several Australian cities, where protestors confronted armed police charged with protecting statues of James Cook, Lachlan Macquarie, and other noted colonialists. In Australia, such acts of de-commemoration target the erasure of both historical violence and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. Indigenous activists in particular see the work of de-commemoration as part of their wider struggles for justice. Unlike other forms of colonialism where the intent was to extract the resources of a territory (often using Indigenous peoples as enslaved or exploited labor), a settler colony like Australia seeks to acquire land and in doing so to replace the Indigenous population with the peoples, institutions, and structures of the new nation.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Paranoia about the settler future: Shakira Hussein, Liz Allen, Scott Poynting, ‘Dangerous Muslim Wombs and the Fear of Replacement: Experiences from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand’, in Amina Easat-Daas, Irene Zempi (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Gendered Islamophobia, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 485-504

30Apr24

Abstract: The ‘white replacement’ (sometimes called ‘white genocide’) conspiracy theory has become a key element of contemporary far-right racist ideology. The white supremacist terrorist who committed mass murder at two Christchurch mosques in March 2019 brought his Islamophobia with him from Australia to New Zealand. His online ‘manifesto’, posted just prior to the massacre, was entitled The Great Replacement, and began with the sentence, ‘It’s the birth rates’ repeated three times. Both Australia and New Zealand are former British white-settler colonies where whiteness remains hegemonic. Both have small Muslim minorities, but have a history of everyday Islamophobia since 9/11, including violence directed against Muslims and their places of worship. Much of this violence has been directed against Muslim women, often more ‘visible’ because of the hijab, itself targeted in Islamophobic ideology as a supposed manifestation of Muslim misogyny and backwardness. Islamophobic vilification has also been explicitly directed at Muslim women, whose dangerous fecundity is portrayed (with wild misrepresentation of demographic reality) as threatening to overwhelm the predominant white, Western national culture. The racist far right calls ritually for drastic counter-measures, with ‘ethnic cleansing’ ranging from violent racist metaphors to actual terrorist murders. In the current global circulation of Islamophobic propaganda, the local articulation of the ‘replacement’ myth in Australia integrates elements of anti-Muslim racism from Eastern Europe and white-supremacist ideology from North America (from Charlottesville 2017 to the Capitol siege in 2021), always in complex intersection with gender relations.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Tik Tok against settler colonialism: Dylan Barnes, ‘Indigenous knowledge and creativities online: TikTok as a relational tool within the Indigenous art process’, AlterNative, 2024

28Apr24

Abstract: This article explores the potential of TikTok videos as a method of relational engagement for Indigenous artists. The concept of relationality is the foundation of Indigenous artistic practices, through which Indigenous art is representative of an ongoing process of knowledge sharing and connection rather than a final product. Within this process, art is given meaning through the extensive relationships that inform its stories and symbolism such as the artist’s connections, ancestral knowledges, and both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. The ways that Indigenous artists share their art on platforms such as TikTok play a key role in the Indigenous art process. Using data produced through content
analysis of three TikTok videos, this article highlights the various ways that Indigenous artists use TikTok videos and its functions as a means of sharing knowledge, locating their identities, and maintaining extensive relationalities with themselves, community, Country, and ancestors.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler anxiety by law: Sarouche Razi, Amy Hamilton, ‘Skeletons in the cupboard: reading settler anxiety in Mabo and Love’, Griffith Law Review, 2024

28Apr24

Abstract: Thirty years apart, Justices Brennan and Kiefel in the Australian High Court made deeply anxious remarks to define Indigenous identity and assert the power of the Court over Indigenous subjects and subjecthood in the Mabo and Love judgments. The notion that the breadth and depth of the Colonial legal system in Australia in 1992 was so frail as to break its skeleton is a form of gaslighting. Equally, the notion that in 2020 connection to Country is so fragmentable that it can mean one thing in Native Title and another in immigration manipulates an Indigenous notion of Country to fit the mould of settler power. This article analyses the judgments by considering the tone of settler anxiety and finds that in both judgments there remains a sinister logic of seeking to contain Indigenous identity and sovereignty.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Metis and Indigenous against settler colonialism: Allyson Stevenson, ‘Dr Howard Adams’s Halfbreed Histories of Canadian Colonialism: An Indigenous Paradigm for Decolonization’, in Maurice Jr. Labelle (ed.), The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization: Post-Orientalism and the Politics of Difference, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023, pp. 25-41

28Apr24

Excerpt: Canada’s settler-colonial history haunts the cities, towns, and rural areas of Saskatchewan as nowhere else. Here, where Métis leader Louis Riel was hanged, Idle No More was birthed, and the statue of John A. Macdonald drips (symbolically) with blood, the past is ever present. The largely rural province straddles the Great Plains to the south and the boreal forest to the North, bisected by the North and South Saskatchewan River (kisiskāciwani-sīpiy, meaning “swift flowing river” in Cree). Saskatchewan has long been the epicentre of radical Indigenous political resistance and remarkable Indigenous cultural and political persistence. First Nations and Métis Peoples who encountered settler colonialism and cultural imperialism have generated creative, radical, and life-affirming responses that link local struggles for Indigenous justice, freedom, and decolonization to worldwide liberation movements.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Exit against fight: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Exodus or Revolution“World Turned Inside Out” vs “World Turned Upside Down” in a 1980s Exchange’, in Maurice Jr. Labelle, The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization: Post-Orientalism and the Politics of Difference, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023, pp. 120-139

28Apr24

Excerpt: Edward Said responded emphatically to Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution. Walzer had presented an argument that is part of a long-lasting political tradition I have called “the world turned inside out”: the attempt to constitute political regimes elsewhere as an alternative to embracing emplaced change. Walzer had deliberately or unwillingly mis-understood Exodus and its politics and presented them as constituting revolutionary and progressive traditions. Against this misrepresentation, Said restated the “world turned upside down,” the attempt to change the world by reshaping specific geographies.3 He demolished Walzer’s contention that Exodus could sustain a revolutionary template and reflected on the exclusions that Exodus as politics is inevitably premised. This paper revisits this 1985–86 exchange by referring to the long history of opposition between revolution and displacement as polit-ical options.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »