settler colonial studies blog

Present resistance: Tamara Taher, ‘Practicing wujud: A Constellation of sumud in the Fragmented Palestinian Present’, Middle East Critique, 2024

29Mar24

Abstract: The Zionist conception of history and its material project of expansion and land annexation produce a temporality of catastrophe (Nakba) that constantly reiterates violence, dispossession, and displacement in Palestinian lives and experiences. The linear temporality of the colonial process, including the neo-liberal framework of one of its crucial phases—the Oslo Accords (1993), has fragmented Palestinian existence throughout the past decades on multiple levels—economic, political, social, and geographic. Reflecting on Palestinian sumud as a constellation—within an epistemological and methodological relational perspective that aims to counter colonial linear epistemologies and temporalities, this article looks at how three significant Palestinian embodied, material and symbolic practices of wujud (presence) function within collective sumud. On the one hand, such experiences resist colonial annihilation by re-integrating the physical and cultural Palestinian presence in the face of catastrophe. On the other, they embody the diversity of Palestinian ontologies and the multi-vocality of Palestinian epistemologies. Practicing and asserting wujud and reclaiming relationships with the land are refractory Palestinian spaces, in the here and now of a fragmented present, to the Zionist colonial temporality, material and epistemic order. They enable the existence and resistance of the Palestinian people and alternative understandings and imaginations of time, meaning, and presence.

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Different Indigenous policies, same indigeneity: Fabian Bergmann, ‘An efficacious remedy for status inequality? Indigenous policies in Norway and Sweden’, Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2024

29Mar24

Abstract: Most states publicly support the recognition of Indigenous rights. Nevertheless, their domestic policies to address Indigenous rights issues vary considerably across countries. So far, research has not committed itself to investigating the consequences of different Indigenous policies on the peoples concerned and their social status. Do policy contexts that accommodate Indigenous rights firmly contribute to status equality between Indigenous people and the ethnic majority? I study this question in the case of Norway and Sweden. These countries host one Indigenous people – the Sámi – but pursue diverging Indigenous policies. Using new survey data, I show that, despite the absence of material inequalities, there is a clear gap in the social status perceptions between Indigenous and majority respondents in Sweden. In Norway, I do not find that Sámi’s perception of their social position is lower than the majority’s. The results suggest that the Swedish policies governing the recognition of Sámi rights are less effective in resolving unequal status perceptions.

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The indenture of settler colonialism: Anna Suranyi, ‘Indentured Servitude in Colonial America’, American History, 2024

29Mar24

Abstract: Indentured servitude was a constitutive factor in the development of colonial America and helped shape patterns of immigration, labor relationships, citizenship, and the economy of the colonies. During the 16th through the 18th centuries, about 320,000 indentured servants, primarily from England but also from Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere, crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the British colonies in the Americas, making up about 80 percent of white immigrants. About three-quarters of them were male, a quarter were female, and approximately a tenth were children. Most indentured servants were impoverished individuals, aged 18 to 25, who had agreed to a term of four to seven years of servitude with a payment of “freedom dues” at the end, but some were shipped or “transported” overseas involuntarily by the government, as vagrants or to serve criminal sentences, or were trafficked into servitude by kidnappers. Even those servants who had nominally agreed to indentured servitude had little understanding of what awaited them on the North American continent, because the indenture relationship gave their masters and mistresses much greater control over servants’ lives than employers had in Britain. Once indentured servants began their term of labor, many found themselves in abusive situations, with women and children particularly vulnerable to mistreatment. However, their circumstances were better than that of enslaved people of African ancestry, as a consequence of the limited duration of indentured servitude as opposed to lifelong enslavement and because indentured servants possessed legally and culturally defined rights as members of British society that were unavailable to the enslaved, including guidelines regulating their terms of labor, protections against abuses, and the ability to sue in court if mistreatment occurred. After servitude was completed, indentured servants were expected to join colonial society, and while many remained in dire poverty, some prospered.

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Korean settler colonialism: Will Sack, ‘Ecology and Colonialism in Late Chosŏn Korea: Ullŭngdo, 1882-1905’, Past & Present, 2024

29Mar24

Abstrat: In the late nineteenth century, the Chosŏn state, which ruled the Korean peninsula from 1392 to 1910, moved settlers, animals and crops to the isolated oceanic island (do) of Ullŭng, displacing or killing the indigenous people, animals and possibly plant species living there. Having first sent observers to investigate Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido, the Chosŏn court accurately replicated its institutions and their impact during its settlement of Ullŭngdo. Documents from the settlement also mention non-Korean islanders uprooted by the state. Their presence shaped these events and the Chosŏn court’s policies, but the nature of their lives is now beyond reconstruction. Although the settlement of Ullŭngdo employed institutions and policies characteristic of settler colonialism, the lack of a self-identifying indigenous people, either at the time or surviving today, complicates the application to this case of the term ‘settler colonialism’. This offers an opportunity to discuss nationalizing settler colonialisms because, unlike the iconic settler colonies of North America and Oceania, settler colonialism in late Chosŏn Korea violently integrated outsiders into the emerging nation.

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The cultivar of settler colonialism: Thomas D. Isern, ‘Wheat’, in Jeannie Whayne (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 269-285

29Mar24

Description: Wheat is a cultivar with agency in world history. Gluten as well as other nutritional and agronomic virtues commended early wheats to humankind. Out of its Neolithic origins, wheat achieved a unity with human agriculturalists; was disseminated across Europe, Asia, and North Africa; spread globally as a participant in settler colonialism; established identifiable wheat belts; and was implicated in environmental catastrophes on the order the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains of North America. Established wheat belts such as the Great Plains developed coherent commodity cultures by which production practices were related to the environment. A direct historical relationship tied the wheat culture of the Great Plains to that of the Russian steppe. In the late twentieth century, wheat culture rose to new prominence in Asian nations as a result of the Green Revolution.

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Settlers in outer space: Mirko Daniel Garasic, Marcello Di Paola (eds), The Philosophy of Outer SpaceExplorations, Controversies, Speculations, Routledge, 2024

29Mar24

Description: This volume provides a rigorous philosophical investigation of the rationales, challenges, and promises of the coming Space Age. Over the past decade, space exploration has made significant and accelerating progress, and its potential has attracted growing attention from science, states, businesses, innovators, as well as the media and society more generally. Yet philosophical theorizing concerning the premises, values, meanings, and impacts of space exploration is still in its infancy, and this potentially immense field of study is far from mainstream yet. This book advances outer space philosophy by integrating key scientific and societal debates sparked by recent developments in space research and activities with conceptual, existential, ethical, aesthetic, and political themes and concerns. It maps various regions of philosophical exploration, reflection, and speculation regarding humanity’s present and future emanations into outer space, to promote a broad, rich, and nuanced societal debate regarding this transformative enterprise, which is as stimulating as it can be disorienting. This book will be a fascinating read for academics, researchers, and students interested in philosophy, space studies, science and technology studies, future studies, and sustainability.

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Earthwork, remunerated, against settler colonalism: David Myer Temin, ‘Wages for Earthwork’, American Political Science Review, 2024

26Mar24

Abstract: This essay proposes a novel paradigm for a political theory of climate justice: wages for earthwork. Indigenous peoples have disproportionately contributed to the sustainable stewardship of the natural world through ecological systems of governance, which I theorize as “earthwork.” Proponents of climate reparations have focused on reparations for unequal climate damages from emissions. By contrast, I propose “wages” or reparations to Indigenous peoples for debt owed to them for their devalued climate work. This framework makes use of an analogy to the 1970s feminist wages for housework movement, which sought to reveal the exploited and yet indispensable character of systematically devalued work rendered natural and invisible. I contend that (re)valuing earthwork must also be central to projects aimed at decolonizing climate justice, that is, anticolonial climate justice. More than monetary transfers alone, wages for earthwork prioritize the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and land and wider structural transformation of colonial capitalism.

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Settler animalities? Rachel Fetherston, “Muzzle for the Queen”: Settler–Nonhuman Entanglements in Australian Speculative Ecofiction’, in Nora Castle, Giulia Champion (eds), Animals and Science Fiction, Pagrave Macmillan, 2024, pp. 112-127

26Mar24

Abstract: In Australian postcolonial literature, representations of the nonhuman animal are often entangled with past, present, and potential future understandings of Australian settler-colonial belonging. Drawing from multispecies studies and scholarship on Australian postcolonial literature, this chapter discusses how the representation of the nonhuman animal in two works of what I define as “Australian speculative ecofiction” underscores the complexities and problematic nature of settler-colonial belonging in Australia. I contend that the human–nonhuman relations portrayed in Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) and Robbie Arnott’s Flames (2018) represent a shift in the way Australian settler-colonial authors are considering the nonhuman in their work. I also discuss how such works partly uphold problematic notions regarding the animal and settler-colonial belonging in Australia, particularly in their obscuration of Indigenous sovereignty.

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Indigenous internationalism: Kim Alley, Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Indigenous Internationalism Against Imprisoned Indigeneity in Australia and Palestine’, Middle East Critique, 2024

22Mar24

Abstract: Indigenous Australians and Palestinians experience some of the highest rates of incarceration and state violence in the world. In this article’s first section we focus comparatively on administrative detention and other forms of incarceration to underline a commonality of oppression that is both historical and contemporary. We examine settler colonial structures of domination and the impact of structural violence on Indigenous bodies, seeking to understand how incarceration acts as a form of elimination, and how it contributes to the consolidation of settler colonial nationhood. To counter incarceration and elimination, this article’s second and third sections call for a politics of solidarity premised on shared indigeneity.

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There goes the neighbourhood: Joshua A McGonagle Althoff, ‘Managing Settlers, Managing Neighbors: Renarrating Johnson v. McIntosh through the History of Piankashaw Community Building’, Journal of American History, 110, 4, 2024, pp. 625-642

22Mar24

Abstract: On the evening of January 1, 1776, Peeyankihšiaki (Piankashaw people) gathered in the village of Vincennes (in present-day Indiana), several miles above the confluence of the Embarras River and Waapaahšiki Siipiiwi (Wabash River). They came to celebrate the coming of a new year with the Francophone residents of Vincennes. On behalf of the British at this fur-trading post, French commandant Jean Baptiste Racine dit St. Marie recorded the evening’s celebrations in his ledger of merchandise. St. Marie was most concerned with estimating the expense of gifts being distributed. Throughout the evening, he noted that eighty loaves of bread and twenty-five “carrots” of tobacco went to groups led by the akimaki (male civil leaders) Sakimia (Maringouin or Mosquito), Old Tobacco, and Young Tobacco. These akimaki were regular guests of St. Marie and leading families of Vincennes, and their company may have been a welcome reprieve to residents occupied with keeping warm. The evening’s quaintness belied the fact that these leaders had gathered not two months earlier to negotiate a deal with an afterlife that would become the foundation of contemporary American Indian law in the United States.

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