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The sanitary settler state: Ruth A. Morgan, ‘Sanitary Citizenship in the Settler Colonial City: Race, health, and hygiene in interwar urban Australia’, in Maxine Newlands, Claire Hansen (eds), Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities, Routledge, 2024

22Aug24

Abstract: This chapter argues for the closer integration of historical analyses of hydrosocial relations into the blue humanities by attending to the expressions and consequences of sanitary citizenship in urban settler Australia. Focusing on interwar Perth, Darwin, and Melbourne, this chapter reveals the ways that freshwater has been historically implicated in the social and moral fabric of settler Australian cities. In these growing cities, the availability of clean freshwater supplies was a means for authorities to govern both urban spaces as well as the raced, classed, and gendered bodies that resided in them. Practices of sanitary surveillance allowed for the exclusion and inclusion of particular bodies, according to their perceived ability and willingness to conform to the expectations of the sanitary state. As the examples in this chapter suggest, this regime provided for the rise of a discriminatory sanitary order that especially marginalised non-white bodies in order to physically and morally protect the settler colonial city.


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The settler flour: Sarah Carter, ‘Pure, White, British, and Canadian: The Moose Jaw Origins and Rise of Robin Hood Flour, 1909–1930s’, Prairie History, 13, 2024, pp. 19-33

20Aug24

Abstract: In a settler colony such as Western Canada, colonizers came to stay and to claim and re-fashion the land permanently as theirs, displacing Indigenous Peoples, and limiting their former access to their land and resources. An important component of establishing settler ascendancy was the undermining of Indigenous Peoples’ food systems and converting them to a settler diet. Flour was at the heart of this settler diet and the wheat the core of the new economy of the West. Flour was provided to and withheld from First Nations following the Numbered Treaties of the 1870s as rationing was a central tool of control used by Canadian authorities to clear the plains, and enforce government objectives. Robin Hood flour played a role in the creation of a new food regime on the prairies; through its massive advertising campaigns, Robin Hood emphasized the superiority, cleanliness and purity of settler, particularly British, foods.


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The truth of settler epistemics: Priya Kunjan, ‘Tracing the limits of epistemic agency in truth-telling about Australian settler colonialism’, Journal of Sociology, 2024

19Aug24

Abstract: The Australian state and much of the settler polity maintain an unresolved contradiction between fully acknowledging Indigenous people and upholding a system predicated on the assumption of their socio-political inferiority. This tension inflects a public sphere in which Indigenous people frequently deploy truth-telling as an epistemic strategy, albeit one that involves a balance between challenging cultivated silences and/or colonial triumphalism and the costs of repetitive epistemic labour. The landscape of communicative exchange thus outlined suggests the need for a more nuanced assessment of the decolonial potential of truth-telling about colonial violence in Australia, given a contemporary context wherein settler individuals and institutions increasingly attempt to elicit such testimony from Indigenous people. Discourse analysis of media items published in 2020 about 26 January, Australia’s national day, reveals Indigenous people’s resistance against both colonial untruths and the racialised epistemic power differential enabling their circulation.


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The truth of a settler consciousness: Abraham Bradfield, ‘Decolonising consciousness: Confronting and living with colonial truths in Australia’, Journal of Sociology, 2024

19Aug24

Abstract: National and state/territory dialogues in Australia have increasingly turned towards implementing mechanisms that will oversee truth-telling processes to facilitate reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. While truth lies central to decolonising, it is vital to reflect on whose truth(s) are being represented, and in what ways it should be disseminated. In this article I discuss how the cultivation of a ‘decolonising consciousness’ may assist in confronting national and personal truths while also helping citizens of settler-colonial nations acquire the proficiency needed to put decolonial understandings into praxis. I argue that decolonising truths entails a responsive consciousness that is informed by frameworks such as border thinking, agonistic pluralism and kincentric orientations. Decolonising truth enables non-Indigenous settlers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples alike to live alongside the complexities of mutually informing, competing, and at times incommensurable worldviews; this is the point of departure in the ongoing path towards reconciliation.


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The truth of settler colonialism: Vanessa Barolsky, ‘Reckonings with truth: Sovereign truths on Country’, Journal of Sociology, 2024

19Aug24

Abstract: This article analyses grassroots truth-telling in Australia, in the light of the 2017 Uluru Statement’s call for a Makarrata Commission to oversee truth-telling and treaty. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have long called for truth-telling about the colonial past. Numerous community projects have emerged to engage with these historical truths. However, few of these initiatives have been documented. This article analyses a small sample of these projects, drawing on case study research. It argues that these activities, grounded in Indigenous onto-epistemology, offer unique opportunities to explore the decolonising potential of truth-telling. These truth practices defy the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism, creating spaces for pedagogic encounter that trouble the settler-colonial order by enacting multiple sovereignties on Country. Importantly, they provide insights for formal truth-telling, modelling resurgent, prefigurative praxis that incorporates Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in transformative processes that could help navigate the challenges of transitional justice in the settler-colonial context.


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The Wall Street Journal against settler colonial studies (I am including it here because this is a repository, but if a critique of settler colonialism is called ‘settler colonial ideology’ then Marx is a capitalist): Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, WW Norton, 2024

18Aug24

Description: This short book is the first to examine settler colonialism critically for a general readership. By critiquing the most important writers, texts, and ideas in the field, Adam Kirsch shows how the concept emerged in the context of North American and Australian history and how it is being applied to Israel. He examines the sources of its appeal, which, he argues, are spiritual as much as political; how it works to delegitimize nations; and why it has the potential to turn indignation at past injustices into a source of new injustices today. A compact and accessible introduction, rich with historical detail, the book will speak to readers interested in the Middle East, American history, and today’s most urgent cultural-political debates.

An excerpt in the WSJ: The passions on campus are focused on the war in Gaza, with protesters accusing the U.S. (and in many cases their own universities) of complicity in what they call Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. But the charge resonates for many young people, especially the most dedicated activists, for reasons that go beyond the conflict that began with Hamas’s attack last Oct. 7. The ideological basis for the anti-Israel protests is a broader set of ideas about “settler colonialism,” an influential academic concept that understands certain countries as inherently and permanently illegitimate because of the way they were founded.


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Settler antisemitism? Raz Segal, ‘Settler Antisemitism, Israeli Mass Violence, and the Crisis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2024

18Aug24

Abstract: This article examines the depiction of Israel as a nation-state like any other as a mechanism of disavowing Israeli settler colonialism. It is a depiction that also brings into focus the antisemitic marginalization and violence against Jews in nation-states. In this framework, the article shows that since modern antisemitism emerged at the intersection of the nation-state system and European imperialism and colonialism, Israel as a settler nationstate also functions according to the logic of what the author calls settler antisemitism. While the racialization of Jews in the frame of White supremacy in other settler-colonial states could include Jews as immigrant settlers but never more, White supremacy in Israel has manifested itself as Jewish supremacy, which defined the project of creating a White Jewish settler society. The article concludes with a discussion of the crisis in Holocaust and genocide studies that this situation has exposed, especially in the midst of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.


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Settlers, migrant settlers, and their separate reconciliations? Jason Chalmers, ‘Settler Colonialism, Reconciliation, and Indigenous–Jewish Relations in Canada’, Contemporary Jewry, 2024

18Aug24

Abstract: This article examines the sociopolitical frameworks that Jewish organizations use to navigate settler colonialism, Indigenous-settler relations, and especially reconciliation in Canada. Reconciliation is a controversial process that purports to restore or establish respectful relations between Indigenous peoples and settler society. While often implemented at the federal and provincial levels, reconciliation may also facilitate social and political change when practiced at the community or grassroots level, and especially when rooted in the histories and traditions of particular migrant groups. My analysis explores how Canadian Jewish organizations are engaging with reconciliation and the ways that these initiatives respond to the settler state. I examine three frameworks that mediate this engagement: Holocaust commemoration and the comparative study of genocide; diversity paradigms, which are often expressed as multiculturalism or anti-racism; and nation-to-nation paradigms based on mutual respect between distinct peoples. I contend that these frameworks, which often overlap and intersect with other public and political discourses, reflect the multifaceted and shifting position of Jews within Canadian society. The tension between national, local, and group identity creates a space where migrant or minority groups and Indigenous peoples can build relationships while avoiding the limits of state-centered reconciliation.


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Settlers somewhere else: José Angel Hernández, Colonizing Ourselves: Tejano Back-to-Mexico Movements and the Making of a Settler Colonial Nation, University of Oklahoma Press, 2024

17Aug24

Description: In the late nineteenth century, the Mexican government, seeking to fortify its northern borders and curb migration to the United States, set out to relocate “Mexico-Texano” families, or Tejanos, on Mexican land. In Colonizing Ourselves, José Angel Hernández explores these movements back to Mexico, also known as autocolonization, as distinct in the history of settler colonization. Unlike other settler colonial states that relied heavily on overseas settlers, especially from Europe and Asia, Mexico received less than 1 percent of these nineteenth-century immigrants. This reality, coupled with the growing migration of farmers and laborers northward toward the United States, led ultimately to passage of the 1883 Land and Colonization Law. This legislation offered incentives to any Mexican in the United States willing to resettle in the republic: Tejanos, as well as other Mexican expatriates abroad, were to be granted twice the amount of land for settlement that other immigrants received. The campaign worked: ethnic Mexicans from Texas and the Mexican interior, as well as Indigenous peoples from Mexico, established numerous colonies on the northern frontier. Leading one of the most notable back-to-Mexico movements was Luis Siliceo, a Texan who, with a subsidized newspaper, El Colono, and the backing of Porfirio Díaz’s administration, secured a contract to resettle Tejano families across several Mexican states. The story of this partnership, which Hernández traces from the 1890s through the turn of the century, provides insight into debates about settler colonization in Mexico. Viewed from various global, national, and regional perspectives, it helps to make sense of Mexico’s autocolonization policy and its redefinition of Indigenous and settler populations during the nineteenth century.


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It is not over, settler colonialism remains contested: Kay Yandell, ‘Indigeneity Buried, Then Unearthed, in Mohja Kahf’s “Fayetteville as in Fate” and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf’, MELUS, 2024

17Aug24

Abstract: When Mohja Kahf met Winona LaDuke, Kahf referenced Native America’s long history of resistance against occupation, land theft, displacement, and genocide. Kahf couched her observation in assumptions that Indigenous Americans lost that battle, and that Native resistance has ended. Kahf notes her own feelings of mortification on hearing LaDuke’s response, that Native resistance is not over, and, on further research into Native history and modern Native lives, Kahf considers the ways that her poem “Fayetteville as in Fate” (written 1995, published 2003) and her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) engage in the sorts of simplified images and cultural appropriations that her earlier assumptions of the disappearance of Native resistance might engender. This kind of simplified vision of Native peoples and cultures is easy for Americans of all backgrounds to adopt inadvertently. LaDuke’s and her family’s own work, in fact, has long been accused of simplification, erasure, and cultural appropriation. Beth Link, for example, calls Winona LaDuke’s Ashkenazi mother, visual artist Betty Bernstein LaDuke, “a white artist whose subjects are exclusively people of color. [For Betty LaDuke,] non-white cultures and bodies can be mimicked and possessed by white artists without substantively critiquing power or legacies of colonization” (17). For American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means, Winona LaDuke’s Ojibwe father, spiritual practitioner Vincent LaDuke, or Sun Bear, “is a liar. . . . The most non-Indian thing about Sun Bear’s ceremonies is that he’s personally prostituted the whole thing by turning it into a money-making venture” (Churchill). Critics have accused Winona LaDuke herself of presenting romantic, essentialist, simplified visions of Native lifeways, in order to appropriate them for her own environmentalist imaginings. For Kimberly Tallbear, for instance, LaDuke’s All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999) “presents a very narrow definition of authentic tribal or indigenous identity, relies on simplistic traditionalist rhetoric, . . . then conditions legitimate governance on the restrictive definition of authentic indigenity that she assumes her readers will innately accept to be true” (234). Yet, even amid such accusations that LaDuke’s stories of Native political actions insist “that authentic indigenous cultures must be representative of a static, generic, and uncomplicated traditionalism” (Tallbear 241), LaDuke performs the desperately needed intellectual work of documenting, compiling, and publicizing modern Native nations’ determination to undergird and strengthen their tribal lands, endangered cultures, and national sovereignties.


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