settler colonial studies blog

The settler legal masquerade: Michal Rotem, Liberal Masquerade: Settler Colonial Pedagogies in Israeli Legal Education, PhD dissertation, Queen Mary University of London, 2024

16Aug24

Abstract: The case of the Israeli juridical field poses a puzzle. The political situation in Israel/Palestine deteriorated over the years from a temporary conquest, to an abiding belligerent occupation, and lately, to an apartheid regime. The Israeli juridical field elevated in the opposite direction, from a formalistic arena to a liberal, active, individual-oriented and human rights focused sphere. If the application of liberal law within a repressive political context is conflictual, then the Israeli case would lead to a head-on collision. Yet, reality suggests otherwise. On the surface, liberal law and apartheid regime are necessarily conflictual, as liberal legal philosophy and particularly the principle of the rule of law allegedly stand against repression. However, on the ground, liberal law and repressive political situations work together to complement and reinforce one another. The research interrogates this apparent enigma by using the Israeli legal education enterprise as a case study. It asks how Israeli legal education work to interpellate law students into a liberal juridical field that operates within a repressive political atmosphere. Based on four years of ethnography conducted within an Israeli law school, this inquiry provides a critical account of how law is being taught in Israel. The dissertation exposes several settler colonial pedagogies that are deployed in the law classroom. Silence and utterance allow to mute some areas and aspects of the law while putting emphasis on others. Legal Judaisation works to make sense of the contradictory definition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. De jure and de facto distinctions allow to teach the law itself while disregarding reality on the ground. Spatial ambiguity and the fragmentation of space overlook the Israeli apartheid regime through a vague description of the State’s territory. These settler colonial pedagogies not only bolster settler colonial logic among future members of the Israeli juridical field, but also bridge the relation between liberal law and apartheid regime.

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Mascot settler colonialism: Linda J Kuckuk, The Persistent Voice of the Colonizer: Troubling a Mascot’s Settler-Colonial Past, MA dissertation, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, 2024

16Aug24

Abstract: The legacy of settler-colonialism permeates American culture. Remnants of westward expansion remain in our societal divides, political differences, environmental inequities and economic inequalities. Conversations about decolonization, gentrification, and other ongoing practices that precipitate and uphold colonialism are notably found in literature, art, social structures, icons and symbols. Mascots that rely on stereotypes or caricatures can contribute to negative perceptions and reinforce discriminatory attitudes, making it necessary to reevaluate and change representational practices. In this analysis I apply historical, textual, and visual methods to explore Cal Poly Humboldt’s mascot Lucky Logger and identify how this character is a “persistent voice” by way of the object’s own history and of the history it reflects. As a rendition of the American mythic hero Paul Bunyan, Lucky Logger is a remnant of Manifest Destiny and inseparable from this mythos. Further, I compare Shing Yin Khor’s graphic novel The Legend of Auntie Po, a counter-narrative, to the legacy of white male superiority inherent in Paul Bunyan tales and by extension in Lucky Logger. I argue that Cal Poly Humboldt’s mascot perpetrates “the persistent voice of the colonizer” and does not represent the values of a Polytechnic University within the California State University system.

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Engels (and Marx) on the colonial question (and on the role primacy of the colonised in the struggle): Ken Olende, ‘Engels on Colonialism: Ireland and the Agency of the Colonised’, Socialist History, 65, 2024, pp. 47-62

15Aug24

Abstract: Frederick Engels’ 1856 tour of Ireland was key to his and Karl Marx’s political shift away from the idea that colonialism might have a progressive element. This article will examine how this relatively early experience, before the Great Indian Uprising of 1857, was part of a shift in Marx and Engels in relation to the agency of oppressed peoples in colonised countries in their own liberation. This replaced the idea that they should wait for help from an outside working class or the development of their own working class. As such it conceptualised capitalism as an interrelated world system.

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Marx on Indigenous communism against settler relations to land: Wayne Wapeemukwa, ‘Primitive Speculation: Marx on Precapitalism, Social Relations to Land, and Indigenous Dispossession’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 38, 3, 2024, pp. 359-370

15Aug24

Abstract: Marx studied how capitalism changes relations to land before and after Capital—but wielded different methodologies and reached different conclusions. In Grundrisse, Marx investigates precapitalism from a speculative standpoint. In Capital, Marx provides a selective and historical description of dispossession but delimits his analysis to Western Europe. Post-Capital, Marx wields Henry Lewis Morgan’s anthropology and Justus von Liebig’s ecology as scientific bases upon which to critique capitalist property relations. Specifically, Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production installed a historically specific relation to land; and that this relation was abstract, accumulative, and proprietorial. This article shows that Marx began to develop a critical theory of dispossession that overspills the historical, metaphysical, and developmental sequencing usually attributed to him. This late Marx believes that Indigenous peoples have a concrete, metabolic, and communal relationship to the land that communism must recapitulate and rehabilitate; this thesis has been misunderstood by readers of Marx, who impose an overly historicized interpretation upon his work.

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Touristic indigeneity: Richard Butler, Anna Carr (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Indigenous Peoples, Routledge, 2025

13Aug24

Description: The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Indigenous Peoples presents an up-to-date, critical and comprehensive overview of established and emerging themes around Indigeneity and connections between Indigenous peoples and tourism development. Offering socio-cultural perspectives and multidisciplinary insights from leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and tourism practitioners, the book explores contemporary issues, challenges and trends. Organised into six sections, the handbook explores Indigenous community involvement in tourism, Indigenous entrepreneurship and innovation, Indigenous tourism policies and politics, and the complexities of colonialism and decolonisation issues. This text focuses on the active role that Indigenous peoples have in the industry and uses international case studies and experiences to explore the global context of Indigenous tourism. This handbook fills a notable gap by offering a critical and detailed understanding of the role of Indigenous practitioners and societies in tourism and how they interact within the tourism nexus. It will be of interest to scholars, students, tourism practitioners and policymakers working in tourism, development studies, anthropology, human geography and sociology.

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The settler colonial suicide: Deanna Zantingh, Brandon Hey, Jeffrey Ansloos, ‘Unsettling Settler-Colonial Suicidology: Indigenous Theories of Justice in Indigenous Suicide Research’, in Alvin Dueck, Louise Sundararajan (eds), Values and Indigenous Psychology in the Age of the Machine and Market, Palgrave, 2024, pp 103-130

13Aug24

Abstract: This paper reflects on suicide research from a critical Indigenous studies perspective, drawing on pluralistic epistemologies of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial contexts. It argues that suicide prevention research must center on Indigenous knowledge systems to address the complex, interconnected nature of suicide and the broader ecological, cultural, and spiritual harms of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism. Indigenous scholars suggest contemporary suicide research is often based on binary-anthropocentric Western epistemologies and insufficiently attentive to holistic, communal, and land-based dimensions of Indigenous life-promoting relations. To unsettle settler-colonial suicidology is to reconceptualize prevention as the process of communal, environmental, social, and cultural healing that emphasizes the importance of harmony in the interconnectedness of all life. This more expansive and contextualized approach recognizes the structural entrenchment of suicide and system factors contributing to suicidal distress. Justice in suicide research involves co-creating meaning and relationally evolving to support all beings’ conditions for life. Indigenous studies of care, life promotion, and healing offer promising frameworks to reorient suicide research from individual responses toward collective healing-justice that is generative and supportive of interdependent communities. Thus, resisting narrow definitions of health and justice operative within the state’s normative desires; re-centering Indigenous communities’ fights to address the structures that thwart life.

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The settler colonial logic of elimination, displaced: Anna Younes, Hanna Al-Taher, ‘Erasing Palestine in Germany’s Educational System: The Racial Frontiers of Liberal Freedom’, Middle East Critique, 2024

13Aug24

Abstract: Since the first Merkel government in 2009, Germany’s reason of state (Staatsrason) has been increasingly formulated as ‘unconditional solidarity’ with the state of Israel, thus evolving into a logic and practice of erasing Palestine and Palestinians. In such a context, the article delves into the most recent events at German schools and universities since October 7, 2023, and examines how these educational sites have become fundamental avenues for reaffirming Germany’s Staatsra€son, as well as potential spaces for its contestation. Combining the work of Lisa Lowe and Nadera Shaloub-Kervorkian, we show how liberal notions of freedom emerge and follow racial frontiers that systemically erase Palestine in the educational structures, from schools to universities. While these processes consolidate Germany’s Staatsra€son, protest movements of students and pupils offer the most radical spaces to resist it.

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Pottering settler colonialism: Martin Crawford, Land and labour: The Potters’ Emigration Society, 1844–51, Manchester University Press, 2024

12Aug24

Description: Land and Labour narrates the history of the Potters’ Emigration Society, the most widely discussed project of its kind in the era of mass migration to America. Founded by the revived potters’ union in 1844, and the brainchild of a young Welsh-born activist, William Evans, it sought to solve the problems of surplus labour by changing pottery workers into farmers on land acquired in Wisconsin through a subscription and lottery scheme. The book examines the Society’s industrial and Owenite origins, including the impact of the 1836–37 strike and 1842 riots, and competition from rival labour organisations and Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist Land Plan. In 1848, short of funds, the Society opened its doors to other trades and regions. At its peak it comprised over one hundred branches, including members in Scotland, Lancashire and London. Beset by naivety, over-ambition and the inherent difficulties of transatlantic communication, the Society collapsed at the beginning of 1851. Land and Labour is based on intensive research into British and American newspapers, passenger lists, census, manuscript, genealogical and other sources. Despite the Society’s failure, its history offers a unique insight into working-class dreams of landed independence in the American West and illuminates the complex and contingent nature of transatlantic emigration in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Settler colonial inroads (in Brazil): Adriana Gomes Santos, ‘“The road that kills:” the projects of the Business-Military Dictatorship and indigenous peoples, Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro), 37, 82, 2024

11Aug24

Abstract: This research focused on understanding the process of productive occupation of the Amazon and the impact on the forms of existence of Indigenous peoples during the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-1985). We analysed numerous documents from the collection of the National Information Service processes and reports from the Federal Public Ministry and Parliamentary Inquiry Commissions. From the analysis of the immanence of the sources, the constitutive links showed the Paranapanema company in its complexion – capital, partners, economic areas of activity, mineral production -, as well as the mechanisms of territorial appropriation engendered by the relations established between the business and the military sectors in power.

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Staging settler ventriloquism: Amy Hull, ‘Re-Reading The Ecstasy of Rita Joe: Ventriloquism and Indigenous Representation on the World Stage’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 20, 1-2 , 2024

11Aug24

Excerpt: Considered to be one of the most celebrated works of Canadian theater, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, a play about an Indigenous woman who moves from the reserve to the city and is eventually murdered, evades critical, postcolonial critique on an international scale. This play, originally written by Ukrainian-Canadian playwright George Ryga in 1967, has become a symbol of Canadianism and Canadian multiculturalism, attracting the attention of scholars from Hungary, Japan, Jordan, and India, to name a few localities. Enduring in memory, performance, and literature in its play, ballet, and opera forms, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe remains a Canadian classic, and Rita Joe a symbol of both Indigenous peoples and of the impacts of colonial violence and biopolitics.

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