settler colonial studies blog

Settler slips: Sarah Elizabeth Vaughn, ‘Unavoidable Slips: Settler Colonialism and Terra Nullius in the Wake of Climate Adaptation’, Critical Inquiry, 50, 3, 2024

02Mar24

Abstract: This article focuses on Guyanese efforts in the postcolonial present to address environmental issues that have become increasingly complex in the face of an awareness of climate change. It opens with an account of how the preservation of Indigenous forests contributes to international efforts to reduce carbon, while making visible the instability that the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the seabed might portend for the Guyanese economy. Specifically, the article examines how engineers have historically confronted settler-colonial discourses about terra nullius unfold as they invest in sea defense. In doing so, the article foregrounds what engineers call slips—the slow or sudden displacement of a sea defense’s structural foundation. Slips are phenomena of energy conversion between land and sea. Rather than arguing for the claims of the pre-Anthropocene earth, the article suggests how many factors are in play in developing policy in the present, in an era of heightened awareness of the different forces in a changing climate.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

More romantic settlers: Nikki Hessell, ‘Songs of (Settler Moves to) Innocence’, European Romantic Review, 35, 2024, pp. 77-91

02Mar24

Abstract: This article considers how public recitation or quotation of Romantic poetry in Aotearoa New Zealand can be read within Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s framework of “settler moves to innocence.” Examining three distinct acts of settler use of Romantic poetry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, featuring Felicia Hemans, Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, the article suggests that we can interpret these moments through the lens of “generations” or the Māori term “whakapapa.” Understanding these apparently isolated moments as part of a process of generating a settler futurity out of Romantic poetry, and foreclosing Indigenous futurities in the process, the essay proposes that some of Romanticism’s cherished lines and authors have underpinned the settler colonial project in Aotearoa in ways that remain both influential and publicly visible to generations of the twenty-first century.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Romantic settlers: Claire Knowles, Thomas H. Ford, Alexis Harley, ‘Hopeless Romantics: Australian Studies in Romanticism’, European Romantic Review, 35, 2024, pp. 3-21

02Mar24

Abstract: For most of the twentieth century, Romantic writers were largely ignored by serious Australian scholars even as they were celebrated and imitated outside the academy. This article tracks the belated emergence of Romanticism as a specialist field of study in Australia while providing what is often a counter-narrative about the broader reception of Romantic literature and ideology by the Australian public. In tracing these contrary yet entwined histories, the article shows how Romantic literature has been and remains implicated in the ongoing project of Australian colonization from 1788 to the present. It has been conscripted into the work of establishing a series of penal colonies on stolen Aboriginal land; of valorizing an English-speaking territorialization of that land; of shaping settler subjectivity; and of defining a national identity often vexed in its relationship to anglophone cultural centers. Exploring the ways in which the reception of Romantic culture is diffracted across various Australian sub-cultures, the essay arrives at the field as it exists today: at a critical Australian Romanticism that is, and needs to be, increasingly attentive to the history of the field and its investments in the settler-colonial state.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The property of land: Dana Lloyd, Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites, University Press of Kansas, 2024

29Feb24

Description: Responding to Vine Deloria, Jr.’s call for all people to “become involved” in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites, Dana Lloyd’s Land Is Kin proposes a rethinking of sacred sites, and a rethinking of even land itself. Deloria suggested using the principle of religious freedom, but this principle has failed Indigenous peoples for decades. Lloyd argues that religious freedom fails Indigenous claimants because settler law creates a tension between two competing rights—one party’s religious freedom and another party’s property rights. In this contest, the right of property will always win. Through an analysis of the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which she interprets as a case about sovereignty and the meaning of land, Lloyd proposes a multilayered understanding of land and the different roles it can simultaneously play. Rejecting the binary logic of sacred religion versus secular property, Lloyd uses the legal dispute over the High Country—an area of the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous nations—to show that there are at least five different, but not equally valid, ways to understand land in the Lyng case: home, property, sacred site, wilderness, and kin. To protect the High Country, the Yurok filed a religious freedom lawsuit but then proceeded to describe the land as their home in court. They lobbied for protecting the High Country through a wilderness designation even as they continued to argue that they had been managing it for centuries. They have purchased large parcels of ancestral land and also declare the land their kin, a relationship that ostensibly excludes the possibility of ownership. Land Is Kin demonstrates the complexity of land in contemporary religious, political, and legal discourse. By drawing on Indigenous perspectives on the land as kin, Lloyd points toward a framework that shifts sovereignty away from binary oppositions—between property and sacred site, between the federal government and Native nations—towards seeing the land itself as sovereign.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler dramas: Jennifer Lynn Peterson, ‘The Covered Wagon: Location Shooting and Settler Melodrama’, in Rob King, Charlie Keil (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 569-593

27Feb24

Abstract: This chapter offers an analysis of The Covered Wagon (1923), one of the most commercially successful films of the silent era, through the critical framework of settler colonialism. Shot on location in Utah and California, the film is a period piece depicting white settlers traveling westward along the Oregon trail in 1848. Modeled on the epic scope of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Covered Wagon used landscape and melodrama to naturalize the colonial impulse. The film also made the covered wagon itself into an iconic, nostalgic precursor to the automobile, at a time when the Ford Model T was selling more than a million units a year, and when the federal government was launching its first major road-building initiatives. In this respect, The Covered Wagon helped pave the way for fossil capitalism, serving as an ideological archetype for a generation of Hollywood films to come.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

A reservation about policing: Theresa Rocha Beardall, ‘“Imperialism without Imperialists” and the Settler-Colonial Logics of Reservation Policing’, in Daniel Gascón, Sebastián Sclofsky, Xavier Perez, Jhon Sanabria, Analicia Mejia Mesinas (eds), Police and State Crime in the Americas, Palgrave, 2024, pp 49-70

27Feb24

Abstract: Growing awareness of U.S. police violence has sparked important discussions that link state violence and the nation’s settler-colonial origins, emphasizing the use of law enforcement to control racially marginalized groups. Yet, the enduring impact of settler-colonial logics of carcerality and elimination on the lives of Indigenous Peoples in the U.S., commonly known as American Indians under federal law, remains underexplored. This chapter examines how and why the social construction of the American Indian as othered, deviant, inherently criminal, and deserving of punishment within the criminal justice system and reservation policing is maintained. I argue that the U.S. deploys this “constructed criminality” as justification for ongoing land theft, racialized social hierarchies, physical and institutional violence, and other forms of othering that permeate U.S. carceral politics.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settling on a settler history: Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell, ‘History by committee: Representing the ‘facts’ of settler colonialism in a local historical society museum’, in Cameo Dally, Ashley Barnwell (eds), Memory in Place: Locating Colonial Histories and Commemoration, ANU Press, 2023, pp. 219-246

27Feb24

Excerpt: In his critical review of the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2018 exhibition Colony, Bain Attwood (2019) suggests that the curators’ aim of representing colonisation from both settler and Indigenous perspectives reflects the recent boom in exhibitions that seek to address what is termed ‘difficult history’ (see also Macdonald, 2008). Internationally, museums are displaying confronting histories and challenging nationalist erasures; for example, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre in Vancouver. In Australia, Indigenous artists such as Fiona Foley (2018) have pointed out that practices of historiographic critique and memorialisation have taken place in moveable Indigenous art, outside of national and academic institutions, in creative and community spaces (see also Foley & Howell, 2017; Grieves & Spiers, 2020; Konishi, 2019). Magdalena H Gross and Luke Terra (2018, p. 52) define ‘difficult history’ as ‘periods that reverberate in the present and surface fundamental disagreements over who we are and what values we hold’.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

An Indigenous foreign policy for a settler state? Angela Wilton, ‘Unsettling settler-colonialism in Gender and Development: reflections from Aotearoa New Zealand’, Development in Practice, 2024

25Feb24

Abstract: In November 2020, the first woman Indigenous Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nanaia Mahuta, was appointed in Aotearoa New Zealand. Mahuta has reinforced the message of taking a values-based Indigenous-centred approach to foreign policy and development. She has also recognised the mana of wāhine (the unique spiritual authority of women), “not defined by western feminist thinking, but the values that have long underpinned our culture, histories and traditions”. Her appointment reflects the complicated intersections of Indigeneity, colonialism, Western feminist discourse, and foreign policy in a settler-hegemonic state, and the possibilities (and constraints) for reimagined futures. How, then, can the teaching of gender and development (GAD) be attentive to these politics of settler-colonialism in Aotearoa? How can the complexities of the colonial project be reflected in GAD, and how can GAD be responsive to settler-hegemonic and Indigenous spaces? This paper will explore these questions and look at GAD’s role in perpetuating or unsettling settler-colonialism.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Redress without guilt: Howard Taylor, ‘Grammars of Repair’: Redress for German Colonialism in the Aftermath of the Shoah, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2023

25Feb24

Abstract: In May of 2021, in a move unprecedented in European history, the governments of Germany and Namibia announced the completion of their negotiations for funding to redress what they together have termed the “wounds” of the colonial past. The bilateral agreement had long been declared void by Namibians of diverse backgrounds, however, who protested that the way they have been treated pales in comparison to the kind of treatment that Jewish people of various communities have received from Germany since 1945. My ethnographic research followed the diversity of discourse about German colonialism in two years leading up to this agreement in multiple locations; from hearings concerning legal demands for the return of Herero and Nama indigenous land, bones, and cattle in New York City, to political struggles around race and racism in Berlin, to the intransigent settler work of German Lutheran landowners in Namibia. I explore this ethnographic and historical material in a thesis that has three distinct sections. In the first part, I look at the place of the idea of Germany in these ongoing struggles by turning to the German Namibian community and the networks that they operate in and through. I ask after the borders of Germany as an idea, as a territory, and as a political theology – and I look to what “German Namibia” can tell us about contemporary German politics more broadly – most specifically as a site to undertake a potential genealogy of German Protestant Liberalism and its various phantasms. In the second part, I look to the history of Holocaust reparations and its relationship to the Herero and Nama case in the New York courtroom to understand how historically specific iterations of the figure of the suffering Jew have come to contour various grammars in which repair for anti-Black violence and native dispossession are fought for and responded to, especially when figured through the juridical language of reparations. In the third part, I turn towards the contemporary German politics of acknowledgment, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the process of coming to terms with the past. Rather than asking here after the lack of attention to colonial history on the part of the German state, I ask after how the state has actively tried to oppose colonial racism by integrating the history of colonialism into its memory politics. I look to the multiple paradoxes of this attempt that I argue ultimately leads to a reinscription of German white supremacy upon racialized bodies. Overall, my research turns to the past and present of German settler colonialism to explore the politics of reparation on an international scale alongside the relationship between race, religion, and repair in a fractured Europe.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Elevated settlers? Nancy D. Wadsworth, ‘Marketing the mountain man in Wyoming: settler memory, cosplay, and conservative fantasy’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

24Feb24

Abstract: This paper investigates the mountain man as a historical icon that illuminates how settler memory reverberates in the Rocky Mountain West and helps construct regional expressions of conservative political identity. Kevin Bruyneel’s analytic of settler memory describes a habitualized process of selective remembrance, ‘forgetting,’ and disavowal of settler-Indigenous relationships, where today’s settlers benefit from legacies of dispossession, violence, and genocidal policies. Using Carbon County, Wyoming, as a case study, I analyze mountain man symbolism in two contemporary contexts: regional tourism marketing and mountain man rendezvous (MMR) reenactment gatherings. Both contexts elevate the mountain man as a symbol of resilience and noble identity. Just as the construct of whiteness has provided a psychological wage against socioeconomic deficits for many Americans, I argue, settler memory of the mountain man compensates for much that settlers experience but won’t name, such as the role the U.S. state in removing Indigenous communities; the hardship of economic precarity in regions marked by boom-and-bust cycles and dependent on tourism; and the reality that government provides the greatest share of employment in the region. Adding mountain man symbolism to our understanding of settler memory expands scholars’ understanding of settler colonialism’s intertwinement with contemporary place-making and political identity construction.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute