settler colonial studies blog

A document on the archeology of settler colonialism: Mordechay Lash, ‘Religious-Zionist Right-Wing Israelis: Their Expectations of Archeological Research in Judea and Samaria and Their Ways of Contending with the Resulting Complicated Findings’, Modern Judaism, 44, 1, 2024, 1-22

24Feb24

Excerpt: The encounter between West Bank settlers and the archeologists who came to survey and excavate in their midst at the beginning of the 1980s was a formative moment that led to the settlers’ embrace of the field of archeology. The findings of the surveys and excavations that were conducted in the region, however, raised new insights regarding the early years of the Jewish People and the historical reliability of some of the biblical texts, forcing the settlers to face a complicated reality. Except for their selective adoption of researchers and of conclusions they viewed as supporting the biblical narrative, the settlers accused researchers who presented new conclusions of nontopical deviation and presented an alternative paradigm of their own that did not stand up to criticism. In contrast, researchers from the second generation of West Bank settlers have employed a more professional approach to archeology and do not see themselves as using it to prove identity or ownership. It appears that, in addition to academic influences and their sense of “indigenousness,” this reality is the product of a fundamental crisis that has befallen the religious-ideological public, the thrust of which has been a deconstruction of the harmony of the messianic vision, one expression of which has been the changing intergenerational approach to the role of archeology.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Imprisoned indigeneity: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian , Stephen Sheehi, ‘Abolitionism, Settler Colonialism and State Crime’, State Crime Journal, 2024

21Feb24

Excerpt: The lives and struggles of political prisoners such as Chippewa Leonard Peltier and Palestinian-Arab Walid Duqqa accentuate the contradictions of how the very sovereignty and governance of settler-colonial nations rely on killability and carcerality as a state logic. Imprisoned by American and Israeli settler legal systems for expressed political resistance against their respective colonial regimes, the inhumane detention, medical malfeasance, legal improprieties, and basic violation of human rights of these two liberation militants illustrate important legal lessons that Natsu Saito and Noura Erakat teach us. If the imprisonment of Gaza itself since 2007 and the Apartheid system that divide Jerusalem and the West Bank into an archipelago of encircled enclaves shows us anything, it teaches us that carcerality and erasability (embedded in the logic of elimination) in the settler state extends beyond the prison system, to include other racialized and gendered systems of carcerality/erasure, as Nadim Rouhana, Joy James, Sherene Razack, Noura Erakat, Sunera Thoubani, Sarah Ihmoud and Otman and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s contributions to this special issue indicate.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Against the thought police: Nadim N. Rouhana, ‘Daring to Imagine: A Future Without Zionism’, State Crime Journal, 2024

21Feb24

Abstract: This article locates the rising extremism in Israel in the dynamics of the ongoing Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine. It introduces the concept of process in settler-colonial settings as the interaction between the settler-colonial structure with its inherent violence and the agency of the colonized with its inevitable resistance. It is within that context that extremism is nourished and grown. The article argues that Zionism is entrapped in path of escalating violence, the end of which we have not yet seen, to maintain the goals of Jewish supremacy and subdue the natives’ resistance to taking over their land. Therefore, the article defines the challenge of a peaceful relationship between Israelis and Palestinians as being based on abolishing Jewish supremacy and establishing equal political and national rights for Israelis and Palestinians. The article argues that to achieve full equality, recognition of the right and legitimacy of the Israeli Jewish national group to belong to the land in equality with the Palestinian nation and to establish a common political framework of sharing the land, can be achieved only by imagining a future without Zionism.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenous rights must be implemented: Sheryl Lightfoot, Sarah Maddison (eds), Handbook of Indigenous Public Policy, Elgar, 2024

21Feb24

Description: This ground-breaking Handbook explores the key legal, political and policy questions concerning the implementation of Indigenous rights across the world. Expert contributors analyse the complex dynamics of contestation, engagement, advocacy and refusal between governments and Indigenous Peoples, presenting a profound challenge to mainstream policy scholarship.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The crime of being Indigenous: Biko Agozino, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Thalia Anthony and Harry Blagg, Chris Cunneen and Simone Rowe, Raewyn Connell, ‘Criminological and Social Theory and Methods, Settler Colonialism and the Indigenous Context’, in Amy Duvenage (ed.), Roads to DecolonisationAn Introduction to Thought from the Global South, Routledge, 2024

21Feb24

Access chapter here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colony and settler colony: Jeremy Wildeman, M. Muhannad Ayyash (eds), Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine, University of Alberta Press, 2023

21Feb24

Description: Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine explores Canada-Palestine relations through a settler colonial lens. The authors argue that there are direct parallels between Canada’s settler colonial project and its support for the Israeli settler colonial dispossession of Palestinians. Chapters reflect on community politics and activism, migration, orientalism, and critical race theory. Among its unique contributions, the volume provides a fresh look at Canada’s foreign policy as informed and shaped by its own history of settler colonialism. The collection also illuminates the breadth and depth of Palestinian life in Canada. Throughout, the chapters are connected by common themes of settler colonial destruction, dispossession, segregation, and otherness, as well as accounts of people challenging those processes in search of a better and fairer world. The book will be of interest to scholars in Indigenous Studies, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Canadian Studies, Palestine Studies, and beyond. Contributors: Samer Abdelnour, Nadia Abu-Zahra, Rachad Antonius, Lina Assi, M. Muhannad Ayyash, Peige Desjarlais, Randa Farah, Azeezah Kanji, Maurice Jr. Labelle, Nadia Naser-Najjab, Emily Regan Wills, Mira Sucharov, Jeremy Wildeman. Foreword by Veldon Coburn.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Migrants one day, settler the next: Jay L. Lalonde, ‘The search for a promised land: three settlement plans, three agents, and three handbooks for Icelandic migrant-settlers from 1875’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

17Feb24

Abstract: The nineteenth century was a time of mass migration from Europe to North America, and in the last quarter of the century, Icelanders joined the flow of European settlers. Icelanders were one of the last European peoples in this period to start sailing west, between 1870 and 1914; but, one in every five Icelanders moved to North America. This article looks at three handbooks for prospective Icelandic migrant-settlers – all published in 1875 – and the settlement plans they promoted (in Nova Scotia, today’s Manitoba, and Alaska), to analyse the information presented to prospective settlers, especially depictions of land and its inhabitants. While the texts, written or translated by three Icelandic immigration agents, vary greatly in their scope and tone, all perceive Icelanders as desirable settlers, suitable for advancing the goals of settler colonialism, and portray the areas as terra nullius, minimizing perceived Indigenous presence in the places marked for European settlement. The texts show that prospective Icelandic emigrants reading these booklets were aware that they contributed to and benefited from Indigenous dispossession, and that Icelanders and other ‘ethnic’ migrant-settlers in British settler colonies should be considered in settler colonial studies, as settler colonialism and migration policy are intimately linked.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenous Sumud, away from the homeland: Zeana Hamdonah, Janelle Joseph, ‘Indigenous dance, cultural continuity, and resistance: A netnographic analysis of the Palestinian Dabke in the diaspora’, Media, Culture & Society, 2024

17Feb24

Abstract: Contending with the structural erasure and appropriation of their land, culture, history, and traditions imposed by the settler state, Palestinians have adopted/adapted traditional cultural elements to further their nationalist aspirations and assert their rights as Palestine’s Indigenous people. In the diaspora, Palestinians practice and perform the dabke folkdance, as a tool of anti-colonial memory maintenance and knowledge transfer. In this context, the dabke has been (re)shaped to keep up with the invasive nature of settler colonialism, by evolving to protect indigeneity, resist imagined settler geographies, and represent an embodied landmark of Palestinian existence and history. In this paper, we examine the digital platforms of a diasporic dabke dance academy in Ontario, Canada, highlighting the innovations of using social media to broadcast the teachings and performance of dabke while promoting Palestinian cultural continuity against settler colonialism. We employ the theoretical framework of sumud, a specifically Palestinian mode of steadfast anti-colonial being/becoming to explain that the performance of dance, and the subsequent broadcasting via digital social media platforms is an innovative approach to counter settler colonialism. Cultural and community leaders such as dancers, teachers, and choreographers celebrate Palestinian resilience, resistance, and restoration, while mobilizing global solidarities through social media and dance.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The settlers in the history of agriculture: Jonathan Daly, ‘Frontier Agriculture and the Creation of Global Neo-Europes’, in Jeannie Whayne (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History, 2024

15Feb24

Access the handbook here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigeneity in the literature of empire: Alex Wagstaffe, Eugenia Zuroski, ‘The Problem of Indigeneity’, in Sarah Eron, Nicole N. Aljoe, Suvir Kaul (eds), The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English, 2023

15Feb24

Access the companion here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute