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Settler colonial rationales, colonial rationales and their convergence: Alvin Padilla-Babilonia, ‘Sovereignty and Dependence in the American Empire: Native Nations, Territories, and Overseas Colonies’, Duke Law Journal, 73, 2024, pp. 943-1035

28Jan24

Abstract: What justifies plenary powers over Native nations, U.S. territories, and overseas colonies? One answer is the text of the Constitution: the Indian Commerce Clause or the Territorial Clause. Another answer is sovereignty under international law. In this Article, I argue that these legalistic explanations overlook a third answer: that political and judicial actors justified plenary powers based on the colonial notion that these so-called dependent peoples were incapable of self-government. Members of Congress, presidents, federal judges, and territorial governors reconciled republicanism and colonialism in the American empire by constituting Native nations, the territories, and the overseas colonies as dependent peoples. This Article unmasks how the legal framework of colonialism rested on their infantilization, the temporal character of colonial rule, and the pretense that it was for their benefit. Federal rule was justified because they were “wards of the nation,” “in a state of infancy,” or in “political childhood,” waiting to learn how to govern themselves. The Article examines the judicial decisions, political speeches, and academic publications that infantilized these dependent peoples and how tribal and territorial sovereignty was contingent upon an expansive concept of dependency. The Article is a cautionary tale about redemption through constitutionalism, either judicial constitutionalism (ending plenary powers) or legislative constitutionalism (repurposing plenary powers). Overruling any of the individual cases that legitimized these plenary powers—including United States v. Kagama or the Insular Cases—will not undo colonial dependence or American imperialism. Instead, it will only conceal how the Constitution and the Supreme Court have long been complicit in empire. Constitutional redemption for the benefit of Indigenous peoples and colonized peoples ignores how central dependence and colonialism are to U.S. constitutionalism. Rather than ending or repurposing plenary powers, this Article concludes that only through democratic politics, social movements, and anticolonial solidarities can we undo the dependencies left by colonial rule. The emancipation of dependent peoples will only be possible if democratic decolonization takes precedence over constitutional interpretation.


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The settlers of other settlers: B. Nobbs-Thiessen, ‘Latin American Migration, Settler Colonialism, and the Unfinished Business of Canadian Mennonite Belonging’, Canadian Jewish Studies, 36, 2024, pp. 268-275

28Jan24

Excerpt: For those Low-German speaking Mennonites who sought to live apart from the world and historically resisted conscription, national schooling, and political par-ticipation, David S. Koffman’s “audacious” question was frequent and fraught across centuries of diasporic mobility. In the 1870s, facing compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, Mennonite delegations traveled to the United States and the Dominion of Canada with that question on their lips. Their investigations on both sides of the 49th parallel did not produce a consensus. For the majority, opportunities in the Mennonite Commonwealth they had established over the preceding century in imperial Russia outweighed concerns about encroaching Russification. Life there, particularly with the option of alternative service, offered a better home and would until the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War prompted a new round of emigration in the 1920s.


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How to see like a settler: Neha Soman, B. Padmanabhan, ‘Human territorial behaviors and power politics in Assaf Gavron’s The Hilltop: a spatial re-examination’, GeoJournal, 89, 2024, #21

28Jan24

Abstract: The dynamics of settler colonialism are intriguing areas of enquiry with contesting geo-political variables to consider. The objective of this article is to address the complexity of settlers and the settler landscapes in the occupied territories of Israel through a literary analysis of the novel The Hilltop written by the Israeli author Assaf Gavron. The novel brings into life the chaotic aura that surrounds the settler landscapes, and through this article we attempt to deconstruct the complexity of settler lives by analyzing the territorial behaviors of the settlers as portrayed in the novel. The fictional landscape of The Hilltop is closely read to understand the interplay of space, territory, and power as advanced by Foucault, Gold, and Duarte to explore the diversity of human behaviors in terms of their political, religious, economic, and emotional engagement with the surroundings. We also examine the significance of the fictionalized accounts of territorialized social groups, such as the Jewish Israeli settlers for re-imagining their social image against the representations in dominant political and media discourses.


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How settler colonialism preempts democracy: Saed Abu Adwan, Sofiane Boussenane, ‘Obstacles to Democratic Transition In Palestine Under Israeli Settlement’, Algerian Review of Security and Development volume, 13, 1, 2024, pp. 44-57

28Jan24

Abstract: The process of democratic transition in Palestine faced many repercussions that negatively affected it, and perhaps the most important of these repercussions is the Israeli settlement, which caused destructive effects on the components of the Palestinian democratic process, through the dimensions behind the settlement project as the Israeli settlement was not limited to confiscating land. It hit the security, political, geographical and demographic dimension of Palestine, hence this study came to analyze the obstacles to the Palestinian democratic transition under the Israeli settlement, through understanding the course of democratic transition in Palestine, and identifying settlement policies and their impact on the democratic transition process. 


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Stealing land somewhere, and geneaologies elsewhere: Hemopereki Simon, ‘Genealogical Violence: Mormon (Mis)Appropriation of Māori Cultural Memory through Falsification of Whakapapa’, Geneaolgy, 8, 1, 2024

26Jan24

Abstract: The study examines how members of the historically white possessive and supremacist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States (mis)appropriated Māori genealogy, known as whakapapa. The Mormon use of whakapapa to promote Mormon cultural memory and narratives perpetuates settler/invader colonialism and white supremacy, as this paper shows. The research discusses Church racism against Native Americans and Pacific Peoples. This paper uses Anthropologist Thomas Murphy’s scholarship to demonstrate how problematic the Book of Mormon’s religio-colonial identity of Lamanites is for these groups. Application of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s white possessive doctrine and Hemopereki Simon’s adaptation to cover Church-Indigenous relations and the salvation contract is discussed. We explore collective and cultural memory, and discuss key Māori concepts like Mana, Taonga, Tapu, and Whakapapa. A brief review of LDS scholar Louis C. Midgley’s views on Church culture, including Herewini Jone’s whakapapa wānanga, is followed by a discussion of Māori cultural considerations and issues. The paper concludes that the alteration perpetuates settler/invader colonialism and Pacific peoples’ racialization and white supremacy. Genetic science and human migration studies contradict Mormon identity narratives and suggest the BOM is spiritual rather than historical. Finally, the paper suggests promoting intercultural engagement on Mormon (mis)appropriation of taonga Māori.


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Explosive settler colonialism: Annelise Roberts, ‘Atomic Totem: Australian Settler Nuclearism, the Disavowal of Aboriginality, and Morbid Reconciliation’, Apocalyptica, 1, 2023, pp. 107-127

26Jan24

Abstract:  Although the actual welfare of nearby Aṉangu populations was so clearly disregarded throughout the period of British nuclear testing in South Australia in the 1950 s and 60 s, curiously, the aesthetics of the nuclear testing project itself were awash with Aboriginal-derived symbolism, imagery, and language. From the names of testing sites and operations, to the declaration by a member of the surveying crew to the media that a mushroom cloud was “a perfect portrait of a myall blackfeller written with atomic dust,” the nuclear testing was repeatedly associated with Aboriginality. This was not a practice unique to Australia; as Jessica Hurley notes, other nuclear-armed nations shared this “compulsion to name nuclear laboratories and technologies after [Indigenous] nations, practices and spaces” (2018, 97). In this essay, I draw on a range of textual sources —a memoir by government surveyor and raconteur Len Beadell, as well as less traditionally ‘literary’ texts (such as place-naming practices) —to examine the ways in which this appropriative act points to a complex process of disavowal that takes place in the settler imaginary. Focusing on the mid-century Australian context, I find that where the existential anxieties of the nuclear age meet the unconfronted violence and dispossession of colonialism, confused and uncanny visions arise; partial acknowledgements of the primacy of First Nations’ claims to country arise in the moment at which all the possibilities of nuclearism —megadeath, the new atomic potential for massive violence and destruction —are also present. In this field, a strange and morbid vision of settler / Indigenous reconciliation emerges from the settler cultural imaginary. 


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Settler colonialism is imagined and practiced: Jenny L. Davis, ‘Attending to settler colonialism in Black/Native American histories in I’ve been Here All the While’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

26Jan24

Abstract: In I’ve Been Here All the While, Roberts provides a definition of settler colonialism as ‘a process that could be wielded by whoever sought to claim land; it involved not only a change in land occupation but also a transformation in thinking about and rhetorical justification of what it meant to reside in a place formerly occupied by someone else’ (2). Central to this definition, then, is that instead of colonialism beginning with an invasion, the settlers in Roberts’ book enter into the literal geographies and colonial process involuntarily, as displaced Native Americans and enslaved Africans/Afro-Indigenous people. Within this rendering, she argues that ‘anyone can act as a “settler”, despite previous status as, say, a slave or a dispossessed Indian, as long as they used this process–composed of rhetoric, American governmental structures, and individual action–which may have aided in their efforts to acquire land or protection by which ultimately served the goals of spatial occupation and white supremacy’. The second part of this definition pulls ‘settler’ away from a permanent quality one might be born into (say as a European-American in the US context) into an act one partakes in, thereby dislodging arguments that exclude those harmed by Black enslavement and Indigenous land theft.


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Herzl’s settler colonialism: Samir Abed-Rabbo, ‘Herzl’s Zionism and Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 2024

24Jan24

Abstract: This article examines Zionist claims to colonize Palestine and the role of Great Britain and prominent European Zionist Jews in the effort to establish Israel. Theodore Herzl, his lieutenants, and supporters personify Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” while acting and appearing as respectable statesmen, scientists, journalists, and businesspeople who advocated for freedom, liberation, and combating antisemitism. They deliberately collaborated with known antisemites and worked to dismantle ancient Jewish communities, relentlessly removing Jews out of their countries of origin, colonizing Palestine for the creation of a Jewish state, ethnically cleansing the indigenous people of Palestine, fabricating history, erasing Palestine and its long history, demeaning and oppressing the Palestinian people, and suppressing and appropriating Palestinian culture.


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Animals and humans on a settler colonial frontier: Lauren Cullen, ‘Animal–Human Entanglements in the Canadian Wild Animal Stories of Charles G. D. Roberts’, in Alex Goody, Saskia McCracken (eds), Beastly Modernisms: The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture, Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp. 181-197

24Jan24

Abstract: One of the most inventive and distinctive formal and generic interventions into modern writings about animals was the advent of the realistic wild animal story at the turn-of-the-century. As Adrian Hunter has pointed out, it was in the 1890s that ‘a three-way alignment between realism, the short story, and various forms of cultural radicalism and avant-gardism came into being,’ signalling the advent of a new modernist moment. The wild animal story, resultantly, demonstrates the current renegotiation of modernist literary and cultural contours with its formal and thematic preoccupations. Pioneered by Canadian writers Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, this unique genre interwove fiction with accounts of animal behaviour based on developments in animal psychology, cognitive ethology, and Darwinian theory. This chapter analyses how these authors use established narrative strategies such as naming, perspective, and narration, as well as more porous and prolific techniques such as identification and relationality. Roberts’s positioning of this genre as a means of reaching an ‘enlightened’ and ‘spiritual’ understanding of the ‘world of wonder’ opened by animal psychology, however, also raises political, cultural, and ethical questions about settler-colonialism. This chapter throws open the geographical, temporal, and aesthetic boundaries of these late nineteenth into twentieth century works to interrogate the unique contribution that the wild animal story provides to broader discussions of nonhuman animals in modernity.


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Even the NYT now thinks about settler colonialism! Jennifer Schuessler, ‘What Is “Settler Colonialism”?’, New York Times, 22/01/24

23Jan24

Access the article here.


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