settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism in Kashmir: Haris Zargar, Goldie Osuri, ‘The Distinct Dispossessions of Indian Settler Colonialism in Kashmir: Land, Narrative and Indigeneity’, Development and Change, 2024

09Jan24

Abstract: India’s annexation of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019 has generated debates within Critical Kashmir Studies regarding the kind of settler colonialism that is operating in this disputed Himalayan region. To illuminate the current relationship between land dispossession and narratives that legitimize land grab (for the settlement of Hindu Indian settlers), this article traces the logics and genesis of this ongoing settler project in Kashmir, going back to the historic Dogra feudal rule. The authors argue that the Hindu Dogra dispensation installed a revenue surveillance system that enabled it to engage in institutionalized land grab, and show how that extractive land administrative structure has been repurposed by the Indian state for its settler project. The article demonstrates how the Indian state engages in the (epistemic/discursive) erasure of local voices to ensure that the Kashmiri (Muslim) native is stripped of the position of indigeneity both over land and over the narrative of an expropriatory land grab. It further illustrates how the state strives to create facts on the ground to (re)define the ‘native’ and (re)claim the land for Indian Hindu settlers.

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Triangular settler colonialism: Cristina Stanciu, The Makings and Unmakings of Americans Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879-1924, Yale University Press, 2023

09Jan24

Description: Challenges the myth of the United States as a nation of immigrants by bringing together two groups rarely read together: Native Americans and Eastern European immigrants. In this cultural history of Americanization during the Progressive Era, Cristina Stanciu argues that new immigrants and Native Americans shaped the intellectual and cultural debates over inclusion and exclusion, challenging ideas of national belonging, citizenship, and literary and cultural production. Deeply grounded in a wide-ranging archive of Indigenous and new immigrant writing and visual culture—including congressional acts, testimonies, news reports, cartoons, poetry, fiction, and silent film—this book brings together voices of Native and immigrant America. Stanciu shows that, although Native Americans and new immigrants faced different legal and cultural obstacles to citizenship, the challenges they faced and their resistance to assimilation and Americanization often ran along parallel paths. Both struggled against idealized models of American citizenship that dominated public spaces. Both participated in government-sponsored Americanization efforts and worked to gain agency and sovereignty while negotiating naturalization. Rethinking popular understandings of Americanization, Stanciu argues that the new immigrants and Native Americans at the heart of this book expanded the narrow definitions of American identity.

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The settler conquest of the ‘desert’: Carolyne L. Ryan, ‘The Conquest of the Desert and Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples’, Latin American History, 2023

09Jan24

Abstract: The Conquest of the Desert was a military campaign launched by the Argentine state (1878–1885) to remove the Indigenous peoples of the Pampas and Patagonia in order to open the region for Argentine occupation. Then Minister of War Julo A. Roca led the campaigns and subsequently became president of Argentina in 1880. Argentine state makers described this campaign as a necessary step in growing the national economy and making Argentina a “modern” and “civilized” nation. The conquest was also celebrated by many contemporaries as marking the emergence of a “White” Argentina. Despite this rhetoric, Indigenous peoples from the pampas and Patagonia have endured throughout the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. The contentious legacies of the conquest have continued to shape Indigenous peoples’ experiences in Argentine society and with the state through the early 21st century, affecting issues including land rights, cultural recognition, state violence, citizenship rights, historical memory, and social experiences of marginalization and discrimination.

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Settler voting: Ron Hayduk, Marcela Garcia-Castañon, Vedika Bhaumik, ‘Exploring The Complexities of “Alien Suffrage” in American Political History’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 43, 2, 2023, pp. 70-118

07Jan24

Abstract: Although historians and political scientists have long acknowledged the significant place of immigrants in American political history, the role of “alien suffrage” has not been well appreciated, and gaps remain in the scholarship about the nature of its practice. How extensively was “alien voting” practiced and what were its effects? This study addresses these questions by examining eleven of the forty states that allowed non-citizens to vote before obtaining citizenship. These states, located in the Midwest, South and West, were selected because immigrants comprised a significant proportion of their total population and allowed alien suffrage for an extended period of time (1848–1920). We develop estimates of non-citizen voters and examine ethnic voting patterns in these states to gauge their impacts on partisan dynamics in gubernatorial elections. Our findings show non-citizens voted and factored into election outcomes, furthering the incorporation of European immigrants. We also shed light on the unsavory side of alien suffrage, which contributed to a form of settler colonialism and functioned to block or delay the enfranchisement of African Americans and women. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for our understanding of immigrant political incorporation in American political history, as well as for contemporary debates about the revival of the legal practice of non-citizen voting in the United States.

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Settler dreaming: Dan Tout, ‘Dreaming of an Indigenised Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2023

07Jan24

Abstract: This article offers a critical engagement with Billy Griffiths’s award-winning book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia as a departure point towards uncovering and examining a significant tradition of Australian cultural reflection and interpretation it terms, following Anthony Moran, indigenising settler nationalism. Tracing the genealogy of the indigenising settler-nationalist tendencies that shape Deep Time Dreaming, and to which the text itself contributes, the article situates Griffiths’s contribution as a recent and notable exemplar of a longstanding historiographical tradition that responds to the continuing crisis of settler-national belonging and legitimacy by attempting to incorporate the historical depth of Indigenous occupation into its own national, nationalising narrative, and so to indigenise the settler nation itself. The tradition is not Griffiths’s alone. When read in the context of a broader indigenising settler-nationalist tradition, Griffiths’s approach is revealed as neither unusually problematic nor uniquely complicit in the dynamics the article draws attention to. On the contrary, the genealogical reading of Griffiths’s work I offer here is important precisely to the extent that it facilitates an understanding of the underlying tendencies towards settler indigenisation that continue to condition Australian settler-national/ist historiography, and culture at large.

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More on racial settler colonialism: Alana de Hinojosa, ‘“El Chamizal is ours forever”: Rumor, time, and the law in El Paso’s settler society’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2023

03Jan24

Abstract: This essay contributes to literature on the intersections of white settler colonialisms, racial capitalism, and U.S.-Mexico borderlands history by tracing the web of spatial, temporal, and legal power relations that produced El Paso, Texas’ seemingly legitimate possession of stolen Mexican territory known as “El Chamizal” in the El Paso-Cd. Juárez borderlands. This land theft became the Chamizal Dispute: an international land and boundary conflict between the U.S. and Mexico caused by the meandering Río Grande that defines the “fixed” international border between El Paso, Texas and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua. In the 1860s, multiple shifts in the Rio Grande “relocated” El Chamizal north of this river/boundary. Soon thereafter, and despite Mexico’s sustained claim to and jurisdiction over this land, recently arrived Anglo American settlers incorporated El Chamizal into the nascent City of El Paso. In 1964, the U.S.and Mexico finally agreed to resolve this conflict by virtue of the landmark Chamizal Treaty, which ceded 630-acres of El Paso to Cd. Juárez as El Chamizal. Contrary to what dominant state accounts and the mainstream historical literature on this settlement would have us believe, however, this ceded land includes only a fraction of the original contested terrain. El Chamizal therefore remains a stolen tract of land nestled within the heart of El Paso. Drawing on oral histories, court testimonies and affidavits, and an array of binational records, this essay demonstrates that this ongoing theft is not a finite or complete project. Rather, the process hinges on a fragile web of spatial, white settler temporal, and legal practices of concealment/denial anchored to a colonial rumor that refuses to open this region to the mystery and wonder of the Río Grande’s “wayward life, beautiful experiment in how to live.”

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Racial settler colonialism: Dinorah Sánchez Loza, ‘Tracking race, tracking settlerness: Theorizing the political project of racialization and uncovering settler tracks in civic education’, in Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, Jade Nixon (eds), New Approaches to Inequality Research with Youth: Theorizing Race Beyond the Traditions of Our Disciplines, Routledge, 2024

03Jan24

Abstract: This chapter traces the development of theorizing race beginning with/in community curricula that showed how race was lived and experienced. It then follows the displacement of this knowledge to a predominantly white space where race was learned in “contrast”, and, ultimately, how living and learning in a red state amidst the rise of white nationalist politics necessitated new approaches. The author discusses settler colonialism as an overarching frame serving as a progenitor and incubator of racialization schemes and structuring politics. These theorizations and engagements with Critical Race Theories and Settler Colonial Studies—namely, that whiteness functions as property and that property/ownership shapes citizenship and sovereignty—necessitate a focus on communities that most benefit from white supremacy and settler colonialism. The author then discusses a “tracking” approach to research as a way of uncovering settler tracks. By “tracking” settler/racial (re)production via schools, the author engages in research and theorizing of race/politics where damage is focused away from Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color and onto settlerness and its resultant political investments. In doing so, we can better work towards unsettling civic education and education writ large.

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Real real estate predicaments under settler colonialism: Lucy Garbett, ‘Navigating Legal Landscapes: Colonialism and Risk in Palestinian Land Ownership’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 43, 3, 2023, pp. 293-307

03Jan24

Abstract: This article is about an ownership dispute between two Palestinian families in the West Bank. The dispute moves between Palestinian and Israeli forums while drawing upon the legal patchwork of Ottoman, British, and Jordanian land laws, and Israeli military amendments. The multilayered legal terrain coupled with the jurisdictional tension allowed some legal maneuvering. The article explores how the families maneuvered the legal landscape, but it complicates the use of forum shopping in the Palestinian context by adding how settler-colonial domination and political economy play into this phenomenon. Settler colonialism has served to intensify the Palestinian land market through a curated land scarcity, all while managing the distribution of relative “security” and risk of land title. This has affected land value, land availability, and land use. When the settler legal system is known to render Palestinian ownership insecure, why would some Palestinians still choose Israeli registration as a forum in which to register their lands, considering these risks? The article argues that land ownership is a process through which layers of unevenness are inscribed and reproduced. In focusing on the process, the article adds to sociolegal scholarship to explore the role knowledge and capital play in forum shopping.

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The bitterness of Indigeneity is validating: Hyunjoo Yu, ‘Zitkala-Ša’s indisputably moody, vital evolution(s)’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2023

03Jan24

Excerpt: Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Dakota), also known by her penname Zitkala-Ša, grabbed non-Native readers’ attention with her semi-autobiographical trilogy published in The Atlantic Monthly in January, February, and March 1900. As a graduate of White’s Manual Labor School, and as a teacher at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Zitkala-Ša wrote what was not expected of her. Perhaps, or even likely, the expectation for her was to act as a grateful poster figure who praises the benefits of the late-nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools and their notorious mission to “civilize” Indigenous children. Her stories bear witness to an Ihanktonwan child’s experiences of violence, sickness, and isolation, and her rebellious feelings that express explicit distress, disgust, and anger toward the settler colonial disciplines. Richard Henry Pratt, the founder and superintendent of the Carlisle School, openly rebuked the stories. He wrote in the school newspaper, Red Man, that he fears that “the home-sick pathos – nay, more, the underlying bitterness of her story will cause readers unfamiliar with Indian schools to form entirely the wrong conclusions” (quoted in Katanski 2005, 123). And to this, Zitkala-Ša retorted in her correspondence to the editor, which appeared in the April 1900 issue of Red Man, “I give outright the varying moods of my own evolution; … no one can dispute my own impressions and bitterness!” (1900b?).

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Settler colonialism in unexpected places: Sony Coráñez Bolton, ‘“Nuestros salvajes filipinos”: Settler Encounters and Black Indigeneities in Mexico and the Philippines’, Periphērica: Revista de Historia Literaria y Cultural, 2, 2, 2023

03Jan24

Abstract: In this essay I develop a relational analysis placing Asian and Latin American racial discourses into conversation. My analysis here seeks to grasp with greater clarity the discrepant ways that Blackness, Indigeneity, and Asian identities are articulated in distinctly and distantly elaborated nation-building projects through mestizaje—a Philippine mestizaje and one originating in Mexico. I move us through an analysis of both Pedro A. Paterno’s ethnological study on Indigenous Philippine Blackness, Los Itas (1915), and José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (1925) as part of a global mestizo archive that is situated in the longue durée of the nineteenth century. The Aetas (or Itas), also commonly known by the Spanish term “Negritos,” are a community of phenotypically Black peoples that inhabit the mountainous regions of the northern Philippines in the island group known as Luzon. They have been a well-known community in the historical and cultural construction of Filipino racial identity. I examine the ways that the Aetas offered evidence of a Blackness that was transformed into a marker indexing the retrogression and development of the “Orient.” The dyad of civilization and barbarism in the Philippines pivoted on the dialectical antinomy of the Orient and Blackness. While the Philippines was not a site of and was far-removed from the transatlantic world, the physical darkness and qualitative Blackness of Indigenous peoples in the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent, and the Antipodes braid together the logics of Orientalism and Blackness in ways that are of interest to a transnational vista of race. This gesture of theoretical braiding of racial logics seemingly more germane to the Atlantic world with racial discourse in the Philippines invites questions on the ways that Blackness and Indigeneity in US-based and Latin American scholarship are treated. In the final analysis, I argue that through the comparison of these different mestizajes that the Asian political subject formation breaks from Indigeneity through the disarticulation of both Asianness and Indianness from Blackness. However, Blackness, as I’ll explore, counterintuitively serves as a foundational heuristic device articulating Philippine racial identity through the prism of settler-native encounter. In my view, the racial scientific basis for Philippine racial identity being rooted in a conquest narrative of Malays conquering Indigenous “Filipinos” whose primitivity is indexed by Blackness has the potential to greatly reshape Philippine and Filipinx historiographies of race. This case study, I argue, provides compelling historical paradigms for thinking creatively and in coalition across Asian American, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous community and political formations in the present.

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