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The memorial life of a settler community: Susan Slyomovics, ‘A Settler Colonial Memorial Book: The Agricultural School and Museum of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria’, Diaspora, 23, 2, 2023, pp. 241-260

18Nov23

Abstract: In French colonial Algeria (1830–1962), a European settler community was made from both displacement and the encounter with Indigenous Algerian collectives. After Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, this community was remade by a second displacement and the encounter in France with the metropolitan community. Known as Pieds-Noirs, this community has organized associative life, books, and newsletter publications, and sometimes return visits to Algeria. This article looks at Pieds-Noir settler associations devoted to Algeria’s colonial agricultural schools, model farms, and nurseries, and how they reconstitute metropole-colony and colony-metropole through memory and a memorial book. This case study of the agricultural school in the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, former headquarters of the French Foreign Legion, discusses post-independent Algerian responses to return visits, claims, and writings by settlers.


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The Settler Accords: Nadim Khoury, ‘Settler colonialism, memory politics, and the Trump–Netanyahu deal’, International Politics, 2023

14Nov23

Abstract: Azmi Bishara’s Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice is essential reading for understanding Palestine today. Initially, the book was supposed to be an English translation of a lecture on what Bishara calls the Trump–Netanyahu deal. Fortunately for the English reader, the lecture is now upgraded with eight chapters that build on decades of Bishara’s political and intellectual engagement with the question of Palestine. These chapters contextualize Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” within the longer history of the region and its geopolitical transformations. The task is ambitious but wonderfully executed. One leaves the book with a deeper understanding of contemporary developments, informed by the weight of history, and with a vision for justice in Palestine/Israel. Addressing all these dimensions in one symposium, let alone one contribution, is impossible. I will therefore focus on a specific topic that runs through the book, namely, the politics of memory in Palestine/Israel. In his introduction, Bishara notes that the book’s different themes will be discussed in conjunction “with the questions of memory and forgetting” (p. 9). Below I will discuss four of these themes: the theoretical framework of settler colonialism, Bishara’s analysis of the Trump–Netanyahu deal, Palestinian resistance to the deal, and Bishara’s vision of justice in Palestine/Israel.


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When settlers buy land: Kristen Alff, ‘Changing Capitalist Structures and Settler-Colonial Land Purchases in Northern Palestine, 1897–1922’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2023

14Nov23

Abstract: By tracing Zionist and German Templer efforts to buy arable private property in Palestine between 1897 and 1922, I show the ways in which the changing balance of Ottoman and Levantine forces over land and labor—as well as political and economic institutions and social structures—facilitated settler-colonialism in northern Palestine. In this article, I examine official records of the Ottoman state, Jewish organizations, and Levantine, Jewish, and Templer real estate papers. I argue that changing capitalist practices in northern Palestine, driven especially by interactions of Beirut-based companies with the changing global capitalist market, facilitated settler-colonialism in the region. Specifically, Ottoman state-sponsored violence during World War I increased peasant dispossessions in the fertile region of northern Palestine, already in progress since at least the mid-19th century, making settler colonies possible.


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Settler colonialism in Kashmir: Mehmood Hussain, ‘From Abrogation to Dominion: Navigating India’s Neo-Colonial Settler Agenda in Kashmir and Elimination of Kashmiri Identity’, Muslim World Journal of Human Rights, 2023

14Nov23

Abstract: This paper examines the neo-colonial project of Narendra Modi implemented in Kashmir after the revocation of special status on August 5, 2019. The neo-colonial infrastructure supported by the threads of re-classification of legal residents and land designations intends to significantly transform the demography of Muslim majority Kashmir into a Muslim minority, consequently destroying the Muslim identity of the state. The abrogation of Article 370 and enactment of new domicile law has extended the legal and administrative control of New Delhi, making Kashmir indistinguishable from the Indian legal system and leaving no room for the local legislative assembly to make laws beneficial for the state residents. The paper asks how India is implementing the neo-colonial settler agenda in Kashmir. How and to what extent legal and military instruments are employed to disempower Kashmiris from territorial and cultural identity? The paper argues that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pursuing a neo-colonial settler agenda in Kashmir through ‘destroy and replace,’ which is supported by the neo-liberal agenda, including; new land management policy, new domicile law, spatial planning and development, new settlements of Hindus, authoritative central control, and massive militarization to carry out gross human rights abuses and repression.


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Settler cannibalism: Olivia E. Murphy, ‘Truthiness, Alternative Facts, and Ersatz Truths: Andrea Carlson’s Exploration of Settler Cultural Cannibalism’, Ethnic Studies Review, 46, 3, 2023, pp. 48-72

12Nov23

Abstract: In this paper, Truthiness, a mixed-media artwork by contemporary artist Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe), is utilized as a case study to illustrate the contexts for Carlson’s repeated artistic engagement with “cultural cannibalism.” Specifically, in Truthiness, from Carlson’s Windigo Series, the artist confronts settler colonizers’ historical labeling of Native Americans as “cannibals” and their own past and ongoing cultural cannibalization in the United States. As Carlson notes, this consumption ranges from opportunistic museum acquisitions to the roles of settlers in the 1862 Dakota Uprising. To analyze Carlson’s work, an iconographical and semiotics approach centered around the concept of symbolic anthropophagy is taken; as her utilization of many layered references demonstrates, Carlson herself engages in a form of cultural cannibalism through her appropriation and use of readily identifiable symbols and artworks in her work. As a whole, this paper aims to emphasize how, in Truthiness, Carlson flips visually the historical narrative that labeled Indigenous peoples as cannibals to label settler colonizers as windigos, insatiable monsters who consume without consequence.


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The settler/invader’s belonging: Hemopereki Simon, ‘Settler/Invader Identity and Belonging in Aotearoa New Zealand: Critiquing “Tāngata Tiriti” and Moving Toward the Collective Future’, Ethnic Studies Review, 46, 3, 2023, pp. 95-127

12Nov23

Abstract: This Kaupapa Māori writing inquiry explores “Tāngata Tiriti” (People of the Treaty) as a settler/invader identity term in Aotearoa New Zealand. Derived from the failed policy platform of “biculturalism” and “Indigenous inclusion,” Tāngata Tiriti is a byproduct of neoliberalism and settler/invader colonialism that fails to provide for Indigenous inclusion, mana motuhake (Indigenous sovereignty) and tino rangatiratanga (self-determination). This article argues that Tāngata Tiriti should be abandoned due to the 2014 paradigm shift surrounding Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Te Tiriti) and mana motuhake from the Te Paparahi o Te Raki report and the author’s subsequent research on non-signatory hapū and iwi. Pākehā settler/invader perspectives on Tāngata Tiriti are compared with Tāngata Moana and Asian scholarly understandings. The author advocates adopting Tāngata Moana thinking around letting Māori as mana whenua lead “wayfinding” and “meaning-making” to define allyship and promote a “collective future” together based on Māori constitutional values that are generally universal throughout Pacific cultures. Instead of settler/invader identity constructs and the doctrine of the nation as a White possession, movement toward a collective future must begin from a place of sovereign relationality. The pedagogy of teaching Te Tiriti must change, the ill-conceived Tāngata Tiriti identity must be abandoned, and “New Zealand” as a settler/invader colonial enterprise must end. Our future must be post-settler/invader colonial and post-Tiriti and must recognize unceded mana motuhake or sovereignty.


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The proportions of settler colonialism: Seohyon Jung, ‘Feeling the Malthusian Empire: Martineau’s Reformulation of Population in Illustrations of Political Economy’, Vitorian Literature and Culture, 2023

12Nov23

Excerpt: For settler colonialism to function as a stable institution, the invader/migrant should come to the colonies with the intention to stay and to maintain their ways of life in the country of their origin. To put it in the language of proportion, the idea of the “whole” must be constant before and after emigration. Thus, emigration dislocates the domestic tension caused by the crisis of “too many hands” only when it is imagined as an act that restores the feeling of proportion. In the final chapter of Homes Abroad, titled “True Citizenship,” Martineau addresses the very issue of “feeling” proportionate.


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Settler colonial neoliberalism: Mack Penner, ‘Settler-Neoliberalism: Tom Flanagan and Friedrich Hayek on the Prairies’, Canadian Historical Review, 104, 3, 2023, pp. 343-366

12Nov23

Abstract: After encountering the writings of neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek in the late 1970s, the political scientist Tom Flanagan became one of the most well-known Hayekians in Canada. Over the course of a career devoted mainly to the study of Louis Riel, Metis history, and the policies of Canadian settler colonialism, Flanagan developed a particular kind of “settler-neoliberalism.” This article takes a broad view of Flanagan’s intellectual development in order to show that, once Flanagan is situated transnationally in the appropriate intellectual currents, his work stands out and represents the most thoroughgoing effort, if not the only one, to deploy neoliberal ideas systematically in the service, or the defence, of a settler-colonial project. By examining the ways in which neoliberal ideas enabled Flanagan’s defence of settler colonialism, this article concludes ultimately that neoliberalism has been a collaborative companion to the Canadian settler-colonial project.


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Crusoe, Locke, settler colonialism: Terence N. Bowers, ‘John Locke, Ecological Imperialism, and the Narration of the Land in Robinson Crusoe—A Tale of the Anthropocene’, Studies in Philology, 120, 4, 2023, pp. 728-758

09Nov23

Abstract: The influence of John Locke’s political thought on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has often been discussed. Most studies have focused on how the novel speaks to political crises in England, especially those surrounding the Glorious Revolution, which have traditionally been seen as forming the key context for understanding Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. But recent scholarship has shown that the Two Treatises also addressed the colonial context in America and provided the intellectual platform that justified British expansion in the New World. Though studies of Robinson Crusoe have for some time analyzed the novel in the context of colonialism, Locke has not figured much in such analyses. This essay argues, however, that Locke’s key connection to Robinson Crusoe is his view of America and empire and that Defoe’s story of survival in the wild builds on and powerfully reinforces Locke’s colonial ideology, which is grounded in a vision of how human beings should (and should not relate) to the earth. This vision is deeply anthropocentric and matches what the environmental historian Donald Worster calls “the ‘imperial’ view of nature.” The vision of empire shared by Locke and Defoe is thus based on and inseparable from a quest for ecological dominion that is global in scope. In the latter part of the essay, I discuss the astounding popularity of the Crusoe story and its status as myth and argue that it constitutes a version of what Carolyn Merchant terms the “Recovery Narrative,” which forms “perhaps the most important mythology that humans have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth.” Given its influence and enduring popularity, I suggest that we see Robinson Crusoe as a key text and driver of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch in which human activities have altered the planet’s land surfaces, oceans, and biosphere and produced the environmental crises that we face today.


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Matters of justice, truth, and settler colonialism: Tariq Dana, ‘Introduction: the settler-colonial framing of Palestine—Matters of Justice and Truth’, International Politics, 2023

09Nov23

Abstract: As the publication of this forum coincides with the unfolding bombs raining down on the Palestinians of Gaza, the book in question gains heightened significance. Against a backdrop where global audiences are witnessing real-time, genocidal actions by Israel against the Palestinians, contextualizing these horrific events is crucial. An in-depth understanding of the current reality and potential future trajectories requires addressing the root causes and factors that shaped the interaction between the colonizer and the colonized, leading to a highly repressive and unbearable status quo that exploded on the 7th of October 2023. Palestine: Matters of Justice and Truth provides much-needed and timely answers.


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