settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism led to genocide: Adam A. Blackler, An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa, Penn State University Press, 2022

04Apr24

Description: At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into “exotic domains” where their imaginations could wander freely. While racist beliefs framed such narratives, the abundance of colonial imaginaries nevertheless compelled German citizens and settlers to contemplate the world beyond Europe as a part of their daily lives. An Imperial Homeland reorients our understanding of the relationship between imperial Germany and its empire in Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). Colonialism had an especially significant effect on shared interpretations of the Heimat (home/homeland) ideal, a historically elusive perception that conveyed among Germans a sense of place through national peculiarities and local landmarks. Focusing on colonial encounters that took place between 1842 and 1915, Adam A. Blackler reveals how Africans confronted foreign rule and altered German national identity. As Blackler shows, once the façade of imperial fantasy gave way to colonial reality, German metropolitans and white settlers increasingly sought to fortify their presence in Africa using juridical and physical acts of violence, culminating in the first genocide of the twentieth century. Grounded in extensive archival research, An Imperial Homeland enriches our understanding of German identity, allowing us to see how a distant colony with diverse ecologies, peoples, and social dynamics grew into an extension of German memory and tradition. It will be of interest to German Studies scholars, particularly those interested in colonial Africa.

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Knowing and teaching the event hides the structure: Mati Keynes, ‘From apology to truth? Settler colonial injustice and curricular reform in Australia since 2008’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2024

04Apr24

Abstract: This article explores how recent curricular reform in Australia has been responsive to a culture of redress. It argues that taken together, the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations and the 2010 national curriculum reform marked a turning point, whereby settler colonial injustices have since been systematically included in the curriculum. This is explored through a case study analysis of the two iterations of the Victorian Curriculum: History post-Apology— 2012 and 2016—the latter of which remains in current use. Using discourse analysis methods, this article argues that the inclusion of colonial injustice in the post-Apology era signals a consensus that has emerged around the significance of representing injustice in history curriculum, and by extension, for shaping future citizens. Through close textual analysis of the curriculum documents, this article finds that representations of historical injustice have been organized by four frames: memorialization, equivalence, personalization, and human rights. It argues that these frames curtail opportunities for the development of an understanding of the structural character and effects of settler colonialism, and limit consideration of the longer history of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. These failures raise questions about how impending reforms might respond to the contemporary political context where treaty negotiations and formal truth-telling with First Nations’ polities are unfolding.

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Settler belonging must be narrated: Alana Brekelmans, Richard J. Martin, ‘Frontier Narratives That Take on Flesh: Tracing Legacy, Labour, and Legitimacy in Outback Queensland, Australia’, Oceania, 94, 1, 2024, pp. 18-38

01Apr24

Abstract: In this article, we explore the notion of legacy through the ways graziers in Outback Queensland, Australia, draw on material, narrative, and embodied traces of past ‘events’ to emplot their lives during times of uncertainty. Through an ethnography of pastoral work and storytelling on stations, or ranches, we show how settler-colonial narratives of the frontier and legacy circulate as affective forces in pastoralists’ daily lives and become embodied through labour. We argue that pastoral families respond to both the failure of modernist grand narratives and more personal events by renegotiating stories of the frontier to legitimate their ongoing presence in Outback Australia and give meaning to their lives. While these narratives are existentially useful for pastoralists, we argue that they remain tied to exclusionary and unsustainable structures and ideologies that prevent pastoralists from adjusting to contemporary crises.

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The art of Indigenous sovereignty: Megan A. Smetzer, ‘Replacing Settler Spaces: The Transformational Power of Indigenous Public Art’, Arts, 13, 2, 2024

01Apr24

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Deep settler colonial water: Emma Blackett, ‘Blue Crush Cinema: Oceanic Feeling and Settler-Colonial Women’, Environmental Humanities, 16, 1, 2024, 19-35

30Mar24

Abstract: This article discusses the settler-colonial femininity at work in two films that foreground the Pacific Ocean, Blue Crush (John Stockwell, 2002) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993). With these film readings it offers a critique of the feminist new materialist turn toward water. The feminist hydrological turn aims to amplify the oceanic sensorium’s potential to dissolve the always-already-illusory boundedness of Western subjectivity into a recognition of watery enmeshment, and it aligns, though does not often directly engage, with Indigenous Pacific and trans-Pacific anti-colonial hydropolitics. This article brings feminist hydrological writing into conversation with psychoanalysis and explains that blue crush cinema has the following elements and functions: (1) it tells of a settler woman with a powerful draw toward the water—here crush is polyvalent; (2) the ocean is at once literal and psychic; (3) the film camera allows water’s diffractive animacy to distort human form, a distortion that hydrological feminists associate with dissolving Western subjectivity, and that psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva associates with “oceanic feeling”; but (4), in the end, the blue crush enables the settler woman to return to colonial work. This final function has critical implications for feminist readings of water, which, as this article’s central speculation goes, may work paradoxically to recuperate Western thought.

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Deep settler colonial time: Jane Robbins Mize, ‘The Deep Time Trap: Retracing Settler Colonialism in Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior”’, Environmental Humanities, 16, 1, 2024, pp. 142-161

30Mar24

Abstract: This article argues that Lorine Niedecker’s 1968 poem “Lake Superior” reveals a limitation of recent scholarly investments in the concept of geological “deep time.” “Lake Superior” is a meditation on deep time; the Europeans who colonized the Great Lakes; and Lake Superior’s assemblage of rocks, bodies, and bodies of water across timescales. In analyzing Niedecker’s poem alongside her research notes, this article claims that, even as the speaker’s invocation of deep time troubles settler-colonialist historical narratives, she nevertheless remains mired in what Mark Rifkin calls “settler time.” The poem’s geological timescale fails to liberate the speaker from a settler-colonialist representation of and relation to the environment. While many scholars contend that deep time offers an alternative to anthropocentrism, this article argues that deep time is also a colonialist construct that can reinforce harmful Western epistemologies and obscure non-white ways of relating to the environment. Indigenous scholarship and activism offer alternative timescales that might allow us to care for the environment without minimizing the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman beings, without relying on settler-colonialist logics, and while centering Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

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The ruinantion of settler colonialism: Ariel Handel, Mori Ram, Hadeel Mustafa, Daniel Monterescu, ‘The politics of time: Political entropy, settler colonialism and urban ruination in Hebron / Al-Khalil, Palestine’, Political Geography, 111, 2024

29Mar24

Abstract: This paper explores the relationships between settler colonialism and temporal regimes of urban ruination in the Palestinian city of Hebron/Al-Khalil. The city is divided into two sectors: H1, controlled by the Palestinian National Authority, and H2, roughly 20% of the city, including 33,000 Palestinians and 700 Jewish settlers, living under direct Israeli military occupation. Drawing on fieldwork in H2, we identify several temporal formations shaping H2: the settler-messianic time that spatializes the past as a platform to facilitate colonial expansion; contemporary military control that seeks to destabilize Palestinian homes, their everyday lives and ontological security in the present; and the Palestinian effort to recalibrate the rhythm of elimination and recover the future. The paper develops the concept of political entropy: a temporal technology of control that builds on the process of natural decay. Israel uses the power of time and entropy to let Palestinian assets decay slowly while prohibiting proper renovation and maintenance. The mundane violence of political entropy tends to remain unseen, as the harm is done slowly, allegedly naturally. Facing the settler colonial temporalities that maintain a state of undecidedness, where deferral itself becomes a weapon which lets entropy operate without interruption, Hebron’s Palestinian inhabitants aim at slowing down the effects of time by applying friction to the process of ruination, as well as by their insistence on futurability. By identifying the temporalities trapping the city’s Palestinian population, our paper thus frames Hebron’s H2 as space that is simultaneously ruined and reclaimed.

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Present resistance: Tamara Taher, ‘Practicing wujud: A Constellation of sumud in the Fragmented Palestinian Present’, Middle East Critique, 2024

29Mar24

Abstract: The Zionist conception of history and its material project of expansion and land annexation produce a temporality of catastrophe (Nakba) that constantly reiterates violence, dispossession, and displacement in Palestinian lives and experiences. The linear temporality of the colonial process, including the neo-liberal framework of one of its crucial phases—the Oslo Accords (1993), has fragmented Palestinian existence throughout the past decades on multiple levels—economic, political, social, and geographic. Reflecting on Palestinian sumud as a constellation—within an epistemological and methodological relational perspective that aims to counter colonial linear epistemologies and temporalities, this article looks at how three significant Palestinian embodied, material and symbolic practices of wujud (presence) function within collective sumud. On the one hand, such experiences resist colonial annihilation by re-integrating the physical and cultural Palestinian presence in the face of catastrophe. On the other, they embody the diversity of Palestinian ontologies and the multi-vocality of Palestinian epistemologies. Practicing and asserting wujud and reclaiming relationships with the land are refractory Palestinian spaces, in the here and now of a fragmented present, to the Zionist colonial temporality, material and epistemic order. They enable the existence and resistance of the Palestinian people and alternative understandings and imaginations of time, meaning, and presence.

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Different Indigenous policies, same indigeneity: Fabian Bergmann, ‘An efficacious remedy for status inequality? Indigenous policies in Norway and Sweden’, Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2024

29Mar24

Abstract: Most states publicly support the recognition of Indigenous rights. Nevertheless, their domestic policies to address Indigenous rights issues vary considerably across countries. So far, research has not committed itself to investigating the consequences of different Indigenous policies on the peoples concerned and their social status. Do policy contexts that accommodate Indigenous rights firmly contribute to status equality between Indigenous people and the ethnic majority? I study this question in the case of Norway and Sweden. These countries host one Indigenous people – the Sámi – but pursue diverging Indigenous policies. Using new survey data, I show that, despite the absence of material inequalities, there is a clear gap in the social status perceptions between Indigenous and majority respondents in Sweden. In Norway, I do not find that Sámi’s perception of their social position is lower than the majority’s. The results suggest that the Swedish policies governing the recognition of Sámi rights are less effective in resolving unequal status perceptions.

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The indenture of settler colonialism: Anna Suranyi, ‘Indentured Servitude in Colonial America’, American History, 2024

29Mar24

Abstract: Indentured servitude was a constitutive factor in the development of colonial America and helped shape patterns of immigration, labor relationships, citizenship, and the economy of the colonies. During the 16th through the 18th centuries, about 320,000 indentured servants, primarily from England but also from Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere, crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the British colonies in the Americas, making up about 80 percent of white immigrants. About three-quarters of them were male, a quarter were female, and approximately a tenth were children. Most indentured servants were impoverished individuals, aged 18 to 25, who had agreed to a term of four to seven years of servitude with a payment of “freedom dues” at the end, but some were shipped or “transported” overseas involuntarily by the government, as vagrants or to serve criminal sentences, or were trafficked into servitude by kidnappers. Even those servants who had nominally agreed to indentured servitude had little understanding of what awaited them on the North American continent, because the indenture relationship gave their masters and mistresses much greater control over servants’ lives than employers had in Britain. Once indentured servants began their term of labor, many found themselves in abusive situations, with women and children particularly vulnerable to mistreatment. However, their circumstances were better than that of enslaved people of African ancestry, as a consequence of the limited duration of indentured servitude as opposed to lifelong enslavement and because indentured servants possessed legally and culturally defined rights as members of British society that were unavailable to the enslaved, including guidelines regulating their terms of labor, protections against abuses, and the ability to sue in court if mistreatment occurred. After servitude was completed, indentured servants were expected to join colonial society, and while many remained in dire poverty, some prospered.

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