settler colonial studies blog

Korean settler colonialism: Will Sack, ‘Ecology and Colonialism in Late Chosŏn Korea: Ullŭngdo, 1882-1905’, Past & Present, 2024

29Mar24

Abstrat: In the late nineteenth century, the Chosŏn state, which ruled the Korean peninsula from 1392 to 1910, moved settlers, animals and crops to the isolated oceanic island (do) of Ullŭng, displacing or killing the indigenous people, animals and possibly plant species living there. Having first sent observers to investigate Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido, the Chosŏn court accurately replicated its institutions and their impact during its settlement of Ullŭngdo. Documents from the settlement also mention non-Korean islanders uprooted by the state. Their presence shaped these events and the Chosŏn court’s policies, but the nature of their lives is now beyond reconstruction. Although the settlement of Ullŭngdo employed institutions and policies characteristic of settler colonialism, the lack of a self-identifying indigenous people, either at the time or surviving today, complicates the application to this case of the term ‘settler colonialism’. This offers an opportunity to discuss nationalizing settler colonialisms because, unlike the iconic settler colonies of North America and Oceania, settler colonialism in late Chosŏn Korea violently integrated outsiders into the emerging nation.

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The cultivar of settler colonialism: Thomas D. Isern, ‘Wheat’, in Jeannie Whayne (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 269-285

29Mar24

Description: Wheat is a cultivar with agency in world history. Gluten as well as other nutritional and agronomic virtues commended early wheats to humankind. Out of its Neolithic origins, wheat achieved a unity with human agriculturalists; was disseminated across Europe, Asia, and North Africa; spread globally as a participant in settler colonialism; established identifiable wheat belts; and was implicated in environmental catastrophes on the order the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains of North America. Established wheat belts such as the Great Plains developed coherent commodity cultures by which production practices were related to the environment. A direct historical relationship tied the wheat culture of the Great Plains to that of the Russian steppe. In the late twentieth century, wheat culture rose to new prominence in Asian nations as a result of the Green Revolution.

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Settlers in outer space: Mirko Daniel Garasic, Marcello Di Paola (eds), The Philosophy of Outer SpaceExplorations, Controversies, Speculations, Routledge, 2024

29Mar24

Description: This volume provides a rigorous philosophical investigation of the rationales, challenges, and promises of the coming Space Age. Over the past decade, space exploration has made significant and accelerating progress, and its potential has attracted growing attention from science, states, businesses, innovators, as well as the media and society more generally. Yet philosophical theorizing concerning the premises, values, meanings, and impacts of space exploration is still in its infancy, and this potentially immense field of study is far from mainstream yet. This book advances outer space philosophy by integrating key scientific and societal debates sparked by recent developments in space research and activities with conceptual, existential, ethical, aesthetic, and political themes and concerns. It maps various regions of philosophical exploration, reflection, and speculation regarding humanity’s present and future emanations into outer space, to promote a broad, rich, and nuanced societal debate regarding this transformative enterprise, which is as stimulating as it can be disorienting. This book will be a fascinating read for academics, researchers, and students interested in philosophy, space studies, science and technology studies, future studies, and sustainability.

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Earthwork, remunerated, against settler colonalism: David Myer Temin, ‘Wages for Earthwork’, American Political Science Review, 2024

26Mar24

Abstract: This essay proposes a novel paradigm for a political theory of climate justice: wages for earthwork. Indigenous peoples have disproportionately contributed to the sustainable stewardship of the natural world through ecological systems of governance, which I theorize as “earthwork.” Proponents of climate reparations have focused on reparations for unequal climate damages from emissions. By contrast, I propose “wages” or reparations to Indigenous peoples for debt owed to them for their devalued climate work. This framework makes use of an analogy to the 1970s feminist wages for housework movement, which sought to reveal the exploited and yet indispensable character of systematically devalued work rendered natural and invisible. I contend that (re)valuing earthwork must also be central to projects aimed at decolonizing climate justice, that is, anticolonial climate justice. More than monetary transfers alone, wages for earthwork prioritize the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and land and wider structural transformation of colonial capitalism.

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Settler animalities? Rachel Fetherston, “Muzzle for the Queen”: Settler–Nonhuman Entanglements in Australian Speculative Ecofiction’, in Nora Castle, Giulia Champion (eds), Animals and Science Fiction, Pagrave Macmillan, 2024, pp. 112-127

26Mar24

Abstract: In Australian postcolonial literature, representations of the nonhuman animal are often entangled with past, present, and potential future understandings of Australian settler-colonial belonging. Drawing from multispecies studies and scholarship on Australian postcolonial literature, this chapter discusses how the representation of the nonhuman animal in two works of what I define as “Australian speculative ecofiction” underscores the complexities and problematic nature of settler-colonial belonging in Australia. I contend that the human–nonhuman relations portrayed in Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) and Robbie Arnott’s Flames (2018) represent a shift in the way Australian settler-colonial authors are considering the nonhuman in their work. I also discuss how such works partly uphold problematic notions regarding the animal and settler-colonial belonging in Australia, particularly in their obscuration of Indigenous sovereignty.

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Indigenous internationalism: Kim Alley, Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Indigenous Internationalism Against Imprisoned Indigeneity in Australia and Palestine’, Middle East Critique, 2024

22Mar24

Abstract: Indigenous Australians and Palestinians experience some of the highest rates of incarceration and state violence in the world. In this article’s first section we focus comparatively on administrative detention and other forms of incarceration to underline a commonality of oppression that is both historical and contemporary. We examine settler colonial structures of domination and the impact of structural violence on Indigenous bodies, seeking to understand how incarceration acts as a form of elimination, and how it contributes to the consolidation of settler colonial nationhood. To counter incarceration and elimination, this article’s second and third sections call for a politics of solidarity premised on shared indigeneity.

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There goes the neighbourhood: Joshua A McGonagle Althoff, ‘Managing Settlers, Managing Neighbors: Renarrating Johnson v. McIntosh through the History of Piankashaw Community Building’, Journal of American History, 110, 4, 2024, pp. 625-642

22Mar24

Abstract: On the evening of January 1, 1776, Peeyankihšiaki (Piankashaw people) gathered in the village of Vincennes (in present-day Indiana), several miles above the confluence of the Embarras River and Waapaahšiki Siipiiwi (Wabash River). They came to celebrate the coming of a new year with the Francophone residents of Vincennes. On behalf of the British at this fur-trading post, French commandant Jean Baptiste Racine dit St. Marie recorded the evening’s celebrations in his ledger of merchandise. St. Marie was most concerned with estimating the expense of gifts being distributed. Throughout the evening, he noted that eighty loaves of bread and twenty-five “carrots” of tobacco went to groups led by the akimaki (male civil leaders) Sakimia (Maringouin or Mosquito), Old Tobacco, and Young Tobacco. These akimaki were regular guests of St. Marie and leading families of Vincennes, and their company may have been a welcome reprieve to residents occupied with keeping warm. The evening’s quaintness belied the fact that these leaders had gathered not two months earlier to negotiate a deal with an afterlife that would become the foundation of contemporary American Indian law in the United States.

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Land titling is the beginning of dispossession (today too): Julie Wetterslev, ‘When the Forest and the Rivers is Home – Managing Indigenous Territory and Settler Relations in North Eastern Nicaragua’, Iberoamericana, 2024

22Mar24

Abstract: Based on a case study in the Mayangna territory of Awas Tingni, this article explores current conflicts over lands, resources and identity in the Northern Caribbean region in Nicaragua. Through ethnographic excerpts and analysis of interviews and observations, the study demonstrates that judicialization and land titling has not brought security and stability for rights bearing indigenous communities. Rather, the titling process has been followed by a process of monetization of the land that has facilitated colonisation with a range of detrimental environmental and socio-cultural consequences, leaving fractioned indigenous communities in a vulnerable position to protect eco-systems and manage the relations with the many new settlers in their territories.

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Once they were settlers: Marta Stachurska-Kounta, ‘Silencing the Indigenous Perspective in the Textbook Accounts of Norwegian Migration to America’, Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk, 10, 3, 2024, pp. 148-175

22Mar24

Abstract: The historiography of Norwegian migration to North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries had, until recently, largely ignored its impact on indigenous people. Taking as a point of departure the presentations of migration to America in Norwegian lower and upper secondary school textbooks in social studies and history, this article demonstrates that the displacement of Native Americans is mostly absent in these presentations, and almost none of the textbooks discuss it in terms of settler colonialism. Such a narrative sustains the perception of North America as a sparsely inhabited continent with enough space for everyone and ultimately justifies Europeans’ right to claim possession of the land. Given that the consequences of settler colonialism continue to persist to the present day, I argue that ignoring the fact that Norwegian migrants were also settlers reproduces historical power relations and oppressive epistemologies. Aligned with the view that history education based on a single master narrative hinders critical thinking, this article contends that there is a need to decolonize the teaching of Norwegian migration to America by incorporating the perspective of Native Americans.

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Militarised settlers: Federica Caso, Settler Military Politics: Militarisation and the Aesthetics of War Commemoration, Edinburgh University Press, 2024

22Mar24

Description: Analyses the relation between visual culture, militarisation, and liberal governance. Elaborates on the relationship between militarisation and settler colonialism. Reads militarisation as a governing rationality. Focuses on the under-explored case study of Australia’s militarisation. Contributes to critical military and war studies by centring settler colonial relations and Indigeneity. Settler Military Politics provides a thorough investigation of the relationship between settler colonialism and militarisation drawing from the Australian experience. In this book, Caso develops the concept of settler military politics to identify the relationship between settler colonialism and militarisation. The book argues that militarisation is a rationality for governing the settler polity and consolidates the settler colonial project. It investigates settler military politics through an in-depth analysis of the under explored aesthetics of war commemoration in Australia and the role of the Australian War Memorial.

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