settler colonial studies blog

A happy settler family is a family you don’t know well: Andrew Milne, ‘Australian Selectors in the Nineteenth Century and Discrepancies in Imaginings and Realities: Critical Family History’, Genealogy, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: Queensland became an independent state in 1859, separating from New South Wales. Almost immediately, an ambitious plan on migration was embarked upon in order to attract emigrants to Queensland, above all other possible colony destinations in the British Empire. Henry Jordan was instrumental as the Emigration Commissioner (1861–1866) in devising the land order scheme and Richard Daintree, as Agent-General, wooed, through modern techniques on never-before-seen photography in colour, small capitalists to the isolated outreaches of Queensland, where settlement was encouraged. Life there for those that migrated was, however, vastly different from what either they knew in Britain, or what they expected. But, ultimately, they settled, took possession of considerable stretches of lands, as selectors, or pastoral land owners, with disregard for the indigenous populations there. In this article, I examine one migration story on an ancestor in the nineteenth century, Andrew Milne, from London to Queensland, through the lens of critical settler family history theory. I take up the challenge for historians to question who their ancestors were, since the past is telling of the present, and the perceptions that are longed for in the future selves. Namely, in the construction of the future self, an individual must also confront their past, and the lives of those that preceded them. In particular, in the case of Australia, settlement, colonisation, and the possession of land are not benign, and are not isolated events, but have an impact on the present and future lives of both descendants of those that possessed the land, and those from whom it was taken away. The legacy of racial segregation (through the Stolen Generations), and despite the attempt to ‘close the gap’ since 2008, Aboriginal peoples in Australia still suffer the consequences of objectification and dehumanisation to which they were subjected. The consequences are not only financial and economic, but are visible in health, education, social status, and in their mistrust of public services.

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Ukraine as a settler colony through history: Boris Belge, ‘Grain, Coal, and Gas: Ukraine’s Economy since the Eighteenth Century’, in Modernity at the Crossroads of Empires: Analytical Articles, Transcript, 2023, pp. 101-118

28Oct23

Excerpt: When taking a closer look at Ukraine’s history, three forms of colonialism are especially applicable: exploitation colonialism, settler colonialism, and internal colonialism. These three types are not mutually exclusive but instead provide different perspectives on the complex process of colonization.

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The poverty of settler colonialism: George Bishi, Duncan Money, ‘”Daisyfield in the crucible”: Afrikaners, education and poor whites in Southern Rhodesia, 1911–1948’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: This article examines the history of Daisyfield School, an Afrikaner children’s orphanage and school in Southern Rhodesia. The existence of an Afrikaner school in a self-consciously British settler colony represented a distinctive settler project within the settler state, one supported by the school’s transnational connections and one whose aims often conflicted with the state. These aims centred around the rehabilitation of poor white children, and we demonstrate how non-state institutions engaged in far-reaching interventions into the lives of children identified as poor whites. We also show how the children who were recipients of this treatment could resist it by crossing social and geographical boundaries. Challenges to Daisyfield’s regime produced a kind of solidarity between the school and state to suppress this challenge as the existence of poor whites threatened racial boundaries in the colony.

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On Islamic settler colonialism: Mohamed Abdou, ‘Conquistador Settler-colonialism & the Crises of Migrant Muslim Complicity’, Political Theology, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: Many migrant Muslims to “conquistador settler-colonial” U.S./Canada are driven to become good – settlers because of the devastating imperialist conditions reaped upon our original homelands. However, no Muslim political-theological works address Indigenous struggles or seriously engage settler-colonial studies. Migrant Muslims assume that the U.S./Canada are democratic-secular despite their animation by white-supremacist religious doctrines as Manifest Destiny. This contribution addresses the Qur’anic bases for a globally applicable decolonial, anti-statist/capitalist, social justice, Islam or what I refer to as Anarcha-Islam Drawing on the Qur’anic perspective of ethical-political responsibilities of Muslim hijra (migration), I argue how non-Black migrant Muslims in exile must seriously re-examine their ethical-political commitments and construct mutual alliances with Indigenous and Black peoples in their demands for land’s repatriation as well as reparations.

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The settler polity as a negative commonwealth: Lorenzo Veracini, Dan Tout, ‘The negative Commonwealth: Australia as “laboratory”, then and now’, Thesis Eleven, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: Federated Australia was seen for a long time as a significant social ‘laboratory’. The Commonwealth itself was seen as an ‘experiment’. This widespread metaphor relied on a particular pattern of perception: the country was ‘new’ (it was not), and the country was allegedly isolated (it was not, at least not completely). Many believed that its social environment could be controlled, like that of a scientific laboratory. A laboratory is designed to shut all disturbances out – the value of the data and experiments depends on it. This article outlines this metaphor in the context of Australian history during the 20th century, its rhetorical power and what made it discursively possible.

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When settler colonialism has no air: Mikko M. Puumala, Oskari Sivula, Kirsi Lehto, ‘Moving to Mars: The Feasibility and Desirability of Mars Settlements’, Space Policy, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: The on-going space settlement debate has raised questions whether it is possible to settle other planets, and if it was, is it something humans should do. The problem with this space ethical discussion is that it can easily become too vague. To avoid this problem, we suggest a framework for identifying relevant variables that affect the feasibility constraints and desirability factors of establishing space settlements. The variables we focus on include the settlement stage, scale and time frame. Based on the relevant literature, we take mission cost, survival, habitation, water, in situ resources for food, oxygen and fuel energy and dependence on Earth as feasibility constraints that are relevant for the framework. None of them are hard constraints, but rather soft feasibility constraints that make it difficult to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars in the near- to medium-term future. However, in the past, humanity has achieved goals that first seemed infeasible. To justify the costs and effort, the goal must be highly morally desirable. We discuss five different desirability factors that could help justify the effort but as each framework has unique feasibility constraints, not all of these factors are sufficient or necessary to justify this effort. We argue that some of the desirability factors prominent in space ethical literature are not sufficient or necessary in our framework, and thus, we conclude that the normative grounds for establishing a permanent Mars settlement in the foreseeable future are weak.

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When settler colonialism is in the air: Alyssa J. Kreikemeier, Aerial Empire: contested sovereignties and the American West, PhD dissertation, Boston University, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: Aerial Empire combines environmental and political history to argue that air shaped the United States’ colonization of the intermountain west. By focusing on environmental management and federal-Indian policy, it shows how claiming and regulating air as a natural resource both supported and subverted the nation’s control over the region in the twentieth century. A combination of white encroachment, warfare, diplomacy, and violence had transferred the region from Native to non-Native populations by the late nineteenth century. This process involved claiming western air, but appropriating the lower atmosphere required technology and policies devised during the twentieth century. Efforts to access and regulate air shaped twentieth-century U.S. expansion in New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, and Arizona, and turned a boundless atmosphere into a finite resource. Climate cures began the process of defining air as a natural resource, accelerated by aviation which compelled courts to legally distinguish navigable airspace from air rights in the 1920s. Nuclear science expanded atmospheric knowledge and smog undermined an approach to pollution based on dilution by 1950. As air pollution control shifted from a local to national issue, commercial and military jets increasingly crowded the skies. Environmental policy extended federal authority over air as a natural resource with the 1970 Clean Air Act, which tribes used to press federal recognition of their environmental sovereignty. Fluid and elusive, atmospheric motion subverted efforts to fix the sky in place and undermined territorial jurisdiction. Although modern legislation made air a material resource, the atmosphere remained interconnected with land in ways that complicated its regulation. Claiming air required seeing it as a material rather than an immaterial resource, and as a finite rather than infinite one. Tribes influenced and deployed environmental law to bolster Indigenous power and challenge the settler state’s authority over air, land, and Native peoples. Yet Indigenous and rural communities suffered disproportionate impacts of atmospheric transformations, such as nuclear testing, extractive industry, and military airspace. Efforts to claim, measure, map, and manage the atmosphere contributed to crucial changes in modern American society, including the transfer of Indigenous land, resources, and labor to settlers; the degradation and pollution of air with dangerous compounds and waste; the expansion of military control over new spaces; and the extension of federal authority through modern environmental policy.

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Settler colonial abortion: Cassidy Ellis, Saved Babies, Dead Doctors: Settler Colonial Anxiety and Strategic Rhetorics of/in the Anti-Abortion Cultural Narrative, PhD dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: In this dissertation I identify and analyze the rhetoric that creates the anti-abortion cultural narrative and locate its toxic secrets by exposing the logics and ideologies the secrets obscure and sustain, and finally, ascertaining the strategic rhetorics that enable the narrative’s power and centrality. There are two primary arguments proposed in this dissertation. First, I argue that settler colonialism is the primary toxic secret nestled just beneath the surface of the anti-abortion cultural narrative. It is the secret that animates and sustains the narrative in service of maintaining settler colonial social order via control and maintenance of the population. Second, I argue that the anti-abortion campaign that burgeoned in the United States in the years following Roe v. Wade (1973) crafted this particular anti-abortion cultural narrative through three strategic rhetorics: 1) a (re)constituted concept of fetal personhood; 2) ideographic use of fetal imagery grounded in a Christian ethos; and 3) ideographic violence made possible through a reconceptualization of what “counts” as a violent act in the context of abortion. This dissertation also argues that the anti-abortion narrative operates in service of a larger settler colonial agenda, ultimately contributing to a settler colonial worldmaking project. I began this introduction discussing Alito’s opinion text because it is a prime example of how history, medical “facts,” socio-cultural discourses, and state power converge in narratives of reproduction. These narratives are not new, rather the Dobbs decision reminds that the heteropatriarchal White supremacist settler colonial state is working exactly as it’s meant to, privileging exactly those it was created to privilege. Alito’s ability to write the significance of pregnancy determination out of U.S. history and to construct pregnancy prevention as nonessential for “liberty” situates the anti-abortion cultural narrative within a colonial master narrative (or, ideology) that is concerned with maintaining and controlling the settler colonial population.

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The non-coloniality of settler colonialism: Doerthe Rosenow, ‘The Violence of Settler Imperialism – and Why the Concept of Coloniality Cannot Grasp It’, Millennium, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: Against a background of ongoing public and academic debate about how to best address the legacies of colonialism and slavery, there is now an ever-expanding body of International Relations (IR) literature that makes use of the concept of ‘coloniality’. Indeed, coloniality, which attempts to make sense of past and ongoing colonial oppression in global terms, seems a particularly apt concept for IR, which, after all, is interested in understanding the nature of global power. This article is critical of the way that coloniality is increasingly used in a unitary ‘catch-all’ manner to describe global colonial domination in often unspecific ways. It argues, based on an in-depth exegesis of key Latin American decolonial texts, that the way the concept has been developed makes certain colonial violence, and the resistance against it, invisible; with the violence of (global) settler colonialism being a prominent example. Using and further developing Jodi Byrd’s concepts of transit and settler imperialism, in dialogue with Latin American settler colonial literature and radical Black thought, this article aims to bring this violence to the forefront of IR debate. I will conclude by elaborating on the concrete consequences that understanding ongoing colonial violence with the help of these concepts has for thinking about decolonisation in IR.

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Gentrification is settler colonialism: Gabriel Schwake, Haim Yacobi, ‘Decolonisation, gentrification, and the settler-colonial city: Reappropriation and new forms of urban exclusion in Israel’, EPC: Politics and Space, 2023

27Oct23

Abstrat: Focusing on the immigration of upper-middle-class Palestinian families to the Israeli town of
Upper-Nazareth, originally built by the state to enhance Jewish presence in the area, this paper
frames the concept of decolonising gentrification. Accordingly, it studies a unique inconsistency
between economic class and ethnonational hegemony, which enables upwardly Arab minority
families to overcome ethnic barriers and to exercise social and spatial mobility. Therefore, this
paper explains how these socio-political dynamics challenge the local settler-colonial aspects of
urban development and enable the reappropriation of colonised urban space. Focusing on the
case of Upper-Nazareth and its former ‘Officers’ Neighbourhood’, we examine a distinctive
contradiction between political power and economic abilities that triggers a unique case of
gentrification, where the colonised minority gentrifies the colonising hegemony. At the same
time, this decolonising gentrification, as we argue, takes place in restricted urban enclaves, and
relies on an ethno-class price gap as it is only the minority upper-class who is willing to pay the
increasing prices, due to their limited options. Therefore, as this paper shows, decolonising
gentrification simultaneously challenges and recreates urban settler-colonialism, enabling
limited market-oriented reappropriation while triggering ethnic-based accumulation and new
forms of neoliberal exclusion.

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