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Nationalism as obfuscation: Muhannad Ayyash, ‘Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and Nationalism: On Motivations and Violence’, Middle East Critique, 2024

14Apr24

Abstract: In discourse that normalizes and propagates Israeli settler colonial conquest and domination, analytical attention is given to the supposed nationalist nature of the Zionist project painting Zionism as a liberatory project for persecuted Jewish peoples in Europe and beyond. To counter this discourse and its erasure of the colonized, many critical scholars have emphasized that Zionism is both nationalist and settler colonial. However, to present a decolonial alternative to the exclusive focus on Zionism as a nationalist project, critical analysis must insist that state nationalism is but one of the elements that scholars can analyze within, not alongside, the larger framework of settler colonial sovereignty. This article argues that we must examine the effects of the Zionist project and give the Palestinian experience its proper analytical weight at the forefront of the analysis, not as that which can illuminate the ‘unintended consequences’ of Zionism, but as that which reveals the very logic and nature of Zionism and the Zionist project.


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The settlers and their isolation (reviewing Lorenzo Veracini, The World Turned Upside Down, and Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native): Adam Dahl, ‘”Then what are you doing here?” Political theories of settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

14Apr24

Excerpt: It is with these three dimensions of this question in mind that I want to frame this review essay. In evoking both the narrative and the normative, both books are deeply contextual and historically sophisticated works written with an eye toward the critical and normative stakes of the present. Furthermore, they reveal not only exciting new avenues for work on histories of settler colonialism, but also show how settler colonialism remains an incisive analytic device for cutting at core questions of political theory revolving around conceptions of revolution, the nation, democracy, territory, and sovereignty. At the same time, in grappling with this question, these works also reveal the limits of a political theory of settler colonialism for future scholarly work to contend with.


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The little house belongs to a settler (and you can visit it): Nancy Reagin, ‘Whose Homestead Is It? Little Houses on the Prairie and the Cultural Politics of White Colonial Settlement in the United States’, in Stijn Reijnders, Emiel Martens, Deborah Castro, Débora Póvoa, Apoorva Nanjangud, Rosa Schiavone (eds), Media, Place and Tourism: Worlds of Imagination, Routledge, 2024, pp. 155-167

14Apr24

Excerpt: Strung across the prairies of the United States, there are small towns whose claim to fame – and draw for visitors – is that they were once home to Laura Ingalls Wilder (1872–1957), author of the Little House series, which began publication in 1932. Wilder’s wandering family lived in homes and farms in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and South Dakota. Some of their original dwellings still stand.


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Needed immigrant settlers: Peter Kvidera, ‘”A Gratifying Divergence”: Immigrant Settlement and the National Narrative in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia’, College Literature, 51, 2, 2024, pp. 203-232

14Apr24

Abstract: This essay examines Cather’s 1923 essay “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle” and her 1918 novel My Ántonia to analyze her representation of the immigrant figure that simultaneously defines the region (Nebraska) and enriches the story of America. The essay contextualizes Cather’s writing within the statutes of nineteenth-century homesteading legislation, which allowed Nebraska to be settled and the nation to expand westward. It first considers opportunities and challenges afforded by homesteading, and then discusses Cather’s use of immigrant settlement and the cycles of storytelling it produces to revise monolithic interpretations of the national narrative.


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Subversing termination: David Dry, ‘”Ready to Be Terminated”: Guy Jennison and Ottawa Traditions of Autonomy through Elimination’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 11, 1, 2024, pp. 3-34

14Apr24

Abstract: The 1950s and 1960s policy of tribal termination is justly regarded as a genocidal federal effort to extinguish tribal sovereignty and identity. Some tribal leaders, however, like Guy Jennison, chief of the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma from 1930 to 1962, supported termination. Jennison’s advocacy for termination developed out of an Ottawa political tradition that sought greater autonomy through embracing federal policies aimed at tribal elimination. In this political tradition, the Ottawa endeavored to escape federal control through eliminatory policies while subverting the eliminatory intentions of policy-makers by ensconcing their community in other dimensions of the dominant society. For Jennison, endorsing termination was a strategy to escape federal paternalism and gain greater control over tribal affairs. In anticipation of termination, Jennison led the Ottawas to reestablish tribal government through a state-chartered nonprofit corporation; by perpetuating tribal identity and prerogatives through this vehicle, the Ottawa undermined the eliminatory intentions of termination policy. Placing Jennison’s advocacy for termination within a longer tradition of Ottawa activism reveals the Native intellectual genealogies that informed his perspective and demonstrates how policies intending tribal elimination represented a complex site of Ottawa struggle against federal authority.


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Convivial settler colonialism: Matthew Allen, ‘Imagining a Public: Anniversary Dinners and the Democratic Political Imaginary in Colonial New South Wales, 1788-1842’, Australian Historical Studies, 2024

14Apr24

Abstract: During the first half of the nineteenth century, the 26th of January was celebrated as the founding anniversary of the colony of New South Wales, typically with a ‘public’ dinner. A political faction of locally born ‘natives’ and former convict ‘emancipists’ used this invented tradition to rally around arguments for democratic rights. Moving beyond their role in political organising, I read these anniversary dinners, and their reporting in the press, as an expression of a democratic political imaginary. The dinners became a stage on which political ideas were debated and endorsed by a representative public in a performative ritual that scripted a vision of a democratic colony, before it was granted democratic institutions.


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The nature of settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel, University of Minnesota Press, 2023

14Apr24

Description: Studying nature conservation in Palestine-Israel through the lens of settler colonialism. Settling Nature draws on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork to document how the administration of nature in Palestine-Israel advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement alongside the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space. Highlighting the violent repercussions of Israel’s conservation regime, Braverman plants the seeds for possible reimaginings of nature that transcend the grip of the state’s settler ecologies.


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The American Dream of Indigenous Peoples: Kasey R. Keeler, American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 2023

14Apr24

Description: Understanding the processes and policies of urbanization and suburbanization in American Indian communities. Examining the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota, American Indians and the American Dream investigates the ways American Indians accessed homeownership, working with and against federal policy, underscoring American Indian peoples’ unequal and exclusionary access to the way of life known as the American dream.


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Viscous settler colonialism: Tyler McCreary, Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities: Colonial Extractivism and Wet’suwet’en Resistance, University of Alberta Press, 2024

11Apr24

Description: Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities examines the relationship between the Wet’suwet’en and hydrocarbon pipeline development, showing how colonial governments and corporations seek to control Indigenous claims and how the Wet’suwet’en resist. Tyler McCreary explores pipeline regulatory review processes, reviews attempts to reconcile Indigeneity with development, and asks fundamental questions about territory and jurisdiction. In the process, he offers historical context for the continuing influences of colonialism on Indigenous peoples. Throughout, McCreary demonstrates how the cyclical movements between resistance and reconciliation are affected by the unequal relations between Indigenous peoples, colonial governments, and development operations. This sophisticated analysis invites readers to consider the complex realities of Indigenous and Wet’suwet’en law, as well as the politics of pipeline development.


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Intersections, including settler colonial ones: Robel Afeworki Abay, Karen Soldatić (eds), Intersectional ColonialitiesEmbodied Colonial Violence and Practices of Resistance at the Axis of Disability, Race, Indigeneity, Class, and Gender, Routledge, 2024

11Apr24

Description: This book provides a rich synthesis of empirical research and theoretical engagements with questions of disability across different practices of colonialism as historically defined – post/de/anti/settler colonialism. It synthesises, critiques, and expands the boundaries of existing disability research which has been undertaken within different colonial contexts through the rich examination of recent empirical work mapping across disability and its intersectional colonialities. Filling an existing gap within the international literature through embedding the importance of grounding these within scholarly debates of colonialism, it empirically demonstrates the significance of disability for the broader scholarly fields of postcolonial, decolonial, and intersectional theories. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, critical studies, sociology of race and ethic relations, intersectionality, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and human geography.


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