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Indigenous self-determination under settler colonialism: Anthea Compton, Alison Vivian, Theresa Petray, Matthew Walsh, Steve Hemming, ‘Indigenous nation building and native title: strategic uses of a fraught settler-colonial regime’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

16Oct23

Abstract: Despite the ongoing and destructive nature of invasion and settler-colonial institutions, laws and policies in Australia, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations continue to assert their sovereignty; exercise their inherent rights to self-determination as self-defined, autonomous peoples; and pursue collective aspirations in highly constrained and contested environments. Many nations are engaged in Indigenous nation (re)building (INB). One key INB strategy utilised by such nations is to use settler-colonial policy for their own collective ends. This article analyses the relationship between a complex and highly fraught settler-colonial legal-political system, native title, and INB processes in Australia. Using the ‘Identify as a Nation, Organise as a Nation, Act as a Nation’ framework, we explore some of the actual and potential relationships between the native title system and INB. Despite the considerable harms of the native title system on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, we maintain that First Nations may be able to strategically engage in the system in a way that assists them to further their cultural and political autonomy.


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The Indigenous person at the line: Amahl Bishara, Crossing a Line Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression, Stanford University Press, 2022

13Oct23

Description: Palestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and considers how Palestinians are differently impacted by dispossession, settler colonialism, and militarism. Amahl Bishara looks to sites of political practice—journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road—to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in these varied circumstances. She draws on firsthand research, personal interviews, and public media to examine how people shape and reshape meanings in circumstances of constraint. In considering these different environments for political expression and action, Bishara illuminates how expression is always grounded in place—and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest.


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The settler at the crossroad: Jeffrey Denis, Canada at a Crossroads: Boundaries, Bridges, and Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-Settler Relations, University of Toronto Press, 2020

13Oct23

Description: Canada at a Crossroads draws on group position theory, settler colonial studies, critical race theory, and Indigenous theorizing. Canada at a Crossroads emphasizes the social psychological barriers to transforming white settler ideologies and practices and working towards decolonization. After tracing settlers’ sense of group superiority and entitlement to historical and ongoing colonial processes, Denis illustrates how contemporary Indigenous and settler residents think about and relate to one another. He highlights how, despite often having close cross-group relationships, residents maintain conflicting perspectives on land, culture, history, and treaties, and Indigenous residents frequently experience interpersonal and systemic racism. Denis then critically assesses the promise and pitfalls of commonly proposed solutions, including intergroup contact, education, apologies, and collective action, and concludes that genuine reconciliation will require radically restructuring Canadian society and perpetually fulfilling treaty responsibilities.


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The foreign policy of a settler polity: Tyler A. Shipley, Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination, Fernwood, 2020

13Oct23

Description: An accessible and empirically rich introduction to Canada’s engagements in the world since confederation, this book charts a unique path by locating Canada’s colonial foundations at the heart of the analysis. Canada in the World begins by arguing that the colonial relations with Indigenous peoples represent the first example of foreign policy, and demonstrates how these relations became a foundational and existential element of the new state. Colonialism—the project to establish settler capitalism in North America and the ideological assumption that Europeans were more advanced and thus deserved to conquer the Indigenous people—says Shipley, lives at the very heart of Canada. Through a close examination of Canadian foreign policy, from crushing an Indigenous rebellion in El Salvador, “peacekeeping” missions in the Congo and Somalia, and Cold War interventions in Vietnam and Indonesia, to Canadian participation in the War on Terror, Canada in the World finds that this colonial heart has dictated Canada’s actions in the world since the beginning. Highlighting the continuities across more than 150 years of history, Shipley demonstrates that Canadian policy and behaviour in the world is deep-rooted, and argues that changing this requires rethinking the fundamental nature of Canada itself.


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Resistance is beautiful: Ellen van Werkhoven, Beautiful Resistance in Palestine: The Use of (Performative) Arts as a Strategy to Decolonise, MA dissertation, Utrecht University, 2023

13Oct23

Abstract: With the multi-faceted, complex dynamics of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, a feasible solution seems further away than ever. Yet, all sorts of forms of resistance occur aiming to oppose the settler-colonial power structure. So does the understudied notion of beautiful resistance. It is defined as the means, and practices aiming to build peace within oneself through arts, education, and culture. This thesis explores the concept of beautiful resistance by unpacking it through three analytical categories. Central to this thesis is, therefore, the question of how practices of beautiful resistance can be understood as a strategy to decolonise Palestine. Beautiful resistance can only be sufficiently understood, once its practices are understood in the context of settler-colonialism and its political economy. Based on eight weeks of ethnographic fieldwork, practices of beautiful resistance are analysed by observing and discussing the complex dynamics between art, culture, and resistance with key agents in the field. This thesis presents a critical exploration of beautiful resistance by demonstrating 1) the inextricable relation with settler-colonialism, 2) the complex network of actors constituting the political economy in which beautiful resistance is embedded, and 3) how in this context practices of beautiful resistance result in the normalisation of the status quo, in other words, the continuation of the Occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. The academic and practical application of the notion of beautiful resistance demands a contextspecific framework adapted to the oppressive structures of settler-colonialism and its adherent political economy.


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A voice against voicelessness: Lorenzo Veracini, Dan Tout, ‘The Negative Commonwealth: Australia as “Laboratory”, Then and Now’, Thesis Eleven, 2023

11Oct23

Excerpt: This work appraises settler-colonial Australia’s strategic contribution to the transnational political traditions of what James Belich (2009) seminally called the global ‘settler revolution’. Specifically, this paper discusses settler Australia’s self-appointed role as sociopolitical ‘laboratory’ during the early decades of the twentieth century, after the settler revolution had entered a period of crisis elsewhere. The federal Commonwealth took this role seriously. The Torrens title, a mode of registering and transferring real estate that systematically erases all traces of prior ownership, the ‘Australian ballot’, identifying a specific settler-colonial form of democratic governance impervious to ‘Old World’ patronage, the constitutionally enshrined exclusion of Indigenous and exogenous alterities through the White Australia policy, and the Court of Arbitration were all institutional devices tested in Australia before being exported elsewhere. A cluster of interlocking political experiments, some older, some more recent, would coalesce in what Paul Kelly in another seminal intervention defined as the ‘Australian Settlement’ (1992). The Australian imperial nationalists loudly lamented the ‘Tyranny of Distance’ (see Blainey 1966), but in crucial ways ‘Australia’ was imagined as a globally relevant laboratory of sociopolitical experimentation precisely because of its assumed isolation. There is no laboratory without a controlled environment.


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The massacre of memory: Vanessa Whittington, ‘Memorialisation, Reconciliation and Truth-Speaking: The Role of Explorer and Massacre Memorials in Settler-Colonial Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: Memorialisation in settler-colonial nations such as Australia is intensely political. It creates public symbols of people and events those in authority consider important and worthy of remembrance. Counternarratives of various marginalised others are silenced through processes of collective forgetting. In Australia, this forgetting has meant that colonial histories of exploration and discovery have been commemorated through ubiquitous explorer memorials. But these memorials represent a very selective account of settler-colonial history firmly based in the colonial fiction of terra nullius or empty land used to justify the British claim to Australia. This fiction is now being actively countered by social protests focused on memorials to explorers and colonial administrators. Furthermore, a trend to memorialise and commemorate the massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as part of the colonisation process is overturning the myth that Australia was peacefully settled. In fact, truth-speaking is now recognised by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians as an integral part of the reconciliation process. However, the truths spoken as part of the shared memorialisation of Aboriginal massacre sites by the Australian reconciliation movement are only partial, and may serve to perpetuate rather than interrupt what has historically been a resounding silence about colonial dispossession and violence.


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Settler petromobilities: Alec Follett, ‘Oil and the Hard-Boiled: Petromobility, Settler Colonialism and the Legacy of the American Century in Thomas King’s Cold Skies’, in Nathan Ashman (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: This chapter examines the relationship between oil and the hard-boiled mode in Cherokee author Thomas King’s Cold Skies (2018). Uniting the fields of crime fiction and petrocriticism, the chapter first traces how the hard-boiled developed alongside twentieth-century American petromobility. It then analyses how King uses hard-boiled conventions to make legible how oil is both an abstracted commodity associated with pleasure and power and a material substance tied to settler-colonial extractivism and dispossession of Indigenous land. Consequently, I argue to address contemporary oil dependency, we must understand and ultimately rewrite our relationship with the American century and with genre.


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The carnivals of settlers are a serious matter: Adrian Franklin, ‘Carnival Relocated? Popular Culture and the Carnivalesque in Colonial Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania)’,Cultural and Social History, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: This article re-evaluates the historical research on the carnivalesque rituals that arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (VDL) with British convicts, their colonial minders and free settlers. The revaluation deploys more theoretically informed understandings of carnivalesque ritual (using Bakhtin, Zemon Davis, le Roy Ladurie, Bristol, Underdown, Durston and others), coupled with more recent historical understandings of carnivalesque ritual in Britain at the time of convict transportation and new evidence on how carnivalesque ritual specific to VDL responded to changes in penal policy and practice. It is argued that carnivalesque rituals persisted as a means for building social solidarity, belonging, cultural-political expression and resilience.


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Crazy settlers at the end of the world after the end of the world: Andrew Nickson, ‘Great Britain and the War of the Triple Alliance: The Lincolnshire Farmers Colonization Scheme to Paraguay and the Fourth Ally Thesis’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: This article challenges the fourth ally thesis, which argues that Great Britain was a crucial actor underpinning the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay that defeated Paraguay in the 1864–70 War of the Triple Alliance. To date, the debate has focused on British involvement in the genesis and financing of the allied war effort. This article instead focuses on the postwar behavior of the British government, exploring its attitude to the 892 mainly English colonists of the failed 1872–73 Lincolnshire farmers emigration scheme to Paraguay. The British government’s open hostility to the scheme and its lack of concern for the plight of the colonists offer new evidence suggesting that the War of the Triple Alliance was of little interest to British imperialism in general and to settler colonialism in particular.


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