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A mimicry of decolonisation: Achia Anzi, ‘Settler Mimicry: Colonization and Decolonization through Imitation’, Palestine/Israel Review, 2024

07Apr24

Abstract: This article explores the dynamics of settler mimicry in Israel—Palestine and its manifestations in the visual arts. It probes the operation of mimicry as a colonial strategy but also emphasizes its decolonial potential. Although imitation of the Palestinian natives enables Israeli settlers to annex the territory, this article suggests that mimicry can be delinked from its colonial registers and transform the settlers’ worldview. This analysis seeks to expand the insights of Patrick Wolfe, who saw the elimination of the natives as the central feature of settler colonialism. By highlighting instances in which the settler mimics the native, this article challenges his reductionist framework, which pins colonial projects to their materialist objectives. Whereas exploitation colonialism uses the colony’s resources, Wolfe contends, settler colonialism is geared toward the seizure of land, and hence toward physical and ideological elimination of the native. This article, on the other hand, emphasizes the complexity of settler colonialism and foregrounds the tension between the cultural apparatuses of elimination and mimicry. While imitation facilitates the indigenization of settlers, it also highlights the presence of natives. This internal tension renders the operation of settler colonialism ambiguous and thus can be utilized to decolonize Zionism.


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Settlers after colonialism: Willeke Sandler, ‘A Foot in the Door: The Colonial Section of the German Foreign Office and the Settlement of Germans in Interwar Tanganyika’, Contemporary European History, 2024

07Apr24

Abstract: After 1925, German settlers began to return to the former German East Africa, lost through the Treaty of Versailles and transformed into the British Mandate of Tanganyika. The German Foreign Office’s Colonial Section took on a proactive role to facilitate these Germans’ settlement in their former colony, including working with German ministries to release funding and navigating the British administration and settlers on the ground in Tanganyika. While Germany had lost its overseas colonies, these officials, many of whom had served in the pre-war empire, did not view their activity in colonial spaces like Tanganyika as belonging to the past. Officials in the Colonial Section navigated the appearance of political neutrality while also promoting their ‘colonial-political’ goals, hoping to create footholds of Germanness in Tanganyika that would keep open the possibility of future empire.


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Indigenous territory against settler colonialism: Shari M. Huhndorf, Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims, University of California Press, 2024

07Apr24

Description: Native Lands analyzes the role of visual and literary culture in contemporary Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights. In the post-1960s era, Indigenous artists and writers have created works that align with the goals and strategies of new Native land-based movements. These works represent Native histories and epistemologies in ways that complement activist endeavors, while also probing the limits of these political projects, especially with regard to gender. The social marginalization of Native women was integral to dispossession. And yet its enduring consequences have remained largely neglected, even in Native organizing, as a pressing concern associated with the status of Indigenous people in settler nation-states. The cultural works discussed in this book provide an urgent Indigenous feminist rethinking of Native politics that exposes the innate gendered dimensions of ongoing settler colonialism. They insist that Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights must entail gender justice for Native women.


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Anatomy of a settler colonial genocide: Human Rights Council, Fifty-fifth session, 26 February-5 April 2024, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese’, 25/04/24

04Apr24

Summary: After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the whole population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come. By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. One of the key findings is that Israel’s executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.


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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

Abstract: Similar to 19th-century steamship travel, 21st-century cruise ships link far-flung communities for visitors to the Pacific Northwest Coast. Contemporary Indigenous artists, like their ancestors before them, have transformed touristic curiosity into economic, educational and cultural opportunities for their communities. Public art has become an increasingly important site for engaging visitors who have only a few hours to spend on shore. This paper compares two public art projects—Juneau, Alaska’s Kootéeyaa Deiyí (Totem Pole Trail) and Vancouver, British Columbia’s Blanketing the City—to explore the multivalent ways in which public art expresses Indigenous sovereignty.


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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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