settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial progressives: Dan Tout, ‘Settler Nationalism and Progressive Discourse’, Arena Quarterly, 15, 2023

29Sep23

Excerpt: Despite stalled progress towards a ‘renovated idea of Australia’, for Schultz it remains the case that if the nation is to transform from half- to fully formed, the foundational ‘wound’ of settler colonisation will need ‘to be healed’. Thankfully, Schultz argues, renewed ‘inspiration for this journey … and indeed the model methodology of how we might embark upon it, comes from an unlikely source: the people who even three score years and ten ago were still routinely and unemotionally treated as vermin, described as a dying race’. Schultz is, of course, referring to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which she insists will, ‘sooner or later, fundamentally reshape the idea of Australia’.

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The Italian settler colonial imagination of Argentina: Tullio Pagano, Italy to Argentina: Travel Writing and Emigrant Colonialism, Amherst College Press, 2023

26Sep23

Description: In Italy to Argentina: Travel Writing and Emigrant Colonialism, Tullio Pagano examines Italian emigration to Argentina and the Rio de la Plata region through the writings of Italian economists, poets, anthropologists, and political activists from the 1860s to the beginning of World War I. He shows that Italians played an important role in the so-called conquest of the desert, which led to Argentina’s economic expansion and the suppression and killing of the remaining indigenous population. Many of the texts he discusses have hardly been studied before: from Paolo Mantegazza’s real and imaginary travel narratives at the time of Italian unification to Gina Lombroso’s descriptions of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina in early 1900s. Pagano questions the apparent opposition between diaspora and empire and argues that there was a continuity between the “peaceful conquest” though spontaneous emigration envisioned by Italian liberal intellectuals at the turn of the century and the military colonialism of Italian Nationalists and Fascists. He shows that racist assumptions about Native American and “creole” cultures were present in the work of progressive authors like Edmondo de Amicis, whose writings became enormously popular in Argentina, and anarchist militants and legal scholars like Pietro Gori, who founded the first revolutionary unions in Buenos Aires while remaining dangerously attached to Cesare Lombroso’s theories of atavism and primitivism. The “growl” of Italian emigrants about to land in Argentina, found in Dino Campana’s poem Buenos Aires (1907), echoes throughout Pagano’s book, and encourages the reader to explore the apparent oxymoron of “emigration colonialism” and the role of literature and public media in the formation of our social imaginary.

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Settler humanitarian elimination: Sung Yup Kim, ‘Humanitarian Elimination: Indigenous Assimilation, State Building, and Settler Biopolitics in the United States, Australia, and Canada’, Journal of Humanities (Seoul National University), 80, 3, 2023, pp. 385-434

26Sep23

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, the United States, Australia, and Canada launched comprehensive assimilation policies targeting indigenous children. These initiatives took shape amidst ongoing concerns with humanitarian protection. Emerging in the context of early nineteenth century AngloAmerican imperial discourse, humanitarian protectionists argued that in order to civilize indigenous peoples while protecting them from settler violence, centralized state power should reach deep into indigenous communities, reshaping every aspect of their existence from familial relations, sexuality, and communal life to everyday habits. In implementing this idea with the vastly expanded state power of the late nineteenth century, governments in all three countries sought to ‘rescue’ indigenous children from the ‘degenerative’ influence of their parents’ generation, and ultimately incorporate them into the racial and gendered order of settler society. The U.S. and Canadian assimilation policies hinged on state-run boarding schools for indigenous children, whereas the Australian policy focused on the biological absorption of “half-caste” indigenous children through adoption into white families. Despite these differences, underlying the assimilation policies of all three countries was what can be termed a new settler biopolitics, in which only the young generation of indigenous peoples, on condition that they are successfully transitioned into modern individuals, would be allowed to survive, while the older generation was categorically excluded from the settler states’ biopolitical regime and thus slated for extinction. While departing from the more rampant and conspicuous colonial violence of earlier periods, ultimately what the new state-led initiatives sought to achieve, armed with the technologies of modern governmentality, was firmly in line with settler colonialism’s ongoing drive to eliminate indigenous presence by weakening the collective resources and structural foundations of indigenous communities. In fact, by professing a concern for humanitarian protection and scientific management, the new mode of settler governmentality enabled settler states to more quietly but effectively facilitate the elimination of indigenous peoples.

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Fragmentation is settler colonialism: Jamal Nabulsi, ‘”To stop the earthquake”: Palestine and the Settler Colonial Logic of Fragmentation’, Antipode, 2023

26Sep23

Abstract: Fragmentation is a key colonial strategy to which Palestinians enact resistance, evident most prominently in the 2021 Unity Intifada. In this article, I take inspiration from such Palestinian resistance to theorise fragmentation as a central logic ofZionist/Israeli settler colonialism. I make three related points. First, I employ the metaphor of the earthquake to consider the fractality of settler colonial fragmentation across the dimensions of land, time, and bodies. Second, understanding the settler colonial logic of elimination as ultimately attempting to extinguish a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, I argue that the logic of fragmentation drives towards elimination. Finally, I demonstrate that, in fragmenting Palestine, Zionism seeks to render Israel a coherent entity. Ultimately then, the Zionist project works to fragment Palestine to eliminate Palestinian bodies from land and time, to render Israel a seamless nation across these dimensions. However, Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is not something that can be broken or extinguished.

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Poisonous settler colonial food: Sharon Stein, Tabitha Robin, Michael Wesley, Will Valley, Daniel J. Clegg, Cash Ahenakew, Tamara R. Cohen, ‘Confronting Colonialism in Canadian Dietetics Curricula’, Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research, 2023

26Sep23

Abstract: Many Canadian universities have committed to becoming more accountable to Indigenous Peoples by confronting the systemic, historical, and ongoing colonialism and anti-Indigenous racism that shape their campuses. In this Perspective in Practice piece, we invite the field of dietetics to consider how colonialism has shaped dietetics research, teaching, and practice. We also consider how we might transform the field of dietetics in ways that accept settler responsibility for interrupting racism and colonial harm; support the resurgence of Indigenous food and health practices; and recognise the connections between struggles to ensure that Indigenous Peoples can access culturally appropriate food and health care, and struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. We do this by reviewing the history of the dietetics field, examining critical responses to existing Indigenisation and decolonisation efforts, and reflecting on recent changes to required dietetics competencies. We argue that curricula in dietetics programmes must teach the history of the colonial food system and equip students to identify and interrupt the individual and institutional colonial dynamics that contribute to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous Peoples’ lands and food sources and negatively impact Indigenous patients.

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Comparative literature is settler colonial (unless it is decolonised): Shu-mei Shih, ‘Decolonizing US Comparative Literature: The 2022 ACLA Presidential Address’, Comparative Literature, 75, 3, 2023, pp. 237-265

26Sep23

Abstract: This essay examines how comparative literature as a discipline has never confronted its interlocking contexts of settler colonialism, imperialism, and racialization as its conditions of possibility in the United States. Inspired by recent efforts at decolonization in other disciplines, this essay calls for decolonizing comparative literature via a critique of the discipline from the nineteenth century to the present. From evolutionary scientism at its origin, overarching and continuing Eurocentrism, the disavowal of area studies, the rise of literary theory, and the primacy of non-US-focused postcolonial studies to problematic conceptions of multiculturalism, the discipline has scrupulously dissociated itself from the US reality. This dissociation, in the final analysis, replicates and supports the settler-colonial structure that evacuates the Indigenous peoples from their land and replaces Indigenous knowledge with settler knowledge, showing comparative literature to be a settler-colonial discipline. Hence, the necessary settler-colonial critique of comparative literature ought to be superseded by Indigeneity-centered practices in our work for decolonization to be possible.

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Desire, under settler colonialism: Janice Feng, Towards a Decolonial Account of Desire: The Cultivation of Desire and Indigenous Women’s Self-Making and Resistance in Early Modern French North America, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2023

26Sep23

Abstract: This dissertation takes up desire as the central analytic to examine the founding and consolidating of settler-colonial rule in Northeastern Turtle Island (Québec and the Great Lakes area, territory claimed by the French Empire as Nouvelle-France) as well as Indigenous women’s selfmaking and resistance in that area. I explore how the cultivation of desire is simultaneously an intense site of political theorizing and colonial investment, as well as Indigenous women’s selfmaking and resistance. Centering embodiment and embodied practices, I show how colonists and Indigenous women crafted different forms of attachment and desire, as well as their respective political efficacy in early modern settler-colonial politics. If the settler-colonial cultivation of desire hinges on disciplining Indigenous women’s bodies and regulating their affect, how did Indigenous women react to, subvert, and resist such colonial interventions in and through their embodied practices? I examine these processes and practices by weaving together close textual analyses and archival-historical research. Chapters are organized thematically. Chapter 1 introduces desire as a central inquiry of political philosophy and theory. I articulate the overall theoretical problematic and my methodology. Chapter 2 is a close reading of Jean Racine’s Iphigénie to tease out what I call the “imperial fantasy of consent” manifested through the enslaved foreign woman’s attachment to her colonizer. Chapter 3 examines the settler-colonial cultivation of desire through an analysis of settlercolonial educational practices aimed at managing Indigenous children’s bodies and regulating their affect. In Chapters 4 and 5 I turn to Indigenous women’s embodied practices as ways of cultivating decolonial desire. Chapter 4 examines Indigenous women’s ascetic practices that I argue show a form of self-making and community-building. Chapter 5 examines Indigenous women’s agricultural labor, i.e., labor in land as decolonial praxis. A concluding chapter reflects on the theoretical and political efficacy of centering desire, attachment, and embodied relations to studies of subjectivity, power, and resistance, as well as to ongoing efforts in theorizing settler-colonialism as a distinct modality of power. Throughout the dissertation, I work toward a decolonial account of desire, which has two different valences. First, I develop a decolonial reading of desire—that is, I dissect how imperial ideology took shape in early modern French literary and cultural productions, as well as colonial discourses, through the articulation of desire. Second, I develop an alternative account of desire as concrete attachments and relations cultivated through embodied practices. This study therefore contributes to feminist political theory, history of political thought, settler-colonial and Indigenous studies, as well as studies of early modern France and the French Empire.

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Allotting settler colonialism: Jonathan David Radocay, Stories in Severalty: Allotment and Indigenous Modernisms, PhD dissertation, UC Davis, 2023

23Sep23

Abstract: “Stories in Severalty: Allotment and Indigenous Modernisms” examines Indigenous engagements with the uneven textual, legal, and environmental terrains of the United States federal Indian policy known as allotment, which aimed to “assimilate” and “civilize” Indigenous Peoples in the United States by disrupting Indigenous forms of collective land tenure and by extending new regimes of racial capitalist property. Intensifying with the Dawes Act of 1887, allotment extinguished recognized tribal sovereignty and privatized Native lands held in common into parcels, which were then “allotted” to individual tribal members, along with US citizenship. Allotment introduced new racialized and gendered geographies that facilitated one of the most significant transfers of land and extractions of wealth in US history. As a scheme of Indigenous expropriation through privatization, allotment has been deployed elsewhere across the globe, and I argue that its terrains, then and now, play a significant role in the history of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Through an interdisciplinary, community-engaged study of both literary and community texts, my dissertation shows how Indigenous authors engage with, resist, and challenge allotment’s enduring forms of domination. Continuous with longstanding Indigenous knowledges and practices, these engagements with “allotment modernity” work in and through allotment’s privatization schemes to extend Indigenous sovereignty and land relations into the future. My project argues that reading allotment through Indigenous texts, past and present, both critiques settler colonial and racial capitalist features of the policy that continue to impact present-day Indigenous communities, and shows how Indigenous Peoples have imaginatively appropriated and converted allotment features toward Indigenous ends.

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The massacre of settler colonialism: Hannah Sue Andrea Thompson, Oscar Howe’s Wounded Knee Massacre: A Complex Critique of Settler Colonialism, MA dissertation, UC Davis, 2023

23Sep23

Abstract: Oscar Howe’s painting Wounded Knee Massacre has been understudied and sparsely exhibited since its completion in 1960. The few scholarly analyses of the work that exist rely heavily on a written interpretation of the painting that Howe produced in 1974. Scholarship has been satisfied with a surface level discourse that concludes that the painting, as Howe himself states, is “a [record of a] true event.” Lack of rigorous examination and interpretation of this work fails to situate it within the social and political climate of the 1950s and 1960s in which Howe was working. This article rectifies this lack through a reevaluation of Wounded Knee Massacre and Howe’s writing about it to provide a more rigorous interpretation that accounts for the broader socio-political context of twentieth-century Native American-settler relations. Specifically, it articulates how Wounded Knee Massacre functions as a nuanced critique of settler colonial violence and the harm caused by its logic of elimination.

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Indigenous health and settler concern: Lucy Vorobej, ‘By Their Own Efforts’: First Nations Health Policy in Canada, 1940s-1970s, PhD dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2023

23Sep23

Abstract: This dissertation explores the early years of Ottawa’s 20th century integration policy with a focus on the impact of settler-colonial power and priorities on First Nations’ access to Canadian health care systems under it. Using critical discourse analysis and the theoretical frameworks of Post-Colonialism and Critical Race Theory to read “along the grain of colonial common sense,” this study explores settler archives to examine the discourses, policies, and practices of settler political and bureaucratic leadership from the 1940s to the 1970s. I argue that Ottawa’s policy of integration, despite settler pronouncements of its break from the past, represented a profound continuity of settler desires for Indigenous erasure and White settler power. As a result, many settler politicians and department officials chose willful blindness to First Nations’ assertions of their Indigenous or treaty rights to health care—deemed to be threats to the status quo. In their place, settler leadership drew on racialized myths of First Nations landlessness and “a primitive unproductive” culture to claim exclusive sovereignty, to “justify” settler incursion, and to offer access to settler health care systems on settler terms. Ultimately, Ottawa’s approach produced a system of profound harm. It left Ottawa’s Indian Health Service unprioritized and underfunded, its mandate unwanted by provincial governments, and its policies the target of resistance from many First Nations individuals and communities. My dissertation joins with a rising number of health care historians who recognize that the history of settler-colonialism and systemic racism is a necessary addition to the history of health care in Canada. Specifically, my research will result in a richer understanding of how racialization continued to impact First Nations access to health care during a political period in Canadian history when overt racial discrimination was no longer sanctioned and details how settler efforts to develop policy in “First Nations best interests” operated largely to serve settler aims.

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