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How settler colonialism preempts democracy: Saed Abu Adwan, Sofiane Boussenane, ‘Obstacles to Democratic Transition In Palestine Under Israeli Settlement’, Algerian Review of Security and Development volume, 13, 1, 2024, pp. 44-57

28Jan24

Abstract: The process of democratic transition in Palestine faced many repercussions that negatively affected it, and perhaps the most important of these repercussions is the Israeli settlement, which caused destructive effects on the components of the Palestinian democratic process, through the dimensions behind the settlement project as the Israeli settlement was not limited to confiscating land. It hit the security, political, geographical and demographic dimension of Palestine, hence this study came to analyze the obstacles to the Palestinian democratic transition under the Israeli settlement, through understanding the course of democratic transition in Palestine, and identifying settlement policies and their impact on the democratic transition process. 


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Stealing land somewhere, and geneaologies elsewhere: Hemopereki Simon, ‘Genealogical Violence: Mormon (Mis)Appropriation of Māori Cultural Memory through Falsification of Whakapapa’, Geneaolgy, 8, 1, 2024

26Jan24

Abstract: The study examines how members of the historically white possessive and supremacist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States (mis)appropriated Māori genealogy, known as whakapapa. The Mormon use of whakapapa to promote Mormon cultural memory and narratives perpetuates settler/invader colonialism and white supremacy, as this paper shows. The research discusses Church racism against Native Americans and Pacific Peoples. This paper uses Anthropologist Thomas Murphy’s scholarship to demonstrate how problematic the Book of Mormon’s religio-colonial identity of Lamanites is for these groups. Application of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s white possessive doctrine and Hemopereki Simon’s adaptation to cover Church-Indigenous relations and the salvation contract is discussed. We explore collective and cultural memory, and discuss key Māori concepts like Mana, Taonga, Tapu, and Whakapapa. A brief review of LDS scholar Louis C. Midgley’s views on Church culture, including Herewini Jone’s whakapapa wānanga, is followed by a discussion of Māori cultural considerations and issues. The paper concludes that the alteration perpetuates settler/invader colonialism and Pacific peoples’ racialization and white supremacy. Genetic science and human migration studies contradict Mormon identity narratives and suggest the BOM is spiritual rather than historical. Finally, the paper suggests promoting intercultural engagement on Mormon (mis)appropriation of taonga Māori.


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Explosive settler colonialism: Annelise Roberts, ‘Atomic Totem: Australian Settler Nuclearism, the Disavowal of Aboriginality, and Morbid Reconciliation’, Apocalyptica, 1, 2023, pp. 107-127

26Jan24

Abstract:  Although the actual welfare of nearby Aṉangu populations was so clearly disregarded throughout the period of British nuclear testing in South Australia in the 1950 s and 60 s, curiously, the aesthetics of the nuclear testing project itself were awash with Aboriginal-derived symbolism, imagery, and language. From the names of testing sites and operations, to the declaration by a member of the surveying crew to the media that a mushroom cloud was “a perfect portrait of a myall blackfeller written with atomic dust,” the nuclear testing was repeatedly associated with Aboriginality. This was not a practice unique to Australia; as Jessica Hurley notes, other nuclear-armed nations shared this “compulsion to name nuclear laboratories and technologies after [Indigenous] nations, practices and spaces” (2018, 97). In this essay, I draw on a range of textual sources —a memoir by government surveyor and raconteur Len Beadell, as well as less traditionally ‘literary’ texts (such as place-naming practices) —to examine the ways in which this appropriative act points to a complex process of disavowal that takes place in the settler imaginary. Focusing on the mid-century Australian context, I find that where the existential anxieties of the nuclear age meet the unconfronted violence and dispossession of colonialism, confused and uncanny visions arise; partial acknowledgements of the primacy of First Nations’ claims to country arise in the moment at which all the possibilities of nuclearism —megadeath, the new atomic potential for massive violence and destruction —are also present. In this field, a strange and morbid vision of settler / Indigenous reconciliation emerges from the settler cultural imaginary. 


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Settler colonialism is imagined and practiced: Jenny L. Davis, ‘Attending to settler colonialism in Black/Native American histories in I’ve been Here All the While’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

26Jan24

Abstract: In I’ve Been Here All the While, Roberts provides a definition of settler colonialism as ‘a process that could be wielded by whoever sought to claim land; it involved not only a change in land occupation but also a transformation in thinking about and rhetorical justification of what it meant to reside in a place formerly occupied by someone else’ (2). Central to this definition, then, is that instead of colonialism beginning with an invasion, the settlers in Roberts’ book enter into the literal geographies and colonial process involuntarily, as displaced Native Americans and enslaved Africans/Afro-Indigenous people. Within this rendering, she argues that ‘anyone can act as a “settler”, despite previous status as, say, a slave or a dispossessed Indian, as long as they used this process–composed of rhetoric, American governmental structures, and individual action–which may have aided in their efforts to acquire land or protection by which ultimately served the goals of spatial occupation and white supremacy’. The second part of this definition pulls ‘settler’ away from a permanent quality one might be born into (say as a European-American in the US context) into an act one partakes in, thereby dislodging arguments that exclude those harmed by Black enslavement and Indigenous land theft.


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Herzl’s settler colonialism: Samir Abed-Rabbo, ‘Herzl’s Zionism and Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 2024

24Jan24

Abstract: This article examines Zionist claims to colonize Palestine and the role of Great Britain and prominent European Zionist Jews in the effort to establish Israel. Theodore Herzl, his lieutenants, and supporters personify Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” while acting and appearing as respectable statesmen, scientists, journalists, and businesspeople who advocated for freedom, liberation, and combating antisemitism. They deliberately collaborated with known antisemites and worked to dismantle ancient Jewish communities, relentlessly removing Jews out of their countries of origin, colonizing Palestine for the creation of a Jewish state, ethnically cleansing the indigenous people of Palestine, fabricating history, erasing Palestine and its long history, demeaning and oppressing the Palestinian people, and suppressing and appropriating Palestinian culture.


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Animals and humans on a settler colonial frontier: Lauren Cullen, ‘Animal–Human Entanglements in the Canadian Wild Animal Stories of Charles G. D. Roberts’, in Alex Goody, Saskia McCracken (eds), Beastly Modernisms: The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture, Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp. 181-197

24Jan24

Abstract: One of the most inventive and distinctive formal and generic interventions into modern writings about animals was the advent of the realistic wild animal story at the turn-of-the-century. As Adrian Hunter has pointed out, it was in the 1890s that ‘a three-way alignment between realism, the short story, and various forms of cultural radicalism and avant-gardism came into being,’ signalling the advent of a new modernist moment. The wild animal story, resultantly, demonstrates the current renegotiation of modernist literary and cultural contours with its formal and thematic preoccupations. Pioneered by Canadian writers Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, this unique genre interwove fiction with accounts of animal behaviour based on developments in animal psychology, cognitive ethology, and Darwinian theory. This chapter analyses how these authors use established narrative strategies such as naming, perspective, and narration, as well as more porous and prolific techniques such as identification and relationality. Roberts’s positioning of this genre as a means of reaching an ‘enlightened’ and ‘spiritual’ understanding of the ‘world of wonder’ opened by animal psychology, however, also raises political, cultural, and ethical questions about settler-colonialism. This chapter throws open the geographical, temporal, and aesthetic boundaries of these late nineteenth into twentieth century works to interrogate the unique contribution that the wild animal story provides to broader discussions of nonhuman animals in modernity.


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Even the NYT now thinks about settler colonialism! Jennifer Schuessler, ‘What Is “Settler Colonialism”?’, New York Times, 22/01/24

23Jan24

Access the article here.


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Arid settler colonialism: Natalie Koch, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia, Verso, 2023

21Jan24

Description: The iconic deserts of the American southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For example: In 1856, a caravan of thirty-three camels arrived in Indianola, Texas, led by a Syrian cameleer the Americans called “Hi Jolly.” This “camel corps,” the US government hoped, could help the army secure the new southwest swath of the country just wrested from Mexico. Though the dream of the camel corps – and sadly, the camels – died, the idea of drawing on expertise, knowledge, and practices from the desert countries of the Middle East did not. As Natalie Koch demonstrates in this evocative, narrative history, the exchange of colonial technologies between the Arabian Peninsula and United States over the past two centuries – from date palm farming and desert agriculture to the utopian sci-fi dreams of Biosphere 2 and Frank Herbert’s Dune – bound the two regions together, solidifying the colonization of the US West and, eventually, the reach of American power into the Middle East. Koch teaches us to see deserts anew, not as mythic sites of romance or empty wastelands but as an “arid empire,” a crucial political space where imperial dreams coalesce.


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Animalism and animalisation: Freja Högback, Sanna Karhu, Lumi Kauppinen, Helinä Ääri, ‘Unmasking the state of Israel’s genocidal tactics: Insights on dehumanization, animalization, and veganwashing’, Elaimiksi, 21/11/23

21Jan24

Excerpt: As the above examples show, animalization can operate through different forms of racialization, such as antisemitism and islamophobia. The oppression of humans as “animals” is rooted in the deep-seated belief in a significant ontological and ethical distinction between humans and other animals. The existing normative hierarchy between humans and other animals is one more dimension in Israeli settler colonialism. Even though all humans are classified as animals, equating Palestinians – or any other human population – with certain nonhuman animals, like “worms” and “snakes,” works as a violent tactic that enables them to be treated “like animals.” 


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Biodiversity as resistance against settler colonialism: Monica Fahey, Maurizio Rossetto, Emilie Ens, Ray Kerkhove, ‘Araucaria bidwillii genomics suggest Indigenous Peoples broadened translocation practices in response to settler colonialism’, People and Nature, 2023

18Jan24

Abstract: Retracing past anthropogenic dispersal of culturally important taxa offers insights to the biogeographic history of species, as well as the history of the people who interacted with them. Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii Hook.) is a culturally and spiritually significant conifer tree for several Indigenous groups in eastern Australia. Sharing the edible nuts and attending Bunya gatherings is an important way for these groups to maintain their cultural connections and it has been hypothesized that prior to European colonization, Indigenous Peoples facilitated the dispersal of Bunya Pine as part of these ancient traditions. We used ethnohistorical information on the use of Bunya Pine by Indigenous Peoples to interpret genomic patterns within and between disjunct distributions of Bunya Pine. We found signatures of long-term isolation within the Australian Wet Tropics (AWT) and extensive gene flow within southeast Queensland (SEQ) that does not fit models of faunal or passive dispersal. Within SEQ, we found greater population structure amongst sites known to pre-date European colonization, than when colonial-era planted sites were included in our analyses, suggesting that pre-colonial translocation was sporadic or localized rather than systematic and widespread. Increased Indigenous translocations in conjunction with plantings by European settlers appears to have erased the natural pre-colonial population structure of SEQ Bunya Pine. Our stairway plot models suggest sharp population decline of SEQ Bunya Pine in the early and late Pleistocene, though we did not find evidence that anthropogenic dispersal facilitated effective population size growth of the species in the Holocene We concluded that pre-colonial translocation of SEQ Bunya Pine was likely restricted by kinship-based custodial rights, and that when Indigenous Peoples were displaced by European settlers, translocation was intensified to maintain cultural connectivity. This study is an example of how Indigenous Australian groups adapt plant management strategies to meet socio-cultural needs and demonstrates the potential for plant genomics to supplement Indigenous Biocultural Knowledge that has been impacted by colonial dispossession.


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