settler colonial studies blog

A settler colonial node: Timothy Maton, Settler colonialism at Portage and Main, past and present, PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2023

12Sep23

Abstract: This dissertation examines the Portage and Main (P&M) intersection and the metropolitan business district of Winnipeg. It looks at how that location has become a reified expression of the North-western plains’ colonial and settler colonial ideology. Between 1862 and 1913, P&M would grow to become the largest settled financial engine driving Canada’s economic expansionism across the North-western plains. It drove the settler commercial economy’s growth when it was first developing on the plains and continues to enable commercial expansionism today. Winnipeg’s P&M Central Economic District remains one of the most important places representing westward and northward commercial expansionism and the processes by which non-Protestants were dispossessed of land. By the 1880s, P&M had become a physical embodiment of the financial banking and exchange processes associated with Britain’s Protestant Reformation Tradition and the Banking Reform laws of the Second Great Reformation movement. Meanwhile, its commercial processes would dispossess the established Roman Catholic and tribal First Nations Indigenous peoples who have lived in the conjoined Great Forks region for millennia of their land and territory. In this dissertation, I argue that Protestant businessmen had built P&M as a physical reflection of the economic, social, and cultural architecture of the Second Great Reform and Banking Reform movements of Britain. In my first two chapters, I show that this Protestant Reformation movement’s Victorian, Edwardian, and high modernist ideology cannot be divorced from the processes that have built Winnipeg’s contemporary business district meanwhile dispossessing both the French Catholic and non-Protestant Indigenous people’s communities downtown. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the physical, ideological, and religious ideas which have reified settler commercial ideology into P&M’s infrastructure and architecture. I do this by looking at the development of the British Commonwealth in Manitoba and at P&M, and; at how Protestant businessmen and their free market ideology got built as a reflection of the financial, social, architectural, infrastructural, and legal frameworks of the Reformation movement of Winnipeg. Close examination of the British Reform movement in Winnipeg shows that the exchange’s money-system, which was first established in the North-west at this metropolitan centre, expressed an abstract and anti-immanent financial and ideological framework that has been dispossessing, segregating, and impoverishing the French Catholic community as well as Indigenous peoples who have lived and traded in the downtown region for millennia. Making this argument, I show in particular that the long-standing anti-Catholic sentiments of the Reform Tradition remain key to comprehension of the high modernist and contemporary city planning infrastructure and architecture associated with Urban Renewal and the Unicity.

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The settler security reflex: Kate Clayton, Katherine Newman, ‘Settler Colonial Strategic Culture: Australia, AUKUS, and the Anglosphere’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 2023

12Sep23

Abstract: Australia’s history as a settler colony within the British Empire fundamentally shapes its sense
of security within the Indo-Pacific region. Australia has consistently looked outside of its region for
security and sought partners on the explicit basis of political, cultural, and ethnic similarity. What
role does Australia’s history play in shaping its foreign policy? We argue that these choices in
foreign policy are inextricable from Australia’s history as a settler colony on the farthest reaches of
the British Empire. The AUKUS Agreement (AUKUS) is an example of how Australia operates to
preserve racial hegemony in the face of non-white threat — real or perceived. This research utilises
critical discourse analysis to interrogate elite-level discourse around AUKUS to ascertain the
dominant narratives that inform its creation, the issues it seeks to address in Australian security
policy, how it is structured by historical narratives of security, and how it functions to structure
those narratives going forward. This article seeks to participate in the growing push to decolonise
International Relations by illuminating the way Australia is ontologically and epistemologically
invested in the preservation of racial hegemony.

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The ecologies of settler colonialism: Brock Cutler, Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

12Sep23

Description: Between 1865 and 1872 widespread death and disease unfolded amid the most severe ecological disaster in modern North African history: a plague of locusts destroyed crops during a disastrous drought that left many Algerians landless and starving. The famine induced migration that concentrated vulnerable people in unsanitary camps where typhus and cholera ran rampant. Before the rains returned and harvests normalized, some eight hundred thousand Algerians had died.In Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria Brock Cutler explores how repeated ecosocial divisions across an expansive ecosystem produced modern imperialism in nineteenth-century Algeria. Massive ecological crises—cultural as well as natural—cleaved communities from their homes, individuals from those communities, and society from its typical ecological relations. At the same time, the relentless, albeit slow-moving crises of ongoing settler colonialism and extractive imperial capitalism cleaved Algeria to France in a new way. Ecosocial divisions became apparent in performances of imperial power: officials along the Algerian-Tunisian border compulsively repeated narratives of “transgression” that over decades made the division real; a case of poisoned bread tied settlers in Algiers to Paris; Morocco-Algeria border violence exposed the exceptional nature of imperial sovereignty; a case of vagabondage in Oran evoked colonial gender binaries. In each case, factors in the broader ecosystem were implicated in performances of social division, separating political entities from each other, human from nature, rational from irrational, and women from men. Although these performances take place in the nineteenth-century Maghrib, the process they describe goes beyond those spatial and temporal limits—across the field of modern imperialism to the present day.

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Indigenous cities: Lindsey Claire Smith, Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City from Oklahoma, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

12Sep23

Description: Oklahoma is bound to both the South and the Southwest and their legacies of conquest and Indigenous survivance. At the same time, mobility, ingenuity, cultural exchange, and creative expression—all part of the experience of urbanization—have been fundamental to people of the tribes that call this place home. Tulsa, New Orleans, and Santa Fe, with their importance in histories of geopolitical upheaval and mobility that shaped the establishment of the United States, are key to uncovering the history of urbanization experienced by Native Americans from Oklahoma. Urban Homelands, while examining the overlooked histories of Oklahoma Indigenous urbanization relative to these regions, engages literature and film as not just mirrors of experience but as producers of it. Lindsey Claire Smith brings the work of three-time poet laureate Joy Harjo into conversation with the great Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs and breakout filmmaker Sterlin Harjo. Flying in the face of civic landmarks and settler histories that at once obscure Native origins and appropriate Native culture for tourism, this creative reclaiming of Indigenous cities points toward the productive possibilities of recognizing untold urban histories and the creative relationships with urban space itself.

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The settler colonial Robinsonade: Nicole Pepperell, ‘“To dream of a wildness distant from ourselves”: Capitalism, colonialism, and the Robinsonade’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2023

10Sep23

Abetract: Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe holds an iconic position, not solely as a work of literature, but also for its influence in economic and social theory. This article reflects on this influence by mobilizing Charles Mills’s concept of epistemologies of ignorance and Lorenzo Veracini’s work on psychological defence mechanisms in settler colonial societies. This theoretical framework motivates a close textual analysis of Robinson Crusoe that focuses particularly on four textual strategies: paired contrasts between Xury and Friday that frame enslavement as a sacrificial act; strategic use of “cosmopolitan” ideals; a theory of subjection as the foundation for legitimate power; and moral relativisms that rationalize Crusoe’s theft of Indigenous land. This analysis then provides the foundation for an original interpretation of Marx’s Capital as a critically inverted Robinsonade: one designed to demonstrate how global relations of colonial expropriation generate a crucible in which a particular imaginary of autonomous individuality is forged.

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Racial settler colonialism: Ronit Lentin, ‘Notes on Racial Capitalism and Palestine: Land, Labour and Jewishness as Property’, Free Radikal, 05/08/23

10Sep23

Excerpt: ‘The Racialization of Land‘ …

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The Virgin as settler: Jerrilynn Dodds, ‘The Virgin as Colonial Agent’, in Susan Slyomovics (ed.), Ordering Imperial Worlds From Late Medieval Spain to the Modern Middle East, Edinburgh University Press, 2023

06Sep23

Access the book here.

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The failure of settler colonialism (in Algeria): Avner Ofrath, ‘Alsace in Algeria and the Notion of ‘Failure’ in Settler Political Culture, c. 1870–1960’, The Historical Journal, 2023

06Sep23

Abstract: This article explores a key trope in the history of French colonial Algeria: the idea of the colony as a failure. The focus is on the resettlement of Alsatians and Lorrainers in Algeria in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. What started as a wave of nationalist elan that sought to rebuild the lost provinces in France’s largest colony soon became the object of criticism and controversy, depicted by contemporaries from early on as failure. While this perceived failure was itself a colonial category – the failure to recruit settlers, expulse Algerians, and seize land – it tells us a great deal about the political culture of the colony. How was this resettlement project conceived? What visions of colonization and colonial settlement were projected upon it? And what mechanisms of coercion, dispossession, and violence did different colonial players seek to deploy? Through these questions, this article seeks to demonstrate that the verdict of ‘failure’ by settlers and lobbyists did not emerge in hindsight but was rather the product of the inherent tension between the sheer force that was necessary to seize the land and the metropolitan attempt to establish in the colony a form of unequal yet standardized civilian governance.

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Climate change and settler colonialism: Tina Oh, (En)countering the Organizing Logics of the Canadian-State: Immigrant Perspectives amidst Settler-Colonial and Climate Crises, MA dissertation, Dalhousie University, 2023

06Sep23

Abstract: Academic inquiry of the climate crisis is incomplete without attending to the impacts of settler-colonialism. By building on analyses and critiques of settler-colonial theory, this thesis argues that modern climate change and Canadian settler-colonialism are intertwined crises that must be linked and read together. With the perceived absence of racialized immigrant perspectives surrounding these crises, narrative methodologies and semi-structured interviews were used to showcase the opinions of immigrant-settlers living in Nova Scotia. Their stories, in addition to interviews with social movement activists, revealed insights into the organizing logics of the Canadian-State in promoting settler-ignorance. It also revealed some of the barriers and challenges that immigrants face with respects to engaging in grassroots politics within the diaspora. In addition to a critical self-reflection of activistscholarship, this thesis contributes to discourses related to settler-environmentalism, Thobani’s theorizations of racial triangulation and the pathways for settler-solidarity with Indigenous resurgence across Canada and Abiayala.

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Settler capitalism sucks: Iana W. Robitaille, Alien Domesticity: Settler-Capitalist Invasion and the Limits of Representation in Ling Ma’s Severance’, Studies in the Novel, 55, 3, 2023, pp. 289-306

06Sep23

Abstract: This article reads Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) for its account of the racial entanglement of transnational mobility, settler capitalism, and homemaking, a dynamic referred to as alien domesticity. The novel narrativizes how the transnational circulation of capital, peoples, and labor over the past four decades has complicated the domestic character of US settler-racial form—and the settler-capitalist character of the domestic novel. I posit alien domesticity as a revision of Amy Kaplan’s “manifest domesticity,” engaging Asian American and settler colonial studies critiques of the racial logic of settler capitalism to read Severance as a contemporary assessment of American middle-class homemaking and its part in a racial civilizing project. Insofar as it frames Candace Chen’s transnational labor with her unsettled movement among various domestic spaces, Severance thus discloses the function of alien domesticity: ultimately, I contend, Candace’s competing duties of representation result in her transnational alienation from the novel’s domestic narrative.

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