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Indigenous Palestinians: Imad Sayrafi, ‘Toward an Indigenous development sociology methodology: social reality and change in the Palestinian context’, AlterNative, 2023

13Aug23

Abstract: This article discusses findings from a dissertation research project in the Palestinian village of Ni’lin in relation to the synthesis of an actor-oriented methodological approach with Indigenous theory. Through this synthesis, the article proposes a theoretical and methodological approach for studying settler colonialism and social transformations in Palestinian contexts. It also adapts the methodology, allowing enriching development theory to account for settler colonial settings and the case of Palestine. It shows the value of critical events, as sites to study historicity, violence, and resistance, highlighting the important interaction of individual and collective actors with culture and larger frames of meaning in relation to Indigenous resurgence.


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Escaping settler colonialism through care: ‘Medical Colonialism and the Power to Care: Eva Boodman, ‘Unsettling Participatory Inclusion in the Settler-State Care Paradigm’, Hypatia, 38, 2, 2023 , pp. 330-352

11Aug23

Abstract: This article looks at the implications of medical colonialism in Canada for the feminist concept of care. Because medical colonialism is an ongoing material relation where “good” settler care cannot be separated from Indigenous dispossession, I defend the view that care and violence can be coextensive and suggest that a decolonial care ethic needs to disrupt the directionality of care as flowing from agential carers toward colonized care-receivers. I argue that contemporary medical colonialism should indeed be understood as a form of care if structural harm is to be addressed in practice, and trouble the notion of inclusion at work in some contemporary theories of care. By finding demands for assimilationist “participatory inclusion” in examples of government-run, Indigenous-serving care services, I caution against the implicit settler-colonial assumptions in notions of “caring democracies” and “caring societies” on the welfare-state model. If care is political and can participate in the normative pressures of civic assimilation, then to “decolonize” it through refraction, disruption, infiltration, disconnection, re-appropriation, and resistance also means to “decolonize” citizenship and civic life in the interests of Indigenous self-determination, rather than presumed inclusion in settler-state processes.


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Displaced performance and survivance: Sara Pillatzki-Warzeha, Margaret Werry, ‘Indigenous Migrations: Performance, Urbanization, and Survivance in Native North America’, in Yana Meerzon, S. E. Wilmer (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration, Pagrave, 2023, pp. 115-129

11Aug23

Abstract: Popular definitions of Indigenous identity as continuous attachment to ancestral territory make migrancy appear a vexed condition for Indigenous peoples. Recent scholarship, conversely, sees mobility as a constitutive feature of Indigenous modernities. This chapter examines performance in the Indigenous diasporas that have taken root in cities throughout North America. What dramaturgies serve those distanced from ancestral lands by choice or by the ongoing violence of settler colonialism? How does performance help make good relations in the deracinated, anomic spaces of urban North America? Examples considered include plays by Bruce King and Marie Clements and the performance work of Dakota Comacho and Emily Johnson.


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Escaping settler colonialism online: Corrinne Sullivan, Jessica McLean, ‘Contesting Digital Colonial Power: Indigenous Australian Sovereignty and Self-Determination in Digital Worlds’, in Antonio López, Adrian Ivakhiv, Stephen Rust, Miriam Tola, Alenda Y. Chang, Kiu-wai Chu (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, Routledge, 2023

11Aug23

Excerpt: Digital worlds are manifestations of power relations and can potentially challenge existing hegemonic regimes, such as those that produce settler colonialism and racial hierarchies.


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Once a slaver and settler, always a settler: Mary Lorena Kenny, ‘Irreconcilable Differences? A Reckoning with Confederado History in Brazil’, Práticas da História, 16, 2023, pp. 55-94 

11Aug23

Abstract: Confederados are descendants of U.S. southerners who emigrated to southern Brazil and the Amazon region after the Civil War, where slavery was still legal. The Brazilian government covered their transportation costs and provided subsides and land grants in exchange for developing “empty” land. Much of the material written about Confederados is by descendants where discussions of slavery, slave ownership (prior to emigration or in Brazil), or the “draw” to Brazil receives little or no mention. This article threads the troubled history of Confederados in Santarém, Pará, to a global context demanding a reckoning with systemic and institutionalized racism and police violence through protests, petitions, and demands of removal of symbols of slavery, racism, and oppression and of reparations. I examine the debates and tensions concerning collective and public memory about slavery, settler colonialism and the display of the Confederate flag.


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Listening to colonialism: Colonialism: A Global History (written by Lorenzo Veracini, narrated by Stewart Crank, unabridged audiobook)

09Aug23

Description: Colonialism: A Global History interprets colonialism as an unequal relationship characterized by displacement and domination and reveals the ways in which this relationship has been constitutive of global modernity. The volume focuses on colonialism’s dynamism, adaptability, and resilience. It appraises a number of successive global colonial ‘waves’, each constituting a specific form of colonial domination, each different from the previous ones, each affecting different locales at different times, and each characterized by a particular method of exploiting colonized populations and territories. Outlining a succession of distinct colonizing conjunctures, and the ways in which they ‘washed over’ what is today understood as the ‘Global South’, shaping and reshaping institutions and prompting diverse responses from colonized communities, Colonialism: A Global History also outlines the contemporary relevance of this unequal relation. Overall, it provides an original definition of colonialism and tells the global history of this mode of domination’s evolution and reach. The broad chronological and geographical scope makes this volume the ideal resource for all students and scholars interested in globalization, colonialism, and empire.


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At the marging of settler ecologies: Jane Komori, Ghostly Labors: Japanese Canadians in Western Canada’s Settler Ecology, PhD dissertation, University of California Santa Cruz, 2023

09Aug23

Abstract: In 1942, my great uncle, Haruo Komori, was removed from the West Coast along with more than 21,000 other Japanese Canadians. Throughout his incarceration, Haruo corresponded with agents at the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property about the forced sale of his belongings. Of particular concern was the future of a fishing boat, the F. C. Vancouver. In a 1944 letter, Haruo explained that he was “worried over this boat,” which he had been holding in trust for a man named Frank Charlie, who, “being an Indian, could not have it registered in his name.” By the following year, however, the boat had been auctioned off along with all of Haruo’s property, never to be returned to its rightful owner.While the fact of Haruo and Frank Charlie’s relationship arrives to us through the voluminous government records produced during mass incarceration, it tells a broader story than the typical narrative of Japanese Canadian dispossession and confinement to concentration camps. Haruo’s letters give a glimpse of how he and Frank were enmeshed in the provisional and fugitive interracial communities forged in Western Canadian resource extraction industries. My dissertation, Ghostly Labors: Japanese Canadians in Western Canada’s Settler Ecology, takes up the experiences of Japanese Canadians like Haruo to examine the tensions and solidarities between the settler, migrant, and Indigenous workers caught up in the settler colonial transformation of the local environment from 1858 to the present. Through fieldwork and analysis of archival documents, oral history, novels, visual art, and my family’s history, I theorize Western Canada’s “settler ecology” as an integrated system of racialized labor exploitation for resource extraction and I highlight Japanese Canadian embodied knowledges and practices that offer immanent critiques of the racialized exploitation of both workers and the environment. The first chapter, “Slimers, Skippers, ‘Slaves’ Indigenous, Japanese, and Chinese Workers of the Fraser River,” elucidates the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fishing and canning industry’s recruitment of an interracial labor force. I argue that the salmon industry’s growth depended on the consolidation of locally specific racializations of seasonal Asian and Indigenous workers, who were represented as both a threat to settler society and as uniquely suited to salmon work. These emergent racializations and settler colonial conceptions of the environment drove in turn the destruction of the local ecology and the restriction of Indigenous fishing rights. The second chapter, “Spectral Yellow, Fine White: Homegrown Sugar Beets and the Racial Stratification of Labor,” analyzes the successive recruitment of incarcerated Japanese Canadian, Indigenous, and Mexican migrant “stoop laborers” to cultivate a domestic sugar supply. I argue that the industry’s collaboration with the Canadian state to produce new classes of temporary workers who are stripped of or denied citizenship has, rather than solving the “labor problem,” exacerbated ecological issues and reinforced systems of racialized employment that undergird white Canadian settler sovereignty. In the third chapter, “Foraging for Ghosts: Steveston’s Migrant Ecologies,” the dissertation follows contemporary Japanese Canadian foraging trips for yomogi back to the historical site of the salmon industry, home to the largest pre-war community of Japanese Canadians. I analyze Japanese Canadian knowledge of Steveston’s migrant ecologies less to retrieve prior Japanese Canadian inhabitance per se, but to interpret the foraging trips as a response to the municipal government’s initiatives to eradicate “invasive species,” present-day anti-Asian racism, and the Musqueam people’s ongoing struggle for land and fishing rights. The dissertation is grounded in Japanese Canadian knowledge—produced through the experience of laboring in British Columbia and Alberta’s rivers, oceans, and fields—and transmitted today in the intimate archives of foraging trips, novels, art installations, oral histories, and old letters. Taking inspiration in Haruo and Frank’s improvised solidarity, I contend that the knowledge forged in fishing and agriculture, and the environmental devastation these industries have left in their wake, offers an immanent critique of Western Canada’s “settler ecology” and harbors strategies for building solidaristic relationships within it.


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The settler climate: Sara J. Grossman, Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy, Duke University Press, 2023

09Aug23

Description: In Immeasurable Weather Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarchal settler society. Grossman outlines the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science, from the nineteenth-century public data-gathering practices of settler farmers and teachers and the automation of weather data during the Dust Bowl to the role of meteorological satellites in data science’s integration into the militarized state. Throughout, Grossman shows that weather science reproduced the natural world as something to be measured, owned, and exploited. This data gathering, she contends, gave coherence to a national weather project and to a notion of the nation itself, demonstrating that weather science’s impact cannot be reduced to a set of quantifiable phenomena.


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The future is beyond settler colonialism: Bronwyn Carlson, Madi Day, Sandy O’Sullivan, Tristan Kennedy (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Australian Indigenous Peoples and Futures, Routledge, 2023

09Aug23

Description: Providing an international reference work written solely by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors, this book offers a powerful overview of emergent and topical research in the field of global Indigenous studies. It addresses current concerns of Australian Indigenous peoples of today, and explores opportunities to develop, and support the development of, Indigenous resilience and solidarity to create a fairer, safer, more inclusive future. Divided into three sections, this book explores: What futures for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples might look like, and how institutions, structures and systems can be transformed to such a future; The complexity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island life and identity, and the possibilities for Australian Indigenous futures; and The many and varied ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples use technology, and how it is transforming their lives. This book documents a turning point in global Indigenous history: the disintermediation of Indigenous voices and the promotion of opportunities for Indigenous peoples to map their own futures. It is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Indigenous studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies, education studies, ethnicity and identity studies, and decolonising development studies.


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Borderless Palestine against settler colonialism: Hanine Shehadeh, ‘Palestine in the Cloud: The Construction of a Digital Floating Homeland’, Humanities, 12, 4, 2023

05Aug23

Abstract: A widespread revolt during the months of April and May 2021 in the Palestinian city of Jerusalem, also known as Habbet Ayyar, responded to Israeli actions aiming to ethnically cleanse and force out residents from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, where approximately 3000 people reside, and to limit the movement and entry of Palestinians to Al-Aqsa Mosque. These measures were met with an unprecedented wave of youth-led protests against the Israeli army, police, security agencies, and settlers. Habbet Ayyar stands out not only for its innovative and effective use of new media to amplify the protests beyond Israel’s sphere of influence and control, but also for the unity displayed by fragmented Palestinians as they confronted Israel. By exploring the larger historical and geographical context of the movement that led to Habbet Ayyar, this article aims to understand how Palestinians have utilized, for the past 20 years, new media as a battleground—despite enforced digital colonialism—and how these media served to articulate and create what I call a digital “floating homeland”. The concept of a “floating homeland” is useful for exploring how the Palestinian virtual social movement has redefined and reconnected with Palestine beyond Israel’s control and fragmentation. This digital homeland is constructed through new technologies that have reshaped Palestinian self-identification and allowed for a virtual and digital reconceptualization of a borderless Palestine.


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