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Trauma with settler colonial characteristics: Joseph P. Gone, ‘Indigenous Historical Trauma: Alter-Native Explanations for Mental Health Inequities’, Daedalus, 152, 4, 2023, pp. 130-150

24Nov23

Abstract: The well-being of American Indian and other Indigenous communities has long been compromised by ruthless processes of European colonial dispossession and subjugation. As a result, contemporary Indigenous communities contend with sometimes overwhelming degrees of demoralization, distress, and disability. The concept of Indigenous historical trauma has arisen during the past thirty years as an alternative mental health discourse that critically contests prevailing categories of psychological disability, psychiatric distress, and mental disorders (including addiction, trauma, and suicide). Indigenous adoption and promotion of historical trauma affords an explanatory account for community mental health inequities that designates the historical legacies of colonization as central for understanding contemporary Indigenous suffering. In so doing, Indigenous advocates of historical trauma creatively recast these problems as postcolonial pathologies, and ardently call for overdue advances in reconciliation, redress, and repair with respect to Indigenous Peoples. Ideally, such advances will be evidenced by societal transformations, structural reforms, and social justice that can enhance and ensure Indigenous futurity and well-being.


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Housing justice with settler colonial characteristics: Naama Blatman, Alistair Sisson, ‘Rethinking housing inequality and justice in a settler colonial city’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2023

24Nov23

Abstract: This paper brings the housing studies literature into conversation with scholarship on settler colonialism to consider questions of housing justice in settler colonial societies. It begins from an understanding of Indigenous dispossession as not simply an historical context but an ongoing process in which housing is deeply implicated through its embeddedness in colonial land and property regimes. Furthermore, processes of exclusion, neoliberalisation, financialisation and gentrification have made housing central to the production of racial inequality in (and beyond) settler colonies. Liberal notions of inequality that dominate most housing policy and some scholarship are, therefore, inadequate; what is required is research and intervention oriented towards housing justice – the meaning of which is best understood through intellectual and practical engagement with movements struggling for it. In this spirit, the paper presents the story of a prolonged struggle in so-called Sydney, which suggests how housing initiatives and campaigns led by Indigenous people are iteratively reconstructing existing political and economic structures in ways that address commodification, dispossession, exclusion, and displacement. This story points to a need for housing justice scholarship to engage with concepts of reparations – an engagement towards which this paper, in its final section, makes some small but hopefully helpful steps.


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Settler colonialism’s playful geoglyphs: Richard Eberhardt, Mikael Jakobsson, ‘Invisible at the Edge: Playing with the Geoglyphs of Occupation in Anglo-America’,Proceedings of DIGRA, 2023

24Nov23

Abstract: Maps are both a pervasive feature of a wide variety of board games and an important locus in postcolonial inquiry. In the words of Edward Said: “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggles over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.” We offer our analysis of board games telling spatial narratives of European settler colonialism in Anglo-American. through a critical reading of the way these games map the land and invite players to bring those maps alive through gameplay. The study expands on the tangential engagement with this topic in Flanagan and Jakobsson (2023). Our theoretical foundation includes Harley (1988), Scott (1998), Wolfe (2006), and Barnd (2017). We also build on video game research, especially that of Lammes (2003, 2010), Magnet (2006), and Mukherjee (2017). But it should be noted that all of these authors study video game. We have found the need to develop a parallel apparatus for the critical analysis of board games with their unique qualities in terms of materiality, player configurations, and role in the cultural discourse. Our methodological approach is rooted in critical theory and builds on interaction criticism (Bardzell 2011). We have acquired over two hundred of these games and played over a hundred of them. By building a substantial collection of colonialist themed board games and dedicating time to play through and analyze them, we have found emergent patterns that remain hidden as long as the games are studies separately.


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The climate settler colonialist: Philip Steer, ‘Narrating Migration in the Settler Colonies: From Systematic Colonization to the Climate Refugee’, in Corina Stan,  Charlotte Sussman (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, Palgrave 2023, pp 19-35

24Nov23

Abstract: This chapter argues that present-day attempts by settler novelists in Australia and New Zealand to conceptualize the migration of climate refugees are shaped by formal approaches that were developed to comprehend migration to the settler colonies in the nineteenth century. The early theorist of settler colonization, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, advanced two contrasting accounts of the relation between capital, migratory labor, and the nation: a “social” model that prioritized a settled and homogeneous population of nation builders, and an “investment” model that asserted the value of mobile non-white laborers. That tension between settled and mobile labor was dramatized by the late-nineteenth-century genre of the invasion novel, which gave virulent form to anti-Asian immigration sentiment. The reemergence of the thematic and formal concerns of the invasion novel in response to climate-driven migration, in novels such as Rohan Wilson’s Daughter of Bad Times (2019) and Kirsten McDougall’s She’s a Killer (2021), suggests that settler culture remains beholden to those foundational conceptual dilemmas of European migration in the nineteenth century. Those enduring limitations are further highlighted through the contrast with a short story by the Māori author, Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu), which demonstrates how differently climate migration might be conceived of in Indigenous terms.


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Settler colonialism is pollution: Elizabeth Grennan Browning, ‘”We were environmentalists long before it was popular”: Legacies of Settler Colonialism in the Coal-Based Pollution of the Midwest’s 1970s Energy Sector’, Middle West Review, 10, 1, 2023, pp. 127-156

21Nov23

Excerpt: In her 1973 exposé Power Over People, Ohio-based science writer Louise B. Young reflected on the disillusioning aesthetics of the postwar American landscape: “We look around billboards and over superhighways and under transmission lines and pretty soon we don’t really see at all.” Young focused on health concerns stemming from exposure to electromagnetic fields created by rapidly proliferating high-voltage power lines; she argued that in its pursuit of capitalist gains, the electric utility industry had neglected the safety of communities that served as unwilling hosts to towering transmission lines. As notions of American progress became closely intertwined with everyday comforts derived from technology, Young sought to make visible the infrastructure behind mass electrification, as well as the sacrifices required by those whose personal lives and property suffered from its construction and operation. Young’s work invoked the storytelling of Silent Spring, published eleven years earlier in 1962: “As Rachel Carson pointed out, we urgently need an end to false assurances and the little sugar-coated pills of half-truths. We are being asked to assume the biological risks and to pay the hidden costs. In the case of high-voltage transmission lines, the electric companies have the ability to force these risks on all the property owners lying in their path.”


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Unreconciled memory: Daniel M. Cobb, Marissa L. Carmi, ‘Unreconciled: Indigenous Presents/Presence & Settler Memory’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 29, 2, 2023, 316-331

21Nov23

Abstract: This essay explores race, racism, history, and popular memory from the vantage point of the Indigenous world, and, specifically, Native peoples colonized within the present-day United States. Over the course of the past decade, Indigenous movements for land and life have shed light on the incomplete nature of conquest in Native North America and the instability of settler colonialism. “Unreconciled” explores the ongoing tension between Indigenous presence and the settler colonial “logic of elimination” in the context of land acknowledgments, commemoration, popular culture, and federal policy. We show that, despite changes with regard to the ways in which non-Indigenous people in settler states collectively remember or imagine community, elements of settler memory continue to reside within and limit public conversations on race, remembrance, reconciliation, and reparation.


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Settlers and the city: Bruno Huberman, The Palestinians and East Jerusalem: Under Neoliberal Settler Colonialism, Bloomsbury, 2023

21Nov23

Description: Over the last two decades, the Israeli government has implemented policies for the development of East Jerusalem. These comprise urban revitalization as well as professional training and the promotion of entrepreneurship for the Palestinians. But how do these policies co-exist under Israeli settler colonial power? This book focuses on the contradiction between the rise of neoliberal development in East Jerusalem and the simultaneous continuation of Israeli settler colonialism. It argues that the combination of settler colonialism and neoliberalism allows for the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ to also occur permanently through deceptive soft forms. More than this, based on theoretical research, interviews, and an analysis of race and class relations in East Jerusalem, the book shows that neoliberal development is used to facilitate the reproduction of racial hierarchies, settler privileges and the pacification of the Palestinian residents, where these outcomes are presented as the ‘natural’ result of market relations. The author calls this environment ‘neoliberal settler colonialism’ and explores Palestinians’ new acts of resistance that exist ambivalently within this structure. A significant theoretical contribution, the study highlights a new settler colonial and neoliberal sociability that co-opts the exploited and oppressed.


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Settlers and their metropolitan interlocutors: Darren Reid, Imperial informants in a settler world: writing empire to the British Aborigines’ Protection Society from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, 1870-1890, PhD dissertation, University College London, 2023

21Nov23

Abstract: This thesis explores the entangled relationship between settler colonialism and imperial humanitarianism in the late nineteenth-century British Empire through the practice of becoming informants for the Aborigines’ Protection Society. Using letters written by settlers, Indigenous peoples, and missionaries living in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa between 1870-1890, it argues that the connections forged between colonial subjects and the Society reveal continuities of imperial subjecthood within self-governing colonies as well as contingencies of settler colonialism on the limitations of imperial networks. Informants came from a wide variety of backgrounds and had different motivations. Colonists became informants to participate in British House of Commons debates and publish letters in the British press. Missionaries became informants to undermine pro-settler logics of mission society capitalism. Indigenous peoples became informants to challenge settler government disinformation campaigns. Yet running through all these different perspectives was a shared desire to claim political rights as imperial citizens, to subvert settler discourses that opposed imperial authority, and to challenge imperial disavowal of responsibility for Indigenous-settler relations. Consequently, these informants moved between a variety of imperial networks to resist the development of settler sovereignty and construct an alternative version of subjecthood that blended self-determination with imperial oversight, all through the discourses of British humanitarianism, honour, and justice. While some experienced more success in their epistolary endeavours than others, the Aborigines’ Protection Society was ultimately incapable of fulfilling informant visions of imperial subjecthood. This thesis therefore suggests that the entrenchment of settler sovereignty and nationalisms in the early twentieth century was not a direct continuation of mid nineteenth-century campaigns for self-government, but was contingent on the failure of imperial networks to provide workable alternatives in the late nineteenth century.


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Racial settler colonialism: James Owens, Race-Making and Land-Taking: Uncovering Policing in the Constitution of Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 2023

19Nov23

Abstract: This dissertation addresses calls for greater communication studies inquiry into processes of colonization, racialization, and the White standpoint all too often naturalized in research. The dissertation accomplishes this through a communication study that expands the horizons of critical research on policing and race, revealing policing as a constitutive force of cultural and structural racism. I study cases of policing in transformative conflicts: uprisings by Anglo Eastern North American settler colonists against Indigenous people and British rule in the 1670s and 1760s, anti-Indigenous settler colonial uprisings in the Northwest Territory from 1795-1815, and the adaptation of colonial policing in industrial urban conflict in Chicago, 1854-1867. These case studies provide previously absent context on the colonial practices, racial ideology, and infrastructures that conditioned practices of policing in Chicago. Policing, the dissertation argues, must be understood as a colonially emergent social technique that gained political importance as means to creatively assert, not merely reinforce, representations and material systems of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. Later urban conflicts in Chicago, I show, adapted colonial policing as means to control geographic, racial, market, and legal boundaries necessary to the hegemony of capitalists, the Chicago Police Department, and city government. Scholarly contributions also include an original research framework of theory and method. I draw on ideas from WEB Du Bois to re-formulate Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and its later poststructural adaptation. My original genealogical method enables the search for emergence and descent of characteristic labor performances, the relations and representations those acts cite and adapt, as well as the structures they produce or destroy, and thereby the form of hegemony they organize. For police studies and history, the dissertation finds continuities between modern and colonial policing and needed redefinitions of policing as a practice. For feminist abolition and Black Marxist studies, my redefinitions expand understandings of the constitutive role of policing in racial capitalism and the White nation project. The dissertation works to draw these fields of study into collaboration with critical communication studies.


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Tax is sovereignty for Indigenous peoples too: Maximilien Zahnd, On Indigenous Tax Consciousness: The Socio-Legal History of the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, 1938-1987, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2022

19Nov23

Abstract: This thesis explores the relationship between taxation, Indigenous sovereignty, and settler colonialism. Specifically, it chronicles the socio-legal history of the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, a Gwich’in tribe from the Alaska interior region. The tribe gained national attention when it attempted to tax a school construction project in the 1980s, triggering a fierce but ultimately unsuccessful judicial battle with the state of Alaska. The thesis seeks to answer the following research questions: How does a tribe develop the idea to use taxation, and why does it decide to use it? The thesis thus strives to explore the origins and contours of what I call ‘Indigenous tax consciousness’. Drawing on archival and field research, I argue that a tribe’s tax consciousness consists of a long and delicate process that often takes years to crystallize. It requires a favorable politico-legal climate, good timing, a few key individuals, and some serendipity. Most importantly, however, Indigenous tax consciousness goes hand in hand with a profound desire to seek political, economic, and cultural empowerment.


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