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Settler colonial sociabilities: Fariha Shaikh, ‘Catherine Helen Spence’s Autobiography: Literary Culture and Associational Life in Nineteenth-Century South Australia’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2022

30Jul22

Abstract: This article examines Catherine Helen Spence’s Autobiography through the lens of settler colonial sociability. It argues that Spence strategically depicts associational life in the Autobiography to showcase for her readers a version of organized settler colonial sociability that envisages a role for White, middle-class urban women in the construction and expansion of settler colonial Australia. Spence’s literary and political sociability extends between Australia, Britain and the US. While it is transnational in scope, however, at the same it is exclusionary in its politics: as its very foundation rests on the exclusion of the White working classes and Australian Indigenous peoples.


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Thinking the end of this planet is easier than thinking the end of settler colonialism: Jens Temmen, ‘Scorched Earth: Discourses of Multiplanetarity, Climate Change, and Martian Terraforming in Finch and Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 2022

30Jul22

Abstract: This contribution discusses the current surge of Mars colonization narratives both in science and culture, and the ways these narratives are received and circulated in current ecocritical debates on a multiplanetary future of humanity. This analysis in this contribution takes its cue from the representation of the California wildfires of 2020 as an anthropogenic spectacle that is foreboding of a post-apocalyptic future in which Earth becomes Mars-like, and discusses how this discourse is reproduced in the Hollywood movie Finch and Kate Greene’s popular science memoir Once Upon A Time I Lived on Mars. As texts of quasi-science communication, they produce a contact zone between Earth/Mars which serves to legitimize technoliberal fantasies of terraforming Mars into Earth as a solution to climate change. With all paths to all possible futures of human habitation – utopian or dystopian – allegedly leading right through the Red Planet, there is an urgency to critically engage with the idea of planetarity being overwritten by a discourse of multiplanetarity that veils the continuity of extractivist capitalism/colonialism in a narrative of futurity and progress.


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The cloud is a settler: Quincy Childs, ‘”This Has Nothing to Do With Clouds”: A Decolonial Approach to Data Centers in the Node Pole: The environmental impacts of Big Tech fall disproportionately on the planet and its poorest people, escalating a need for decolonial reckoning’, Common Place, 29/06/22

28Jul22

Excerpt: This same matrix is inhered within all forms of infrastructure; in other words, infrastructure is the how of settler colonialism.


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The Netherlands discover itself in its settler colony: Andrew Burnett, The Dutch Rediscover the Dutch-Africans (1847–1900): Brother Nation or Lost Colony? Brill, 2022

28Jul22

Description: Were the Dutch-Africans in southern Africa a brother nation to the Dutch or did they simply represent a lost colony? Connecting primary sources in Dutch and Afrikaans, this work tells the story of the Dutch stamverwantschap (kinship) movement between 1847 and 1900. The white Dutch-Africans were imagined to be the bridgehead to a broader Dutch identity – a ‘second Netherlands’ in the south. This study explores how the 19th century Dutch identified with and idealised a pastoral community operating within a racially segregated society on the edge of European civilisation. When the stamverwantschap dream collided with British military and economic power, the belief that race, language and religion could sustain a broader Dutch identity proved to be an illusion.


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Europe discovers itself in the settler colony: Matthew D’Auria, Fernanda Gallo (eds), Mediterranean Europe(s): Rethinking Europe from Its Southern Shores, Routledge, 2022

28Jul22

Description: This book investigates how ideas of and discourses about Europe have been affected by images of the Mediterranean Sea and its many worlds from the nineteenth century onwards. Surprisingly, modern scholars have often neglected such an influence and, in fact, in most histories of the idea of Europe the Mediterranean is conspicuously absent. This might partly be explained by the fact that historians have often identified Europe with modernity (and the Atlantic world) and, therefore, in opposition to the classical world (centred around the Mediterranean). This book will challenge such views, showing that a plethora of thinkers, from the early nineteenth century to the present, have refused to relegate the Mediterranean to the past. Importance is given to the idea of a distinct ‘meridian thought’, a notion first set forth by Albert Camus and now reworked by French and Italian thinkers. As most chapters argue, this might represent an important tool for rethinking the Mediterranean and, in turn, it might help us challenge received notions about European identity and rethink Europe as the locus of ‘modernity’. Mediterranean Europe(s): Rethinking Europe from its Southern Shores will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in European studies and Mediterranean history.


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Settler gastrocolonialism (and with a chapter by LV): Ronald Ranta, Alejandro Colás, Daniel Monterescu (eds), ‘Going Native?’ Settler Colonialism and Food, Palgrave, 2022

26Jul22

Description: Addresses the subject of settler colonial identity and settler-indigenous relations through the prism of food. Provides rich, original, innovative and empirical contributions from a wide range of geographic case studies. Takes a multi-disciplinary approach, in a global comparative framework.


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Settlers against trafficking: Julie Kaye, ‘Anti-Trafficking and Settler-Colonial Discourses of Protection: The Coloniality of Racialized Interventions’, in Kamala Kempadoo, Elena Shih (eds), White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking, Routledge, 2023

26Jul22

Access the chapter here.


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Domestic settler colonialism (it’s always domestic): Tamara Wagner, ‘Domestic Settler Writing and the Global Nineteenth Century’, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, 1, 1, 2022, pp. 109-118.

26Jul22

Abstract: Domestic settler writing has long remained a largely overlooked by-product of imperial expansion and the resultant exportation of popular culture. Global nineteenth-century studies may offer an opportunity to reconsider this admittedly amorphous set of writing from a newly unifying perspective. Approaching these texts through different lenses does more than bring them to renewed scholarly attention and tease out hitherto unacknowledged aspects. In turn, they can enrich global nineteenth-century studies itself, ensuring that the experience of female settlers, emigrating families, and unaccompanied children are not once again marginalized. This article resituates domestic settler writing within a transoceanic, global field of representations, setting out three specific directions for the critical investigation to proceed: (1) a distant reading to capture patterns, (2) a mapping of the circulation of such colonial reading matter, and (3) a comparative analysis, especially of texts that engage with such exchanges, through intertextual references or rewritings.


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Gendered settler colonialism (it’s always gendered): Katrine Barber, ‘I Just Had to Do Most Everything’: Gender, Settlement and American Empire in the Far West, MA dissertation, Portland State University, 2022

26Jul22

Abstract: The field of settler colonial studies has made huge strides in recent years toward problematizing the establishment of the United States on stolen land and the nation’s steady, violent expansion across the continent. Settler colonial framework provides a rich opportunity for historians of the American West to reframe white settlement on the frontier, especially that which was made possible through land grant legislation such as the Homestead Act of 1862. As the families who took up land grant property sought new opportunities for themselves, they also acted as drivers of U.S. territorial acquisition. This process was inherently gendered, in terms of both the ideological and legal framing of homesteading, as well as the material contributions made by gendered labor. The critical role of white women on the frontier, in particular, cannot be overlooked in settler colonial histories. This thesis argues that women’s labor, reproduction, and marriage alliances formed the backbone of U.S. settler colonialism, and that the “feminine” and intimate nature of these contributions both obscures the reality of imperialism in the West, as well as the important role of women’s agency in that structure. It does so through a microhistorical examination of three women who homesteaded on the North Oregon Coast in the late-nineteenth century, and compares their experiences with the limited record of Native women who lived in the same time and place.


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Yearning for a settler country that never was: Callie Maidhof, ‘Settler Nostalgia: Colonizing Temporalities and the Genre of Coexistence’, Cultural Critique, 116, 2022, pp. 92-118

26Jul22

Abstract: For Jewish Israelis in the West Bank settlement of Alfei Menashe, nostalgia for the early years of settlement entails a fantasy of coexistence with Palestinians. This fantasy responds to contemporary peacemaking discourses, reimagining the role of settlement from a practice engendering conflict to one that is an integral part of the peacemaking project. Settler nostalgia is thus a temporal orientation with important political consequences. Scholarly debates have focused on the universalizing, modernizing temporality of settler colonialism, but neither this nor the state-centered historicity of hegemonic accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be the only or even the most relevant temporal frames for contemporary Zionist settlement in the West Bank of Palestine. This article examines settler temporal strategies as a crucial part of how one settlement has not only survived but also has grown and flourished in the nearly forty years since its founding.


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