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The performance of settler colonialism: Nassim Winnie Balestrini, ‘Performing Settler-Colonialism: Populism and Nineteenth-Century Theater in the United States of America’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 2020

01Apr20

Abstract: This essay brings together conceptualizations of populism in political science with those in literary and cultural studies. Theater historian Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s theory of a »performative commons« (from 1649 through 1849) are applied to three US-American nineteenth-century plays. The first two examples confirm Dillon’s points regarding strategies of erasing Native Americans from evolving definitions of ›the American people‹. In the third play, which was popular between the 1860s and early 1900s, Native Americans are completely absent, and the populist nostalgia related to the central character and star actor privileges white male entitlement to personal freedoms at the expense of women’s rights within the newly minted New World republic.


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How do settler colonialism and capitalism relate? Brad Bauerly, ‘Economic Transition, Class Formation, and the Superintendent State in the Midwest: 1850-1900’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 33, 2020, pp. 39-60

01Apr20

Abstract: This article outlines and clarifies the complex relationship between economic development, the formation of classes, political movement responses to these changes, and state institutional capacity building in response to these movements in the Midwestern US. It seeks to remedy views of the transition to capitalism in America that focus too narrowly on a moment of transition, positing instead a long, politically contested process of class formation by elucidating the specific interactions between agrarian and union movements and state-building processes. Our research reveals the substantial role of the state in forcing through acceptance of economic changes and shifting class locations through a co-developmental process of political resistance movements and state-building.


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A history of the settler-indigenous relation: René Harder Horst, A History of Indigenous Latin America: Aymara to Zapatistas, Routledge, 2020

01Apr20

Description: A History of Indigenous Latin America is a comprehensive introduction to the people who first settled in Latin America, from before the arrival of the Europeans to the present.

Indigenous history provides a singular perspective to political, social and economic changes that followed European settlement and the African slave trade in Latin America. Set broadly within a postcolonial theoretical framework and enhanced by anthropology, economics, sociology, and religion, this textbook includes military conflicts and nonviolent resistance, transculturation, labor, political organization, gender, and broad selective accommodation. Uniquely organized into periods of 50 years to facilitate classroom use, it allows students to ground important indigenous historical events and cultural changes within the timeframe of a typical university semester.

Supported by images, textboxes, and linked documents in each chapter that aid learning and provide a new perspective that broadly enhances Latin American history and studies, it is the perfect introductory textbook for students.


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A nation, asserted through negation: Daiva Stasiulis, ‘Elimi(Nation): Canada’s “Post-Settler” Embrace of Disposable Migrant Labour’, Studies in Social Justice, 14, 1, 2020, pp. 22-54

01Apr20

Abstract: This article utilizes the lens of disposability to explore recent conditions of low-wage temporary migrant labour, whose numbers and economic sectors have expanded in the 21st century. A central argument is that disposability is a discursive and material relation of power that creates and reproduces invidious distinctions between the value of “legitimate” Canadian settler-citizens (and candidates for citizenship) and the lack of worth of undesirable migrant populations working in Canada, often for protracted periods of time. The analytical lens of migrant disposability draws upon theorizing within Marxian, critical modernity studies, and decolonizing settler colonial frameworks. This article explores the technologies of disposability that lay waste to low wage workers in sites such as immigration law and provincial/territorial employment legislation, the workplace, transport, living conditions, access to health care and the practice of medical repatriation of injured and ill migrant workers. The mounting evidence that disposability is immanent within low-wage migrant labour schemes in Canada has implications for migrant social justice. The failure to protect migrant workers from a vast array of harms reflects the historical foundations of Canada’s contemporary migrant worker schemes in an “inherited background field [of settler colonialism] within which market, racist, patriarchal and state relations converge” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 14). Incremental liberal reform has made little headway insofar as the administration and in some cases reversal of more progressive reforms such as guaranteed pathways to citizenship prioritize employers’ labour interests and the lives and health of primarily white, middle class Canadian citizens at the expense of a shunned and racialized but growing population of migrants from the global South. Transformational change and social justice for migrant workers can only occur by reversing the disposability and hyper-commodification intrinsic to low-wage migrant programs and granting full permanent legal status to migrant workers.

 


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Settler colonial historiographies focus on success: Kyle B. Carpenter, ‘A Failed Venture in the Nueces Strip: Misconceptions and Mismanagement of the Beales Rio Grande Colony, 1832–1836’, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 123, 4, 2020, pp. 420-442

29Mar20

Excerpt: Historians of Mexican Texas rarely study the empresario grants that failed. Scholars generally relegate the unfulfilled contracts that Mexico awarded to land agents to populate its northern territories to footnotes or brief paragraphs, while the success stories continue to produce books and articles.


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Black under settler colonialism: Caren Holmes, ‘Afrofuturist Responses to State Violence’, Brief Encounters, 4, 1, 2020, pp. 12-18

29Mar20

Excerpt: The African diasporic subject encounters the territories of occupied North America within a ‘post abduction existence’. Contemporary manifestations of state violence and dehumanization are reproductions of generational legacies of mass incarceration, apartheid and slavery imposed upon those racialized by categories developed to alienate the original class of abductees. In 1988, the American hip hop group Public Enemy proclaimed in a song, ‘Armageddon been-in-effect’ for the African diaspora: that is to say that ‘the conditions that continue to restrict black freedom and foreclose black futures mark the aftershocks of a man-made apocalypse’, also known as the transatlantic slave trade. In this essay, I explore two short stories written by Black authors in the United States. Each imagines Black resistance to the American settler colonial condition and to futurist mutations of state violence imposed upon Black and Brown communities. Both stories conceive of creative strategies through which their characters confront forms of structural and material violence which imprisons Black life in and outside of prisons and situates it closer to death. Several scholars have understood and represented the experience of Black people in settler colonial North America as that of the alien or post-human subject. 


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The dead and the living: Paul Turnbull, ‘International Repatriations of Indigenous Human Remains and Its Complexities: the Australian Experience’, Museum & Society, 18, 1, 2020, pp. 6-19

29Mar20

Abstract: Over the past forty or so years, many Indigenous peoples in former settler colonies have fought for, and in many instances won, recognition of their rights to have the bodily remains of their ancestors returned from Western museums and other scientific institutions for burial. It has been a remarkable achievement. However, as this article highlights, in the Australian context, the efforts of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders to secure and bury the remains of their ancestors as their cultures require have, in many cases, been complicated by challenges arising from the need to revitalize or re-establish continuities with the ancestral past eroded by settler colonialism, while seeking restoration of their ownership rights in respect of land and cultural heritage in the contemporary Australian context.


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The settlers have guns: Levi Gahman, Land, God and Guns: Settler Colonialism and Masculinity in the American Heartland, Zed Books, 2020

27Mar20

Description: This book is an antidote to the ideas of American white hetero-settler masculinity, prowess, and exceptionalism that are currently being flexed on the global stage. Through a fascinating combination of ethnographic research across six US states and an application of anti-colonial, feminist, andpoststructuralist theories, Land, God and Gunsreveals how time-honored rationalities and rites of passage associated with manhood in the American Heartland are constitutive of colonial worldviews, capitalist logics, essentialist gender binaries, ethnocentric religious conservatism, jingoistic nationalism, racial superiority, and embodied violence. A violence that both privileges and ultimately damages its main proliferators, white settler men. A detailed work that unravels how white constructions of and claims to land, history, and manhood are manufactured frontier myths that uphold a racist and heteropatriarchal ordering of life, and argues for a reconceiving of taken-for-granted notions such as respect, pride, property, and production. 


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Finance capital itself is a settler: Catherine Grace Cumming, ‘How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History’, Counterfutures, 7, 2020, pp. 41-72

27Mar20

Abstract: This paper intervenes in orthodox understandings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counterfutures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anticapitalist politics today. 


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Are returned settlers settlers? ‘Repatriates, refugees, or exiles? Emanuele Ertola, ‘Decolonization and the Italian settlers’ return, 1941-1956’, in Giuliana Laschi, Valeria Deplano, Alessandro Pes (eds), Europe between Migrations, Decolonization and Integration (1945-1992), Routledge, 2020

27Mar20

Access the chapter here.


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