settler colonial studies blog

Settlers levitate? Peter Adey, ‘Floating with Kim Scott’s Benang: Vertigo, settler-colonial mobilities and levitation’s geographies’, Emotion, Space and Society, 40, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: In this paper I explore the strange figure of the levitator within Kim Scott’s (1999) Miles Franklin Prize winning novel Benang: From the Heart. Through different genres of art and creative practice, mysticism, religion, science-fiction, magic, and even civil disobedience, the levitator is a poorly acknowledged mobile subject who seems to refuse scholarly enquiry. Levitation is more readily understood as a maligned form of fraud, fakery and social frippery, a figure of esoteric interest. Building on recent attempts to resurrect and reconsider levitators (Adey, 2017; Young, 2018), as well as floating, lighter-than-air atmospheres and elements (McCormack, 2018; Engelmann, 2015), this paper argues that floatations like levitation provide a crucial addition to critical and radical thinking in mobilities, affective life and studies of settler-colonialism. Through Benang, Kim Scott’s vast historical and yet intimate novel, the paper works with the floating encounters woven through the politics and ecologies of Western Australia and its racist policies which sought to regulate the Noongar people, an Aboriginal people recognised as the traditional owners of south west Western Australia. Within Benang, levitation, lightness and detachment, become expressions of vertiginous (post)colonial distance, fear, anxiety and escape.

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Settler insecurities: Liam Midzain-Gobin, ‘Comfort and insecurity in the reproduction of settler coloniality’, Critical Studies on Security, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: Understood as a practice, citizenship can bring benefits across affective and material registers; however, its possibility also rests on logics of exclusion. This is especially the case in Anglosphere settler colonial contexts in which citizenship is both a function of settler state authority while simultaneously reproducing that very authority. Using Canada as an illustration, the paper reads citizenship through the concepts of implicated subjecthood and colonial liberalism. In doing so it puts forward a phenomenon described as ‘settler insecurity’ to underscore one aspect of how this reproduction occurs. Relating this insecurity to mythologies of the settler geographic imaginary and the affective and material benefits of citizenship, the paper argues the comforts of settler colonial citizenship and this insecurity are co-constitutive. When understood in relation to the un-realised nature of settler coloniality as a genocidal project, the paper outlines how these interconnected phenomena represent important logics in ongoing processes of remaking settler sovereignty through the domestication of Indigenous nationhood and erasure of colonial relations.

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Penal settler colonialism: Jessica Evans, ‘Penal nationalism in the settler colony: On the construction and maintenance of “national whiteness” in settler Canada’, Punishment & Society, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: The summer of 2020 was one of unprecedented mass protest and a growing critical awareness around the racist operation of criminal justice systems in North America. Consequently, criminal justice systems have been placed squarely at the forefront of struggles for racial equality and social change. While activists, critical researchers, and legal experts have argued racial justice requires a diversion of communities and resources away from criminal justice systems, the focus in mainstream policy, media, and academic circles has been on reform. In Canada, a focus on reformist responses to this racial violence has been justified through a distorted view of Canada’s criminal justice system. Drawing on the concept of penal nationalism, I argue that Canadian carceral practices must be understood as constitutive of the settler-colonial state and its ideological, material and institutional mooring in racial whiteness as the locus of settler power and sovereignty. To this end, it is not enough to reform specific penal practices, while leaving intact the legitimacy of the criminal justice system in general. What is at stake is the very definition and protection of a national identity, which in the settler colony is predicated
on colonial whiteness, Indigenous erasure, and racialized exploitation.

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Settler preppers: Allison E. Ford, ‘”They Will Be Like a Swarm of Locusts”: Race, Rurality, and Settler Colonialism in American Prepping Culture’, Rural Sociology, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: Preppers represent a sub-culture of Americans who prepare for the collapse of society, or “the end of the world as we know it,” via emergency preparedness and self-sufficiency. Securing access to land and the rights to access natural resources are the tenets of self-sufficiency. Preppers associate access to land, water, resources, and distance from the presumed danger of the urban core with the national myth of a white, settler-colonial rural idyll. Rural living is thus an ideal of self-sufficiency. Based on thematic narrative analysis of data derived from multi-method ethnographic research (participant observation, digital ethnography, and interviews [n = 22]), I examine the relationship between settler-colonialism, white hegemony, and environmental privilege in preppers’ discourse about the rural. Preppers rely on racially based frameworks that align with hegemonic whiteness, color-blind racism, and settler-colonialism. Even as they deny the salience of structural racism, preppers make claims to superiority based on cultural capacities like individualism, meritocracy, rationality, and objectivity. They invoke these claims to justify individualized, defensive response to socio-environmental risk that reproduces white possession of rural lands. Racialized prepper discourse informs the environmental practices that preppers adopt, based on claims to superiority and cultural entitlement to land rooted in settler-colonial ethics.

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Settler Pocahontas: Kristalyn Marie Shefveland, ‘Pocahontas and Settler Memory in the Appalachian West and South’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: This article utilizes the Pocahontas coalfields in West Virginia and the Indian River Farms Company settlement of Vero Beach Florida as case studies of settler memory. As late as the nineteenth century, setters considered these two very different, but connected, Southern spaces as frontiers. Settlers in both places constructed fantasies about Native peoples that focused primarily on the idea of the Native woman Pocahontas. These are imaginative creations that both attempt to create a settlement and to hearken back to fantasies of the past that never fully existed. With selective constructions of memory, both settlements chose Pocahontas because the name evoked a settler dream of the good Indian yielding to conquest, just as they sought a pliant and willing landscape that would yield mineral and agricultural riches. In fact, both places have longer and deeper Native histories that settler and booster histories have obfuscated and hidden in favor of more “romantic” national narratives such as the Pocahontas myth, in order to sell a place and a product.

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Unreconstructed settler history vs settler colonial critique (of course, one sells, the other doesn’t): Honor Sachs, ‘The Unbearable Greatness of Pioneering: Storytelling in David McCullough’s The Pioneers’, Journal of the Early Republic, 41, 2, 2021, pp. 209-216

07Jun21

Abstract: In The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, author David McCullough tells a story of the white heroes who settled the Ohio Territory. McCullough describes a story of intrepid pioneers with noble intentions who endeavored to advance the American Dream. His work, however, ignores decades of historical scholarship that challenge such triumphant narratives and reveal the darker consequences of American exceptionalism. By excluding recent scholarship, McCullough’s work excuses the violence of settler colonialism and fails to capture the complex history of this region.

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Healing from history. But How? Natalie Avalos, ‘What Does It Mean to Heal From Historical Trauma?’ AMA Journal of Ethics, 2021

07Jun21

Abstract: Native American peoples’ health is impacted by structural legacies of settler colonialism, including land dispossession, racism, and poverty. Responding with care to individuals and communities experiencing past and present traumatic stress from genocide and deeply entrenched structural violence means navigating ongoing grief, restoring self-community and human-ecological relationships, and generating cultural vibrancy.

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Whose apocalypse? A settler apocalypse! Natalie Koch, ‘Whose apocalypse? Biosphere 2 and the spectacle of settler science in the desert’, Geoforum, 124, 2021, 36-45

07Jun21

Abstract: Deserts have a special prominence in apocalyptic visions of the future. As a trope, the desert frequently indexes apocalyptic visions of the warming planet and future challenges of securing food, energy, and water in a changing environment. This article considers how diffuse visions of “environmental apocalypse” are spun through narratives constructions of the desert as sites of utopia and dystopia – places where humanity is simultaneously portrayed as meeting its most dire possibilities of collapse, but also places where hopeful futures might be tested out and extremes overcome in an era of climate catastrophe. This article offers a genealogy of techno-scientific schemes in the Arizona desert and the “visioneers” behind them, focusing on the most iconic example of Biosphere 2. Initiated in the mid-1980s, Biosphere 2’s history illustrates how such projects are underpinned by multiple forms of spectacle, which draw on the ideals of science, technology, and environmental salvation to build settler colonial structures of exclusion and Indigenous dispossession. By centering the question of whose apocalypse we are being sold in such techno-centric “solutions” to ecological dilemmas, this article expands recent discussions of environmental injustice and settler colonial violence to show how ostensibly “progressive” ideals and initiatives are also violent and routinely overwrite histories and presents of colonial dispossession.

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Settler colonialism’s scopic regime: Jakub Zahora, ‘Occupation, Sight, Landscape: Visibility and the Normalization of Israeli Settlements’, International Political Sociology, 2021

04Jun21

Abstract: This article contributes toward the understanding of social and political mechanisms that work to normalize and naturalize contested political conditions on the part of privileged segments of the public. I engage these issues via an ethnographic study of Israel’s so-called non-ideological settlements in the occupied West Bank, which attract Israelis due to socioeconomic advantages rather than a nationalistic and/or religious appeal. Nonetheless, the settlers’ suburban experiences are in stark contrast to the geopolitical status of their communities as well as the local and international resistance they generate. I draw empirically on interviews and observations conducted in the settlement of Ariel to make sense of this dynamic. Utilizing insights from critical investigations of visuality and landscape, I argue that the normalization of everyday life in the settlements is achieved through the operation of a particular scopic regime linked to the landscape formations in the West Bank. Employing these concepts to investigate the everyday politics of seeing, I show how they channel the settlers’ sight in a way that makes the Israeli rule seem uncontested, naturalized, and even aesthetic in three registers: the depth of visual field, the surroundings, and the people who inhabit the settlements’ landscape.

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Resisting multiple attacks: Kent G. Lightfoot, Peter A. Nelson, Michael A. Grone, Alec Apodaca, ‘Pathways to Persistence: Divergent Native engagements with sustained colonial permutations in North America’, in Lee M. Panich, Sara L. Gonzalez (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas, Routledge, 2021

04Jun21

Abstract: In addressing the question of how and why Indigenous people initiated diverse kinds of engagements with colonial agents, this chapter highlights two crucial variables that should be considered in any archaeological investigation of colonialism. One concerns Indigenous sociopolitical and economic organizations, including dimensions such as polity size, polity structure, landscape management practices, and regional sociopolitical relationships. The other involves the various permutations of colonial programs that encroached on tribal lands, as exemplified by managerial, missionary, and settler colonies. A significant challenge in the study of colonialism is that Indigenous people did not encounter one type of colonial program over time but rather a plethora of colonial agents with divergent policies and practices. This chapter argues for archaeological investigations of colonialism that take a long-term perspective in examining the full range of colonial succession patterns that unfolded in tribal lands and how Native people created innovative strategies for mitigating colonialism and making the most of new technologies, trade connections, settlement arrangements, and economic opportunities. The chapter concludes with several examples of resourceful pathways that Native people initiated in their entanglements with colonial agents.

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