settler colonial studies blog

The settler’s wilderness: Jamie Corliss, White wilderness: race, capitalism, and alternative knowledges of natural space, MA dissertation, DePaul University, 2019

14Apr19

Abstract: This project investigates discourse about American wilderness, from the first European explorers through contemporary outdoor recreation, to reveal that wilderness is a socially constructed concept. By uncovering nine essential myths, this project argues that wilderness discourse is both influenced by and perpetuates American settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Section One traces a history of wilderness discourse to demonstrate that wilderness discourse establishes whites as citizens, as civilized, as courageous conquerors, as rightful owners to land, as protectors of space, and as beneficiaries of any potential profit. Section Two uses a content analysis of contemporary outdoor recreation websites to argue that attempts at multiculturalism in wilderness recreation fail to address underlying structures of power that justify settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Ultimately, Section Three advocates for “race radical” epistemologies of wilderness, using an analysis of visual art, as a means to challenge the structures of power embedded in wilderness discourse.

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Assimilating the settlers (rather than the other way round): Jennifer Sessions, ‘Making Settlers Muslim: Religion, Resistance and Everday [sic] Life in Nineteenth-Century French Algeria’, French History, 2019

09Apr19

Abstract: On 26 April 1901, members of the Righa tribe overran the French colonial village of Margueritte in central Algiers province. They seized the settlement’s male colonists and demanded they ‘make [them]selves Muslims’ by reciting the shehada and donning North African clothing. Several Europeans who could not or would not comply were killed. This article explores the meanings of this forced conversion of European settlers, which made the Margueritte revolt unique in the history of Algerian resistance to French colonialism. For French colonial officials, the religious ritual indicated the causal role of ‘Islamic fanaticism’ in fomenting the revolt. Administrators and magistrates focused their investigations on the religious habits of the revolt’s leaders, possible ties to Sufi brotherhoods and pan-Islamist conspiracies. But in doing so, they largely overlooked the more quotidian meanings of the conversion ritual for the inhabitants of Margueritte itself. By resituating the symbolic transformation of body and soul within the cultural logics of everyday life in the settler village, the article attempts to map out the more mundane social practices by which ethno-religious colonial hierarchies were enacted and embodied in French Algeria.

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The settlers against the ocean: Meg Samuelson, Charne Lavery, ‘The Oceanic South’, English Language Notes, 57, 1, 2019, pp. 37-50.

09Apr19

Abstract: This essay proposes the category of the oceanic South. It presents the Southern Hemisphere’s blue expanses as one of its defining features and elaborates from this a framework that brings into agitated contention the extractive economies of the North, the persistent legacies of settler colonialism in the South, and other interlocking human and more-than-human itineraries. Tracking a drift into the Southern Ocean in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, the essay takes this “most neglected of oceans” as a vantage point from which to draw the contours of the oceanic South and engage its troubled surfaces and lively depths. Thinking through the roiling and hostile, fecund, and unbounded nature of this ocean, the essay follows “the lives of whales” in novels by Witi Ihimaera and Zakes Mda. Sounding the ocean’s imaginative depths, these fictions offer illuminating ways of thinking the South while maintaining an unsettling planetarity.

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Settler diasporas: Iyko Day, Juliana Hu Pegues, Melissa Phung, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Danika Medak-Saltzman’, Settler Colonial Studies, Asian Diasporic Questions’, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 5, 1, 2019, pp. 1-45

09Apr19

Excerpt: The study of settler colonialism in Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian diaspora studies offers important challenges to long-standing rubrics of racial “minority” politics, immigration and citizenship rights, and conceptions of national and transnational mobility. Since the groundbreaking publication of Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i in 2008 (which grew out of a special issue of Amerasia Journal in 2000) (Fujikane and Okamura 2008), there has been a decisive shift toward interrogating the role Asian communities play in extending or disrupting the structural dynamics of colonial dispossession, displacement, and disposal that are imposed on Indigenous populations in the Americas, Australasia, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands.

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Japanese settlers and their borderless empire: Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire, University of California Press, 2019

09Apr19

Description: In Search of Our Frontier explores the complex transnational history of Japanese settler colonialism, which linked Japanese America with Japan’s colonial empire through the exchange of migrant bodies, expansionist knowledge, colonial capital, and technology in the Asia-Pacific basin before World War II. Eiichiro Azuma outlines how the practices and thinking of members of pre–World War II Japanese America demonstrate a vital link between migration-led expansionism inside and outside Japan’s formal colonial empire. The ideas and trajectories of these transpacific migrants exemplified a prevalent national structure of thought and practice that not only supported Japan’s empire-building but also promoted the quest for national expansion. This book offers new interpretive frames and perspectives that will allow readers to understand Japanese settler colonialism’s capacity to operate outside the aegis of the home empire.

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Settler colonialism and murderous Islamophobia: Azeezah Kanji, David Palumbo-Liu, ‘Settler Colonialism Lurked Beneath the Christchurch Massacre’, Truthout, 06/04/19

07Apr19

Excerpt: The persistent tendency to abstract racist “hate crimes” from the contexts of settler colonialism in which they have occurred perpetuates the belief that expanding colonial state institutions of “counterterrorism” can provide a solution to white supremacy, when in fact they are part of the problem.

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Whose remembrances? Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, Rob Hales, Sydney Sparrow, ‘Remembering and Forgetting First Nations in Australia: Unsettling the Silence on the Founding and Building of a New Nation’, in Pauline Collins, Victor Igreja, Patrick Alan Danaher (eds), The Nexus among Place, Conflict and Communication in a Globalising World, Palgrave, 2019, pp 207-231

03Apr19

Abstract: Settler colonial societies such as Australia revere their monuments. In such ‘young’ countries, monuments to conquerors, settlers and soldiers place the settler populations’ indelible stamp on the landscape. However, these monuments are as much about forgetting as about remembering. Despite this, Indigenous Australians are asserting their place, insisting that they never ceded sovereignty and refusing erasure. Recent events sparked conversations in Australia about such practices. Debates considered whether colonial monuments should come down or additional monuments narrating Indigenous Australian stories should be erected. This is an un-settled space ripe for exploration and analysis. These social, cultural and political contestations are examined. ‘Remembering and forgetting in Australia’ reflects on the dissonant heritages of Australia, the place and the ways that these heritages might be better reconciled.

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Decolonising pedagogies: Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang (eds), Indigenous and Decolonising Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, Routledge, 2019

31Mar19

Description: Indigenous and decolonizing perspectives on education have long persisted alongside colonial models of education, yet too often have been subsumed within the fields of multiculturalism, critical race theory, and progressive education. Timely and compelling, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education features research, theory, and dynamic foundational readings for educators and educational researchers who are looking for possibilities beyond the limits of liberal democratic schooling. Featuring original chapters by authors at the forefront of theorizing, practice, research, and activism, this volume helps define and imagine the exciting interstices between Indigenous and decolonizing studies and education. Each chapter forwards Indigenous principles – such as Land as literacy and water as life – that are grounded in place-specific efforts of creating Indigenous universities and schools, community organizing and social movements, trans and Two Spirit practices, refusals of state policies, and land-based and water-based pedagogies.

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Settling land, controlling water: Nicole J. Wilson, Leila M. Harris, Angie Joseph-Rear, Jody Beaumont, Terre Satterfield, ‘Water is Medicine: Reimagining Water Security through Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Relationships to Treated and Traditional Water Sources in Yukon, Canada’, Water, 11, 3, 2019

31Mar19

Abstract: There is growing acknowledgement that the material dimensions of water security alone are inadequate; we also need to engage with a broader set of hydrosocial relationships. Indeed, more holistic approaches are needed to explain Indigenous peoples’ relationships to water including the use of traditional water sources such as mountain creeks and springs. In this paper, we seek to reimagine water security through a case study of Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in’s relationships to both treated and traditional water sources throughout the First Nation’s traditional territory in Yukon, Canada. Through community-based research including interviews with Elders and other community members, we examine the importance of traditional water sources for meeting important health requirements including physical, spiritual and cultural wellbeing. This intervention contributes to ongoing debates about what it means to secure safe and affordable water in three key ways: First, we argue that Indigenous water relations invite a shift towards more a holistic understanding of water security; second, we contend that settler colonial politics should be understood as a root cause of water insecurity; finally, we explore how Two-Eyed Seeing can be applied as an alternative to the ‘integration’ of Western scientific and Indigenous approaches to drinking water.

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The settler has no jurisdiction over community determination: Damien Lee, ‘Adoption Constitutionalism: Anishinaabe Citizenship Law at Fort William First Nation’, Alberta Law Review, 56, 3, 2019, pp. 785-816

31Mar19

Abstract: This article explores familial jurisdiction over citizenship, using the study of Anishinaabe citizenship practices in the Fort William First Nation, through the lens of adoption stories. The author highlights how families are able to use adoption to regulate citizenship, bringing new citizens into the nation, while also selecting those who do not belong. The familial system of affirmation is different than a Certificate of Indian Registration and requires collective action, rather than individual self-determination. Belonging at Fort William is further argued to not depend solely on blood quantum, Indian status, or band membership but, rather, depends on active community determination and accountability to the community on an on-going basis. Seen this way, adoption narratives reveal a citizenship order that challenges Canada’s claimed jurisdiction to discern who belongs with First Nations.

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