settler colonial studies blog

Decolonising law, one mode of colonial domination at a time: Sujith Xavier, Beverley Jacobs, Valarie Waboose, Jeffery G. Hewitt, Amar Bhatia (eds), Decolonizing Law: Indigenous, Third World and Settler Perspectives, Routledge, 2021

06Apr21

Description: This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.

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The poverty of settler colonialism: Jerome Tharaud, ‘Western Salvage: Scarcity, Settler Colonialism, and Adaptation in Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2021

03Apr21

Excerpt: Wallace Stegner is perhaps best known as a chronicler of the arid West. As he put it in his 1987 lecture “Living Dry,” “The West is defined … by inadequate rainfall, which means a general deficiency of water . . . . Aridity, and aridity alone, makes the various Wests one” (American West 6, 8). But if Stegner anticipated an environmental historian’s definition of the West as “a region of scarcity, where water sources are few and far between,” he also explored scarcity as a cultural condition (Worster, Under 31). From his ruminations on John Wesley Powell’s “homemade education” (Beyond 8) to his account of the “deprivation” of his own “frontier” upbringing (Wolf Willow 25, 23), Stegner mapped another geography of Western scarcity: information deserts where books are rare treasures; aging towns whose young people have left in search of opportunity; places where entire histories have eroded away, replaced by imported traditions. This essay examines that alternative geography through its most eloquent statement, Wolf Willow (1962). As Stegner reconstructs his family’s failed venture homesteading a borderland wheat farm and his formative experiences in the nearby town of “Whitemud” (his fictionalized name for Eastend, Saskatchewan), he illuminates the relationship between different forms of scarcity, the historical process that has produced them, and possible strategies for adapting to them. Wolf Willow thus offers an opportunity to reconsider not only the history of Western regionalism and its relationship to settler colonialism, but also the potential futures of the region—considered both as a particular geography and as a general concept—in an age of global climate crisis.

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Or trapped outside of history? Darryl Cronin, Trapped by History: The Indigenous-State Relationship in Australia, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021

01Apr21

Description: The Australian nation has reached an impasse in Indigenous policy and practice and fresh strategies and perspectives are required. Trapped by History will highlight a fundamental issue that the Australian nation must confront to develop a genuine relationship with Indigenous Australians. The existing relationship between Indigenous people and the Australian state was constructed on the myth of an empty land – terra nullius. Therefore, interactions with Indigenous people have been constrained by eighteenth-century assumptions and beliefs that Indigenous people did not have organised societies, had neither land ownership nor a recognisable form of sovereignty, and that they were ‘savage’ but could be ‘civilized’ through the erasure of their culture. These incorrect assumptions and beliefs are the foundation of the legal, constitutional and political treatment of Indigenous Australians over the course of the country’s history. They remain ingrained in governmental institutions, Indigenous policy making, judicial decision making and contemporary public attitudes about Indigenous people. Trapped by History shines new light upon several historical and contemporary examples where Indigenous people have attempted to engage and dialogue with state and federal governments. These governments have responded by trying to suppress and discredit Indigenous rights, culture and identities and impose assimilationist policies. In doing so they have rejected or ignored Indigenous attempts at dialogue and partnership. Other settler countries such as New Zealand, Canada and the United States of America have all negotiated treaties with Indigenous people and have developed constitutional ways of engaging cross culturally. In Australia, the limited recognition that Indigenous people have achieved to date shows that the state is unable to resolve long standing issues with Indigenous people. Movement beyond the current colonial relationship with Indigenous Australians requires a genuine dialogue to not only examine the legal and intellectual framework that constrain Indigenous recognition but to create new foundations for a renewed relationship based on intercultural negotiation, mutual respect, sharing and mutual responsibility. This must involve building a shared understanding around addressing past injustices and creating a shared vision for how Indigenous people and other Australians would associate politically in the future.

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Indigenous resistance against settler terraforming: Michael Dockry, Kyle Whyte, ‘Improving on Nature: The Legend Lake Development, Menominee Resistance, and the Ecological Dynamics of Settler Colonialism’, American Indian Quarterly, 45, 2, 2021, pp. 95-120

01Apr21

Abstract: In 1968 a large- scale recreational vacation property development, Legend Lake, was carved out of the recently terminated Menominee reservation to create a tax base for Wisconsin’s newly formed Menominee County. Menominee peoples’ resistance to the Legend Lake project and land sales expressed multiple concerns about settler colonialism and the process of terraforming and ecological change, land dispossession, cultural erasure, and implications for the future. Th e Menominee people came together to respond to this twentieth- century manifestation of the ecological dynamics of settler colonialism by asserting their tribal identity, culture, and relationships to their land. In this paper, we argue that the ecological changes created by the Legend Lake project was one of the major catalysts for Menominee resistance to settler colonialism that ultimately led to the restoration of the Menominee tribe.

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Settler violence is also sexual violence: Mythili Rajiva, ‘A comparative analysis of White and Indigenous girls’ perspectives on sexual violence, toxic masculinity and rape culture’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: North American feminist scholarship on violence against women (VAW) focuses primarily on gendered-based violence and does not substantively incorporate intersectionality. In this paper, I offer a comparative analysis of Canadian Indigenous and White middle-class adolescent girls’ narratives of toxic masculinity, rape culture and sexual violence. I use VAW research, Indigenous feminist theory and girlhood studies to focus on the following: (1) the ‘boys will be boys’ discourse, (2) the feminist critique of the stranger danger discourse and (3) the surveillance of girls. I analyze focus group data with girls (aged 13–19 years). I am interested in how girls both accept and resist the status quo in their day-to-day negotiations with family, peers, schools and public spaces.

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Settler ideal communities: Emily R.M. Lind, The White Settler Colonial Landscape of Toronto’s Wychwood Park, PhD dissertation, Carleton University 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Mythologized as a former artist’s colony, Wychwood Park is a gated community in midtown Toronto that encompasses fifty-eight homes built at the turn of the twentieth century. Wychwood Park’s landscape plan is one of Canada’s earliest examples of a garden suburb – a suburban design model derived from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century English Garden City movement. The Park boasts the highest concentration of Arts and Crafts domestic architecture in Toronto. Famous early residents included artists and art patrons who were instrumental in establishing what became the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Ontario College of Art and Design, and the Ontario Society of Artists. In this dissertation, I argue that Wychwood Park is a white settler colonial landscape. This argument is informed by the idea of landscape as an actor in social and political processes, rather than a reflection of them. The physical landscape of Wychwood Park, and the extent to which it reflects the ideas and values that sustain settler colonial rule, are seriously interrogated in this project. I am interested in the ways that a neighbourhood like Wychwood Park can teach Torontonians something about how patriarchy and racism work and what it means to live in an environment shaped by gendered/racialized thinking and social organization. I am informed by Richard Schein’s contentions that “discourses of racialized social relations work through landscapes”
and that landscapes are the sites in which racialized discourses become “materialized.” In this dissertation, I situate the patriarchal and racialized social relations of settler colonialism within the material landscape of Wychwood Park. This approach highlights Wychwood Park’s engagement with the settler colonial project, addressing a gap in existing literature on the Park specifically and on Toronto history as a whole.

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Secular settlers: Stacey Gutkowski, ‘Secular feelings, settler feelings: the case of Palestine/Israel’, Religion, State and Society, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Scholars have not yet discussed how secular and settler-colonial emotions intersect in contexts such as Palestine/Israel. This article addresses the gap. It explores one case of settler, secular emotion, using data from a larger study on secular Jewish-Israeli millennials after the 2014 Gaza War. It analyses how the Jewish-Israeli settler experience problematises ‘Jewish secular’ feelings and vice versa. Stressing the need to study secular sentiments intersectionally, it offers Bourdieu’s field and habitus as a new conceptual framework. This article argues that the dominant power dynamics within a given context will also predominantly shape people’s emotions – though, critically, not always.

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Settler colonialism and its environments: Roberta Biasillo, ‘Socio-ecological colonial transfers: trajectories of the Fascist agricultural enterprise in Libya (1922-43)’, Modern Italy, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: This paper intertwines the two historiographical concerns of migration and colonialism by exploring the case of Italian rule in North Africa from 1922 to 1943 and by adopting the analytic ground of the environment. The role played by the environment in targeting and shaping specific social groups, forming and grounding specific policies, creating and preventing social and natural transfers, has been overshadowed until now, particularly in relation to Italian colonialism. This study articulates the Fascist agricultural enterprise in Libya around the watershed event of the colony’s 1932 pacification. To illustrate its development, it looks at the environment-making processes and transfers entailed in the transformation of the Italian colonial project. This reconstruction contributes to the environmental history subfields of migration and colonialism and invites historians to further explore the first decade of Italian rule in Libya and not to limit historical explorations to the lens of settler colonialism.

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Again, on distinguishing colonies and settler colonies: Krishan Kumar, ‘Colony and Empire, Colonialism and Imperialism: A Meaningful Distinction?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Colony and empire, colonialism and imperialism, are often treated as synonyms. This can be acceptable for many purposes. But there may be also good reasons to distinguish between them. This article considers in detail one important attempt in that direction by the classicist Moses Finley. It argues that there is considerable strength in that approach, putting the stress as it does on the distinctiveness of the settler community. It is also valuable in suggesting that early-modern Western colonialism marked a new departure in an older history of imperialism, thus once again suggesting the need for a conceptual separation of the two. But the article concludes that ultimately more may be lost than gained by insisting on the distinction. In particular, it inhibits wide-ranging comparisons between ancient and modern, and Western and non-Western, empires, which can often suggest illuminating connections and parallels. The field of empire studies gains by drawing on the rich store of examples provided by the whole history of empire, from the earliest times to now. Western colonialism is part of that story; to separate it out is to impoverish the field.

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The settlers look to the stars: R. A. Rosenfeld, ‘Exploring the History of Colonialism and Astronomy in Canada’, Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, 117, 2, 2021, pp. 89-95

30Mar21

Abstract: Many societies have recently experienced increasing calls for racial and social justice, spurred by lethal abuses of authority and power originating in systemic imbalances. Land acknowledgements of varying degrees of sincerity have been confected, statues of slave traders have been toppled, and buildings, streets, and communities have been renamed. Research and educational institutions have not been untouched by this; the statements and records of benefactors have come under increased scrutiny. Many bodies, including astronomical ones, have started processes of self examination, and established committees to address issues of reform. The problems are generally considered to arise from colonialism continuing to shape post-colonial societies—an unwelcome haunting of the present by the past. The better we know that past, the better equipped we are to change what has to be changed. This paper looks at the history of colonialism and astronomy in Canada.

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