settler colonial studies blog

More (settler) frontier making assemblages: Rachel Busbridge, ‘Messianic time, settler colonial technology and the elision of Palestinian presence in Jerusalem’s historic basin’, Political Geography, 79, 2020, 102158

19Feb20

Abstract: Advancing the settler colonial paradigm through a temporal perspective on territoriality, this article argues that the Jewish messianic idea is a distinctive feature of Israeli settler colonialism and an important element of Zionist territorial production. Specifically, the article contends that messianic time constitutes a specific settler colonial technology of domination which finds place-based expression in the ‘historic basin’ of occupied East Jerusalem. This is illustrated through two sites: the City of David archaeological park in the Palestinian village of Silwan and the Temple Mount/Haram al-Shariff, current home of the Dome of the Rock and prophesised location of the Third Jewish Temple. Both are at the frontier of settlement in the historic basin and the messianic conception of a mythical past and redemptive future aids claims to territorial exclusivity by ‘disappearing’ Palestinians in the present. The article concludes by reflecting on the value of an analytical focus on time for settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and in political geography more broadly.

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(Settler) frontier making assemblages: Wassim Ghantous, Settler-Colonial Assemblages and the Making of the Israeli Frontier: Palestinian experiences of (in)security, surveillance and carceral geographies, PhD Dissertation, Göteborgs universitet, 2020

19Feb20

Abstract: This dissertation examines the operations of contemporary Israeli security machinery as it unfolds in the course of expanding the Israeli colonial frontier over Palestinian rural areas of the occupied West Bank. Since the early 1990s and up to the present, Israeli security measures and monitoring technologies multiplied and have come to operate across various public, hybrid and civilian actors and institutions that orchestrate control over Palestinian bodies as a mean to dispossess them and expand the Israeli frontier over their lands through the erection of settlements. In order to study how the Israeli frontier is made today, this dissertation follows Palestinian villagers’ everyday experiences of (in)security and control as they play out through a multitude of formal and informal colonial actors, institutions and technologies — in other words, through a settler-colonial assemblage. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ontology of ‘assemblage thinking’, and drawing on their theorizations regarding power, politics and contemporary war-making, this dissertation pays attention to various domains in which the Israeli assemblage operates today in relation to Palestinian bodies and landscapes. More specifically, the dissertation identifies dominant features of Israeli power as they play out across imaginative and spatiotemporal domains of the Israeli assemblage, highlighting relations between political and security discourses, securitization practices, and the movement and intensity of control and violence. By investigating the operations of Israeli power in rural areas of the West Bank, this dissertation offers novel conceptual insights regarding political processes and logics that inform contemporary Israeli regimes of control and colonization in the occupied Palestinian territory more broadly.

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The settler colonialism of co-ethnic studies: Ashwin Manthripragada, Emina Mušanović, ‘Accounting for Our Settler Colonialism: Toward an Unsettled German Studies in the United States’, in Regine Criser, Ervin Malakaj (eds), Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies, Palgrave, 2020, pp. 23-40

19Feb20

Abstract: Accommodating both decolonization and diversity in reshaping German Studies brings together two potentially incommensurable discourses. A chasm opens up when decolonization is first, repeatedly taken up metaphorically as a “decolonization of the mind,” and second, made commensurate with diversity frameworks. Both impulses in the decolonization of German Studies appear to be at odds with Decolonial Studies. In this essay, we first map out the conflict between decolonization as “decolonization of the mind” and decolonization as theorized by Indigenous Decolonial scholars. We then engage with challenges Decolonial Studies pose to German Studies specifically. Finally, we examine practices in our field that contribute to the continued erasure of Indigenous life.

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Settler heterodirection: Tamara Wagner, ‘The Antipodes of Victorian Fiction: Mapping “Down Under”‘, Victorian Popular Fictions, 1, 2, 2019, pp. 45-60

19Feb20

Abstract: Victorian settler fiction produced in colonial Australia and New Zealand increasingly expressed a search for settler identity, and yet it partly remained targeted at readers “at home,” at the centre of the British Empire. Nineteenth-century novels of daily life in the colonial settlements, therefore, also functioned as fictional maps for readers in Victorian Britain and elsewhere in the expanding empire. While some of these publications explicitly addressed potential emigrants, others endeavoured to reshape Britain’s antipodes in the popular imagination more generally. Australian and New Zealand women writers dismantled clichés involving bush-rangers, gold-diggers, as well as escaped convicts and resented returnees. By drawing on a variety of settler novels by female authors, I aim to track how their fictional maps for readers overseas worked and how these maps shifted in the course of the century. In particular, I focus on the motif of the homecoming and how its reworking in nineteenthcentury settler fiction reveals shifting attitudes towards emigration and empire, homemaking and homecoming, old and new homes.

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Settler dogs: Josh Doble, ‘Can Dogs be Racist? The Colonial Legacies of Racialized Dogs in Kenya and Zambia’, History Workshop Journal, 2020

19Feb20

Abstract: Can dogs be racist? Posing this question may seem odd and at worst, unhelpfully provocative at a time when the discourse of ‘colour-blindness’ is so pervasive. Yet the idea of ‘racist dogs’ remains salient within the post-settler societies of eastern and southern Africa, where dogs have been an integral if overlooked tool of colonial practices of racialization. This article traces the colonial demarcation of ‘native dogs’ – juxtaposed to white settlers’ ‘pet’ dogs – to understand how racial categories were imposed on domesticated animals, and how these racialized animals were then colonized through rabies legislation. Although the formal racialization of dogs ended with the dawn of political decolonization in the early 1960s, dogs continued to be co-opted for postcolonial racial discourse. Dogs were in a prominent position in postcolonial society due to their prevalence in the security arrangements of white homes as well as in the security forces of white supremacist Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. The intensity of the relationship between white minorities, their canine pets and the surrounding African population points toward the uncomfortable conclusion that in the heightened racial environments of decolonizing settler Africa, dogs could be made to be racist.

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Settler storying: Rowland Robinson, Settler Colonialism + Native Ghosts: An Autoethnographic Account of the Imaginarium of Late Capitalist/Colonialist Storytelling, PhD Dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2020

19Feb20

Abstract: This dissertation is an Indigenous, decolonial, and autoethnographic account of the genealogical formation and function of Nativeness within biopolitical formations and racializing assemblages, as well as the visual, ontological, narrative, and affective imaginings of the northern bloc of settler colonialism (the United States and Canada). As an autoethnographic work it centres my own lived and embodied experiences to chart the corridors of settler-colonial power and knowledge production, in particular my experiences as a diasporic, urban and liminally enrolled Native person, and the very real, and at times overwhelming, affective burdens that come with such a positionality. In doing so this work situates my journey within the structures of settler colonialism, and in particular against what the late Patrick Wolfe referred to as the “logic of elimination,” as well as what many scholars have identified and referred to as the Coloniality of Power and the Colonial Order of Things. Further, it works to centre Indigenous resurgence, insurgence, decolonization, self-determination, and a politics of refusal. In thinking through in particular the centering of practices of refusal, this work proposes and engages in a kind of methodological-pedagogical-praxiological movement of autoethnographic refusal, where the dissertation begins its first of two narrative movements by charting Indigenous damage narratives within frames of political ontology, biopolitics and racializing assemblages, visuality, and community loss and disruption, before moving towards actively no longer telling those stories. The second narrative movement of this dissertation moves then from telling of my own stories of damage under settler-colonial regimes of power/knowledge, towards theorizing about Native damage narratives, most especially why they are so readily consumed within digital, filmic, and academic settings and the economies of late capitalism/colonialism. This is referred to within as the imaginarium of late capitalist/colonialist storytelling. In doing so, it continues to ask fundamentally onto-existential questions about Natives through frames of Savageness and Wildness, temporality, and what the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher referred to as the Weird.

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Beyond settler colonialism or beyond settler colonial studies? Jane Carey, Ben Silverstein, ‘Thinking with and beyond settler colonial studies: new histories after the postcolonial’, Postcolonial Studies, 2020

16Feb20

Abstract: The past two decades have seen the dramatic emergence and, according to some accounts, the seeming rise to dominance of settler colonial studies across a broad range of disciplines. As an approach has become a field, and has perhaps become institutionalised, a series of critiques and debates has prompted both revision and rearticulation. This special issue reflects on the current state of what might now be called the ‘field’ of settler colonial studies. It showcases new directions in scholarship in North America and Australia, regions which have been pivotal in the articulation of settler colonialism as a distinct political, territorial, and epistemological phenomenon.

Most narratives of the development of settler colonial studies suggest that it emerged first in Australia and (to some extent) New Zealand before spreading roughly to Hawaii and Israel/Palestine and eventually to Europe and North America. It was only with this last move that its status as a major new scholarly intervention was confirmed. As Penelope Edmonds and Jane Carey explain, in the 1990s ‘a range of scholars began to view the singular category of “colonialism” as too blunt a tool’. They began to argue that colonies where the settlers ‘came to stay’ were distinctive colonial formations with specific dynamics that required separate interrogation. In short: settler colonial studies began as a response to the perceived limitations of postcolonial theory. Where the ‘post’ in postcolonialism refers to the ongoing effects of colonial rule in states that have been formally decolonised, settler colonial studies consider those political and geographic contexts in which the colonisers never left. This scholarly position emerged through Black and Indigenous criticism. A key aim of this special issue is to return this context to current assessments of the field.

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On the sovereignty of indigenous memory: May Chazan, Jenn Colery, ‘Making memory sovereign/making sovereign memory’, Memory Studies, 2020

16Feb20

Abstract: This article foregrounds the activist memory projects of four Indigenous women artists, recorded as part of a digital storytelling project in 2018. These memory projects collectively represent a refusal of settler colonial frameworks and a grounding in Indigenous knowledges, which challenge institutional understandings of the archive and dominant conceptions of memory. Through close reading and analysis, we argue that these storytellers’ practices – rooted in Land, body, ancestral relations, and creativity – are not efforts to simply right the colonial archive, nor are they insertions into colonial narratives; instead, they remember differently, with distinct modes and mechanisms for accessing, producing and circulating memory. Their work, in concert with Indigenous scholars cited throughout this article, extends not only the epistemological basis of the archive. It also expands the ontology of memory: pushing memory scholars to expand their understandings of what is possible to remember, and how memory is accessed and shared.

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Thinking the colonial after the settler colonial: Lian Kwen Fee, ‘Retracing the Political Construction of Race and Ethnic Identity in Malaysia and Singapore: Career of a Concept’, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Working Paper 53, 2020

16Feb20

Abstract: In this paper, I trace the development of my work on race and ethnicity over my academic career, as a reflection in part of my biographical background. My interest in race and ethnic relations originated from my experience of the race riots in Kuala Lumpur on May 13th in 1969, subsequently grounded in graduate school in New Zealand where I conducted research on the Chinese and the Maoris. My early work on returning to Singapore was on Malay identity in the region. It moved on later to writing about the marginalization of Tamils as an underclass in Malaysia and then a broader consideration of race, class, and politics in Peninsular Malaysia precipitated by the General Election of 2008. Since the 1990s the representation of race and politics has pre-occupied many social science discourses, which is reflected in my work on the politics of racialization and Malay identity in Singapore.

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Even though it would be tempting, the Court said that the settler government should not have the authority of deporting indigenous peoples: Tony McAvoy, ‘High court’s ‘alien’ decision is not surprising – but it won’t be the end of the story’, Guardian, 12/02/20

15Feb20

Excerpt: Yesterday the high court of Australia decided by a four-to-three majority that Aboriginal Australians are not capable of being “aliens” under the Australian constitution.

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